Talking With Kids (The Goat Kind And Human) About Homesteading in a Warming Climate

I talk about climate change pretty much every day of my life now. I am not kidding. It’s true. And it’s not because I talk to myself a lot. It’s because I got my dream job of working as a professional climate policy analyst. So now I get to talk about climate change every Monday through Friday. But I also get to talk about it outside work, too.

Just as important as my day job, I am also a homesteader and small goat farmer, and I talk about climate change as I experience somewhat subtle impacts as I work to move our humble little plot of land toward increased sustainability and climate resilience. Sometimes I talk to the goats about it, and sometimes I talk as I do regular and seasonal homestead chores with my co-laborers, my children. Today we talked about our soil erosion problem. Our homestead is at the foothills of the Helderberg Mountains, which means our small plot of mostly wooded land is on a slope. It used to be that the winter would come and freeze the soil and drop a nice layer of snow on the ground. Any additional snow would mostly just pile up until the spring came, the ground would unfreeze and the grass and undergrowth would grow, and spring rains would mostly go right into the soil to help everything grow at the prefect time when it was most needed. But today we talked about how winter just as often drops rain now, not snow. And the ground is not frozen.

Ríobart É. (Rob) Breen, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Anam Earth Center for Sustainability and Culture, and Lecturer - Biodiversity, Conservation and Policy Program, University at Albany. riobart.breen@anamduan.org, rbreen@albany.edu