Cranberry harvest in New Jersey (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)
One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:
In the late 1990s, the market for cranberries started drying up. Americans didn’t
seem to crave the pucker of our native berry. Some years growers were getting as
little as 8 dollars a barrel and they didn’t know if they could stay in business much
longer.
Today, they’re getting as much as 150 dollars per barrel.
Dawn Gates-Allen is fourth generation cranberry grower on Cape Cod.
“It’s been ten years of suppressed grower return for the price per barrel.”
Prices are rebounding because cranberries have gained popularity as a healthful
fruit overseas. Europe and Japan have started importing a third of America’s
cranberry crop.
But even with that new demand, you shouldn’t see a big jump in prices at the
supermarket this year: the weather has been great for cranberries and there’s a
bumper crop.
Greg Seymour, with the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources, walking through Cranberry Bog (Photo by Christina Morgan)
Cranberry Bog is actually floating on top of a lake (Photo by Christina Morgan)
Cranberry Bog is made up of sphagnum moss (Photo by Christina Morgan)
It’s normal to want to protect special
places in nature. But in some cases, these
places are disappearing simply because of nature.
Christina Morgan reports on an ancient spot that
might disappear in our lifetime. The people who
love it want to save it, but they might have to
let it go:
Transcript
It’s normal to want to protect special
places in nature. But in some cases, these
places are disappearing simply because of nature.
Christina Morgan reports on an ancient spot that
might disappear in our lifetime. The people who
love it want to save it, but they might have to
let it go:
For four generations, J-me Braig’s family has visited a rare
site, a bog left behind by glaciers thousands of years ago.
“As a child, I used to go out there and play on it, with my
grandmother, and we would pick cranberries; my brother and I would play on it. ”
Braig says her grandmother used to take a boat out to the bog
in a lake in Ohio. Her grandmother made pies and wine with
the cranberries.
Braig is a lake historian who’s worried about the bog. That’s
because it’s shrinking.
But before we talk about why it’s shrinking, though, it’s important
to know what makes this tiny area special.
Webster’s dictionary defines a bog as soft, waterlogged
ground. This bog, Cranberry Bog, is soft and waterlogged.
But it’s not ground. There’s no dirt. The bog is a 10 acre
patch of sphagnum moss.
Most bogs surround a glacial lake. Instead, Cranberry Bog is
surrounded by a lake, and floating. Here’s what happened.
Nearly 200 years ago, crews digging in an ancient river bed
created a reservoir to feed the Ohio and Erie canal. The
reservoir filled, the mossy bog floated to the surface. How or
why it stayed, no one knows.
“An absolute oddity. It shouldn’t be here.”
Greg Seymour is with the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources. He says the ancient bog is home to likely the only collection
of plants of its kind in the world.
More than 150 plants, a
handful native to Canada. Nudged southward by the glacier,
the plants are tricked by the cool bog mat into thinking they
never left home.
The bog is shrinking for several reasons. Waves from passing
boats loosen the bog mat. Storms topple trees
which rip out chunks of the mat. But Seymour says the biggest
threat is the bog’s chemistry, which makes the site its own
worst enemy.
“The number one factor is going to be the chemical reaction
between the alkaline lake waters and the acidic bog.”
The pH balance is off – way off. Cranberry Bog is doomed to disappear, probably within 30
years.
But area historian J-Me Braig remains upbeat, saying ever
since she can remember, someone has had a scheme to save
Cranberry Bog.
And sure enough, there is a new group determined to preserve the
ancient bog.
George O’Donnell leads Friends of Cranberry Bog. He and
others think one way to generate interest in the site, is to inventory of all that the bog has to offer.
Such an inventory is being done by the bog’s neighbor 8 miles
to the north, Dawes Arboretum.
Tim Mason is the manager of natural resources there. He says even
if the inventory and other efforts to preserve the bog fail, they
have a plan B. Dawes created a restoration area where pieces
of Cranberry Bog that break off are placed.
“We can just hold on to what’s there. It takes thousands of
years for the peat moss material to grow; so to create that is something we would certainly not see in
our life times.”
Saving the bog – or just preserving its pieces – are a long shot.
Yet the efforts persist. Historian J-Me Braig is one of many people
who hope for success. But even Braig admits, after more than
10,000 years, Cranberry Bog has had a pretty good run.
John Pastor is trying to figure out how climate change will affect bogs and fens like this one. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
A bog north of Duluth, Minnesota. From this view it looks like a typical woodland, but the vegetative mat on the floor of the bog actually floats on top of water. A person can walk on the bog, with some risk of falling through into the water below. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
Peat is key to holding carbon away from the atmosphere. Peat decomposes very slowly in the cold climate and cold water and stores more and more carbon. Should the water go away, and temperatures increase, peat could decompose much more quickly, releasing that stored carbon, and accelerating the pace of global change. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
In northern Minnesota, a researcher says wetlands like bogs could be key to how fast the climate changes worldwide. And the areas like the upper United States and Canada in the bull’s eye for rapidly changing temperatures and rainfall. The GLRC’s Bob Kelleher reports:
Transcript
In northern Minnesota, a researcher says wetlands like bogs could be key to how fast the
climate changes worldwide. And the areas like the upper United States and Canada in the
bull’s eye for rapidly changing temperatures and rainfall. The GLRC’s Bob Kelleher
has more:
What have wetlands, like fens and bogs, got to do with global warming? John Pastor says,
plenty.
Pastor is a professor and researcher with the Natural Resources Research Institute of the
University of Minnesota-Duluth. When Pastor straps on his hip waders, he goes where
almost no one else dares to go: into northern Minnesota’s fens, where water can be
several feet deep, and onto the bogs, where the mass of plant material is so thick it floats
on standing water.
A seven year-long study has revealed that fens and bogs can either help slow global
warming, or accelerate it. Pastor says all cards are off the table if temperatures keep
rising:
“The one problem in science that has the most ramifications throughout all of science – it’s
global warming.”
We’re in a swamp north of Duluth, Minnesota. Actually, it’s a fen, and it borders some
higher landscape nearby that’s a bog. What fens and bogs have in common is water and
peat, the not quite decomposed stuff left over when plants die. Pastor says peat lands are
one of the world’s significant bank accounts for carbon. They keep carbon out of the
atmosphere.
“Peat lands cover only 3% of the earth’s surface, but they contain 30% of all the carbon
that’s in all the soil in the world, locked in that partially decomposed organic matter, that
peat.”
Minnesota has vast peat lands that have been storing carbon for 10,000 years, but even
the size of Minnesota’s peat lands pales compared to those further north – around
Canada’s Hudson Bay, or in the Russian republics – all regions Pastor says that are facing
higher temperatures.
“All of the global climate models, one thing they all agree on, is that the greatest amount
of warming will occur in areas from Minnesota northward, and then inland – mid-
continent areas. So here we are. We’re sitting right now, right in the bullseye of the
greatest amount of warming that will happen on the face of the earth.”
This is the question: Will higher temperatures help trap more carbon in bogs, or force
more carbon into the atmosphere?
In this bog, Pastor’s been trying to figure out how warmer weather will affect bogs and
fens, and, in turn, what role the wetlands will play in global change. One thing he’s
found: the results depend largely on the water table, and that’s going to depend on
rainfall.
In some combinations, say with additional heat and additional rainfall, bogs could thrive,
trapping more carbon. That would be good. In other conditions, say with more heat but
less rainfall, bogs and fens could die and decompose, releasing even more carbon into the
atmosphere. That, Pastor says, would be bad:
“Now we have kind of a double whammy. Not only are we putting carbon dioxide from
fossil fuel into the atmosphere, the warning from that could cause the carbon from the
peat land also to go into the atmosphere and accelerate the warming.”
Predicting an outcome becomes mind numbing. Pastor’s working with new mathematical
theory to try to determine at what point global warming has gone too far.
“And so what seems to be happening is the temperatures of the earth have crossed some
kind of a threshold, where all the sudden, before that they crossed that threshold, the old
earth that we grew up with was stable. Now, it’s becoming very unstable, and ice sheets
are collapsing, birds and plants are migrating – everything’s happening very, very
quickly. And we’re going to enter into a new kind of earth that has a different kind of
stability – a different stable endpoint.”
Pastor says there’s no more complicated problem in all of science than global warming,
and no more important problem. Global warming, he says, changes everything, from the
forests to the wetlands. Pastor’s hoping the new mathematical models will provide more
definitive answers in time to do something about the outcome.
President Clinton has said this summer’s record breaking heat is evidence of global warming, and he blasted congress for ignoring the problem. Most scientists are firmly convinced that global warming is already underway, but there is still some scientific uncertainty about what effects it might have. Around the world, scientists are looking for answers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports on one research project now underway:
Cranberry harvest in New Jersey (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)
