Reshaping Our Future
This past Sunday, my last day of maternity leave, I was meandering along one of my favorite wooded trails with my husband and four-month-old daughter when we came across a northern spotted owl perched in a redwood. For me, this was a delightful first. Though I’d walked this trail many, many times, and heard of occasional sightings, I’d never set my eyes on one of the rare birds.
We didn’t linger under the tree. Our daughter prefers to be in perpetual motion, and she was beginning to make her displeasure at the bird-watching delay known — we didn’t want to disturb the raptor. But as new parents in a warming world, the experience did get us thinking: Would spotted owls still grace this trail when our daughter was grown?
I went looking for answers. The Bay Area is at the southern edge of the northern spotted owl’s range. Scientists can’t be sure, but they suspect that warming temperatures will push redwood forests like the one we were walking through northward. The Audubon Society estimates that the combined winter range for spotted owls will decrease by a whopping 98 percent by 2080 due to climate change. Overall, global warming seems poised to add on to other longterm threats, like logging, to the spotted owl’s survival.
After learning all this, I spent a few moments feeling gloomy about the world my daughter is inheriting. Kathleen Dean Moore’s words from the Journal’s Spring issue came to mind: “So much peril surrounds the children, who were born to this great planetary decision point, soon to witness the rapid reinvention of human civilization or its slow extinction.” But her words also got me thinking: What if we do witness that reinvention? We may yet change our ways. We may still manage to get a grip on our global carbon emissions. We may have the pleasure of seeing spotted owls perched along this wooded trail in the decades to come.
The future isn’t written in stone. It’s what we make it. I hope — for the sake of the owl, my young daughter, and so many other beings large and small — that we can imagine a future different than the one we’re currently hurtling towards, and that we can quickly begin to shape it.
Zoe Loftus-Farren
Managing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Hitchster
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