The Flight of the Iguana – David Quammen

This collection of essays, subtitled A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, is at the softer end of the genre, mixing a sizeable amount of the writer into the writing. Almost necessarily dated (the collection was first published two decades ago), most of Quammen’s essays are still relevant and interesting today.
Sometimes this is because of the timeless subject matter- “Thinking About Earthworms,” for example, looks at Darwin’s lifelong (and unknown to me) interest in worms, an interest that trumped his far more well known writing on evolution, segues into a reflection on the disadvantages of a population that thinks about the same things rather than one composed of people interested in a diversity of things. “Talk is Cheap” explores our concept of what makes something human, a question we’re no closer on – at least by consensus – than we were then, and also looks at our lack of regard for the chimpanzees researchers taught to sign, brought up alongside humans, and then abandoned. Two essays - the title essay and a companion piece - look at why evolution on islands is so different, an observation no less true now than when Darwin first noted it.
Other essays caught my attention because, though contemporary when published, they reminded me of things I’d long forgotten – the plague of Crown of Thorn starfish along the Great Barrier Reef, for example, or the 1985 rescue of a pod of whales trapped in ice by a ship full of Russian sailors
Other essays are chilling in their relevance to today - an essay on African bed bugs foreshadows the ‘intelligent design’ vanguard currently rampaging through the US, another on piranha clearly depicts that unforeseen effects of disrupting native habitats, and “Island Getaway” explains why saving wildlife can be an exercise in futility. “The Bearded Lizard” and “The Desert is a Mnemonic Device” discuss Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, and when Quammen observes that the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service frame their desperate flight from tyranny so as to undermine the validity of their status, involving “a trick of perspective,” I was reminded of how far a distance we’ve travelled – sadly in the wrong direction.
Throughout it all Quammen maintains a wry tone – in “The Lonesome Ape” he discusses a book by anthropologist Jeffrey H Schwartz, where a key theory is presented “at much greater (somewhat tedious) length” than can be done justice in an essay. A little later Quammen observes that much of the book is “intently disputable. It is also fresh, imaginative, torturous in its logic, abundantly researched, turgidly expressed (The Red Ape can’t be recommended, alas, as bedtime reading)…” The Flight of the Iguana is also fresh and imaginative, lucid in its logic, substantially researched but inspiringly presented, and is not recommended for bedtime reading only because it’s difficult not to read ‘just one more’ essay before switching off the light. - Alex