Year 2, Month 3, Day 26: Luckily We’ll Have GMO HFCS Instead.

The Danbury, CT News-Times runs a piece by Robert Miller on the future of maple syrup in a climatically reconfigured New England:

It’s not that there will no longer be maple syrup. It’s just that it won’t be made here. It will have to be shipped south for Connecticut pancakes.

(snip)
it’s not as if the maples in the state will move en masse and quickly.

(snip)

But if we do lose them, it will matter.

The native Americans in New England were making maple sugar before the Europeans arrived.

People have been walking in the winter woods, tasting the sweetness they have to offer, for a very long time.

Sent on March 25:

It’s saddening to think of New England’s maples slowly giving way to other species, and of the small farmers whose trees produce syrup for the region’s pancakes and waffles — and who’ll be shutting down their operations. Seen in isolation, this is a minor historical blip: there’s nothing unusual about a local food becoming harder to find. But the culinary consequences of climate change are hardly limited to America’s Northeastern states. The extreme weather conditions of anthropogenic global warming will have a huge agricultural effect. Considering the vulnerabilities of our staple crops is a sobering experience: a single day’s anomalous high temperatures can devastate corn harvests; monsoon failures can wreak havoc on rice production; wheat is likewise extremely vulnerable — hardly a single product of human agriculture won’t be adversely impacted. Climate change denialists need to wake up and smell the coffee — before that’s gone, too.

Warren Senders