Climate change: Making U.S. bears hungry?
April 16 (NPR) — National Parks Week kicks off Saturday, but the celebration comes at a rough time for National Parks. Harried by federal funding cuts and urban development, the nation’s park system is also facing the rising threat of climate change. Those effects are becoming most visible in Yellowstone, one of the best known of all national parks, according to Paul Solotaroff. He wrote about Yellowstone’s climate challenge in April’s issue of Men’s Journal and tells Weekend All Things Considered guest host Noah Adams that the damage is putting the park’s ecosystem out of balance. “In the last decade, there has been just an endless siege of dry and unusually hot stretches that have thinned out the streams and lakes, that have made it very difficult for trees to regenerate at the highest elevations, among them the lodgepole pine and whitebark pine, which are the signature of the Yellowstone greater ecosystem,” Solotaroff explains. As a consequence of the heat and dryness, pine beetles have invested the trees and left many of them dead, he says. This is a big problem for Yellowstone, as the pines are especially essential to the park’s inhabitants. They provide shade, stabilize the soil and, perhaps most importantly, feed the local grizzly bears. The tree’s pine seeds are core to the bears’ diet. Without it, the animals become increasingly desperate to find food, Solotaroff explains. …
