by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

Introduction (Part 2)

The Missouri River: Nature’s Landscape Painter

The river is the central fact [of one-sixth of the United States].  In its twisting and turning, ever easterly, from Three Forks to the Mississippi, the Missouri has succeeded in carving a crude but large question mark across the surface of one-sixth of the Nation.  The mark readily symbolizes the great array of problems which await satisfactory solution in the Basin.
-Missouri Basin Survey Commission, 1953.

Thousand years.  All this here water just a going to waste.
-Woody Guthrie

Rocks are nature’s books, minerals are its words.

Rivers are nature’s landscape painters, brushing rocks and minerals, books and words, on the landscape.  Rivers have a beginning; a young river cuts steeply through the book of rocks, creating cliffs.

Rivers mature; they erode cliffs back into gentle hills; they create wide floodplains and meander through them.  Life responds to this painted landscape.  In the soils, microbes and plants read the words and push through the pages, abstracting life-giving nutrients.  The river creates a landscape with flowing water, backwaters, side channels, stream-side zones, and uplands.  Each is a different habitat to which a different collection of creatures has adapted. In the United States, one of the greatest of the painters of landscapes is the Missouri River.

The Missouri River Is The Great Plains

Some people would think it was just a plain river running along in its bed at the same speed; but it ain’t.  The river runs crooked through the valley; and just the same way the channel runs crooked through the river . . . The crookedness you can see ain’t half the crookedness there is.
- A river man who raced boats on the river, said a century after Lewis and Clark had traveled up

The Missouri is one of the Earth’s twenty longest rivers, extending 2,315 miles, from its origin at the confluence of the Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison Rivers in Montana, to its mouth, where it meets the Mississippi, at St. Louis.  It flows eastward from its origin, through Montana into North Dakota, then makes a big bend southward into South Dakota down to Nebraska.  From there, it flows southeast and east for a way, forming part of the boundary between the two states, South Dakota and Nebraska, then turns south once again to form the boundary between Iowa and Nebraska, Nebraska and Missouri, and part of the northern border between Kansas and Missouri.  Finally the river turns generally east and southeast, flowing through the state of Missouri to its confluence with the Mississippi near St. Louis.

The Missouri is not just a river that happens to flow through the center of North America, it drains more than 500,000 square miles, or about one-sixth of the continental United States.   Along with the Arkansas to the south and the Saskatchewan River in Canada, the Missouri drains the Great Plains, an area that makes up one third of the United States, all the land between the Rio Grande in the south, the Mackenzie River’s delta at the Arctic Ocean in the North, from the Rocky Mountains on the west and the lowlands on the east – an area some 3,000 miles by 300 to 700 miles wide, part of which is in Canada.  The Missouri collects waters from the Bad River, the Blackwater, Cannonball and Cheyenne; the Gasconade, Grand, Heart, Judith, Kansas, and the Knife Rivers, the Little Missouri, Moreau, Musselshell,  Niobrara, Osage, Platte, Yellowstone, and White rivers, which flow into it from the south and west, meanwhile also picking up the waters from the northern plains that extend into Canada, from its other tributaries, the Big Sioux, the Chariton, the James, the Little Platte, the Marias, the Milk, the Vermillion, the Sun and the Bad Teton rivers,  rivers that enter from the north and east.

The Missouri drains waters that fall on mountains 14,000 feet high in the Rockies, and it ends it journey near St. Louis at an elevation of only 400 feet above sea level.   What goes into this huge area of the United States, the central part of the Great Plains, its main prairie states, comes out the Missouri.  Drop a bottle with a message in it in a stream in eastern Montana  or in southern Canada north of Nebraska  and, unless it rafts up on some sand bar or snag, it will float out at St. Louis.

The Missouri flows from a major mountain range through comparatively dry country that has been greatly altered by the glaciers.  The Great Plains give up their waters to the Missouri.  In turn, the great river, with the help of vegetation,  paints the surface into prairie.   The Missouri picks its pallet from the slopes, from the mountains and the wind-formed hills.  It carries these earth colors downstream and dabs the landscape with floodplains, terraces,  and bluffs.

On the surface of our planet, the Missouri River acts as an irresistible force against which there is no immovable object.  All earthly things that confront the Missouri, all that attempt to surround it, to sieze it and hold it back, give way.  If not now, then later.  The mountains fall before it as do the more meager works of mankind – levees, houses, and bridges.

The simplest way to understand the Missouri is to consider that it has four major geographic sections.  The first section is from its headwaters to near Great Falls, Montana.  The Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson headwaters are in the Rockies where rain and snowfall greatly exceed evaporation and these rivers accumulate water and sediments which the Missouri River carries onto the plains.  The second section is from Great Falls, Montana to where the Milk River joins the Missouri near the Montana — North Dakota Boundary.  Here the river flows through semiarid plains along a geological new pathway, formed when ice-age glaciers changed the Missouri from a river whose outlet was at Hudson Bay to one that flowed into the Mississippi.  The third is from the Milk River to Yankton, South Dakota where the river joins its ancient bed, the bed of the pre-glacial age Missouri.  Here evaporation exceeds rain and snowfall and the river deposits sediments.  In dry years, the river can lose water faster than it accumulates water from its tributaries.  The fourth is the last 825 miles from Yankton to St. Louis, where the river flows through a humid region of higher rainfall and low relief.  Each section has its own scenery, its own hydrology, and its own characteristic, dominant species.

The Painter and the Carpenter

Without the Rocky Mountains there would be no Missouri River.  The river is a necessary consequence of a mountain range adjacent to a large plain.  Mountain ranges are created when huge masses of the Earth’s crusts, plates, collide through a process called plate tectonics.  The word “tectonics” comes from the Greek meaning a carpenter or builder.  As the river is the painter, the continents are the carpenters, creating the mountain ranges on which rain and snow fall, from which water drains and erodes, creating channels that dig deeper and deeper into the rock, creating a river.

From the mountains, a river erodes away pieces of differences sizes: clays, silts, sands, gravels, pebbles, and, for short distances, rocks and boulders.  With these, it cuts through the rocks and, downstream, colors the landscape: with the help of ancient winds it colors the land the burnt-wheat brown of loess hills; with bacteria, algae, sedges, rushes, cattails, it paints wetlands a Swiss-chocolate brown; with prairie tallgrass and flowers, the best soils in the world become a gingerbread brown; and with the dry-land plants of sandbars and sandhills, the shores are tinted creamy, lemon-white.  The river is the master painter; its journeymen are living things.  To these it gives habitat, nutrients and water, a place to stand, a place to grow, a place to color with a much brighter, broader palette, if much more fleeting and occasional, from the brilliant white of migrating pelicans to the rich blues of prairie asters.

It is my hope that the essays that follow will help the reader come to know the natural history of the Missouri River both externally and internally, and that with this knowledge and appreciation we can move forward to a better use of our natural resources – for nature and for people.

by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  Here is the introduction to the book, which explains how to use it.  I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

Introduction (Part 1)

How to Use This Book

This is a different kind of travel book.  It is intended for two types of travelers, actual  and vicarious, to find out about Lewis and Clark, nature and ourselves.  It has two brief introductory chapters, 42 main entries about places to visit, and a list of more than 80 other travel destinations.  Each main entry tells some of the things that happened to Lewis and Clark and relates a unique story about nature, natural history and the environment.  As a set, all the entries paint a picture of the entire Missouri River and its landscape at the time of Lewis and Clark and as they have changed and are today.

There are hundreds of interesting locations to visit along the Missouri River and its surrounding countryside related to the Lewis and Clark expedition.  So that you can design your travel plans to visit the places whose topics interest you, the list of additional entries is cross-referenced to the main ones.  Each entry provides travel directions.

Travelers can use the book in several ways.  For those who have picked  destinations, they can refer directly to the main entries.  Each is about one aspect of the natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the changes that have occurred since the expedition.  Each includes relevant experiences from the Lewis and Clark journals: What they did and what happened to them at the location.  These are augmented by modern experiences of myself and others to suggest what you can discover and do there.

A second way to use the book is to select a general route and then refer to the main and short entries on that route to make a list of places to visit.  Take the book with you and read each main entry at its location.  A third way to use this book is to read it from beginning to end.  Taken together, the introductory chapters and major entries form a whole story of nature, Lewis and Clark, and us.

Lewis, Clark, Nature and Us

In preparation for the Lewis and Clark expedition, President Jefferson wrote to Meriwether Lewis that he should “record the mineral productions of every kind . . .  Volcanic appearances . . .  Climate, as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy, and clear days, by lightning, hail, snow, ice; by the access and recess of frost; by the winds prevailing at different seasons; the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower or leaf; times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects.”  Through their historic journey, Lewis and Clark faithfully followed President Jefferson’s instructions; recording the condition of rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, and wildlife, without romanticism, without ideology.

Lewis and Clark were careful and accurate observers, skills learned as outdoorsmen, as military men on horseback, and as young men full of curiosity.   To these abilities, President Jefferson added modern scientific training.  He sent Lewis to Philadelphia, then the center for learning about Nature Philosophy — the term of that day for all natural sciences together, not yet divided into the narrow disciplines they are today.  There, within the city of Benjamin Franklin, one of the young nation’s centers for rational thought,  Lewis took crash courses in botany, zoology and geology. This study reinforced and deepened the knowledge that he and Clark shared of wildlife and countryside.

It is common knowledge that the journey of Lewis and Clark was a fascinating epic, incredibly successful, full of adventures, near disasters, amazing coincidences,  replete with tales of courage and bravery.  But it was more than that.  It was a journey to discover the natural history of an unrecorded continent.  As a result, it can be modern society’s window on a nature we know little about but discuss often, believing that we do know it.   On their way west, Lewis and Clark measured the distance they traveled; paced off the feet between river meanders; shot the sun with a sextant; looked at, touched and tasted minerals; collected, described, and pressed new species of plants.  They ate, wore, and wrote about wildlife.  Their records tell us what nature was like before modern technology changed it; they have become a yardstick against which we can measure what we have done to the rivers and landscapes of midwestern and western North America.

Seeking to find the right route across the continent and to survive in the process, Lewis and Clark were not just keen observers, but also willing participants in an attempt to generalize successfully  from a series of observations.  It is a skill we are seldom taught and few of us learn: How to make reliable inferences from a selection of facts.  More typically, we cannot believe that an event that we see in detail once may not be true in general.  We fall into the unscientific trap of indefensible generalizations from too few observations.   Lewis and Clark traveled up the river, but when they could, they strode on shore and climbed hills, bluffs, and mountains to get a view, to see a broader perspective.  They measured and counted, they mapped and  studied.  In my experience, three decades of trying to piece together an understanding of the process we call nature, I have found a great irony of our times.  In this information age, we rarely obtain the information we most need about ourselves, our civilization, and our surroundings.  Over and over again I have discovered that Lewis and Clark, two centuries ago, put a yardstick or sextant to things that we no longer seek to pace or measure.

And so by experience, necessity and Jefferson’s plan, Lewis and Clark are our best external window on the reality of nature in the American West before it was altered by modern technological civilization.  Their journey epitomizes our struggle to understand our effects on nature and nature’s effect on us. Their journals provide clear and vivid insights into the past.

What is remarkable, and I believe unique, to the expedition of Lewis and Clark is that these two men took on the role of naturalist-recorders as seriously as they did their tasks of finding a route to help open up the West and making contact with and learning about Native Americans along the way.  Human beings have long altered nature, but our knowledge of this is obscured by failed memories, confusion between myths and realities, and a loss of written historical accounts.

The Missouri River and its landscape exist for us at two levels: internal and external.  The first level is that of external knowledge: knowledge of natural resources, environmental issues, the names of animals, plants and minerals; and understanding  rational inferences about how the landscape and its life came to be and how it might be in the future.  It is the level of detailed observation and records of natural history.  The second level is that of feelings: how the countryside affects us, and how we feel we fit into that countryside. Like Lewis and Clark, we begin with the first, external level; these experiences lead us to the second.

So I invite you to come with me on this journey with this guide in hand to see, touch, smell, and feel the countryside of Lewis and Clark and the landscape of today, and to find a path to a connection between oneself and nature.

Originally published in the International Herald Tribune, October 17, 2008.
Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2008.

John McCain has called for building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 and 100 eventually. Barack Obama’s Web site says, “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.”
But to what extent can nuclear power really help achieve energy independence?

There’s a problem about nuclear energy that gets little attention. At present, fossil fuels provide 87 percent of the world’s total energy while nuclear power plants provide just 4.8 percent. (All nuclear power plants currently generate electricity, accounting for about 15 percent of world electricity generation, while fossil fuels produce almost 67 percent of the electricity.)

The best estimates put the amount of uranium that can be mined economically (what geologists call the reserves) at about 5.5 million metric tons, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, today’s nuclear power plants use 70,000 metric tons a year of uranium. At this rate of use, the uranium that could be mined economically would last about 80 years.

Suppose it were possible to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power. Suppose that we could use nuclear energy to make liquid and gas fuels to power vehicles, and could do this quickly using conventional nuclear power plants.

We would have to build enough plants to increase energy production by 17.4 times, which means using 1.2 million tons of uranium ore each year. At that rate of use, the reserves of uranium would be used up in less than five years.

Geologists also estimate that there are about 35 million tons of uranium out there regardless of the cost of mining it (geologists call this identified resources). With nuclear power replacing all fossil fuels, even these would be used up in 29 years.

Thus, if the goal is to counter global warming by replacing all fossil fuels with nuclear power, this goal cannot be met.

Advocates of nuclear power point out that it doesn’t have to replace all other sources of energy. Let’s consider that approach.

At a recent meeting, the Group of Eight major industrial countries agreed to reduce carbon emissions 50 percent by 2050. Suppose nuclear energy increased just enough each year to enable fossil-fuel use to decline at a constant annual rate, to 50 percent by 2050, while nuclear power therefore increased to provide 50 percent of the world’s energy.

At this rate of use, uranium reserves would run out by 2019, and the estimated maximum of 35 million metric tons of uranium in identified resources would run out by year 2038, gaining us less than two decades.

There are some important caveats. Exploring for minerals is done on an as-needed basis, and large areas of the world may have been little explored for uranium. Every mining geologist and mine corporation executive will tell you that estimates of total reserves of a mineral are just that – estimates – and that the reserves of many minerals always increase over time.

This approach may be all right for the planning time of mining companies, but it won’t work for a long-term global energy strategy based on adequate supplies of uranium.

Considering the enormous costs of building the large number of nuclear power plants that are contemplated to replace fossil fuels, the United States would be courting disaster if it chose this route with nothing but blind faith that there may be a lot more uranium out there if we only look for it.

We need to know a lot more about available uranium resources and where they are. If they are in unfriendly countries, they might not be available at all.
Nuclear power advocates also argue that it is possible to recover significant amounts of uranium from spent fuel. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “In 2004, two-thirds of the uranium used was newly mined; the rest came from civil and military stockpiles, spent fuel reprocessing and re-enrichment of depleted uranium.”

But the amount from spent fuels is not specified, and a reprocessing program to deal with 1.2 million tons of used uranium would be a major undertaking, perhaps not technologically feasible in the near future.

Others suggest that breeder reactors, which produce more nuclear fuel than they use, will solve the problem.

The United States experimented with a few breeder reactors from 1964 to 1994, but they were shut down or work on them halted in the 1990s.
Other nations have tried building them, and some are considering or developing them. But to my knowledge perhaps only one or two breeder reactors are in use and providing electrical energy anywhere in the world, and these are probably not “breeding.”

There are reasons for this: The technology is not there yet, and the reactors are dangerous in themselves, even without considering their potential use in making atomic weapons. They are the kind of nuclear reactors that everybody fears Iran or North Korea might build and use to make atomic bombs.
In sum, the breeder-reactor route, if it is practical at all, is a long way in the future as a major contributor to the world’s energy, and certainly not a way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels now or in the near future.

The bottom line: From what is known about resources of uranium and the present and future state of nuclear power plants, there is no way that nuclear power can play a dominant role in the world’s energy supply.

This is not to say that it could play no role in a mixed strategy involving many kinds of energy, only that those who continue to press for a greater role for nuclear power must first show that there will be enough uranium to assure that thousands of nuclear power plants built at enormous cost would not soon stand idle – and leave our economy standing idle too.

by Daniel B. Botkin, Henrik Saxe, Miguel B. Araújo, Richard Betts, Richard H. W. Bradshaw, Tomas Cedhagen, Peter Chesson, Terry P. Dawson, Julie R. Etterson, Daniel P. Faith, Simon Ferrier, Antoine Guisan, Anja Skjoldborg Hansen, David W. Hilbert, Craig Loehle, Chris Margules, Mark New, Matthew J. Sobel, And David R. B. Stockwell. Published in BioScience 57(3): 227-236.

In 2004 a group of scientists, including myself, met and discussed what needed to be done to improve the ability to forecast the possible effects of global warming on biodiversity.  The result was a paper published in BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS).

In that paper, we proposed a “Quarternary Conundrum” — we found that the fossil record gave results about climate change and biodiversity that did not agree with modern forecasts.  Here is what we wrote about that idea.  (If you are interested in more from this paper, let me know and I will post more of it, or you can obtain it from AIBS.)

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Current forecasting methods suggest that global warming will cause many extinctions, but the fossil record indicates that, in most regions, surprisingly few species went extinct during the Quaternary (from approximately 2.5 million years BCE to the present)—in North America, for example, only one tree species is known to have gone extinct (Bush and Hooghiemstra 2005). Large extinctions were reported mainly for tree species in northern Europe (68% loss of tree genera; Svenning and Skov 2004) and for large mammals (> 44 kg) in the Northern Hemisphere (MacPhee 1999).We refer to this contrast between the implications of modern forecasts and the observed fossil record as the “Quaternary conundrum.” The resolution of this conundrum is key to improving forecasts of climate-change effects on biodiversity. Among the possible explanations are that climate change during the Quaternary was greatly different from climate change forecasted for the future; that genetic and ecological mechanisms, not accounted for in formal forecasting methods, allow the persistence of many species even under rapid climate change; and that factors in addition to climate change could decrease rates of extinction.

Some recent ecological genetics research further deepens the puzzle. For example, the risk of extinction for a species in response to climate change depends on the demography and evolution of genetically differentiated populations across their geographic ranges. If populations are locally adapted, climate change will cause conditions to deteriorate across the species’ range, rather than just at the margins of the range. Modern reciprocal transplant experiments, in which spatial gradients in climate serve as proxies for temporal climate change in the future, show that these fitness losses can be large (Rehfeldt et al. 1999, Etterson 2004). For example, a reciprocal transplant experiment on lodgepole pine in Canada indicated that global warming would slow tree growth and increase mortality, resulting in a 20% loss of productivity (Rehfeldt et al. 1999). Likewise, a study of a prairie annual in the Great Plains of the United States showed a 30% reduction in seed production in climates similar to those predicted for future decades. Ecological genetic data, in each of these cases, predicted different rates of adaptive evolution in different parts of the species’ range (e.g., rear and leading edge; Hampe and Petit 2005) but generally suggested that evolutionary rates would be slower than the anticipated rate of climate change (Etterson and Shaw 2001, Rehfeldt et al. 2002).

Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (^oC) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years,indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7^oC to 12^oC within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. Although these changes were probably not equally severe everywhere on the globe, a well-documented rapid warming did occur around the shores of the North Atlantic at the end of the last glaciation, when melting of the ice cover on the ocean suddenly allowed the Gulf Stream to reach the shores of northern Europe. There, temperatures rose rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as anticipated today for the next several decades (Huntley et al. 1997).

What could explain the Quaternary conundrum? One possibility is that migrations were faster than has been thought possible. A large literature examines late-Quaternary range shifts deduced from the pollen record, and recent papers consider models and seed-dispersal mechanisms that may account both for migration across geographic barriers and for rapid invasion of new territory. Sparse populations of several tree species are now known (from genetic and macrofossil evidence, supplemented by detailed analysis of mapped pollen data) to have persisted during the last glacial maximum in regions where very few, if any, pollen grains have been observed—regions that for this reason would be judged well outside the climate envelope for these species (Tomaru et al. 1998, Brubaker et al. 2005, McLachlan et al. 2005, Magri et al. 2006). These populations serve as advance colonists, allowing rapid population growth in newly available habitat.

A second explanation is that low extinction rates during Quaternary climate change may be partially attributable to ongoing adaptive evolution. Theoretical models suggest that adaptive evolution can enhance the persistence of populations in a changing environment even when migration is possible (Bürger and Lynch 1995). And rapid genetic adaptation to climate has already been documented for a few wild organisms for which long-term studies of field populations have been conducted (reviewed in Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2006). Invasive species have also evolved since their arrival in a new habitat in the 20th century, at surprisingly rapid rates of evolution (e.g., Huey et al. 2000).

A long-standing controversy regarding the role of people in Quaternary extinctions of large mammals speaks to the difficulty of quantifying impacts of multiple factors on species loss. The high extinction rate of large mammals has been widely recognized since the 19th century, and extinctions of large mammals and island birds over the past 100,000 years have been the subject of much conjecture. Paul Martin has made the now well-known case that the timing of extinctions followed human dispersal from Afro-Asia to other parts of the globe and that these extinctions resulted from human “blitzkrieg” overkill (Martin and Steadman 1999). But careful analysis of well-documented extinctions in Beringia suggests that human hunting was superimposed on a preexisting trend of diminishing animal population density (Shapiro et al. 2004, Guthrie 2006). These data suggest that the interaction of environmental change and human resource use can have a larger negative impact on biodiversity than either factor alone.

Copyright © American Institute of Biological Sciences, posted with permission.