Finding Selfhood, Inspiration, and Loss in a Disappearing Land

I’ve always been a Northern Minnesota girl, but it took 18 years and 1500 miles for me to begin to realize just how special — and threatened — that identity is. Now I hope for nothing more than to advocate for its persistence.

The head of the Mississippi in Itasca County.

Growing up, I learned from my dad to recognize the individual voices of northern warblers, listened to the wind at night as it rustled the popple leaves above a summer campsite, looked around and found folk stories and fir-fragrance dancing through forests where stately red and white pines loomed above layers of spruce trees and hazel bushes and history. I took up trail running, Nordic skiing, mountain biking, birding, blueberry-picking, and on and on, anything to get outdoors. I experienced the intricate boreal landscape and filled it up with memories, personhood merging with land and land forming personhood: my own spiritual geography.

It wasn’t until I moved to Massachusetts, however, that I began to identify strongly as a Northern Minnesotan. Traveling and living across the country, I held my memories of Minnesota up against new backdrops, new landscapes devoid of lakes and conifers and below-zero temperatures, and I began to realize we possessed a unique natural heritage. I discovered our identity in the eyes of the rest of the country, too, as a tough, frigid, northern land, and I was so proud of my home region every time someone gushed about a Boundary Waters trip they’d taken, or when all of Boston panicked when temperatures dipped to the negatives that Minnesotans brave on every other January day.

Boston could NEVER. A beautiful snowy Minnesotan day.

As my pride grew, so too did the weight of climate change on my mind. I’d known for some time about the conifers shifting northward, about the warming winters and disappearing boreal birdsongs, but now it was personal: my identity, and my own uniquely beautiful land unlike almost anywhere else in the Lower 48, was under threat. I saw Minnesota’s future in the brown plains of Indiana as my train passed through on the way back home, in Massachusetts’ snowless winters and barren oaks. I mourned a land that wasn’t even lost yet. To make matters worse, it seemed no one back home knew about the issue! Out of dozens of conversations I had this past December, I found only two people aware of the changes coming to Northern Minnesota, let alone who knew about the overturning of the very soul of our beautiful, resilient region that will accompany these shifts.

I’m desperate to do anything I can. I’ve struggled for months to chart a path forward, figure out how to sound the alarm bells about the threat on our doorstep and advocate for the land and people I love. This blog — and BorealForward as a whole — is the answer I arrived at. It’s ever-changing, ever-developing, and it’s wholly an experiment, but it’s the only way I know to spark recognition of the threat and discover the path to meaningful collective action. The road ahead will be messy, but I’m here for the process, I’m here for the region, and I know other Northern Minnesotans are, too.