the eternal frontier: an ecological history of north america and it's people

the eternal frontier: an ecological history of north america and it

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. 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.

The eternal frontier: an ecological history of north america and it's people