Going green at our parks
Thousands of cars, pickup trucks and minivans carry visitors to Paradise, Rialto Beach and the Cascade Pass trailhead in national parks in Western Washington. They leave behind tons of plastic water bottles, granola bar wrappers and banana peels.
It’s a two-hour 60-mile drive for Mount Rainier National Park staff to get from the operations center in Longmire to Sunrise.
Heating the Hurricane Ridge visitor center at Olympic National Park costs almost $12,000 a year for diesel fuel.
All the driving, waste and utility consumption – not to mention the energy to power employee computers, to buy fuel for snowplows and to haul away food scraps – spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As a result, the state’s three national parks have an estimated combined carbon footprint of 30,820 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from 2,667 households, or a town about the size of Steilacoom.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are striving to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Climate Friendly Parks program.
“Our national parks can be used to demonstrate the impacts of climate change,” said Shawn Norton, who heads the climate program for the Park Service.
Raising the ante, the Western region office wants park operations to be carbon neutral by 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Park Service’s creation.
A carbon footprint estimates the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases emitted. The footprints for Mount Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic national parks are produced by the more than 5 million people who visit and the functions needed to operate the more than 1.85 million acres at the parks.
To identify what contributes to each park’s footprint and how to reduce emissions, staffers at the three parks met in two-day workshops in February and earlier this month. The ideas are in their embryonic stage and no cost has been calculated for them.
“It’s a pretty ambitious goal to become carbon neutral for park operations by 2016,” said acting Mount Rainier superintendent Randy King. “We have to start working on that now to reach that goal.”
Officials recognize that even if they succeed in making park operations carbon neutral, the parks still will feel the effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gases emitted beyond park boundaries.
The hope, they said, is that park efforts will inspire visitors to do their parts at home and at work to reduce emissions across the region.
IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Park officials want to reduce carbon emissions because a growing number of scientists believe greenhouse gases are responsible for changes in the Northwest climate. The result has been more frequent and stronger storms lashing the Northwest and warmer weather, resulting in more winter rain and less snow at higher elevations.
Mount Rainier is still recovering from the historic flood in November 2006, which dumped 17.9 inches of rain in 36 hours and caused $36 million of damage.
“One-hundred-year floods are now happening every 14 years,” said Paul Kennard, a park scientist.
April snowpack measurements in the Cascades and the north Sierra have declined from 1950 to 1997, said Alan Hamlet of the climate impact group at the University of Washington Department of Civil and Environment Engineering.
“By 2020, they are predicting a 27 to 29 percent loss of snowpack compared to 1980 levels,” Hamlet said.
This means snow-reliant river basins, such as the Quinault, the Skagit and the Yakima, will see an increase in winter flows, peak flows earlier in the year and lower summer flows – all of which could reduce fish populations in those rivers.
‘OUR RESOURCES ARE FINITE’
The effect of climate change on the parks is easy to see following each flood and by measuring receding glaciers. It’s more difficult to gauge the impact on endangered species such as marbled murrelets, or the bloom of wildflowers such as Cascade aster in subalpine meadows.
“We should care because our resources are finite,” said Karen Gustin, superintendent at Olympic National Park. “Being good stewards of our communities, whether a national park or a backyard, we have to be conscious of how we can protect those resources.”
Chip Jenkins is the superintendent of the North Cascades National Park Complex that includes the Ross Lake and Lake Chalen National Recreation areas.
“National parks are the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “We are places where there are leading indicators of what is going on in the United States. So if you are seeing changes in these parks, and we are, they are indicators of what you will see elsewhere in the country.”
King said climate change is affecting the ability of park staffs to meet the parks’ mandate to provide for visitors’ use while protecting park resources.
“It’s hard for visitors to access and enjoy Mount Rainier National Park when the roads and trails are washed out,” King said. “A change of a few degrees in average temperature would certainly impair the park’s plant and animal communities, glaciers and watersheds. Some species of plants and animals could be imperiled.”
Park leaders said the Climate Friendly Park program will better focus efforts already under way to reduce emissions, and has required a change in thinking.
“When we started this program in 2002, the words ‘climate change’ weren’t even to be spoken in the federal sector,” said the Park Service’s Norton. “Up to five years ago, only two park general management plans had the words ‘climate change’ in them. Now it is a required chapter.”
SIMPLE IDEAS TO START
The ideas generated during the workshop will be the foundation of an action plan to be developed for each park. But steps to cut emissions have already been taken.
At Olympic, lights and a hand dryer in a Rialto Beach restroom are powered by a small wind-driven generator and solar panels.
“Solar might not be unique to the rest of the world, but it’s something new for us at the park,” said Nancy Hendricks, the park’s environmental protection specialist.
A North Cascades heavy-equipment operator suggested the park could reduce the use of fuel-guzzling heavy-duty pickup trucks by using a trailer to haul tools. Smaller, more fuel-efficient trucks can pull the trailer or it can be left behind when not needed.
The worker, Reilly O’Brien, “already figured it out. He didn’t have to be told to do it,” Jenkins said.
At Mount Rainier, an efficiency expert is consulting on the remodeling of a Longmire office used by the interpretive staff, said Jim Fuller, the park’s utilities manager. Materials will be reused for construction, triple-pane windows will be installed and restrooms will have dual-flush toilets.
“We’re trying to make it a zero-energy building. We’re not going to make it, but we’ll get it as close as we can,” Fuller said.
That philosophy – to do the most that can be done with existing resources – is the approach Gustin is taking in Olympic.
“We just have to set some reasonable goals,” she said. “We have to remember what changes we’ll make will be positive and get us toward our goal.”
The long-term ramifications are what drive King to find solutions now at Mount Rainier.
“The scientists tell us that climate change is under way, we can’t stop it at this point. But they also tell us that we can still make choices about how we live – in our homes and communities –- that will affect the scope, severity and impacts of the change,” he said. “Ultimately, we have to ask, what kind of world do we want our children to inherit?”
Jeffrey P. Mayor: 253-597-8640
blogs.thenewstribune.com/adventure
WHAT THE PARKS ARE DOING
These are some of the areas where staff at Washington’s three national parks want to focus early efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:
Mount Rainier National Park
1. Transportation
Getting around the park is a challenge for park employees and visitors. Transportation accounts for 72.6 percent of the park’s total carbon footprint, and 23.8 percent of its operational footprint.
Park employees often drive long distances to get to work and to reach work sites within the park.
“We are fairly dispersed so there is a lot of driving from place to place,” said acting superintendent Randy King.
The park has taken steps to reduce its transportation emissions. It owns 10 hybrid vehicles, two van pools shuttle employees from their homes in Eatonville and a no-idling regulation is in place.
Park staffers also want to persuade more visitors to use the shuttle bus system to Paradise, the most visited locale in the park. This year the route was extended to the community of Ashford. There were 10,143 visitors who rode shuttles in 2008, down from the more than 18,250 riders in 2007.
One reason for the decline is that the park stopped a shuttle run along Paradise Valley Road in 2008, because more people were using it for sightseeing and not to get from cars parked along the road to Paradise.
Park leaders want to run an ongoing shuttle system, but have to resolve where to park visitor vehicles and how to pay for the system.
“We’re looking at a voluntary system, not mandatory, to entice people out of their vehicles and into shuttles,” said Bryan Bowden, the park’s community planner. The goal, instead, is to reduce the number of private vehicles on park roads by 15 percent, he said.
“It’s unlikely we would ever prohibit private vehicles from the park because we have multiple entry points,” Bowden said.
That, he said, is a contrast to a place like Zion National Park in southwest Utah that has just one road to Zion Canyon, the most visited part of the park.
Since 2000, the park has run a mandatory shuttle along Zion Canyon Scenic Drive from early April to October. It’s kept an estimated 50,000 vehicles out of the area each year, said Ron Terry, the park’s chief of interpretation and visitor services.
Switching to the propane-powered bus system has reduced CO2 emissions by 24,201 pounds per day.
2. Building energy needs
Energy to heat and light buildings accounts for 55 percent of the park operations’ carbon footprint.
“In some ways it doesn’t surprise me, with the infrastructure we have and its age,” King said. “We have to expend a lot of energy to maintain these buildings and roads.“
The Sunrise Lodge is the park’s new poster child for energy inefficiency. The aging building has single-pane windows, no insulation in the walls and lots of “natural ventilation,” better known as holes and gaps.
Insulating the walls and the ceiling would cut heat loss by 72 percent, said Teodora Rutar Shuman, a Seattle University professor, which could save 2,900 gallons of diesel fuel a season.
3. Personal responsibility
This applies to park employees and visitors, said Jim Fuller, the park’s utilities manager. During a park climate workshop, his group looked at ways to improve energy efficiency.
“From our group’s point of view, individual participation is important,” Fuller said. “It might not make a huge dent, but it’s an important step.”
He cited the concept of vampire energy, which is energy wasted by electronics in standby mode or chargers that are plugged in but not being used. Studies estimate standby power accounts for 5 to 6 percent of electricity usage in the United States.
“People have to understand, OK, it’s not a big deal to leave your computer on,” Fuller said. “But if the guy next to you doesn’t (turn it off), and the guy in the office next door doesn’t, and everyone in Tacoma doesn’t, it all adds up.”
North Cascade National Park
1. Transportation
Getting from park headquarters in Sedro-Woolley requires a 50-mile drive for park superintendent Chip Jenkins. The legislation that created the park dictated Sedro-Woolley as park headquarters to provide jobs.
The park’s operations center facility is in Marblemount, also outside the park. These two locales explain why transportation accounts for 50 percent of the carbon footprint from park operations.
“We have so many people driving back and forth just to get to the park,” said Jenkins, who drives a hybrid Honda Civic for park duties.
“We knew that transportation was a substantial amount of our emissions, but I didn’t think it was as big as it is,” he said.
Park staff is working with the Defense Logistics Agency to analyze the park’s fleet and make recommendations to increase efficiency.
2. Education
Jenkins said the park can be an example to visitors on how to reduce their carbon footprint at home. He cited the use of biodiesel fuel for vehicles at Stehekin in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area.
Additionally, if the park can run a successful recycling program at the remote Colonial Creek campground, Jenkins hopes that would encourage people to recycle at home, where they have curbside service.
The park, working with the North Cascades Institute, will host high school students from across the country to teach them about the ecology of the North Cascades and climate change. The idea, Jenkins said, is that the students will put what they learned from park scientists and other experts to work in their schools.
3. Ecosystem changes
The park has seen the volume of its 300 glaciers decline by 7 percent from 1958 to 1998, according to a 2006 study by Andrew Fountain and Frank Granshaw.
Jenkins said monitoring changes will be incorporated into a general management plan being written for the Ross Lake National Recreation Area.
Park staff also will inventory and monitor mountain lakes, bird populations and changes in vegetation. The changes in alpine lake is of particular interest.
“One of our scientists said our mountain lakes are giant petrie dishes in the sky because so much stuff falls from the sky,” Jenkins said.
Olympic National Park
1. Transportation
Emissions from visitor transportation account for 61.4 percent of the park’s total carbon footprint. As a result, park staff is discussing alternative transportation, said superintendent Karen Gustin.
“When you look at Olympic, you see all these access roads going into the park. You have all these people in individual cars driving into the park,” she said.
Nancy Hendricks, park environmental protection specialist, said that determining the feasibility of alternative transportation is part of the park’s new general management plan.
“If we could get people to take alternative transportation up to Hurricane Ridge that would be great,” she said.
Gustin said the park might look at partnering with Clallam County’s bus system.
2. Recycling
Park staff estimates handling waste accounts for 5.7 percent of the park’s carbon footprint. But hauling waste is a significant challenge at a park as far-flung as Olympic, where park staffers have a three-hour drive from headquarters in Port Angeles to the Quinault River area.
“We want to be more organized in how we approach it,” Gustin said. “We want to be sure we capture as many of the recyclables as we can.”
3. Ecosystem changes
If climate change continues, frequent flooding and habitat changes could alter the landscape and threaten park infrastructure.
“The habitat can change, the wilderness can change. Some of the subalpine vegetation can change on the slopes, even some of the wilderness areas could change,” Hendricks said. “It’s just hard to get a handle on what might happen.”
Significant road repairs were necessary following major floods in 2006 and 2008. A comparison of aerial photos taken during the last 50 years shows trees encroaching into the subalpine meadow.
“We were just brainstorming how changes might occur. But a huge part of it was getting the staff to think about what might happen,” Hendricks said.
ONLINE VIDEO
A new video on climate change in national parks is available on the Web.
“Cascading Effects: Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest” is a two-part look at changes in the North Cascades Mount Rainier and Olympic national parks, said Chip Jenkins, North Cascades superintendent.
Researchers talk about the emerging indications that climate change is occurring now and their attempts to predict how warming temperatures will affect natural resources.
You can see the video at:
www.lifeonterra.com. Go to the Archive menu and scroll down.
