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Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
By Alan Burdick Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Reviewed by Jason Van Driesche It is not often that a book presents a contradiction before you even open the cover. But such is the case with Out of Eden. At the heart of the matter lies a well-worn question: What is nature? If one takes the book’s title at face value, Burdick seems to be saying that nature is Eden — a state of perfect balance that exists only in our absence and is therefore unknowable and unrecoverable. “We all hurry to see it, only to discover that it departed immediately with our arrival,” he writes. “Always there is a worm in the apple, and the worm is us.” This kind of setup left me worried. Didn’t he know that the “balance of nature” idea went out the window decades ago? Was this just one more superficial recitation of the familiar tragedies of a homogenizing world? Thankfully, Burdick is far more interested in good ideas and good writing than in assembling a uniformly grim case with which to beat the reader over the head. The result is a book defined much more by its subtitle — An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion — than by its title. This is a journey through some of the world’s more devastated ecosystems in the company of a tour guide whose sense of curiosity is matched only by his blazing intellect. A chapter or two into the book, Burdick has already launched into a headlong exploration of the complexity and contradiction of the natural world as it is — not as we think it might once have been. And no better place to start than with the island of Guam, where the depredations of the brown tree snake have resulted in an ecosystem nearly devoid of birds. Burdick’s approach to this well-trodden ground is at once brilliant and exceedingly audacious: he sets out to explore a scene of ecological havoc from the point of view of the perpetrator thereof. What does it mean, he asks, to think like a brown tree snake? Above all, he answers, it requires an unswerving focus on what motivates a snake — not on what motivates us to dislike it. Calling the snake an opportunist, Burdick contends, is nothing more than a “post-hoc explanation masquerading as a noun.” The snake is simply an ecological force — a novel and devastating force, but one without a shred of malice. He compares the snake to the AIDS epidemic — “a kind of contagion, surreptitious yet virulent” — and argues that combating it effectively requires a deep understanding of the snake’s own reasons for doing what it does. So Burdick spends a chapter with a researcher who designs snake-proof exclosures by parsing in minute detail the behavior of trapped snakes. He spends another chapter following a scientist who himself tracks his quarry’s every move, tracing 240-m-long threads whose leading ends are tied around the necks of captured-and-released snakes. “If I thought like a snake, this would be easy,” the researcher says. Would that it were. The second section moves to Hawaii, where Burdick plunges into the murky world of invasion ecology with an uncommon intellectual rigor and enthusiasm. He offers a finely nuanced exploration of the ecological concepts — refuge, niche, competitive exclusion — that form the backbone of our understanding of invasions. In the process, he cuts every one of these concepts loose from its moorings, setting them adrift in a world where everything changes — and not just because we’re stirring the pot. “To introduce niche theory is to propose a koan,” he says. “Does an ecological niche exist before an invader arrives to fill it?” The answer: there is no such thing as an “empty niche” — just a swirling mess of opportunities and threats, the ownership of which shifts with each new addition to or deletion from the system. This leads to the central question of the Hawaii chapters and, really, of the whole book. If nature is always changing, on what basis do we claim that changes wrought by invasives are bad? A Hawaiian ‘apapane (Himatione sanguinea) doesn’t care if its kind goes extinct; native or nonnative, all creatures save humans are (as best we can tell) concerned only with their own individual survival and reproduction. Burdick’s core argument is that ecological homogenization is bad only in the eyes of a creature able to understand the concepts involved — and that this is reason enough to combat invasions. “It is a disarming notion,” he says, “that the strongest argument for preserving biodiversity might rest on something so mercurial, so subjective, so intimate as a personal desire to live in a world drenched in biological richness.” And there it is again: a longing for Eden. How does one reconcile the apparent contradiction between an all-too-human desire for something familiar and the ecological reality of constant change? By developing an intimate understanding of and a deep appreciation for the process of change itself — and then using that knowledge to make change biodiversity’s engine rather than its destroyer. “Stability is not an end result,” Burdick says. “It is a state that nature is forever falling into.” I wish I had written this book. I am glad, at least, to have found it. Burdick’s writing exhibits an intelligence and a resonance that few nature writers since Aldo Leopold have managed to master. I will be returning to Out of Eden again and again, and each time, I suspect, I will find something new. Back to Books Index >> |
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The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire By Richard Adams Carey Counterpoint, 2005 Reviewed by Margaret Pizer The sturgeon was first called a “philosopher among fishes” because of its ancient evolutionary lineage and plodding life history. But Richard Adams Carey’s book could just as easily have derived its title from the philosophical paradoxes and quandaries that the story of the sturgeon raises for conservationists. The very qualities that allowed the fish to weather the past 100 million years virtually unchanged have also made it especially slow to recover from overfishing. The same demand for caviar that drove this overfishing has led to innovations in sturgeon aquaculture that may ultimately be the fish’s best hope for survival. Efforts to restock natural populations with hatchery fish are controversial within the conservation community despite, or even because of, the success of some pilot projects. Carey astutely examines these contradictions as he describes the natural history of the sturgeon and the human history of the caviar trade. He focuses on both U.S. and Caspian species and introduces the reader to a diverse cast of characters, from scientists to customs agents and from citizen conservationists to black-market caviar dealers. Back to Books Index >> |
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Striper Wars: An American Fish Story By Dick Russell Island Press, 2005 Reviewed by Cheryl Lyn Dybas This case-study in environmental activism is a behind-the-scenes look at what author Dick Russell calls the striper wars, “a story about a magnificent fish and those of us who fought against commercial interests and government bureaucrats to bring it back from the brink.” By the 1980s, numbers of striped bass were in such decline that the fish seemed destined to join bald eagles on the endangered species list. But through the efforts of fishers like Russell to curtail striped bass landings, a population estimated at about 4.6 million in 1982 reached a historic peak of some 56.7 million fish in 2004. The fish’s remarkable comeback has become part of modern conservation lore and is hailed from coast to coast as an example of a fishery management strategy that — for a while — worked: Stop overfishing, and the fishery will rebound. But the fish is once again in trouble, its numbers declining. This time the likely culprit is overfishing of the bass’s primary food source, small, silvery fish called menhaden. The relationship between striped bass and menhaden highlights the need for ecosystem-based fisheries management, argues Russell. Menhaden are like passenger pigeons once were, according to one scientist Russell interviewed — so ubiquitous that it seems inconceivable that they could ever be wiped out. “It could be over before you’d ever know that they [menhaden] were overfished.” Back to Books Index >> |
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Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic By Marla Cone Grove Press, 2005 Reviewed by Nancy Bazilchuk In 1996, biologist Andy Derocher journeyed to the arctic archipelago of Svalbard to fulfill his dream of finding a polar bear population in a pristine environment undisturbed by hunting and far from the intrusions of the modern world. Instead, as detailed in Marla Cone’s fine new book, he found that Svalbard’s “pristine” polar bears have PCB levels 12 times higher than those of their Alaskan counterparts. Cone details how prevailing air currents from Europe, North America, and Asia converge near Svalbard, carrying their toxic load. Toxins tend to persist throughout the Arctic because cold temperatures slow their breakdown, allowing them to be concentrated in the food chain. Even those familiar with these worrying trends will be fascinated by Cone’s broad-ranging tales revealing how scientists like Derocher documented the poisoning of arctic fish, otters, whales, seals, and even humans. Cone, an environmental writer at the Los Angeles Times, won a Pew Charitable Trust grant to travel to Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway to piece together stories that are both beautifully written and deeply disturbing. Back to Books Index >> |
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Nature’s Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How The Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Organization in the World By Bill Birchard Jossey-Bass, 2005 Reviewed by Jon Christensen NGOs are the creative engines of conservation worldwide. Yet the history of conservation is often told as a government tale. NGOs play an important role in pressuring governments, but the internal problems that NGOs encounter are seldom explored. Now Bill Birchard, a veteran business journalist, tells the inside stories of nine key moments in the history of The Nature Conservancy and of the people who confronted the challenges facing the growing organization. The portraits range from that of Richard Goodwin, president of TNC in 1956 when it had a staff of one, and who launched it on its astonishing trajectory, through those of scientists and dealmakers and managers to that of Steven J. McCormick, the current president and CEO, who is leading TNC through challenges on entirely different scales. Nature’s Keepers reads like a series of practical Harvard Business Review articles. It’s about time the business of conservation got this kind of careful attention. Back to Books Index >> |
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