2013 read #129: Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery.

Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery
236 pages
Published 2011
Read from October 10 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Some part of me has always wanted to be a field researcher. I don't like excessive heat, or cold, or damp; I don't care for blood-sucking parasites of any description; I would not like malaria or ghastly gastrointestinal diseases; I like my skin free of fungus and burrowing larvae whenever possible. Yet from a young age I've been drawn to stories of exploration, whether that meant climbing cliffs in Baffin Island or crossing Antarctica by dogsled or digging up early traces of agriculture in the hinterlands of New Guinea. If I had made other choices in life, I could conceivably be netting tropical birds or cataloging unusual conifers or chipping out samples from some Cretaceous lake bed even now. Who knows, if the country doesn't implode before my current wealth of debts is paid off, I might be able to go back to school and get a useful degree, one that lets me pursue my more quixotic and bug-infested ambitions in some unguessable corner of the world in years to come.

One such corner I've long daydreamed of is the strange scatter of islands east of New Guinea: the Bismarks, the Solomons, New Caledonia. I'm a sucker for living fossils, and the Antarctic plant kingdom hoards some of the largest and most visually striking living fossils of all, forests composed of conifers and primitive flowering plants dating back to the waning days of Gondwana, vegetative communities evolving largely along their own separate paths while the rest of the world got swept up by such fads as grasses and true pines and maple trees. It gives me a thrill to see pictures of New Caledonia's Araucaria forests, or Norfolk Island's "pines." I won't say anything silly like "It's an atavistic response," but I do find ancient flora damnably compelling.

On the strength of two of his books, Throwim Way Leg and The Eternal Frontier, I had decided that Tim Flannery was also compelling, albeit in the more limited arena of pop science and natural history writing. Among the Islands was rather less compelling than memories of those two books had led me to expect. It was a relaxed book, more like an evening of casual conversation and reminiscence than anything else, a chatty, rambly, somewhat shallow account of a series of ramshackle expeditions into my favorite corner of the Pacific. It was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, but I left it feeling like I didn't learn much, aside from (alas) the depressingly inevitable sense of how much irreplaceable biological wealth has been gouged out and destroyed by unregulated exploitation, even in such remote regions.