By Sushant Sharma
28 Jun 2010
Amy Seidl's book is a perfect blend of remarkable personal observation, scientific facts and motherly concern for the land and children.
Informative and hopeful!
This is how a reviewer has described the book Early Spring by Amy Seidl. 'Informative' is a word that is often allied with books. But it's the first time that I personally have heard the word 'hopeful' being linked with a book. And that was the reason that made me pick this book off the shelf.
Early Spring talks about our rapidly changing environment and climate owing to global warming. Published in 2009, this book seems to be just another brick in the huge wall of published material on global warming. But there is something that makes this brick stand out from rest of the bricks in the wall.
The 171 pages of this book enlighten you much more convincingly than 171 scientific papers can do. But don't let its size daunt you. It's often said: All good things come in small packages!
So in this small package, Amy Seidl, a concerned mother and an even concerned ecologist, records her observations of life in the wooded Vermont, New England where she lives. Her background as environmental scientist and teacher at Middlebury College and University of Vermont vouches for the accuracy of the facts and the observations she has penned down.
Vermont nestled in beautiful country side and woods of New England is one of the few places where one can imagine seeing global warming take its toll. But New England, a region whose culture is rooted in its four distinct seasons is changing along with its climate. As Seidl narrates - At Christmas, people are canoeing rather than skating, daffodils blooming in January and subsequent outbreaks of tent caterpillars. Even the ice-fishing derby is being cancelled more times than it is run because they can't depend on the thinning ice to hold up.
Seidl takes the discussion of global warming and its effects to a totally new aspect. Her frank observation backed by proven few scientific facts makes the readers more aware to the debacle we may face in near future.
Over the years seeing such changes take place right before your eyes forces us to take notice of the environment around us too. The sheer frankness of the Seidl's honest observations packs a hard punch, which a few pie charts and weather models can never do. Increasingly, the media report on melting ice caps and drowning polar bears, but Seidl brings the message of global warming much closer home by considering how climate change has altered her local experience and the tradition and lifestyle of her Vermont neighbours.
Seidl blends a well-researched environmental study with observations of her small-town, even as she reaches beyond New England by keeping her discussion of global warming artfully broadminded. Thus Mexico can easily figure into a chapter on butterflies and Japan fits nicely into a discussion of her backyard garden. But mostly Seidl remains firmly settled in Vermont. The inclusion of her children in the narrative makes clear Seidl's awareness and concern for the future generations who in the time to come are to unwillingly pay the price of their parent's and their grandparent's mistake.
Chapter after chapter, we find Seidl's thoughtful assimilation of data from scientific studies as well as her careful observations of the land she lives on. Seidl's passion for scientific detail is matched by her concern for her relationship to the land and for her children's experience of the natural world. She tells of looking through a microscope at pollen grains from successive periods of history and relates this to the effects of climate change on forests.
Early Spring is an apt name for a book on global warming. The chapter begins with a beautiful quote and the chapters themselves are so beautifully named that they firmly anchor the views of the author in the minds of the readers.
A perfect blend of remarkable personal observation, scientific facts and motherly concern for the land and children, Seidl's book makes you sit up and take notice. Her testimony, grounded in the science of ecology and evolutionary biology but written with beauty and emotion, helps us realize that a natural upheaval from climate change has already begun. And after reading the book, I agree with what the reviewer had mentioned: the book is obviously 'informative' and 'hopeful' index
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