Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples starts with the asteroid that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago and scoured North America clean of the 80% of its species that couldn't stand up to forestorms and tsunamis. The asteroid is also suspected of wiping out the dinosaurs, but that was a side effect in comparison to the number it did on North America. For the next few million years, North America was primarily populated with descendents of the remaining 20% — burrowing frogs, deep-river fish and reptiles, opportunistic ferns that invaded disturbed land with hardy spores, riverbottom trees with leaf structures designed to withstand floods, and alpine and arctic species that survived just out of reach of the holocaust. For those who know where to look, the effects of that asteroid are still visible in North American flora and fauna.
That's only the first drama detailed by Flannery in North America's long history of de- and re-population by a combination of meteorological forces and invasions of hardy opportunists from Eurasia. The title comes from this tendency for newcomers to make quick work of exploiting North America's resources, with harsh consequences for their predecessors. Flannery's book attracted some controversy from its carefully explained argument that the first Native Americans wreaked mass extinctions shortly after their arrival which can only be compared to the damage done by European invaders throusands of years later.
Flannery certainly seems to know his stuff, and for the most part rises to the challenge of the vastly telescoping time scale of his subject (he must work in millions, then thousands, hundreds and tens of years). There are a few times when the register of his writing seems awkward as he jumps from catalogues of amazing beasts to vignettes about the scientists who discovered them. I find his take-no-prisoners style in the final historical chapters of the book refreshing, when he turns unabashedly political in his explanation of the stupidity of 19th- and 20th-century extinctions and their relationship to the uniquely North American invention of frontier-fed capitalism, but I'm sure some readers will be put off by it. The biggest shortcoming of the book is its paucity of illustrations: we're told over and over about amazing creatures from the gomphothere to the carrier pigeon, but only a handful of them are pictured. I'd like to see a heavily illustrated edition of The Eternal Frontier, with Edward Tufte in charge of the design.
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