Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World Hardcover - 2009

Excerpt

Preface

The little crab alone with the sea became a symbol
that stood for life itself—for the delicate, destructible,
yet incredibly vital force that somehow holds its place
amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world.
Rachel Carson,
The Edge of the Sea, 1955
 
As a mother who has borne life, as a person who delights in
the diversity of life, and as an ecologist who realizes that life
in our gardens, forests, lakes, and meadows relies on the
countless multitude of species and their interactions, I am
unsettled by global warming. I fear it will have a tragic effect
on all forms of existence, including our own.
 
I chose to write this book after I spent years researching
natural systems. As a field scientist I have worked
around the world studying Antarctic, alpine, coastal, temperate,
and tropical ecosystems. These experiences sharpened
my ability to understand how natural communities
work, to identify species across taxa, and to admire their
complexity and beauty. But it was after these experiences,
when I was bound to a single place as the mother of two
young daughters and the wife of a man establishing his caxi
reer that I began to carefully observe my immediate environment.
Here, outside my door in rural Vermont, I readily
found signals that the natural world was changing.
 
It was at this point that I decided to collect my observations
about climate change in a book and call it Early
Spring. I chose the title to signify one of the strongest signals
of global warming for the Northern Hemisphere:
spring is coming days earlier with each decade. I decided
that by sharing the signals of warming from my garden and
woods, the places where I take my children to swim or
where we walk along the road and collect stones, I could localize
the experience of global warming for my readers.
Further, by describing the ecological flux that is a consequence
of climate change in the iconic New England landscape,
I hoped to engage with the significance of global
warming to all life, including our own.
 
Throughout Early Spring I apply my knowledge of
ecology and evolutionary biology to reveal the effect
of global warming in the landscapes I have studied as well
as the landscape where I presently live. To these descriptions
I add personal stories of how ecosystem health is
being altered—at micro and macro perspectives. I also examine
climate change in relation to the fact that I have
small children—Helen was one when I began this project
and Celia was six—and I relay my concern for their ecological
future and the planet they will inherit as global
warming progresses.
 
While I have spent time in regions of the world where
global warming is more rapidly affecting ecosystems, I
want to emphasize the changes I see in my landscape close
to home—in my garden, in local woods and ponds. It is in
this everyday context that I notice the world entering flux.
The timing of seasonal events, for instance, is shifting:
lilacs are blooming earlier, gardens remain prolific well into
the fall, and butterflies appear weeks earlier than previously
recorded. But it is not only the natural landscapes that are
shifting. In my rural community, cultural traditions tied to
the season are no longer assured: ice-fishing derbies and
winter carnivals, once relied upon as cold-season diversions,
are on-again, off-again, and the start of maple sugaring
rarely begins in early March as it historically did. As I
wake to these signs, I place each onto a growing list that
challenges my sense of season, cycle, and time, even my expectation
of what is true.
 
With each year I am compelled to ask: How are the natural
communities and ecosystems where I live responding
to climate change? What does a thunderstorm in January
signal? What about deluges in May that preclude spring
planting? And the absence of ice on rivers and ponds in
early winter? These are examples from my landscape—and
the natural and agricultural communities in it—that signal
that the world around me is moving into flux. As these
events collect, I realize how more and more of my observations
reflect the predictions that climate scientists are
making for New England—greater single precipitation
events, warmer nights, shorter winters, and overall more
variable weather. While it remains difficult to draw causal
relationships between global climate change and local
weather, we are able to see how our local conditions increasingly
resemble the forecasted predictions.
 
I am not alone in noticing changes in the landscape
where I live. Fortunately, there are others who have observed
and recorded changes or are currently noting and
writing about them, many for far longer than I have. There
is Kathleen Anderson, who has for thirty years kept daily
records of the flora and fauna that she sees on her farm in
Massachusetts and when particular species come and go.
There’s my neighbor Bob Low, who notes the area’s
weather and keeps an annual list of the birds on Gillett
Pond, the place where I bring my daughters to skate and
canoe. These record keepers are motivated by their enjoyment
of the natural world and also by the feeling that they
are a part of the annual cycle they document. Like the famous
conservation biologist and ethicist Aldo Leopold,
who kept records of bird and plant sightings on his Wisconsin
farm, these environmental diarists maintain a close
connection with their home environment, and their diaries
provide a history of this intimacy.
 
Now these diaries are being used to further our scientific
understanding of climate change. Statisticians and
ecologists are analyzing them for the occurrences they document,
and the presence and absence of species is being
added to electronic databases and computer models in an
attempt to see repeating patterns of change across landscapes.
Equally important, these narratives serve as a local
chronicle of how human communities are experiencing the
local effect of a global event. Indeed, the longer these diaries
have been kept, the better they are at relating how our
seasonal expectations are being preempted by anomalous
events, how the familiar is being superseded by the unusual.

Media reviews

This is the voice we need to hear now: a biologist mother, with no time for despair, bearing witness to the unraveling of the ecological world within her children's backyard—which is all of our children's backyard. With urgency and grace, Amy Seidl delivers the message I've been listening for.—Sandra Steingraber, PhD, author of Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood

"Seidl ponders the human predicament in a titanic and visionary personal inquiry that remains fixed on promise even in the face of grim and unsettling facts. This is a brave book."—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

"An eloquent celebration of commitment to family, community, and the ever-so-fragile natural world . . . Regardless of where you live, this may very well be one of the most important books you'll ever read."—Howard Frank Mosher, author of A Stranger in the Kingdom

"Early Spring contributes something of great value to the tradition founded by Rachel Carson. Amy Seidl brings her own professional training as a biologist, as well as her engaging lyrical voice, to bear on the blurring of seasons around her Vermont home. The result is a timely, important book—both troubling and lovely."—John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home

"Who would have thought a few years ago that coal-burning plants on the other side of the globe could affect us? The hills and hollows of Vermont would seem to be the last place on Earth you'd expect to feel the effects of global warming. But Amy Seidl tells lovingly of how Vermont's nature and landscapes will change, and what could be in store." —Bernd Heinrich, author of Mind of the Raven

"Early Spring is brave and eloquent testimony from a reliable witness about the extraordinary changes we face in the very nature of daily life on Earth. It reminds us that the human heart and mind have their place in the order of things, too."—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

"This is a quiet but important little book in the spirit of Gilbert White, J. Henri Fabre, and Thoreau, three other writers who grasped that close observation of local details can lead to transcendent understanding. Amy Seidl, a graceful and trenchant writer herself, combines scientific research and home truths to alert us, at gut and heart and head levels, about what's happening to our planet."—David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

"This slim and informative book speaks to the heart as well as the mind. Painlessly and in quiet, personal language, it taught me much about ecology and my native New England." —Mark Bowen, author of Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming

"Informative and hopeful."—Library Journal, starred review