| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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REVIEWS Ursine Paradise Lost Bear In Mind: The California Grizzly, by Susan Snyder. Heyday Books, Berkeley, CA, 2003, 244 pp., $49.50 hardcover. Bears have always struck a chord in the human psyche: intelligent, curious, omnivorous, and able to stand upright, we see in them a shadow of ourselves. Yet as much as we admire bears, we’ve simultaneously destroyed them. As Susan Snyder poignantly reminds us in Bear in Mind, no wilderness was more quickly tamed than California’s, and no symbol of its wildness more vehemently eradicated than the California grizzly bear. Snyder, a librarian at the University of California Berkeley, dipped into the literary and pictorial larder of the Bancroft Library to create a wide-ranging portrait of Californians—Native Americans, Spaniards, miners, hunters, and settlers—and their love-hate relationship with the “king of our continent.” She tells the story through historical accounts complemented by period art and photographs. The Golden State where SUVs now roam was once grizzly bear paradise, home to an estimated 10,000 before the human juggernaut of the Gold Rush. One pioneer recalled, “they were everywhere...I often killed as many as five or six in one day, and it was not unusual to see fifty or sixty within twenty-four hours.” As Snyder points out, Bear in Mind is “a portrait of bears, but a better portrait of their exterminators.” Vaqueros made cruel sport of grizzlies by lassoing the bears as they scavenged meat cast aside by ranchers. One vaquero recalled lassoing and killing forty bears in a single night in what is now Silicon Valley. An even crueler amusement was bull-and-bear baiting, which pitted irascible grizzles against hot-tempered Spanish bulls. Even Grizzly Adams, a mountain-man-turned-showman who clearly loved the bears he raised and exhibited, didn’t hesitate to kill a mother to capture her cubs. Though emphasizing the human element, the book’s tales and images convey a sense of the animal’s quirky personality. One grumpy grizzly insists on sharing a rowboat ride with a terrified hunter; another gently snuffles the forehead of an Indian cowering inside a hollow log. Unfortunately, California’s first conservationists were more concerned with preserving the state’s scenery than its bestiary. The grizzly, “ancient symbol of California savagery,” was gone by 1908, shot, lassoed, and poisoned with such intensity that not one single complete specimen was preserved for science. That the California grizzly graces the state flag is pitiful and ironic compensation. As Snyder sadly concludes: “Bear symbols and bear tales are not the same as bears.” It’s something we should all bear in mind. Pamela S. Turner An Ecology of Caring The Pine Island Paradox, by Kathleen Dean Moore. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN, 2004, 208 pp., $20.00 hardcover. If you aren’t familiar with Kathleen Dean Moore’s previously published books, Riverwalking and Holdfast, you might at first believe she’s just a “middle-aged woman in rubber boots,” as she describes herself in The Pine Island Paradox. In fact, Moore is a distinguished philosophy professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, and she’s also the founding director of the university’s Spring Creek Project, an interdisciplinary program that meshes science, literature, and philosophy to analyze humans’ role in the natural world. Like the mission of the Spring Creek Project, Moore’s new collection of essays seeks to step outside the classroom. Like her earlier collections, The Pine Island Paradox travels through marshes, forests, and deserts to offer fresh ways of looking at ourselves and the world. In 1987 Wendell Berry called for a new kind of academia in his book, Home Economics. Berry argued that “when the departments of a university become so specialized that they can speak neither to each other nor to the students of other departments, then that university is displaced.” The Pine Island Paradox addresses this problem by building bridges across the traditional boundaries of science, literature, and philosophy, and by constructing the spans in plain English and outdoors. The style of Moore’s essays is conversational; you might think she’s chatting with you in her backyard, but she’s actually wrestling with some heavyweight concepts. In one essay she tackles Descartes and the Book of Genesis within a matter of pages; in another essay she knocks around the Book of Job. In writing that reads almost like a travelogue, she joyfully elbows such cherished behemoths of Western culture as Enlightenment philosophy and capitalism while wading through shrimp-filled ocean water, camping on an island, or listening to a meadowlark at dawn. Because she isn’t a scientist, she can easily cast aside scientific objectivity. In an essay about personal classified ads, she admits that her husband accuses her of “bad science.” But Moore isn’t being naively subjective, she’s deliberately flying in the face of an authoritarian, faceless science that pretends that research is done in an emotionless vacuum. No wonder, then, that the book’s ultimate message is about human love. Moore isn’t afraid to use the L word. For her, love for her family and love for a place are all wrapped up in the same “ecology of caring.” This ecology fuses Aldo Leopold’s land ethic—that “we should sing our love for, and obligation to” the land—with feminist Nel Noddings’ ethic of care, where human beings are obligated to each other as caregivers. Moore combines the two into an “environmental ethic of care.” This ethic, she claims, should be “built on caring for people and caring for places, and on the intricate and beautiful ways that love for places and love for people nurture each other and sustain us all.” The fate of our species depends on such care.
Dragonflies and Damselflies of California, by Timothy Manolis. California Natural History Guides, University of California Press, Berkeley,CA 2003, 304 pp., $39.95 hardcover. A couple of generations ago Roger Tory Petersen started a natural history revolution in this country. He introduced the public to a well-illustrated field guide to North American birds that was simple to use, affordable, yet could quickly discriminate among the many feathered residents of a region. It was small enough to fit in a pocket and take into the field. This bird guide was soon followed by many others, and today millions of people owe their first knowledge of native plants and animals to field guides. But most insects are so small and so diverse that for a long time they didn’t lend themselves well to field guides. Slowly, that lack is being rectified. In recent years there has been a growing interest in dragonflies and damselflies. Why it didn’t happen sooner, I can’t understand. They are large, brightly colored, and conspicuous. But now comes a profusely illustrated field guide by Tim Manolis on the dragonflies and damselflies of California. In addition to sections on their anatomy, behavior, heat regulation, dispersal, and life cycle, there are keys to both larval and adult forms, and 40 color plates that include all 108 species found in the state. Each section of the book can be found by flipping the color coded tabs at the edge of each page. Finally, in true bird-watching fashion, there is a checklist of species. The book is packed with a wealth of information, yet smoothly integrates the key elements of species identification into an easy-to-use format. It allows users to delve as deeply into taxonomy, behavior, and ecology as they wish. For anyone wishing to learn about more than our vertebrate fauna, this field guide is a fascinating way to start. Norman D. Penny The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, by Amy Stewart. Alonquin Books of Chapel Hill Workman Publishing, New York, NY, 2003, 223 pp., $23.95 hardback. Charles Darwin was amazed by the soil-building powers of earthworms, noting that at Down House horses could canter silently across fields that were stony ground a few years earlier. Amy Stewart has written a worthy successor to his On The Formation Of Vegetable Mould. In lucid, fluent prose, Stewart chronicles her own explorations into the life of Lumbricus and its kin. Stewart has etched two examples of the worm’s disassembling activities into my mind. The first is the ability of worms to destroy hardwood forests, as is happening in Minnesota and New Hampshire. European species easily outbreed and out-eat the natives when it comes to devouring leaf litter. Their appetites leave the forest floor bare of duff, which is bad news for seeds and tender young sprouts. There is no understory now, no up-and-coming replacements for today’s leafy towers. So next time you fish, toss unused live bait into the lake, not onto the ground. From forests to sewage sludge seems quite a jump, but worms take it in stride. For years earthworm farmers have used these wriggling stomachs to break down mounds of manure, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, they tackle mounds of sewage biosolids. At the Calera Creek Water Recycling Plant in Pacifica, the biosolids are heaped into long windrows, and once they have cooled, earthworms start processing the material into clean, sweet-smelling, nutrient-rich plant food. Stewart quotes Darwin as wanting to be laid to rest “among his beloved earthworms.” It would have been a fitting re-entry for him into the great cycle of life. Suzanne Ubick Mammal Tracks and Sign: A Guide to North American Species, by Mark Elbroch. Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2003, 784 pp., $44.95 paper. Next time you step into the wild, remember: the neighborhood news is ready to read all around you. Those pawprints on fresh snow could mean a passing housecat—or a hunting fox. The raised ridge of dirt running in crazy circles could be Bugs Bunny on his way to Albuquerque—or a local pocket gopher looking for a meal. From pyramids of stinky poop to piles of ransacked pinecones, animals betray their passage in a thousand different ways. Our ancestors deciphered these clues to keep themselves in fur and food. Today, most prefer food shopping to shooting. Yet interest in tracking lives on among a growing number of naturalists eager to reconnect to their environment. Mammal Tracks and Sign, by master tracker Mark Elbroch, is a fantastic way to join their ranks. It brings together color photos of spoor and scat from an exhaustive list of North American mammals with range maps, gait analyses, trackway drawings, and life history notes. Anecdotes from the field and interviews with other trackers are interspersed with tips on interpreting gait patterns, clawmarks, meal leftovers, and even nests. It is the Cadillac of tracking books, easy to use and authoritatively complete. Kathleen M. Wong |