Tim Flannery is a clear-sighted scientific hard-nut with a tight focus on the ills of an abused planet and the “poxed, incompetent weaklings” who did the abusing. His bestselling The Weather Makers (2006) was arguably the single most compelling account of the causes and consequences of climate change. Now here he is again with a polymathic life-history of the human species and all its complex interactions with the world around it.
His message could not be clearer. We can’t go on the way we are, consuming as if there is no tomorrow, unless we are content for there to be no tomorrow. He would like to see conspicuous consumption go the way of tobacco smoking and racial intolerance, buried by stigma. Status symbols, he thinks, should become “emblems of ridicule and disgust”.
But Flannery is no polemicist. He does not rant, and nor is his science of the reductionist kind that sees life purely in terms of chemistry. “Humans may be built by our genes,” he says, “but our civilisations are built from ideas.” Neither is he afraid of emotion. “Our world is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.” It makes him an engaging writer as well as an authoritative one. No-body will read this book and not learn something. Nobody will read it and not be compelled to think.
Here on Earth is a masterpiece of distillation, its academic scrupulousness in no way compromised by its brevity. At an easy jog we move from the origins of life to the mechanisms that might extinguish it and, crucially, to the ingenuity that might yet be our salvation. For Flannery at heart is an optimist for whom “humanity” is the saving grace of humankind. He writes movingly of the “natural magic” of an encounter in New Guinea with local people whose ancestors and his own had parted ways not long after the birth of civilisation. “Yet when we met, after 50 millenniums of separation, I understood immediately the meaning of the shy smile on the face of the young boy looking at me, and he understood my motion for him to step closer to better observe what I was doing.”
This fellow feeling is the essential feedstock of the “commonwealth of virtue” that Flannery trusts can bind us in common purpose and provide answers to the question that Charles Darwin left us to ponder. Does evolution create increasingly stable ecosystems that bind together every living thing in a single, Gaian mesh of symbiotic relationships? Or must it lead to an all-powerful “Genghis Khan species” whose unquenchable greed will exhaust the planet?
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Flannery inclines to the former, though we’ll have to awaken from our “civilised imbecility” to engineer the “intelligent earth”, with its electric cars, desktop democracy and automated cropping systems that will smooth the path to a survivable future. The book is not all about message. The author is too nimble a writer to succumb to the perils of didacticism or dogma. His interlocking biographies of planet and people are a treasury of fact and anecdote, timely reminders that it takes more than money to make the world go round. If any man can inspire gladness in the miracle of being alive, then that man is Tim Flannery.