July 17, 2023
Environmental journalist Welz debuts with a lucid survey of the “ways that our gas emissions are fracturing and reshaping the entire natural world.” He explains how rising temperatures, water shortages, and extreme weather have impacted ecosystems across the globe, highlighting the plight of the Kalahari savannah’s yellow-billed hornbills, California’s Joshua trees, and Puerto Rico’s wild parrots, among others. New England’s moose population, Welz notes, has been decimated by winter ticks, which used to freeze to death en masse during the colder months, but have been surviving at higher rates as their environs warm. In Mannus Creek, Australia, in 2020, forest fires devastated Macquarie perch, which suffocated as ash driven into the creek by rainfall clogged their gills. Welz also discusses how some animals are successfully adapting to climate change; for example, some of California’s butterfly species are expanding their habitat by taking refuge in the “cooler microclimates” of urban gardens. Though textbook explanations of photosynthesis, hurricane formation, and genetic mutation might elicit yawns, Welz more than makes up for that with lyrical descriptions of the locales and their animal inhabitants (he writes of a Namibian cheetah: “She indulged in a long, tongue-flexing, canine-baring yawn as the first pulse of real blue began to wash the stars from the eastern sky”). It’s a beautifully rendered tour of a natural world on the brink.