Title

Anna’s Climate Story

Name

Anna Kopf

Place

Oshkosh, WI 54901

How are you sensing climate change?

In the backyard of my college house in Oshkosh a city on the northeastern side of Wisconsin, I have found that there are a few changes in our seasons. Although Wisconsin is not a hot spot for climate catastrophes to hit, there have been changes that I have observed over the years and over the past few weeks in my backyard. It technically is not a backyard, just a gravel driveway with space to park but there is a huge tree that aligns the fence to my neighbor’s yard. Over the three weeks that I observed the tree and the space around it, I have noticed the amount of fluctuation in the weather. February is usually a cold and snowy month in northern Wisconsin, so seeing the sun melt the snow into puddles then the next day watching snow pile up again in the same spot was odd. Another change that I noticed throughout the winter and the three weeks of observing my yard was that the birds never stopped singing. The song was not as near as loud as in the summertime, but usually during the winter it is dead silent. This shows that the birds’ migratory patterns have been affected by the differentiating weather, or it is warm enough here in Wisconsin year-round for them to survive.

How do these changes make you feel?

The changes from unusually warm to cold again during the winter is hard to grasp. It makes me feel like I am losing a familiarity of my state’s seasons, along with the seasons I knew as a kid. It makes me feel sad that if I ever have kids that grow up in Wisconsin, that they will have a completely different experience of the “four seasons” that we go through. It also frightens me that they might only have a handful of good snow and sledding days, where I had weeks upon weeks of fun outside sledding. It also makes me feel frustrated that there is nothing that I can do to make a real impact on the changing weather, and that all of my eco-friendly habits are mostly for a peace of mind.

Collection

Citation

 

Oshkosh, WI 54901

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