While climate change has become a political issue with large groups of people insisting that the concept is a hoax this isn’t what this book is about. Henderson isn’t offering opinions about it. She describes her experiences and things she learns. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Her accounts of being out in the field are what make this book really sing. She spends months with a group of researchers that makes an annual study of a glacier in Alaska. They ski across the ice field and stay out there taking core samples from the glacier. The stamina this endeavor required is astounding.
She goes to an African lake to get samples. We are right there with her as they plunge tubes into the lake bottom to extract the cores which will reveal chronologies of climate. Back at the laboratory Henderson studies them inch by inch, analysing silts, sands, seeds, and whatever else she finds.
She shifts careers and goes to work for Senator Al Franken in Washington, D.C. She was pregnant with her first child when she took that job advising Franken on climate issues. She had gone from a field of scientific research dominated by white males to a new situation where she soon finds herself trying to locate lactation rooms in government buildings.
With gorgeous prose she lures us into unexpected places. Following her stint working inside the federal government she scores a job as climate advisor to the governor of Minnesota. That state is known as the land of 10.000 lakes. Unfortunately many of those bodies of water are no longer safe for swimming or fishing because of the high levels of agricultural chemicals being siphoned off into the water.
Governor Dayton addressed the issue by trying to get legislation passed that would lead to the creation of buffer areas between farmland and the rivers and streams that carry the fertilizer and other chemicals off. The Mississippi River originates in Minnesota. Some of those midwestern farm chemicals end up in what is now a large dead zone of water in the Gulf of Mexico.
Her work in politics was grueling. In Minnesota she was on call 24 hours a day. Through her eyes we see how legislation gets passed. The negotiating. The wheeling. The dealing. The public forums. The exhaustion of it all. She finally took a break. She declined great job offers to focus on her writing. The result: this splendid book.
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Saturday at 7 a.m. and on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
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