Bigfoot and Bobcats

Earlier this week on my way to work I cast my eye skyward to see sunny blue skies with few clouds. The voice on the radio was telling me to expect 1-3 inches of snow later in the day, and even went so far as to predict what time the snow would start falling in my part of the state.

Had I been living a couple of centuries ago, I would not have been able to listen to a meteorologist who had access to weather models and radar. I could have made a trip to the privy and consulted my Old Farmer’s Almanac, which would have given me seasonal weather predictions along with handy reminders of when to plant my flax while I multi-tasked in an early 19th-century way.

But more likely I would have relied more on my own observational experience to sense that snow was imminent. I would have been a wiser reader of the skies, clouds, and more sensitive to changes in humidity and barometric pressure. And when Aunt Beulah told me the bursitis in the toe of her left foot was acting up, I might have had enough conclusive evidence to predict that it was going to snow that afternoon.

As a species, we spend a lot of time and mental energy trying to predict not just the weather, but just about everything else that makes up “the future”. We routinely do so with various levels of utter failure. With that in mind, here are a few predictions for the coming year.

Ten predictions for 2016

1. Trees will keep growing. Our perception of their economic value may fluctuate, but the forests don’t really care about that—they just grow. It also continues to be true that in New England we are allowing our forests to add biomass. That is, trees are growing faster—adding more biomass—than the volume of biomass we remove each year through harvesting. Hard conversion of forests remains a concern—it turns out that a forest paved over for a parking lot doesn’t grow back particularly well.

2. The New Hampshire Presidential Primary will be held. Voters will cast ballots for candidates. Ballots, printed on paper made from trees (a renewable resource), will be counted. No presidents will be elected as a direct result, however.

3. Knowledgeable people will predict that prices paid forest products like sawlogs or maple syrup will go down. Knowledgeable people also will predict that prices paid for such products will go up. The direction of the prices will depend not so much on who happens to be doing the predicting, but to whom they happen to be talking at the time.

4. Bobcats will continue to rebound in New Hampshire. This is thanks to a concerted effort to conserve the kinds of habitat that support them and to a ban on hunting and trapping decades ago after it was determined that populations had declined significantly. Bobcats may or may not have to count humans as predators in the near future depending on the outcome of a public debate. In any case, smart bobcats will give us wide berth.  Also, smart humans might stay away from bobcats, although there’s some evidence to suggest that there’s been a significant decline of late in the population of smart humans.

5. There will be no credible evidence of Bigfoot in New Hampshire, despite the efforts of intrepid “documentary filmmakers” with long camera lenses. That does not mean there won’t be reports of Bigfoot sightings, and we may even get a grainy picture of what looks like Bigfoot, petting a mountain lion, in Franconia Notch.

6. A reality television series featuring NH Fish & Game will be so popular that other natural resource organizations and agencies will want in on the action. Land trusts like the Forest Society will propose shows like “This Old Growth Forest” and DES will be flooded with requests to create “Swamps and Quagmires: True Tales of Shoreland Permits Gone Awry in the Granite State.”

7. The State Legislature will discuss and debate the meaning of “agriculture” and agri-tourism”, which in turn will cause local land use boards to do more of the same. At issue is this: is growing and selling a turnip at a farmstand really that different from cooking the turnip and serving to 200 guests at a wedding held in the middle of the turnip field? And what if that turnip is a potato and the potato comes from Idaho? Farmers will say call it what you will, they need to do whatever it takes to keep the farm economically viable. Farm neighbors will say call it what you will, loud music at 2 a.m. is annoying and inappropriate. Someone will fall off the turnip truck, but claim that they didn’t. Someone else will ask, “do people really eat turnips?”

8. Energy proposals, including gas pipelines (Kinder-Morgan), electric transmission lines (Northern Pass, Merrimack Reliability, Seacoast Reliability), wind (Antrim) and solar installations will continue to be hotly debated throughout 2016. Everyone will predict what is “needed” and what the energy sector will be like in 2017 and beyond, just like everyone predicted 18 months ago that we would be paying $1.81 per gallon for gasoline. They did, right?

9. The climate will change a bit in 2016. There will be debate over what that means and what should be done about it. I’m pretty confident in these particular predictions.

10. Nine out of ten predictions made will be inaccurate.

Jack Savage is the Executive Editor of Forest Notes magazine, published by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. He can be reached at jsavage@forestsociety, or follow @JackatSPNHF on Twitter.