Books
Most books reviewed in our book review section are available through Amazon.com. To make your purchase easier we have included a link when available. When you purchase a book through this service on our website Conservation receives a portion of the purchase price.
July-September 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 3)
REVIEWS
Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator
by Paul Colinvaux
Yale University Press, 2008
At a critical point in his scientific career, Paul Colinvaux’s mentor chided him gently for spending four years studying Arctic lakes to show “that when the glaciers came, it got colder.” Colinvaux spent the next 40 years trying to find out what happened to tropical forests during the Ice Age. His conclusion in a nutshell: it got colder there, too (but, unexpectedly, not much drier). Far from being an anticlimax, this finding brought Colinvaux accolades and helped sink a dearly held paradigm of tropical biodiversity—refuge theory. Colinvaux’s tale of his 40-year quest to take cores of Ice Age pollen from tropical lakes is an engaging account of the grind of doing ecological research in the tropics and an illuminating analysis of the intellectual struggle between competing ideas about tropical diversity.
Lost Worlds: Adventures in the Tropical Rainforest
by Bruce M. Beehler
Yale University Press, 2008
Beginning as a student in Papua New Guinea, ornithologist Bruce Beehler documented the diversity that Paul Colinvaux sought to explain. In the process, he discovered new bird species, organized expeditions to untouched wilderness, and developed a strong sense of the importance of local people in maintaining and protecting tropical forests. Beehler has put this appreciation into practice, working for Conservation International and other nonprofit organizations on programs that combine conservation and economic development. His memoir vividly describes the forests and wildlife that are his passion while offering an unromantic view of how “environmental carpetbaggers” like himself work—warts and all—to advance international conservation in tropical forests from Madagascar to the Philippines to India.
Reviews by Margaret Pizer
The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest
by Ian McAllister
University of California Press, 2007
Conservationist Ian McAllister documents one of the world’s last truly wild wolf populations. McAllister dedicated 17 years of his life to observing wolves on Canada’s North Pacific coast, spending long stretches of time in the wild to earn the trust of two packs. Reflecting this extraordinary commitment, the photographs provide an intimate portrait of the canines’ lives and life cycles.
Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threatóand How to Counter It
by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert KunzigHolly Menino
Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
In a welcome departure from the doom and gloom that often characterize the climate debate, Wallace Broecker offers some tempered hope for the future. Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, joins forces with acclaimed science writer Robert Kunzig in a book that walks through the global warming problem and outlines strategies to mitigate the climate threat. Looking beyond efforts to simply reduce carbon emmissions, Broecker assesses exactly what it might take not only to scrub CO2 out of the air but also to dispose of it.
The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment
by Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich
Island Press/Shearwater Books 2008
Forty years after Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb and helped define the way environmentalists think about Earth’s limited resources, he and his wife Anne Ehrlich have published a meticulous examination of how Homo sapiens came to dominate the world. Marrying ecology with anthropology, the authors explore biological and cultural evolution to guide readers through the complex forces and relationships that drive our planet.
Reviews by Judy Wexler
