Home » Gardening Information » Book Reviews
Garden Reading—Books, Websites & CD-ROMs
Plants & Gardens News Volume 22, Number 1 | Spring 2007
by Patricia Jonas
Saving Nature?
The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer
I have written for Plants & Gardens News for almost a decade. During that time, I have reviewed many books on loss of biodiversity and the extinction crisis and have always maintained a degree of optimism in the human capacity to turn the crisis around. Stephen M. Meyer, professor of political science at MIT and author of The End of the Wild, has analyzed the catastrophic evidence that has piled up during this same decade and concluded, "The race is over, and we have lost."
Meyer credits worldwide efforts that have resulted in many environmental victories and writes: "A casual reading of the news would suggest these efforts are paying off." And indeed, the number of endangered plants and animals on CITES and the IUCN Red Lists expands by thousands of species annually, and the refuges and bioreserves where they are protected now account for more than 10 percent of the earth. But still, he says, we are losing ground irreversibly. Meyer argues that much of mainstream conservation policy and practice is misguided and lacks ecological perspective. He says that by considering the factors contributing to biotic collapse—development, agriculture, resource consumption, pollution, and alien species—in isolation from each other, we make them seem manageable, but we're grossly oversimplifying the problem.
Meyer also blasts what he sees as the futility of "anthropocentric" conservation efforts that focus just on rare, charismatic species or threatened biodiversity hot spots: "Although legal prohibitions and strict enforcement can preserve some relic species at the margins and temporarily forestall the extinction of ghost species, they cannot prevent or even slow The End of the Wild."
Meyer reminds us that our understanding of ecosystem processes and functions remains appallingly shallow, and he says that we continue to underestimate the "multiplicative nature" of human selection that has replaced natural selection everywhere. ("From the most remote corners of the frozen Arctic to the darkest interiors of the Amazon's tropical rainforests, the impact of humanity now drives biological systems.") Human manipulation of the environment is accompanied by dominance of those adaptive weedy species that thrive far more successfully alongside us than habitat-fussy species.
So how do we prevent the web of life from becoming, in Meyer's words, a "strand of life"? While the author's answer is grim, he believes that we can begin to "shift the balance away from human selection and back toward natural selection" without substituting ecocentrism (a system of environmental ethics that rejects the idea that modern science and technology can solve our problems) for anthropocentrism. We must invest far more in research and in mapping the earth's biota: "We need to know what is here, how it lives, what it does, and what is happening to it if we are to prepare for what will be lost." Most importantly, "we should concentrate on protecting and preserving still strong and vibrant ecosystems and natural communities and abandon the old approach of trying to save biodiversity piecemeal at its weakest points." Although the author does not foresee a barren world, he does predict a world where "everyone will enjoy English house sparrows; no one will enjoy wood thrushes."
Meyer tackled a big, complex subject that in less able hands would have overwhelmed 98 short pages. Stark, yes, but such a pragmatic and fresh argument is rare in books of far weightier proportions and absent in books with more dogmatic positions. Sadly, this is Stephen Meyer's last book. He died of cancer in December.
Balancing Extremes
The Landscape of Reform, by Ben Minteer
Another book published by MIT Press earlier last year, The Landscape of Reform, by Ben Minteer, also attempts to redefine the environmental debate by mapping out a "civic pragmatist approach in environmental thought." Minteer turns the spotlight on several early figures whose contributions to environmental philosophy constitute what he calls a lost "third way" between anthropocentric and ecocentric extremes. Among them are Liberty Hyde Bailey, whose groundbreaking environmental books, particularly The Holy Earth, have been completely overshadowed by his encyclopedic horticultural writings (still consulted nearly a century after their original publication); and Benton MacKaye, whose name is nearly forgotten but whose vision led to "one of the most culturally valued and successful wilderness projects of the 20th century: the Appalachian Trail." Minteer also reexamines Aldo Leopold's environmental philosophy and the "powerful literary legacy" of his short masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac. In Wes Jackson's "natural systems agriculture" and "new urbanism," he sees a contemporary third way that is beginning to define a common ground between historical poles in environmentalism.
A Poet's Plant Treasury
Emily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Facsimile Edition with introduction by Richard B. Sewall.
Just three miles away from MIT, Harvard University Press has produced two new publications that are centuries and worlds removed from the books by Meyer and Minteer. MIT Press's small books tackle big subjects; Harvard's oversize, luxurious, slipcased books are facsimiles of small personal objects—a 17th-century gardener's notebook and a 19th-century poet's personal collection of pressed plants.
Botanizing and creating personal herbaria were quite fashionable among young ladies in the 19th century, but the plant collection featured in the latter book belonged to Emily Dickinson and is one of the treasures of Harvard's Houghton Library. It is a fragile, rarely seen part of the Dickinson Collection that is at last accessible to scholars and to fans and gardeners—at least to those with $125 to invest in this faithful and exquisite digital reproduction.
While a student at Amherst Academy, the young poet collected, pressed, and artfully arranged 424 plant specimens in a charming album. Her schooling in botany and horticulture is reflected in the care with which she assembled her herbarium: Most of the plants are identified in the poet's neat hand with scientific name and numbers that identify class and order according to the Linnaean system. The album's order, however, appears to be aesthetic rather than scientific; and data on where and when plants were collected is completely lacking, limiting its botanical value.
Nevertheless it is thrilling to turn the pages, knowing with what joy Dickinson picked the plants in her garden and in the fields and woods around Amherst; with what devotion to science she sat at her desk studying Amos Eaton's Manual of Botany for North America to verify their identity; and with what wonder in the floral kingdom she pasted her specimens neatly on the 66 pages of her treasured herbarium. Dickinson scholar Richard Sewall provides context in a splendid introductory essay, "Science and the Poet," and Ray Angelo, associate of the Harvard University Herbaria, provides meticulous botanical scholarship.
Unearthing Lost Gardens
The Gardens at San Lorenzo in Piacenza, 1656–1665, by Ada V. Segre
The Gardens at San Lorenzo in Piacenza, 1656–1665, by Ada V. Segre, is an exhaustive study of an exceptionally rare horticultural notebook in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, in Washington, D.C. The publisher describes it as a "groundbreaking example of garden archaeology" and indeed, using the notebook itself, along with published books and maps, the author has tenaciously pieced together clues from an impressive number of original Renaissance sources—family registers, letters, and the period's few other extant garden notebooks—to determine the location and ownership of the eponymous gardens and reconstruct their plantings.
The book not only includes a facsimile of the curious notebook, which features plant lists and garden plans drawn separately by two unknown gardeners, but also four computer-generated reconstructions of the beds and a topographical reconstruction of the garden. (While interesting, I think the CAD [computer-aided-design] renderings are a jarring anachronism and wish that the reconstructions had been more graceful drawings, in keeping with the rest of the project.) All of this is slipcased with the author's substantial analysis and translation of the manuscript.
Segre convincingly demonstrates the importance of the early use of modular grids as a flower garden design technique and the significant influence of the works of Jesuit naturalist Giovanni Battista Ferrari. The scholarship that went into this project is prodigious, but I wish there had been someone like Ray Angelo involved. He would have corrected misspellings of names and confusion of botanical terms that dot this otherwise important contribution to an understanding of the meaning of garden making in a time when the known number of plants was expanding as rapidly as it is declining today.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist and writer and director of Library Services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.