Millie LaFontaine lives in Concord.

As we’ve bounced between periods of unseasonably warm and unseasonably frigid weather this winter, the effects of climate change are inescapable, even to those of us who wish to ignore that inconvenient truth. We’d like to think that warm is ok, because our heating costs are down, and extreme cold snaps, especially short ones, are okay because we can bundle up and avoid the worst of the cold.

The Monitor has covered stories that reveal the tip of the iceberg of the adverse health and environmental effects of this wacky weather, both for humans and for our fellow creatures on earth. There has been more robust coverage of the plight of unhoused people, and the need for cold weather shelter and so much more as the thermometer plummets.

If we didn’t know it before, we now know that frostbite can occur on exposed skin in a matter of minutes. Importantly, we are learning that the stress and emotional toll of finding a way to avoid the cold is enormous for far too many in our state. This has a direct effect on the health and well-being of people in our community.

We’re all drawn to the more sensational stories, like house fires engulfing our neighbors’ houses, resulting sometimes in winter from efforts to stay warm, or pileups on icy roads. But we also need to read the more nuanced stories, for instance about the adverse effects of excessive salting of roads on trees, adjacent bodies of water, and the wildlife they support, and the quality of our drinking water.

We know, of course, that consistent cold is crucial for our winter sports, which has been a real problem this year. What we might not realize is that a good snowpack that remains throughout the winter is critical to our New Hampshire trees and other vegetation, as well as the insects and creatures that spend the cold months beneath the snow and ice. It’s also key for replenishing our water table and keeping drought at bay during the warmer months. That’s been covered in our paper, too.

And we’ve also learned that consistent cold is needed to keep dangerous pests like ticks from causing the slow death of our iconic moose, or deer ticks from infecting deer (and consequently us) with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease, or the woolly adelgid from sapping the strength and killing our native hemlocks. Hemlocks, in turn, shade our lakes and streams and make them hospitable for the fish, and the web of aquatic wildlife they rely on. We need sustained cold temperatures that prevent pests from surviving and multiplying, for human health, and for that of our fellow creatures.

I applaud our paper’s efforts to keep these issues front and center as climate change bears down upon us. When I moved to New Hampshire more than 30 years ago, people would reassure me, “If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes!” But the unpleasant fact is that we need to act now to keep the things that make our state special, or they will be gone in 10 minutes.

Our governor and state legislators have far too often ignored these facts, as they have consistently made it harder for us to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, transition to clean energy or to preserve fragile habitats from development. The party line has been that there’s too little oil, not too much, that private property belongs to individuals to do whatever they please with, that extraction of whatever is contained in the forests and lands is better than leaving it there, that development of the land is the ultimate good. It brings me back to that song of the seventies, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I hope the Monitor and other local news sources continue the vital function of covering what is happening beneath our very noses. These are messages we don’t necessarily want to hear. I hope we learn the things we can do as individuals, and we learn how to act collectively to convince our lawmakers to do the right thing or elect those who will. And I hope we do the hard things we must do before it’s too late.

]]>