Early Spring: an Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World

5/7/09: Climate change is a phenomenon of massive proportions: with millions of pounds of CO2, state-sized chunks of ice shelves detaching, and creeping tides affecting over six billion people, it's easy to get lost in the sea of numbers. However, in Early Spring: an Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World, author/scientist Amy Seidl focuses in on her direct observations in her community surrounding Huntington, Vermont. After attending Sandra Steingraber's lecture, Seidl was kind enough to spare a few words about her book and her personal experiences with climate change.

In Early Spring, Seidl's main aim was to study climate change as it relates to the local landscape. As she put it, “it closely examines the ecology, mechanism, and personal landscape as [it's] pallete [...] What does it feel like, and how do people talk about it?” Although climate change has an effect on everyone's lives, Seidl believes that, while many people acknowledge it as real, it seems a sort of distant reality, both ecologically and psychologically. By writing about the everyday sightings that serve as evidence (such as an early-awakened butterfly feeding on a non-native flower, still surrounded by winter,) she hopes to (literally) bring home her point.

While the evidence is all around her/us, and the prospects are pretty daunting, Seidl isn't one to encourage throwing up one's hands: “I mean to confront that fatalism that is pretty dominant in climate change activism.” Life will always find a way to go on: the question for her (and all of us) is not whether to adapt our ways, but how. As a biologist, Seidl looks for examples of adaptation in the natural world she studies. “Four billion years of life has figured out a lot, so how do we look to these [to learn]?” We need to learn to adapt to a stable system as much as one with a more random pattern, she continued.

Ultimately, what Seidl hopes to accomplish through her writing is much the same as what we hope to accomplish with the Vermont Climate Witness website: a way to get a hold on a global issue (climate change) by taking things one community at a time. Lots of smaller actions, like changing a lightbulb, writing a legislator, or taking part in events like Green-up Day or the Way to Go commuter challenge, add up to something much bigger. Even if you don't believe in climate change, there's only so much influence you can have by yourself, so pleasepost your stories on this site.

Amy Seidl is an author, ecologist, and Vermont's unofficial resident butterfly expert. To learn more about her and her writing, visit
http://www.earlyspringthebook.com/