He was a carpenter much of his life, despite earning a bachelor's degree in geology, a master's in statistics, and two Ph.D.s, in botany and philosophy. When I arrived at his house in Homer recently, Berg wore a tool belt and carried a nail gun. The blight hit hard last year in the Susitna Valley and is still spreading. That historic research 20 years ago made the world's first proven link of a major biological event to climate change.Īlthough retired, Berg predicted in 2015 that another big spruce beetle kill was coming farther north. New warmth had boosted the reproduction of the spruce bark beetle into a fast-moving plague. When he was a research scientist for the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, he established climate change as the cause of a die-off of spruce across the region. "Here we're talking about a few million years."Īs an oracle of the future, Berg has a good record. We'll probably see lots of things growing here, for better or worse, that haven't been able to grow for a long time," Berg said. They are trying out other warm-weather trees, too. They hope its towering trunks could once again populate a forest where the dominant spruce trees now are dying. Homer farmers are trying to grow the metasequoia, also called dawn redwood, which nearly went extinct. Then we looked at a living seedling of that same species, once again potentially viable in the newly warmed climate. HOMER - Retired botanist Ed Berg took me to a beach off Kachemak Way, east of town, to see petrified stumps of big metasequoia trees that died out millions of years ago. Retired scientist Ed Berg of Homer points to details of the petrified stump of a metasequoia tree on the shore of Kachemak Bay, July 23, 2018.
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