How Will the Environment of Virginia Change?

Note that the question is not "Will the Environment of Virginia Change?" It's a sure bet that the ecosystems, habitats, and species in Virginia will continue to adjust to the impacts of changes in climate, evolutionary shifts, the arrival of invasive species, and the extirpation (local elimination) or extinction (complete, world-wide elimination) of species that can not adapt fast enough.

We'll see rapid alterations due to continued human impacts as the population grows. If we look closely, we may also see some of the slow evolutionary shifts that occur naturally over time.

There's an ongoing debate over the role of the first humans in North America in the Pleistocene epoch, and whether their hunting pressure led to the elimination of the "megafauna" such as mastodons and giant sloths. Some of the more-dramatic shifts in the state that can clearly be defined as human-induced include:

• massive deforestation through fire by Native Americans, land clearing for tobacco and food-based agriculture by colonists after 1607, and urban sprawl in the last century
• replacement of deep forests habitat with extensive edges between woods and open grassland areas, creating population booms for deer while reducing the populations of species such as wood thrush
• extinction of passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets that damaged crops and orchards
• extirpation of wolves, panthers, and other predators that fed on livestock
• introduction of dandelions, English sparrows, starlings, honeybees, phragmites, purple loosestrife, kudzu, brown trout, and other non-native species that have displaced native plants and animals
• damming of rivers, reducing the mussel populations and shifting the species composition in the lakes and downstream of the larger dams from warm-water fish such as bass to cold-water species such as trout

Some recent events were recognized as key moments of environmental impact:

• the lawsuit by Tennessee forcing the reduction of salt pollution into the North Fork of the Holston River in the early 1970's (followed later by the realization that mercury pollution was a greater threat)
• the closure of a major portion of the James River to fishing in 1975, due to kepone pollution
• the closure of the Avtext plant on the Shenandoah River in 1989, after the discovery of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and the recognition that DuPont had released mercury into the river for two decades before 1950
• the 1983 Rhinehart Tire Fire in Winchester
• the Kim-Stan landfill in Alleghany County