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a recovery took place. Under Jones’s leadership, sea otters were reintroduced to Attu in the mid-1950s. Starting in 1954, the otter population increased at a healthy rate of at least 5 percent annually. A comeback was happening, one oyster bed at a time. “The number of animals we released at Attu was well below the level where the population could sustain itself,” Jones wrote. “I concluded it was for the better to expand the necessary protection to otters and let them expand than to try to introduce them. When a sea otter population really begins to grow, it will swamp the survival of any artificial introduc- tion.”

Another of Jones’s jobs was to make sure that people in boats or other trespassers didn’t hunt sea otters, which were like sitting ducks. Sometimes he would trap otters by using tranquilizer guns. “Unlike a seal that often sinks,” Jones explained in an official oral history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “sea otters float.” From 1958 to 1959 he introduced caribou to Adak Island. On Amchitka, working with the newest science, Jones helped reestablish the Canada goose by trying to get rid of island rats. Agattu, in particular, was plagued by these rodents. Sometimes Jones would use a slide-action 12-gauge Winchester Model 12 to shoot them. “All we had access to was poison and that was not good enough,” Jones reflected, “and besides, you have to watch where the poison goes. You don’t want it to go into the eagle population.”12

Although Jones felt good about his work for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, including the introduction of caribou on Adak Island, he was apprehensive when he heard rumors that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) wanted to conduct a series of underground nuclear explosions on Amchitka Island. Ironically, the Aleutians’ greatest strength as a wildlife incubator—their remoteness—was now their most dangerous liability. To Jones, it was strange to think that the U.S. government wanted to detonate an atomic bomb in the “ring of fire,” also called the “volcano belt”). “He blasted the AEC,” his wife recalled in an interview in 2010. “He went to Fairbanks to protest. His outspokenness came from a disbelief that a U.S. government agency could be so reckless.”13

Within an afternoon’s motorboat ride from Homer on the Kenai Peninsula were four major volcanoes: Redoubt, Douglas, Iliamna, and Augustine. Sometimes they looked like picture-postcard peaks, particularly when blanketed in snow. But eruptions were—from a geologic time perspective—commonplace. Mount Douglas, which guarded the entrance to Cook Inlet just north of the Shelikof Strait, had a highly acidic crater about 525 feet wide. To set off an atom bomb on an Aleutian island could very easily trigger earthquakes, causing smoke plumes to rise 50,000 feet in the sky. Then again, the Soviet Union had conducted more than 2,000 nuclear tests on the island of Novaya Zemlya (including a fifty-eight megaton, which is considered the biggest explosion in world history) and nobody at the United Nations was chastising the Kremlin.14 Why couldn’t Americans understand that wildlife and nuclear explosions didn’t mix?

When the AEC did detonate nuclear bombs on Adak in 1961, all Jones could do was weep. As a government employee, he felt trapped in a corridor with no exit, or a tunnel with no opening. If he quit U.S. Fish and Wildlife because of the detonation on Adak, who would look after the sea otters and emperor geese? The U.S. government also detonated nuclear bombs on Amchitka Island in 1965, 1969, and 1971.15 All Sea Otter Jones could do was try to protect the wildlife in the Aleutian chain—and outfit his home for solar energy, a small first step in the green movement. To reassure himself that humans weren’t invariably monsters, he’d play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor over and over again on the turntable.

II

Coinciding with Jones’s work in the Aleutians during the 1950s was Peter Matthiessen, a New York–based writer determined to document American wildlife in peril. Born on May 22, 1927, in a Manhattan hospital, Matthiessen was raised in Connecticut