The results of climate change make the headlines almost daily. All across America and the globe, communities have to adapt to rising sea levels, intensified storms, and warmer temperatures. One way or another, climate change will be a proving ground. We will either sink, in cases where the land is subsiding, or swim, finding ways to address these challenges.

While temperatures and seas are rising slowly, we have some immediate choices to make. If we act quickly and boldly, there is a small window of opportunity to prevent the worst. We can prepare for the changes by understanding what is happening and taking specific measures. There is “commitment” already in the climate change system. To minimize those effects will require another kind of commitment, the kind Rick Van Noy illustrates in these stories about a climate-distressed South.

Like Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking work Silent Spring, Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring is a call to action to mitigate the current trends in our environmental degradation. By highlighting stories of people and places adapting to the impacts of a warmer climate, Van Noy shows us what communities in the South are doing to become more climate resilient and to survive a slow deluge of environmental challenges.

All the world will feel the effects of our rapidly changing climate, of course—and those spots that we cherish most for their sense of place, their long-standing in our hearts, will be the hardest to watch change. Perhaps these fine reflections will spur us to some of the action necessary to minimize the damage!

—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Imagining an unwanted future is something most people aren't willing to do. This book is full of quiet heroes who help communities in the Southeast imagine a future they do want. It isn't easy, but it's crucial.

—Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University

In Sudden Spring, author Rick Van Noy provides a gripping account of the threat that climate change already poses to the American South. But this a tale of hope as well. Van Noy describes how the South can still rise to the challenge.

—Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State

Sudden Spring is an urgent, important book. Stroll down a southeastern beach in the United States and climate change will no longer be a theoretical, distant problem. Stranded houses jut out of the sand like the Statue of Liberty at the end of the original Planet of the Apes. The ocean is rising, and this isn’t hard to see on the Outer Banks or in Miami or Norfolk, Virginia, where the military, at least, are no longer climate skeptics. Rick Van Noy has done us all a service by issuing this wake-up call. As he points out, humans have not evolved to face long-term threats, but as this book makes clear, we need to adapt sooner rather than later. Our survival depends on it.

—David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains

This on-the-ground research lends an exceptional intimacy to the book, bringing the reader close to some of the most fragile portions of the country. . . . The book depoliticizes climate change, considering instead what communities are doing to cope with drastically changing conditions. It still acknowledges the political debate, but larger issues of resilience, adaptation, and survival are at the heart of Sudden Spring, an eloquent narrative about what has become the most important challenge of our time.

—Barry Silverstein, Foreword Reviews

By highlighting stories of people and places adapting to the impacts of a warmer climate, Van Noy shows us what communities in the South are doing to become more climate resilient and to survive a slow deluge of environmental challenges.

—Amy Brady, Chicago Review of Books

Van Noy undertakes a journey himself, a search for place-based stories of adaptation that offer strategies and innovations, cooperation and confrontation, hope and solace in response to rapid, unprecedented change. The result is both an eloquent guide to action and a cautionary tale—a pleasure to read, yet also deeply unsettling.

—The Hopper

Winner

Best Environmental Books, Book Riot

Winner

Best Climate Books of the Year, Chicago Review of Books

About the Author/Editor

RICK VAN NOY is a professor of English at Radford University. He is the author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons (Georgia), and Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (Georgia).

Sudden Spring

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Sudden Spring

About the Author/Editor

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