Hope and Despair; Biking the Western Upper Peninsula

Carly, her boyfriend Paxton and his sister Ali all moved from Minneapolis to Ontonagon, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula in August of 2021, and bought a small motel. Renaming it after their black lab Griswold, Griswold’s Lodge is their hope and promise for the future. They believe in this area’s potential for growth. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on. - Theodore Roosevelt

It’s been a rough news cycle. The names of two American towns say it all: Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.

———————

Thank you for taking the time to read the latest blog post from carbonstories.org. I apologize for the long hiatus between posts. In March, a bike trip to the Ozarks (which would have resulted in a posting) was upended by a family emergency that required consistent attention for several months. Yet, happily over the same period, my daughter Saren had a second child. ….Welcome to this very troubled and extraordinarily beautiful world, Kaia Spire!

A proud grandfather holding Kaia Spire, born April 5, 2022.

After meeting my new grandchild over a week ago, my intrepid cycling partner Jenny Hershey and I left my daughter’s place in Wausau, Wisconsin, and headed north on our bicycles to explore the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Lake Superior shore of Wisconsin. So far we’ve biked about 500 miles from Wausau, Wisconsin into the Lake Superior shore in the state of Michigan, up the Keweenaw Peninsula to Copper Harbor, and back to Ontonagon, Michigan just east of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Forest. Next we will head to Ironwood, Michigan and then to Ashland, Wisconsin and the Apostle Island area. If we are lucky, we’ll make it to Duluth, Minnesota, before heading back to Wausau and Milwaukee to visit family before our return to New York City. The copper ridges, mountains, wet valleys and innumerable lakes of this country - mixed with cool temperatures and copious rain that keep the insects in check - are making for a bracing and energetic trip (with occasional unplanned layovers as we wait for storms to let up).

Wausau is to the south on this map. The circle is Ontonagon, Michigan. Near the end of the long peninsula to the northeast lies Copper Harbor, where we were several days prior. From Copper Harbor or Houghton, Michigan, one can take a ferry to Isle National Royale, a US National Park wilderness area. We wanted to go, but were unable to make the ferry schedule work out…. Another time! Map by Guru Maps Pro.

I’m a lucky man, and I try not to take my good fortune for granted. I have loving and wonderful friends and family. I am healthy enough to do most everything I aspire to. I get enough to eat, and I usually sleep where it is dry and warm. When I experience physical discomfort, I know it won’t last and I will be comfortable again soon. I have lived a life of privilege; among other forms of good fortune, my gender, race and education have always worked in my favor. I suppose you can call me “woke.” Well, so be it, especially when the alternative is to be not-woke, which really means “asleep.” A lot of sleeping folk are in Houston right now, railing against the possibility of meaningful gun legislation. They are “asleep at the wheel,” as far as I’m concerned… on gun control, on climate, on constitutional protection from religious persecution on a woman’s right to choose. They are loud, but common sense will always be louder, even if it arrives too late to mitigate some of our pain.

I had polio as a child (and am so grateful for the polio vaccine). I’ve had several major illnesses and surgeries as an adult, and I am managing post-polio syndrome as I enter my “golden” years. I’ve lost people I loved a great deal. I’ve had other setbacks. But on the whole, life has been very good to me. I worked hard at several careers and was rewarded for it; now in retirement, I bike the world and live a life of adventure. Given how challenging life has been over millennia for most humans, I regard my good fortune as remarkable.

Heading north on the Bear Skin State Trail south of Minocqua, Wisconsin. Photo by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Yet, the future of humankind weighs heavily on my imagination. I worry for my grandchildren. I worry for the human species. I grieve for the many people experiencing life-altering and deadly extreme weather events now, for those trapped in extreme poverty, random inexplicable violence in so-called “safe communities,” and those unfortunate enough to be living under wartime conditions. I grieve the rapidly accelerating loss of so many animal, plant and insect species all over the globe. At times, witnessing the extinction of the earth’s magnificent biodiversity makes me overwhelmingly sad.

The emergency report published in February by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the largest peer reviewed body of climate scientists in the world - was grim, concluding with this paragraph: “The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

Jenny Hershey takes a break on Five Mile Point Road in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness. Lake Superior is behind her… Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

This report coincided with the sidelining of the most aggressive climate legislation ever attempted by the US Congress, and then was quickly eclipsed by an immediate humanitarian catastrophe - the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Geopolitical concerns are now displacing climate change among world leaders as the most critical issue on the global stage. Some decades ago we might have had enough time to solve one global crisis and then move on to another - but now we are facing twin crises of equal magnitude that must be solved simultaneously. Which world governments will remain democratic and which ones will embrace or collapse into authoritarianism? And can governments work collectively to reduce emissions rapidly at the same time they are struggling to preserve their geopolitical identities?

We don’t yet know how such dilemmas will resolve themselves. But I, for one, wouldn’t place my bet on things remaining the same. I think our reasonably immediate futures are going to look vastly different from our reasonably immediate pasts. Change is speeding up. In fact, I think those who try to keep things the same are fighting the wrong battle. My biggest objection to “conservatism” the world over is that “stopping or slowing down change” at a time when change is increasing exponentially in speed and scope - whether we like it or not - is essentially useless. There is little point in being nostalgic for a past that no longer exists (and didn’t work for large numbers of people anyway). The best we can do is “direct change” so that we survive, first and foremost, and hopefully do so in a way that is somewhat to our collective liking. We might be able to survive with some dignity in a harsher and less predictable climate while we create an equitable and sustainable way of life and help others less fortunate than ourselves. But we can no longer sustain massive climate destroying autocracies and pseudo-democracies that coddle carbon intensive behaviors by wealthy individuals, encourage racial inequality, accept massive poverty and wantonly destroy our earth for personal gain. Those days are over. Either we adapt or we perish.

And what might adapting look like? In my last blog post, as Jenny and I rode through the southwestern desert just before the massive spring fires of 2022 set in, I wrote about the formal movement of Deep Adaptation. Deep Adaptation argues for a deeper accounting of adaptive processes. This perspective assumes that extreme weather events and other related climate stressors will increasingly disrupt power, food, water, shelter, and social and governmental systems, and that society and local regional governments need to prepare for such occurrences.

Dick is a wood grader who has lived his entire life in Marenisco, Michigan (population 250). He cheerfully explained the difference between White Pines and Spruces and detailed how Jack Pines form their weird cones. When we asked if he knew of any COVID cases in his town, he thought a minute, and then replied, “Yea, a couple people croaked from it.” Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

However, we’ve come across another form of thoughtful climate adaptation while biking in the upper Midwest. Among the leaders in developing scientific and analytical tools for anticipating human migration in the United States is the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, a ten-year-old group of resilience scholars and practitioners based in Ypsilanti. ASAP, as it’s known, is collaborating with Ann Arbor, the National League of Cities, Florida State University, and the state of New York to develop the first scientific models for anticipating economic and population shifts under changing climate conditions. Their work focuses on migration in the Great Lakes region.

Near the summit at Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow his work on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

It isn’t hard to find opinions on the internet about which American cities might be the best (and the worst) places to live as climate change advances. For example, the insurance broker website Policygenius published a study in 2020 listing the top 10 best and worst places to live over the coming decades. Interestingly enough, the top two best cities on this list are San Francisco and Seattle (while the worst are Houston and Miami). However, air quality issues from fires close to both San Francisco and Seattle over the past few years plus the unprecedented heat dome over Seattle in the summer of 2021 challenge the wisdom of these choices. Additionally this research was based on the largest 50 metropolitan areas in the US, which suggest that Policygenious is thinking more about where large numbers of people may suffer or do slightly better, meaning those who are most likely to need insurance products.

ASAP - as a group of adaptation professionals - isn’t focused on how communities will come apart (and which ones to avoid), but rather on where human societies may do better through the lens of social justice and equity as climate change accelerates. Quality of life issues such as availability of jobs and affordable housing are emphasized in the communities studied, as are livability concerns such as good transit, walk-ability and bike-ability. Although this research is still in early stages, ASAP has teamed up with the New York State Energy Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) to anticipate trends of climate migration throughout the Great Lakes region. This approach is notably different from the more common images of climate migration in developing and underdeveloped parts of the world, which typically reference patterns such as those driven by large numbers of Bangladeshi farmers fleeing into nearby countries as their delta disappears, or South Pacific Islanders abandoning islands submerged by sea level rise, or farmers in sub-Saharan Africa moving to cities to escape desertification of their farmland.

In contrast, the migration patterns under study through ASAP imagine the possibility of a reversal of the last half decade of American population expansion into the south and southwest, and consider how Great Lakes regions might be affected by refugees from other states fleeing fires and water shortages and in search of cooler temperatures. This analysis now serves as a prescient preview to questions gaining relevance for human migration: will fierce meteorological turbulence cause Americans to move — away from danger and toward safety? Will people stay or go?

I wager they’ll go. Most Americans have always sought out better places to live. With the exception of Native Americans, it’s in our DNA as a nation of immigrants.

The flowage from “Lake of the Clouds” heads towards Lake Superior at Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow his work on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

And it turn outs the northern midwest, which has been losing population for decades, is a likely destination. As is true everywhere, there are significant contemporary challenges that climate change presents for land and water, communities and governance in the Great Lakes region. Still, the northern midwestern region is now viewed by scientists and social theorists as one of the more ecologically resilient regions in the country, so it makes perfect sense to think about how business, government, and culture can evolve to accommodate the climate-altered seasons. That’s why the American Society of Adaptation Professionals is …convening researchers who anticipate that warming winters, ample reserves of fresh water, and forests not prone to wildfire are ecological benefits that will attract millions of new residents to the Great Lakes and reverse decades of slow population growth.

Here’s an example of a climate professional turned climate migrant (Jamie Beck Alexander, the Director of Drawdown Labs at Project Drawdown,) who choose to leave California with her family for a safer, more sustainable life in Duluth, Minnesota. Our Ontonagon hosts Carly, Paxton and Ali may be leading a similarly smart migration from a larger to a smaller town. Perhaps population density will also factor into quality of life issues as we reshape our communities for climate adaptation, just as COVID reversed a decades-long trend of people moving to cities from rural communities. As residents of New York City, this definitely gives us something to chew on… how about you?

Gaylynn, our server at Syl’s in Ontonagon (population 1400) has spent her entire life in this small town, except for a period of service in the Navy. She is happily upbeat about life in the Upper Peninsula, and a proud citizen of Michigan. An energetic and attentive waitress, it was a pleasure to watch her interact with townspeople she knows very well. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to this blog, so you can follow our next biking trip later in the summer of 2022.

All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post authors.

Deep Adaptation; Biking from Los Angeles to Tucson

Reading to my grandson Emery as he nods off. Like most grandparents, I wonder what the world will be like when my grandkids are older. It will be 2089 when Emery is the age I am now. The world seems so precarious now; what will it be like then? Will life be better or worse? Will we even be here? Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Any way you slice it, keeping warming below 2°C requires an immediate, massive, and global mitigation effort. With each passing day, it’s less likely that we’ll succeed. Indeed, over 90% of Earth scientists believe we’ll surpass this threshold.

Here’s an idea that’s simple and beautiful but goes against both the myths of the mainstream culture and our deepest mental habits. It’s this: don’t be afraid, and spread love every chance you get.

Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at NASA, from his book Being the Change

Cows wander through a date tree orchard in the Imperial Valley near Brawley, California. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

When I set out on my first solo-biking adventure in 2015, I had no idea I would remain enthusiastically committed to long distance biking seven years later. Nor did I imagine I would have the good fortune to share many trips with an enthusiastic and equally curious biking partner who is also an excellent illustrator. Jenny and I both hope our occasional blog posts enrich your life (as they do ours) in some small way. Traveling at the speed of a bicycle is great exercise, and it’s an in-your-face way to experience how a place actually feels. It also provides a very intimate experience of the natural world, which is especially important in an age where most of us (at least in the Global North) are mostly protected - even isolated - from our rapidly changing climate and increasingly degrading environment.

After trips to Wisconsin to see my kids and grandkids over the Christmas holidays, we drove Jenny’s car to El Paso (stopping for a few days to bike in Big Bend National Park), and then took Amtrak to Los Angeles with our bikes to visit my brothers Chris and Steve for a few days. Our plan was to ride our bikes from Anaheim back to El Paso. We only made it to Tucson.

We rode by a Cattle Manure Power Plant south of Brawley in California’s famed Imperial Valley. The plant is now abandoned, after opening twice over the last 30 years to great fanfare under two different private companies - one of whom claimed they would help local cattle ranchers dispose of  manure by turning it into electricity under a contract with Southern Californian Edison, and another who was going to also process King Grass for the biofuel market. Unfortunately, the first project was plagued by a massive rainstorm that made manure retrieval and processing impossible, and the second was closed after an earthquake in 2010 damaged the processing plant. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

After some very long rides (over 85 miles), mixed with several brutal days riding into intense and unremitting easterly winds while climbing several thousands of feet in elevation, Jenny and I decided that it would be best for us to rest up in Tucson, and then take the train back to El Paso from Tucson for a more leisurely return to our car, where we would car/bike our way back home to New York City (I had been hoping to ride Highway 9 along the New Mexico border through historic Columbus, NM  into El Paso, but that will wait for another trip).

Lizzie is a takeout restaurant hostess in Canyon City, California, with a complex story about the many people for whom she is responsible. She patiently listened to Jenny express frustration over the lack of regard drivers demonstrated toward us on Gilman Springs Road on the way to the Palm Springs desert. We were unavoidably placed in a very dangerous situation (having been directed there by a bicycle mapping program I don’t think we’ll continue to use). We found ourselves several miles up a canyon when the shoulder disappeared on a narrow two-lane road, with high winds and cars passing feet away at 75 miles an hour showing no intention or interest in our situation or safety. We were forced to walk our bikes over a rumble strip trying to avoid traffic on our left and thorny bushes on the right. Nobody stopped or slowed down. The indifference of drivers to our situation was stupefying. After listening to Jenny’s story, Lizzie said “That’s so sad. What’s going on in people’s heads? We’ve lost our humanity with traffic. It’s as if it’s no longer human beings driving those cars”. Then, she offered to bag up extra chips and guacamole (which turned out to be excellent) for our ride into Palm Springs the next day. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Deciding to change our plans wasn’t easy. Jenny and I have different strengths and limitations. We both felt challenged and each reacted differently. But like all collective human endeavors, we had to accept our limits as we confronted our own personal challenges and devise a bail-out strategy that worked for both of us. In the meantime, we rode through many diverse industrial and agricultural environments and basked in 650 miles of extraordinary natural landscapes during our ride from Anaheim to Tucson.

“!Hay zanahorias. Muchas zanahorias!” Workers near the road express their pleasure over the harvest to Jenny. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

It’s easy to love the sheer rawness and massive scale of the American southwest, especially as seen from a bike. Where there is water for irrigation (delivered through a system of canals from the Colorado and Gila Rivers) green fields of lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, sugar beets, carrots, alfalfa, wheat, king grass and countless other plants stretch into the horizon on endlessly flat terrain. In every direction lie mountains - craggy and massive, brown, apricot, and hazelnut in full sunlight, gray, impersonal and barren under cloudy skies. Where there is no water, barrel-cactus covered flatlands fall into the horizon, ubiquitous washes create carved out ridge-lines that delight the eye and ominously warn of floods to come, and Joshua trees and Saguaro cacti stand like regal gifts from Diego Rivera. The sun can be unrelenting (thank God it is January), and the wind can be deafening. The rare absence of wind results in a silence more peaceful than a Buddhist retreat. These physical polarities get under one’s skin like dirt under one’s fingernails. And it’s impossible to get enough of the warm afternoons, especially when the sun slants lower in the sky and casts a golden glow on all it shines upon, even trash.

Field workers in the Imperial Valley. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Manuel, a hard working date farmer from Calexico, CA, tends to a date palm orchard about 20 miles from his home. After telling us what the trees behind him were, he explained to us that dates are harvested once a year in August. Manuel also does agricultural work in the adjoining border town of Mexicali, Mexico, and has traveled back and forth between California and Mexico for years. He worries about the heat and extended drought in his region, and how it will impact crops in both countries. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram @deeofo.

During the recent months American environmentalists have been hyper-focused on the passage of the climate provisions in the “Build Back Better” act. Hoping to finally address climate change at a policy level that approaches the scale scientists tell us is required, climate activists were seriously disappointed by recent setbacks to the bill’s passage. Other occurrences haven’t added comfort: in mid-January the news broke that the hottest eight years ever recorded have occurred in the last eight years, and US emissions jumped in 2021 over 2020 levels, making our national goal of a 50% reduction in 2005 CO2 levels by 2030 further out of reach. Yet, these troublesome headlines are only part of discouraging news. Bloomberg just published an article about the potential of Kuwait becoming too hot for people or wildlife in a few decades, and NPR just published an article and video about how a climate change-induced drought in Kenya and nearby Uganda is parching landscapes, killing livestock and creating a humanitarian crisis. And only a few days ago, Weekend Edition published a story and video footage about a crippling drought now underway in Iraq. It’s sad to say there is little that is surprising in such reports, and it is easy to cite so much other alarming news (such as unprecedented high temperatures and decline of sea ice in the Arctic, and the rapid melting of the Thwaite Glacier in Antartica).

We met David on a dirt road near Eloy, Arizona. A road safety and maintenance manager for 35 years, David helped us avoid some dangerous paved roads without shoulders by directing us down some safer dirt roads. He pointed to one area and said teasingly, “Oh don’t go down there—the locals will shoot at you just to mess with you.” He suggested a course for us that he would confidently cycle with his wife. We deeply appreciated his kindness as we made our way to safer terrain.

It isn’t my intention to be depressing, but rather to lay a foundation for what I’ve been thinking about on this trip. Now that meaningful action on climate change appears stalled once again in America, it might be time to think more deeply about the potential consequences of climate chaos. In January of 2020, I wrote the following in a blog post titled Getting Real About Global CO2 Emissions: ….current science tells us that global carbon emissions MUST be cut in half over the next ten years for us to maintain a climate anywhere close to what we humans have enjoyed in our comparatively short time on earth. In that post I worked through the most recent science on the carbon budget climate scientists tell us we shouldn’t exceed to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures. However, global emissions have not decreased in the past two years; instead they have increased, making what we have to achieve in the coming years even more challenging. This has happened even though we achieved a slight aggregate reduction of GHG emissions in the US (a 10% drop in 2020 versus a 6% rise in 2021), and the successful enactment of a few nationally determined contributions (NDC’s), as outlined in the Paris Accords, most particularly by the European Union.

Current CO2 levels today are at the historically high figure of 417 ppm, which is 50% higher than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In other words, in spite of lots of incredible efforts by millions of activists and sustainability professionals, hundreds of corporations, countless NGO’s and other agencies, and many national governments and world government organizations, we aren’t yet moving the needle downward on GHG emissions. Not yet, anyway.

Hope is an extraordinary thing, and there are new reasons to be hopeful every day (such as the recent creation of the Clean Energy Corp by the US Department of Energy). Still, I often hear others say that while they aren’t optimistic we will deal with climate change successfully, they are hopeful regardless. I feel the same way, and savor living each day with the future in mind far more than I despair over what we may have already wrought.

Yet, a persistent thought nags at me from the back of my mind, a thought that until now, I have only expressed to my closest friends. What happens if we fail? What happens if the world doesn’t get it together to stop our use of fossil fuels soon enough to avert catastrophe? What happens if we unwittingly set in motion one or a few climate tipping points (if we haven’t done so already), and climate chaos arrives suddenly and violently? What might that look like, and when might that happen? How will civilization respond? Will it be game over? Or might we rebuild something of value out of the rubble of a wounded, mangled or even collapsed civilization?

Jenny met Derek in Tucson outside a Walmart store. Recently released from prison, he is currently homeless. Jenny needed someone to watch her bike while she shopped for dinner, and he needed someone to keep an eye on his cellphone as it charged while he shopped. They negotiated an exchange: Jenny watched Derek’s phone while he shopped and Derek watched Jenny’s bike while she did. This unlikely exchange resulted in a long conversation with common ground on many subjects. As Jenny began to leave, she told Derek he was a good man, and to stay strong no matter what others said about him. He had served 2.5 years in jail for possessing narcotics. He believes he has paid his dues, and he dreams of moving home to Atlanta to be close to his daughter and opening up a car detailing shop. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deepfo.

I’m not alone in wondering about such outcomes. I suspect many readers of this blog have had similar fleeting thoughts. As it happens, there is a growing body of literature and activist thinking by writers (especially scholars) who are wondering (out-loud) if civilization will indeed collapse as climate change gets worse. The most well-known version of this literature is based on a paper published in 2018, and a subsequent book published in 2021 called Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read.

Some of the leading scholars of this approach are already convinced civilizational collapse is inevitable, and believe climate chaos will arrive in the next few decades. Others aren’t as certain the collapse of civilization is imminent, but strongly believe we should consider it a potential outcome for which we should make preparations. These perspectives are not intended to be nihilistic, and no scholar is suggesting we should refrain from doing all we can as quickly as we can to mitigate climate change. But Deep Adaptation does argue for a deeper accounting of adaptive processes. It is simultaneously a concept, agenda, and an international social movement. It assumes that extreme weather events and other related climate stressors will increasingly disrupt power, food, water, shelter, and social and governmental systems. The word deep in this context indicates that strong measures are required to adapt to an unraveling of western industrial lifestyles. That agenda includes values of nonviolence, compassion, curiosity, and respect, and a framework for constructive action. This agenda was recently featured in an article in Inside Climate News.

Seen near Fort Hancock, Texas. Photo by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

The term deep adaptation follows a logical naming sequence. A few decades ago, activists and scientists talked about mitigating the negative impacts of GHG in our atmosphere by finding alternatives to carbon-based fuels and increasing ways to draw down carbon through natural processes and technological fixes. However, over the years the realization that we also need to adapt to irretrievable changes already baked into our atmosphere and oceans are driving public conversation about changing where to locate human communities (and where not to), and how to prepare communities for more extreme weather. As a result, scientists and activists began to speak about helping communities to develop greater resilience as an attribute of adaptation. Now we have a term that describes the kind of adaptation we will need if climate chaos causes civilizations to collapse. Deep adaptation can be thought of as a re-adaptation of the structures of societies to create new ways for humans to survive and prosper.

There’s a related scientific field called collapsology that studies how civilizations have collapsed in the past, and how environmental overshoot might cause them to collapse in the future. Collapse in this context doesn’t necessarily mean that societal disruption will be sudden and complete, but does imply a form of breakdown in systems that is comprehensive and cannot be reversed. Deep Adaptation describes personal and collective responses to the anticipation or experience of societal collapse. And, as already stated, it suggests that by getting out in front of the possibility, we may have time to create new structures and/or institutions that will allow human life to flourish. 

Seen on Texas State Highway 20, east of El Paso. Photo by Michael Chase. Following him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Thus far, deep adaptation has been met with a great deal of resistance, and with only a few exceptions, it hasn’t caught the attention of media. After all, it is unthinkable. Anticipating societal collapse - whether from a range of environmental, economic, political or technological factors - has been attacked as pessimism, alarmism, doomism, fatalism or defeatism. Yet, proponents consider it would be defeatist to not even begin exploring what we can do to help in the face of massive societal disruption, and that any call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of a global pandemic. Not very long ago, it was unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations. It may have been this obvious global lack of preparation and resilience in the face of the COVID pandemic that inspired more than five hundred international scholars to sign and publicize a Scholar’s Warning Letter in March of 2021. The letter publicly addresses the equally unthinkable topics of societal disruption and potential collapse.

We met Raul east of El Paso as we were heading home. He was tending the field in front of his ranch, preparing to turn the hay under as green manure. He joked he was doing it for the exercise, since he had no access to water for planting anyway. Turns out much of the Rio Grande valley is in the 7th year of a drought; this one being the most serious one Raul has seen in the 50 years he’s lived in this valley. If farmers don’t have wells (the use of which, ironically lowers the water table), they have to rely on a water allotment from the local canal system. The canals are fed by Rio Grande river water, whose headwaters are the Weminuche Wilderness in southwestern Colorado, some 575 miles away. The wilderness is three quarters the size of Rhode Island, and has fed the Rio Grande for centuries. Now, between the competing problems of a reduced snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and increased use of water upstream as New Mexico also grapples with drought, Raul’s usual allotment of 3 acre feet has been reduced to a few inches. Since Raul doesn’t have a well, he basically can’t grow anything now. He even said it would be risky to grow a vegetable garden because, “you never know if you’ll have the water”. Raul also told us that it used to be a lot colder, with some snow on the ground and more wind than now. We were enjoying the weather, but it was a placid day with full sunshine and about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. I asked Raul if he thought rain would come. He replied, “I hope so”. And I replied, “ I read a lot of climate science, and I think that although you might get occasional relief, what you’re going through now is likely to be the trend for a long time”. And I added, “I hope I’m wrong”. Raul gestured with open palms as if to say, what will come, will come. The Rio Grande is about a mile behind Raul’s ranch and the mountains in the distance are the Chihuahua Mountains of Mexico. Raul used to visit Mexico a lot but now the area behind his ranch is controlled by the cartel, so it’s no longer fun to go there. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow his work on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

It can take a while for new perspectives to establish themselves in academic communities, much less among citizens and policymakers. Think about how long it has taken to get consensus on even the most conservative scientific warnings about climate change. It was well over 30 years ago that Congress held its first hearing on the subject of a warming climate, long before we had a vocabulary for what is now everyday news: extreme weather, droughts, floods, sea level rise, ocean acidification, rapid biodiversity loss, crop loss and famine, human migration and resource wars over water and arable land.

Similar to many of the citizens, politicians, and media outlets represented in the movie Don’t Look Up, some of of us don’t want to face information that challenges our closely held assumptions of security. However, some people will find dignity no matter what is coming. The final scene in the movie is a window into that possibility. A small group of people (who fought hard to avoid what they are about to experience) share a simple and final meal accepting their fate and fortifying themselves through prayer and conversation over their good fortune to know and love one another. In that moment, as in all moments: acceptance and love, recognition and kindness, staring into the abyss and knowing humanity means something, even though like all things, it was just another blink of life in the everlasting expansion and contraction of universal consciousness.

We met Erik at Catalina State Park just outside of Tucson. A park ranger, he is also a licensed falconer, and was leading a seminar with Virgil, a Harris Hawk. Erik became falconer to Virgil a couple of years ago and is devoted to him. Yet, Erik seemed quite realistic about the limitations of the relationship. When Jenny asked him if he loved the bird, he blushed and said, “Well, it’s not reciprocal because Virgil has no emotion”. Jenny's (sotto voce) response to me was, “Call me crazy, but that bird is attached to Erik. You can see it in his eyes”. In any case, we were enchanted by the extraordinary relationship between this man and a hawk, and found it a great inspiration for how different species can harmonize in such a profound way. Perhaps on the other side of “Deep Adaptation,” we can cultivate more sacred and symbiotic relationships with other species on this fragile world. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Jenny’s sister, Terry Hershey, sent the following poem to start the new year in 2022. We both believe it says much about what the world needs right now.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to this blog, so you can follow our next biking trip later in the spring of 2022.

All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post authors.

Food Systems and Climate Change; Biking Prince Edward Island

Eliot Coleman, organic farming author and founder of the prolific agroecological Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, reflects on one of his favorite books, Soils and Men, a 1938 yearbook published by the USDA. The farm produces year-round vegetable crops, even under harsh winter conditions (using unheated and minimally heated greenhouses and polytunnels). Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. - Amory Lovins

I don’t see problems, I see solutions. - Eliot Coleman, quoting Amory Lovins

The view just above Deer Isle on Maine’s central coast on the way to Prince Edward Island. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Along the Way

Jenny and I left for our next biking adventure in mid-September. Following our usual custom for our bi-monthly explorations, we intended to drive to our starting place with our bikes in tow. This time our destination was Prince Edward Island (PEI) in Canada. We passed through Maine on the way, and stopped in Deer Isle to stay with friends Jack and Linda Viertel, who - knowing we have written about regenerative agriculture and climate change in previous blog posts - kindly introduced us to their friends Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch.

The sun sets behind the sign that identifies the road to Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, where Eliot and Barbara live. The farm is currently managed by Eliot’s daughter Clara Coleman. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Neither Jenny nor I fully grasped at the time what an extraordinary opportunity this was; both Eliot and Barbara are seminal authors, educators and very successful organic market gardeners. In addition, Eliot has invented many farm tools that other organic farmers have adopted over the years. Meeting them set the stage for subsequent meetings with organic farmers in PEI, as well as the helpful people we met at the Climate Lab at the University of PEI (more on that later). Everyone we talked to knew of Eliot Coleman’s work; he became a serendipitous calling card for all things organic, simply because we had been lucky enough to meet him along the way.

Several fields at Four Season Farm. The field in the foreground had just been tilled with an ample amount of green manure (crop residue from buckwheat plowed into the soil to enrich it) in preparation for a cover crop of winter rye. The field in the background was sown with peas and oats for the summer and will be planted with winter spinach, and the second greenhouse to the left will be moved over the spinach to optimize growing conditions. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

As urban devotees of regenerative agriculture, we especially appreciated hearing Eliot’s critical perspective that the current buzz around “regenerative” farming is being be co-opted by large agriculture companies with little genuine interest in solving environmental problems.

Consider the ways agriculture is supported through government subsidies. In the US alone, the meat and dairy industry receives 63% of total agriculture subsidies, compared to fruits and vegetables producers who receive only 0.04% of total subsidies. If you are a meat producer (whether your product is regenerative or not), you will receive subsidies that small-scale organic growers (especially market gardeners) won’t. This suggests at least one of the reasons “regenerative” has rapidly grown in popularity, eclipsing the older “organic” processes revived by farmers like Eliot Coleman. But subsidies are only part of the issue. Corporations notice consumer trends, and the recent popularity of the “farm to table” movement has also driven corporate influence over small-scale organic farms as well.

Consequently, Eliot Coleman is also not a fan of the ways the label “organic” has been diluted. He explains this on the farm website: Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine has been farmed organically since its inception in 1968.  However, we are NOT “USDA Certified Organic.” And for good reason. The USDA refuses to uphold the honest, old-time, carefully stewarded farming practices that organic has always represented. The USDA National Organic Program has been totally corrupted by the money, power, and influence of industrial food corporations. USDA certification is a hollow sham.

More vegetable fields at Four Season Farm. The greenhouse to the far left is the backside of the same one as in the previous picture, and it will be moved farther to the left to cover winter spinach. The extraordinarily productive field in the foreground is kale, lettuce and chard (photo taken mid-September). Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

The website goes on to explain what real organic standards should be: First, for uncompromised nutritional value all crops must be grown in a biologically active fertile soil in full contact with the earth and nourished by the natural biological activities of that soil. Research into the marvelously complex soil micro-biome reveals the vital ecological processes that support natural, non-chemical food production. Second, soil fertility should be maintained principally with farm-derived compost and mineral particles from ground rock. Why take the chance of bringing in polluted material from industrial sources when fertility can be created and maintained internally? Third, deep-rooting green manures, cover crops, and grazed pastures must be included within broadly based crop rotations to enhance soil fertility and biological diversity. The greater the variety of plants and animals on the farm, the more stable the system. Fourth, a “plant positive” rather than a “pest negative” philosophy is vital. The focus must be on correcting the cause of pest problems (weak plants) by creating optimum soil conditions to strengthen the plant, rather than merely treating the symptom (pest damage) by trying to kill the pests that are attracted to weak plants. More and more scientific evidence is available everyday on the mechanisms by which a biologically active fertile soil induces resistance to pests and diseases in the crops. Fifth, livestock must be raised outdoors on grass-based pasture systems to the fullest extent possible. Farm animals are an integral factor in the symbiosis of soil fertility on the organic farm.

Eliot looks over starts for the winter season in one of his greenhouses. Photo by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Arriving in Canada

In September of 2021, Canada opened their border for recreational travel to Americans who are fully vaccinated for Covid-19 and demonstrate negative results on a Covid PCR test within 72 hours before entering. PEI requires an additional negative result on a second rapid test upon entering the Province. Given these safeguards (combined with the fact that the percentage of fully vaccinated Canadians is significantly higher than Americans), we felt safer biking here than we would have in the U.S. The sadness and irony of that realization wasn’t lost on us; in fact, it probably made us more attentive to the Canadian approaches to the science of both Covid and our rapidly changing climate.

After their kids left the nest, Yeung and his wife left their home in Vancouver and came to PEI, where they bought a mid-century motel in Murray Harbor in the southeast of PEI. Yeung kept us safe from mosquitoes with his racquet zapper. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Interestingly, we encountered no political resistance to Covid vaccination efforts or masking mandates in anyone we met. All of the major political parties in Canada (except the ultra-right Peoples Party of Canada at 4% of the electorate), are strongly pro-vaccine and equally attentive to the science of climate change. In fact, because we arrived just before the recall election, we had the refreshing opportunity to watch the major two parties - the Liberals and Conservatives (aka Tories) - attempt to outdo one another on general media about how to address both the pandemic and the climate emergency. We met no one who isn’t concerned about Canada’s rapidly changing climate. Perhaps this is because climate changes are more intensified toward the equator and at both poles, so the further to the north one is located the more obvious the changes are. In any case, the focus on method over content in Canadian politics was a refreshing change from American politics, where our major political parties perceive themselves as inhabiting planets facing distinctly different threats.

Charlottetown is near the blue dot. This is PEI’s largest city, with a metropolitan population of about 80,000 of the island’s 160,000 people. The purple lines on this map form the spine and the spurs of the Confederation Trail. The points at the ends of the wings are North Point in the northwest and East Point in the east. There are wind farms near both points, the largest in North Point. Currently, renewables supply about 25% of the Province’s power; they will supply 100% by 2040. PEI has no natural gas lines, and most cooking and heating is already electric. Summerside, a town in central PEI of about 15,000, uses wind farms, solar arrays, smart grids, industrial-scale lithium-ion batteries and the highest per capita concentration of electric car chargers in the country, and expects to derive the majority of its electricity from renewable sources by 2022. A fascinating story is how the town is dealing with the problem of intermittency: there are a suite of specialized appliances in homes throughout the city that can store energy as heat rather than electricity. This can be read about in more depth here. Photo from GuruMaps Pro.

We left our car at the parking lot for the Woods Island ferry to Caribou, Nova Scotia, and have spent the last several weeks biking the island. PEI is about 200 miles from end-to-end, and shaped like an angel’s wing veering rightward. What we missed in biking long distances every day, we made up for by enjoying biking the inland spines of the “rail to trail” conversion called “The Confederation Trail,” meandering the many mellow coastal roads that circumnavigate numerous bays, estuaries, peninsulas, isolated and peaceful beaches, and exploring lovely farming towns and charming fishing villages. The trip was idyllic.

Taken on the north shore of PEI not far from Cabot Provincial Park, this picture demonstrates how erosion works on the shoreline. Waves wear away the sandstone cliffs until they collapse from underneath. Because of sea-level rise and increased storm surges, PEI has been losing an average of about two feet a year of its shoreline. Scientists expect the rate of erosion to worsen in the future. Other impacts of climate change on PEI include steadily rising average temperatures, milder winters with less snow, increasing swings between excessive drought and precipitation events, and greater exposure to extreme weather events such as hurricanes, storm surges and destructive winds. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Cabins are plentiful in PEI. Some are delightfully rustic and placed on windswept cliffs over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the north or the Northumberland Straight on the south shore. With only a few exceptions most have kitchens. After discovering that dining out was very expensive compared to cooking our own food, we began to sample the island’s sustainably raised mussels, oysters and lobsters by buying seafood at many of the small shops near the waterfronts. PEI mussels (which sell for CAD 1.50 - 2.00 a pound) are farm-raised on ropes hung in the ocean, which ensures that there is no dredging or disturbance to the ocean floor. Since there is no dredging, delicate life forms are undisturbed.

Oyster cages can be seen in the distance at a sustainable oyster farm. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohsonchase.

Oysters can be raised sustainably as well. The production cycle on a Canadian oyster farm begins with the collection/production of oyster larvae. Some farmers still collect larvae in the wild; however, larvae are increasingly produced in controlled hatchery facilities from spawning adult broodstock. The larvae are kept suspended in tanks by circulating water – and in a few weeks they transform into tiny seed. The seed is essentially a very small version of the adult oyster. Once the seed reaches an appropriate size, it can be transferred to the ocean for final grow-out in cages that are moved every year for 3 to 4 years to stimulate growth and achieve a marketable size.

While we were reading an historical placard out loud at the old fishing harbor of Tignish Shore, Hector approached us and pointed himself out in a 1953 schoolhouse photo (upper right). A retired lobsterman, Hector bought his lobster fishing license for CAD 25 cents; now they cost CAD 1.5 million. Hector has survived many storms over the years. Because the beach kept receding, the provincial government moved his boyhood home (where he still lives) from the beach to the inland side of the street. Hector has watched the shoreline at Tignish Shore recede at least two hundred feet during his lifetime. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Perhaps most exciting for us as laypeople (beyond eating these exquisite creatures) was recognizing the value of the industry to the local environment. Mussels and oysters raised in estuaries live off plankton and are very productive at filtering water; even nitrogen (a problem in PEI because of extensive commercial potato farming) and pesticides are absorbed and deposited in inert form on the sea bottom through feces by these amazing shellfish.

We met Frances, an oyster fisherman, at Yeung’s motel on the first day of the oyster season at Murray Harbour. Fishing the older conventional way by using 12-foot-long tongs (they used to be regulated for 10 feet, but the water is deeper now because of sea level rise), he rakes wild oysters off the sandy bottom in the numerous estuaries around the island. Frances (and his partner Pete) brought back 26 crates of oysters their first day out. They will earn CAD 50 cents per oyster for the bigger ones (which would cost USD 3-4). Both Frances and Pete were pleased with their catch, and they celebrated by gifting us a dozen of their largest oysters and another dozen quahogs. Needless to say, we were delighted! Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Why Bother?

In August, 2021, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the 6th assessment of our changing climate (the first assessment was published in 1990). For the report, hundreds of scientists all over the world assess thousands of scientific papers published annually to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how efforts at adaptation and mitigation can reduce risks. The assessments represent the best of global general scientific consensus about what is most likely to happen to our climate in the near and reasonably near futures, depending on how many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions humans continue to release into the atmosphere.

Although climate science has improved greatly over the years, most humans now understand we are placing our children and grandchildren at considerable risk by continuing to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But the recent IPCC report is sanguine. In general, emissions are not stabilizing, much less decreasing. We aren’t meeting the moment yet, and we are rapidly approaching crisis. We have only a few decades to decarbonize our atmosphere before we hit tipping points that may undermine civilization as we know it.

From left to right are Ross Dwyer, Erin Taylor and Stephanie Arnold. All three of them spent several hours chatting with us about PEI’s sustainability plans, particularly in the agricultural sector. PEI appears to be situated well for success, and key players in all industries are feeling pressure and excitement about improving their processes to become more sustainable. Ross Dwyer is the ClimateSense Project Coordinator and Project Manager at the Climate Lab at UPEI. Ross is a passionate representative, and was very welcoming to Jenny and me. Erin Taylor is the Manager of the Climate Change Secretariat at PEI’s Department of Environment. She is an intrepid connector and environmental advocate. Stephanie Arnold is a prolific author and PhD Candidate (UPEI). Her technical specialty is helping potato farmers adapt to societal pressures to become more sustainable and adapt to rapidly changing growing conditions. Read about the Provincial Prince Edward Island Climate Plan here. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Fortunately, many governments are listening to these onerous warnings, the PEI provincial government among them. But our talks with the climate team of university and government officials in PEI weren’t about quantifying GHG emissions, nor was it about making a transition in energy systems. That has to happen, and it’s already underway. But for the people we talked to that’s the easier part of dealing with climate change. Transformation in agriculture, which is the cornerstone of life on this island (and always has been) is the preoccupying problem, because farming here is so integral. And underlying how we live on the land is a more fundamental issue - our most cherished values.

Stephanie Arnold from the UPEI Climate Lab shares her feelings about the unfair blame directed at many well-meaning potato farmers by uninformed environmentalists.
We were lucky enough to hear Stephanie speak publicly (along with Adam MacClean) at a panel event on agriculture and climate change in New Glasgow. When asked what single-most important action she thought could be undertaken to get at the root causes of climate change, Stephanie answered Canadians could review and recommit to the country’s original Treaty Agreements with indigenous nations. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Adam MacLean describes himself as a shepherd-entrepreneur-scientist and very recently, a public servant, working with the PEI Department of Agriculture and Land as their Organic & Perennial Crop Development Officer. He practices regenerative agriculture by managing pastured livestock to produce nutritious meats in a way that respects the animal and heals the land. Together with his flock, in partnership with Island landowners, they are building soil, sequestering carbon and feeding the community. We were lucky enough to hear him speak in New Glasgow, where he agreed passionately with Stephanie Arnold that our biggest challenge is reckoning with our most fundamental values. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram @deeofo.

Our conversations revealed a collective agreement that climate change is a symptom of a larger problem: societies that value the rights of powerful individuals over those of poorer communities, societies that seek to dominate nature rather than live within natural processes, societies that place individual rights and personal consumption ahead of a collective commons with the capacity to allow all humans to live in natural abundance. Those are societies most responsible for polluting our atmosphere and bringing us to the brink of extinction.

Such talk used to be the province of the crazy and marginalized. But in PEI, such talk seems to be increasingly normal. Views are shifting everywhere, and PEI is small enough that shift is palpable. After all, relationships are the true currency of change, and that currency in a place as small as PEI is alive and well.

We saw this Bald Eagle (Canadians call them Sea Eagles) lift off a tree near North Point in PEI. For us urbanites, there are few things more exciting. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

Organic and Regenerative Farming in PEI

Our first few days on the island revealed little information about farmers, other than the unmissable reality of the large and ubiquitous potato industry and the equally accessible shellfish and lobster industries. Before we learned more about how conventional potatoes were farmed, we were happy to dig up a few potatoes for our dinners as we biked by the corners of commercial fields. That is, until we learned that commercial potatoes growers use a spray that kills the plants from the ground up, leaving the potatoes easier to harvest. Although Roundup (glyphosate) is repeatedly used to kill weeds on the fields earlier in the season, we were never able to determine whether that is the herbicide used to kill the plants at harvest. But even if you never eat another potato from PEI, please understand that glyphosate is still the most-used herbicide in the U.S. Unless you’ve eaten only organic vegetables for years, you’ve been exposed to it in large quantities already. In any case. our past blog posts on regenerative agriculture and our serendipitous meeting with Eliot Coleman focused us to understand more about the agriculture scene in PEI.

We managed to look beyond the potatoes once we got wind of the PEI Certified Organic Producers Co-op (COPC) through an email exchange with my friend Regina Grabrovac of Healthy Acadia in Machias, a Maine-based food systems specialist and organic certification official for the USDA. Once we learned from Regina where and how to look, we began to appreciate how much fresh food was available all over the island.

Brian MacKay, an organic farmer at Crystal Green Farms in Bedeque, PEI, raises organic vegetables and livestock, as well as operates a small flour mill where they mill their own grains and prepare baking mixes. Their milled products can also be found on the shelves of many local retailers. Once Brian learned that Jenny was a vegetarian for environmental reasons, he patiently asked us what we thought “Beyond Beef” was made from? Did we think that the peas, corn and soy in the product was grown without fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides? Did we think it was grown with crops that haven’t been sprayed with glyphosate? Did we think the crops used weren’t genetically modified, tying them in with Monsanto and other seed monopolies? (We checked the Beyond Meat website and supposedly they do not use GMO crops). Even so, might it be that eating beef, pork, chicken, lamb or sheep grazing in a field of perennial grasses creating healthy soil while sequestering carbon, was a better option environmentally? As Brian spoke, his grandson, Xaviar, hung onto every word, as did we. What do you think? Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Kathy MacCay from Crystal Green Farms in the 140 year-old farmhouse in which she was raised, and in which she raised her children. She has lived in this house for most of her life. Kathy runs a tight ship working with husband Brian and caring part-time for her 14 grandchildren. Somehow, she also managed to cook us delicious homemade waffles (from a pancake flour mix milled in their barn for market distribution). Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

The COPC is run through volunteers. We assumed the most active farmers in the organization might be among the most dynamic farmers in PEI, so we reached out to their chief officers. COPC President Brian Mackay and his wife Kathy own and operate Crystal Green Farms located in Bedeque, PEI. Vice President Sally Bernard from nearby Freetown, co-manages a local Organic Grainery, and is the primary force behind raising livestock at Barnyard Organics. We weren’t disappointed. As characteristically warm and friendly as other islanders, they both welcomed us to stop by, meet their families, and learn about their operations.

Mark Bernard makes a point about commercial versus organic feedstock. Mark is from Freetown, PEI, and along with his wife Sally converted his traditional family farm in 2002 into a Certified Organic production (primarily as a financial consideration). As their soil management practices improved and they witnessed land and nature respond positively to their organic practices, they started taking organic more seriously. They’ve never looked back. Sally co-manages the expanding Organic Grainery, and together they operate  Barnyard Organics. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Sally, the youngest of nine from a cattle-ranching family, immediately impressed us with her wit and joy. She met Mark at the Agriculture University in Truro and told us she was immediately smitten. Together they work the land and raise four beautiful children. Sally has a special place in her heart for their three pigs (Dolly, Shania and Reba) and two dairy cows. They no longer raise chickens for market, but they keep quite a few hens for selling pasture raised eggs. Sally dislikes the local Sea Eagles, who will swoop down undetected, lift chickens in their claws and take them away to eat. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

COPC was established in 2002 and is composed of organic producers and like-minded consumers who wish to see organic agriculture grow within Prince Edward Island. They are a coalition of growers and not a certifying body. Instead, under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR), any food, seed, or animal feed that is labelled organic is regulated by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).

Brian MacCay explains how the multiple grinding and sifting options work on his new flour mill from Austria. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

This allows COPC to function as an advocate for organic growers. Their vision entails a vibrant organic industry in PEI, and they are committed to supporting: 1) Quality healthy food for Islanders, 2) A revitalized rural economy and culture, 3) Protecting and enhancing the environment, and 4) A fair income for organic farmers.

Mark and Sally standing next to their new “no-till” seeder. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.

This trip has caused us both to think a lot about the foods we eat and their intricate relationship to our changing climate. Clearly, there are wonderful upsides of knowing the farmer who grows your vegetables, grain, meat or fish. When you buy direct from the grower you can ask what he or she did to raise that food. But most of us don’t have that luxury.

However, it’s important we all know that, worldwide, the agriculture sector accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions and as much as 75% of the world’s freshwater use, an issue that has grown more severe in recent decades as more farms have become industrialized to increase productivity. Farmers globally receive roughly $683 billion in government subsidies each year and government aid is expected to more than triple by 2030. Yet roughly 87 percent of these funds currently support industrial farming practices (mainly in the developed world) that harm the environment and human health. They also disproportionately help large corporations at the expense of smaller farmers and make food more expensive for millions of people. These are findings of a new UN report calling for repurposing damaging incentives to achieve more of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and realize the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.

The most problematic supports are those tied to the production of specific commodities like corn, soy, or beef, said the study's authors. These funds encourage farmers to grow fewer crops and boost their yield with fertilizers, pesticides and other environmentally harmful technologies. Beyond this approach's environmental impact, the industrial production of a few commodities can make them unnaturally cheap while driving up the price of other, more nutritious foods. For instance, in many developed countries, industrial farms growing major commodity crops such as corn and soy, receive billions to help them stay afloat. Yet, as was stated earlier in this post, smaller-scale, more diverse and sustainable farms - who pollute and use water in significantly smaller quantities - tend to receive minimal or no government support at all.

Michael Rossy is a well-known, organic farmer from near Montreal (Runaway Creek Farm in Arundel), who retired as a “hobby” farmer on a lovely farmstead and B&B called Heart and Soul, about 30 kilometers south of North Point in Highway 12. An innovator all his life, Michael currently pushes the envelope by growing and selling - among other unusual things - Asian Pears, Asian Pear Melons and Gojiberries. He enjoys showing locals that anything is possible with great soil, and tender loving care. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

…If we truly want a sustainable food future, we have to stop looking at food as capital and start looking at long-term land restoration projects, creating healthier soils, and creating more localized growth of food and food sharing that isn't out to make a buck, said Sarah Dunigan, host of the food-focused podcast Anthrodish, as quoted in Canada’s excellent Climate Change newsletter, the National Observer.

In other words, we need to change our values.

Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to this blog, so you can follow our next biking trip later in the fall.

All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post authors.

These buildings were on the pier at a small fishing village named Darnley near Rustico. The photo is a favorite of Jenny’s. Photo by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.

Hauling Bees, Growing Soil; Biking the Dakotas

Gabe Brown shows us a map of his farm. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. If you want to make major changes, change how you SEE things.

Don Campbell (as quoted by Gabe Brown in his book Dirt to Soil)

When I began long-distance bike touring six years ago I was enthralled by the sense of freedom it offered; I learned how to carry very little to meet essential needs, I relished the sensuality of riding as fast as I dared down a hill with the wind to my back, I experienced deep satisfaction in conquering long uphill slopes, even while riding directly into a headwind. Those very simple experiences - the rush of freedom, the pride of accomplishment - made touring on a bicycle worthwhile. Beauty, however, was a generalized experience. Mountains, lakes, rivers, clouds, rain and rainbows caught my eye, while most small things went unnoticed. A small town boy turned long ago into a city slicker, I was a “big picture” observer. If it was dramatic, I was likely to appreciate it. Most small things went unnoticed, and my curiosity was limited. I was content to not know the particulars of a landscape or what was growing in a field unless I could recognize what I was looking at without much effort. Yet, my experiential palette broadened as I continued to cycle, and my observations began to sharpen. So did my curiosity.

Horses in a field near Lake Oahu (the Missouri River) north of Mobridge, SD. Photo by Michael Chase.

At about the same time, Jenny Hershey started joining me on biking adventures, and it wasn’t long before we began to recognize how many different things we each see in the same landscapes. Jenny - as a visual artist - is drawn to detail, and her observations fueled my curiosity even more. I began to appreciate that no matter where I am, there is more to observe in any landscape than I can ever fully digest. I am not discouraged by that perception; rather it is an incentive to stay with it, to see (and potentially understand) all I possibly can before that day arrives when I am no longer able to lift my leg over a bike seat. And there is continual progress; I see and learn more every day. My skill as an observer is growing. I think Jenny would say the same about herself.

The Missouri River from Standing Rock Reservation. We cycled the entire length of the Reservation on Highway 1806 and were deeply impressed with the beauty of the environment. At one point near Fort Yates, a woman waved Jenny over to point out the Sitting Bull Sacred Horses on a hill. An omen of good luck for those who see them, these wild horses are regarded as descendants of Sitting Bull’s horses. Photo by Michael Chase.

Climate change is both the biggest conundrum humans have ever faced, and simultaneously the ultimate challenge to our observational capacities. It is the result of millions and millions of small things that humans do. Most of those things can be seen in small measure by observant people, yet many human actions are at a scale beyond that which is perceptible to individuals. One housing development becomes many and hundreds of acres are lost to food cultivation, an oil derrick becomes thousands strewn across a vast region, a tanker truck becomes hundreds of miles of pipelines, a bare field in the wind becomes tons of lost topsoil, an application of synthetic fertilizer on crops becomes ruined waterways and destroyed municipal water systems, an application of pesticide on crops kills insect pests and simultaneously their beneficial predators - including the honeybees the same crops rely on for pollination.

Wind erosion on a conventionally tilled field in South Dakota. Photo by Michael Chase.

Small things become big things. All these things happen right in front of us, day after day after day, and many of us fail to notice them or their consequences until it’s too late. Some people do notice, however. Proverbial canaries in a coal mine, some are well known and in the news a lot, such as climate scientists Michael Mann or Katherine Heyhoe, or environmental activists Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibbon or the Standing Rock Water Protectors.

An inflow into Lake Oahe just south of the Cannonball River in South Dakota, where the Standing Rock protests of 2016 took place. Water Protectors have tried to protect groundwater sources from the probability of pollution, which in turn protects soil that nurtures healthy plants that feed bees and other pollinating insects. Although they were successful in getting the Obama administration to cancel the DAPL pipeline, Trump immediately approved it. Oil now flows under Lake Oahe and the pristine nature of this region is still under threat, yet, there is hope among Standing Rock residents that the Biden Administration will reverse Trump’s action and halt the flow of oil. Photo by Michael Chase.

Others don’t seek attention but attract it anyway by virtue of what they do, or how they see. John Miller is one of those people, as is Gabe Brown. While these two men (who are the primary subjects of this blog post) may be unlikely allies, they share a deep concern for the future, a love for the land, and a deep faith in nature as the greatest role model and teacher for agricultural practices.

We met Mylene, the town historian of Enderlin, North Dakota, about 70 miles west of Fargo, the day before we got to Gackle. She greeted us in her bright green pant suit and shared with us the history of why this town was more diverse (in its European ancestry) than most other North Dakota towns. This says something about diversity in North Dakota, since the 2010 census indicates Enderlin is 98.6% White, 2.4% Hispanic, 0.2% African American, 0.8% Native American, 0.1% Asian, and 0.2% from two or more races. When asked, she said the population was exactly 884 - unless someone she didn’t know about had died the night before. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

This post is a story of our interactions with these remarkable people as we cycled west from St Cloud, MN, to Bismarck, ND, down the Missouri River (aka, Lake Oahe) to Pierre, SD, and back east to St Cloud, MN, in May 2021.

——————

Gackle, ND, is the only stop along the 110 miles between Enderlin and Napoleon, ND, on the Adventure Cycling Association “Northern Tier” route through North Dakota. Although Gackle has a bar and a Tasteefreeze, there are no motels. However, we weren’t worried. We had learned from the ACA map there is a wonderful place for cyclists to stay called the Honey Hub. Located in the back of a split-level ranch house that sits empty for 9 months each year, the makeshift bedroom and bathroom also features a hot plate and refrigerator stuffed with drinks. The guestbook revealed no one had stayed there since late summer of 2020 (apparently, only the most intrepid of touring fanatics biked the iconic Northern Tier during the pandemic).

Jenny and I were greeted in the front yard of the Honey Hub by John Miller, the father of Jason Miller. Jason owns the house (and now, with a partner, the Miller Honey Farm) but lives in California most of the time. John is the colorful protagonist of The Beekeepers Lament by Hanna Nordhaus. We had no idea who we were talking to as we unpacked our gear, although it didn’t take us long to figure out John Miller is an unusual man. There were clues all around us: a stack of Hanna’s books for sale, a large display of honeystinger cycling treats and other forms of honey swag. “It is called the Honey Hub after all,” I told myself.

Miller Honey Farm created a winter home for their bees in a climate-controlled warehouse lit with infrared lighting that helps keep the bees dormant. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

I grabbed a copy of The Beekeepers Lament before we ambled over to the nearby Tasteefreeze for dinner, and read the book out loud to Jenny while we waited for some astonishingly good cod sandwiches. Our education was rapid, and we were transfixed. Turns out we had a complete misconception about how modern commercial beekeeping works. (It’s funny how something that seems so obvious after the fact, isn’t so obvious beforehand.)

As we thought, most beekeepers own just a few hives, and typically raise bees as a hobby. Some make extra money by selling honey, pollen, and beeswax. Commercial beekeepers, on the other hand, are responsible for thousands of hives and millions of bees. These colonies produce large amounts of honey and related products for profit, and are the primary means of large-scale agricultural pollination. Commercial beekeepers are distinct to the developed world; globally only about 5% of beekeepers run commercial operations, mainly in northern latitudes and Australia where industrial agriculture flourishes, and where (sadly) very few bees remain in the wild. Beekeepers elsewhere keep a much small number of hives in countries where farms are smaller and more diverse. That said, commercial beekeepers are responsible for as much as 60% of the world’s honey crop. Interestingly, the production, importing and packing of honey generates 22,000 jobs in the US, about half the amount of the total jobs created by the US coal industry.

Extra beehive pallets line the wall in the Miller Honey winter storage facility in Gackle, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.

As we had expected, the Miller Honey Farm sells the honey their bees make. They normally ship their honey to a major supplier in Lancaster, PA. But honey and beeswax-related products aren’t their most important activities. Like the 1200 other commercial beekeepers across the United States, John (now in charge of the Modesto pollination region) and Miller Honey Farm essentially “rents” their bees out to different growers over the season for pollination services. And also like many other US beekeepers, their year begins in the almond groves of the California Central Valley.

Every year in January and February the world’s greatest pollination event takes place in the valley. Over 2 million hives from around the US are put on flatbeds (at least 2,600 truckloads of those bees come from outside California) to pollinate more than 1 million acres of almond orchards. That includes Miller Honey Farm hives. Before John retired and took a back seat in the company he owned, he used to transport his hives from Newcastle, California, where he once owned a ranch. Now the farm winters their entire colony in their climate-controlled warehouse in Gackle over 1500 miles from California’s Central Valley.

Barrels for transporting honey line a wall at the Miller Honey plant in Gackle, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.

John’s hives stay in the California almond orchards until the growers no longer need them - usually mid to late March, when he takes them away to pollinate another crop. Pollination is a critical part of growing almonds, so removing hives too early can result in reduced yields. Keeping them too long can delay Miller Honey’s commitments to other growers, resulting in risks for honey bees to find alternative food sources when the almond bloom is over - or worse yet - subjecting the bees to pesticides when the almond growers start spraying. Some beekeepers believe that pesticides are responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), while others blame an invasive mite known as Varroa destructor. We got the impression that John Miller is agnostic about the subject of CCD as a persistent issue. …He once told Hanna Nordhaus the primary reason for massive bee collapse is PPM (piss poor management) by beekeepers.

Miller Honey bees placed in a field near Napoleon, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.

That may be true for some. But while modern industrial agriculture is the hand that feeds him, John is not the greatest fan. He works closely with the Honeybee Health Coalition, and is on the Board of Bee Informed. More than once he mentioned to us that regenerative agricultural practices would considerably help his bees. He even gave us bumper stickers that say: Farmers Feed Bees. For bees, greater diversity in available plant life makes for healthier bees and richer honey. Monoculture - a primary feature of modern conventional industrial agriculture - is a definite buzzkill for bees and their honey. Pun intended.

John Miller and Jenny Hershey in the Miller Honey winter bee storage facility in Gecko, ND. The light is infrared and won’t disturb resting bees. Photo by Michael Chase.

Besides, trucking bees around is no fun. I can’t imagine a beekeeper who wouldn’t be excited by placing bees in an environment so plant-rich he or she would never need to move them. The payoff would be considerable. One could even say that bees feed farmers.

As Hanna Nordhaus writes in The Beekeepers Lament: Farmers depend on honey bees to pollinate ninety different fruits and vegetables, from almonds to lettuce to cranberries to blueberries to canola—nearly $15 billion worth of crops a year. Although wind and wild insects pollinate some plants on a small scale, only bees promise the levels of production needed to meet the needs of the nation’s grocery shoppers. Like every aspect of American agriculture, beekeeping has, by necessity, joined the global economy of scale. Bees are pollination machines, and many of America’s farmers need them just as much as they need their tractors, threshers, and combines. For problems with water, labor, pest control, and soil quality, there are irrigation systems, big machines, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Today the biggest factor limiting the amount of produce grown is, for many crops, the number of bees available.

We saw this placard outside of Pierre, SD, at the Oahe Downstream State Recreation Area. Photo by Michael Chase.

Indeed, more pollinators (in the form of bees) are required if ever greater yields are the goal - especially if the type of agriculture practiced is fundamentally antithetical to the well-being of bees. And that is the conventional agricultural model. An unrelenting focus on yields has been the primary driver of industrial agriculture for decades, without regard to the health of the resources required to produce it. What if the predominant paradigm were to shift from chasing ever-higher yields to profits based on lower inputs based on increased soil health? Might we have happier farmers, cleaner water, richer soil, healthier consumers, less carbon in our atmosphere, and an abundance of bees? That, in essence, is the primary focus of regenerative agriculture.

———————

We organized this entire biking trip around a visit to Gabe Brown’s farm near Bismarck, ND. Our curiosity about regenerative agriculture had been heightened by our last bike trip through the Carolinas and our subsequent blog post on land trusts, where we learned about the potential importance of carbon sequestration through land use practices. So the opportunity to meet a successful farmer who is recognized as a leading practitioner of regenerative agriculture was a big lure. We weren’t disappointed. Nonetheless, much that happens on a biking adventure is based on serendipity, and our encounters with both John Miller and Gabe Brown were about as serendipitous as could be. Before we met him, we didn’t know John Miller existed, and although we intended to visit Gabe Brown’s Ranch, we really didn’t expect we’d get to meet the man himself. I don’t know if being able to spend precious time with each of these men was intervention by the gods or simply good luck. Gabe Brown told us he thinks people make their own luck; whatever the case, things definitely worked out for us.

The entrance to Gabe Brown’s Ranch, about 11 miles northeast of downtown Bismarck. Photo by Jenny Hershey.

As we rode up the long gravel driveway to the Brown Ranch, it looked empty. I wasn’t surprised. It was mid-May after all, and I expected every available hand to be out in the fields. Yet, I had made a bet with Jenny that someone would be there, selling many of the remarkable products Gabe and his son had figured out how to direct market over the years, and describes so well in his book Dirt to Soil. Obviously, I was naive about how the Brown Ranch markets its products. Roadside stands are not common on the plains, and it’s much easier to market through the internet. Gabe Brown’s outlet is called Nourished by Nature.

Gabe Brown’s farm looking west. Notice the perennial grassland and the size of the herd. Photo by Michael Chase

We arrived at a small ranch home, next to a barn and an equipment shed, and a few more buildings I didn’t recognize. In the distance near the shed, we saw a man get into a small off-road vehicle, and start driving toward us. Gabe Brown is a bit of a rock star because of his formidable presence in the movie Kiss the Ground (watchable on Netflix), and his ubiquitous presence on YouTube. We recognized him immediately. He was the only person around; we couldn’t believe our luck. Gabe seemed equally surprised. His first comment when he got close enough was, “That’s a first - I’ve never seen anyone arrive here on a bicycle before, much less a couple of older folks!” He was easygoing, but we were worried he might be really busy, so we quickly explained to him why we were there, and said we’d be happy looking around on our own. He replied, “I have a few minutes, so why not get out of the wind?” We went into a small building on the opposite side of the road - which, it turns out, is where Gabe Brown holds “soil health” seminars.

Perennial rangeland on Gabe Brown’s farm. Gabe is very thoughtful about where and how long he pastures his cattle so he can optimize the nutrient density and carbon content of his soil. Photo by Jenny Hershey.

Our conversation was quick and to the point. Gabe was a panelist on a Zoom call in about 20 minutes, so we covered a lot of territory quickly. My biggest takeaway was that while Gabe thinks the potential for sequestering carbon in soil through the use of cover crops, no-till seeding, and effective grazing of ruminating animals (his most profitable products), the science is still not clear on how to effectively measure the storage capacity of carbon from the atmosphere into soil. What is clear is that there are many other benefits of regenerative farming. As Gabe explains on his website: Our belief is that if we have healthy soil it will provide for clean air, clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people. Our soils are much more resilient than they once were. They now harbor billions of life forms that in fact “feed the food” we raise. Soils that are biologically active produce foods that are higher in vitamin and mineral content and when we eat these foods, these vitamins and minerals are passed on to us. These soils are also able to store more carbon and water which has a positive impact on the environment.

After a short while, Gabe handed over the keys to his off-road vehicle (apparently he thought if we were crazy enough to bike to his farm, we could certainly be able to drive his Polaris) and sent us off to see his pasturing chickens and his son’s iconic eggmobiles (described in Gabe’s book), where the Browns raise eggs and chickens, and integrate both into their soil development and management routine.

Chickens grazing in a section of field on Gabe’s land. When all the chickens are laying there is no need for fencing; the eggmobiles (where the chickens go to lay their eggs) are simply moved to another part of the field. The chickens don’t need to be fed, eggs are collected and sold, and the soil is naturally fertilized. Photo by Jenny Hershey.

A half hour later, he returned in a truck. Although Gabe had another Zoom call in an hour (we later learned it was with a major American retailer who is interested in supporting regenerative farmers by marketing their products), he wanted to show us more of his farm. We spent the next hour touring his remarkably beautiful perennial pastures and checking on his cows with him. We shared his delight as we saw some of the 11 new calves that had been born overnight. It was a wonderful way to spend an hour.

As a concept, regenerative agriculture aims to be more all-encompassing than or other types of agricultural practices, including organic. A recent article in Sustainable America lists five main principles that regenerative farmers agree upon: improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, aiding in carbon sequestration, incorporating humane treatment of livestock and farmworkers, and improving the overall larger ecosystem as a whole. These practices include:

• Incorporating crop rotation and cover cropping

• Increasing plant and crop diversity

• Practicing minimal or no-till seeding to prevent erosion and increase soil health

• Integrating managed grazing and pasturing of animals

One of the biggest potential benefits of regenerative agriculture is that it can help combat climate change. The hope is that regenerative agriculture’s strong focus on soil health and reduced tilling efforts will lead to more carbon being sequestered into healthy soil instead of being released into the atmosphere. However, many experts in addition to Gabe Brown agree: the science isn’t quite there to support the claims yet. Yet, whether regenerative agriculture ends up being a scientifically proven way to fight climate change or not, its methods still offer many benefits to the ecosystem, producers and consumers.

Gabe Brown relaxes on his no-till planter after explaining how it plants seed with minimal disruption to soil. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

Gabe Brown agrees, and it’s hard to imagine John Miller would disagree. The people at Understanding Ag, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (the NRCS is part of the USDA), and the Soil Health Academy also agree, as well as many more organizations that advocate for sustainable practices in modern agriculture. But the most stunning approval right now is bipartisan support coming from the federal government through the Growing Climate Solutions Act. This proposed legislation was reintroduced this April in the U.S. Senate by a large bipartisan group of senators, led by members of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Senators who are sponsoring the bill include 17 Democrats and 17 Republicans.

The bipartisanship toward this bill is almost stunning in our divided politics, and its potential should not be underestimated. In addition, more than 60 agriculture groups and many environmental organizations back the bill (but not all; some have a bad taste in their mouths because of previous problems with other voluntary carbon markets). As it is currently written, this bill will create a certification program at USDA to provide technical assistance for farmers and forest owners to enroll in a carbon-credit market. The USDA will provide guidelines to farmers on how to qualify for carbon-credit programs, and the carbon-credit program will then become "USDA certified." The legislation comes as an array of companies have started enrolling farmers in carbon sequestration programs to quantify and pay for farming practices that minimize tillage and increase organic matter in the soil.

Clearly, we have a lot more to learn about how to most effectively incentivize the agricultural sector to manage soil better, and policymakers must get this right. Yet, there is no time to waste and the potential for doing good is enormous. Let’s not forget: If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. If you want to make major changes, change how you SEE things.

In closing, I would like to add that Resources for the Future is one of my favorite go-to organizations for current information on large-scale climate solutions. Here’s what they have to say about carbon sequestration and storage in the land. Time will tell what we can accomplish. In the meantime, keep noticing the small stuff. It adds up.

Walter, a retired railroad engineer, is the Enderlin, ND, Friendly Tavern’’s Wheel of Fortune champion. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. Follow our next biking trip this July (while places are still under consideration, land use and carbon sequestration will be likely subjects).

All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.

Jenny Hershey took this photo in South Dakota, and she really wanted me to add it to this post because she likes it so much. I do too.

A Journey into Land Use; Biking the Carolinas

Calvin is from from Bennettsville SC. A forklift operator for Marley Engineered Products, he was given incentives and a bonus to work through the Covid pandemic. He has two kids and somehow managed to never miss a day of work, although his wife was furloughed. We met him on his way to his mailbox. He teasingly joked he was hoping for a stimulus check. …and then he said he’d been watching for it in his checking account…

Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

Leonard Bernstein

We started our latest cycling trip in Chapel Hill, where Jenny’s son Sam lives with his family. Our plan was simple enough: we would bike to Savannah and back, and then drive back to New York City in time for our second Covid vaccination shot in late March. This was our first tour since the onset of the pandemic without a car, and like many of the “best laid plans of mice and men,” it didn’t go quite as we had expected. Who would have thought that a jumble of discarded wire could work its way into a derailer and rip off a speed sensor? Yet, that’s what happened to Jenny as we turned off a rather bucolic South Carolina road onto the notorious Highway 17. Because of aging infrastructure and an abundance of coastal marshland, this is essentially the only road that connects Savannah and Charleston with the sandhills to the north. To complicate matters, route 17 is recklessly identified as a cycling route on the East Coast Greenway.

Marshland near Charleston, SC

It is also the most dangerous highway that Jenny and I have ever biked on. Where there is a shoulder (which is rare), this highly trafficked four lane highway offers cyclists lots of fast moving traffic, a customary South Carolina rumble strip, lots of loose gravel and stunningly challenging detritus. We saw the bundle of wire too late to avoid it. I went over it first, and my bike tossed the bundle into the air. Jenny swerved, but alas, it caught her rear wheel on its way down. Her bike seized immediately. Not good, but thankfully she didn’t crash.

Our “fully loaded” Trek Crossrip e-bikes parked on a boardwalk near the beach on Sullivan Island in Charleston.

We both ride Trek Crossrip pedal assist e-bikes that increase our hourly touring speed by 3-5 miles/hour. This makes riding 70 miles a day on average a bit easier and faster, yet still physically challenging. But these extraordinary machines also have their downsides. After carefully disentangling and cutting out multiple strands of wire wound around the cassette, derailer, rear wheel and frame of Jenny's bike, imagine our disappointment when we discovered the wire had somehow managed to tear off the speed sensor for the small motor in her crankcase. It wasn’t the end of our trip altogether. Although we doubted we’d find a Trek dealer with such a rare part in stock, Jenny was able to nurse her bike along even though the motor would cease to work from time to time when the torque increased. This made for painful uphill cycling. We were about 400 miles from our car. Getting home on the bike would be possible, but it was going to take some fortitude.

The Francis Marion National Forest on a mellow stretch of road off Route 41 north of Charleston. Formally established in the 1930’s, this forest covers approximately 259,000 acres. In 1989, the forest was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Hugo; only the young growth survived the storm and its aftermath. Today, most trees in the forest do not predate this hurricane.

A Great Egret flying over coastal marshland on the Isle of Palm Connector near Mount Pleasant, SC, southwest of the Francis Marion National Forest.

Jenny rose to the occasion, although it took us three days to reroute ourselves through Charleston and Mount Pleasant (where we found a bike shop that, predictably, didn’t have the part we needed). Please be forewarned; if you ever visit Charleston by bike, getting into or out of that extraordinarily charming and historic city is not fun. On the upside, there is talk by state and local officials of making both Savannah and Charleston more accessible to cyclists at some point in the not too distant future through “smart growth” planning.

Charleston is a spectacularly attractive town, and it seemed to be gently waking from a Covid induced slumber when we passed through. There were lots of tourists wandering the streets, horse drawn carriages carrying passengers, and numerous guides talking to small groups of masked up people. We ate outside at a well known local fish restaurant, Eli Hyman’s, run by a 4th generation Jewish businessman who told us that just a few blocks away we’d find the oldest continuously used temple in the United States,

Temple Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC. Founded in 1750, this temple is the cradle of reformed Judaism.

“Dumb growth” planning has irritated me for years. There are many roads in America where poor design fragments communities, destroys land unnecessarily, and makes walking or biking impossible. Humans have walked everywhere for thousands of years, yet in recent decades transportation planners have built many roads that can be navigated only in a functioning motorized vehicle. It's as if planners have acquired dementia about our capacity to ambulate. Where are the sidewalks or shoulders? God forbid that someone’s car should break down, and they would have to walk to the nearest gas station for help. Try ambulating by foot, in a wheelchair, or on a bike to the nearest mall next to a freeway in your community, and you’ll know what I mean. You're likely to be surprised at how terrorizing such a trip can be.

A typical road in South Carolina. While North Carolina has skinny or nonexistent shoulders, South Carolina has a terrible practice of adding rumble strips to their very narrow or nonexistent shoulders (at extra cost to taxpayers)! This might be helpful to the occasional driver, but it also forces cyclists onto very busy roads. I’d wager that for every sleepy or drunk driver whose life is saved, several cyclists are killed. This is so dangerous that the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) runs an entire advocacy program focused solely on redesigning and/or eradicating rumble strips. You can read about it here.

Mr Patel has owned the Colonial Inn in Andrews, SC, since he immigrated from India 41 years ago. He survived Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which devastated his town and blew off his motel sign. Mercifully, his motel was spared but his parking lot was filled with debris, including a few roofs from neighboring homes. Temporary power was restored after 4 days, and the motel prospered as it filled up with utility workers from all over the state. Currently Mr. Patel benefits when the nearby paper mill at Georgetown shuts down annually for maintenance because he houses all the workers.

Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

In much of America, where clumps of population are mixed with cropland, pastureland and forests, it can be difficult to grasp the identity of a given “place.” That’s what Jenny and I experienced as we cycled south from Chapel Hill. After we passed a lovely (man made) reservoir on a narrow, shoulder-less, highly trafficked road and some seemingly affluent horse farms, much of the landscape became chaotic - a house here and there, a recently tilled dirt-exposed field, junked cars, abandoned appliances, a decaying shed and house, a few acres of lumpy clear-cut timber with trunks and branches strewn every which-way, a field of sod, a thin stand of trees, a gravel field of unused septic tanks, a half acre of forest, a driveway to nowhere, a parking lot, an abandoned industrial shed, a pile of tires, a Dollar General, enormous stacks of pipelines, a Family Dollar, a quaint house with a yard full of tchotchkes, a few trees, a large field revealing last year’s cotton crop.

It was dizzying to take it all in, and even harder to know if there was anything at all sustainable about what we were looking at. Most likely not, we thought. And I mused on one of my obsessions - the persistent degradation of our treasured American landscape. It all seemed so ….disorganized. I really couldn’t get my mind around all that I was noticing. It was a crazy landscape, a random piecemeal (de)construction with no regard for itself. It reminded me of a frog in a slowly boiling pot who fails to notice the water is slowly heating up until it’s too late to do anything about it. There was persistent decay all around us, and no one seemed to care. But then, what do I know? As a small-city Midwesterner I can probably identify five to seven agricultural crops, and Jenny as an urbanite, even fewer. I am only now recognizing the difference between timberlands and forest. The sad fact is I know very little about rural landscapes beyond what I have come to appreciate in our magnificent national parks. But protected public land is very different from the vast stores of private land that occupies most of our landscape. And this was private land in a gentle rural landscape that had once been vast forests of Longleaf Pines nestled among swamp, marsh, bayou, streams, rivers and lakes. It is now small patches of forest, timberland, cropland and pasture, random houses and housing tracts, abandoned lots, industrial products, and an abundance of intentional and uninspired human detritus.

After explaining the value of winter wheat as a harvestable cover crop, the 6th generation farmer Keith Williamson tells us about the Pee Dee Land Trust (PDLT) which has partnered with private landowners throughout the Pee Dee River watershed (second in size on the eastern seaboard to the Delaware River watershed) to permanently protect over 32,000 acres of land. Over 80% of conservation easements held by PDLT are working farms and forests clustered mainly along waterways.

Did you know there are approximately 5 times more farmers over 65 years of age than there are farmers under 35?

Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

Talking to Keith made our day. We saw him standing next to his car looking over a field that we had just been wondering about, so we pulled off on the grass (because there was no shoulder on the road) on the opposite side of the road, and yelled in our nasalized New York City and Midwest accents to get his attention. Keith didn’t seem the least bit phased by the bikes, or our car dodging as we crossed the busy road on foot all the while peppering him with questions. He patiently answered us in his gentle South Carolina drawl that we were looking at winter wheat, a cover crop on a field that would be soybeans in a few months. “It’s a complimentary process. The wheat takes up the nitrogen the soy puts down,” he explained. Legumes add nitrous oxide to the soil, which then enters the atmosphere through erosion or when the field is tilled. We learned later that nitrogen is a potent greenhouse gas, so using cover a crop like winter wheat to reduce nitrogen levels has a beneficial impact on climate change, as well as helping soil health. As we talked more, we learned about the Pee Dee Land Trust, which helped Keith and other members of his family to protect 3,000 acres of family land.

At one time most of the southeast was covered in Longleaf Pine forest. Naturally fire resistant, these superb trees would grow quite tall and create savanna-like conditions underneath, which would be routinely burned off, either by natural causes or intentionally by indigenous people. Now burning is almost always intentional. This relatively young forest was recently burned off.

Land trusts are an important tool for protecting land from development, preserving it for valuable forests, timberland and agricultural uses that encourages smart rural growth, improves water quality and ensures natural carbon storage and sequestration. For example, forests alone in the US store 59 billion metric tons of carbon in trees, roots, soils and forest products, and sequester 14% of the country's CO2 emissions. Agricultural crops are not quite as storage intensive due to their shorter life cycles, but their carbon storage and sequestration properties can be significant.

Land is typically conserved by outright purchase into a trust, or less expensively, by “conservation easement,” a deeded agreement with a Land Trust by the owner to protect a property. Conservation easements are irrevocable and apply to the present and all future owners of the land. As with other real property interests, a conservation easement is recorded in local land records and becomes a part of the chain of title for the property, permanently protecting the land from development.

An intentional burn off seen at a distance.

Because approximately 9000 acres a day of farmland and forests in the US are lost to commercial and residential developers, land trust programs provide enormous public benefits. Conservation easements alone already protect an estimated 50 million acres of natural habitat in this country, and each year another 2 million acres are added to that total. Since 1982, the US has lost over 25 million acres of agricultural land to development, while global population and carbon emission levels have almost doubled. I couldn’t find a figure for how much farmland we have left in the US (I’m sure the USDA knows), but I did learn we currently have about 450 million acres of forestland in the US under threat of development, which is about 60% of our remaining forests. According to a study cited by the American Farmland Trust, land that is converted to other uses from its natural habitat (including agricultural land) emits greenhouse gas emissions at rates 50-70 times greater than had it remained undeveloped. Preserving our land is essential if we are going to reach net zero by 2050.

Flood damage on a road near McColl, SC

This protection doesn't come without a price tag, however. Easements are incentivized through tax credits or property tax reductions, so taxpayers effectively pay private citizens not to sell their land to developers at a higher price in order to benefit the greater good. (Frankly, that strikes me as analogous to the failure of capitalism to externalize the social costs of carbon pollution, but that’s a subject for another blog post.)

Yet, the effort is essential. Soil stores two to three times more carbon than the atmosphere and up to four times the amount of carbon stored in the vegetation on land. Since the advent of modern agriculture (till and fertilize; wash, rinse and repeat) soil health has degraded considerably and we have lost much of our topsoil to erosion, including more than half of the organic carbon originally stored in US soils. With nearly 400 million acres of cropland alone, we have an enormous opportunity to use “regenerative” farming methods to rebuild organic carbon in our soil, sequester atmospheric carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, soils need healthy plant life on them to be able to accomplish this. How we manage carbon stocks on our land - whether it’s forest, timberland, cropland or pastureland - will have a significant impact on climate change over the coming decades. Climate activists, policy makers, and most importantly farmers, need to understand that how we use our land (and in particular, how we grow our food), are every bit as important to our collective efforts to decarbonize as transforming our energy system.

A field of turnip, another popular cover crop in regenerative agriculture.

Rural communities face a host of challenges - including changing demographics, lack of economic growth, community health and preservation, and a strong need for environmental protection. In addition, rural communities need workforce development, access to broadband, and effective transportation in their planning efforts. Smart growth strategies can help communities guide development while protecting working lands and preserving rural character. There are an increasing number of great organizations and online mapping tools for learning more about these topics. I list some of them below, especially those that I used to prepare this blog.

Farmland Information Center

Open Space Institute

The Land Trust Alliance

The Nature Conservancy

American Forests

Lucky, a 74 year old ex jockey from Virginia, runs a 16 acre horse boarding farm in North Carolina. He believes everyone can find a job doing something even if they don't like it, and he doesn’t like the Covid stimulus package. He earned his way up “galloping” horses (Secretariat was his most famous) when he was young. He got paid $3.00 a run. He laughed as we biked away, just after we encouraged him to get a Covid vaccine. We gathered he wasn't interested.

Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.

And finally, the Biden administration’s recently-announced plan to address climate change, which includes provisions to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and waters by the year 2030, is definitely worth attention.

Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. Follow our next biking trip from central Wisconsin into the Dakotas this coming May, 2021.

All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.