I read this book years ago and loved it - it set me on the path of reading much more by David Quammen, and much more non-fiction in general. As the years have passed and I've become fuzzier on the details, I decided to reread it. My first thought, is that I am glad I read this when I was working on my dissertation and clearly had greater...patience...for the scientific aspects of the work. Which should not be taken to mean that it's entirely dry or dull - far from it. It is the case that there's more discourse around competing theories than I remembered and more hard science, but there are plenty of Quammen's own adventures, and all of it - from the hard science to the unlikely encounters - is rendered beautifully.
Interspersed with the hypotheses and journal article excerpts are the anecdotes of Quammen's own travels, the hilariously self-deprecating stories that led me to declare a decade ago that I wanted to *be* David Quammen when I grew up. As I read about him being mugged in Rio, for example, I could not help but think, "I should not be laughing this hard," and yet also recognize he's selected his words to have just that affect upon the reader. Obviously any author who writes of his half-hearted attempts to ensure he doesn't run into one of the world's deadliest serpents in Tasmania: "I place [my feet] as carefully, anyway, as a person can who's foolish enough to be hiking through the outback at night in cheap running shoes while wearing a headlamp that isn't turned on" is strongly suggesting the reader shouldn't take him too seriously.
While the pendulum swings between hilarity and sobriety, Quammen is always deadly serious, and quietly poignant. It could hardly be otherwise when the recurrent themes are "insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom," or more succinctly, "islands are where species go to die." I was reminded more than once of Hariri's Sapiens, though Quammen was ahead of the game on the measure by which Homo sapiens were afflicting their damage on the planet by some twenty years. Quammen writes "what it has done here in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species;" this sentiment is virtually the hypothesis around which Sapiens is written! (It's in the final pages where the parallels are most striking, though, particularly the observation that "the richness of the Earth's ecosystems might recover to previous levels within, oh, ten or twenty million years, assuming that Homo sapiens itself has meanwhile gone extinct too.") So there's the rub: to save the planet, we must eliminate ourselves.
More than the thoughts Quammen provokes, his prose remains the crown jewel of the book. Whether in the form of a quick turn-of-phrase tucked into a longer sentence (such as the description of something as a "gloriously improbably gambit"), or writing about a scientist who continues to believe that an animal is not quite extinct, despite what Quammen terms empirical discouragement ("that's what faith is: belief that transcends data," a beautifully concise observation with applicability far beyond luckless conservation officers), Quammen's writing remains among the best I have encountered. Questioning the accuracy of one's recollection, Quammen writes "There's surely some little human detail, incidental, piercingly vivid, so poignant that even memory chooses not to remember it." That line stopped me: what in my life had fallen into that category? What tiny details had I subconsciously judged so poignant that even memory chose not to remember?
But when the topic is the very survival of so many species - when the outcome, should we continue on the current trajectory can be only that "the world will be an emptier, lonelier place," - how can Song of the Dodo be imbued with anything other than poignancy and reflection? Whatever urgency Quammen felt as he researched and wrote this book in the 90s, that urgency is only greater today. For that reason, I find it a shame that Dodo has the heft of a doorstop: more people need to read these words, to consider what it means that "there are no hopeless cases, only people without hope and expensive cases," to weigh the value of flora and fauna against those of unrelenting development.
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