'BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2011' NOW OUT

The Best American Science Writing 2011 (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) is out. This year's edition is edited by Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), her father, the poet and essayist Floyd Skloot, and Jesse Cohen.

I'm honored to say that my Mother Jones article, BP's Deep Secrets, is one of ten pieces chosen for the volume. Of it, one reviewer wrote:

"Deep Secrets" by Julia Whitty: An examination of the recent oil spill near Louisiana. This was my personal favorite. What we didn�t know about the gulf environment before the oil spill we may never know if the environment�s destroyed.

Support your local indie bookstore and a science writer or two and buy a copy. Or two. Thanks!

NOW IN PAPERBACK

Available at Amazon and through your local bookstore.

Want a signed copy? I'll be setting that up through PayPal for all my books. Stay tuned.

VOICE OF THE DOLPHINS

In his newly released book, The Voice of the Dolphins, filmmaker Hardy Jones reports his story of a life spent working with dolphins�working to understand them and working to save them. 

Ultimately, and with a sad irony, this dolphin work proves important to Hardy's own survival. He writes:

This memoir covers three phases of my more than thirty years spent among dolphins and other sea creatures: my initial, exhilarating encounter with friendly dolphins; my subsequent discovery that these creatures are mortally threatened by both slaughter and the chemical contamination of our oceans; and, finally, my diagnosis with a form of blood cancer that has clear links to the same chemical toxins that are causing disastrous consequences among dolphins.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Credit: Bmatulis via Wikimedia Commons.)

Like all love stories, Hardy's story with the dolphins�Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, spinner dolphins in Hawaii and Tahiti, orca in the Pacific Northwest and Norway, to name a few�is full of beauty, discovery, and wonder. 

The book resonates with these passages. Here Hardy describes swimming for the first time in the wild with dolphins who did not flee him... a feat even Jacques Cousteau considered impossible in 1978 when Hardy pulled it off.

Dolphins raced at me from all directions, their eyes wide and bloodshot with excitement. The sea was a cacophony of breaking waves, my own gasping, yells, outboard motors, and the creaky-door buzzing of dolphin sonar. Whenever I surfaced, I tried to get some idea of how the filming was going, but no one was even remotely coherent. Words tumbled out of ecstatic faces...

I made a surface dive and swam down among a mixed group of juvenile and adult dolphins, blending into their formations, banking and turning in mid-water. It seemed I had no need to breathe, that I�d assumed properties of a dolphin just by being among them. When my air did run out, I clawed my way back to the surface and gasped for breath, often to find a trio of dolphins accompanying me.

(Photo from here.)

But like many love stories, Hardy's with the dolphins is also full of pain and sickness. In 1979 he went to Japan to film the slaughter of dolphins. This was the first of many trips to talk, listen, and argue with the fishermen in defense of the dolphins�all done decades before The Cove filmmakers got there. 

Hardy writes of being haunted by the two irreconcilable dolphin worlds he'd come to know:

Again and again, especially in early morning hours when I couldn�t sleep, my thoughts returned to the brutal images of dolphins piled on the beaches of Iki... I placed an aerial photograph of the dead dolphins littering the beach at Iki on my desk. Next to that photograph, stood a framed print of two dolphins, looking at me as we swam side by side in the turquoise waters of the little Bahama Bank.  

(Shamu Stadium, SeaWorld. Credit: David Bjorgen via Wikipedia.) 

Hardy's first film on the dolphin slaughter in Japan was called Island at the Edge�a masterpiece of restrained, elegant reporting. But that was only the beginning.

In the course of my travels to Japan, I�d come to realize that... a major part of the incentive to local fishermen to pursue and kill dolphins is cash put on the table by international dolphin traffickers who come to Taiji to pick out "show-quality" dolphins. They pay enormous amounts, as much as $150,000 for a dolphin trained in Taiji. The service includes trainers who will accompany the locally trained dolphin to its final destination in one of the many dolphinaria in Japan, as well as to China, Korea, French Polynesia, Turkey and Egypt. For dolphins, this must be the equivalent of an alien abduction. The captive dolphins eventually end up in a cement tank performing for fish in aquarium shows and "swim-with-dolphins" programs around the world.

(Dolphins in tuna nets. Photo from here.)

From stories of the brutal dolphin entertainment industry, Hardy was eventually drawn into other problems, including the monumental tragedy of six million dolphins drowned in tuna nets.

His film If Dolphins Could Talk helped tip that story in a new direction.

When the show hit the air, the results were explosive. The emotional impact of the footage was amplified by a short PSA hosted by George C. Scott that included a 900 number, produced for the show by Stan Minasian of the Marine Mammal Fund. The result was a pile of six thousand telegrams hitting the desk of the chairman of Starkist tuna demanding an end to catching tuna by setting nets on dolphins. Within weeks, Starkist announced that it would no longer accept tuna caught on dolphin. The dolphin-safe label was born and is today overseen by Earth Island Institute and the Marine Mammal Fund. My film synergized with years of hard work by several organizations and was a major conservation victory.

In 2003, Hardy was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer. A few weeks later, he was offered an exciting film project with the PBS series Nature. The film that would eventually come to define him was called The Dolphin Defender.

In follow-up conversations with [PBS], we mapped out the general shape of the film that would be an episodic journey through my career of making films about dolphins. It would combine archival footage shot over a period of several decades with newly shot footage that would fill in gaps in the story and bring it up to date... I hadn�t looked at a lot of that old film for years, and as I started to screen bits and pieces, memories flooded back with a combination of exhilaration, nostalgia, and not a few thoughts of how young I looked. The reaction was, no doubt, intensified by my new-found sense of mortality. 

Amazingly, Hardy eventually discovered that his rare disease was not rare in dolphins. Investigating further, he found that places where dolphins were suffering were also myeloma hot-spots for people.

But I'll leave the rest of that amazing chapter of Hardy's story for you to read.

(Hardy Jones.)

There are a lot of old friends in Hardy's book, and many facile sketches of others in that strange realm where dolphins, diving, and filmmaking intersect. I'm there too, because Hardy and I worked together for 20 years making nature documentaries. I shared many of the adventures and some of the horrors he describes in The Voice of the Dolphins.

After more than three decades, Hardy's relationship with the dolphins he loves and admires has mellowed. You can get a sense of that in this clip (below) from BlueVoice.org�Hardy's nonprofit dedicated to fighting to end the slaughter of dolphins and to exposing levels of toxins in the marine environment harmful to marine mammals and humans. Hardy included.



Among Dolphins from BlueVoice.org on Vimeo.

So buy the book. It's vivid, vibrant, impassioned, generous, inspirational, and packed with one good sea yarn after another.

Best of all The Voice of the Dolphins is loaded with dolphins�old friends with names and personalities and great stories that only Hardy can tell on their behalf.

CARL SAFINA'S EXCELLENT VIEW

I had the distinct pleasure of appearing with Carl Safina at the Song for the Blue Ocean Symposium at Oregon State University last month. One aim of the meeting was to explore whether or not scientists should use their knowledge to advocate policy change. 

The alternative�and, until recently, the status quo�is for scientists to simply deliver their results into the hands of policymakers and the public and let them hammer out our future as best they can. The flaws in that system are pretty obvious.

Safina's been a powerful pioneer in advocacy since his 1999 book Song for the Blue Ocean appeared�when he stepped out from behind the curtain of science and spoke directly to the public about the issues affecting our oceans. 

(Photo courtesy Carl Safina.)

Safina's new book, The View From Lazy Point, is a meditative journey around the world and through the seasons, from coral reefs in Belize to penguin rookeries in Antarctica�though its heart beats from the northeastern tip of Long Island. There, he writes, "I became the owner of a beach cottage that had fallen into such disrepair that I could afford it." He continues:

As much as I admire Henry Beston's classic The Outermost House, this is not a story about getting a little place out past the edge of the world and finding one's self in solitude and peace. This story is, though, partly about going home, about immersing in rhythms that come naturally... But this story's also about a kind of heartbreak for a world that remains so vitally unaware of how imperiled it is. The more I sense the miracle, the more intense appears the tragedy.

(Photo by somenametoforget, at Flickr.)

Writing about miracles and tragedies has come at a cost for Safina: The loss of his scientific research. Here's what he told me recently.

Carl Safina: I'd been studying mainly terns and their foraging ecology, until I realized that while we're learning increasingly minute things about the workings of these systems, we're losing great things like large populations of fish. So I started working on the issue of driftnets. And when the next tern field season rolled around, I realized I couldn't just quit advocacy. I thought I'd miss one field season. Then I missed two. As the marine advocacy field grew, I moved into what I do better: writing and talking. Now I get my research fix through invitations to visit scientists whose work I'm most interested in during their field seasons.

(Least tern, Sternula antillarum, with chicks. Photo by Dan Pancamo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

I asked Safina where The View From Lazy Point�his fifth book, released last month�fits into the trajectory of his writing life. 

Carl Safina: I used to think my work was all about marine conservation. But the climate issue has blurred everything. You can't worry about coral reefs without worrying about the people living around coral reefs who depend on them. The climate issue has blurred the lines between our peace and security and, say, the fate of sea turtles. In The View From Lazy Point, I cast my widest net yet, following the ripple effects.

(Photo by Nhobgood Nick Hobgood, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

I asked Safina why we're so slow to get any traction of the global issues facing us.

Carl Safina: Our institutions are fundamentally irrational. Economics, including capitalism, our wisdom traditions, like religion, are all hundreds or even thousands of years old. They're born from a time when we thought the world was unchanging and unchangeable. Not until science came along did we understand that the world can and does change, and that we have the power to change the world for better or worse.

I asked him what themes he was working on in the book and he described one that emerged only late in the writing.

Carl Safina: That nature and human dignity require each other. When nature is destroyed�Haiti is a case in point�people can't get back on their feet and lose their ability to live a dignified life. When people are oppressed beyond human dignity, then there's no ability to care for nature.

(Photo by Fred Hsu, Fredhsu, at Wikimedia Commons.)

The View From Lazy Point is a synthesis of deep storytelling and deep thinking. Its muscular language makes for an uncommonly good read: far from doom and gloom, rich with anecdotal rewards and practical solutions. It's infused with Safina's own signature blend of fisherman-scientist-philosopher wisdom. Here's one of my favorite passages:

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, though I'm a secular person and a scientist, I believe that our relationship with the living world must be mainly religious. But I don't mean theological. I mean religious in the sense of reverent, revolutionary, spiritual, and inspired. Reverent because the world is unique, thus holy. Revolutionary in making a break with the drift and downdraft of outdated, maladapted modes of thought. Spiritual in seeking attainment of a higher realm of human being. Inspired in the aspiration to connect crucial truths with wider communities. Religious in precisely this way: connection, with a sense of purpose.