Meticulous almost to a fault, but flashing with human interest and keen environmental insight: an illuminating march through...
Magazine journalist Klucas debuts with a patiently detailed unfolding of the environmental missteps that have marked the entire history of Leadville, Colorado.
The town sits atop an impressive array of mineral deposits: silver and gold, copper and manganese, molybdenite, and, of course, lead. This variety, explains Klucas, allowed Leadville to survive when other one-horse mining burgs went bust. During its heyday, the town hosted Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt at the opera, made a multimillionaire of Meyer Guggenheim, and generated enormous quantities of waste. Even during lean times, Leadville was a community tightly knit by friendship, camaraderie, and pride in its mining tradition. But tunnels often burped a gush of suspended metals into the Arkansas River, creating Technicolor hues. One spectacular belch coincided with the rise of environmental concern across the country, bringing the EPA, the CDC, and other federal agencies to Leadville’s door and earning it a reputation as the Rockies’ Poison Central. At this moment, the story gets really interesting, and the author’s clarifying touch pays off. The defenders of the environment came on like gangbusters, alienating the citizenry to such an extent that they found the EPA more toxic than the tailings. Klucas shows that all concerned parties acted in their own worst interests: the regulators creating a stultifying bureaucracy, the mine operators treating the problem as a legal rather than an engineering issue, the Colorado attorney general filing an absurd class-action lawsuit. “Any law that invites this much litigation is poorly drafted,” one judge commented, referring to the Superfund’s severe liability provisions and general clumsiness. “Why should you pass a law that is so complicated that everyone spends more on lawyers than they do on the technical side solving the problem?” Character sketches provide a refreshing break from all the legal squabbling and stalling; Klucas makes even the drab players as bright as the river.
Meticulous almost to a fault, but flashing with human interest and keen environmental insight: an illuminating march through environmental politics at a turning point in green awareness.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2004
ISBN: 1-55963-385-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shearwater/Island Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
