Book Reviews, Winter 2010
The Earth After Us
What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?
By Jan Zalasiewicz
Oxford University Press, 2009
Taking the very long view, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz embarks on a provocative thought experiment in his new book: if extraterrestrials landed on Earth 100 million years from now, what traces of humanity would they find? In other words: what will be our geologic legacy? The answer might make you feel less guilty about your ecological footprint. Chances are, in a few million years there will be no trace that you ever existed, let alone any record of your cross-country, carbon-intensive airplane trips. In fact, even iconic human structures—such as the pyramids of Egypt—will be gone millions of years from now. But as Homo sapiens continues to alter Earth’s climate and ecosystems, our collective record in the rocks will not be insignificant. ❧
Down to the Wire
Confronting Climate Collapse
By David W. Orr
Oxford University Press, 2009
Political scientist and environmental thinker David Orr throws his hat into the ring of climate-change prophecies but fails to push beyond the familiar laments. Orr warns that humans cannot continue with business as usual. And also like his fellow Jeremiahs, Orr laments the uneducated state of the American populace, infantilized by consumer culture. But his prescribed solutions for the U.S. and for the world seem glib for a political scientist. A bulleted list of recommendations in the book’s last chapter includes cutting the Pentagon’s budget by one-half and confiscating all profits from the weapons industry. ❧
Plan B 4.0
Mobilizing to Save Civilization
By Lester R. Brown
W.W. Norton & Co., 2009
As one might expect from the subtitle of his new book, Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 is no modest affair. The founder of both the Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institutes proposes that, to avoid global catastrophe, humans must cut net CO2 emissions 80 percent, stabilize population at 8 billion or lower, eradicate poverty, and restore the Earth’s natural systems—all by 2020. Brown’s enthusiasm is contagious, but what’s really striking is just how familiar his goals have already become—and how Brown fails to outline a specific, workable plan to avert catastrophe. ❧
Grass
In Search of Human Habitat
By Joe C. Truett
University of California Press, 2009
Grasses—including rice, wheat, corn, and oats—make up only two percent of Earth’s approximately 400,000 species of vascular plants, despite their outsized importance for humanity. Joe C. Truett’s book is a paean to these monocotyledons, which he began studying as an undergraduate in the 1960s. Now a grassland ecologist, Truett writes elegantly about the African savanna of the Pleistocene era, the prairies discovered by Lewis and Clark, and the first golf courses commissioned in the United States. Along the way, he reveals that what you might regard as an 18-hole, country-club centerpiece is actually a carefully designed landscape—one that that mimics our evolutionary preferences for the grasslands from which we evolved. Truett’s essays range from memoir to history lesson, but they’re always impassioned, informative, and entertaining. ❧
Rewilding the World
Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution
By Caroline Fraser
Metropolitan Books, 2009
Amidst the hyperbole and hand-wringing often found in environmental writing, Rewilding the World is a beacon of clarity. In her primer on the recent history and current state of conservation science, author Caroline Fraser explains how ecological theories, such as mesopredator release and the theory of island biogeography, became integrated into applied conservation. Some case studies from the book are success stories—what once was a heavily fortified border between East and West Germany is now a corridor of habitat for predators such as the European lynx. Some anecdotes end in failure; when the U.S. government reintroduced wolves to the Southwest, many were quickly shot by ranchers. And some efforts, such as the relocation of prairie dog colonies in New Mexico, have trajectories whose outcomes are yet to be determined. ❧
Reviews by Judy Wexler
