The Rising Sea by Orrin Pilkey

Following up on yesterday’s review of The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast by Stanley Riggs, try this related title!

Pilkey, described as colorful and outspoken, provides a brief balanced overview of the urgency of sea- level rise in a global context. This important book breaks a scientifically and politically complex topic into fascinating chapters for the public, defining the scope of the enormous challenges ahead and our options.

2100 seems so far in the future to some, it breeds inertia. Photos visibly show seas already claiming coastal communities, yet it took twenty years of public debate to relocate our Cape Hatteras Lighthouse back 2000 feet in 1999.

Now, rapid response is required. Indonesian scientists believe the airport of its capital, Jakarta (population 8.5 million), will be inundated by 2035. Our Outer Banks could collapse by 2050. As many as 150 million people in the world’s major cities may need engineering structures such as dikes for survival by 2070. Countries like the UK, Netherlands and South Africa are taking positive steps to prepare for inundation of their coasts.

Instead of continually funding relief for predictable disasters after they occur, Pilkey urges government agencies to focus on prevention. He advises planning for a 7 foot rise by 2100 as a cautious approach. Instead of monstrous sea walls and dikes, wherever possible he recommends retreat for a more sustainable future: strategic relocation of roads, buildings and infrastructure. He envisions redesigning with nature to maintain a coast that future generations can enjoy.

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The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast by Stanley Riggs

Sign up now for an talk with author with Stanley Riggs at North Regional Library tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18th at 7:00 p.m.

Every January, the news media immediately refocus our attention from the hectic December holidays to the new year ahead, with New Year’s resolutions and forecasts about Top 10 national or local stories to keep on your radar. For North Carolinians, my pick is sea-level rise.

Why? Because scientists project accelerating sea rise could range from 3 to 6-7 feet or more by 2100. NC is one of the top three most vulnerable states. Whether you love to visit the coast, own property there, or are a tax payer who’ll indirectly share the costs of addressing potentially catastrophic changes, you’ll find two brief books by internationally eminent NC scientists, fascinating and informative.

This compelling book focuses on NC’s treasured barrier islands and unique coast: how our islands have historically receded due to storms, and are now threatened with collapse over the next few decades by accelerating sea-level rise and storms. Our 20 coastal counties and tourism industry are also at risk.

Riggs’ 40 year career of coastal research and leadership has led to him being described as a state treasure and coastal icon. He’s been instrumental in NC’s coastal management policies which helped protect our beaches’ stability and natural beauty.

Riggs points out that NC policies are more proactive than many other states. But development practices, increasing urbanization, and trying to hold the islands where they are, to protect buildings and roads, are in direct conflict with their natural landward movement. They’re actually hastening island destruction. His book is filled with fascinating color photographs illustrating the need for new approaches, and presents an important positive new vision for protecting both our coast and tourism for the future.

Check back tomorrow for another book review on this topic!

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Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Some of the best books I’ve ever read are by British authors, and they became my keepers.   Through a January Book Club selection, I discovered another one, Old Filth, the story of a successful British barrister who self-deprecatingly coined the acronym for “Failed In London Try Hong Kong.” Contemporary Brit author Gardam, who has written over 30 books, has received numerous literary awards.  Old Filth has been called her masterpiece, and I’m still under its spell.

When Filth is first introduced, he seems to be the quintessential Englishman of the “best sort.”  Sir Edward Feathers, retired and nearing 80, has just left the Bencher’s luncheon room of London’s Inner Temple. Overhearing other Benchers’ admiring gossip, we learn he is a legendary barrister and judge. “Magnificent looks, though. And still sharp.” His wife Betty is still alive. “They’ve had a soft life, Far Eastern Bar.  And made a packet.”  “Never put a foot wrong, Old Filth. Very Popular.” “Child of the Raj, public school, the Bar – but he’s not a bore. Women went mad for him.”

But characters are not always what they seem in Gardam novels. Filth was born in Malaya early in the 20th century, son of a District Officer, and he was phenomenally successful later in Hong Kong.  But he and Betty had no children, and as 1997 neared, they retired to a country home in Dorset. After Betty dies, alone without his longtime companion and career demands, emotional wounds long buried begin to surface. And here Gardam begins developing her major theme: the emotional damage done to children of the British Raj when they were separated from their parents and sent “home” to be educated in England. “I wanted to show what it does to a child and how it shapes the grown-up he or she becomes.” She was influenced by reading about the cruelties Rudyard Kipling experienced in his autobiography, Something of Myself, and short story “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

Gardam creates a compellingly readable portrait of Eddie Feathers from his birth to his death. Along his journey are the steaming jungles of Malaya, the chaos of the fall of Singapore, and the selfish negligence of his aunts. Yet there are saving kindnesses and witty humor. Throughout, she treats people in Eddie’s life with compassionate insight. There is a hint on her dedication page: “To Raj Orphans and their parents.” Preceding that is the simple wry inscription on the statue of a child in the Inner Temple Garden, “ Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

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Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

If you’re looking for something special to read, explore our rich collection of memoirs.  I was lucky to recently come across Ray Bradbury’s 1957 classic Dandelion Wine, the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story of 12 year old Doug Spaulding, set during the remarkable summer of 1928 in rural Green Town, Illinois. This book is a series of poetic vignettes, some chapters only one page long. It’s been described as a tender love letter to Bradbury’s childhood and family.

As the story opens, Doug awakens before sunrise on the first day of summer in the third story bedroom of his grandparents’ home and leans out the window to survey the town. He’s almost breathless with anticipation for the days stretching ahead to be filled with his favorite boyhood summer adventures – climbing trees, picking midnight plums and exploring the rivers. But this summer will be different.

In the early chapters Bradbury makes ordinary summer activities golden sweet with minute observations, (Doug picking berries in the country with his father, walking through maidenhair ferns in silence so still you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down through the bee-fried air). Doug becomes so alert to the wonder, that he’s overwhelmed with the awareness that he’s ALIVE in a way he’s never sensed. When he and his younger brother Tom gather dandelions for Grandfather to bottle his annual Dandelion Wine, Doug realizes that each bottle represents the magic of those June and July summer days, caught and stoppered.

Doug also discovers a more mature understanding of his world, his family, and the colorful characters that inhabit Green Town as he experiences losses for the first time, by direct involvement, or sometimes as a minor observer. In one of his most poignant moments, Doug gets to know elderly Colonel Freeman as the “Time Machine,” because he’s so old he can remember historic events that few others experienced. He remembers fighting in the Civil War. He can’t remember what side he fought on, but he remembers massive deaths and sadness.  When his “time” comes he calls long distance to an old friend in Mexico City just to listen to the street the sounds once more before he dies.

Ray Bradbury worked on material for Dandelion Wine between the ages of 28 and 37, enriching it with truths and wisdom gained through his own joy of life.  In 2006, fifty years later, he completed the long awaited sequel, Farewell Summer.  He will be 91 this year.

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Pompeii by Robert Harris

A  Must Read historical fiction is Harris’s Pompeii, about the destruction of the city in 79 C.E. by Mount Vesuvius. Try to start it when you can selfishly read through to the end without stopping. By page 12, I didn’t want to pause to make dinner or even answer the phone.

Over four excruciatingly tense days Harris vividly portrays Roman society around the Bay of Neopolis on the brink of disaster, increasingly disturbing mysteries, and a cast of finely drawn, very human characters who experience, moment by moment, the final cataclysm. In a brilliant conceptual choice, all are revealed and connected by the Aqua Augusta aqueduct, one of the greatest engineering feats of the empire.

It began simply. No one living knew that Vesuvius was a volcano. There was no real knowledge of volcano behavior. Attilius, a young 27 year old fourth generation engineer from Rome, has just been given command of the prestigious Aqua Augusta aqueduct because the former chief, Exomnius, disappeared two weeks earlier. The aqueduct wound over sixty miles around Mount Vesuvius and the coast of the Bay of Neopolis, supplying water to over nine towns around the bay – Pompeii first on the eastern side, and at its terminus on the west side, filling a vast underground reservoir at the strategic naval base at Misenum.

Attilius faces enormous pressures immediately after arriving in Misenum. It was a suffocatingly hot August ending a summer of drought. The critical naval reservoir level is dwindling to a two day supply and water to the towns is jeopardized – resorts for some of the richest, most important citizens of the empire, just before celebrations of Vinalia and elections. He quickly begins discovering disturbing events indicating something major is happening: small springs disappear into to the earth, sulphur contaminates fish farms and public fountains, rumors of vaporous “giants” in the hills, ground tremors, and finally a break in the matrix beyond Pompeii. Through Ampliatus, a freed slave who has risen to power and wealth as a developer, Attilius discovers a web of corruption which threatens his mission to repair the break in two days.

The final hours detailing Vesuvius spewing successive waves of tons of ash, pumice and sulfuric gas miles into the atmosphere, and firestorms of poisonous vapors and molten debris, which engulf the surrounding area provide a terrifying climax. They are based on recorded observations by Pliny the Elder, Admiral of the fleet, his nephew Pliny the Younger, and the archeological record at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. This story was so richly written I wanted to write Harris to please give us another novel featuring Attilius. If you’d like to learn more about this event and volcanism, visit the fabulous website, Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption, at http://www.fieldmuseum.org/pompeii.

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The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

If you hear the word Redwood and your first thought is “best lumber for my new deck,” or your mental image is grainy photographs of turn-of-the-century logger crews posing triumphantly with their cross saws on a huge stump, be prepared to have your mind rewired by this book. I recently ran across it while preparing for a book display on global climate change and couldn’t put it down.

Author Preston has earned acclaim as a science writer who creates best selling nonfiction biological thrillers. As to how he writes, he says on his website, “I like to reveal nature by showing human character engaged with nature, often in a life-or-death situation…. A book seems to reveal itself slowly. The characters come alive on their own, and they end up showing me where the story must go.”

Wild Trees is the story of three off-beat young people, Steve Sillet, Michael Taylor and Marie Antoine, whose disparate lives converge because of their passion for discovering and climbing the world’s tallest trees, the coast redwoods of California. On a hiking trip in the Humboldt area, nineteen year old Sillet rashly made his first climb on impulse. Since the first branches often don’t occur before twenty stories, he climbed a smaller tree and leaped across space to the branches of a taller one where he ascended to the upper canopy and discovered a previously unknown world of biological diversity.  On his dangerous branch by branch journey he wasn’t aware that he was well above the “redline,” the point at which a fall means certain fatality.

The other key characters are the majestic trees, each one a unique individual, some thousands of years old. The redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the tallest organisms the world has ever sustained. Over ninety-six percent of the original North American redwood forests have been destroyed by logging. Those that remain survive just inland along the northern California coast, their tops almost invisible, shrouded by fog. The true giants, which may reach over 35 stories high, were often discovered in unmapped and almost inaccessible ravines. Sillet, Taylor, Antoine and their later colleagues regard the “supertalls” with reverent awe, giving their discoveries mythic names like Hyperion, Illuvitar, Atlas and Icarus.

The emerging love story between Steve and Marie, Michael’s phobia of heights, their passionate quest and breathtaking adventures in their evolution to become the leading scientists and naturalists of tall tree ecology make for compelling reading.

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