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A National Strategic Vision for Climate Change and Archeology
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David: Test. Test. Test. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to ArcheoThursday. My name is David Gadsby and I'm pinch hosting for Karen Mudar who's on detail to the Office of Communication this month. I'm an archeologist in the NPS Washington Archeology Program, which is hosting this series.
This fall and winter we're exploring the Anthropocene and climate change in archaeology. In our upcoming talk on January 22, that’s next week, Ellen Wohl, of Colorado State University will explore the impact of human activities on wilderness from a geomorphological perspective in a talk called "Is Wilderness Dead? Legacies of Past Land Use and Covert Contemporary Human Affects in the Anthropocene."
Wohl’s research examines the intensity of human use of ecosystems services and the manipulation of water sediment and nutrients of the earth's surface and beneath the earth's surface. Wohl observed through a synthesis of existing studies that wilderness is effectively gone and explores the implication for critical zone studies and management from a geomorphological perspective.
And she further looks at some of the management implications of her work and argues that understanding the manipulation of ecosystem services and soils and sediments and it continued to influence on ecosystems and landforms are useful in a forward looking approach to prediction and management, so that is coming next week.
Last week we had Jay Sturtevant from the Midwest Archaeology Center. He presented his research on the effects of Wildlife Fire on historical archaeology sites. He reported that historical archaeology sites, with their relatively high proportions of organic materials, are particular vulnerable to damage from wildland fire.
Projections of increasing wildland fire frequency fuel accumulations and fire intensity combined with longer fire seasons imply that archaeologists may face a growing threat to the preservation of historic period sites. Resource managers will be challenged to adequately protect sites as climate variability and uncertainty increase. Today's presentation provided an overview of threatened sites, highlighted the potential of an increased impact from climate change and proposed strategies to protect sites through management action.
Today, we have Marcy Rockman, who is going to discuss the intersection of ... she's going to continue our discussion of the intersection of climate and archeology. She'll discuss her work on climate change adaptation for MPS Archeological Resources in a presentation titled "A National Strategic Vision For Climate Change and Archeology." Dr. Rockman is the US National Park Service Climate Change Coordinator for Cultural Resources based here in Washington, an archeologist by training, her research focuses on how humans gather, share, remember and transmit environmental information, particularly during colonization.
She has done some field work across the American West, Europe and the Middle East and worked in environmental compliance in many western states as well. She came to DC as a Washington Science Policy Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In that capacity she managed to work archeology into Homeland Security Risk Communications with the EPA. Her current role at MPS addresses impacts of climate change on cultural resources and the use of cultural resource information in federal to global level adaptation and resilience planning.
Marcy has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, a BSC in Geology from the College of William and Mary. She's also a colleague and a friend and I look forward to hearing what she has to say. Thanks for talking to us today, Marcy.
Marcy: Hey, so is that my signal to take it away?
David: That is your signal to take it away. [laughter]
Marcy: Well I'm really glad ... Hi everyone, this is Marcy and I will apologize upfront. I'm getting over a truly massive head cold and if I dissolve in to a fit of coughing in the middle, we will cut to muzak or Dave will take over for a minute. So I just wanted to apologize for that in advance. I'm really pleased to be here. My thanks to Karen for the invitation and Dave for that kind introduction.
So as advertised, I will talk about a national strategic vision for climate change action, which I know sounds very intimidating but actually, we can do this. But what I want to start with is really just jumping right in to some examples of how climate change is showing up for archeology across the Service, without further ado, we’re jumping right in.
There you go. All right, this is Bandelier National Monument, which is north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it preserves and interprets the heritage of Ancestral Puebloan as well as earlier human communities with pueblo structures, kivas, cliff dwellings, rock art and many archeological sites.
In 2011, the Los Conchas fire burned more than 150,000 acres including much of the park. While the American southwest is not unused to fire - this happens in that area -this fire was extremely large and extremely hot, damaging soils, vegetation and archeological sites within them during the fire itself, by firefighting activities, and during the severe flooding that followed.
While individual fires cannot be directly attributed to climate change, the increasing temperatures and droughts that are projected for this area raise the probability that when future fires start, they will be severe, which increases the risk of damaging and losing more of the archeology and cultural heritage in this area.
Now over on the opposite coast, on the eastern coast, this is Jamestown, which is part of Colonial National Historical Park, which encompasses the remains of the first long term English settlement in the New World. This site has a unique relationship with climate change as tree ring studies conducted in the early 2000s demonstrate that in 1607, when the colony was established, the region was going through the most severe drought in over 800 years.
So the archeology of Jamestown islands provides the opportunity, among many things, to learn about not only how the drought affected the colonists in the early settlement period but how the local Native population coped with the drought and how they lived here before the arrival of Europeans and this drought period.
Jamestown is along the James River and it has long been subject to coastal erosion. There is a sea wall that was built to protect the site that is itself more than 100 years old and I apologize, this particular photo does not actually show that sea wall but it's there. So there's actually an armored sea wall that is part of the historic resources at Jamestown. Now, recently, resource managers had noted that while sea level rise is a threat to the site from the side, it is also becoming a threat from below as it is raising local ground water tables and saturating archeological sites from the bottom up and what this does is it shortens the time frame that we have to address the threat of sea level rise.
Moving back across the country, this is from the Gates of the Arctic. Gates of the Arctic, up in Alaska, includes many areas of permafrost which are now subject to melting, which results in slumping, which as I'm sure you all know, can wreak absolute havoc with archeological stratigraphy. This photos includes a part of a slump feature and I'm going to try to use the pointer here to show you where it is. There's the slump feature ...
That is a slump feature. It is on the edge of Krupa Lake, which is on the north side of the Brooks Range. The Arctic I and M Network which tracks permafrost slumping as part of its vital signs in this area and one of the major points of collaboration in the future between I and M network and archeology is getting their vital sign tracking data in to a GIS format so that we can relate it to site locations and actually really calculate the risk to sites in this area from this kind of damage.
The Gates of the Arctic is also one of several parks with ice patches, which are also subject to melting due to warmer temperatures and this can uncover artifacts and other biological remains. This is a photo of Jeff Rasic, with an antler that he found in an Krupa ice patch, which is a relatively short helicopter flight from Krupa Lake, also on the north side of the Brooks Range.
Now, Alaska’s going to get two slides in this introduction, because they have a lot of change impacts going on from sea level rise and storm related coastal erosion, it's hard to find a place that visually conveys vulnerability more than Cape Krusenstern. Cape Krusenstern is made up of a series of beach ridges that has human occupation among every one of its 114 beach ridges going further back in time, older on the right hand of the photo and ... sorry, younger on the right hand side and older on the left hand side.
From the air, which is where this photo is from, it looks so fragile as though it can just be pulled apart by winds and waves. This is actually a close up, if you haven't actually seen what some of the house ridges look like. You can see close up, right in the middle … I will try the pointer again. The house pit in the middle there.
They're not actually that fragile that they will be pulled apart like strings but they are vulnerable to sea level rise and increasing severity of storms in this area and as well, I also wanted to point out ... we talked about being pulled apart, you can also have this. This is a close up of some looting, a little bit farther south on the Seward Peninsula on Port Clarence. During my travels in Alaska this past summer, we found very recent evidence of looting there. It literally had just happened. As Jeff noted, we saw some cans of Coke there and he said there are actually still bubbles left in the Coke that is in those cans right there.
Now, looting is not a direct impact from climate change but it is subsistence practices for the local folks in the area, who are stressed by climatic changes along with other development and economic pressures. It is a secondary impact that is affecting the archeology in the area. This looting was not on NPS property and was actually shown to me by Jeannette Koelsch, who is the superintendent of Bering Land Bridge.
She is very concerned that looting may spread into park areas so we're very aware of that going on in this area. So this has just been a very brief example of some impacts to archeology that I wanted you to have in mind. Now I'm going to briefly jump in to a few other cultural resource situations that I wanted to just bring to your attention. This is Tumacacori, which is in the Southwest, relatively speaking, not so far from Bandelier. It's a mission that was established by Father Eusebio Kino in 1691, when he visited the O’odham people in southern Arizona.
The mission buildings are built of whitewashed adobe and the current versions of them that are in the park are about 200 years old. In January 2010, winter monsoons brought nearly 4 inches of rain in about 4 days. A short time later, a really large spall appeared above one of the major windows at the mission, resulting in the loss of large sections of adobe in the wooden lintels in the window.
The diagnosis of this all is that the heavy rains really saturated the adobe, weakening the structure. Now adobe is not a maintenance frame material but the coincidence of the spall with the heavy rains raises the issue that as climate projections for this area are for heavier rains and for higher temperatures, this combination of forces is going to place an increasing stresses on these buildings, which is likely going to increase the chances of spalling both at this park and at many of the other parks in the Southwest that have adobe buildings.
And speaking of stress on buildings, I will give you one more example for the moment. This is, as I'm sure many of you know, Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park down in the Florida Keys. Dry Tortugas is about two and a half hours boat ride west of Key West, out in the Gulf of Mexico. The key on which it sits is in a deepwater Harbor and so it was an extremely strategic location in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The fort was built during the mid 1800s but the key period of construction was during the Civil War and it's most famous inmate was Samuel Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth after Booth shot Lincoln. He then provided valuable service during the Yellow Fever epidemic and was released so there's some really interesting stories there. Now Fort Jefferson is an excellent demonstration of a lot of the physics and chemistry that say that brick, mortar, iron and seawater are not a sustainable construction combination.
The fort was actually never finished and so it really requires a substantial maintenance input and in 2010, there's a major collapse of what is known as Front 3. Significant portions of the fort had already been repaired and upgraded with parts of the ARA funding. This is what they look like there but the work on Front 3 had not been gotten to yet.
Now the deterioration of Front 3 isn't really due to climate change. It isn't due to specific climate change impact but the decision of what we're going to do about it must take climate change into consideration. The climate change protections for this portion of the country is that for sea level rise, which is going to affect the moat wall, which you can see on the left hand side of the photos, and less frequent but more severe storms and hurricanes.
The estimated cost of repair for Front 3 is estimated at about $13 million, taking in to account the very detailed restoration, such as done in the photo of the repaired section. So given the many needs and concerns across the NPS related to cultural heritage and climate change, making the decision to repair Front 3, it's not a decision that we can make lightly but a decision not to repair it is also not a decision that we can make lightly.
So with all of the issues facing archeology - the wildfires, the erosion, the melting permafrost, and the very visible damages that we have going on to buildings such as in the American Southwest with our adobe stresses and the buildings such as Fort Jefferson, these are all happening at the same time and the question being asked across the NPS is "How do we make good decision for our cultural heritage and balance all of these stresses?"
One of the goals of this national strategic mission that I will be telling you about is trying to find a way that we can actually balance these different stresses and not be pulled in the direction of some things that are very visible such as Front 3 at Fort Jefferson but really take in to account the needs of sites at Gate of the Arctic and Bandelier and balance them with the needs of our buildings and structures elsewhere across the service.
Okay, so that’s all is a bit of a downer and some really hard decisions are going to have to be made. I am pleased to say that we are not really at sea when it comes to making some of these decisions. The inpass is doing quite a lot with respect to being organized and preparing to make the decisions with respect to climate change.
So very briefly here, I just want to introduce you to the overall structure of the Park Service Climate Change Response program and to illustrate where cultural resources overall and archeology specifically fit into this. In the middle of this slide is a big map of the current staff of the NPS Climate Response Program. They're currently 22 people working essentially full time on climate change response for the service, which is a pretty substantial number compared to many of our federal family.
You can see me in the bubble. I'm there and I'm the lead for Cultural Resources within the Climate Change program and the other primary person working in Cultural Resources is Stanton Amimoto over in Hawaii. He is actually based in one of our LSTC offices there so that is the main component of his time but he speaks very eloquently and is very knowledgeable, especially about native Hawaiians and indigenous people issues. So between the two of us, we balance back and forth across all of that. The Climate Change Response Program is balanced by the Climate Change Coordinating Group, which includes the Director, Associate Director, Chief of Staff and the high level folks. They essentially form the oversight for Climate Change Response Program.
One of the key things I really wanted to mention to you is that one of the things that is coming out of all of these people is a growing family of documents that are attempting to provide guidance and vision and strategy for Climate Change Response. We've got, here I'm pointing to the Climate Change Response Strategy, which was published in 2010. Down in the lower corner, we've got one of what is now one of many policy memos, stating different aspects of climate change response.
We have the Climate Change Action Plan from 2012 - 2014 and we are in the process of updating that action plan. Updates on that will be coming soon. I’ve got a very small graphic here for our hands on for scenario planning and there are multiple other documents in preparation that are out there providing structure and guidance for how to address climate change. So the main document that I ‘m going to build on for the balance of my talk is the Climate Change Response Strategy, circling that document, just here. And if you haven’t actually read the Climate Change Response Strategy, I’ll give you just a brief overview. One of the main things that the Climate Change Response Strategy sets out is, essentially, four pillars or components of climate change response. These are science, adaptation, mitigation and communication. Science is working with data trends and observations, really figuring out what actually is going on measuring it, tracking it, monitoring it. Adaptation is figuring out what to do with the data. How do we make decisions? How do we come together to do planning and create frameworks for bringing everyone together to work with these really difficult issues? Mitigation is reducing the overall NPS environmental footprint, getting our emissions down and improving sustainability. Communication is the process of sharing and learning and engaging the NPS and the public with science, adaptation and mitigation across all of these different issues. And I will say, I’ve been with the Park Service for about three years now, and I was with the EPA for two years before that and I have seen many different strategy documents. With the climate change response strategy, we do use these pillars. We actively work with them, talk about them, build projects that work on them, so it is a very active strategy.
Now one of the key pieces for our talk today is how cultural resources, particularly archeology, are represented in the Climate Change Response Strategy and here is just a graphic of the one page in the Response Strategy that addresses cultural resources. I don’t expect you to read all that but I’m just illustrating there were just a very few points about cultural resources that were included in the original response strategy and they were all included under the adaptation component. The original points in here are not wrong, they are actually some very good starting points, but they really do not walk out cultural resources, particularly archeology, across science, all of adaptation, all of mitigation, all of communication. So the strategic vision that we are currently developing, that I am currently developing, and want to tell you about, is actually trying to grow this and really create a fuller and more complete vision for cultural resources.
OK, so what does this look like? I’m going to back up for just a minute to kind of some of, those introductory stories that we talked about. This is what I call the dreadations chart, and it is an effort to collect together all of the bad things that can happen to cultural resources from climate change going forward into one power point slide. Everything from submersion, erosion, inundation, saturation, down to conflagration, desiccation, invasion, and disruption. And because I am responsible for all of the cultural resources, this does try to actually walk out not just the impacts for archeological sites, but also buildings and structures, cultural landscapes, ethnographic resources, and museum collections. I had the chance to present this to a group including Director Jarvis, and he looked at this and said, “This is really depressing. Where does alcoholism fit?” and I did tell him that was inebriation or intoxication and that’s also on the secondary effects chart.
But the key point to this is that there are many effects of climate change that we can’t anticipate across the Service and across all of our resources, and that it is a many to many relationship. There’s no one effect that is going to hit archeology, there’s no one effect for cultural landscapes, and there’s no one effect for Alaska, there’s no one effect for Florida. It’s really a many to many relationship and one of our key challenges is figuring out what the diversity of impacts are across our many parks and across our many regions. So, that is one goal. The other part of this is this quote,” One of the most precious values of the national parks is their ability to teach us about ourselves and how we relate to the natural world. This important role may prove invaluable in the near future as we strive to understand and adapt to a changing climate.” This is from testimony that Director gave in his first Congressional hearing back in 2009, and it’s really one of the – I find it to be fairly profound and another just very personal aside, I actually had the chance to hear him talk about this in person – it was my very first Congressional hearing that I went to, and I don’t remember him saying this specifically but I do remember Senator Udall asking him a question straight off and his very first sentence of response was saying how important cultural resources were in the Park Service, and I remember thinking to myself, “I would work for that man.” And so, it’s actually – every time I read this I have this memory of saying, “It’s really an opportunity to try to bring this concept really into being, and to activate it, and make it work.”
So, we have impacts we have this idea of learning from, and what the vision- the vision that I would like to put to you – is that there is actually a dual relationship between cultural resources and climate change. On one hand, we have this big range of impacts that are affecting cultural resources and archeology across the Service in all of our different areas, and then on the other hand we have the capacity to learn from cultural resources and this is just a very brief collection of possible directions for doing that: paleoclimatic data, land use history, past social adaptation to environmental and climatic variation, traditional ecological knowledge, origins of modern climate change, and so forth. And really, the little heart of the vision for cultural – for archeology and climate change is that these two parts are equal. We do need to address the impacts on, but one of the reasons we really need to address the impacts on archeology from climate change is that we can learn from them. They’re not just victims but they are part of the solution, and so what I like to say is that it is really a Yin and Yang type of relationship. They’re dual.
And this concept that there is actually this dual component and that these two parts are equal is now actually part of Park Service policy. There is a policy memo called Climate Change and that Stewardship of Cultural Resources, which was released last February and one of the core components of this policy memo – one of the opening statements, if you will – is NPS cultural resource management must keep in mind that 1.) cultural resources are primary sources of data regarding human interactions with environmental change and 2.) changing climates affect the preservation and maintenance of cultural resources. So it does set out that idea that there is these two parts and we must address both of them as we address our stewardship of cultural resources and climate change moving forward.
Right! So! How’s that idea? How do we actually do that? This is my vision. This is taking those four pillars of climate change response – the science, the adaptation, the mitigation, and the communication and actually setting them both as having two parts, one side dealing with the impacts on – that is on the right hand side of each of the pillars, and then, that there is a learning from part of that pillar, which is on the – I’m sorry I have it backwards – Stage left, stage right sort of component – on the left hand side of your screen is the impacts on and on the right hand side it’s the learning from component.
There are a lot of words on this slide and I’m not going to walk you through each one of them, but the real concept is that there are already two components to each slide and that the vision is that, ultimately, if we do work in each of the eight parts of this framework, then we will be addressing the full scope of cultural resources and climate change and we will have a fully active program that can really address all of the issues that are coming down on it and we will be engaging with all of the information that they have to offer us.
So, that is really the vision and the goal is, really, also that this can work as an inspiration for figuring out what climate change projects can look like and what we can do. It’s also a way also of looking at gaps analysis, but really, working in all eight parts of this, in brief sum, that is the big national strategic vision that we have.
What I want to do for the balance of my talk is I’m going to walk you through some pieces of this framework to really explain a little bit more about what I mean by some of these concepts. One more point, is that all the concepts listed here, while there are a lot of words on this slide, it is not a fully- it is not exhaustive. It’s intended to be comprehensive, to really give some ideas for what the different sides of these different pillars look like, but I’m sure there are additional topics that a lot of us, if we put our heads together, we can think of to add to these, but the idea is really to set out this full vision and say, we should be working in all of these different parts.
So with that in mind, I’m going to start in the science realm, and just walk through a few pieces of the puzzle, so to speak. Right. So, on the… looking at vulnerability assessments, on the impact side of science, this one is a key issues that we have, thinking about all the different impacts, that ok, once we are aware of all the impacts, the real nitty-gritty is choosing –Ok- which of our resources are most vulnerable to which impacts? How vulnerable are they? Because we need to know that before we can start to really figure out what we are going to do about them. There’s a basic equation that’s been set out for vulnerability assessment that says “Vulnerability is exposure times sensitivity minus adaptive capacity.” When we talk about cultural resources and particularly archeology, which does not move on its own, we really run on the issue of – we really don’t have a much adaptive capacity. So, I’ve been trying to re-write that framework, or rather, the equation a little bit differently, saying it is “Climate trends times the material properties of the character-defining features in a given location minus the potential to apply adaptation options to significant aspects of that resource.” That’s its vulnerability. So, a lot of words together, but really trying to get the needs of archeology into that equation so that we can talk with our natural resources and other colleagues with a common language.
Now there have been some – I’ll pull up my pointer again – there have been several vulnerability assessments that have been completed in the Park Service already. There is back in – here – we’ve got one that was an integrated natural and cultural resource vulnerability assessment that was done for the Badlands back in 2011. This one did not actually assess the vulnerability of archeology. It really looked more at the ethnographic resources, particularly the plant communities that are collected and used by some of the Native communities in the vicinity of the Badlands. And it noted that archeology in the Badlands is susceptible to erosion but didn’t do a deeper dive than that, so it was really was a first run at broadly integrating cultural resources and natural resources in a vulnerability assessment.
Point Reyes did a very detailed and extensive coastal archeological vulnerability assessment, and I really point to that as being one of our best examples of what a vulnerability assessment for archeology can look like and they really divided up their ecosystem into different sort of micro-zones and looked at the different impacts in that area.
Park Service, particularly in the facilities realm, is looking at sort of broadly taking FMSS data, precise data, and trying to create some sea level rise tools, particularly for our coastal parks, and say, “Ok, how do we do this on a broad scale basis, taking sea level rise models and applying them to our different data sets that we have to figure out what is most at risk?” The key point of this thing is that we have several projects and initiatives to build on, and we will continue to build on them further.
Now, this graph that you probably cannot read in detail in the middle of your slide, is actually just a placeholder, I would say, for climate change data that is being provided to all parks. We have a climate scientist as part of the Climate Change Response Program named Patrick Gonzales and my understanding is that he is just about done with doing downscale projections for every park and providing every park with, essentially, a consistent set of projections, graphs, charts and so forth, so that any two superintendents can sit down and say, ”What does your graph look like? What does my graph look like?” so that they can, essentially, compare what is coming down the line at them.
What will be happening over the next year – Patrick is going to be leading an effort to, essentially, start up some additional vulnerability assessments and - with the goal of- within the next few years, have every park be part of a vulnerability assessment. They will not be assessing every resource in every park, but every park will be part of a vulnerability assessment. When this idea was put to the Climate and Culture group, which I’ll talk about in a little bit, there was a very strong request for more training in cultural resources vulnerability assessments, and so, this little icon over here is my attempt to show a computer. There will be some vulnerability assessment training webinars coming in the future, and archeology will definitely be a part of that coming forward. So, that’s all on the science side, and some of the things that are coming forward in the near future.
On the learning from side is one of my most favorite examples from one of our Park Service archeologists, and this is Margo Schwadron, I’ll point here out in the photo down here. I don’t know if she’s on the line but Cheers! Margo! If you are on the line. And I just want to mention about her dissertation research in the shell mounds of the western Everglades, completely fascinating work. She did a lot of baseline work, mapping and dating, and definitely got some very big – good baseline data there, showing how tall and how big these things are, and noting that carbon 14 dates were essentially the same on the bottom of these shell mounds as they were on the top, suggesting that they actually had accumulated within a recent short date of time, within a generation or so, and that this whole area was abandoned around AD 1290 to 1300. For those of you who are up on your American Southwest culture history you know that that time frame is also the time period that many of the sites in that area were abandoned, the Chaco Canyons and Mesa Verdes were abandoned. This raises the question of what was happening in the Everglades. Had they managed to deplete their oyster resources and needed to leave or did they also experience some climatic downturn, or was it some composite of the two, an overrun of their resources at the same time that there were climatic fluctuations? I know that Margo has worked with some – has done some isotopic work with her shell to get some more information on sea surface temperatures and some more detailed work in that realm and I don’t know what she has found out, so that’s a big question for myself but at the moment, she has really put a dot on the climate map. There had not been information prior to her work saying that there was evidence either of climate fluctuations and human response in this area, and now we do have a big dot in that area, and this is a fantastic example of what archeology can really add to our paleoclimatic map.
Ok, moving on to the adaptation realm. I’m going to be looking at these few pieces. Ok. So, on the impact side, and remember adaptation is figuring out what to do with every thing that is going on, once you’ve identified resources as being vulnerable to different climate change impacts and said, ok, these ones are significant, they are at risk, the real big question is, so, what do we do? There has been a fair amount of work to date to try to actually lay out some of our – you could call them adaptation options- you could also think of them as management or decision options and say “Right! What have we got? What are our different options?” and currently we have a list of seven. Everything ranging from no active intervention, saying “Nope! We’re deciding to not take action” to attempting to offset the stresses or keep the stresses away from a resource to improving resiliency, managing change, doing some sort of movement, either allowing a resource to move if it is one of the few that is living or picking something up in movement – Cape Hatteras light house is our iconic example of that – doing documentation of a resource, or doing some combination that allows us to interpret the change.
Now over down on the bottom here, and I’m circling this sort of funnel-looking thing we’ve had a very large workshop in New York City last April building on some of the lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy that brought together not only Park Service but also members of the National Trust, State Historic Preservation Offices, several other historic preservation and planning groups to start talking about this. We did not come to full decisions but trying to bring our partners together to say, “What are our options? How do we define these? And what are some of the conditions under which we might choose one option over another?” And I will just point to this green thing in the middle; there is a coastal heritage workshop report where you actually have community outcomes of a lot of those discussions, and folks are really not comfortable with some of those decisions. It’s a really uncomfortable thing to say, “No, we won’t actively intervene,” but we are also trying to agree, sometimes you need that option to be on the list. So, we are working on those options. Having options, however, doesn’t – really doesn’t tell you what ones to pick, so I am now circling this other graphic that says Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C, and Scenario D. The Park Service has been doing a great deal of work with scenario planning. Actually, to date, there have been 25 different events of scenario planning across the Service, working with climate change projections as well as other types of futures, looking at different social trends, budget trends, political trends trying to say, what might our different futures look like? And if certain different sets of possible futures come together, what might we do? What might be coming down the line for our resources, what might be coming down the line for the Park Service, and how might we respond and react to that? So, there are actually a group of folks within the Climate Change Response Program, and I am one of them, who have been trained in running scenario planning workshops and, as of last summer, we recommitted to running a series of climate scenario planning workshops for different sets of resources in parks in different types of situations. And upcoming this year, I’m circling another photo down here, we will be doing a big scenario planning workshop at Cape Lookout which won’t be focusing as directly on archeology but it will be looking very closely at Portsmouth Village, which is an 19th century village, which is literally right at sea level rise, with a very active descendant community, so there are no easy decisions here about this very at-risk site. What to do with it and how do we protect it, and then we will also be working at Acadia, which has a very interesting mixed set of both natural and cultural resources there. So, cultural resources will be very much at the forefront of these scenario planning workshops. And as I understand Dry Tortugas has just put in a request for some scenario planning for Fort Jefferson, so that is also on the list, and that is just being planned right now, so there is a lot of work going on in terms of figuring out what to do about it.
Now, over in the Learning From part of this is one of my favorite examples of all time, and this is one that I have found through my research. It is not through a particular Park Service research but we do cover some of the areas that this example covers, so, hopefully, it is valid enough, and this is the example of the Chumash, who live on the Central Californian coast. They are fully visible there in the archeological record back to about A.D. 650, pretty much. Yep! Yep! That’s the Chumash and they still live there today so they have been there for quite a long time. This is why they make a good comparison with Margo Schwadron’s work in the Everglades, they stayed in place during the climatic fluctuations of A.D. 1290 to 1300. They did experience a great deal of drought during that time, that is very clear from some of the paleoclimatic record of that area, and they did change both their economy and their settlement system. You can see in the archeological record that villages changed sizes, chiefs moved to different places, there was different trade moving- actually trade intensified between the interior valleys and the coastal islands and there is even some lithic evidence that they were moving around more to help actually deal with the stresses that they were going through, but they did remain in place, they did not abandon the area, and they remained identifiably Chumash. And so, when we are in this realm of talking about what is adaptation, the Chumash are one of the best examples that I have seen of –this is what a resilient society looks like. They saved themselves, they adapted their economy, but they remained identifiably themselves. One of the key other issues, however, through, is the physical anthropology from this area, shows that after the 1300, there is definitely a decrease in violent injuries and an improvement in health, which suggests that they did not get through that time without stress, which is another really important component of discussions of what do we mean by a resilient society, what do we mean by adaptation. So, the picture of what the Chumash went through that comes out of archeology and all of the research in that area is a very important example as we start to work on the impact side of the thing. What are we doing? How do we make good decisions? Having this example of a society that actually been through the fire, so to speak, is a very important one.
Moving on – I’m going to move on to the mitigation realm, and I will apologize actually – in my mitigation examples I do not actually have good archeological examples for mitigation so if any of you think of any as you listen to me talking please let me know, because I would love to fill them in. On the impact side of mitigation, we have work done by the National Trust, which has demonstrated quantifiably that in most cases the greenest building is actually the building that already exists, so there is much room in our plans to reduce our carbon footprint in maintaining, and actually renovating, using our historic building stock and not – while LEED-certified buildings are absolutely wonderful, there is a big role for historic buildings that they can continue to play and, of course, within the Park Service, we have our own Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for rehabilitation and showing right here there are sustainability guidelines that have already been published on how to help make buildings sustainable and I know that they are now working on a set of climate change sustainability – or guidelines directly related to climate change, so those will be forthcoming.
Now, I deliberately put these photos right in the middle, because they actually bridge the gap between both impacts and learning from. These are both from Marsh-Billings. This is the historic house there, and this is actually their super high tech, high-pressure wood boiler. The area actually – Marsh-Billings – actually is all about conservation and they still practice – they practice sustainable forestry, so the wood that they use in their burner comes from the actual park. They do harvest it there, so it is a sort of low-tech high-tech combination. In talking with the facility manager there, he says he uses a lot of this high tech approach, but then he also works with the actual prevailing wind direction when they open windows in the house to get circulation going and uses a lot of old-fashioned caulking. It’s his favorite thing! His caulking gun is his favorite weapon to keep the energy costs down and to keep it as energy efficient as they can.
And then way over here on the right-hand side in the Learning From – again, it’s not an archeological example, and it’s not actually a Park Service example, though it is directly adjacent to Salem Maritime National Historic Site, but it’s the best story that I have found thus far for mitigation. If you walk into – it sits in the House of Seven Gables – If you walk into the kitchen area of the House of Seven Gables, that part of the house was built in 1632, and the ceiling is very low, which you might envision if you have been in very early colonial houses. And how many of you have experienced this: you’ve stepped in and it’s a guided tour and the tour guide says “Right, so you’ve all noticed the ceiling is right over your head, and you’re all ducking. That’s because the people in the 1600s were short, right?” And I remember him, he said that, and I know that’s not the right answer, but you know, brain working, brain working, and he said, “Right! 1632, chopping wood is hard, New England winters are cold, and heat rises. Therefore, ceilings were low.” And it was just that I think about mitigation and keeping the carbon footprint low all the time but it was just one of those really powerful reminders that there are other ways of living and other ways of building when energy costs are really high, and as you walk through the rest of the house, you can see that, as the energy supply situation changed, the ceilings got higher, and things got lighter and more open, and it was such a powerful experience to actually experience that and think about how it is possible to live differently when energy costs are higher. Again, one of those powerful learning-from opportunities for mitigation.
I’m finally going to move into the fourth quadrant of the pillars, which is communication, and I’ve just gone and circled all of them here, because we’ve got a lot of different things going on and they all interlink with each other. Right, so on the impact side, multiple things going on. I’m sure, as many of you know, Park Service interpretive staff are not given any scripts for how to talk about their resources – that they’re trained in how to connect visitors with the parks in which they’re visiting and to create these meaningful experiences. So, the Interpretation Program has done a wonderful job in actually creating climate change interpretive training and actually training them in climate change – this is what it is, and this is how to connect visitors to the climate change experience and to find stories in their parks and they have actually – this is, again, my little webinar icon, there – they have been doing this remotely for a couple of years now and I had the opportunity to be a part of this training and they already do a very wonder job in integrating cultural resources and the historic experience into this training. So it is not just a natural resource experience, they do have archeology and historical thinking is very much a part of this training. So, I wanted to call that out.
We have the Climate and Culture group which is a essentially a community of practice for anyone interested in cultural resources and climate change. It is primarily – although we have a lot of culture resources folks on our list – currently we have 95 people within our community of practice – but it is not always natural resources folks. We have facilities folks and several partners from around the Federal family also part of that. So, if you are not part of that and you would like to be part of it, please just let me know. I will happily sign you up for it.
A few other parts in some of our outreach and sort of dealing with impacts. This is just a web grab in the back of the IUCN World Parks Congress webpage. The Park Service was asked, just about two years ago, to run the Climate Change Program of the 2014 World Parks Congress, which we did, in November. It was in Sydney, Australia, and IUCM, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, so it very much had nature as its DNA, but the Park Service did make a strong effort to make sure that, because we incorporate cultural resources into our climate change response program, that cultural resources was very much a part of our program in Sydney, and it very much was. We had multiple sessions that did look particularly at archeology and learning from and telling stories. So we did get the word out there that we were very proud of and then we do work with our partners and this is, here, I’m circling here, the National Landmarks at Risk is a publication from the Union of Concerned Scientists which came out last May. They are very concerned with trying to get the word out about many of the impacts being experienced by cultural heritage across the country and many of our colleagues across the Service did help them to develop case studies for this report, so it is not entirely about the Park Service, but we are definitely featured within it. And we are also working with the Union of Concerned Scientists now on another workshop, back in sort of the adaptation realm, looking at questions of what to do about these risks, and that will be coming up later this spring.
Now, finally, flying over on the Learning From side, our mission is that every place has a climate story, and this comes out some of the work with the interpretation program and trying to say, how do we coordinate our efforts to get cultural resources and things that we can learn from them better integrated into climate change and into the interpretation program? How do we better communicate everything that we have to say to you? And one of the ideas that came up is, really, every place - even if we don’t have polar bears or glaciers or things that are melting – there’s some thing that we can say from every place that people have been about climate change. And we kind of have a structure of four different kinds of stories. One is how can we see effects on material cultural heritage. This is how we can actually see change happening around us and when we look at change happening in cultural heritage, you’re actually seeing change at a human scale, which really brings it down to a very personal level. We have had past societies adapt to past environmental change and this is definitely in the realm of archeology. Any place that has had people has likely had them live through different climatic episodes and so we have something to learn from that. Of course, Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon are some of our big, best known ones but any place – I actually challenge people – find me a place where there hasn’t been people where we can’t talk about this.
Now, we have a question of how did modern climate change come to be? And I credit Katie Bliss at the Mather Training Center for really - for bringing this idea up. I’d thought about it but she really captured it. She said, “I’m looking out at Harpers Ferry right now and I’m looking at the history of industrialization in the U.S. We have so many sites that talk about this and really, this history, is why we have climate change now.” And it’s uncomfortable to talk about it but we really need to talk about it. And so, we have started looking at many of our industrial sites and saying, how can we talk about the history of industrialization at this place and understand climate change, as coming out of the many different initiatives and priorities that created these sites. And, of course, we have traditional ecological knowledge in traditional communities and how they are seeing and feeling climate change in their practices and in their knowledge and what they know.
So, we currently have a project to start, literally, listing out all our different parks and identifying different stories that go with different places. I will just say it is currently in the draft stage, but everyone I have talked to about this says, yeah, I get that and I want to build that out, and we want to build it out into a set of information for interpreters to use and – I lost my arrow – we have proposed developing this further as a potential Centennial project, so I’ll just say, watch this space, as more information will be coming forward on that.
So, that actually brings us to the group, but what I wanted to do is actually just tell you of two new things that are upcoming that will hopefully be really useful for the archeological community as we look forward to really dealing with climate change. One is the Cultural Resources Climate Change Impacts Table and I know that you cannot read it, it is a whole lot of tiny words, but it is just a screen grab of a very large chart that we have built. You saw the Dreadations table earlier in this presentation. It’s good for getting it on one PowerPoint slide, but it’s not really useful if you really want to dig into it and say “Ok, what does changing precipitation really mean for archeological sites? What does it mean for cultural landscapes?” and so forth. I’ve had a young woman working with me over the past year who has done an enormous amount of research and talking with our colleagues across the Service and really compiling a detailed, referenced table and I expect that some of you on this call actually helped review this. We are literally at the point now, within the next two weeks, I will be sending it out for a final internal review and then we are – we’ll be intending to publish it as a tri-fold - one of our Park Service sort of brochures, and then it will also be available on the Web. So, hopefully, this will be a useful resource, again, not exhaustive, but hopefully comprehensive enough to give everyone a good starting point on what impacts from climate change will be for all of our cultural resources.
And then, we also have in preparation, a Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. This whole 2X4 Pillar framework that I’ve been talking to you about, we are in the process of writing this up as an actual companion document to the Climate Change Response Strategy so that you don’t just have to know what we are talking about, you can actually look at it in your hands, and the current outline of it has this sort of framework. We’ll start with the introduction, and the impacts table will be included in the strategy document. Then there’ll be a section talking about that four pillars, the two – the dual approach across all four pillars - what that means, what that actually looks like. Then some actual practical guidance, what is scenario planning, what is vulnerability assessments, and how do we work with different adaptation options for cultural resources. And then a section on international efforts, because Park Service does speak as a national platform for cultural resources and climate change and we have international partners who are also working at that same level. What can we learn from them and what do we have to share out to the global community? So, I will just say that this is in progress, hoping to have a full draft for review later this spring into the summer.
So, I’ll wrap up with one – actually just two final points. I noted earlier that there was the Policy Memo that came out in February of last year. There’s a lot in it. It’s about five and a half page, fairly densely written, so hopefully comprehensibly written. There are two points that I really wanted to point out to the archeological community. As Dave introduced me, I am an archeologist at heart, and I’ve had to - by training - and I’ve had to learn to speak the language of all cultural resources but I did want to make sure that there were there two particular points in - that were incorporated into the policy memo, because they do really speak to the needs of archeology, and the potential of archeology. So, I’ll just quickly point these out. 1.E. Value Information from the Past. National Register criteria challenge us to identify and manage not only our known and honored heritage, but also to understand how cultural resources can address questions about the past. Such questions must now include how our modern climate situation has come about and how human societies have responded to climate and environmental variability in the past. What do resilient and sustainable societies look like? The resources in our parks, including the ones we have not yet identified, have a vital role to play in answering these questions for our multiple publics.” This really is speaking so much to what archeology has offer. We really need the information that comes from archeology, and the ways of living in the world that we don’t have any other access to except through our archeological record.
And just a quote from the final – one of the closing points of the Policy Memo. “The process of adaptation will not return us to the ways that things have been done before, but it will assist us in making choices in the face of uncertainty and change. Cultural resources remind us of who we are and where we have come from. They offer clues on past climate variability and speak to the many different ways humans have adapted to changing environments over time, in our parks, and across the country. We need their information and their inspiration.”
And, I will just say, I had archeology in mind when we wrote those words. They are intended to speak very broadly, but archeology really has so much to say. So, that really is what I wanted to say to all of you. That is the vision for our national plan. So I will just say, thank you. For those of you who don’t know what I look like, this is me, and my e-mail address. And with the few minutes that we have left I will be happy to take any questions that you might have.
Dave: Thanks, Marcy. So, if you’d like to unmute your phone and ask a question by phone, or use the Q and A tab in the webinar, either way will be fine and I can read them as they come in over the Q and A.
Marcy: Sounds good.
Dave: And if there aren’t questions, in a minute, I wait a few seconds and then I will ask one. Well, I do have a couple questions that I started jotted down while you were talking and so, you and I have had more than one conversation about data and
Marcy: Yeah!
Dave: and I just wanted to ask you, so what data sources were important to you as you were developing the national vision and what kind of data do you need as you move forward and as you develop guidance and that kind of stuff.
Marcy: I think there are two types of data that are really needed and one of them really is some of locational data and trying to understand how we can best access location information. I’m thinking particularly of some of the coastal studies that are being done, with Facilities Management and they’re using FMSS data, which does include some archeological site location information – for Managed Archeological Sites – but it doesn’t include all of them and when I would be in meetings and they say “OK, this is what is at risk” and then my hand would go up and I’d say, “Um, I don’t think you have all the resources that are at risk in your data set, and just because there aren’t data points there you also need to know what has been surveyed and what has not, because just because there is a blank space on the map does not mean that there is nothing there” and this usually makes everyone else at the table really uncomfortable and really grumpy, and one of the things we really needed to try to figure out is ok, how do we get the data, how do we interface the FMSS data, which includes pretty much everything else with the archeological data and, particularly getting that information on where have we not looked, what areas have not been surveyed. That’s a real clincher, because being able to show that easily and quickly is going to be a real help as we start to build these models and I’m really worried that as we go forward, and a lot of these studies are in parks, and if we can’t get that information available in a suitable time frame that what happens is they note in their report that we didn’t include this data. But then, the analyses just don’t include it, and there’s not the chance to go back and do that again. The other piece of data, that I feel I just can’t quite get my hands around, is really where we are in terms of the sort of learning from data, where do we have really interesting and fascinating research projects either done by Park Service or by science from the outside that we can build into some of these climate stories. I get asked for those stories a lot and I want to write, I’m like– I want to talk about them! But each story is trying to figure out where do we have that information, where do we know really useful and interesting stuff and where don’t we, and how do we build those kinds of data bases so that we are links to that information so that we can actually tell these stories, easily.
Dave: Thanks.
Marcy: Yeah!
Dave: Anyone else on the line want to chime in with a question for Marcy? Well, I’ve got one more for you but I know that it may be a little too big for the two minutes that we have left but
Marcy: Try me!
Dave: I’m thinking about the communication piece of what you said, and I’m wondering if you can identify some roles for individual NPS managers or archeologists as you’re moving forward with your work and here’s where the question maybe gets too big, what about citizens and, you know, opportunities for those folks and for us to engage with the public on this stuff.
Marcy: Let’s see. One thought immediately comes to mind and this is – I didn’t put this on the Learning From part. There is currently in development a National Climate Change interpretation plan and its significance is that there are usually not national interpretation plans, they’re usually done at the park level, so this a first attempt to do something very broad and getting - Every Place Has a Climate Story will be part of that. But one of the things I’ve try to just to ask the questions of it will be nice to have a national strategy – but still it just comes down to individual parks finding their own climate stories, and getting that information together and available and making it a priority to talk about it. What I like doing is that often that just comes down to making those individual contacts and saying “I have an idea!” or “I have some information!” or “I just want to help share that story” so that would be, I mean to say - don’t wait for the national plan to come out though that provides some support for that but try to make communicating information that we know to individual parks that might be interested a priority. Don’t be shy about doing that. Ah. Let’s see. I had another idea and it just went out of my head. I thanks where I’m going to stop for the moment.
Dave: Perfect! Thanks, everyone for listening in, and don’t forget about next week’s webinar. Goodbye!
Marcy: Yeah! Thank you all so much!
Description
Marcy Rockman, 1/15/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
56 minutes, 32 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
01/15/2014
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