Youth voices join the community discussion aimed at creating a North Country Rural Resilience Roadmap
By Mike Lynch
Farmers, river stewards, and a 14-year-old student came to talk about climate resilience.
They were among the roughly 25 people who gathered Thursday afternoon at the Whallonsburg Grange in the Champlain Valley to brainstorm.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
“Resiliency is important, no matter who you are, or what you own, or where you came from,” said Katherine Preston, whose family owns a farm in Whallonsburg. “We have to do it because it’s already past the time.”
Preston and other participants were brought together by the Adirondack Climate Outreach and Resilience Network (ACORN), a collaboration of the Adirondack Research Consortium, Paul Smith’s College and the Wild Center. Its efforts are funded by the Adirondack Foundation and NYSERDA.
The group is hosting a series of about 10 community listening sessions in the 14 northern New York Counties over the next few months. They’re also meeting with private sector groups, such as the forestry and outdoor recreation industries and other community stakeholders. Plus, they have an online survey that anyone can fill out.
Their goal is to better understand the needs of Adirondack communities in the face of climate change so they can create the North Country Rural Resilience Roadmap, a report that will summarize the ACORN’s findings, identify potential projects to pursue and present possible ways to fund them.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
They are also hoping to connect people, communities and organizations throughout the region.
“We’re trying to break down the silos that exist between all the different organizations, groups and identities to try to figure out a way where we can connect them and not be so isolated,” said Jen Kretser, director of climate initiatives at the Wild Center.
ACORN’s Project Manager Sunita Halasz said flood resilience, lack of affordable housing and having a collective voice to talk to Albany government officials are some of the themes that have been discussed at the handful of meetings they’ve already held in recent weeks.
People have also been talking about how communities lack the capacity to apply for and administer grants to pay for projects associated with storms or to make upgrades to become more energy efficient.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
At the Whallonsburg meeting these topics were among those discussed, including some talk about future climate refugees and how that could potentially make it even harder to find affordable housing in the future. Some organizations have projected there will be an influx of people moving to the Adirondack Park in the coming decades because it may be less impacted by climate change than other areas of the United States.
“This is a desirable place to move as the climate gets more extreme, and we better be ready if we want this park to maintain the things we cherish. We got to make sure it doesn’t become a McMansion every 40 acres, or a McMansion every 12 acres. That’s not, I think, what anybody here wants,” said Wadhams resident Colin Powers, executive director of the Boquet River Association.
Evan Beech is a 14-year-old Westport resident who attended Thursday’s session and a similar one at the recent Adirondack Youth Climate Summit at the Wild Center. The climate migration topic was something that stood out for him.
“I think that that’s really important, and something that I hadn’t thought about a lot before until today,” he said.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Beech also emphasized there is a need for more education on the topic of climate change, so the general public can have a better understanding of its basic premises.
Essex resident Richard Robbins said there is a need to build more robust local economies.
“If you have an area where you have the degree of poverty and joblessness, as you get in most rural areas, you have a population that can’t be concerned with climate,” he said. “For them, economic survival comes first before climate survival.”
In the Champlain Valley, that means supporting local farmers through private investors or government programs, he said.
“We discussed the need to, frankly, rebuild local agriculture by doing that,” Robbins said. “One, you create jobs. Two, you bring people back into the area. Three, you create a much improved food supply. But to do that it is going to take investment either by the government or by private investors.”
ACORN’s next listening session is Dec. 5 at Clarkston University in Potsdam where the discussion will be focused on stormwater. After that, ACORN will visit Warrenburg for a more general climate resilience discussion. More sessions are expected to be added to the schedule in the near future.
The meetings will culminate in the Adirondack Climate Conference on March 6 at The Wild Center, where ACORN will summarize its findings and feature resilience leaders, Halasz said
Top photo: John Bingham, owner of a hay farm in Whallonsburg, joined Thursday’s climate resilience meeting in his town. Photo by Mike Lynch
Leave a Reply