A Few Moments Deep in Thought

This Moment on Earth (Public Affairs, 2007, $25) by John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry. To purchase this book, visit our online book store.

If John Kerry could speak the way he writes, he might well be holding a higher office at the moment. But this book speaks well for him and Teresa Heinz Kerry, suggesting both have many years ahead of them to contribute to the public good. In concise prose, closer to Teresa's impassioned speeches than John's prolix formulae, the pair serve up a collection of profiles in courage, covering the past 40 years of environmental decline and those who've fought against it. Many of their cast are well known figures, including Rachel Carson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet many more are regular folk who work the land or rivers and seek to preserve the natural landscape that's close to vanishing before their eyes.

Take Helen Reddout of Yakima, Washington, a grandmother who used to pick fruit in the fields as a migrant laborer then bought her own orchard with her farmhand husband. In the more than 50 years she's spent in Yakima, she and her family have enjoyed their free time bird watching, fishing in the river and gathering wildflowers. The arrival of Concentrated Animal Feed Operations, or CAFOs, however, turned the landscape into an open sewer and filled the riverbanks with filth. Arriving withfar more cattle than had ever grazed in Yakima, the CAFOs installed no sewage lines nor any means of handling the 120 pounds of manure each cow produces every day other than to pour it into pits and spray the excess across fields.

Soon so much manure was being sprayed that Reddout found herself gagging in her sleep: "All of a sudden, I just woke up. It was as if someone had taken sewage out of a septic tank and dumped it right in my face." Facing governmental inaction but with the need for a solution present with every breath, she persevered until the Eureka moment—learning that the Clean Water Act forbade the pollution of waterways and provided for lawsuits against polluters. By 1999, her coalition of neighbors won a suit against the area's worst polluter in a decision that recognized the Act applies to all of a CAFO's operations. Despite her successes, to this day, Reddout is uncomfortable with the environmentalist label, a theme Kerry and Heinz Kerry return to with other concerned citizens who have made a difference, noting that the power to change things is as much in the hands of grassroots organizers as it is in the control of larger non-governmental organizations.

Whether they are raising the alarm over global warming or detailing the chemicals entering our waterways, John and Teresa (who put the reader on a first-name basis with them throughout) bring a much-needed passion to a host of environmental concerns, always returning to the changes in individuals' lives and their triumphs. In it's 200 pages, the book covers methane mining, drift-net fishing, hormone-disrupting chemicals and shrinking glaciers, to name but a few of its concerns. Their appendices offer home energy and other tips and provide a compendium of sources for further information (including The Green Guide). And This Moment on Earth makes demands on its readers, holding all of us "accountable for the environmental implications of every decision," whether in Congress, in state and local government or in business. As they say, this is the moment not just to talk about the planet, but to save it.

—P.W. McRandle