"Where do camels belong?" by Ken Thompson

 This brilliant book by an ecologist is a polemic against the division of species in 'native' and 'alien'. He shows that the idea of 'naturalness' is wrong-minded by asking where camels belong: in the middle east or in North America (where they evolved and then went extinct) or in South America (where llamas and alpacas etc represent the greatest species diversity from the camel root) or in Australia (the only country where camels are feral).  He suggests that the myth of nativeness assumes something special about this moment in time, the writer of a key text, “Elton believed firmly that species belong to wherever they happen to be right now, irrespective of length of tenure or of where they had evolved or migrated from. More than that, he believed that belonging confers rights of occupancy, that these rights extend indefinitely into the future, and that natives are morally superior to aliens.” (Ch 2)

He goes on to suggest that the talk of 'invasive' aliens is based on a very few cases where an introduction (normally by humans) caused damage to an ecosystem and that normally the arrival of aliens increases biodiversity, or would do except that “Invasion biologists worry a lot about biodiversity, but only native biodiversity; introduced species are not allowed to contribute to biodiversity. alien species can never add to biodiversity.” (Ch 12). He suggests that most examples of harm are caused because human agency alters ecosystems and this provides an opportunity for new (alien) species to thrive where the established species can't (because their environment has been changed which means that “Blaming an alien for filling the gap left by declining natives looks like shooting the messenger.” (Ch 4)

He provides oodles of evidence and gives a short (and easy-to-read) course in biogeography and ecology. He demonstrates that the evidence for alien harm is often based on dubious science: “I was going to say that ... I debunk the myth that alien species constitute the second largest global threat to biodiversity (after habitat destruction). But on reflection I think that assertion has been debunked so often ... that it no longer deserves the status of a myth, and is best described merely as a straightforward lie.” Ch 2)

He lambastes the ridiculous ideas built upon the idea of nativeness as enshrined in laws which don't take account of the fact that most 'invasions' are done without (conscious) human agency: “Nowadays, for plants with the right kind of seeds, socks are a major dispersal pathway.” (Ch 1)

It's very convincing ... and made even better by an author who can really write well and is often very funny

And, of course, it has huge implications for humanity. Who is 'entitled' to the United States: the post-Columbian immigrants or the Native Americans? And the perjorative language used again 'invasive alien' plants and animals resonate quite strongly with the way some right-wing politicians talk about human immigrants. 

Selected quotes:

• “Conservation is a value-laden activity ... ‘Nativeness’ appears to offer the prospect of unambiguous attributes that make something worth conserving; or, in the case of its absence, worth exterminating, or at least controlling. To question this approach is close to heresy.” (Introduction)
• “Species are born, and then they die. That is, is they evolve by natural selection from earlier species, and eventually they go extinct.” (Ch 1)
• “By definition species evolved in one particular spot, but later they may spread to occupy a much wider range.” (Ch 1)
• “Brown tree ... snakes climb pylons and frequently short out power lines, causing power cuts. In fact somewhere on Guam experiences a snake-related power cut about every other day.” (Ch 3)
• “The modern world is essentially a mosaic of new ‘anthropogenic biomes’” (121) This is why “in the last few thousand years, and especially in recent centuries and decades ... being a rat or a weed has turned out to be the golden ticket in life.” (Ch 7)
• “The Wildlife and Countryside Act Schedule 9 ... lists the species that cannot legally be introduced into the wild ... it now includes several species of Cotoneaster ... spread far and wide by birds, none of which can be persuaded to read Schedule 9.” (Ch 8)
• “The difficulty here is the inevitable collision between the law, which deals in black and white absolutes, and ecology, where a grey fog predominates.” (Ch 8)
• “Assisted migration of endangered species is a small step in the direction of allowing them to compete on a playing field that still slopes uphill, but slightly less steeply than before.” (Ch 10)
• “Sometimes it seems many conservationists would prefer a species to go extinct than to survive somewhere it doesn't ‘belong’.” (Ch 10)

Great fun to read ... and eye-opening.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God January 2022; 223 pages

"The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf

The core of this book is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable Prussian polymath who knew Goethe (and Schiller) in Jena and Weimar, who assisted the revolutionaries in the French revolution, who explored northern South America, who inspired Bolivar and Darwin and who laid the foundations of what we know know as ecology.

He must have been a remarkable man: hugely intelligent, hugely energetic, scarcely sleeping, unceasing, talking endlessly; fantastically impressive but I'm not sure he could have been a friend. He didn't really seem to empathise with people. He was glad when his mother died (partly because it released him to spend his inheritance on his passions) and a letter of consolation to his sister-in-law failed spectacularly to console. Though supposedly attractive to women he wasn't attracted by them and chose as his companions young men. But, above all, he was noted for talking non-stop and never letting anyone around him get a word in edgewise. Perhaps he was better off communicating through his hugely best-selling books (which were so expensive to publish that they ruined him).

Humboldt is important partly because of his ability to communicate his ideas through his books but mainly because of what those ideas were. He was the first to really understand the inter-connectedness of nature. This is the reason why this book is only partly a biography of Humboldt. It also explores, in a chapter for each of them, the influence of Humboldt's ideas on:

• Darwin for evolution by natural selection,
• Thoreau on the interplay of science and art: "his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as 'an intolerable bore' who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read." (C 19)
• George Perkins Marsh, the US pioneer of the fight against deforestation, who believed that "if nothing changed ... the planet would be reduced to a condition of 'shattered surface, of climatic excess" (C 20)
• Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology
• John Muir who fought for the first US National Park as a way of preserving the wilderness.

As a young man, Humboldt lived in Jena, where Schiller worked at the university and Goethe often visited from nearby Weimar. (C 2) Goethe was interested in the underlying patterns of animals, what he called the urform. "He distinguished between the internal force - the urform - that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment - the external force - that shaped the organism itself." (C 2)

His first exploration started in Venezuela and early on he saw a lake whose water levels were falling and he realised the part that intensive agriculture and deforestation had played in that. When he got to the rain forest he realised that the animals were competing for food, predating on one another, and that even the trees were competing for light. He discovered the Brazil nut which he introduced to Europe. (C 5) In what would become Ecuador he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world, as high as anyone else had at that time but he couldn't reach the summit because his way was blocked by a huge crevasse. But it was staring at the surrounding landscape from this vantage point that showed him the zones of vegetation and allowed him to later divide the wold into climate zones. (C 7)

Back in Europe he met 21 year-old Simon Bolivar, a rich, spoilt, womanising playboy; Humboldt inspired him so he would later abandon his life of pleasure and return to his native South America to lead the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule (Bolivar later decreed that Bolivia should plant a million trees.). (C 9) He then embarked on a grand tour with another in a long line of good-looking, unmarried men, this time the chemist Gay-Lussac. (C 9) By luck, Vesuvius erupted when they arrived in Naples. (C 9) Later he met Alessandro Volta by Lake Como (C 10)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just four years after the publication of Humboldt's tale of exploring South America; she made the monster declare to Victor that he wanted to escape to "the vast wilds of South America". (C 13)

Coleridge was inspired by Humboldt (C 13), as was John Lyell who wrote Principles of Geology which in turn inspired Darwin (C 13); in this book he theorised that climate is affected by tectonic movements. Humboldt knew Gauss and George Canning. (C 14)

For Humboldt it was all about connections. "He connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores  on 30th January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30th April 1812." (C 15)

He turned sixty during his second great expedition through Russia and into Siberia. "Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the ... man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin's grandfather." (C 16)

Selected quotes:

• "When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel." (Prologue)
• "Goethe began to fling his arms around whenever he went for a walk ... he had discovered ... that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal." (C 2)
• "When he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses." (C 2)
• "One morning Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence ... but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table.  ... Humboldt realised that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction." (C 2)
• "If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the similarities and differences without ever losing sight of the whole." (C 2)
• "Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense." (C 2)
• Goethe's "Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by an endless striving for knowledge, by a 'feverish unrest'." (C 2)
• "Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at different locations and the Rio Atabapo was 'delicious'." (C 5)
• "Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential to an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch." (C 5)
• "One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy's testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl." (C 8)
• "Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word 'God'." (C 18)
• "Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours." (C 20)
• "Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit." (C 20)
• "His finances remained precarious. He didn't even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive." (C 20)
• "'Solitude', Emerson warned him, 'is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife'." (C 23)

Humboldt is also explored by the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme in a broadcast on 28th September 2006; it can be accessed here> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1c2

A little bit more than a biography. May 2020; 337 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"How nature works" by Per Bak

This book is subtitled The Science of Self-Organized Criticality and explains the new discipline of Complexity Theory, the the process making it distinct from Chaos Theory.

Per Bak is a critical (pun not intended) researcher in this field, having been one of the first to devise the famous sandpile experiments in which grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a pile of sand and the size of the subsequent avalanches recorded. From here to theoretical models of ridiculous simplicity modelled on desk top computers which provide results which closely match phenomena as diverse as:

• The distribution of earthquake size
• The distributions of extinctions within the fossil record
• Learning
• Economics
• Traffic jams

The suggestion is that many systems evolve into a position of 'Self Organized Criticality'. At this point small external events will trigger adjustments of the system, some of which will be unnoticeably small and some of which will be enormous. Key insights are:

• That you do not need to postulate an external trigger for a catastrophe, systems such as the world's ecosystem or a the world's stock markets are always on the edge of catastrophe anyway so that a very small trigger can create a massive landslide (but normally doesn't, of course)
• That these systems are very large so that you need to consider the entire ecosystem of the world (which might include the atmosphere - life creates oxygen - and the oceans and the landscape) or the entire geological system of the world (earthquakes and plate tectonics etc) or the economics systems of the world or an entire brain etc
• That these systems may be hierarchical such that complex astrophysical systems give rise to complex geological systems which give rise to complex biological systems (eg life) which give rise to complex ecological systems etc etc.

This was a fascinating book, mostly very readable, which gives insight into this fascinating new science. A slight criticism is that the bibliography appears quite selective and some of the researchers mentioned in the text do not appear, making it difficult to access their original work.

July 2015; 198 pages

Other books covering this interesting topic include:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, the inventor of the NK landscape model
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"Cod" by Mark Kurlansky

Since I had previously read Kurlansky's 'Salt' and found it a fascinating discussion of history from the perspective of a commodity I was very keen to read 'Cod'. It is much the same. He explains how Cod was important in the discovery of America, suggesting that the Basque fishing fleet were off Newfoundland long before Columbus or Cabot, and played a crucial part in the War of Independence. He also details how overfishing has led to the closure of the Grand Banks.

Cod is not (at least to my life) as important as Salt and inevitably the book is more limited because of this. And I was not at all interested in the endless recipes although I understand that this is a food book (and it did inspire me to choose Bacalaho when I encountered it by chance in a little Eastbourne cafe principally devoted to burgers and omelettes but run by a Portuguese couple who were delighted that someone ordered their national dish even though I couldn't finish it).

What I really disliked was his perpetual use of 'off of' when a fishing boat was 'off of' Iceland or 'off of' Newfoundland etc. Surely one can say 'off' Cape Breton.

This was an enjoyable book but Salt is better!

August 2012; 276 pages