What will Minnesota's north woods look like in the future?

While war rages on elsewhere in the world, we really must keep an eye on our environment. I live in western WA state and even though our state has two main climate zones, we still need to be aware of changes here too. Good topic Julia, thanks.

Thanks for this link Julia. I know John Pastor because of an affiliation with the Benedictine Oblates. I didn't know he was involved in this important work. Having just seen An Inconvenient Truth, I am more conscious than ever of our (my) impact on earth's resources and more determined than ever to make the necessary changes. We are investigating solar heating right now and have been recycling, buying fuel efficient cars, using as little energy as possible to heat our home, planting trees, conserving water. Buying locally produced food is almost impossible because of the unfavorable soil up here, but we buy organic whenever possible.

Please check out the link climatecrisis.com . A wonderful site.

In 20 years this question may be a moot point. The way things are going the north woods will get smaller and smaller as more and more people move "up north" to get away from urbania, bringing said urbania with them. It really bums me out that the twin cities & big box retail giants now extend all the way to Brainerd. I miss the "up north" of my childhood, when the northwoods seemed like a different world entirely.

Many places will look different in 20 years including the northwoods. We can only hope that enough preservation techniques are employed now so that the northwoods can recycle itself.

Solar heating is an interesting idea and also geothermal heat pumps, which have been around for quite some time.

Hey Carol W., thanks for speaking up. Maybe if we all tend our backyard while keeping an eye on the larger picture...

Thanks for giving us some of the backstory and that link, Beryl. How small our world is - you know John Pastor!

Don't get me started auntie. The property prices and development up along the north shore are getting me down. How much wilderness is necessary for a place to remain a wilderness? And why don't people ask themselves this?

Diana only hope? I suppose. We haven't been the best stewards of the earth so far....

I should have said "only hope that enough preservation techniques will be employed now" meaning we must, but knowing that it's not a priority of many politicians.

Funny you should say that, Diana - yesterday I caught an audio clip of Gov. Pawlenty talking about Minnesota needing to maintain its lead in ethanol and other renewable energy. What really struck me is that he said he wished we had been working at this 20 years ago. Isn't that always the way? If we start now, imagine how much we can reduce the impact for the future.

Thirty years ago I wrote an artical for Duluth News Tribune with the lead being a question: Why are the birch trees dying?

My observation was then, and has been confirmed since, that the southern range of natural paper birch stands between the Twin Cities and the Twin Ports has been steadily moving northward. You could at that time find a lot of natural birch stands south of Duluth even as far as Pine City. But at some point along the drive, there came an area where the birches were unhealthy, with top branches dying and breaking off, spoiling much of the beauty of the trees. I had been watching this area moving north for some years. Each year more of them to the south died and fell, while more of them to the north lost their upper branches.

If you want to see this effect now, you have to go north of Two Harbors. Most of the old stands of birch south of there are gone, although a few stubborn trees remain. I live inland from Two Harbors, and all of my birch trees are dying as I write this. In a few years, I expect they will be gone.

Thirty years ago, I wasn't sure why the trees were dying. I set out to find some answers, but only got conflicting opinions. One of my theories was that there was some disease. Or, I thought, pollution from the traffic on the highway. Or, maybe it was natural succession. Or maybe climate change.

Readers today may be suprised that anyone was thinking about climate change back then, but I assure you it was under discussion in some of my biology classes at St. Cloud State University. It was thought a radical and unlikely idea, but already the temperature curve had been noticed rising, the glaciers melting back, the Northwest Passage along the Siberian coast staying open unusually late in the fall.

So I asked the local DNR, where the administrator sent me to the University of Minnesota Agricultural extension agent. No, he said, there was no known disease. Pollution? Acid rain was a topic of discussion back then. But the agent thought acid rain was more a problem back east. Here in the Arrowhead, prevailing winds from the northern plains were innocent of industrial acids, in his opinion. Climate change? He only laughed. His opinion was that it was natural succession. He explained to me that in forest development, there was a time of fire that denuded the land, then there was a growth of quick plants like aspen and birch, then an understory of fir trees, pines. Eventually, the aspen and birch would die off and the firs take over, then those would eventually die and be replaced by the long-lived pines. That was natural succession. The climax forest of pines had been cut on the North Shore about a hundred years ago (a hundred and thirty, now) and we were in the period of natural maturity and die-back of the birch and aspen. Not to worry. Logging and clear cut had taken the place of fire, he said, and plantations of pine trees would restore the climax forest in another fifty or sixty years.

I sent the article to the editors of DNT, but they sent it back to me with a request that I should not bother them any more, so I have not.

Now it seems acid rain has been largely cured by smokestack restraints. My DNR contact was probably wrong about it having no effect in Minnesota, however, because studies showed that acid rain from Europe was transported all around the planet, falling even in the Arctic and Antarctica.

My patch of woods back of Two Harbors was a three-story wonderland back then. I have watched all the crown trees die. There was a time when you could not see the sun or any patch of sky from the ground, nothing but a canopy of green. Now the ground is littered with fallen branches, and dead trunks stand like silent witnesses everwhere. The lower trees, maples, balsam fir, ash and basswood, are still growing, but I see that many of the fir have started to brown out, and the ash have suffered the same fate as the birch, dying from the tops down. So far, the maples seem ok, but my neighbors who make syrup have complained that there hasn't been a good sap run in decades. Sugar Maples don't range much south of Duluth either, so I have reason to worry about them.

What will natural succession do for us? Will oak and elm outrun the plains, which seem to be migrating north and east? Will we find ourselves in cottonwoods, southern pines? Will we find our hills bare, covered only with thin grasses?

Wait and see. That's all I know to do.

Anyway, I thought I'd chime in here, and point out that Governor Pawlenty is disengenuous when he suggests no one was working on the problem twenty years ago. There were people aware and working, but they were ignored. What workers are we ignoring today, what articles are not being printed, what curious citizens put off with a pat answer?

It is good and fine that more people are wakening to this silent future. Too bad it took so long for the message to sink in. But Nature will go on, even without us. Three and a half billion years ago a rogue planetoid the size of Mars plowed into Earth, which had only one continent back then, which we have called Pangaia. Our fractured continents and our moon are the main evidence of that event we see now. Life survived. If we can survive that, we can survive a little climate change. Right?

Well, if you include bacteria in your sense of "we", anyhow.

Happy holidays,

R.