Welcome!! This is the first episode of Nature Quest, a monthly Short Wave segment that answers listener questions about your local environment. This month, we hear from a listener in California who's concerned that the flowers in his neighborhood are blooming way, way earlier. Is that normal? And is climate change the culprit? Short Wavers Emily Kwong and Hannah Chinn investigate.Got a question about changes in your local environment? Send a voice memo to [email protected] with your name, where you live and your question. We might make it into our next Nature Quest episode!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What is Nature Quest and who is Shai Soar?
It's like they were looking for a lost dog.
Yeah, except they didn't even know if these records existed. So it's like if they were looking for a hypothetical dog.
And this friend of ours who was an environmental philosopher at one point said, well, why don't you look at Thoreau's records? And we said, like, what records?
But Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist, the philosopher Thoreau. That's him. So when Thoreau wrote Walden, he lived in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts for a little over two years. He kept his journal. Famously, yes. And apparently, he also kept very detailed plant blooming records.
Oh. These tables were really unknown to biologists, but they were very well known to Thoreau scholars. But when we saw these unpublished tables, as soon as we saw them, we knew that they were fantastic.
Because, Emily, these tables recorded the first leaf out and flowering times of more than 500 plant species during an eight-year period in the 1850s. Jackpot. Thoreau. Who knew? The transcendentalist scientist among us. Okay, so when they compared... Thoreau's tables to what we see now, what did they find?
Generally speaking, the trees are leafing out about two weeks earlier now, and the wildflowers are leafing out about eight to 10 days earlier now than in Thoreau's time. And the reason that they're flowering earlier and the trees are leafing out earlier is because it's warmer.
Richard says, overall, the weather is about 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 150 years ago in Thoreau's time. And this warmth, these changes, they aren't just happening in Concord.
It's happening across the United States. It's happening across Europe. It's happening across the world. Plants are flowering earlier. Trees are leafing out earlier.
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