Read an Excerpt
A Sugar Creek Chronicle
Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland
By Cornelia F. Mutel University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-396-1
CHAPTER 1
The Place I Call Home
I LIVE WITH MY HUSBAND, ROBERT, AND OUR DOG, SIDNEY, in the center of an eastern Iowa woodland, within the embracing arms of white, black, red, and bur oaks and shagbark hickories that wave in the wind a hundred feet over my head, large trees that have lived far longer than my 65 years and will, if conditions permit, thrive long after I am gone. Our three boys were rooted and raised here, roving the woods in search of baby squirrels, chasing toads as they leapt through the leaves, discovering insects and cocoons tucked into the crevices of bark, damming the rivulet below our house with sticks, and following that trickle down to Sugar Creek, which is large enough for a youngster's fishing expedition. Now, when they bring their children back to visit, our grown sons tell stories of the tree forts they built as kids, the fire crackers they lit near the pond, their secret naming of "winter wonderland" and other special woodland hideaways. I love listening to my sons' recounting of their collective past, although they do not often include our more tender moments together, the times that I remember. Yet, their stories tell me that this house, this plot of land remain their planet's center, a stable refuge, a dreamscape to which our sons mentally return when times get rough. Our home and the surrounding woods have nurtured them, protecting and providing stability for their spirits even after their bodies left to roam elsewhere.
I am a walker. Most days I roam our land and the trails and lanes defining neighboring woods, fields, and creek bottoms, observing their wild occupants and considering processes from long ago that continue today. When I proceed up our lane to the county road at the top of the hill, I peer across a series of flat ridgelines that stretch to the horizon. These ridges mark the plane formed by a glacier that leveled this landscape half-a-million or more years ago, ages before humans roamed North America's mid-continent. At that time, I could have hiked for miles in any direction across a uniform terrain dotted with rocks dropped from the glacier's melting ice. But not now. Time and running water have cut channels deep into the land, so that whenever I walk out our door, I must go uphill or down. The landscape and its inhabitants are constantly evolving, although usually in a slow and orderly fashion.
Going in the opposite direction, following a path that winds downhill to the far corner of our land, I pass the remains of the original settlers' summer kitchen, part of a larger homestead from the 1800s, a tiny rough structure built of heavy timbers. I find plants here that the settlers or perhaps their children collected from nearby riversides and native prairies and brought back to their home gardens — shooting star, obedient plant, creamy gentian. Despite landscape changes, this region undoubtedly cared well for these immigrant settlers, Iowa's rich soils growing grains, the wildlands yielding meat, our woods relinquishing logs for constructing and warming their crude homes.
Continuing from the summer kitchen down the lane, I pass the neighbor's pond, where our boys swam in the summer and skated in the winter, and then follow the road to an expanse of public land bordering a large reservoir. Meandering south a few miles along the reservoir, I approach circular Native American burial mounds on hilltops overlooking the Iowa River — places significant to peoples living in nearby villages a thousand years ago.
Crossing Sugar Creek and hiking a few miles in the opposite direction, I reach a cave where small groups of these same ancient residents camped in fall and winter while hunting deer, collecting mussels, and gathering nuts from surrounding forests, which provided diverse foods in abundance. Long before these food-gathering sessions, this same cave was occupied by other human wanderers of riverside forests who also sought warmth and shelter here. The message is clear: this eastern Iowa landscape has sustained human life for several thousand years, providing the food and shelter people needed to flourish.
I imagine that all these earlier residents lived through times of beauty and crisis, wonder and conflict, as I have. Surely their lives outlined stories of changes in the land and its means of provision. But on the whole, throughout human civilization's occupancy of our planet, natural changes have occurred slowly, within predictable limits. The land's dependability and integrity, its provision of fundamental resources and ecological services have remained for the most part intact.
This may now be changing. As a student of the natural world, I have traced our woodland's expression through several decades, monitoring the sequence of wildflowers emerging in spring, watching the fading of color in autumn, observing the migrating breeding birds arriving in May and disappearing with their broods in October. But I am starting to sense vagaries in the air and weather patterns, disruptive shifts that are influencing our woodland's occupants and seem to be accelerating. The first wildflowers used to bloom like clockwork on April 7. And ticks were a worry primarily in spring months. Now, with the winter's cold dissolving earlier and summertime's warmth persisting longer, the early wildflowers might bloom in March, perhaps before their pollinators emerge, and I sometimes find ticks in November. Meanwhile the well-regulated rains that previously characterized Iowa's rich growing season are shifting to intense downpours falling earlier in the year and eroding springtime's bare cropland soils. Similar symptoms have been documented across the country and around the world. Too many unusual changes are happening too fast. An unsettled feeling permeates the air. The climatic stability that has regulated our landscape and governed Earth's residents for thousands of years seems to be teetering.
As individuals and societies, we depend on the earth's constancy to order our days and give our years structure and direction. A beneficent climate is, like health, something elementary, something we tend to ignore until disturbing symptoms arise, something we assume will always be there like the sun rising in the morning. What if that regularity dissolves? Would we know how to pattern our lives?
For someone who likes the illusion of stability, fosters traditions, and shuns unplanned change, I was born at the wrong time. I arrived in 1947 on the coattails of World War II, a take-off period for many of the environmental challenges now plaguing our globe. Between then and now, the planet's natural features have been altered arguably more rapidly and profoundly than at any time in the past, except perhaps during dramatic geologic seizures such as massive volcanic eruptions or meteor strikes.
Consider the shifts that have occurred from 1950 to 2010, approximately my current lifespan. Tremendous increases in the human population, paired with increasing per-person consumption, have triggered the use of vastly more resources and products, use that was made possible by exploding industrialization fueled by increases in energy consumption, energy provided by large increases in the burning of natural gas and oil. The result: soaring rises in carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants, along with decreases in wildlands available for Earth's perhaps 10 million other species, which are now experiencing species extinction at 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate. Inexpensive and readily available fossil fuels also have encouraged adoption of the car as the primary means of transportation, which has totally changed our lifestyles and expectations.
Humanity, while implementing all these changes, has accomplished something hitherto considered impossible. We have measurably and significantly altered two of the planet's largest physical entities: the oceans, making them warmer and more acidic, and the atmosphere, which is on average warmer and growing warmer still.
These changes have been so monumental that some have earned newly minted names. Today's human-induced loss of species is being called the sixth mass extinction, equating it with other extinctions during the last half-billion years that were triggered by natural causes such as massive volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, or glaciations. And the sum total of these changes, some say, is defining a new geologic epoch — the Anthropocene — a time when humans (rather than natural processes) are altering the entire global environment in a major way.
One of the Anthropocene's defining traits is an increase in the globe's average annual surface temperature by 1.4 degrees, with most of the rise occurring since 1980. [Note: Because this book is published in the U.S., temperatures throughout are given in Fahrenheit, not Celsius units. Readers may see Celsius temperatures used in scientific articles and elsewhere.] This seemingly small temperature rise embraces a suite of trends that have been defined by scientific measurements and are occurring around the world: increasing ocean heat content, rising sea levels, growing atmospheric moisture, shrinking ice and snow cover, poleward- and upward-climbing plant and animal ranges, shortening winters and earlier springs. All these factors contribute to the definition of climate change, which is also called global warming, although the phenomenon goes well beyond warmer temperatures. The process originates with the atmosphere's retention of greater heat energy, created primarily by increasing greenhouse-gas emissions produced when fossil fuels are burned. This process has been acknowledged by an estimated 97 to 98 percent of trained climate scientists and validated by thousands of peer-reviewed research studies.
While researching and writing this book, I learned a tremendous amount about climate-change science. I now understand how small invisible changes — parts-per-million increases in certain atmospheric gases — can upset the flow of heat energy into and out of the atmosphere. The consequences of this altered flow are profound and transformative. They include concerns about food production, water availability, emergency relief, military security, infrastructure integrity, society's stability, the economy, and ecological biodiversity and integrity. As greenhouse-gas emissions and average temperatures grow further, they will increasingly touch every aspect of global function and human life, from what and how much we eat, to where we live and how we die, to our basic economic, political, and societal stability. We are now entering a new reality.
I learned that a cascade of climate-induced changes is already reshaping life on Earth in multiple and diverse ways. And that the rate of these changes is too fast to allow nature's ready adaptation and fast enough to challenge human adaptation.
I learned that some expressions of climate change are appearing sooner than was predicted, and that we are just beginning to see their unveiling. Without a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, average temperatures are expected to climb considerably higher and multiply concerns during this century. At some point, if we do not restrain our current emissions' unchecked growth, they could trigger self-feeding tipping points that would make rising temperatures and their spinoffs impossible to halt. If we allow this to happen, climate change threatens to transform the human experience on Earth and potentially human survival as well.
And yet, I learned that if is a powerful word. If we let all this happen. If we do not address climate change soon and in a major fashion, the future will likely be shaped by increasingly severe and unpredictable weather and all its environmental and societal spinoffs. By contrast, if we take strong and rapid steps to mitigate greenhouse-gas production, we can put the worst climate-change ramifications into remission.
Hope for limiting climate change is not naïve. We can take definite steps to limit its repercussions even as we improve our economy and quality of life. Dozens of countries around the world are already doing so, as are large and small corporations and some states and cities in the U.S. Research institutions and individuals are working on creative solutions. And many concerned citizens are reordering their lives to reduce their carbon footprint — that is, they are cutting the amount of carbon dioxide they personally release into the atmosphere. If we all reduced our carbon footprint, our combined actions could make a large difference.
The coming months and years will determine our climate future and, through this, humanity's prognosis. If we take a proactive stance in dealing with climate change, the future could be a time of exhilarating challenge and attainment. The sooner we start acting, the easier and less expensive and more profound will be the results. We need to get going.
I remember well the moment that this book was conceived. Late one evening in December 2011, Robert and I were sitting at the kitchen table with our son and his wife when they shared the news that the next summer, we'd be welcoming a new grandchild into the family. We were overjoyed, as were they, and the four of us jubilantly chatted for some time about how this new life would affect future years.
As we talked, I felt something click deep within my mind. For the previous several months, I had been reading about the dangers of climate change and what it might do to the natural world and to human civilization. My growing knowledge had forced me to consider what sort of world I was leaving for my children and grandchildren and how I might employ my experience as an environmental writer to help others envision a healthier, more positive future. That evening, sitting at the table with my family as the night deepened, I realized that this grandchild-to-be could live through a dramatic reshaping of the planet's climate.
Within days of learning about the grandchild we now call Ellie, I had begun writing a journal that I hoped would someday tell her that I had understood the dangers of climate change and had done what I could to address them. The journal morphed as I wrote, taking on first one guise, then another, but with time my focus narrowed to a few goals: I wanted to introduce Ellie to the woodland where Robert and I now live and where her father grew up — a woodland that I hoped she too would come to love — tracing it through a single year of seasonal changes. During that year, 2012, I also dedicated myself to carefully observing weather events and learning more about climate-change science and including elements of these subjects in my woodland journal.
As I wrote, I realized that the climate-change story needs to be rooted in an understanding of the past, especially within the explosion of environmental problems since World War II. I thus decided to add a longer perspective to my writing and also to share some of my personal story. I wanted Ellie to know of my lifelong passion for wild places and native plants, a passion that sprouted when I was a child. I also wanted to share the challenges of my life, in particular my ongoing skirmishes with cancer, which took my mother's life in her middle age and also has threatened my life.
While writing, I became aware of the similarities between cancer in the human body and greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. Both can distort healthy functions and ultimately lead to dramatic changes, and both are best treated by strong actions taken early, before they spin toward points of no return. This comparison, which may seem all too obvious to some readers, has informed my thought processes and my writing.
All these writings and wanderings eventually became this book, which intertwines the two timelines and story lines — the woodland journal chapters, written for the year 2012, intermixed with memoir chapters that consider the period 1947 to 2012.
With that introduction, I invite you to turn the page and join me for a conversation at my kitchen table, a cup of tea in hand, and then to walk with me through the seasons of my life and of our woodland, considering the slow, ongoing changes that bring health and resilience to such natural systems and the ways that today's accelerating climate changes might alter them.
My guess is that even if you have not lived in a rural woodland, our lives are in some ways similar. You too have loved family, treasured a special place, worried about illness, been touched by beauty and by loss, felt drawn to things nonhuman, wondered about our rapidly changing world, and worried about where the future is taking us. You too have wanted to leave a legacy of a better world.
I now invite you to come along as I share how these universal themes have played out in my life, how I have met changes and challenges, and how I have searched for health and wholeness during difficult times, a search that you too have surely made.
And so I begin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Sugar Creek Chronicle by Cornelia F. Mutel. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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