| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Book Reviews Crane Travels The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes, by Peter Matthiessen. North Point Press, New York, NY, 2001, 349 pp., $27.50 hardcover. After an absence of more than three centuries, Eurasian cranes returned to England in 1979, an event that speaks worlds about the nature of cranes and aptly summarizes Peter Matthiessen’s newest book. While extremely vulnerable to human disturbance, cranes are also immensely enduring birds. Though the cranes had disappeared from England in 1653 (victims of the General Draining Act of 1600, which eliminated most of the country’s marshes), they were once so common that two of every three English counties had towns and villages named after them. Ironically, after a 300-year absence, they returned to breed in the same exact stretch of marsh where the last pair was seen before they disappeared from the country. These birds of heaven, so-named because they often migrate high in the sky beyond our sight, are an apt mirror for an equally astonishing writer whose life has been an endless global migration. Matthiessen’s journeys in the course of writing nine fiction books and 18 nonfiction books (including the classic The Snow Leopard) are the stuff of legend. Along the way, the author has garnered countless awards, along with membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This time, Matthiessen’s travels with cranes take him to places on Earth that leave the rest of us in awe. In dizzying succession, he wanders from the vast Amur basin of Siberia into 100,000 square miles of Mongolian steppe that few westerners know exist. He continues onward into Rajasthan, then to formerly closed portions of the remote Tibetan Plateau, the Yangtze River basin, Japan, the Demilitarized Zone of Korea, a million-acre ranch in Australia, the Transvaal of South Africa, England, and back to America (tip: have an atlas at hand). His accounts provide both a breathtaking travelogue and a gut-wrenching glimpse into the state of our world. Along the way, Matthiessen chronicles these giant birds being squeezed into extinction by encroaching humans: a lake in China where 600 Siberian cranes were killed for their white feathers in 1983; India’s population of these same cranes dropping to five birds ten years later; a single pair of whooping cranes that tried to nest in a Florida housing development. We can despair over these tragedies, or we can take heart from the Eurasian cranes that have returned to England and the whooping cranes that have hatched their first chick in America in 60 years. Matthiessen leaves the decision up to us.
Amidst the Gorillas In The Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 2001, 370 pp., $27.50 hardcover. In the 1970s, Rwanda’s eastern mountain gorillas became well-known to armchair adventurers worldwide. Featured in National Geographic magazine and videos with Dian Fossey, the charismatic apes charmed their human relatives with intelligence and playfulness. In spite of the gorillas’ popularity, when husband and wife research team Amy Vedder and Bill Weber arrived in Rwanda to study them, the apes’ fate was far from certain. Hunters preyed on the gorillas, even though Dian Fossey tortured and tormented suspected poachers, while an insatiable hunger for land, fueled by unchecked population growth and widespread poverty, put the gorillas’ refuge at risk. In the Kingdom of Gorillas is a vivid account of the authors’ quest to save the gorillas from their human neighbors. The book begins like a richly detailed field journal, offering insights into the researchers’ intimate experiences with the gorillas. Vedder, a biologist, was determined to record their feeding habits, though another researcher warned her that they would not tolerate her presence. Undeterred, the white ape adopted characteristic communicative gorilla behaviors—grunts, belches, and bows—that won her access to the tight-knit group. During one of Vedder’s vigils, a young male gorilla named Ziz reached out to her with his massive hand, drawing her into the “simian daisy chain.” The incident is a poignant demonstration of the bond that can develop between gorillas and their observers. But the interspecies connection did not end with Weber and Vedder, who were not content to live like monkeys in trees, as they were accused of by one official. Convinced that the key to the gorillas’ survival lay in the hands of their Rwandan neighbors, they set out to win the “hearts, minds and money pouches” of the local people. To that end they launched the Mountain Gorilla Project, a conservation venture built on the twin pillars of education and ecotourism. When the program began, Rwandans knew little about the gorillas in their midst, and few tourists ventured into the rugged mountain refuge. And though they were opposed by developers, turf-conscious bureaucrats, and even the dark figure of Dian Fossey herself, the authors pushed the project forward. Ten years later, it was thriving, and thousands of tourists were pouring millions of dollars into local communities. While the gorillas’ fate was becoming more secure, life throughout Rwanda was unraveling. The AIDS crises ravaged the tiny country. At the same time, tensions flared between Rwanda’s ethnic groups, eventually erupting into full-blown genocide. The authors draw a wrenching portrait of human loss, as within months, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsi were murdered. Yet, in the gorillas’ unlikely survival story, they see hope: “Hope not only for the mountain gorillas, but also for the millions of Rwandans who must now find a way to reconcile a brutal past and bring lasting peace to the beautiful land they call home.”
Recommended Reading from the Editors' Desks Lichens of North America, by Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2001, 795 pp., $69.95 hardcover. Traditionally, lichens have been important to man for food, poisons, medicines, and brilliant dyes, and they still gratuitously decorate our backyards and gravestones. Many are easily recognizable, from hanging ‘fruticose’ lichens such as old man’s beard and the vivid yellow-green wolf lichen decorating our trees, down to the tiny ‘crustiose’ lichens that cover rocks in exquisitely colored quilts. Now these tiny marvels of natural art can be viewed up close in the comfort of your own home. Lichens of North America combines stunning photography with the latest scholarship in “lichenology” to produce a beautiful work that could easily be mistaken for a large coffee table book. Indeed, the book’s large physical size contrasts with its subject, which is frequently one of the smaller components of the visible world. While technical terms are explained in the introductory chapters, an illustrated glossary would have been a great asset. Nevertheless, Lichens could introduce a whole new generation of amateur lichenologists to this beautiful world. The book also serves as an elegant memorial to Sylvia Sharnoff, one of the authors and photographers, who died before the book was published. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation, by Aldo Leopold. Photography by Michael Sewell. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2001, 194 pp., $35.00 hardcover. There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.” These opening lines to Aldo Leopold’s 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There succinctly sum up the man many consider the father of the modern conservation movement. Leopold’s essays, which radiate respect for the land and all things wild, established the ideological framework for habitat restoration. His Land Ethic, which in his own words “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” still rings loudly in the heads of land stewards across the nation. Now Leopold’s epic prose is preserved in a new form, complemented by the photographic genius of Michael Sewell and an introduction by Kenneth Brower, nature writer and son of one of the most influential environmentalists since Leopold himself. Sewell captures the wildflowers and wetlands, the creatures big and small, that inspired Leopold, while never straying from the conservationist’s 120-acre farm-cum-forest preserve in northwestern Wisconsin. Brower, who provides a poetic analysis of Leopold’s long-lasting legacy, hits what he terms the Leopold Effect right on the head: “[The Almanac] is bible still for land managers; Koran for those of us who work the soil where literature overlaps ecology; urtext for the ecological restoration movement.” For those who cannot live without wild things, this coffee table version of Leopold’s classic is a goldmine. For Leopold fans, it’s a necessity. The Jepson Desert Manual: Vascular Plants of Southeastern California, by Bruce G. Baldwin et al. UC Press, Berkeley, CA, 2002, 640 pp., $35.00 paper. Only rarely do you find a book that is exciting by itself only to discover that it is merely the tip of a giant iceberg. The new Jepson Desert Manual is one such book. While superficially similar to the original Jepson Manual, which includes everything from stem size to horticultural hints for California’s vast flora, a much grander scheme lies behind this new book covering the state’s desert regions. Known as the Jepson Flora Project, it’s turning Jepson into an evolving encyclopedia of botanical knowledge virtually unmatched in the world. The project’s goal is to provide a unified set of California flora data and an online interchange (http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/) that includes distribution maps compiled from reports by amateur and professional botanists alike. The new Jepson series is the beginning of great things in California botany. |