America’s wilderness areas are under threat, including in Summit and Eagle counties. This article discusses just one of the threats — climate change. Later articles will discuss other challenges, including increased usage, funding cuts, and our human-centric attitude to the living world around us.

Climate change — and its impact on wilderness ecosystems — was not an issue in 1964 when Congress passed the Wilderness Act. Today, it is perhaps the greatest threat to preservation of wilderness ecosystems.  

In 1964 it was hard to imagine that every acre of our wilderness areas could be adversely impacted by human action. Then, the threats were more discrete and limited —  a proposed road here, a mechanized incursion there, the loss of a few species. How could man adversely affect every acre of every wilderness area? After all, some wilderness areas in Alaska have seldom even felt a human footprint.

But changes to the Earth’s atmosphere reach everywhere, affecting every living thing on Earth — animals, plants, fungi, even bacteria. And as we are learning, every living thing is interconnected in a vast web of life. Pull on one thread and all parts of the web vibrate and are impacted.

Ecosystems have evolved over millennia. It will take them millennia to adapt to new conditions, if even possible. Meanwhile, thousands of species will go extinct and every ecosystem will be affected.  

As temperatures have warmed in Colorado, our treeline has moved measurably higher. Animals like pikas and ptarmigan that live above treeline are forced to move higher to find shelter and food. But our mountains have not grown to keep up, so their living space gets reduced. Fewer pikas and ptarmigan mean less food for raptors and carnivorous mammals, loss of the important role they play in promoting diversity of plant species and nutrients and fewer chances for us to enjoy seeing them.

Higher temperatures also mean lower snowpack. Less snowpack means less habitat for snowshoe hares, which means less food for lynx. Fewer lynx means loss of an important keystone species. And so on, for the countless threads that make up wilderness ecosystems.

The results are dramatic and rapidly changing our wilderness areas and the web of life within them. These changes include the type of threats that immediately adversely impact both humans and wildlife, such as the number and severity of wildfires, droughts, floods and other natural disasters. All of this degrades every acre of our wilderness areas.  

We who are fortunate enough to live in the High Country already see the effects of climate change — shorter and warmer winters, earlier and fewer wildflowers, longer and drier autumns, more intense and frequent wildfires and temperature records being broken on a regular basis. 

Tackling climate change will require both individual and collective efforts. What can you and I do to face this challenge?  It will require each of us to change our behavior and our very relationship to the earth. While change is difficult, our very existence depends on it. We can reduce our personal carbon footprint — carpool, take public transportation, turn off lights when we leave a room, turn down our thermostats, make our next car an EV and reduce the carbon footprint of our consumption. We must also urge our elected officials to support alternative energy, reduce subsidies for carbon-intensive industries and reduce our state and nation’s carbon footprint.

Wilderness areas are worth saving for so many reasons, including that they absorb massive amounts of carbon, which alone is a clear reason to protect them. We can either watch while the degradation continues or be proactive. 

“Get Wild” publishes weekly in the Summit Daily News. Mike Browning is a volunteer wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service and the Eagle Summit Wilderness Alliance.