Excerpt from the introduction to The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz. Welz is an environmental writer, photographer and conservation consultant who will be speaking at this year’s Regenerative Solutions for Resilient Landscapes Conference at Delaware Center for Horticulture on November 14 about how climate change has made the traditional aims of conservation impossible to achieve, problems with mainstream native horticulture, and how ELA members can evolve their practice to help save wild species in this era of deep uncertainty.
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Imagine a beautiful day in New York City in the early 2020s. Spring is breaking out across the metropolis and you’re taking a stroll in a large, green park. Many of the people in the park are attached to a portable computer of some kind—that’s quite a new thing—but otherwise the scene around you appears much the same as it would have on a random spring morning a couple of generations ago: lawns, trees, shrubs, paths filled with joggers and dog walkers, noisy kids in the playground. Squirrels. There’s a bit less litter and less fear of crime than thirty or forty years back, but to most people the park is essentially unchanged.
Except it’s not. Look closely, and you’ll discover that many plants are carrying clumps of shriveled brown mush in place of the flowers that they would normally be showing off at this time of year. They were tricked into flowering weeks earlier by a spell of unusually warm, springlike days that swept across the region when the calendar said it was still winter. Freezing weather returned soon after, though, and destroyed their blooms. Because their flowers appeared long before the emergence of the spring insects that normally pollinate them, the plants have failed to produce seed and the insects now face starvation.
Fungal diseases like Southern Blight, spurred on by higher-than- normal temperatures, are also spreading rapidly among perennial shrubs, and the park’s Azalea Lace Bugs—insects that destroy the leaves of azaleas and their relatives—have started breeding early. They’ll produce four or five generations this summer instead of the usual three, and unless park workers double down on pest control, there will be a lot of wrecked azaleas by fall. Look closely at the stems of the park’s lilacs, and you’ll see groups of whitish bumps, populations of a strange insect called White Peach Scale. It’s a pest that used to be confined to the southern United States, but it’s recently moved into New York.
Ragtag groups of binocular-wielding birders, who have been scouring the park for spring rarities since dawn, are seeing slightly fewer migrant warblers than last year, when they saw slightly fewer than the year before; in fact, the number of migrating songbirds passing through here has dropped by about a third since 1970. (The total number of birds in North America dropped from about ten billion in 1970 to about seven billion in 2018.) Insect numbers have dropped precipitously, too.
But a handful of new bird species have appeared in recent years, like the Black Vulture, a large scavenger with a black, wrinkly face and sharp, hooked bill. It used to be rare north of the warm southern states but is now often seen soaring over New York City. The Anhinga, or Devil Bird, is a large fish-eating species that’s common in hot, wet parts of the Americas—think Florida and the Amazon Basin—but in April 2023 one flew into the city and stayed for weeks. A small number of species that formerly migrated south in the winter, like the American Robin, are now staying in the park year-round. They’re breeding ever earlier in the spring and their numbers are rising.
Many of the park’s largest and strongest-looking inhabitants, its big old trees, some of which have grown here for centuries, have been damaged or obliterated in recent years. They’ve been progressively weakened by a series of droughts, which have been longer and drier than before. Trees have been broken and toppled by more frequent, increasingly intense thunderstorms and blizzards as well as city-blitzing hurricanes like Irene and Sandy. They’re being chewed through by wave upon wave of new insect enemies like the Emerald Ash Borer, the Asian Long-horned Beetle, the Southern Pine Beetle, and, most recently, the Spotted Lanternfly, which are moving up from southern latitudes thanks to warming temperatures in New York.
The presence here of at least one of the new pests can be linked to extreme weather: in 1985, Hurricane Gloria swept some small, sap-sucking insects called Hemlock Woolly Adelgids from the southern United States all the way to the Northeast, where their species established itself and has been attacking Eastern Hemlock trees ever since.)
As the park’s trees die, their carcasses are trucked away for burning or chipped into tiny fragments to make footpaths. The spaces they leave in the sky, the soil, and the ecosystem rapidly fade from human memory. The park’s gardeners don’t always know what to replace them with because the weather has become so weird and unpredictable in recent years that it’s hard to tell which species will survive. But gardeners have noticed that plants from warmer climes like crape myrtles, Cherrybark Oak, and Japanese flowering camellia—species that would not have survived the local winters just a couple of decades ago—seem to be doing quite well.
This scene is not fantasy. It’s a synthesis of actual changes happening in parks and natural areas in and around New York City as I write. One thing that’s common to all these changes—besides the fact that many park visitors haven’t paid much attention to them—is the dramatic recent increase of energy-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, which is forcing up the Earth’s average air, land, and ocean temperatures. It’s sometimes difficult to comprehend how this threatens wild species throughout the world and how thoroughly it is disrupting, unraveling, and impoverishing ecosystems not just in the Arctic, with its now-iconic melting ice sheets and starving Polar Bears, but everywhere.
If Earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be about as thick as the apple’s skin. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in about 1760, humans have been performing an uncontrolled experiment on this fragile, life-giving cocoon. We’ve decided to burn incomprehensibly many gigatons of fossil fuels and spew their combusted remains into the air while simultaneously destroying millions of acres of forests, savannas, and prairies for industrial agriculture and ever-sprawling roads and cities, thus releasing even greater volumes of energy-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
This is wreaking havoc on nature from the largest to the smallest scales. Extreme weather events are intensifying, megadroughts are afflicting vast regions for years, and megafires are burning up millions of acres with breathtaking speed. But species and ecosystems are also being eroded and rearranged more subtly as local microclimates shift and change, forcing smaller, less-noticed life forms to evolve, move away, or wither into extinction; these intimate ecological breakups and breakdowns are of no less consequence than the so-called natural disasters that generate dramatic headlines, and they’re happening all around us.
We’re creating an all-penetrating phenomenon that is scrambling ecosystems and triggering cascades of chaos throughout the biosphere. It’s something like a monster from ancient Greek mythology that, as it embraces the world, sprouts thickets of writhing necks from which horrifying, sharp-toothed heads emerge. Looking into its faces can turn humans to stone.
This is not the first time a miasma of this kind has enveloped our planet. Energy-trapping gas concentrations and global temperatures have spiked before during the four billion years of life on Earth: natural events like colossal, long-lasting volcanic eruptions and massive meteorite impacts have on a few rare occasions caused huge climate shifts and devastating mass extinctions that are laid down hard in the fossil record.
But the current rise is different: not only is it caused by humans, but data indicate that gas concentrations are going up far faster than in any previous epoch. We’ve pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide from its natural level of about 280 parts per million to over 420 parts per million in just ten human generations, and we’re increasing it further still. There is now more CO2 in the air than there has been for at least three million years.
Since our own species evolved into its current form about two hundred thousand years ago, so this means that we’re creating an atmosphere profoundly unlike any we—and huge numbers of other species—have lived in before.
We are making and breathing changed air.