Two themes blend well together in Liana Joy Christensen's Deadly Beautiful - Vanishing Killers of the Animal Kingdom (Exisle Publishing).
Nature abounds with creatures venomous, fierce, likely to poison you, paralyse you, suck your blood, inflict a fatally infected bite, crush you to death or simply eat you whole. And humans are depleting the biosphere of these lovable horrors.
Part of the problem is the beauty of many of these creatures. The colouring of many snakes, whether flamboyant or camouflaged, is "interesting", and worth collecting. Border control has its work cut out confiscating "pretty" shells - never mind their former inhabitants protected themselves with a painful sting. The place for a majestic big cat is of course a steel cage in a dismal Victorian-era zoo.
This stunningly well-produced and readable book focuses on the macro world - spiders, jellyfish, stingrays, hippos and the like - but some microscopic creatures have miniature poison darts and other fiendishly cunning anti-personnel weapons.
• Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year 2007, ranges expansively over science, the history of our planet and its prospects in Here On Earth - An Argument For Hope (Text Publishing). His theme is cautiously optimistic for the ultimate survival of humans and life, but not wildly so.
An understanding of how humans are likely to survive is grounded firmly on a Darwinian foundation of how life evolved, but leads us only so far. Quite commonly in the history of science, innovative ideas are seen to have surfaced contemporaneously. Alfred Russel Wallace was a person of very different background and personality from Charles Darwin but arrived, if differently, at very much the same ideas, and indeed the pair corresponded about them. James Lovelock promoted the idea of Earth being almost itself a living entity with a delicate interdependence of atmosphere, oceans and life.
We know what we are doing wrong for our planet; Flannery distills some remedies that bear thinking about - deeply.
- Clive Trotman is a Dunedin science writer and technical arbitrator.
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