New Book nails the culture and sociology of an oil spill – without even visiting or mentioning the gulf or BP
Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, the old saying going. Corollary: Even better is to be both. One example is to be found in Charles Wohlforth, an Alaska-born nature writer and former newspaperman at the Anchorage Daily News.
I met Wohlforth about six years ago in Alaska. He’d written a book on the Inupiat eskimos of the North Slope Borough and how their way of knowing nature intersected, ran crosswise with, and enriched the powerful inquiries of trained scientists. I wanted to talk with him on the way farther north to do a story for USNews on the changing environment of the Arctic Ocean and Alaska. Now, this month, he has another book out: The Fate of Nature. Months ago he sent me the uncorrected proof, which I started then set aside as various deadlines and other practicalities arose. I just, finally, finished it. Holy moly.
If you want to know the bigger social and conservationist dynamic of the Gulf Oil Spill, particularly if you are in the news business and are covering it, read this book. And if you are in a hurry to get to its visceral impact right now, skip straight to Part V: Exxon Valdez, Blackness Visible. The whole book is good, and it builds toward Part V logically. But Part V is the lucky part. The book comes out, after six years work, exactly when its lessons and observations on human society, selfishness, cooperation, and nature’s future have a premier news event unfolding to rivet its theme to your bones. For as you read what happened up there in 1989 and in the years following, you surely will find it spookily, frighteningly parallel to what is making the front pages now. I found myself reading passages and able to mentally turn them into dispatches from the petro-stinking marshes of Louisiana with only a few changes of name, of oil company execs, of stunned, grieving local residents, and of politicians dashing about. Different wealthy company, very different spill, very different ecosystem, but almost the exact plot. The press conferences, the promises of big money, the yelps that nobody saw this coming, the news releases recounting the miles of boom deployed and the high-tech equipment being used to fix the shoreline, all so familiar. So is the air of helplessness and two-facedness. But what gets the most traction in view of current news is the aftermath. From Prince William Sound we learn about the inability of any amount of money and labor to put things back as they were. Broken people don’t fix quick. Neither do crude mousse-soaked shorelines – even long after the sheen is gone, the shore is green, barnacles spread again over the rocks and pilings, and whales sound offshore.
Overall, Wohlforth starts this work a bit on the breathless, idealistic side for my tastes. But stay with it. It quickly gets its hooks in deep. You’ll meet unforgettable people, learn things about the roots of conservationism and environmentalism you may not like, and wind up with something on which to loop a thread of hope. From Alaska, a planetary tome.
See Also:
- Anchorage Daily News – Charles Wohlforth: The Fate of Nature – excerpts. His previous employer ran a series of pieces drawn from the book, on a native village, a tsunami, and the aftermath.
- Anchorage Daily News – Richard Mauer: Gulf spill victims learn from Alaskans ; Excellent article, covers much the same theme as Wohlforth’s book and esp. its section on the Exxon spill. It also makes clear why some newspaper writers realize the only way to tell the story right is to write a book even if it does take six years.
- Charlie Petit
