Students in Virginia plan a school walk-out Friday -- a protest over government’s failure to confront climate change. That doesn’t surprise one college professor and author. His new book – Sudden Spring – visits Virginia and other Southern states to learn about the signs of a warming planet.
Rick Van Noy teaches English at Radford University, so you might be surprised to find him writing about climate change, but he was worried. People didn’t seem to respond when scientists forecast a frightening future. Maybe, he thought, there was another way to persuade.
“Stories could affect people as much or more than the science,” he explains.
Because it was already warmer than many other regions, the South seemed a logical place to collect those tales.
“I also chose it because the South has some interesting politics," Van Noy adds. "They’re going to be affected the most, and yet they’ve also got communities that are the most resistant to addressing the causes of it.”
He was surprised to find that while people used different terms and disagreed about causes, many were on board with the need for change.
“I think it is starting to change. I think more and more people are becoming alarmed. I think some of the recent storms have hit hard.”
Some were deterred by the substantial costs of measures needed to protect shorelines, homes and businesses, but others told Van Noy there was really no choice.
“If we deal with it we may very well stave off fiscal collapse. We’re spending billions of dollars a year in disaster relief.”
And some of the changes we need to make could actually improve our quality of life – like planting trees or restoring oyster reefs and wetlands along Virginia’s coast.
“What the living shoreline does is it kind of filters the wave action, and it traps some of the sand and silt, so in effect it builds up the shoreline. Here we were in the shadow of the largest naval base in the world, and yet I was learning that the lowly oyster was among our best options for coastal defense.”
The book takes readers to Tangier and Hampton Roads – which some now refer to as Dampton Roads – to meet people doing positive, helpful things. Van Noy thinks our best hope is to stop sharing nightmares and start talking more about dreams.
“I think the doomsday stories definitely get our attention, and there are some alarming information out there that can be kind of apocalyptic, but those things may not help us to build the kind of long-term change that we need. We’re capable of making the right decisions. We did say in the 70’s when we passed things like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and we dealt with the ozone problem.”
He admits our federal government seems painfully slow to respond, but he sees cities leading the way toward human survival.
“New Orleans would follow Norfolk, and Savannah will follow Charleston. Miami is certainly on top of it, and then – yeah -- we hope Washington, D.C. will eventually come around.”
And, he says, cities like Norfolk might someday prosper from their early experience with climate change.
“They’ve gotten some advice from the Dutch, who have been dealing with this for a long time. I think the Dutch got something like four percent of their GDP from consulting on climate change, and so there was the possibility that some of the strategies that people in the area come up with are then exported to other communities.”
In the end, he says, there are only three choices for the people of a warming planet.
“We can adapt, mitigate or suffer.”
The more we do of the first two, he says, adapting to warming weather and higher seas while putting less carbon into the atmosphere and maybe removing some of what’s there, the less we’ll fall to the third option – suffering. The author of Sudden Spring will appear at the Virginia Festival of the book, one week from today at 2p.m. in UVA’s bookstore.
