Windfall, by Erika Bolstad: Tragic, disheartening, and encouraging

Many of us struggle with the knowledge that our actions are hastening global climate change. As an environmental journalist, Erika Bolstad’s angst ratcheted up when she learned that her mother’s family was benefiting from an oil lease. The news of the windfall was intertwined with a mystery: how had her mother’s grandmother homesteaded the land and what had happened to her? 

Bolstad learns more about her family while following North Dakota's oil boom and bust. She weaves her family’s history, and her and her husband’s longing for a child, with her coverage of climate change, fracking, and methane flaring. The interweaving keeps visits with U.S. Geological Survey and university researchers, and oil company employees, from becoming boring, and the personal stories of fertility challenges and multi-generational mental health struggles from becoming (overly) heartbreaking. 

Bolstad wonders if her family should profit from an oil boom where workers, chasing windfalls, risk their lives to extract oil that makes billions of dollars for others. She fantasizes about interviewing one of wealthiest oil company owners and asking him, “[W]hen he first understood the world was his for the taking. How did he learn that the rules weren’t for him or anyone like him?...[W]hy he thought he deserved to amass an $11.3 billion fortune when people were living in their cars in a Walmart parking lot, and in church basements and in housing next to his soil field, just so they’d have a crack at a few crumbs of the American dream.” 

Bolstad makes an admirable and kind decision about her family’s oil lease. The stories she tells in Windfall are, at times, tragic and disheartening, but her response is encouraging.

How did wheat take over the world?

I was smitten by the wheat fields of Montana in high school. My dad and younger brother and I were headed to Glacier National Park when the rolling fields stretched from the horizons to capture my heart. I was sure that some day I'd live that far from town and drive tractors on fields that big. But I didn't wonder why there was so much wheat in Montana or how the crop I wanted so badly to raise affected the ecology of the area. 

Montana State University professor Catherine Zabinsky has thought about those things and wrote a book about them. My recent review  of Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop is in the current Issues in Science and Technology. 

I was living 35 miles from town when I wrote the review, but I wasn't on a Montana wheat farm.

Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath

Light on the Devils pulled me in and made me want to know more about the people and places it described.

After reading Louise Wagenknecht's book, I searched aerial photos to track her family's moves from Hilt, California, downriver to Happy Camp, and then to Seiad Valley during the 1960s. I wondered where her high school classmates committed suicide, died in vehicles rolling off mountain roads, gave birth between junior and senior years, and dropped out to work in the timber.

Then I searched topographic maps for the Three Devils peaks of the book's title. I traced the path of the Klamath River through the forests of northern California, where Wagenknecht's stepfather laid out clear cuts in old growth timber. I looked for the roads and bridges built to "get out the cut"—infrastructure the cut didn't pay for. I planned a road trip to see how the clear cuts were filling in and search for remaining old growth trees.

Between the crescendos of tragedy—floods, fires, and logger deaths—Wagenknecht records the steady bass beat of disappearing old growth timber and degraded watersheds and wildlife habitat. At the height of the post-World War II timber boom, a neighbor remembers California condors and Wagenknecht's family moves into a house with a large supply of kindling: veneer peeled from old growth pine.

But I didn't need a guide to follow Wagenknecht's journey from science geek kid who loved animals, through her dismay and disbelief when her stepfather tells her women can't be veterinarians and his co-worker tells her women can't fight fires—after she had just fought one, and on to her decision to attend college. She saw the contradictions in growing up female and told the world, and herself, that she wanted to be a science teacher—a nice, acceptable job for a high school valedictorian.

At home, Wagenknecht's stepfather decreed she would spend time doing her hair and nails, plus three agonizing hours a week holding up the walls and reading album covers at high school dances. But she, the oldest child, was also his hunting and fishing companion. She was the one who helped him fell trees for firewood and then split, load, and unload the fuel. She made a good hand and he made a good teacher. Despite their conflicts at home, they reached détente in the woods.

This book describes Wagenknecht's path toward a career with the Forest Service—which included fighting fires—and her détente in the woods with society.

An entomological who dunnit

Jeff Lockwood's book, Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier is available on Amazon, where I reviewed it.

Scientific understanding usually shuffles along in the two-to-three-year steps of graduate student research projects. Big, intriguing mysteries take longer to resolve, but are more fun to research—and more interesting to read about.

Jeff Lockwood tackled the mystery of why the Rocky Mountain locust went extinct at the dawn of the 20th century. The species' periodic irruptions rivaled the bison in terms of biomass and the 1875 outbreak still horrifies young readers of Laura Ingles Wilder's, On the Banks of Plum Creek. Then the insects disappeared.

In his book, Lockwood recounts the challenges of sleuthing out a big mystery. Big research projects require new research techniques and years of soul-crushing work counting, dissecting, measuring, and recording data. Papers describing new research findings are sometimes rejected by academic journals; colleagues sometimes snicker. Unearthing the Rocky Mountain locust's secrets required field work at remote high elevation "grasshopper glaciers" reached by difficult climbs in foul weather.

Big research projects need lots of brains and lots of backs. Lockwood doesn't hog the limelight; he credits his employees, students, and colleagues for their inventions and insights. Field research is carried out by people, so it's a social activity, which Lockwood captures. A twenty-five-mile hike, completed in the dark, isn't quite as bad when you're not suffering alone, and joy shared at discovery is joy multiplied.

Other ecological changes in the late 19th century might have been linked with the locust's disappearance: decline of the bison, changes in climate, or reduced burning by Native Americans. Lockwood guides readers through the possibilities and explains why he rejects each. He focuses instead on the ecological bottleneck of limited egg-laying sites in valleys of the northern Rocky Mountains. Lockwood determines that when settlers plowed and grazed these areas, they destroyed the locust's eggs, and with them, the species. The culprit was settlers, in valleys, with plows, by accident.

Although the Rocky Mountain locust's sky-filling swarms are gone with the thundering bison herds, Lockwood ends his book by wondering if a few individuals may live incognito in less disturbed valleys of the Rockies. Another big, intriguing mystery.

Marathon health, lava stroke, and natural resources

Mike Medberry's book, On the Dark Side of the Moon is available on Amazon, where I recently reviewed it.

Mike Medberry's legs carried him uphill to finish a half marathon the day before a clot in the 44-year-old's brain stopped blood flow, immobilizing his right side and scrambling his speech. His was the kind of stroke you want to have in the ER parking lot. But Medberry was hiking across lava at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. He spent most of a day waiting to be found and whisked to a hospital.

Medberry "became pure observer" while wounded and waiting on the lava. He describes the stroke clearly enough that I don't have to experience one myself to feel I have a working knowledge of the condition.

Recovering, Medberry learned to brush his teeth, drive, navigate phone trees, speak, and write. His struggles to organize his thoughts are heart-breaking. "…[T]he pieces of [his] brain were a blizzard of blowing pages ripped from a book." Medberry's emotional struggles are inspiring. His falling in love and recovering enough to say, "I do," are triumphs.

Interwoven with Medberry's own story is the story of Craters of the Moon. He was working to expand the national monument when the stroke found him there. Even after the stroke, he hiked and found peace on the lava.

I enjoyed Medberry's descriptions of Idaho landscapes, but I wondered about a few points in his discussion of cheatgrass. He's correct that the exotic annual grass fuels wildfires that damage native vegetation and the wildlife habitat it provides. But I cringed when I read that cheatgrass is "[a] poison brought here by cowboys, for cows." In its native range, cheatgrass is an insignificant grass that doesn't inspire purposeful sharing. Researchers understand that the grass was inadvertently introduced to the U.S. West.

The stark black and white cover photo of a hiker leaning against gravity to climb lava echoes the contrast between Medberry's marathon health and lava stroke. Natural resource issues are rarely as clear cut and the actors, both people and plants, are rarely completely good or evil.