Author Bruce Stutz to Address Class of 2010

Who: Author Bruce Stutz
What: Stutz' "Chasing Spring: An American Journey through a Changing Season," has been selected as The First Year Summer Book. Stutz will discuss the book with LMU's class of 2010.
When: October 12, 2006


From Publishers Weekly
With mortality on his mind after serious heart surgery, Stutz, former editor-in-chief of Natural History magazine, needed physical and emotional renewal. He found both during the odyssey chronicled in this loquacious account of "seeing spring in various phases." For three months starting in March and ending in June—all the while exulting in the energy of spring, in its lengthening days and blossoming landscapes—he traveled east to west and south to north in a 20-year-old Chevy Impala sedan stuffed with camping gear. Stutz tracked salamanders and frogs across reawakening forest floors, watched cacti bloom in the Arizona desert, followed birds as they migrated northward, harvested morels in Montana and Oregon, and capped his restorative, philosophical trek by hiking through Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during the bright 24-hour solstice days that herald the transition of spring into summer. Along the way, the author expresses concerns: climate change means that spring is arriving as much as a week earlier across the continent, disrupting migration patterns, and most of the world's midlatitude glaciers are melting with unanticipated speed. Spring remains the season of rebirth, says Stutz—but his amiable report cautions readers to "see it now, because it's changing." (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
While recovering from heart surgery, Stutz, former editor in chief for Natural History, embarked on a dynamic inquiry into the science and culture of spring, the season of renewal and hope, followed by a cross-country journey that unexpectedly revealed how and why spring has changed over the past 50 years. Upbeat and companionable, Stutz reels off a provocative survey of ancient spring rituals punctuated by bracing observations about the divergent realms of myth and fact as he tracks spring in the Appalachians, Louisiana, the Arizona desert, the Rockies, and Alaska, hooking up in each region with scientists studying impacts of global warming both subtle and all too obvious. Stutz provides lucid, eye-opening scientific explanations of the consequences of increased levels of carbon dioxide, how climate change disrupts the balance between pollinators and plants and threatens the freshwater supply, and the dire implications of melting polar ice. By turns poetic and witty, Stutz's paean to spring past and present, and frank cautions about a forbidding future, render seemingly abstract concerns personal and enhance receptivity to environmental realities. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Who is Bruce Stutz?

A writer and editor, my work has appeared in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Discover, Scientific American, Natural History, Audubon, Conde Nast Traveler, and Travel & Leisure.

I have been features editor of Audubon magazine (1992-1995) and Editor-in-Chief of Natural History (1996-1999). Born in Allentown, PA, I attended Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and then received a Schubert Playwrighting Fellowship to the University of Texas. I moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1974 and after working in the theatre in New York City for a couple of years I began writing stories for a local Brooklyn weekly.  Although the work was supposed to support my playwrighting, I became more engaged in news reporting and soon found work at the local weekly paper in Florham Park, New Jersey.

It was a hard but worthwhile apprenticeship and in 1979 I began working for Gannett’s Westchester, NY, daily newspapers in Ossining and White Plains. Having covered several stories on the Hudson River I decided my interest lay in writing on science, natural history, and the environment, so I left with the determination to freelance.

I began writing stories on the troubles of the vanishing commercial fishing industry along the New Jersey shore as the catch declined and housing development made fishing ports more valuable as second-home real estate..  I spent a great deal of time out with these fishermen on their boats and with their families when they were home and wrote articles for National Fisherman, a broadsheet that covered the commercial fishing industry.  In this way I learned the intimate connection of the environment and nature to people and their culture—a subject that I continue to report on.  National Fisherman was kind enough to raise my pay from $50 to eventually $250 an article and I began selling stories about these issues to the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times and soon, to magazines.

In 1986, I was asked by the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association and the Hudson River Foundation to develop a magazine on the ecology of the Hudson River.  River looked at life along the Hudson with an eye to the environmental issues facing the river.   The magazine lasted two years—a short run, but during which time we covered major stories that affected a great deal of work on the river. In 1986 I also became a senior editor at Natural History magazine, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. After three years at Natural History, I received a grant from the American Littoral Society and left Natural History to begin writing a book on the natural and cultural history of the Delaware River Valley.

My research for the book took a full year during which time I developed a network of researchers working on the river and traveled with them into the field.  These were biologists, geologists, palynologists, botanists, and archeologists studying diverse aspects of the river’s ecosystem. The book that resulted . . . Natural Lives, Modern Times was as much history as natural history, as much about culture as about science.

In 1991, following the book’s publication, I became features and contributing editor at Audubon magazine and began traveling often—home and abroad—writing on how the loss of natural places results in a loss of the cultures that live in them. I wrote on the New River in Virginia, the Peruvian Amazon, and the natural history of the Jordan River Valley. This article, Water and Peace, and another, The Landscape of Hunger dealing with the relationship of environment to hunger, have since been used extensively in university courses on the environment.

I became Editor-In-Chief of Natural History magazine in 1996.  During my time at the magazine I focused on moving the magazine away from strictly behavioral science and into more broadly reported stories.  I brought in journalists to cover stories and photojournalists to shoot them.  The magazine won several international photojournalism awards.  I continued to write and travel, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, to meet scientists, learn about their research, and with them, develop articles for the magazine. During this same period I taught as an adjunct professor in the New York University graduate program in Science and Environmental Reporting. I left Natural History in 1999 to return to writing but heart surgery to repair a bad heart valve took me on another journey that I wrote about in “Chasing Spring,” published in January, 2006, by Scribner. Bruce Stutz, (http://brucestutz.com)