We are requesting support for our social, economic and climate justice project
Elderberry Wisdom Farm is expanding partnerships this winter to develop a social, economic and climate justice project being proposed to US Department of Agriculture for rural Marion County, Oregon. Our concept proposal is being submitted for review in mid-February with the full proposal due in April. We are inviting Western science partners to work with us to apply 'resilience thinking' that can strengthen biodiversity and sustainability of Willamette Valley ecosystems. Interested partners can contact Rose High Bear at rose@elderberrywisdom.org before January 31.
As we read grim statistics on climate change in the Pacific Northwest that continue to be published, including last week’s climate report from NASA, NOAA and Berkeley Earth. They confirm that July was the hottest month humanity has ever recorded. http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2021/. We certainly felt it in Marion County in July as we watched our Native plant starts suffer from the heat.
The heat dome that seared the Pacific Northwest this past summer was ‘the most anomalous extreme heat event ever observed on Earth,’ in the words of one scientist — a disaster so severe that it would have been virtually impossible in a world without climate change… climate change has already affected extreme weather in a big way, especially heat waves… Global warming is not our grandchildren’s problem; it is ours, here and now.
This is not surprising Elderberry Wisdom Farm’s Founder who has been filming Native American and Alaskan Native elders’ responses to emerging climate issues for over a decade. She recorded subsistence peoples from Alaska who shared observations and memories of over 65 years of changes in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic. Some stories were shared in six climate documentary films from the Native Wisdom Climate Documentary Film series produced by the film team between 2012 and 2019.
In this decade, as we continue to track persistent global challenges to our earth’s biodiversity, we see more losses, especially food insecurity among the world’s indigenous peoples. They are experiencing not just the threat of the loss but the loss of traditional First Foods they and their ancestors enjoyed for centuries in their sacred landscapes.
We appreciate that our scientific community is increasingly including indigenous people in identifying solutions that can inform development of more holistic and sustainable land-use policies, including climate adaptation and mitigation projects happening on tribal lands throughout Indian Country.
We have created this new project and are relying upon collaborative partnerships with tribes, government agencies, educational institutions and environmental nonprofits. Including leaders from all generations and diverse collaborative partners can help to transform sacred Willamette Valley landscapes in a sustainable way that promotes biodiversity and also advances equity. Again, you can contact Rose High Bear, Executive Director at Elderberry Wisdom Farm rose@elderberrywisdom.org.