by Janet A. Ginsburg

I am now in my 12th city in two months watching Spring unfold yet again. It's lilac bush and peony reprise here in East Lansing. From the first resolutely cheerful forsythia startling the winter-weary in Bologna and the delicate primroses near Stuart's house staking an alpine claim, to wild iris on the Cinqueterre and the iris-about-to-be in Chicago, it's been a treat. Especially, after a winter so brutal, so frightening, so long.

I love to get up in the morning not knowing exactly where my feet will take me. Will there cobblestones and medieval towers? Bookstores? Miles of sprawly strip malls-by-the-highway where farm fields used to be, where prairies and forests used to be before that? When I walk out the door will it be 23rd street? Apostole? Connecticut Avenue? Will I get invited to recess on the rooftop of a Chelsea preschool? Sit at a dinner table with half a dozen math teachers? Will funghi and merlot be on the menu? Or will it be plateful of college town fried-with-fried? Will I discover a magic tree with the most unlikely purple flowers? Or sit in bumper to bumper traffic, wondering how we all got ourselves into such a stupid mess?

Speaking of which, I am now halfway through Tim Flannery's new book, The Weather Makers, which is full of disheartening big insights and disturbing little details:

“...100 tons of ancient plant life is required to create one gallon of gasoline. Given the vast amount of sunlight needed to grow 100 tons of plant matter, and the prodigious rate at which we are using gasoline, coal, and gas, it should come as no surprise that over each year of our industrial age, humans have required several centuries' worth of ancient sunlight to keep the economy going. The figure for 1997 -- around 422 years of fossil sunlight--was typical. Four hundred and twenty-two years' worth of blazing light from a Carboniferous sun -- and we have burned it in a single year.”

Between Flannery's book and a copy of what is probably the definitive tome on zoonoses, Disease Emergence and Resurgence, which Milt Friend, the emeritus founder of the National Wildlife Health Center, just sent me (signed!), it's been a depressing reading stretch. Even a lovely new book on migrating birds (Songbird Journeys) that I found in New York ends with a litany of so many bird-threats, it's a wonder there are any birds left at all.

And yet as I sit here watching six lanes of fossil sunlight race by, today's sunlight sparkles on spring fresh leaves sheltering thousands of tiny winged travelers whose brave and bold flights take my breath away, and the world seems hopeful, despite it all.