Climate Change in Maine: the Problem, the Response, the Impact on Maine Farms

Saturday, September 24

2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at the Spotlight Stage

In Maine we are experiencing generally warmer fall weather and earlier springs, later first frosts and earlier last frosts. This gives us a longer growing season, but not dependably. Often the weather is extreme, and it is the extremes of temperature and rain, flood, drought and storm intensity, their frequency and duration, that really matter for growers and other Maine producers in natural resource industries. We are seeing new insect pests, “invasive” plants, and disease frequencies, in our fields, forests and fisheries, and effects on our own health, with new insect vectors and the increasing warm hazy ozone days in the summer. Beyond our relatively moderate climate, we see the melting sea and glacial ice, affecting fresh water sources and weather tempering ocean currents, the ongoing acidification of the oceans (a serious threat to sea food production), disrupted wildlife biological life cycles, more very large storms, record flooding, drought, forest fires and heat waves, even now threatening agriculture and peoples around the world.

Strangely, our leadership, the media, and the institutions and public they inform and represent, have been unable to respond reasonably to this increasing threat and even appear decreasingly aware and concerned about this critical problem.

However the Common Ground Fair itself is a wonderful source of solutions to global warming, that reduce our CO2 emissions with energy efficiency and use reduction, in our homes and transportation choices, energy alternatives to fossil fuels, protect biodiversity and adaptability on our wild lands and farms, provide natural CO2 sinks, teach us how to build local production and community planning for sustainability and social cohesion, and last but not least, political action to help make this happen. We have a broad mandate and the Fair is a good place to start, to find where you want to start, where we want to start together.

MOFGA’s Public Policy Teach-in on Saturday will address these overall effects of climate change, our state’s legislative and planning responses (or lack thereof), the more specific effects on Maine agriculture and food production generally, and how communities can respond to build resilience into our lives as the climate continues to change.

Panelists will include: Stephen Mulkey, PhD, president of Unity College, an ecologist, working in forest ecology and interdisciplinary environment and sustainability education development at the college and secondary level; Dylan Voorhees, Clean Energy and Global Warming Project Director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine; John Jemison, PhD, University of Maine Trustee Professor for 2011, water quality and soils specialist, Cooperative Extension, focusing on sustainable food and agricultural systems; Andy Burt, community organizer and environmental justice consultant with Maine Partners for Cool Communities and the Eat Local Foods Coalition; and Lou McNally, longtime MPBN meteorologist, and former TV host of “Made in Maine”, Interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, and Assistant Professor of Applied Meteorology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. A question and answer period will follow short presentations by each panelist. Sharon Tisher, J.D., who teaches environmental law in the School of Economics, University of Maine, Orono, is a member of MOFGA’s Public Policy Committee and past President of the MOFGA Board of Directors, will moderate the panel discussion.