(Reviews)

Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee

The Case for Refuges

Celebrating the centennial twice over: an intimate portrait of the sprawling system, and a special, spectacular plea to preserve its largest piece.

—By Frank Graham Jr.

America's National Wildlife Refuges: A Complete Guide
By Russell D. Butcher
Roberts Rinehart Publishers
714 pages, $29.95

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, a Photographic Journey
By Subhankar Banerjee
Mountaineers Books
176 pages, $22.95

In this centennial year, our national wildlife refuges are finally drawing the kind of literary and artistic attention usually reserved for the national parks and forests. Two notable recent books are Russell D. Butcher's America's National Wildlife Refuges: A Complete Guide, and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, a Photographic Journey, by Subhankar Banerjee. Combined, Butcher and Banerjee may help to build a strong constituency for the refuges in the current hostile political climate.

Butcher's book is far more than a guide; it is an invitation to come to know and cherish the 540 units across the entire range of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Banerjee's work is an evocative and inspiring plea to preserve the jewel of the system against recurrent attempts to ravage its coastal plain for the oil that lies beneath. (Happily, the most recent such effort in Congress was rebuffed in March, although more are in the works.)

Butcher has inherited his skill at putting together this kind of a resource guide, which has become something of a family cottage industry. His parents, Devereux and Mary Butcher, produced guides that covered the national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges.

As a boy, Russ accompanied them across the country on a couple of summer trips to explore many of the parks and refuges, and he has carried on his parents' work. His new book provides an in-depth portrait of each refuge in the system. It mingles history, anecdotes, and perspective to give us the best assessment yet of these national treasures. One of his innovations is to explain (through the eyes of a refuge manager or staff biologist) what goes on, and why, at each site—whether it's building freshwater impoundments to provide better feeding for migrating waterfowl, or eradicating exotic plants that compete with native vegetation.

If Butcher brings to his book a lifetime's familiarity with the subject, Banerjee seems to have been hit by a bolt from the blue. He grew up in Calcutta and embarked on a career in physics and computer science in the United States before turning to photography. Wildlife and cultural images became his specialties. "While traveling with friends, I saw the polar bears near Churchill in Manitoba, Canada—an arresting moment," he writes. "But I also saw too many people, each scrambling for pictures. My entire being became galvanized with the desire to witness polar bears in a wild landscape untrammeled by tourism or industry."

A little research convinced Banerjee that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was the place to carry out his quest. After incurring a great deal of personal debt, and then later talking various organizations and individuals into supporting his project, he set out to help gain "official, permanent wilderness designation for the coastal plain." During the two years he spent in the refuge—at 19.5 million acres, the size of South Carolina—Banerjee covered 4,000 miles of plains, rivers, mountain ranges, and river valleys, traveling by foot, raft, kayak, and snowmobile. He returned from this adventure with hundreds of photos that will surely set wilderness lovers to dreaming of the ultimate escape. In Seasons of Life and Land, you'll see caribou and their calves feeding in the mist of the coastal plain; musk ox herds in the foothills of the Romanzof Mountains; the Brooks Range's 9,050-foot Mount Isto; and, of course, polar bears on remote melting ice in spring.

Impressively, Banerjee also managed to assemble a lineup of heavy hitters on his project's behalf. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote the foreword to the book, and Peter Matthiessen, George Schaller, and David Allen Sibley contributed pertinent essays. Writing of this magnificent but threatened cluster of ecosystems, Matthiessen sums it all up in the words of a Native American elder: "If we fail to save the land, God may forgive us, but our children won't."

Editors' Choice

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy
By Jack M. Hollander
University of California Press
237 pages, $27.50

According to conventional wisdom, the richer we get, the more we consume, and thus the more waste we produce, which naturally leads to widespread environmental degradation. Apparently not; poverty, not prosperity, is "the real enemy of the environment," insists Jack M. Hollander, professor emeritus of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. In his thoughtful and well-argued thesis, Hollander contends that societal affluence—and the technological innovation that results from this affluence—actually serves to promote better environmental stewardship. "Impoverished people," on the other hand, "plunder their resources, pollute their environment, and overcrowd their habitats," he writes. "They do these things not out of willful neglect but only out of the need to survive." Hollander admits that modern, technologically advanced societies are far from green utopias. Still, he argues, at least their citizens have the wherewithal to care about safeguarding the environment. Which is not the case, he says, for the billions who are chronically malnourished and live without access to clean water or education. True global sustainability, he concludes, will be achieved when "affluence and democracy replace poverty and tyranny as the dominant human condition."

—Vivienne Caballero

Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galápagos Islands
By Michael D'Orso
Harper Collins
345 pages, $24.95

While the enduring aura of the Galápagos Islands is framed around images of unspoiled beaches and Darwin's finches, the archipelago's 20,000 residents have long been viewed as little more than a quaint backdrop in an Edenic garden. No more. In this haunting narrative, journalist Michael D'Orso travels to all 13 isles over a three-year period, spending time with their inhabitants, chronicling their rich history and their desolate modern-day existence. The gritty portrait he paints is hardly one of paradise for the islands' people; on the contrary, poverty and social turmoil are widespread, and often exacerbated by a corrupt and disinterested Ecuadoran government. In recent years news stories on the Galápagos have focused on the poaching of such species as sea lions and sea cucumbers. To his credit, D'Orso explores not just the plundering but also the desperation of the residents of the Galápagos, without passing judgment on their actions. His tale is by turns poignant and unsettling; surfers, nature guides, and hotel and brothel owners share the stage with native tortoises and feral goats. In the end the author shows how it is truly survival of the fittest for all of the Galápagos Islands'inhabitants.

—Christy Melhart

Lewis & Clark Among the Grizzlies
By Paul Schullery
Falcon
247 pages, $14.95

During the 25 years that naturalist and historian Paul Schullery has been studying and writing about grizzly bears, he has imagined himsef "constantly in the presence of Lewis and Clark." Evidence of his twin passions abound in this sophisticated and elegant work, which rewards us with a richly limned history of the "great lore-ridden creatures" that are grizzlies. As the author shepherds us up the Missouri River, we witness the men of the Corps of Discovery killing bears for food, oil, and skins. But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the animal was a symbol of evil "routinely shot, trapped, poisoned, snared, blown up," writes Schullery. Grizzlies once numbered in the tens of thousands; today barely more than 1,000 survive in the Lower 48. In his elegy for this "terrible, beautiful, unforgettable animal," Schullery demythologizes the grizzly with long-overdue respect and admiration.

—Sydney Horton

Editors' Cut

Winged Migration
Directed by Jacques Perrin
Sony Pictures Classic
89 minutes, Rated G

The ad copy for the box office smash read: "You'll Believe a Man Can Fly!" The 1978 movie was, of course, Superman. The desire to fly has always tantalized people, but audiences don't want to just believe; they want to do it. Until random selection produces humans with wings, we will remain, alas, earthbound. Winged Migration, a new documentary from award-winning French director Jacques Perrin, temporarily quells evolution envy. His astonishing bird's-eye view, brought to life with the help of 14 fearless cinematographers, 17 gravity-defying pilots, and nearly 200 oblivious bird species, is about as close to euphoria as any amateur Icarus is going to get. Be forewarned: If you are at all scared of heights, stay far, far away from this film.

Winged Migration takes the annual round-trip flight paths of a vast assortment of bird types and distills them into an hour and a half. (Ratio freaks take note: The editors began their work with 400 hours of raw footage. That computes to a ratio of approximately 270 to 1.) The whirlwind tour spans flybys on all 7 continents, with visits to 40-plus countries, and features locales as diverse as the Arctic Circle, the deserts of West Africa, and the Amazon rainforest, as well as a few instantly recognizable tourist traps, like the Eiffel Tower and Lower Manhattan. (Since the latter sequence was shot in 1999, the appearance of the World Trade Center is cause for an eerie double take.)

Speechless awe eventually gives way to mere incredulity: How on earth did they make this? The technical answers include a small air force of specially designed planes, gliders, helicopters, and balloons—combined with some truly hair-raising camera calisthenics. Perrin deliberately chose to excise all of the gizmos from the on-screen action, leaving the audience with an unadulterated aerial ballet. The strategy works. Everyone has seen bird-in-flight footage before; this time viewers are going to feel it.
Here are a few of the film's numerous highlights.

Winged Migration was nominated for a 2002 Academy Award for best documentary, but it's much more than a clearly defined objective "document." Just as nature abhors a vacuum, filmmakers have to tell stories. Winged Migration has definite narrative arcs (will our heroes make it home?), evil villains (faceless hunters and carnivorous crabs), and a climax (I won't give it away). It all keeps the action brisk, and the only flaw in the make-it-mainstream logic is the unfortunate addition of a melodramatic New Age sound track that interferes with the magnificent ambient location sound. But that's a minor quibble.

The opportunity to see Winged Migration the way it was intended, in a theater, is not to be missed. It might be a cliché to claim that what the film offers is bigger than life. But technically speaking, that's an accurate statement. (When you get right down to it, where else will you see an eight-foot puffin?) Seek this film out. Exhaust those imaginary wings. And then, to complete the experience, check out the forthcoming DVD, so you can finally see the behind-the-scenes, nosebleed-inducing action that made this masterpiece possible.

—Chris Chang

© 2003  NASI

Sound off! Send a letter to the editor
about this piece.

Enjoy Audubon on—line? Check out our print edition!