Stranded: Finding Nature in Uncertain Times - Hardcover

Bearzi, Maddalena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597146048 ISBN 13: 9781597146043

Verlag: Heyday, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Marooned in Los Angeles by the pandemic, a marine biologist rediscovers the delights and wonders of the natural world in her own backyard.

"Stranded reminds us of what we all too easily forget: the sustaining delights of finding beauty and wonder all around us." —Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak

Conservationist and marine biologist Maddalena Bearzi made her career studying the wild creatures of the deep, but when COVID-19 made landfall on the California coast this seafaring scientist found herself shuttered up ashore, her wide blue world constricted by pandemic lockdown. Never good at sitting idle, she despaired at the confines of her Los Angeles flat—until she began to find wonder in the wilderness of her own backyard.

Stranded charts Bearzi’s discovery of both rapture and resilience in the unsung wildlife of urban LA. With a green thumb and a canine sidekick named Genghis, she finds as much to marvel at in her garden’s singing blackbirds, night-blooming cacti, and industrious wasps as in the whales, dolphins, and sea lions at the center of her maritime adventures. Discovering in the quotidian an antidote to the grief occasioned by captivity and climate chaos, Bearzi reveals how each of us can take heart, find courage, and discover inspiration in the thrumming systems of life that surround us. With a scientist’s precision and a poet’s instinct, she invites us to look at, listen to, and revel in the everyday grandeur of the natural world—and to embrace, with urgency, our responsibility to sustain it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maddalena Bearzi is president and cofounder of Ocean Conservation Society. She holds a PhD in biology and a postdoctorate from UCLA, and she has been involved in studying marine mammals, with a conservation bias, since 1990. Her research on dolphins and whales off California represents one of the longest investigations worldwide. She has published several scientific peer-reviewed papers, and she is coauthor of Beautiful Minds (Harvard University Press) and author of Dolphin Confidential (University of Chicago Press). Her work has been covered by CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera America, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, American Scientist, and National Geographic, among others. Born and raised in Italy, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and dog.

Carl Safina is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius" grant; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, and his writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE: FOLLOWING FLUKEPRINTS

[...]

Over many years, led by curiosity and dedication, my research team and I have had countless encounters with the wild and mysterious marine mammals off the teeming City of Angels.

We saw Pacific white-sided dolphins close off Malibu, showing off the natural beauty of their two-tone physiques in astounding midair somersaults. With a languid mood, bottlenose dolphins traveled and foraged up and down the coast in almost perpetual motion. They were constantly changing group composition in their fluid fission-fusion societies, much like people shifting from one social cluster to another at a party. On occasion, transient, mammal-eating orcas, with their monochrome black fins and cultural traditions passed from generation to generation, roamed in pursuit of a meal: a baby gray whale, a sea lion, an occasional seabird. Pacific harbor seals slept on sun-kissed rocks or relaxed in kelp beds just shouting distance from Hollywood celebrities' garish and well-guarded mansions. Offshore, shadowy Dall's porpoises dashed with gravity-defying leaps, their dorsal fins carving through the surface with such swiftness a watery "rooster tail" was all one could see. Standoffish and bulky Risso's dolphins, oddly dissimilar in temper from the affable ones I met in the Tyrrhenian Sea, made brief appearances before fading into the depths in search of squiddy buffets. We tailed gargantuan blue whales, with blowholes so big a baby could fit inside them, and humpback whales, with their endlessly evolving, haunting and beautiful songs. I learned as much as I could about their otherworldly complex and magical existence, especially that of the whales and dolphins, who captivated me the most. And I started to understand how much they share with us, the striking resemblances, and the linkages among different species and their collective habitat—those invisible ties that exist in the intertwining web of marine life. I saw firsthand how every living organism at sea plays a part; how every being is essential for the survival of others in a delicate balance.

Life in LA revolved around the work Charlie and I do for and with the ocean. Then all of a sudden, on a seemingly ordinary morning at the outset of spring, that life vanished.

The flowers in my garden were blooming; the sky was its usual intense California blue; the dog next door was barking with his high-pitched voice. On my desk lay the airplane ticket for Europe, where it had been sitting for over a week.

My iPhone squawked, showing another incoming text from my mom: "Don't come!!! It’s a mess here!!!!!" I remember scrolling down to read the rest of my mother's exclamation point-filled dispatch reaching me from the other side of the planet, sadly learning how Italy was already strangled in the grip of the Coronavirus.

That day changed everything for me. And for everyone else on Earth.

With no other choice on the horizon, we did what other nonhuman animals on Earth do: we adapted. We stayed home, we avoided crowds, we wore masks and reduced activities to the purely essential. And then there was the awkwardness of social distancing and Zoom meetups, swapping our natural contact with others for sterile face-to-face conversations on computer screens. It was a new domain, an unfamiliar creek to navigate with no paddles or easy instructions. Confusion, panic, and fear were everywhere. 

As a field marine biologist accustomed to spending most of the time outside and in the wild, I found this new regime stifling. For so many scientists whose jobs depend on being out in the world searching to further understand nature beyond human borders, our lives’ purpose was upended. You can’t work from home when your work is the ocean. Not that I had any right to complain. I was living in my house with a loving husband, a dog, a backyard, and everything I needed, toilet paper included. But I still couldn’t circumvent the caged feeling of being closed inside four walls.

With my research shuttered because of the unforeseen, meteor-like impact of a pandemic, unable to be at sea with my team due to social distancing, I could only revisit in my mind that vivid day when the anchovies arrived, that simple act of feeding, interacting, living. I was sequestered, stopped in my tracks and blocked from being on the water, where I have spent much of my life. I yearned for the ocean and that lost, almost spiritual connection with the dolphins.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Heyday
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1597146048
• ISBN 13: 9781597146043
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland