Customer Reviews

World of Northern Evergreens

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

 

 

This is the perfect book for the serious amateur naturalist or the freshman Natural Historian who will be spending any time in the northern treelands.Pielou uses a combination of clear-non-technical prose and beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations to take us through the key species and ecological relationships of the region. What is particularly delightful about the book is that although one doesn't have to be a botanist to follow the discussions, one feels always that one is in the hands of a master ecologist and writer -there are always the questions behind the questions that lead us to further understand and appreciate what we are seeing. This is the shortest of Pielou's books that I have yet read, but it is just the right size to sling into your backpack as you head off for a field station this winter, or to have by your bed when you get back & want to look up "just whatever THAT was..."

For one who lives, as I do, within the heart of the temperate rainforest, I cannot escape the din of poliotically charged rhetoric about what needs doing and saving. And rarely now do publishers resist the temptation of putting out one more tract. That is why it is so delightful to get hands on a slim volume written by someone who is really an ecologist - I do not mean an environmental advocate -- although Chris Pielou has been that too, but someone who has a real grasp of the theory and the natural history on which bona fide ecology depends.

In "The World Of Northern Evergreens" Pielou takes us on a trip into the forest, in order to answer "two simple questions" that really are one: how did this magnificent kind of ecosystem become what it is? She is so knowledgeable about the subject that she can gracefully weave in to an account of some creature or plant, just enough theory or metaphor that you can start to really "get it", and figure out what makes these places work. Only in her brief and wise epilog does she draw explicitly the lessons about the sensistivity, indeed the non-renewable nature of northern evergreen forests. The book has many beautifully clear pen drawings of the habitats and the organisms described. A lynx of p. 142 watches the reader so attentively that it was a bit unsettling!

Put this on you shelf and, more important, sling into your pack when and if you have the good fortune to visit these special places.

This book covers the boreal forest, from the types of soil to the average temperatures and atmospheric content found at these higher latitudes. The book is more scientific and comprehensive than one would find in a Peterson field guide, for example, but is written in a similar vein. This is a very good place to start if you're interested in more esoteric subjects such as muskeg or the amount of carbon found in soils at northern latitudes. Pielou delivers another winner.