Climate change rally informs crowd
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PABLO — Montanans gathered in 13 communities around the state on April 26 in a series of rallies and events entitled Montanans for Climate Solutions.
In Pablo, about 45 people gathered at the Late Louie Caye Building on the Salish Kootenai College campus.
Speakers included Werner, Ph.D., a retired biology professor from Northern Michigan University and adjunct professor at SKC; Whisper Camel-Means, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal wildlife biologist; and Karl Sutton, an ecologist and a farmer.
Werner defined an ecosystem for the crowd as all living or biotic components: animals, plants, fish, turtles; and all the non-living or abiotic components such as water, rocks, and air, interact in two ways.
Those two ways are through a nutrient system — a nice way of saying eating each other — and energy flows, Werner said.
He also talked about the size of ecosystems. “What’s an ecosystem — the Mission Valley, Polson, my garden?” Werner asked.
The boundaries of an ecosystem are set by the people who study them, he answered.
“The largest ecosystem is the earth, the ecosphere,” Werner said.
Humans lived in balance with the ecosystem for thousands of years, he said. People knew where their food came from because they gathered it everyday, and they also knew where their waste was dumped because they covered it up.
The population grew, people congregated in towns and cities, technology expanded, cars were invented.
“We physically removed ourselves from where our food is produced and our waste is removed,” Werner said.
People have taken pleasure seeking to a new level by extracting extraordinary amount of natural resources to make refrigerators, iPads, iPhones, cars, clothing, etc. and labeling this extraction technology as progress.
“There’s no free lunch,” Werner said. “Any amount of technology we have today comes with a price of some ecosystem somewhere.”
Camel-Means talked about the CSKT climate change strategic plan. She’s been working with Mike Durglo, division head of the CSKT Division of Environmental Quality, on “what we need to do as a government, as a people in this area.”
The document is in its early steps and will try to improve the tribal community and its resiliency.
“The plan isn’t just something we just created and put on the shelf, it’s a living document,” Camel-Means said, adding that they have a climate oversight committee meeting every month and continue working on funding and brainstorming on what they may have missed.
In creating the plan, Camel-Means said they also looked at what other people had created, such as the Missoula plan and the Swinomish Climate Change Initiative.
A lot of the plan has to do with emergency preparedness, Camel-Means said. Problems could be animals at high elevations with the climate warming up, or huge flood and fires, and what people and animals would do.
“The lesson is not a debate about whether the climate is changing,” Camel Means said, “but that we should pay attention, be mindful … ”
Sutton spoke about community supported agriculture and shortening the supply chain.
Instead of buying produce that’s been trucked in, patronize Farmers Markets or local cooperatives and buy fresh food. He also suggested community gardens, an organic seed co-op and a community compost area.
“We need to hone in on relationships between community food and farms,” Sutton said.
He said families may use SNAP money at Polson Farmers Market and the Western Montana Growers Cooperative because many times it isn’t that people don’t want healthy food for their families it’s a dollars and cents matter.
Although no conclusions were reached, Werner said more meetings would be held and solutions suggested.
