My bountiful backyard garden is a scary Thanksgiving sight

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When I picked a brilliant red cherry tomato off my backyard vine and enjoyed the burst of sweet flavor, I knew it was a guilty pleasure. That’s because it was Nov. 20, and I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tomato I tasted is a cherry bomb of climate change.

The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving.

I’m not the only one feeling this. The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving. A radio personality in New Jersey posted pictures of bell peppers he picked Nov. 18, a late-season harvest that he said “rings alarm bells.”

New England’s November Garden of Eden has alarmed me for some time. In December 2001, I wrote a column in The Boston Globe about my Thanksgiving Day backyard harvest of cilantro, jalapeño peppers and eggplant. I gave it a tongue-in-cheek dateline of “Atlanta, Mass.,” as Massachusetts was projected to have the climate of Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta by 2090. I doubted back then that anyone would be freaked out by the freakish harvest “when most of us like it warm.”

It was also the first of Republican President George W. Bush’s eight years in office. By then , his administration had already rejected the Kyoto climate treaty. It would eventually censor the Environmental Protection Agency from directly tying warming to human activities and from warning the public how fast the planet was heating up. The oil man turned president kept the nation out of the global fight against climate change with the claim that he first needed to see “sound science.”

The years since have been a yo-yo. President Barack Obama signed the Paris climate accords, only for President Donald Trump to withdraw from them. President Joe Biden rejoined the treaty, but Trump getting elected again all but assures another withdrawal from the global stage, even though the United States is, by far, the world’s largest emitter per-capita of the carbon dioxide emissions fueling global warming.

And regardless of whether we do or don’t sign international climate treaties, our commitment to the global fight … Read More