After Irene, Vermont shows us what climate resilience looks like

Three years after Tropical Storm Irene turned their fields into lakes and their cows into swimmers, the owners of Liberty Hill Farm are planting sunflowers, creating beauty where they once saw devastation.

Beth Kennett’s eyes still flood with tears as she and her husband, Bob, recall the volunteers — strangers, mostly — who streamed into town during the late summer of 2011 to help save its last remaining dairy farm. With well over a million dollars’ worth of damage, “our farm wouldn’t exist” without volunteer labor, Beth says.

With its iconic red barn and the graphic punch of black and white cows against kelly green fields, Liberty Hill Farm is everything you envision when you picture a family farm. Nestled between steep hills along the White River in central Vermont, the 240-acre property is home to 270 Holstein cows. Everyone helps: the Kennetts’ grown sons, Tom and David, their daughters-in-law, and their five grandkids, including 2-year-old Ella, who trots after her father in her little bright pink rubber boots.

The simple pleasures of rural life — fresh air, clean water, honest labor, proximity to nature — are at their seductive best here, right down to the tire swing that hangs from the maple tree and the rhubarb coffee cake that cools on the stove.

But for the Kennetts and the 1,137 others in Rochester and countless communities like it — remote places with abundant beauty and meager resources — the outlook is clouded at best. In its most recent report released earlier this year, the National Climate Assessment (NCA) devoted an entire chapter to the increasingly detrimental effects of climate change on rural America: its infrastructure, economy, and overall quality of life.

Read more: http://grist.org/climate-energy/after-irene-vermont-shows-us-what-climate-resilience-looks-like/

150 hurricanes later, these island people can teach us a few things about surviving climate change

As coastal cities and states strategize ways to protect residents from climate change impacts, they would be well-served to talk with members of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. These are the people, descendants of enslaved Africans, who live among a string of islands stretching along the Atlantic seaboard from Jacksonville, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla.

As you might imagine, this means that their homes and businesses are on the front lines of any violent weather attack striking the U.S. from the southeast. Almost 150 hurricanes hit these states between 1851 and 2013. And yet the Gullahs and Geechees have found ways to preserve their culture and ways of living for generations.

Their chief spokesperson is Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, the founder of the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, which advocates on behalf of the nation’s members when politicking with other heads of state. She is a consultant to the U.S. Department of the Interior and also the National Park Service, making sure that these islands, which supply much of America’s seafood, aren’t overlooked in policymaking.

Queen Quet has a saying: “De wata da bring we an de wata gwine tek we bak.” That means, she explained to me in August, that people and businesses (since courts say corporations are people too) must “live in balance with the land and water in such a way that we will be able to sustain life for future generations.”

Read more: http://grist.org/climate-energy/150-hurricanes-later-these-island-people-can-teach-us-a-few-things-about-surviving-climate-change/