A solid demonstration of why those who have a taste for lobster rolls better eat up while they can.
An environmental journalist turns in a somber story of vanishing fisheries and ways of life Down East.
Jumping aboard lobster boats and heading to sea, White (The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, 2013, etc.) returns with an affecting report on the way humans have mismanaged marine resources. Economics is all about scarcity—and the scarcer the good in question, the more expensive it is likely to be. But in the case of the lobster, he writes, what looks to be a species in grave danger of disappearing has been overly abundant on the market, so much so that lobstermen had trouble selling their catches—which, in 2014, were six times the size of a normal year’s yield. Well, that’s the tragedy of the commons for you, or, as he puts it, “tragedy of the capitalists,” and, to trust White, it won’t continue for much longer. The supply will eventually dry up. The author examines the parallel story of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, an apex predator on the path to extinction thanks to overfishing. Some temporarily lucky lobstermen are able to extract huge numbers of shellfish from a sea fast warming and acidifying, while others, he writes, “are switching professions or moonlighting as truck drivers, telephone repairmen, and tollbooth attendants.” If there are a few stock characters in the narrative (“We’ll try to catch some lobstah—that’s my idear anyways,” says one veteran captain), there is also an obvious moral lesson: We have only so much influence over climate change at this late hour, but we must adjust our demands if food fisheries are to outlast the first half of the century. There are no shortcuts, for aquaculture doesn’t work for lobsters, and other species are dwindling alongside the crustaceans. “Does anyone ever learn from their neighbor or from the past?” White wonders. His answer is self-evident.
A solid demonstration of why those who have a taste for lobster rolls better eat up while they can.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08085-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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