keywords: wildlife conservation, zoology
Though bears loom large in our collective imagination, their flesh-and-blood counterparts are increasingly losing ground. Eight Bears, the debut of environmental journalist Gloria Dickie, draws on visits to key hotspots where Earth’s remaining bear species come into conflict with humans. By interviewing scores of people, both conservationists and those suffering at the paws of these large predators, this nuanced and thought-provoking reportage asks whether humans and bears can coexist.
Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, written by Gloria Dickie, published by W.W. Norton & Company in August 2023 (hardback, 250 pages)
The roots of this book go back to 2013 when Dickie started a master’s in environmental journalism and midway settled on bear-human conflicts in the Rocky Mountains. Since then, she has travelled to Asia and the Americas to see first-hand all eight extant bear species (spectacled, sloth, panda, moon/Asiatic black, sun, American black, brown/grizzly, and polar bear[1]). The only obvious regions missing from her story are Alaska, Russia, and Europe, all of which have large populations of bears. Even so, she has visited a formidable list of destinations. As an aside here, kudos to both the stylish bear portraits opening each chapter from the hand of Arjun Parikh, and Dickie’s meticulous list of notes. The latter mentions the many people she has interviewed or corresponded with over the years and, for some sources, provide additional notes that are too detailed for the main narrative.
The first half of the book’s subtitle promises a look at the bear’s mythic past. Though there is mention here of the predominance of bears in northern hemisphere cultures, the so-called circumpolar bear cult tradition, and the rarely discussed role of the bear in Peruvian culture and history, this is a minor motif in the book. Much more can be and has been said about the cultural history of bears and I have provided some recommended reading below.
Instead, as seems unavoidable when writing about megafauna nowadays, the focus of Eight Bears is on the second half of the subtitle, their imperilled future. The outlook is grim and Dickie early on mentions that “almost everywhere I went, bears seemed to be a shadow of what they once were” (p. 8). Probably the biggest threat is habitat loss, followed closely by hunting and poaching. A historic combination of these two decimated North American bear populations under European settlement. Polar bears have become the poster children of climate change, though the disappearance of sea ice is yet another form of habitat loss. I would be remiss if I did not mention that several whistleblowers have argued that hunting poses a continued but underappreciated threat to polar bears. Asia is additionally home to some particularly grisly practices: sloth bears are beaten into submission to become dancing bears, and moon and sun bears are experiencing years of, what is effectively, surgical torture on bile farms. The former has been outlawed with a reasonable degree of success, the latter less so. From her descriptions, Dickie visits the same bile farmer and speaks to some of the same people that Rachel Love Nuwer interviewed for her 2018 book Poached. Little seems to have improved in the intervening years, unfortunately.
“as seems unavoidable when writing about megafauna nowadays, the focus of Eight Bears is on the second half of the subtitle, their imperilled future.”
Though bears are usually at the losing end of human-wildlife conflict, Dickie does not avoid exploring the flipside. Many readers outside of Asia might be surprised to learn that the inappropriately named sloth bear is easily the world’s most dangerous bear. In India, more than 100 attacks every year kill or gruesomely injure predominantly poor, rural people, with Dickie seeking out some of the victims. In the USA, where grizzly populations are recovering, she speaks to ranchers and farmers who lose livestock to bears and frequently object that “liberal urbanites are the ones who want predators back on the landscape, but they aren’t the ones suffering the consequences” (p. 177). In Canada, she visits the remarkable tourist town of Churchill at the edge of Hudson Bay which is home to equal numbers of humans and polar bears. To keep people safe while avoiding lethal control methods as much as possible, it relies on an unprecedented amount of technology such as helicopters, snowmobiles, flares, rubber bullets, a bear-holding facility, and one scientist trying to turn a military radar into a proverbial beardar. Even so, human lives are at risk, and Dickie speaks to a woman who survived a mauling.
The chapters focusing on bears in the USA offer some of the most remarkable case studies of people attempting to live alongside bears. The century-long history of black bear management around Yosemite National Park offers “a full-scale experiment of all the ways people and bears can clash” (p. 153). After decades of park management doing things wrong (making a tourist attraction out of bears scavenging on garbage dumps, thus inadvertently training a generation of them how not to forage in the wild), they spent decades trying to do things right. A combination of bear-resistant food storage containers on campgrounds and strict enforcement of rules has trained tourists to be more mindful. Judging by Biel’s book Do (Not) Feed the Bears on Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite has not been unique in this regard. Similarly, the continuing saga to get grizzlies delisted as a protected species, and the lawsuits reverting those decisions, make for fascinating reading.
“The chapters focusing on bears in the USA offer some of the most remarkable case studies of people attempting to live alongside bears.”
Eight Bears becomes more thought-provoking as it progresses. Here is how it provoked mine. Dickie puts down several relevant dots on paper at different points in the book (mentioning human population growth, climate change, and the resource-hungry global supply chain) but she does not explicitly connect them to draw the contours of the larger challenge ahead. So, here be a tangent, and my attempt to connect those dots, triggered by her repeated interviewing of grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen. Upon retirement in 2015, with grizzlies sufficiently recovered, he supported their delisting. However, by 2021, seeing how states were failing to manage grizzly populations “with maturity and grace” (p. 180), he changed his mind and now opposes delisting. This raises fundamental questions. What is the point of all our conservation efforts, of the decades-long recovery programs, of the large number of scientists engaged in it, if we do not address the root causes that got threatened species in trouble in the first place? For me, books such as Abundant Earth and Alfie & Me have really driven home the point that, unless we change our relationship with the natural world and stop treating it as a bottomless larder, conservation is little more than a palliative solution, a stay of execution. If we restore animals to an increasingly degraded environment, to a human population that does not want to share the world with them, they will have to remain on permanent life support. To be clear, I do not think conservation is futile; it is vital. So long as it is not an end unto itself. We cannot lose sight of the bigger picture: a world hospitable to non-human animals. Achieving that goal might very well require us to do less rather than more, to (as advocated by Abundant Earth) pull back and scale down our imprint on this world. Servheen’s call for “maturity and grace” in the context of grizzly bear management can just as well be applied to our tenancy of this planet.
Even if you were to come away from this book without having your thoughts similarly provoked, Eight Bears is a mighty fine environmental reportage that is nuanced and well-researched. Given the often regional nature of books on bears and people, Dickie’s globetrotting overview of the challenges faced by all extant bears is very welcome.
1. ↑ Dickie is quick to clarify the confusion around several non-bears such as red pandas and koalas. She also steers clear of the warren of subspecies, only briefly mentioning the existence of the Kodiak bear (a subspecies of brown bear). For all species except polar bears, two or (many) more subspecies are recognized or proposed and there is much disagreement as to which ones are considered valid.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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A selection of titles on the cultural history of bears:
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keywords: ornithology, philosophy
Ecologist Carl Safina needs little in the way of introduction, having written the lauded Beyond Words and Becoming Wild, and a score of earlier books. For me, he ranks right up there with modern science popularisers such as Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, and the late Frans de Waal for his thought-provoking and intensely beautiful writing. His latest book sees him captivated by a bird as he nurses back to health an orphaned screech owl. But Alfie & Me is far more than a memoir about one man’s friendship with a wild animal, as it sends him on a personal quest to better understand humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Come for the owls, stay for Safina’s philosophical reflections and piercing analysis of how the West came to see the natural world as a commodity to exploit and exhaust.
Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, written by Carl Safina, published by W.W. Norton & Company in November 2023 (hardback, 352 pages)
Safina is far from the first person to nurse a wounded owl back to health and write a book about it. Jennifer Ackerman mentioned several wildlife rehabbers in the recently reviewed What an Owl Knows; in 2014, historian Martin Windrow wrote about his 15 years with a tawny owl named Mumble; in 1985, biologist Stacey O’Brien committed to 19 years of caring for a barn owl named Wesley; in 1960, Jonathan Franklin wrote of his time with two tawny owls at Eton. It is a human-bird relationship that might very well stretch back to the dawn of human evolution.
This saga starts in June 2018 when Safina and his wife find a young, orphaned screech owl starving and near death in their yard in Long Island, New York. They nurse her back to health and name her Alfie. What follows are several years of intense caring as some of her feathers initially fail to develop properly. Tamed, Alfie sticks around as Safina dithers between caring for her and releasing her. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns offer the opportunity for near-constant monitoring while Alfie flies free, matures, finds a partner, and raises a brood. It is also accompanied by not a small amount of continuously shifting worries about her health, behaviour, and ultimate fate. With hindsight, Safina considers the shelter-at-home orders a blessing in disguise, allowing him to build up a particularly intimate picture with some unique behavioural observations that should appeal to birdwatchers.
“if you think this is a natural history memoir, you might get both more and less than you bargained for, neither of which is a bad thing.”
Advance warning though: if you think this is a natural history memoir, you might get both more and less than you bargained for, neither of which is a bad thing. Alfie’s story is a proverbial MacGuffin that functions as a doorway to two topics. First, Safina wants to understand how people have viewed humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Second—closely intertwined with, and flowing from it—it allows him to reflect on his personal philosophy and spirituality. Both are worth further consideration here.
For the longest time, Safina contends, our ancestors thought of the world around them in relational terms and, though he is hesitant to generalize, he thinks that many of today’s Indigenous cultures continue to do so. In other words, many people understood themselves “as living in a network of relationships” (p. 14) which “binds human existence into a moral drama of duty and conduct” (p. 23) and requires us to “move in the world with respect and care” (p. 29). Simply put, despite nature’s diversity, there is a unity; everything is connected. To the modern ecologist in Safina: “the currency of Life is the shuttling of energy […] there are only living nodes in flowing networks” (pp. 15–16). Yet, in Europe we came to believe differently, seeing ourselves apart from nature rather than a part of nature. Thanks to colonialism, that view went global and turned into a world-altering force in the last few centuries. “The great blindness of the West is to grope the world as inventory. The great wisdom of the Indigenous mind is to understand the world as relationships” (p. 30).
“Tracing the history of our collective disenchantment, Safina lands on the Ancient Greeks as the culprits and singles out Plato in particular”
Tracing the history of our collective disenchantment, Safina lands on the Ancient Greeks as the culprits and singles out Plato in particular. There is a fierceness here that brought Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth to mind as Safina does not mince his words. Plato’s dualist doctrine, his distinction between our world and that of eternal and idealised Forms existing on an abstract plane, “could very well be history’s biggest intellectual mistake” (p. 77). With the three main Abrahamic religions turning dualism into an article of faith, exhorting man’s dominion over nature while denigrating the needs of the flesh, “Plato casts perhaps the longest shadow across our lives—and thus the life of every living thing on Earth” (p. 91). René Descartes completes this short summary by releasing dualism from religion and offering a secularized version around which people of all persuasions could rally. By the time he was done, “the foundation of Western values was hard-set for the coming centuries. Remodeled for oncoming modernity, the physical world was ready for its role as strip mine and drainpipe” (p. 116). Thanks to the modern Western mindset in which “we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything” (p. 199, quoting philosopher Crispin Sartwell), we now face climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental destruction, etc. “Throughout it all, Platonist dualism has consistently whispered urgings of encouragement” (p. 213). And yet, Safina concludes, “Plato based his cosmic valuation on figments of his imagination. That’s all they are” (p. 77).
And you thought this was a book about owls.
So, can we pin the blame so squarely on one man and his ideas? Admittedly, Safina recognizes precursors in e.g. the Egyptian ruler Akhenaten as possibly the first to invent monotheism, and Zoroaster as possibly the first to portray a dualistic universe. The forthcoming Subjugate the Earth situates it in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation (I hope to investigate this further in a future review). I admit that my knowledge of the Classics is insufficient to weigh in on this further, but Safina presents a plausible scenario.
“Overt talk of wisdom [and] spirituality […] normally makes me cringe, hard. [but Safina’s] is the kind of writing I stick around for.”
The second topic that is intertwined with this, and informed by it, is Safina’s personal outlook. Like some other biologists (myself included), he is charmed by certain Buddhist ideas. Overt talk of wisdom, spirituality, and anything that smacks of New Age woo-woo normally makes me cringe, hard. That is my personal bias. But when Safina takes the observation that, chemically speaking, we are made of the same matter as everything around us, and marries this to the Buddhist notion that there is no separate self to conclude that “we are selves in a real sense—but not in a closed sense. As a river depends on new water, one’s body is an interchange” (p. 54)… When he adds that “Energy and matter constantly create and then leave us, but we remain recognizable” (p. 167)… When he quotes Carl Woese that “Organisms […] are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow” (p. 167) which so nicely gels with Kevin Mitchell’s observations in Free Agents that “life is not a state, it is a process […] persisting through time” (p. 26 therein)… When he quotes physicist Steven Weinberg that in a meaningless, uncaring universe, we create meaning through our actions by making “a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves” (p. 300)… When he concludes that his goal in life is “to care fiercely without apology” (p. 319) for all life around him… Then, yes, despite my scepticism, I am moved. This is the kind of writing I stick around for.
What helps is the balance and nuance in his outlook, steering clear of simplistic dichotomies. Though he regularly expresses his admiration for Indigenous thinking about the world, he remains beholden to science and logic: “For discerning objective reality […] science has the stronger claim” (p. 36). However, quoting Einstein, he adds that “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary” (p. 36). Safina criticizes the excesses of reductionism and dualism while recognizing it has made great strides in understanding our world. Where spiritually inclined environmentalists often heap scorn on reductionism, Safina pushes back: “Using a reductionist approach is not what devalues the world. The devaluation comes first” (p. 122). Despite spiritual leanings, he avoids falling for feel-good New Age claptrap. Are birds that show up when people die spirit messengers? “Is [there] more to life and death than you can know? Or simply […] more to bereavement than you can bear” (p. 233). And anyway, “why would birds, who existed for tens of millions of years on a planet without humans […] be “messengers” to us? Isn’t that just another self-aggrandizing delusion of our own importance” (p. 312)? The only aspect that might be problematic is his call to turn to Indigenous knowledge for solutions and alternative worldviews. There is a recent interest in various life science disciplines in Indigenous knowledge. The risk is that this devolves into yet another round of cultural appropriation and seeing what else we can take from others. I must add that I do not feel Safina is doing so here; this is a risk more generally.
“For me, this book contributes to a growing personal awareness that addressing the environmental polycrisis we face boils down to addressing our values.”
For me, this book contributes to a growing personal awareness that addressing the environmental polycrisis we face boils down to addressing our values. No amount of technofixes and scientific advances are going to salvage the situation if “the global Westernized economy [continues to gallop] along behind its three headless horsemen: bigger, faster, more” (p. 235). This is an insight that I find as fascinating as I find it intimidating, as it requires interdisciplinary input from, for instance, ethics, philosophy, sociology, and politics. Science can inform this, yes, but much of it falls outside of its purview. Safina’s quote, here attributed to Freeman Dyson, is particularly apt: “The progress of science is destined to bring enormous confusion and misery to mankind unless it is accompanied by progress in ethics” (p. 271).
This leaves me with one last question: does the combination of these disparate strands work as a book? My short and rather unhelpful answer to this is “Sure, I think so”, so let me clarify. The individual strands are each impressive, insightful, and beautifully written—for the sake of brevity I have left out of this review several other points Safina makes eloquently. However, focusing for a moment on their combination, I was not left gobsmacked. Simultaneously, the book does not come across as a concatenation of ham-fisted non-sequiturs and forced pivots, which it might have become in the hands of a lesser writer. So, come for the owls, stay for the philosophical reflections and piercing history lessons.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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keywords: ecology, wildlife conservation
The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the roads to pretty much everywhere else are paved with the corpses of animals. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb explores the outsized yet underappreciated impacts of the, by one estimate, 65 million kilometres of roads that hold the planet in a paved stranglehold. These extend beyond roadkill to numerous other insidious biological effects. The relatively young discipline of road ecology tries to gauge and mitigate them and sees biologists join forces with engineers and roadbuilders. This is a wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the situation in the USA and various other countries.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, written by Ben Goldfarb, published by W.W. Norton & Company in October 2023 (hardback, 370 pages)
Goldfarb might be familiar to readers from his earlier book on beavers that I reviewed back in 2018. Little did I know that Crossings was already gestating. The roots of this project go back to 2013, with several articles on road ecology published in newspapers and magazines over the years. All this work has now culminated in a rather epic reportage that has been very well-received by the press.
As Goldfarb points out, roadkill is as old as the road, with some animals uniquely vulnerable to being crushed by horse-drawn wagons. However, the phenomenon went into overdrive with the invention of the combustion engine and a new-found need for speed that menaced humans and animals alike (and was initially furiously resisted). With the morbid curiosity typical of biologists, Dayton and Lilian Stoner published the first tally of motorcar casualties in 1925, in the process diagnosing “a malady with no name” (p. 16), as the word roadkill would not be coined for another two decades. The word road ecology was only coined in 1993 by Richard Forman, though it was translated from the German Straßenökologie that was coined in 1981 by Heinz Ellenberg.
As a discipline, road ecology both studies the impact of roads and formulates solutions. Particularly common, and featured extensively in this book, are wildlife crossings. Underpasses guide animals under the road and, through trial and error, we have figured out what does not work (long, dark, and narrow tunnels) and what does (a combination of tunnels and fences). Studies in Wyoming on how roads interfere with the migration of many ungulates have been particularly influential. Other animals have different needs, and the story of overpasses, wildlife bridges, and ecoducts is told through the lens of P-22, the radio-collared cougar that stole the hearts of Los Angeles urbanites. It ultimately led to a successful campaign for a massive overpass that hopefully will reconnect fragmented cougar populations.
“For other animals, [roads] are barriers: despite the good intentions, wildlife crossings cannot serve all animals equally and cannot be constructed everywhere.”
In tropical countries, arboreal species such as primates need canopy rope bridges, while small animals such as amphibians and reptiles are given a helping hand with toad tunnels and bucket brigades. Even fish migration can be thwarted if culverts are only designed to channel water underneath roads as quickly as possible. Ongoing campaigns are trying to restore salmon runs to rivers by retrofitting culverts that are better navigable. And where windshields once resembled “mobile natural-history museums” (p. 156), today they remain squeaky clean, portending a poorly understood insect apocalypse. The monarch butterfly is a rare exception: a long-distance migrant whose path runs parallel to major highway systems and is targeted by rewilding roadside verges.
To us, roads are the unnoticed connective tissue that links places of extraction with industry and commerce, and shuttles commuters between home and work. For other animals, they are barriers: despite the good intentions, wildlife crossings cannot serve all animals equally and cannot be constructed everywhere. Millions of animals still die in collisions every day. Goldfarb addresses the very real concerns of extirpation (the extinction of local populations), habitat fragmentation, interrupted migrations, and noise pollution. With roads come humans who bring deforestation, hunting, real estate development, urban sprawl, tourism, etc.
Amidst this litany of harms, Goldfarb features several topics that will be eye-opening even to ecologists. There is the little-known history of how the US Forest Service constructed one of the world’s largest road networks of now mostly abandoned forest tracks. Roads also feed a diverse community of scavengers that includes humans; a necrobiome that “airbrushes our roadsides, camouflaging a crisis by devouring it” (p. 181). In Tasmania, a small and beleaguered group of wildlife rehabilitators nurses back to health animals that survived collisions, though this Sisyphean task takes a toll on their mental health. In the city of Syracuse, Goldfarb faces the racist legacy of interstate highways that, as in many other US cities, were bulldozed straight through Black and Latino neighbourhoods, extinguishing them in the name of urban renewal. Plans are now afoot to reverse this wrong, move the highway, and create a community where people can again walk to their destinations. In a brilliant flourish, Goldfarb connects this back to the book’s main topic: “Road ecologists and urban advocates are engaged in the same epic project: creating a world that’s amenable to feet” (p. 287).
“Brazil […] shows what government regulation can achieve. Here, highway operators are held legally responsible for dealing with the harm and costs resulting from collisions.”
So far, so good. Goldfarb’s writing shines and certain turns of phrase are memorable, as the above quotes hopefully show. I was initially concerned how US-centric this book would be. Though weighted towards US examples, Goldfarb also visits Wales, Costa Rica, Tasmania, and Brazil, and discusses several European initiatives. Compared to e.g. American Roadkill and the UK-centric Traffication, Crossings looks beyond its borders.
Despite the gloomy picture, there are some encouraging signs. The US Forest Service has started decommissioning parts of its road network. Brazil, meanwhile, shows what government regulation can achieve. Here, highway operators are held legally responsible for dealing with the harm and costs resulting from collisions. A remarkable but rare example of prioritising wildlife over humans is the SP-139 highway that is closed at night and has on purpose been designed as an undulating, winding road, forcing drivers to slow down. Contrast this with the USA, Goldfarb observes sharply, where individual drivers are blamed for collisions. This “deflects culpability from the car companies building ever more massive SUVs and the engineers designing unsafe streets […] we came to rely on cars not by personal choice but by corporate design” (p. 295). As with addressing climate change, individual action only gets us so far; making roads safer demands systemic change, “a public works project, one of history’s most colossal” (p. 296).
And yet, something nagged at me. The focus on mitigation smacks of a palliative solution and Goldfarb concedes the limitations of road ecology. Crossings and fences will not stop the many other impacts of roads and risk becoming “a form of greenwashing […] a fig leaf that conceals and rationalizes destruction” (p. 265). As with other environmental problems, should we not first focus on abandoning or reducing certain behaviours, instead of turning to techno-fixes? Can we imagine something more radical? Can Goldfarb?
“The focus on mitigation smacks of a palliative solution and Goldfarb concedes the limitations of road ecology. […] Can we imagine something more radical? Can Goldfarb?”
To his credit, he admits wrestling with this problem. “The most straightforward solution to the road’s ills would be a collective rejection of automobility […] In the course of writing this book, I’ve felt, at times, like a defeatist—as though, by extolling wildlife passages, I foreclose the possibility of a more radical, carless future” (p. 295). I would have loved to see him explore this further in a dedicated chapter as, in my opinion, environmental problems are best addressed by exploring all solutions: “and” rather than “or”. We will, to use an automotive phrase, have to be firing on all cylinders. Instead, Goldfarb comes down on the side of pragmatism. Bicycles and public transport are great for making urban areas more liveable, but most roadkill happens elsewhere. Furthermore, personal mobility is only part of the story, with logistics making up a huge chunk of traffic. The eye-opening chapter on Brazil, and the outsized influence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that sees it invest in infrastructure globally, is a forceful reminder that the developmental juggernaut is nigh impossible to slow down, let alone stop. One road ecologist points out that you cannot seriously enter the discussion around roads if you oppose social and economic development, while another chimes in that, whether we like it or not, more roads will be built. Although I do not think resistance is futile, Goldfarb leaves me sympathetic to the road ecologists who are desperately trying to nudge construction projects in directions “that, if not quite “right,” are at least less wrong” (p. 270).
Goldfarb acknowledges the input of some 250 people and even then stresses his book is far from the final word on the subject. He encourages readers to take it as a starting point and read deeper, providing 43 pages of notes to the many sources of information he has used. I would additionally recommend A Clouded Leopard in the Middle of the Road by Australian road ecologist Darryl Jones which was published last year but seems to have flown under the radar compared to Goldfarb’s book. Overall, Crossings is a wide-ranging, eye-opening, and thought-provoking reportage that deserves top marks.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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keywords: earth sciences, popular science, volcanology
If volcanoes make you giddy, then this is the book for you. Robin George Andrews is that rare hybrid of the scientist–journalist: a volcanologist who decided to focus on science communication after completing his PhD. Super Volcanoes combines scientific exactitude with engaging writing and is a tour of some exceptional volcanoes on Earth and elsewhere in the Solar System. Andrews starts it with an unabashedly enthusiastic mission statement: “I want you to feel unbridled glee as these stories sink in and an indelible grin flashes across your face as you think: holy crap, that’s crazy!” (p. xxi). For me, he nailed it and I found this an incredibly satisfying read.
Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond, written by Robin George Andrews, published by W.W. Norton & Company in November 2021 (hardback, 312 pages)
Super Volcanoes breaks down into two parts. The first four chapters cover volcanoes on Earth, including Hawaii, Yellowstone National Park, the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania, and underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. The last four chapters go off-world to our Moon, Mars, Venus, and moons such as Io and Enceladus.
In several chapters, Andrews delves into the history of his discipline. He introduces Harvard geologist Thomas Jaggar (1871–1953) who dedicated his research to better understanding volcanoes after investigating the aftermath of the destructive 1902 Mount Pelée eruption. He founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory that to this day does important work and features prominently in Andrews’s lively reporting on the 2018 Kilauea eruption. And then there is Marie Tharp (1920–2006) who identified the mid-Atlantic ridge when collating oceanic depth readings obtained by the US Navy. Initially, she was belittled by her supervisor for “girl talk” that might support the then-still controversial idea of continental drift. However, when another student mapped seaquakes that overlapped perfectly with her proposed ridge, he had to concede that she was correct. Her map would grace the cover of National Geographic and she was awarded the Hubbard Medal in 1978, which can be considered the Nobel Prize of the earth sciences.
But next to historic figures, Andrews has also tapped into his network of colleagues and here features lively conversation drawn from his many interviews. The enthusiasm he shares with his fellow scientists is infectious, no matter whether he discusses the geologic riches of Yellowstone with the resident scientist Mike Poland, Kate Laxton’s mission impossible to retrieve samples of the unique, runny carbonatite lava from Ol Doinyo Lengai, or Linda Morabito’s investigation of photos taken by the Voyager probes that revealed ongoing volcanism on Jupiter’s moon Io. Next to giving a good idea of what these scientists do and how they got interested in their fields of study, he also touches on the many questions that remain regarding volcanoes on Earth, but especially in our Solar System.
“though we often imagine a magma chamber as “a hollow lithological cathedral“, the actual plumbing of volcanoes is far more complex”
Two things, in particular, stood out for me. One is that Andrews is interested in correcting misconceptions. This might be a popular science book, but as a volcanologist, he knows his subject. He abhors how it often gets misrepresented by the “unrelentingly enthusiastic screaming of tabloid newspapers and social media crystal-ball mystics“. No, Yellowstone’s volcano is not “Earth’s self-destruct button” (p. 35) and the widely-adopted phrase supervolcano[1] has a very specific meaning amongst volcanologists. And though we often imagine a magma chamber as “a hollow lithological cathedral“, the actual plumbing of volcanoes is far more complex. Better to imagine it as “a strange sponge, with the holes filled with a hellish gelatin” (p. 41).
The other stand-out of this book is the writing. In places, Andrews is concise, such as when describing the use of LiDAR to map lava flows obscured by vegetation as a technology “capable of virtual deforestation” (p. 15). Or how the study of extraterrestrial volcanoes “underscores a vital truth: that Earth may be normal to us, but the universe has other ideas” (p. 261). In other places, he is poetic, such as when depicting how microbial life survives at great depths, “dreaming in darkness within vaults of glass” (p. 137). Or how the tidal tug of gravity keeps the insides of extraterrestrial moons warm, long after primordial heat has dissipated and radioactive decay has slowed down. This allows for ocean worlds and cryovolcanism such as on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “When it comes to keeping worlds alive, perhaps the tides of gravity are the only engines that transcend the tides of time” (p. 271). Foremost is his humour. Admittedly, pop-culture references to Star Wars and Game of Thrones might not amuse everyone, but I chortled when he described Venus “to be as habitable as the business end of a flamethrower” (p. 225). Or when he compares the two models of volcanism that might have created the enormous Tharsis rise on Mars; either as stack upon stack of erupted lava, “like hell’s idea of pancakes” (p. 184), or by the crust expanding as it is fed magma as if it were “a giant, Lovecraftian éclair” (p. 185).
” the study of extraterrestrial volcanoes “underscores a vital truth: that Earth may be normal to us, but the universe has other ideas“”
To conclude this review I have to make a quick comparison with Natalie Starkey’s Fire & Ice, which was published only a few months before Super Volcanoes. Both books cover very similar topics, including the same volcanoes, though Andrews includes much more detail on e.g. Ol Doinyo Lengai which Starkey mentions just once, or on the Martian Tharsis rise and the nearby Valles Marineris while Starkey focuses on Olympus Mons. Where Andrews has picked a select number of extraterrestrial locations, Starkey ranges wider in her Solar System tour. Super Volcanoes has a black-and-white illustration opening each chapter but could have used more—Fire & Ice at least had a colour plate section. It seems that the somewhat dated Alien Volcanoes is still the go-to book when it comes to pictures. In my opinion, Starkey puts the focus on education first with the entertainment factor a close second. She includes much about volcanism itself while telling the story in her own voice. Andrews puts entertainment first with the education factor a close second. He tells part of his story through the many scientists he interviewed. In my review of Fire & Ice, I mentioned the writing did not quite gel for me and this is where Super Volcanoes hit the sweet spot for me.
Overall, Super Volcanoes is a hugely entertaining book on a fascinating subject that met its goal of leaving this reader with a grin on his face. This is a great example of deeply informed popular science written by a knowledgeable author.
1. ↑ I like to think that the insertion of a space between “super” and “volcanoes” in the title is a deliberate in-joke on Andrews’s part—this is not a book about supervolcanoes, but about how super volcanoes are.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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We tend to think of forests as static. Trees, after all, do not move. But that is a perspective foisted upon us by our limbed existence. Science reporter Zach St. George unmasks this illusion in plain terms: when trees die or new ones sprout, the forest has moved a bit. “The migration of a forest is just many trees sprouting in the same direction” (p. 2).
There is no shortage of books on trees, but this sounded like such an unusual take on the subject that I was utterly stoked when I learned of The Journeys of Trees. A journalist who delves into the palaeontological record to consider the slow-motion movement of forests over deep time? Get in here!
The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future, written by Zach St. George, published by W.W. Norton & Co. in August 2020 (hardback, 244 pages)
The question of where in space and time organisms live where they do, and don’t where they do not, is the purview of the academic discipline of biogeography. St. George’s handling of ecological concepts here is excellent, especially when considering the many unknown factors that keep a tree from growing somewhere, or his clear breakdown of different niche concepts (his description of Hutchinson’s fundamental niche as a multidimensional hypervolume is fascinating). He traces the interest in questions of biogeography back to 18th-century naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Asa Gray, and Darwin and Wallace. It was not just dinosaurs that fossil hunters unearthed, but also fossil trees, revealing that they had grown in places they now no longer did.
There are spine-tingling peeks into the deep past sprinkled throughout this book. Giant sequoias—today restricted to a few groves in North America—once towered over trees from Alaska to Europe while the quintessentially British oak spend the Pleistocene ice age in Spain and France. He mentions the ecological anachronisms of plants that have become marooned when their pollinators went extinct. Or, and this one blew my mind, the striking pattern seen in forest invasions. Time and again, tree species on one continent succumb to insects or fungi native to their sister species on another continent. This hints at the boreal forest that once ringed the globe at northern latitudes and connected these forests. As St. George explains, each continent now has its own oaks, maples, chestnuts, pines, etc. evolving separately, but their shared history is recent enough that they are still vulnerable to each other’s pathogens and pests.
“There are spine-tingling peeks into the deep past sprinkled throughout this book […] and I would have happily had St. George discuss nothing but palaeobiogeography.”
Through these examples, St. George cultivates a mindset that Marcia Bjornerud has called “timefulness“. For me, this is the rare, vertigo-inducing sensation where you find yourself peering down the yawning chasm of deep time and, for just a fleeting moment, connect with its incomprehensible vastness. Not many books manage to induce this and I would have happily had St. George discuss nothing but palaeobiogeography. However, there are two important topics linked to the present and the future that almost eclipse his writing on the ghosts of the past: the burden of invasive species and the question of forest conservation in the face of future climate change.
Plants do not just move themselves, we are increasingly doing the moving for them. While naturalists and geologists were still getting to grips with the age of the Earth and concepts such as biogeography, the Industrial Revolution was busy producing its legacy of Victorian plant hunters filling up botanical gardens and private collections in Europe, and entrepreneurs moving trees to improve colonies overseas. One such thread that St. George follows here is the story of how the Monterey pine growing in California and Mexico ended up blanketing New Zealand.
But each such translocation is an experiment. We take species out of their evolutionary context at our peril. Each journey that moves plants, wood, or even soil brings the risk of unwanted stowaways. Only a minority of translocated species become a problem, but with global trade and travel having increased exponentially, so have the risks posed by invasive species. A recent example recounted here that came to light only in 2001 is the decimation of North America’s ash trees when they fell victim to the emerald ash borer, a small beetle imported from Asia, possibly in pallet wood.
“it is exactly [the] legacy of species invasions that is now causing great tension […] when considering the future of the world’s forests, [particularly] the conservation initiatives taking matters in their own hands by planting trees in new areas.”
As St. George highlights, it is exactly this legacy of species invasions that is now causing great tension in the academic and conservation communities when considering the future of the world’s forests. As the deep-time perspective of The Journeys of Trees already reveals, forest migration is closely linked to climate change, and there is plenty of that in store, with St. George highlighting the risk of exacerbated droughts and fires in particular. One difference with past climate change is that in the geologically speaking short intervening time we have laid claim to vast swathes of the Earth’s surface, largely deforesting it.
Thus, the third and final important form of forest migration that St. George considers here are the conservation initiatives taking matters in their own hands by planting trees in new areas, often in the face of caution urged by ecologists. This varies from “assisted population migration” where trees are planted in their current range, to forward-looking initiatives better labelled “assisted range expansion” where they are planted outside of the current species’ range. St. George discusses Connie Barlow’s Torreya Guardians project that is planting Florida torreya all over North America, and the living seed bank of giant sequoias created by timber company Sierra Pacific Industries.
The flap text on the dust jacket mentions that the book focuses on five trees, but the story defies any rigid or chronological organisation, looping round in circles and delightfully intersecting its own narrative in numerous places. Much as I had hoped, The Journeys of Trees ended up being a fascinating sylvan road trip that sets itself apart from the many books written on trees, not least by its deep-time perspective.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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Some books, it seems, sit on your shelf just waiting for the right moment. David Quammen’s Spillover may have been published back in 2012, but it eerily foreshadows the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic that currently keeps the world in its grip, and provides many insights. Right now, most people are of course concerned with the direct impact on public health and their jobs. While we try to slow down the spread of this disease, the global economy is taking a nosedive as country after country goes into lockdown. Once we come out on the other side though, there will be deeper questions to be asked. Could this happen again? How do we prevent that? And what the actual fuck just happened? Let Quammen be your guide, for, as he will show, everything comes from somewhere…
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, written by David Quammen, published by Vintage in August 2013 (paperback, 592 pages)
Quammen likes to write big, chunky books. Spillover tops out at 587 pages. But do not let this put you off, for he is a master at writing a suspenseful narrative and has chopped up the book in 115 short chapters that irresistibly flow into each other.
He kicks off with the pandemic that wasn’t. You can be excused for never having heard of Hendra. First recognized in Brisbane, Australia, in 1994, it killed a dozen horses and one man. After months of research, it was traced back to bats. This crossing of species boundaries by infectious diseases is at the heart of Spillover and is a phenomenon known as zoonosis (professionals will want to refer to Zoonoses).
Zoonosis leads on to the second important concept in this book: reservoir hosts. The reason viral diseases such as polio and smallpox no longer plague us is that they only occur in humans. With nowhere else to hide, they can be eradicated by sustained vaccination campaigns. Zoonoses, in Quammen’s words, are more like guerilla fighters. They strike unexpectedly and disappear again, sometimes for years, while living on in other organisms where they cause little harm. Tracking down these reservoir hosts requires intrepid individuals willing to leave the confines of their laboratory. Several such virus hunters have written about their adventures.
“[…] the second important concept in this book: reservoir hosts. […] Zoonoses are more like guerilla fighters. They strike unexpectedly and disappear again, sometimes for years. But where do they go?”
Quammen spares no effort and accompanies many such scientists in the field, specifically to learn more about Ebola. The bloody details of this disease have been slightly exaggerated in the (in)famous book The Hot Zone (Quammen provides a healthy corrective). But it still is a horrific disease that stalks Africa, periodically popping up in humans but also killing many gorillas. The hunt for its reservoir host continues, although bats are a likely candidate. Quammen’s vivid and personal descriptions of the fieldwork, the extraordinary working conditions, and the chance scientific breakthroughs are what make Spillover such a pleasant mix of popular science and reportage. It is worth noting that at the beginning of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, a part of Spillover was updated and republished. It was a bit premature in hindsight, as that outbreak lasted until 2016.
Of course, a large part of virological research plays out in the lab, and Quammen shows himself equally at home here. The long chapter on AIDS and HIV is a perfect example, describing the decades-long research effort that has pushed the emergence of this disease back in time, all the way to the start of the 20th century. At the same time, the family tree of HIV has exploded “like an infectious starburst”, and Quammen skillfully guides the reader down the warren of HIV-1 and HIV-2, the different groups within these, and, nested within those, the many subtypes. Oh, and of course the numerous variants of the closely related simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, found in apes and monkeys. He relies on interviews and close reading of publications to reconstruct the tumultuous and twisting history of scientific breakthroughs and blind alleys.
Quammen also shines when it comes to memorable metaphors and masterful distillation of technical details. All of this is helped by crisp writing, short and straightforward sentences, and the repeating of salient points. He knows the details are complicated, yet he enlightens you in a conversational tone without ever being condescending. He is equally at ease giving you a potted history of the important epidemiological parameter R0, as he is highlighting the unique character of retroviruses such as HIV. The former is the basic reproduction number that you will have seen in the news lately.
“There is some eerie foreshadowing when Quammen asks: “Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China?” […] once we get out on the other side, there will be some uncomfortable and probing questions to be asked.”
Particularly relevant now is the distinction between DNA and RNA viruses, coronaviruses belonging to the latter. As highlighted in my review of Viruses, single-stranded RNA lacks the error-correction mechanisms of DNA and is thus much more prone to mutation and rapid evolution. Quammen throws three metaphors at you to emphasize this point before repeating it: “RNA viruses mutate profligately“.
A host of other, lesser-known diseases fills these pages: herpes-B, Nipah, Marburg, bacterial zoonoses such as Lyme disease, psittacosis, and Q-fever. Even a surprise zoonotic strain of malaria. After all, most strains of malaria are vector-borne diseases, mosquitoes being their vector. They are incredibly deadly, but they are not zoonoses.
All of these have fascinating backstories. But one point jumped out at me in particular: bats. Bats are, or are suspected to be, the reservoir hosts of many zoonoses. Why? Quammen highlights some of the unique aspects of their biology that might contribute to this: there are many species (a little-known fact is that about 20% of mammal species are bats!), they roost and hibernate at extremely high densities, and they fly. For more, see Bats and Viruses, Bats and Human Health, and the practical FAO manual Investigating the Role of Bats in Emerging Zoonoses.
“Many will have been left bewildered by the abrupt arrival of the current coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the world that has just gate-crashed ours, Spillover is (still) a magnificent piece of science reporting”
Viruses are everywhere: some speak of the virosphere rather than the biosphere, while Carl Zimmer calls ours a planet of viruses. Of the Ebola virus, Quammen writes that it “is not in your habitat. You are in its.” And the virosphere is a Pandora’s box that we have ripped wide open through our actions. A recurrent and important message in Spillover is how habitat fragmentation and destruction exposes us to a menagerie of new viruses as wild animals are forced to live and die in our midst.
Particularly fertile breeding grounds for zoonoses are the bushmeat trade and the so-called wet markets in Asia where a wide range of poached animals are traded and slaughtered. Nuwer’s Poached highlighted the exotic tastes and conspicuous consumption by wealthy diners as one of several driving forces behind the demand for wild meat. These markets were ground zero for the SARS outbreak in 2002-03, and likely too for the current coronavirus pandemic. There is some eerie foreshadowing here when Quammen asks: “Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China?” As I said at the beginning, once we get out on the other side, there will be some uncomfortable and probing questions to be asked.
COVID-19 is only the latest in a long line of zoonotic diseases, and will certainly not be the last. But rather than wanting to make you more worried, Quammen wants to make you more smart. Many will have been left bewildered by the abrupt arrival of the current coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the world that has just gate-crashed ours, Spillover is (still) a magnificent piece of science reporting that weds exceptional clarity to spell-binding storytelling.
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“End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World’s Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals“, written by Ross D.E. MacPhee and illustrated by Peter Schouten, published by W.W. Norton & Company in November 2018 (hardback, 236 pages)
Paul S. Martin (1928-2010) was a palaeoecologist who developed the overkill hypothesis in the 1960s: as our ancestors spread over the planet and entered new lands, they hunted the existing megafauna into extinction. Especially in the Americas there seemed to be a close link between humans appearing and megafauna disappearing. He championed this idea in a career spanning five decades, culminating in his 2005 book Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. A lot of the ensuing academic discussion has been compiled in the edited volumes Extinctions in Near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences (1999) and American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene (2009) to which MacPhee contributed, and on which he now draws in this book.
MacPhee first introduces the particular characteristics of our world during the Quaternary (the last 2.6 million years), both its climate with the many ice ages and warmer interglacial periods (see also The Ice Age), and the peculiar megafauna that included giant sloths, enormous flightless birds, and more exotic species such as glyptodonts and gomphotheres, weighing in the hundreds or even thousands of kilograms (see for example Megafauna: Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America, Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys: The Fascinating Fossil Mammals of South America, Extinct Madagascar: Picturing the Island’s Past, and Australia’s Mammal Extinctions: A 50,000-Year History). Throughout, the book is illustrated with wonderful plates by Peter Schouten that bring to life the landscapes and animals of this time (though some of them have been spread awkwardly over one-and-a-half pages, obscuring some details).
The bulk of the book, however, is dedicated to a careful examination of the two leading explanations for the extinctions; climate change and, foremost, overkill. MacPhee walks the reader through the unfolding discussion as opponents poked holes in these ideas and proponents tried to shore them up again with new data. He takes stock of the main objections and the status of the overkill idea today, and puts forward alternative explanations.
Especially based on the peopling of the Americas (see First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America), Martin envisioned a wave of destruction as humans migrated from north to south, from Alaska to Patagonia, in about 1000 years, killing everything in their path – even likening it to a blitzkrieg. He saw this pattern as a template for recent megafauna extinctions around the globe. Dramatic? Yes. Especially extinctions of island dwellers such as the dodo, which are clearly linked to human hunting, lend the idea credibility (see The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions).
“Martin envisioned a wave of destruction as humans migrated […] from Alaska to Patagonia […] killing everything in their path – even likening it to a blitzkrieg”
But, MacPhee points out, upon closer inspection many things don’t add up. Some species that were not hunted (e.g. horses and camels) went extinct, whereas others that were (e.g. bison), survived (only to be almost exterminated in recent times…). Timing is crucial, but findings from archaeology and ancient DNA (see Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past) increasingly suggest that the Americas were populated before the Clovis people moved in 12,000 years ago. In Africa and Eurasia, meanwhile, humans and megafauna “happily” coexisted for thousands of years. Martin furthermore argued for prey naïveté: not having encountered humans before, megafauna supposedly lacked appropriate anti-predator responses. Though observed in island species, it seems implausible in continental animals. The scale and organisation required from bands of hunter-gatherers equipped with stone-age tools to effect a sustained blitzkrieg strains credibility. Ethnographic studies show that humans might band together shortly for annual hunting expeditions, but normally disperse again afterwards. Finally, there is a lack of any archaeological evidence for mass kill sites.
MacPhee concludes that we have reached an intellectual impasse pursuing this research agenda. Though some strong arguments can be made in favour of overkill, and some extinctions no doubt can be attributed to it, there are many and obvious weaknesses when extrapolating this. He discusses some interesting alternative explanations and highlights what data we need moving forward to come to a better answer. The strong suit of this book is not just that it explores the nitty-gritty biological and palaeontological details, but also that it takes a step back to examine the history and nature of the debate itself.
As MacPhee also remarks, catastrophic, single-cause explanations for extinctions are sexy, and the media love the dramatic storytelling it allows. The discussion surrounding the K-Pg extinction 66 million years ago is a point in case (Meteorite impact? Giant volcanic eruptions? Or a bit of both? – see T. rex and the Crater of Doom and The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions). And this is not just a rarefied academic discussion. His insight that the overkill hypothesis has shaped our thinking on the current extinction crisis (see The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) is incisive: staving it off is being cast as a moral duty to redeem ourselves for our past sins of overhunting.
End of the Megafauna is a first-class example of a fantastic popular science book. The combination of a logical structure, accessible writing, shrewd observations, and beautiful illustrations make it a pleasure to read and impossible to put down. Even the glossary makes for an informative read! When I recently reviewed When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano, another example of a catastrophic explanation for observed extinctions, I mentioned being disappointed that Prothero spent so few pages actually discussing the arguments pro and contra. What really makes this book stand out is that MacPhee does it just right: he takes his time to engage with the idea and provides an accessible overview of the arguments for and against. This is, hands-down, one of the best palaeontology books I have read this year and I expect it will be the go-to reference on this topic for years to come.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
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