BOOK REVIEWS: TWO INTERESTING BOOKS
ON ECOLOGICAL CONCERNS
The
Once and Future Great Lakes Country by John L. Riley, chief science advisor at the
Nature Conservancy of Canada, is a marvelous overview of lands and waters of
this vital region of North America. He provides many fascinating bits of
information, historical and contemporary, that help the lay person appreciate
the growth and development of the Great Lakes region, as well as its current
ecological health. He has a considerable gift in shaping a compelling
narrative that describes the geological and natural history of several
thousand years of the Great Lakes, as well as the impact that the various
human migrations have had over millennia. One of the most compelling is the
contrast between the original forest cover that migrating tribal peoples
encountered with today’s all but decimated, so called “older” growth forests,
which stand in mute testimony to the rapaciousness of modern times. Another
fascinating period of history he describes is the native Algonquin and
Iroquoian peoples and their development of the region in the centuries
preceding European arrival that had opened up large swathes of forest for
cropland and hunting/grazing practices, and how conflicts between various
tribes, as well as colonial wars and indigenous population decline due to
disease during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put much of this
developed land out of production for a century and a half, “re-wilding”
much of the forest lands, whose paltry remnants we see today.
He writes with conviction and from a lifetime of study, and I thoroughly
recommend his book. (Another helpful book along the same subject, with more
focus on the ecological history of the Great Lakes themselves is The Death
and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan.)
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Never Out
of Season by Rob
Dunn is a fascinating examination of the various food crops that humans
have come to rely on in global agriculture. He gives the history of bananas,
wheat, corn, cacao, coffee and cassava, among others. He describes their places
of origin and how they came to be dispersed across our planet. He comments
throughout on how our current methods of growing food, particularly in the wake
of the mid-twentieth century’s “Green Revolution” and subsequent use GMO
technologies, have made our food systems increasingly fragile and
‘overly refined’. They are fragile because they are increasingly at risk from
new pathogens and pest infestations, as well as climate change; they are overly
refined because many of our most important sources of food come from just a handful
of crops bred from a very narrow range of genetic material. He warns that
biodiversity is being lost, and significantly, that regions of our planet where
the ‘wild cousins’ of our staple food crops—sources of genetic strength and
renewal for our monoculture farms and plantations—are also being lost.
He describes the work of a number of scientists and ecologists and their
efforts to expand and maintain our food sources. One compelling chapter describes
the infamous Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century where
something like a million people died of starvation over the course of a few
years after successive failed potato harvests, and where two million migrated
to other countries in order to survive. His examination of the Irish tragedy is
shocking and sobering, especially when he describes how the blight (a
fungus) still exists in Latin America, with the potential for its
re-emergence, to once more devastate world potato crops. Given the current
interconnectedness of our globalized world, transmission of plant diseases and
pests is no longer a remote possibility.
Another chapter is devoted to the work of one American scientist and his
efforts to increase wheat yields, and how his discoveries brought about the
problematic “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, with its mixed blessing of greatly
expanded yields of corn, wheat and rice, but with the associated dependence on
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and monoculture farming practices that are
evident today. Dunn provides much information on pathogens, pests, soils and
climate that gives the reader a greater appreciation for the complexity of
modern agriculture and the dangers we face from planting and selecting
crops from only a narrow range of genetic sources. He also cautions against our
dependence on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and perhaps most
importantly, our destruction of the wild areas of this planet (he calls
them “crop centers of diversity”) which house the original plants (and insects,
bacteria, etc.) from which we get our food.
He provides
a cogent wake-up call and a corrective for complacency for all of us who take for granted that banana we use to
top up our cornflakes at breakfast.
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