Conservation In Practice - Books

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Fall 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 4)

Some books reviewed in our book review section are available through Amazon.com. To make your purchase easier we have included a link when available. When you purchase a book through this service on our website Conservation In Practice receives a portion of the purchase price.
Rapture of the Deep: The Art of Ray Troll University of California Press, 2004 Reviewed by Kieran Mulvaney To Alaskans, marine scientists, paleontologists, and environmentalists, Ray Troll has long been something of a cult superstar. Now, with the publication of his first complete anthology, the rest of the world has a chance to become acquainted with Troll's borderline hallucinogenic portrayals of marine life: a unique mixture of Hieronymus Bosch and Gary Larson, windows into a dreamlike alternate universe in which fish, not humans, dominate. For Troll, this journey into a parallel reality began in Ketchikan, Alaska, where the art major moved in 1983 to work in his sister's fish processing plant. In 1984, on a whim, he screened the words "Let's Spawn" on 300 T-shirts for a Ketchikan seafood festival and sold them all within two days. Numerous trips to the library to learn more about the creatures he was gutting, slicing, and dicing were leading to an obsession with fish and other sea creatures, and other T-shirts followed: a school of mean-looking pink salmon dubbed "Humpies from Hell" and perhaps his most famous design, two salmon and a skull arranged in Jolly-Roger fashion with the slogan "Spawn Till You Die." Several of Troll's images are mated with intentionally obvious puns. James Dean, cigarette in mouth and empty fish hook in hand, is a "Rebel without a Cod." Lures tempting a morass of fish are "Weapons of Bass Destruction." But for all his drollness, wit, and flights of fancy, Troll is also highly regarded for his scientific precision. He was commissioned to produce the cover for the definitive academic guide Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific. He is the only person to attempt an artistic reconstruction of the long-extinct Edestus giganteus, which Troll dubs the giant scissor-toothed shark. He has also spent countless hours obsessing over the likely appearance of a prehistoric cartilaginous fish Helicoprion, which for decades has baffled paleontologists with its lower jaw containing an apparently rotating coil of teeth. A few years ago, a newly discovered species of ratfish was officially named Hydrolagus trolli in his honor. Troll seeks not only to entertain and amuse with his artwork but also to educate and, in the subtlest of ways, proselytize. He collaborated with Brad Matsen on the book Planet Ocean, which catalogued the evolution of life in and from the sea. Among the many images in the cover's artwork is a barely visible, ruler-wielding representation of the nun who taught young Troll in the second grade that dinosaurs were not allowed on Noah's ark because they were not part of God's plan. Troll is an unabashed Darwinist, using art to spread the good word of Darwin's theories; the great man himself frequently cameos in Troll's images and stars in at least one of them, driving along in his "Evolvo." But Rapture of the Deep is not an evolutionary manifesto nor, for that matter, a manifesto of any kind. It is an artistic celebration of the marine world-or at least Ray Troll's version of it-a world in which fish are kings who use money and beer to catch humans in the deep sea. I'm not sure that's the kind of world I'd like to live in, but visiting it is a delight. Back to Books Index >>
Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa By Martin Meredith PublicAffairs, 2003 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard The elephant is the nearest to man in intelligence, wrote Pliny the Elder in 77 AD, ". . . it possesses virtues rare even in man, honesty, wisdom, justice. . ." Pliny was scarcely the first European to praise elephants, for he relied heavily on Aristotle, another great admirer. Nor was he the last: English naturalist Edward Topsell, in 1607, remarked that elephants "are apt to learn, remember, meditate and conceive such things as a man can hardly perform." But all these virtues, as Martin Meredith points out in this bright, yet utterly sad book, did not do the beasts much good. These two ideas-human admir-ation for elephants on one hand, and their eagerness to exterminate them on the other-are the threads that bind Elephant Destiny together. The human desire for combs, billiard balls, and piano keys made of ivory-and the money to be made from them-has spurred hunters to drive what were once huge herds of elephants to the edge of extinction. The heart of this book is the history of the shrinking of the elephants' Africa. They once roamed from Egypt to the Cape. Hunters first nibbled at the edges, then plunged into the continent's heart to seek the last remaining populations. When the Boers reached what is now Cape Town in the 17th century, elephants were a common sight. But as the colony expanded, the elephants' domain shrank. Meredith cites Jacobus Botha, who boasted in his old age of having shot as many as 22 individuals in one day. By 1830, elephant hunting was banned in the colony, but there were few left to protect. Frederick Selous, an Englishman returned to England in 1881 because "every year elephants were becoming scarcer and wilder south of the Zambezi, so that it had become impossible to make a living by hunting at all." The same sequence-from vast herds to pitiful remnant populations-played out in East Africa and then finally in the heart of the continent, the Congo basin. Meredith also provides an overview of what biologists have discovered recently. Most of the research takes place in game parks, but even these areas are no safe haven. Despite the conservation efforts chronicled in the final section of the book, "Ivory Wars," numbers continue to decline rapidly. Future generations in the First World may only see elephants in zoos. Africans may not see them at all. Back to Books Index >>
The Pine Island Paradox By Kathleen Dean Moore Milkweed Editions, 2004 Reviewed by the Editors Here is a book that offers a witty, fresh combination of natural history, philosophy, and conservation. Kathleen Dean Moore is a professor of philosophy at Oregon State University whose essays have appeared in the New York Times, Orion, and Audubon. She is an observer. She looks at the everyday things in life and questions things that the rest of us don't. In a personal ad in her local paper ("Shy Affectionate SF"), she sees evidence consistent with E.O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis. In another story, she starts with refrigerator fungus and ends with what it takes to look closely, to really see, and then to begin to care about places. She calls her philosophy a moral ecology. And her prose delivers with a sharp edge and a dry humor. Back to Books Index >>