A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land by Dan Chapman

Author:Dan Chapman [Chapman, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, General, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Travel, United States, South, Biography & Autobiography, Environmentalists & Naturalists
ISBN: 9781642831955
Google: haVjEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2022-05-26T20:48:37+00:00

A warming world doesn’t necessarily mean a drier one. The South, historically, has been blessed with ample rain, which is why everybody from Bill Gates and Chinese investors to potato chip makers flock to well-watered sections of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina to grow fruits and vegetables. Annual rainfall totals haven’t changed much in the last century. Climate models can’t predict whether they’ll change much in the next century, either. What is changing, though, is how the rain falls. Not since 1900 in North Carolina have there been as many heavy rain events—three inches or more in a day—as there were between 2015 and 2019. By century’s end, the number of extreme rainfalls could double, according to the National Climate Assessment. More frequent and more intense hurricanes have something to do with the surge in deluges. But higher temperatures are also culpable. Hotter air leads to greater evaporation from soils, plants, and lakes. Once the water vapor condenses, heavier rains, and flooding, ensue.

The South was battered by storms in October 2015. A deluge early in the month hammered the Carolinas. Mount Pleasant, on South Carolina’s coast, got a whopping twenty-seven inches of rain. Sumter, in the middle of the state, got twenty-one inches. A monstrous hurricane wasn’t to blame. Instead, a deep trough of moisture from the Gulf sat on South Carolina for five days. Rivers spilled over their banks. Dams breached. One hundred and sixty thousand homes flooded. Damage topped two billion dollars. Nineteen people died in the thousand-year monsoon.

A year after the historic floods, a killer drought gripped much of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama, with wildfires ravaging the Smokies and the Chattahoochee National Forest. September–October was the driest two-month period ever recorded at Coweeta. Five years earlier, Georgia suffered its second driest summer. Five years earlier than that, Alabama notched “by far the most devastating drought ever recorded,” according to the US Army Corps of Engineers. And five years earlier . . .

“Drought impacts almost every aspect of southeastern forests,” says Steve McNulty, a colleague of Peter’s who runs the Southeast Regional Climate Hub. “Climate change increases the likelihood for severe droughts, now and into the future.”

It’s hard to recognize, at first, the impact of drought on a forest. Coweeta, for example, is a lush, water-blessed oasis of green where certain ridge tops receive ninety inches of rain a year. Climb the fire tower atop Albert Mountain, though, and gray and brown splotches of dead trees dot the landscape below. Some are hemlocks sucked dry of sap by woolly adelgids. Others, though, are pine trees whose inner bark is under attack from southern pine beetles. Sustained drought stresses pines, allowing the tiny beetles to readily burrow under the bark and build S-shaped tunnels in which they lay their eggs. The tunnels girdle the tree, blocking food and water passageways. The 2016 drought led to “gobs of dead pine trees,” Peter says.

As our climate tour ends, he points me to Watershed No. 1. It’s a short drive to the experimental corner of the forest planted in white pines in 1957.

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