Summer Reading Opens My Mind
Summer Reading Opens My Mind
July 19, 2013 by Taylor Studios
My reading habits ebb and flow, between escapist fiction and a wide selection of non-fiction subjects. My summer reading has been dominated so far by non-fiction, and I would like to share an excellent book I read and the tangents to which it led me.
* by Nathanael Johnson is an exploration by the author of the pillars of his environmentally aware upbringing. The lifestyle and ideologies his parents fervently believed in strongly shaped his childhood, but he wanted to take a closer look at those ideas as an adult. Johnson unpacks some big subjects; natural birth, bacteria and germs, nutrition, vaccines, environmental management, agriculture, and healthcare. He keeps it at a very accessible, personal level, and he is willing to play devil’s advocate if that will provide a clearer picture.
The whole book is fascinating, but I would like to lead on from an idea in the chapter about environmental management. The classic version of environmental succession is that each habitat is headed toward a stable, high quality mix of plants and animals, the climax community, that will persist until disturbed by human forces. The problem is, ecologists have already begun to realize that this isn’t true. Even when humanity keeps its hands off a habitat, the landscape can change for the worse. Some landscapes don’t progress at all, even if they are far from being a climax ecosystem. Any ecosystem is in a state of flux, even if the timescale of that change is larger than we can perceive. As the climate changes, the habitat will change. As animal populations surge and crash, the habitat will change. If you set out to “manage the environment,” you have to first figure out what you want from that landscape. Keeping a habitat ‘frozen’ in a particular stage of succession will take a lot more work than carefully observing where it’s headed.
Taking a new look at a big environmental problem also ties in to a video our president, Betty, sent my way. It’s a TED Talk by a man named . In it, he details his decades-long effort to fight desertification in degraded environments by introducing intensive, managed grazing. While overgrazing can lay waste to a habitat, managed grazing, which seeks to mimic the natural cycles of wild grazing herds, can restore habitat and reverse desertification. It’s such a mind twister that only his extensive experience with the concept kept me watching. It can work, it has worked. Truly mindblowing.
Fox kits from a new film about the Oostervaardersplassen in the Netherlands.
Grazing herds feature another wonderful example of habitat restoration, but with a wilder angle. In the Netherlands, a section of land drained in the 1960s was left vacant after an economic downturn erased the need for a chemical plant. The land became a marsh that attracted bird populations and their bird-watching supporters. Once the land was set-aside as a bird refuge, environmental experts expected the land to succeed to a forest community, related to the primeval forest assumed to cover most of northern Europe before large human populations. Then the greylag geese came, stripping all green from the landscape and showing just how easily a large animal population can maintain the habitat it needs to be successful. A visionary forest service biologist named Frans Vera fought to expand the refuge and bring in modern equivalents of the wild horses and cattle that once roamed the area, along with red deer. Today, the forest has still not arrived, with trees limited to scattered stands amid meadows, marshes, and swamps. Thousands of horses, cattle, and deer roam the refuge, called the , with no human intervention. This huge experiment is an example of an ecological concept called , a movement in Europe that seeks to make it a wilder place that will benefit wildlife, wilderness, and people.
I hope you can enjoy your summer reading as mush as I did, and please send your suggestions my way!