39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Onward with Pleistocene Park!, February 27, 2006
This review is from: Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Organisms and Environments) (Hardcover)
"Twilight of the Mammoths" is a gem of a book that traces the career work of one of America's most distinguished ecologists: University of Arizona Emeritus, Paul Martin. Martin begins the book with a crash course in Pleistocene ecology: a who's who of magnificent megafauna, from mammoths to mylodon ground sloths - most of whom vanished suddenly some 13,000 years ago ("Near Time," according to Martin). Surely readers will be surprised by how little this awareness has penetrated even the ecologically schooled. Martin aims to correct that oversight, by bringing the dimension of time - near time and "deep time" - into ecology.
Paul Martin is best known for his "Overkill Hypothesis." The great beasts of Ice Age America went extinct, he maintains, not because of climate change but because of us - specifically, the first mammals to arrive on this continent, across the Bering Land Bridge, equipped with weapons that could kill at a distance. This scientific memoir does a splendid job of helping the reader step by step engage with that issue and to acquire a deep sense of the historical twists and turns of its reception. Along the way, we are treated to sensory rich descriptions and storytelling of events and experiences that shaped Martin's outlook. The author is not only a scientist but one of the world's great naturalists - feeling and tasting his way through the landscape. And he is an elegant and sensitive writer:
"It will come as no surprise," Martin writes, "that I define 'the last entire earth' differently than did Thoreau. Prehistorians find that any given land begins to lose its wildness not when the first Europeans arrive, but when the very first humans do. In the Americas true wilderness was more than 10,000 years gone by the time Columbus reached our shores. It disappeared with the megafauna, whose calls gave voice to the forests and prairies." (p. 183)
He continues, "A great many large animals, gifts of the evolutionary gods, were destroyed before anyone drew their images on bone or stone or on the walls of American caves."
Just before "Twilight of the Mammoths" was published, Paul Martin was among a dozen authors proposing in a commentary in the prestigious journal Nature that it is not enough to mourn the near-tiime passing of the great beasts. Rather, we must embark on a kind of "resurrection." ("Rewilding North America", Donlan et al., 18 August 2005).
Martin's final chapter, "Resurrection: The Past Is Future," brilliantly and movingly establishes the argument and begins to develop the details. But it all began thirty years ago, and with just one man as lonely advocate. "Twilight of the Mammoths" revisits the highlights of those years.
To begin: In the mid-1970s, Paul Martin publishes an outlandish proposal in Natural History Magazine: "Bring Back the Camel!" Martin is advocating a return of the camel to shrubby rangelands in the western United States - in part because overgrazing of grasses by horses and cattle would be ameliorated by the browsing prowess of camels (which prefer noxious shrubs to silica-rich grasses). But he is also urging the introduction of camels as a kind of "repatriation" of a type of animal that not only used to live on this continent but whose family originated right here.
Paul Martin was, thus, bringing an evolutionary understanding to range management and conservation biology. His proposal to bring back the camel was met by a resounding silence. As decades passed, Martin kept at it: arguing (to no avail) for officials at the Grand Canyon to look upon feral burros not as troublesome aliens but as suitable proxies for the native members of the horse family that lived throughout the western United States until going extinct just 13,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, this Pleistocene ecologist was authoring and co-authoring all sorts of technical (but, nevertheless, always engagingly written) scientific papers supporting the theory for which he is best known: Overkill.
Finally, in the late 1990s, Martin published an idea that made his camel and burro advocacy look tame: "Bring Back the Elephants!" he declared in Wild Earth Journal. Well, this time, somebody was listening - several somebodies, important somebodies in the realm of conservation biology (e.g., Michael Soule) and in environmental activism (Dave Foreman). The commentary they co-published in Nature is bringing an exciting and monumental expansion in the scope of conservation biology. "Twilight of the Mammoths" is the historical foundation.
"It could be argued," writes Martin, "that taxa have an inherent moral right to continue evolving free of human intervention, or even that Earth as a whole has a right to demonstrate its fullest possible evolutionary potential. It could be argued that, as the species responsible for the extinction of so many taxa, humans have a corresponding responsibility to attempt their restoration when feasible. Like all sweeping philosophical and ethical arguments, these are open to intense debate." (p. 202)
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Provocative Read, January 3, 2006
This review is from: Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Organisms and Environments) (Hardcover)
As a student of the Quaternary, I was excited about this book from the acknowledged near time expert, Dr. Paul S. Martin. I was not disappointed. Dr. Martin does a great job of building a pyramid of background information so any new student to Ice Age Extinctions will have a firm foundation. He even parenthesizes definitions behind terminology that might be new to the lay reader. For those new to Dr. Martin's angle on Ice Age Extinctions, he attributes all of the near-time megafaunal extinctions to pre-historic hunting. He dismisses climatologists' assertions that changing weather patterns contributed or were solely responsible for the end of so many large terrestrial animals in North America. Following his logic, Dr. Martin proposes a "rewilding" of America with not only wolves and horses, but with similar species of those animals no longer in existence, such as elephants and African antelope. Whether you agree with his assertions, assumptions or conclusions, you will find this book provocative and full of good science.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking arguments and speculation, August 2, 2007
This is one of those books that may jolt the conventional wisdom implanted in your brain, especially if you are an environmentalist. First the negative...I thought the first 5 chapters, about one-half, of this book to be a bit boring, telling me more about sloth dung than I really wanted to know. But then the book picked up -- way up -- in interest.
The true "natural" environment of the United States, in Martin's view, existed 13,000 years ago before man got here and that it has been out of balance since. Martin comes down strong on the side that human beings were responsible for the extinction of many large mammals in the Americas about 13,000 years ago and his argument is persuasive. He also makes a strong case that human beings have lived in the Americas for little more than 13,000 years. This is a hot-button issue among archaeologists, but Martin's point is: if the Indians were here more than 13,000 years ago where are the signs of their presence? Not many, if any, have been found in a hundred years of looking.
His most interesting point and new to me was his proposals to re-people (wrong word, maybe "re-animate"?) the New World with representatives of the large mammals that became extinct. For example, why is that our government is trying to kill off the burros and wild horses in national parks? Horses originated in the Americas; they became extinct about 13,000 years ago. Why not allow them to reestablish themselves as a native species?
And then he really gets off on a speculative tangent, "rewilding America." Camels and Llamas lived in the United States until 13,000 thousand years ago; why not reintroduce them as native, wild species. Similarly rhinocerous, elephant, lion, tiger and other mammal species. To be sure the species of the mammals that became extinct are not exactly the same species that now live -- but close enough, in his opinion. An Asian elephant, he says, is closer genetically to extinct mammoths than it is to the African elephant.
Smallchief
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