7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book for all American Naturalists, July 16, 2009
This review is from: Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery (Hardcover)
A plague of Rocky Mountain Locusts around Nebraska in 1875 was estimated to cover 198,000 square miles, over twice that of the UK. Despite the largest ever single species swarm determined in history, the locust was soon extinct. It is just one of several examples covered here, cataloguing abundance in nature in the North American continent and its demise following Columbus, half a millennium ago: "Columbus didn't discover America; he simply ran into a continent already occupied by countless nations as varied in their lives as the ecology of the land they occupied." Here the author is swift to dismiss America as a pristine wilderness unchanged by man, rather it was wilderness in relatively stable balance with human communities, who had already modified or continued to manage nature to their ends.
British wildlife film maker Steve Nicholls is at pains to tease out why collapse in natural abundance is so poorly regulated by science and politicians, given the skewed nature of our baselines as to actual abundance: we estimate abundance based on a limited perception long out of date. Copious records exist from European contact, to gain a relatively complete picture as to what happened when a mercantile capitalist civilization was unleashed on paradise found; a chain of events repeated elsewhere but scarcely revealed in such vastness of scale: "The hugely abundant natural world of North America provided the raw capital to fuel the birth of new nations. Those same historical documents that allow us to build up a picture of past natural abundance also provide a stark and sobering illustration of the last five hundred years of our relationship with nature."
Far from an unfurling tragedy, Nicholls is a canvas strewn with bounty and grandeur incorporating native communities like the Calusa who never farmed. They lived off an incredible marine productivity. Combining history and personal narrative, there is a pointed lack of illustrations or maps. Depictions work through our imaginations as we glimpse the late Great plains as Lewis and Clark convey from 1803: "this scenery already rich pleasing and beautiful was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe, deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compreed at one view ...(sic) "
Of twenty chapters, over a third is given over to aquatic habitats including the oceans and their exploitation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are complimentary, referenced sources as with oyster harvesting off Chesapeake bay: "the Lord put them there so we could get them ... Get it today! To hell with tamar. Leave it till tamar, and somebody else'll get it." As is now dawning and highlighted, ocean abundance has probably fared worse than terrestrially, hidden in invisibility and subject to assumptions of infinity: "These animals are found at all times of the year everywhere around this island in vast numbers ... could [yield] plentifully from them with both fat and meat." - concerning Steller's sea cow that became extinct a record 27 years after discovery.
Despite examples of dramatic recovery in certain species, (beavers, elephant seals and the cahow, from Bermuda that was restored from presumed extinction by a determined governor) this is more a witness narrative than a call for change given wildlife literature and warnings about collapse are nothing new. As Nicholls observes "Almost as soon as the New World was discovered, it was connected to an enormous market ... These markets sucked up American resources at extraordinary rates." starkly illustrating a carnage disguised along our supermarket aisles. The further we are separated from the source and nature of exploitation as with fishing on the high seas, the more we consume in ignorance, with profligacy. Historical natural abundance is now unimaginable. Suggestions to reform globalised capitalism are indicated.
Leaving a litany of extinctions, Nicholls attempts to grapple honestly with infinite abundance that greeted Europeans to the new world, not just in the beginning but through several waves of exploration and spread following history from East to West. He tries to pin it down and bring us face to face with it. There is an exposure to the value systems the Europeans brought with them, so ill suited to the preservation of biodiversity: primarily a strong belief in a self serving God and that all the abundance discerned was the Lord's great gift for the new pilgrims to pillage as they wished; that the wolf and its ilk was the devil incarnate and worst of all, a rapine capitalism where everything was potentially available to kill and destroy on the cheap and sell dear - money money money. We meet crystal clear waters carpeted in oysters, mussels and abalones. Seas and rivers aplenty with whales, seals, turtles, sirenians, otters, birds, walruses and fish. We move from the Atlantic through the Eastern USA and then south, north ... from the Caribbean to the Mississippi, from the wastes of Canada to the warmth of Florida. From giant forests to the great plains. From sea to sea, coast to coast and from the Vikings to the 21st century. What has been lost is not simply species, but abundance and richly evolved ecosystems, in many ways lost for ever - like vast cities of prairie dogs up to five billion strong ...
"I offer this book as a time machine." Nicholls "time machine" is warmly inviting - a detailed and lavish expose in an unfinished (his)story.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Slaughter of the Innocents, September 6, 2009
This review is from: Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery (Hardcover)
This well documented book traces American natural history from the time of Jamestown (sometimes regressing to earlier times) into the present. If you would like to read history from the perspective of the American Indian, Jesuit priest explorers and all the fauna and flora riches surrounding them without any weepy eyed attempt to bemoan their destruction - Read "paradise found". Until I did, I had no real concept of how far we have fallen. Even though in my short life of 61 years I recall dramatic destruction of our natural environment (seems almost anyone older than 30 might likewise attest).
Steve Nicholls' excellent monograph goes much beyond my own extrapolations of "the way it was" and it exceeded my expectation of reading enjoyment. Would you have thought that Native Americans were boreal forest managers? Did you know that European diseases all but wiped out Native Americans as it almost did native Hawaiians (I just returned from Kauai)? Did you know that the Passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet existed in the millions, nay billions and are extinct today? The inexhaustible cod fish population has collapsed from trillions to millions just recently (1992), and seems unable to recover. However be assured, Nicholl's prose is not a whining harp about paradise lost but an education of how the principle of the "last oyster" has fouled coastal waterways, inter alia, Chesapeake Bay... and all else. This gregarious account caused me to flash back to the first time I viewed "Seven Lakes Basin" in the Olympic National Park; from that ridgetop vista I saw paradise.
Would you have guessed feral (escaped) hogs have rooted and destroyed almost as much as the men who brung'em. "Nature in America at the Time of Discovery" causes revelation of how history has been driven by man's lust for natural resources. It was the motivation to move men ever westward to fulfill their divine destiny or "Manifest Destiny".
I'll sum it up by quoting the last sentence in this book, "I offer this book as that time machine." Yes, this book is a time machine which permitted me to walk creation as it was and might be, if only in my imagination.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paradise Found, December 4, 2009
This review is from: Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery (Hardcover)
If you have ever yearned to know what North America was like before we started stripping it down for our gain, this is the book for you. It is both exhilerating and and desperately poigniant. Carefully researched with wonderful extensive descriptions straight out of early explorer's logs, it sings with authenticity...and I am only half way through it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
