Choteau has been one of my favourite towns so far. We spent the night in the wonderfully hospitable surrounds of Eric Bergman’s house for the second night in a row and were treated to a venison bbq with half the population of Choteau. There is something about country towns and the people who inhabit them that is totally unique and special. Where else could you engage in a combination game of telephone / charades with half a room of strangers, after a summer’s day in the snow, following an amazing BBQ from someone you had only met the previous day; and end rolling around on the floor laughing like you were all the oldest of friends?
Today was spent out at Pine Butte Preserve, owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Located in the area known as the Rocky Mountain Front, this is where the plains meet the Rockies, and it was a truly spectacular place. In being charged with management of the preserve and encouraging conservation across the broader landscape for such outcomes as grizzly bear population survival, TNC has a very important role in this landscape. Mark Korte, the land steward for TNC’s Pine Butte Preserve, told us that he works with ranchers to facilitate practices that encourage the maintenance of this bear habitat. TNC also pays ranchers for conservation easements to ensure critical parcels of land for their conservation targets are protected in perpetuity. Through integrating conservation into ranching operations, this allows for landscape-wide protection of processes and habitats that would otherwise not be protected solely on the 13,000 acres owned by TNC.
As we sat on a knoll taking in the incredible landscape Mark was explaining to us, jackets were being zipped tighter, and hats pulled down further as the nippy wind that had been blowing all morning became decidedly colder. We went to the old Pine Butte School for lunch and huddled rather closely to warm up again. Outside, it began to snow. The beginning of summer and it was snowing. I was reasonably incredulous. We are studying climate change and its impacts on a West that is supposed to be getting hotter and drier and it is SNOWING in June. The old climate change theory must surely be a myth. Surely.
Except that what we witnessed and felt (or rather didn’t feel in the case of some sandal clad toes) was not so much the effects of climate change, but rather aberrations in the weather of a mountain system. With the unusual rainfall thus far for spring and cold weather into June, it could be easy to dismiss the warming theories. However, climate is essentially long term weather patterns so our cold day today is but a short term blip in the long term climate patterns. NRDC’s publication, “Hotter and Drier: the West’s Changed Climate” points out that the American West is likely to be the hardest hit by climate changes. Studies of temperature over the past 100 years has shown a rise in temp for the region of 1.7oF greater than the global temperature rise, and a snowy day in June does nothing to disprove this.
This beautiful landscape, and many more totally unlike it, were the link between the energy efficiencies, renewable technologies and fossil fuel industries we have focused on in the course thus far. As we now start to look at climate change in our studies, this is what connects it all. The rural towns we have been passing through, the beautiful landscapes and all this talk on energy conservation and alternative, renewable energy systems. Looking up to the mountains above and the plains below all this beauty is at stake. More than that even.
This place’s people, like Mark and the ranchers he is working with, are in an unenviable position. Will the grizzly habitat of today that they are working so hard to protect be the same in 50, even 20 years time? Are the conservation efforts of today going to be rendered useless because the magnitude of change will mean grizzly habitat is forced further up into the mountains, or north into Canada? Or will the possibilities and changes suggested in earlier parts of the course come into play soon enough to have some effect?
Hard to say, but the community conservation outlined by Mark gives us at least a path to head down no matter what the consequences, intended or otherwise, of climate change. Community conservation.
–Felicity “Flick” Anderson, University of Queensland
