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Commentary

[27]

Commentary

Bog is dead: The waning defense of Minnesota wetlands

What once captured carbon will soon release it

Aaron Brown
[28]

Aaron Brown

February 21, 2023 6:00 am

Sunrise at Sax Zim Bog. Getty Images.

Early one Sunday morning my son's Boy Scout troop toured a small
research facility in the middle of the Chippewa National Forest in
northern Minnesota. As the presentation began, someone handed me a
chunk of wood.

Researchers sawed this simple round from a tree pulled out of a nearby
bog. It was perfectly preserved, even though the slab turned out to be
older than St. Edward's chair, Christ's cross, or even Noah's Ark. It
was certainly older than the European cities that produced my
ancestors, the ships that carried them to America and the towering
pines they cut down upon arrival.

How old was it?

No joke. Tests confirmed that this tree became entombed in the bog at
least 5,000 years ago, preserved by tannins leached into the bog from
cedar trees and other vegetation. This reminded me of all the ancient
human bodies discovered in wetlands around the world. [29]Some of them
were as many as 10,000 years old, their skin and facial features
unperturbed by time. Lead scientist Randy Kolka said it's only a matter
of time before we find similarly preserved human remains in the
northland. "They're out there," he said.

These finds demonstrate the preservative power of peatlands, including
some of the continent's biggest freshwater bogs here in Minnesota.
These wet wonders don't just preserve old wood and dead bodies. Swamps,
bogs and fens capture vast amounts of carbon and have for millennia.

After the last Ice Age, wetlands formed from the recession of glaciers
as inland seas transformed into land. Dense, nutrient laden soil
captured pools of water upon which layers of peat formed year after
year. Even as humans erected smokestacks across the globe, the mosses
and peat of wetlands seized and stored carbon from the air.

And if that doesn't interest you, consider that these peatlands are now
poised to belch all that carbon into our atmosphere, tilting climate
change from bad to worse in a matter of years, not centuries.

You don't have to wonder what climate change might do to Minnesota's
forest ecology. At the U.S. Forest Service's Marcell Experimental
Forest, you can see for yourself. Here amid the sphagnum, tamaracks and
black spruce, scientists built a fleet of time machines. Each will take
you to the future.

Life in the bog

I grew up in the Sax-Zim Bog south of Eveleth. Theoretically, I could
have communed with nature and the diverse populations of migratory
birds. But in the 1980s my family ran a junkyard. Instead of all that
nonsense, I pulled around a metal plate with four protruding bolts
pretending it was a cat because our real cat was too mean to pet.

I liked to climb the earthen barricades of my family's sharp metal
playground. St. Louis County forced my grandfather to block the view of
the junkyard from Highway 7 with long berms of gravel and swamp muck.
He dug them with his backhoe, a dinosaur in the mire, creating a small,
shallow lake skimmed with oily rainbows and doomed frogs.

Like Sisyphus, I tried to protect the frogs to no avail. The tadpoles
didn't last long in fish tanks, especially when you fed them French
dressing from the school cafeteria. When the vernal pools under the
berms began to drain, the tadpoles and young frogs became attractive
snacks for crows and snakes.

Out past the gash my family cut in the swamp unfurled the real bog:
mossy and foreboding. My mom cautioned my sisters and I not to play out
there. We ignored her, usually sinking thigh deep in muck while fleeing
clouds of angry ground hornets. Bogs can be scary. Author Annie Proulx
captures that feeling in her 2022 book "Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short
History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis."

"Suspense writers find bogs very useful," Proulx writes. "Bogs stir
fear. They are powerfully different from every other landscape and when
we first enter one we experience an inchoate feeling of standing in a
weird transition zone that separates the living from the rotting. Black
pools of still water in the undulating sphagnum moss can seem to be
sinkholes into the underworld."

In 1997, a military fighter jet crashed in a boggy forest in the
Finland State Forest several miles east of where I grew up. The plane
penetrated 10 feet below the surface, even when the ground was frozen.
The tragic crash built a mystique in my mind, largely apocryphal, of a
landmass that could swallow the Air Force like a pitcher plant.

After all, carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews, such as the ones
that grow in the bogs of Minnesota, evolved to eat meat to supplement
the nutrients they can't get from their environment. The diverse life
within peatlands are among the most enterprising you will find.

But that's not how modern humans came to see swamps and bogs. To them,
peatlands represented underused acreage that could be made productive
through development into farms.

More than a century ago, Hibbing newspaper editor Claude Atkinson
thumped for the agricultural potential of Itasca and St. Louis County
on the front pages of his Mesaba Ore. Throughout the Sax-Zim Bog,
engineers planned a system of judicial ditches to drain floodplain into
tillable soil. If the county moved too slowly, individual farmers acted
independently. Most rural counties in Minnesota tell a similar tale.

Swamp land came cheap and for many immigrants it represented a foothold
in the American Dream. On the Mesabi Iron Range, this became especially
true when mines blacklisted Finnish-Americans after a 1907 strike.
Subsistence farms cropped up across northern Minnesota.

Decades later, international pizza roll magnate Jeno Paulucci, another
Hibbing native, imagined a canal that would cut through the bog to
connect Iron Range mines to the port of Duluth. No matter how fanciful
the dream, the bog was just something in the way.

In her book, Proulx talks about the worldwide phenomenon of draining
wetlands to form "productive" land over past centuries. This activity
eliminates the carbon-sinking qualities of the wetlands, and it's also
a major factor in the collapse of North American waterfowl
populations.. That's why, of all groups, duck hunters have been among
the most aggressive in advocating for wetlands restoration.

The fact that duck hunters count politicians, judges and industrialists
among their ranks might explain why they have been so successful. Such
idealistic endeavors actually can be achieved if the right people
support them.

Future pods

At the Marcell Experimental Forest, Kolka led us down a gangway
suspended over the bog. The tamaracks sported their bright gold autumn
needles. Meanwhile, the evergreen black spruce stabbed at the sky with
their distinctive long-fingered peaks. Set amid the trees were several
Plexiglas enclosures that would fit comfortably in a 1970s science
fiction movie.

The project is part of the SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under
Changing Environments) experiment. In SPRUCE, the U.S. Forest Service
partners with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a secure government
research center that inspired the mysterious Hawkins Laboratory of the
Netflix show "Stranger Things." But on the day I was there it was too
damn cold and windy to worry about Demogorgans.

Fortunately, at least in the moment, this experiment is all about a
warming planet. Each semi-domed enclosure wraps around the common plant
species of the surrounding bog, including trees, moss and grasses.
Heaters and fans simulate the effects of climate change under different
forecasting models. Pods run from 2.25 degrees Celsius above the
outside temperature all the way to 9 degrees Celsius. Each pod explores
a different climate change scenario.
Lead scientist Randy Kolka highlights the effects of climate change
simulations on native vegetation at the U.S. Forest Service's Marcell
Experimental Forest. Photo by Aaron J. Brown.

Even before this experiment began, Kolka documented changes on this
site over the past several decades. Winter low temperatures increased
significantly. [30]The Star Tribune reported last December how this
propagates certain harmful insects and diseases that affect native
forests. Kolka said fall and spring temperatures also rose, extending
northern Minnesota's growing season by three weeks. Recent [31]research
confirms these findings. More growing sounds great, but it also
promotes "false springs," where trees wake from their winter slumber
too early and die from late frosts.

These measurable changes attracted scientists to the experimental
forest. Siting began in 2009, with principle construction happening
between 2014 and 2016. Kolka said the project adopted the name SPRUCE
shortly thereafter to avoid the political connotations of the word
"climate" during the Trump Administration. Nevertheless, the project's
findings are entirely about climate.

Many experiments are still ongoing, evaluating every imaginable aspect
of the biome. But even a novice like myself could observe significant
changes in the warmest of the pods.

The spruce trees hover near death. It's hard to see new ones sprouting
in the changing undergrowth. Shrubs thrive in the new environment,
including blueberries and Labrador tea. But their success comes at the
expense of lichens and sphagnum moss. Those are the species that
capture and contain the most carbon from the atmosphere. Meantime, the
rising temperatures observed in the waters below trigger chemical
reactions that release methane into the air.
At 9 degrees celcius higher than current temperatures, northern
Minnesota black spruce trees like these ones fail to thrive. Photo by
Aaron J. Brown.

Kolka says the results clearly show that this future bog now produces
carbon rather than capturing it. This will soon accelerate climate
change in Minnesota.

Preparing for the inevitable

[32]Psychologists observe how the climate crisis confounds our human
nature. It boils too slowly for the broader population to perceive the
risk, so we delay action. Meantime, subtle effects on wildlife slip
into daily life, such as the avian flu that caused our recent spike in
egg prices, or a January smog warning across much of the state. In
"Fen, Bog and Swamp," Proulx does not write optimistically about
efforts to reverse climate change. It's too late for that, she says.

"I used to think that stasis in the `natural' world was possible and
desirable," Proulx writes, "but I have learned beliefs like the
`balance of nature' are point-in-time-defined fantasies."

She instead concludes that it's more important for humans to stop
causing damage and to prepare for coming change.

When peatlands like those in northern Minnesota begin releasing their
ancient carbon -- and they soon will -- there will be no going back.
What can be preserved through conservation will become all the more
important.

This change will cause conflict, and not just because of political
differences. Entire paradigms will shift.

In 2019, Ed Nelson, secretary of the Arrowhead Regional Farm Bureau,
called me about a problem vexing farmers like him in the rural
communities near the Sax-Zim Bog. "Mr. Ed" runs one of the last
horse-powered farms in the region. It has become [33]a farm life field
trip destination for kids and families. But now he was having trouble
getting hay for his horses. Local fields that had produced hay for
livestock since the early 1900s now flooded for much of the summer.
Farmers who once produced two crops of hay each year could now barely
produce one.

The reason was plain to see. Those judicial ditches dug a century ago
had plugged up. Some investigation revealed that it was far more than
just a lack of maintenance. A company blocked the ditches, creating
"wetlands" contrivances, which they then sold as wetlands credits to
big developers in other parts of the state. St. Louis County let it
happen. No one told the farmers.

Mitigating damaged wetlands will take more than just policy. It will
require community planning, compassion and respect for people whose
lives will change as we adjust to this new age. Otherwise grifters,
culture warriors and political squabbling will tear us apart.

At this point, if you still don't believe that climate change is real,
I'd suggest you redirect your anger at the people who sold you that
line. A Jan. 12 [34]Oliver Milman story in the Guardian revealed that
company documents show Exxon Mobil scientists correctly forecasted
human-caused climate change as early as the 1970s. Their predictions
proved more accurate than even the government-sponsored science that
came later. Exxon buried the report and -- with the rest of the fossil
fuel industry -- spent untold fortunes convincing Americans that
climate change wasn't real.

If you remain unconvinced, know that our climate future is plainly
visible in those sci-fi pods tucked into a bog in the Chippewa National
Forest. If you can't believe the politicians, believe your eyes.

Environmental conservation isn't just a trend or even a defined set of
policy objectives, it's an unrelenting daily challenge that we humans
will face the rest of our lives.

X

Bog is dead: The waning defense of Minnesota wetlands

by Aaron Brown, [35]Minnesota Reformer
February 21, 2023

<h1>Bog is dead: The waning defense of Minnesota wetlands</h
by Aaron Brown, <a href="https://minnesotareformer.com">M
Early one Sunday morning my son's Boy Scout troop toured
Researchers sawed this simple round from a tree pulled ou
How old was it?______________________________________
No joke. Tests confirmed that this tree became entombed i
These finds demonstrate the preservative power of peatlan
After the last Ice Age, wetlands formed from the recessio
And if that doesn't interest you, consider that these pea
You don't have to wonder what climate change might do to
<h4>Life in the bog</h4>________________________________
____________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
I grew up in the Sax-Zim Bog south of Eveleth. Theoretica
I liked to climb the earthen barricades of my family's sh
Like Sisyphus, I tried to protect the frogs to no avail.
Out past the gash my family cut in the swamp unfurled the
"Suspense writers find bogs very useful," Proulx writes.
In 1997, a military fighter jet crashed in a boggy forest
After all, carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews, such a
But that's not how modern humans came to see swamps and b
More than a century ago, Hibbing newspaper editor Claude
Swamp land came cheap and for many immigrants it represen
Decades later, international pizza roll magnate Jeno Paul
In her book, Proulx talks about the worldwide phenomenon
The fact that duck hunters count politicians, judges and
<h4>Future pods</h4>____________________________________
____________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
At the Marcell Experimental Forest, Kolka led us down a g
The project is part of the SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Re
Fortunately, at least in the moment, this experiment is a
<figure><a href="http://minnesotareformer.com/wp-content/upl
Even before this experiment began, Kolka documented chang
These measurable changes attracted scientists to the expe
Many experiments are still ongoing, evaluating every imag
The spruce trees hover near death. It's hard to see new o
<figure><a href="http://minnesotareformer.com/wp-content/upl
Kolka says the results clearly show that this future bog
<h4>Preparing for the inevitable</h4>___________________
____________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/0
"I used to think that stasis in the `natural' world was p
She instead concludes that it's more important for humans
When peatlands like those in northern Minnesota begin rel
This change will cause conflict, and not just because of
In 2019, Ed Nelson, secretary of the Arrowhead Regional F
The reason was plain to see. Those judicial ditches dug a
Mitigating damaged wetlands will take more than just poli
At this point, if you still don't believe that climate ch
If you remain unconvinced, know that our climate future i
Environmental conservation isn't just a trend or even a d
<style> figure, .tipContainer, .socContainer, .subscribeShor
____________________________________________________________
<a href="https://minnesotareformer.com">Minnesota Reform
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Aaron Brown
[38]

Aaron Brown

Aaron J. Brown is an author, community college instructor and radio
producer from Northern Minnesota's Iron Range.
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