Customer Reviews

The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the books that first drew me to Baja california years ago. Unfortunately much of what Krutch saw has inevitably been swept away by the rising tide of tourism & development, but enough remains that Krutch's lyrical prose is more than a eulogy, one can still find some of teh magic that he describes so well here. I would strongly reccomend this book to anyone planning on visiting Baja California and/or anyone who is interested in the intersection between natural history and literature -one gets both here.

I first read Joseph Wood Krutch in an introduction he wrote to "Walden and other writings". Undoubtedly Thoreau influenced Krutch's world view and philosophy (so much so you would say that he evolved from a drama critic to a naturalist, although no doubt both of these interests occupied him concurrently at least for some portion of his life).

The Forgotten Peninsula is a fine book by a naturalist. Krutch described the desert plants and marine animals as well as the human and natural history of Baja California based on several trips he made (some the "hard way" by 4-wheel vehicles, some the "easy way" by plane). The descriptions are crisp and vivid, if somewhat detached. I deduct one star because sometimes I wish he was a little more emotional, more personal and more passionate in his writing -- maybe this is why another reviewer thinks it is a "dry listing" (actually it is much better than that). Perhaps he was too content with being (and indeed he may have intended to be) merely an observer.

The last two chapters posed some profound questions about the place of the human race in nature and the virtue of progress. This is a book written almost 50 years ago, reading these questions in the context of what the world has become now gives one much to ponder. No doubt a lot of things described in this book may have long disappeared, but ironically Baja is forgotten no more (ever heard of or seen on ESPN Baja 500?). Yet reading the book still makes one want to go to Baja California (a place I have not yet been to) to see what little still remains there.

I loved reading this book about the Baja of years past and relating it to the places I was now seeing -- but the changes over the years were tremendous! Don't expect this to reflect the Baja of today.

You would think that with a subtitle like "A naturalist in Baja", you could expect this to be a nature guide to the area. You would be mistaken. Instead, this seems to be some sort of discourse on the human development of Baja California by a naturalist who has decided to play amateur sociologist. Most of the comments on the natural history of the region amount to a dry listing of the local plant life. The final chapter is prescient in its questioning of the sustainability of economic development, but the prose throughout the book suffers from awkward syntax and seems stilted even by 1961 standards. The description of the roads and towns is now so outdated as to be only of historical interest
I was looking for a nature guide written in narrative style to take along on my first trip to the region, and this is definitely not what I had in mind. Aside from the grey whale and sea lion, this work does not even mention some of the marine animals for which the area is so famous - such as the whale shark and manta ray. If you're looking for a literate exposition on the Baja experience, consider instead John Steinbeck's classic Log form the Sea of Cortez. Although written even earlier, it remains timeless.

This 1961 "classic" was recommended to me as background reading for an upcoming trip to Baja California and the Sea of Cortez. Don't be tempted to judge it by its inexplicably murky cover.

The author, a well-established theatre critic, biographer, essayist and author, in later life became an enthusiastic naturalist and conservationist and made ten study visits to Baja by private airplane during the 1950s, long before Highway 1 was completed. Overland travel at that time, even short-haul and local, was slow and liable to breakdown; he had his share of that, too, and includes it in this personal account.

The book is a generally comfortable mix of factual and historical information and his own personal experiences. He covers topography, geology, climate, fauna and flora, fossil history and human history - the Spanish conquest, adventurers, priests, whaling, the sea-salt and mining industries and much more - interspersed with his encounters with local residents. One of his particular obsessions is the strange boojum tree, which gets a chapter to itself. The only illustration in the book is an outline map of the peninsula.

The writing style is easy, natural and relaxed, and occasionally amusing. I often felt as if I was in his company, just listening to him talk and talk about all the stuff he found so fascinating. His enthusiasm is infectious and he manages not to baffle the layman with overly academic or technical terms. Sometimes, he tends to go on a bit - name-checking his well-to-do travelling-companions or elaborately detailing the manoeuvres of his aircraft; these must have been important to him at the time but really add nothing to the story.

He uses the last chapter to ruminate on the contrast between life in the US and life in Baja, on abundance and shortage, and on the inevitability and the desirability of "progress". Although not alone in his ambivalence towards industrialisation - Vance Packard's "The Waste Makers" was published in 1960 - his view was not too fashionable at the time. Since then, of course, we have had Hippies, Conservation Awareness and the Climate Change Movement and so his qualms may now seem to us rather tentative. He worries about us imposing "our own way of life" on other people as zealously as the Jesuit missionaries once tried to impose their ideas in Baja. He fears for Baja's future: outsiders might see it as ripe for exploitation - the beaches becoming "Coney Islands of horror" - or might prefer it to remain picturesque and primitive. He acknowledges that he, too, is "an intruder in Baja" and knows that the good of its own population ought to come first, but may not. Fifty years on, was he right to worry?

As a guide to present-day Baja, the book is obviously well out-of-date. As a portrait of Baja up until fifty years ago, it is very readable, affectionate, informative, wide-ranging, and much of it is still of value.

This is the book we use on NOLS expeditions, and we have to literally carry these books. It is worth carrying.