The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples by Tim Flannery BOOK REVIEW

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples by Tim Flannery

This story is centered around a meteor that impacted the earth 650,000,000 years ago on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula with such devastating force that life on earth would be forever after altered. The age of the great dinosaurs was obliterated, but this was just one immediate catastrophic change. The good news was however that we the humans would then have the opportunity to materialize.

This fact-filled book amazingly takes you, the reader, on journey to the present day down the path of that aftermath. I loved the fascinating and very true story of how humans and particularity we got here.

EXCERPTS:

In one northern hemisphere group after another, whether in the depths of the Arctic Ocean (as plankton, snails or clams), or in the forests on the northern lands, the Arctic Circle was the only sure sanctuary from the devastation of Chicxulub.

North America, paradoxically, is also the global center of Creationism, whose dogmatic followers believe that the Earth was formed just 6000 years ago.

The sea itself began to circulate in a different way at this time, for differing saltiness in the various oceans began to drive currents that brought warm, salty water to the poles, only to see it cool and descend into the depths to be reheated at the equator.

The planet had become a true greenhouse world, whose warmth would open the continent's polar portals and allow massive immigration between North America and Eurasia. Such conditions have not been repeated in the 50 million years since, but industrial emissions may ensure that in coming centuries the world will again enter such a greenhouse.

By the time the pilgrims stepped ashore and began constructing their rude shelters at Patuxet in January 1621, Mexico City was an established and elegant European-style capital, its university seventy years old. Its cathedrals, markets and mansions were magnificent, and Mexican-Spanish influence had spread as far north as Florida and New Mexico.

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