| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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reviews Come Forth and Multiply Life Out of Bounds: Bioinvasion in a Borderless World, by Chris Bright. W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998, 288 pp., $13.00 paper. Alien Invasion: America's Battle with Non-native Animals and Plants, by Robert Devine. National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1998, 280 pp., $24.00 cloth. As a child growing up in Oregon, I played long and hard with my sisters in a shady forest bordering my family's backyard. To me, the grove of sequoias and firs seemed like a primeval wilderness, with lush ivy and wild berries. It was many years later that I realized that this suburban woodlot had little to do with the pristine old-growth of western Oregon. The sequoias were not native, nor was the ivy, nor were the thickets of Himalayan blackberry. All three were examples of how immigrants had permanently altered North America's flora long before I was born. In 1936 botanist George Neville Jones described the arrival of weedy species as an "invasion" on par with the Ice Age. And that was before weeds like knapweed, kudzu, and loosestrife showed up. Today, non-native weeds invade agricultural crops far more effectively than native intruders, and cost U.S. farmers roughly $5 billion a year, and that doesn't include damage done to national parks and other wildlife areas. Nor does that figure include damage wrought by animals, such as zebra mussels, starlings, and carp. No wonder, then, that Chris Bright's and Robert Devine's books employ Neville's term "invasion" in their titles. As overused as this term is, the authors substantiate their claims with sobering accounts of mismanaged land, degraded soil and water, and invasive organisms out of control. Take Hawaii, for instance, where Bright notes that during the past 200 years, at least 263 of the islands' native species have disappeared and another 360 or so are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Or there's San Francisco Bay, where a new exotic species establishes itself every three months, often at the expense of indigenous aquatic life. Life Out of Bounds and Alien Invasion are similar in their mission of educating the reader about the ecological damage humans have caused, and how that damage is escalating through global commerce and travel. But they do have some differences in scope and style. Bright, a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute, focuses on catastrophes worldwide, with breathtaking thoroughness. Reporting in the third person, he tells of places like the island of Mauritius, where indigenous flora has been reduced to eight fenced plots that must be constantly weeded. Bright also explains the odd way that tree farms can contribute to deforestation, and how humans have created a biological seesaw by planting Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Ocean and Pacific salmon in the Great Lakes. A journalist specializing in conservation, Devine focuses on how invasives are changing landscapes inside the United States. Narrating vividly in the first person, Devine takes the reader outdoors to infested sites. He travels to places like south Florida, where melaleuca trees have claimed more than 50,000 acres of wetland, and California's Imperial Valley, where whiteflies thrive on artificial farmland created by irrigation. He talks with land managers, farmers, ranchers, and scientists to offer a compelling tale of ecological havoc. Despite a few redundancies, the books complement each other well to illustrate powerfully how invasive species are forcing many plants and animals into extinction–as many as ten species a day worldwide. However, their recommendations are few–no doubt because solutions have yet to be defined. On the whole, Federal agencies have been slow to respond, and global treaties are even more bureaucratically removed from the problem. But on February 3, President Clinton signed an executive order that prioritizes invasives as a problem for federal agencies to solve. The order could result in an additional $28 million for federal agencies. The order also establishes an Invasive Species Council, which will develop a national management strategy over the next 18 months to deal with alien invaders like cheatgrass and feral pigs. Both authors conclude that permanent solutions will have to begin at the grassroots level with an informed public–a public that values diversity in its own backyard as well as in its farms, rangelands, forests, and parks. For as much as we try to villainize plants and animals, it is humans who are responsible for a world out of balance. A Walk Through Time–From Stardust to Us, by Sidney Liebes, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Brian Swimm. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1999, 224 pp., $29.95 cloth. As an explanation of how we got here, the theory of evolution is constantly mugged by the human preference for stories that put people at the center of things. Polls suggest that half of Americans reject evolution in favor of traditional religious explanations. Even among those who accept it, evolution tends to be regarded as if it were some boring old uncle, bow-tied, studious, deferential, but murmuring interminable stories with no big emotional moments. We want our creation to be dramatic, full of human form and strong declarative voices, and told about warriors, entrepreneurs, and all-American athletes. In other words, we want a creation myth that justifies our present behavior. A Walk Through Time offers us something different. In text and photographs it is a chronicle, not simply of the brute sequencing from lungfish to Monica Lewinsky, but of the long unfolding processes that led from stardust to life, and then to the present world, including humankind. It's a brief telling, but lively and full of challenges. A Walk Through Time, the currently traveling exhibit on which the book is based, was conceived by co-author Sidney Liebes, then a senior scientist at Hewlett Packard. Alarmed at the loss of biodiversity, Liebes proposed a mile-long outdoor exhibit. Highlights of the Earth's five-billion-year history would be laid out in exhibit panels along this one-mile walk, and would demonstrate how little of life has showcased human achievements, and how much more has concentrated on the biological miracles that make humankind even possible. It would give us new respect for life and urge us to preserve options for the future. Hewlett Packard financed the exhibit and introduced it at its Palo Alto headquarters. The richly illustrated book contains the exhibit panels with an expanded text. It begins with the generation of helium atoms from hydrogen atoms in the fires of ancient stars, the evolution of heavier chemical elements, the collapse of ancient stars and the wandering of stellar dust clouds, the formation of organic chemicals in the stardust that coalesced into the planet Earth, and the amalgamation of those chemicals into living forms. Most of the story then told is of the vast experimentation and modification that went on in single-celled organisms. Plants don't debut until the last third of the book. The telling blurs comfortable distinctions we have grown up with. Rocks are sometimes formed by living creatures, and rocks break down to become parts of living creatures. Most of the iron ore humans exploit was once processed by microbes, and chalk, oil, and the limestone we use for cement all originate in this biogeological cross-dressing. The plants and animals we think of as inviolably distinct species are themselves the result of great leaps across species lines, as one cell invaded another, coopted some part of its host, and then made peace under a treaty of genetic unity. The oxygen-tolerant metabolism of one bacterium, for example, perhaps joined with the ciliated motility of another, the enzyme producing abilities of a third, and the DNA repairing talents of a fourth, and the patchwork became a successful species. In time, too, multi-cellular organisms formed from the coordinated, communicative joining of single-celled creatures. We humans are the product of these monumental acts of experimentation, accommodation, and cooperation, of bacterial cilia that moved into colonies of, say, energy-producing aerobic bacteria and then evolved into neural tubes, which enabled various parts of the organism to work in concert. There are chronicles here, of five past great extinction events, of climate shifts or meteor collisions that destroyed up to 95 percent of the species on Earth and took millions of years to recover from. The authors warn that, we are "in the beginnings" of another such extinction. The argument here is not simply to save the tiger and the whale. Liebes and his co-authors warn that we depend on microbial species for many essential services: for oxygen, for making nitrogen available to plants, for recycling of the building blocks of all life. A repeated warning is that interrupting these older accommodations can have serious consequences. For example, hydrogen sulfide gas liberated by oceanic plankton serves as nuclei for rain drops. Whales feed on the plankton that produce these gasses, and as we kill whales and create agricultural chemical runoff that feeds huge new populations of these plankton, we may change global rainfall patterns. The view presented here is indeed a challenge to the lifestyle we lead today. It urges us to see that fate is determined less by the purposes of great men than by the relationships between physical particles, species, and human beings. This view is tough to sell in a human world that so stresses individuality and competition that it makes celebrities of Bill Gates and Donald Trump. A Walk Through Time asks us to respect little things as well as big ones. It is a call to be curious, to be filled with wonder, to accept the humility due our dependence. It also calls upon us to change our lives. That, of course, has been the big reason people fear and avoid thinking about evolution. But it is also one of the reasons we should. The better we understand our debts to such things as viruses and bacteria and polyps and fungi, the better we may be able to sustain life on Earth. Recommended Reading from the Editors' Desks California Marine Life: A Guide to Common Marine Species, by Marty Snyderman, Roberts Rinehart Publishers & Monterey Bay Aquarium, Niwot, CO, 1998, 180 pp., $24.95 paper. This lavish look at the rich life and underwater environments along the California coast belongs on the shelf of every scuba diver or anyone who has ever wondered what those wet-suited legions descending on Point Lobos every weekend actually see while submerged. The photos, most taken by the author, capture a colorful range of subjects: wolf-eels peer from a frame of strawberry anemones; a great white shark swims just above a diver's head; a sheep crab, bat ray, and sand star feast on dying squid spent from spawning; a lacy rosette of nudibranch eggs drapes across a rock like a diaphanous gown. After an overview of the major marine phyla and a chapter on the state's geography, currents, and seasonality and how these affect water temperature and visibility, Snyderman's text profiles a handful of habitats in detail: beaches, kelp forests, rocky reefs, sand plains, and the open sea. A concluding chapter covers the ever-popular whales, pinnipeds, and otters. Sidebars throughout provide practical guidance for divers as well as interesting information about such topics as "bilateral symmetry: the advantage of having a head," "sex in the sea," and "how whales avoid the bends." Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999, 253 pp., $60 cloth; $35 paper. California: Land and Legacy, by William Fulton. Westcliffe Publishers, Englewood, CO, 180 pp., $50 cloth. Both of these new "coffee table" books bear the same urgent message: that the "golden state" may not be golden much longer, unless we act now to save it. But the way they deliver that message couldn't be more different. California, Land and Legacy, with its vibrant color photographs of preserved oak woodlands, redwood groves, wetlands, and other areas, shows us the beauty of what remains. In contrast, Robert Dawson's stark black and white photos in Farewell, Promised Land, show us the unlovely and little-known side of California: the pipe taking Owens Valley water across the Tehachapis to Los Angeles; bored children hanging out next to a graffitied wall in Pittsburg; the New River carrying polluted suds to the Salton Sea; the dry Tulare lakebed, now a corporate farm. Both books chronicle California's environmental history, from hydraulic mining to oil extraction to the look-alike subdivisions that continue to creep over the state's golden hills, but the authors arrive at different conclusions about what the past portends for the state's future. "Californians believe they do not extract;" writes Fulton, "they do not alter; they transform." Just as we transformed the Silicon Valley from "a myth into a reality far beyond anything the reality could have promised," writes Fulton, we can transform our future–and save California–by forming creative coalitions among developers, environmentalists, private landowners, and others. But Californians do extract, says Brechin, and have done so from the first days of European settlement, treating the land like a commodity to "be bought and sold on the market like cuts of meat." If we are going to save California, Brechin writes, we need to confront our materialistic culture, which is too often disguised as progress or growth. Either book is a fine reference on the state's environmental history, and in a strange way, they complement each other. The deserts, waterfalls, wildflower meadows, and other landscapes in Fulton's book will inspire most Californians to appreciate what's left. But for anyone with a lingering sense of loss–over what's been "filled in, paved over, drained, torn down, burned out–inevitably crowded out"–Farewell, Promised Land could be the catalyst from armchair to action. California Desert Miracle: The Fight for Desert Parks and Wilderness, by Frank Wheat. Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, CA, 1999, 336 pp., $14.95 paper. One of America's greatest conservation battles is chronicled in California Desert Miracle by Frank Wheat, himself a somewhat unlikely but heroic warrior in that fight. Wheat is a lawyer and the former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, but his book is in plain English and reads more like an adventure tale than a legal brief. The story begins in the late 1960s, when BLM manager Russ Penny's horror at the destructive Barstow-Vegas motorcycle race moved him to study ways to protect the desert. (The annual race continued to take place through 1989.) The tale winds through the mid-1970s, when then Senator Alan Cranston dedicated himself to legislation protecting the California Desert. (Cranston maintained that dedication for nearly 20 years.) Wheat covers the heavy politicking in the House and the Senate, and the lobbying skirmishes that bloodied the halls of the Capitol throughout the 1980s. And finally, Wheat reports on "the California Desert Miracle" itself, which came in the form of a Senate cloture vote on October 8, 1994, that passed the California Desert Protection Act without a single vote to spare. Wheat's is a compelling and inspiring story about the triumph of passionate individuals fueled by their love of the land. He aptly quotes Victor Hugo: "Stronger than all the armies of the world...is an idea whose time has come." |
Spring 1999
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