Not So Stochastic Events
Laura England | December 2017
There are times when I think going underground would be preferable to the anguish of the daily news today. As our President beats his chest in the direction of North Korea, as endless cases of sexual assault and misconduct perpetrated by powerful men surface, as suffering piles upon suffering in any number of situations around the world, burrowing into a media-free bunker sounds increasingly attractive. I envy all the burrowing mammals with their safe, subterranean existence. At least I thought they were safe.
The Amargosa vole, a small rodent, digs underground burrows where it raises its young and spends much of its time. These herbivores travel no more than 20 feet from the entrance to their burrows as they forage for bulrush, a native marsh plant. Amargosa voles are highly specialized, and have a narrow range within the Mojave Desert of California where small patches of marsh form in the corridor of the partly subterranean Amargosa River. So Amargosa voles depend on wetland habitat in the middle of the desert—a tenuous existence in the best of times.
Thanks to anthropogenic disturbance including habitat alteration, invasion by water-hogging plants such as salt cedar, water diversions, and groundwater withdrawals, only remnants of the historic Amargosa vole habitat remain. Scientists recently estimated that these remnants total less than 250 acres. As a result, these voles are among the most endangered mammals in North America and are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The California Department of Fish & Wildlife asserts that the limited, patchy habitat makes this species “extremely vulnerable to extinction from stochastic events.” Stochastic is such an ugly sounding word. And worse, it represents something that is abhorrent in our society—randomness and unpredictability. We much prefer to be in control and in the know—to be able to predict future events or at least assign probabilities of potential outcomes. Unfortunately, the dedicated work of conservationists and scientists to save Amargosa voles may one day go up in smoke thanks to random, unpredictable—i.e. stochastic—events.
But increasingly, these kinds of threatening events are all too predictable. Species pushed to the brink are increasingly vulnerable to the forces of severe weather events that are intensified by climate change. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, and wildfires can extinguish already small populations by killing them directly or by destroying the last remnants of their habitat. In the case of the Amargosa vole, wildfires intensified as a result of climate change may someday be the final nail in the coffin.
It’s harrowing to think that everything that you’ve painstakingly and lovingly built in your lifetime could go up in smoke. For endangered species like the Amargosa vole, it’s not just what individuals or families have built, but what their entire species has built over thousands of generations, that may go up in smoke.
According to scientists, climate change fosters a “more favorable fire environment”—what bland, inept language for such violent destruction. Warming means there’s more and drier fuel available for ignition when the inevitable lightning bolt strikes. And recent research demonstrates a connection between warming and increasing frequency of lightning strikes. A 2016 study estimated that anthropogenic climate change contributed to an additional 10 million acres of forest fire area in the western U.S. during the last three decades, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in the absence of climate change.
This year, perhaps more than any other year, exemplifies scientists’ predictions about climate change amplifying wildfire damage. In the summer of 2017, wildfires ravaged large expanses in Canada’s Northwest Territories and British Columbia as well as in several U.S. states, including Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California. In mid-August, Canadian newspapers announced that 2017 was officially British Columbia’s worst-ever wildfire season on record with 2.2 million acres burned. The Northwest Territories lost more than 2.5 million acres in a total of more than 250 fires. As for the 2017 wildfire season in the United States, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that as of December 8th, wildfires had scorched nearly 10 million acres.
As early December fires raged in Ventura, San Diego and Los Angeles Counties in southern California, the media thoroughly covered the human tragedy, including countless images and video footage of entire neighborhoods reduced to ash. We read the stories of the former residents, and about the particulars of their losses—family heirlooms, photo albums, and more.
I worry about my twin sister and her family, precariously perched in a part of Los Angeles County called Sherman Oaks. Sounds like a place with lots of fuel for a wildfire, no? I check in with her by text, and I follow the continuously updated fire map published by the Los Angeles Times, but yet I worry. Just a few weeks ago, my nephew was born and is now thriving though there was medical trauma for both him and my sister during the birth. They had only been “out of the woods” for a few days when this new danger struck. Millions of people in the region had just been living their lives and, like my sister, dealing with the usual human crises when the wildfires ramped up. Thankfully, few human lives have been lost in the wildfires of 2017.
But what about the lives of animals? What about the millions (billions?) of animals, large and small, who once occupied the areas engulfed in flames? Social media proves that at least some of us care about those animal lives—smart phone footage of a man rescuing a wild rabbit who was confused and terrified by the choice between the highway and the fire went viral last week. The man was clearly distressed as he tried to redirect and eventually catch the rabbit. Viewers could only hope he was able to transfer the rabbit to safety.
But what of the myriad other animals who burned alive? And others who ran for their lives, only to become roadkill or to otherwise perish in a landscape denuded of the sustenance they needed. It is more than heartbreaking to ponder. And what of the endangered species, like the Amargosa vole, who lost significant portions of their habitat remnants? As the New York Times aptly reported earlier this fall, For an Endangered Animal, a Fire or Hurricane Can Mean the End.
Laura England | December 2017
There are times when I think going underground would be preferable to the anguish of the daily news today. As our President beats his chest in the direction of North Korea, as endless cases of sexual assault and misconduct perpetrated by powerful men surface, as suffering piles upon suffering in any number of situations around the world, burrowing into a media-free bunker sounds increasingly attractive. I envy all the burrowing mammals with their safe, subterranean existence. At least I thought they were safe.
The Amargosa vole, a small rodent, digs underground burrows where it raises its young and spends much of its time. These herbivores travel no more than 20 feet from the entrance to their burrows as they forage for bulrush, a native marsh plant. Amargosa voles are highly specialized, and have a narrow range within the Mojave Desert of California where small patches of marsh form in the corridor of the partly subterranean Amargosa River. So Amargosa voles depend on wetland habitat in the middle of the desert—a tenuous existence in the best of times.
Thanks to anthropogenic disturbance including habitat alteration, invasion by water-hogging plants such as salt cedar, water diversions, and groundwater withdrawals, only remnants of the historic Amargosa vole habitat remain. Scientists recently estimated that these remnants total less than 250 acres. As a result, these voles are among the most endangered mammals in North America and are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The California Department of Fish & Wildlife asserts that the limited, patchy habitat makes this species “extremely vulnerable to extinction from stochastic events.” Stochastic is such an ugly sounding word. And worse, it represents something that is abhorrent in our society—randomness and unpredictability. We much prefer to be in control and in the know—to be able to predict future events or at least assign probabilities of potential outcomes. Unfortunately, the dedicated work of conservationists and scientists to save Amargosa voles may one day go up in smoke thanks to random, unpredictable—i.e. stochastic—events.
But increasingly, these kinds of threatening events are all too predictable. Species pushed to the brink are increasingly vulnerable to the forces of severe weather events that are intensified by climate change. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, and wildfires can extinguish already small populations by killing them directly or by destroying the last remnants of their habitat. In the case of the Amargosa vole, wildfires intensified as a result of climate change may someday be the final nail in the coffin.
It’s harrowing to think that everything that you’ve painstakingly and lovingly built in your lifetime could go up in smoke. For endangered species like the Amargosa vole, it’s not just what individuals or families have built, but what their entire species has built over thousands of generations, that may go up in smoke.
According to scientists, climate change fosters a “more favorable fire environment”—what bland, inept language for such violent destruction. Warming means there’s more and drier fuel available for ignition when the inevitable lightning bolt strikes. And recent research demonstrates a connection between warming and increasing frequency of lightning strikes. A 2016 study estimated that anthropogenic climate change contributed to an additional 10 million acres of forest fire area in the western U.S. during the last three decades, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in the absence of climate change.
This year, perhaps more than any other year, exemplifies scientists’ predictions about climate change amplifying wildfire damage. In the summer of 2017, wildfires ravaged large expanses in Canada’s Northwest Territories and British Columbia as well as in several U.S. states, including Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California. In mid-August, Canadian newspapers announced that 2017 was officially British Columbia’s worst-ever wildfire season on record with 2.2 million acres burned. The Northwest Territories lost more than 2.5 million acres in a total of more than 250 fires. As for the 2017 wildfire season in the United States, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that as of December 8th, wildfires had scorched nearly 10 million acres.
As early December fires raged in Ventura, San Diego and Los Angeles Counties in southern California, the media thoroughly covered the human tragedy, including countless images and video footage of entire neighborhoods reduced to ash. We read the stories of the former residents, and about the particulars of their losses—family heirlooms, photo albums, and more.
I worry about my twin sister and her family, precariously perched in a part of Los Angeles County called Sherman Oaks. Sounds like a place with lots of fuel for a wildfire, no? I check in with her by text, and I follow the continuously updated fire map published by the Los Angeles Times, but yet I worry. Just a few weeks ago, my nephew was born and is now thriving though there was medical trauma for both him and my sister during the birth. They had only been “out of the woods” for a few days when this new danger struck. Millions of people in the region had just been living their lives and, like my sister, dealing with the usual human crises when the wildfires ramped up. Thankfully, few human lives have been lost in the wildfires of 2017.
But what about the lives of animals? What about the millions (billions?) of animals, large and small, who once occupied the areas engulfed in flames? Social media proves that at least some of us care about those animal lives—smart phone footage of a man rescuing a wild rabbit who was confused and terrified by the choice between the highway and the fire went viral last week. The man was clearly distressed as he tried to redirect and eventually catch the rabbit. Viewers could only hope he was able to transfer the rabbit to safety.
But what of the myriad other animals who burned alive? And others who ran for their lives, only to become roadkill or to otherwise perish in a landscape denuded of the sustenance they needed. It is more than heartbreaking to ponder. And what of the endangered species, like the Amargosa vole, who lost significant portions of their habitat remnants? As the New York Times aptly reported earlier this fall, For an Endangered Animal, a Fire or Hurricane Can Mean the End.