Customer Reviews

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an outstanding book. Without doubt it is the best I have ever read on plant, animal, & landform evolution during the Cenozoic Era in general, & North America in particular. However, the only reason I don't rate this book at 5 stars is that it desperately needs illustrations. Tim Flannery, if you read this review, please put out a second edition of this book ASAP, but containing some 50-100 new pages of drawings & color images of all the major plants & animals described, along with maps showing changes to the North American land mass - its immigration routes from Europe, Asia, & South America, glacier advances, etc - for each Epoch of the Tertiary & Quaternary Periods. I also recommend that a geologic time-chart be shown at the beginning of each chapter, highlighting the time period being discussed, since I expect the general reader could not differentiate the Paleocene from the Pleistocene by name alone. Even without these illustrations, this is still a great read, but it would have been a lot more fun without having to keep a dozen other books nearby to look up pictures of each plant, animal, or landform change being discussed.

Eternal Frontier is a marvelous read, lively, insightful, fast - well, you have to go fast to cover 65 million years in 357 pages. And, boy, does Flannery cover the territory. A student of the animal kingdon, he has covered a lot of physical territory in his career, studying the remains of extinct species and searching for undescribed living ones in the forests of New Guinea. Small wonder, then, that Flannery is at his best when contemplating the forces that led to the evolution or extinction of species, or of entire classes of species. In the pages of Eternal Frontier ancient periods of warm climate conjure tropical forests in the Dakotas and create strange herbivorous beasts who munch their way across the landscape, only to be swept away by the onset of an ice age. The pleasure for readers is that Flannery doesn't just describe what took place, he leads us into an understanding of the process whereby creatures evolve to fill vacant niches in an evolving ecosystem. It is wonderful stuff.

The closer we come to the present day, however, the further Flannery moves from material he knows really well. Readers spoiled by such masterful works of ecological history as William Cronon's Changes in the Land and Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire will find Flannery shallow indeed.

In truth, this entire, wonderful book will not bring much pleasure to readers who are familiar with the subjects covered. When confronted with confusing evidence that might support one of several plausible historical scenarios, Flannery picks the one he finds most compelling and dismisses the others. Extinction of the paleolithic megafauna, for example, was here caused by overhunting by spear-carrying paleo-Indians, the first humans to enter the western hemisphere, who arrived about 13,000 years ago. This dismisses some major areas of evidence to the contrary. Flannery is, of course, familiar with this evidence. Readers will not discover how compelling some of it is. When the story reaches European settlement, it becomes clear that Flannery has only a cursory familiarity with the literature. The irony is that both when dealing with the pre-history he knows so well and with the historical period with which he is less familiar, Flannery has a sure instinct for apparant truth. Most of the hypothesis that he ignores or dismisses are, indeed, less well-supported than the story he tells. And even when in discussing the historical period he gets lots of the details wrong, he has the grand outline right. A reader of Eternal Frontier will have a very good grasp of how nature continues to shape America.

The advantage of Flannery's approach is that he tells a ripping good story. It moves quickly, it is fun to read, it is thought-provoking, and it is even true.

Flannery begins his ecological history of North America 65m years ago with the Chicxulub asteroid impact spraying molten rock far into the present Canada and creating a shockwave that flattened trees across the continent. North America lost 80% of its flowering plant species and the dust polluted the atmosphere so most photosynthesis stopped as the planet entered a decade of freezing temperatures.

From here the book describes the major ecological developments through to the present, starting with how the continental drift of Australia from Antarctica and the rise of the Panamanian isthmus impacted on North America's climate. Even when writing of continental drift, Flannery's account is fast-paced. Some will deplore Flannery's speculations, but I found them intensely stimulating. One speculation is not necessarily like another: a well-informed speculation can help to eliminate more far-fetched speculations.

This quote exemplifies his well-informed speculation:

"The lifestyles of the oreodonts have been a mystery for some time. Some possessed eyes on the top of their heads like hippos, which certain researchers have taken to indicate an aquatic life. Oreodont remains, though, are most common in windblown sediments, indicating dry conditions. New and still contentious studies focusing on well-preserved remains of animals that were presumably buried where they lived suggest that some oreodonts may have been burrowers. Some skeletons even have the remains of foetuses, usually, two, three or four, preserved in their mother's belly. Such large animals tend to have so many young only if they live a precarious life, prompting one researcher to suggest that oreodonts used those eyes atop their heads to peek over the rims of their burrows before emerging. But what kind of danger were they keeping an eye out for? The caution of the oreodonts may have been prompted by the pig-like entelodonts...."

Throughout the book Flannery lifts the lid on some of the liveliest scientific controversies. Thus he begins the second half of the book with a clear account of carbon-14 dating and the debate about whether the extinction of most American megafauna was caused by climate change or the arrival of the American Indians. Both debates have political implications for present social policy and Flannery does not, thankfully, smother his account with politically-correct obfuscation.

Chapter 23 describes the destruction of the American Indians - an eye-opener for someone like me who, as a child, played "cowboys and Indians" on the premise that the two sides were evenly matched.

Flannery is fascinated with the notion of "frontier" as was Frederick Jackson Turner who documented the closure of North America's physical frontier; but for Flannery the frontier lives on in US popular culture.

Flannery describes how the myth of the eternally bountiful frontier has fostered a cavalier disregard for environmental laws and other attempts to constrain profligate behaviour. A nation "conceived in liberty" actually had its cultural and political freedom underwritten by rich glacial soils, abundant water and ecological diversity. When these frontier underpinnings no longer apply, US culture will have to adapt to survive.

Flannery leads the reader to ask if the spread of American frontier culture to nations without the bounty of North America has been at huge cost to their environment. Flannery's second theme is his three-phase model of "founder effect", "release" and "adaptation". The founders find an ecological niche and exploit it and in the absence of competition almost all variants make a living of some sort. "Release" occurs when a species is newly arrived in its environment with few competitors and abundant resources; they diversify and flourish in their new conditions. In Flannery's book, the same applies to grizzly bears as to humans on the "eternal frontier"; however, release and adaptation is faster with humans as culture can change more rapidly than biology. When abundance diminishes, species have to adapt to their environment. Because North America is such a rich continent, Europeans have as yet adapted very little - a phase they must enter to produce a diverse and truly North American society. He observes that North Americans still seek frontiers to exploit (irrigating the deserts, even exploiting space - their last frontier) rather than adapting.

This review cannot hope to bring out the richness of Flannery's book. It flows so effortlessly that the reader barely notices the superscript references that follow many paragraphs which show that he has woven together his 365 sources into a seamless tale.

Flannery takes Aldo Leopold's dictum about restoring the environment and shows that there was no complete ecological balance in pre-European or pre-Indian times.

This introduces the question of how the wilderness areas should be managed for the future. Flannery seeks to "revolutionize our rangelands management" by proposing a megafauna to recreate the more balanced ecology of 13,000 years ago: elephant (to replace the mammoth and mastodon), bison, llama, tapir, jaguar, camel and Chacoan peccary - all of which could be harvested for mutual human/megafauna/ecology benefit.

My criticisms of the book are minor and I would not like them to be taken as detracting from this otherwise positive review. The seven-page index is adequate but has not been compiled by someone who understood Flannery's theoretical models. It would have been more helpful, too, if all the animal and plant species mentioned in the text were included in the index. The maps are inadequate: they do not show the majority of the sites mentioned, nor the locations of the Indian tribes referred to. The addition of timelines and illustrations (even silhouettes) of all the animals covered would enrich the book.

Flannery's book has come at an opportune time. Most topically, when the US is considering the implications of the most recent census, when the Bush administration is finding its feet in terms of environmental policy and when creationist escapism is threatening scientific education. More significantly, because the physical and biological frontier, eternal for millions of years, has been closed for all time by the latest mass immigrant and mass exploiter: homo sapiens.

Tim Flannery's book The Eternal Frontier is not a perfect book [but was closer to a 5 than a 4 for me], but given the amount of Earth history it covers well and in detail, it's a helluva read. Flannery covers the history of North America from the really bad day that ended the Cretaceous Period up to the present day. Flannery could've included so much more, but then The Eternal Frontier would've been turned into an Earth history textbook, which was not the author's purpose. I do agree with other reviewers that more illustrations would have been nice [maybe if The Eternal Frontier does well, an illustrated edition a' la A Brief history Of Time or Longitude might be forthcoming], but for readers with a little background and a big imagination, the lack of illustrations shouldn't be too much a hindrance to enjoying the book. The thing I liked the most about the book was the seamless incorporation of humans into the story. One of my personal pet peeves is the rigid dichotomy of natural versus synthetic that often shows up in ecological discourse. Certain human activities ARE unique in the history of the Earth [e.g. humans produce chemicals never before seen on Earth], but to consider the ecology of the Earth without humans as an integral part is incorrect and foolish. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Earth history or ecology, with a special recommend to those folks involved in any current environmental and ecological debate in North America who want to have a thorough grounding in the history of the place they are arguing over. Whether for good or for ill, the near future of North America and the Earth includes human beings and all thinking humans should know something about how we got to where we are.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I agree with earlier reviwers that it could use more and better illustrations and also tends to favor particular ecological hypotheses to the near exclusion of others. The book begins with what is certainly the most dramatic description of the KT asteroid impact that I have read so far, and then takes us on a wild ride through the next 65 million years and across the entire North American continent. The book is well-written (downright gripping in places) and I appreciate the exhaustiove-but-unobtrusive footnoting. Anyone keen on digging into pre-Columbian ecological history will appreciate Flannery's assemblage of material that would otherwise be scattered across the technical literature. As we approach the Recent Flannery's focus (almost bordering on hero worship) on Paul Martin and the "Pleistocene Blitzkrieg" will doubtless annoy many -even though I tend to agree with Martin & Flannery about the importance of hunting on mammalian ecology I wish that more space had been given to competing hypotheses. Flannery's analysis of the Really Recent (last few hundred years) is definitely abbreviated (I encourage the reader to look to Diana Muir's excellent REFLECTIONS ON BULLOUGH'S POND for more detail) but it is hardly shallow. Instead Flannery asks us to both consider & seriously speculate on how the events of so short a time as we usually regard "history" might produce a future North America. Controversial? you bet! Thought-provoking? Absolutely! Give us some more maps & diagrams & this will jump to 5 stars easily!

This book is very very insightful. from its beginning point at the asteroid impact that wiped a continent clean and subsequent repopulating waves of vegetative and animal communities, to its discussion of Indigenous human populations/migrations, culminating in the European "re-discoverors'" and the modern conquest replete with considered reference to "guns, germs and steel".... all this is well researched and creative in its most speculative aspects. This is a valuable resource and should provide plenty of opportunity for the learner and educator alike. I particularly appreciate the "deep time" perspective. It resonates with what I believe is a vital component to any truly honest and appropriate assessment of human impacts on landscapes and ecologies. I will use this book in many references for educational projects. This is a great discourse on a most important modern phenomenon: why America and the Americans and their ideasl are so much the envy and goal of all other developing countries.... And yet, Flannery warns (rightly) that the American way is not globally sustainable... Certainly this book will generate much needed discourse.

"The Eternal Frontier" by Tim Flannery, sub-titled "An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples." Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.

An in-depth history of the continent of North America, with tidbits from South America, Australia and Eurasia thrown in. The book traces the ecological history of the Continent down to the present, with an emphasis on the disappering or changing frontier.

The author, an Australian professor, despite his Irish surname, describes the changes in the fauna (and somewhat the flora) of North America over the past 65 millions year, from the crashdown of the comet that destroyed the dinosaurs to the arrival of mankind and down to the present age, with the influx of immigrants, mainly from Europe. Professor Flannery takes for granted the theory of the movement of continental landmasses over the eons, the destruction of an entire order of creation by the smashing effects of a comet (asteroid?) and the arrival of the first humans about 13,200 years. Interestingly, Flannery is not afraid to be politically incorrect, as he ascribes the destruction of the mammoths, mastodons and other large animals (including the giant sloths and horses) to the arrival and expert skill of the first humans, the ancestors of today's Native Americans. These "Clovis Points" hunters were so expert that in a short three centuries they rid both North and South America of these largest animals in what Flannery describes as "a megafauna barbecue". He has a way with words, and every now and then puts in some Australian usage, e.g. "wonky".

In his description of evolution of the animals on North America, Dr. Flannery makes it clear that dogs "(family Canidae) are a true production of North America". After describing the dogs and their North American evolution, he addresses the cheetah, belonging to the only genus of living cats that may have originated in North America. On p. 115, he writes a memorable statement, "What is a cheetah but a cat trying to be a dog?" The Professor's insight is different than most of my college and university teachers!

As the book gets close and closer to the present time, the chapters become shorter and shorter. He spends some time describing the political and stylish differences between the New England colonies and Virginia, with an emphasis on how a New World weed, tobacco, would shape Virginia's history, leading to plantations and "egalitarianism". He terms the American War of Independence "...a bitter struggle, a true civil war", which, with his Irish surname, I would not expect. The Irish immigrants in the American Continental Army, and the German settlers in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York definitely did not consider the Revolution to be civil war between Englishmen.

The book is well written, and well documented, with pages 358 to 385 devoted to Notes and books referenced. Flannery certainly gives you a different point of view on North America!

Finally, the story of the North American continent in all its mythic grandeur! As a EuroAmerican, I learn from Flannery's tale that my kind, too, can become indigenous - just as all the other recent immigrants - the "native" Americans, the elk, the griz, the moose, the gray wolf, even our bison and almost all our other large mammals - have gradually become indigenous during the past 13,000 years. Recent immigrants all. How can we become indigenous? By ending once and for all our exploitation of a "frontier" land and instead coming to relate to this continent as our home.

For 65 million years, and especially for the last 13,000 years since the continental ice sheets melted and the first humans arrived, North America has been a land of immigrants. Flannery explores 3 evolutionary forces (the founder effect, ecological and social release, and adaptation) throughout all phases of the Cenozoic. By the time he works up to the EuroAmerican colonial period and the newest waves of human immigration, the continental themes are secure in the reader's mind. Stunning new insights for ecological and social progress thus become available.

For the final two-thirds of this book, I barely could put it down. I was in awe, both of the ideas and the beauty of Flannery's presentation. This Australian has done for my continent what is so desperately needed: the creation of a mythic tale that is true to the science yet can guide and inspire us to move forward, to heal our relationship to this magnificent land. Thomas Berry (coauthor of "The Universe Story") has long been urging Americans to find and celebrate their continental story, midway between the story of the cosmos/Earth and all our various bioregional stories. Finally, finally, the continental story emerges. Make no mistake: this is North America speaking through the voice of Tim Flannery. Let us listen to the wisdom and urgings of our continental home!

I myself plan to begin telling this mythic story wherever and whenever I get the chance. Flannery's remarkable book provides the context for my own work on continental faunal and floral changes since the Ice Ages, which is presented in my 2001, "The Ghosts of Evolution." And gosh golly, I have to recommend his book above my own! Bravo, Tim Flannery! And, hello North America!

In The Eternal Frontier, Tim Flannery starts his ecological history of North America with the major asteroid impact near the Yucatan 65 million years ago. He writes of the catastrophe with great verve, and the book becomes quite a page-turner. From there he moves forward through time to the present showing the changes in climate and habitat, and then how the advent of humans in North America impacted its ecology. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I had no idea what a distinct climate and ecology the central portion of North America has compared to the other continents. Because the major mountain ranges (Sierra Nevada, Rockies and Appalachians) run from north to south compared to east to west (the Alps, Urals and Himalayas), North America has a "climatic trumpet" where hot air comes up from the equator in the summer producing near tropical summers even in Wisconsin, and then cold air comes down from the arctic in winter producing a sub-arctic winter. I hadn't realized that Europe and Asia don't have areas with such major swings in temperature as the norm. Flannery also explains how this trumpet will cause global warning or an ice age to be most severe in North America compared to the other continents. Flannery presents and explores in the latter portion of his book many theses on how he thinks North Americans need to take care of their continent so that life as we know it is not jeopardized. Many may think his predictions more dire than need be, but all are worth some careful thought, and many are new ideas (such as the need for large carnivores) that most people would not have thought of. All in all, The Eternal Frontier is a thoughtful, well-written and surprisingly exciting book.

I rather enjoyed this book, though given its subject matter - discussing the evolutionary and ecological history of North America from the asteroid impact that closed the Mesozoic Era to today's environmental problems - it was perhaps a tad too sweeping. Epic, yes, grandly so, but sometimes I was frustrated that he didn't spend more time on a particular subject or idea that interested me. Arguably this was unavoidable given the 65 million years he sought to cover, but still I wished the book was even longer.

Having said that though, the book was quite wortwhile. Many aspects of the fauna and flora of North America were discussed. Quite a bit of space is devoted to mammalian evolution in the Cenozic, something that is hard to find in popular writings (I know, I have looked; there isn't much on the Cenozoic, particularly the Tertiary Period). Oreodonts, uintatheres, protoceratids, and one of my favorites _Teleoceras_ are all given attention.

Many interesting questions in North American evolution are raised and then answered. How did temperate forests come to be the dominant biome of most of eastern North America? What part did tree squirrels play in North American plant evolution? How did the bison become the vastly numerous species that thundered across the plains when the settlers arrived? Why did rhinos become extinct in North America? How did horses, at one time quite abundant on the continent (one fossil site in Florida he writes yielded no less than 9 co-existing fossil species), become extinct? Indeed, what happened to the Pleistocene megafauna in general, which included not only horses but mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, camels, lions, cheetahs, and many other animals?

Though the book focuses on North America, by necessity other continents are discussed, logical given the many land bridges that connected North America at various times with Asia, Europe, and South America. I didn't know for instance about the great fauna interchange between North America and the then European island archipelago 55-46 million years ago, how the fauna of North America overwhelmed the archaic fauna of Europe, though some European animals did successfully colonize North America (Flannery writes that mockingbirds first evolved in the Eocene epoch, likely from starling migrants that arrived from Europe). He goes into more detail in the more well known Great Faunal Interchange between North and South America, where large numbers of species colonized new lands, as well the formation of Beringia in the Pleistocene, the great land bridge that brought over not only many Asian animals but also humans.

Though mammals seem to get much of the focus in the book, Flannery does discuss the arrival and/or evolution of birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and plants throughout the time period in focus in the book. I thought his sections on reptiles was particularly intersting, discussing those who survived the asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico and those who didn't for instance, as well as notes on the advent of rattlesnakes in North America. Plants are not neglected; his writings on the creosote bush I found unexpected and interesting as well, and as mentioned he spent quite a bit of time discussing the evoltution of arguably North America's most charasteristic biome, the temperate decidious forest.

Flannery by necessity discusses a fair amount of climatology, geology, and plate tectonics in "The Eternal Frontier" as well. Not to an overwhelming degree but enough to allow the reader to get "the big picture" and to see how these events relate to the continued evolution of life in North America.

As might be expected mankind is well covered in the book. Much time is spent on the arrival of the first Native Americas (he refers to them as Indians, acknowledging cultural traditions though noting the inaccuracy) as well as the evolution of the Folsom and Clovis cultures. The impact the native peoples had on North America is the focus for Flannery, largely their probable role in the extinction of the North American megafauna of the Pleistocene but also their impact elsewhere.

Finally, and sadly, there is a considerable section on what Europeans have wrought in North America, from the extinction of the great auk to the slaughter of the buffalo to the ivory-billed woodpecker to vast deforestation...all chronicled.

All in all a good book with a nice section of color plates in the middle. A bit more detail in some sections would have been nice though, but perhaps that is not necessarily a fault.