Sarah’s Soapbox – Climate Crisis

Each year we publish a political essay in our paper catalog. This year the Sarah’s Soapbox was cut due to space constraints, so we’ve posted it here instead.

2019 was not an easy year to be a farmer in most of the country. Here was no exception.

Nearly every month in 2019 we had new examples of the effects of climate change in our local area, not to mention the world at large. At our farm in Sweet Home, Oregon, unusually heavy snowfall landed in late February, burying our fields in snow just as many overwintering crops were beginning to go to seed. The weight of the wet snow snapped some of these nascent seedheads right off (Brussels sprouts, mustards). Then the sun came out in the beginning of March long enough for fields to dry out and flowers to bloom. In April, severe river flooding led to a nearby contract seed grower’s field, that was full of seed crops, being submerged by six feet (!) of water. The following month we had to irrigate to finish prepping our spring beds because of lack of rain, unheard of in our usually wet springs. After a summer that never really heated up, nonstop rains fell most of September and we lost a few dry seeded crops because of it (dry beans, lettuce). Our first frost appeared in mid-September this year, and then in October, several weeks of deep freezes (22˚F) put an undeniable end to the growing season – the kind that row cover doesn’t help – and took a few more crops along with it (sorghum, some flowers). Here, in an area where we frequently don’t even get a mild frost until November.

It’s now mid- November as I write, and we haven’t had a drop of rain for three weeks. November, historically our wettest month of the year. I can only wonder what December, and beyond that 2020, will have in store.

In some ways it’s like our season has shifted forward a full month. In our tiny corner of the universe, we’re living climate change almost every day. In these waning days of 2019, it seems the only thing that is predictable any more is day length.

In comparison to many other places in the world, we don’t have it bad at all. It’s still perfectly livable here. No catastrophe has wiped out our home, as with the floods and fires that many other places have experienced. And thanks to the diversity within our fields, in spite of our few crop losses we still had a successful growing season. I have acknowledged climate change in our seed catalog pages before, but it seems every year the effects are being felt more strongly.

It also seems like 2019 was a turning point for the general public in regards to the climate crisis, thanks to the many powerful youth leaders such as Greta Thunberg with Fridays for Future, Felíquan Charlemagne with US Climate Strike, and the youth-led Sunrise Movement. On September 20, 2019 the Global Climate Strike saw 4,000,000 participants in 150 countries leave their schools and places of work, united in a call for action to curb greenhouse gas emissions to an extent that would mitigate the climate crisis. But the people in power are still not responding.

The UN Climate Action Summit in September that prompted the week of action will probably achieve as much as every preceding congress has on the topic – lots of words and very little action. More appalling was our own government’s silence at the talks. The US has since begun the official process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement, which will ultimately make us the only country not included in the landmark international agreement aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Recently, the media has pointed out that the USDA has been mostly silent when it comes to climate change – to the point of suppressing studies that show the dangers of climate change. This at a time when farmers are facing ever more extreme weather and suffering far greater damages than Adaptive Seeds crop losses this year. For example the 40,000,000 acres that went unplanted due to flooding in the US Midwest this spring.

How bad does it have to get? If our leaders won’t act, what can we do?

Here in Oregon, after many years of trying, a Cap and Invest Bill known as HB 2020 came before the solidly Democratic state legislature this summer, with the intent to reduce Oregon’s emissions to 45% below 1990 levels by 2025, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The money from carbon credits would go towards retraining people formerly employed by carbon producing industries, among other things. The bill passed the House.

But then shenanigans ensued with 11 Republican state Senators leaving the state to deny the quorum necessary for a vote. After five days, the Senate President announced that the bill didn’t actually have enough support to pass anyway, and the Republican Senators eventually returned to vote on dozens of other bills that were held hostage by this denial of democracy.

Really. The lengths people in power will go to to protect the status quo, and the moneyed interests involved, is astounding. This is what democracy looks like. It’s sickening.

The opposition to HB 2020 depicted the bill as a “job-killing energy sales tax that would deliver little benefit for the planet.” Some of the biggest polluters are those in resource extraction industries, and even though the logging industry was exempted from the bill, transportation was not. Lots of rural Oregonians drive trucks (including log trucks) as independent contractors. #Timberunity was born to oppose the bill, and quickly mobilized an angry mob of people fighting to keep the status quo of resource extraction and pollution. Many farmers in our area jumped right on board, with #timberunity signs dotting our neighbors’ fields. Large scale farming, after all, uses lots of fossil fuels, and there was speculation that the cost of gas would go up $0.30 per gallon.

Now TimberUnity is a PAC, with the first donation coming from the CEO of Stimson Lumber Company. The stated goal of this PAC is to save Oregon and its natural resource economy. “We can no longer support Lawmakers who support special-interests over the working men and women of Oregon”.

But the website also says “Every one of us who is connected to working the land has a voice in #TimberUnity.” Well, that includes me. I am a rural Oregonian, farming in the midst of climate chaos, and I’m saddened that so many people who are also “connected to working the land” see combating climate change as a greater threat than climate change itself. And I’m ashamed and enraged that many of Oregon’s elected officials are not doing everything they can to mitigate the crisis.

People were worried this law would threaten their way of life. But the climate crisis is more of a threat, and it threatens more people. And continued resource extraction is only going to make it worse. #timberdisunity. Remember the epic fire seasons the west coast of the US faced 2017 and 2018? Where will the timber jobs be when the forests have burned down, in part because of changing rain patterns due to climate change?

The author harvesting dry beans in 2018, wearing a mask due to poor air quality caused by wildfire smoke.

How bad does it have to get? If our leaders won’t act, what can we do?

Instead of #timberunity, Fridays for the Future has another idea: Worldwide Unity, a call for action to fight climate change, and they’ve released a moving video. Anyone remember “We Are the World” from 1985? It’s like that, but it’s youth from all over the world, singing about how “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

While inspiring, it’s really too bad that this is the case. It’s us adults who have the money, and the right to vote, and the ability to choose whether to drive SUVs or hybrids, or to not drive at all. Many of us who are now well into adulthood have been doing small things for years, reducing our food miles by growing our own food, conserving energy, minimizing our participation in the consumer economy, reusing, etc. But it’s clearly not enough. Voting to elect more leaders who are on the same page may not even be enough — Even a Democratic supermajority in Oregon doesn’t include enough of them to get climate legislation passed.

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During the September Global Climate Strikes, some of our team here at Adaptive Seeds participated in local actions. I stayed at the farm, harvesting and cleaning seeds. It was heartening to know that so many people were stepping out for the climate. I wished I could join them – because ally is both a noun and a verb, and requires action – lip service is not enough. I rationalized my absence from the strike by telling myself I was doing relevant work, and that driving 60 miles round trip by myself to the nearest strike would not help the planet. Mostly I was trying to process some seeds before the rain sprouted them all in the field.

Back in April, we had written off those crops I previously mentioned that were submerged in 6’ of water: kale, cabbage, onions, pac choi, and more. Especially the onions, whose bulbs had only been planted back out a few weeks before the flood and probably didn’t have well-established roots, we thought were sure to float away with a current that moved several large trees into the field and knocked down the deer fence. I sowed a few new flats of those onions, and started looking for new contract growers for some of the other varieties.

But once the water subsided nearly a week later, we received the report that to everyone’s amazement, the plants were all still there and appeared to be just fine. With them, tiny deposits of silt appeared on the downstream side of each plant. Each of those crops went on to produce healthy seed crops, and a demonstration of true resilience in the face of adversity, or what could have been one hell of a “selection event.” Perhaps their having been previously grown in the water-logged soil of our home farm gave them an advantage. Perhaps growing under organic conditions, without plastic may have helped set them up for success. Or maybe not. Maybe many plants are just as adaptable as humans (within reason). And with each generation comes more adaptation. That’s the hope, anyway. We’re all in this together.

The next generation of humans will have to adapt to the increasing demands of climate change. It’s a disgrace that we aren’t setting them up for success with the policies (or lack thereof) that we are instituting today. But in our fields and in our gardens, maybe we are.

And it turns out here in Oregon, we’re getting another chance at HB 2020, which is slated to get a second chance in the legislature during the upcoming short session in February of 2020.