As I read this remarkable book, a memory lurked in the back of my mind – of an essay I read years ago about someone facing death who, as a closing gesture, planted trees though he would not live to see them grow. That is how I see this remarkable book by Michael Yochim who, facing death from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), did something similar, completing three books and nearly finishing this one, focused on national parks, while he was ill. Colleague and friend William R. Lowery, with help from others, put the finishing touches on Requiem. Yochim loved the parks, worked for the National Park Service, 22 years in Yellowstone National Park as well as a Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Sequoia, and in this book expresses that love and his hope for their future in the face of many threats from climate change. His books, and especially this one, are the trees he planted for the future he would not see.

I find the title interesting because a requiem is a dirge, an expression of sadness and mourning, often a lamentation for the dead. Yochim knew his time was short, was he in such a mood as he considered the future of the national parks? I think not, but he knew they were in jeopardy. In his introduction he writes, “Ultimately, if the book is an elegy for our premier national parks, it’s also a plea to take action now.” An elegy expresses sorrow, in poetry it is a pensive and reflective piece, lamenting loss, and Yochim clearly fears for the future of the parks and describes changes he has seen in them that is already loss. They are not dead, but they could be in future, at least as we know them, if we don’t take action to save them. Both stories he builds the book around are of loss. He writes, “But they are also stories of contrast, for as much as my affliction is of unknown origin, the other is very much self-inflicted …. one inexplicable and inexorable, the other unnecessary and still preventable.”

So, like the man who planted trees knowing he would not live to see them grow, Michael Yochim calls us to action, though he would not be present to enjoy the fruits of such action. What an act of courage and hope! In his forward, William Lowry tells us that Yochim wrote this entire book with his eyes, his disease too advanced to write in any conventional way. But the physical act of writing this way is only one remarkable part of the story. The content of the book, much of it recently published work about climate-change impacts on the parks, is meticulously and extensively researched. In doing this project, Michael Yochim showed incredible grit and determination.

Requiem for America’s National Parks is structured around five iconic national parks: Olympic, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. One of his goals is “to examine the climatic, ecological, and hydrological changes the parks are already seeing, along with the projected changes in those same attributes later in the century.” The book is chock-full of information and references to recent studies, but he artfully weaves this body of troubling information into his account of his own illness and stories of trips he has taken in each of the parks. We read of his personal journey with his illness, then of his joy in adventures in the parks, both before and during his illness, moving on to his discussion of the problems besetting the parks in which he travels.

At Olympic National Park he hikes with friends on a five-day backpack trip up the Hoh River toward Mount Olympus, over the High Divide, and out the Sol Duc Valley, describing the beauty of this famous rainforest. He is astonished at the scale of the Blue Glacier on Mount Olympus but can’t just enjoy the scenery for he knows that the glacier is shrinking quite rapidly.

Given its proximity to the Pacific Ocean, which somewhat buffers the park from the warming that more inland parks have seen, Olympic has only warmed by 1.2 to 1.8 degrees since 1900, the least of the five parks in this book. Still, the frost-free growing season is getting longer, spring is beginning earlier, and the coldest night of the year is getting warmer. Temperatures in the higher elevations have risen more; those at Blue Glacier, for example, are five degrees warmer since 1948. These changes may seem trivial, but they have been enough to melt off some 80 glaciers, along with causing a host of other changes. The content of the winter snowpack, known as its snow water equivalent, or SWE (as measured on April 1), is now 15 percent less than it was when measurements began in 1968, with some lower elevations declining markedly more.

This is an example of Yochim’s approach, presenting and synthesizing a trove of information from studies of the changes coming to the parks he profiles. Glaciers are retreating and disappearing in Olympic, Glacier, and even the Yellowstone country. At the Grand Canyon, the wildlife community is changing, trees are dying, invasive species like non-native grasses are increasing wildfire danger. At Yellowstone, the whitebark pines are being wiped out, virtually eliminating a vital food supply for the park’s grizzlies and threatening populations of pine-nut dependent species like the Clarke’s Nutcracker. A megadrought continues with its myriad effects in the Southwest. On and on it goes, a litany of challenges to these parks as we know them.

Yochim spent his longest Park Service stint in Yellowstone, and the longest and central chapter in the book is about that park. The chapter is woven around a trip he took in 2006 into the Thorofare, the wild corner of the park that required paddling, hiking, and scrambling. He and his companion enjoy many wildlife encounters. But, he notes, moose are disappearing from even this wildest corner of the park, and he observes that people will miss the presence of this large ungulate, “but who will notice when the wolverine and the lynx and the pika disappear from that incredible landscape.” He explains how “climate change is already undoing Yellowstone’s rich tapestry of life” and contends that the losses in Yellowstone and other parks are “more than simply biological, especially with moose, which is so much a part of visitor’s hopes and imaginings. It is about the most fundamental element of the Yellowstone landscape, the wildness found in precious few places in America today outside of Alaska.” That element involves “an intangible something, the feelings one senses in a landscape inhabited by wild animals, especially those larger than us.” In passages like this throughout the book Yochim eloquently describes the values of national parks and what is a risk from climate change.

In his conclusion, he asks why care “if some beauty will survive the melt-off, why worry about global warming, especially since many of us (perhaps most) won’t know the difference?”

He writes,

But I think we know some of the answers: beauty reduced is beauty diminished, for without its glaciers, the mountains in Olympic will no longer be unique and will resemble dozens of other mountain ranges in the West. Beauty reduced also violates the code we have as caretakers of the Earth, for it means we’re not passing the planet down to our children in better shape than we received it from our parents. It violates the golden rule, too – to do unto others as we would have them do unto us – for it means we are damaging communal properties. It disrespects our fellow creatures, because glaciers provide year-round cold water to streams and rivers that sustain an abundance of fish and birds and mammals and amphibians. Finally, it suggests an arrogance that is at odds with the attitude of humility and restraint one should have in the presence of anything powerful and complex, a heedless disregard for the consequences of our actions, known and unknown, direct and indirect, short term and long term.”

He rejects the argument that some may make that a national park may drastically change but is still a national park. Glacier National Park will still have monumental mountains – the scenery will be great – but without many of its wild inhabitants, it will be changed for the worse, and will have lost some of its beauty and wildness.

At the end of his chapter on Yosemite, Yochim writes two very moving passages, too long to quote here, but there is this: “I spend my days trying to make the best of my situation, writing about the places I love and the most urgent existential threat to them in history…. If there are any places that energize the body, mind, and soul, they are these places, at least for me. ... And if there are any places that offer hope for the terminally ill – and hope that nature can prosper if we just give it a chance – they are places like these, even if we can only visit them in our memories.” He gives thanks for the experiences these places have given him, and he has made the herculean effort to write this book in the hope that those who come after him can be as blessed as he has been.

This book is unique in the literature of national parks. As far as I know, no one in a situation like Michael Yochim has testified to the values of national parks like he does here. No one has, or can, make such a strong and compelling case, or offer stronger reasons, for protecting the national parks, than he does. He knows the parks and what they face, and he knows his fate. He expresses his final wish in the closing sentence of the book, in italics. “Take action against climate change, NOW, before we forever lose their wonders, both tangible and intangible.”