The Fate of Nature by Charles Wohlforth. I have no idea how this book crossed my path but it stared at me on the bookshelf for a while challenging me to open. I side stepped it with a Jimmy Buffet Biography and the excellent U.S. Grant Biography by Chernow. Slightly annoyed and finally out of fresh reads I opened her up thinking I had a preachy research book. I was wrong. What I didn't account for was the author's talent, his story telling ability and the unfolding adventures that fire out one right after the other chapter after chapter. "The Fate of Nature" reads like a novel and a damn good one.
Charles Wohlforth is a seasoned author beginning as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News covering the Exxon Valdez oil disaster (spill my ass). His experience and research of nature, history, science, politics and adventure all coalesce in "The Fate of Nature"
The book proffers the question are humans even capable of correcting their greedy, piss in our well water, destroy our food system behavior of arrogance? But more than a screed about our knuckle dragging consciousness "The Fate of Nature" articulates and entertains with history, science, personality and context the vast array of interconnection that frames our collective lives.
We're talking about property rights versus community rights, the birth of conservation, the integration and survival of the indigenous populations living in harmony with their environment and the destruction of their way of life from unregulated capitalism, and it's nascent rebirth.
This is not a romanticism but a look at the breadth of human activity impacting the entire globe with the Northern Gulf of the Alaska Coast and Prince William Sound as back drop.
The book begins with the fascinating Killer Whale Culture and human spirituality, the spirits of Nature and the Chugach culture. Fur traders and Captain Cook then arrive followed by the Russian conquest of Alaska and then the equally egregious American conquest. Chapter after chapter it plows through history. It's an informative brisk page turner and you can't wait to see what the next chapter is going to hit upon.
A book of this breadth could easily bog down in technical specificity and moralizing yet Wohlforth spins a narrative of anecdotes, adventures and events punctuated by short chapters building out his observations, research and thesis.
You are definitely going to want to visit Alaska after reading about the foreboding sumptuous landscape he pulls together. I'll be checking out his other work. In the meantime this is a good one folks from a guy you never heard of and a title that is unfamiliar. Dive in!
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