Wilderness in the Age of Climate Change
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is "The Sunday Story." This summer has been hot. And I'm talking about really hot in D.C. We've had so many days where the temperatures have been over 100 degrees, and that is not normal for D.C.

And not only was I living through that, but for about a month this summer, I did not have AC. At times, I had to tell my children to just stop moving because it was too hot to move. It was too hot to talk. But this year, many places hit record high temperatures. Palm Springs reached 124 degrees Celsius.

Now that's hot. Las Vegas, 120 degrees. And along with the heat, there have been fires. The West has been engulfed by wildfire. Over the last few years, these wildfires have been burning hotter and bigger than ever before. A result of decades of fire suppression and climate change.

Today's episode explores what happens when climate-fueled fires like these encroach on areas we humans have protected as wilderness. What if these wilderness areas need help because of what we've caused? Should we step in or step aside?

Marissa Ortega Welch, a reporter with KALW Public Media, has been grappling with these questions in her new podcast, How Wild. She joins me now. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So Marissa, I understand that unlike me, you're a big wilderness fan.

You could say that, yes. I have spent the last 20 years backpacking and hiking around wilderness areas with my best friend. We go on a trip every year from the Sierra Nevada, where I live in California, to the Wind River Range in Wyoming. It sounds really beautiful. It is. It's really beautiful, but we have also seen a lot of changes.

You know, you're talking about the heat and the fires. We've seen that. There was the year it was so smoky from fires we couldn't see the mountains that were right in front of us. There was the year it was such a big winter we couldn't get over mountain passes because of all the snow hanging on into the summer. And then the next year there was so little snow that the creeks had dried up and we had to carry drinking water with us for miles. Some of the changes I've seen are really good, like how the internet is helping more people learn about wilderness and get outside.

But good or bad, the meaning of wilderness is changing. That definition is being tested. And what do you mean by that? Well, there's this official definition of wilderness that these areas are supposed to be natural. And with climate change, are these areas natural anymore? The same thing goes with these areas are supposed to be places for primitive recreation. But if we're bringing our phones on the trail, is that primitive recreation anymore?

So these definitions are being tested. And I wondered what that meant for these physical places we call wilderness, but also for ourselves as humans. What does it mean if there's no place outside of our impact, no place where we can unplug, and no separation between humans and this thing we call nature? And you explore this in your podcast by traveling to wilderness areas all over the West, right?

But today we're going to focus on just one of the places you went, a place that contains a worldwide treasure. Yes, it's in the Sierra Nevada of Central California, and it's home to a very special tree. Wilderness and what it means for some of America's oldest trees when we come back.

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Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And NPR listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash NPR. We're back with the Sunday story. Marissa Ortega Welch is taking us on a hiking trip to understand wilderness in America.

Where the trail ends, the official trail is down here. And then we start on these zigzags going up. We're in California's Sequoia National Park, and we're headed off-trail to a remote, rugged corner, which is kind of the whole point. And I can actually pull out.

of math. So this is the person I'm relying on not to get us lost. And then will you say your name and your title? Yeah, this is Andrew Bishop. I'm the restoration ecologist at Sequoian Kings Canyon National Park. I'm excited. Okay. Yeah, same here. And nervous. I didn't mention rattlesnakes. Oh. We should be aware that

In the lower elevation part of this hike, there's a good potential for a rattletoe. Plus, there's poison oak and these annoying flies that keep getting in our face. The sunglasses are helping for the face flies. Oh, good. Just for the record. I wouldn't be putting up with all this if I wasn't getting to see something today that not a lot of people have seen. It's 2022, and we're heading to Board Camp, the name of a grove of giant sequoias that burned two years before in the Castle Fire.

Giant sequoias, the biggest trees on earth, only live here in California. And nearly half are found in Sequoia Kings Canyon National Parks. But since 2020, severe fires burned up to a fifth of the world's giant sequoias. Some scientists are worried that we could face a future with no giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park.

The National Park wants to replant giant sequoias in the wilderness. Other people say that goes against the very definition of wilderness. The debate is really around the question, what is natural and how much should humans intervene? That's why we're here today. Almost as soon as we leave the trailhead, we're in what's called the John Krebs Wilderness. I'm curious if we'll see a wilderness. I'm curious.

Say we're entering the designated wilderness? Yeah, well, let's pause if we do. I love those signs. It's like nothing says wilderness like a sign. The fact that we're in an area designated as capital W Wilderness is really important. Wilderness areas are the most protected public lands in the U.S.,

Maybe you've been to Yosemite Valley. You drove there or took the bus to see Yosemite Falls. Maybe you've just seen pictures. It's beautiful, but the valley isn't technically wilderness. If you headed out on the trail, away from the roads, within a few miles, you'd enter into a designated wilderness zone.

Starting in the 19-teens, as tourists flocked to national parks and forests, roads and buildings were built to accommodate them. Environmentalists got worried that the land that was supposed to be protected was getting developed. So they came up with an idea for setting aside some areas from development, an extra level of protection, as what they called wilderness. A wilderness is an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.

where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. And in 1964, the president signed into law the Wilderness Act. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.

This is a very happy and historic occasion for all who love the great American outdoors, and that needless to say includes me. More recently, land managers broke down the Wilderness Act into five measurable qualities of wilderness character: untrammeled, undeveloped, natural, with opportunities for solitude and primitive, unconfined recreation, and other features of value.

Today, wilderness managers work hard to make sure they're meeting these standards. They do surveys to make sure people are experiencing enough solitude. They only put in trail signs if absolutely necessary so as to not take away from the primitive recreation experience. I hear land managers talk a lot about the idea of restraint. They only intervene if absolutely necessary.

Generally speaking, ecologists like my guide Andrew can only do restoration work in wilderness if the damage they're trying to restore was directly caused by humans. So like pulling out invasive plants introduced by pack horses or restoring a meadow that was impacted by an old trail. Sequoia National Park is a fascinating example in a growing debate. How much should people intervene to restore wilderness?

Because with climate change, every part of the planet is affected by humans, even wilderness. We'll kind of go around the back a little bit and over a ridge that you can't quite see from here. And that's where board camp is. A couple miles into our hike, Andrew and I stopped to look up the steep canyon where we're headed. And we can see burned trees.

Trees. I see a bunch of, I mean, I think I'm just seeing skeletons of trees up there, right? Yeah. This fire just ripped up that. You can imagine that's where we really saw high severity fire in the Castle Fire. The strategy for over the last hundred years has been to put out wildfires in California to protect homes and timber. Right in this valley, fire crews extinguished dozens of lightning fires over the years.

But fire is important. Without it, smaller trees and shrubs grow unchecked, like matchsticks waiting to be lit. All that fuel on the ground, plus a hotter and drier climate, means California's fires now burn hotter, faster, and bigger. Like the Castle Fire. It was started by lightning in August of 2020 and burned for months. In the moment of the fire, it's very hard to know what you're going to find afterwards.

This is Christy Brigham, Chief of Resource Management and Science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. As the fire kept spreading, she checked on the Sequoia groves the way you might check on a loved one after an emergency. It's smoky, you don't know what's happening. So we were getting these different reports. I was calling people who had connections and like, has anybody seen this grove or that grove?

As a biologist, Christy knows that giant sequoias need fire. The heat from the flames below triggers the cones to open and drop their seeds, and the fire clears the ground of underbrush and creates soft mineral soil, perfect growing conditions. But Christy could sense that something different might be going on here. And then she got signs confirming her fear.

downwind in the town of Three Rivers. Large chunks of sequoia needles were falling on the ground in Three Rivers. And so those were indications when the fire was burning that the fire was destroying a lot of sequoias. She knew this meant that the fire was burning hot enough to reach the needles of the world's biggest trees.

As soon as winter was over, Christy assembled a crew to hike out to the board camp grove. Which was in itself a journey because none of us had been there before. The group climbed over burned down logs and bushwhacked through Chaparral to survey the fire's effects. It was terrible.

It was really, it was like the surface of the moon. There was nothing alive. The fire had in fact reached the seed cones in the tops of the giant sequoias and killed off most trees entirely. So at that point, we thought we're going to have to come back out here. There may not be sequoia seedlings here because of the way the fire burned.

That's when Christine and her team started to plan. Board camp wasn't the only Sequoia Grove that burned, and because most of the fire occurred in a wilderness area, the team knew they'd have to take special considerations.

Now, the Wilderness Act asks land managers to not trammel the land unless absolutely necessary. And trammel's kind of a beautiful, poetic, old-timey word, so people might not know what that means. A trammel is a device used to shackle a horse's gait.

So to be untrammeled means to be unchackled, unrestrained, free. But what it's been generally interpreted to mean within the Wilderness Act context is that we're supposed to let nature take its course. Humans aren't supposed to hinder or interfere with natural processes.

Another one of the qualities of wilderness character is that the area is to remain natural. To have a place that's allowed to change and evolve and undergo its natural evolution. But that is really not what we're seeing with wildfire in California and with these impacts to these sequoia groves.

Christy and other scientists agree that even though this fire was started by a natural cause, lightning, the severity of the fire was a result of human causes. They're driven by 100 years of fire suppression, which were poor decisions that we made as managers and made worse by climate change-driven hotter drought. That's why scientists feel that they should try and restore the groves by replanting sequoia trees from seeds from surviving cones.

which sets up this sort of catch-22. If the burning down of these thousand-year-old fire-resilient trees wasn't natural and the park wants to restore the groves, it might need to do a little bit of trammeling. That's after a quick break.

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where you might not have thought an electric vehicle could go. To learn more about the all-electric Mustang Mach-E rally, go to Ford.com. You're listening to The Sunday Story. Back now to Marissa Ortega-Welch and her story about the giant sequoias. Okay, back to the hike I took with Andrew in 2022.

So on our way to the board camp grove, at a creek in a small grove of living sequoias, we run into the tree climbers. Here's our climber. This is Marissa. Hi. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you too. This is Steen Christensen. So Steen is the leader of this wonderful outfit, doing the cone collecting. This is the crew. They've been camping out here for days, and respectfully, they look like it. Steen's shirt sleeve is ripped, and his socks are mismatched.

We have the flies a bit. Oh, there, yeah. The park contracted Steen and his team of tree climbers to spend the summer climbing giant sequoias and collecting seed cones from living trees. We can, we can show you what we do. One of the climbers, Justin Marble, is going to harvest some cones from one last tree. He pulls on a climbing harness and attaches himself to a rope that's already been set up. I have a foot ascender and a knee ascender, so it allows me to basically walk.

Up the rope. I give him my extra audio recorder, which he puts in his pants pocket. Here we go. Justin starts pulling himself up the rope, and he's moving fast. Pretty soon, I can't see him. He disappears into the canopy. Bro. Finally to the first branch. Onward and upward. There we go. Easy picking right here. All right, I'm heading down. Stand clear. Yeah, you can come closer.

How'd it go? Good! Here, I can show you what I got. Just got a few plums here. If you can break these apart, you can kind of see. There you go. That's what they look like. Oh yeah, there's the little oatmeal flakes. Sequoia trees, despite their world record size, have tiny seeds smaller than oatmeal flakes. For the past few days, Justin, Steen, and the rest of the crew have been climbing trees in the board camp grove, where I'm headed next.

Only about 40 trees survived the fire there, not necessarily enough to sustain a grove. And so the crew climbed them to collect some of their cones. I think we have it right here. Steen opens up a big military canvas backpack. And there's fresh sequoia cones. Fresh sequoia cones, yes. Just collected yesterday from board camp. Now we're headed out with them and we'll process these cones.

get the seed out and grow the seedlings. And then if everything goes well, we'll get them planted back there. When he says if everything goes well, he means if the park's proposal to replant sequoias here undergoes an environmental analysis and the park doesn't get sued.

See, their plan has some opponents, and it turns out Steen just met one of them a few days ago. When we got here, we were camped at the South Fork campground, and there was a fellow there. He came over and asked a little bit about us and where we were going, and it turns out that he was with Wilderness Watch. Rene Voss? Yes. Yeah. Guess who hiked out with us? What?

Okay, I know Rene Voss because he's been a vocal critic of the park's plan. The night before, in my motel room, I was reading an article by him about why the park shouldn't replant giant sequoias here. And now it turns out he and Steen were hiking together a few days ago? You know, I struck up with some interesting conversations with these guys. And these guys are all diehard environmentalists. So, I mean, we had something in common.

This is Rene Voss. He's a natural resource attorney and on the board of Wilderness Watch, a national organization that advocates for wilderness protection. He just happened to come check out the project area a few days ago.

Rene says the replanting work with all the boots on the ground and equipment required will have a huge impact on the groves. Plus, the park plans to lower materials using helicopters. So that means cutting down a bunch of trees. But Rene's main issue with the proposal is he believes planting trees in a wilderness is a violation of the Wilderness Act. We don't need gardening in a wilderness. We need wilderness to be left alone for its own devices.

Renee says for park managers to go in and restore after this fire, as tragic as the loss of the sequoias may be, sets a dangerous precedent of imposing our human beliefs about what this area should naturally look like, rather than letting nature take its course. It could open the door for land managers across the country to be able to intervene in wilderness.

But I have to ask Rene, given climate change, can humans afford not to intervene? Sequoia National Park may no longer have sequoias, and Joshua Tree National Park may no longer have Joshua trees. And that is... Glacier National Park is probably not going to have glaciers one of these days. For example, I mean, we can't create, we can't intervene on that one, right? But...

You know, it is, you know, where do we draw the line? I mean, climate change is affecting every ecosystem. We can't go down the line and try to fix the ecosystems that are caused by climate change because climate is going to continue changing unless we solve the climate crisis. It's hard to talk about why I love wilderness without sounding really cheesy.

But if you haven't been to a wilderness yourself, maybe you've gotten the chance on a dark night away from any cities to see a clear starry sky. I don't know about you, but for me, looking at the layers of stars behind stars puts my own life and all of human existence into perspective. I know, cheesy.

Being in wilderness, for me, is like that feeling times infinity. Standing on top of a mountain and seeing a valley in each direction that rises up to another mountain and knowing behind that there's another valley leading up to another mountain and another valley and another mountain and knowing that there isn't a road or city for miles, that it's just animals and plants and fungi and insects living their lives.

Seeing an ancient glacier, making eye contact with a fox as it runs through the forest, watching finches eat seeds on snow after a long winter. It makes me aware of how vast and powerful and old and precarious and fleeting the earth is. It gets me thinking beyond my own individual lifetime and stretches my idea of size and timescale. Plus, it's also damn beautiful.

And so I appreciate Rene's argument that wilderness areas should be places that are left alone from human intervention, where natural systems can dominate, even after a devastating fire. Because isn't it a sort of hubris to think that humans can know what's best here? Especially when humans are the ones causing the current changes. What is wilderness?

Here's Steen Christensen, the head of the tree climbing crew again. Historically, when you go on this trail that you're going on to board camp, wilderness, there's a trail that was built in 1909. There are cows.

grasses that were spread by cows that are not native. There's micropollution. There's Fresno right down there. And I think Wilderness Act is fine, but you've got, you know, we've got this world that is much more cosmopolitan with its problems. Renee Voss and Wilderness Watch, the biologists and the tree climbers, all have the same goal of being good stewards for this place.

But the disagreement is about what stewardship should look like. When you see Bordkamp, the fire effect is so extreme with granite exploding and giant trees burned down. It looks like a bomb hit it. It doesn't look like a natural fire. So, yeah, I think you'll really see something that nobody has seen.

Steen and his crew hike out with the cones they've collected, while Andrew and I continue our hike up the ridge to board camp. Thank you. I'll be in touch. We're following an old grass-covered trail that the park no longer maintains. So you can see people have gone that way, but this to me is very clearly a switchback. And now I'm like doubting it since I said it, but I think... We stop our climb to take in the view down valley. Oh my gosh. You can see where we came from.

Finally, we finish our climb. This is one of my favorite parts of any hike, when you leave behind one view and a new one is revealed. From up here on the ridgeline, we get our first look down the other side, into the burned Board Camp Grove. As an environmental journalist in California, seeing a burned forest doesn't really shock me anymore. I've been reconditioned to think about most burns as generally a healthy thing for a forest.

Fires can help forests regenerate, and the land needs more fires, not fewer. But what's striking about this view is not just that every tree has burned, but there are these massive trees that have lost their tops and are completely hollow, so you can see down into them. I feel like I'm looking into humongous blackened chimneys, not trees. Those are the burned shells of the oldest giant sequoias here. Wow. It's, uh...

I don't know. Striking. Nothing much to add. Just is a sad scene. After the fire, scientists surveyed this grove. They say they didn't find enough living adult trees or seedlings to indicate that the grove will grow back on its own. They predict that without intervention, it will convert into a different habitat, one of shrubs and oak trees instead of sequoias. And I have a really hard time looking at a tree like that

A year later, another fire, called the KNP Complex, burned through the parks, killing more sequoias. In total, six sequoia groves burned so severely, the loss of trees was unprecedented.

Here's Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park's Chief of Resource Management, Christy Brigham again. These are very challenging times. We've never seen fires like this before. And it has taken a lot of really intense conversations, a lot of field work, a lot of philosophical probing, a lot of conversations with tribal partners about what does it mean to be a steward?

Wilderness land managers and scientists are starting to think differently about their role as stewards, based on a rethinking of the past and what's coming in the future. We're proposing that we made decisions that resulted in incineration of thousand-year-old trees, and rather than just let them disappear to plant seedlings and give those trees

a chance to continue to adapt and grow and evolve in the face of climate changes that are going to occur in the next hundred to a thousand years. The year after my hike, park staff and the tree climbing crew went back to the board camp with seedlings they grew from the cones they collected. They replanted sequoias and other conifer trees in the burned down grove. Renee's group, Wilderness Watch, and three other nonprofits sued the park.

The litigation is still ongoing, so the park didn't provide new comments, but they did continue to plant. So, Marissa, this debate, I know that it makes your head spin, and it kind of makes mine spin, too. These are huge questions. Is intervening the right thing to do? And is it even possible anymore to think that there are places that are truly free of human impacts?

The thing is, no place in the West has ever been truly free of human impacts because indigenous peoples have lived on and managed these areas for a very long time. And that's why the concept of wilderness itself has always bugged me because it could be seen as erasing the history of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from the land so it could be protected.

And as many indigenous people point out, there's no such thing as wilderness in the sense that when European settlers arrived to these so-called pristine forests, hundreds of thousands of people were already living on the land and managing it, including regularly burning it to open up habitat, encourage certain plants to grow, and attract certain animals. So, I mean, with that being the case, it makes me wonder all over again, what is wilderness?

I do not have the answers, but I do think it's worth asking these questions in this moment when so much is changing. Well, thank you so much for your reporting, Marissa. Thanks for having me. To hear more of Marissa's podcast, How Wild, you can listen on the NPR One app or on your favorite podcast player. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt.

It was engineered by James Willits. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Big thank you to the folks at KALW who helped with the How Wild podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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