P/P | Suggested links

[...] I finally arrived at my destination: a curving, hundred-yard
sweep of grasses and blossoms marked at all four corners by
10-foot steel towers connected by heavy steel cables. More cables
hung crosswise, suspending the big array of infrared heat lamps
strung up by U.C. Berkeley professor John Harte in 1990. Harte has
kept the lamps on for 14 years now, baking this living swath of meadow
to create real warming, in real time, in a real ecosystem. No fussing
around with historical temperature records, no computer modeling of
hypotheses, and thus no vulnerability to the claim that it's all conjecture;
Harte has simply warmed a piece of the world and watched it change.
[...]

The verdict? Sagebrush is already crowding out everything that makes
a meadow a meadow in the first place -- the colors and textures and
birds and bees. [...]

[...] As the world warms, and we enter the first part of the meadow-to-
sagebrush transition, the effect will be much like the clearcutting of tropical
rainforests. All the carbon bound up in those plants will be released into
the air -- it happens through the burning of clearcut debris in the Amazon
and through decomposition in meadows -- but with an ever-diminishing
photosynthesis to pull the carbon dioxide back into more plants on the
other side of the cycle. [...]

[...] "Environmental events and biological events that once made sense
together are losing their synchrony." [...]

"In “Warmer and Warmer," NOW visits John Harte, a Professor of Environmental
Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and examines his unique
global warming experiment in Colorado. For over a decade, Harte has been
heating a Rocky Mountain meadow to figure out what global warming is going
to mean for life on earth.

"One of the most certain effects of climate change will be
less snow in our mountains.

The U.S. government reports with a “very high confidence”
that climate change will greatly reduce snowpacks in the Rocky
Mountains. Not only is the climate expected to be warmer overall,
but temperatures are expected to increase more in winter than in
summer, more at night than in the day, and more in the mountains
than at lower elevations – all leading to less snow." [...]

"Snowpack is very likely to decrease as the climate warms,
despite increasing precipitation, for two reasons. It is very likely
that more precipitation will fall as rain, and that snowpack will
develop later and melt earlier."

The River Has Many Stories [15']

"For thousands of years, Native American people used Hells Canyon and
the Snake River as a trading route, a place for hunting, fishing and gathering.
This deep chasm separating Oregon and Idaho was also a place where
cultures intersected, leaving their marks on the cliff walls, in the ground, and
in the many stories passed down through time. Through interviews with tribal
elders, scenic footage, images of rock art, and a Native American musical score,
this video conveys the value of cultural sites in Hells Canyon from the Native
American perspective."

Proving Up and Settling Down: Stories of Life in Hells Canyon [25']

"The basalt cliffs of Hells Canyon have witnessed the ebb and flow of Native
American tribes, trappers, miners, and homesteaders as each has left a mark on
America's deepest river gorge. This film brings Hells Canyon to life through
the accounts of historians; Horace Axtell, a descendent of Chief Joseph's band
of the Nez Perce; and early Hells Canyon residents, Violet Wilson, Ace Barton
and Joe Jordan. These old-timers share stories of work and family, isolation and
ingenuity, and a deep respect for the canyon they called home in the first half of
the 20th Century."

Not Just Stones and Bones [17']

"By training young people, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation have been working for more than a decade to improve Native
American involvement in the management of archaeological and cultural
resources. This video documents the First Annual Aboriginal Lifeways,
Prehistoric Artifact Recognition and Documentation Training experience,
July 1995, at Hiyúumtipin' in northeastern Oregon. Witness firsthand the
excitement of the trainees as they learn both traditional and archaeological
skills."

Cradle of the Snake A Forest Service Video