Dealing with It

It’s the topic of the century happening this week. How could I not weigh in on the Climate Change…ahem, Crisis debate. One would have to live under a rock not to have seen Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech to the United Nations or at least some commentary. To be honest, I’ve been following her since her initial climate strike, her Ted Talk, and subsequent travels.Each time I hear her speak I am reminded of the sage advice from the old codger who laid the foundation for my ensuing agrarian endeavors. In 1990 he told me to get out of California if I wanted to grow food.Ranching while overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Channel Islands off the coast of southern California was nothing short of spectacular. I would have done it the rest of my life had I not listened to him and returned to central Pennsylvania.“In ten years you won’t be able to afford the water. In twenty, there won’t be any,” he warned. I’m certain if he were alive today, he’d have beaten his hat against his leg while bellowing about his knowing this climate stuff thirty years ago.People closest to the land are always the bellwethers to changes, even ones so imperceptible it takes a lifetime to notice. But people do notice.It doesn’t matter if you agree with the 16-year-old climate activist or not, she is indeed correct when she says, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.”We are more aware of global events with technological communication advances and 24/7 data access at our fingertips. Wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, flooding, increasing extremes—it’s happening, just ask all those farmers in the Midwest getting hammered by one disaster after another. If it’s not a freak spring blizzard killing off tens of thousands of livestock over several states, it’s a freak series of storms dumping more water than the region has seen in generations, exacerbating the disaster by further decimating the feed supplies that would have been fed to the livestock.Well folks, the freak show is at the dinner table eating the food.Most of the naysayers I encounter are also homebodies, never traveling more than the confines of the mid-Atlantic region. Tending to base my opinions on first-hand experiences, two recent events stand out leading me lend faith to the pig-tailed girl in pink.The first was the abject heartbreak a long-time friend, avid global diver and retired university professor shared with me upon recent return from their fourth trip to Australia. For the last twenty years, they’d dove the Great Barrier Reef that was once over a hundred thousand square miles of the most diverse, vibrant living ecosystem on the planet. “It’s dead,” they said, tears spilling down the septuagenarian’s face. “I get to say that my generation witnessed this loss.”Ok, so someone loses their vacation spot. Big deal, right? But what if it’s your home, your livelihood, your subsistence, your country? Again, all we have to do is watch the news or listen to those who cross our paths as I was humbled by my good fortune to live in a region not so detrimentally impacted by rapidly changing climate conditions.“You are a farmer?” asked the couple at my local library when they overhead me chatting about the farm with the librarian. Their English was broken, barely understandable. Their small stature and faces said South America to me without having to ask.“We were farmers, too,” they said obviously wanting to join the conversation about growing food. I never learned exactly where they were from, however, my limited Spanish was enough for me to understand they had no rain, no food and no choice.Once again, Greta’s forceful words rang out, “Irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.”She’s right. We cannot control Mother Nature no matter how hard we try. Our levees break, our sea walls crumble, our dams breach. The buzzword I see in all the brochures for this winter’s agricultural conferences is resiliency.This is the one trait that farmers in coming generations must have in order to succeed. I’m wildly unpopular at times when farmers lament how difficult things have become, how hard it is to make it in agriculture and how many are failing at it only for me to reply is that some farmers need to go out of business. The ones who have tried to beat nature into submission with everything but common sense, the ones who believe anyone trying to sell them a silver bullet solution instead of doing the hard work while listening to the dirt, the plants and the animals.Smart farmers today are shifting from having contingency resources for occasional disasters to those who actively build climate change into their business plans and daily operations. They are asking themselves how to logistically deal with external and uncontrollable impacts to their operations. Like Greta, they are no longer expecting for if, but when.She closed her speech with “Change is coming whether you like it or not.”Concise, yet also telling of her tender age. The truth is change is inevitable; it is how we foster new paradigms that determine outcome. When I was sixteen, my biggest worry was whether or not my parents would allow me to stay out past my curfew so I could watch the second feature at the drive-in theater.Greta’s generation recognizes that it may be them one day who has to walk 1,500 miles to have food security or that familiar foods will no longer be affordable or available.Overwhelming? Absolutely. But don’t dismay. If you are reading this, you’re probably shopping at the farmers market and supporting people who believe in the future enough to make incremental changes toward a healthier planet by growing food in ways that respect the environment, our communities and ourselves.