I tried to study and teach about climate and sustainability and resilience for thirty years at the college level. My wife (also a professor) and I started a small farm and have been running that for twenty years, trying to model on a small scale the agricultural and energy and housing systems needed to fight climate change. In my teaching, I met resistance at every turn. I was a poverty stricken grad student for twelve years just in order to get the PhD (climate policy) needed to qualify for my eventual position. I gave up a large portion of potential income, and postponed having a family. I was yelled at at public meetings and insulted by conservative students. Ultimately our brand of radical thinking was too much for our employers and we were forced out. I chose to retire in near mental exhaustion.

But I can tell myself I fought the good fight. And as for my former opponents of all stripes, fuck 'em. They can kiss my sustainable ass.

Now in retirement, getting my exercise running the farm and fixing things, having recovered mentally and physically, I have become not complacent, not fatalistic, but perhaps I am now able now to take the geologic view over the ecological one. Nothing in nature is static. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. Home sapiens only for around 150,000 years. Maine only for 203. If everything happens much as the majority of climate scientists expect, the place we now call Maine will have a climate more like Virginia's by 2100. The ecosystem we know in Maine will be replaced by one more like that found in VA. The sea level will rise, perhaps by a lot if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet fails, as it certainly appears to be trying to do. Our costal towns will need to move uphill and inland. It's possible, even likely, that the warming will continue after 2300, unless we find a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Immigrant pressure from the global south, where farming and urban environments will fail humanity completely, will increase tremendously, perhaps catastrophically at times. Storms will get yet worse, especially hurricanes and rainstorms. But ecosystems currently unattractive in places like Labrador and Greenland will also open up and so some of us will move north in turn, pioneering new civilizations. Even Maine life will go on. It won't necessarily be awful, just different. We'll be better off than Texas and Florida, a notion that carries some shard of natural consequence for the collective guilt of the populations of those states in regard to climate politics. The hard part will be the toxic politics and conflict that these changes will encourage globally. We will be lucky to keep our democracy and freedom. I realize that more and more with recent events and have started to realize my work isn't over, so I've begun to write about the nexus between climate change, societal resilience, democracy and freedom.

I'll let you know how this new venture turns out if I get anywhere with it.