Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’
Diana Six, an entomologist studying beetles near Glacier national park in Montana, says the crisis has fundamentally changed her profession D iana Sixs love of the outdoors began before she could form words, run, or collect the bugs and fungi that were precious to her as a child. A tough home life eventually led her to drop out of school and live on the streets. But biology classes in community college helped Six discover her calling in studying various forms of life. They took me right back to how I was as a kid, she says. Now an entomologist at the University of Montana, she has spent the last 30 years researching how bark beetles are decimating pine forests. But a constant, haunting depression has taken over her life. A recent trip to Glacier national park spurred her to vent some of this emotion in a tweet that went viral and resonated with many: Glacier National Park. 97F in June. Little snow left. 75F degree water. Glaciers disappearing. That is what we hear. But the worst is what most never see. To Six, the climate crisis isnt just decimating glaciers and life on Earth. Its taking her identity with it. She recently spoke to the Guardian about her changing role on the land she loves. I dont think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. Its all the stuff thats dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke. There are many years where the snow is gone so early that you just dont see it in the mountains. And water getting that warm is absolutely devastating to fish and algae. Life doesnt just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didnt even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and theyre already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked. There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just cant take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds. People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. Its not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because theyve moved too far off shore. Theyre emaciated, theyre starving to death. We are at the point that theres nothing untouched. Im also an artist. I recently finished a 10-week art course called Identity in America where the instructor made us use a medium we had not worked with before, because he felt we couldnt go back to old habits. I ended up drawing myself morphing from being an ecologist to the guys who walked around during the plague to bring out the bodies. When I was forced to actually confront my identity, I realized that Im no longer doing what I thought I was. My whole life has been documenting how life works, how we can conserve species that are in trouble. I was no longer cataloging life and finding ways to prevent ecosystems from reaching tipping points. I had actually hit my own tipping point. Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. Im describing loss, decline, death. And that is what is accounting for my kind of overwhelming sense of grief. This is what really brought home to me that my entire job has changed. I dont like my new job, but I cant quit. Even if I quit being a professor and doing research, Im always going to be a coroner now. When I started work, I didnt think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. Its not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldnt ignore that. I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 million hectares of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now. Were coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you arent going to the root cause of the problem its still going to happen. Thats not to say that if we didnt just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldnt save some of this. We just cant do it one species at a time. This article was amended on 22 July 2021. An earlier version referenced a beetle species killing 70 acres of trees across North America; this should have been 70 million hectares.