By Elizabeth Courtney

It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy, right?

Our family’s vacation this summer was another staycation in Vermont. Much of it involved getting into water, as we had the hottest three months on record in May, June and July. 

The summer also found us glued to our vegetable garden. We started it on the first of April, with snow peas, carrots and chard. The ground was already warm. But by the first of May after the leaves were all out on the maples — a good two or three weeks ahead of time — we had a killing frost. Thank goodness we had learned to use garden fabric during the summer. Those white sheets of cloth allow the beneficial sun’s rays in and keep the frost, hail, torrential rains, high winds, pests and severe hot sun from damaging the plants. 

We saw a similar story with our honeybees this summer. They started to fly early, on March 5 — way before anything was in bloom. We prepared a sugar-water feeding to get them through to the first flowering. But the half-starved black bear was out early with the warm, premature spring, and she also was looking for a few calories. 

She found those calories in our backyard-downtown-Montpelier hives — leaving both greatly damaged, but still with queen and brood. So before the end of April, we moved the hives to the flat roof of my office at work, three blocks down the road. That was a calculated transfer, pulled off with the help of our good and brave neighbors in the neighborhood truck, on a snowy evening in mid-April. It worked. And from the looks of it, those honeybees will be producing over 100 pounds of downtown Montpelier honey this year, unlike many in the area whose beekeepers report very poor production this summer. No one seems to know why.

All in all, we might say of this summer, the livin’s been easy, as in the ballad from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess musical. It’s been a long, beautiful summer with much bounty from the good earth. But it was a lot more work this year to stay cool, keep the vegetables alive and the bees safe and productive. 

And something is lurking beneath the gorgeous surface of a productive Green Mountain summer and the optimism we all want so desperately to feel. 

Here in Vermont we’ve witnessed an almost frost-free ground over the winter, early spring, late frost that killed new growth, record-breaking heat, staccato weather patterns of sun and rain and wind in separate short bursts, brighter than bright sun, hail and high winds, torrential rains that wash out silt and pollutants into waterways, billowing thunderclouds in the morning, hungry bees and bears too early for food and a growing need to intervene in what used to be a “let-nature-do-its-thing” world. In other parts of the globe, it’s much worse. Major populations are being displaced by unprecedented storms, flooding or in the other extreme, drought. 

Are these the early signs of climate change? To say “no” would just be kidding ourselves. 

Unlike the easy livin’ of a bygone day, we’ll need to work harder to keep the Vermont we love healthy. Whether it’s adapting to the inevitable climate change or preventing further escalation of global warming, we must work to build community and ecological resilience and create strong new energy and climate legislation in Washington and Montpelier.

 Please talk to your friends and neighbors, our federal delegation and our state legislators and gubernatorial candidates about this critical issue, so we can have a safe and productive Vermont for our children and grandchildren.