Dandelions and Climate Change: Lessons from Your Front Lawn

A t long last the immense threat of climate change is becoming more widely recognized and accepted as a reality at all levels of society. Resulting from this recognition comes the desire to act—to take the steps necessary so that severe droughts, intensified storms, sea level rise, and other catastrophes predicted to result from climate change might be limited in their scope. Achieving this goal, to minimize the effects of climate change, has some inherent challenges or obstacles, with which we as humans have great difficulty coping. All result from the inherent nature of the beast before us. Perhaps the greatest of these obstacles is that greenhouse gases are just that—gases. We cannot see them nor do we smell them, at least under the circumstances at hand. That means we are dealing with an invisible foe. Homo sapiens are much more adept at facing visible challenges. Filthy rivers, smog-laden air, trash-ridden dumps inspire outrage. Invisible gases? Not so. Most of us simply cannot comprehend of what 10 billion tons a year of invisible stuff entering the atmosphere really means. An equally important obstacle is the lag time between cause and effect. We humans respond well to immediate threats. Firefighting, either literally or figuratively, is one of our strongest aptitudes. Addressing threats that only show themselves much later in time—the health effects of tobacco or cancer come to mind—are much more of a challenge. But the point of this discussion is neither of these obstacles. Rather, it is a third—the difficulty we face in changing longstanding behaviors and what those new behaviors might entail. Such a behavioral shift, one virtually embedded in our culture for over a century, is fundamental if we are to adapt effectively to the new realities facing us. Particularly, the shift pertains to how might we most effectively conserve the precious animals and plants many of us cherish and how might we sustain our favorite forests, grasslands, and coastal environs, which we have come to take for granted. To many this question has a ready solution: Setting aside protected areas and other types of reserves has been successful in the past, so we just need to ramp up this approach in a strategic way and all will be well. Well, will it? Such a strategy is dependent upon projections, rent with caveats and speculation, about where habitats will migrate over time. Migrating habitats is a new concept to us. And these computer projections—what if we guess wrong? Perhaps Mother Nature can shed some light on the subject. After all, animals have been adapting to changing environments since evolution began over 4 billion y ago. What might we learn from them? Perhaps most importantly we learn that, in general, organisms evolve different strategies to cope with stable vs. variable environments. In a stable environment, meaning one relatively unchanging over time such as a rainforest, a number of organisms evolve a set of common characteristics. These include being long-lived, having few offspring, and nurturing those offspring for some time before they become independent. This evolutionary strategy suggests that such organisms—the gorilla Gorilla gorilla being a good example—take advantage of ‘‘knowing’’ their environment and passing learned skills on to their young. This capacity is particularly advantageous in stable environments because such environs tend to have a high diversity of species among which competition is presumed to be intense. Under such circumstances the nurturing of offspring is clearly advantageous. Ecologists refer to this adaptive strategy as Kselection (Mac Arthur and Wilson 1967; Odum 1971; Futuyma 1979). In their lexicon K stands for carrying capacity, and stable environments tend to support species that are believed close to their carrying capacity. In simple terms, this means the species are maximizing the number of individuals their particular environment can support. Or, in other words, individuals have spread to every corner of the habitat leaving no room for others; thus, the individuals best able to cope with the unique