Story Snippets from Across the Ocean

By Berenice Tompkins

​Since I began collecting climate stories, I’ve started to notice them everywhere I go. I visited family in England this past Christmas and got to travel to parts of the country I'd never seen before. In each region we visited, we heard climate stories.

When my uncle returned from visiting friends in Sussex, southern England for New Year's, he reported that they have decided to turn their property into a champagne vineyard after learning that the region’s climate has become similar to that of Champagne, France two hundred years ago.

My mother and I visited my great aunt and uncle in Sheffield, in the north, and got into a conversation about the winter weather. My great aunt mentioned that it wasn’t nearly what it used to be – several decades ago, they’d spend the winters shoveling piles of snow. The past few winters, there have been infrequent sprinklings of snow, never enough to shovel.  

We headed further north to the Lake District to visit my cousin's girlfriend's family for the first time, and they told us that severe floods last year destroyed a bridge that had just celebrated its 200th anniversary.

Toward the end of our trip, I went to see a friend in Cambridge, and he fondly recollected ice skating as a child on the area’s fens, or marshes, which used to freeze through each winter. Now, he said, they’re no longer frozen consistently enough for kids to skate safely.
       
Below is a map of England, with pins placed on the areas mentioned. I am always surprised by the diversity of ways climate change appears in different places. The more I do this work, the more I see that climate change is showing up everywhere.

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