Reviews for Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

The average rating for Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-27 00:00:00 Jean Lapointe 'Nature Noir' is definitely a suitable pandemic lockdown book, as it transports the reader away from their claustrophobic reality to an incredible landscape in the Sierra Nevada. I very much enjoyed the laconic and insightful tone of Elmore Leonard applied to crimes taking place in a spectacular state park. I hadn't realised that in America park rangers carry guns and make arrests. (Oh, America.) Fisher Smith is a thoughtful and deliberate writer, giving equal weight to the landscapes and wildlife as the humans that visit them. Each chapter centres upon a particular episode in his career as a park ranger, placed within wider context that informed me about the gold rush and rise of public environmental concern in California, among other things. Recounted incidents include unsolved murders, suicides, drug overdoses, and 20th century gold prospecting. The criminal activity is tragic, squalid, and embedded in poverty. In tone and content this recalled Justified, the excellent TV series adapted from Elmore Leonard's work. Hanging over the whole narrative and Fisher Smith's job is the fact that his park was for decades slated to be submerged by a massive new dam. Incidentally, I did not previously realise that dams can cause such significant pressure on local geology that they cause earthquakes. Fisher Smith discusses notions of wildness, nature, and human impact on the environment in a considered and nuanced fashion that I really appreciated: We rangers have a fair amount of time to read and I'd been aware of these [postmodern] ideas for a while. They are merely a more fashionable version of traditional human-centred technological optimism. But seen from a boat on a regulated river that night, the claims of these postmodernists looked faulty. However poorly managed that day, the job of metering a single river to generate power without killing any whitewater rafters was far simpler than managing the climate that provided the river's water. If dams had many beneficial effects for civilisation - our late summer white water rafting season being one of them - they also had many unintentional outcomes. Coastal beaches were now deprived of their sand, for centuries replenished by rivers wearing down mountains. Some of the beaches would now grow rocky - and that change might have an effect on, say, the economy of a beach town or the nesting of plovers, and that change still another effect. [...] We humans were reductionists, and neither our brains nor our most powerful computers can begin to account for the complex web of interrelationships in a global ecosystem. In the end much of what is seemingly known and tamed is in fact unknown, and untamed. 'Nature Noir' is a unique, diverting, and informative read. Although the title suggested that its appeal would be stylistic, I was delighted to find it has a great deal of substance.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-31 00:00:00 Joshua Rodriguez I read this when it came out, around 2007, so didn't think I would ever write a review. But this book has stayed with me over the past 8 years primarily because of the description of what it really means to be a forest ranger(a description I could never have predicted), and because the author sadly and tragically contracted Lyme Disease as a result of his work. It was the first time I had ever heard of such devastating symptoms. Sadly, it is not the last time I heard of such a thing.