books
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Bats, Vultures, & Two-Legged Ghouls
Pity uncharismatic wildlife! So much easier to slaughter. We have here two books on creatures that get the short end of the representational stick most places around the world, meaning the stick is often applied to them. Bats are irrationally feared. They’re also pollinators (of wild bananas, agave, and much else), voracious insect devourers, and…
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Frankenstein’s Planet
I re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, recently. The book is 200 years old this year (see the exhibit at the Morgan). If you have not read it, it is profoundly different from the Frankenstein created by the commercial media over the years. The strangest transference may be the naming thing: “Frankenstein” has…
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The Overstory
“What use are we, to trees?” Richard Powers’s novel begins with Roots, separate stories, capsule biographies. These are illustrated at chapter start with leaves of the trees prominent in each story. In one case the tree isn’t named, since the character is oblivious to this tree, but the description is more than suggestive and the unique…
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Willughby
The very next book I picked up after No Way But Gentlenesse was Tim Birkhead’s The Wonderful Mr Willughby: The First True Ornithologist. And the very first section break, after a discussion of Honey Buzzards, which Francis Willughby distinguished from Common Buzzard at the dawn of taxonomy, is this dingbat of three soaring raptors. A…
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K is for Kestrel
Richard Hines’s No Way But Gentlenesse is a memoir of the stunting British class system, and his falcons. The first theme definitely grips one’s attention, the second, well, less so for this ornithologically-inclined kestrel-fancier. Hines’s older brother Barry wrote a novel called A Kestrel For a Knave (1968), inspired by Richard’s experience with Falco tinnunculus.…
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The Experiment
For more than a century now, the planet has been under chemical attack. At first, we directed this attack at insects, then at humans, then again at insects, and now again, by default, at humans. It was war, literally and figuratively. Now it is war of another sort, a profit-driven war against life itself. I…
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There Were Whales
D. Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century is a whale of a book. He traces the… evolution (?) of whale science from the cutting room floor of factory ships by scientists who were more or less creatures of the industry, flensing their way through interesting collections of…
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The Anthropophiles
Some animals have learned to live and even thrive alongside the greatest ecosystem engineers on the planet. In Darwin Comes To Town, Menno Schilthuizen tells some their stories. On the basis of the non-ant animals that live inside ant colonies, called myrmecophiles as a group, Schilthuizen uses the term anthropophiles for those animals that adapt…
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Three Books: Paths Not Taken
“One could be an environmentalist, or a social activist, but not both, and the recent rise of environmental justice helps underscore just how little justice has historically meant to environmentalism.” Daegan Miller’s vital This Radical Land: The Natural History of Dissent explores the paths not taken since Henry David Thoreau mixed it all up. Thoreau…
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Go Forth This Fourth
There have been, on occasion, squawks of outrage in the comments here by people upset that I bring politics into the mix along with pretty pictures of nature. How anyone can separate the two is beyond my understanding. This is the Anthropocene: humans are geosystem engineers on an unprecedented level, transforming the planet as we…
Backyard and Beyond 