Complimentary Blueberry Juice

This book was published a couple years ago in 2023 and I’ve been waiting and waiting for a translation from the original Finnish (since my Finnish needs improvement), and as of 2025 it is now available in English. Written as an account of Russian expedition to the east that lead to the Steller’s Sea Cow extinction and events thereafter, Iida Turpeinen blends facts with a creative license for narrative to tell this engaging story.

This book grabbed a lot of attention when it was first released in Finland, and it grabbed mine too (even though I couldn’t read it), with this gorgeous book cover.

Like many naturalist books, natural history books, or books on environmental issues in general, Turpeinen puts into grave and poetic terms the cost of rampant human destruction on the natural world. She puts in the crosshairs the idea that nature is forever, that there is always more around the corner, indefatigable to human pressures and always able to provide more.

This is a lesson we still have yet to learn today, and may never learn as a species until it is too late. Having read book after book and paper after paper citing unbelievable numbers of animals shot, skinned or bagged, or numbers of trees felled, and so on, in Beasts of the Sea there are new dimensions to this, even to a seasoned reader of the trails of human destruction.

The truth about the destruction of the animal kingdom and natural world by humanity is that future generations will not know what it was like, and lose the capacity to imagine, and thus, perhaps lose the capacity to fix what we have broken. Just like today, you and I have no recollection, and no ability to imagine whatsoever, the vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons, or herds of tens of thousands of Bison. We likewise have no concept of how one could walk along a river or tributary and find thousands of Beavers. Even the life we have now, has been pushed to the margins of existence. We are impoverished by what we don’t even know that we don’t have any longer.

These books always end on a message of staying hopeful. I’m not sure that I am all the time hopeful, but to read an account like Beasts of the Sea provides, at least I got to learn about a new species that has been lost, and to imagine Alaskan islands so full of foxes they would come right up to your campfire.

I think this book also pairs well with Werner Herzog’s excellent new film Ghost Elephants. Why a significant percentage of humans feel the need to shoot everything that moves is quite beyond my understanding.

Sooner or later we will have to learn that we need all the life on this planet. 99% of all life that has ever existed has gone extinct, but what is alive today, and what stays alive until tomorrow, is, at this point in history, entirely up to us.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice

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