Unofficial Conference Blog | Society of Environmental Journalists

Tour: Clark Fork River Superfund Site

Stretching from the infamous Berkeley Pit at Butte to the former Milltown Dam site outside Missoula, the Clark Fork Superfund area is one of the largest in the country. An amalgamation of four different superfund sites, Butte/Silver Bow Creek, Montana Pole, the Anaconda Smelter, and the Milltown Reservoir, it runs along 140 contiguous miles of the Clark Fork River.

Leaving before sunrise, Thursday's Superfund Tour visited each of the major superfund sites along the river before ending back at Missoula later in the day. Each site offered a unique glimpse of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in action, working to remedy and restore lands degraded through the callous mineral extraction of copper kings.

 

 

Image: Anaconda Company smelter site. Credit: U.S. EPA

Tour: Wild Trout, Wilderness, and (Global) Warming

Despite the title of our tour, we didn't see any trout.  What we did see, though, was a landscape in a state of rapid change. 

My group ventured up Mt. Jumbo (the one with the "L").  We took the long way, up a cold and shadowed Woods Gulch.  Everywhere we looked, climate change's causes and effects were inescapable.  When we looked near at hand, we saw the beetle-killed ponderosa pines.  Looking far, we saw the sprawling Missoula valley.  We were also reminded of periods not that long ago (only 10,000 years) when Montana's climate was considerably colder: the bathtub rings of ancient Glacial Lake Missoula, and the steep walls of Hellgate Canyon carved by the massive jokulhlaups, or glacial-floods.

Before our hike, we received a breakfast primer on climate change in the northern Rockies. Speakers included: Nobel laureate Steven Running, Regents Professor at the University of Montana; Diana Six, professor of integrated forest entomology and pathology at the University of Montana; Michael Gibson, outreach coordinator for Montana Trout Unlimited; and Dave Morris, a doctoral student at the School of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. 

Much of the discussion revolved around the current changes in flora and fauna in the region.  Six, a bark beetle expert, explained: "You can't work on bark beetle issues without working on climate change issues."

Morris wondered aloud whether people will act in response to the signs of climate change on the landscape.  He described the beetle kill across the west as "climate change impact slamming you in the face."

Later in the day, Morris brought our group to the trunk of a beetle-killed ponderosa pine.  We peered into the holes that the beetles had bored to fly away in a mass migration to some yet living tree.  The question, it seems, is not if the beetles will spread.  The signs indicate they will continue their profligacy.  Instead, the question is if we will continue ours.

Tour: Kootenai Creek Canyon's Trout Habitat

Roughly a dozen SEJ conference attendees ventured into the Montana wilderness braving the early morning chill, and a trail that could potentially lead them 19 miles into the Bitterroot Mountains.  They were at Kootenai Creek: a tour added at the last minute, thanks to high interest in hikes along trout habitat.

As I was the only volunteer who was familiar with the area, I was asked to lead the group and be van-driver to the Stevensville trail Thursday morning.

Although the group opted to hike only about two and a half miles in, the group reached the edge of a scorched landscape, where trees were reduced to ash and matchsticks along Kootenai Creek, which burned in a 4500-acre fire along the canyon last fall.

 They encountered snakes and wooly-bear caterpillars along the trail and saw trout swimming in pools along the river, camouflaged by multicolored rocks along the streambed.

 The two-hour hike gave the visiting journalists and scientists a slice of recreational wilderness in Montana. Kootenai Creek is often home to hikers, kayakers and rock climbers during the summer. 

 

Tour: Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World

This tour, about preserving wildlife against both human encroachment and climate change, was my first choice, given my interest in the interface between wildlife and humans at Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Viewpoint.

Here in Montana, the species crossing paths with humans include elk, black bears and grizzly bears, wolves, lynx and hares.

Jim Robbins and Alex Sakariassen did a great job of organizing the tour. We got out and saw the habitat where these critters live and talked to the experts in their native territory.

New housing developments put people in elk range. Since the local herd increased from 40 in the 1980s to over 300, conflicts between what some describe as a 500-pound pigeon and humans became more frequent. “Hunting is really the only management tool we’ve got,” Scott Eggeman, a graduate student in Ungulate Habitat Ecology at UM, told us. “But you can’t hunt in somebody’s back yard.”

The elk have it figured out, too. Last year they migrated out of the wilderness into the lower private lands where they can't be hunted the night before hunting season opened.

Tour: Alpinist Conrad Anker Talks with SEJers About Glacier Project

Alpinist Conrad Anker joined the SEJ conference field trip to Glacier National Park on Thursday. Anker is most famous for his challenging ascents of the worlds highest mountains, including peaks in the high Himalaya, Patagonia, and Antarctica. He is also the climber that found the body of George Mallory in 1999 on Mount Everest (Read Anker’s account in The Lost Explorer). At 47, the Bozeman, Montana-resident now also includes environmentalist and citizen scientist among his chief occupations. Global warming is one of his greatest concerns, he said. 

Standing on the shores of the McDonald River, Anker, who writes a column in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, told journalists about his new project to monitor ongoing changes to the glaciers of the Himalaya. A few months ago, Anker led a five-person team of climbers and photographers to install cameras in the Himalayas. It was a project directed by photographer James Balog of Boulder, Colo.-based Extreme Ice Survey. The five cameras are affixed to the sides of mountains. They take photos every 30 minutes and capture time-lapse images of the changing glacial landscape. Two of the cameras monitor the Everest Base Camp and the Khumbu ice fall, and two cameras are equipped with telephoto lenses and focus only on parts of the Khumbu ice. Another camera monitors Nare Glacier, on the south side of nearby Ama Dablam. EIS has cameras all over the world that monitor glaciers in Alaska, the Alps, Greenland, and Iceland. 

At Thursday’s reception, Anker gave a talk about images from the EIS project. He showed a time-lapsed series of photos taken from the newly installed Himalayan cameras. Then he showed a historical image from the same location taken 50 years ago, which shows how ice has vanished from the south side of the Khumbu massif and how the glacier is now thin and sparse. 

Conservation Biology and Chemical Engineering: Finding the Bridge

Of those "hard science" topics, I would argue that Chemical Engineering and Conservation Biology are about as opposite as they come. That notwithstanding, I joined the Wildlife Tour members for a day filled with the exploration of elk, bears, wolves and hares. What I found was a surprisingly complex world that shares many values with engineering. 

Megan Parker (Working Dogs for Conservation) put it best; "Conservation biologists need to count how many are there, where they are, and are they increasing or decreasing?" We heard similar stories about elk migration in the Missoula area, where the species poses a competitive threat to livestock ranchers.

What I find striking is that each of these Conservation Biologists is using a population sample to elucidate an elaborate causal framework. These scientists are only able to measure the quantity of a species (e.g. snowshoe hares) in a given location at one snapshot in time. From this two-dimensional data, the next step is to evaluate how particular independent variables (e.g. climate shifts) may affect future migration patterns or population balances.

Pertinent to Metcalf's network lunch and beat dinner tomorrow, I see this data strategy as very similar to how scientists and engineers approach a deepwater crude oil flowline. Given that many deepwater lines are at least 5,000 ft. under the ocean, engineers and operators can typically measure only pressure and temperature along the line. They're trying to understand turbulent, multiphase flow (with oil, gas, water and probably gas hydrate) using only these two variables as guideposts. Because these flows are considered "turbulent," they contain random swirling motions ("eddies") that make pure theoretical prediction next to impossible.

Ultimately, the engineers and scientists that work on these flowlines are working on problems shared by their colleagues in Conservation Biology: trying to map highly complex systems based on a few macroscopic measureables. Perhaps we're not so different, after all.

Montana Meanderings

 

Flathead River, National Bison Range

Having scheduled an extra day to regroup after our journey to Missoula from Philadelphia, my husband Bob (an academic member of SEJ) and I headed out to do some exploring and photography, to get acclimated to the ecosystem and local culture before the conference's official start.

Our destination: The National Bison Range, a wildlife refuge about 45 minutes outside the city, up routes 200 and 93. Moments after leaving Missoula, we were greeted with mountains rising like dinosaur spines in the east.  On the way, there's a wildlife overpass and lots of open range with horse and cattle ranches (no surprise). 

Once there, we checked out the visitors center, which recounts the history of the American bison. It's a remarkable tale of environmental destruction and (ongoing) restoration: At one time some 30 million bison roamed what's now the U.S. with a range extending as far as the Mid-Atlantic.  Human predation reduced their numbers to less than 100 individuals.

Fortunately, in the early part of the 20th century conservationists (including the ASPCA!) committed themselves to saving the bison, and the range was established as the first preserve with that goal.

Pollination, Pesticides, Fungus: Mini-tour, network lunch addresses threats to bees

A mysterious illness has decimated honeybees around the world. An article in the October 6 edition of The New York Times reported that new research blames a fungs tag-teaming with a virus for the die-off.

A Fortune story two days later took issue with this research.  Reporter Katherine Eban pointed to financial ties between Bromenshenk and Bayer AG, the chemical company that produces the pesticides blamed for the neurological disorders that make bees unable to navigate and work.

Janet Raloff, senior editor at Science News, and Beth Daley, environmental reporter for the Boston Globe, will co-host a Saturday mini-tour on this threat to bees, called "colony collapse disorder." Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula will lead the mini-tour. Also, a member of the Montana team will lead a network lunch on CCD.

I look forward to learning more about this urgent problem at these sessions. Thanks, Janet and Beth, for putting them together.

Wildlife meet Humans

One of my interests at this conference is to explore the interface between humans and wildlife. I’ve been gathering information by serving as a docent at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Viewpoint on California’s Central Coast.

The issues of of marine mammals are similar to those of land mammals, which I’ll learn about on the Thursday tour, "Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World."

Northern elephant seals don’t cross paths with humans much, so they’re less controversial than animals that do, such as manatees.

SEJ member Craig Pittman’s book, "Manatee Insanity," examines how that innocuous vegetarian became the hot button animal in Florida’s development fights. Manatees and elephant seals are both marine mammals, but very different from each other. Manatees can die if the water gets too cold. Elephant seals eat fish and squid and spend most of their time in frigid northern Pacific waters. Manatees stay close to the surface. Elephant seals are deep divers.

In my work as a docent, I often see how coming across hundreds of seals on the beach delights the tourists, most of whom have never heard of them. The nonprofit that sponsors the docents – this is California, there’s not money to staff the viewpoint with paid employees – is making plans to celebrate the millionth visitor this month,

Climate Change Warms Montana

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and First Dog Jag, his border collie, will be SEJ's guests at the opening reception and dinner Wednesday evening. Thomas Friedman, in Hot, Flat and Crowded, quotes Gov. Schweitzer at length on global warming. The governor and his wife, Nancy, are plugging an electric ZAP truck in this photo.

  

It turns out that Montanans get it: elk hunting season has had to be pushed back from October to November, because the heavy mountain snows that push elk to lower elevations where hunters can track and kill them don’t arrive in October any more.

 

“Changing the date for the start of elk hunting season is not being driven by scientists,” he said. It’s being driven by guys who want to hunt and are telling me, ‘I have not shot an elk in three years.’ These are just regular people, and they may not have the climate data, but they know what they know, and they know something is different.”

 

Montana’s getting less snow and it’s melting off earlier. Temperatures in trout streams are rising, not good for those cold-loving trout. Some rivers have been closed to fishing. Insects larvae that used to be killed by frigid winter temperatures are surviving warmer winters (relatively speaking – it’s still Montana), to eat up the trees. More dead trees means more devastating forest fires.

 

“We now have acres and acres of dead and dying trees in the Rockies,” said Schweitzer. “Nature has her way of dealing with that – lightning strikes. A healthy forest will burn a little and then a little rain will come and it will all stay in balance. Now, with so many dead and dying trees, you get a lightning strike and boom – 500,000 acres of trees are gone. It is changing the whole composition of the forest.”

 

See Chapter 5, Global Wierding, of Friedman’s book for more. I look forward to hearing Gov. Schweitzer at the dinner, and meeting Jag. The conference will have lots of sessions on subjects from wildfire to salmon. See you there.