The End of the Wild (Boston Review Books)
by Stephen M. Meyer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen M. MeyerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-15
ISBN: 026213473X
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: The MIT Press
Book Reviews of The End of the Wild (Boston Review Books)
Book Review: The ongoing 'Grand Extinction' of our natural world
Summary: 5 Stars
Fascinating, if true.
This brief, brilliant bold assertion says humans have created an ecological collapse that rivals the extinction of dinosaurs when 76 percent of Earth's life forms went extinct. It's a bold assertion presumably supported by Meyer's academic credentials plus the ethics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in not suffering fools.
Meyer's argument is concise: ". . . humanity has pounded the wild into a shape that fits its needs . . . coexisting with nature has always meant taming it . . . we have lost the wild for now . . . perhaps in five or ten million years it will return."
Instead of the wild diversity that now exists, Meyer asserts, "Everyone will enjoy English housed sparrows; no one will enjoy wood thrushes."
Okay - - who misses the passenger pigeon? Who knows what it was? How different is our society today because no one has ever seen a live passenger pigeon?
Or, in more immediate terms, who would miss the Irish if they vanished? Would the world be richer or poorer without Catalans? What value were the Beothuks? Do we really need the Jews? We know about the Holocust of the Jews and its impact. But who knows about the Beothuks?
Likewise,we need an examination of what life on earth will be like without the wood thrush and 75 percent of other species.
"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls," wrote John Donne in 1633; this admonition applies to more than our neighbors, it applies to the world around us.
Meyer says the bell is tolling.
It makes his book fascinating.
Summary of The End of the Wild (Boston Review Books)
With the extinction rate at 3000 species a year and accelerating, we can now predict that as many as half of the Earth's species will disappear within the next 100 years. The species that survive will be the ones that are most compatible with us: the weedy species--from mosquitoes to coyotes--that thrive in continually disturbed human-dominated environments.The End of the Wild is a wake-up call. Marshaling evidence from the last ten years of research on the environment, Stephen Meyer argues that nothing--not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, or "wildlands"--will change the course that has been set. Like it or not, we can no longer talk about conserving nature, only managing what is left. The race to save biodiversity is over.But that doesn't mean our work is over. The End of the Wild is also a call to action. Without intervention, the surviving ecosystems we depend on for a range of services--including water purification and flood and storm damage control--could fail and the global spread of invasive species (pests, parasites, and disease-causing weedy species) could explode. If humanity is to survive, Meyer argues, we have no choice but to try to manage the fine details. We must move away from the current haphazard strategy of protecting species in isolation and create trans-regional "meta-reserves," designed to protect ecosystem functions rather than species-specific habitats.
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