Changing Seasons

With snow falling in San Francisco and record-breaking heat in Canada, it's been a wacky winter. And things aren't likely to get more predictable now that it's spring. Just ask author Bruce Stutz, who spent three months driving north across the United States as it thawed and bloomed, chronicling the trip in his book Chasing Spring (excerpt | author interview).

“Each place, each species experiences its own spring,” Stutz writes. During his 2004 journey, he observed rituals of the season and oddities of nature--like the wood frogs that turn two-thirds of their bodily fluids to ice during winter and thaw in spring--as well as the effects of global warming, which threaten to change a time of renewal into one of uncertainty. What changes have you noticed in your spring?

(From Sierra magazine's "The Green Life," March/April 2006.)