Reality demands a more complex story
June was the beginning of the southeastern peach season, and by now we should all be satiated with affordable and delectable “Georgia fuzzies.” But not this year. This summer’s peach crop was down by 90 percent.
The Georgia peach crop is a perennial favorite of journalists in the summer. Occasionally it makes national or even international news. But like much environmental journalism in the last few years, stories about the Georgia peach have increasingly become stories about climate change. There’s frequently a kind of antiphonal, call-and-response structure to these stories:
Dried up rivers . . . climate change.
Toxic dust plumes . . . climate change.
Boreal wildfires . . . climate change.
And of course:
A bad year for peaches . . . climate change.
Setting aside for a moment the question of accuracy in these individual stories, the overall effect is a drumbeat of doom: inexorable, relentless, and impossible to change by, say, recycling milk cartons.
I worry about this drumbeat. It’s not that I think climate change isn’t real, or that governments and businesses and institutions shouldn’t prepare to ameliorate its effects, especially on the most vulnerable. Nor is my concern only that the constant invocation of crisis is wearing us out, leading listeners to plug their ears, throw up their hands, shrug.
Instead, I’m worried about the how the Climate Change Crisis narrative has become the story, and so is obscuring other stories. In the case of the Georgia peach, climate change talk distracts from more complicated questions of rural livelihoods, farm labor, and state support for agriculture (a point I’ve tried to make elsewhere. But it also cancels out a fascinating story about the complicated relationship between Prunus persica, the weather, and the location of the earth in its orbit around the sun—to say nothing of the insects and fungi and microorganisms and other plants that also have roles to play.
All deciduous plants in temperate climates go dormant during the winter, and they all have ways of delaying budbreak until after danger of freezing temperatures. In the case of peaches, a ripe one in June or July depends on the accumulation of certain number of hours of cooler temperatures during the winter, though it’s not clear exactly how best to measure that requirement—researchers have used “chill hours,” “chill units,” or “chilling portions.” Contender, a popular high-chill cultivar, needs 1050 hours; FlordaGrande, one of many low-chill varieties developed by researchers at the University of Florida and grown commercially in south Texas, only requires seventy-five. Even this rather complicated explanation is an oversimplification: On a single tree, the chilling requirement for individual flowers might vary as much as two hundred hours.
In a manner of speaking, a peach tree remembers. It stores the chill hours of a given winter in its sap and buds.
This winter memory prepares the peach tree to respond in various ways to the pattern of warming in the spring. Very inadequate chilling can cause buds to abort and not open at all. Higher chilling levels make the buds more responsive to heat, so colder winters often translate into earlier and more rapid blooming, while warmer winters can delay blooming. The southeastern peach belt has a tremendous range of last spring frost dates, and so the peach crop is always vulnerable to a late freeze. The “average” last frost date in Macon, near the center of the Georgia peach industry, is March 20. The actual last frost since 1960 has been anywhere from February 11 (in 1961) to April 20 (in 1983). This year, relatively low chilling delayed budbreak and prevented some varieties from producing at all, and then two late freezes back-to-back in mid-March killed much of the crop.
I typically think of “the weather” as a series of easily understood statistics such as highs and lows, precipitation accumulation, wind speed, and barometric pressure—and last frost dates. But “the weather” is merely a useful simplification, bearing only an oblique relationship to the complexities of the actual world.
Freezes are typically measured by open air thermometers under shelter. The temperature that matters to a peach tree, however, is the temperature around the flower buds. That temperature is affected by several other factors. Since colder air is denser and sinks to lower elevations, relative altitude matters. The current peach industry in Georgia and South Carolina is concentrated on plateaus where piedmont meets coastal plain, and where orchards are slightly elevated above surrounding lands. Few orchards are truly flat, and trees growing in shallow depressions, just a foot or two lower than the surrounding topography, often suffer more freeze damage. Too, like all objects exposed to space, buds radiate heat and so can drop several degrees colder than the air temperature. Finally, the wind plays a role in mixing the air around and reducing variability due to elevation or radiation. There’s not much to be done to protect peach trees from cold temperatures on a windy night. But on still, clear nights, growers might employ wind machines or helicopters to keep the buds at air temperature, or smudge pots—special stoves burning wood chips soaked in kerosene and pitch—which can heat the air slightly and reduce heat radiation with a low-hanging cloud of smoke.
This is the expansive and mysterious world that is obscured when the explanation of every environmental story is climate change. It is not necessarily a more comforting place. Climate change crisis discourse can, paradoxically, be quite comfortable. It offers legibility, a known narrative, with sometimes very satisfying villains (Donald Trump, Shell Oil, industrial agriculture, etc), subtle confirmations of my own righteousness (I’m not the one sitting curbside in my giant SUV, blasting my A/C as I wait for my Styrofoam-encased meal), and moral imperatives that frequently cost me nothing, since, quite frankly, it’s individualistic to suggest there’s something I can do about it. Climate change crisis talk is also comforting because humans—with our heedless greed and dizzying technological advances—are right at the center of the story, which is of course right where we think we belong.
But consider the peach tree, even one conscripted and sheared and soaked in chemicals in vast commercial orchards. It knows things about its place in the world that we can only dimly sense. It is dynamic and resilient in ways that put us to shame. If the climate change crisis is ultimately a human crisis—who are we saving the world for, anyway?—then we will need something other than anxiety and fear to sustain us through what comes. We will also need humility, wonder, and awe—and the capacity to cultivate them in orchards and cities and wildernesses alike.
William Thomas Okie is the author of The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South and “Amber Waves of Broomsedge.” He teaches history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
Image: Jo Zimny Photos