Activists will remind you that Lolita is already living on borrowed time. Well into her 50s, she’s eclipsed the normal lifespan of an orca in the wild—and long since surpassed the life expectancy of one captured.
As they await her fate, a band of whale fanatics in Washington—scientists, capture converts, and spiritual relatives—have advanced an ambitious plan to bring her back to the Salish Sea.
They could have come together much sooner.
Groundwater—held in caves, pores, and cracks—is actually the world’s largest unfrozen freshwater habitat, containing more water than all lakes and rivers combined. And where there is water, there is life. Often blind, pale, and adapted to live in near starvation, these groundwater-dwelling animals—known as stygofauna—are poorly understood and difficult to study.
But lately scientists from France to India and Australia are using genetic and chemical techniques to better understand stygofauna—and warning that many of these strange creatures may soon face extinction, including Texas’ salamanders. Many people rely on groundwater for drinking and domestic use, and in the past it has often been treated like an infinite resource. But groundwater is already running out in many areas. And the world is going to get even thirstier in the coming century: According to the World Meteorological Organization, by 2050, 5 billion people may lack adequate access to water.
Visibility and attention, and even a lively cultural conversation, are one thing. Actually mustering the power to fundamentally rearrange society or politics — that is something else. And though activists are good at achieving the former, they often seem stuck when it comes to the latter.
Very Cold People is not a novel one reads for plot, but I hesitate to say too much about how the stories of Ruth's friends, aunt, cousins, and mother deftly dovetail in this sobering portrait of the damage wrought by predatory adults on young girls' lives. The glimmer of hope in this understated variant of what has come to be called the trauma plot is in the narrator's escape and gradual understanding of the terrible circumstances that warped her mother.