* * Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone in writer and Radford University professor Rick Van Noy’s audience that the evening of his scheduled talk about his new book on climate change was the coldest of the year. Van Noy spoke to a packed room at the Radford Public Library about his travels to the coastal southeast to tell stories about how both urban and sparsely populated areas were dealing with encroaching seas.

Rick admitted to me as we spoke about it later that he’s not a scientist; he’s a story-teller. The book has no charts or graphs, and little technical data. Rick’s goal was to highlight that rising seas, a predictable result of a warming planet, are already happening and people are already being forced to confront it.

“The questions I usually get,” he said, “are, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ and I ask, ‘Do you want me to give you a three-point plan?’ The fact is, the solutions and answers will be many, based upon the place and situation.”

I asked how he decided to commit himself to the project.

He said, “I’m an English professor. I’m interested in the environment and natural systems. I spend a lot of time outside. Anybody with an outdoors hobby notices changes in the environment. If you’re a fisherman, a hunter, a bird-watcher – whatever – you notice changes to the landscape and habitat. I was also frustrated by not seeing the needle move. I was reading information about climate change and I didn’t see policies or human activities changing.

“One galvanizing moment for me was on a family trip to Glacier Bay in Alaska, where we watched a huge chunk of ice calve off a glacier. I thought I’d tell stories from national parks in Alaska and Montana and elsewhere where changes were happening. It would be too hard to pull off. But I realized there were places in my own region that are experiencing similar things. I went to the Everglades and to the coastal islands. How could I get people interested? How could I help people understand how it may affect them directly?”

So Rick went to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where old cemeteries are being inundated. He went to Norfolk, where city streets are seeing recurring flooding. He went to Tybee Island in Georgia where the causeway linking to the mainland is being swamped. He went to the Everglades and the Keys.

Several other ironies occurred to us as we spoke:

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“Most of us live moment by moment,” he said. “It’s hard to think of the big picture. We’re the only species that will foul its own nest. So maybe that’s where stories come in. We need to think about long-term effects of unimpeded progress, consuming more resources, and endless growth. We may need to change the storytelling, change our foundational myths. The stories can be more powerful than the statistics.

“I was encouraged that I could have conversations (with affected people). I thought there would be more fear, more resistance. People didn’t want to think they lived in climate change refugee communities because they feared it would be bad for tourism or industry. But they would talk about it. We are an ingenious, adaptable, creative, malleable species. We’re sentimental to places we don’t want to leave.”

We talked about the analogy of the earth as a living thing. Glaciers grow and shrink. Mountains rise and are eroded away. Barrier islands are dynamic systems, constantly moving with storms and tides. Most changes are not in human time frames, but they happen nonetheless. Humans will survive climate change, but we can avoid the worst impacts by acknowledging the science and planning accordingly. We have done things in this country to improve the environment, like banning CFCs that were killing the ozone layer and passing the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. With the right political will, we can improve our chances of avoiding the worst.

“We are capable of doing the right thing,” he said. “In the decades to come, our coastlines in particular will look very different. Some places we may have to let go, to abandon. We may need to re-define what we mean by ‘progress.’

“My goal is to raise awareness. Climate change and sea level rise are facts. We need to have conversations about how to minimize the damage. I hope the stories affect people in ways the numbers can’t.”