Author
I went to Kansas in October to film a book trailer for The Ogallala Road. While there, I made some exciting discoveries and some sad ones. It was exciting to see the Republican River running higher than I’d ever witnessed.Could this be due to the immense rains received there and to the west, in Colorado, in September? Or is it because the Republican River Compact battle between Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado resulted in Colorado shutting off water to Bonny Dam,
In short, yes. I think the fact that a few western Kansas farmers have agreed to voluntarily cut back on the amount of water they are taking from the Ogallala Aquifer is newsworthy. So, apparently, do a lot of major news outlets, the most recent being NPR. In order to stretch the water out a little bit longer, the farmers in one “intensive groundwater use control area” will reduce withdrawals by twenty percent over the next five years.
Rick Bass’s characters often find themselves…. I was going to finish that thought, but then realized I already had. They find themselves, in a place, with a problem. They are self-aware and honest about their predicaments. But it’s hard to generalize about Bass’s characters, because, in his story “The Prisoners,” for instance, he gives us those three “prisoners” going down the highway oblivious to their own hurts and needs. So much is wrong with their lives that catching a few fish cannot fix.
Author Brenda Peterson has led a charmed life among animals. But her book Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals, makes clear that her life is charmed only because she has always gone out of her way to meet the animals more than halfway. The experiences she comes back to report–among dolphins, whales, dogs, cats, bears–startled and often moved me to tears. Who knew that a whale in deep mourning over the loss of her calf would take a woman’s arm in her mouth and gently “sound”
For an amazingly-well researched and galvanizing example of the environmental memoir genre look no farther than Kristen Iverson‘s Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. I’ve lived in Colorado for about eight years, but even though I’d heard people question the sanity of turning the former nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats into a wildlife refuge, I had no idea how extensive the radioactive pollution was.
