Transient Landscapes: Insights on a Changing Planet

By Ellen E. Wohl

Landscape—the unique combination of landforms, plants, animals, and weather that compose any natural place—is inherently transient. Each essay in Transient Landscapes introduces this idea of a constantly metamorphosing global landscape, revealing how to see the ubiquity of landscape transience, both that which results through Earth’s natural environmental and climatological processes and that which comes from human intervention.

The essays are grouped by type of environmental change: long-term, large-scale transformation driven by geologic forces such as tectonic uplift and volcanism; natural variability at shorter time scales, such as seasonal flooding; and modifications resulting from human activities, such as timber harvest, land drainage, and pollution. Each essay is set in a unique geographic location—including such diverse places as New Zealand, Northern California, Costa Rica, and the Scottish Highlands—and is largely drawn from Wohl’s personal experience researching in the field.

A combination of travel writing, nature writing, and science writing, Transient Landscapes is a beautiful and thoughtful journey through the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781607323693

Book preview

Transient Landscapes

Transient Landscapes

Insights on a Changing Planet

Ellen Wohl

University Press of Colorado

Boulder

© 2015 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of The Association of American University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

ISBN: 978-1-60732-368-6 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-369-3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wohl, Ellen E., 1962–

Transient landscapes : insights on a changing planet / Ellen E. Wohl.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60732-368-6 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-60732-369-3 (ebook)

1. Geodynamics. 2. Landscape changes. 3. Environmental geomorphology. I. Title.

QE517.5.W64 2015

551.3—dc23

2014034309

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover photographs by the author.

For my mother, Annette Wohl, who provides stability in the midst of transience

Contents

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Of Landscapes and Transience

Solid as a Rock? Geological Transience Out Far and In Deep

Landscapes on the Edge

Balance of Power: Camp Creek, New Zealand

Facing the Subduction Zone: The Lost Coast of Northern California

Himalaya: The Weather Makers

Tortured Landscape: Mount Unzen, Japan

Paradox: Sechura Desert, Western Peru

Hell, 100 Years Later: Katmai National Park, Alaska

Juxtapositions of Violence: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona

Interior Landscapes

Buckeye Creek Cave, West Virginia: What Lies Beneath

Stepped Landscape: Augrabies Falls National Park, South Africa

Islands of Rock: Kakadu National Park, Australia

Retreating Ice: Mackenzie River, Canada

Time and the Rivers Flowing

In Transit: La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica

Summer’s Abundance: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska

Survival Strategies: Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska

Differing Scales of Transience: Wulik River, Alaska

Transient Rivers: Bungle Bungle

Amazon I: Flood Pulse of the World’s Greatest River

Amazon II: Várzea of the Rio Napo

Amazon III: Igapó of the Rio Ampiyacu

Black Water Swamp in Autumn: Congaree National Park, South Carolina

Flowing Rivers: Missouri River, Montana

Negev Desert, Israel

Motion and Fixity: Shortgrass Prairie, Northeastern Colorado

Seven Billion and Counting

Terra Nova: Hawai’i

Old-Growth Forest Stream, Colorado Front Range

Vernal Pond, Northeastern Ohio

Watershed: Upper Rio Chagres, Panama

Refuge: Coweeta Forest, North Carolina

Altering the River’s Pulse: North Fork Poudre River, Colorado

Rivers and Oceans: Broome, Australia

Beaver Meadow, Rocky Mountain National Park

Twilight of the Mountain Glaciers: Sermiligâq Fjord, Greenland

Deep, Dark Forest: Temperate Rain Forest of Northwestern Montana

Vanishing Wonderland: Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Rio Pequeño? Big Bend National Park, Texas

Rannoch Moor, Scottish Highlands

Wild Gardens: The Moorlands of Northern Britain

Missing Pieces: Italian Dolomites

Shrinking Ecosystem: Kruger National Park, South Africa

Y2K in the Thar Desert, India

Mountain Pine Beetles in the Colorado Front Range

Living with Transience

Selected References

Index

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

—Santayana

Of Landscapes and Transience

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Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight! —Percy Bysshe Shelley

The short essays collected here record the times and places in which I have been privileged to feel the spirit of delight over the course of many years of exploring the world’s natural places. There are no natural places in the sense of true wildernesses that have never been altered by humans, for humans now indirectly alter the entire planet with global warming. In writing of natural places here, I describe places no longer primarily used by humans for living or gathering resources—places that are not primarily urban, suburban, or farmlands. In some cases these regions come as close as possible to wilderness, for people have never substantially altered the plant and animal communities or the way the rivers flow. In other cases the regions I write of are no longer as actively managed for resource extraction but have been substantially altered by people in the past. In all of these places the lack of contemporary, intense human presence provides a sense of being apart from much of the surrounding world, which is crowded with people and their structures. Some people have grown accustomed to this crowding and rely on it, feeling ill at ease in the absence of overt signs of humanity. Others need at least a periodic escape from that pervasive awareness of densely layered people and structures. I write for these latter people.

I first thought of Shelley’s line in connection with the joy wild places can bring while on a float trip in Alaska. A group of us spent five leisurely days exploring the Fortymile River in eastern Alaska after being dropped off by a small chartered plane at a gravel landing strip in a remote portion of the interior. The weather was singularly uncooperative, a succession of gray days of low, heavy clouds, intermittent rain, and chill temperatures. I lived in a wetsuit underneath a spray jacket and pants, and after a couple of days the inside of my small tent smelled awful when I took off the wet clothing and crawled into my damp bedding. The stunted black spruce trees and shrubby willows growing along the river concealed ankle-twisting hummock grasses and mucky pools of black water that limited the amount of hiking I did when not on the water. The scenery did not present the alpine extravaganza of other parts of Alaska. Rounded ridges covered in dark green vegetation disappeared into low-hanging clouds, and views were limited. Yet maneuvering the inflatable kayak on the clear water flowing swiftly over variegated brown, gray, and white cobbles, I might round a bend to see a moose lift its dripping chin from the river’s edge or glimpse a black bear easily climbing the hummocky slopes on which I struggled. For five days we saw no other people. We heard no airplanes overhead, passed no buildings or roads, and experienced a deeply calming sense of being detached from our daily lives and the frenetic activity of our society. I named my kayak Spirit of Delight on that trip, for no other phrase so well captures the unexpected gift of that sense of being apart and fortunate to participate in a world obviously beyond humans and our misleading assumptions of control and privilege.

The essays in this collection are designed to share with the reader some sense of what it is like to be in these natural places and to experience the spirit of delight. Many of the essays are structured around a particular theme, but all of them focus on description designed to evoke that place and that moment. The essays record the gifts I have received from the world’s natural places and represent my efforts to share those gifts. Although I have included a range of environments, the places chosen are completely eclectic in that they reflect my travels, typically for work and sometimes for play, rather than a deliberate sampling of the world’s diversity.

I began writing these essays when SueEllen Campbell asked me to contribute what she called on the spot essays to her book The Face of the Earth, an exploration of the geologic forces that shape landscapes and of human perceptions of landscape. SueEllen broke up the main text with a series of short essays by diverse writers who described for the reader what it feels like to be in a particular landscape at a moment in time. I enjoyed the challenge of evoking a particular place and time in a thousand words or less, and I started writing more of the essays, which gradually took shape as this collection. I gave myself a little more generous allotment, expanding the essays to as much as 2,000 words, but I kept the general format. Each of these places on Earth, transient as it may be, has been a source of continuing delight.

I titled the collection Transient Landscapes because the spirit of delight is transient, coming unexpectedly before once more giving way to the prosaic emotions of daily living. My impressions of place are also transient. I live in a suburban house in Fort Collins, Colorado. A third of my life is spent sleeping. More than a third is spent working and, although some of my work is outdoors when I do field research as a geologist, that leaves relatively little time for directly experiencing the diverse landscapes reflected in this collection, most of which I visited for days or at most weeks at a time during a single season of a single year. These essays are written snapshots that record the impressions of a moment in time.

Landscape in the title refers to the unique combination of landforms, plants and animals, and weather that composes any of the natural places I describe in these essays. This unique combination is inherently transient. We readily acknowledge the obvious changes, the transition from summer to autumn or the unusual early snowstorm that bows down the still-leafy branches and knocks out electrical power. These changes we expect and accept, at least in part because we understand that they are temporary. The big storm’s snow will melt, and summer will return.

Recognizing change that spans longer time periods becomes more difficult, sometimes requiring the specialized insight of an ecologist or a geologist. Changes driven by the great pacemakers of climate and tectonics can be invisible at the scale of individual perception. Vast ice sheets advance and retreat. Tectonic plates subduct beneath one another or crumple at the colliding edges and thrust upward into immense mountains. We can change the focal length at which we consider the pace of change in these landscapes we perceive as permanent, thinking about change over geological rather than human time spans. Many of the landscapes along the margins of the planet’s tectonic plates are geologically transient, continually changing as the balance shifts between tectonic uplift and the forces that break down rock and carry away the fragments. The actual processes that change the landscape are extremely transient and episodic. The earthquake that lasts a few minutes or the flood that lasts a few days can create dramatic changes for individual people or societies, and the cumulative effects of numerous earthquakes or floods over millennia shift the balance between uplift and erosion. Landscapes away from the plate margins may have a slower pace of change, but transience characterizes even the seemingly stable interiors. Stronger rocks temporarily slow the pace of erosion and create transient vertical steps in landscapes. Weaker rocks hold up the overlying material for a time, then dissolve into caves and eventually collapse. Continental ice sheets plane off the topography and leave an imprint long after the ice melts. Look out far and in deep, and your sense of permanence shifts.

Recognizing landscape changes created by humans can be as difficult as recognizing geological transience, if the changes occurred long before your lifetime. The treeless moors of northern Britain were deforested centuries ago and would now return to forests if left alone, but inhabitants and visitors are so accustomed to a more visually open landscape that they perceive it as natural and prefer to maintain existing conditions.

Accepting recent changes induced in some way by human actions can be the most difficult of all. The conversion of shortgrass prairie to a shopping mall or the dying of chestnut trees in the forest may be transient when considered over hundreds of years, but these changes are permanent for each person’s lifetime and may take an emotional toll on people fond of the existing natural landscape. My first experience of losing a treasured natural landscape to urbanization continues to influence my sense of progressive, pervasive loss of wild places around the world.

I live in the western United States. I have lived here since I was seventeen years old. I studied geology here and did my first overnight hikes alone here. I have driven the boundaries, from the hundredth meridian to the western ocean and the southern deserts to the northern conifer forests. I became an adult and a scientist here, and living in the West is central to my identity. Yet I did not grow up here, and my first perceptions of the natural world and of transience reflect the very different environment of northern Ohio.

I was born in 1962 and grew to maturity in a society increasingly aware of pollution and environmental change. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. The US Congress enacted legislation to improve national air and water quality during the early 1970s. Ecology became a much more widely recognized word, and conservationists became environmentalists. The changing societal perceptions carried me along, not least because of my father. He had been an environmentalist since as a child he contributed pennies to the Save the Redwoods League. As a high school science teacher he worked with his students to measure air and water pollution, and I tagged along and learned too.

At least as a young child, however, discovery of the immediate surroundings made a much greater impression on me than the idea that we were destroying our natural inheritance. What I remember now is the rhythm of the seasons playing out in my own small wilderness of a few acres behind our house. Only a decade or two earlier the site had been a commercial plant nursery, and odd reminders popped up each spring in the form of long rows of vivid yellow daffodils blooming among grasses and shrubs gone wild. A decade of neglect created sufficient time for second-growth forests and wetlands to colonize the site, along with deer, foxes, raccoons, pheasants, and other animals that thrived along the edges among woodlands, meadows, and marshes.

Northern Ohio can be grim during the winter, which goes on and on in days of finger-numbing, damp cold beneath seamless gray skies. Spring can be delightful in any climate, but the return of warmth and light heralded by spring in northern Ohio created surges of energy and excitement that propelled me outdoors to watch the changes. At the first hint of warmth in the air, the pointed tips of skunk cabbages poked up through the snow crust in the quaggy marshes, unfurling wine-splotched green banners with golden centers. The strengthening sunlight scattered handfuls of tiny spring beauty and bluet blossoms across the meadows. As spring filled out and the snow vanished, fields of May apples spread green and tender among the arthritic old roots of the oaks. Rue anemone, violets, and wood sorrel bloomed in soft colors on the forest floor. Marsh marigold blazed yellow in the shallow swamps, and the wild strawberries bloomed white before breaking out into juicy red berries that stained my fingers and lips.

Summer settled heavily down in days of sticky heat and nights troubled by tornadoes. Monarchs and swallowtail butterflies drifted over fields flecked with blue asters and chickory, white Queen Anne’s lace, and pink milkweed. As I pushed through the masses of green, my lightest touch burst the jewel weed pods. If I could trace the explosive trajectory of one of the little brown-jacketed seeds, I could peel back its nondescript exterior to reveal the turquoise seed within. Bluebirds and warblers, thrashers and robins stuffed themselves and their screeching nestlings on the season’s abundance. Cicadas shrilled through the hot days. By afternoon even energetic children grew languid, secure in the knowledge that summer vacation stretched endlessly ahead.

Then, goldenrod flames swept across the fields. The nut trees dropped neat brown bundles among the swiftly falling leaves—butternut, oak, hickory, walnut, buckeye—winter’s food reserves for squirrels and handy little missiles for children. Cedar waxwings blew through in chattering brown storms that stripped the bushes of seeds. The local woodchuck waddled in layers of fat among wind-fallen apples.

And then it snowed. And snowed and snowed, until the world lay white and silent and I looked out to a cold moon framed white among silver icicles and winter-blue sky. My memories of deep, lingering snows may be distorted by time, but we lived sufficiently close to Lake Erie to experience the infamous lake effect of dreary gray skies and heavy precipitation. The snow made life more difficult for those who moved only between buildings and cars, but on our Sunday morning outings on foot or on skis, my parents and I enjoyed the pleasures of the winter woods. The knocking of downy woodpeckers sounded among the trees, along with the steady chirps of chickadees. Pert, bustling little birds, the chickadees looked fat with their feathers fluffed against the cold. Male cardinals stood out, fiery red as drops of blood against the white snow.

These are the details that come first when I think about where I grew up. Then I remember how a vivid imagination and an insatiable appetite for books allowed me to perceive in those few acres behind the house every wilderness known on the globe. I moved cautiously along thick green rain forest tunnels of maple and oak freckled by the fierce tropical sun. I waded through rivers of grass where garter snakes waited looped among the stalks and startled bullfrogs croaked in high-pitched panic. A row of poplars ghostly gray on winter afternoons doubled as wolf-haunted aspen groves of the high Rockies.

Now an adult separated from those experiences by decades, I read Josephine Johnson’s 1969 book The Inland Island. Woven through her observations of plants and animals on an Ohio farm reverting to wild land are her despair over the Vietnam War and the readily visible pollution of a creek that flows across the farm. Reading her book as I approached fifty, I was struck by the disparity between the weariness and anger that half smothered her fifty-something ability to derive joy from the natural world and the wonder of discovery in that same 1960s environment of northern Ohio that drove my eagerness and enthusiasm as a child.

Transient landscapes, transient perceptions. Ownership of the old tree nursery changed hands as I finished high school. First came surveyors with stakes, then heavy equipment. A church, a highway, and a huge shopping mall obliterated the woodlands and marshes. I got my first taste of anger and despair as a landscape that felt so vital to my sense of place and self changed apparently irrevocably under forces beyond my control.

Perhaps if I had not spent so much time alone there . . . perhaps if the budding scientist in me had not been quite so fascinated by the details of individual plants and animals and the repeating patterns of seasonal changes . . . perhaps if I had not been quite so comfortable and free from the social expectations that bind even children . . . perhaps if I had not identified so deeply with that wild place . . . then perhaps the changes that came to the landscape abruptly would not have been so emotionally difficult. As it was, I metaphorically turned my back on the loss and eagerly moved with my parents to the western United States, where wild places still abounded. But the loss of that one wild place has colored my perceptions of environmental change ever since.

The essays in this collection are not chronologically ordered. Successive essays might describe a place in which I conducted field research during my forties and a region where I worked as a graduate student during my early twenties. Individual essays also span different lengths of time, from the fleeting impressions of a day’s visit to Mount Unzen, Japan, to insight developed over a decade of working along North St. Vrain Creek in Rocky Mountain National Park. The essays are arranged to explore the idea of landscape transience over progressively shorter spans of time.

The first group of essays addresses the changes I can only perceive by drawing on my intellectual training in geology. Viewed across thousands or even millions of years, the contemporary configuration of the landscape is evanescent. The enormous waterfall will erode upstream and eventually disappear entirely. Colliding tectonic plates will create mountainous topography, and weathering and erosion will tear down the mountains. Although this scale of transience might appear to have little relevance for people, the pace of change is punctuated. The Himalayas form over geologic time spans from millions of individual fault movements that generate the earthquakes that level cities and kill people. And the cumulative effects of geological transience create the framework on which all living creatures exist, by determining the locations of mountains, deserts, canyons, and plains.

The essays exploring geological transience are distinguished by a stylized symbol for either a convergent plate boundary or a landscape with rain falling. The first symbol reflects landscapes shaped by proximity to a boundary between two of the twelve enormous tectonic plates that cover the planet’s surface. At a convergent boundary, two plates meet head-on in a crash prolonged over hundreds of millions of years, manifested in the abrupt jolts of earthquakes and explosions of volcanoes. The landscape with a rain symbol indicates landscapes within the interior of the tectonic plates. The appearance of these landscapes of lower geologic energy is more likely to be dominated by water and ice gradually disintegrating rocks and carrying the resulting sediment to river floodplains and coastal deltas.

The second group of essays explores seasonal or other relatively rapid forms of transience that, repeated over centuries, act with larger geological processes to define the contemporary landscape. Because of my research on the processes that shape individual landforms and physical landscapes, I am particularly aware of the episodic nature of changes in landscapes and the cumulative effects of events short in duration. Individual essays in this section explore different forms and scales of transience in hot deserts, polar deserts, rain forests, and grasslands.

The essays exploring seasonal transience are distinguished by a symbol indicating rainfall or flowing water. The uneven distribution of the sun’s energy over Earth’s surface drives the enormous movements of air and water vapor that we call weather. Weather, expressed as average conditions and as the fluctuations of hurricanes, blizzards, or droughts, sculpts the raw material of bedrock geology