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(More customer reviews)Many mysteries faced the scientists who came to investigate the worst oil spill in American history, who arrived with hundreds of pet theories to explore and promote. But even greater challenges arose with the arrival of the politicians, enviro-activists, Exxon executives, and, of course, federal bureaucrats; they had to choose, and finance, measures to contain and perhaps "reverse" the environmental damage. Were otters and salmon as threatened as they appeared? Would the poison work its way up the food chain, to the bald eagle and man? Would the cold climate doom their efforts? Or should nothing be done? What, finally, did "environmental recovery" mean?
To explore these questions, Jeff Wheelwright decided to tag along with the scientists. Sometimes awestruck, sometimes antagonistic or even macho - in one place he licks raw oil off his finger to silence a heckler - Wheelwright got unusually close to his subjects, which highlights both the strengths and the drawbacks of his approach.
On the positive side, he examines issues in the infant science of ecological disaster and recovery. Many assumed, for example, that animal populations were severely harmed. This seemed natural, but were they?
Sea otters, who sustain their high metabolisms through ravenous eating, were judged extremely vulnerable to breakdowns in the ecological chain. To help them, some scientists captured and scrubbed the oily otters clean, then implanted radio transmitters in their bellies to monitor their progress. But soon others claimed that a quick wash removed their natural insulation, worsening their chances in the wild. In the end, no one could determine whether the surviving otters were even ill. It was harder still to measure the impact on game fish populations: estimates of salmon returning to their Prince William spawning grounds vary from one to twenty million each year. In the face of such uncertainty, how could scientists plot the oil spill's precise impact?
The same was true for the toxicological damage of the spill: some petroleum compounds are more poisonous than others; some evaporate and disperse immediately; and some may sink to the seabed, a deadly long-term legacy of the accident. For example, inside the gashed hull of the Exxon Valdese, scientists were astonished to discover it was teeming with life. Dodging globs of oily matter in the wounded bulkhead, salmon, herring, and shellfish were flourishing; even the cloudy water, upon closer inspection, was revealed to be dense with bacteria and other microorganisms. This miniature ecosystem, perhaps ten times richer in biota than the water outside, should have been a poisoned and stagnant pool. But it wasn't.
To investigate these observations and their toxicity scenarios over time, scientists painstakingly heated oil samples, electrically charging the vapors that boil off with each increase in temperature; the amount of charge - how much of each vapor sample there is - indicated the exact chemical constituents. Unfortunately, writes Wheelwright, the scientists had virtually no idea what their readings meant. For all their chemical statistics, it was like they had a map but didn't understand where it began.
These are valuable portraits of the grunt work that is the bread and butter of scientific research. It is a messy business, full of half-answered questions, ambiguous results, and healthy disagreement. Unfortunately, by continually lamenting that the experts cannot agree and that "objective" measures don't exist, Wheelwright gets lost in the details and even seems to misunderstand the nature of the scientific enterprise. It is a symptom of the deeper flaws in his book.
Wheelwright seems to assume, with surprising naivete, that the right answers are out there if only we'd let the scientists be scientists. In one of the cheapest shots in the book, he complains about the "bureaucrats" who are blocking scientists, influencing the press, or withholding vital information. Yet Wheelwright makes virtually no attempt to uncover what motivated the bureaucrats, what concerned them, or what directives may have come from Washington, DC; he completely fails to appreciate that they must make decisions quickly, however spotty and incomplete the evidence, and without the benefit of hindsight. As such, he does not explore the political context in which the scientific questions were formulated.
Even worse, Wheelwright blithely concludes that it may have been better to do nothing. Attempting to help, he often argues, hurts more than allowing nature to "take its course". Yet if Wheelwright admits that experts cannot agree, on what basis can he advocate that doing nothing is better? On none, it turns out, except his own assumptions that the environment can "tough" it out. It's not as if you can run the disaster over like an experiment in a test tube!
Instead of probing into the rich area where science meets government under pressure, Wheelwright chose to hang out in the scientific trenches. It is often interesting and gracefully written, but is a sadly incomplete picture. Lurching from story to story, Wheelwright's book rarely builds any narrative momentum, and leaves too many of the big questions unanswered. We never learn what "environmental recovery" should mean, or whether it took place in Prince William Sound.
I would not recommend this book except for those wishing for an introduction to the science - this is a four-star performance. The policy dimension - where the science is supposedly applied to remedy real-world problems - is ridiculously ignored; it rates one star in my view, and the author seems intolerably, arrogantly glib in his judgments and unsupported pronouncements.
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