Iowa City Ecologist’s Memoir Touches On Climate Change

SOLON — It took a scientist’s growing concern for her grandchildren’s future and her own observations of accelerating destabilization of the beloved woodlands surrounding her Johnson County home to crystallize Cornelia Mutel’s belief that humans are rushing toward a climate disaster of their own making. Mutel, a University of Iowa ecologist trained in detecting subtle changes in the balance of nature, connects those dots in “A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland,” to be published next month by the University of Iowa Press. Writing from the perspectives of scientist, nature lover and grandmother, Mutel blends natural history, personal memoir, weather descriptions and climate science into gentle encouragement for planet-saving lifestyle changes. In doing so, she presents her own struggles with cancer as a metaphor for the illness threatening the earth. “I’m a very private person — not one who wants to put myself out there,” said Mutel, whose previous books have been written from a more detached perspective. She did so, she said, to make her book more inviting to everyday readers — people who, she writes in her introduction, have “loved family, treasured a special place, worried about illness, been touched by beauty and by loss, felt drawn to things non-human, wondered about our rapidly changing world and worried about where the future is taking us.” Long aware that the burning of fossil fuels is heating the earth’s atmosphere, Mutel has striven to reduce her own carbon footprint, nearly 40 years ago building with her husband, Robert, an energy-efficient home complete with composting toilet. Mutel, senior science writer at IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering in Iowa City, said her thinking about climate change evolved rapidly after 2010, when she edited a report on climate change effects for the Iowa Legislature. “I thought it was somewhere off in the future, that we had time to deal with it, that someone else would take care of it.