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Interview: Dominique Bachelet
The Nature Conservancy’s lead climate change scientist talks about wine, watercolor, and why global warming isn’t all doom and gloom.
—By Courtney Leatherman
Nature Conservancy: You recently participated in a Conservancy-sponsored panel on climate change and wine. What was that about?
Dominique Bachelet: I talked about the impact of climate change on grapes. When you tell people that their favorite wine will not be too good, they start to pay attention.
Nature Conservancy: You’re French. What’s climate change mean for your favorite native vines? Is Bordeaux an endangered species?
Dominique Bachelet: Ha. Burgundy is more at risk. Right now, Bordeaux is getting better. You have a curve of optimal temperature—the quality rises with temperature, eventually plateaus, and if it gets too hot, the wine goes the wrong way. Burgundy is already at its optimal temperature.
Nature Conservancy: I’m partial to zinfandel. How would you sell me on Bordeaux?
Dominique Bachelet: Come over. I’ll cook some meat and serve Bordeaux.
Nature Conservancy: Would you be serving beef tongue? I hear that’s one of your favorites. Not so popular in the United States.
Dominique Bachelet: I had an American friend for dinner. I cooked tongue and sliced it so he couldn’t see what it was. He went on and on about how good it was, how tender. I’d have a Côtes du Rhône, a Cahors or a Buzet.
Nature Conservancy: Are you a wine snob?
Dominique Bachelet: No. I go for the cheapest one on the shelf, especially if it’s French. I’m not rich enough to buy California or Oregon wines.
Nature Conservancy: What price the carbon footprint? A fellow panelist said people like you who live on the West Coast should buy your own region’s wines to reduce carbon emissions. Thoughts?
Dominique Bachelet: That’s a curse.
Nature Conservancy: You worked at a vineyard as a student. Is grape picking typical employment for French kids?
Dominique Bachelet: It used to be, but now that the harvest is earlier—two weeks earlier in ’99 than when I worked there in 1974—you have a different crowd. In Burgundy, they now hire temporary pickers from other countries. It’s changed the sociology of those villages.
Nature Conservancy: How important is this wine stuff? I mean, isn’t there more serious work you should be doing?
Dominique Bachelet: Absolutely. I gave a talk on this; I don’t work on this. I use the wine industry as an example of an adaptation strategy to climate change. The industry is flexible and opportunistic, and it provides the best monitoring you can find. Records go back generations, with dates of harvest, dates of bloom, numbers of bottles produced. They’re very aware of the climate; that’s the only reason I talk about wine.
Nature Conservancy: You work on generating computer models that simulate changes — to vegetation, nutrients, etc. Why are models important?
Dominique Bachelet: Models synthesize state-of-the-art knowledge about an issue. They give interdisciplinary teams a common language and help researchers go forward and monitor things. They can help discover gaps in knowledge. But they are only as good as the current state of knowledge. The problem is, models have been used as crystal balls, which they are not. They’re misused by everybody who wants an answer and cannot find it any other way.
Nature Conservancy: For instance?
Dominique Bachelet: We don’t know what the climate will be in 2100. The models tell one possibility, but we don’t really know. We don’t have a clue.
Nature Conservancy: Isn’t that kind of frightening?
Dominique Bachelet: The media always focus on the negative of climate change. People forget, opportunities for adaptation do exist.
Nature Conservancy: We still get readers asking why the Conservancy works on climate change. How do you respond?
Dominique Bachelet: The Conservancy is trying to conserve species and systems. Someone may want to save a lot of forest, but what if I tell them, you’ve saved this chunk of land, but 50 years from now you won’t have conserved a forest—the trees will be dead? And there are so many people on the planet, it’s a challenge to build corridors between core habitats. Human structures are everywhere, so species can’t migrate. We have created barriers to fluidity in the dynamics of nature.
Nature Conservancy: At one climate change meeting, artists were invited to submit work showing the future. You did a watercolor, right?
Dominique Bachelet: I had a flamingo in Paris with the Eiffel Tower covered in green goop. Think about a tropical Paris. A big tower would quickly be covered in vines and mosses and green stuff.
Nature Conservancy: I think I need a drink.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Natalie Fobes
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