The national climate planners built the future for cities and abandoned the countryside.
Saw the thermometer hit 96 at the shop last Tuesday, which is not supposed to happen in central Wisconsin in June the way it happened. The dogs wouldn’t go out past noon. The asphalt on Highway 13 was soft enough to leave boot prints in the co-op parking lot. I closed up early and sat on the porch with the kids.
Two days earlier, the national business daily had run its innovation newsletter — the one that writes about smartglasses and AI agents and new drugs — telling readers that U.S. cities need to plan for warmer weather. The illustrations showed self-healing power grids rerouted by artificial intelligence during heat waves, city neighborhoods structured around working farms on vacant lots and rooftops, tree-shaded commute corridors that navigation apps will eventually identify as the coolest route to work. The closing line asked readers what they were doing to prepare.
What they are doing to prepare is the question for the cities the publication addresses. What we have been doing in Adams County for the past twenty years is the question the publication did not get to.
Our power grid is run by Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin. There is no artificial intelligence rerouting load during a heat wave. There is a line crew. There is a phone number you call when the power goes out. There is a prayer that the transformer on your road doesn’t blow because the next one is in the truck at Friendship and the truck is forty minutes out. Our farms are not “agrihoods.” They are corn and soybean operations that irrigate from the Central Sands aquifer, which is dropping.
The climate notebook on my bench — the one that tracks ice-out dates on Lake Petenwell, the first mosquito of the year, the rut onset — shows what the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts documented in their 2021 assessment: about three degrees of warming since 1950, the 2010s as the wettest decade on record, winters warming fastest in the northwest part of the state, annual precipitation up seventeen percent since 1950. The lake freezes weeks later than it did a generation ago. The maple syrup season at the co-op down the road used to start in mid-March. The last two years the first boil was in February. The ticks are earlier. The deer bed down later and move later and the rut is two weeks off where it used to be.
That notebook is my self-healing grid. It doesn’t reroute power. It tells me what is coming.
The wettest decade on record means the manure from a dairy operation that was manageable when it rained twenty-eight inches a year becomes a drinking-water crisis when it rains thirty-three and the shallow aquifer is sand. The wells on the south side of the county went over the nitrate standard in the late 2000s. The Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department published the data; the Adams County Times-Reporter covered it. Kewaunee County has had thirty percent of tested wells fail. That is not a city problem. That is an Adams County problem. That is a Kewaunee County problem. It is a problem for every county where the wells are shallow and the consolidated operations are large.
This is what adapting to a warmer climate has looked like in Adams County. It has not looked like an AI grid. It has looked like a forty-acre farm that has lost its well, a sugar bush that has to run earlier every spring, a deer season that opens on a rut two weeks later than it did a generation ago, and a labor-force participation rate that is near the bottom of the state. People do not stay to adapt. People leave.
The piece is part of a longer pattern. The innovation newsletter, the smart-cities expos, the resilience grant programs at the Department of Energy, the navigation-app companies that sell cool-route subscriptions — they all tell the same story. The story is that climate change is a problem of the future, that the response is technological, and that the people who will do the responding are in the cities. The rural counties in the story are scenery. They are the places the heat comes from. They are the places the people leave. They are the places whose land gets turned into the solar farms that power the urban grid. They are not the people who are already living in the climate the cities are about to plan for.
The same week the publication was pitching AI-managed grids as the climate solution, researchers were warning that AI expansion was straining climate progress — the data centers that run the rerouting algorithms need water and power at industrial scale. The grid that reroutes the urban load is built on rural extraction. High-voltage transmission corridors connecting distant wind and solar fields to urban substations cross rural land, and the easements pay the rural landowner and route the power out. The cooling shade for the urban commuter is a tree on a rural parcel whose carbon credits are sold to the urban firm that wants to advertise its offset portfolio.
Wendell Berry has been writing this split for fifty years. In The Unsettling of America he named it the difference between an economy of membership and an economy of extraction. The membership economy is the one where a person lives in a place long enough to know its weather and its wells and its deer. The extraction economy is the one that takes the timber and the water and the labor and the tax base and leaves. The national climate guide is part of the extraction economy. It takes the climate problem — which rural counties have been paying for in contaminated wells and shortened syrup seasons and changed deer patterns — and recasts it as an urban innovation opportunity. Cities get to plan. Rural counties get to be the planning material.
The urban-adaptation frame does not quite rob the countryside. It is something quieter. It is the sound of a society deciding, one FEMA BRIC resilience grant and one HUD CDBG allocation at a time, that some places matter enough to invest in and some places do not. The countryside is being abandoned by omission. And the people who live here — the ones who cannot afford to leave, and the ones who will not leave, which are two different populations that policy writers tend to treat as one — are left with the heat and the sand and the shallow wells and the power grid that was built for 1950 and the climate that left in 2010.
Aldo Leopold wrote that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. The biotic community in Adams County is the kid, the well, the deer, the lake, the co-op, the section-line road. The national climate guide does not mention any of them.
The thermometer at the shop reads 96. The dogs are under the porch. The notebook doesn’t offer a rerouted commute or a rooftop farm. It just says this is not the worst it will get, and that the frost-free season is now twenty-two days longer than it was a generation ago.