The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth - Hardcover

Wohlforth, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312377371 ISBN 13: 9780312377373

Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

“What capacity for good lies in the hidden depths of people?”

Starting with this question, award-winning author Charles Wohlforth sets forth on a wide-ranging exploration of our relationship with the world. In The Fate of Nature, he draws on science, spirituality, history, economics, and personal stories to reveal answers about the future of that relationship.

There is no better place to witness the highs and lows of our treatment of the natural world than the vast wilds, rocky coasts, and shifting settlements of Alaska. Since the first encounter between Captain Cook's crew and the Alaskan Natives in 1778, there have been countless struggles between people who have had different plans for the region. Some have hoped to preserve Alaska as they found it, while others aimed to create something new in its place.

Incidents such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill may seem like cause for despair. In the face of such profound tragedies, Charles Wohlforth has found heartening developments in the science of human altruism. This new understanding of what causes humans to cooperate and act conscientiously may be the first step toward taking the actions necessary to preserve an environment that has already been altered drastically in our lifetime.

A clear-eyed, original work of research, reportage, and philosophical reflections, The Fate of Nature gives us a chance to change the way we think about our place in society and the world at large.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Charles Wohlforth is a lifelong Alaska resident and author of The Whale and the Supercomputer, winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize, as well as many other books and articles about nature, history, politics, and travel in the North. An avid cross-country skier, Wohlforth lives during the winter in Anchorage with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. In summer they live off the grid on a remote Kachemak Bay shore reachable only by boat. Wohlforth began his career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News he worked months in the field covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

CHARLES WOHLFORTH is a lifelong Alaska resident and author of The Whale and the Supercomputer, winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize, as well as many other books and articles about nature, history, politics, and travel in the North. An avid cross-country skier, Wohlforth lives during the winter in Anchorage with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. In summer they live off the grid on a remote Kachemak Bay shore reachable only by boat. Wohforth began his career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News he worked months in the field covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Learn more online at www.fateofnature.com.

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The Fate of Nature

Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth

By Charles P. Wohlforth

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2010 Charles Wohlforth
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-37737-3

Contents

Introduction, 
Part I: The Context: Natural History and Human Nature, 
1. The Gulf of Alaska Cauldron, 
2. Killer Whale Culture and Human Spirituality, 
3. Chugach Culture and the Spirits of Nature, 
4. How Animals Think, 
5. Thinking and Being a Person, 
6. The Essence of Carol Treadwell, 
7. Connected or Alone, 
Part II: The Enlightenment Comes to Alaska, 
8. How Captain Cook Saw Alaska, 
9. Rethinking the Moon, 
10. Competition in Men and Snails, 
11. The Russian Conquest of Alaska, 
12. The American Conquest of Alaska, 
13. Evolution, Free Will, and Hope, 
Part III: How Conservation Happened, 
14. Taming the Gold Rush, 
15. The Anatomy of Sharing, 
16. Catalysts for Conservation, 
17. Whistle-blowers to Save Alaska, 
18. Conservation and Eugenics, 
19. Fantasy Meets Reality at Katalla, 
Part IV: Property Rights and Community Rights, 
20. Chenega Destroyed, 
21. Ownership in a Liquid World, 
22. Clem Tillion and the Ownership of the Sea, 
23. An Alternative to Tragedy, 
24. Chenega Reborn, 
25. Native People Become Native Corporations, 
26. The Broken Covenant, 
Part V: Exxon Valdez: Blackness Visible, 
27. Finding Oil, 
28. Costs and Values, 
29. A Community Collapses, 
30. Rick Steiner and the Fight for the Trees, 
31. Understanding Life as a System, 
32. Hearts Connect to the Coastal Forest, 
Part VI: Conclusion: The Problem and Hope, 
33. Choosing Good (Beach Cleaners Part 1), 
34. How Change Happens, 
35. Chenega's Next Generation, 
36. The Hedonic Treadmill, 
37. Making a Difference (Beach Cleaners Part 2), 
38. Celebrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Gulf of Alaska Cauldron

What seems solid and permanent swirls and disintegrates, spun by invisible forces. Sand and mist blast along the seven-mile beach of Softuk Bar, entrained in an east wind tearing the tops off roaring gray breakers and hurling them into the twilight. A lumbering brown bear, hunched against the flying grit, digs for a beach plant that the wind has buried in wet sand up to the tips of its leaves. The leading arm of a vortex hundreds of miles wide is sweeping the exposed shore of the Gulf of Alaska, east of Prince William Sound, half a day's walk from the next nearest human being. As the storms of September and October pulse unremittingly and the dark of winter thickens to impenetrability, the last person will desert these hundreds of miles of shoreline and even the blubbery, salmon-fattened bear will disappear. Sand lance, silver slivers of fish, will bury themselves in the beaches like hidden mineral veins. Humpback whales will retreat to Hawaii and stop eating, trading food for warm water. Herring will gather in the sound's fjords where cold, hidden waters may, in stillness, allow a store of fat to last through the winter. While animals wait, life recharges in the mountains above. The storm is depositing energy there, in deep fields of snow that will power the spring.

This is the starting point, within a three-mile-high semicircle of mountains along the gulf's northern rim. Remote from human experience or even detailed scientific understanding, mighty forces and abundant organisms combine in a system of life that ultimately sustains animals and distant, unknowing people and restores the air and stirs the ocean. The furious chaos vibrates with creativity and destruction, as virile and unknowable as an ancient, all-powerful god. From ingredients of water, air, light, and rock it produces the aged giants of the deep and the weightless feathers that lift terns balancing on gusts. From a swirling cauldron come delicate patterns of meaning.

Here, at this beginning, we can begin to decipher what we are, although not in any simple way. To know our own human nature we must examine our context, the ecosystem that precedes us, especially that wild part that defies human habitation or control. For example, consider the sea's alchemy that spawns tiny, crystalline herring eggs on fronds of seaweed, delivered to the lips of a woman on a warm spring afternoon next to calm water, sustaining her in body and spirit. Food, the essence of what one is, and who, and even why. She will know answers just by crushing the salty gems between her teeth — about the sea's generosity and its demand for humility. Somewhere the stormy night hides an origin for that understanding.

First the storm reaches shore, falls into the mountains' snare, screams in alpine wind tunnels, and bleeds out. Moisture rising against rock condenses into water and snow. This snowfall accretes to become the continent's largest glaciers, snow becoming dense, glassy ice and oozing downslope, grinding and shattering solid rock on the way back to the sea. Downslope from the permanent ice in the perpetually damp temperate rainforest grow enormous trees and bottomless spongy wetlands pocked with small, clear pools. In winter, all is buried under yards of heavy, wet snow. In the spring, the rivers will flood with melted snow, ice, and sediment, eventually fertilizing the ocean's plankton with iron and extending quarter-mile-wide ocean beaches.

The fresh water itself moves the ocean. Freed of their banks, the rivers turn right, pumping the coastal current toward the west. No, the water doesn't turn right. It flows straight. It's the earth that's turning. Like a marble rolling across a spinning disk, water seems to turn. The runoff from the gulf's coastal mountains follows the shore to the west, sucking behind it warmth from the American West Coast, whose energy in turn melts more snow and ice and powers stronger storms to pile more snow and ice in the mountains. Spirals within spirals: the storms bend, too. Air rushes toward their low-pressure centers, but the spinning earth diverts the wind to the right, on the long, circuitous route of a cyclonic vortex, like water going down a drain. The storm's leading edge of east wind collides with the Gulf of Alaska's coast, hurling sand west along endless, bear-tracked beaches and pushing water west, along the shore. In the dark of autumn, the waves grow into hills.

There are mountains and canyons under the sea also, along the ragged-edged continental shelf, the fringe between land and the abyss. At the center of the gulf's arc, vertical rock confuses the waves and wind, with contradictions offered by fjords, islands, channels, and spires, and within the unfathomably complex inland sea of Prince William Sound, which encloses a world of its own, water-floored corridors walled by brooding spruces leading to secret, fecund gardens of mud and flashing fish, prey for eagles. Winds funnel and focus through these mazes. Currents twist in baroque patterns, changing with each turn of the tide or season. Intricate forces entangle ecological stories into as many digressions and surprise endings as there are eddies and tide pools. But the tempo of every tale comes from the beat of the storms and the timing of the moment in the spring when the sun emerges warmly on stilled waters.

The prodigious biological productivity of the Gulf of Alaska owes everything to that moment when the surface's crop of phytoplankton is perfectly prepared for growth. The winter storms have stirred up organic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312377371
• ISBN 13: 9780312377373
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 434
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar