2014 read #39: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery.

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People by Tim Flannery
407 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 28 to April 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

One would never guess from the current pitiful state of popular science, but the past two or three decades have been an extraordinary golden age of scientific discovery, theory, and interpretation. Every field from physics to biology to paleontology to archaeology has exploded with new approaches and new raw data, vastly building upon or wholly overturning old concepts and understandings. If there weren't so much else to worry about in the world (staggering economic inequality, social apathy and stagnation, regression from egalitarian aspirations, the decay of democratic institutions, the reemergence of all-powerful oligarchies, loss of interest in real sustainability in favor of fashionable sops to status and suburban ego), it would be a great time to be alive, if only because we're finding out so goddamn much about the universe and our beautiful, life-filled little pocket of it.

Which makes reading 20 year old science books a little bit like blowing the soil off the lid of a time capsule. The speculations are so quaint, the optimism so... depressing. For the casual-yet-engaged reader, there's also the awareness that practically any information in a book like this could well be superseded by more recent research or reinterpretation.

Much of this book's human ecology talk is drawn wholesale from Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Flannery adding grand speculations of his own, built upon if-we-assumes and then-logically-it-musts and an overriding belief in reductionist interpretations of behavior. More interesting to me are Flannery's accounts of primordial biogeography in Australasia and the various reconstructed effects of human incursion, but even those chapters left me wondering whether reanalysis or new archaeological sites might have obsoleted all the information he presents. I dreaded Flannery's windup for the inevitable "What can we do now to create a sustainable future for these lands?" pitch, knowing nothing at all of any substance had been done before all pretense of informed democracy had died over the last two decades.

I found myself wishing for an updated, fully revised tome addressing much the same information, but alas, the '90s were a more hospitable age for such publications. It's unlikely anything like this would get published in today's dismal popular science climate.