Yellowstone.
It's a lot different than it is on television,
I can tell you that.
For two years I've been a ranch hand,
working the land on the Paramount Network
series Yellowstone, a role I was born to play.
See, as a kid I discovered my love
for this giant wild punchbowl
where the sky just goes on forever.
But today, something is amiss.
Yellowstone has seen changes that have hunters and ranchers,
scientists and park visitors alike,
concerned, not just for the future of the park,
but for the planet itself.
I want to know why this particular place
is so important.
Why this environment, this ecosystem can answer
the bigger questions that we have.
So this trip is different from the ones I took as a child.
This trip isn't about discovering nature's beauty,
but about finding out what I can do to preserve it.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
My name is Erik Oberg.
I am the founder of the phenology project
here in Yellowstone.
Phenology is the study of nature's calendar, right?
So we are-
Like me, Erik Oberg came to Yellowstone
as a kid and fell in love.
Okay, let's take a look.
Today he's a biologist and a Yellowstone park ranger
who leads a team of volunteer citizen scientists
that study how the parks, plants, flowers, and insects
are adapting to a changing environment.
This is one of the world's most pristine natural laboratories.
It's really one of the places that gets us as close
as we can be to the most natural conditions
that that we find on earth.
I would imagine that studying cycles and patterns
are going to highlight changes
that the ecosystem's going through.
Nature is always changing, but here in Yellowstone
we have some really clear evidence
that that pace of change is happening faster.
Spring is now coming about a month
sooner than it did 30 years ago.
30 years ago.
Yeah, a month change in about 30 years of time.
Someone who understands the challenges
facing Yellowstone better than most is Dr. Mike Tercek,
a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology.
He's one of 875 permanent residents of Gardiner, Montana,
the gateway to the park.
Here he's spent the last 20 years exploring
and studying his town's next door neighbor.
Can you tell me why it's so important
that we use this ecosystem here at Yellowstone?
This was a national park
before there was a National Park Service.
1872, it was the place where preserving nature was born,
you could argue.
If we can't protect this and do the things to maintain it,
what does that mean for the rest of the world,
the life support system that keeps us alive?
To better understand the scale of the threat
that a warmer and drier climate means for Yellowstone,
we decided to get out of the weeds and into the clouds.
All of these downed trees, that's fire damage.
Yeah. When you're high up like this,
you can really see the scale of the problem.
You know, forests like Whitebark Pine
that took 20 human generations to grow
that are going to be wiped out in one generation
and they won't have time to recover.
You have the northeast entrance in Yellowstone?
Since the 1960s,
we have one month less of snow cover than we used to.
What would you say to people who would argue
that the differences that we're seeing are an anomaly,
that if you zoom out far enough, it's going to be just a blip
and it's not as bad as you think and it's going to be
part of the normal course corrections of the planet?
The biggest difference is the rate of the change
that we're talking about,
and it's very well correlated to industrial activity.
If you run the climate projections out into the future,
under a business-as-usual scenario,
you'll have years that are as dry as 1988,
which was considered a 300-year event,
by 2050 or so that'll happen every three to five years.
Which means that it will become a charred moonscape-
So you would just lose all the majesty of our forest.
Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people will say,
"Well, it'll still be wild and it'll still be different,"
but I have to disagree. We're in the early stages
of what I consider to be a catastrophe,
and you can't hide how you feel about this anymore.
This for me has to work out a certain way.
We need to stop the problem before it gets to that point.
One person doing his part
to stop the problem is Charley Able,
a local engineer and lifelong outdoorsman.
Charley's joining me in the park today
to help collect data on bison.
What's that?
Oh, I heard a tone.
That's right.
So there's a collared animal. Right there.
And we just sort of metal detect your way to a-
You metal detect your way in.
Our turn as citizen scientists is led by Park Ranger
and wildlife biologist Chris Geremiah.
Geremiah runs a team of volunteers
who monitor the impact shorter growing seasons
have on Yellowstone's largest mammals.
What these bison do is they re-graze the same area
over and over and over again.
It's kind of like cutting your lawn with a lawnmower,
and as a result, the grass has never matured.
They're soft, they're nutritious,
they're the same things you'd find on a watered lawn.
And then we're trying to figure out,
well, how does that affect all the other animals in the park?
The answer to that question lies somewhere in the grass
clippings, soil samples, and bison poop,
or scat as the scientists like to call it.
So once you put these on, don't wipe your nose.
Okay.
So here's one.
That one's pretty fresh in there.
Okay.
Can we flag it? All right. This is a team effort.
[inaudible 00:06:20].
I'm just going to kind of-
Yep. Just nice and gently.
I was upset when I got the spoon to begin with, but now-
You're happier about it.
I'm happy that I got the spoon and you got the bags.
I think the biggest take-home from bison
is to realize that these animals are incredibly resilient.
They don't just move to find food,
but how they move makes food, and they're very smart.
And they're just going to adapt to these changes.
Or try to.
Try to because the hard thing is what happens if they can't?
All these systems have timescales that
they naturally can adapt on.
If you try to go faster than that,
you're kind of out running what they're capable of.
We know that the temperatures and the precipitation patterns
have changed fairly drastically in northern Yellowstone
over the last hundred years. So that's probably happening,
maybe more rapid relative to how animals are learning.
That does mean the animal populations in Yellowstone 20,
50 years from now may look entirely different
than they do today.
The way that I understand the whole system working,
all of the parts work together,
and I didn't realize how land did that in this way.
The soil and the ground and what lives on it shape one another,
and it's a continuing dance cycle of life.
You know, I've never felt so motivated
to be a better dance partner, I guess.
My fellow bison scat collector, Charley Able,
has been dancing with climate change for decades,
first as an MIT-trained engineer who started a mining
and drilling company with this data
and as a lifelong hunter and fisherman.
Now he's a dedicated volunteer
for the national nonpartisan organization,
Citizens' Climate Education, and will talk to anybody
who will listen about climate change solutions.
Most people have opinions about this.
Like it's kind of a polarized thing,
but if you start drilling down into exactly what people know,
you can help draw them into a conversation.
A lot of people that might disagree that this phenomenon,
climate change, is even real or existing,
are the most adversely affected by and they're outdoors people.
Will it take them to lose things
and see it before they want to make an effort?
It might. That's the unfortunate truth.
The streams might have to get warm enough
that trout have trouble surviving.
We might have to lose some big game.
Stuff like that might have to happen for people to realize,
"Hey, this is affecting me.".
So there's gotta be a way to plug in the people
that don't know what they don't know.
If it's not economical, I want to put something in their heart
and shock them so they wake up.
So then, I think everybody wants to do that.
But the reality is you can't push or shock people.
That's why I take the approach that I do
because I think honestly it's the only one
that can be successful.
[singing 00:09:26]
There's a piece of Yellowstone
that's 22 miles from the nearest road.
The most remote patch of land in all the lower 48 states.
But no matter how far it is from asphalt or industry,
it's still ground zero for rapid climate change.
So why am I leaving here more hopeful than ever?
Because I'm leaving with the knowledge
that citizens like you and me
are fighting for this wild, magical place.
The real trick is to kind of call the legislators
like they'll actually listen.
And so that's why I'm going around talking to people.
Just because it's not happening today
and just because it doesn't look like
it's going to happen tomorrow,
you just keep grinding away, and we'll get there.
I was really inspired by what President Johnson said in 1964
when he signed the Wilderness Act,
which is pretty connected to a place like Yellowstone.
He said that if future generations
are going to remember us with gratitude
rather than contempt, we must leave them
more than the miracles of modern technology.
We must leave them a glimpse of the world
as it was when it was new,
not just after we got through with it.
It's not a science problem. It's a human problem.
You have to reach people in a way that they care about.
Get them to care about particular places
like Yellowstone.
After my trip to Yellowstone,
I care about this place more than ever,
and I'm going to talk to as many people
as I can about not only what's happening here,
but what that means for our planet.
Do you want to take action? Citizens' Climate Education
gives ordinary citizens the power
to educate political leaders, the media,
and the general public about climate change solutions.
Find your local chapter and get started today.