Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South
by Rick Van Noy
The University of Georgia Press $32.95
Reviewed by Dylan Ward
If anything, the recent temperatures rising to a staggering one-hundred and thirty degrees in Death Valley should be a clear indication of troubling times ahead. In this regard, Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring is an incredibly timely book addressing our need for solutions to combat our escalating climate change problem.
Though a slim book, Van Noy still delivers a wealth of information and observations within its pages. He concentrates primarily on people and how every aspect of our lives is affected by climate change, from the food we eat to the air we breathe. A Radford University English professor and a father, Van Noy finds himself, like many of us, concerned with the alarming transformations occurring, like earlier spring seasons, as well as earlier breedings and migrations. He is mostly curious about the creative ways in which people and their communities are attempting to curb this problem, whether or not they actually acknowledge climate change itself. There are methods actively implemented by these southeastern communities who are now finally “facing up to the inevitable changes they will experience” and “working to disentangle climate change from partisanship” (4-5).
No stranger to the south, Van Noy is a long-time resident of Virginia, a place he loves dearly. He begins fittingly, if not morbidly, here with tombstones by the sea, near the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, painting a stark image of what one might find in our ocean waters there: headstones and leg bones. From there, Van Noy traverses other areas of our southern regions of the US, exploring the complex pieces of what he calls the “climate change puzzle” (35). The research in each of these regions is fascinating and promising, but Van Noy presses the gravity of it, of what it could mean for everyone in the southeast and across our world without those viable solutions put in place now. The rapid pace of climate change is intensifying and it is no longer a future threat but a present day reality.
As Van Noy considers the altering landscape of the south, documenting its troubled people along the way, he is also careful to consider alternate viewpoints. As he does, he strives to understand their heartfelt resistance toward climate change, of the political and religious conflicts that hinder our immediate need for innovation and a path forward to achieving them.
Sudden Spring is no doubt an absorbing read. It’s an important and necessary book, one in which Van Noy helps to “bring these beautiful dying places to life” (13) while hopefully passing along a still livable planet for our future generations.
Dylan Ward lives and writes various things in North Carolina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Person's Trash, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He also contributes as a fiction reader for Alternating Current Press and Flash Fiction Magazine. When not writing he's usually reading something with a strong cup of coffee, pondering the mysteries of the world, or dreaming of writing.