Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It by Erin Brockovich

Erin Brockovich warns us that we the people are the only ones who can save us. Grass roots efforts by moms have stood up to power to save their children. Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal mom, and Leeann Walters of Flint, Michigan are two of the most recognized citizens who have stood up to power in defence of families. For change to happen, more ordinary people need to become involved.

Superman's Not Coming describes the problem of providing clean water under a dysfunctional EPA and climate change. Brockovich offers resources to empower Water Warrior wannabes.

I have spent a good deal of my life a few hours drive (or less) from one of the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater source in the world. I grew up boating on the Niagara River, and later vacationed at Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and Lake Huron.

I also remember in the 1970s seeing yellow foam at the base of Niagara Falls. I remember algae blooms poisoning Toledo's water, Love Canal, and the Flint Water Crisis. I have lived near lakes made toxic by industrial waste. My state is dealing with PFAS contamination.

Across the country, Americans--today--discover their water isn't safe to drink. And they endure limits on water use because it is in short supply.

It's only going to get worse as temperatures rise.

Brockovich presents her information and argument with passion. The book is upsetting but it is also empowering. If we have the will, we can create change. It starts with people like us.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher

From environmental activist, consumer advocate, renowned crusader, champion fighter-maverick, whose courageous case against Pacific Gas and Electric was dramatized in the Oscar-winning film--a book to inspire change that looks at our present situation with water and reveals the imminent threats to our most precious, essential element, and shows us how we can each take action to make changes in our cities, our towns, our villages, before it is too late.

In Erin Brockovich's long-awaited book--her first to reckon with conditions on our planet--she makes clear why we are in the trouble we're in, and how, in large and practical ways, we each can take actions to bring about change.

She shows us what's at stake, and writes of the fraudulent science that disguises these issues, along with cancer clusters not being reported. She writes of the saga of PG&E that continues to this day, and of the communities and people she has worked with who have helped to make an impact. She writes of the water operator in Poughkeepsie, New York, who responded to his customers' concerns and changed his system to create some of the safest water in the country; of the moms in Hannibal, Missouri, who became the first citizens in the nation to file an ordinance prohibiting the use of ammonia in their public drinking water; and about how we can protect our right to clean water by fighting for better enforcement of the laws, new legislation, and better regulations. She cannot fight all battles for all people and gives us the tools to take actions ourselves, have our voices be heard, and know that steps are being taken to make sure our water is safe to drink and use.

Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It
by Erin Brockovich
Pantheon/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub Date: August 25, 2020
ISBN: 9781524746964
hardcover $28.95 (USD)

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory by Richard Powers was on my TBR bookshelf and when I saw it was the November choice for the Now Read This online book club, sponsored by the PBS Newshour and the New York Times Book Review, I decided to participate.

In The Overstory, Powers gives readers nine characters whose stories entwine over the course of the novel. Each has an experience that alters their awareness, motivates them to resist the status quo, and for some, culminating in acts of eco-terrorism.

Trees, forests, ecosystems, nature--these are the stunning stars of the novel, that which gives meaning to our assorted human characters and spurs their community. They are described in gorgeous, vivid language.

It is a testament that this novel made me reconsider my personal choices. I have read nonfiction books about climate change, rising waters, the impact of animal farming, the ways we need to alter how we live. But this novel had me second-guessing my choices.

We are installing new carpeting and porcelain tile to repace vinyl tile and an awful maroon carpet. What environmental damage am I causing because I want a prettier home? 

"We have a Midas problem. There's no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity," says the creator of an alternate reality online computer game. But he was talking to me and you.

I look at the paper towels and the paper napkins on my countertop and shudder. What about the very book I read, made of paper? Yes! It is recycled paper, saving 657 trees with the first printing! AND 614,962 gallons of water, 206,700pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, 62,925 pounds of solid waste. We CAN DO BETTER!

"The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story," one of the characters states.

The Overstory is that kind of story. It can change your mind.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Overstory
by Richard Powers
W. W. Norton
$18.95 paperback

Whose Water Is It Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands

I have read the headlines and news articles:

In Detroit, surviving without water has become a way of life, 2018 Bridge Magazine article headline
ACLU Petitions State to Stop Detroit Water Shut Offs, 2019 Michigan Public Radio story
Water Shut Offs Could Reach 17,000 Households, 2018 Detroit Free Press article
According to the EPA, an affordable water bill costs about 4.5 percent of a household’s monthly income, but metro Detroiters are paying around 10 percent. 2019 Curbed Detroit article 

My own water/sewer bill in the Detroit suburbs has doubled over ten years. We have installed low water toilets and appliances and we don't water the grass in summer. We have four rain barrels to water the gardens.

Luckily, we can pay our water bill. I can't imagine how people survive without reliable, clean, tap water. People who can't afford water like thousands in Detroit--and across the world. People like those in Flint and Oscoda other Michigan communities whose tap water is polluted with lead and PFAS.

In Michigan, surrounded by the Great Lakes, and embracing 11,000 lakes, we still don't provide clean water to all. In Osceola, Michigan Nestle pumps out our water for $200 a year, but our citizens in vulnerable communities suffer. Where is the justice in this?

Author and water activist Maude Barlow has fought for water justice since 1985 when NAFTA gave Americans access to Canadia's water resources. Alarmed at the implications, Barlow questioned, who owns the water?

In Whose Water Is It Anyway? Barlow celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Blue Communities Project. She describes her personal journey as an activist. She explains how water became privatized and the impact world-wide. Finally, Barlow presents the Blue Communities Project which has been adopted across the world, putting water back into the hands of the people, with sample documents to help local citizens begin their own campaign.

Companies have bought water rights and pumped the groundwater dry across the world. And all those plastic bottles have created a nightmare. Not just as trash--Barlow shares that bottled water testing shows most contain micro-plastic!

I was surprised to learn that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights did not include access to water as a basic right because seventy years ago it was assumed all people had and would have access to water. Today we know that water is not limitless. Barlow tells how privatization of water takes local water away from citizens to be sold for a profit. In 2015 the UN finally addressed the human right to water. Included is the statement that governments must provide clean water to people, "must refrain from any action or policy, such as water cut-offs," and are obliged to prevent businesses from polluting a community's water.

But to fulfill that promise, citizens must claim the power over their water. Barlow's book tells us how to do that.

I received access to a free ebook through the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

The Blue Communities Project is dedicated to three primary things: that access to clean, drinkable water is a basic human right; that municipal and community water will be held in public hands; and that single-use plastic water bottles will not be available in public spaces. With its simple, straightforward approach, the movement has been growing around the world for a decade. Today, Paris, Berlin, Bern, and Montreal are just a few of the cities that have made themselves Blue Communities. 

In Whose Water Is It, Anyway?, renowned water justice activist Maude Barlow recounts her own education in water issues as she and her fellow grassroots water warriors woke up to the immense pressures facing water in a warming world. Concluding with a step-by-step guide to making your own community blue, Maude Barlow’s latest book is a heartening example of how ordinary people can effect enormous change.

the authorMaude Barlow is the international bestselling author of 19 books, including the bestselling Blue Water trilogy. She is the honorary chair of the Council of Canadians and of the Washington-based Food and Water Watch. She is on the executive committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and a councillor with the World Future Council. In 2008–09, she served as senior advisor on water to the 63rd president of the UN General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the UN. In 2005, she won the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, the “alternative Nobel.” She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Whose Water Is It, Anyway?: Taking Water Protection into Public Hands
Maude Barlow
ECW Press
Publication September 2019
$19.50 CAD
ISBN: 9781770414303

Northward by Chuck Radda

Francis McNally, retired private investigator, is caring for his wife who is battling cancer when he gets a call for help. Ten years previous he had failed to find the caller's missing wife. Now, another person has gone missing in Nunavut.

Derek Phillips has been experiencing time lapses and visions. Autumn, the company he works for, has offered Derek the chance to be on the cutting edge of a new project.  Climate change will allow availability of new energy sources and Autumn wants to get a head start. Now he has disappeared and a local townswoman wants him found.

McNally's wife knows this is her husband's opportunity to atone for his earlier failure and she encourages him to take the case. McNally journeys to Canada's frozen North's deadly cold and long dark days.

The locals have a complicated relationship to Autumn, enjoying the influx of money while resenting the environmental threats.

With snappy dialogue, direct questioning, and sharp insights, McNally is a classic PI character, modernized in all the best ways--as a respectful and loving husband, there is none of the sexism of classic noir. I loved the genre in-jokes, like references to Nick and Nora or Columbo. McNally's voice is well-honed, offering a real feel for the character.

I had not read the earlier McNally book Dark Time and although it's events are referenced in Northward I did not need to know the entire story to appreciate the moral burden McNally carries from his failure to find a man's wife in that volume.

"Northward" has several meanings in the book. It's the direction McNally travels from his home in the States. Derek's wife references her dad's euphemism "going northward" as the result of 'too much cold, not enough light.' And maybe it means crazy, or maybe it means getting in touch with the spirit world. 

McNally encounters people motivated by cold cash and self-sacrificing idealists and a man who may be a shaman. He meets a female 'mountie' and a townswoman who has embraced her Inuit heritage. 

The bulk of the novel is the unraveling of truth from behind the facades, but there is a high-action scene at the end. And some otherworldly encounters that can't be explained.

I enjoyed Northward and would read this author again. I thank Chuck Radda for his book which I won in a Goodreads giveaway. My review is fair and unbiased.

Northward: A Novel
Chuck Radda
Lefora Publishing
Publication Dec. 2018
ISBN 9780960001798

The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy

"In the first full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal."--from the publisher

A woman who was a high school classmate posted on Facebook about her work distributing bottled water in Flint, Michigan through the American Red Cross. Day after day people came for a case of water. The had to make daily trips because they were only allowed one case a day. The people needed an I.D. to get the water. It was the middle of a brutal winter, and many of the people were elderly or disabled or had no cars. Church pastors came, hoping to get cases of water to deliver to their shut-ins who could not make it out.

Lori told me that the people were uninformed about the toxic water and how to be safe. Actually, the Red Cross workers didn't know what the Health Department standards would recommend. Could one bathe in the water? Use it to mix baby formula? Filters and water purifiers were distributed, but not everyone knew how to install or maintain them, and the filters only fit on certain kinds of faucets.

Setting up the warehouses and creating a system from scratch was 'chaotic,' 'hell'. Some warehouses were overstocked while others emptied quickly leaving people without water.

It was heartbreaking, Lori said.

Flint once had the highest per-capita incomes in the nation. GM founder and Flint mayor Charles Stewart Mott developed a renowned school system. The city boasted the Flint Symphony Orchestra and the Flint Institute of Arts.

My father-in-law grew up in Flint and worked for Fisher Body. His widowed mother found work at GM and participated in the Woman's Brigade during the Sit-Down Strike. His eldest son opened his professional offices in Flint and raised his family there.

When GM closed its auto plants over twenty thousand residents left. Businesses closed. The city tax base was gone and revenue sharing was sidelined to balance the state budget. An economic turndown and mortgage crisis devastated the country.

Still, Flint was Michigan's seventh largest city with 49,000 residents. The community was not down yet and neighborhood civic programs for change and betterment were led by the University of Michigan Flint, Habitat for Humanity, and church groups.

The state assigned an Emergency Manager to oversee Flint and solve its budget crisis. Buying treated water from Detroit Water and Sewerage was costly. It was decided to switch to the Karegnodi Water Authority, drawing water from Lake Huron, and process the water by reopening Flint's water treatment plant. Until the new source of water was in place they would draw water from the Flint River.

The state's environmental agency had warned that using Flint River water was a bad idea. The decision was based on cost-effectiveness. As the Detroit Free Press observed, the state had "voted for a business person" when they voted for Governor Snyder, the "bottom line" being his priority. "Governing a state as well as governing a nation is not like running a business. He and the people of Flint have found out the hard way."

Residents complained of bad smelling coffee-colored tap water, skin rashes, and illnesses. Children lost hair, suffered aches and pains. For eighteen months, the city, state and federal governments delayed action, claiming the water was safe.

Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes which hold one-fifth of the world's freshwater yet Flint residents were drinking tap water that was toxic.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had suffered staff and budget cuts although monitoring the largest number of community water systems in the country.

People came down with Legionnaire's disease for years but there was no public notice about the outbreak. Forty-six patients at McLaren Hospital in Flint became ill and ten died of the disease. Four years passed before a Wayne State University investigation traced the outbreak to the switch to Flint River water and corrosion in pipes. 

Every governing authority had failed the people of Flint. Water quality tests were skewed to lessen the amount of lead found. Citizens with the highest amount of lead found their test results eliminated from the results.

In 2015 the State Integrity Report Card from the Center for Public Integrity ranked Michigan dead LAST. Snyder signed bills "that did more to conceal the actions of state government," including political donors. Journalism was undergoing deep cuts, with fewer local journalists employed--a loss of local watchdogs.

The Poisoned City puts the crisis in the context of the history of Flint, the development of water sources, and legislation for environmental protection. It tells the story of the grass-roots activists who demanded justice. And how the media brought the story to the public, beginning with Michigan Public Radio which first reported the problem to Rachel Maddow who brought it to national attention.

Liability for causing environmental hazards rarely punishes the polluter.  In the case of Love Canal, the New York State neighborhood poisoned by Hooker Chemicals' leaking toxic waste storage,  the courts held Hooker responsible for cleanups but not punitive damages for the harm the residents suffered. The law requires evidence of intent to cause harm.

In Flint, lawsuits were filed over the poisoned water, Legionella, damaged plumbing, lost property values and paying for water only fit, as one said, to flush toilets.

The devaluation of Flint, mostly poor and African American, was evident when the EPA made the decision not to provide financial aid for buying filters because then other cities would demand them and Flint was not "the kind of community we want to go out on a limb for."

Children were being poisoned by lead in the city water lines. Dr. Hanna-Attisha studied the records of children treated at Hurley Medical Center in Flint and discovered a rise in blood-lead levels in 27,000 children. There is no 'cure' for the damage from lead poisoning.

In 2016, Governor Snyder admitted, "Government failed you--federal, state, and local leaders--by breaking the trust you placed in us. I am sorry most of all that I let you down. You deserve better." High ranking Michigan officials have legal immunity.

A class-action lawsuit did settle a deal which included $87 million for Flint to locate and replace water lines by 2020 at no cost to the homeowners. Criminal investigations brought indictments of authorities who had falsified or buried information or obstructed investigations.

Before Flint, Washington, D.C. struggled with lead in their water. Another predominately African American community was allowed to be poisoned for years before the issue was addressed.

Two American cities have been proactive about removing lead water pipes, Madison, WS and Lansing, MI. Lansing had the advantage of a city-owned system, The Board of Water and Light, and was able to completely overhaul the system, removing all lead pipes. Mayor Virge Bernero said, "...the poor suffer the most...the rich can insulate themselves...they can move out...Though ultimately, when we have a complete and utter infrastructure failure...no one is safe."

Recently, the distribution of bottled water to Flint was ended. The water lead levels have been brought to standards. But the residents no longer trust the authorities to protect them.

Nestle', who draws Michigan spring water for $200 a year for resale will provide several months of water to Flint. Actors Will and Jaden Smith have been providing water to Flint.

Flint is not the only city with lead pipes. And I shudder to consider what lies ahead if we are not able to address the aging infrastructure of America.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy
by Anna Clark
Henry Holt & Company
Pub Date 10 Jul 2018
ISBN 9781250125149
PRICE $30.00 (USD)

The Right to be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change

The Right To Be Cold is Sheila Watt-Clouier's biography, concentrating on her life's work to protect the Inuit culture and the Arctic. She is inspiring and courageous.

She shares her story of growing up in Nunavik, learning her people's traditional way of life, hunting and preparing 'country food'. Young people were taught how to survive in the harsh climate. Igloos were stronger than tents and offered protection from both weather and polar bears. Sled dogs were smart and capable and reliable.

Then she was sent to the 'South' for her education and was exposed to modern, Western life. She lost fluency in her native language.

Returning to her Arctic home she became involved in education. She saw how Southern colonialism was destroying her people's culture, resulting in a rise of addiction and suicides.

Sheila became an activist for her people, first in education and culture preservation, and later in the environment and climate change. The warming of the Arctic, caused by Southern use of fossil fuels, also means the destruction of her people's way of life, the animals they depend upon, and the very land
    they live on. Her work led to being considered for the Pulitzer Prize.

Sheila's childhood memories offer a great understanding of her native culture, and her early experience in the South informs readers how traditional knowledge is lost. Her chapters on her activism and achievements are detailed and sometimes overwhelming; I can't imagine how she maintained the energy and strength to do what she has done.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change

by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

University of Minnesota Press

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

Paperback $22.95

ISBN: 9781517904975

from the publisher:
For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq—behaving in strange and unexpected ways.

The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times. It is the story of an Inuk woman finding her place in the world, only to find her native land giving way to the inexorable warming of the planet. She decides to take a stand against its destruction.

The Right to Be Cold is the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world. Raised by a single mother and grandmother in the small community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, Watt-Cloutier describes life in the traditional ice-based hunting culture of an Inuit community and reveals how Indigenous life, human rights, and the threat of climate change are inextricably linked. Colonialism intervened in this world and in her life in often violent ways, and she traces her path from Nunavik to Nova Scotia (where she was sent at the age of ten to live with a family that was not her own); to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba; and back to her hometown to work as an interpreter and student counselor.

The Right to Be Cold is at once the intimate coming-of-age story of a remarkable woman, a deeply informed look at the life and culture of an Indigenous community reeling from a colonial history and now threatened by climate change, and a stirring account of an activist’s powerful efforts to safeguard Inuit culture, the Arctic, and the planet.

White Wash: How Science is Corrupted by Business

Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam is an expose' of how Monsanto's pesticide glyphosate came to dominate the farming industry--and its product Roundup in suburban back yards--even when evidence of  its threat to human health and environmental degradation arose. It is the story of how chemical companies, not the federal governmental programs we believe protect us, drive policy and law.

Gillam is a career journalist who in 1998 was moved to Kansas to write about agriculture for Reuters. Previously she wrote about Hurricane Katrina and reported from race-torn Ferguson, MS. She spent a lot of time learning her new beat, talking with farmers as well as company executives at Monsanto and other chemical companies. 

Glyphosate was sold as the safest pesticide ever, a wonder product that would help farmers increase their yield. Monsanto then developed plants that were resistant to their pesticide, the GMOs we hear so much about. Farmers left behind the older ways, even ending crop rotation. Monsanto owned the marketplace.

As her research led Gillam to become concerned with GMOs, not accepting the 'desired narrative,' Monsanto-funded organizations pressured her editors to remove her! As Gillam tells it, "What I've learned, what I know with certainty, is that when powerful corporations control the narrative, the truth often get lost and it's up to journalists to find it and bring it home."

The result is this book.

This was a hard book to read--not just because of the density of information, but because it taught me that business runs more of government than we are aware of. It's not just lobby money. It's in the research they pay for and tweak and offer to the EPA as unbiased studies when decisions are to be made about public safety. And its about the professors and professionals they enlist to tell their story. 

Wheat field

I buy organic foods whenever possible. I have the luxury of being able to afford to make that choice. I am not an agricultural worker who is around chemicals that are associated with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the disease that took my father's life.

We did, for two years, live next to a farm field. There was a beautiful field of golden wheat when we moved in on a late June day. A few months later I sat on the back deck to watch the farmer cut the wheat.

Cutting the wheat

The next year he planted corn. Our dog loved to run down between the row of corn. We moved before it was harvested.

Sandhill Crane in the farm field

The Sandhill Crane came in pairs in the spring and over the summer we watched them and their young birds. In the autumn, after harvest, the Crane flocked to the field in the hundreds before flying South.

Sandhill Crane in the late fall

So when in the book I read about 'chemical drift', how the pesticides sprayed on the soil before planting or on the GMO crops before harvest are carried on the wind, I shuddered. Was the yard my dogs played in safe? What about my open kitchen windows, my bedrooms that faced the farm field? What was I tracking into the house on my shoes? I am ignorant about that farmer's use of pesticides.

And the Sandhill Cranes that came every year in the hundreds to eat the insects in the field? What is the impact of pesticides on the birds? We had Bald Eagles flying over the fields, looking for prey. On the other side of the field was a wet land, and also senior housing. I found a rare salamander in the yard once.

After we moved a family with a young child moved into the house. Will that boy's health be impacted negatively?

"Most of us are Guinea pigs in this horrendous toxic experiment."--from White Wash

I was taught in environmental biology that pesticides are poison, and not just harmful to the pests it was developed to kill. Gillam shows how glyphosate, which is combined with harmful chemicals to make it 'stick' to crops, impacts more than weeds. And it has created resistant weeds and has affected the soil.

I am continually appalled by all the ways big business has manipulated government. You should be, too.

White Wash is available in ebook form (ISBN: 9781610918336) at your favorite seller for $7.99 the month of November, 2017.

Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science
by Carey Gillam
Island Press
ISBN 9781610918329
PRICE $30.00 (USD)  

Mini Reviews, Life Stories Real and Imagined

I read that A Whole Life was an international bestseller similar to John William's Stoner and Marilynne Robinson's Lila. And since I was very impressed with Stoner and have read Robinson's Gilead THREE times I put in my request at NetGalley.

I woke one night and couldn't get back to sleep so I got up and read this short novel in one sitting. It is the story of Andreas Egger, a woe-begotten man for whom life was one disappointment after another. Orphaned, beaten, suffered WWI in battle and in a Russian prison camp, tragically widowed, and then he dies. What he does have is a love for the landscape of his isolated village.

"Scars are like years", he said,"one follows another and it's all of them together that make a person who they are."

Andreas survived "his childhood, a war and an avalanche." He lead a clean life, turning from worldly temptations. And he had loved. He had no regrets. Andreas learned that "Every one of us limps alone."

This novel is far darker than Stoner. I felt more pity and felt a lack of affirmation. But thousands across the world have catapulted the book into an international best seller.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
Picador
$23 hard cover
ISBN: 9780374289867

I bought John Muir and the Ice that Started a Fire on Kindle after watching Ken Burns' National Parks on PBS. I wanted to know more about Muir.

Although I read this ebook over many months, mostly in waiting rooms, I enjoyed it and found it informative, moving, and inspirational. Heacox offers a wonderful biography of a man who could have had a lucrative career but gave it up for his love of nature and the wild. Muir dared to stand against a country worshiping wealth, a nation that had lost it's vision of the sublimity of America's unique landscapes.

Dedicating himself to research, educating and writing and pushing for polity to protect his beloved lands, Muir had a mystical belief in the healing property of the environment which today is becoming recognized as truth.

The book's particular focus is on Muir's enraptured love of Alaska's glaciers. I appreciated that the book does not end with Muir's death, but continues to the present day, addressing how climate change is affecting the glaciers (which were already diminishing during Muir's lifetime.)

John Muir and the Ice that Started a Fire: How A Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America
Kim Heacox
Lyons Press
Published 2014

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award. I borrowed it from my public library. Written as a letter to his teenage son Coates offers an unvarnished and appalling condemnation of race in America and what it means to be born 'black' in a 'white' dominated culture. I have thought about this book for several weeks. I don't feel qualified to make a statement. Just read it.  Read the Atlantic Magazine article written by Coates here.

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau

Another book I borrowed through Overdrive was Mary Gaitskill's novel The Mare. The characterization and story is captivating and I read it in two days.

A woman with a troubled past and unable to ground herself hosts an inner city girl through the Fresh Air Fund, changing their lives and the lives of their families in complicated and unexpected ways. The girl Velvet connects with an abused mare; together they cobble together their redemption.

I loved the juxtaposition of the two worlds, the inner city and the suburbs, peeling back the pressures and stresses of each. My favorite ah-ha moment is when Velvet's host mom recognizes her own latent racism, the sad and horrible tragedy of American society that affects us all.

The Mare
Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon

My Last Continent by Midge Raymond: Antarctic Romance and Adventure

"Midge Raymond's phenomenal novel takes us on a voyage deep into the wonders of the Antarctic and the mysteries of the human heart...packed with emotional intelligence and high stakes--a harrowing, searching novel of love and loss in one of the most remote places on earth, a land of harsh beauty where even the smallest missteps have tragic consequences." from the publisher

It was World Penguin Day when I started reading  My Last Continent by Midge Raymond. I had not realized how perfectly timed my choice was. Raymond's novel is a love story, the love between star crossed lovers and their mutual love of penguins and the Antarctic.

from the author's blog

Deb and Keller are penguin researchers whose love affair flourishes only during their brief weeks together in Antarctica. Their off-season work is on opposite sides of the county, Driven by their need to make a difference and to save the penguins, both are willing to risk everything, even their lives and each other.

Shadows of Antarctic explorers are seen everywhere, foreshadowing the novel's climax.The ghosts of lonely deaths haunt the desolate landscape. Robert Falcon Scott's hut stands undisturbed. "I may be some time," said Capt. Oates as he left the tent shared with his imperiled Scott expedition explorers. He never returned. Deb's lover in passing, Dennis, likewise wandered off to his lonely death after being left behind by his tour boat.

The solitude of the icy desert, the isolation, soothes Deb. Part of Deb wants and needs solitude. Part of her fears dying alone. The memory of an emperor penguin who died alone haunts her. Female emperors leave their eggs under the male's care while she takes off to fatten up for nursing the chick. The males huddle together during the long months of darkness until nearly starved. Human males aren't programmed like the emperors. Before meeting Keller Deb had been alone, for what male was going to wait at home while she took off every year?

"Great God! This is an awful place," Robert Scott wrote in his journal. Tragedy comes into Deb's life and for the first time she realizes the depth of despair that prompted Scott's desperate cry. Keller's ship has hit an iceberg and is sinking and Deb is compelled to search for her beloved mate in the thrilling climax of the novel.

Antarctica is more than the backdrop for the novel, it is a living character. A hundred years ago the explorers vied to be the 'first'; today tourists tick it off  as the last of continent visited. The environmental destruction and pollution that comes with tourism, overfishing, and climate change all endanger the penguins. Raymond manages to educate readers through the characters and the action.

I loved this book. It is so original in concept and the writing is beautiful.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

My Last Continent
by Midge Raymond
Scribner
Publication Date June 21, 2016
$26.00
ISBN:9781501124709

The History and Legacy of Love Canal

Requesting the book Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was personal. I have lived near two toxic waste sites left by Hooker Chemicals.

I was born in Tonawanda, NY an old industrialized area along the Niagara River. My hometown dump contains radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project. Just down river near the city of Niagara Falls, Hooker Chemicals took advantage of an unfinished canal to dump industrial waste.

The canal had been part of William T. Love's plan to create a Model City. The chemical industrialist envisioned a self-contained city with homes and parks. Clean, hydroelectric power was to come from an artificial falls. A canal from the Niagara River would be built to divert water over another section of the Niagara escarpment. Love mismanaged his money. All he accomplished was to leave a big ditch.

The city of Niagara Falls needed to expand and bought the land. A community of homes and a school was built over the filled-in canal. The young families living in Love Canal believed they were living the American Dream. Their dream turned into a nightmare.

They noticed basement seepage, chemical odors, rocks that burst like fireworks, grass that left chemical burns, and a high rate of miscarriages. Their complaints were unheeded. Housewives turned into activists. It was the first grass roots movement for environmental justice.

It took years for government leadership to act. The activists influenced the passage of environmental laws and in 1980 the creation of the Superfund for hazardous waste remediation. (Which under President Reagen was already being weakened with reduced funding in the battle between what is good for business vs. what is best for the people.) Love Canal has become the poster child for American environmental disasters.

I wrote about organizer and environmental activist Lois Gibbs and Love Canal at: http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-green-heroes-quilt-lois-gibbs.html

America's toxic past is never 'in the past'. The Environmental Protection Agency states that one-quarter of all Americans live within five miles of a Superfund site, the worst toxic dumps in the nation.

Consider my own history.

My family had moved from Tonawanda in 1963 when I was ten, several years after the first basement seepage was reported in Love Canal. President Carter approved emergency financial aid to Love Canal the year I graduated from university.

When my son was a tot we moved from Philadelphia to a small Michigan town where a chain link fence separates a toxic waste site from a park with a little flowing stream. An elementary school is on the other side.

We moved again. Our church needed to expand. They bought adjacent land then discovered the business had left toxic waste. They took out loans to supplement Federal aid to clean up the site. It took nine years. Half the land was sold for a charter school and senior housing.

We moved again, to a city on a lake  that fed into Lake Michigan, with a picturesque marina, sand dune beaches and a light house near by. The lake had been foully polluted by a tannery and the clean up had been going on for decades. The town was also home to Michigan's worst toxic waste site, left by Hooker Chemicals. Montague, like Niagara, had a massive salt mine. The rise of  a chemical center brought much needed jobs to the area. And a sad legacy. A woman in our church lost a child to a rare cancer. She began collecting stories of other cancer victims. Days after moving in, I met a neighbor while walking our dog. She said three dogs on the street had died of cancer.

My retirement home is a half mile from a 'spill'. Superfund money is limited and spent on the 'worst' sites. The rest are just fenced off.

Newman grew up in the Buffalo area, and like my family, visiting Niagara Falls was a typical family day trip. He worked on this book over a long time, writing Freedom's Prophet about former slave and African Methodist Church founder Richard Allen in the meantime. (A book I would love to read!)

Niagara Falls, taken by my dad on his last trip home

The book covers:

• The first European explorers, who identified it's economical potential
• The rise of the 'chemical century' and industrialization of the area with particular attention to Elon Huntington Hooker, including information based on new archival research
• The rise of citizen environmentalism in the 1970s and 80s
• The partial resettlement of the Love Canal neighborhood in the 1990
• The legacy of Love Canal

I appreciated the book's inclusiveness, especially the 'big picture' of the Niagara Frontier's industrial history. Love Canal is a story of failure and success, of how citizens can alter policy. It raises issues of responsibility and the role of government in monitoring industry. Can we contain the toxins we create for the products we demand? And what becomes of the land that has been poisoned? Montague residents worried that people will forget and build on the Hooker toxic waste site. Well, they did at Love Canal.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Love Canal
by Richard S Newman
Oxford University Press
Publication Date May 4, 2016
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9780195374834