This week’s story: Martin Heintzelman talking about putting a price on carbon
The Institute for a Sustainable Environment is collecting climate stories from Clarkson and the surrounding community. The project explores personal experiences that people have had with our changing climate along with some academic perspectives. We started the project off with Dr. Susan Powers talking about how when she was an undergraduate everyone walked across the Raquette River to get from Clarkson to downtown – and she has temperature data to back it up!
Our hope through this project is to collect and share content that exposes the reality of climate change here and now. Rather than talking about global average temperature changes, which can seem abstract and irrelevant, we are more interested in how climate change has affected people’s lives who live here in the North Country. We can see everything changing – What does that mean for us as a community as our recreation and work adapts to new normals? Some stories we have collected, or have in the pipeline include:
- Plowing in Potsdam
- Whitewater rafting in the Adirondacks
- Animals surviving with more freeze-thaw cycles in winter
- Maple syrup season
- Cross-country skiing in December
- Harvesting fruits
- Gardening with new vegetables
- A Catholic perspective on climate change
- The Ice Palace in Saranac Lake
- Hunting season
- Days over 100 degrees
- Ice climbing
Climate change is happening now. It’s happening here. And it’s affecting us. This project was inspired by the Climate Stories Project and some of the work that our friends at Paul Smith’s College have been doing with telling these stories. If you have a climate story you’d like to share please email Alex French at afrench@clarkson.edu or our ISE intern Nick LaScala at lascaln@clarkson.edu.