Book Review

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples
Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001
ISBN 0-87113-789-5

The story begins 65 million years ago when, most likely an asteroid, ended the age of dinosaurs. At that time North America was an east coast island and a west coast island separated by a shallow sea. It traces the many changes in the climate, land forms, plants and animals from that age to the present.

Perhaps the major feature of the book is the hot off the press theories about the disappearance of the megafauna (wooly mammoths, mastodons, etc.) quite quickly due to extreme hunting pressure by the newly arrived Clovis hunters (early Amerindians) about 13,000 years ago.

The book gives a new perspective on just how great the changes in climate and hence the plants and animals can be compared with the relatively small changes we are now seeing due to man-caused global warming. However man-caused major changes are not a new feature, e.g. the Clovis extinction of the megafauna.

Given that change seems to be the norm, one can ponder about preservationists views of maintaining some particular state, when any given place has passed through many states before arriving at its current state.