Most stories about climate change and agriculture are about the destruction of crops by droughts and floods and storms and plagues of migrating insects. But there is a place, in America, where agriculture of the right kind — small-scale, diverse, regenerative, low-impact — is flourishing because of global warming. Of all places, it’s Alaska.

The number of farms in Alaska increased by 30% between 2012 and 2017, while the total number of farms in America declined. Most of that growth was in small farms of nine acres or less. And in that same time period the value of farm products sold directly to consumers doubled, to $4.4 million. Warming temperatures (Anchorage experienced 90 degrees Fahrenheit last summer for the first time ever) and longer growing seasons (by 45% since 1900 in Fairbanks) have opened the way for growing plants that could not have survived there before.

Now we need an immediate disclaimer here. This sort of example is often used by climate-change deniers to try to make a case that climate change has both positive and negative effects that over time will even out, that people who see climate change as a catastrophic, even existential threat are looking only at the negatives and are ignoring the positives. Hogwash. AGW — global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels — is going to play a large part in bringing industrial civilization down and drastically reducing human population.

So what’s interesting about these developments in Alaska is not what they say about the effects of global warming, but what they say about our reactions to global warming. People all over the world, invisible to the industrial media, are abandoning industrial agriculture, learning Permaculture, moving to small acreages, figuring out how to feed themselves without industrial inputs, and to produce their own energy where the energy is to be used.

This approach is the last, best hope of humanity now. This is the only kind of resilience that could — there are certainly no guarantees — see a small number of our kind through the coming catastrophe. They will have to endure not only the loss of the cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy that made the Industrial Age possible, but the long-lasting effects of their consumption.

There is simply no way that anyone could successfully take up this kind of farming after the crisis hits, the learning curve is way too steep. And there are precious few people on this planet who will willingly renounce the comforts of the dying age to learn the hard lessons of a truly sustainable life. Those few — the Hutterites, the Amish and Mennonites, the urban farmers of Cuba and the new farmers of Alaska, for example — may not be there yet (that is, to a totally sustainable, off-the-grid life) but they are showing us the road less traveled, one that anyone with a life expectancy over 20 years or so will richly regret not having taken.

One other interesting thing about this development in Alaska. One of the outstanding successes there has been an urban farm and farm market combined in Anchorage. About 20 farmers are growing and selling produce there, and almost all of them are women refugees from places like Cambodia, Sudan, the Congo, Burma, Somalia. Climate refugees, showing us what they’ve learned. Showing the way forward in a state that has gorged on oil profits for half a century, but has now almost completely run dry. Priceless.

“Alaska” by frank1030 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0