Who Made This Mess of Planet Earth?

The Australian paleontologist and biologist Tim Flannery has earned his broad-brimmed field hat. Flannery is the discoverer of dozens of mammal and dinosaur species, extant and extinct, across Australia and Melanesia. In books like The Future Eaters (about the devastation wrought by the settlement of Australia) and The Weather Makers (about climate change), he has won accolades as a vivid chronicler of ecological history with an uncommonly broad sweep and an increasingly activist bent.

Now, in his fascinating, sometimes exasperating but ultimately valuable new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, Flannery moves to the widest possible view, swinging between a loving invocation of our home planet and its astonishing cloak of living things and a blistering portrayal of modern Homo sapiens as fuel- and chemical-addicted “Gaia-killers.” Our self-centered resource binge, he writes, is exacting irreparable damage to Earth’s biological patrimony, “undoing the work of ages.”

An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have upended hosts of ecosystems and are exerting a growing and potentially calamitous influence on the climate. Some, perhaps in response to public indifference, have a tendency to push beyond the data in arguing for action. Here on Earth places Flannery in this group. I had a moment, about halfway in, when I was ready to give up in the face of overheated descriptions of environmental problems. But I stuck it out and was heartened to see Flannery abandon the rhetoric of shame and woe and turn to a more reasoned assessment of a young, intelligent species that finds itself in quite a predicament. After all, it’s not easy being the first life-form to become both a planet-scale force and — ever so slowly and uncomfortably — aware of that fact. That awareness is in its early stages and, as Flannery notes, “infancy is the most dangerous period of life.”  Read Article

By Andrew C. Revkin