Why you should tell your children about vanishing fireflies
OQUOSSOC, Maine Every morning this week, Ive woken up to a sea of yellow birch and balsam fir in this northern stretch of the Appalachians. The wind whipping off Mooselookmeguntic Lake stirs millions of leaves with a sound like the ocean. Once darkness falls, the loons arrive, their voices pealing across the water as they dive for chub, golden shiners and small brook trout. To my eye, this is as Edenic as you get in America today. Yet almost everything I assumed about this pristine landscape was wrong. Maine, while 90 percent forest , is also one of our most logged states. If youre wondering where a lot of Americas 2-by-4s and toilet paper come from, its here. Of Maines original species, sea minks, cougars, caribou and gray wolves are either extinct or extirpated from the state. Without this knowledge, it was easy to think I stood on the edge of primeval wilderness. Changes here unfolded over centuries. Each generation came to see the woods and rivers around them as normal even as the ecosystem degraded. Theres a name for this: shifting baselines. Today, a new normal is being rewritten in our own lifetimes amid climate-related disasters , from smoke-filled skies to lethal heat waves . Yet accepting these conditions as normal threatens to unravel what made the world capable of withstanding these shocks in the first place. To restore the rich relationships of species, and our place among them, we need to remember our baselines, whether thats in Maine or your own backyard. One of the best ways to do this, even scientists admit, is telling stories. The term was coined by marine biologist Daniel Pauly in 1995. Pauly, now at the University of British Columbia, noticed fishery scientists generally accepted the size of fish populations at the start of their careers as normal, and then managed toward that goal. If stocks declined by the time the next generation entered the field, this became the new normal. The result, obviously, is a gradual shift of the baseline, he wrote in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution , a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species. Shifting baselines is now shorthand for generational amnesia of the natural world. As species decline or die off, our cultural memory of them fades. We might remember the abundance and diversity of our childhood but never imagine the world of our grandparents or of their ancestors. This phenomenon has already been documented among groups as diverse as bush meat hunters in Africa and birders in Britain . In Maine, Ive been thinking about this a lot. How can we remember what once was, even as climate change promises to transform the planet? The answer, Pauly suggests, is not simply more wildlife counts. We need stories from people who remember to re-create these baselines as best we can. The big changes happened way back, he wrote, but all that we have to recall them are anecdotes. To hear those stories, I called on the people who have been in Maine longer than anyone else. The Penobscot Nation is among the oldest continuous governments in the world . Some of its members still recall stories of Atlantic salmon filling Maines rivers and of alewife, or river herring, swimming upriver by the uncounted millions, says Chuck Loring Jr., the Penobscot Nations director of natural resources. Last year, fewer than 1,400 salmon returned to the state. Loring , who manages forests, game and fisheries across 121,000 acres, doesnt think in decades in his work. He looks back centuries. We have a seven-generation approach, he says. Unlike most commercial timber harvesters, hes aiming to create an old-growth forest like those that existed hundreds of years ago across Maine but now cover only 0.05 percent of the state. Instead of cutting trees every 30 to 40 years, Loring plans to grow them for a century or more. And hes not optimizing for wood. Were one of the biggest timber tribes, says Loring, but the most highly regarded goal is water quality. For the Penobscot, the goal is restoring a landscape and its inhabitants place in it from fish to moose to future members of the Penobscot Nation . Thats one of our goals getting into the school, and talking about everything we do, says Loring. The tribe has made ensuring a viable forest in the future the priority, even if were not generating income from the forest. Maine, and the rest of the world, can never fully recapture the past. Our new landscape must straddle a healthier past and a warming future because of climate change. Jessica Leahy, a natural resources professor at the University of Maine who manages 600 acres of her own forests, is already living there. The ground isnt freezing in the winter, the mud season is extending, and our roads are washing out, she says. Everything I do now is not called a climate change project, but it is driven by it. Shes creating a new baseline for Maine. Leahy now orders her new tree saplings from nurseries in warmer climates such as New Hampshire. Shes diversifying the species, planting white pine and northern red oak, as new insect pests and other challenges emerge. She mentions others pursuing assisted migration, moving trees beyond their historic range in anticipation of warmer temperatures to come. The deep past can be a foreign concept in a nation of immigrants. For most of us, our memories of the natural world date back decades, or perhaps a few generations. And our firsthand experience is declining: In the 1800s, roughly three-quarters of Americans made their living on the land. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 2 percent . But you dont need to identify every flower, plant and tree around you, or manage forests as Loring and Leahy do, to know what once lived in your neck of the woods and could again. Playing outside is enough to start. Thats what did it for me. I spent my earliest years rooting around mangrove forests and oak hammocks in Florida. I played video games like everyone else, but my mother and great-grandmother slowly introduced me to the plants and animals around us. I grew up awed by land crab migrations and lovebug swarms , sparking a natural curiosity I never lost. But this affinity is not necessarily innate. Its learned , suggest researchers at the University of Chicago . If you live in a place that once glowed with fireflies each summer night, tell your children what you remember, and ask your parents to tell their stories. Why fireflies are going extinct, and what to do about it Ill be telling my son stories about the wild lives that existed in the places we go before anyone thought to call them Maine or California. If he wont inherit an ecosystem with all its parts, hell have a shot at reassembly. Baselines, after all, dont always decline. Many of the days Ive been in Maine, Ive watched bald eagles fly over Lake Mooselookmeguntic on their way to fishing grounds. In the 1960s, virtually no one in my parents generation could have done this. Just 800 or so bald eagles remained in the Lower 48. Today, more than 317,000 live in the contiguous United States, and the population is growing. When my son is my age, hell know those flights as the new normal.