| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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life on the edge Points North Keith K. Howell It is extraordinary that the photographs in the exhibit that recently opened at the California Academy of Sciences should have stirred up controversy. “Seasons of Life and Land” depicts the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska. It is a part of the world where very few have ventured. Even fewer have remained through the winter when the sun can stay hidden for weeks and biting gales bring the wind-chill temperature to minus 100 F. Yet this refuge contains the greatest variety of plant and animal life of any region north of the Arctic Circle. Subhankar Banerjee, who had only recently taken up photography, determined to rectify the oversight and spent two years photographing the land and its inhabitants in all seasons. When the exhibit first opened at the Smithsonian Institution earlier this year, it was scheduled for display in one of the museum’s major halls. Instead, at the last minute, it was moved to an obscure corner of the basement. And the captions of the images were mysteriously truncated. For instance the description beside the sandpiper photograph (see story) was changed from “This species, a long-distance traveler that migrates each year from Argentina to the Arctic Refuge coastal plain to nest and rear their young, is one of the top five bird species at greatest risk if their habitat is disturbed.” to “Buff-breasted sandpiper, coastal plain of the Jago River.” Prior to the demotion of the Smithsonian exhibit, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, official champion of the nation’s parks, had called the refuge “an area of flat white nothingness.” Meanwhile, the Defenders of Wildlife described it as the “crown jewel of America’s refuge system.” You can judge for yourself after you have viewed Banerjee’s photographs on these pages and in the exhibit. This issue features another voyager through a wildlife reserve in a less traveled land. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, anthropologist Christiaan Klieger and Academy photographer Dong Lin walked 150 miles into the newly-established Hkakabo Razi reserve in northern Burma to meet the people of the region. Klieger wanted to find out how they lived, if they still depended on traditional trade routes into China, and whether the new reserve, which ostensibly prohibited hunting, would affect them. The highlight of the journey, recalled in “Along The Salt Road,” was their stay in the home village of the last known members of the T’rung, a people all under four-and-a-half feet tall. “I had a hard time believing in a place so remote, a people so small,” says Klieger. “Alaska’s Serengeti” is not the only feature concerned with the effects of snow and ice on the landscape. Seventeen thousand years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet stretched over Canada and into the northern United States. Repeated advances of ice lobes along its southern border blocked rivers and formed giant lakes. As the water built up, it would suddenly break through the ice barrier, empty the lake within hours, and scour the downstream landscape of the Columbia Basin. George and Rhonda Ostertag describe those deluges in “Missoula’s Monster Floods.” Such floods are not just events of the past. The recent advance and subsequent retreat of the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska created, on August 14, 2002, the second largest glacial lake outburst in historical times. Fortunately, the water cascaded into Disenchantment Bay and the Pacific, not onto land. However, the Hubbard’s movements were an anomaly. All the other glaciers along Alaska’s western coast are in constant retreat, one of the many pointers to global warming. Another is the movement of animals to higher latitudes and altitudes as they attempt to remain within their comfort zone. Such migrations are reported from much of the world. Liese Greensfelder in “Feeling the Heat” describes global warming migrations that are happening right here in California and the West. Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild. |