This Is Also Climate Change
Or, Our Future Will Depend on 'Assisted Migration'
Layout-wise, I don’t like putting a picture between the headline and the body of an article, but I wanted you to see the cherries. Because of this long, hot, rainy spring, we got a lot of them. Raspberries, too. Mulberries. Blackberries. A squash seed that survived a winter in the compost pile has taken over one of the raised beds (the one the rabbit birthed her babies in a month or so before). A plague of grackles (that’s what a group of them are really called) have grumbled into the nearby trees to eat their fill.
A 17-year resident of this house, I’ve never seen grackles here before, and we’ve never been host to this kind of agricultural abundance.
This is also climate change, the same force that’s whipping up superstorms, raising sea levels, killing the moose and fish, and melting glaciers. Like all change, it will hit all of us differently. New Hampshire, Southern and Central Maine, Vermont — within a few years they’ll have the growing season the Mid-Atlantic States have now. I read an article in the Bangor Daily News the other day that the Viles Arboretum in Augusta, Maine are planting tree species native to the Mid-Atlantic States to make up for the projected loss of spruce, fir, cedar, ash, beech, and possibly pine. Researchers at the arboretum say, in fifty years, the Maine woods will look a lot like the forests of New Jersey and Maryland, full of oak and hickory, poplar and sweetgum. This will happen on its own naturally, in response to climate change, but helping it along, with so-called ‘assisted migration,’ could smooth out the messy-middle bit (acres and acres of dead trees and teeny saplings).
In fifty years, the Maine woods will look a lot like the forests of New Jersey and Maryland, full of oak and hickory, poplar and sweetgum.
People are going to come, too, from all over the world, looking for a safe place to live and bring up children. Climate migration will be de-colonization, as folks from all the places the Western World has exploited, stole from, and manipulated over the centuries show up at the door for some of what we built from the spoils. They deserve their piece, their place, as recompense, and because we’re the ones who ruined things with our addiction to petrol, power, and plastic.
My fear is that we won’t open the door. We have a history of doing that, and a pattern of calling people in need ‘criminals’ and ‘invaders,’ when all they really want is some of what we took from them (resources, stability, etc.).
Assisted migration would help out there, too. Planning ahead and funneling refugees to places that need people and have the capacity to absorb them, cities like Detroit, Mich., Cleveland, Ohio, Utica and Buffalo, NY with declining populations and under-used infrastructure. We have to build new cities, too, in the now chilly places that climate change will make more appealing
This is going to require far-seeing. Fifty years ahead, a century. It’s another thing we’re not good at. But for an example, for now, we can look to the trees.
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Grackles are one of the most resourceful black birds you will find in New Hampshire. They are very much like the pigeon. Everywhere. Here in the southwest is the Mexican grackle. Most birds are quiet during the day. But have not dropped from the sky and died which they have done in Death Valley.
Here in South Wales there is a definite shift in when seasons begin and end. I have no green tendency in terms of growing, since putting a garden fork through my foot at about 10 yrs of age; but the weather is generally warmer and wetter, with less cold snaps and snow.