RADFORD – Radford University professor Rick Van Noy will be reading from his newest work, “Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South,” at an upcoming event at the Blacksburg Public Library on Saturday, July 20 at 2 p.m.
“The effects of climate change make headlines almost daily,” reads information released about the event. “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,” it continues. “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 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.”
Van Noy grew up in a small New Jersey town on the Delaware River just up from where Washington crossed on Christmas Eve. After stints in Colorado, Washington, and Ohio, he moved to Radford, Virginia, for a position in the English Department at Radford University and has stayed for the clean waterways and lovely mountains.
He is the author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place (2003), A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons (2008), and Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (2019). Find more information about the author at: https://www.rickvannoy.com/.
Books will be available for purchase and signing after the event.
