A well-told, fact-filled story written with a touch of fury and a dash of regret.
A journalist/activist’s investigation into the history, science and politics of copper, a metal essential to modern civilization but one whose extraction is enormously polluting.
Carter (Red Summer: The Danger, Madness, and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village, 2008, etc.) begins his story in his backyard in the old copper-mining town of Bisbee, Ariz., where he discovered that the soil in his garden had been poisoned by toxins created by years of mining and smelting. The question of whether the open pit mine on the edge of town might reopen led the author to consider what that would mean for his young family’s quality of life and to examine how and why that might come about. He educated himself about the copper market, researched the largest mining companies, toured working mines, and traveled to Bristol Bay, Alaska, where a battle is under way over the possible development of one of the world’s largest copper mines close to the home of the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs. Carter also visited a nearly defunct mining town where a new job-producing copper mine is planned. In his travels, the author chatted with locals, mine workers and mine company personnel. Although he was unable to visit them, he paints a vivid and truly horrific picture of mining operations in Africa and Indonesia, and he delineates the growing impact on the worldwide copper market of burgeoning economies such as those of China, Brazil and India. Carter’s scope is large, but his storytelling technique is up-close and personal. In the end, the author decided to move his family out of his beloved Bisbee to escape the threat of a reopened copper mine, but he makes it abundantly clear that there is, for our modern society, no escape from dependence on copper.
A well-told, fact-filled story written with a touch of fury and a dash of regret.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3644-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
McPhee (Irons in the Fire, 1997, etc.) winds up his artful geohistory of the US by going deep into the heartland—Kansas, Nebraska—in pursuit of deep time: the Precambrian. Included in this collection are his four previous forays into geology—Basin and Range (1981, which, to encapsulate, delineated plate tectonics), In Suspect Terrain (1983, Appalachian geohistory and some broadsides at plate tectonic theory), Rising from the Plains (1986, Wyoming curiosities and environmental conundrums), and Assembling California (1993, a showcase for active tectonics). Here he adds "Crossing the Craton"—craton being the rock basement of the continent—delving into the realms of "isotopic and chemical signatures, cosmological data, and conjecture," in the company of geochronologist Randy Van Schmus. McPhee has a way of making deep structures seem freestanding, right there to ogle: "the walls of the rift are three thousand feet sheer," they're also 600 feet below the surface. Dexterous as ever, McPhee takes on the creation—early island arcs and vulcanism and microcontinents—and tells it with all the power and simplicity a genesis story deserves.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-10520-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great...
An alarming account of the “slow-motion catastrophe” facing the world’s largest freshwater system.
Based on 13 years of reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this exhaustively detailed examination of the Great Lakes reveals the extent to which this 94,000-square-mile natural resource has been exploited for two centuries. The main culprits have been “over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation,” writes Egan, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Combining scientific details, the stories of researchers investigating ecological crises, and interviews with people who live and work along the lakes, the author crafts an absorbing narrative of science and human folly. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which allows “noxious species” from foreign ports to enter the lakes through ballast water dumped by freighters, has been a central player. Biologically contaminated ballast water is “the worst kind of pollution,” writes Egan. “It breeds.” As a result, mussels and other invasive species have been devastating the ecosystem and traveling across the country to wreak harm in the West. At the same time, farm-fertilizer runoff has helped create “massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning [Lake] Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.” The blooms contain “the seeds of a natural and public health disaster.” While lengthy and often highly technical, Egan’s sections on frustrating attempts to engineer the lakes by introducing predator fish species underscore the complexity of the challenge. The author also covers the threats posed by climate change and attempts by outsiders to divert lake waters for profit. He notes that the political will is lacking to reduce farm runoffs. The lakes could “heal on their own,” if protected from new invasions and if the fish and mussels already present “find a new ecological balance.”
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24643-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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