Photo Credit: kanvag/ Shutterstock.com
May 20, 2013
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This article first appeared at
Orion magazine under the title "
The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future
Orion articles by signing up to the
magazine's free trial subscription program.
My
children have snow anxiety. For the record, this started in the winter
of 2011–12 when no snow fell—at all—and sleds, saucers, skis,
and snowball makers sat dejectedly on the porch, unused, next to the
irrelevant and despondent snow shovel. Week after week, month after
month, Faith and Elijah scanned the skies and studied the forecast. When
June-like temperatures hit in March, the sight of the toboggan filled
them with so much despair that they wordlessly dragged it back to the
barn and put it in storage.
Which did not go unnoticed by their
dad and me. When had our kids ever put stuff away without being asked?
It was as unprecedented as a snowless winter in upstate New York. Nobody
had ever experienced that either.
During the unfrozen winter of
2011–12, the grown-ups all walked around saying, “This is crazy!” True
enough. When the temperature in the mudroom hits eighty degrees before
the daytime:nighttime ratio hits parity, some synonym for insane is what
the thesaurus should take you to. But “This is crazy!” also implies
that we possess no rational explanation for June arriving in March. And I
noticed that my son and his friends never said things like that to each
other. They spoke more grimly, along the lines of, Global warming. It’s
here. Now we can’t go sledding. Probably ever. So what do you want to
do, dude?
When snow and ice finally fell in April—hard enough and
fast enough to cancel school—it fell on tulip and magnolia petals and
killed off the entire cherry crop.
The toboggan stayed in the barn.
But
wishful thinking springs anew in the hearts of children, even in the
face of permanent catastrophe, so, after a cherryless summer and a fall
with few apples, Faith and Elijah conferred hopefully about the upcoming
winter. Last year was a global warming winter. But maybe global warming
winters come only every other year. Maybe this year would be normal.
The snow fell. The sleds came out. The snow melted.
The
snow fell again. And turned to rain. The ground thawed and great lakes
of water filled the low areas, and the sleds that had been parked at the
bottoms of sledding hills across the county bobbed around like
flotillas of small boats at harbor.
The sight of floating sleds made the adults say, “It’s crazy!” all over again.
The
kids just gave up. Let the record show that in February 2013, the
children of Trumansburg, New York, gave up on winter. As a season, it
was no longer reliable. You could wake up in the morning to a
wonderland—snowflakes dutifully falling, the front yard all white,
perfect, hushed, squeaky—and by the time school let out in the
afternoon, the miraculous world had already reverted back to brown,
gray, mushy, yucky.
“Don’t get excited,” said Faith to Elijah
right before Valentine’s Day when he looked out the window at first
light and announced a fresh snowfall. “It won’t last.”
My children
were born just before and after the turn of the century. They are old
enough to reminisce about the days before winter went bad and became the
crazy uncle in the seasonal family. Faith’s fashionable friends discuss
the clothes they used to wear—month after arctic month—when they were
little and the snow was piled high from November to March. Kids today,
they note with disinterested interest, just don’t have the same
relationship to their snow pants.
I think I’m on to something
here, and I’d like to make a prediction. I predict that the cohort of
kids who are now ten to fifteen years old are going to have a very
different worldview than those born just a few years after them. My kids
and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the
last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of
seasons.
Let me put a finer point on this. My kids, who are in
middle school, know that winter is supposed to be cold and that January
pond ice should be thick enough for skating. They possess snowman-making
techniques, snow-fort construction skills, and an elaborate ethos about
exactly what kind of snowballs can and can’t be used for ambushing the
friends of one’s sibling and what body parts are and are not off-limits
(no ice balls, never in the face). They have methods for assessing the
slide-ability and pack-ability of any given snowfall. They know which
methods of tucking snow pants into snow boots work and which leak. They
have strong opinions on gloves versus mittens and the proper way to make
a snow angel. And yet, for the last two years, they have had almost no
opportunity to exercise this knowledge.
Meanwhile, a friend calls
to tell me that her otherwise very bright granddaughter, who is of
nursery-school age, is having trouble learning the names of the seasons.
They make no sense to her. “But grandma, you said that winter was
cold!” Winter, when she said it, wasn’t. And there was the added problem
of the forsythias. They bloomed this year during a warm spell that
spanned the twelve days of Christmas. April showers bring May
flowers. When the nursery rhymes no longer match the empirical evidence,
what’s a three-year-old to think?
Here are two more stories for
the record. Because of climate change, Elijah gave up on Little House in
the Big Woods. He liked the first half. But the episodes involving
horse-drawn sleighs and maple-syrup snow cones were too painful. He
refused to read on. “It’s not that way anymore, Mom,” he said
matter-of-factly, and set the book aside.
I was stunned. But then
it happened to me. While rereading the poem “Corsons Inlet” by A. R.
Ammons—“I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning / to the
sea, / then turned right along / the surf”—which had once been the
subject of my own master’s thesis, I found that I couldn’t go on. It’s
not that way anymore, Archie. And how come, in 1965, you didn’t see it
coming? Corson’s Inlet, a last undeveloped stretch of beach in New
Jersey, was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.
I set the book aside. Matter-of-factly.
Not
to say that our hearts have all turned to stone around here. Here’s my
other story: After days of wild, record-breaking weather, our village
winter festival was canceled because of rain and flood warnings. When I
told Elijah the bad news on the walk home from school, he began to cry. I
told him I was sorry.
He said, “I’m not upset about the festival. I’m upset because the planet’s dying. I know this is all because of global warming.”
This
is what I heard myself say: “Look, Mom is on the job. I’m working on
it. I’m working on it really hard, and I promise I won’t quit.”
And
then I cried. And not only because my son believes himself to be alive
on a dying planet, but because all the generations of parents before
mine have been unable to deal with the facts and mount a response of
sufficient scale to solve the problem, meaning that all of us now have a
monumental task before us. I cried because keeping my promise makes me
arise before dawn to get on buses, puts bullhorns in my hand in faraway
cities, may yet land me in jail, and, in these and other ways, takes me
away from my children so that I can prove them wrong.
This article first appeared at
Orion magazine under the title "
The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future
Orion articles by signing up to the
magazine's free trial subscription program.
Sandra Steingraber is the
author of "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment" and "Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood."
She is the founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking.
Oceans, coasts & climate change on Cape Cod
NASA image by Norman Kuring, GSFC Ocean Color Team
This satellite image of the
Barents Sea (part of the Arctic Ocean north of Russia) from August 2009
shows a massive phytoplankton bloom. Scientists have found that algal
blooms in the Arctic Ocean are starting earlier due to climate change.
Aah, the irony: a post about seasonal changes linked to climate
change was intended for the spring equinox (a.k.a. first day of spring)
but got delayed by winter illnesses making their way through my family.
Better late than never …
Everybody has their own favorite first sign of spring. Personally,
I’ve always loved the snow drops and crocuses that are brave enough to
poke their little heads up through the snow to give us our first flowers
of the season. The ocean has seasons, too, and in a decade or so of
living on Cape Cod I’ve come to appreciate those more. I look forward to
my first sighting (or hearing) of an osprey soaring over the cranberry
bogs near my house in search of fish. Or watching the shape of local
beaches change as winter-storm-driven waves give way to the gentler wave
action of spring and summer.
A number of recent studies indicate that warming air and water
temperatures are changing the timing of many seasonal hallmarks. And
while an early end to winter may not sound like a bad thing
(particularly on a snowy March day), it’s not all sunshine and roses.
Here are a few ways seasons are changing – on land and at sea. You may
be surprised to find out you’ve already noticed one or two.
flickr/Ian Muttoo
Ragweed is blooming earlier and longer, causing more allergies.
On Land
- If you’re a gardener, you may have already noticed that some flowering plants are budding earlier in spring. Observant citizens are helping scientists document the changes going on in their own backyards. Interested? Check out Project BudBurst.
- Much to the dismay of allergy sufferers, USDA scientists have found
that the pollen season for ragweed and other common plant allergens is
starting up to a month earlier,
lasting longer, and affecting a broader area of North America.
Because warming is more dramatic at higher latitudes, the effect is
most pronounced in the northern half of the continent and unnoticeable
in places like Texas and Oklahoma.
At Sea
- Spring blooms of harmful red tide algae are starting earlier and lasting longer, according to Stephanie Moore of NOAA’s West Coast Center for Oceans and Human Health. Harmful algae in the Alexandrium group – like those Moore studies on the West Coast, and WHOI’s Don Anderson studies
here in New England – produce toxins that can build up in the bodies of
shellfish and be deadly to humans who consume contaminated shellfish.
So earlier, longer red tides could have significant economic and public
health repercussions.
- Ocean scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego
have used satellite images of the Arctic to determine that the “late
summer” bloom of phytoplankton – microscopic plants at the base of the
food chain – is happening up to fifty days earlier
than it did just fourteen years ago. While there’s not much evidence to
back this up (yet), scientists are concerned that this shift could
disrupt the entire food chain because the animals that depend on the
blooms might not be able to shift their timing as quickly.
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