We published two pieces over the last week that embody FERN’s approach to the evolving story of climate change and its impact on agriculture. In the first, staff writer Teresa Cotsirilos sifted through the wreckage after a series of climate-driven “atmospheric rivers” swamped farm communities along the border of Washington State and British Columbia, drowning cows and sending farmers out on jet skis to rescue them. She found a story about a decades-long dispute over how to manage the Nooksack River in a way that protects the interests of the farmers without harming the endangered Chinook salmon that spawn there.
The dispute, which pits Canada against the U.S. and farmers on both sides of the border against Native communities, was reinvigorated by last fall’s storms. Farmers want the U.S. to dredge (or dam or otherwise aggressively control) the Nooksack to mitigate flooding. But Native communities that depend on the salmon run, and fisheries and river-management experts who have studied the issue, say such changes could be disastrous to a river ecosystem that’s already at risk of collapse.
It is a story about the myriad knock-on effects of a changing climate — the complex and controversial choices humans face as weather becomes more extreme, upending the status quo and forcing reckonings where stalemates have persisted.
FERN’s mission is to dig beyond the headlines to discover the complicated reality beneath. With climate change and agriculture, that often involves exploring proposed “solutions,” from carbon sequestration to “living shorelines.”
The second piece is such a story. Reporter Stephen Robert Miller went to Arizona to learn about guayule (pronounced why-oo-lee), a latex-producing desert shrub that could help ease the region’s water woes—if a Japanese tire company can convince enough farmers to grow it. “The West is mired in a water crisis that’s difficult to fully comprehend,” Miller writes. “More than 40 million people in seven states and two countries depend on the Colorado River, and its waters are depleting at a terrifying rate … For decades, leaders have sought a way to equitably share what’s left of the shrinking supply, but there has always been one stubborn sticking point: Farmers consume three-quarters of the region’s precious water, often to grow thirsty, inedible crops like cotton and hay.”
From a 300-acre laboratory south of Phoenix, Miller explains, the Bridgestone Corporation is “trying to establish the country’s sole domestic source for the kind of high-grade natural rubber used in airplane tires and surgical gloves — and they were doing it with a crop accustomed to drought.”
As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, FERN’s determination to push beyond low-hanging stories of disaster and crisis will become even more important. With that in mind, keep an eye — and an ear — out later this spring for news about our upcoming podcast, which explores how climate change is reshaping agriculture in the Midwest. And as always, our work depends on your generosity. If you want to help support stories like these, please consider a donation to FERN.