For 14 years, Professor John Harte has been baking a Rocky Mountain meadow to demonstrate the effects of global warming. The results aren’t pretty.

MotherJones.com

Colorado State Highway 135, along the Gunnison River, threads a landscape that could be anywhere from Arizona to Idaho, Nevada to the foot of the Rockies. Valley after valley floats a handful of cottonwood and aspen trees in a dry ocean of sagebrush, the pale gray green running out the flats and over the hills. Lizards and rattlesnakes, hard sandy soil and the smell of the American West—it’s the kind of wide-open emptiness in which you’d never want to find yourself on foot with a long way to go. But I was driving, en route to a meadow in the Elk Mountains, the site of an unusual global warming experiment. So the sagebrush yielded soon enough to the sweet high-country fragrance of the evergreens, and then the snow-speckled peaks appeared, and with them that ineffable feeling of being above and away from it all.

I suppose everybody favors a particular landscape, whether it’s the Northeastern forest or the Louisiana bayou—a function of familiarity, temperament, memory. For me, after 25 years of backpacking and climbing in the Sierra Nevada, it’s the meadows of the high ranges, the patches of grass and flowers in the austere cobalt of an alpine sky. I do still want a “peak experience” from time to time, but when I sit at my desk and think of the mountains, I think mostly of the crimson columbine and the Indian paintbrush, of drying off from a frigid swim and sleeping in the sunshine among the mariposa lilies. The mountain meadow, in my view, is rivaled only by the tropical beach as a vision of our proper home in the natural world, an earth seemingly made for our delight. Subalpine meadows in particular, meaning those below tree line, are also among the very jewels of our national parks, from the Cascades to the Rockies, and if you’ve ever yearned to visit Yosemite, you’ve yearned in large part for their solace. The snowcapped peak behind a lake or a creek, the blossoms in the foreground—mountain meadows are the bread and butter of our great outdoor image makers, be it Albert Bierstadt’s romanticism, the cool modernism of Ansel Adams, or the color-saturated photography of Galen Rowell. They are also at the heart of what American conservationists have fought to preserve for more than a century.

Highway 135 terminates at Crested Butte, a Victorian ski village doing a respectable summer business around its official status as the Wildflower Capital of Colorado. A cheerful, positive-attitude kind of place, Crested Butte teems with fresh-faced twentysomethings carrying climbing ropes into fudge shops, and the drama of steep stone and sweeping green is so omnipresent, so central to the town’s survival, that travel agents, art galleries, and even a widely publicized wildflower festival all traffic in the sheer glory of the local color. (A popular book on the area is called Wild About Wildflowers: Extreme Botanizing in Crested Butte.)

To see that color up close—and to face the lousy likelihood that it will disappear, not just from here but from the mountains back home, and all in my lifetime—I came to Crested Butte early last fall. I took County Road 317 out of town, up to the nearby ski area. Bulldozers were scalping the earth for condos, and the chairlifts had that embarrassed off-season look, their metal monstrousness and clearcut ski runs unredeemed by the clean white of winter snow. Then 317 turned to dirt and a tributary of the Gunnison fell steep and deep to my right, a tight creek booming through a precipitous canyon. A hand-carved wooden sign nailed to a post soon told me I was entering “Gothic, Colorado,” and I found myself in what could easily have been the set for a Hollywood Western. Gothic was a silver-mining town before it went bust in the 1880s, and its weather-beaten shacks and old general store sat empty until 1928, when Gothic became the permanent home of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL, or “Rumble,” as it is known to locals).

I parked by the creek in the bottom of the valley, Gothic Mountain broken and grand in the western sky. Hiking a slope to the east, I rose above one of the world’s great mountain scenes, trout leaping in the lazy creek and a breeze ruffling the spruce trees. Cresting a small rise, I finally arrived at my destination: a curving, hundred-yard sweep of grasses and blossoms marked at all four corners by 10-foot steel towers connected by heavy steel cables. More cables hung crosswise, suspending the big array of infrared heat lamps strung up by U.C. Berkeley professor John Harte in 1990. Harte has kept the lamps on for 14 years now, baking this living swath of meadow to create real warming, in real time, in a real ecosystem. No fussing around with historical temperature records, no computer modeling of hypotheses, and thus no vulnerability to the claim that it’s all conjecture; Harte has simply warmed a piece of the world and watched it change. So festooned is the meadow with data-collection boxes, and so riddled with multicolored wires plunging into its flesh—sinking temperature and moisture monitors to three different depths—that the whole thing looks less like a meadow than like a patient nailed to an operating table.

The verdict? Sagebrush is already crowding out everything that makes a meadow a meadow in the first place—the colors and textures and birds and bees. And similar experiments, not just in the Rockies and my own beloved Sierra, but also in the Alps and on the Himalayan plateau, suggest that all such dreamscapes, by century’s end, will be as stark as the semiarid drive up from Gunnison.

Daniel Duane is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast and the forthcoming novel A Mouth Like Yours. He is working on a book about walking the 211-mile John Muir Trail through the Sierra Nevada.