4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mourning the missing, August 28, 2007
This review is from: The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind (Hardcover)
It's no longer news that the human species is now considered an "outbreak" in the sense that we are an epidemic like AIDS or SARS. We are an organism that kills other life. Our methods are more subtle than some diseases. We don't often kill off whole species directly, but our lifestyle destroys the habitat they need to survive. Given how much attention we demand our medical services give to those other outbreaks of infectious organisms, it's still perplexing that we pay so little heed to our own destructive nature. According to Terry Glavin, it doesn't take much to see the result. He's done a great deal of observing our influence on other life, and in this excellent series of essays, he shares what he's found. With penetrating insights imparted in the finest story-telling manner, this book is a needed adjunct to the growing list of environmental works.
Unlike so many books covering the human devastation of our planet, Glavin doesn't overwhelm us with numbing numbers. This is, as he declares in the subtitle, "The Age of Extinctions" - the worst since an asteroid took out the dinosaurs and many other forms of life. There are some body counts, along with lists of which other animals have survived our depredations. The threat, however, is ongoing. In recent years we've seen the fish stocks - cod, tuna and salmon were once common fare on our tables - decline or disappear. Plant species, upon which many of our medicines depend, are being swathed away. A quarter of the mammals which ultimately led to us after the dinosaurs were taken out are threatened with following them. How many can we truly afford to lose?
Glavin's title is indicative. At a Costa Rican reserve, where he was assured the glorious Macaw was a regular visitor, he was forced to wait until just before leaving. He and his wife waded down a stream for a better viewing spot, only to climb out to be greeted by a sign warning them of crocodiles. He's visited many places in his survey, meeting people who could describe plentiful stocks of fish present a generation ago that are now gone. Whaling, which takes up a major segment of the book, is examined carefully. The question arises: "What is a 'sustainable' catch?" The answer lies in still better observation in the field and not in more pronouncements from distant bureaucrats. Glavin isn't a withering environmentalist. He understands the needs of people. He visits little villages, conversing with those who depend on the wild stocks and who understand what habitat means to them. And to us. We are the ones who must better understand our impact on our surroundings. He stresses that the loss of these creatures is our loss.
In the final analysis, of course, we are also the sole species with the power to cure the infestation. Various suggestions have been forwarded as the means to prevent further extinctions. Managed wildlife reserves is one idea, the "breeding zoo" is another. These and other proposals are desparation measures, in Glavin's view. They are an artificial means of "keeping the numbers up" while ignoring the fundamental question of how wildlife fits into the environment. It is the loss of habitat on which we must focus our attention and apply solutions. And that's something we aren't doing enough of. He notes that instead of our vaunted technologies and education systems increasing what we need to know, we are losing knowledge with every passing generation. It is up to us to reverse that trend, not only to help the wild species survive, but to accomplish our own survival. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Close-Up Look at the Causes of Extinction, the Possible Consequences, and New Choices, July 20, 2007
This review is from: The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind (Hardcover)
The statistic that a species is lost every 10 seconds sounds bad, but it's hard to connect to. What does it mean? In this thoughtful book, Terry Glavin travels around the world to examine the edge of extinctions to see what the consequences and answers might be. You'll find it a moving and thoughtful trip.
As a youngster, I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and vividly remember those passages that described birds' eggs that wouldn't hatch because of pesticides. The Sixth Extinction will place several new vivid memories into your mind about the consequences of human economic development and population growth.
Are we headed for environmental disaster? It's very likely. The main encouraging sign to the contrary is that there's a strong desire among many people to save environments, species, and avoid pollution.
The book opens with a visit to the Singapore Zoological Gardens, a natural-seeming zoo that provides most of the somewhat natural environment left in Singapore. Mr. Glavin goes on to point out that zoos can't replace natural settings and describes the many flaws of zoos . . . including the terrible loss of wildlife from capturing specimens for zoos. Your full horror at this will be captured by his stories about how early zoos often included aboriginal men. This is an important point because even if biotechnology allows us to save species (even extinct ones), there needs to be a proper environment for those species.
More shocking to you will be the revelation that large parks are often too small to provide proper environments. They just delay the eventual extinction.
The first sign of hope comes in Mr. Glavin's visit to Costa Rica to see a scarlet macaw. In Costa Rica, endangered species are being revived by the social contract that favors the tropical rain forest and ecotourism. As a result, he did see the macaw living free in the 1500 hectare Curu National Wildlife Reserve. Unfortunately, in almost every other country the tropical forests are burned to make farmland or logged at a profit . . . destroying habitats essential for the bulk of the world's land species. One problem of people loving birds is that many rare species are hunted for private collections, speeding their decline into extinct status in the wild.
A visit to Russia shows that opening of "free" markets often means faster extinctions. You'll read about large fish beyond what you've probably imagined. But they won't be around much longer as people can earn a year's wages in a single night of poaching protected species.
Mr. Glavin next examines the increasing number of attacks on humans by cougars. It turns out that there aren't so many cougars, but humans are filling up the spaces where cougars used to live without humans in the wild. Cougar attacks will increase, even though their numbers will probably decline from the current low levels.
In a visit to Norway, Mr. Glavin looks at the logic of how whales are saved. Not all whales are on the endangered species list, such as Minke whales. Yet, many people oppose hunting any whales, even if they aren't going to be pushed towards extinction by limited harvesting. In this chapter, Mr. Glavin points out that our preferences for animals can lead us to bad decisions. This chapter will cause you to rethink what it means to be in favor of species survival. Unlike other fishing cultures, this one has preserved its species in local waters by wise self-restraint on harvesting.
An investigation of apples leads to a chilling look at the potential risk to our food supplies by increasing monoculture of a few species. The Irish potato famine should have taught us that diversity of food is a good idea. We seem to have forgotten that lesson. In this part of the book, you'll read about some amazing tomatoes that will definitely tempt your taste buds.
The book's final chapter looks at what the alternatives are through a visit to the Eastern Himalayas, a land where the people have resisted modern ways in favor of their own approach to sustainability. Trees are harvested without being cut down. Trees are used to fertilize the soil, rather than chemicals. Crop rotation using varieties of several species allows good yields. Local languages and cultures are surviving as a result. This chapter will leave you with a sense of what the alternative paradigm might be . . . with good leadership.
Mr. Glavin points out that due to extinctions of species, cultures, plant lore, and languages that are we probably losing more valuable knowledge that humans have long known than we are adding valuable new knowledge at the frontiers of learning. It's a valuable perspective that I hadn't seen expressed before.
Although he didn't use this example, I remember reading that no one kept a copy of the engineering plans for the Saturn V rocket that U.S. astronauts rode to the moon. Even if we wanted to spend the money to revisit the moon (something that hasn't happened for several decades), we would have to develop a whole new set of plans to do so. How many lessons were lost by not valuing this old knowledge? Multiply this example by hundreds of millions of times and you can see the problem. I often see this in my consulting practice as I arrive to find that the current leaders have no idea what worked well for the prior leaders 10, 20, and 30 years earlier. Often, I'm the only person left who can transmit that earlier, valuable knowledge.
This is more than a book about extinction: It's a book about what it means to be a human being. Read this book and dwell deeply on its lessons.
Bravo, Mr. Glavin!
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