Product Description

The eloquent voice of Rick Bass has been raised often in celebration and defense of America's surviving wilderness and the big wild animals that live there, in acclaimed books such as Wild to the Heart, The Ninemile Wolves, and The Lost Grizzlies. Now, in Caribou Rising, he journeys from his beloved Yaak Valley in Montana to Alaska, to witness firsthand one of the sole remaining landscapes on Earth where the wild is entirely untrammeled-America's Serengeti, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It is a place where great caribou herds gather, calve, and migrate as they did in the Pleistocene, and where the ancient bond between animals and human hunters still informs daily life. Bass's avid desire to meet this landscape and its native people, the Gwich- in, had several sources. A hunter himself since his Mississippi childhood, he now pursues game with a primal passion coupled with an environmentalist's conscience, providing nearly all the meat his family consumes. He hoped to kill one caribou and bring home its meat. But the deeper intent of that act was to enter, even briefly, the experience of the Gwich- in, who have been following, relying on, and praying to the caribou for 10,000 years, in a relationship parallel to that of the Plains tribes and the buffalo. The more urgent impulse for his journey was that the Refuge, along with the caribou and the Gwich- in, faces ruin if the oil industry and its minions in government get their way. Rather than fight for it in the abstract, Bass wanted to find out for himself-and share with readers-what we really stand to lose if the Arctic Refuge is opened to drilling. Bass's Arctic sojourn brings surprises and unexpected rewards. The caribou's late arrival gives him some downtime in remote Arctic Village, the Gwich- in's home at the base of the Brooks Range. Waiting to travel upriver, Bass walks the land, talks to villagers about their lives, and interviews their leaders. Through him we meet Sarah James, a matriarch wise in the ways of Beltway politics; Trimble Gilbert, an Episcopal priest who kills a caribou for a village-wide barbecue while Bass is in town; and the mysterious Jimi, designated the village's chief hunter. Bass ponders the profound differences between this culture and ours: "the gunmetal hardness of their lives," their casual acceptance of physical risk, and their visceral knowledge that none can exist outside the community. And he reflects on the timeless dance of human, caribou, and land in this place. While a great many Americans are concerned about assaults on the Arctic National wildlife Refuge, not all are aware that a culture is at risk along with the 129,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd-so, as Bass observes, "the caribou. . . will either save the the Gwich- in one last time, or not." Those who read his extraordinary testament to the place, its animals, and its people will understand the interconnectedness of the three and will have all the more reason to make a stand with conviction. "It is here that we are being challenged," Bass writes, "with the responsibility of imagination and of discipline, attributes we as a country once had in spades. . . . It is not the caribou, nor the Gwich- in, who are being given one more chance. It is we who are being given one more chance." Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #802026 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this poetic cri de coeur, Bass (The Book of the Yaak) turns his focus to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He visited there to join the Gwich-'in tribe in its annual hunt for the life-sustaining caribou—as the Bush administration pressured Congress to open the herd's traditional calving grounds to oil drilling. This bittersweet account of his stay conveys a profound appreciation for the immense, unblemished majesty of one of the few almost untouched landscapes on Earth; an eye-opening understanding of the intimate spiritual and physical connection, stretching back as much as 10,000 years, between the scattered Gwich-'in tribes and the migrant caribou; and an unexpected respect for how tribal elders and a young generation of activists in Arctic Village (pop. 150) have developed a media-savvy offense against "predatory" Alaskan politicians desperate to drill for a few months' worth of petroleum. Bass is no starry-eyed optimist arguing abstractly for the environment; he concludes his emotional defense of the Gwich-'in uncertain that the preservation of a precious, ancient way of life is possible. But this eloquent narrative holds out hope.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where corporate and governmental interests want to drill for oil, is the homeland of the Gwich'in, "people of the caribou," a group that has lived on this harsh land and hunted its animals for 20,000 years, making the ongoing debate over the preservation of the refuge as much a human rights issue as an environmental concern. Bass, a well-known, profoundly expressive writer, traveled to Arctic Village to get a sense of what's at stake. He couldn't be a better emissary. Not only is Bass a hunter and a lover of pristine terrains, he has also worked as an oil and gas geologist. In his knowledgeable, impassioned, and involving inquiry, he describes the stark beauty of the tundra (home to numerous animal species), profiles savvy and resilient individuals determined to protect the Gwich'in way of life, and explains the damage done by oil-drilling operations. Ultimately, Bass asks, which is worth more to humankind, an insignificant amount of oil (more could be conserved with improved fuel economy standards) or an ancient culture and a glorious ecosystem? Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"This place at the top of the world...is, in both a scientific and spiritual sense, the place where the Porcupine caribou keep coming into the world, year after year...coming into the Gwich-'in world again and again, as if issuing forth not so much from that one secret cleft formed by the base of the magnificent Brooks Range, and the edge of the Beaufort Sea Ice cap, and the lichenfurzed sheet of tundra, but instead as if coming up through some vent or shaft or sacred bore-hole below: caribou rising vertically from that lower world like a blessing... It is this bounty that has shaped the Gwich-'in into what they are, as surely as landscape and the animal of time shape anything." - from Caribou Rising"

Customer Reviews

love and courage in Arctic Alaska
The fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has weighed heavy with me for some time now. One of my first reactions to the disaster of November 2 was to buy and read Subhankar Banerjee's "Seasons of Life and Land," a true masterpiece, including not only his own magnificent photographs of ANWR, but also helpful and fascinating commentaries by a number of environmentalists and scientists and other thoughtful visitors to the region. Rick Bass's "Caribou Rising" is a perfect companion to Banerjee's book. At base it is a travel memoir, in which Bass shares the experience of his visit to the Gwich'in community of Arctic Village, his impressions of the residents, and especially his joining some Gwich'in hunters on an expedition in search of their sacred, life-sustaining caribou. "Nature writing" in general is not a genre that impresses me much; but Bass's account of this up-river journey in a questionable boat with his finely drawn hosts is truly fascinating. (Bass is frankly a hunter and a carnivore. Those are issues that tend to divide environmentalists. Hopefully we may look beyond them for now to the very important values that we share.) Interwoven in this memoir are two major strands. First is that of the folly of the Bush/Cheney project to drill for oil in the coastal area of ANWR, the breeding ground of the Porcupine caribou herd, and the ignorance, arrogance and selfishness of that project's supporters. Bass, writing before October 2, argues eloquently that whatever this project might gain for us is despicably little, while what it will destroy is inestimably great. Even more important, though, is his other great theme, the integrity and well-being of the Gwich'in people, and the preservation of their culture. Since the Pleistocene they have been the people of the caribou. So dependent are they on the hunt of the caribou for everything important in their lives, that it seems true to agree that they and the caribou are one. Already as a result of global warming, the caribou population is under great stress. The intrusion of Dick Cheney's friends into the breeding ground in ANWR seems likely to make the caribou's persistence in this region highly doubtful. And if the caribou disappear, so does the ancient love and life of the Gwich'in. It is terrificly inspiring to read Bass's words on all the Gwich'in are doing to defend themselves, the caribou and the land, at home in Alaska, in Washington, and around the world. This story is not over; and it touches every one of us.

good for the goose, but . . .
Save the caribou ... so the Gwich-'In can slaughter them! Eating red meat is bad for you ... unless you're Gwich-'In -- in which case, it's good for you!