Fixing Nature: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
In 1935, scientists released 2,400 cane toads into Australia's sugar fields to eat a beetle that was destroying the crop. The toads couldn't reach the beetles. Ninety years later, more than 200 million of them cover an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, and they're still spreading.
Fixing Nature is the funny, fact-checked history of humanity's most confident mistakes: eighteen true stories of people who brought in a living thing to solve a problem and ended up with a bigger one.
The mongoose sent to kill rats on Caribbean and Hawaiian sugar plantations, which works days while the rats work nightsKudzu, planted by the millions to save Southern soil, and the myth that it "ate the South"Flying carp that escaped from fish farms, now leaping at boaters and pushing toward the Great LakesRabbit viruses released on purpose in Australia and Europe, and the Spanish predators that paid the priceChina's war on sparrows, a campaign to fix nature by removing a species, with devastating consequencesThe vedalia beetle, the tiny ladybird that saved California's orange groves, and what it teaches about doing a fix rightThe people in these stories weren't fools. Most were trained, serious, and right about the problem. Several were warned. That's what makes the book more than a list of disasters: in every chapter, you'll ask yourself what you would have done with what they knew.
Each chapter ends with a Fix Scorecard and a rating from zero to five toads. The book closes with Seven Questions to ask before anyone tries to fix nature again, which matters now more than ever. Gene drives, sterile insects, and mosquitoes dropped by drone are being tested right now.
Sharp, skeptical, and politically neutral, Fixing Nature is for curious readers who like their science history true, surprising, and a little bit absurd.
Scroll up and grab your copy. The toads are waiting.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
