Near to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, Grand Rapids is located in Itasca County, home to more than a thousand lakes. Grand Rapids originated as a logging town and, to this day, both the North Woods community and its tourist industry enjoy the access to forested lands, bodies of water, and trails weaving between the two.
Caleb Tommila, a participant in the Grand Rapids Rural Climate Dialogue, grew up in Itasca County. Tommila spent 14 years working in the paper mills, which is an enormous economic driver in the region that has recently seen some changes: “the paper industry is one of the things being affected by climate change. The trees are not growing back as fast and our ash trees are dying because they don’t have the cold winter days to kill off those ash borers anymore. What used to be walking trails you can now drive three cars down, side by side. What used to be forested with patches here and there you can see for miles now, because it’s all been cut, and isn’t coming back like it should.” Tommila adds that paper mills face added expenses in replacing their declining lumber resources by shipping in lumber from Wisconsin: “there’s some definite changes that need to be done economy-wise for the area to continue to thrive.”
This past summer, Itasca County experienced a destructive hail storm, its powerful winds downing trees. Tommila recently sold a plot of land in the area, and the new owners lost “almost ninety percent of their trees in one storm. Basically, anything that’s bigger than two inches in diameter is gone. It was either uprooted or snapped off. My grandmother has lived in the area her whole life. She’s eighty-some years old, never seen anything like it. She doesn’t have a tree left on her property, because it was all older growth. I cried even though we don’t own it, just looking at the pictures. I don’t know what to say other than I’m devastated. That stuff ain’t coming back in my lifetime. The couple we sold it to is a couple years older than us. It ain’t coming back in their lifetime. Basically, our little forested paradise is gone.”
When asked to describe what, if any, effect the Rural Climate Dialogue had on Tommila, he noted that while he keeps up on news and understood that worldwide the climate was changing, “before I was a part of these events, I really didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. I was always just one of those who thought, ‘It’s too big of an issue. It’s happening. My hands are tied.’ Where, from these events, I realize that there are things we can do, even me personally, my community. It is a global issue, but there are community, individual issues too that can be dealt with. Everybody has the impression that climate is something we’re always going to be reactive to, never proactive to, so how do you answer, or deal with, that question?”
Read the profiles of a Stevens County participant and a Winona County participant, or go back to the Rural Climate Dialogues.