OYENTE

Ryan Giesecke

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  • 5
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A Sand County Almanac Audiolibro Por Aldo Leopold, Barbara Kingsolver - introduction arte de portada

Extremely heavily abridged.

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-15-23

Missing around half the book. Read a real copy. Don’t waste your time/money/credits.

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Nature's Best Hope Audiolibro Por Douglas W. Tallamy arte de portada

Myopic Nativist Nonsense

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-09-23

I found this book to be full of logical inconsistencies and too much sales pitch. At its core it reads like nativist propaganda rather than science-based education/conservation. This only got above one star for Adam Barr’s narration.

Tallamy constantly emphasizes keystone species that he appreciates while ignoring many classic examples of keystone species (ex. wasps, wolves, and megafauna) as optional/irrelevant/inconvenient/dangerous. He comes off like he’s simply playing favorites, and even describes himself as “greedy” for native birds in his yard.

In a chapter called “Are Alien Plants Bad?” he concedes the unfortunate bias in “alien” terminology (despite choosing it for the chapter title), suggests “introduced” as a less biased term (I prefer “recent immigrant”), and then proceeds to use “invasive” predominately as his synonym of choice for the remainder of the book. He defends this synonymizing with “introduced species occupy space.”

Tallamy wants us to be “wary of claims… that the loss of species is inevitable.” This flies in the face of well-established science on extinction. (Search ‘The Drunkard’s Walk’ for the inevitability of extinction.). Seemingly Tallamy simply isn’t capable of thinking that far into the future.

He talks constantly about human-dominated urban ecosystems, but never seems to include humanity in discussion of food webs. He never gives discussion space to the feasibility (or unlikelihood) of an entirely North-American-native diet for humanity while advocating against non-natives in our yards, nor does he seem aware that our food coming from further away has negative environmental impacts. Some authors refer to this as exporting our ecological impacts; it is certainly not the same thing as solving them sustainably. Indeed there are parts of this book where one wonders if Tallamy has forgotten that people eat. Before the end of Ch. 1 he has told us that negating harmful impacts on the oceans will be “relatively easy,” seemingly unaware that our annual fish harvest from the oceans exceeds food production from cattle, sheep, poultry, etc. And this guy calls himself an ecologist.

Essentially his entire nativist premise (in regards to continents) relies on a single unsupported and uncited statement that he breezes by in Ch. 7, where he claims “ecosystems don’t function on a continental scale; they function locally.” This is vital to his perspective, as it allows him to claim extinction and species-level biodiversity loss where, viewed on a broader scale, none has occurred. He concedes that introduced species increase continental biodiversity (x + y > x) and that insularization decreases species diversity, but he doesn’t seem to realize that his assumption of negative continental impacts is dependent on imaginary boundaries of his own creation, drawn without substantial justification in a manner which inevitably supports his preconceived xenophobic biases.

Most of Tallamy’s message supports urban rewilding in a fashion which I could have appreciated, but his constant emphasis on the perceived uselessness (or worse) of non-natives is short-sighted and distracting. It shows a lack of consideration for future speciation (which depends substantially on colonization) and a lack of understanding of Darwinian evolution (which depends to some degree on extinction). Tallamy’s insistence on environmental stasis in the name of function even leaves me questioning Tallamy’s comprehension of own specialties to some degree.

For me the us-vs-them fear-mongering polluted the entirety of the book, much the way Tallamy claims immigrants destroy ecosystem functionality. Consider Mark Davis, Ken Thompson, Chris D. Thomas, Emma Marris, etc, and don’t get drawn in by Tallamy’s ecological nonsense. For interactions of nativist approaches with human sociological concerns consider Sonia Shah and Jeannie Shinozuka, or even prepare for some critical thinking and look into the historic commonalities between the earliest American invasive species debates (see the ‘Sparrow Wars’) and the early American eugenics movement (see Madison Grant, who would likely have loved Tallamy’s inclusion of introgressive hybridization in Ch. 7.)

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Rewilding Earth Unplugged Audiolibro Por John Davis - editor, Susan Morgan - editor arte de portada

Elevator pitches for non-profits with no real substance

Total
2 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
2 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 09-06-21

Consists mostly of the kind of information you would expect to find free in the associated websites; lots of sales pitch with minimal science.

Also, it highlights a bunch of projects that claim to value all life, but clearly embrace outdated nativist pseudoscience that favors some organisms over others, even at the cost of functional restoration. Ironic that some of the projects specifically complain about actions like predator eradication efforts while continuing to embrace this same kind of approach to recent-comers.

This is the least worthwhile purchase I’ve made on Audible.

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