What's Happening with the Climate and Why Does It Affect Me?

Picture of Laura England’s various efforts to promote environmental and sustainability education throughout the High Country. Photo Credits: Sustainability Department at Appalachian State University

Ebe Santes, Staff Member for Watauga 10

Climate change is not a distant issue. It is a present and growing challenge that affects ecosystems, communities, and everyday life. From shifting weather patterns to more frequent extreme events, its impacts are becoming harder and harder to ignore. Climate change calls for awareness, education, and action. For students, this can seem overwhelming, not knowing what steps to take to try to slow climate change. However, Mrs. Laura England, Director of Academic Sustainability Initiatives at Appalachian State, is helping bring awareness to what’s happening in our climate and what changes are already underway to better our future and be proactive against climate change.

England has a background in ecology and environmental science. After gaining years of experience within her studies and classroom, England moved on to bigger roles in the environmental sustainability awareness industry.

“I’m not in the classroom currently. I’m instead working at the university-wide level,” said England, who is part of a climate literacy initiative at Appalachian State. “It’s a five-year project, and the goal is for every single academic department to develop coursework and opportunities for their students to learn about climate solutions within those majors and the professions that flow from them.” 

The motivation behind this program is the encompassing idea that, ‘In the future every job will have a climate component.’ The climate initiative doesn’t just focus on staff and how they can make strides in their course offerings, but in implementing climate-centered content all throughout a college campus.

“We’re also working with partners across campus to offer co-curricular learning programs that can look like a two-hour-long event with a guest speaker who’s a climate expert,” said England. “We had North Carolina's Chief Resilience Officer come as a one-year remembrance of Hurricane Helene to keep the learning going about resilience.”

Some events have included a workshop on global warming bracelets, where students made bracelets out of beads, with each color representing a different temperature throughout the years since 1880. They also had climate change artist Jill Pelto visit last April, and they took her to Grandfather Mountain to talk about sky islands.

 “[Pelto] is creating two new paintings telling the story of our region that'll be part of the exhibition that's opening in June at the Turchin Hill Art Center,” said England.  

While these events help students and teachers better understand climate change in creative and engaging ways, the issue extends far beyond the classroom and into everyday life. One of the most direct ways people experience the effects of climate change is through the food they eat. If you think about what you ate today, it was probably plants, animals, and/or animal products. It seems strange to ask, but how could global warming affect your diet? 

“Every living organism responds to changes in temperature, precipitation, moisture--all of these things that are the weather, which is influenced by the longer-term climate--so it’s hard to think of a profession that’s more at the mercy of the weather and long-term climate change than farming,” said England. “Farmers develop their practices based on historical patterns, but those patterns are no longer holding up year to year.”

Climate change is not just warming across the board. It’s extreme weather events like droughts, snowstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and more. Climate change is really an increase in extreme, unpredictable weather events. Many places around the world, including North Carolina, that are experiencing more droughts are also experiencing more flooding due to the annual rainfall being heavily concentrated in fewer rainfall events, caused by global warming.

“During Helene, parts of our region got half of their annual rainfall in those couple of days, which is just unreal, it’s still hard to believe how much water fell,” said England. “The Valle Crucis Park was like a gigantic ocean of flowing brown water full of debris.”

Climatologists urge people to think about the extreme weather events happening, not only across the world but here in North Carolina, and consider how they are affecting communities and loved ones. 

“The extreme events have caused damage to everything, including agriculture,” said England. “For farms that are growing crops and livestock, a lot of that land is located in the lower-lying areas for really pragmatic reasons because the flatter land tends to be in the low spots, and flood lands tend to be more fertile.”

Here in the High Country, farmers are a lot more impacted by droughts than in other areas like the Piedmont and the Coastal Plains. These extreme events only make it harder for local farms and communities to get by.

“Extreme events, including drought, are really hard on food production,” said England. “Some farmers are irrigating, but I think less so in the High Country than down in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, where there are very large industrial sized farms that have a whole lot more money for that kind of infrastructure, so drought could be harder on the smaller farms that we have up here.”

Global warming makes agricultural and livestock farming patterns much harder to track and implement for farmers worldwide. 

“The uncertainty, the not meeting historical patterns, the having to constantly experiment to figure out what works, like changing varieties of what you're planting and the timing of planting, you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” said England.

With such widespread and damaging effects caused by climate change, many people are enthusiastic to make changes and help combat it, but are unsure where to begin. Some major ways to be more climate-friendly are planting trees, composting, changing your diet to include more vegetables than meat, voting, and, most of all, talking about it.

“Trees do so many good things. We can never have too many trees,” said England. “Besides providing shade, they're providing evaporative cooling by pulling water through their roots into their leaves, and water is evaporating from them, which provides cooling on a local scale and is a lot better for cattle than building a shed.” 

England urges her students that climate change prevention and awareness starts with the individual. While it may feel ostracizing to make such drastic lifestyle changes for the good of the environment, climate change prevention is personal, public, and political.

“For every individual, there are things that we can do that are lifestyle-related, and there are things we can do related to public and social lives, and then there are things we can do that are more related to being a participant in American democracy,” said England. “High school students are not yet old enough to vote, but you will be soon, so emailing and calling your elected officials to express that, as a constituent, you want to see them supporting climate solutions, and those are things that don’t take a lot of time or effort or even expertise.”