A look at the world after mankind has disappeared. Is it the end of nature? The simple answer is no; however, many of the larger mammals may disappear, along with man, due to climate change. I well referenced book written in a style that make is accessible to the layperson. There are a few places where the discussion drags a bit as the author goes over some of the data. There is a bit of wit in the writing that adds to the readability. ( )

While I think that Dunn greatly overstates his case and I would have liked much more meat on the biological laws he presents, this book still has interesting material and thought-provoking hypotheses.

> Herren, Bellotti, and others then discovered a wasp that laid its eggs in the bodies of the cassava mealybugs in Paraguay. They took a dozen of those wasps to a quarantine lab in the UK (where an accidental escape would be less likely to prove problematic). Then, after detailed studies of the biology of the wasps, they took their progeny to West Africa where, against the odds, they found a way to turn a few wasps into hundreds of thousands. They released the hundreds of thousands of wasps and, amazingly, the wasps and their progeny spread across Africa, destroying the mealybugs and saving the cassava crop for hundreds of millions of Africans. The same story would later be repeated in Asia. A small group of scientists, each of them an expert in some obscure facet of the biological world, saved millions of people from hunger.

> If plants that do not produce pesticides are planted near crops that do, pests will preferentially devour the defenseless, pesticide-free, crops. These pesticide-free crops are called refuge crops: they provide refuge to susceptible pests. In such situations, resistant pests might evolve, but any individual resistant pests will be most likely to mate with the more successful pesticide-susceptible individuals that are feeding on the refuge plants that do not produce pesticide. The genes for resistance stay rare in the pests

> Today, the sidewalls of car tires and the entirety of airplane tires are made from latex that flows from trees of the species Hevea brasiliensis. These trees grow wild in the Amazon rain forest but cannot be grown on plantations there because they are very susceptible to pests and parasites. As a result, almost all the rubber in the world comes from plantations in tropical Asia. There, it grows, having escaped its pests and parasites. But it is only a matter of time before those pests and parasites catch up, and when they do, it has been estimated that the entirety of the global production of rubber could be wiped out within a decade

> Some C-section babies, by chance, ingest fecal microbes from elsewhere in their environment. From dogs. From the soil. From wherever those microbes might be found. In doing so, they acquire the microbes they need. But this chance pickup of necessary microbes has a statute of limitations, at least in humans. As babies get older, it is progressively more difficult for them to acquire new gut microbes, both because those microbes must compete with microbes that are already established and because the human stomach, while neutral at birth, becomes more acidic in the first year

> roughly two to three million years ago, an ancient human species appears to have evolved a change in the gene that produces a type of sugar found on red blood cells, the sugar to which one type of malaria parasite binds; that change made them immune to this ancient malaria for millions of years. Roughly ten thousand years ago, somewhere in tropical Africa, a strain of gorilla malaria made the jump to humans. In doing so, it evolved the ability to cope with human red blood cells and their lack of key sugars. It also diverged, eventually becoming a new species now called Plasmodium falciparum

> parasites from the crops of the Americas caught up with crops that had been moved. The arrival of the potato blight in Ireland reunited the potato with an ancient enemy from which it had escaped.

> one example of the relationship between species diversity and area for island-like habitats, ants in street medians and parks in Manhattan. … Savage, Amy M., Britné Hackett, Benoit Guénard, Elsa K. Youngsteadt, and Robert R. Dunn, “Fine-Scale Heterogeneity Across Manhattan’s Urban Habitat Mosaic Is Associated with Variation in Ant Composition and Richness,” Insect Conservation and Diversity 8, no. 3 (2015): 216–228.

> all the worst things we can imagine doing to Earth—nuclear war, climate change, massive pollution, habitat loss, and all the rest—may affect multicellular species like us but are unlikely to lead to the extinction of most major lineages on the evolutionary tree. What is more, in the face of our worst assaults, many of the most unusual lineages would actually be more likely to thrive ( )

Timely Take-Aways for Life-Long Learning

Several new works of nonfiction explore the long history of planet Earth including the relatively recent impact of humans and other animals. Each provides a unique perspective and context for investigation.

...
A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species
Rob Dunn, Nov 2021, Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group
Themes: Natural history, Nature, Ecology

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FUTURE explains how Earth has become a human ecosystem. Focusing on ecology and evolution, the author skillfully explains the history of humans and their impact, climate change, and the need for action.
Take-aways: Educators will find the timely topics useful in curriculum updates. ( )

In depth review of studies, statistics, charts, graphs offering a new view of climate change issues. Not the usual information. We are at the mercy of the laws of nature according to the author. This is like living within our means of what earth resources we can use. High temperatures are arriving and that means more violence. Studies reveal hundreds of millions of people will become (and have become) climate refugees. How will countries cope? Animal and plant species may or may not adapt - specific examples are given and explained. We need to stop thinking we can control our planet. We must reintroduce biodiversity, as low diversity has smaller yields and people need to eat. This book is not just solar panels and electric cars but caring for the earth for our survival ( )

Humanity's impact on the environment around us is easy to see. We have dammed and re-routed rivers, built large cities whose growth has sprawled and interconnected, constructed nationwide and international transportation networks, and much more. All of these things have transformed the natural world.

But along with many of our environmental "improvements" have often come unintended consequences. Climate change is probably humanity's largest unintended environmental impact - indeed it may prove to be our most impactful change, and one that is already giving evidence to how detrimental it can be to humanity itself.

Rob Dunn's A Natural History of the Future gives us plenty of food for thought as we contemplate a warmer future. That said, this is not a book about how to prevent global warming. It doesn't lay out policy prescriptions for mitigating climate impact, ala Bill Gates' How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Rather it's a book urging us all to think about humanity's place in the natural world, to rethink what we do and the impact it has on the planet's inhabitants in total - human, plant, animal, or microscopic.

The book is full of examples of unintended consequences. Trying to contain the Mississippi River behind levees to clear land for occupation has led to larger and more damaging flooding when those levees inevitably burst. Creating large cities and connecting them with interstate highways has led to environmental conditions favoring certain animals - urban rats and pigeons for example - over others. Creating Cape Canaveral led to the extinction of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow. Favoring birth by C-section has led to babies who lack the appropriate gut microbiome normally acquired from their mothers during vaginal births. Babies born via C-section can be more susceptible to asthma, celiac disease, obesity and Type 1 diabetes.

The book is also full of examples of how much we know about life and the species that surround us, but more importantly, how much we DON'T know. We know that if you were able to put all the life on Earth on a gigantic scale, the weight of humanity would be a very small percentage of the total - most life on earth is microbial. Yet our understanding of microbial life is only just beginning. We can list a number of species that have gone extinct, but we know that species form dependencies with other species (think of humans and their dogs, or cows, or even more directly humans and their malaria viruses or humans and their pinworms). So any count we have on extinct species is necessarily low as we haven't made attempts to understand the co-extinctions that went along with them.

We also know that all species eventually go extinct - one of the many biological laws that Dunn cites throughout the book. As he puts it: "We [humanity] are a clumsy giant late to the drama, a character in life's play that doesn't make it to the curtain call." In other words, no matter what we do - however we handle the looming climate crisis - at some point in the future humanity will face extinction, and life on Earth will go on without us. The ultimate message of the book is that we should be humble and open to learning more, so that we can begin to live within nature's laws, using them to our benefit rather than continuing to try to "tame" nature and facing the growing unintended and adverse consequences.

Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐ for A Natural History of the Future.

NOTE: I received an advanced reviewer's copy of this book through NetGalley and Basic Books in exchange for a fair and honest review. The book is generally available Tuesday, November 9, 2021. ( )