The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen
When I was a kid, I had a book called Life that was some kind of text on biology. I read it a lot, but I can’t remember much of it. I was really too young for it. What drew me in, though, were these amazing pictures of the Galapagos, and the strange animal life there. Those photographs fascinated me so much, that I just had to know about those animals. Somehow my learning never connected that fascination to a deep understanding of Darwin’s voyage or the Theory of Evolution as he put it forward, but I did retain the memory of those photographs into my adult life.
There are no gorgeous pictures in Song of the Dodo, by Quammen does the equivalent with words. He takes many trips during the writing of this book, to see Komodo Dragons, giant tortoises, strange rodents of Madagascar, and many other wonders of island evolution. He also gives an admiring look at the work of Alfred Russell Wallace (aka The Other Guy Who Came Up With Evolution), and the historical moment when both he and Darwin were publishing at the same time. All of this storytelling is lovely, and it’s what drew me in to the book.
In the end the book was a bit too long and dense for me to continue reading every bit of it, but it also proved open to skimming and jumping about. If you are interested in biology, this is a very good read.
The point of the book is more of a stark truth, however. We are reducing our world to more and more islands. When we chop up habitat and prevent the free movement of animals between these little pockets of wilderness, we have created an island on land. That process will push more and more species to a dangerous place where extinction is just a matter of a bad storm or a forest fire. The author calls this “The World in Pieces”.
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