Book Review: Relicts of a Beautiful Sea

Relicts of a Beautiful Sea:Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert Worldby Christopher NormentUniversity of North Carolina Press, 2014Few visitors to the heat-blasted flats and arroyos of the Basin and Range country of California's dreaded Death Valley would guess by looking around them that water, of all things, was once staggeringly abundant right where they're standing and sweating. But only a few million years ago in the Pleistocene, this was the location of vast Lake Manly, eighty miles long and six hundred feet deep and teeming with life in its depths and shallows. As the world's climate changed and the waters dried up, indigenous life did what such life always does: adapt, migrate, or die out. Only the first option would seem a near-impossibility, since the present-day Death Valley often gets less than four inches of rainfall in an entire year. Surely it plays host to no aquatic life-forms whatsoever?Environmental scientist Christopher Norment's new book, Relicts of a Beautiful Sea corrects that impression in an authoritative and fascinating way. He goes to godforsaken places like the Inyigo Mountains, the Amargosa River, and the scalding geothermal ponds of Devils Hole, and in these remote places he finds, amazingly, water-life: a salamander, a toad, and four types of pupfish. His book is a detailed and sometimes quite technical study of the incredible adaptations these aquatic creatures have fashioned over millions of years in order to live in Hell on Earth, but the book is also part travel-writing, since Norment is a firm believer in a boots-on-the-ground kind of bioscience:

During thirty-five years of fieldwork I have learned that written descriptions mean very little if I haven't searched out the nest or held the creature in my hand, seen and smelled and felt enough to let my senses and my intuition, rather than my intellect, do the looking. Everything near the water looks possible yet at the same time nothing looks right.

In eight very well-written chapters, Norment gives us the natural history and present stratagems of his remarkable animals, always pointing out the extreme fine-tuning they've needed to perfect in order to exist on the knife's edge of their environment. Take the pupfish that constantly negotiate the hotsprings of Tecopa Bore, living their lives by carefully-calculated inches:

In addition to temperature acclimation, pupfish employ a sophisticated set of behaviors to control their body temperature and take maximum advantage of their thermal environment. An example of this precise regulation occurs in Amargosa pubfish living in Tecopa Bore, a small artesian spring near the Amargosa River. Water issues from the ground at 117F, too hot for even the toughest pupfish, but rapidly cools to 96F in the small stream below the springhead. Pupfish reach their maximum density between 90 and 97F, but may follow the 107F isotherm along the stream edges, while only inches away is water beyond their upper thermal tolerance.

Norment patiently explains such arcana as heat shock proteins that serve as "molecular chaperones" and help prevent extreme fluctuations in temperature from harming protein structure and function, and such is his easy skill with words that even his least scientifically-literate readers will be carried right along.In fact, although the scientific and environmental acumen of all this is utterly engrossing (although at times carried too far - nearly all the book's attempts at proving the "relevance" of extreme ecosystem survival adaptations to mankind's current climate crisis feel contrived), the book's best surprise is Norment's sheer literary talent. At every turn, he remembers to look up from the data of his account and provide us with perfectly-realized grace notes:

A few more minutes brings us to a thin stream of water weaving through a cobbled rock and a thin green garden. Even though our topographic map tells us that there is a spring here its presence is astonishing. Here in this arid canyon, the desert offers us the wonderful dissonance of water, as well as the pleasure of an unexpected discovery. It's like a packet of your great-grandfather's letters hidden away in some dusty attic chest, the shadow of a wolverine disappearing into a thicket of pines, or the taste of cold water on your parched tongue as the sun goes nuclear.

And his book's larger message is its most eloquent note, a broader and deeper sympathy than any mere "relevance" could be. Norment is dutiful in reporting the latest conservation efforts and the real-world economic snags they encounter along the way, but as he points out in the book's best passage, there's much more to it than that:

But it is not just a matter of cost-benefit analyses, of dollars and cents and balance sheets, bits of data and testable hypotheses. Beyond our pragmatic concerns there is what Joseph Wood Krutch realized as he listened to a chorus of peepers, that vernal avalanche of frog-song that rises into celebration during each northeastern spring: "we are all in this together." Yes. We are all in this together, "this" being public and personal history, the shit and sorrow of life, the painful trajectories of individuals and nations alike, but also the overwhelming joy and grace of this world. We desperately need all of the hope, all of the determined persistence and beauty that a Devils Hole pupfish or Inyo Mountains slender salamander can offer up, the ways in which they can help us endure. We need their beauty and otherness, their delicate and fragile strength. We need their allegiance to the physical conditions of this world, and to time, to the millions and millions of years that mark the vectors of their existence.

You don't typically find intelligent passion like that in treatises with this kind of scientific gravamen, but they glitter throughout the length of Relicts of a Beautiful Sea. This is natural history of the finest order.