Nature is Becoming Unreliable

Twice a year, I hike a favorite trail in Oregon’s Cascade Range. I have done this for over 20 years, timing my hikes for early spring and fall. The first hike is for wildflowers, the second is for autumn leaves.

In June up high, the forest floor is lit by the spires of flowering vanilla-leaf spangled with starflowers, along with coralroot orchids. The towering conifers and mountain river lined with vine maples and dogwoods are a world apart from the cottonwood-shaded creeks of my home ground in the valley.

Visiting in fall, it’s a far more colorful spectacle. Down in the valley, the oak leaves manage a rusty orange brown, but up in the mountain forests, trees along the river prepare for winter with a blaze of glory.

The dogwoods now bear leaves tinged with delicate salmon pink, while the wild hazel glows yellow and vine maple leaves flame orange and red. In places, the trail passes through a tunnel of these trees, and I can feel my body soaking up the luminous colors, as if storing light for the dark winter ahead.

Everyone who is attuned to the natural world experiences and anticipates seasonal delights. For most of us, these are simply opportunities for appreciating the beauties of nature. But the reliability of nature is something that every living thing depends on and responds to in timeframes both long—evolutionary adaptations—and short—ecological strategies.

This reliability has shaped the flowering and fruiting times of plants, the migratory patterns of birds, and the yearly cycles of nomadic people, who knew the seasonal availability of resources in exquisite detail.

But what would it mean if nature were no longer reliable? I’m afraid that we and every organism on Earth are finding that out through much hotter days and more frequent floods. The reason, of course, is global climate change. But that phrase has become so familiar that it has lost much of its power.

It seems to promise some orderly change from one climate to another, admittedly less desirable, one. But what the planet will really be experiencing in the coming decades can better be described as climate chaos.

Climate chaos could manifest in two very different ways. The first, and most terrifying, is that global warming will trigger one or more “climate tipping points” that cause “abrupt, irreversible and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity,” reports Science magazine.

Its 2022 investigation identified no fewer than nine tipping points that could be activated this century, including collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, failure of the Indian summer monsoons, and breakdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation that delivers the warm Gulf Stream to northern Europe.

The effects of passing any of these tipping points are almost too momentous to contemplate. Let’s instead focus our attention on the other, seemingly less all-encompassing aspect of climate chaos: spring wildflowers and autumn leaves.

Even if global warming doesn’t send the planet over a tipping point into an entirely new climate reality, it will affect the distribution of every organism and the seasonal timing of every natural phenomenon. To quote a report by the National Climate Adaptation Science Center, “… not all species are responding at the same speed or in the same ways. This can disrupt the manner in which species interact and the way that ecosystems function overall.”

In other words, the ecological effects of climate change are chaotic. The reliable pleasure of mountain wildflowers may fade as the complex ecology of the forest breaks down in the face of changes in snow cover, spring temperatures and soil moisture. The spectacle of autumn colors may be muted.

To be sure, these are small losses in comparison to, say, the reversal of the Gulf Stream. But as you hike through your corner of the world, or as you tend your home garden, you might spare a moment of gratitude for the reliability of nature that you have experienced in your life.

What’s coming is bound to change everything.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a biologist and writer based in Ashland, Oregon.