The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation by Fred PearceMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I seem to have unintentionally gotten into a "how should humanity address current ecological concerns" kick this year, as The New Wild continues on themes previously touched on in Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. The New Wild doesn't tread the exact same paths as the other books, as Sixth Extinction depicted a rather morose view of the anthropocene and Resurrection Science examined ways we try to mitigate what we've caused. Instead, The New Wild considers the ecosystems we have now: a mix of native and non-native species in a constantly changing environment.
Fred Pearce is rather pointed about challenging the orthodoxy of typical conservation- he posits there are no 'pristine' ecosystems and what we often think of as pristine have still been shaped by humanity for thousands of years, so why try to preserve a fixed point in time when nature is constantly changing? Various examples of invasives filling in niches of native plants that were wiped out because of people are placed in context as providing habitat/food/etc. for endangered species native to the area, or how something that can be endangered in one place is considered invasive in another. Pearce bolsters his argument by pointing out how shaky some of the statistics and numbers used to vilify invasives are.
It's a persuasive argument. I'm not convinced it should be taken whole cloth (as it could easily slide to "Oh, well, nature will recover so let's go ahead and build this new farm or whatever"), but nuances are certainly needed for conservation efforts.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment