American Indian Ecology - J. Donald Hughes

Europeans and American Indians suffer from such a fundamental disconnect concerning the relationship between people and the natural world, that they are unable to speak meaningfully across cultural boundaries. Such a disconnect was on-display at treaty negotiations and throughout the process of land settlement disputes, as Europeans settled North America. More crucial still was the victory of the Western mindset and subsequent subsuming of American Indian cultural ethos and ways of knowing. If American Indians had anything to teach the West about potential alternatives for how people and the world would interact, that message has all but disappeared.

But not entirely.

J. Donald Hughes looks across a plethora of American Indian cultural experiences (while acknowledging the fundamental differences between them) and communicates alternative ways of living in the world that were every bit as rational and tested as the Western-scientific approach. To casually dismiss an entire people, who inhabited all available environments and developed complex and responsive ways of living within them, is, most innocently, dismissive, and, at worst, a willing and continued cultural genocide. Upon what premises do we assume that American Indians have nothing to tell us about living in the world? While Hughes may oversell the benevolence of American Indians in relation to their habitat, and overlook a broader historical contexualization, his work represent a marginalized voice, in need of a platform. American Indian ways of living have much to say about finding our place within the world; this is, perhaps, more important than ever.

Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought - J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (eds.)

As environmental destruction grows apace the world's Western turn, many cannot help but wonder at a different way forward. Perhaps the very ideological underpinnings of Western thought are fraught from the outset with problems surrounding conceptions of objectivity, rationality, and an unbridgeable gap separating people from the world (whether contingent or essential). Could a subsequent departure from western thought be in order? The East, ostensibly so different in its conceptions of man and the universe, has much to say that Western thought marginalizes, or outright ignores. Is it possible that our world could be healed with a dose of Eastern thought?

Spanning traditional Chinese environmental conceptions of the Lao-Tzu (TaoTe Ching) and insights from Buddhist teaching and mythology, many of the chapters give the western mind much to ponder over. Does our insistence upon the Cartesian separation of man and the world ensure an inability to live an interconnected existence with our surroundings? Are there alternate ways of seeing ourselves in the world, and vice-versa? While the questions raised may strike the Western mind as unanswerable and circular, the reader is left with the impression that the Eastern thinker would respond to such a quandary with a simple, "yes."

Agreed upon across the work, largely the result of Asianists from the United States, is the belief that in no manner can traditional Eastern thought be simply imported to our present predicament. While varying philosophies and ways-of-being can potentially expand our horizons of possible futures, modes of thought arise within, and in response to, certain social and cultural contexts. Once again, a simple answer for our environmental predicament is left disappointed.

This edited volume seeks to answer the question, what does the East have to teach the West about a possible environmental philosophy? Various contributors respond ranging from much and some, to none and the question itself is fraught. Such variety is hardly surprising. As can similarly be expected, the strength of argument, insight and scholarship varies. There is much to inform the beginner here and much for the initiated to ponder over. After more than twenty years much of the work maintains its insight, clarity and necessity.

The Song of the Dodo - David Quammen

"The case of the Dodo was only one of hundreds."

Truly, David Quammen's book is not really that much about the dodo. Nor is it strictly a lament for our now muted world of absent bird-song. Quammen has achieved much more than a simple elegy for extinct species; his is not just mournfully warning us about the hazardous world we have created for our disappearing neighbors. Rather, Quammen has endeavored to explore a host of complex scientific theory, make his understandings communicable to the reader, and interrogate the extent to which our best scientific efforts mesh with the world around us. Weaving his travels and own scientific explorations together, Quammen brings the full-force of a scientific argument to the world, while simultaneously giving concrete example to the sometimes erudite work of the research community. As the work develops and deepens in nuance and explanatory power we better realize why Quammen's is so dedicated to his pursuit. This is a tale that grows in the telling.

The Song of the Dodo takes the transformation of our world and concomitant effects on biodiversity as an alarming, and complex problem desperately in need of explanation. To better illuminate the disappearance of (mostly island) species the world over, David Quammen travels the extent of the globe to speak with researchers and locals. Throughout, his motivating question examines why certain species become extinct. While it would be a noteworthy addition to the scientific literature if he could simply provide a lucid answer to such a difficult question, Quammen has achieved something much more profound: along the way we also learn why we ought to care about such disappearances. Part natural history, part travelogue, part historical scientific review, The Song of the Dodo is a triumph for taking the question of extinction and ponderously allowing a plethora of perspectives to interweave. The result is an emergent understanding, transcendent of aggregate evidence. It is as though Quammen has concretized his subject into a physical entity that we can circle and investigate from a host of angles and insights. What appears to begin as another lament for the destruction of the world, a two-dimensional abstraction of a global problem, gains force and momentum throughout the study. There is much to mull and ponder in the work, not least of all the transformation of Quammen's, and our own, thinking about how our own place in the world, more and more, comes at the exclusion of other species. It is not simply that the song of the dodo has been forever cast beyond the ken of human knowledge; rather, it is the silent cacophony of voices that have already joined it, and the untold numbers that will be added to the chorus in years to come.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn

Vast amounts of critique, plaudits, queries and aspersions have been leveled at Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the 51 years since it was first published. While I am sure there is little novel (or, frankly, of interest) that I could add to the discussion, I wanted to highlight one aspect of the work which seems generally overlooked. Though SSR is the intricately tied together and carefully written this aspect is surely addressed in reference to many of its other salient points, what struck me was the notion of incommensurability and perception.

When Kuhn writes (paraphrasing) that each scientific revolution transformed the scientific imagination in ways ultimately resembling a transformation of the world, he is speaking volumes indeed. Seeing something new, for the first time, is, for Kuhn, a discovery not only of what something is, but, moreover, that something is. Our conception of science and the universe will always impinge upon our sense of what is possible. Thus, it is not to say that Aristotle was a primitive Newtonian, or that Einstein could have imagined quantum theory - each time period is dealing with a context so distinct, that they can be meaningfully said to inhabit different realities. The implications of this, and the role that perception and theory play upon both our science and our place in reality, are far-reaching.

As such, science can be said to evolve, just like nature. Issues of emergence, fitness, and phase change are just as real in science-as-subject, as they are in science-as-method. What this evolution says about the substance of science - about the phenomena that science can possibly know - is surely a pressing concept for  the field of science studies. All around us science (and scientific endeavor) expands, seemingly without limit. Yet, any case must choose what to prize and what to marginalize; all manner of looking must be exclusionary. The development of our scientific understanding has yielded so much; we must remember to not lose sight of that which it would deem insignificant, or, worse, non-existent.

Mother Earth - Sam D. Gill

The ubiquity of the Mother Earth story in Native American traditions rest, in Sam Gill's estimation, upon a mistaken legacy of simplified scholarship and dismissive, and one might argue racist, history. Gill's historical scholarship looks at the scant evidence upon which this myth was originally perpetuated, and, then, how it did become adopted by latter-day Native American's in defense of their lands and tribal rights.

Gill has uncovered a historical narrative worthy of examination, and his thorough scholarship strongly contrasts to the small evidence upon which the traditional Mother Earth narrative took shape. Perhaps the most interesting point his scholarship addresses is concern over what is lost when traditional voices are abstracted to fit a predetermined mold: by assuming before-the-fact that Native American tribes have similar Mother Earth traditions, we risk overlooking the cultural nuance and uniqueness of each tribe's stories and myths.

While the work raises many interesting questions, Gill addresses too few of them. His depth of historical research succeeds at the hands of what might be a more creative scholarship. Seemingly much  of the conclusions highlighted could be better addressed in an essay or introductory chapter. Unexamined are questions surrounding the power of narrative and the ability to take ownership of discourse. Why is that a story imposed by a powerful colonial system, became adopted by the very people oppressed to defend themselves from further divestment? What does this tell us about the politics of story and narrative? It is possible that to answer such is not the purview of this work; but the questions sit as inescapable. When Gill compares the differences between tribal-belief structures to the gaps between Catholic and Protestant Christians, or, furthermore, between Jews, Christians and Muslims, he seemingly undermines his own argument. Symmetrical interrogation suggests a Native American anthropologist traveling to Europe and the Middle East and wondering at how all of these people have come to believe in single, indivisible ancient father who created heaven and Earth; and man in his image. The level of analysis and abstraction is crucial when looking for similarities and differences in such an arena. How we look greatly influences what we see. Yes the particulars of each sect differ, but, depending on the level of abstraction, they can seem similar indeed.

While Gill's work puts forward interesting insights and broaches numerous interesting questions, the work, finally, waivers between being too deep and too broad. It is a successful provocation of novel lines of thought in need of further pursuit.

Kennedy - Theodore Sorenson

The days of the Cuban Missile Crisis would test the organization, the powers, the wherewithal and the abilities of the Kennedy White House. So much in those days of greatest tension was uncertain, and so many pieces were, by needs, juggled to ensure that such a defining moment would become, in essence, landmark for what did not, what could not be allowed to happen. Amidst the storm of danger and uncertainty was President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With less than two years - and, one could argue, more than a few missteps - under his belt in the Oval Office, President Kennedy had to be ready, had to be willing to look out to the precipice and bring his country back from the ledge. To hear Ted Sorenson tell it, this was not a question of politics or ethos, patriotism or toughness, President Kennedy was uniquely able, in such overwhelming circumstance, because of a very simple, though nonetheless rare, quality: his humanity. John Kennedy was many things to many people: a symbol of hope and a new generation, a war hero, a political upstart and accidental superstar. For Sorenson, a man who would work with the Senator-cum-candidate-cum-President, John Kennedy's greatest strength and most virtuous depths were as man suited to the time and task; a man of great care and compassion, patience and thoughtfulness. He was, in one estimation, a bigger man than could have been supposed. It was this that set John Kennedy apart.

Sorenson's laudatory biography traces the political growth of Kennedy from 1954 to his assassination. Largely a character study, we are given insight into how Kennedy thought-about and approached such numerous issues as Civil Rights, peace summits, arms control and trade policy. Because it was written so soon after the President's death in Dallas (published in 1965), it is little wonder that Sorenson's work speaks in unparalleled terms of the man. That he was a great man is not in question, yet Sorenson perhaps oversells the young President's wisdom and adequacy to each task of his mammoth office. When missteps occur it is rarely on account of the President's approach or judgement, and all victories are won by his sage abilities and good humanity. Virtual deification can only help us understand the man in relation to his times to a certain extent, and runs the risk of leaving an audience feeling disempowered in the light of a complex and uncertain world: not a particularly democratic ideal. Though Kennedy's calls to service energized a nation, Sorenson biography may leave us all too willing to look for our next savior. He is, through and through, a Kennedy man.

Despite this Sorenson's work has achieves an insightful look into the most inner of circles of power. That we have a record of how President Kennedy governed, less from a perspective of politics and more as a study in character, is a gift. Should future generations ever wonder what it was about the brief public career of John Kennedy that made him such an important figure, they will need to look no further then Sorenson's work.

Africa as a Living Laboratory - Helen Tilley

Helen Tilley’s work examines the role that colonial science played in the expansion of empire in British Africa. Rather than succumb to the traditional narrative that scientists and colonial administrators blindly employed pre-conceived epistemologies to African environmental issues of the day, she reveals an intellectual and administrative history whereby African indigenous knowledge played a formative role in how western scientific concepts evolved and were translated back to the seats of Empire. Being able to govern an empire, with the attendant necessity of integrating varying disciplines and realms of knowledge, meant that these emergent scientific understandings also had to be integrated into a broader framework that scientists at the time were beginning to refer to as ecology. Tilley’s work gives voice to a heretofore overlooked concern of colonial science that still speaks strongly to our contemporary concerns: how do we apply practical and conceptual developments within the sciences to address complex and heterogeneous environments? Not only does this work address the role of science in the development of Africa, it asks us to consider the role of colonial Africa in the development of modern western science. Surely such an inversion is potentially grounds for fruitful discussion concerning ways of knowing, localized and universal knowledge, and how the sciences speak, not only to one another, but to the world at large.

See full review at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534712002686