I want to say thanks to Susan Casey for taking the time to guest-blog with us over the last few days, and introduce you to our next guest: introducing Dick Russell, Oceana’s guest blogger starting Sep. 26.
Dick Russell has dedicated most of his professional and private life over the past 20 years to fighting for the environment, a passionate pursuit fueled by the crisis that’s fast pushing the world’s fisheries and oceans to the point of no return.
A longtime recreational fisherman, Dick spent the better part of three years fighting for stronger regulations to protect the endangered Atlantic striped bass, organizing a national conference in Washington, D.C., and appearing on numerous radio and TV programs. For his efforts, he was awarded the citizen’s Chevron Conservation Award in 1988. Today, the return of the striped bass is considered the foremost example of the resiliency of the oceans – provided a species is given a chance to recover. His new book on this subject, Striper Wars: An American Fish Story, was published this summer by Island Press/Shearwater Books.
Striper Wars has been very well received. Critic Sandy Bauer said in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “This book is one of the most amazing fish stories I’ve ever come across, and that’s counting John McPhee’s sturgeon book, John Hersey’s exploration of the bluefish, and Mark Kurlansky’s ode to the lowly cod. It’s a conservation textbook, a testament to human fortitude and wily tactics, not to mention a splendid yarn about a fish that Russell calls the aquatic equivalent of the bald eagle.”
And this, from H. Bruce Franklin in The American Scientist: “Can a book about a single species or genus of fish teach us more about ourselves and our interrelationships with our environment than it does about that fish? “Yes” is the answer suggested by a rapidly growing literary genre….To this genre we must now add Dick Russell’s wonderfully rich and provocative Striper Wars: An American Fish Story.”
Here’s a link to Dick’s book on Amazon:
Amazon.com: Books: Striper Wars : An American Fish Story
Recently, Dick was a guest at Oceana, where he met and had a chance to speak with other longtime warriors in the battle for the oceans. Among topics discussed at the breakfast meeting were some of Dick’s previous books, including Eye of the Whale (Simon & Schuster hard-cover; paperback edition by Island Press/Shearwater Books), which upon publication was named among the Best Books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Eye of the Whale is an account of his following the migration of the California gray whale, from Mexico’s Baja peninsula all the way to Alaska and Siberia.
Dick also is a respected and long-established magazine writer, having penned dozens of stories about other environmental issues for a broad variety of publications ranging from The Nation to Parenting and is an active member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and PEN USA.
Among his many non-environmental works is the acclaimed The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), a book hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a masterpiece of historical reconstruction” focusing on the Kennedy assassination.
For more details of Dick’s rich and varied career, please visit his website, www.dickrussell.org.
Please welcome Dick Russell as Oceana’s guest blogger!