THE RIVERKEEPERS:
Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right
By John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Scribner, $25
ONE ROUND RIVER:
The Curse of Gold and the Fight for the Big Blackfoot
By Richard Manning
Holt, $25
“Did you ever stand and shiver, just because you were looking at a river?” goes a line from a song by folk troubadour Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. For centuries, America’s waterways have inspired awe while serving as sources of food, water and pleasure. But as industrial pollution born of man’s need and greed takes its toll, many waterways and their fragile ecosystems have been plunged into peril. Two noteworthy books chronicle the tales of two rivers, at opposite ends of the country, and the struggle to preserve them.
John Cronin grew up near the Hudson River in New York, waded in its polluted waters as a child in the 1950s, and once worked as a commercial fisherman; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s background was far more privileged. The two eco-crusaders met on common ground in the Hudson Riverkeeper organization, a waterways-preservation group that has battled scores of industrial polluters and filed hundreds of environmental lawsuits on behalf of the watershed and its residents. Their data-dense but highly readable book, “The Riverkeepers,” recounts how they and other Riverkeeper members have fought polluters and politicians on a variety of fronts, including opposing a proposed superhighway that environmentalists argued would have deep-sixed the river’s striped-bass population.
Cronin and Kennedy do not champion wilderness preservation above all else, nor do they support what they describe as “look but don’t touch” laws that have made it illegal to pick up a blue jay feather in New York or pick pine cones in the Black Hills. “Well-meaning environmentalists wrote many of these laws. It’s time to reexamine them,” they argue.
Richard Manning, an environmental journalist who now lives in Oregon but lived for years near the Blackfoot River in western Montana, brings a passionately personal approach to “One Round River,” his saga of a once-serene waterway in trouble because of generations of logging, grazing, overdevelopment and the latest mining threat–the “curse of gold.” Manning traces the watershed from the time of the Salish tribe, whose ancient folklore is populated with giants, dwarfs and squat, bad-mannered people called the Foolish Folk, to recent proposals for massive, open-pit gold mines that he argues would threaten the very life of the river.
For all his environmental outrage, Manning seldom falls prey to self-righteousness; his writing reflects a self-deprecating sense of humor coupled with a self-awareness that he, too, plunders nature to satisfy material desires. Precious metals may hold little lure for him, but he acknowledges that he owns and enjoys guitars crafted of fine woods from rainforest trees. There can be “gold,” he observes, in all things, a symbol of excess and also of beauty. “I cannot draw a clean line between `need’ and `want,’ ” Manning writes. “I know that gold is all want . . . but as I consider the things I use to sustain my life, it is always true I can get by on less. And should.”
BEYOND THE NATIONAL PARKS:
A Recreation Guide to Public Lands in the West
Edited by Mary E. Tisdale and Bibi Booth
Smithsonian, $19.95
For those who want to experience nature in all its raw and rugged glory, 264 million acres of remote public lands await–untamed, undeveloped, often breathtakingly beautiful and sometimes subject to flash floods and other environmental constraints.
For the past 50 years, these wilderness territories beyond our nation’s parks and playgrounds have been protected by the Bureau of Land Management, which also is entrusted with the stewardship of millions of archeological and historic sites. This handy, photo-filled paperback guide to bureau public lands in 14 Western states and a smattering of Eastern locations gives the lowdown on what to expect in terms of wheelchair accessibility, flora and fauna, camping, fees (if any), weather advisories, recreational opportunities and the nearest town where travelers can stock up on food, bottled water and bug repellent. It’s not always necessary to totally rough it–some sites boast marked trails and public washrooms. Other, more challenging destinations feature large expanses of treacherously rocky terrain populated primarily by rattlesnakes and ticks.
NATURE WARS: People vs. Pests
By Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, $24.95
Pest management appears to have been around practically forever. Ancient peoples relied on magical chants, potions and prayers to designated pest-control deities; by 2500 B.C., the Sumerians were using elemental sulfur to control insects and mites. We’ve come a long way since then–with today’s arsenal of killer products, mankind can lay waste to countless pests at a moment’s notice. But progress exacts a toxic toll.
“What is different about the modern structural pest industry compared with historical pest control is that our society now has to struggle with the balance between killing pests and the damage that heavy-handed chemical pest control can cause,” writes Mark L. Winston in “Nature Wars.” Winston, a biological-sciences professor, is not wholly opposed to chemical warfare but believes there are more natural and ethical ways to battle pests.
” We have come to expect a sanitized world, a world without cockroaches in our kitchens, insects on our lettuce, dandelions on our lawns, or blemishes on our oranges,” he observes. “That sanitized existence has a price, however, in thousands of serious or fatal pesticide poisoning cases each year . . . and in fields, meadows, and forests stripped of biological diversity.”
A better way, Winston concludes in this thoughtful, well-researched account of people vs. pests, is to be willing to manage rather than control, reduce instead of eradicate, tolerate rather than panic. It is possible, he maintains, to be stewards of the environment while protecting ourselves from damage caused by real pests.
VULTURE: Nature’s Ghastly Gourmet
By Wayne Grady
Sierra Club, $22.50
The Bible calls them “an abomination”; Charles Darwin described them as “disgusting.” Cute and cuddly they’re not, but vultures haven’t always gotten such bad press. Ancient Egyptians revered vultures as a symbol of the goddess Nekhbet and protected them by law, the birds figured prominently in pre-Columbian mythology, and in ancient India the carrion-consuming carnivores were believed to guard the gates to the underworld.
Most folks, though, find vultures downright distasteful and probably don’t care that the birds have been on the decline in North and South America for centuries, largely due to habitat loss. But in “Vulture: Nature’s Ghastly Gourmet,” Wayne Grady argues that vultures’ gastronomic tastes–coupled with industrial-strength digestive juices that handle botulism bacteria with ease–serve them well from an evolutionary standpoint and actually help control anthrax outbreaks in cattle and swine.
On a warmer and fuzzier note, “Vulture” covers courtship and family life among various species and chronicles the crusade to save the endangered California condor (yes, it’s a vulture). But be warned: Some of the book’s 60 color photos feature the birds feasting on bloody dead animals.
THE NATURE READER
Edited by Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank
Ecco Press, $16
A revised and expanded paperback edition of a hardcover anthology published a decade ago, this highly erudite nature reader draws heavily on prose and poetry that originally appeared in the literary magazine Antaeus. The more than 40 writers represented here come from a variety of disciplines and vary widely in approach and attitudes. Some contributors clearly have no problems with hunting as sport, and Joyce Carol Oates smugly chronicles her casual cruelty toward the black ants she crushed one by one as they crawled across the Parsons table where she sat trying to write a poem that would “hurt like a white-hot wire up the nostrils.” If the writings share a common strand, the editors argue in their preface, it is their exploration of the idea that “the quest for a right relation to the natural world is also the quest to understand our own nature.”
