Reviews for Biography of Dr. W. A. Belding

The average rating for Biography of Dr. W. A. Belding based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-28 00:00:00 Jean-sebastien Vey Flannery has become like a Carl Sagan for the world of environmental science. In this book he takes in the whole cosmos of the North American ecosystem, from dinosaur days, to the Native patterns of resource management, to the great Western ecocide frontier, until our present hour of furiously evolving co-dependence. While detailing the self-destructive exterminations of targeted species, with their blow-back to the whole chain of life, he notes a great change of heart that's taking hold in the popular mind. For example, by the early 20th century, the New York Zoological Society’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, could receive a respectful hearing for his seemingly anti-patriotic words: “Nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States … an earthly paradise is being turned into an earthly Hades; and it is not savages nor primitive men who are doing this, but men and women who boast of their civilization.”

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-21 00:00:00 Willette Swann I am conflicted about this book: the first 2/3, when Flannery discusses the ecological history of North America up until 1492, gets 5 stars in my book, while all the politically charged clap-trap in the final third would get 2 stars (and even there I am probably being generous). Flannery introduced a couple of interesting notions that I'd never really thought about:North America's inverted wedge exaggerates global temperature shifts, impacting the ecological history of this otherwise fertile continent for at least the last 65 million years; and the driving force behind human exploration for at least 13,000 years has been to sate our virtually unlimited lust as a carnivorous primate to kill other creatures. Flannery got me to think a bit more deeply about the middle American landscape, and that has made me love it all the more deeply. It is when Flannery starts talking about human societies that he loses me. Besides his selective use of facts to push all the obvious buttons about the evils of American capitalism that the well-kept show ponies in academia (like himself) love to push, Flannery's biological determinism may be trendy, but it is intellectually weak. Flannery's own oratory refutes his larger point in a single sentence: the most powerful force in literate societies is language, because "words-especially written words-bind us in a way nothing else can." Thus our ideas can override our biology. Hey dude, you just refuted your own argument. Game, set, match. Next subject. But I still give this 4 stars, because the first part of the book actually got me to look at the world in a new way. Which is no small thing.