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A friend of mine who works at a national environmental organization has often said that her trips exploring different parts of the natural world help fuel her work for the environment by reminding her what she fights for on a daily basis.
While my career in non-profit advocacy focused more on civil rights & civil liberties, my campaigns for public office were motivated largely by a goal to protect the future from an accelerating global ecocide driven by corporate resource extraction and the loss of natural habitat.
More recently, I’ve been working on a short series of posts examining the global climate crisis. They’ll revisit the only solutions that—at this point, after decades of obliviousness and complicity from Wall Street to Washington—could meaningfully address it.
A walk up a mountain this weekend offered a few illustrations that seem like a good place to start the series.
Damn, my legs are tired
Sunday morning, I got up a little before dawn and went to a trailhead at the base of a mountain not far from where I live. Over the course of the ensuing nine hours, I hiked up and down 3500 feet, covering over 12 miles before returning to the bottom.
It’s the most ground I’ve ever covered in a day, which felt gratifying in itself. 
Beyond the opportunity to demonstrate my endurance to myself, however, the hike also offered many beautiful sites, in addition to at least two visible reflections of the mounting global climate catastrophe.
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Show & tell
It’s amazing how a landscape can shift, from a meadow replete with wildflowers exhibiting seemingly every hue under the sun, to exposed rock scree, and then back again through each of those cycles.
On my hike this weekend, I saw wildflowers in yellow and white, as well as purple and pink and blue. Below are a handful of my best photos from that morning & afternoon.
I found myself recalling “The Sound of Music,” and half-expected to see a shepherd skipping down the mountain with a flock of sheep.
In addition to wildflowers, I also saw abundant wildlife. Lizards darted over rocks, chipmunks ran between them (and also right up to me), birds filled the air with song as ducks crossed the several ponds and lakes that I passed, dragonflies continually caught my eye (while eluding my camera), and butterflies swarmed in groups bigger than any I’ve ever seen in the United States.
The trees can talk
One of the most striking aspects of the hike was the impressive biodiversity within the forests. Quaking aspens at the base gave way to jeffrey and ponderosa pine, above which fir trees flourished. I didn’t see as many of the cedars that appear in other parts of the local landscape, nor any of the sequoias that draw visitors to other parts of the Sierras.
Among the pines and firs that I witnessed, two particular patterns reflected the disturbing escalation of the climate crisis.
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First, entire sections of the hills and mountains visible from my vantage point were denuded. The bare hills to the East are continuing reflections of wildfires that in recent years have wreaked havoc with the local landscape, prompting dangerous levels of particulate matter in the air and even forcing evacuations when threatening to burn nearby cities—including the one where I now live—to the ground.
These burn scars are prolific, terrible reminders of the devastation [ [link removed] ] that wildfires can cause—and likely will again [ [link removed] ] at some point.
Even where the forests continue to flourish, many trees revealed sickly branches, with pine needles turning brown. Each of them are effectively dying in slow motion, afflicted by bark beetles that they normally are able to fend off, except when weakened by drought.
Conifers have a natural defense against bark beetles [ [link removed] ] in the form of sap. When well-hydrated, trees can use sap to counteract beetles and prevent larvae from nesting. When weakened by drought, however, many of these trees become susceptible to native bark beetles. Their trails can be seen in bark, in wood, and in the brown blight spreading across our forests.
Wildfires and drought are both direct consequences of the climate crisis. In many parts of the country, Americans pretend that they can be immune from the effects of this global pattern. Here in the mountains, there is no such pretense.
Paid subscribers can get specific details about the hike I went on, including directions to the trail head, links to a trail map, and a brief story demonstrating the intersection of indigenous wisdom and the use of landscape as a seasonal weather forecasting device...

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