Gloomy in outlook but a cleareyed view of the world’s bears and the many threats they face.
A look at the world’s eight surviving bear species.
As Reuters global climate and environment correspondent Dickie notes, some of the world’s embattled bears are charismatic bywords for wild animals as a whole: the polar bear, say, or the grizzly. Others, such as the spectacled and sloth bears, are scarcely known. Yet all are slipping away save for the black bear, the sole species “considered secure throughout its global range,” and 6 of the 8 are under immediate threat of extinction—all due to human interventions in their environments. Their fortunes were not always so tenuous. As the author writes, modern bear lineages appeared over the last 5 million years or so, “extremely recently in terms of geological time,” and spread to every continent except Australia. Still, their day in the sun has been curtailed: There are perhaps 500 primate species, vastly outnumbering ursines. While many hunting cultures revered bears even as they feared them, urban civilizations have tended to discount them—and to kill in the course of encounters almost always initiated because humans are intruding into bear country. This sometimes happens in unexpected places. In North Gujarat, India, for example, sloth bear attacks on humans numbered 1 per year between 1960 and 1999, on average, while today the number has jumped to nine. The culprit? Lack of water in the hot summer months, when most attacks occur, caused by climate change. Climate change, of course, is devastating polar bears, who are becoming fewer and smaller, the result of a tightening food chain and loss of sea ice habitat, which “could disappear completely as early as 2035.” Dickie concludes by noting that the future is likely bleak. By 2100, she observes, the world’s human population is projected to reach 11 billion, and “every new human exacerbates the crises faced by the natural world.”
Gloomy in outlook but a cleareyed view of the world’s bears and the many threats they face.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781324005087
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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