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Brenda
Peterson is the
author of three novels: River of Light (Knopf, 1978), Becoming
the Enemy
(Graywolf Press, 1988), and Duck and Cover (HarperCollins, 1991)
which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Her two collections of essays: Living by Water (Fawcett/Columbine,
1994) and
Nature and Other Mothers (HarperCollins, 1992) established her
as a leading nature writer and she was extensively profiled in the two-volume
reference work America's Nature Writers (Charles Scribners, 1996).
She was also featured in Edge Walking on the Western Rim: New Works
by 12 Northwest Writers (Sasquatch, 1994). Her creative non-fiction
work
Sister Stories (Viking/Penguin 1995, paperback 1997), was hailed
by the
New York Times as an "inspiring, thought-provoking and strong
book."
Peterson's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Seattle
Times, and magazines such as New Age Journal, Sierra, Orion and
The Utne
Reader (continues)...
Born in 1950, in the high Sierras of the Pacific Northwest on the border
of California and Oregon, Peterson spent much of her childhood moving
around the country following her father's U.S. Forest Service work. She
is a graduate of the University of California, Davis. For five years,
she worked at The New Yorker, and then moved to live on a family farm
outside of Denver. There she was fiction editor for Rocky Mountain
Magazine, and taught at Arizona State University in Tempe. For the last
20 years, Peterson taught writing in universities and now mentors
private students and workshops in Seattle, Washington.
Over the last two decades, she has been studying and swimming with wild
dolphins all over the world and writing extensively about cetacean
conservation. She also is working with several marine mammal scientists
in the field of dolphin-human interaction. For seven years she worked as
an environmental writer and editor and has written extensively about
animals. In 1993, Peterson covered the Alaska Wolf Summit and the 1995
Yellowstone Wolf Recovery for the Seattle Times, New Age Journal, and
National Public Radio. She is a commentator for NPR, and a contributing
editor at New Age Journal where she has published several cover stories,
such as "Sex as Compassion: A New Eros in a Time of AIDS" and "Sister
Against Sister: The Civil War Over Abortion." Her environmental feature
articles appear regularly in the Seattle Times and Orion. Her work is
reprinted in over 40 anthologies and textbooks.
With co-editors Linda Hogan and Deena Metzger, Peterson has edited the
best-selling anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and
Animals (Ballantine). Volume II in this series of Women and the Natural
World is The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World
(Farrar, Straus, & Giroux). Volume III in the series is Face to Face:
Women Look at God (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003). The sequel to
Peterson's popular classic Living by Water, entitled Singing to the
Sound: Visions of Nature, Animals, and Spirit, was published to critical
acclaim and is now out in paperback from New
Sage Press.
Peterson's most recent book, a memoir, is
Build Me an Ark: A Life with
Animals (W.W. Norton). It was chosen as a ONE SPIRIT and Quality
Paperback Club book selection and is also being translated into Chinese.
It was awarded a “Best Spiritual Book of 2001” by Spirituality and
Health magazine and is due out in paperback, July 2002.
Author’s Note
The science in my most recent book,
Animal Heart—including xenotransplantation and the use of a new
military sonar—is factual and reflected in real-world current
events. The novel is inspired by my love for our oceans and marine
life and my concerns about the threats posed by some of these new
scientific technologies.
The U.S. Navy’s use of
mid-to-low-frequency active sonar has especially troubled me. In
1998, I wrote my first of many articles about this sonar—“War Games
in a Whale Nursery.” Since that time, there have been mass
strandings of marine mammals linked to such sonar tests from Greece
to the Canary Islands. And in March 2000, there was a stranding of
whales off the Bahamas, for which the navy belatedly admitted its
sonar was the probable cause—only after official necropsies showed
that the cetaceans had suffered hemorrhages in their jaws, inner
ears, and brains.
After the navy
tested its sonar in my home Pacific Northwest waters in the spring
of 2003, thirteen harbor porpoises stranded. Newspapers reported the
deaths and the scientists’ questions: Did these animals beach
themselves to escape the painful acoustic blasts—sounds so loud they
were heard above water by whale watchers twenty miles from the navy
ship? Did the noise send the panicked cetaceans into dives so deep
that they ran out of air, then surfaced too quickly, suffering a
form of the bends? Or does the sonar disorient, deafen, and cause
hemorrhaging due to traumatic “sonic pressure insult”?
This high-intensity
sonar is like “acoustic bullets,” says orca expert Ken Balcomb,
“like having a nail driven into your head and it stays there.”
New, international
research now confirms the lethal link between military sonar and
necropsy evidence of decompression sickness in marine mammal deaths.
The U.S. federal courts have taken an important step in limiting the
Navy’s far-reaching, low-frequency sonar to 1 percent of their
global ocean range, when they had planned to use it in all the
world’s oceans. But environmental exemptions for the military could
undermine this U.S. limit; and mid-frequency sonar -- like that
responsible for the Bahamas and Canary Islands strandings -- is
still being used by NATO and the U.S. all over the world.
I believe that it
will not be scientists or government agencies that will finally halt
or limit this dangerous underwater technology. It will have to be
us—everyday people and international grassroots organizations.
If you wish to make
our seas safe for all life, please contact: Orca
Network,
Natural Resources
Defense Council,
Ocean
Mammal Institute,
SeaFlow,
or Ocean Futures.
Brenda Peterson
Seattle, Washington
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