Brown: From South Beach to Superior shore, bringing resilience back home to Duluth

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Today, bureaucrats scan spreadsheets to cancel federal grants containing the words “climate change.” And yet, during a recent trip to Duluth, I saw work on a $3.15 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to bolster the Canal Park shoreline. The new design responds to more frequent storms that have caused extensive damage to the popular lake walk in recent years.

Canal Park is now more climate-resilient; people are working, and taxpayers will pay less for repairs in the long run. It’s just fortunate that the word “climate” didn’t appear in the project title, or else it might have been laid low by the cool blade of Ctrl + F.

Climate change, renewable energy and developing industries will define this era whether we like it or not. But reactionary partisanship — perhaps best personified by laughing-face social media emojis — is changing how we talk about climate, especially its relationship to our economic well-being.

And maybe that’s a good thing in the long run.

Climate is about much more than carbon; it’s the way we live, as cultural as it is ecological. Climate solutions will improve people’s lives, or they aren’t solutions at all. That’s a challenging truth, but potentially a unifying one.

“Resilience is a very flexible term, and it doesn’t mean climate change. It means the ability to come back from chronic stresses and shocks,” said Treuer. “It’s the ability to return and to sustain yourself over time. Climate change is a chronic stressor, and it causes bigger shocks. Those things go together.”

Treuer graduated from Duluth Marshall High School in 1997. An economics degree from Oberlin College in Ohio led to political disillusionment. He described hearing a speech by former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers about the positive aspects of foreign manufacturing and imported goods. Treuer said the speech didn’t sit well with him.

“I don’t know that getting T-shirts from Bangladesh is actually going to pay off for us,” he said. “We got cheap shirts but no jobs. I think we found this out.”

After a decade of successful theater and dance work in Minneapolis, Treuer returned to economic research, earning his Ph.D. from the University of Miami with emphasis on climate strategy. What he learned about climate economics connected the hardships of his old neighborhood with the very real threat of rising oceans in fast-growing coastal cities.

In both cases, economic disinvestment threatened the livelihoods and wealth of working people.

Whether affected by a plant closure or a hurricane, people in stressed communities see rising costs, skyrocketing insurance rates and blighted neighborhoods that cause home values to stagnate or even drop.

“The climate crisis is an affordability crisis for most Americans,” said Treuer.

Building resilience takes time and doesn’t come easy. In Duluth and on the Iron Range, climate success might be measured by skilled professionals doing the work of mitigating past industrial failures and preventing new ones.

Treuer cited the success of the St. Louis River Estuary project in West Duluth as a good example. He remembers going to the river — polluted by decades of industry — for science field trips as a kid, unable to find any living things. Today, after decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity, the river is largely restored. What was learned there can be applied elsewhere, creating economic activity in a valuable environmental services sector.

“Let’s take pride in what we’re doing,” said Treuer. “Let’s have a diversified economy that has higher-value jobs and protects those assets that are a lot of natural resources, community resources and cultural resources.”

“[The region is] poised to grow,” said Treuer. “We have the space. We can do it. If we can get the jobs here, housing will come. I’ve seen that happen in other places. But the rural community and the urban community are politically divided in ways that are deeply dangerous.”

This region’s divergent politics — mirroring those found statewide — brings us back to my original point: If the north central “reds” and Duluth “blues” can’t speak the same language about change, we won’t be able to solve problems that we otherwise could.

“This country is going to become more regional,” said Treuer. “If I am going to predict what happens in America, it would be that states are going to take more rights back.”

That means that local governments, backed up by the state, will solve economic and climate problems not because they want to, but because they must. The more we prepare, the better the chances of success.

In 2019, a Tulane professor wrote a paper referring to “Climate-Proof Duluth.” A 2023 New York Times article highlighted Duluth as a “climate refuge.”

“I moved here because of my family,” said Treuer, who bought a house four blocks from his parents on Park Point, a coastal island like his last home in Miami Beach. “But I feel so much more confident being here because I know our risk profile is so much lower, and this community knows how to get things done.”