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An American Journey Through a Changing Season
Scribner
January 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 0743262476
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Memoir
In the tradition of Blue Highways and Silent
Spring, Chasing Spring follows nature's season of
renewal even as it shows how the delicate mechanisms of
spring are increasingly endangered by climate
change. Seeking to revive his body and soul
following heart surgery, acclaimed nature writer Bruce Stutz
set out on a three-month journey through the unfolding of an
American spring. Driving across the country in a
twenty-year-old Chevy sedan, Stutz shows readers that spring
is not so much a progression as an arousal; each added
minute of the lengthening days and lingering sun brings yet
another transformation in the greening landscape as well as
in the human spirit. Beginning with the
season's southernmost stirrings along the Gulf of Mexico,
Stutz sees the first blooms and partakes in the season's
festivals -- celebrations with ancient origins that still
speak to our wonder at nature's annual rebirth. He follows
the migrations of birds northward, the return of life to the
forests, and the quickening of snowmelt in the Rockies. He
moves across the southern desert, encountering the explosion
of cacti and wildflowers and the violence of tornadoes on
the drought-stricken Great Plains. He then travels north
through the national parks of the West, finally celebrating
his journey's end by basking at the solstice amid the beauty
of the Alaskan Arctic's twenty-four hours of
daylight. Along the way, he accompanies
scientists into the field to study the season's changes and
meets farmers, Arctic natives, and even migrant mushroom
pickers whose livelihoods depend on the coming of spring. In
each location, as he observes the sensitive interplay of
light and warmth that draws animals, plants, water, and even
the soil itself into the biological ballet that makes for
the profound stirring we call spring, he also finds that
climate change now threatens the basic pro-cesses of
nature. A moving and thought-provoking record of
the year�s most invigorating season, Chasing Spring
is a timely reminder that as trees bud and flowers bloom,
the human spirit reawakens as well. Anyone who has ever
marveled at spring�s wondrous transformations�from a first
garden blossom to a world in full flower�will find in
Chasing Spring a journey to savor.
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