Today’s Exec’s Blog is about global warming and is RINHS’s contribution to Focus the Nation.

I grew up in New England, around Boston and then on Cape Cod and I have loved living in New England because of the winters. No, not for the way ten inches of new powder snow muffles the village green, nor the way the skaters congregate on the neighborhood pond, nor the tangy smell of hardwood smoke lying under the temperature inversion along the valley floor. After all, I said, “Cape Cod.” Think driving sleet instead of snow, crackling deathtraps instead of solidly ice-covered ponds, and acrid smoke of fires “burning” wet oak instead of mouthwatering maple, hickory, or butternut. No, it’s not for the Currier & Ives aesthetics that I love New England winters: I love New England winters because they reset the bugs once every 12 months.

Once you get them going, arthropods (insects, spiders, mites, et al.) have a tendency to just keep going unless and until they run into something that stops them. As long as conditions are favorable, they’ll keep on eating, growing, and breeding. For arthropods, favorable conditions are warm and humid, with lots of leafy, bushy, grassy vegetation to provide food and shelter. So very generally speaking, for any particular region the size and population of crickets, spiders, centipedes, mosquitoes, and what not is more or less determined by how much eating, growing, and breeding can be fit in between last frost and first frost. If that’s a short time, you have small bugs and not so many of them and if that’s a long time, you have lots of bugs, they’re giants, and they have plenty of time left over after securing life’s bare necessities to explore the insides of your home. It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. For instance, arthropods’ growth and reproduction isn’t just on or off, its rate can rise and fall with temperature so a long, cold summer can be as limiting as a short, hot one. Also, you’ll probably have noticed that the short, cold summers of the Arctic don’t seem to slow down the mosquitoes any. But generally, the arthropod fauna in an area is temperate if the climate is temperate or tropical if the climate is tropical.

These same general observations apply to plants (and to rodents) as they do to arthropods. In the same way that a painter brings light into a painting by using dark, frost makes it possible for us to have variety in our flora…spring ephemerals, summer perennials, fall foliage. As with insects, frost either limits a plant’s size to the growth of one season or forces it to be woody so it can over-winter (which just makes it useful for things like firewood). A good, hard frost is truly the Great Equalizer. Without a good, hard frost animals and plants would just treat winter like intermission…pop out for a pee break and some popcorn then back in for the second act!

And that’s where global warming comes in. If I wanted to live in a part of the country where giant crickets were a regular part of my kitchen’s fauna and I had to deal with chiggers AND ticks when I went outside, I’d move to Virginia. I’ve learned to live with ticks and I like my hymenoptera small and manageable. I don’t want to live with chiggers or fire ants or malaria mosquitos or killer bees. Frost has protected us New Englanders from these things and from kudzu and God knows what. And yet with global warming, all these creatures and more have just got their tickets punched for an express trip to a quaint New England village. Doubt it? Have you experienced the chiggers now making their way around Long Island, NY?

All this interest in keeping the bugs down may seem pretty strange coming from someone with a professed avocation in insects, but there you are. Maybe I like my Nature just a little bit buttoned down, and as long as it’s Mother Nature herself who does the buttoning, then I’d say it’s a defensible sentiment. But what if we mess with Mother Nature’s natural reset button, as we seem to be with global warming? SHE’s not the one who’s going to care. She’ll just keep going with the insects and the mites and the ants and the vines. WE’RE the ones who’ll have to move north too, or learn to love our new environment…”Oh look, honey, the fire ants got the dog!”

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On January 30, 2008, RINHS announces the creation of the Rhode Island Conservation Stewardship Collaborative, a new working relationship among seven of the most significant land conservation organizations active in the state with the goal to improve the scope and effectiveness of conservation land stewardship. Stewardship is that constellation of practices that maintain and enhance the values of conservation land against threats such as invasive species, vandalism, over-use, or simple the passage of time. After acquisition of conservation land comes stewardship and neither by itself will be effective at preserving those aspects of our wonderful environment that we aspire to save. Nonetheless, with the recent development boom galvanizing us into heroic efforts at acquisition, the conservation leaders were looking for a way to make stewardship just as exciting and attractive. We need to reinforce the interest and resources being directed toward stewardship; we need to work together to make the most of the available stewardship resources. We need to find ways to work on projects that are urgently needed for effective stewardship even when those projects are too big for, or do not naturally fit into the work plan of any one organization. High level discussions about these needs were the genesis of the Conservation Stewardship Collaborative.

The Conservation Stewardship Collaborative includes:

• Rhode Island Natural History Survey
• Audubon Society of Rhode Island
• The Rhode Island Chapter of The Nature Conservancy
• Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management
• University of Rhode Island Department of Natural Resources Management
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Rhode Island Refuge Complex
• Rhode Island Land Trust Council

The CSC is guided by written principles and operating procedures and will work in part through its role as advisor to the Rhode Island Foundation on distributions from the new Rhode Island Conservation Stewardship Collaborative Endowment. Take a look at the CSC FAQ.

For more information on the Conservation Stewardship Collaborative, keep visiting www.RINHS.org or visit the RICSC’s new website, still under construction, at: www.ricsc.org

Read about the CSC announcement in the Providence Business News:
PBN story on CSC

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