Environmental bad boy Chase (Playing God in Yellowstone, 1986, etc.) takes on biocentrism and the Endangered Species Act in this delightfully angry if at times snide volume. Pretty much from the word go, this country's responses to the environmental needs of the land have been inadequate, suggests Chase, but the currently voguish notion of ``ecosystems'' is egregious in the extreme. He traces the roots of this concept back to its holistic/monistic source: It reflects the long line of thinking from ``Puritans longing for salvation through intimacy with God in nature'' right up to the preservationists' notion of nature as self-regulator (a particular bugbear of Chase's). Quaint ideas, scolds the author, unscientific and full of gaping holes. Nature is everywhere in flux; our yearning to return to presettlement conditions shows us up as ``self-interested primitivists infatuated with the aesthetic features of climax communities.'' Our desire to protect threatened creatures via the Endangered Species Act is an absurd ``mandate to stop evolution.'' Nature chooses no favorites, extinctions are inevitable, so why ``set aside for a Disneyesque menagerie of obscure life forms'' entire regions of the US?particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where the fight to save old-growth forests serves as the book's framework. Though diatribe is Chase's forte, he's willing to put himself on the line with some recommendations for those involved in the environmental issue: Embrace change, work in concert rather than as adversaries, remember that humans too are an element in the landscape (and their works often very pleasing), and understand that the diversity of landscapes demands differing environmental strategies to reflect not just the land but the variegated interests of a heterogeneous society. Not for everyone this bitter medicine, devoid as it is of mystery and charm, but it is fascinating reading, impeccably researched, and powerful in that Chase is clearly a friend of the Earth, not another glad-tider or apologist. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-60837-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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