Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

Bizarrely and mostly unwittingly, A Natural History is a weirdly positive book on the fate of nature around us. Dunn's iron laws of ecology or paleontology may not be as accepted or sound as he claims, but they are an engaging and informative read. They provide a stinging critique of anthropogenic climate change and its impact on the existing species diversity.

When one looks at long time scales, the author's laws lead to numerous inevitabilities that might be comforting for nature lovers despite their apparent short-term doomsday-isq consequences. The author did not intend these; in many ways, they are still macabre about the fate of the species most important to us, our own one.

The book claims that every species, like every organism, eventually goes extinct with an average age of around two million years. At 200,000 years, the Homo Sapiens are young and with a large future ahead, but we are immensely harming the species diversity critical for our own survival through our lifestyle. Given that most of our climate repair-related measures are extremely short-term on such time scales, with enormous damage already underway, an environmentally ghoulish winter of sorts is unavoidable for our race lasting possibly a few thousand or tens of thousands of years.

However, this phase does not have to start within the next few generations, let alone the next few decades, and it may not end with our complete and quick annihilation. The book provides numerous examples of species' natural adaptability and resilience in light of the changes in its environment. Add in our spread on the planet along with human ingenuities, the Homo Sapiens are unlikely to die as a species with the ongoing climate change. Yes, there will be enormous inconveniences and miseries for all of us compared to what we have begun to take from life/nature for granted. Still, the long history recounted in the book argues for both futility in fighting the looking darkness first and the reason for hope in the very long-term at the specie level.

We are responsible for tens of thousands of species going extinct already. The harm to biodiversity is real and irreversible. As the book shows, this is hurting our survivability (not on the scale of a few thousands of years, though). That said, with billions of bacterial species and even more (trillions?) of bacteriophages and other microbes in the deepest recesses of the earth, the earth's evolution cycle is not in any danger. The book rightly emphasizes how the species to come may not correlate to the species we are making extinct during this Holocene epoch.

Once again, the book's intention is not to provide conclusions like the above. It has fresh and highly original ways to make us focus on the degradation we are causing to biodiversity and their implications on our species' survival. This critic's personal sidenotes above are an effort to find long-term positives in an otherwise scary scenario painted by the book.