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This sense of responsibility for the natural environment was born in Bret-Harte while growing up in the Arizona desert and the shadow of mountains in rural Oregon. A self-described "misfit," by the time she arrived at Reed in the late 1970s, Bret-Harte was hungry for other cerebral types. Her four years at Reed, she says, helped turn her passion for the mountains into a scientific pursuit.
"At Reed there was no topic so sacred it couldn't be questioned," she says. "It encouraged people to question their assumptions and examine them in a rational way."
That disciplined curiosity has taken her far. With a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford, and postdoctoral research positions at the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and the University of Alaska under her belt, Bret-Harte is currently a research assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There, in the dark of winter, she analyzes data, writes scientific papers, applies for grants, and sometimes works with graduate students, but each summer she flees 340 miles north, to work outside beneath the long endless light of Arctic summer.
A funky hodgepodge of old military trailers, canvas tents, and a helicopter (to transport scientists to remote lakes and streams), the Toolik Field Station where Bret-Harte works looks like some sort of 21st-century "M*A*S*H" set. Established by the National Science Foundation in 1975 as a long-term ecological research facility, the site, nestled on the edge of Toolik Lake, has since attracted an annual crew of up to 100 scientists, graduate students and technicians from universities and institutions throughout the country. Each year they spend weeks at a stretch studying the changing landscape, isolated by the empty terrain from what they fondly call "their real lives."
Here, the tundra that Bret-Harte studies is a patchwork of ancient grasses, berries, moss, and woody shrubs. Due to the intense cold and the limitations of a two-month-long growing season, the plants are miniature—400-year-old tussocks are no bigger than a pie tin. Yet as the climate has warmed, the woody species like birch, willow, and alder shrubs are not quite so shrub-like these days. Compared with aerial photographs taken on oil exploration missions in the mid-1950s, the woody plants appear to have run rampant. In each of the 200 comparison photos, not only did individual shrubs increase in size, but the patches of alder and birch have spread into areas that weren't shrubby before. This trend is likely to continue, says Bret-Harte.