The Power of an Open Question

Whitebark pine, Part 2 (See Part 1 and Part 3)

I was encouraged by the energy and attitudes of people who attended this summer’s “High Five” conference on the future of our five-needled pines, including the imperiled whitebark.  Perhaps most striking was how open participants were to engaging with perhaps the most critical question facing those who care about whitebark pine: “O.K. what shall we actually do"?

There are a lot of things getting done--by the Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as NRDC.  Some, like Grand Teton Park, are aggressively tacking Verbenone packets on trees that appear to have some resistance to blisterrust to save them from being attacked by bark beetles.  Blisterrust is a non-native fungus that kills virtually every whitebark it infects; Verbenone is thought to confuse and deter beetles.  Others are spraying whitebark pine with Carbaryl, another chemical that deters beetles.  We at NRDC have filed an endangered species listing petition to protect whitebark pine throughout its range—a move we hope will bring new brainpower and resources to the whitebark arena.

Many are collecting cones from trees that appear to be resistant to the blisterrust fungus.  Because cones live at the tops of whitebark trees, cone collection is a serious undertaking, involving climbing gear and a tolerance of heights and sticky pitch.  The hope is that agency personnel can collect enough seeds and propagate enough seedlings from trees able to withstand the infection of this airborne fungus to insure survival of the species.  There are seedlings now growing in Forest Service nurseries in northern Idaho and elsewhere that will be planted back into the wild soon.

The timeframes are long, the challenges huge, and the scales enormous.  Whitebark pine takes 50 years or more to produce cones.  Money, staff, labor, and commitment for monitoring and restoration are all needed in large quantities.  Exacerbating these problems is the amount of whitebark we’ve already lost.  More than half of the whitebark pine in the Northern Continental Divide region is dead, and over 80% of whitebark in the Greater Yellowstone is also dead or dying.  Models developed by Forest Service and university researchers suggest that if warming continues, whitebark pine will be virtually extirpated. The forests would be pushed off the tops of the mountains if current trends in pollution-driven global warming continue.

There are serious questions facing the restoration efforts: Will planting be successful?  Will seedlings survive and flourish?  How effective is Verbenone and Carbaryl, and can they keeping trees alive that have resistance to blisterrust? 

What forest management practices should we be pursuing, if any? Will thinning of non-whitebark pine (e.g. spruce and fir) in mixed species stands allow whitebark pine to grow bigger and faster?  What about the role of prescribed fire?  Will management practices such as these make a significant difference for whitebark pine?  In other words, will these efforts be good enough, or big enough in scale to help, given the magnitude of the whitebark pine loss? 

Scientifically speaking, the whitebark landscape is littered with questions.  And although there are a lot of very talented, dedicated and committed people trying to address them, there are many uncertainties and wide-open questions.

A Buddhist teacher who I greatly respect, Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, recently published a book called “The Power of an Open Question”.  Last winter, I heard Elizabeth give a reading from the book, which gave me new courage and the hope to find solace in this land of open questions.  Elizabeth talks a lot about staying with the question itself, creating space and emptiness, that in turn frees us from fixed beliefs about self and others.  She speaks a lot of interdependence, a concept at the core of ecology.  And she speaks of service.  Service to others, whether they be humans, plants, or animals, is something I have thought a lot about. 

Elizabeth says in her book “when we serve beings…our aspiration to benefit them shepherd us toward the bigger truth of our interdependence.  As our wisdom of the interdependent and the boundaryless nature of things increases, so does our compassion and inclination to serve.  Do you see the relation between these two?  Without the bigger view, we would simply try to fix things in our limited, objectified world.  And without the practice of service, we would have no way out of that world.”

So, maybe we should take courage in the fact that there are so many open questions about whitebark pine.  Maybe it’s O.K. that we don’t have all the answers now.  Because, to be blunt, we don’t.  Maybe simply admitting that we don’t know what to do can prompt others--people who may be sitting on the sidelines but with something to offer--to come forward and help at this important juncture.  Maybe new people with different perspectives can help freshen the discussion and bring forward new ideas and new solutions. 

Here’s one question that currently haunts me: “can we ourselves open up to the possibility of a new relationship with each other, in service of these forests and the irreplaceable ecosystems”?  Can we pursue a different future despite some negative history and relationships among people with different viewpoints?  And I ask myself: am I willing to give up old patterns of doing business, and even old grudges, to explore something new?  This is an open question only I can tackle.  But we, as a community of people concerned with the future of a magnificent forest system, have to take on this question too—now, before it is too late.