Warming in the garden
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
IN THE past few months, the controversy over global warming has changed. The rising tide of scientific reports has left those few people who still deny the possibility that the world’s climate is warming stranded on tiny islands whose boundaries are shrinking daily.
The argument now is whether the warming is the result of human action or natural cycles in climate. It is not a profitable argument because, if the warming continues, the results will be the same in either case — changes in sea levels, rainfall patterns and growing seasons. Together, those elements have formed the set of assumptions on which modern society is based. Change those elements and life will be changed, willingly or not.
The idea of climate change seems somehow remote here in the middle of the country, where there are no seas that may rise, no glaciers to watch as they retreat, year by year, into the mountain ice fields. Kansans know of the warming in the arctic and on Greenland only secondhand, in brief reports from places so far away they might as well be on the moon.
Maybe Kansans are looking for proof of global warming in the wrong place. In a new report, the National Wildlife Federation suggests looking closer to home — out in your own lawn or garden.
In its “Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” available online at www.nwf.org/gardenersguide/index.cfm, the federation tracks changes that have already taken place in the nation’s climate. The changes are most visible in an interactive garden zones map. The map is based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s maps of “hardiness zones,” detailing what sorts of plants can grow in what parts of the country. Those maps are essential information for outdoor gardeners across the United States.
From 1990 to 2006, the zones, which range from Zone 2 for cold areas to Zone 10 for tropical climates, have been moving steadily north. In 1990, Emporia was about on the border of Zones 5 and 6. Last year, the city was firmly in the middle of Zone 6. Zone 7, which used to cover southern Oklahoma and northwest Texas, is now firmly established in south-central Kansas.
Of course, climate changes affect more than garden flowers and ornamental trees. Every plant — from crops to weeds to lawn grasses — has its own comfort zone. In the right climate, a plant will thrive. Change the climate and the plant will sicken and die. Wild plants will begin to migrate with the climate, moving into new territory.
The federation’s report brings the issue home with this prediction: If the warming continues at its current pace, wild plants that Kansas is in danger of losing to climate change include two that the state has enshrined as icons — the sunflower and the eastern cottonwood.
Imagine the Sunflower State without sunflowers, its streams and rivers no longer bounded by ancient cottonwoods.
That image of global warming in Kansas is somehow much more immediate than all of the pictures of melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps and stranded polar bears. People understand their gardens.
As the gardens go, so goes the state. As the state goes, so go the nation and the world.