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Tigers in Red Weather: A Journey Through Asia
By Ruth Padel Walker & Company, 2006 Reviewed by Fred Pearce John Nielsen grew up in the shadow of the California condor, psychically if not physically. In the 1960s, he was a kid roaming the foothills of the rugged mountains near the Sespe Range in central California, frightened at the notion (planted by his young friends) that the giant, unseen vultures lurking somewhere in that remote backcountry would swoop down to attack. As a writer twenty years later, he began chronicling the condor’s roller- coaster fortunes—and lost his heart to the bird he once feared. Nielsen, an environmental reporter for National Public Radio, stakes out his allegiances quickly in Condor, his lively and hugely readable account of this Pleistocene survivor’s checkered fortunes. “You may think there’s no chance you could ever give a damn about this bird, but take my word for it: once you see the condor soaring, it owns you.” Writing for a general audience, Nielsen uses rich, muscular language and vivid descriptions to bring alive the bird, its world, and the work of the field biologists who have tried—with varying degrees of success—to save this most famous of endangered species. Here’s a passage in which he describes the experiences of a scrawny young biologist named Pete Bloom, who spent months in grave-like pit blinds trying to capture the last free-flying condors in the 1980s: “Bloom said it was easy to recognize the roar of an approaching condor: the whoosh that became a roar kept getting louder and louder until it ended with the thump of great big feet and the clatter of enormous wings. When the condors walked directly over the trap, Bloom could hear them breathing, their wheezing lungs sounding something like a winded child’s.” Nielsen is a deft storyteller, but it doesn’t hurt that the condor’s history is freighted with colorful human characters, from overzealous egg-collectors living in caves on the condor cliffs to turn-of-the-century naturalist Joseph P. Grinnell, who could tell when the local kangaroo rats had come into breeding condition by noting the marks left in the sand by the males’ scrotal sacs. Looming large in the story is Carl Koford, the young researcher Grinnell hired in 1939, with National Aud-ubon’s help, to conduct the first study of the condors. Koford was a bit of an odd duck, thriving in the chaparral and living for weeks at a time on little but canned apricots. His work, interrupted by World War II, resulted in the 1952 publication of the seminal work on condor ecology. It also left Koford convinced that the best thing anyone could do for condors was to leave them the hell alone, and he managed in the 1950s to scuttle a plan to create a small captive flock. Embraced by wilderness activists like David Brower and backed up by Koford’s almost godlike credibility on all things condorish, it was a view that held up serious research and conservation measures until it was almost too late. In many ways, the fight over how to save the condor has been far nastier than the fight over whether to save it—and, as Nielsen shows, it’s far from over today. The conflict between the hands-off and hands-on camps forms a significant part of his story, and given Nielsen’s evident sympathy for the hands-on approach, he does an admirable job of not taking sides. In fact, his book is a gripping tutorial on the trial-and-error nature of wildlife management—the heart-stopping way scientists must make decisions that may save or doom a species, often with little or no information to guide them, and the bitter internecine conflicts that those decisions may spark among people of good intentions but differing opinions. But Condor’s flaw is one that conservationists will note with particular regret. Having brought his readers through this remarkable story, Nielsen misses a golden opportunity to sum up the lessons of the condor’s long travail and apply them to broader questions of endangered species conservation, thus forcing us to confront what they mean for the preservation of the larger wild world. The condor’s history may be the future for other charismatic but inconvenient species like bears, big cats, and elephants, and I would have welcomed his insights into an issue I have struggled with as a conservationist. Since we can’t afford to spend tens of millions of dollars and decades of exhausting field work in pulling back every species from its final death spiral, how best can society use its limited resources to preserve the most challenging of megafauna—those with enormous ranges and habits that bring them into repeated conflict with humanity? What wisdom have we accrued, in the long slog to pull the condor back from the brink, that can be applied in other places and to other species? Unfortunately, these are not questions Nielsen spends much time pondering. Admittedly, there is no way to bring the condor’s story to a neat finish because the end is far from certain. Condors are now breeding in the wild but still dying at a frightening rate from lead poisoning; many of the wild-born chicks die from ingesting all manner of manmade junk. Released condors have often behaved more like teenage thugs than wild birds, even breaking into homes. The fault lines among the condor’s defenders are as deep as ever, splitting colleagues over such fundamental questions as whether modern America is simply too toxic a place for the condor—whether this magnificent bird, whose history is such a cautionary tale, has a future as anything other than a sham species stocked from zoos just fast enough to replace the ever-dying wild birds. Back to Books Index >> |
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The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
By Tim Flannery Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006 Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change By Elizabeth Kolbert Bloomsbury USA, 2006 Reviewed by Margaret Pizer It might be easy to dismiss the recent slew of books on climate change as more contributions to the old debate about whether global warming is real. But Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe both move far beyond the hackneyed arguments to deal with the implications of climate change reality. Flannery, one of Australia's leading ecological thinkers and writers, takes a systematic and scientifically detailed look at the evidence for global warming, the history of climate change science, and the prognosis for the future climate. The last section of The Weather Makers, titled "The Solution," offers refreshingly clear assessments of strategies to get us out of the mess we've created, and it ends with a surprisingly motivating pep talk about the power of changing individual behaviors. In contrast to Flannery's systematic style, New Yorker writer Kolbert frames her somewhat slimmer volume as a series of profiles of places and people central to climate change science and policy. Although Kolbert also covers the basics of global warming science, her strength lies in providing additional personal detail that nicely complements scientific detail described by Flannery. For instance, Flannery mentions the Alaskan village of Shishmaref as an example of how global warming can destroy communities. This centuries-old Inupiat village is falling into the sea as the ice pack—and the traditional food-supplying animals that use it—retreats. Kolbert gives a human dimension to this example by describing her discussions with elders about plans to move the entire village out of harm's way. For all their differences in approach, both books effectively deliver the message that it's time to wake up and do something about human-induced climate change. Both Flannery and Kolbert make compelling use of the concept of the Anthropocene, first introduced by Paul Crutzen (codiscoverer of the ozone hole). Both illustrate how humans have become the defining force that shapes our planet's biological communities and physical environments, right down to geology and climate. Flannery takes this idea to its logical conclusion, attributing to climate change a variety of natural and human catastrophes—from increased hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico to the drought in the Sahel that he blames for genocide in the Sudan. Soon, he writes, "The judiciary will be faced with apportioning guilt and responsibility for human actions resulting from the new climate." Flannery has some particularly provocative ideas about how we will maintain a civilized society in this brave new world. He and Kolbert both argue convincingly that we'll soon be forced to stop denying climate change and start managing its consequences if we want to adapt to life in the Anthropocene. Back to Books Index >> |
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Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006
By Edward O. Wilson Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 Reviewed by Margaret Pizer This imposing volume is a compilation of 61 articles and essays picked from the mind-boggling list of E.O. Wilson's published works (over 400 in total, listed chronologically at the end of the book). From the first article Wilson (as a 19-year-old undergraduate) ever published—on the distribution of invasive fire ants—to his recent writings on the philosophy of knowledge, this retrospective is a fascinating survey of a body of work that has addressed many of the most important concepts in modern ecology. Wilson's brief introductions to the articles trace the development of his scientific interests and fit them into the broader context of developments in the field as a whole. Although many of the articles are available separately elsewhere, seeing them together drives home the truly remarkable scale of Wilson's influence on modern biology—from inventing the subdisciplines of island biogeography and sociobiology to coining the term "biodiversity" and justifying conservation as one of the central goals of modern biology. Back to Books Index >> |
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Nature's Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation
By Peter Friederici Island Press, 2006 Reviewed by Margaret Pizer Restoration is "a lovely word, like religion. But people are abusing it," says Mary Lou Quinn, one of the players in the controversy over cutting trees and burning brush to return prairie and savanna habitats to Chicago-area parks. In Nature's Restoration, environmental journalist Peter Friederici focuses on the motivations and passions of restoration's practitioners as well as its opponents, such as Quinn. Traveling from east to west across the U.S. (with a prologue in Bermuda), Friederici seamlessly weaves discussions of restoration research, history, and philosophy into five conservation stories, ranging from efforts to breed blight-resistant chestnuts in Virginia to the environmental and cultural reclamation of an island in Hawaii previously used for military testing. What emerges from each example is a portrait of difficult and rewarding work that is deeply optimistic, requiring an almost religious faith in the ability of people to improve their surroundings and "set things right." Back to Books Index >> |
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