I bought the book, A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland by Cornelia F. Mutel, following her talk in Iowa City in 2016. The talk, filled with emotion and urgency, left the audience with sobering and even frightening facts. Mutel has been a supportive friend before, during, and after the writing of my book, also published by the University of Iowa Press. I must admit that I put off reading her book. The problems of climate change seemed so large. But as I have worked to become more knowledgeable on the subject, the book has become central to my research and understanding.

Mutel is passionate about the environment and writes from a lifetime of immersion in the natural world. Her professional and nonprofessional activities have intertwined as she has used her technical knowledge about plants and their habitats to become a proponent for the need to protect them. Four years later her book’s relevance is even clearer. We need to address climate change.

I do not want to scare you away from picking up the book. It is just the opposite. We all should awake to the seriousness of the state of our world and begin to plan for solutions. Mutel felt that her contribution to prevent greater changes would be to write about climate change.

The book is a journal about her life, living in a woodland, raising a family, and carefully investigating the natural world around her. She writes beautifully and lyrically, describing the plant and animal life in the woodland and the activities of their three boys as they explored its spaces. The effects of climate change she sees in her woods and community expand her research and knowledge. These she shares with the reader between the journal entries.

Mutel covers 2012 in her Weather and Climate Journal. It begins with unusually warm weather and short winter days. The early spring brought unpredictable and extreme weather. The summer brought extreme heat and drought. An early hard frost occurred in late September. The fall intense leaf color lasted a short time due to the dry year. The winter began warm and turned frigid after Christmas.

She writes, “These incongruities provide the impetus for me to start digging seriously into my self-appointed task for the year—learning details about Earth’s changing climate and how it may be reshaping our woodland and our world.”