Winter 2020 Editor's Letter
2019 brought a lot of climate news, most of it bad. Warming oceans melted billions of tons of glacial ice; pesticide runoff acidified oceans, killing coral reefs and disrupting marine life; thousand-year floods in the plains and hundred-year storms on the coasts were frequent, even regular; and massive fires burned in Australia, California, Siberia and the Amazon, wreaking havoc on people and wildlife and releasing dangerous levels of carbon into the atmosphere. Pretty scary stuff wherever you live, but two consecutive 70°+ days in mid-January in New England felt less like a welcome reprieve from the cold and more like a scary view into a winterless future. Strange, wasn’t it?
Needless to say, people are waking up. In story after story in last year’s national media there were words like “tipping point” and “irreversible” punctuating the headlines. Time’s Person of the Year wasn’t a Nobel winner or a titan of industry, it was a teenage climate activist with a huge following and the power to inspire a generation. The Global Climate Strikes in September spanned the globe, with millions of young—and not-so-young—people taking to the streets, demanding action to end carbon emissions and a transition to renewable energy. The United Nations’ Climate Report was bleak: “Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in global [greenhouse gas] emissions, meaning that deeper and faster cuts are now required.”
And where the United States once led the fight against climate change, our current government spent precious time rolling back existing environmental regulations, revoking a Clean Power Plan and pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, among other dastardly deeds. Seems incongruous.
When I first planned out this issue and its theme— Climate, Community and Conservation—I wanted to tell the stories of what local people are doing to nurture and protect our collective ecosystem in the face of a changing planet. What could concerned citizens do to confront these daunting, overwhelming issues? Are the problems so vast that individual actions won’t help? Will any amount of personal change even make a difference? Food, its agricultural production and the packaging/ transport/disposal thereof, is an important contributor to climate change. Maybe adjusting how we eat and where we put our waste could help stall the inevitable. I’ve always thought that regular people changing small habits en masse could slow this crisis down and leave more time for our government to catch up.
Often the solutions to the environmental problems humans create are expensive and too complicated to put into action. Energy efficiency is incredibly important, but it’s difficult and costly to do as individuals while we continue to wait for real structural, governmental change. Like most people, I wish I could easily fix the energy waste in our home life, but, as they say, the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Reducing food waste and excess packaging are low-hanging fruit; in the absence of a fully energy efficient home, we do what we can, where we can, and it starts in the kitchen.
To help offset our energy use, we eat less meat and make sure it’s raised nearby. I keep a small kitchen garden, compost our waste, support local farmers and replaced our ziptops and cling film with cotton and beeswax wraps. These are really small changes, but maybe when combined with the positive actions all of you are taking, they can help push us in the right direction?
This issue is chockablock full of uplifting and optimistic work in the face of a challenge, but it’s certainly not comprehensive; we will have missed some things, for sure, and we did try to have a little fun around a heavy subject. We didn’t even touch on pollinators (but devoted a whole issue to bees in 2013; those articles are just as relevant today— find them in our archives on our website). Our sister magazine, Edible Worcester, is also running a climate issue that features a home composting service, solar-powered brewery, farmers adapting to a changing ecosystem, urban gardening and mushroom foraging—be sure to pick up a copy or read it online.
In December, my husband, Chris, and I bought Edible Boston and Edible Worcester from their founder, Ilene Bezahler. We assure you that the mission will remain the same: to tell the stories of the food community in Greater Boston and Worcester County, now and into the future. We thank you for reading, subscribing and supporting the businesses who advertise in every issue. And when you’re done with it, pass this copy along, recycle or compost it; our paper is Forest Stewardship Council-certified and the ink is soy-based, so you can feel good about returning it to the earth.
My eyes have been opened in the making of these issues. The people featured here and in Edible Worcester are doing critical work to get us through this crisis and I feel more optimistic now than I did last fall. It’s up to us to join them and make as many small changes as we can; there’s no time to waste. But what’s the best way for us to correct the course we’re on? You guessed it:
Vote.
Sarah Blackburn
