Nature’s sad new fifth season in the Northeast
With morning temperatures in the 60s, Andrew Perez of Port Washington wears shorts and a T-shirt while reeling his catch at North Hempstead Beach Park in Port Washington on Thursday, Dec. 24, 2015. Credit: With morning temperatures in the 60s, Andrew Perez of Port Washington wears shorts and a T-shirt while reeling his catch at North Hempstead Beach Park in Port Washington on Thursday, Dec. 24, 2015.
It used to be that in the Northeast, summer slid quietly and peacefully into fall, then winter. By Christmastime, it usually felt cold enough to properly celebrate the multilayered holidays built on the winter solstice.
But now, a new season of uncertainty and disquietude has inserted itself. It is literally a season of naught, for it begins after all the trees and flowering plants have long ago given up their fruit, the migratory birds and butterflies have fled, and the landscape turned leafless and brown. Yet it reaches 60 degrees or more with regularity.
Of all the already-visible consequences of the onrushing climate changes now being denied with such fervor, the emergence of a fifth season among our cherished four is perhaps the most insidious. It has none of the drama of storms and floods, and seems not to hold the withering power of drought. Yet the new season of dearth is also a harbinger of ruin.
Many of the wandering animals who find nothing to eat will starve in their dens when winter finally comes, having lost a critical part of their fat reserves. The premature growth, the re-emerging insects, even the frogs and salamanders that do not burrow into the pond bottoms — an entire cross-section of what makes a natural community — may die without reproducing when the forestalled frozen period arrives. Their biological clocks are still set for the triggers of the four original seasons. As this asynchronicity happens year after year, whole populations will be lost, then species, finally ecosystems.
At some point, new species will arrive from the South, one by one, and recolonize the emptied lands. But first, the old and familiar ecological order will pass, and with it, much that we hold dear, including our deepest notions of place.
John F. Cryan
Gramercy Park
Editor’s note:The writer is a former state environmental analyst and a co-founder of the Pine Barrens Society.
