678 Book Reviews
conversations with people she met along the way, many of whom were studying the bears themselves. Dickie writes with the wide-eyed language of a neophyte and a tendency to hyperbolic phrasing (e.g. ‘his men laid waste to that bear with ten well-placed bullets’, p. 12). Her relative inexperience in biology shows in places, such as portraying the spec- tacled bear as being in danger of extinction be- cause of loss of cloud forest—despite visiting a park where they live in lower elevation dry forest.
Dickie frames some stories in a curious
way, as if struggling to gain the reader’s atten- tion: the sloth bear is pictured as a ruthless at- tacker of innocent people, with the opening story of a young woman so scarred by a sloth bear attack that she will never be able to marry. Although the reasons for such at- tacks are discussed in the chapter, the over- whelming sense is that the author’s sympathy and understanding side more with the people than the bears; the latter are, unfor- tunately, described as ‘irascible’, ‘uniquely ag- gressive’ (both p. 50) and possessing a ‘fondness for violence’ (p. 52). I think the bears may have a different point of view. A recurrent theme is bears in captivity,
where they are kept to facilitate their conser- vation, as is the case with pandas (the author describes volunteering at a Chinese captive breeding facility), or for unpleasant purposes such as Asiatic black bears confined in small cages for repeated extraction of bile, which is used in traditional medicine. Some of the most moving—and upsetting—passages de- scribe the truly nasty conditions in which these bears are kept, with some of their captors describing them as ‘my bile bear’. Based on the author’s personal travels and
experiences, North American black bears are mentioned largely in the context of conflict with humans at the urban–wildlands fringe, particularly related to garbage, and especially in national parks in the western USA. Grizzly bears also feature mostly in conflict with ran- chers, and polar bears are framed in the by now familiar context of climate change and re- sulting negative interactions with people. The book finishes with the obligatory lament that losing bears would mean that ‘the woods, and our stories, would be empty’ (p. 214). Yet other than this nod towards bears as a group, Dickie never unites the eight bears into a co- herent whole, and I was left with the somewhat unsatisfying feeling that I learnt more about the author than the bears. The third book couldn’t be more different
from the bear volume. Written originally in Icelandic byGísli Pálsson, an emeritus professor of anthropology at theUniversity of Iceland, this translated and expanded work is a quiet mas- terpiece. First off, this is not really a book about the great auk, but rather about how the
disappearance of this species almost in front of the eyes of Victorian naturalists led to devel- opment of the concept of extinction—and human-caused extinction in particular. The story of the great auk Pinguinis impen-
nis—the original ‘penguin’ as evidenced by its generic name—is sketched only briefly as the author’s interest is focused more on its ab- sence than its presence. A large, flightless bird of the North Atlantic, the species used to nest on islands and skerries, and has been hunted by people for millennia. But starting around the 15th century, they became a staple for sailors traveling near the American and European coasts. Crews ate their eggs, brought them onboard as living food sources and plucked out their feathers to sell to pillow- makers. They even burned their oil-rich bod- ies for fuel. Most believe that the last indivi- duals were killed on an island off Iceland in June 1844. The main character of the book is a set of
unpublished manuscripts known as the Gare-Fowl Books (gare-fowl being an early name for the great auk), written by John Wolley and Alfred Newton, two 19th century naturalists. When they set off for Iceland in 1858, they hoped to study the rare great auk— unaware of the fact that the species had already been hunted to extinction. Led expertly by Pálsson, we revisit, through the manuscripts, Wolley and Newton’s vain attempts to collect great auk specimens from their last redoubt off the coast of Iceland. We learn where they stayed, what horses they rented, who accom- panied and who helped them, and other day-by-day details of their frustrated endea- vours to get out to the island where great auks were previously known to nest. Newton in particular deserves greater at-
tention: he is largely unknown today but can be seen as the major proponent of the idea of there being two kinds of extinction—one natural and one as a result of human actions; he also recognized that the latter could be pre- vented by humans themselves. This is why, as Pálsson writes, ‘it is vital for us to attend to the historic journey of John Wolley and Alfred Newton to the Reykjanes peninsula in the southwest of Iceland in 1858’ (p. 17). Prior to the killing of the last great auks,
extinction was either seen as an impossibility or trivialized as a supposedly natural phenom- enon. Linnaeus thought living species could never disappear, and most everyone believed that all species of the living world had been created once and for all, and that existing or- ganisms could not vanish nor that new species could appear—there was no term for the loss of a species. Rich with irony is the fact that the final blow in the extinction of the great auk was dealt by naturalists eager to have their own specimens of the adult birds or their beautiful mottled eggs.
Wolley and Newton’s trip is set with eru-
dite details of the study of natural history in Europe: the arrival of Darwin on the scene, the sociology of science, the privileged pos- ition of most scientists, the debates over whether extinction did take place, the impor- tance of stuffed specimens, and why birds draw more attention than other groups of spe- cies. We learn of Wolley’s untimely death and the career of Newton, who Pálsson credits not only for recognizing human-caused extinc- tion, but more importantly for the imperative to try to intervene and stop such extinctions. Post great-auk Newton became a key figure in pushing for bird protection in Britain, for example as a founding member of the British Ornithologists’ Union. This is a personal and emotional book. The
author reflects on his own childhood in Iceland, his ownhabit of egg collecting and his anthropo- logicalwork in the same areawhere the last auks were killed. His writing is informed by perspec- tives on gender roles, power structures and the influence of history. He does not shy away from the troubling fact that naturalists had to cause the extinction of a species to recognize the existence of extinction. One of the images that appear early on in the book is a photograph of the hearts of the last two great auks. A number of years ago I was leaving my
job at a large conservation NGO for the day when a colleague asked me ‘why can you be going home early, don’t you recognize there is an extinction crisis?’ Another colleague published a study making the case that those working in the environmental fields may suf- fer from post-traumatic stress disorder as their work is ‘emotionally laden because of the struggle on behalf of ethical positions and the daily experience of loss and frustration’ (Fraser et al., 2013,p. 70). Yet emotions are often considered to be out-of-bounds for the professional conservationist, despite the fact that the soaring flight of macaws at sunset, the speckled flank of a whale shark or the smell of lilies of the valley in the spring woods are all emotional experiences that fuel our motivation to continue our work. So too, a couple of centuries ago, was owning a stuffed great auk or one of its treasured eggs. Leila Philip and Gloria Dickie are open
about their emotional responses to the sub- jects of their books: Philip simply loves bea- vers, and Dickie is alternately scared by, deeply sorry about, or thrilled by the world’s bears. Their books appear to have done very well, with numerous accolades printed on the dust jackets and glowing reviews in all the best places. And Pálsson, too, is forthright about his emotional connection to the great auk and its loss. So, it appears that the public has a healthy appetite for books about species and our emotional connections with them, yet we conservationists are trapped by the
Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 677–680 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001261
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