Good Friday Morning!
The forests or WV feel “eternal” - unchanging. That you could leave a place, come back in 10 years, and see nothing different, other than taller trees. Sometimes the culture feels that way too - one of the things I love about this place.
The thing is - change seems slow here, until it isn’t.
While we were out on our break, I saw news about flooding in Morgantown and talked first-hand with folks about flooding in the Thomas/Davis region, where the Blackwater hit it’s highest level since the mid-1990s - and the second round of heavy flooding in 2 years.
I’ve been noticing these things all around the state. Things seem to be getting wetter and storms rougher. I’d never heard of “training” thunderstorms until maybe 10 years ago, now it’s a phrase I hear all the time. I was reading the FEMA findings from the 2016 floods, and one of their conclusion was “the 2016 flood was not a rare, 1 in 1,000 year event”, but are in some cases more like every 20 years - a scary thing to think about.
On a more widespread scale, I can see some of these changes in the woods. It’s rare to find an elm or an ash tree in the woods these days - taken out by parasites and pests that like the warmer, wetter weather. I worry that I may live to see the end of the hemlocks too. Everything I read says that climate change will change the makeup of our forests, a change that may be slow, but also will be of huge impact to this place.
What’s my end message?
I don’t know. These problems seem so intractable, so big, that it feels like the only thing to do is what folks here have been good at for ~2 centuries: adapt. Learn what grows and what doesn’t. Learn how to take advantage of the warmer and the wetter.
But that doesn’t mean something won’t be lost. My grandmother told me about what a loss it was when the chestnut tree died off. It’s scary to think that might have been minor, compared to what we are seeing.
Talk to y’all on Tuesday.