The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America (Hardcover)

The deep history of America is particularly interesting from an ecological point of view because the region seems always to have acted as a haven for migrants--human or otherwise. As such many parallels can be drawn between the continent's distant past and its recent history of human occupation. Here Flannery is very good, sensibly exploring the links between ancient and modern America without ever overplaying his hand.

Although specialists will gasp at the way Flannery flings himself across subject matter that would fill the best part of a public library, I suspect most of them will applaud his audacity and praise the final result.--Chris Lavers

Review
This account begins at the beginning: with the catastrophic event 65 million years ago in which America was 'created and undone' when a ten-kilometre-wide asteroid crashed into the sea near the northern tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The rest is a tale of how the continent's inhabitants have shaped, changed and ultimately ruined their land. Flannery combines a fluent style with evident enthusiasm for the breadth of his subject, and an ability to draw on disciplines as diverse as zoology and history. In an early anecdote, he tells how he went to discover the asteroid's impact in the rocks at a cliff site at which a near-complete skeleton of a tyrannosaurus had been found. 'Perhaps it was the great breakaway yawning below me, or the dismal weather,' he writes, 'but a distinct feeling of the transience of life stole over me as I peered at that thin line that separated two very different worlds'. It is this awareness of a greater picture that illuminates and makes coherent the smaller, fascinating, terrible details: the 'luminous' timber of the Huon pine, 'a living vegetable dinosaur, making a last stand' in Tasmania; the extinction of the ivory-bill woodpecker, stripped of the dark cypress woodland it needed to bring up its young, the poignant loss of the Tennessee River snail darter fish 'to a useless dam' and the Las Vegas frog, 'another American who could not win against the casinos'. Flannery is brusque about this: 'What right do we have to extirpate creatures that have been 70 million years in the making? To do so is as stupid and unforgivable as tossing the contents of Fort Knox into the sea.' Cataloguing the history of the continent, from the heatwave of 51 million years ago through the vast wave of immigrants, both human and non-human, up to relatively recent times in which development of canals, railroads and mass-production methods has resulted in North American 'becoming Earth's bread basket', Flannery has produced a masterful and magnificent account which is hard to fault. (Kirkus UK)

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