Beluga Days: Nancy Lord

Posted At : August 14, 2008 1:00 AM
Related Categories: Science & Social Science,Alaska

Excerpted from Beluga Days by Nancy Lord, published by Counterpoint Press and Mountaineers Books.

Contributed and read by Nancy Lord, a Homer writer and the author of six books. Nancy teaches writing part-time at the Kachemak Bay campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage and in the new low-residency graduate program at UAA. Her website: www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com.

This is Nancy Lord, and this piece is from my book Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale's Truths:

"I had wanted, when I started, to learn everything I could about Cook Inlet's belugas. What I'd learned was that most of what was about belugas was really about things other than, or in addition to, belugas.

Dena'ina writer Peter Kalifornsky had taught that everything has a life of its own, but that nothing lives by itself. Cook Inlet's original people ... understood ecological relationships in a way that our ... scientists seem only now to be catching up to. The plankton connects to the salmon and the salmon to the beluga, and the pesticide sprayed in Mexico connects to the river and the air to the beluga..., and the people eating muktuk connect to ... the woman who reaches out and touches a wild beluga swimming by. The senators and the judges, and the corporations, connect to them all."

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Thanks for hosting Nancy Lord - she's been a wonderful advocate for the Cook Inlet beluga. In a state that prides itself on clean water and exceptional wildlife, it's hard to believe how hard the state and federal governments fight to rollback common sense safeguards.

# Posted By Bob Shavelson | 8/14/08 4:54 PM

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