Climate Change in the Adirondacks: The Path to Sustainability

"Thanks to Jerry Jenkins, I think the future has been plotted more firmly for the Adirondacks than perhaps any other region on the planet. With his trademark ability to work across disciplines, he has taken evidence from every branch of the sciences, including the social sciences, to paint a devastating picture of where we are headed. These are the biggest changes the park has faced since the last Ice Age, and if we allow them to play out in full many of the glories of the Adirondacks will simply be gone. Jerry Jenkins has emerged as the information source for our mountains. This book is a great resource and a great gift; we are all in his debt."---from the Foreword by Bill McKibben.

Although global in scale, the impact of climate change will be felt, and its effects will need to be fought, at the local level. Refocusing our attention away from the ice shelves disintegrating in the Antarctic, the flooding of Pacific islands, and carbon inventories measured in billions of tons, Jerry Jenkins turns to changes that are alredy occurring much closer to home, changes that threaten to transform one of America's great wildernesses, the Adirondack region, into a damaged and unfamiliar landscape.

With the aid of color illustrations, graphs, charts, and maps, Jenkins explains the problem and maps a possible solution. In the first half of the book, he demonstrates the fundamental reality of climate change on a local level and analyzes the available data for the Adirondacks. The region's culture, biology, and economy are already shifting rapidly: boreal species such as the spruce grouse are in decline, pests such as the hemlock woolly adelgid are moving in, and nearby ski areas are suffering from lack of snow. In the second half of the book, he delivers a critical message: the tools are available to free our households and our communities from fossil fuels. If we want to alter the present trajectory of global warming, we must start using them, and start using them soon.

Climate Change in the Adirondacks is thus a portrait, a warning, and a map. It shows that the natural and human communities of the Adirondacks, like many others around the world, are in grave danger. It says that the tools already exist that could eliminate fossil fuels and avert this danger. And it challenges the people who care about these communities, in the Adirondacks and beyond, to take up these tools and lead the way to a sustainable future.

Jerry Jenkins is an ecologist with the Wildlife conservation Society and author of Acid Rain in the Adirondacks: An Environmental History, also from Cornell and The Adirondack Atlas: A Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park.
Bill McKibben is the author of books including The End of Nature.