Doreen Cunningham

I enjoy this combination of scientific fact and personal experience. Some may find it has a little much of her personal life, but I became almost as interested in the fate of Doreen & her son Max as I was in that of the whales. She includes references for her facts, which provides support for our need to make a change.
Even as she was searching for quotes from local residents about how the melting of the Arctic was affecting them, they responded yes, "It's touched every one of us" but added that "there are other things that are important to us" (p.178) and gave as an example the effects of MTV on their youth.
Activists feel urgency. My geography texts talked about the slowness of glacial moving, so well-accepted that it is a metaphor. Over their lifetimes, Inuit have seen glaciers times when moved quickly. Doreen reflects that "Change is always a process...It takes work, careful dialog, and sometimes it feels like nothing is happening. I remember the glaciers, their movement sometimes imperceptibly slow, sometimes as fast as a running dog." (p.275)
Some quotes I want to remember & ponder:
Hugh Brody states that " the Inuit spiritual belief left people open to a profound and intellignet uncertainty, allowing the brain to work at its fullest, widest potentil, using both intuition and detailed information...was not binary and exclusive like Christianity" (p.67-8).
When she was out on the arctic ice, she wished she could be in that beauty forever, but was cautioned by an Inuit who knows the instability of the ice "it can't. Like everything in live...you better be ready to move in a second." (p.178).
Doreen spends quite a bit of time at the end wishing she had been able to maintain a relationship with Billy. She seems to reconcile it by remembering what her (divorced) father said: "...'It's not that relationships ended that's important, it's that they happened at all.' Grief is woven through all of life after all, it means we are connected. I can't stop death. I can only face it and myu life with as much openness and generosity as possible." (p.273)… (more)

nonfiction/memoir - British environmental journalist takes out a loan to follow whale migrations along the Pacific coast with her two-year-old after a grueling custody battle and the loss of her job; she also talks about her time spent with indigenous communities and other projects she has studied in her life.

Read to page 67. I liked this but it's slow as fuck. I think it may be better suited to audio, where you can just listen and relax without worrying over the details of what is happening (probably not much is happening).… (more)