Reviews for The engineer in the garden

The average rating for The engineer in the garden based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-29 00:00:00 Terence Pare I read this book so long ago but I think it's worth your attention nonetheless. It's one of those non-fiction reads that hasn't left me after all these years as it surfaces every now and then. It was an epic read as I recall. It covers many different fields and toward the end had some salient thoughts about future human history when looking at it from before human history. It asks the question: will there be humans millions of years in the future? It's sort of mind-boggling to think about what life on this planet will be like a million years from now and if humans will be part of the equation. What, if anything, will survive from our time? What kind of artifacts will future discovers dig up about us and what will they make of it (or will anyone care to make anything of us at all)? Will we be thought of as some primitive species? Will we and all our history, for the most part, become extinct? Will we be forgotten or become some cautionary tale? Will we even be thought of at all? If we are thought of, will it be collectively or as individuals? I mean, when reading this book, these are the kinds of things I thought about. For all our glorification of man's achievements and objectification of other creatures, it would be somehow fitting if we were forgotten completely, as if we never existed. All our grand adventures and discoveries and chasing after this or that - in the end, lost to the trash heap of history. When you look out on the universe, our planet is so insignificant. It's so odd how our heads are so big when our place in the universe is so small. There have been, what is it, five or six mass extinctions on our planet? The last one, as we all know, was around 65 million years ago where more than two-thirds of all species were wiped out. Where dinosaurs ruled the world before this mass extinction, humans now rule it. But we are only the new kids on the block. It's likely there will be another mass extinction that will wipe out 90-percent of all species. Humans could be one of them (will likely be one of them). But that could be millions of years from now, unless we have the same kind of mass extinction that happened about 200 million years ago that likely involved climate change. It's the meltdown we may be headed to sooner than later if we don't watch how much carbon dioxide we are releasing into the environment. Sea levels rising should concern all of us. It's not some hypothetical, it's real and we could make things worse sooner than later. We probably weren't due for a mass extinction for tens of millions of years from now, yet we may have created our own wormhole on that count. And we've likely done it over the last 250 years since the advent of the industrial revolution. Think about that. America's history may run parallel to our doom. It's such a short amount of time in the scheme of things and yet, in that short amount of time one creature has done more harm to our planet than in any other time in history. It takes your breath away when you look at it like that. If we don't kill them all first, I'll bet sharks rule the world next. I mean, some other creature will rule the world after humans, it might as well be sharks. They have survived all other mass extinctions. Well, look at them, they look positively prehistoric don't they? They've seen it all and then some. Humans are just the latest blip on their radar. Who knows, maybe some of our hazardous waste will be part of a cocktail that will evolve sharks out of the water, maybe into the air and onto land. If that happens, all bets are off. Even if they stay in the water, if all land masses are covered with water, they will be it. If we don't make them go extinct first. Humans are their own form of mass extinction when it comes to other creatures. We have no shame in our game on that count. I've gotten completely off track here. Let me just conclude by saying that this book covers a lot of material in a fair way as I recall. In the end, the author leaves you with all the information and asks that the reader acknowledge what is at risk so that maybe humans play a positive role instead of a self-destructive one. If you are in San Diego, I donated my two copies of this book to the public library.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-02 00:00:00 R Pinson I wasn't impressed with the writing in the first Tudge book I read, Trees. The subject matter turned out to be fascinating; I learned a great deal about trees, their impact on the environment, and their importance to the biosphere but the booked dragged on and on. This was not the case with The Time Before History, a terribly interesting look at human evolution and how it's impacted our environment and how it might impact it in the future. The first half of the book sets the stage, discussing how the environment works, how it changes over time, and the role of animals in regulating it. Tudge makes one of the best defenses of evolutionary biology that I've ever read, and there's a wealth of interesting information that I had not known before. Vid.: I never knew that the upthrust of the Himalayas leached carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, causing a cooling effect (an "icebox world") that forced the early hominids out of the deep jungle and into more open forest lands. Tudge also makes the most understandable case for the transition from hunting/gathering to farming that I've ever seen. Essentially, it was a combination of three factors: (1) He argues that humans had been opportunistic cultivators for as much as 20 millennia before the Agricultural Revolution c. 10,000 BC; (2) the mass of land under cultivation reached a critical point where it was interfering with traditional hunting lands; and (3) there was a climate shift that further reduced the availability of prey and made humans more dependent on crops. These factors tipped the balance permanently toward agriculture and was the key to (as the Pentagon might say) Man's "full spectrum dominance" of his environment. From an individual point of view, farming 'sucks' -- it's hard physical labor and subject to the fickle whims of uncaring Nature and (if that weren't bad enough) it ushered in an era of physical disability (diseases, malnutrition, etc.) and social stratification (all the ills of urban civilization we've been trying to cope with since Sumer, at least). From an evolutionary point of view, however, it gave our species the definitive edge over all others and it gave farmers (as a group) the edge over hunters, pushing them to the periphery. The last chapter of the book takes a look at where Man is headed in the next 500-1,000 years and a million. Here I think Tudge is a bit optimistic. He sees population topping out around 10-12 billion and then slowing falling back toward 5-6 billion over the next 5 centuries or so, and that in the long term, humanity and Earth will reach an equilibrium: We're going to lose a lot more biomass before things settle out but we'll survive it. To get there, though, he argues that we need to cultivate an "economy of reverence" rather than an "economy of exploitation." Exploitative economies have succeeded in the past because there's been vast scope for waste -- before the modern era, localities often exhausted their resources but overall there was scope for expansion and experimentation. Today, the situation is far different and exploitation is a recipe for disaster -- there's no more room to waste. Of coures, we've seen a move toward economies of reverence in the last few years but I'm afraid it's the usual human reaction of "too little, too late" and our future is going to look a lot more like Soylent Green than Star Trek.