A weapons-grade indictment of river despoliation, and an astute analysis of the socioeconomic factors that affect it....
Taking a break from the foreign-affairs beat, amateur fly fisherman Black (The Good Neighbor, 1988, etc.) broadly contemplates northwest Connecticut’s Housatonic River, its Shepaug and Naugatuck tributaries, and their respective fates.
The Shepaug River, the author declares, is his “Platonic ideal of a trout stream”: pristine, musical, cradled in a handsome landscape, and filled with trout (at least until Memorial Day, when downstream Waterbury taps into the river). A mere ten miles to the east runs the Naugatuck, a poisonous swill of auto tires, shopping carts, and chemicals with names too long for comfort. Why was this? Black asks. How did natural phenomena, human choices, economics, odd moments of timing, and simple twists of fate come to this pass? The author approaches the rivers from two complementary perspectives: ecologically, as a question of hydrology, geology, botany, zoology, and climate change; and politically, as an important and intricate analysis of “the social, economic, and political food chain of the watershed.” Here, he discovers, was the epicenter of American iron and armament production from the Revolution to the Civil War, and here he discovers the trout pool paradox: “the production of iron required exactly the same ingredients that make up ideal trout habitat: limestone, fast water, and the cooling forest canopy.” That the Shepaug didn’t go the route of the Naugatuck was really a matter of timing: the railroad to the furnace came too late, and the area’s sheer loveliness attracted a resident population with the economic and political wherewithal to protect the land from development. Black does a neat job of spelling out the class warfare embodied by the two rivers, providing a trim history of Waterbury’s sorry political landscape. He also gives away his secret: having fished there for years, “I had never once seen another angler on these wild trout waters.” He can forget that now.
A weapons-grade indictment of river despoliation, and an astute analysis of the socioeconomic factors that affect it. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-31080-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
In tones both reportorial and evocative of the shadowy and deadly habits of the Florida panther, Fergus chronicles the efforts of a welter of agencies and individuals to avert the extinction of this creature, which ranks high on the Endangered Species List. Wildlife officials estimate only 50 to 75 adults and kittens- -the majority bearing the inbred characteristics of a cowlick and kinked tail—inhabit the state, mainly in the Everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve. Continually threatened by hunters, cars, encroaching agricultural and residential development, mercury poisoning, and the scarcity of healthy, breeding males, the future of Felis concolor coryi is bleak. Fergus (Shadow Catcher, 1991, etc.) manages to insinuate himself among field biologists, wildlife managers, ranchers, and private preserve owners who offer varying solutions to save this puma subspecies. Possibilities include land acquisitions connecting panther habitats, increasing the population of deer (the favored prey of the panther), captive breeding programs, and introduction of a genetically different subspecies. While this last measure might legally bump the Florida panther off the Endangered Species List as an unfundable hybrid, Fergus argues, ``if it came down to one or the other, was it not better for the subspecies to renew itself with outside blood . . . Subspecies be damned, it was a panther.'' Pleasingly unpedantic, Fergus also relates anecdotal snippets of scrapes between humans and this predator over the last century, introduces readers to the country's most famous panther hunter, and rides with a group of humorously profane Florida cowboys on a ranch in panther country. Fergus's prose is highly descriptive, particularly when, daydreaming at a droning meeting convened by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, he envisions a panther's quiet, muscular stalk through the woods. Concise and comprehensive, this fills an important niche in the environmental compendium of species that face annihilation at the hands of man.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-86547-491-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
Leaf-cutters, weavers, acrobats, carpenters, and harvesters- -ants all, and Hoyt gets their measure in this extraordinary tour d'horizon of an ant's life. Hoyt, who made his naturalist's name writing of leviathans (The Whale Called Killer, 1981, etc.) turns now to motes, in whose realm he is just as comfortable and inspired; he fashions the ants into enchanting creatures: busy, busy, busy, always hunting and gathering, jousting and warring, executing and slaving. And that's just the surface, for what goes on in underground nests is even more astounding. In the dark, fungal gardens grow in the 2,000-room mansions that house a queen and her millions of workers. But Hoyt does much more than simply tabulate one wild ant-fact after another. He charts their daily toils and dramas, sketches their biological and sociological frames, then from these foundations spins theories of evolution, behavior, ecology, and chemical communication. Myrmecologists E.O. Wilson and William L. Brown Jr. figure prominently in Hoyt's tale (inevitably, since they are to ants as Audubon is to birds). They prove to be as curious as their quarry (``warm and funny, yet strange and obsessive,'' in Hoyt's words), two gents prone to such comments as ``Pardon me while I have good drool'' (said while poking through an ant midden in the field) or ``He's going to sting me. He's stinging me. Oh, I've been stung.'' Wilson's travails as the father of sociobiology, bugbear of the left in the 1970s, are thoughtfully raked over. Best of all is Hoyt's chronicling of an ant's day afield: ``A worker ant . . . stands on the leaf of a low-growing bush. . . . The air is pungent with leaf sap. As it drips from the leaf, she stops to lick a drop or two for refreshment.'' Readers get right down on all six to join the action. Fabulous stuff, commandingly told with wit, color, and grace. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81086-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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