Tag Archives: 2021-nonfiction-reader-challenge

February 18, 2022 · 12:01 am

The Treeline by Ben Rawlence

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Big changes are taking place across the vast plain stippled by spruce and striated with water that unfolds below the aircraft at 10,000 feet. The skin of the earth is melting, microbial life waking after thousands, possibly millions, of frozen years. The soil is transpiring—perspiring one could say since more moisture is being released than absorbed—and animals and plants are taking note. It is a new world, and intelligent life—the smart genes—is sniffing it out, sending out suckers, seeds and scouts, ranging north, getting ready.

The Treeline is a mind-blowing piece of work that will teach you many, many things you never suspected, while feeding your sense of awe and your sense of dread. We look to the margins for evidence of large changes in the world, tell-tale signs like rising levels along water frontages, expanding desert edges, changes in growing seasons, changes in wildlife. The treeline was the edge Ben Rawlence chose.

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Ben Rawlence – Image from 5 x 15

He had spent years writing human rights reports and trying to get the UN and governments to address refugee issues, but when he started writing through the eyes of the refugees themselves, in several books, many more people began to listen.

Understanding that the conflict and the displacement that was going on was driven by climate change I began to look for other examples, other parts of the world where we could see this process in action, where we could see climate breakdown as history already, and we could catch a glimpse of the future that awaits the rest of us. So I began digging around and doing research and came across this very arresting image of the trees and the forest moving north towards the pole. I discovered that the forest was on the move and the trees were turning the white arctic green. They shouldn’t be on the move. That’s not supposed to happen. And this sinister fact has huge consequences for all life on earth. – from the 5×15 piece

So, what exactly is the treeline? Generically, it is the latitude above which there are no trees, roughly the Arctic Circle. Another measure is the rippled line around the globe south of which the average July temperature is ten degrees centigrade or higher. (The Arctic Squiggle?) Discovering that the Arctic treeline consisted of mostly six types of trees, he set about to look at each of these.

Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandinavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska and, to a lesser extent, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland. I decided to visit each tree in its native territory, to see how the different species were faring in response to warming, and what their stories might mean for the other inhabitants of the forest, including us.

The Arctic treeline is actually fairly squishy, not so much a line as an area of transition, an ecotone, where tree presence diminishes rather than ceases. Rawlence begins with a look at where he lives, in Wales, at the yew, struggling to persist in a world that is no longer conducive to its needs. But that may be changing. Then, it is off to the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, the Scandinavian interior, Siberia (larch), Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, looking at the role the boreal plays in our environment, and at the impact of global warming on these borderlands.

More than the Amazon rainforest, the boreal is truly the lung of the world. Covering one fifth of the globe, and containing one third of all the trees on earth, the boreal is the second largest biome, or living system, after the ocean. Planetary systems—cycles of water and oxygen, atmospheric circulation, the albedo effect, ocean currents and polar winds—are shaped and directed by the position of the treeline and the functioning of the forest.

One of the things that most impressed me, among the many fascinating nuggets to be found here were descriptions of the structures underlying forests.

Wherever there are mushrooms, ferns, bracken and particular kinds of woodland plants like violets there was once forest. Rings of mushrooms are usually the outline, the long-ago earthwork of a tree stump. There are between fifteen and nineteen ecto-mycorrhizal fungi (fungi growing around the roots) in a mature pine forest, and they play a role in everything from carbon and nutrient transport to lichen cover, taking sugar from the tree and providing it with minerals in exchange. Planting trees without regard for the essential symbiotic “other half” of the forest below ground may be far less effective than allowing the ground to evolve into woodland at its own pace. Oliver Rackham describes a planted oak wood in Essex that even after 750 years still does not possess the orchids, plants and mushrooms that you would expect of a natural wood.

I was reminded of what it might look like to see a city like New York or London from above and believe it to be constructed entirely of the visible structures, not appreciating that there are vast underground networks, water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, electrical lines, communication cables, transit tubes, and the like that provide the lifeblood which allows the above-ground, visible city to survive. Globally, these threads of mycorrhizal fungi make up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils. Soil is in fact a huge, fragile tangle of tiny connected threads. Having done some digging in our back yard, I can very much appreciate that.

Another impressive feat is Rawlence’s strength in communicating how local populations interact with the trees among which they live. There are many surprises to be found here, in the range of specific benefits trees provide for one, which includes the fact that they transmit aerosols carrying chemicals that help maintain health in humans, that their leaves, berries, bark and other parts providing medicine for a wide range of illnesses, that they provide materials that oceans need to sustain life, that they drive planetary weather. Did you know that there are birch trees with things called trichomal hairs on the underside of their leaves, that capture particulates from the air, natural air filters that then allow the materials to be dropped to the ground, and washed away with the next rain? They also act like a fur coat for the leaves. The list goes on. You will be surprised by many of the uses that Arctic peoples have devised to make use of their local trees.

Will it be possible to continue such a positive relationship as the land becomes less supportive of human endeavors? The Sami people, for example, are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their reindeer herds. Snowmobiles are less than ideal when there is no snow. Substituting four-wheel All Terrain Vehicles may allow them to herd their critters, but using them damages the landscape even more. At what point will it be impossible to continue at all?

There are plenty of dark tidings. In this ring of melting ice global warming is taking place at a rate far in excess of what we experience in the more temperate zones. And then this unnerving bit; with more Co2 in the air, trees do not need to work so hard to get what they need, thus will produce less oxygen. Uh oh. As the forests of the northern hemisphere migrate north (race actually, at a rate of hundreds of feet a year in some places instead of inches per century) they are pursued on their southern end by increasingly fire-prone conditions. How much of our forest land will be consumed by a Langolier-like army of drought and flames before finding more welcoming climes? And then there is methane, pretty pearl-like bubbles when seen through clear Arctic ice, but how about this cheery nugget as permafrost becoming permaslush?

Some studies have suggested that an unstable seabed could release a methane “burp” of 500–5000 gigatonnes, equivalent to decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to an abrupt jump in temperature that humans will be powerless to arrest.

In pop science books, the author acts as a guide to the subject matter, introducing us to the places he visits, and the experts he consults. Rawlence is an engaging and informative teacher with a gift for extracting local cultural lore and area-specific histories, as well as reporting the science in accessible terms. He seems like someone you would want to hang out with. You would certainly like to sign up for any class he teaches. You will learn a lot. He is also a lyrical writer, able to offer not only straight-ahead exposition, but poetical, sometimes emotion-filled reactions to the places he visits and the experiences he has on this journey.

The brilliant sun on the pinkish cliffs and the starched blue of the sky, which has been mostly hidden all week, make the morning sing. The scent of a meadow is so heady it should be bottled. The hay has been freshly cut: huge plastic-covered bales guide the eye to a combine harvester abandoned mid-job, its windows covered in sparkling dew. Beyond, the path crosses the meadow to a wide bend that the flooding river has worked into a series of interlinked channels. The little bridges have been overwhelmed and carefully placed stepping-stones lie visible in the clear stream, half a meter underwater. Feet have cut a higher path along the edge of the valley, around drowned shrubs, riparian willow now floating midstream. The roar of the main river is all around. Gray water cradling slabs of dirty ice meanders around a cliff and then widens into a foaming skirt over even-sized white granite boulders that snag the ice and make it dance and nod until it falls apart and joins the sea-ward torrent.

Rawlence a not a fan of western capitalism, and it would be difficult to argue that the short-term profit motive is not at variance with the long-term health of the planet, but places that were at least nominally socialist did a pretty good job of devastating their environments too. Maybe the problem is a human one first, and a economic-political one second. Maybe if we lived as long as some trees (not all are long-lived) we might have a more long-term view of what matters, and not keep rushing to use everything as fast as we possibly can before someone else does. Rawlence keeps his eyes on the scientific and anthropological issues at hand. How is warming impacting these trees, the landscapes in which they exist, the societies that have lived with them for centuries, and the wider world? What can we learn from the changes that have already taken place? What can we look forward to? What can we do about it?

Despite the growth of electric car usage and renewable power generation, we have arrived at this party too late, and relatively empty-handed. Attempts to mitigate global warming cannot change the fact that there is warming to come that is already baked in. We can do nothing to change that. It will continue, even were we to cease all carbon usage tomorrow. Not that we should abandon attempts to reduce emissions. But we should know that we will not see the benefits of those actions. The mitigation work we do today may impact future generations, but the planet will continue heating up for quite some time regardless. The most we can hope for in the short term is to slow the rate somewhat.

The Treeline is a must read for anyone interested in environmental issues, global warming in particular. Who doesn’t love trees? After reading this you will love them ever more. As Rawlence points out, we are at our core tree people, having evolved thumbs to get around in an arboreal world, and having lived among or near trees for all of human history. We have evolved together, and will continue to do so. But we will have to adapt to the new Anthropocene world rather than attempting to force it back into its prior form.

In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all.

Review posted – February 18, 2022

Publication date – February 15, 2022

I received an ARE of The Treeline from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and a promise to plant a few saplings. Thanks, folks. And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s Twitter page

Lizzie Harper, a Welsh illustrator, provided many images for the book. Sadly, there were none in the e-galley I read. But you can see some on her site. Here are links to Harper’s personal, FB, LinkedIn, PInterest, and Twitter pages

Interview
—InterMultiversal – An Interview with Ben Rawlence by Simon Morden

Items of Interest from the author
—–Video trailer for the book – 1:09
—–5 x 15 – Ben Rawlence on The Treeline – video
—–The Big Issue – ‘As the planet warms, the forest is on the move’ by Rawlence

Items of Interest
—–Patagonia Films – Treeline (Full Film) | The Secret Life of Trees – video 40:16
—–Cairngorms Connect – 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area within the 600 square kilometer Cairngorms National Park.
—–NY Times – Feb. 4, 2022 – Seen From Space: Huge Methane Leaks by Henry Fountain

You Might Also Want To Check Out
—–Land by Simon Winchester
—–Being a Human by Charles Foster
—–The Earth’s Wild Music by Kathleen Dean Moore
—–Road of Bones – not in form, obviously. But this one offers a fictional horror-story take on the great north rebelling against the outrages of humanity

Music
—–George Winston – Forest
—–Sondheim – Into the Woods

Genius Makers by Cade Metz

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[In 2016] Ed Boyton, a Princeton University professor who specialized in nascent technologies for sending information between machines and the human brain…told [a] private audience that scientists were approaching the point where they could create a complete map of the brain and then simulate it with a machine. The question was whether the machine, in addition to acting like a human, would actually feel what it was like to be human. This, they said, was the same question explored in Westworld.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, is a source of active concern in our culture. Tales abound in film, television, and written fiction about the potential for machines to exceed human capacities for learning, and ultimately gain self-awareness, which will lead to them enslaving humanity, or worse. There are hopes for AI as well. Language recognition is one area where there has been growth. However much we may roll our eyes at Siri or Alexa’s inability to, first, hear, the words we say properly, then interpret them accurately, it is worth bearing in mind that Siri was released a scant ten years ago, in 2011, Alexa following in 2014. We may not be there yet, but self-driving vehicles are another AI product that will change our lives. It can be unclear where AI begins and the use of advanced algorithms end in the handling of our on-line searching, and in how those with the means use AI to market endless products to us.

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Cade Metz – image from Wired

So what is AI? Where did it come from? What stage of development is it currently at and where might it take us? Cade Metz, late of Wired Magazine and currently a tech reporter with the New York Times, was interested in tracking the history of AI. There are two sides to the story of any scientific advance, the human and the technological. No chicken and egg problem to be resolved here, the people came first. In telling the tales of those, Metz focuses on the brightest lights in the history of AI development, tracking their progress from the 1950s to the present, leading us through the steps, and some mis-steps, that have brought us to where we are today, from a seminal conference in the late 1950s to Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron in 1958, from the Boltzmann Machine to the development of the first neural network, SNARC, cadged together from remnant parts of old B-24s by Marvin Minsky, from the AI winter of governmental disinvestment that began in 1971 to its resumption in the 1980s, from training machines to beat the most skilled humans at chess, and then Go, to training them to recognize faces, from gestating in universities to being hooked up to steroidal sources of computing power at the world’s largest corporations, from early attempts to mimic the operations of the human brain to shifting to the more achievable task of pattern recognition, from ignoring social elements to beginning to see how bias can flow through people into technology, from shunning military uses to allowing, if not entirely embracing them.

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This is one of 40 artificial neurons used in Marvin Minsky’s SPARC machine – image from The Scientist

Metz certainly has had a ringside seat for this, drawing from hundreds of interviews he conducted with the players in his reportorial day jobs, eight years at Wired and another two at the NY Times. He conducted another hundred or so interviews just for the book.

Some personalities shine through. We meet Geoffrey Hinton in the prologue, as he auctions his services (and the services of his two assistants) off to the highest corporate bidder, the ultimate figure a bit startling. Hinton is the central figure in this AI history, a Zelig-like-character who seems to pop up every time there is an advance in the technology. He is an interesting, complicated fellow, not just a leader in his field, but a creator of it and a mentor to many of the brightest minds who followed. It must have helped his recruiting that he had an actual sense of humor. He faced more than his share of challenges, suffering a back condition that made it virtually impossible for him to sit. Makes those cross country and trans-oceanic trips by train and plane just a wee bit of a problem. He suffered in other ways as well, losing two wives to cancer, providing a vast incentive for him to look at AI and neural networking as tools to help develop early diagnostic measures for diverse medical maladies.

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Marvin Minsky in a lab at M.I.T. in 1968.Credit…M.I.T. – image and caption from NY Times

Where there are big ideas there are big egos, and sometimes an absence of decency. At a 1966 conference, when a researcher presented a report that did not sit well with Marvin Minsky, he interrupted the proceedings from the floor at considerable personal volume.

“How can an intelligent young man like you,” he asked, “waste your time with something like this?”

This was not out of character for the guy, who enjoyed provoking controversy, and, clearly, pissing people off. He single-handedly short-circuited a promising direction in AI research with his strident opposition.

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Skynet’s Employee of the month

One of the developmental areas on which Metz focuses is deep learning, namely, feeding vast amounts of data to neural networks that are programmed to analyze the incomings for commonalities, in order to then be able to recognize unfamiliar material. For instance, examine hundreds of thousands of images of ducks and the system is pretty likely to be able to recognize a duck when it sees one. Frankly, it does not seem all that deep, but it is broad. Feeding a neural net vast quantities of data in order to train it to recognize particular things is the basis for a lot of facial recognition software in use today. Of course, the data being fed into the system reflects the biases of those doing the feeding. Say, for instance, that you are looking to identify faces, and most of the images that have been fed in are of white people, particularly white men. In 2015, when Google’s foto recognition app misidentified a black person as a gorilla, Google’s response was not to re-work its system ASAP, but to remove the word “gorilla” from its AI system. So, GIGO rules, fed by low representation by women and non-white techies. Metz addresses the existence of such inherent bias in the field, flowing from tech people in the data they use to feed neural net learning, but it is not a major focus of the book. He addresses it more directly in interviews.

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Frank Rosenblatt and his Perceptron – image from Cornell University

On the other hand, by feeding systems vast amounts of information, it may be possible, for example, to recognize early indicators of public health or environmental problems that narrower examination of data would never unearth, and might even be able to give individuals a heads up that something might merit looking into.

He gives a lot of coverage to the bouncings back and forth of this, that, and the other head honcho researcher from institution to institution, looking at why such changes were made. A few of these are of interest, like why Hinton crossed the Atlantic to work, or why he moved from the states to Canada, and then stayed where he was based once he settled, regardless of employer. But a lot of the personnel movement was there to illustrate how strongly individual corporations were committed to AI development. This sometimes leads to odd, but revealing, images, like researchers having been recruited by a major company, and finding when they get there that the equipment they were expected to use was laughably inadequate to the project they were working on. When researchers realized that running neural networks would require vast numbers of Graphics Processing Units, GPUs (comparable to the Central Processing Units (CPUs) that are at the heart of every computer, but dedicated to a narrower range of activities) some companies dove right in while others balked. This is the trench warfare that I found most interesting, the specific command decisions that led to or impeded progress.

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Rehoboam – the quantum supercomputer at the core of WestWorld – Image from The Sun

There are a lot of names in The Genius Makers. I would imagine that Metz and his editors pared quite a few out, but it can still be a bit daunting at times, trying to figure out which ones merit retaining, unless you already know that there is a manageable number of these folks. It can slow down reading. It would have been useful for Dutton to have provided a graphic of some sort, a timeline indicating this idea began here, that idea began then, and so on. It is indeed possible that such a welcome add-on is present in the final hardcover book. I was working from an e-ARE. Sometimes the jargon was just a bit too much. Overall, the book is definitely accessible for the general, non-technical, reader, if you are willing to skip over a phrase and a name here and there, or enjoy, as I do, looking up EVERYTHING.

The stories Metz tells of these pioneers, and their struggles are worth the price of admission, but you will also learn a bit about artificial intelligence (whatever that is) and the academic and corporate environments in which AI existed in the past, and is pursued today. You will not get a quick insight into what AI really is or how it works, but you will learn how what we call AI today began and evolved, and get a taste of how neural networking consumes vast volumes of data in a quest to amass enough knowledge to make AI at least somewhat…um…knowledgeable. Intelligence is a whole other thing, one of the dreams that has eluded developers and concerned the public. It is one of the ways in which AI has always been bedeviled by the curse of unrealistic expectations.

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(left to right) Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio – Image from Eyerys

Metz is a veteran reporter, so knows how to tell stories. It shows in his glee at telling us about this or that event. He includes a touch of humor here and there, a lightly sprinkled spice. Nothing that will make you shoot your coffee out your nose, but enough to make you smile. Here is an example.

…a colleague introduced [Geoff Hinton] at an academic conference as someone who had failed at physics, dropped out of psychology, and then joined a field with no standards at all: artificial intelligence. It was a story Hinton enjoyed repeating, with a caveat. “I didn’t fail at physics and drop out of psychology,” he would say. “I failed at psychology and dropped out of physics—which is far more reputable.”

The Genius Makers is a very readable bit of science history, aimed at a broad public, not the techie crowd, who would surely be demanding a lot more detail in the theoretical and implementation ends of decision-making and the construction of hardware and software. It will give you a clue as to what is going on in the AI world, and maybe open your mind a bit to what possibilities and perils we can all look forward to.

There are many elements involved in AI. But the one (promoted by Elon Musk) we tend to be most concerned about is that it will develop, frighteningly portrayed in many sci-fi films and TV series, as a dark, all-powerful entity driven to subjugate weak humans. This is called AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence and is something that we do not know how to achieve. Bottom line for that is pass the popcorn and enjoy the show. Skynet may take over in one fictional future, but it ain’t gonna happen in our real one any time soon.

Review first posted – April 16, 2021

Publication dates
———-Hardcover – March 16, 2021
———-Trade Paperback – February 15, 2022

I received an e-book ARE from Dutton in return for…I’m gonna need a lot more data before I can answer that accurately.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages

Interview
—–C-Span2 – Genius Makers with Daniela Hernandez – video – 1:28:17 – this one is terrific

Other Reviews
—–Forbes – The Mavericks Who Brought AI to the World – Review of “Genius Makers” by Cade Metz by Calum Chace
—–Fair Observer – The Unbearable Shallowness of “Deep AI” By William Softky • Mar 31, 2021
—– Christian Science Monitor – Machines that learn: The origin story of artificial intelligence By Seth Stern

Items of Interest from the author
—–A list of Metz’s New York Times articles
—–A list of Metz’s Wired articles
—–excerpt
—–NY Times – Can Humans Be Replaced by Machines? by James Fallows

Items of Interest
—–Public Integrity – Are we ready for weapons to have a mind of their own? by Zachary Fryer-Biggs
—–Wiki on Geoffrey Hinton
—–Wiki for Demis Hassabis
—–Cornell Chronicle – Professor’s perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon by Melanie Lefkowitz
—–The Scientist – Machine, Learning, 1951 by Jef Akst

Land by Simon Winchester

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This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. – from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlement

What are the three most important things in real estate? All together now, “Location, location, location.” Simon Winchester, in his usual way, has offered us a grand tour of land, and thus real estate on our planet. Note the subtitle, How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World). This is not the broker’s walk-through in which the good elements are highlighted while the less appealing aspects are minimized or ignored. It may be that location is the most important property of land, but there are other features that are worth knowing too. Things like How much land is there? How do we know? How was it measured, by whom, and why? Is the amount of land fixed? Can it increase or decrease? Can land be made unusable? Where is everything? Who can make use of it? Is land inherently public, for (reasonable) use by all? Was it ever? How did it come to be private? How do different cultures think about land? Why is land divided up the way it is, into public and private, into parcels of particular size? Who gets to own land, and who is relegated to merely renting it? Winchester has answers.

Land is the defining characteristic of every nation. Our (the USA’s) national anthem, for example, goes “O’er the land of the free” not o’er the pond, lake, river or fjord of the free, (and no, Norway’s anthem makes no specific mention of fjords), not the sweet air of the free, not the great views of the free (although “spacious skies” and “purple mountain majesties” from our other national anthem, America the Beautiful, comes close), but the land. Check your nation of choice for common ground re this. (Click for a list of anthems) The word “land” figures prominently. Although I suggest you check out the Algerian lyrics. Dude, switch to decaf. The war is over.

Land is seminal in human culture as well as national history. For many of us in the West, our very origin story begins with a landlord-tenant dispute. “If we owned the garden instead of renting it, Adam, I could have eaten the goddam apple and it would have been nobody’s business but my own. And we wouldn’t have to put up with the creepy landlord spying on us all the time, or his freaky feathered bouncer. The guy should get a hobby, make some friends or something.”

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Simon Winchester at home in his study in the Berkshires – image from The Berkshire Eagle – Photo: Andrew Blechman

This is the eighth Winchester I have read, of his fifteen non-fiction books (so, plenty left to get to) and they have all been engaging, informative, and charming. He read Geology at Oxford, so, has a particular soft spot for explaining how physical things on our planet came to be where they are, how they changed over time, and why they exist in the forms they have taken on. You might be interested in the Atlantic Ocean, maybe the Pacific? Winchester has written a book on each. How about looking at the creation of the world’s first geological map, or maybe why Krakatoa blew its top. He is also interested in tracing back how we know what we know, (or, um, history) as a crucial element of understanding things as they are now, and how they came to be. The Perfectionists looks at how industrial standardization developed, and how machine tolerances improved to the point where they are beyond the control of flesh and blood humans. In The Professor and the Madman he looks at how the Oxford English Dictionary was made. The third element in Winchester’s trifecta of interest is people, often odd personalities who played pivotal roles in the development of technical and intellectual advances, thus expanding and deepening human understanding of the world.

I think what I’ve done is to get obscure figures from history and tell the stories like I’ve told you about Mister Penck and his maps, Mister Struve and his survey, Mister Radcliffe and his line, and turn them into what they truly are, which is heroic, forgotten figures from history….I just become fascinated by these characters. – from the Kinukinaya interview

There are plenty of interesting sorts in Land. Maybe none of the folks noted here are quite so interesting as the institutionalized murderer in The Professor and the Madman, but they are still a colorful crew, and it is clear Winchester had fun writing about them. They include Cornelius Lely, who built the 20-mile-long Barrier Dam in The Netherlands, which turned the Zuider Zee into vast tracts of arable land, Gina Rinehart, the world’s largest private landholder, not someone who has contributed nearly so much to the store of human knowledge as she has to conservative politicians, and Friedrich Wilhelm Georg von Struve, who spent forty years measuring a meridian for the tsar of Russia. There are many more, of both the benign and dark variety.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. — Desmond Tutu

There are surprising connections made, such as the relationship between the invention of barbed wire and America’s appetite for beef. Or the link between the growth of commercial aviation and the development of World Aeronautical Charts, well maybe not so surprising, that. But that such things did not exist prior to people flying the friendly skies reminds us just how recent so much of the foundation of today’s world truly is. I suppose it also might not count as surprising, but John Maynard Keynes had an interesting solution to the problem of landed gentry, euthanasia.

Winchester details many of the outrages that have been inflicted, in the name of seizing land, on indigenous people across the planet, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA figuring large in these. But there are also plenty of other people who have been expelled from their homes, livelihoods, and history by the forces of greed across the planet. These include immigrants to the USA whose land was stolen while they were illegally incarcerated, and farmers who were dispossessed by land-owners seeking to maximize the profitability of their holdings, via the Enclosure and Clearance laws passed in England and Scotland. Then there are the perennial turf battles, like those in Ireland and the Middle East.

Gripes are, per usual with any Winchester book, minimal. He writes about the role, historical, current, and potential, that trusts have, had, and might have for the preservation of land from destructive exploitation. Yet, in doing so, there was no mention of The Nature Conservancy. Their motto could be (it isn’t) We save land the old-fashioned way. We buy it. It has over a million members (yes, I am) and has protected about 120 million acres of land. It definitely merited a shoutout here. Another part of the book tells of the annihilation of bison from the American west. The critters are referred to as multi-ton. Like the mythical eight hundred pound gorilla which grows only to about 400 pounds at most, bison max out at roughly 2,000 pounds, or a single ton, which still leaves them as the largest land mammal in North America.

Like any good geologist, or writer, Simon Winchester enjoys digging. And we are all the lucky recipients of the informational nuggets he unearths. He is a master story-teller, and if you are ever fortunate enough to find yourself at a party with him, or find a chance to see him speak publicly, just pull up a seat and listen. You won’t be sorry.

So, I can tell from the looks on your faces that this one would be a perfect fit for you, particularly if you are planning to start a library soon. Do you think you’d like to make an offer on the book? There are other potential buyers stopping by this afternoon, and I would hate for you to miss out. It won’t stay on the shelves very long. Take my card and give me a ring when you make up your mind, ok. But I can assure you that, whether your preferences for land are LaLa, Never, Sugar, Holy, Promised, Wonder, Native, or Rover, when you check out Simon Winchester’s latest book, you will be a Land lover.

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. – Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1948)

I could say that Winchester covered a lot of ground in this book, but really who would write such a thing? I suppose one might say that he planted a flag on his subject matter and claimed it for his own, and if you don’t like it, you can get the hell off his lawn. Not me. Nope. Nosiree.

Review first posted – February 5, 2021

Publication dates
———-January 19, 2021 – hardcover
———-January 18, 2022- trade paperback

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

A nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found here

Interviews
—–Kinokuniya USA – Interview with Simon Winchester on ‘Land’ – video – 30:03 – by Raphael – This is wonderful. The interview is a lot like SW’s books, one fascinating story follows another follows another.
—–RNZ – Simon Winchester: how land ownership shaped the modern world by Kim Hill – text extract plus audio interview – 48:24
—–The Book Club – Simon Winchester: Land – audio – 42:46

Songs/Music
—–Woody Guthrie – This Land is Your Land
—–The Lion King – This Land
—– LaLa Land – soundtrack

Reviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read:
—–2018 – The Perfectionists
—–2015 – Pacific
—–2010 – Atlantic
—–2008 – The Man Who Loved China
—–2005 – Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
—–2001 – The Map That Changed the World
—–1998 – The Professor and the Madman

Items of Interest – by Winchester
—–From 2013 – Simon Winchester at TEDxEast re his book The Men Who United the States – There is an interesting morsel here about 11 minutes in on an important Jeffersonian decision having to do with land ownership
—–American Scholar – Experience Everything

Items of Interest
—– Citizen Simon: Author, journalist, OBE, sage of Sandisfield by Andrew D. Blechman – Posted on September 9, 2018
—–International Map of the World
—–The Nature Conservancy

An extra bit. I had intended to incorporate the following into the body of the review, but just felt off about that. Nevertheless I do hold with the notion expressed, so here it is, tucked away at the bottom:

I was taken with a particular instance of the horrors that accompanied land grabs in the expanding USA, as having resonance with today, with Donald Trump as the embodiment of that carnage. Whereas the racist yahoos of the 19th century westward expansion delighted in slaughtering bison from a moving train, in order to deny the native residents a living and to make it easier to clear them from desired land, so Trump has spent his time in the limelight, and in power, blasting away at the things that are central to our culture, to our values, so that he could deny us our cultural and legal core, as he seized all he could grab for himself and those like him.