"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods

John Platt has a terrific piece up at Extinction Countdown about the changes that global warming and invasive species have brought Walden Pond, made famous by the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, whose thought was profoundly influential on America’s environmental movement.

Thoreau famously documented his “experiment” of living sparsely in a small cabin by a pond in Walden.  “To be awake is to be alive" he wrote.  Thoreau was a keen observer of nature and took detailed notes of the species he observed in the area and their behaviors.  This “Concord data set” was begun by Thoreau in 1851 and naturalists have continued to add to it until the present day.  In recent years, scientists have used Thoreau’s data to document changes to his little Pond.  They ain’t pretty.

• Over the last 150 years the mean annual temperature in the Walden area has increased by 2.4°C;
• This climate shift has allowed non-native (invasive) species of plants to out-compete their native rivals by flowering earlier;
• As a result of the combination of climate change and competition from invasive species, 27 percent of the plant species Thoreau recorded are now locally extinct;

As we’ve discussed here at Switchboard many times, invasive species are a nasty business.  Unfortunately, climate change often seems to make it worse.

Jonathan Zasloff, an environmental law professor at UCLA, has an interesting post up at Legal Planet about the role of environmentalism and religion, a topic I’ve touched on here at Switchboard before.  Zasloff is taking a course on Jewish theology and environmental consciousness.  He writes:

But I’m taking the class because at this stage, I am somewhat skeptical of the general notion that religion can add much to environmental policy debates.

First, it seems to me that many of the crucial issues of modern environmentalism are not amenable to broad-based moral reasoning and intuition that religion can provide.  Religious thinking has little to say about, for example, what is the appropriate amount of particulates that should be in the air, or whether climate change should be tackled by cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, or command-and-control regulation.

So far as it goes, I think this is basically right.  The problem is that Zasloff limits his focus on “policy debates.”   It’s true, of course, that most religions won’t have much useful to say about “the appropriate amount of particulates in the air.”  But that’s true of almost any policy debate.  Religious tradition also won’t tell us much about whether providing the uninsured with health care is best tackled through a government managed single-payer system, the inclusion of a “public option” to compete with private health insurance plans, or competition among purely private plans.  What religious tradition can contribute, however, is a belief about whether or not society should provide access to health care for all it’s citizens.

This is all pretty new for environmentalism--and pretty important.  People steeped in religious tradition generally have well developed views about how their faith calls on them to treat other people.  As a result, we may differ over how much government aide should be directed towards social welfare policies, or exactly what form those policies should take, but providing for the poor and destitute--and, I would argue, the general consensus that society has a moral obligation to do so--is deeply rooted in the “broad-based moral reasoning and intuition that religion can provide.” 

Not so when it comes to our obligation to the natural world.  There are philosophical and ethical values inherent in environmentalism, of course, as well as a rich tradition of environmental thinkers from Thoreau to Leopold, but mainstream religious theology has, until relatively recently, been something of a bit player in its development.  That this is now changing in many religious traditions has the potential to fundamentally alter the nature of environmental debates. 

A great example is Andrew Sullivan.  Just today, when musing about the pro’s and con’s of the Waxman-Markey global warming bill, Sullivan wrote:

In weighing all these issues, I have to say that in the end, the moral question does hang heavy on me. ...We have a responsibility not simply to advance our own material welfare, and weigh costs and benefits, but also to conserve our natural inheritance as much as we can. I reach this from a religious perspective, but it is easy to reach it from other grounds.

In fairness, Zasloff recognizes these points—particularly the role that religion plays in informing our notions of intergenerational justice.  My point is that to also expect religious tradition to provide answers to fine grain policy debates is an unnecessary burden.  The value that religious thought brings to environmental debates is no more, and no less, what it brings to every other debate that encompasses both morality and policy.  What’s novel is that many religions (and thus many of us) are beginning to see environmental questions in this very light.

The weird thing about the rule is that it treats global warming pollution differently than other forms of global pollution.  Mercury pollution (ironically, also emitted from coal-fired power plants) also harms wildlife, but we've never categorically ruled out its consideration under the Endangered Species Act.  The same can be said of PCBs.  Indeed, one of the impetuses for passing the Endangered Species Act as the widespread use of DDT, which endangered bird species around the globe.  My point is this: the Endangered Species Act is a valuable tool that can be used to help control many different forms of pollution.  We should treat greenhouse gasses no differently.

Another strange thing about the Secretary's decision is the fact that just last week he decided to withdraw an eleventh-hour Bush Administration regulation that changed the requirements for inter-agency consultation under the Endangered Species Act.  Those regulatory changes were in large part premised on excluding the consideration of global warming pollution during such consultation.  So why did the Department of the Interior choose to withdraw one, but not the other?

The researchers found rising death rates across a wide variety of forest types, at different elevations, in trees of all sizes and among major species including pine, fir and hemlock.

"Wherever we looked, mortality rates are increasing," said Nathan Stephenson, a study co-author and USGS research ecologist.

The study concludes that the most likely cause of the increased mortality is warming temperatures.  At NRDC, we've long been concerned about the increasing impact of global warming on forest communities.  Many tree species act as "foundation" species, defining entire ecosystems.  If these tree species decline or disappear, entire biological communities can be lost.  Dying forests can also lead to a vicious positive-feedback climate loop--non-forest ecosystems, such as grasslands, sequester less carbon dioxide than forests and forests can even become net carbon emitters as the number of dead and decaying trees increase. 

Because of a combination of pine beetles (whose outbreaks are exacerbated by global warming) and blister rust (an introduced pathogen) one of the foundation tree species farthest down this grim road is the white bark pine.  Last month NRDC petitioned to protect white bark pine under the Endangered Species Act.  Given the implication's of the Science study, how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service react our petition, and the problem of disappearing forests in the wake of global warming pollution more generally, is likely to become an increasingly important piece of finding solutions to global warming and enacting meaningful federal legislation to deal with climate change.