Second Nature

January 11, 2021
Humans have irrevocably altered nature, warns New York Times Magazine writer-at-large Rich (Losing Earth) in this vividly reported survey. The challenge now, he writes, is to harness those changes and conserve the parts of nature that are “beautiful and free and sacred, those that we want to carry with us into the future.” Rich tells the story of Robert Bilott, a lawyer who defended chemical companies until he took the case of a cattle farmer whose herd was dying because of pollution runoff from a DuPont landfill; Nate Park, whose work creating plant-based meat is a source of pride and bafflement for his butcher father; and Shin Kubota, a Japanese scientist who believes a jellyfish called Turritopsis, about which he writes rhapsodic songs, holds the key to immortality. These profiles highlight “people who ask difficult questions about what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility” as humans’ impact on the natural world evolves. Rich suggests, “It is impossible to protect all that we mean by ‘natural’ against the ravages of climate change, pollution, and psychopathic corporate greed, unless we understand that the nature we fear losing is our own.” Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich’s study is packed with moving insight. Agent: Elyse Cheney, the Cheney Agency.

March 1, 2021
In his new book Rich (Losing Earth, 2019) updates articles previously published in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Vice, and the New Republic to create a collective reflection on the romantic ideal of the "natural world." Rich's argument--bolstered by forays into such topics such as DuPont's chemical contamination of West Virginia waters (see Robert Bilott's Exposure, 2019), the 2015 SoCalGas natural gas leak near Los Angeles, and efforts to re-engineer Louisiana's coastline--is that nature has been so extensively tampered with by man that there is no "returning" it to a long gone, sublime, original state. Rich sees the present era as one of "terrible responsibility," and the stories he collects here of scientists, lawyers, community organizers, and "average people" at the center of so many storms are composed to evoke concern while also presenting the ethical questions at the heart of our complex, in-flux times. Nature is still with us, Rich asserts, it just doesn't look like what we remember or even ever knew.

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Starred review from February 15, 2021
The author of Losing Earth returns with further assessments of climate change and environmental destruction. In this outstanding collection of pieces, some of which were published in different forms in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Men's Journal, and other outlets, Rich provides vivid, often disturbing portraits of individuals and events contributing to "the death rattle of the romantic idea that nature is innocent of human influence." The author hits the ground running with a gripping account of the stubborn lawyer who, since 1999, has been suing DuPont for massive dumping of toxic perfluorooctanoic acid (a component of Teflon) into landfills, streams, and water supplies. His article led to the highly praised film Dark Waters (2019), but the victory was modest. DuPont settled with the Environmental Protection Agency for a paltry $16.5 million ("less than two percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year") and slowly phased out PFOA but admitted no liability and maintains that its closely related substitute is safe. Sadly, in this and other stories, readers learn that the EPA is largely toothless. The author chronicles the 2015-2016 Aliso Canyon methane leak, the largest in American history, which drenched a wealthy Los Angeles community with methane and other far more toxic gases. The company paid a fine and is still fending off lawsuits, but unsurprisingly, politicians and regulatory officials looked after their own interests. In other essays, Rich explores Louisiana and the Mississippi River, ecologically fragile even before Hurricane Katrina, which triggered an immensely expensive reconstruction that is not improving matters. The author doubts that genetic manipulation will save the environment, but he does offer entertaining stories about the efforts to restore the extinct passenger pigeon, create a rabbit that glows in the dark, or get people to "buy burgers composed of cultured animal cells, if they tasted good enough." Another disheartening but important book from Rich.

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