White nose syndrome a harbinger of things to come?

When I first started covering environmental stories in the early 1980s, my understanding of the crisis was essentially centered around “point sources.”

That is, if you stop a factory or coal-fired power plant from pumping pollution into the atmosphere, or prevent the paving-over of a forest, or stop the sale of DDT, you effectively solve The Problem.

Protect endangered species and you save The Planet.

Even on big stories, like the Exxon Valdez spill — which I covered for NPR, the BBC and Alaska Public Radio — there was a clear line of cause-and-effect.

Tanker plus rock equals contaminated Prince William Sound.

But now there’s a growing sense in the scientific community that the larger fabric of global ecosystems is at the point of unraveling.

The entire ocean is being overfished and inundated with pollution. Whole chains of key habitat and migration corridors have been disrupted.

Which leads us round to events like honeybee colony disorder and white nose syndrome in bats.

Obviously, it’s possible that ecological events like these are essentially ‘natural.’ Long before humans came on the scene, wild populations experienced disease, disruption, and even extinction.

But it’s also possible that events like these are something like stress fractures.

There are growing calls — the latest at the House Natural Resources Committee hearing yesterday — for a new kind of environmental monitoring.

A sort of CDC organization designed to recognize and respond quickly to ecological systems that have reached a tipping point or an unraveling.

The controversial question for such an organization, of course, would be: what do we do?

How do we respond to environmental problems that are far more three-dimensional and complex (and potentially grave) than we once understood?

My guess is that we will see more events like this white nose syndrome, triggered by a convergence of climate change, invasive species, human-produced toxins and habitat degradation.

If so, we may find ourselves forced to make changes to our lifestyles and consumption habits that would have seemed like science fiction only a couple of decades ago.

Your thoughts? Are you worried by these events? What do you think we should do about them?