In 2012, when a species of Karner blue butterfly in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore park suddenly perished during a summer of intensifying climate catastrophe, Gregor W. Schuurman, who at the time was working as a conservation biologist, had an epiphany. His refusal to accept the planet’s changing patterns was beginning to feel misguided. It prompted Schuurman to join the National Park Service’s newly-created adaptation team as an ecologist, where, among a host of other duties, he was tasked with finding out-of-the-box solutions—or, alternative futures, as I prefer to think of them—in the face of an unrelenting climate reality: that all things, at some point, come to an end.
A major objective of the adaptation team is to discover what possibilities are viable on the other side of extinction. Schuurman and his colleagues have been on my mind lately. One of the prevailing…
