E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I write environmental mysteries I call 'eco-thrillers.' My new book Red Tide deals with what might happen if criminals dumped extremely dangerous chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact dolphins, whales, manatees, shrimp, oysters, and other coastal and offshore wildlife are dying off in unprecedented numbers in the Gulf. Presumably that was due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But my plot suggested others could be using that as an excuse for dumping deadly chemicals. Meanwhile, what is happening to our environment worldwide? According to today's NPR World News glaciers throughout the world are melting. Our Republican congress can't even agree that climate change is happening, let alone that it is man-made. According to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe global warming is a 'hoax.' Pretty good hoax, to be melting every glacier on the planet, Jim. There are other changes happening as well, at an alarming rate. We depend on photo-plankton for half the oxygen...

My love for and attachment to Florida and it's true natives goes way back: to when I was six years old, in fact, and my dad got pneumonia. His company--then a global telephone monopoly--while perhaps unaware of the irony of themselves being the cause of his illness (second-hand smoke)--felt sufficient guilt, it seems, to send him to Florida for six months to recover. I, being at the time a footloose five year old, had little choice but to leave my safe home in suburban New Jersey, along with my kindergarten schoolmates and white middle-class neighborhood gang (another story) and tag along to experience, for the first time, an alien world. I might as well have been a (really) young Luke Skywalker on Dagobah. Nothing was familiar: not the empty dunes on the coast of the strange teal-blue sea that didn't even have real waves except sometimes (I was accustomed to the Jersey shore, which had real waves on which I'd later learn to body surf). The dunes were protected by a sea wa...