Someone recently asked my son, who's studying environmental studies at St. John's University, if he regrets choosing a major that's "just a fad." That was the exact word they used. A fad. Like pet rocks or Crocs with socks.
He nodded politely. Later, when he told me, we laughed. Not because it was funny, exactly, but because it made us wonder: what part is the fad? Studying how land, water, and weather affect people's lives? Learning how to keep lakes clean or stop fields from washing away? If that's a fad, it's one with pretty practical uses around here.
Zoom out a little, and it relates to the big stuff too. The weather's getting weirder. The seasons don't feel the same. The damage is getting more expensive.
Frankly, Mother Nature doesn't care what label you use. She just does what she does. And lately, she's been sending the bill. One that we're already paying.
Look around Paynesville. Last week's storms flooded basements, flattened crops, and dropped century-old trees on homes. We've always prided ourselves on surviving wild weather. Like Prince said, "it keeps the bad people out." But storms and high lake levels that used to show up once a decade now come every couple of years. When your insurance goes up again, it won't matter whether you call it climate change or just bad luck. You'll still be the one footing the bill.
Even our winters are changing. Remember when ice fishing season used to last for months? Minnesota's lost 10 to 17 ice-covered days over the past 50 years. Some lakes freeze nearly three weeks later than they used to. Mid-season warmups now make the ice unreliable. Every lost day cuts into the income for area businesses selling rooms, food or even bait.
And it's not just ice. Average winter lows in northern Minnesota have climbed 5 to 7 degrees. Central Minnesota's warmed 6 degrees since the late 1800s. That's thousands of winter nights that used to be cold and aren't anymore.
Summers bring their own price tag. Hotter days strain air conditioners, raise energy bills, stress livestock, and send workers to the ER with heat exhaustion. Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
So what can we do?
To some folks, environmental science still sounds like something people in the Cities talk about while eating avocado toast. But it's full of practical tools we can use right here. We can restore shorelines and plant buffers to protect our lakes. Add cover crops and improve drainage to keep topsoil in place. Plant trees. Restore wetlands. These "fads" help land absorb heavy rain, hang on through drought, and brace for the temperature swings we're already living through. And if we're serious, we can also chip in on the bigger effort to slow the storms down in the first place.
We don't need to agree on politics or climate models. We just need to agree that flooded fields, shorter ice seasons, and storm-damaged roads are expensive. Doing nothing will cost even more.
This isn't about someday. It's about what's happening now. The storms, the insurance hikes, the crops lost. We can't vote on the weather, but we can decide how we prepare for it and what kind of future we want for central Minnesota.
So if land buffers and wetland restoration still sound like fads, just remember: they might be the kind of "fads" that help keep the lights on, the fields productive, and the road to town passable the next time Mother Nature sends the bill.
