“Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is ‘dying,’ can avert a complete denaturing of the world.”
This observation by writer Jonathan Franzen nicely captures the challenge of understanding climate change’s impacts on nature. As Franzen also notes, climate change is so big that it’s everybody’s — and nobody’s — problem. To initiate change, we need to understand its impacts on a human scale.
In an effort to communicate climate change impacts on a personal level, a team of researchers from Penn State University recently published a paper examining how climate change will affect opportunities to fish for eastern brook trout. The paper argues that one meaningful measure for assessing and facilitating public understanding of climate change impacts is the distance people will have to travel from a city to the closest water body to fish for wild brook trout. “For trout fishermen, climate change will mean more driving time, less angling,” the news release accompanying the paper states. Although unlikely to lead to a mass protest against longer driving times to go fishing, having to travel noticeably farther to wet a line might motivate some anglers to take climate change more seriously.
Brook trout are a coldwater fish, so it’s no surprise to learn from the Penn State study that in the climate-altered future, Maine anglers will fare better than those in Tennessee and Virginia when it comes to finding brook trout within easy driving distance. Anglers in Bangor and Portland will still be able to find wild brook trout within a reasonable distance from home.
Yet, despite the rosier prospects for Maine anglers, there is more to consider. To begin with, there are brook trout — and then there are Maine brook trout. Maine has the most intact wild brook trout population and habitat in the United States. According to the leading range-wide assessment for brook trout in the U.S., “Maine is the last true stronghold … with as many intact subwatersheds as all other states in the eastern range combined.”
Maine also has several hundred waters that have never been stocked, meaning they contain truly wild fish with distinct and irreplaceable life histories and genetic heritages. No other eastern state, even New York, with its vast Adirondack Park, even approaches the quality of Maine’s brook trout resource. In most of the fish’s native U.S. range — spanning from Maine to northern Georgia — brook trout cling to the relatively remote, uppermost reaches of streams. In Maine, wild brook trout, once nearly everywhere, are still reliably present anywhere there is cold water.
Maine brook trout also support an angling experience that far exceeds that available anywhere in the U.S. and in much of southeastern Canada. Thanks to a unique geography that connects major lakes to their tributary streams — as well as a profusion of small headwater ponds — Maine is the last place in the U.S. where anglers can encounter large brook trout that are utilizing the full range of relatively un-fragmented habitats and have shoulders to show for it.
So, while measuring the driving time required to fish for wild brook trout can offer a useful lens to understand climate change impacts, it obscures the vast differences in the quality of the resource and thus the magnitude of the threat a changing climate poses to a species whose robust presence is itself an expression of Maine’s environmental quality. Even here, at the top of the fish’s U.S. range, climate science predicts that if current warming trends continue, there will be a dramatic loss of brook trout habitat over the next seven or eight decades.
Once upon a time, eastern brook trout were a reliable reminder of what the entire Appalachian region was like when the world was a little younger — in geological terms — than it is today. In nearly every place other than Maine, that no longer holds true. For Maine anglers — indeed, for anyone who cares about climate change impacts on wildlife — the stakes are far greater than the potential burden of additional driving time to experience the thrill of catching a wild fish. They go right to the heart of a fishery resource that makes Maine one of the last, best places.
Charles Gauvin is the executive director of Maine Audubon. He served as Trout Unlimited’s CEO from 1991-2010.