Monumental folly and needless greed: how nature is suffering the consequences of climate change

Review: The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown – Adam Welz (Bloomsbury Sigma)

Set aside the apple and the snake. Set aside the unforgiving God. The loss of Eden is a story about the consequences of monumental folly and needless greed. Having soiled paradise, we live now in a harsher, bleaker world.

In The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, the South African author and naturalist Adam Welz shows we are repeating those errors, sowing and reaping our despoilation. His book is a thoughtful, perceptive, empathetic and sorrowful account of the consequences of our increasing subversion of the natural world that gives us life.

By now, we are all aware of the devastating losses brought by increasingly frequent environmental catastrophes: the Black Summer bushfires, the floods, the coral bleaching, the droughts, the mass fish kills, the retreat of glaciers, the loss of polar ice, the days of unbearable heat.

Most people recognise that, as the creators of climate change, we are the responsible agents; we have put ourselves on a pathway that is rushing us towards destruction. Many of us have been directly affected; all of us will be indirectly affected.

In End of Eden, Welz describes some of the myriad losses of nature caused by such disasters. One of his examples is the impact of Hurricane Maria on the Puerto Rican parrots known as Iguacas. Following a long history of clearing of its habitat, its remaining wild population became restricted to a single national park in highland rainforest. By 2017, following decades of care by conservation agencies, this remnant population was at last seemingly secure, and the population had built to about 650 birds.

In vivid prose, Wenz describes what then happened when the hurricane tore through and destroyed this forest. Through radio-tracking, scientists were able to establish that maybe only one bird survived the onslaught. But after a few days lost in the devastated landscape, that single bird succumbed too.

In this case, happily, not all was lost for the Iguacas. Although the entire wild population was wiped out, some individuals in a captive breeding facility survived, providing a tenuous thread for the ongoing existence of the species.

It is a story with many lessons, but preparedness for inevitable disaster is an important message.