While the media continue to focus on the melting Arctic, few notice the changes that are already happening in our own backyards. Bruce Hamilton -- the Sierra Club's Deputy Executive Director and an outdoors expert -- sat down with me to talk about the hidden impacts of global warming in our country's wild places and why we need to focus on creating Resilient Habitats. This is part one of a two-part interview.

[Update: Here's part two.]

Q: In terms of parks and open spaces, in what ways is global warming already having an effect?

A: We’re already seeing changes in ecosystems, and we’re already seeing extinctions. So this is not just a hypothetical problem, and it’s something that’s projected to accelerate dramatically.

Right now we're mainly seeing this at the poles and the tropics. That is where the vast majority of extinctions are projected to happen. But you see shifts in range already taking place here in the United States. For example, a researcher has found that while you’d ordinarily find the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly in Baja California, because of temperature increases it can no longer live there, so it's steadily migrating north. But just north of Baja, you get into Tijuana and San Diego and the Southern California metropolis, and that’s not good butterfly habitat. As a result, you’re seeing a crash in the population as it tries to move north.

You’re also seeing situations where species are changing their phenology. That is, plants are blooming earlier. Insects are emerging or hatching earlier in the spring. Birds are migrating later in the fall and coming back earlier in the spring or sometimes not migrating at all.

Q. And these changes are supposed to accelerate in the decades to come. What will that mean?

A. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that even if we were to dramatically cut emissions and reach the goal that we need to reach -- an 80 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2050 -- we’re still going to see 20 to 30 percent of species that they have studied to date at an increased risk of extinction. It would be a more significant extinction than when the dinosaurs were lost.

(The interview continues after the jump.)

Q. The Sierra Club has a campaign called Resilient Habitats. Talk about that.

A. What we’re trying to do is create a habitat that the plants and animals within an ecosystem can survive in even with an increase in temperature change or the other manifestations of global warming -- severe weather, fire, drought. What you want to do is increase the chances of survival for that species.

If a species is in a very small park or preserve, and the climate changes, it doesn’t really have any place to go. On the other hand, if you create a larger area so that it has room to move, it potentially could move upslope or toward the north. But if there’s no place to move because subdivisions or highways are butting into its habitat, then that kind of migration to find a cooler climate won’t be available. In that case, building a resilient habitat would mean creating more space.

There might be a very good preserve in one place and another good one ten miles to the north, but if you don’t have a corridor between the two, then the species can’t move back and forth. If it’s blocked, then the species can’t get to that more hospitable place to survive climate change.

Sometimes it’s a matter of reducing stresses that are on that species. For example, trout have a narrow range of temperature that they can tolerate. They are a cold-water species. However, they can tolerate slight increases in temperature if the water is cleaner. If the water has pesticides in it and the temperature is increasing, it’s a double-whammy. But if you reduce the pesticides in the water, then you find that the fish can withstand that particular temperature increase. In that case, creating a resilient habitat means reducing stresses like pesticides and fertilizers in the water supply.

Q. How are you supposed to anticipate how a species will react to warming temperatures? How do you pick and choose which species to accommodate and how do you guide a species toward survival?

A. Those are very important questions to answer and generally speaking, the Sierra Club is not as equipped to answer them. We need to go to independent scientists, non-governmental organizations that have scientists on staff who study this stuff, people in universities, and government biologists. 

Q: But while habitat resiliency sounds like a very holistic approach, land-management agencies are more structured and bureaucratic. What's the challenge in getting these agencies to adopt a plan of such scope?

A: The first challenge is getting them to understand, accept, and recognize the problem. The initial response of an agency like the National Park Service is to say, “We’ll do our part for global warming by putting solar collectors on the visitors center. We’ll have low-emission vehicles.” That is helpful, but it doesn’t really respond to the big issue and their responsibility with what happens when an entire ecosystem starts to collapse.

The way land management presently takes place for a national forest -- say the El Dorado, the Shoshone Forest, whatever it is -- that comes out with a land-management plan for each forest every four or five years. Similarly the Bureau of Land Management has a land-management plan, as do the state parks. Each is done in isolation. Right now every one of those plans presumes that there is a static climate. All they are doing is managing the wildlife there presuming it will be able perpetuate, and we are just trying to figure out how many deer we have here, how much hunting pressure there should be -- things like that. But they aren’t thinking about dramatic shifts for the trees on the plot of land they are managing or the trees that are going to die off because of the bark beetle or drought.

In the past, the Forest Service has said, “How can I maximize timber production, water yield, grazing?” Those were the key questions they asked. Going forward, each of those agencies should ask, “How can I preserve the ecosystem to avoid extinction? How can I sequester as much carbon as possibly on the land under my jurisdiction? And how do I cooperate with the land management agencies right next to me so that we can co-manage our land in a way to have enough land under our joint jurisdiction to ensure the survivability of species?” Because it may be that the land just to the north that a species will need to move to that belongs to a different agency or is private land. Our Resilient Habitat program basically says, “We want to do planning on an ecosystem by ecosystem basis. We want to develop the best science available that will tell us what to do. And we want to lobby all of the land jurisdictions within that ecosystem -- federal, state, tribal, private -- and try to get them to all cooperate and come up with a symbiotic land-management plan that addresses adaptation.”