The Eternal Frontier
An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The Eternal Frontier leads the reader on a 65-million-year quest to understand the formation of North America. From the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period to the present day, Flannery explores America's history with keen insight and an extraordinary breadth of knowledge. Ultimately, human beings had to face the environmental vicissitudes of the continent, and Flannery's exploration of the ways in which we have coped makes for fascinating reading.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If Nature itself has a nature, it's the desire for balance. In a fascinating chronicle of our continent's evolution, Flannery shows, however, that this desire must forever be frustrated. Flannery starts his tale with the asteroid collision that destroyed the dinosaurs, ends with the almost equally cataclysmic arrival of humankind and fills the middle with an engaging survey of invaders from other lands, wild speciation and an ever-changing climate, all of which have kept the ecology of North America in a constant state of flux. We see the rise of horses, camels and dogs (cats are Eurasian), the rapid extinction of mammoths, mastodons and other megafauna at the hands of prehistoric man, and the even quicker extinction of the passenger pigeon and other creatures more recently. Flannery also spotlights plenty of scientists at work, most notably one who tries to butcher an elephant as a prehistoric man would have butchered a mastodon, and another who had the intestinal fortitude to check whether meat would keep if a carcass were stored at the bottom of a frigid pond, the earliest of refrigerators. This material might be dense and academic in another's hands, but Flannery displays a light touch, a keen understanding of what will interest general readers and a good sense of structure, which keeps the book moving, manageable and memorable.
