Headwaters Magazine - Fall 2019

HEADWATERS The University of Vermont’s Environmental Publication

Art by Katelyn Lipton

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Contents Flowers in the Clouds

By Marissa Swartley | Page 4 Plot by Plot, Row by Row: Growing Burlington Gardens for All

By Corinne Hill-James | Page 6 Divestment and Power at UVM

By Chris Gish & Adela Miller | Page 9 A Sinking City and its Push for Resilience

By Emmett Gartner | Page 11 Plum Island

By Emma Gimbrere | Page 15 “Learning All The Bad Things All At Once”: Examining Diverse Approaches to Climate Education at UVM

By Chris Gish | Page 16 I Grew Up On A Mountain

By Liza Bryan | Page 19 Soundscape of the Blue

By Eleanor Duva | Page 21 Plasticizers

By Alexis Martinez | Page 23 Grape Series

By Katelyn Lipton | Page 25 What They Run From: Indian Child Runaways and the Green Revolution

By Sunny Nagpaul | Page 26 The Lumber Yard

By Matty King | Page 29 The Roots of Mitigation: Assessing Carbon Credits Feasibility for Vermont Landowners

By Noah Stommel | Page 31 Field Notes

By Reese Green | Page 33 Crisis in the Amazon: Examining the plight of one of the Earth’s most essential resources

By Deniz Dutton | Page 35 From Farm to Forest: Models for adaptive land management

By Jill Reynolds | Page 38 Headwaters Magazine 2

Dear Reader, Thank you for picking up this magazine!

In the tenth week of every semester, we send off the final PDF proof of our magazine to Vantage Press on North Street. The weekend before, our team commandeers a piece of the library and gets working. Over 48 glorious hours, designers, editors, and writers flit between Google docs and InDesign files, typing and sketching and creating a final work so thoughtful and beautiful that in my sleep-deprived state, I think I might like to get it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

While fear of climate change remains near inescapable, the days I work alongside the people that run this magazine buoy me. Every contributor is an unpaid volunteer. They piece together the free scraps of their packed days to puzzle out the mechanisms behind environmental problems — learning to communicate those complexities to improve our collective understanding, they inch us toward resolution, stability, and justice.

Our cover depicts the climate crisis as a simple board game. As you move along the board, your spinner-dictated moves can either bring you towards the ever-elusive finish line of an ecologically and socially stable future, or keep you suspended in a time of fracking, floods, and forest fires.

Beyond this edition’s cover, we explore the complex ills of climate change — the costly predicament of flooding in coastal Annapolis, MD, the political pressures behind the ongoing Amazonian forest fires, and some of the individuals and systems that have blocked divestment at UVM for more than a decade.

Still, we pivot towards the hopeful viability of carbon credits in Vermont, tales of sustainable land management from around the globe, and mitigation efforts in that same imperiled Maryland city.

This mag grows from the effort of our writers, editors, designers, and those who work on the parts of the magazine you may not hold in your hands — our business team, UVM’s Environmental Program, the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, our advisor Josh Brown, and UVM’s Student Government Association. As we all wrestle the changing climate, we hope the care and energy within each of these pages help to propel you onward.

Read on!

With love,

Julia Bailey-Wells University of Vermont ‘20 Editor-in-Chief of Headwaters Magazine

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Masthead Editor-in-Chief Julia Bailey-Wells Managing Editor Emmett Gartner Managing Designers Katelyn Lipton Gretchen Saveson Managing Editors Maya Bostwick Meryl Braconnier Emmett Gartner Chris Gish Avery Lentini Gillian Natanagara Lindsey Stinson Designers Natalie Barton Eileen Brickell Braden DeForge Eleanor Duva Rye Fought Alexis Martinez Adela Miller Treasurer Sydney Decker Business Associates Rebecca Goldstein Olivia Hall Danny Holman Grace Mungenast Jill Reynolds Want to see your writing or art in the Spring 2020 edition? Submit a 100 word pitch outlining your intended topic and approach to uvmheadwaters@gmail.com by Friday, January 24th at midnight. uvmheadwaters.org uvmheadwaters@gmail.com Find us @uvmheadwaters on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Cover: Art by Katelyn Lipton All images unless otherwise noted courtesy of wikimedia commons Copyright © 2019 Headwaters Magazine This magazine was printed on the traditional land of the Abenaki People

Flowers in the Clouds

By Marissa Swartley

The White Mountains of New Hampshire are unforgiving and dangerous — many consider them the most brutal portion of the Appalachian Trail. The mountains’ peaks are composed of rough granite that stretch over 80 miles along the northeastern United States. There are no impressive hardwoods or protective evergreens for the last mile of the hike to the top of Mount Washington, the tallest of these peaks. Leaving the canopy behind, one ascends through the Krummholz — German for “crooked wood” — which is composed of short, subalpine conifers distorted by harsh winds. Above the treeline, one must pay closer attention to appreciate the indistinct, low-lying ecosystem.

Shrubs and lichens cling to the cragged rock. Aside from wind whispering across the trail, the scuff of hiking boots, and the occasional distant thunderstorm, silence dominates the air between Mount Washington and Mount Monroe.

The Whites are home to some of the world’s harshest weather conditions. On Mount Washington’s summit, which towers above the rest at 6,288 feet, wind speeds have reached 231 mph, the highest surface wind speed ever observed first-hand as recorded by the Mount Washington Observatory. The scope of visibility is often less than ten feet ahead when traveling in the clouds, and precipitation in all its forms — massive rain drops, gumdrop-sized hail, or impenetrable snow — comes barreling from the upper stratosphere in all directions. Despite this seemingly inhospitable ecosystem, life persists in the most unlikely places, and the resilient alpine flora covering these peaks exemplify a unique beauty.

The first to bloom when spring bursts through the doors and the last to say farewell, is dwarf cinquefoil.

Dwarf cinquefoil, or Potentilla canadensis, is a species of flora whose dainty petals appear to have a soft yellow glow reminiscent of fireflies. Ninety-nine percent of this species can be found on the White Mountains. Each flower

Lapland Rosebay

is accompanied by an abundance of soft textured leaves. In late May, dwarf cinquefoil welcomes the elegant unfolding of lapland rosebay and the bursting buds of bog bilberry.

Rosebay is unordered, colorful, and detailed, the magenta frill-like flowers drooping next to the plump fruit of bog bilberry.

By the time summer sneaks up, the snow patches have retreated, leaving only thin strips draped over the mountaintops like tinsel on an evergreen. The wind still feels angry against a brave explorer’s exposed skin, but by noon, the sun softens its bite. The remaining flowers bud, burst, and bloom in a frenzy. Mountain Cranberry, diapensia, azalea, and avens form a mosaic of pinks, reds,

Dwarf Cinquefoil

yellows, and whites. Diapensia flowers carpet the mountaintops, their white petals spotting the alpine surface like a summer snow. The gold stamens of the mountain avens poke out from the patch like small suns bursting at the much-welcome warmth. Mountain cranberry blossoms resemble small pink teacups nestled in glossy leaflets, exhibiting gentle poise.

The delicate flowers seems to face me in curiosity as I amble mindfully down the trail, being careful not to tread on their fragile bodies. To be so delicate but resilient to extreme weather is just another wonder of alpine flora.

The impending possibility of these species becoming collateral damage of climate change becomes increasingly likely.

Climate change forces flora to bloom two days earlier in

Art by Katelyn Lipton Headwaters Magazine 4

Mountain Cranberry

the White Mountains than the recorded average phenological periods. To bloom late by a mere few days is more than disappointing, but builds up to a complete cascade of interdependencies between organisms. This unique ecosystem that fosters biodiversity and endemic species is not equipped to adapt as quickly as the climate is changing.

The alpine flora contribute to a mountain’s complexity and purpose by not only adding beauty but also by attracting organisms such as butterflies like the White Mountain arctic butterfly and the White Mountain fritillary, which are both endemic to the alpine zone in the Whites. Although researchers have studied alpine vegetation for its apparent resilience to extreme weather conditions, the fluctuating climate has had serious impacts on the flora, as well as the pollinators that depend on a somewhat consistent flowering period. Without proper pollination, flower populations will dwindle, leaving the landscape dominated by sparse vegetation and granite.

The alpine zone is invaluable to not only the flora and fauna inhabitants, but also to the state in which these mountains reside.

People from all over the globe seek to experience the Whites through recreation, and the preservation of these unique landscapes is dependent upon policy action and enforcement. New Hampshire expects around 3.5 million visitors bringing in almost two billion dollars in revenue over summer sessions, according NH Division of Travel and Tourism Development. Average temperatures are rising, the weather is volatile, and the plants are left in a state of confusion.

New Hampshire made national news this October for supporting a climate mitigation policy initiative targeting the state’s biggest carbon emitters. The policy would enforce a carbon pricing program on transportation, which contributes to more than 40 percent of New Hampshire’s total emissions output, according to New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services. As of now, New

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Hampshire’s policy makers are encouraging public input as they continue to formulate a more detailed framework. To tackle a threat as immense as climate change is daunting to say the least, and New Hampshire should be acknowledged for taking responsibility for its environmental impact. Yet, the true question is whether the state’s carbon solution is impactful on a larger scale, and whether global change will be enacted quickly enough to relieve the pressure climate change has inflicted on organisms like the alpine flora.

When July starts to roll into August, the vibrant and lively flora have started to prepare for a bittersweet concluding show. The buds have stopped bursting, the flowers have stopped blooming, and fruits have begun to drop. Colors are fading along with the warmth that pretended to stay. Every exhale produces a wispy cloud that disperses in seconds. The cool air and harsh wind support the notion that fall is encroaching, summer is retreating, and the valley is calling.

As I descend the mountain, somewhere along the way, I am no longer taller than the trees and the wind no longer makes me shiver. There is only a soft breeze accompanied by the song of a brown-capped chickadee hidden in the branches of a nearby balsam fir. I can no longer see the world laid out in front of me – just the soil at my feet. A bittersweet feeling of deep appreciation for the mountains mixed with traces of fear for the future of the alpine zone seems to add an impossible weight to my pack, causing me to clip my toes on the plunging granite staircases. I close my eyes, and I see the pinks, reds, yellows, and whites of petals dancing beside my feet. As I near the trailhead, the trees break, and my body slows. Parting with the mountain, I turn my back on the whispering trees and hold on to the hope that when I return, the Whites will be just as I left them. H

Bog Bilberry

PLOT BY PLOT, ROW BY ROW Growing Burlington’s Community Gardens for All

By Corinne Hill-James On a late August afternoon in the Old North End of Burlington, the air is saturated with the endless, rhythmic chatter of crickets. The padlocked chain-link fence is all that divides the garden from the busy, concrete world outside. Plots have become a tangled jungle of undefined greenery, control surrendered to nature’s own creativity.

Bean plants have surpassed the corrals of sticks and twine that once coaxed them into straight lines and tidy trellises.

Tomato plants tumble over the walls of their beds, fighting against the weight of someone’s forgotten salsa or spaghetti sauce. Gardens that were once neat rows of seedlings have become unconfined forests confusing weed with non-weed and decay with new growth.

The crickets fill the entire garden with their unwavering symphony as though it only belonged to them, each plot just another corner to fill with their persevering hum. But despite nature’s effort to reclaim these plots as the season comes to a close, the garden remains deeply human. For more than 1,400 gardeners, these spaces serve as a physical and emotional canvas for the expression of their personal, cultural, and ecological identities. Gardens, according to sociologist Hondagneu-Sotelo, “reflect prevailing social relations of power, culture, race, class, and gender” that are present in all other aspects of civic and social life. For Burlington, Vermont, once referred to as “The Community Garden Capital of the Country,” this reality is raising the question of how to balance the differing goals of all those who share these spaces.

At the Tommy Thompson Community Garden in the Intervale, Trudy Macy has tended her community garden plot since her husband passed away in 2001: “It’s helped me through grief and beyond.” Gardening, for her, is a way of honoring her husband’s memory, processing

loss, and carrying out her family’s tradition of growing fresh food. She remembers being asked as a child to go outside and pick lettuce from her family’s garden in New Jersey. From a young age, she learned the power and joy of producing her own food. With the gardening knowledge she gained growing up, as well as nearly 20 years of experimenting in her plot at the Tommy Thompson garden, Macy now produces more food than she knows what to do with. Despite this overabundance, it is clear that subsistence alone is not what motivates Trudy to spend her summers digging in the dirt.

Research points to the many benefits of community gardening beyond food production. Based on her masters research on community gardens in San Diego, Audrey Porcella highlights the “therapy” and “escape” of gardening as one of its strongest benefits. Gardens serve as a “sanctuary from the frenetic pace of public life, work, and competition,” explains sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, allowing gardeners to feel a sense of control by connecting with a small piece of nature.

Gardens do not provide an escape for everyone, says Burlington city land steward Dan Cahill. who acknowledges that the city’s community garden system still has work to do to make gardens welcoming for all. As the city’s land steward, Cahill is responsible for running the Burlington Area Community Gardens (BACG) program within the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. A major challenge he faces is carrying on the legacy of B.H. “Tommy” Thompson, who Cahill refers to as the “Johnny Appleseed” of community gardens. Thompson, an employee of the Garden Way Company, worked with the city and private landowners to secure 21 sites for community gardens across the city as part of a program called Gardens

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for All in the early 1970s. The belief that everyone should be able to enjoy the benefits of gardening drove Thompson: “though everyone presumably has the right to plant and harvest the fruits of the earth, there are millions of people who cannot enjoy the pleasure of working the soil,” he wrote. Thompson died in 1983, leaving it to the city to continue carrying out his mission of making gardening accessible to everyone. Now, the biggest challenge Cahill and his colleague Meghan O’Daniel face is balancing different cultures within the gardens. While community gardening offers a powerful opportunity for cross-cultural connection, he says, this dynamic is “not all warm and fuzzy.”

Trudy Macy wonders why a nearby plot in the Tommy Thompson garden is filled with a monocrop of corn — “who needs that much corn?” she asks.

As a designated refugee resettlement area, Burlington has welcomed thousands of New Americans into the city since the 1980s. According to a study conducted

by Kari A. Hartwig and Meghan Mason at St. Catherine University, refugee populations often have higher rates of depression than the surrounding population, having escaped some sort of trauma, hardship, or persecution in their home countries to find themselves suddenly relocated to a new, different culture.

Alicia Laramee, Program Specialist for New Farms for New Americans (NFNA) in Burlington, explains how community gardening allows many New Americans to find a sense of peace. “Gardening is just like riding a bike,” she says. Without having to worry about language or other cultural barriers, refugees can rely on memory to rebuild gardening experiences from their home countries. Cahill notes that since 2014, the percentage of New American gardeners in the Tommy Thompson garden has risen from seven percent to over 57 percent.

Unlike Macy, who intentionally turned to gardening for its therapeutic benefits, a lot of New Americans garden with the primary goal of feeding themselves and their families with culturally-relevant food. Laramee points out that for many New Americans, the idea of going to a grocery store to buy food is foreign. Community gardens offer a space for refugees to grow familiar food to which they might otherwise not have access. Because of this, a New American’s garden plot likely looks very different from the plot of a native-born gardener. Macy’s garden is a mix of dozens of different crops — kale and chard tower over rows of leeks, cucumbers and tomatoes compete for space, herbs crowd each other out year after year. She could buy any of this produce in a supermarket, but chooses to grow it herself instead. Many New Americans, on the other hand, grow crops in bulk and varieties from their home countries that aren’t otherwise available in Vermont.

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O’Daniel, Program Coordinator of the city’s garden system, explains that often, gardeners stay within their own communities at the gardens. Gardeners share surplus from their gardens, exchange advice, and admire one anothers’ plots. But due to language or other cultural barriers — or simply the comfort of likeness — native-born gardeners tend to separate New Americans and long-standing Burlington residents into their respective groups and talk to native-born gardeners, while foreign gardeners talk to foreign gardeners, leaving room for misunderstandings or false assumptions.

“Are people still going to think I’m doing bad things?” a New American gardener asked Cahill after a neighboring gardener suspected her of violating the BACG’s organic standards. The New American had been growing a variety of corn that is larger than typical corn in the United States, and she had, in fact, been using organic fertilizer given to her by University of Vermont’s Extensions Services. However, the other gardener, a long term Burlington resident, went to Cahill to report the possibility that the New American gardener was using synthetic fertilizer without consulting the gardener herself. The lack of personal communication gave the New American gardener a sense that white gardeners were suspicious of her.

One Somalian gardener describes how her family fills their freezer with their harvest at the end of the growing season so that they can eat African corn all winter. She learned how to garden from her father, who showed her how to make the most of a plot by layering corn, beans, squash, and tomatoes together. The corn field that Macy sees on the other side of the garden will be ground into cornmeal or frozen to feed a family all through the year.

And what she doesn’t see, underneath all the corn, are other crops growing in synergy.

“The corn field that Macy sees on the other side of the garden will be ground into cornmeal or frozen to feed a family all through the year. And what she doesn’t see, underneath all the corn, are other crops growing in synergy.”

The dramatic increase in New American participation in Burlington’s community gardens between 2014 and 2016 came as BACG began actively investing in the accessibility and inclusivity of its gardens. They began to “meet people where they’re at,” as Cahill put it. He and O’Daniel

collaborated with the Janet S. Munt Family Room and the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, two organizations that provide services to New Americans resettled to the Burlington Area. Together, they have worked to provide forms and interpreters to New Americans who were interested in the garden program and they encouraged garden site leaders to take steps to understand cultural differences taking place in the gardens.

Bonnie Hooper, a volunteer site leader at the BACG Winooski Valley Community Garden, appreciates the effort BACG has put into their relationship with New American gardeners and makes an effort herself to make the garden welcoming to everyone. “I greet people every time I visit,” she says. “I love hearing their stories. When I do orientations to the garden, I always encourage people to get to know each other.” This strong sense of community, though, wasn’t necessarily present at other gardens she’s worked in. Increasing diversity in the gardens through these recent accessibility efforts is great, says Cahill, but creating true inclusivity requires much more than just handing over plots.

Increasing access for New American gardeners has created new demand for garden space in Burlington’s community gardens. The increase in proportion of New Americans gardening in the Tommy Thompson garden from seven percent to 57 percent means that other gardeners were undoubtedly displaced. In response to rising demand, BACG added an acre to the Tommy Thompson garden in 2016 and has reduced the number of plots left fallow each season at the Starr Farm Community Garden in the New North End. But every year, according to O’Daniel, they have to turn away more and more requests for plots.

At Starr Farm, this increase in demand is largely from young, native-born gardeners who are moving away from the city center as housing costs rise, explains O’Daniel. They are joining many Eastern European immigrants who have been living and gardening in the New North End for years. In the Tommy Thompson Community Garden, it is native-born gardeners who have been welcoming

an influx of New Americans, especially Burundi, Somali, and Burmese refugees.

The community garden system reflects the changing demographics of the city at large, but like many other areas of social and civil life, there is not necessarily a lot of cultural exchange taking place. People come to community gardens to garden, says Laramee.

It is that simple act of gardening that sustains people, both physically and emotionally, with food and with solace. The city has kept alive Tommy Thompson’s goal of making gardens truly accessible and welcoming for all so that everyone can have the opportunity to experience this power. But given this intention, challenging new dynamics inevitably arise as more gardeners and more cultures come together in these shared spaces. Hours of dedicated digging, planting, and weeding instills a strong sense of ownership in gardeners whose personal, cultural, and ecological identities have formed deep roots in these spaces. Even given the positive intention of the modern day Tommy Thompsons and the people with power, community gardens aren’t necessarily building a collective sense of ownership for the gardens as a whole. Who do the gardens truly belong to? Who feels welcome? As community gardens continue to grow in Burlington, BACG, volunteer site leaders, and, most of all, gardeners themselves will have to face these questions. When does our control over these small pieces of nature inadvertently extend into the human dimensions of these gardens, changing what it means to be a true community garden? H

Art by Rye Fought Headwaters Magazine 8

Divestment and Power at UVM

By Chris Gish

Over the last decade, students have repeatedly pushed for the University of Vermont (UVM) to divest from fossil fuels. Each time they have been stymied. On October 26, students from the group UVM Organize presented the latest proposal to the Board of Trustees, calling for them to divest the $27 million of UVM’s endowment that is currently held in fossil fuels. At the time of this printing, the Board had yet to issue a decision on the latest proposal. The case for divestment — particularly at a progressive, ‘green’ institution like UVM — is overwhelming.

This article does not attempt to make such an argument; rather, it focuses on the individuals and structures that hold power at UVM and may contribute to our institution’s reluctance to take action.

The UVM Board of Trustees holds the power to divest UVM of its fossil fuel assets. The 25-member Board is made up of nine Vermont legislators, nine “self-perpetuating” trustees, two students, three gubernatorial appointees, the UVM president, and the Vermont Governor. Only the two students are selected with any formal input from the broader UVM community. In an interestingly circular concentration of power, the ‘self-perpetuating’ trustees are elected by the Board itself, and then go on to make university decisions and choose future trustees. With regards to divestment, it is the four-member investment subcommittee, composed entirely of self-perpetuating trustees, that has the ability to draft a divestment proposal that could then be approved by the rest of the Board. As these sub-

committee assignments suggest, power is not distributed evenly across the Board. According to legislative trustees and UVM faculty members, self-perpetuating members often exert more influence on the Board. Compared to trustees who juggle their own career with a demanding and poorly-compensated legislative commitment, self-perpetuating trustees often have more time and resources to set the agenda and draft specific proposals.

More broadly, the UVM Board of Trustees is not a representative or democratic entity. In a November 5 UVM Cynic article, student journalist Emma Pinezich pointed to gender and race differentials on the board — only 24 percent of the board, for example, identify as women at an institution where more than 55 percent of students, faculty, and staff do. However, the article failed to connect this incongruence to the underlying issues of responsibility and representation at play on UVM’s Board. The board does not match the demographics of the UVM community because, according to a presentation the Board uses to admit new members, it is explicitly designed not to represent UVM. Board members are mandated not to claim any part of the UVM community as a constituency or feel accountable to them; rather, like any ‘Board of the Corporation,’ their only responsibility is to the institutional survival of UVM. Because of its undemocratic structure and corporate managerial mandate, the UVM Board attracts very specific kinds of people who likely have anything but progressive stances on investing and the environment. The majority of the investment subcommittee, for example, has held powerful roles in some of the largest and most influential financial institutions in the world. David Daigle is currently a partner at Capital Group, which, with $1.87 trillion in assets, is one of the largest investment management firms in the world. Donald McCree, meanwhile, held senior executive positions at JPMorgan Chase (the largest bank in the US) for 31 years, including during the 2008 financial crash which was triggered in large part by mis-rated mortgage-backed securities sold by firms like JPMorgan.

Robert Brennan, the chair of the investment subcommittee, had a long tenure in charge of the Global Commercial Real Estate Finance business at Credit Suisse, an enormous banking firm known for its opaque management practices, disreputable clients and numerous allegations of tax evasion.

Beyond these connections to questionable financial firms, members of the Board also have specific ties to the fossil fuel industry and other socially irresponsible projects. Ron Lumbra, the vice chair of the Board and the man who presided over the October 26 meeting, worked as the Regional Vice President for Latin America for the Art by Adela Miller

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Power Resources division of Amoco, a petroleum company now merged with BP. At the time, his division was involved in buying large shares of power plants in Trinidad and Tobago, and dramatically expanding Amoco’s access to natural gas there. UVM’s president Suresh Garimella — who also holds a seat on the Board — has similarly contributed to petroleum development. During his previous post as the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships at Purdue University, he spearheaded a more than $20 million research center devoted to shale (fracked) gas. He coordinated numerous military contracts to develop things like jet engines and hypersonic vehicles. Additionally, Dr. Garimella began an ambitious ‘sustainable development’ initiative in the least-developed region of Colombia. This project stands to greatly benefit Purdue and the Colombian national government, but it ignores much of the socio-po-

litical complexity of the area (notably indigenous claims on territory and an ongoing civil war) and thus threatens to continue many of the most destructive tendencies of other neolibeal, corporate-friendly development schemes.

Not only does the Board hold power in an undemocratic and unaccountable way, there are also some common themes in the history and positionality of its members. These histories, involving everything from weapons contracts to notoriously suspect investment firms, suggest that social and environmental responsibility is not naturally our Board’s top concern. Change is certainly possible at UVM, particularly on an issue with as strong a precedent across other universities as divestment. Given the Board’s unrepresentative structure and composition, however, divestment is not likely until the UVM community mobilizes around this cause. H

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A Sinking City and its Push for Resilience

By Emmett Gartner

October 12, 2019 marked the Severn River’s most recent attempt to leap the United States Naval Academy and the City of Annapolis’s coastal barriers. High tides, a hunter’s full moon, and a fleeing tropical storm coalesced to inundate the City with water that shutdown its harbor and primary business area, City Dock.

Ryan Lamy, owner of Pip’s Dock Street Dogs, a popular hotdog joint that lines City Dock, described the event nightmarishly. “Our entire store was flooded. All of the way to the back of the shop. Rarely does it fill the entire store, and this time it was about a foot deep,” Lamy recalled.

Mention of the Severn does not evoke the same emotions as the mighty Mississippi. Far fewer musicians have dedicated songs to its murky, modest flow, nor does the backbone of American agriculture rely on its nutrients.

All told, its waters are comparatively mute to the Mississippi’s intense clamor, word of which panged across newswires throughout the United States in 2019 as it experienced weeks of devastating flooding. Nevertheless, the Severn,

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too, is flooding, and residents of its banks are flailing for solutions to suppress the water’s steady march, foreshadowing the consequences of climate change for coastal communities of the United States.

The Severn’s ten-mile expanse incises the heart of Maryland and bleeds into the Chesapeake Bay. Freshwater from the Severn, and a multitude of other tributaries like it, merge with saltwater from the Atlantic to form the Chesapeake, breeding a highly productive ecosystem in the process—the Chesapeake’s fisheries and seafood industries supply the surrounding region with $890 million in economic benefits annually. Because of the Chesapeake’s link to the Atlantic, however, productive fisheries come at a cost. Both the Chesapeake Bay and the Severn River are disproportionately chained to the will of rising sea levels.

As the rest of the globe’s sea levels rise between 1.7 and 3.2 mm/yr, the Chesapeake’s subsiding land, a product of the last Ice Age, bestows the region a rising rate of 3.2 to 4.7 mm/yr.

Many Maryland coastal communities are in the process of retreating or have already vanished because of these unprecedented rates. Holland Island, a historic town that once housed 260-350 residents off of the southeastern tip of Maryland, surrendered its last structure to the Chesapeake Bay in 2010, ending a decades-long battle with rising tides. Neighboring Deale Island residents, meanwhile, are scrambling to sell or foreclose on their homes as the cost of defending against intrusive water proves to be insurmountable for some. On the Severn’s southwestern bank, nested at the river’s mouth, similar options await Annapolis and the United States Naval Academy (USNA). One serves as the policy hub of the state; the other is the cradle for the nation’s premier aquatic navigators. Their rich history and magnificent architecture, birthed by a cultural reliance on the Severn and Chesapeake Bay, make the irony of losing these assets to rising tides evident to all.

Historically, the duo have utilized a series of bulkheads, seawalls made of wood, rock, or concrete, along the coastline to protect their land from erosion and to hold back the Severn’s waters. Areas not fortified with bulkheads or the cement base of roads rely on patches of sediment

and native plants to halt high tides. Before 2019, these structures and spotty vegetation were the last lines of defense for a City that leads the nation in nuisance flooding—flooding that occurs from high tides on days without precipitation—experiencing an average of 39.3 flood days per year between 2007 and 2013. These defenses are of little help when the city floods simultaneously from the inside and outside, however. City Dock business owners like Lamy have found this abundantly clear.

Since 2009, Lamy has been slinging hotdogs and french fries for the greater Annapolis community while flood waters consistently attempt to shut down his business. Whenever water sidles through the front door of his shop, health department code forces him to close until it fully retreats. In years past, he would seal the doorway with sandbags that Annapolis officials plopped down at the cen-

ter of City Dock as an offering to its businesses.

“After the first couple of years I gave up on the sandbags,” Lamy confessed. “On the days that we do need the bags, the high tide flood waters come up through the storm drains and then out of our floor drains. The sandbags keep some water out, but they also keep some water in.”

Annapolis’s tendency to flood from within inspired its most recent stopgap flood mitigation project: underground pumps that return flood waters to the harbor and drainage gates that keep them out.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Elly Tierney, who represents Lamy’s neighborhood, has used her engineering background to inspire and support these efforts in City Council, but also recognizes that they are not enough. During events like October 12, where the tide swelled 4.5 feet

Art by Alexis Martinez

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above its average levels, the pumps are overwhelmed and ineffective. They can only bear a maximum load of 3 feet above the base average, and the Severn is expected to rise by 1.5 feet by 2050, further worsening the odds of flooding.

“It’s only the first phase of a complete stormwater management system,” Tierney admitted. “Unfortunately, [that day] was a dire display of Mother Nature and our inability to control such flooding without permanent measures.”

The City has only recently unfurled long-term resilience plans. This includes a $50 million design to remodel City Dock and install a flood retention system with expanded flood barriers. Immediate reinforcements for the pumps under City Dock are currently under construction.

City officials have also plotted out the initial plans for a pump station and wet well a few blocks away, on the opposite side of the harbor. The wet well, a cavernous underground hold for flood waters, would capture water from storm drains and use the pump station to return it back into the harbor.

matter of how much money is available and how innovative the city is willing to be.”

Residents, politicians, and resilience experts alike are calling for the adoption of a permanent adaptation plan.

A recent study from Nees and other University of Maryland researchers urgently highlighted Annapolis’s need to “move forward quickly and aggressively to address infrastructure implementation and financing needs.” Without significant funding, Annapolis’s current political trajectory, flood mitigation projects included, does not provide a sufficient vision for safety in a changing climate.

In September 2003, Hurricane Isabel barreled into the North Carolinian coast as a Category 2 Storm, then trudged north through Virginia towards the Chesapeake Bay. When it approached Annapolis, concerns over driving winds and rains paled in comparison to the threats of Isabel’s storm surge. Its low pressure presence above the Chesapeake Bay pushed tides upwards and drowned the Annapolis area with 7.58 feet of water, flooding classrooms at the USNA and leaving City Dock only navigable by kayak.

The disastrous impacts fester in the minds of Annapolitans,

The pump station and wet well’s construction, however, hinges on a pending $3 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that, even if provided, would only cover a portion of the plan’s total cost.

The second phase of the current plan, which would supply additional pumps to City Dock, remains unfunded.

Dan Nees, a sustainability researcher at the University of Maryland and a member of the City’s subcommittee on resiliency, raised similar concerns over the $50 million long-term resilience plan. Upon its adoption, Nees praised the City’s bold mitigation strategies, but noted, “It’s just a

with talk of “the next big one” in rotation whenever hurricane season approaches. The City’s next door neighbor is taking a more actionable approach.

The USNA’s cost for storm repairs totaled a whopping $120 million. Nuisance flooding and the slew of storms after Isabel have since tacked onto the bill.

“With greater frequency and increased amounts of water, the negative impacts are being increasingly felt throughout Naval Academy operations,” said Edward Ziegler, a spokesman for Naval District Washington.

“Following Hurricane Isabel in 2003, the Naval

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Academy, in partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers, developed mitigation strategies, such as wet and dry floodproofing, to address major storms and stormwater surge.”

According to Ziegler, the USNA has already implemented many of these strategies, including an underground reservoir to collect and discharge stormwater, door and window dammings for low-lying structures, raising ground floor elevations on new construction, and the use of flood-proof building materials on ground floors. More recent resilience efforts involve stormwater repair projects to restore seawall and shoreline along the USNA’s perimeter.

This cohesive response, product of the federal defense budget, displays a level of urgency that Annapolis has struggled to garner amongst its broad range of stakeholders and decision makers. In order to receive a bulk of the funds for their resilience projects, the Mayor and members of the City Council will have to argue before the Maryland General Assembly, which has been slowgoing out of legislative session; it does not convene until January 8, 2020. Priorities in the City’s own political agenda further undermine the objective of getting resilience financing onto the state’s legislative docket.

While sea level rise looms over the City, so do other municipal crises. Issues regarding the City’s public housing policies have arisen alongside major updates to its

transit plan. Then, behind these items, remain the lengthy bureaucratic processes that keep any city government operating.

Alderwoman Tierney commented on this gridlock. “Due to other agenda items sponsored by the Mayor, I have not been able to elevate [flood mitigation] to our top priority. I trust that the Mayor will get before the General Assembly and ensure that we get money to at least fund phase one of our stormwater plans.”

There are also understandable difficulties that come with translating climate change’s broad temporal scale into immediate action. Whereas flooding frequently damages businesses, like Lamy’s, near City Dock and obstructs transportation infrastructure with standing water, residencies have suffered noticeably less damage from storm and flood events like Isabel, where houses were left largely unscathed by high tides. Residents outside of the City Dock area, as Tierney explains, are relatively quiet on these issues since the flood waters have not reached their front doors. How much longer they will be spared depends on whether the worst case or best case scenario of sea level rise occurs, and Tierney is not willing to take that risk.

“Until the City puts [climate change] on the forefront, public urgency won’t rise up to the level it should be. We need to beat the drum on a state and national crisis. Another Isabel is imminent.” H

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Plum Island

By Emma Gimbrere

Plum Island, a place of sand and salt Of morning mist and strong currents Of the sun and the moon disappearing behind the horizon A place of magnificent pink and purple skies and the occasional red moon A place of sanctuary for snowy egrets, tree swallows, pied-billed grebes, and sandpipers This sandbar is my home, my personal sanctuary I was born with salt air in my lungs and the chirping of sparrows by my window Growing up I would dance on the sand and splash in the waves I stood strong where the waves met the sand, watching my feet sink deeper into the shoreline Rocks soon replaced the sand, where I would play hide-and-go-seek with my little sister I grew up with sand, she grew up with rock I taught her how to balance, to run, to swim I taught her where to find the largest crabs in tidepools nestled a few moments walk from our house We would play pretend in the marshes, acting like wolves looking for prey My father would walk ten minutes out to the shoreline and set up his rusty beach chair

At sunset, we walk along the jetty and wish the sun goodnight, and welcome the moon to our beach The sun and the moon never changed The horizon never changed But the sand changed, and the ocean grew stronger A ten-minute walk became a six-minute walk, then a three-minute walk, then hardly a walk at all The mist became overwhelming, the sounds of birds were replaced by silence The marsh grass disappeared from sight from my little bedroom window The house with the orange tabby cat named Sal fell into the ocean on a grim Monday afternoon The shoreline where I watched the crabs emerge from their grainy, damp hide-out spots became too dangerous for me to stand on A place of comfort, warmth, play, soon became dangerous, cold, urgent My home, the place of sand, of salt, of mist, of birds, of family, became a place I didn’t recognize My unique sanctuary soon became one of the many, One of the many casualties of our warming atmosphere.

Photo by Emma Gimbrere 15 Headwaters Magazine

“Learning All The Bad Things All At Once”

Examining Diverse Approaches to Climate Education at UVM

By Chris Gish Reckoning with an uncertain future is a daily burden for many young people. CNN, Reuters and the New York Times have all reported on ‘eco-anxiety’ in children and teens, and even the American Psychological Association acknowledges that reports of this condition are increasingly common and credible. Micheal Mann, a renowned professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University who gave a public lecture at the University of Vermont (UVM) on October 10, acknowledges the difficulty of communicating climate change in a way that does not feed feelings of worry and disempowerment. In a personal communication, he highlighted ways that environmental discourses often pull people apart, alienating them and making them less likely to pursue collective action. Such feelings of anxiety and powerlessness in the face of unprecedented environmental change may be produced by particular social positions, as it takes a lot of privilege to be comfortable enough in daily life to worry about an invisible future. They are still a real and understandable concern, however, and are visible right here at the University of Vermont.

Harlan Morehouse, a lecturer in the Geography and Environmental Programs at UVM, asks each of his classes to rate their feelings toward the planet’s future on a spectrum between pessimistic and optimistic. Based on these informal surveys and numerous conversations, he senses that students are “generally pessimistic.” Similarly, one student in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Earth and Environment Scholars Program affirmed that “there’s mostly a pessimistic outlook” among her peers, while another pointed out the difficulty of “learning all the bad stuff all at once” across multiple environmentally-themed classes. Even a sampling of recent graduates of UVM’s Environmental Program all came across as fundamentally nihilistic about the planet’s ecological future. As one student put it, the best he could hope for was conserving his immediate environmental surroundings as the broader biosphere disintegrated. Morehouse worries that such pessimism is a dangerous place to end up, because, without acknowledging the possibility of a better future,

there is no grounds to mobilize or make change.

Institutionally, UVM seems to demonstrate commitment and awareness of today’s environmental challenges. The deep pessimism common among UVM students stands in contrast to the visible, performative expressions of ecological good citizenship which abound on campus: one need only walk into any recently-built structure to see LEED certification, step outside to glimpse photovoltaic panels, or turn to a bulletin board to see promotions for environmentally-themed events. The administration also manages a Clean Energy Fund to support ecologically oriented projects and heavily markets a ‘green’ image to appeal to prospective students and external funding.

Nonetheless, climate change communication at UVM is trickier than a triumphant institutional response might suggest. Much of the work and discussion of climate change at UVM is distributed widely and unevenly across campus. All students are required to meet a 3-credit sustainability education requirement, for example, but this requirement can be fulfilled across numerous different colleges and departments in classes with diverse and often divergent foci. Understanding how climate change is discussed at UVM outside of its official messaging, then, surely must include views from a variety of teachers and departments across campus.

Walter Poleman is one faculty member at UVM who believes that conversations across these different perspectives are essential for effectively communicating the climate crisis. He holds many professional roles, working at the Sustainability learning community, leading service trips in the Caribbean, and teaching as a Senior Lecturer in the Rubenstein School for the Environment and Natural Resources. He emphasizes that “networking across difference” — opening up dialog with as broad a selection of people and approaches as possible — is crucial for navigating toward a viable future. Drawing from systems thinkers like Donella Meadows, Poleman insists that both “strident voices” and people in positions of institutional power are necessary to progress on climate change, and often act in synergy even if they appear opposed. He sidestepped the

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question of whether such an accommodating approach is adequate to the urgency of climate change, but because of all the excellent conversations he has in the local and global community, particularly with younger generations, he is decidedly “optimistic” for the future.

Erik Bishop Von Wettburg, an associate professor in Plant and Soil Sciences, directly reckons with the urgency of climate change in his teaching and research.

Currently, he works to develop drought resistant and fertility-enhancing crop varieties for a changing climate. Similarly, he focuses his classes around innovative plants and cropping systems that can support food production and ecological health in an unstable future. According to Wettburg, climate change is an essential challenge that breeders, biologists and other natural scientists have a responsibility to tackle. He is also aware, however, that even the most well-intentioned and scientifically rigorous attempts to do this will be complicated by political and commercial interests like USAID or large agribusinesses. Wettburg still struggles to navigate the complex landscape of corporate and government interest in ways that do not compromise his vision of adapting to climate change through plant breeding.

For some in the Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) department, these economic and profit-making interests are essential to any practical climate change solution. In Introduction to Community Entrepreneurship (CDAE 166), Trisha Shrum and Marian Fritz use climate change as a backdrop to frame the need for profitable and creative ‘solutions’ generated with an entrepreneurial mindset and skills like accounting and marketing. The professors frequently end lecture imploring students to “go out and change the world!” In an interview last Spring, Shrum had faith that entrepreneurial projects could “nudge” behavioral change and incrementally shift social norms enough to bring humanity to a sustainable future. To that end, she co-founded the non-profit Dear Tomorrow, which strives to mobilize people around the issue of climate change by asking them to write letters that make a promise to their future loved ones. Ultimately, Shrum envisions an “all of the above” approach to climate change, which, for her, means trusting that everyone acting from their current perspective and position can do their part for the climate. Like Poleman, she has faith that all of these discrete actions will productively combine for adequate change, and that just getting the word out—through existing means like the classroom or social media—is the missing step to motivate action.

Morehouse, for his part, is skeptical of simple ‘solutions’ like entrepreneurial change and behavioral nudges that he worries are too often marketed to students

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across the university. He recognizes the very fine line that professors must tread between conveying a hopeless, foreclosed future and falling into unrealistic optimism. Focusing too long on ready-made solutions that are not really up to the task of guiding humans toward a livable future, according to Morehouse, only widens the gap between the reality of the problem and everyday experience. Instead, he emphasizes that the current environmental moment is a set of complexly interwoven predicaments which has no easy answers, but innumerable places where advocates can effectively intervene.

Perhaps recognizing the complexity to current environmental challenges is essential to parsing out the differences in environmental communication at UVM. While faculty and administrators happily describe the work that they do, they are loath to point out any substantive differences or conflicts around climate change at the university. Indeed, most faculty I spoke to, as well as UVM’s official messaging, conveyed the idea that everyone was on the “same team” when it comes to climate change, sharing a common understanding of the scientific reality of the problem and uniformly good intentions to make positive change. Poleman, for example, emphasized that people in power at UVM are all “good people,” and even asked students specifically to empathize with upper administrators like UVM’s president Garimella because it is “easier … for students to protest” than for people in power to take action.

In interviews and written communication, faculty and administrators also tend to allude to climate change in nonspecific terms, as if to imply that the whole UVM community shares a common perspective on the nature of the issue itself. In reality, however, UVM community members may hold dramatically different issues in mind when it comes to climate change. For some, climate change means doubling down on a sense of social justice, because marginalized populations will be made even more vulnerable in a chaotic climate. Others, including Micheal Mann and Trisha Shrum, feel environmentalists should be wary of hitching the fight against climate change to social justice concerns that may hold back rapid ‘insider’ change. A third perspective sees climate change largely as a matter of institutional survival, as UVM has to keep up with other sustainability initiatives if it is to remain appealing in a tight educational marketplace.

Students, interestingly, seem quite attentive to the differences that other actors at UVM miss or intentionally gloss over. More than feeling simply pessimistic or nihilistic, UVM students come across as discerning participants in their ‘green’ university education. First years in the CAS Earth and Environment Scholars program noted that most

Art by Eileen Brickell

of their peers were “attracted to UVM because of its environmental focus,” and were thus very concerned and engaged with environmental issues. The strongest theme that students pointed to in interviews was a sense of greenwashing on campus — that the school projected a progressive, eco-friendly image while maintaining certain practices that are notably un-green. As high-paying stakeholders in the university system, students are very aware of “the discrepancies between what they [UVM decision-makers] say they are versus what is actually happening.” Morehouse affirmed bluntly: “My sense is that students know when they are being lied to.” In particular, students objected to UVM’s ongoing refusal to divest the $27 million it currently holds in fossil fuel assets, despite more than a decade of campus advocacy on the issue.

Beyond a feeling of betrayal over green-washing, students insisted that UVM “absolutely” has a responsibility to study and act on climate change, noting UVM’s abundance of resources and its obligations as a public institution. They were frustrated by an excessive emphasis on rigid, mutually unintelligible disciplinary approaches to climate change at the expense of genuine interest any approach that may work for the future. Particularly, students worried about the “short timer” that ticks every day on climate action, and questioned whether conventional channels of institutional change will be adequate to make

progress within this timeframe. As one Earth and Environment Scholar put it: “How long can we really wait for these CEOs and these institutions to change?”

It is heartening to see that faculty and students across so many departments and disciplines engage with the issue of climate change. If, in bringing awareness to this engagement, this piece does anything to counter the sense of aloneness and pessimism that students may feel, it has certainly succeeded. Nonetheless, a lot of complexity and contention remain in the way that UVM addresses climate change. Professors may be reluctant to specifically discuss these sticking points, but students clearly identify some of the idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of climate education at UVM. They call out greenwashing and recognize a vast disconnect between the daunting reality of the problem and the rhetoric of some professors and the institution as a whole. Solidarity and cooperation are absolutely essential to confronting runaway climate change, but these connections do not come from a vaguely conjured assertion that everyone is doing their part so long as they have good intentions. The specific stories we tell, and the systems we mobilize to fight climate change matter.

Each approach will empower certain perspectives and leave out others. Despite—no, precisely because of the urgency of this issue—it is essential to remember the specific social and material relations of any proposed approach. H

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I Grew Up On A Mountain

By Liza Byran

Four yellow birches flaunt their chunks of chaga neighboring the path, their white cousins Whose skin hearty and thick brandish scars of letters and initials.

I’m so sorry that somebody felt they had the right to rip the skin off your body.

Whose morality lead them to carve into you?

How many people tread on your roots where they cross the path?

Can you feel us?

Do we hurt you?

Do thin white webs of mycelial networks struggle to carry nutrients to heal your wounds?

Does grandmother maple know you are healing?

Has grandfather hemlock sent you his carbon?

Are your roots as helplessly entangled with others as your canopy is with the American Beech?

With the Red Spruce and the Balsam Fir? And do your roots stretch to wrap around the rock that marks the half-way point?

A rest stop for tired human legs.

I wonder if your lifeblood is that of spruces’ waxy needles If it runs through the cambian of these tenacious trees I wonder if you’re in cahoots with the lichen plastering themselves against barren rocks Clinging against tempestuous gales and sheets of icy rain I wonder if you keep them alive, I wonder if you work together.

I wonder if the gentle tendrils of lace lichen tickle your bark.

I wonder if you hear the Bicknell’s thrush, or watch as the warblers forage I wonder if the wind tells you secrets washing over your outstretched arms and exploring the tips of your fingers Tell me mountain, Do you know your neighbors?

Do you speak at length with the birches and the crows?

Do you tease the fiddleheads as they unfurl?

Do you nurture the hobblebush with your springs?

Do you laugh with the trilliums on their early arrival?

And do you comfort the oaks into finally letting go of their leaves?

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Do you coax the twinkling gems from the forests that grow in and on you?

Do you organize their festival in autumn?

Do you urge them to wear their finest robes?

To see summer away. To welcome winter as it comes.

And, my mountain, do you know of the people who walk your skeleton?

Do you hear them as they hop from rock to rock?

Do you listen to their heavy breath and eavesdrop on conversations?

What do you think of those who scatter food on your summit?

And what do you think of those who leave trash in their wake?

Do you know me from a child?

As I have learned to know you?

Do you recognize my footsteps?

As I have learned to recognize your stones?

Do you share your mystery with everyone who comes?

Or is this sense of solitude, of compassion, understanding, and curiosity, something you evoke only between the two of us?

And what will happen if more people come?

Will you withdraw into your deepest parts?

Will you shy away from the masses, become quiet in the face of public hoards?

If the road becomes lined with hiker’s cars.

If the paths become busier and your underbrush is trodden on.

If instead of silence, Bicknell’s thrush, and wind’s secrets, You hear music, gossip, and human laughter.

If instead of ancient underground networks along the length of your backbone, The excavators, plows, bulldozers and chainsaws sever the conferences of white pines, sugar maples, and mountain ash.

If humans infiltrate into your peace of mind...

Will you keep your stillness?

Will you manage to save your tranquility?

Will your community be broken?

Will you lose your solace?

Art by Braden DeForge Headwaters Magazine 20

Soundscape of the Deep

While light wanes and odors halt at the sea surface, every depth brims with sound. Snapping shrimp pop their claws. Toadfish, herring, and many other species mark their territory and attract mates with a cacophony of chirps and growls. Below it all, whale songs travel far. The ocean’s acoustic environment, or soundscape, is a crucial part of its biology. A noisy marine environment is a sign of its good health. In addition to sound produced by animals, noise generated by crashing waves and seismic plate activity fills out the ocean’s natural soundscape.

Human Sound Production Humans produce speech through the coordination of the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory systems. Air from the lungs causes the vocal folds to vibrate open and closed and create sound. The vocal folds are stretched and modulated by many muscles and cartilages to modify aspects of vocalization such as pitch. The vibrations then resonate through the oral and nasal cavities and are shaped along the way to form the sounds that make up human languages. Like many organs, the larynx is multifunctional. Other key functions include sealing off the airway to protect the lungs during eating and swallowing and to build pressure in the thorax while straining, like lifting heavy objects and bearing down in childbirth.

Whale Sound Production Whales produce sound as an essential part of their survival. Communication serves to maintain social structure, facilitate mating, and defend territory. Sound guides whales’ general navigation, hunting and foraging, and helps them avoid potential threats. Whales can produce a vast variety of sounds, from high frequency squeals to low frequency calls.

Structures of sound production in whales are more complex and less understood than their human & land mammal homologs. The vocal anatomy of whales can be broadly understood along the traditional distinction of whale groups; toothed and baleen whales. The evolution of these groups is thought to have diverged some 34 million years ago. While toothed whales have teeth, baleen whales large structures of keratin protruding from the jaw that filter food from mouthfuls of ocean water called baleen plates.

Vocal Folds Phonic Lips U-Fold

Cartilages Profile Cross-section

Melon

Muscles: Tongue and Laryngeal

Cartilages Toothed whale

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Inflatable Air Sacs

Art and Words by Eleanor Duva

Anthropogenic Impacts Human interference endangers the incredible sound production mechanisms whales and other animals employ in their ecosystems, Dr. Laura May-Collado, a marine mammal communication and soundscapes expert and research associate in biology at the University of Vermont, thinks more people should consider sound as part of the ocean’s biology, along with how the imperceptible threat of anthropogenic ocean noise could one day silence the sea of any natural sound.

While humans have traveled by sea for centuries under sail, Dr. May-Collado said “the scale of change to the ocean since we put engines in our boats” is unprecedented.

Cargo ships, oil rigs, and sonar use are some of the most contributive technologies to anthropogenic ocean noise.

Toothed Whales Includes dolphins, sperm whales, belugas, and orcas.

Unlike baleen whales, toothed whales lack a structure like the human larynx. These whales produce sound by intake of air through the blowhole and the vibration and resonance of a system of air sacs and specialized soft tissues known as phonic lips. Vibrations produced in the air sac system are then shaped and propagated out into the water by changes to the shape of the whale’s melon, the fatty bulging tissue on the whale’s head.

Whales produce other sounds by striking the sea surface with their bodies. The tail strike of a humpback whale creates a broadband frequency sound which can contain frequencies between 30 and 12,000 hertz. Dolphins produce kerplunks when they raise their tail and lower body out of the water and splash back down again. With each breach of the surface to breath, whales can make different sounds with different motions of their fins and bodies.

Baleen Whales Includes humpback whales, blue whales, and right whales.

The U-fold is a U-shaped continuous ridge of tissue that spans the tracheal opening and separates it from the laryngeal sac. Like human vocal folds, the U-fold articulates with a number of cartilages and muscles. Baleen whales can both adduct & abduct, or bring together and open, the U-fold and modify the tissue’s thickness and tension to alter the sound produced.

The laryngeal sac is an inflatable pouch-shaped tissue. Air enters through the blowhole and travels into the lungs. Muscle contractions send air from the lungs into the laryngeal sac and back again.

Muscles surrounding the laryngeal sac also suggests that its shape can be modified to change the sound produced.The complexity and extensive musculature of the larynx suggests it might be an organ of multiple functions, like the human larynx.

Sound propagates further and largely unimpeded in water compared to land. The chemical contents of seawater also contribute to sound propagation. As the ocean’s acidity increases due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reacting with seawater to produce carbonic acid, sound is traveling faster and further. Noise could impact distant ocean communities on scales unthinkable to those of us that dwell above sea level.

Whales are using strategies to be heard over all this noise, including producing sounds at lower frequency, increasing the amplitude, and repeating signals. Anthropogenic sound may be causing behavior changes, masking their perception of sound, and damaging hearing tissues. Dr. May-Collado’s research on patterns of stress in mari ne animals against the high seasons of tourism suggests a correlation between the levels of the animals’ stress and the level of noise produced by boats in the water. Animals manifest stress through increases in stress-related hormones and the development of diseases and tumors.

On what we all can do to help protect the whales and their ocean, May-Collado notes that much of what we buy has been shipped across the ocean, bringing new context to the impact of habitual consumerism and individual choice on our global ecosystem.

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PLASTICIZERS

By Alexis Martinez

I have been told I have a very unique style of art, yet I often criticize my work until I cannot bother to look at it any longer. I think a huge reason as to why I do not enjoy my art is how wasteful and toxic it can be for the environment.

This is a three-piece painting narrative about art (specifically acrylic paint) and its hazardous contribution to waste in the ocean.

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Lichen Grape Valley

Grape Series

Web of Life

Grape on water color paper

By Katelyn Lipton

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Lichen, Grape Valley and Web of Life are painted with the pigments from wild grapes I foraged on the Burlington Bike Path. I learned of these pigmented grapes from the children I mentor through the University of Vermont course Birding for Change, taught by Dr. Patricia O’Kane. The kids discovered the grape’s rich color while exploring Derway, a nature preserve in Burlington off of the bike path.

Making my own paint allows me to create artwork about the environment without hurting my muse with plastic based paint. I strive to make art that honors Mother Nature that is made from her bountiful gifts. Lichen is inspired by the lichen growing on a piece of bark I found at Walden Pond in Massachusets. Grape Valley is inspired by the view of the Hudson Valley from the top of Storm King Mountain. Web of Life is inspired by the interconnected and complicated ecological relationships between all living things.

What They Run From Indian Child Runaways and the Green Revolution

By Sunny Nagpaul

Two decades of the Green Revolution have brought conflict to India — new ecological scarcities, cultural disruption and unprecedented violence — that are anything but green; yet American agencies like World Bank, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and seed and chemical multinationals continue to advertise the movement as a Western technological miracle.

Initiated by agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Borlaug, the Green Revolution began in the agricultural region of Punjab, India in the 1960s, introducing Western scientific methods of agriculture to produce higher yields of crops aided by artificial fertilizers and unsustainable amounts of water. The Indian Government endorsed the movement’s implementation, funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and seized control of farming practices from Indian farmers.

The movement was, and still is, heralded as an unprecedented political and technological achievement. But instead of abundance and peace, Punjab has inherited diseased soils, indebted farmers and record-breaking violence in which 3,000 people were killed in one year.

World famous physicist and philosopher Vandana Shiva explains how ‘miracle’ seeds, and specifically Borlaug’s high yielding variety of wheat, exploited farmers’ identities and livelihoods all while receiving endorsement from the Indian Government and Western corporations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

In the mid-1960s, Indian ecological policies adapted to include Borlaug’s semi-dwarf high yielding strain of wheat.

By 1968, nearly half of Indian wheat plantations grew Borlaug’s variety.

Shiva reveals the misconceptions behind Borlaug’s ‘miracle’ seeds — they only work conditionally. “It is a misnomer because it implies that the new seeds are high yielding in and of themselves,” she writes. Their high-yield is dependent on advanced systems of Western irrigation and artificial fertilizers, both of which are foreign in Punjab.

This Nobel Prize-winning movement promised to utilize technology and science to allow Punjabi farmers to produce more food than they could using natural

seeds and traditional methods. While the movement did produce more food at first, it led to a series of tragedies.

The seeds called for intensive irrigation that exceeded the natural drainage potential of farmland in Punjab. As a result, intense floods water-logged deserts and fields in south-west Punjab, salt poisoned arable land, and homes were destroyed. Shiva writes, “in September 1988, Punjab was flooded...80% of the standing crop was destroyed, and 1,500 people were reported killed.” Artificial fertilizers destroyed the natural fertility of centuries-old land and intensive irrigation water-logged Indian deserts; Punjabi farmers, powerless in their own livlihoods, committed suicide by the thousands. The Punjab Agricultural University suggests that at least 7,000 Punjabi farmers have committed suicide since 2003.

University of Vermont market researcher Srini Venugopal, an expert on social entrepreneurship in contexts of poverty, highlights the importance of involving marginalized farmers in processes of change.

“The question is how do you involve the people enough, whose livelihoods we are talking about, in the process of change — both in the direction and pace of change,” Venugopal said.

Venugopal runs social enterprises in several low-income communities, including Nochikuppam, a small Indian fishing village of about 300 subsistence fishers, which was hit hard by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Due to the tsunami and the effects of climate change, the character of the sea is rapidly changing and traditional wisdom has stopped helping fishers navigate the sea and make enough catches to make ends meet.

Venugopal states, “the richer you are as a fisher, you can get navigation equipment like GPS equipment and bigger boats. You can spend longer in the sea. But the poorer you are the more disproportionately impacted you are by all these environmental disruptions.”

Venugopal compares the trials of the fishers in Nochikuppam, caused by environmental destruction, to those of the Punjabi farmers, caused by government poli-

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cy. On the fishers, Venugopal says, “they are a community with traditional norms and are empowered in some ways— they have a very strong sense of community, identity and social capital so they will push back against any kind of encroachment to their turf. There have been a lot of attempts to develop their property, because it’s prime property for India along the beach, and the community has been able to exercise power.”

While the greater size of Punjab affects the closeknit qualities of its society, Venugopal emphasizes that maintaining a strong cultural society with interdependent socio-economies is imperative for a community to hold its ground against central government policies.

Punjab’s united farming culture and society slowly dissipated as the havoc from the Green Revolution destroyed farms and livelihoods. Shiva writes, “Punjab is the region most seething with discontent, with a sense of having been exploited and treated with discrimination.” Punjab experienced the largest numbers of killings in peacetime in independent India in which 15,000 lives were claimed in six years between 2010 and 2016.

The farmers who stayed alive desperately searched for ways to find success. “The progressive farmer of Punjab became the farmer who could most rapidly forget the ways

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to the soil and learn the ways of the market” Shiva writes.

But the market, which embraces the ways of capitalism and expansion of wealth, conflicted with the region’s already fraying sense of community and solidarity. As the commercialization spread, cultural connections degraded and gave way to new forms of abuse, aggression and drug-addictions.

Muhammad Nabil stood with bare feet and tattered clothes, sporting an inhalant-soaked rag at a street corner near Old Delhi’s Hanuman Mandir, The Monkey God Temple, when Jonah Steinberg recognized him as a child runaway.

Steinberg, a professor at the University of Vermont, published a book that describes the thousand mile journey Nabil traveled on foot, bus, and train from Pakshi Village in Bangladesh to Delhi, India to escape an abusive living situation. With no permanent home except the open streets, Nabil joined the ranks of children who call themselves kangaal, a religiously rooted Sanskrit term meaning ‘bone children.’

Nabil fled a rural borderland marked by unsatisfied and powerless lower-class workers who, without agency over their region’s agrarian system, have turned to corruption and violence as their only viable survival options. He

left home to escape not only his father’s drug addiction and mistreatment but also his degrading society, in which traffickers pull children into moving vans from the streets in broad daylight. “Districts with the most exploitative practices towards poor farmers are among those most likely to see children leave,” Steinburg writes. “The expectations for labor from children, both at home and from an employer (or the risk of getting trafficked or even being trafficked at the hands of one’s family for money) are substantial.”

The ecological and political demands of the Green Revolution actualized this exploitation, wrecking rural farming regions in India with conflict and violence and encouraging children to leave their homes in search of viable futures.

The fates of missing children are brooded over in the imaginations of regretful parents who scour over the last moments they saw their child in bed or leaving for school. More than half of reported missing children in India are never traced.

Nabil, among thousands of runaway children, established his makeshift home in the New Delhi Railway Station. On such journeys, children are vulnerable to abductors, recruiters for domestic and sex work and, in Nabil’s case, unfortunate accidents. He had an alarming disfigurement: a missing arm. A train severed it while he was living on the platforms.

It is extremely difficult to record accurate figures on how many children go missing in India each year. The

country’s Ministry of Women and Child Development reported 242,938 missing child cases between 2012 and 2017, but Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood), an anti-trafficking organization, suggests the figure may even reach 500,000— nearly double that amount, each year.

The huge and expanding population in India’s megacities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai also adds difficulty to locating missing children. Over the last decade, India experienced an increase of urbanization by around 4 percent. In 2017, 33.6 percent (about one-third) of India’s population of 1.339 billion lived in cities.

These cities are crowding because Indians in rural or farming villages face tremendous stresses of poverty exacerbated by The Green Revolution, which introduced deceptive Western ‘miracle’ seeds, whose unsustainable ecological needs meant social upheaval.

Activists claim that under-registration and underreporting of child disappearances both contribute to these unreliable figures and, more importantly, demonstrate how little control the government has over this problem.

Plights like Nabil’s are an open wound of The Green Revolution. Despite the movement’s supposed advancement of Indian agriculture and health, children run in fear of danger from communities so burdened by the stress of poverty that their people will do almost anything to put food on the table. H

Art by Gretchen Saveson

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Photo by Danny Holman

High Five This piece was made from a block of red oak firewood, for no reason other than that I was bored and felt a lack of daily high-fives in my life.

Watering Can This watering can was made out of the same block of red oak firewood as the hand, in response to the six different succulents I killed in my freshman dorm.

The Finger This piece was carved out of a piece of ash, entirely on the evening of November 8th, 2016. I was, quite simply, goddamn pissed at the election results and made this in response.

The Lumber Yard

haven’t been to a lumber yard in years. An increase in the clear-cutting of forests paired with a cultural shift towards efficiency over quality has turned the lumber yard, a traditionally small-scale production focused on sustaining the land, into a modern, industrious business focussed on profit above all else. The result is an entirely new type of wood: “new-growth” lumber. Planters organize the trees so as to maximize exposure to the sun, which increases the soft wood in between the hard growth rings, resulting in softer lumber.

Because of this, I source most of my wood from old buildings, firewood piles, and simply the ground.

This wood tends to be “old-growth,” meaning it is denser and therefore makes stronger furniture. These three carvings, for example, were all made from pieces of firewood I nabbed from my local tree service before they were turned to sawdust. This method of cultivating lumber is ultimately better in every way except predictability, which can always be remedied with a little creativity.

By Mat t y King

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The Roots of Mitigation:

Carbon Credit Feasibility for Vermont Landowners

By Noah Stommel

Isolated communities of old farms and dilapidated cabins dot the valleys of the Green Mountains. These Vermont forests veil secrets: cold water streams cascading from mountainsides, lichen-roughened cliff faces descending from rocky peaks, and the occasional moose traipsing through the trees. Still, one secret of these woods remains largely undiscovered by its numerous landowners: the potential to link their land to a carbon market, courtesy of the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Jim Shallow, the conservation director at the Vermont chapter of The Nature Conservancy, oversees the state’s biodiversity conservation of land and water ecosystems in the face of climate change, including the introduction of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom into the CARB carbon credit program.

Shallow describes the CARB program as such: Vermont landowners invest their land into credit programs that exchange carbon sequestration for economic returns from partnering Californian businesses. CARB has developed a compliance market that targets large-scale greenhouse gas emitters, namely corporations and large-scale industries, and utilizes a cap-and-trade framework established in partnership with landowners to reduce emissions. Cap-andtrade entails the creation of market regulations intended to reduce emissions from multiple industrial sources at once, permitting them a certain allowance of greenhouse gas emissions per year. One caveat of the program is that “the financial hurdle of creating a carbon market is pretty high, so you have to have a lot of land to offset the initial upfront investment,” as Shallow puts it.

Much of Vermont currently lies in a condition of lush forested land, brimming with trees that eagerly absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, buying the global community a little extra time to sort out how to prevent impending climate tipping points. CARB has begun to monetize photosynthesis in the Green Mountain State’s forests by transitioning private lands into a carbon market. Discussions on carbon credit programs have been in existence since the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s, and yet places like Vermont still have a lot to work on in terms of

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bolstering such mitigative practices in addressing climate change. This may be due to lags in communicability of the benefits of carbon credits both to the global climate and to private landowners.

Unfortunately for Vermont, 85 percent of the land area is privately owned in small subdivisions. This makes the objectives of CARB harder to implement for private landowners because land aggregation, which would be necessary to get a large percentage of Vermont’s forests into the program, is not allowed. Voluntary carbon markets, which typically serve individuals and allow for the aggregation of properties in present cap-and-trade policies, may be more attractive for landowners across Vermont, but are yet to exist here.

Despite these initial drawbacks, The Nature Conservancy has begun to use carbon sequestration as a method to preserve the landscape while emphasizing the value of nature’s services in the fight against climate change.

It already has one tract of 5,400 acres in the Northeast Kingdom, from which it expects to earn somewhere in the ballpark of $2 million over the next decade for its sequestration activities. Word of the legacy of this project’s successes have permeated through the Vermont community, reaching citizens such as Alisha Stommel, a co-owner of a 3,500-acre forest in Waitsfield, who hopes to get involved with the CARB program.

Stommel’s forest is one of Vermont’s private landholdings with enough acreage to be considered for carbon credits. “I think the most attractive aspect of joining a carbon credit program is that I feel that I’m helping provide some sort of solution to our climate crisis,” she says. “I also like how without hurting the planet, the carbon credit program offers people economic incentives to join.”

Stommel stressed the importance of the initial decision to enter a carbon market, mentioning that she and the other landowners currently use much of the land for logging purposes to pay off yearly taxes and maintenance fees on the land and the trails that snake through its woods.

Business as usual in her forest, although lucrative enough, “is not going to help prevent climate change from pro-

gressing, and is the exact course of action our communities and economies are advised against taking if we are to avoid ecological catastrophe,” she says. Conflicting views on short-term economic rewards have stirred debates between Stommel and her fellow landowners on the best current use patterns for their land, presenting another hurdle in the way of larger-scale implementation of carbon credit programs in Vermont.

Jared Nunery, who works as the forester for Orleans County in the Northeast Kingdom through the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, is responsible for educating the public on stewardship, management practices, and forest wellbeing in the area. When talking with landowners, he tries to assert that “there’s always a balance” between the lock-up of the state’s timberland and conserving trees as a result of joining the carbon market, and that carbon markets are not trying to dismantle the logging industry in Vermont. Rather, there must be an equilibrium reached, balancing actively logged land alongside carbon-capturing forest. As Jared describes it, the goal is to “increase the vibrancy of our forest products, keeping as much of that local as possible, and even keeping some acreage to be forever wild.” As for Stommel, she does not know yet if completely eliminating logging on her land as a source of profit would be wise, and she hopes to learn more before moving forward with her fellow landowners.

As Nunery mentioned, it is important to allow for mixed uses of Vermont forests. This will help maintain logging activity while allowing for healthy population of trees to keep growing, thereby generating credits needed to offset the initial investment of entering land into a carbon program. Jim Shallow of the Nature Conservancy agreed with this logic, saying that having to choose between logging and carbon sequestration will “create a false dichotomy.” The California market currently allows for the harvesting of wood products from land tracts receiving carbon credits, and incorporated lands can still be operated under approved forest management schemes that serve to augment the carbon stocks of the forest.

With this information, perhaps Stommel would have an easier time convincing her co-owners that a carbon credit program is feasible. Afterall, joining a compliance market for Stommel is realistic given the sheer amount of land she co-owns. When faced with this question, she regretfully admitted that the “co-owners struggle to agree on a way to best manage the forest while receiving a sufficient economic return, because some of them simply are unaware of [the program’s] existence.” Outreach to private landowners may be lacking in certain contexts, given the disparate perspectives that exist among prospective program participants. Her statement runs in contrast to the beliefs of Nunery, who, as an outreach representative, says he does not think public awareness was a big hurdle to

overcome.

The CARB program does indeed hold promising outcomes for Vermont and its landowners, but as shown through discussions with Stommel, complications related to the logging industry, land holding requirements, and overarching communication seem to be suppressing its growth. Carbon markets have also proven more difficult to implement than other climate change mitigation strategies because they are so complex. But in the midst of the complications, there are evidently still vast expanses of Vermont forest that could be successfully utilized as economically active carbon sinks. According to Jared, northwestern states and Canadian provinces such as British Columbia and Quebec have already been implementing large-scale carbon credit programs, perhaps due to the sheer level of space available in those areas. But as Stommel believes, if other places can do it, so can Vermont.

She grounded her thoughts in her personal experiences, recounting, “I grew up in this state and have lived here my entire life. Vermont is special because its natural surroundings are so beautiful and I want to maintain this so that my children (and their children) can experience Vermont’s beauty as well. I think all Vermonters have some moral and social responsibility to uphold when it comes to this.”

As a state that prides itself on progressive social and political climates, it remains imperative that landowner accessibility to these programs increases in Vermont, potentially through optimized dissemination of information, upheld individual responsibility to the environment, allowance for land aggregation, or a combination of the three. Weighing the consequences of Vermont’s current lack of widespread involvement in the program, it is important that our small state curbs its environmental impact with mitigative strategies that have effects as economically far-reaching as California, and as environmentally far-reaching as the entire globe. Of course, Stommel’s land in Waitsfield represents a small fraction of total forested land in Vermont. But if we can learn anything from tract-by-tract initiatives within carbon programs, it is that smaller scale mitigative actions are capable of translating into largescale climate solutions. H

Art by Natalie Barton Headwaters Magazine 32

Field Notes

By Reese Green

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Art by Katelyn Lipton

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By Deniz Dutton

Examining the Plight of one of the Earth’s Most Essential Resources

Crisis in the Amazon

T

he spread of shocking images of the Amazon Rainforest burning on social media has provoked an outcry from people around the world. With the fate of one of the earth’s most precious resources at stake, it is more important now than ever to understand the political and social factors that continue to actively harm this precious resource. The Amazon Rainforest is a critical regulator of global ecological health. It produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and regulates its climate. Deforestation and burning in the Amazon contribute significantly to rising global temperatures by releasing centuries worth of sequestered carbon from plant biomass and soil. This year, burning in the Amazon has released 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — equal to the annual emissions of 30,000 cars. As a comparison, in August and September of 2019, these fires released 32 times more the amount of carbon than Vermont’s forests sequester in an entire year, according to University of Vermont (UVM) Professor of Forestry Dr. Bill Keeton.

Though these fires are a recent development in the plight of the Amazon, they provide a window into some of the existing factors behind this complex issue.

Tracking the issue of deforestation, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research has published data showing a 278 percent increase this July compared with the same month last year. A study conducted in 2008 through a collaboration between the Brazillian National Institute for Space Research and the Met office Hadley Center in the United Kingdom, it was projected that 55 percent of the Amazon could be lost over the next 20 years, leading to the release of 15-26 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

While government negligence and powerful agricultural interests have contributed to a large part of the destruction of the Amazon, the greatest underlying factor uniting these is the mentality that the forest is a free, unlimited resource.

In the immediate sense, the destruction in the Amazon is due to unsustainable land use practices like logging, which only harm Brazil in the long run by slowly rendering its rich land infertile. As history shows, you cannot have your ecological cake and eat it too. Bill Keeton explains that the crisis in the Amazon is due to more than just fires: “What’s happening now in the Amazon is a combination of small scale agricultural clearings or illegal timber harvesting, and large scale commercial agriculture coming in from the south. Both these things tend to perforate the forest canopy.

And when you do that, it literally dries the Amazon. It changes the air circulation [and] reduces evapotranspiration — the way forests take up water and transpire it to the atmosphere — that changes local and regional climate.”

A pattern of desertification is already well established in the Amazon, and it is the direct result of unsustainable farming techniques. Amazonian soils are not very fertile, due to the extremely high rate of decomposition that occurs in the warm and wet environment. When a farmer clears a section of forest to grow a crop such as soybeans, they can only sustain two or three rotations of that crop until soil nutrients are depleted. Next, the cattle ranchers move in, grazing the land for up to five years until even that is no longer profitable, and proceed to clear even more rainforest, perpetuating the cycle. Because it exacerbates the already decreased precipitation and depleted soils, logging in the Amazon produces no long-term economic advantage for Brazil, contrary to popular perceptions by those who are looking to profit from the Amazon’s riches.

Brazillian government’s negligence towards its precious resources is in part to blame for the Amazon’s critical condition. Although deforestation in the Amazon had been declining steadily since the late 1990’s, there has been a recent resurgence as the controversy over and resistance to environmental conservation continues to grow, bolstered by the pro-industry rhetoric of Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro. President Bolsanaro has been very clear about his belief that what is good for the environment and what is good for the country are mutually exclusive. During his campaign, Bolsanaro made promises to make obtaining an Environmental License easier for investment projects, to end the Ministry of the Environment, and to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, following the lead of the United States President Donald Trump. All of these promises point to his view that the economic prosperity of Brazil is far more important than the millions of people and the wildlife that depend on the Amazon Rainforest, and that compromise is not on his agenda. If Bolsonaro manages to fulfill all of his campaign promises, deforestation could increase by 25.6 million square kilometers per year.

“President Bolsanaro has been very clear about his belief that what is good for the environment and what is good for the country are mutually exclusive.”

By March 2019, the Brazilian government had already cut a respective 24 percent and 20 percent from the budget of The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) and The Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), two of the

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most important environmental research and conservation institutions in Brazil. As the group that exposes illegal logging schemes, issues fines, and shuts down noncompliant industries, IBAMA is the muscle behind Brazil’s environmental policy. A cut to the IBAMA budget means impaired structural environmental protection enforcement. Many believe this budget cut to be precisely the goal of the new President — to appear to the world as if he is maintaining Brazil’s environmental institutions while simultaneously stripping them of their power.

international distributors, while the rest of Surui villages are collaborating with loggers and miners. As Bolsanaro continues to use racially charged rhetoric to encourage attacks on Indigenous people and developments continue to encroach on their territory, more Indigenous tribes will inevitably be forced to make similar decisions. This creates a feedback loop in which there are fewer individuals who actually have rights to Amazonian land to stand up for the forest in which they live, the forest that has no voice itself.

Land rights are essential to ensuring the rainforest is protected; land cannot be developed if it is owned by someone who does not want it developed.

“Land rights are essential to ensuring the rainforest is protected; land cannot be developed if it is owned by someone who does not want it developed.”

President Balsonaro, as he attempts to have his ecological cake and eat it too.

The Amazon’s Indigenous communities often have to choose between protecting their lands and helping loggers destroy those same lands for income. Although some tribes are united in their resolve to protect their land and culture, others are divided. A minority of the Surui tribe, which resides in Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory, has been deriving income from selling coffee and cacao to

In a recent case in Ecuador, the Waorani tribe achieved a rare victory in a lawsuit against the government for allowing oil exploration on their land by pointing out that they had not given consent for their land to be used for this purpose. Although this is an incredible victory for Ecuador, in Brazil, the very rights the Brazilian government allows the Indigenous people are in peril. Bolsanaro administered a decree this year to shift responsibility for Indigenous matters from Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Office (FUNAI) to the Ministry of Agriculture. This is a direct conflict of interests, and many see the transition as the perfect opportunity for agribusiness to hold power over Indigenous people and treat their land as an industrial resource, something it agribusiness groups have been lobbying for for years.

Clearly, the current administration sees Indigenous populations as an obstacle to their desired expansion of agribusiness, rather than considering that Indigenous knowledge could be reconciled with this desire to ensure the prosperity of all. Indigenous perspectives on land use often directly contrast with pro-industry actions of the political institutions at play in places like Brazil. Because their interests lie in preserving their homeland, Indigenous people may be the best guardians of the Amazon rainforest, having lived there long before any Europeans stepped foot on the continent, and utilizing their knowledge may be essential in determining the best environmental and economic policies. H Art by Gretchen Saveson

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From Farm to Forest Models for Adaptive Land Management

By Jill Reynolds

Photo of Peru by Jill Reynolds

It is easy to paint agriculture as one of the villains of the climate crisis. Here, in the United States, industrialization and commodification command land-use, monocultures dominate the Great Plains, and concentrated animal feeding operations are ubiquitous across Iowa and the Carolinas. These systems generate enormous ecological consequences, including phosphorus runoff, methane production, deforestation, and soil erosion. In the face of climate change, cultures around the world have the potential to inform the future of American land use. Three such cultures — Andean peasants, Roman farmers, and the Menominee people — manage land through different agricultural strategies b ased on ecological values, positioning them well to adapt to climate change.

Peru

The highlands of Peru consist of a series of striking landscapes. Mountains reach into the sky, commanding one’s view and allowing for only a sliver of blue; glacier topped peaks hint at their elevation, often over 15,000 feet.

At such heights, the air is brisk, and it is easy to mistake the clouds rolling through as simple fog. This landscape is home to Andean peasant farmers, as they call themselves, who have worked this land for 5,000 years. Their work at various elevations and different microclimates has created numerous varieties of potatoes and other traditional crops like the edible tubers “ulluco” and “mashua.” Andean

peasants have historically traded seed across microclimates, allowing for better pest and disease resistance. These traditional seed networks persist to this day, with many farmers still replenishing their seeds by exchanging them or buying them from neighbors. Despite the oppression of Andean culture by Spanish conquistadors, these farmers were able to preserve some of the agrobiodiversity of their native crops by utilizing these seed exchanges, among other practices. This resiliency played a part in maintaining a sustainable agricultural landscape in the Andes, a region greatly affected by climate change.

“The Peruvian highlands are one of the most vulnerable places on earth,” says Dr. Dan Tobin, a professor of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont, who has conducted research in the Andes for over a decade. He is well-versed in the many factors contributing to the changing agriculture landscape, including glacial melts, the loss of fresh water sources, and unpredictable frost. In the face of such a dynamic climate, Tobin says, “The traditional knowledge [of Andean peasants] is seemingly becoming less reliable.”

In light of these vulnerabilities, there have been actions to utilize Andean agricultural resiliency. The Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development, a non-governmental organization based in Calca, Peru, works with farmers to acclimatize vegetable varieties to higher altitudes. As the conditions change in the Andes and the region warms,

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vegetable crops are becoming easier to grow. The opposite is true for the traditionally grown crops like potatoes and ulluco. Andean Alliance partners run a demonstration farm in the region named the “Eco Huella” (Ecological Footprint), where the Nina family grows vegetables for open-pollinated seed. This type of seed can be saved every year and allows for farmers to pick out seeds from the best plants, expediting the process of acclimatization. Eco Huella provides an alternative source of vegetable seeds in a region often dominated by hybrid seed from “agrovet-

erinarias,” catch-all stores selling pesticides and herbicides that service and support industrial agricultural systems.

Andean Alliance and Eco Huella hope to take advantage of the same traditional seed networks that exist in the region for disseminating vegetable seed to improve food security, nutrition, and possibly provide additional income through the sale of excess crops. Utilizing their traditional structures of seed networks and information sharing gives Andean peasants an edge over a changing climate.

Photos by Jill Reynolds

A house in Peru by Jill Reynolds

Italy

In the rolling Sabina hills an hour northeast of Rome rests Le Mole sul Farfa, a farm owned and operated

by Stefano and Elisabeth, an Italian-Dutch couple. Stefano grew up outside of Rome, but adores the Sabine area and its dominant profession, saying, “my dream was to be a farmer, but my family said it was better to study.” Without his family’s blessing, he started to explore the area, discovering the gorge of the Farfa River and trekking through the temperate hilly region. Through work with an environmental group, Stefano interacted with locals, who pointed him to a charming piece of antiquity: an ancient Roman villa buried mostly beneath the ground. Stefano loved the property and with the help of friends, he established a farm in Mompeo close to the Roman villa. “I started the farm from zero, without any help from my family,” he recalled.

This farm would eventually become Le Mole, a bustling “agriturismo,” a government incentivized farm designed

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for tourists. The Italian government devised the Agriturismo rural development initiative to keep farmers on their land and preserve the agricultural landscape.

Today, Le Mole sul Farfa boasts scratch gourmet vegetarian meals from locally-sourced food. Elisabeth, a self-taught chef, runs the kitchen, directing volunteers and designing every meal. Nearly everything served is handmade, from jam to yogurt and fresh fruits. To keep government-granted agriturismo status, the farm must produce 25 percent of the food that they feed their guests; the other 75 percent must come from local farms, supporting the local agricultural economy.

The quaint farmstead boasts five simplistic rooms for guests, a patio area to relax or eat, and an in-ground salt-water pool for seasonal use. The industrially designed kitchen is well-concealed by the rustic charm of the dining room, with mason jars of herbs, bottles of olive oil lining the walls, and wooden tables decorated with wildflowers.

Views from the patio are breathtaking; soft green hills folding into one another, quilted by the occasional patch of farmland, accompanied by vocal birds and murmuring insects. Stefano offers guided tours of the area, which includes their fruit trees, a windy woodland path, and stunning river-side gorge.

Like most farmers, Stefano is well aware of the personal impact that climate change has on his livelihood.

“People say the climate is changing. For me, the climate has changed!” he says. One of his major concerns is the declining rate of olive oil production. “[There has been] tragic impact. I speak with other farmers, especially old ones, and they never remember bad seasons for the production [of olives] like we have now. You see 90-95 percent

less [yield] for olive oil, and our area is most famous for [the production of ] olive oil.” Stefano worries about the potential impact of non-viable olive groves on the landscape: “When farmers start to chop down old [olive] trees, the landscape will be damaged. Now you can still see olive trees from Roman times, but instead farmers will grow corn and other crops that simplify the landscape.” While agriturismos have reduced the financial burden of low olive oil production, it may not be enough to maintain the current agricultural landscape. The ability of farmers to find other adaptation strategies in lieu of low crop production will have a significant impact on the Italian agricultural landscape for generations to come.

Farms on a hillside in Peru by Jill Reynolds

Menominee

The Menominee people of what is now called Wisconsin, give themselves the name “Maeqteknankinkiw kew kanahwihtahqua”: The Forest Keepers. They have been practicing sustainable forest practices long before the coining of the term ‘sustainable.’ Before contact with Europeans, the Menominee practiced a seasonal way of living based on the availability of food and medicine. They have always valued their connection to their land. Pre-colonialism, the Menominee had access to over 10 million acres of land that they used semi-nomadically. Today, their reservation rests on only 353.9 square miles.

During westward expansion, the U.S. government pushed their farming model on indigenous populations, but these practices were not the way of the Menominee, who were used to cooperative efforts from the community to collectively provide resources and care for the land. So, they turned to the forest.

“Start with the rising sun, and work toward the setting sun, but take only the mature tree, the sick trees, and the trees that have fallen. When you reach the end of the reservation, turn and cut from the setting sun to the rising sun and the trees will last forever.” These words, commonly attributed to Menominee leader Chief Oshkosh, embody

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An Italian olive grove by Trevor Biggs

the sustainable forest philosophy of his people. Just one look at a map of the reservation reveals how differently the Menominee treated their land compared to the surrounding settlers.

The strikingly clear borders of the reservation highlight the stark difference in land use and management ideologies. To the northeast of the reservation is a state forest, on par with the appearance of well-managed, economically viable forest operation. The rest is tree-less farmland or urban sprawl. The history of the Menominee details many an adaptation to unforeseen contexts and conditions for hundreds of years. Their next challenge is climate change.

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Climate change contributes to unpredictable weather patterns. An increase in natural disasters is bad news for anyone living in their path: a rise in unpredictable weather for a farmer or forester can be devastating. In response to such a growing threat, the Menominee have joined the Northeast Indigenous Climate Resilience Network. This network seeks to connect indigenous peoples in order to “identify threats to Indigenous self-determination and ways of life and to formulate adaptation and mitigation strategies, dialogues, and educational programs that build Indigenous capacity to address climate-related issues.” The Menominee are certainly doing tenacious work towards developing a sustainable future. Chris Caldwell, the director of the Sustainable Development Institute at the College of Menominee Nation, says it best: “[We’re] not trying to achieve a perfect balance, we’re just working towards a balance.”

Andean peasants, Italian farmers, and the Menominee offer many lessons and pieces of advice for North Americans as they start to reshape farming in the U.S. While none of the above practices or cultures are perfect or infallible, they provide promising alternative land management models. Promoting sustainable livelihoods for producers allows them the agency to make environmentally-conscious land management decisions. There is not one universal adaptation to climate change—rather, facing impending ecological threat requires localized solutions, like Andean resiliency in Peru, agriturismo in Italy, and Menonminee forestry practices, each presenting a small way to better manage land towards a stable and resilient global ecosystem. H

Visit Folino’s or their website to learn about their carbon offset tree planting.

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