Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural post of our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map straight to your inbox. If you had asked me six months ago whether I thought climate change would harm me personally, I would have responded with a hesitant “‘Yes,” an answer informed by an intellectual understanding of environmental catastrophe. I would have tried to come up with an abstract example. I’d probably garble some mess about food supply chains or drought or vulnerable infrastructure. Something vague, impersonal. If you were to ask me the same question today, I’d tell you not to trust insurance maps, that a 1,000 year flood could, in fact, happen in your lifetime. I’d scoff at the idea of a “climate haven’”, a term coined to describe areas like Asheville, North Carolina, a city an hour south of me in the Appalachian mountains, that are unlikely to experience environmental crises. I wasn’t even in town when Hurricane Helene flooded downtown Bakersville, North Carolina, a rural town near the Tennessee state line where I live with my partner. But the event left an imprint on my psyche. I came home from a reporting trip to an intact house with a small roof leak, and yet I close my eyes and see rising water. If you live in a town that hasn’t burned, flooded, or dried up in recent memory, you might only give climate change a passing thought, or pay no mind to it at all. You might have never thought about it as a potentially personal phenomenon. That’s what the Yale Climate Opinion Survey suggests. Researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication conduct an annual survey about public opinions on climate change to capture […]