Latest news with #ReaktionBooks
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Science
- Sydney Morning Herald
These personal portraits of extinct species may well make you cry
ENVIRONMENT Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction Barbara Allen Reaktion Books, $49.99 If you care about animal extinction then reading this book could cause you to weep. For author Barbara Allen, writing Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds was an upsetting experience. 'I wrote this book accompanied by many tears. I could not stay dry-eyed reading about the slaughter of the great auk, the seemingly endless shootings of the passenger pigeon, the destruction of habitat.' Indeed, feelings of grief and outrage are unavoidable when reading about how these species, along with others such as the dodo and thylacine, have disappeared due to human encroachment, exploitation and sheer viciousness. Human beings are both the kindest and cruellest species, and this dichotomy is expressed no more plainly than in the way we treat other animals. So many of the 31 species described by Allen in this book were lost due to the destructive aspect of our nature. Allen includes contemporary expressions of self-satisfaction, even glee at the wholesale slaughter of vulnerable species, as if animals that could be killed without effort somehow did not deserve to live. Species that evolved on remote islands, such as the dodo, were easy prey for the humans who circumnavigated the globe in the age of exploration. 'Having never encountered humans before,' she writes, 'some of the creatures did not realise the danger they posed. Many colonists labelled such behaviour, this absence of fear, as evidence of them being 'stupid'.' Loading A 1909 report commenting on a thylacine kept at London Zoo stated that these animals evidently were 'untameable' yet not intelligent enough to 'know what they fear'. Allen describes how the last, neglected thylacine in captivity died in 1936 from exposure and malnutrition in a freezing cold concrete enclosure at Hobart Zoo. The thylacine was not recognised by the Tasmanian government as a threatened species until 1966. A not dissimilar story of neglect relates to the Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared functionally extinct in 2006. According to Allen, it was 'lack of money, poor planning, ignorance, incompetence and, saddest of all, apathy' that drove the decline of the world's only known fresh water dolphin.
The Age
a day ago
- Science
- The Age
These personal portraits of extinct species may well make you cry
ENVIRONMENT Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction Barbara Allen Reaktion Books, $49.99 If you care about animal extinction then reading this book could cause you to weep. For author Barbara Allen, writing Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds was an upsetting experience. 'I wrote this book accompanied by many tears. I could not stay dry-eyed reading about the slaughter of the great auk, the seemingly endless shootings of the passenger pigeon, the destruction of habitat.' Indeed, feelings of grief and outrage are unavoidable when reading about how these species, along with others such as the dodo and thylacine, have disappeared due to human encroachment, exploitation and sheer viciousness. Human beings are both the kindest and cruellest species, and this dichotomy is expressed no more plainly than in the way we treat other animals. So many of the 31 species described by Allen in this book were lost due to the destructive aspect of our nature. Allen includes contemporary expressions of self-satisfaction, even glee at the wholesale slaughter of vulnerable species, as if animals that could be killed without effort somehow did not deserve to live. Species that evolved on remote islands, such as the dodo, were easy prey for the humans who circumnavigated the globe in the age of exploration. 'Having never encountered humans before,' she writes, 'some of the creatures did not realise the danger they posed. Many colonists labelled such behaviour, this absence of fear, as evidence of them being 'stupid'.' Loading A 1909 report commenting on a thylacine kept at London Zoo stated that these animals evidently were 'untameable' yet not intelligent enough to 'know what they fear'. Allen describes how the last, neglected thylacine in captivity died in 1936 from exposure and malnutrition in a freezing cold concrete enclosure at Hobart Zoo. The thylacine was not recognised by the Tasmanian government as a threatened species until 1966. A not dissimilar story of neglect relates to the Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared functionally extinct in 2006. According to Allen, it was 'lack of money, poor planning, ignorance, incompetence and, saddest of all, apathy' that drove the decline of the world's only known fresh water dolphin.
Bloomberg
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
How Does Diplomacy Work Now?
In A History of Diplomacy (Reaktion Books, 2010), historian Jeremy Black challenged the traditional take on international relations. Black, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, charted the development of a global diplomatic system that is constantly evolving, shaped by domestic political agendas, conflicts, culture and new technologies. In this Next Chapter, Black revisits the subject against the backdrop of dramatic twists in the global order. Thus British writer and politician Arthur Ponsonby offered a critique of the work of the diplomat in his 1915 book Democracy and Diplomacy: A Plea for Popular Control of Foreign Policy. This assessment is all-too true of so much writing about international relations: Scholars, in the cloistered calm of academic aloofness, present diplomacy as primarily the work of bureaucrats operating in a rigid system, who guard the interests of their nations with mounds of dispatches and memoranda.
