12-Year-Old Audubon Article Warned of Dangers of Valdez

While magazines around the country scrambled to get a grip on the Exxon oil spill in Alaska last month, editors at Audubon magazine quietly thumbed through back issues of their conservation journal.

The article they sought is titled “The Valdez Connection,” and they’ve since mailed it to 250 newspaper editorial page writers around the country, with a note pointing out that the piece is extremely timely--even though it was published 12 years ago.

As soon as this latest tanker wreck occurred, Audubon sent a team of reporters and photographers to the scene, editor Les Line said. Their work will appear in a “long perspective” piece in the September issue, focusing on the political impact of the spill on the proposed development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the long-term effect on marine ecosystems.

In the meantime, Line is hoping people will take a look back a dozen years.

Written by science reporter Philip Fradkin, the March, 1977, piece summarizes the doubts of some public officials and environmentalists about the wisdom of shipping oil through that fragile ecology, and the author’s speculations on why those doubts were largely ignored.

It discusses, for example, why double hulls and other safety measures were not mandated by international law, and raises concerns about the threat to tankers presented by the extreme weather and natural hazards in the Valdez area. Stating that more than 50% of ship collisions and groundings are due to human error, the article details alleged inadequacies in regulations governing the people who pilot those ships.

In attending public meetings on the then-proposed port, the author observed that Coast Guard officers and oil tanker captains are among “the most self-assured professional groups . . . (with a) commonality of style, which can form the strongest of bonds.”

He adds, however: “Against these bonds and the combined expertise of the two groups it has been impossible for other federal agencies, coastal states and environmental groups to assert themselves with any effect in the highly technical field of oil tanker safety.” Twelve years ago, the author wrote that the shipment of oil through Alaskan waters would be a dangerous experiment. “The tremendously rich waters of southern Alaska . . . are a poor place to experiment on such a large scale,” he concluded.

“I hate to be in a position where we are saying we told them this is going to happen,” Line said this week. “But we did.”

Two-Faced Cover Story

Anyone who hasn’t guzzled too many of this month’s selected vintages will quickly discern that the current issue of the Wine Spectator is literally two-faced. Two covers; two sets of editorial copy.

One contents page lists the standard oenophile stuff: features on California cabernets and the scarcity of Dom Perignon.

Flip the semimonthly magazine over, though, and you’re staring at the cover of the “First Annual Swimsuit Issue.” Inside you’ll learn that “the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran has decreed that a noted cookbook author and chef must have his tongue cut out for writing a guide to matching Middle Eastern food with wine,” and you’ll find a satirical look at Sen. John Tower’s alleged wine imbibing habits: “Tower’s Guide to Power Drinking.”

Don’t be fooled. The mock issue is merely those wacky wine folks’ way of playing a belated April Fool’s prank on their epicurean readers.

Jim Gordon, managing editor of the twice-a-month Spectator, said the spoof has received enormous response, about two to one in favor of the gag. Those who didn’t toast the effort were mainly women in the industry, who failed to see the humor in the swimsuit parody.

The best of the seven-page satire is deliciously dry and delicate, with hints of spice on the finish--as in alleged wine writer Dan Limberger’s piece describing a scene in which Mondavi vineyard crews unload imported grape plants, “speaking only French to soothe the extraordinarily sensitive French vines.”

Other efforts, however, are rather astringent, with the sort of bouquet that makes one wish the editors had put a cork in it.

In light of recent events, for instance, one can only grimace at the cover teaser--”Geraldo Rivera: Favorite Wines of Serial Killers.” Grimace and hope it doesn’t give the talk show host ideas.

Soviet Named Top Editor

Writing in Pravda recently, Communist Party conservatives called him “scum on the crest of the wave of renewal.”

World Press Review took a different view, and in its May issue the magazine names Vitaly Korotich “1988 International Editor of the Year.”

WPR selected the editor of Moscow’s weekly Ogonyok (Little Flame) “for his leadership in a new age of journalism in the Soviet Union; for his devotion to reform and democratization despite efforts by conservatives to minimize his influence, and for his work to correct ‘official’--but false--history and promote the rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist repression.”

When he assumed the editorship of Ogonyok, the “glossy, Life-like” publication was similar to other Soviet propaganda organs. “It did not respect people,” Korotich told WPR. “What appeared in Ogonyok was so removed from people’s lives that they did not read it.”

The first key to the magazine’s transformation, he said, was a simple commitment “to tell the truth.”

Then he persuaded some hot Soviet writers to contribute, among them physicist Andrei Sakharov and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

What really caught the eye of the WPR editors, however, was the magazine’s reporting on Afghanistan, by a young reporter who gave firsthand accounts of life in the trenches.

“We published some of the first articles to say directly that we should get out of there,” Korotich said.

Fiction Running Strong

Fiction, long thought to be on the verge of extinction in non-literary magazines, continues to make a strong comeback. The April Mother Jones excerpts Alice Walker’s new novel, “The Temple of My Familiar,” and the May issue of Self features a new short story by Jay McInerney of “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Story of My Life” fame.

Titled “Baby You’re the Greatest,” the story represents a radical departure from McInerney’s previous work. Written from a traditional point of view, the narrative takes a downright mature (moralistic?) approach to the McInerney staples of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Elsewhere on the literary front, in an apparent attempt to cross over from one brat pack to another, actor Sean Penn can be found waxing poetic on the pages of The Moment, “A Randomly Published L.A. Journal of the Arts” (22704 Ventura Blvd. 245, Woodland Hills, Calif. 91364).

Penn, who finds himself in the company of such local literary stars as Charles Bukowski and Laurel Ann Bogen, shares his thoughts on older women, big dogs that wear animal sweaters, and an embarrassing moment in dating. That one begins:

i’m a cartoon, man

i’m a cartoon for a lot of reasons

i’m in living color, man

dots and shades . . .

‘California Design’

The May Architectural Digest is the fattest issue of that monthly ever, apparently because advertisers were attracted to the special theme, “California Design.”

Brendan Gill ponders the nature of California style in the issue--from Spanish colonials to Frank O. Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra homes--but seems to conclude only that the state can’t be categorized.

Among the homes profiled are Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving’s Pacific Palisades spread and Robert Mondavi’s Napa Valley estate. The most eye-catching place featured, however, is artist Tony Duquette’s San Francisco residence and sculpture pavilion.

With its weird sculptures and gilded pillars, towers, stupas and odd sweeping spaces, Duquette’s “celebrational environment,” would cause most interior decorators’ brains to hemorrhage.

But it’s easy to believe Duquette when he writes in the accompanying text, “within these walls the world which often looks ugly and sad, becomes a beautiful, magical place. . . . I look forward to seeing the smile on the face of the observer as he feels the excitement of looking into another world.”

Look hard at the pictures. On Feb. 15, while the Architectural Digest issue was going to press, a five-alarm fire destroyed the pavilion.

‘Cushy’ California Life

Another view of California can be found in the April issue of the Atlantic, which remains on the news racks through next week. The cover story excerpts the diary of George F. Kennan, whom Atlantic editors call “one of the most brilliant analysts and makers of foreign policy in American history.”

In these diary entries, Kennan writes eloquently of Paris during the Nazi occupation, of postwar Switzerland, Siberia and Norway. But none of these places seems nearly as foreign to him as Southern California.

It’s particularly interesting to read his condescending comments, which were made 20 years before Christopher Lasch wrote “The Culture of Narcissism,” and 30 years before the South Coast Regional Air Quality Management District decided to take charge of our lives.

Observing California’s dangerous dependence on two liquids, gas and water, Kennan worries that with the rise of the automobile, “man has acquired a new form of legs. . . . What disturbs me most is man’s abject dependence on this means of transportation and on the complicated processes that make it possible,” he writes.

The cushy California life, Kennan believes, renders local residents “childlike in many respects: fun-loving , quick to laughter and enthusiasm, unanalytical, unintellectual, outwardly expansive, preoccupied with physical beauty and prowess, given to sudden and unthinking seizures of aggressiveness, driven constantly to protect his status in the group by an eager conformism--yet not unhappy.”

If Southern Californians are wise, he writes, “surely the rest of us are fools.”