A Radical Mention: Robert Leonard Reid

Robert Leonard Reid

from John Barrette at NewsReview:

There are third party candidates, but my favorite for that role is too busy with his own writing and musical career to jumble his life by stumbling into the political maelstrom. I speak of the aforementioned friend, Carson City’s Robert Leonard Reid (no relation to Harry that I can discern).

Bob Reid is a bleeding heart booster of an ecological approach to existence, something captured with aplomb in his latest book: Arctic Circle: Birth and Rebirth in the Land of the Caribou. In it he recounts an Arctic trip to watch caribou migrate.

And he quotes the great naturalist Wendell Berry. For me, it made a pertinent point regarding current politics both nationally and in Nevada.

“In his poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things,’” writes Reid, “Wendell Berry offers as an antidote to the dissonance of daily life the ‘still water’ of the natural world:

‘When despair for the world grows in me/ and I wake in the night at the least sound/ in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,/ I go and lie down where the wood drake/ rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds./ I come into the peace of wild things … ’

“Nature has the capacity to heal the frazzled soul, Berry reminds us, bringing with it freedom and ‘the grace of the world,’” Bob Reid concluded.

Bob Reid also wrote the musical revue “I Say Nevada!” that was presented in Carson City in 2008. An updated “bailout version” is scheduled for this autumn. In it, songs make sardonic humor romp. In one, Harry Reid is satirized for the heartthrob he is (NOT).

Arctic Circle Review

“Reid’s book is not exactly a chronicle; it’s a poem, an ode to wild Alaska. It’s not only about nature, but also about human interaction with it, and specifically about the reactions of one human, himself, to it. Initially I was impatient with Reid’s prologue, his meandering and his failure to get on with it. But this book is not about plot or narrative tension; it’s about being there. And Reid has a talent for taking us there.”

from Marty Carloc's review of Arctic Circle
at The Internet Review of Books

Burning Down the House: Oil in the Arctic Circle

from Arctic Circle, a memoir by Robert Leonard Reid

“The coastal plain is where the polar bear dens and the caribou vacations, and where millions of migratory birds nest during a blink-of-an-eye summer. It’s also where the oil is. No one knows exactly how much is there, but it’s a lot. Oil industry sources put the number as high as sixteen billion barrels. If they’re right, refuge reserves exceed those of Prudhoe Bay, the largest-known oil field in North America. Drilling opponents have adopted a much smaller figure. By their estimate the refuge holds about an eight-month supply of oil for the United States (assuming that only refuge oil were used). An equivalent amount could be saved — and drilling foregone — by increasing the fuel efficiency of every vehicle in the United States by just two miles per gallon.

The United States Geological Survey conducted exhaustive analyses of the relevant seismic data and in 2000 published what may be the closest we’ll get to an impartial estimate of the coastal plain’s oil potential. The survey estimated a 95 percent chance that 1.9 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil will be found; a 50 percent chance that 5.3 billion barrels will be found; and a 5 percent chance that 9.4 billion barrels will be found. The only way to assess the accuracy of such predictions, of course, is to drill. This idea strikes some people as sensible, and others as akin to burning down a house to see if it is fireproof.”