It was the Title...

...that piqued my interest. Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots, by Alanna Mitchell. I recently started reading the Weathermakers but got lost somewhere in the first few chapters. Too much was happening in my life and it seemed to be a book written by a man for men. I'll come back to it later. A quick perusal of the book jacket and inside pages revealed more endorsement than I have ever encountered. Powerful Men. With names like Blair, Suzuki, Kennedy. There were others but those are the ones that I recall, which also says something.

If environmental degradation interests you, climate change etc., and you are perhaps more interested in the peoples, societies, cultures of the world and their interactions with the environment thus far, this book may be more up your alley. Allana Mitchell of the Globe and Mail was named best environmental reporter of the world in 2000, by the World Conservation Society and the Reuters Foundation which resulted in a term of study at Oxford and this publication. She travels, visiting: the evolutionary incubator of Madagascar, fossils and oil fields of Alberta, the parched land of Jordan, sunken graves in the Arctic, the rainforests of Suriname, the innovative energy options in Iceland, and the scorched lava landscape of the Galapagos. Lyrical and romantic at points, veering into the personal but staying focused on the essential humanity of the problem, the very nature of humanity which has triggered such catastrophe. A few excerpts...

"The scary thing is that the business of species conservation is sometimes just that fragile. Sometimes, it's just a question of being in the right place at the right time. Miss the plane, cancel the trip, get a touch of malaria and, bam, a species goes extinct or gets that much closer to the brink. Mittermeier has been telling me about the Bali mynah. It's a brilliant white bird with a blue eye that lives only in Bali. There are just a handful left in the wild because the birds have been caught so efficiently for the trade of live birds.

But they breed well in captivity, and there's a program at Bali Barat National Park to increase their number. For some reason though, the program wasn't working well. Mittermeier was in Bali and happened to have some time to check it out. It turned out that the wardens who were supposed to stand guard over these mynah birds were so poorly paid that they didn't have enough money to buy gas. That meant that they couldn't keep up with the armed poachers who kept invading the mynah breeding center. A check for $6000 (U.S.) was all that was needed to make the breeding program a success."

Another example...

"Iceland's secret is that it is not a land of inert ice but of kinetic steam. It is one of the few places in the world in the throes of constant geological creation, driven by the force of heat far below the surface. Volcanoes spew lava, and geysers boil water on this metamorphic island. Earthquakes daily crack open new fissures in the land, exposing the inner workings of the planet. In ancient times, the island was thought to contain the maw of hell, a voracious opening to the eternal fires of the netherworld."

And another....

"Just beyond is a broad, flat stone the circumference and height of a table. It has the feel of a sacrificial altar. I stumble and touch it to steady myself. My guards stiffen and the other guards swirl fiercely around. Mittermeier tells me urgently to take my hand away. Then I notice the dominant carving, repeated everywhere. It is a single, wrenching face, eyes wide open, mouth stretched in terror."

Gonna read it?