I Won’t Be Going to Yellowstone

American Inertia (2/3): Society

A few weeks ago, I drove across the Rocky Mountains. I was in the U.S. for a series of reports as fodder for a book I’m grinding away on. I’ve always wanted to go to Yellowstone, one of the most famous nature parks in North America and located on the border of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. It’s a place tucked far away featuring tall volcanoes, geysers and wide valleys covered with pines, firs and spruce. It’s where wild animals abound, free and far from cities and highways.

So yes, I have dreamed a great deal about America! My mind has often traveled up there in the Rockies, has shared an Indian campsite under the branches, has challenged the rapids in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, or has hunted grizzlies with Teddy Roosevelt. And I was sure I would one day go to see what it is like, Yellowstone, whose name so strongly evokes in me the vigor of the ancient world with its irrepressible beauty.

I’m thinking that everything is dead in Yellowstone, or almost everything. And I won’t be going there.

Over the last fifteen years, along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, a small beetle that feeds on bark has ravaged the cold forests at high altitudes over millions upon millions of hectares. In North America, the observed rise in temperature, in summer as in winter, has allowed this insect to reproduce about twice as fast as before. Its population is increasing continuously. From the Arctic Circle to Mexico, the consequences have reached frightening proportions in recent years.

Eight years ago in Alaska, my heart was already torn by the display of petrified forests, empty and silent! Along their edges, we had filmed men trying to cut down dead trees as fast as possible before the drought lets loose cataclysmic forest fires, which North America now faces each summer. At the time, I was filming the first French documentary showing the human consequences of climate change. These ghastly images have haunted me and inspired me as well.

This year, without really looking, I found myself again among dead trees. So I veered away and crossed over the Rockies in short time, and I fled to the Nevada desert. I gave up on Yellowstone, since I was unable to take it any longer, even for reporting purposes, with my outlook on life hardened for entire days on the road.

Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychology, stated long ago that “people cannot face too much reality.” The irony of this phrase infuriated me for many hours as I looked for a way out of the dead forest. Alone at the wheel, I had a tragic, mad feeling to have my head examined by Ol’ Man Carl in the name of all humanity.

To find myself practically by chance among millions of dead pine trees six months after the farce of the Copenhagen summit on climate change….

Why this blindness? How can Washington D.C. not officially declare this emergency climate situation when the forest rooted along the spine of the U.S. is dying away? Incredible.

[A report published in July by the U.S. Forest Service and the National Resources Defense Council shows that over half of the white bark pine trees in the Rockies are dead and that a quarter more are going to be dead soon. At the end of July, this is what a tiny editorial reported at the bottom of a page in the New York Times linking the epidemic to climate change. In British Columbia, eighty percent of today’s forests could be destroyed in 2013, as predicted by Natural Resource Canada.]

Quite near the headwaters of the Colorado River, I posed the above question to an old bearded codger sitting in his pickup truck. There he was, stopped along a desert road with a lost look, in face of the wasted mountain, a faded stars-and-stripes cap tight on his crown. With a thick Western accent, he quietly replied: “They make cars that guzzle less gas now, and then there is also a bit of solar here and there.” He didn’t seem too convinced. We looked at the forest in silence. And then he added, almost to himself: “Things have gotten bad in recent years. Nothing left to do but pray that everything burns and that something grows back.”

On the road, I ended up noticing small clusters of graciously green spruce trees, growing up snuggled at the foot of their parents. It’s stupid, but I thought about the fate of the buffaloes and the Indians. Later on, I read the following phrase in a Rockies nature park newspaper: “The problem of bark-eating insects has arrived, so as to remind us of the capacity of Nature to change beyond human control”…. Human control… The sophistry stunk of marketing to tourists, and I pointed it out to a ranger, an official assigned to the protection of Nature. He explained that, around 2005, there was in fact an information program and hikes for teaching about global warming. “But there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to take part in it due to the implications. There’s a lot of controversy up there, you know, so they stopped.”

What “they” won’t stop, it seems, is the drilling of new wells for oil, the life blood of the American way of life, of which technological companies must miss very little now (it seems). Everywhere in the Rockies, for two or three years, new types of extraction systems have been sprouting like mushrooms. They are being used to “develop” shale gas, a form of natural gas called “non-conventional” that was thought until now to be insufficiently profitable* but that energy companies have undertaken to exploit completely for lack of anything better. It probably has to do with an all-out ‘gold rush’ for fossil fuels on American soil, a century and a half after the first gold rushes.

*modified from the original version

The forest is dying, and all around it, greed and need are resulting in still more poison.

“People cannot face too much reality”: Carl Jung’s final verdict.

On Interstate 70, which leads from Las Vegas to Denver, over the Continental Divide between the Atlantic and the Pacific, I found myself stuck in a traffic jam at an altitude of around 3,000 feet. Around us, the forest was decomposing as far as the eye can see. It was Sunday evening when the inhabitants of Colorado were returning home from their weekend at lakes in the high valleys. Many were towing a pair of jet skis. Coloradans are known for their love of nature. The traffic jam lasted for so long that I missed my flight for Washington.

Among the drivers in their cars that evening, I didn’t know how many were thinking about climate change or about the consequences derived from our addiction to fossil fuels (at a certain point, as if to finish me off, two huge military transports went by, flush with uniforms; the army trains a lot in this sparsely inhabited region). The devastated forests in the Rockies are very far from the mega-cities of the East or California. The death of pine, fir, and spruce trees is forgotten too easily. Close the door and crank up the A/C — most people don’t even know anyway that the death took place.

On summer days in Washington D.C., at the foot of each official building, big ventilation grates vomit forth millions of cubic meters of hot air in an infernal whoosh from air conditioning systems.

[Refrigerant gases used for air conditioning escape and increase the greenhouse effect, just like the decomposition of dead wood, which releases methane, another powerful greenhouse gas.]