In my work as an ecologist who has been studying climate change, actually originally in high alpine areas of Colorado, I came to realize the need to communicate the science of climate change to my neighbors, you know, people who I live in my small town of Huntington with.

And so my first book, Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World, is all about locating those signals of change in the language that everybody can respond to. The language of people meeting at the library or the language of people seeing each other at the post office, how cardinals sing earlier every year, how our gardens are changing because we can grow different things and the growing season is longer. How the absence of winter sometimes, or at least the protracted nature of winter is something we're all experiencing.

And so in my books, both Early Spring and my later book on climate adaptation, I try to communicate what can be difficult information around the science of climate change in a language that really draws on our collective experience of living in a time that is already the beginning of a radical departure of what we would expect; seasonality in terms of temperature, in terms of how one stage of the year is followed by another. And I think that this is something we have to do more and more of in the university as we have to find the language to communicate our findings to the public to every day people who really want to know and already have a good sense from their own anecdotes and their own stories and their own experiences in the landscape that yes, change is upon us.