Spring 2011 Books Reviews
By Eric Wagner
The View from Lazy Point
A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
By Carl Safina
Henry Holt, 2011
A few years ago, a cottage near Montauk on Long Island finally became so shabby that, as Carl Safina puts it, even he could afford it. Safina’s books tend to be about wanderers, be they fish or albatross or sea turtles. But in his latest, he tries to write from home, this new-old place. Naturally, he fails to some degree, being pulled to different points of the globe to investigate the depredations of the ocean he loves so much. The tragedy of the commons, he writes, extends through time as well as across space: what we take from our neighbors, we also take from our children. Yet the book is neither just polemic nor lament. That would be too easy. Far harder to do what Safina has done—to look closely at the state of a world in flux and come away with some measure of wonder and joy. ❧
The Death & Life of Monterey Bay
A Story of Revival
By Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka
Island Press, 2011
Accounts of successful restoration are rare, but Stephen Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka have collaborated to tell a hopeful tale in The Death & Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival. Originally, they set out to study the ecology of the bay. But in so doing, they came across one colorful character after another, each one demanding pages in the story. The result is a book that is both scientific compendium and history. Along with more sober sections on fisheries, landings, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, there are tales of the famed sardine canneries and the Harvard-educated, pistol-packing mayor of Pacific Grove, Julia Platt, who in 1931 battled their owners and the California legislature to devise the scheme of marine protected areas still in use today. ❧
Stolen World
A tale of reptiles, smugglers, and skulduggery
By Jennie Erin Smith
Crown, 2011
Stolen World is, broadly, an account of nearly five decades of global traffic in reptiles. It is also a vibrant character study of two men, Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield. Since the 1960s, both men have competed for the title of top reptile smuggler. From a conservation point of view, their high jinks can be tough to stomach—these are real animals that they’re stuffing into tiny spaces and freezing and battering and generally abusing. Smith clearly earned the trust of her sources by being nonjudgmental, perhaps a little too much so. The world of wildlife smuggling is a nasty business, and there is hypocrisy aplenty. Molt and Crutchfield wouldn’t be in business if there weren’t willing buyers, and those buyers aren’t necessarily just lowlifes looking to stock clandestine menageries. Sometimes they are eminently respectable zoos. In the end, we learn, it is not the reptiles that are necessarily the most cold-blooded creatures. ❧
Nature as Measure
By Wes Jackson
Counterpoint, 2011
Nature as Measure is a selection of Jackson’s essays from three of his previous books: New Roots for Agriculture, Becoming Native to This Place, and Altars of Unhewn Stone. Now personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of “selected essays,” even by authors I like. (For the record, I like Wes Jackson.) They always seem to me a bit of an indulgent cop-out—a repackaging of old material for no other reason than to slap on a new cover and a higher price. But Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, has spent a lifetime considering both the physical and spiritual impacts of agriculture on the earth. Given this, it is pleasurable to read the evolution of his ideas as they are molded and shaped, much like the clay about which he cares so much. ❧
The Fate of Nature*
Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth
By Charles Wohlforth
Thomas Dunne Books, 2010
Charles Wohlforth uses Alaska as the stage for an ambitious attempt to grapple with how we think about place. By exploring cultural evolution and the ideologies and political battles that have shaped Alaska’s history—as well as personal stories—Wohlforth charts the unique connection his Alaskan neighbors have to the land and sea. But he falls short when he takes on the question of whether the Alaskan experience can inform efforts to avoid the perils of overpopulation and industrialization. After all, Alaska is often the place we turn to for nostalgia, not guidance. The exception—and the book’s greatest strength—is Wohlforth’s overview of the Exxon Valdez spill, which he covered as a journalist. His recollections of seeing clean-up workers use oil-absorbent rags to scour rocks provide ominous and valuable parallels to the recent BP disaster in the Gulf and will convince any reader that history does, indeed, repeat itself. ❧
*Review of ‘The Fate of Nature,’ written by Jennifer Jacquet.
