Environmental Resilience Institute

Description of the video:

Everything's more extreme. We've lost our balance. We have events that are more severe, when it rains, it rains more, when it stays dry, it stays dry longer, when it gets hot, it gets hotter. As farmers, we have control over a lot of things but one of the things we don't have control over is the weather.

The world is evolving so fast, we in agriculture don't have the tools and background to interpret and analyze and understand that always. There is a niche for an organization like ERI to step in and start really helping us understand the science behind what we're doing.

I learned about the Environmental Resilience Institute after taking office. Part of the way that we found out about ERI is because one of my goals as mayor was to form an environmental or a sustainability commission. And I think that's important when we're moving forward with any sort of science-based approach that we start with an inventory, we find out where we are, and then we measure against that in year after year.

So without the ERI, we would never have been able to do that on our own. Because this really is a building block for us to have data, to engage our community and start to set some community priorities and ideally set up our own sustainability commission and begin to create more long-range planning around maintaining and improving our local environment.

This is an opportunity for our community to define what mitigating climate change looks like for us. What I'm excited about is that this is a community-based approach that is using science to help inform us of how we develop policy.

There’s no question that the more resilient the system we build, the more efficient we are, the more control we have over our own destiny. We all benefit from a better environment, cleaner water, cleaner air, healthy soils, higher quality food. The resilience that is required in a system to produce these things is where ERI can play a major role in helping Hoosier farmers to provide those ecological services to all Hoosiers.