It may be named after a symbol of the ultimate martyrdom, but the
crown-of-thorns starfish has become the villain of tropical seas. Grotesquely
bedecked with sharp and spiky poisonous prickles, Acanthaster planci
browses slowly across coral reefs, consuming the thin layer of living coral.
It’s a greedy feeder: this starfish killed 90 per cent of the corals in
northwest Guam between 1968 and 1969. As the reefs die, so do many of their
creatures, which make up an astounding quarter of the ocean’s species of plants
and animals.

At this point you may well say: so what? Here’s a natural predator doing what
it does best. It’s a natural cycle: as the population of the crown-of-thorns
rises, reefs die. And when the starfish population drops, the reefs grow again.
Naturally.

But some wonder about just how “natural” the phenomenon is. What is
“natural”, anyway? The controversy is old, and environmental scientists have
been engaged in it for 30 years and more.

My dictionary defines the “natural” as that “produced by or according to
nature”, “not miraculous or supernatural” and, most tellingly, “not interfered
with by humans”. But palaeontologists agree that Homo sapiens is a
product of evolution—suggesting that we are as natural as evolution is
long. Others, of course, maintain that we are as unnatural as the seven days of
creation. Almost all, though, are burdened by free will. We feel we can
interfere with anything we like, or worry about what we have or have not
done.

Jan Sapp, a biologist, worries. The tale of the crown-of-thorns appears in
his meticulously researched blow-by-blow account of his quest in What Is
Natural? The result? The best science whodunnit I have ever read.

The web of actions and perpetrators that Sapp reveals tells us much about the
ecological crises threatening the world. The crown-of-thorns plague is not the
only coral culprit. We are also to blame. Reefs are choked by riverborne silts
and poisoned by sewage and pesticides. Ships’ anchors tear holes. So those spiky
underwater vandals are only administering a coup de grâce.

Then Sapp introduces an unusual suspect: El NiĂąo. This Pacific Ocean
current has been somewhat hyperactive over the past three years. Its warm waters
have bleached corals, killing 90 per cent of them along large areas of tropical
coastline. Far more serious is the general warming of the world’s oceans, in
which we may well have played a part. The mass destruction of forests across the
world cannot have helped to cool the global greenhouse. The web is complex: is
the carbon dioxide leaking from the starfish-ravaged reefs exacerbating global
warming, perhaps fuelling the latest tantrums of El NiĂąo?

Growing pains

This fascinating book includes thumbnail sketches of a couple of generations
of marine scientists, and a wonderful, detailed account of the environmental
movement’s growing pains. Intrigue lurks in every chapter. How on earth, for
instance, did the scientists manage to drum up enough public support to stop
atomic excavators gouging a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama?

Apart from being a damned good read, What Is Natural? is a poignant
history of humanity’s most troubled times. The decisions we have to take right
now concern the plague of human irresponsibility—our failure to see the
consequences of our actions. The population of any organism will eventually be
controlled by fair means or foul. Only we have the choice.

BIODIVERSITY may be merely a word, but it sums up late 20th-century ideas.
With “heritage” and “millennium”, it is one of a trinity of words that celebrate
the past and question the future. We owe its common usage to the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992. And it’s the theme of Niles Eldredge’s Life in the
Balance. It may have all been said before, but not in quite this way. Like
the Bible, Koran and Talmud, this book praises the act of creative evolution and
sets out a code of behaviour for humanity. It is a natural history of the world
seen through the eyes of a latter-day prophet. And one who has had the good
fortune to serve in one of Earth’s great treasure houses of knowledge, the
American Museum of Natural History in New York. There he has learned from the
insects, the most biodiverse—and most successful—group of all living
things. Here, he writes to warn of the profligacy and arrogance of another
social organism, humankind.

Eldredge takes us on a journey across the world, exploring the evolution of
its inhabitants. He begins in Botswana’s Okavango Swamp, the last place left in
the great continent of Africa that still bears some semblance to its original
pristine state. It is the birthplace of the ancestral Eve, whose mitochondria we
all bear.

From Okavango, the excitement of the living world is ours to explore, though
not at leisure. Our mentor races us back across 3.6 billion years of creative
evolution then fast-forwards us towards an uncertain future.

The text is a delight, written as if the story in all its intricate detail
has been bottled up and is bursting to get out. This is such a strong impression
that I had the feeling that once the author had his fingers on the keyboard, the
book just had to happen. It is from that enviable standpoint that Eldredge tells
the tale of evolution: how life began, how sponges got their holes, elephants
their trunks, spotted owls their spots and people their insatiable
arrogance.

He floats you across complex gene pools, makes you worship at the temple of
biologist Lynn Margulis, known for her spirited advocacy of new ways of looking
at early life that helped to reveal the riches of cladistics. Then he takes you
on safari through a vibrant living world replete with solar-powered ecosystems.
The most biodiverse of these such as rainforests and coral reefs are found in
tropical regions that are short on nutrients. To visitors, living may seem easy
in the tropics, but native organisms have to perform a difficult balancing act,
recycling non-renewable resources, the lack of any of which can tip the balance
against survival.

So why are the tropics so rich in species? Selection acts on species
struggling to survive in harsh environments. Natural selection is the capacity
to adjust to any changes by seizing each and every new advantage on offer.
Biodiversity is the product of species repeatedly chiselling out niches in
complex systems. Ecosystems thrive by always making ends meet: many different
organisms are doing a variety of jobs, each one of which depends upon a job well
done by all the others.

It is biodiversity that has kept evolution firmly on the road of sustainable
development for 3.6 million millennia. Sustainability is manifest in Africa, the
birthplace of humanity and the last continent to support a full portfolio of
megafauna. Or to put it in the author’s words: “Why are all the big hairies
extinct except in Africa, the continent that has supported hunting people longer
than any other? The answer is that we humans evolved in concert with, and
literally as part of the African ecosystems. The big hairies know us well. They
and we grew up together, so to speak in a dynamic equilibrium, an equilibrium
(of interdependence) still palpable today .”

This was the way of the living world until the invention of agriculture: the
most dangerous thing to come out of Africa, a mere 10 000 years ago. From then
on, biodiverse self-balancing ecosystems have been replaced with monocultures
and overgrazing. Soil erosion became rife, stripping the world of its true
assets and sending ever more species to the wall.

A key part of this sad and catastrophic process has been the loss of
indigenous cultures, the knowledge that allowed our ancestors to live at least
in quasi-harmony with the local living systems—if not with their human
neighbours. Life in the Balance lists the species we know we have
already lost and bemoans the fact that we may be losing 27 000 species each
year, out of a possible total of 10 million. Equally shocking is the fact that
the world has already lost more than half of its human languages and the customs
and ways of life that went with them.

So awesome a story does he relate that the illustrations might seem out of
keeping with a book about biodiversity and humanity. Where’s the colour, the
vibrancy of life?

Enough adulation. It is a little strange that eutrophication, the enrichment
of both fresh and inshore waters with phosphate and nitrate, hardly gets a
mention. Eutrophication is one of the most widespread and worrying of factors
causing loss of species and imbalance in ecosystems.

Perhaps my greatest worry is that Life in the Balance is so short,
so telegraphic. It is what I suppose would be called in streetwise jargon a
“fast book”. But that, of course, is actually just what we need: an easy-to-read
bestseller that speaks with an authority that should make even the most
sceptical members of our throwaway society sit up and pay attention.

Life in the Balance could be that book. Take a look at the executive
summary between pages 177 and 182. Eldredge focuses on the Panama Canal, a vital
link in the world’s $1-trillion-a-day economic exchange. The canal only
continues to work thanks to conservation of the rainforests in its catchment
area. They are the source of the water, which raises and lowers each ship
through the five-lock system on their short cut to serve the global economy.

Without the forests, rain carries away the topsoil, which silts up the canal.
I beg every board member of every company in the world to read this section at
least. Follow that up with the sixth chapter “Striking a balance”. But, if you
don’t intend to follow the new code of biodiversity practice, don’t leave the
book around for your kids to read. If you do, you are in for a hard time, but
not as hard as theirs will become. For without immediate action to protect the
biodiversity of the world, the future of our children is indeed bleak.

Angier interviews Victoria Elizabeth Foe, who describes her work thus: “This is biology’s golden age. It’s analogous to cathedral building of a thousand years ago. We are building and building this great edifice. Some of us are building arches, some are painting murals, some are carving in stone. I feel enormously privileged to be alive now and part of it.” This is the world of the 1990s as seen by a biologist who is charting the pulse of development in the embryos of fruit flies with nothing more sophisticated than a microscope and a sketch pad.

The more you turn the pages the more you sympathise with Foe’s view of biology and crave to be a part of the biological scene, as busy as a bee. But then Angier takes us to another side of biology, proceeding to demolish the myths about the natural world that we hold so dear.

She tells us clearly that we cannot anthropomorphise other creatures, or impose our moral systems on them. For example: “Animals across the phylogenetic spectrum will thumb a proboscis at biblical injunctions to labour and proceed to engage in any number of inactive activities.” To our minds, the hummingbird is the epitome of constant activity, but Angier reveals “hummingbirds spend 80 per cent of the day motionless on a twig – conserving energy – and at night they sleep”. Another natural myth shatters with her account of those legendary symbols of eternal love, the trumpeter swans. They engage in adultery, cuckoldry and gang rape. “Blame” for what we see as immorality is inappropriate.

She also discusses the relationship between emotions, behaviour and hormones, describing oxytocin as “a satisfactional hormone, nature’s way of ushering in joy”. A fantastic account, especially when she explains that 100 laughs are equivalent in aerobic terms to 10 minutes’ rowing. There’s a point to this for a male – get fit so that “female choice: that Eve-olutionary force” may not pass you by. Perfect symmetry appears to be the answer to attracting mates. But not for all: if you were one of the biggest, meanest, longest-lived, most sensitive, most maternal, least fraternal, quickest and most luminous creatures among the arachnids – a scorpion fluorescing under ultraviolet – you might opt for lopsided pincers.

Among other gems, Angier reveals that pit vipers are gallant and venomous; dolphins are not quite such nice guys as their antics may lead us to believe; and all unsightly fat is not life threatening. And those “individuals who have a tendency to suicide may be likened to taut strings on a beautiful violin. If bowed too hard the string will snap”.

Angier doesn’t believe there is a good way to die. “Death to me is a wasteful obscenity. You spend your life mastering tasks, cultivating knowledge and opinions, gradually getting the hang of living in your skin and skull, when it all must be disposed of to make way for the latest models coming up from behind. Nature is a spoilt brat who needs a perpetual supply of new toys.” So how can you die well when death is such an imposition? Please read the book, you may find out.

For me, only the last chapter, “A Grandmother’s Fear”, seemed out of place. That was until I read the whole again in reverse order. How I wish that I was still an active player in this The Golden Age of Biology.

A group of 25 assorted botanists poses in front of a mighty redwood,one
of a diminishing population within a young national park in the US. The
group includes Heinrich Engler, an Old World taxonomist – a name-popper
without equal; Frederick Clements, complete with hat, New World champion
of the concept of succession, climax and the superorganism (shades of Gaia
to come), and Henry Cowles, whose festschrift published 22 years later not
only celebrated his work in the field of ecology but was also the vehicle
within which the botanist Sir Arthur George Tansley enunciated the term
and the concept of the ecosystem: ‘More than the sum of its parts’. This
photograph from 1913 is the cover illustration for A History of the Ecosystem
Concept in Ecology, and sums up the book.

From that point on the challenge to prove or disprove the idea that
an ecosystem was more than its individual constituents began to occupy more
and more young minds and spawn more scientific journals and textbooks.

Most Europeans and Scandinavians invented names under the guise of
phytosociology and geobotany, describing the parts of their cultural landscapes
as they tried to assess the make-up of the natural vegetation that was there
before people arrived. Lest we forget, by the turn of the 19th century,
97 per cent of Sweden’s forests had been reduced to swidden – an area reduced
by slash and burn – again proving the importance of naming names even in
the century that gave birth to Carl Linnaeus.

Led by Clementsian orthodoxy, New World ecologists did their best to
study the structure and the workings of the organs of the superorganism.
Meanwhile in Britain, population studies bit off more than they could chew
until the age of the computer made even the devotees of the mainframe realise
that garbage in, however well randomised, makes garbage of the predictive
whole.

In a way the Russians gazumped the whole field of ecology. Although
steeped in the phytosociology of peasant dominated ‘sustainable’ landscapes,
by 1931 Vladimir Stanchinskii had worked out a simple mathematical model
of energy flow in a community. We can only guess what course the history
of ecology might have taken if more Western ecologists had been versed in
the Russian language, and if the jealous bigotry of the Russian biologist
Trofim Lysenko had not purged Stanchinskii from the face of Russian science.
Evidently, the idea that nature might have properties that could limit human
manipulation was too much for Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

So the first high-level slap was delivered to the face of upstart ecologists
and conservationists, a slap that resulted in the enormous environmental
problems of the former Soviet Union now revealed by devolution, such as
the drying up of the Aral Sea. In the process, this has perhaps proved that
even communism is no more than the sum of its parts.

By 1965, thanks to the inspiring work of Raymond Lindemann, the Odums
and many others, trophic dynamic ecology had proved the inter-relatedness
of things, paving the way to the shock people felt on reading Silent Spring
by the American marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson. It revealed that
we not only had the ability to destroy vegetation in the name of progress,
but that our wonder chemicals – the pesticides and fertilisers that were
to help to feed the exploding world population – could cause insidious damage
to the ecosystems. Food chains became webs of concern as the embryo atomic
energy industry provided isotopes and research grants to study the effects
of radiation, and the recycling of biogeochemicals.

Perhaps most seminal in all this eco-ha-ha was Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country
Almanack. He stressed that: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise.’ Therein lies the fundamental of environmental
ethics and sustainable redevelopment, for the latter was the way of succession
long before Clements and Tansley came into scholarly conflict over the nature
of climax.

This is a book of exceptional interest written by one of the champions
of ecology. For someone who worked through the heady days of the International
Biological Programme thirty years ago, each chapter pumps adrenaline and
speeds the fingers to the pile of reprint request cards. For those fresh
to the cause, it is a must – a launch pad for any research career in ecology.

Most fascinating of all, I found, are the notes to the chapters, full
of hindsight and crammed with questions still waiting to be answered. My
advice is to read them again before tacking the last chapter which overflows
with new challenges. I wish I were a postgraduate student again.

I had hoped that I would find an answer to a question which has always
puzzled me. Why did Tansley, steeped as he was in the taxonomic botany
of the day, not use the phytosociological method developed by his friend
Rienhold Tuxen as a basis for the descriptive side of his work? I can,
however, throw some light on the fate of the Tansley-Godwin library for
I am looking at an important section of it as I write this review – I discovered
it on sale in an antiquarian bookshop not far from Cambridge.

David Bellamy is head of the Conservation Foundation, London.

The world needs a new definition of sanity, of that there is no doubt.

There are holes in the ozone layer, greenhouse gases are affecting the
global climate, the Earth is being ‘skinned dead’ at the rate of one hectare
per second, millions of species are doomed to premature extinction, deserts
are expanding and erosion is rife. Our skies, rivers, lakes, seas and soils
are polluted and overenriched. A hundred thousand people die every day of
conditions relating to malnutrition and environmental pollution, yet the
world’s population is set to top 10 billion early next century. A crazy
world indeed.

Theodore Roszak in The Voice of the Earth seeks to resurrect a ‘new’
sanity from the heartbeat of the cosmos itself. He traces all back to the
big bang, that percussive moment which energised the present round of creative
evolution. The music of the spheres rippled out, engulfing space with the
order of a new expanding Universe, yet left that telltale echo behind, by
accident or design, stimulating the question, ‘Is there a mind in the Universe?’
– but only at a dim and distant time when that mind was part of a society
with the ability to tune into those microwaves and sense the touchstone
of their existence. The touchstone which allowed me to achieve organismic
pleasure from watching Fonteyn dance Ondine and Nureyev play his part in
Spring Waters. Yet even as I was watching, the cosponsors of my pleasure
– capitalism and communism – were hard at work destroying the diverse harmonies
of myriad cultures that still danced in the light of the cosmic mind.

‘The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation
by the withering touch of our civilisation; the local market is flooded
by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker by art cannot
compete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organisation
and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his
art and forced to find himself a ‘job’; until finally the ancient society
is industrialised and reduced to the level of such societies as ours, in
which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that Western nations
are feared and hated by other people, not alone for obvious political or
economic reasons, but even more profoundly and instinctively for spiritual
°ůąđ˛š˛ő´Ç˛Ô˛ő?’

These are the words of Ananda Coomaraswamy, vigorous hybrid of East
and West, a geologist and an art historian who knew that the sources of
wisdom and sanity are still to be found rooted in the soil of the villages
of Sri Lanka.

Roszak feels that Freud’s rebuttal of nature left a dangerous void
in how we perceive ourselves. Instead of recognising our links with the
natural world as an essential part of our existence, he fostered the idea
of humans outside and apart from nature. This has impoverished us.

If I have one main criticism of the book, however, it is that too many
of its examples are drawn from cultures that have evolved in temperate lands
– climates in which, at least at certain seasons, as Mary Midgley puts it,
existence ‘shrinks to a few urban rooms, no wonder life becomes absurd’.
Absurd enough to engender the Vietnam War but alive enough to learn from
its horrors as that most understated war memorial, The Wall in Washington,
states again and again. There names are simply named and a nation’s shame
and grief hang out to embrace humanity.

Konrad Lorenz warned in his last book, The Waning of Humaneness, that
this may well be our last chance. How, he asks, can the urban majority of
the future, imprinted in concrete, ever be expected to mourn let alone campaign
for that with which they have no contact.

Roszak reinforces this conclusion by elegantly stating that the epidemic
psychosis of our time is the lie in believing we have no ethical obligation
to our (mother) Earth. Why did the goslings take Lorenz for their mother
figure?

The sad thing is that with 6 billion people needing the services of
a planetary home we need new leadership, and must ask whether the right
answers are there in the id.

The biosphere has maintained the Earth as a habitat fit for an increasing
diversity of life for at least 3.6 billion years, a wonderful achievement
of which we – like Narcissus – think we are a special part. Yet in Ages
of Gaia, Lovelock warns that not only do we live on a geriatric planet but
earthly life is doomed to cremation, for our local star is getting warmer
all the time. The warming Sun is a basic tenet of the Gaia Hypothesis and
thus the alpha and omega of Freud’s theory that the first instinct that
came into being was the instinct to return to the inanimate state. The
lie may simply be that as materialists we think we are having such a good
time that death may well have a sting-a-ling in its tail.

Fortunately for the id, silicon can play similar covalent games to carbon
but at much higher temperatures; the user-friendly hardware of today could
become the friendly owner-user of tomorrow.

I have no answer for the dilemma and, as far as I can see, neither does
the book, but I only read it three times before I attempted this review.
Apart from giving me great enjoyment it has made me re-evaluate all my preconceptions.
I am sure it will do the same for many people.

The likelihood of it affecting the masses is remote for the book is
not an easy read. While Roszak recommends that to achieve a sane balance
between ourselves and nature, ecology has a vital role to play as an enricher
of psychology most people will not even be able to afford the luxury of
even fifty minutes on the psychiatrist’s couch. Decision makers have a better
opportunity of changing the public’s underlying set of values and some
may seize that chance – Al Gore, Vice-President of the US no less, for example,
has acclaimed Roszak’s work and blown some of the cosmic dust from off
the jacket.

David Bellamy is a botanist, campaigner and consultant.

I was first introduced to the heritage of Ireland and especially the
Burren by reading the books of Robert Lloyd Praeger, botanist, archaeologist,
historian and educator. They are still cherished possessions that have pride
of place in my library, each one a compulsive read, again and again. I now
have another book to place beside them, The Natural History of the Burren.

Crafted in the 1990s, it is a worthy companion for, like Lloyd Praeger,
Gordon D’Arcy links scholarship and wonder, science and the excitement of
knowledge. The facts and the fantasy of the Burren, which makes up 1 per
cent of the surface of the Emerald Isle, are presented in 148 enchant-ing
pages. The pictures are excellent and facts meticulously researched.

The book tells the story of limestone laid down 300 million years ago
beneath the sea, now raised up and washed by the warm rains of the north
Atlantic drift. The coast appears complete with whales, dolphins, kelp and
jellyfish which still enjoy the freedom of as yet unpolluted waters. The
cliffs are home to the rare pine marten, birds and a diversity of flowers.
The cliffs are limestone, like the massif of the Burren itself. Though remote
from the pulse of the waves, the Burren has been eroded, first by ice and
more recently by rain.

The rain that falls on the Burren is made slightly acid by the natural
cycle that moves sulphur from the oceans back onto the land, and dissolves
the limestone to produce a jigsaw of clints and grikes. These small cliffs,
crevices and canyons are on a grand enough scale to protect plants from
grazers, predators and the drying power of sun and wind alike. Arctic, alpine,
montane, southern and oceanic plants thrive cheek by jowl, enabling us to
study a unique habitat.

The rain and rare snow melt drain away as if by magic to reappear in
the ephemeral mirror lakes, or turloughs, that fill and empty almost at
will with little recourse to local weather patterns. The mixture of plants
and grasses surrounding each turlough, has fed animals and their people
– and proved sustainable – for at least 6000 years. We should not call the
Burren a wilderness. We now have proof that until relatively recently much
of it was covered with woodland. The open landscape we now see has been
created and managed mainly by people. Only after the Neolithic farmers arrived
did the plants of the open habitat spread from small refugia around the
turloughs and on cliffs, to grace the whole countryside with their presence.

The only thing I can find to fault the book is that there is insufficient
detail on the place of people in the landscape. But it is a natural history
– both author and photographer can almost be counted as locals – so perhaps
they take for granted the wealth of human heritage epitomised today by the
warmth of welcome and the musical tradition of the people.

The last chapter in the book and the picture captioned ‘Rock climbing
and conservation – is there a conflict?’ place our feet firmly on the ground.
Perhaps the book itself should carry such a health warning, for anyone who
reads it will want to go and see the Burren. This is the dilemma: as it
is no longer remote and accessible only to the few, we can no longer hide
from the fact that the area is in grave danger.

If Europe wants to continue to hold up its head in matters of conservation
and the environment, then the money must be found to help the people of
the Burren and Ireland to develop this unique resource without destroying
the sanctity of a landscape that has been managed sustainably for thousands
of years. An interpretation centre or centres there must be and, thank God,
money from the European Community is already on stream for that. But it
must be in the right place. No buildings, car parks or sewage works should
be built within the open landscape for that is the essence of the resource.
The local towns and villages that have served the trickle of tourists in
the past should house that infrastructure so that local people benefit from
worthwhile, well-paid jobs by running local buses, jaunting cars – yes,
even hot-air balloons with guides and rangers – taking the new-wave tourists
in to see the unspoiled Burren. Thanks to this book, the Burren is now available
to the hearts of thinking people across the world.

David Bellamy is founding director of The Conservation Foundation, London.