Amy Seidl's "Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World"

Author and biologist Amy Seidl appeared at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester on March 20^th , calling on the crowd of two dozen gathered to hear her to begin “owning the meaning of this time.”

To Seidl, who is promoting her just released book Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World, that meaning is starkly undeniable; humanity has entered a century of warming, and talk of environmental “tipping points” marking climate change points of no return have largely become moot. We have “tipped,” and it is time to discussing not only minimizing the damage we do to the environment, but to discuss how we as a culture and a species plan to adapt.

It’s a seismic shift in rhetoric that the book presents, and one wonders if Seidl herself realizes just how significant it is. Still, as grim as it sounds, she is almost effortlessly hopeful, reminding readers and listeners that human cultures have undergone natural climate change in the past, and we can learn from those cultures that transitioned as well as those that went extinct. She calls for a strategic approach to reimagining and relocalizing our economies and energy infrastructure – and to be prepared to make serious adjustments to our lifestyles. Seidl sees the necessary transition as not merely a function of pragmatism, but of our very identity, as well as our relationship with life itself.

Although Seidl’s casual rhetoric as well as her discussions of the science underscore her academic background, the book itself reads as a personal work. She is a storyteller, and delivers her message as a series of narratives and ruminations on her experiences as a member of a community and as a mother. Seidl is less concerned with facts and figures than she is with people and their experiences with, and roles within the web of life, and she effortlessly supports her narratives with the hard science that she is trained and practiced in.

Early Spring presents the urgent need for us to evolve or perish, and calls upon us to do so with a very human, personal – and reassuringly hopeful voice. 

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