Reckless or not, ''The Eternal Frontier'' persuasively illustrates why the frontier image, though tired, is so enduringly apt. What he has done, reckless soul, amounts to offering himself as the Tocqueville of American biogeography. It's no task for the fainthearted or cautious. In the largest sense, to Americans - and to everyone else. Synthesizes a vast range of scientific studies and a decent selection of historical and cultural writings, leavening those with his own forceful ideas and a modest acquaintance with the landscape, in order to explain America, Opening American niches to mammals) up through such recent developments as the water crisis in the West, the fast-food culture and the northward return of the armadillo. Ecological history is a growing field, and its practicioners are increasingly ambitious.īut no one before Flannery, so far as I know, has been brave enough to tackle the whole pageant of North America, from the asteroid impact of 65 million years ago (which seems to have knocked off the dinosaurs, thereby
In the manner of Jared Diamond, whose ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' he cites as an inspiration and point of departure. He defines himself as an ''ecological historian'' Views and considerable intellectual chutzpah, as revealed in ''The Future Eaters,'' his earlier book about human colonization of Australasia.
#Tim flannery eternal frontier series#
Rather, as Tim Flannery reminds us in his new book, NorthĪmerica is a 65-million-year evolutionary work in progress, a series of contingencies, causal forces, drastic upheavals and transitional phases, amid which can be seen a single recurrent theme: the frontier.įlannery is an Australian mammalogist, a respected authority on tree kangaroos and extinct giant wombats, who has done hard-traveling fieldwork in the rain forests of New Guinea and northeastern Australia. North America was never a timeless Eden, and the United States is not such a glorious aberration as we might like to believe.
The shape and the size of our continental slab, its isolation relative to other slabs, the circumstances of climate, the topography, the ebb and flow of plant communities,Īnd the immigration and extinction of various animal species have combined, along with later human doings, to create the big American story, one encompassing Mexico, Canada and a lonely superpower prone to the delusion Long before the Clovis, long before anybody, the landscape itself had a history. It didn't begin 13,000 years ago when Asiatic migrants crossed the Bering land bridge into a hemisphere that was blessedly untrammeled by humans, to become known eventually as the Clovis people. S we know, but tend to forget, American history didn't begin at Jamestown, or with Columbus, or with the rise of the Sioux and the Iroquois nations. Your Arctostylops.Ī biogeography of America, from its earliest four-legged immigrants to its bipedal Johnny-come-latelies.