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April 22, 2009
A Book For Earth Day
Alarming without being alarmist, Amy Seidl's Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World tells the story of global warming in the context of Seidl's Vermont hollow home and the garden where she and her children explore a changing world. Early Spring is a love story of the relationship between the author and the world. It moves with ease and grace between wonderful, homey, observations and hard science. In so doing, it explains the complex connectedness of life and environment.
Seidl is an ecologist with a PhD in Biology from the University of Vermont and a Masters in Entomology from Colorado State University. She has taught at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont and is currently a Research Scholar in the Environmental Studies Program at Middlebury College as well as an avid lecturer.
Seidl documents the already apparent changes in the ecosystem. She tells us that what we now see is but a hint of things yet to come. But her book is far more enabling than pessimistic. Our small individual decisions do matter. She is not naive either,
There is the phenomenon of change, the signs we can see through our windows and along the paths that we walk in our landscape. And then there is the perceptions of the changes that we register: how we take in the calamity, how we live with being deeply unsettled about the weather and its foreseeable effects on live, human and other. There is, I find, an impulse to remain skeptical even if one accepts that global warming is a human-induced change with planetary consequences. (p. 19)
Much of her little book seeks to overcome that skepticism. Drawing on observation, anecdote, and science, Seidl illustrates the current "ecological flux," and outlines several possible victors for continuing change. Her skillful transitions from her garden to her children to hard science and back to her garden give the science a decidedly human face. For that reason, Seidl's book lacks the often ponderous, sometimes nearly impenetrable, quality of a science treatise while providing a scientific basis for everyday observations of the world around us.
There is some risk in Seidl's approach. This is particularly true should a reader separate the many stories from the science. In the hands of some, her approach might reinforce the common tendency to discuss global warming in terms of anecdotal evidence: a hot day in winter "supports" the idea of global warming; a cold day in summer shows that global warming is "bunk." But I think the risk is worth it in this case. If we are to adapt to our changing world and mitigate all but certain further deterioration, those of us who are not scientists need to develop informed intuitions to guide our everyday activity, to reinforce our individual efforts, large or small, and to inform our political decisions. It is exactly a book like Seidl's that provides the non-specialist with a basis for those intuitions.
Posted by Duane Smith at April 22, 2009 12:41 PM | Read more on Science - General |
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