So an A for laying out the situation, a B for partial solutions, but an Incomplete for not addressing the fundamental...
Never one to shrink from the Big Picture, Harvard antman Wilson (Consilience, 1998, etc.) addresses the decline and fall of species but sees the potential for the survival of biodiverse life on earth if . . .
. . . we do the right thing. But first comes the lugubrious recital of the status quo. Wilson regulars know the tune—so many creatures great and small, with losses of species at a rate of one thousand to ten thousand per million a year. To his credit, Wilson explains how such estimates are made, while admitting that no one really knows the denominators: how many species there are. The malady is familiar as well, even has an acronym: HIPPO, for Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting—all revealing the hand of Homo sapiens. Wilson singles out Hawaii, Madagascar, Vancouver Island, and other defined sites to provide convincing details. But just at the point of reader despair, he turns the tables to offer solutions. Here, he draws on theses he has defended elsewhere: e.g., “biophilia,” defined as humankind’s innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike forms, attracts us to our fellow creatures. Wilson’s reliance on instinct, on developmental stages that hone biophilia, and on certain heritable factors have him out on speculative limbs he has pursued previously. His political and economic arguments for preserving biodiversity are more persuasive, dwelling on how much a well-preserved nature gives back in the form of diverse food, medicine, clothing, shelter, etc. That, and an increasingly rich and more savvy group of international conservation organizations may save the day, he suggests. Their savvy lies in buying reserves, plowing money back into the local economy, and allowing peripheral communities to draw (modestly) on the reserve, while encouraging bioprospecting and ecotourism. While these solutions are promising, Wilson does not really grapple with how to stem the tide of overpopulation—and the religious, sociopolitical, and economic imperatives that maintain it.
So an A for laying out the situation, a B for partial solutions, but an Incomplete for not addressing the fundamental problem.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-45078-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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