Page 120 - Esquire (November 2019)

THE FIRST ELECTION AT tart cherries and 20 percent of its sweet cher- CNN climate town hall when he asked her the
THE END OF THE WORLD ries. And the industry is in very deep trouble. following question.
The cherry farmers in Grand Traverse and “The president announced plans to roll back
Leelanau Counties are being hit from all sides. energy-saving lightbulbs, and he wants to re-
Trade agreements have allowed Turkish cher- introduce four different kinds, which I’m not
ries to flood the market. Fruit flies have become going to burden you with, but one of them is
an overwhelming problem. (This year, the peak the candle-shaped ones, and those are a favor-
population for the flies occurred just as har- ite for a lot of people, by the way. But do you
vest season began.) In August, a fourth-genera- think that the government should be in the
tion farmer from Old Mission Peninsula named business of telling you what kind of lightbulb
Raymond Fouch and his son posted a photo on you can have?”
Facebook that showed nine tons of tart cherries Warren gave him the answer that question
that had to be dumped on the ground because deserved. She went on to say, “Look, there are
local processing plants had told him they didn’t a lot of ways that we try to change our ener-
need any more. And then there’s the weather. gy consumption, and our pollution, and God
Or, more precisely, the climate. bless all of those ways....But understand, this
Once ideal for the cultivation of cherries, the is exactly what the fossil-fuel industry hopes
and entire swaths of Asia and Africa become climate in the area has become completely un- we’re all talking about. That’s what they want
incapable of sustaining agriculture and are ren- predictable over the past decade. In 2012, a us to talk about. ‘This is your problem.’ They
dered uninhabitable. In 1864, the United States warm spell in March caused the trees to bud want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy
did something remarkable: It conducted a pres- five weeks early, only to have the buds die when around your lightbulbs, around your straws,
idential election in the middle of a Civil War. a bizarre cold snap lasted almost the entire and around your cheeseburgers.
This election is similar to that, but different, month of April. One farm that produced ten “When 70 percent of the pollution, of the
too. That could have been the last election held million to fifteen million pounds of cherries carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes
in the United States of America. This could be annually saw its production drop to 100,000. from three industries, and we can set our tar-
the first election held at the end of the world. This had happened before, in 2002. The farm- gets and say, by 2028, 2030, and 2035, no
ers saw two once-in-a-lifetime weather events more . . . the point is, that’s where we need
As far as anyone can tell, the cherry was first in a little more than a decade. to focus. And why don’t we focus there? It’s
cultivated in the West in an area of the Ro- And these were not outliers, either. In 2012, corruption. It’s these giant corporations that
man Empire called Anatolia, now Turkey. It is Michigan state climatologist Jeff Andresen told keep hiring the PR firms that—everybody has
thought to have arrived there from China, where PBS, “We know from our climate records that fun with it, right, gets it all out there—so we
cherries had been grown since around 4000 B.C. our seasonal warm-up is beginning an average don’t look at who’s still making the big bucks
(The name is derived from Cerasus, a town in of a week and a half earlier than it did just thir- off polluting our earth. And the time for that
Turkey.) They were brought to Rome in the first ty years ago. We also have very, very strong ev- has passed. We have a chance left, in 2020, to
century B.C. by a soldier-politician with the idence that the number of freeze events fol- turn this around, but we are running out of time
tongue-twisting name of Lucius Lucinius Luc- lowing the beginning of development for these on this one.”
ullus. (Lucullan, a word used to describe luxuri- tree-fruit crops has increased. So there’s a lon- There was a lot going on in that exchange.
ous dining, is derived from his name.) The cher- ger time frame where that crop is vulnerable If Cuomo’s framing of the question prevails,
ry spread through northern Europe, especially to those spring freezes than used to be the case there is no hope of mustering the political will
France and Belgium, whence Henry VIII, as Lu- thirty, forty, fifty years ago.” to face the true magnitude of what’s going on
cullan a king as ever there was, planted an or- This year, the cherry farmers, and all of the around the world. There will have to be sacri-
chard of them in England in 1533. They crossed fruit farmers in northern Michigan, found their fices, and the longer we delay seriously con-
over into the New World with the French ex- crops struck by a killer fungus that had every- fronting the problem, the harsher those sac-
plorers and colonists who rode the St. Lawrence thing to do with how rainy the spring was, and rifices are going to have to be. And discussing
River into the Great Lakes area, settling in and this was after how snowy the winter was, and the crisis in the stunted juvenilia of our current
around what is now Detroit. how rainy the fall had been before that. A warm- political dialogue and trusting its solution to
In 1839, a Presbyterian missionary named er earth is a wetter earth, and as Michigan offi- something emerging from the cheap context
Peter Dougherty went north from Detroit to cials pointed out to Interlochen Public Radio, of our current political moment is something
convert the Ottawa and Chippewa who lived the state now gets three or four more inches of akin to the cherry farmers of Leelanau Coun-
around Grand Traverse Bay. Dougherty brought rain on average than it did fifty years ago. ty trusting to the intervention of Mishipeshu,
with him cherry plants, the story goes, to start This is the insidious thing about the climate the underwater panther, to save their crops.
an orchard on what is now called Old Mission crisis. It is central to every other issue but, of- The truth is that the rain in northern Mich-
Peninsula. The local Native people told him ten, you have to look past the obvious to find its igan doesn’t care if we do nothing, or laugh off
not to bother, but Dougherty was determined. effects. The cherry farmers of northern Mich- the warnings, or mock those truly concerned,
(Legend has it that the Chippewa dubbed him igan are beset by foreign competition and by or laugh about paper straws while entire island
“Little Beaver” because of his determination fruit flies, but they also know that what was nations slip under the waves forever. Nor do
as a farmer.) The soil and the climate, it turned once the perfect climate for growing their crops the killing frosts and the voracious fungi and
out, were perfect for the cultivation of cherries, is changing, inexorably, and that it doesn’t mat- the swarming fruit flies. They are the conse-
and now the area in and around Traverse City ter if Turkish cherries overwhelm the market quences of the issue that, for whatever reason,
is probably the cherry capital of the world. The if you can’t grow cherries yourself anymore. our politics and our political institutions and
National Cherry Festival is held there every Ju- our people find so difficult to confront fully in
ly. (It began, in 1925, as a ceremony called the “Oh, come on. Give me a break.” the dwindling time we have left. That is where
“Blessing of the Blossoms.”) The area produces This was the answer Senator Elizabeth War- we are, in 2019, one year out from the first elec-
somewhere around 75 percent of the country’s ren gave to moderator Chris Cuomo at the tion at the end of the world.

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