Don Gordon: Thoreau, orchids, protected areas and more

Don Gordon is professor emeritus of botany at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Email him questions concerning horticulture or the environment here.

In the mid-1800s Henry David Thoreau kept detailed records of more than 400 plant species in an area around Walden Pond. The journal Science recently reported that Harvard University taxonomists recently tried to inventory Thoreau’s flowers and found that half of the species exhibited significant population decline and 20 percent had disappeared entirely.

The two degree centigrade increase in temperature that has occurred at Walden Pond since Thoreau’s day has placed whole groups of plants at risk. The authors found showy wild flowers such as orchids are most vulnerable to climate change. Plants that do not have the ability to shift their flowering times seems to be at the greatest risk

When I came to Minnesota 40 years ago, some of the states 42 orchid species were much more abundant than there are today. In our immediate area [Mankato], orchid populations have declined significantly. How much of the decline is due to climate change is unknown. Despite the fact that orchids are protected by state law, I suspect most populations have declined because of development and over zealous collectors.
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Sometimes we are “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” A recent study reported in Science by environmental professors at Berkeley illustrates the point. The authors studied 306 environmentally protected areas (PAs) in 45 countries in Africa and Latin America.

Protected areas are often criticized because they are sometimes viewed as areas for the elite where costs of establishment with few benefits are borne by marginalized rural communities. For example, when a national donor organization buys land to set up a protected area to protect diversity, who really benefits?

The researchers found that human population growth on the borders of PAs increased significantly and were nearly double average rural growth. The study indicated that the “scale of human settlements around PAs was a strong predictor of illegal timber and mineral extraction, bushmeat hunting, fire frequency, and more generally, species extinction.” The message here is that if PAs are intended to serve as the “last of the wild,” we may be deluding ourselves. The challenge for PAs is how to manage increased populations so that they don’t destroy what we are trying to protect.
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A new report by the federally funded environmental think tank, the Heinz Center, indicates that the nation’s ecosystems are in trouble. Years of industrial and agricultural growth have altered ecosystems significantly and this may affect human health and well being. The Heinz report did not contain policy recommendations, but it did urge Congress to authorize a set of national indicators and use them in environmental policy making. Important findings released in the report include:

• Between 1960 and 2000 freshwater consumption increased 46 percent.
• Pesticides, fertilizers, and medications have been found in every freshwater streambed analyzed.
• Contaminants in streambeds are above benchmarks designed to protect aquatic life in 57 percent of farmland and 83 percent of urban and suburban areas.
• Contaminants above benchmarks to protect human health were found in seven percent of urban and suburban areas. Nitrate, at levels which exceeded federal drinking water standards, was found in 20 percent of farmland groundwater wells.
• Over one million tons of nitrogen travel in waterways to coastal areas each year. This nitrogen along with other nutrients create “dead zones” which kill marine life. The largest dead zone is in the Gulf of Mexico.
• One-third of the U.S. plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.