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The
Washington Post
March
2, 2008
Reviewed
by David Gessner
NO WAY HOME
The Decline of The World's Great Animal Migrations
By David S. Wilcove
Island Press. 245 pp. $24.95
The world is doomed.
This is not breaking news. At least
not to the environmentally attuned reader. To the litany
of melting ice caps, reduced habitat and killer hurricanes,
we can now add not just the extirpation of countless animal
species but also the possible end of the great and stirring
phenomenon of migration itself.
This grim, somewhat apocalyptic news is broken by an understated
doomsayer named David Wilcove. In No Way Home, Wilcove lucidly
describes the journeys of some familiar migratory superstars:
monarch butterflies making their generational round trip
between the northern United States and the mountains of Mexico,
right whales dodging boats and fishing nets as they navigate
the shipping lanes off our Northeast coast, already over-fished
salmon blocked by dams, and wildebeests whose wild African
territory has become no more than an oversized zoo.
The author doesn't overwork the awe
aspect of these journeys, perhaps because they speak for
themselves. Consider just the monarch: Its fluttery trip
south defines precariousness -- to watch one travel is like
seeing a piece of Kleenex migrate -- but somehow, using the
sun as a compass, it makes its way back to its ancient home
of spruce trees in a once-hidden mountainous forest in Mexico.
Then, in the spring, it heads back north, laying its eggs
in milkweeds along the way so that its young and their young
can complete the return trip.
The motivation for migration is often
evolutionary opportunism, being in the right place when the
right food is there (when the milkweeds are blooming, for
instance). But for animals, times of movement are times of
peril. As Wilcove points out, migration, always a great feat
of exertion and endurance, has never been more dangerous,
and animals now face four relatively new threats: "habitat destruction, human-created
obstacles, overexploitation, and climate change." In
other words, while they are busy running or flying or swimming
their particular marathons, animals are also contending with
being hunted or fished, dodging nets and cell towers, and
finding fewer patches of wildness to serve as pit stops.
Then throw in the fact that the seasons have turned screwy,
which is no minor inconvenience when your trip depends on
exquisite timing.
Think of the poor Red Knots, robin-sized
birds that fly up from Tierra del Fuego on their way to spending
their summer in the Canadian tundra. They need to land on
the shores of Delaware Bay just when the local horseshoe
crabs are laying their eggs. If the horseshoe crabs are early,
or late, there is no food, and if there is no food, there
is no energy for the next leg of their 10,000-mile jaunt.
Wilcove, a professor of evolutionary
biology and ecology at Princeton, has the science cred, but
his book is clearly written for the non-scientist, and the
sentences are brisk and no-nonsense. He's not after lyricism;
he does well simply to present the facts and stay out of
the way. The very occasional authorial intrusions -- I counted
a grand total of three -- are off-putting, as when we are
told, "Patience is
not my strong suit" by a narrator who to that point
has remained invisible.
Each chapter follows a pattern: a description
of a particular migration, a scientific explanation of how
and why it takes place, and an inventory of the current,
often fairly overwhelming, manmade threats to that migration.
It could be depressing to dwell on the contrast between the
wonder of these migratory feats and the dismal idiocy of
so many of the roadblocks we've created for the migrants,
but Wilcove's straightforward style makes the book less of
a cri de coeur than a state-of-migration report, educational
and important. In fact, it is refreshing to read a book like
this without the mandatory apocalyptic screed. This Mr. Spock-like
confession is about as far as the author goes: "Having
spent a day in the company of right whales, I don't pretend
to have a dispassionate view of their fate."
But if Wilcove were of a more philosophical
bent, he might have considered what compels the massive globe-wide
restlessness he describes, particularly when it comes to
the species now overrunning the Earth. Hunger drives us as
surely as it does loggerhead turtles, though our hunger is
not always the physical sort. Scientists are the only human
heroes in this book, but aren't they, with their constant
trapping, marking and weighing, benign cousins to the beach-devouring
developers? Isn't it the encoded inability of homo sapiens
to stay still, to refrain from uncovering, digging into,
and spreading across the globe, that makes it harder for
other species to do the same?
And how are we -- chronically curious, inventive and inventing
-- ever to begin to understand the consequences of our tinkering?
Surely the scientist who created the first genetically modified,
herbicide-resistant crops believed he was on to something
good, never thinking that when the fields were sprayed, the
milkweeds would die and the monarchs would lose what they
had been fluttering thousands of miles to find.
David
Gessner is the author of six books of nonfiction and editor
of the literary journal Ecotone. He is the 2007 winner of
the John Burroughs essay award. |
