The Song of the Dodo

“I don’t think anyone has described the fragmentation of nature in the modern world as brilliantly as Quammen. He likens an ecosystem to a Persian carpet. Cut a beautiful, complex carpet into tiny squares, he says, and you get not tiny carpets, but a lot of useless scraps of material fraying at the edges. That’s what we’ve done to our ecosystems. For the most part, nature now exists only in tiny pockets, oases in a biological desert, fraying at the edges. Species that exist in these little Noah’s arks are increasingly vulnerable to assault by pollution, climate change and predators. Populations that – unlike birds or flying insects – are unable to move and mingle with other populations suffer from genetic impoverishment. This is what happens on small islands in mid-ocean. Islands are where species most commonly go extinct. Quammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become.” Read more...

The best books on Wilding

Isabella Tree

“The book covers the role that islands have played in our thinking about how nature works, all the way up to the current issues and debates of the time. Quammen describes how pioneering biologists and ecologists are using islands as laboratories to try to figure out fundamental questions such as how many species can live in a particular place. It’s a great hybrid of rich history and contemporary science.” Read more...

The Best Biology Books

Sean B Carroll, Biologist

“It is superb. David is a very scholarly but brilliant journalist who can tell scientific stories with the kind of panache you’d expect from a novelist. The Song of the Dodo is now a classic. It’s about island biogeography, about Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and how their theories are demonstrated in closed ecosystems.” Read more...

The best books on Man and Nature

TC Boyle, Novelist