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No Turning Back: The Life and Death of Animal Species
By Richard Ellis


 


Product Description:

 

Nearly every species that has lived on earth is extinct. The last of the dinosaurs was wiped out after a Mount Everest-sized meteorite slammed into the earth 65 million years ago. The great flying and marine reptiles are no more. Before humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge some 15,000 years ago, North America was populated by mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and cave bears. They too are MIA. The passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America, is gone forever.

In No Turning Back, renowned naturalist Richard Ellis explores the life and death of animal species, immortalizing creatures that were driven to extinction thousands of years ago and those more recently. He documents those that were brought back from the brink, and most surprisingly, he reveals animals not known to exist until the twentieth century -- an antidote to extinction.

 



Amazon.com Review:

In No Turning Back, Richard Ellis makes a survey of animals that have disappeared through anthropogenic or other means. "Everybody knows what extinction is," he writes, but theories of why it happens are hampered by "the inability of biologists and paleontologists to agree on exactly what a species is." Still, Ellis manages to pick perfect examples to show how extinctions happen in the natural world, and how humans unnecessarily contribute to some of them. It's hard to look at the careful illustrations of long-gone animals such as the Irish elk, Steller's sea cow, quagga, or even the dodo, without feeling that the world would be better with some of them around. Ellis also introduces little-known species currently close to extinction, such as the spot-tailed quoll, the bilby, and the saiga, to add to the list of well-known threatened animals such as the white rhinocerous or the orangutan. Ending on an optimistic note, Ellis tells how some animals have been brought back from the brink of extinction through hard work, careful conservation, and lots of money. A master of the shocking ecological fact, and a thoroughly accessible and engaging narrator of the natural world, Ellis has succeeded in explaining extinction and its causes by showing readers what there was to love about creatures long gone. --Therese Littleton



Summary: Hatchet job
Rating: 1

I am amazed that Ellis mentions his scathing review of MEG in this book. The LA Times actually hired him to do a hatchet job on my first novel, after LA Times book review editor Steve Wasserman became upset with Bantam Doubleday for using an LA Times reporter's quote, "JURASSIC SHARK" on the front cover. Ellis attacked MEG in its unedited advanced reading copy form, criticizing everything from typos to its title, to ocean dynamics, stating (para-phrasing) "only in Alten's topsy-turvy world could warm water exist beneath icy depths" and "that no hydrothermal vents exist in the Mariana Trench."
Really? What first grade science primer is that taken from? NEWSFLASH: Warmth, originating from hydrothermal vents DOES exist beneath cold layers! And salinity/density determines ocean layers, not temperatures! As for vents existing in the Mariana Trench - guess what? In 2003 they discovered HYDROTHERMAL VENTS in the Mariana Trench just as I had stated in 1997! And yet you still decided to mention your lambasting quote in this book?
Stick to painting and writing books, Mr. Ellis, and quit using my name and my works of FICTION to help sell your work.
--Steve Alten
NY Times best-selling author of the MEG series.



Summary: The Last Lonely One
Rating: 3

In "No Turning Back", Richard Ellis conjures these emotions for the sole remaining members of species soon to be extinct, such as the last passenger pigeon or the last Carolina parakeet, which finished out their lives in zoos. It is not the animals themselves who feel the lonely demise of their DNA, their unique genetic make-up, their strings of molecules that are never to be known on the Earth again--Ellis does not anthropomorphize, the animals have no idea that they represent the last of their kind--but humans who have viewed the last of these species and have known that this is it; there will be no more. There is the odd case here and there when a migrating species has been reduced to such a low number that the few remaining individuals--still engaging in their migratory behavior--return to breeding grounds to find that they are all alone. They carry on, though, back and forth through their migratory cycle until they die of natural causes or other events. These few survivors cannot know that they are the last of their kind, but they must know deep in their genes that something is terribly wrong.

It is all very sad, and such a waste.

Ellis spends a great deal of the book discussing recent man-caused extinctions. This testimony is the most disturbing, especially when modern extinction events are dwarfing those massive extinction events that occurred deep in geologic time, extinctions that may have been caused by astronomical events or geologic upheavals; that humans are capable of such destruction. It is all very sobering. Too often, a dying species is known to be on the brink, even by the least educated among us, yet the killing goes on against tigers and elephants and rhinoceros and apes... Ellis works to downplay the notion that an extinct species somehow deserved its extinction, as if its inability to adapt quickly to the rise of Homo sapiens shows that it is inferior in some way.

The book does not just describe human-caused extinctions--Ellis discusses historical extinctions as well, and calls into question some recent theories such as the Cretaceous asteroid impact. How could this event affect only dinosaurs, leaving just about everything else virtually intact, including many fragile species? He applies this question to many of the periodic extinction events, with one sure conclusion: There must have been much more going on than we are aware.

Overall, this is a very informative book; its modern chapters are akin to Douglas Adams' "Last Chance to See" in the wasteful finality of it all, but the book is organized poorly and is difficult to read. Ellis jumps back and forth, from birds to mammals and then back to birds again throughout the book, as if the book were pasted together from remnant articles collected over a period of time (and perhaps this is the case). He mentions the "K-T Extinction...which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs" so many times that I lost count, and I wondered why he kept bringing it up.

Read the book as a reference resource for extinction events, but be prepared to be at it for a while: the book is very dry.



Summary: Crying wolf
Rating: 5

"No Turning Back" is a hybrid of several other books on the subject that I have read: "Extinction-Evolution and the end of man" by Michael Boulter, "The Sixth Extinction" by Richard Leakey, and "Song of the Dodo" by David Quammen. Interestingly enough, the blurbs on the back cover are for other books written by Ellis, not this one. His thirteen or so previous books all dealt with sea life.

Ellis is an excellent writer. This book is well-researched and full of interesting facts. You would think that I would know a thing or two about extinction judging from the books I have read on the subject but I learned a lot from this one. For example, hyperdisease is a disease capable of wiping out an entire species. Irrevocable evidence of just such a disease has been found in the most recent bones of Mastodons. It is assumed by the timing of the epidemic to have been spread by people and their dogs. We may be witnessing the same thing with the frogs of the world. I do not want to give too much of the book away, but you can count on seeing lots of good tidbits like this.

Anything a lay person would want to know about the topic of extinction in general is covered. He also talks about species that have been brought back from the brink, the probability of resurrecting extinct species, and new species that have been discovered. If you do not already know much about extinction, this book will be fascinating.

Personally, I am less interested in ancient extinction events than in finding solutions to halt the one currently in progress. Ellis finishes his book with the standard ominous suggestion that humanity may be positioning itself for extinction. This warning bell has been ringing out since 1962 when Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring." You would think (as we head for the half-century mark for her book) that the concept would have taken hold, but it hasn't, strongly suggesting that it never will. The wolf may be coming, but the warning has lost its effect over time. The debate over using DDT is raging all over again.

Missing from the book, as with most other books like it, are innovative suggestions for how to end this event. It has been estimated that for about 28 billion dollars enough critical habitat could be bought or leased to protect 70 percent of the known plant and animal species in the world. Our current attempt to establish a democracy in Iraq has already cost us five times that much. Such is human nature.

It is also human nature to form into groups complete with a geographic boundary and a label. These boundaries are called countries. All through history, in times of war, the areas adjacent to the warring parties widen into what is called a no man's land. Given time, these off limits areas are taken back by nature. This has happened in the no man's land between the two Koreas and it is an excellent example of what happens when human beings are kept out, in this case, by warring factions. No one goes hungry in South Korea just because that piece of land is not farmed. Whereas the hunger found in North Korea is caused by its poor economy. Will our technology explosion outstrip our population explosion? Can we find ways to stay housed and fed without destroying the rest of nature?

I highly recommend Ellis' book. It is by far the best I have read on the subject of extinction.

Russ Finley, Author of "Poison Darts-Protecting the biodiversity of our world."