Climate Change Garden offers a lens into the future

The entrance of the Climate Change Demonstration Garden, located at Pounder Garden at the Cornell Botanic Garden.
The entrance of the Climate Change Demonstration Garden, located at Pounder Garden at the Cornell Botanic Garden.

Cornell Chronicle [2017-06-08]:

In the shadow of Barbara McClintock’s historic campus shed, plots of foliage thicken in the university’s Climate Change Demonstration Garden. Located at the Cornell Botanic Gardens, these raised beds provide a living illustration of how future temperature conditions may affect plants.

“Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing,” said Sonja Skelly, director of education at Cornell Botanic Gardens. “For the general public, climate change is something they hear about, but it can be out of sight, out of mind. It is some sort of future phenomenon. It is not going to happen in our lifetime. It’s going to happen to somebody else in another part of the world, other than ourselves.”

But it is here, and it is happening now. Skelly untangles the disconnect between climate change knowledge and societal unwillingness to engage. “We wanted something demonstrative, experiential, interactive and compelling,” she said. “We want to give people a sense of what climate change will do locally.”

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