The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation by Fred Pearce
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It is always interesting to read what Fred Pearce has to say, and I have great respect for his many years of investigative reporting on environmental and nature issues. He writes lucidly and the variety of locations from which he reports adds tremendously to the interest of his accounts.

Having already read two of his previous books, I noticed he tries to be deliberately controversial and contrarian in his views on these topics. Whether it is merely an attempt to generate more interest for his publishers and audience, or if he truly believes in the conclusions he writes about I do not know. This book is ostensibly about invasive species, a subject that evokes strong feelings in many. Pearce argues that labeling species as such is entirely arbitrary and artificial since it all depends on the time frame in which one is referencing. Go back far enough and every organism has to come from somewhere else, so arguably every species 'invaded' its current home. This much I agree with. But he goes further to opine that given this, we should therefore embrace ecological change, since nature is never static, habitats and their creatures are always evolving. We should not be too bothered by 'novel' ecosystems created out of brownfield sites where hybrid and alien species thrive. In any case there is nothing humans can do to stop this change as nature does not go back to previous states.

Yes, it is true that humans have altered the landscape on a massive scale for thousands of years, even in such seemingly wild places like the Amazon and the African savanna. However the book totally misses the point at looking at the RATE of change we are imposing on the natural world. It is this that makes the whole argument for letting go of traditional attempts at preserving nature fall flat. "The New Wild" is the author's version of that other controversial book "Rambunctious Garden" by Emma Marris, in that it also envisions and supports a new state of nature marked by human interference and the giving up of preserving 'pristine' nature because it was hardly pristine to begin with. For this conclusion and its anti-conservation (in the traditional sense) message it does not warrant a high rating from me.

One simply cannot deny that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction because of the rapid rate of species extinction, up to 1000 times the background rate, due to our activities in the Anthropocene. How can one argue that this does not matter since change is the constant? Of course it does because we are the agents of change at a pace that is out of proportion to the change that the environment is used to. There is no time for nature to adapt to the destruction, we are for all intents and purposes akin to the meteorite that struck out the dinosaurs. Sure nature will EVENTUALLY come back, but in what time frame? What about the species lost FOREVER? The danger in Pearce's and Marris' writing is that it is okay to let go, and let our destructive habits continue unabated, let nature 'take its course' so to speak. Yes we are part of nature anyway so is it therefore natural to let humans wipe out other living beings on this planet?

It is well and good that forests are regenerating on abandoned farms as urbanization takes hold. Good that animals are once more returning to suburban landscapes in Europe and North America. What the author does not mention is the continued habitat destruction that has been exported by the developed countries of the west to the global South in places like China, India and Indonesia, where the opposite is occurring much like the massive die offs that took place in America and Europe during their industrialization. Nature simply cannot withstand the scale and pace of industrial development. It is merely wishful thinking and misplaced optimism that unbridled development is all right since nature can recover as is now happening in some places of the global North. We will all live in a biologically impoverished world as nature gets wiped out, notwithstanding the handful of hardy species that can live with us.

Pearce's book is still worth reading for educating readers about common misconceptions of nature being untouched, virgin and pristine, and how no species can be seen as absolutely native and more recent arrivals as dangerous and undesired. But this does not imply that we should not care about the rapid change we are imposing right now on the natural world and that anything goes since nature has always been resilient and will bounce back somehow. I hope readers do not get misled into this dangerous way of thinking.

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