The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples. (New and Noteworthy).

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples by Tim Flannery (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 2001). The Eternal Frontier portrays in broad strokes thc development of North American flora and fauna over the course of millions of years. Flannery argues that the continent's nature has been shaped by many waves of immigration--first of animals and then, starting 13,000 years ago, of humans. Both ecologically and culturally, North America has been a frontier since long before the Europeans made it their frontier.

By the time humans entered the stage via the Bering land bridge, the continent's flora and fauna had been radically and repeatedly transformed by such forces as fluctuations in climate and continental shift. But the arrival of the first humans, the Clovis people, initiated an episode of mass extinction. The Clovis pioneered the use of stone spear points and used them to "dispatch into oblivion...a continent full of giants." That pattern was repeated with the advent of the European immigration. By the middle of the 20th century, frontier-minded immigrants in search of new opportunities to exploit the land "had eliminated about four-fifths of the continent's wildlife, cut more than half its timber, all but destroyed its native culture...and depleted most of its soils."

By thus juxtaposing North America's palaeontological record and the relatively brief history of human settlement, Flannery characterizes the influence of our own species as both relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things and extremely destructive in the short run.