The U.S. presidential election is one long week away. If there is not enough anxiety to go around here on earth, I need to mention the planetary concern that has not been in heavy rotation during this autumn’s news cycle. James Carville, in 1992, famously told his campaign staffers: “It’s the economy, stupid! Carville was the strategist for Bill Clinton who was pitted against the incumbent George H.W. Bush. The country was recovering from a recession. Unemployment was high, and economic growth was slow. Clinton won easily.
Would it make any difference this go around to yell, “It’s climate change, stupid!?”
59% of U.S. adults, according to a 2024 opinion poll, say global warming is caused principally by human activities. 29% aren’t buying it—attributing the warming to natural environmental changes.
There’s a demographic that hasn’t been polled
Growing Greener podcaster and Garden Ranter Emeritus Tom Christopher recently interviewed paleobotanist Dana Royer in an interesting podcast episode called “Will Nature Heal Itself?” They discussed fossil evidence of plants, the loss of native plant habitats, and the millions of years that is has taken the earth to recover from previous mass extinctions.
What caught my attention was Tom’s assessment: “I don’t know any gardener who is really serious about it and pays attention to it who doesn’t notice that there are systems within nature, all sorts of dynamics, many of them pretty obvious,” he said.
“For instance: I rarely run into a gardener, and I don’t care if it is red state or a blue state, who doesn’t accept climate change. They’ve seen it in their own yards.”
Though there is no polling to give this credence, I have had the same observation from a demographic whose passions are intertwined every working hour with the science outdoors.
Carolina Native Nursery, in Burnsville, NC, lost an estimated 95% of their shrubs and 85% of their perennials to Hurricane Helene.
Four feet of flood water.
Potted plants washed down Price’s Creek as far as Erwin, Tennessee, 27 miles downstream.
Shelby Jackson, Horticulturist and Head of Sales, and Founder and President Bill Jones have talked and cried a lot.
“It feels like the car was totaled but the hood is fine.”
I asked Shelby whether she thought this was a 100, 500 or a 1000-year flood. “All bets are off,” she said.
“We’ve had tons of help, and everyone shows up with a smile on their face and this makes every day of cleanup a little easier.”
“We’ve put 20 years into this and we’re not giving up.”
The wise people know: it’s climate change, stupid!
Photos courtesy of Carolina Native Nursery
It’s climate change, stupid! originally appeared on GardenRant on October 29, 2024.
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