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Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion

Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
By Alan Burdick

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Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes hitchhike to Hawaii in the landing gear of airliners; pernicious European zebra mussels, riding in ships’ ballast water, disrupt aquatic ecosystems across the United States; feral camels and poisonous foreign toads plague Australia; giant Indonesian pythons lurk beneath homes in suburban Miami. As alien species jump from place to place and increasingly crowd native and endangered species out of existence, biologists speak fearfully of “the homogenization of the world.” Never mind bulldozers and pesticides: the fastestgrowing threat to biological diversity may be nature itself.  Out of Eden is a dazzling personal journey through this strange and shifting landscape. Alan Burdick tours the front lines of ecological invasion in the company of world-class scientists: in Hawaii, Tasmania, Guam, San Francisco; in lush rain forests, aboard an Alaska-bound oil tanker, inside a spacecraft-assembly facility at NASA. Wry and reflective, animated and provocative, Out of Eden is a search both for scientific answers and for ecological authenticity, from a writer of remarkable range and talent.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #499048 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-05-02
  • Released on: 2006-05-02
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 352 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. To be human is to change our habitat; this is one of the many insights in this thought-provoking account on the ecology of invasions, a hot new science in which new discoveries swiftly overturn old theories. Now that our habitat is global, creatures emigrate with us at an ever-accelerating pace, carried in ship ballast (a bivalve mollusk from England to Massachusetts), imported by nostalgic birders (once native birds returning from disappearance) or crawling into airplanes on their own (the brown tree snake from Australia to Hawaii). Even NASA's space probes carry potential invaders. If these creatures make new homes for themselves, they may eat other species into extinction, infect them with new diseases, even reconfigure an entire ecosystem. Burdick's fascination with the science is contagious, and he does a superior job of conveying the salient points of classic experiments. The Discover senior editor is at his best following invasion ecologists—a lively bunch—as they do their gritty, often ambiguous research in Guam and Hawaii, along the margins of the San Francisco Bay and on the deck of an oil tanker. His vivid descriptions add the pleasure of travelogue to the intellectual satisfactions of science: "Travel is a weekend away, a reward upon retirement, a chance gift won in a game show or a sweepstakes. Honey, we're going to Hawaii! Applied by biologists to nonhuman organisms, the phenomenon is known as the ecological sweepstakes, and it explains how life arrives at a place like Hawaii to begin with." This is a captivating book with wide-ranging appeal. 6 illus. Agent, Flip Brophy. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Increasingly, exotic animals and plants have been migrating to new environments, resulting in a phenomenon that biologists call the homogenization of the world. Burdick's journey found him searching for the brown tree snake (indigenous to Australia) in Hawaii–once a paradise without serpents–and visiting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the foothills of Pasadena, CA, where scientists take extreme measures to make sure that we neither introduce nor bring back alien species in our exploration of space. He had set out to solve an ecological riddle; but as he followed invasion biologists fighting exotic invaders in Tasmania, Guam, and San Francisco, his observations led him to ask philosopical questions about the nature of the natural world. Teens curious about natural history and its odd permutations will be fascinated by this lyrical treatise.–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
When alien species are introduced into new territories, they often imperil ecosystems, threatening native species with extinction. The ecology of invasion is, in consequence, a burgeoning field, and Burdick's survey follows herpetologists to the jungles of Guam, where they track the infamous brown tree snake, which arrived around 1949 and decimated the local bird population. He explores underground lava tubes with an entomologist studying the waning song of insect plant-hoppers; and he helps strain ballast water from tankers in San Francisco Bay, where non-native zooplankton are elbowing their way into the food chain. The long spans of evolutionary history and the speed of change make for some dizzying contrasts. Ninety per cent of Hawaii's native species are found nowhere else on earth, and the honeycreeper, a songbird currently depleted by avian malaria, first inhabited islands in the archipelago that have long since vanished into the sea.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker