Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World - Hardcover

Berger, Joel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022636626X ISBN 13: 9780226366265

Verlag: University of Chicago Pr., 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"Extraordinary. . . . Berger is a hero of biology who deserves the highest honors that science can bestow."—Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books

On the Tibetan Plateau, there are wild yaks with blood cells thinner than those of horses’ by half, enabling the endangered yaks to survive at 40 below zero and in the lowest oxygen levels of the mountaintops. But climate change is causing the snow patterns here to shift, and with the snows, the entire ecosystem. Food and water are vaporizing in this warming environment, and these beasts of ice and thin air are extraordinarily ill-equipped for the change. A journey into some of the most forbidding landscapes on earth, Joel Berger’s Extreme Conservation is an eye-opening, steely look at what it takes for animals like these to live at the edges of existence. But more than this, it is a revealing exploration of how climate change and people are affecting even the most far-flung niches of our planet.

Berger’s quest to understand these creatures’ struggles takes him to some of the most remote corners and peaks of the globe: across Arctic tundra and the frozen Chukchi Sea to study muskoxen, into the Bhutanese Himalayas to follow the rarely sighted takin, and through the Gobi Desert to track the proboscis-swinging saiga. Known as much for his rigorous, scientific methods of developing solutions to conservation challenges as for his penchant for donning moose and polar bear costumes to understand the mindsets of his subjects more closely, Berger is a guide par excellence. He is a scientist and storyteller who has made his life working with desert nomads, in zones that typically require Sherpas and oxygen canisters. Recounting animals as charismatic as their landscapes are extreme, Berger’s unforgettable tale carries us with humor and expertise to the ends of the earth and back. But as his adventures show, the more adapted a species has become to its particular ecological niche, the more devastating climate change can be. Life at the extremes is more challenging than ever, and the need for action, for solutions, has never been greater.

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Joel Berger is the Barbara Cox Anthony University Chair in Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University and a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. He is coauthor of Horn of Darkness and the author of The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World and Wild Horses of the Great Basin, the latter two published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Extreme Conservation

Life at the Edges of the World

By Joel Berger

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 Joel Berger
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-36626-5

Contents

Foreword, 
Prologue, 
Part I The Intersection of Continents — Beringia's Silent Bestiary, 
1 Motherless Children in Black and White, 
2 Before Now, 
3 Beyond Arctic Wind, 
4 Where Worlds Collide, 
5 Muskoxen in Ice, 
6 When the Snow Turns to Rain, 
Part II Sentinels of Tibetan Plateau, 
7 Below the Margins of Glaciers, 
8 The Ethereal Yak, 
9 Birthplace of Angry Gods, 
Part III Gobi Ghosts, Himalayan Shadows, 
10 Counting for Conservation, 
11 To Kill a Saiga, 
12 Victims of Fashion, 
13 In the Valley of Takin, 
14 Pavilions Where Snow Dragons Hide, 
Part IV Adapt, Move, or Die?, 
15 The Struggle for Existence, 
16 A Postapocalyptic World — Vrangel, 
17 Nyima, 
Postscript, 
Acknowledgments, 
Readings of Interest, 
Index, 
Photo galleries, 

CHAPTER 1

Motherless Children in Black and White

A Pleistocene mother responsive enough to make her baby feel secure was likely to be a mother embedded in a network of supportive social relationships. Without such support, few mothers, and even fewer infants were likely to survive.

SARA BLAFFER HRDY, The Past, Present, and Future of the Human Family, 2002

The steady din of our small Cessna belies a sense of calm. Below is a wilderness frozen in time. February's windblown snow hides secrets. One is a cluster of dark objects. We bank hard for a closer look. Three ravens scatter. There are fox tracks. Then we see muskoxen.

Adults, each beheaded.

Seven.

Like ghosts, the snowmobile tracks leading from them dissolve. The hunters are gone.

We don't know when the muskoxen were killed or why they are headless. The area is remote. There's no one to ask. The macabre scene plays out in my head. Who? Why? Did animals escape? If so, who were the lucky ones?

Surges of volcanic extrusions poke above shallow lakes a month later. Hexagons of ice reflect early morning light. From the air on this March morning in 2010, we're drawn to the dwarf willows below, hoping to spot a flock of ptarmigan warming in sun. Instead, the permafrost is lifeless, patterned. Mountains block the southern horizon. Only the pressure ridges of jagged ice reveal where sea begins and land ends.

This is polar desert, the edge of the continent and the edge of terrestrial life. Our search today is for its largest resident — muskoxen.

For a thousand square miles, we see nothing. Gradually, shadowy rays illuminate beige bodies, and caribou break the wintry monotony. Tracks of a wolverine appear, then vanish. There are a few trails that do not disappear, and these are snowmobile imprints. Some head to Deering, a few to Shishmaref, others to Wales; all are tiny native villages near what was once a land bridge connecting Asia to Alaska. It's now submerged below the ocean but the visible part is protected acreage known as the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (managed by the National Park Service). The general area is often just called the Bering Land Bridge. None of these hamlets, or Alaska's other 190 remote settlements, are accessible by road, and not even by rail. Each has fewer than three hundred residents, except for Shishmaref. Its metropolis of six hundred is squeezed onto a spit against the Chukchi Sea. A step west is Siberia. To connect to the outside world, only dogsled or snow machine, boat or bush plane are available. Today we are lucky. The weather is good and we continue our aerial search.

Weeks pass. Fifty miles separate me from the carnage of the seven beheadings. I'm on a snowmobile. It's still winter and the snow cover is good, hard. The drifts are tall, the canyons navigable.

My purpose is to locate the living. I want to know whether muskoxen in this part of Alaska have a future. An answer will help me understand a broader puzzle of how warming temperatures and the loss of ice are changing prospects for species reliant on cold. Most of the world knows the plight of polar bears, but the fate of species living primarily offshore will inevitably differ in kind and magnitude from those on land.

I cross more miles of tundra. The rushing air numbs my face. My goggles fog. I warm them on my snowmobile's engine and scrape away ice flecks. Maybe now I'll spot signs of life. My thoughts return to death, to the seven guillotined. Did herd mates survive the butchery?

My ears ring from the high pitches of the droning machine. Silhouetted ahead, against a scarp a mile or so away, are black dots. Basalt? I lift frozen binoculars for a hurried look. They, too, fog. The dots move. My team of three spew blue fumes in a chase.

My heart pounds. What are they?

Closing in we see. They're not adults. Not even juveniles. They're less than a year old — terrified and alone.

Delicate brown eyes bulge, laser focused on our machines. They stand, squeezed together tightly as if hoping to be cradled by mothers who are nowhere around. Steam rises from their overheated bodies. We count them. The number is seven.

Unbelievable — precisely the same as the beheaded corpses fifty miles away. What becomes of motherless children, their psyches, their fates?

High latitudes are special. Every place is, of course. But nowhere are changes in Earth's atmosphere and oceans more dramatic than at the poles. They are literally the refrigeration system for the planet. As the Arctic continues to release more heat to space than it absorbs, the planet's climate will continue to modify, and the Arctic will continue its rapid pace of warming. To dismiss understanding Arctic conditions because they are just too distant, or because most people will never see its wildlife or people, is a mistake. The poles herald our biological world at lower latitude: less ice, more warming, more carbon dioxide, storms of higher intensity, and greater erosion of shorelines.

The challenges are vast and pressing, especially if we care to understand wildlife and people, neither of which can easily be detached from a challenging future. Are the ambient changes at the poles and elsewhere occurring faster than species' capacities to evolve? Can species persist in the advent of radical climate change? What, if any, conservation tactics can effectively be applied? I'm here to explore these issues using animals from the edge — high latitudes and high elevations and a few in between — beginning with muskoxen in a place that once was an immense link connecting two continents. It's called Beringia, a two thousand–mile-wide stretch north to south and an area even longer east to west. It lies at the northern juncture of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. The terra firma that once connected Asia to North America was literally a bridge. This land enabled human travel between Asia and North America twelve to fourteen thousand years ago; its crossing was regulated by temperature and arbitrated by ice sheets. Water was released or frozen as sea and glacial ice grew or faded across time. With melting, seas grew deeper; as temperatures turned colder, the seas became shallower. The land bridge opened or submerged. Today it's under water, and most of it has been for more than ten thousand years.

Three years before the decapitations, in spring 2007, I was in a small bush plane north of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Pr.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022636626X
• ISBN 13: 9780226366265
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland