Rob Dunn

More than anything, this is a book about the thirst for knowledge, about the indomitable desire to know more, about the insatiable curiosity that drives the most passionate scientists. Not so much a story of life as a series of stories of scientists. Vaguely obsessed, not entirely normal, they could have walked right out of The Big Bang Theory, and yet just like the TBBT characters, they are lovable and you can't help rooting for them. Dunn tells us about scientists with all their hubris and show more flaw, and all their simultaneous passion, in a style that adds a healthy dose of irony and a deadpan delivery that turns what could seem like boring stories of ants and beetle into hilarious snapshots of life.

Of particular amusement to me, as someone who lives with Asperger's syndrome, were repeated moments by Dunn where he wonders about how it is possible for someone to become so incredibly obsessed with small things to the exclusion of all others. I had to constantly repress the need to figuratively grab the man by the lapels and shake him until his teeth fell out. show less

"Life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, crashes through barriers... Life finds a way."

When Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park) said those words, he was foreshadowing the disastrous end of a human-designed biological theme park. But he would have been just as accurate describing the natural world as a whole. everylivingthing0284Time and time again, humans thought they understood what life was and what its limits were. Each show more time, they have been humbled by a new discovery. For several hundred years, scientists tried to finish their comprehensive lists of earth's species only to realize they needed more paper.

Every Living Thing by Rob Dunn is one of those books that blows your mind: What you know about life isn't one-tenth of what you don't know. I'm not referring simply to something as newsworthy as finding a new monkey (as the book's subtitle mentions). We thought we had all monkeys documented and studied, but a new one was found recently. If a new monkey can still be found, what else is still out there? There are likely whole ecosystems no one has yet imagined.

Dunn begins in a remote area of Bolivia where inhabitants know the local species quite well. They are more familiar with their animals and insects than most of us in the industrialized, "educated" world know of our own. The variety of the world's megafauna is greater than you might expect.

From there, Dunn plunges us into history. He follows Linneaus, an 18th century biologist who attempted to list all the animals in the world on a brief sojourn into the Swedish countryside, but came to realize there were many more species than he (or anyone) anticipated. Leeuwenhoek startled the scientific world when he found countless "invisible" creatures swimming in water tucked under his new microscope. His studies revealed an environment on a previously unknown scale.

Within our own lifetimes, science had established guidelines for which environments were sterile -- too hostile for anything to survive. But researchers have had to repeatedly erase and reassess. Entire classes of life have been found in places considered too acidic, too hot, too cold, too pressurized, or too exposed to radiation. Life has not only been found in caustic sulfur deposits and boiling undersea vents, but it has thrived in those places. Living organisms have been found in rock miles beneath our feet. Nanobacteria have been found living all around us at atomic scales smaller than a strand of our DNA.

We humans mostly concern ourselves with an extremely thin zone at the earth's surface. We know the worms and vegetables a few feet down. We see the animals and trees near us or slightly overhead. But the abundance we see is nothing compared to what we don't see. Dunn's book expands that view. Each chapter leaves you with a perspective of life much larger than you considered the chapter before.

There appear to be no inhospitable environments; no region devoid of living creatures; no dead zones. If one is suspected, scientists should look more carefully. "Life finds a way."

Find more of my reviews at Mostly NF. show less

I really enjoyed this book, which looks at scientists through the ages, many of whom are more than a little bit dotty. Especially Linnaeus, of course. I learned a lot about archaea and nanobacteria (or maybe nanons, the jury's still out on the ultimate nomenclature), but mostly this book is about hubris, about the depth and breadth of our ignorance, and about those visionaries clutching guttering candles in the dark. Dunn is humorous without being snarky, respectful without being obsequious, show more and a damn fine writer. He points out with a certain degree of asperity how, in science, it seems true that whatever everyone knows for certain is sure to be proven false later. Highly recommended for anyone interested in life itself, in all its mysterious and magnificent forms, of which we may be the least interesting after all. show less

Ecobiologists study lifeforms and their environments. It’s a wide open field, as its proponents discover how very little work has been done to date. They keep finding huge gaps. We don’t even have names for the vast majority of lifeforms on Earth, let alone what other lifeforms rely on them, or that they rely on, or under what conditions they thrive. Because nothing exists in isolation. There might be trillions of species (mostly microscopic) or maybe just billions. We don’t know what show more we don’t know. So it’s quite a leap for ecobiologist Rob Dunn to leverage what we do know into predictions for life in climate change. The result, A Natural History of the Future, is most thoughtful, careful, reasoned, and entertaining.

Dunn goes back to Darwin to examine what happens to groups of species in isolation, say on islands. These islands can be as big as Madagascar or as tiny as street medians in Manhattan. But what they have in common is the smaller they are (or become), the fewer new species take hold and the more go extinct. Climate change promises to create islands of refuge in what used to be vast expanses. It’s self defense, not flourishing. That does not bode well.

Scientists have found that species will travel to find ideal environments when theirs go wrong. Corridors, even as rough and slim as street medians, find plants and insects making their way towards survival. Ecobiologists are actually helping, designing corridors to help plants, animals and insects find islands of conditions where they can thrive again. Because that’s how it works: lifeforms only thrive when their environments suit them perfectly. When that changes, they adapt if they can, move if they can, or die out.

Is moving to another planet the solution? Dunn figures if earthly bacteria haven’t made it to the moon or Mars already, they will soon. Because they are all over us, our clothing, our equipment and the air we breathe in and out. For those expecting other planets to be pure laboratories for our experiments – wrong. Bacteria and viruses have already made themselves homes in the international space stations, those paragons of sterility. Man does not control the environment; he can only damage it.

This brings up monocultures and diversification. Endless papers prove beyond any doubt that monocultures are a dead end. Only diversification lets a plot of land thrive. The huge number of subsoil species, each focused on their own plant or root, makes for a healthy civilization in that plot. A single species, hemmed in by endless biocides (pest, fungal, herb and so on) is not only of no benefit, but destructive to the soil itself. With climate change, those monocultures won’t work, if only because the crops can’t take the neverending heat. With no fallback plants, and no protective cover thanks to bacteria and insects, food supplies will plummet.

The big unknown is stability. For all of human existence, the climate has been quite stable and resilient, beating off the effects of storms, volcanoes, earthquakes and the occasional meteor. What’s coming is different. Farmers won’t know from year to year what to expect or what to plant, between temperature swings and weather events. We have only to watch the wine grape harvests in France, where the past five years have seen killer frosts, summer hailstorms, droughts and flash floods. The 2021 harvest promises to be down by 30%, a rather large number that, in say wheat, would mean starvation.

Some are preparing for the worst. But while well-intentioned efforts to store seeds in the Arctic until things stabilize again are well underway, the seeds alone won’t work, Dunn says. They need the bacteria and other living aids they get in the earth and in the air to thrive. They require the bacteria on their leaves, stalks and roots. Planting one of those seeds a thousand years from now might well produce a sickly plant that dies without fruiting. A seed alone is necessary, but not sufficient.

They also know that humans have thousands of species that they rely on or as followers. We are biased towards thinking in terms of vertebrates – rodents, birds, mammals that hang around us. But our skin, mouths, hair, armpits, and guts contain billions of life forms that need us to survive, and which we need to survive. Our microbiomes produce our vitamins and minerals for us. They process what we eat. Without them, we die. How will we replenish them on the moon? We don’t even know how to do that on Earth.

We find these things out the hard way. Several animals have gone extinct in captivity, because we insist on cleaning and delousing them until they can no longer survive. Without a host, their parasites vanish too, multiplying the loss to the biosphere. Dunn provides a number of examples that are fascinating – both for the reality of it all and for our singular ignorance of how the world works.

At the same time, there are big successes. Dunn tells the story of cassava, whose root has been the mainstay of billions of people, particularly since it was brought to Africa from South America. The plant was suffering greatly from an attack of mealybugs, threatening famine. Searching up and down the western hemisphere, scientists found a tiny wasp that laid its eggs among mealybugs, consuming them. They brought the wasps to Africa where the infestation was, and sure enough, the mealybug plague flattened. Everything is there for a reason. Everything is connected. Nothing in nature is insignificant or irrelevant. Or it wouldn’t be.

For these kinds of reasons, Dunn thinks human might not fare well on other planets. Unless there is a way to maintain the connection to all the bacteria, viruses, mites and insects that keep humans going, there will be problems. Humans are not above nature; they are locked into it, despite all attempts to deny or rise above it.

Talking about evolutionary history, Dunn shows it is the younger species that have the most difficulty surviving change. Humans are babes in evolutionary timeframes. So while people have learned to overcome climate differences around the world, it remains to be seen how they fare in relentless heat, deserts without the possibility of crops, insects and other animals, air that can’t breathed and water that can’t be consumed. Cockroaches will find a way as they have for half a billion years. People – the jury is still out.

Mixing economics into it, Dunn says: “In countries where the average annual temperatures are at or above the optimum for economic output, increases in temperature consistently led to decreases in GDP. When temperatures increase in the United States, India, or China, GDP declines in every case. GDP declines because crops fail, conditions become too hot to work outside, brains become addled, and, directly or indirectly, violence breaks out.” And “Increasing temperatures above the temperatures associated with the optimum human niche lead to rising violence, decreases in GDP…and a reduced probability of being able to sustain large populations.”

“What is more, for those societies on which (Solomon) Hsiang and other climate economists have focused, the effects of climate changes seem to be independent of any details of those societies. Repeatedly, when climate changed, agriculture collapsed. Cities collapsed. Governance collapsed. As Hsiang put it when I talked to him over the phone, ‘We see it again and again, a society is on top of the world resilience, should also tend to lead to a more stable food supply.’”

There is a lot on bacteria and their brothers in the book. In one particularly frightening sequence, Dunn talks about drug resistance and how we achieve it. An experiment with E. coli and its mortal enemy antibiotics shows how truly fragile our current advantage is. A long box topped with agar is also topped with antibiotics, going from none to thousands of times the dose to kill E. coli. The bacteria eat through the agar until they hit the antibiotic, which stops them. But a day later, the e-coli has produced so many new generations that one of them can handle the drug. The new strain of E. coli proceeds eating its way through to the next barrier, an even stronger dosage. To make a long story short, it only took ten days for E. coli to evolve to be stronger than unheard of doses of antibiotics. It’s that simple to make key drugs worthless. Dunn says “Resistant cells, strains, and species grow, unbothered, throughout our societies’ ecological systems. But ‘unbothered’ is not the right word, because these cells, strains, and species actually do better in the presence of our biocides; their competition has been killed off. They grow as if favored, selected by us when we selected against the rest of life.” Natural selection is unstoppable. Bacteria will survive climate change. Will Man?

So when we design biocides, we favor resistance, defeating the whole purpose. We encourage bad bacteria to find a workaround. This cannot end well. Dunn employs the example of a castle with a moat all the way around, and no bridge across it, just to be totally secure. The enemy will eventually cross that moat one way or another, but without a bridge, the occupants will not be able to get out. We have no strategy to save ourselves from ourselves; we just continue to dig moats.

The world of ecobiologists is very supportive. Dunn loves to quote his peers and his and their students all over the world, not just mentioning their names, but praising the work they do. It adds quite a lot that the author actually knows most of his sources personally, and is not simply repositioning internet finds. The book has a real feel of credibility because of it.

A Natural History of the Future is no monoculture. Its expertise is nothing if not diversified. This is the first climate change book I have read that lays out the detailed specifics of how and why things will change at our level, if not deteriorate appreciably. It’s the science behind the emotion. And that has been a missing link in the argument.

David Wineberg show less