At a visitor center overlooking a deep foreboding chasm cut by the Gunnison River, I picked up a small Park Service brochure.  On a rare chance to get away from the farm, sheep, and late garden harvest last October, we visited some lesser known units of the National Park Service—Black Canyon and Colorado National Monument, with the intriguing Grand Mesa in between.

In another life I would have been a park ranger, and much to the frustration of my family, I love thoroughly investigating visitor centers.  I love the wild and don’t like crowds, but the interface between the two epitomized in National Parks and their visitor centers fascinates me.  These parks are really ours—collectively not personally, which is important, and therefore deserve our collective care.

The brochure that caught my eye was on “Climate Change in National Parks”—one of several by that name over the years as the Park Service saw increasing impacts and let the public know.  I reread and pondered that brochure over the next several weeks as it brought home the severity and urgency of climate change impacts on our world—but in a very personal way.  This particular brochure came close to home—on the edge of its satellite map of the Mesa Verde fires was our own community.  (In writing this, I feared I had misplaced the hardcopy, so I went the Park Service climate webpages to search for climate change publications—to my surprise they hadn’t been deleted!)

The brochure was blunt.  The Joshua trees in the lonely park I traversed in a VW bug almost 50 years ago may not survive in that park much longer as the winters warm.  The climate-induced beetle outbreaks threatening my favorite pine, the Whitebark, are causing profound ecological unravelings.  The pinyon pines in southwestern parks are suffering the same fate as those in our own backyard.  The glaciers in Glacier Park are disappearing, and I worry I won’t get back to see them again before they are gone.  Mangroves will likely be inundated where we visit our daughter in Florida.  All treasured memories and things I want to see again—preferably as they were, but that’s not in the cards.  Natural changes are one thing, but those at our hands make me sad and make me angry.

Climate change impacts are real, are here now, will get worse before better, and could get much, much worse if we don’t act soon.  The brochure explains that “the magnitude and pace of these changes…are unprecedented in human history.”  I have been guilty of repeatedly saying that “we need to act now” more than I have given really clear ideas of what we can do.  Finally, after absorbing all this and then seeing DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood”, I decided to make it as clear as possible in our outreach.  We work in food, so we posted a simple outline of what people as individuals and then as communities can do to  Address Climate Change with Local Food and a similar page for Addressing Biodiversity.  So there is plenty to do with local food as a tool, and that will lead to actions in other parts of our lives like transport, home energy use, consumerism, and more.

Action is even more critical now given the new political climate.  Political will on the national level to confront climate change is distressingly low, so we must do much more on the local level—perfect for actions regarding food.  The impacts on the many plants, animals, and ecosystems of these far-flung parks allow us to “experience” or internalize the depth of the severity and the urgency of climate action that we would not experience just in our home territory—even if we never visit many of these places.  Social research shows that personal experience and impacts on our possessions is what makes climate change real.  These parks are our possessions, albeit collective ones, but can help engage us all more deeply.

These parks themselves are under political attack by some groups as well, but I am confident that we love them enough to keep them intact.  These lands are our national treasures.  I am hopeful that the absurdity of some recent efforts to downplay science, ignore climate change, defund environmental protections, and act unfairly to other people, our society, our environment, and our future will actually back-fire.  Those tweets from Badlands National Park are a sure sign of hope, and live on even after being deleted.

We need to be “doing something” about climate change. There is plenty of talk, more and more people recognizing the problem, but much, much less action than needed. Food, actually local food, is a perfect way to start, and an area that all people can make substantive changes in without hardship. Effort—yes; thought—yes; hardship—not really.

Climate change is hitting food production now, is slated to get much more intense, and urgent action is required to keep climate disruptions from becoming catastrophic. This all comes at a time when the local food movement is calling for more local food, and when Native peoples are trying to revitalize their Native foods and farming. To us, this is an opportunity to harness the power of the local and indigenous food movements to support thoughtful and proactive measures to make our local food systems more resilient, more productive in a changing world, and a truly regenerative force combating climate change.

Map, Monitor, Adapt. We at Healthy Community Food Systems have been working this past year on a number of resources to support this effort. We believe that a concerted effort among farmers and ranchers, local food activists, and consumer-citizens is needed to understand and adapt to climate change impacts on food production, mitigate further impacts by reducing greenhouse gases generated by the food system, all while making their communities healthier as well as their future.

Mapping—who doesn’t love maps? Maps help us visualize patterns and relationships, and if you think in terms of foodsheds, the geographic representation is essential. Local food groups have mapped their food systems as part of local food assessments for some time, but we are suggesting that we pay more attention to the land where this food production occurs and the broader landscape that is ecologically tied to these gardens, farms, and ranches.

We see local foodsheds as the area that we should look to first for our food, and that area we should be most responsible for—such as a county or two to start—so maps help us visualize these landscapes in relation to neighboring foodsheds.

Maps, simple or complex, help us consider the health of the land that our food production depends on, so we not only map out economic disparities, food security and access, food production areas, and personal health indicators—but the environmental health as well. For example, in our Four Corners/San Juan Mountain region, we consider water quality (we think of the yellow river here last year), water supply (snowpack changes in our mountains), air quality (Four Corners power plants), climate (heat, drought, floods), and biodiversity (pollinators, bats, sage grouse, and pikas), and more. All must be considered for truly sustainable and healthy foodsheds.

Monitoring—what’s changing? Without tracking the changes in these indicators of health, we simply would have little idea what we have accomplished or how to set priorities. The food system and specific projects need monitoring over time or we can’t catch longer term changes and outcomes. Economic development, health, agriculture, and environmental agencies and groups are logical partners in this effort.

Is anyone watching? What we see as an excellent opportunity to engage people of all ages in this effort is to get them involved in citizen monitoring of foodshed health. It can start with kids learning to be observant of nature in their school and backyard gardens—worms, bees, birds, weather, pollinators, etc.  This is our Wild School Gardens project—deeper ecological learning in school food gardens.

What if these kids shared their observations with the farmers and ranchers that sell local food to their schools, and asked these producers what they were seeing on their farms and ranches? What if they needed local experts from the community to help? We envision a whole community effort that raises awareness of the connection between the health of the land, food, and people.

An elegant solution. Citizen Science programs allow the public to submit their observations to help scientists understand these issues and develop improvements. While environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity losses can be so worrisome that there is a tendency to be paralyzed into inaction, straightforward observations of the indicators of these problems shared with scientists is an elegant way to be aware of the issues while helping to improve them. Our Observing Indicators of Foodshed Health guidelines are for observers and citizen scientists of all ages.

Adapting—as if our future depended on it. Much of what needs to be done is already known—things we have known that we should be doing as part of a sustainable and wise agriculture. What we have now with climate change is an even more critical need for these changes and a greatly enhanced urgency. In addition to what might be called mainstream sustainable agriculture is a need to revisit systems-changing approaches such as forest gardens, permaculture, traditional knowledge, and biomimicry as Gary Nabhan promotes in his outstanding guide: Growing Food in a  Hotter, Drier Land.

Mitigation is the most important adaptation. As we compiled information on current impacts, possible solutions, and the prospect of much greater climate change, a need became clear. We don’t at all suggest that adapting to withstand climate change is not important, but that unless we act now to reduce greenhouse gases, we face the prospect of catastrophic impacts that we will be hard put to withstand. In this sense, we see mitigation as the most important and urgent change we can make in our local to global food systems. The silver lining is that many if not most adaptations to be better able to withstand climate change will also help mitigate it.

Looking Forward—to more healthy local food from healthy local foodsheds. We currently face the certainty of challenging times ahead for food production, but also the uncertainty of exactly how and when these impacts will unfold. We need to envision the future (we present scenarios that can help), make the changes that will address what we think is likely (especially no-regrets strategies), and be ready to adapt to the unexpected. With this mindset and resolve, we should be able to look forward to more healthy local food as we strive to keep our foodsheds healthy and productive.

I have felt lately like I have joined a “preppers book club” as friends discuss books looking to an uncertain future, not as survivalists but as preparers or preppers. Concerns for the future range from electromagnetic pulses frying our electronics, our fragile electric grid, even that subtle and far-off specter of climate change. Preparing for the unknown is not a bad idea—if done strategically and with a clear view of relative risks. In fact this is what we at Getting Serious Now have been urging for some time.

A scenario from Lloyd’s articulates a very real concern for our future that we should all prepare for. Yes, Lloyd’s of London, the venerable insurance company that adds an air of authority to projections into the future. Their recent report is getting some much-deserved attention lately with an excellent synopsis and climatological backgrounder from Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, alarmingly called, “Food System Shock: Climate Change’s Greatest Threat to Civilization.”

Master’s synopsis of the Lloyd’s Scenario is well worth reading. They see “uncomfortably high odds,” pegged at an 18% chance over the next 40 years, of catastrophic disruptions rippling through the global food system, and then to the world economy and international affairs. Crop losses, food price spikes, food riots, stock market drops, famine, civil wars, terrorist attacks, and failed states.

“Yes, we have heard these warnings”—but let’s listen again with some real-world projections from Lloyd’s scenario: Crop losses (corn and soybeans down 10%), food price spikes (four times prices seen in 2000), food riots (Mid East, Latin America), stock market drops (European loses 10% value), famine (one million starve in Bangladesh), civil wars (Nigeria), terrorist attacks (US), and failed states (Mali). For a relatively fragile world system, these are shocks indeed.

“Still, just projections”—not so fast! Masters calls up the most extreme weather year of recent times, 2010, to illustrate how realistic these projections are. A stagnant jet stream brought Russian grain failures and a heat wave killing tens of thousands, food price spikes, riots in the Mid East and North Africa tied by many to the Arab Spring—among other disruptions across the globe. What strikes me as so alarming is that at the beginning of 2010, the USDA projected good global harvests and low prices. These experts seemed to have little inking in January what that very year would bring!

The key to the catastrophic global disruptions in Lloyd’s specific scenario is a few things happening at one time, a strong El Niño causing a US corn crop failure along with failures in two other regions of the world, coupled with two well-known diseases attacking global wheat and soybeans. The nature of our global food system and of global climate connections, such as when warm Pacific waters of an El Niño cause droughts and floods around the globe, makes the deadly combination of crop failures just a matter of time. These odds will grow if we allow population to surge, industrial agriculture to remain the norm, and if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Not a pretty picture. Yet, I find curious solace in a haunting poem from Wendell Berry, that gives me a literal and figurative direction.

February 2, 1968 

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Certainly we need to prepare, to be smart preppers. But even more important is to work as hard as we can individually and collectively to reduce the chances of the Lloyd’s Scenario. The beauty is that decoupling as much as possible from the global food system (heresy for sure), localization of our food systems (naïve indeed), and depending on our local foodsheds and keeping them healthy (idealistic to say the least) will help us prepare for the worst and make sure the worst doesn’t happen.

It isn’t all about local solutions though, we need to have wise national and international policies. Not the corporate, industrial, business-as-usual solutions predictably springing up, but “whole solutions” as Wendell Berry would propose—those that don’t create new problems along the way. As much as we might want to retreat politically into our local shell, we need to elect and support wise, compassionate, and clear-thinking leaders, in spite of the odds, who are willing and able to pursue these whole solutions.

As the day warms this beautiful May morning, I need to wrap up this piece, plow through all the other so-important pressing work on my desk, and get out to the garden I have been neglecting and get working on some of Berry’s truly whole solutions.