Climate & Community program series update
Images above from UUFES’s Winter Landscape Coffee House, a Climate & Community program.
While New Hampshire is not experiencing the challenging impacts of climate change in the same way as island nations or areas of intense desertification or annual wildfire seasons, its impacts are being felt by tourism and other industries, by municipalities, in demographic changes to the state, and by the land and water and all who dwell therein, including we humans, whether we are wandering around finding pools of watercress in open woods at the end of December, shoveling another 10 inches of sleet, or patching up our driveway after heavy rains.
Early in 2022, Chocorua Lake Conservancy (CLC) and Cook Memorial Library (CML) met with a group of interested community members to discuss climate program possibilities. Since then, with inspiration from that group and continuing conversations with folks around the community, we have been convening an ongoing program series called Climate & Community (C&C).
The goals of Climate & Community are to examine and respond to climate change and adaptation through conversation, learning from subject experts and each other, and through constructive action and creative response at home and in community. All of these activities allow us to practice being in community, and listening, so that we can be resilient as a community in complex times.
Implicit in these goals is the understanding that we will not always agree on what the specific challenges are or how best to address them. One thing that turns a group of people into a community is being able to listen and value each other as friends and neighbors even when we don’t agree on everything. We hope that this series has created, and will continue to create, opportunities for people to meet, be in conversation with each other, and find ways to be involved in generative activities that are suited to their temperaments and interests.
We’ve also had a desire to facilitate opportunities for people to respond through the arts to this moment, its climate challenges as well as the ongoing beauty and generosity of the natural world. And we are aware that other groups are doing this and/or have an interest in offering various kinds of climate-related programming.
In the spirit of an interconnected community, the Climate & Community series will now serve as an umbrella for events hosted by various community groups and organizations. We welcome local organizations who are hosting events that fit the Climate & Community themes to get in touch with one of us to be part of our shared Climate & Community event calendar.
In honor of this new iteration of Climate & Community, UUFES in Tamworth Village hosted a beautiful Winter Landscape Coffee House in mid-January (see gallery above). Eighty people or so gathered to be in creative practice together, writing winter-themed group haiku and making animals to add to a collective winter mural; to enjoy gorgeous winter-themed art by K.A. Brett students; to hear from representatives of organizations around town about why a changing climate is relevant to their work; and to hear moving songs from local singer-songwriters about their experiences of a changing climate and their love of the natural world. A big thank you to UUFES for bringing us all together in this lovely manner, and to everyone who participated in this breadth of creative offerings.
One thing that is happening this year, thanks to inspiration from the Mountains to the Sea monthly writing group offered by Cook Library, is an offering of monthly and seasonal themes, and the invitation for creative responses to these themes from anyone who would like to participate, either by participating in the Mountains to the Sea group on the second Wednesday of each month, or other C&C programs, or at home in your medium of choice— writing, song, visual art, dance, and more. Community members will be invited to share this work at a harvest event this coming November.
Upcoming themes include: February: communication and networks, webs; March: movement, cycles; April: eclipse, awe. If you’d like to hear what the themes are each month, you can sign up for the Mountains to the Sea mailing list by emailing mountainstosea.writing@gmail.com. Mountains to the Sea meets on Zoom the second Tuesday of each month from 10:30-11:45AM. The Zoom registration link is available on the Cook Library events page.
Banner image: Community creations from the UUFES mid-January Winter Landscape Coffee House