Feral Future by Tim Low

Recently I started to read about biological invasion because I don't have much background in this area. Areas I am particularly interested in are 1) the ecosystem effects of invasion, 2) the socio-economic impacts of invasive species, 3) insects as invasive species and 3) case studies in Australia.

The first book I picked up falls into the last category and it is "Feral Future" by Tim Low. It was first published in 1999, when " It (invasion) is a major world phenomenon, but not one you hear discussed much in the media or tackled by conservation groups or politicians. (preface, pg vi)." So the book was meant to be a waking up call for people who hadn't paid much attention to invasion at the time.

It is aimed at the general public who don't have training in biology/ecology. So the terminology was layman-friendly. For this reason I started by reading it at bedtime but soon realized it wasn't a relaxing read, on the contrary, it was a bit scare-mongering even. Throughout the book Low gave examples of severe and in most cases irreversible impacts of biological invasion. In fact more than half of the book was dedicated to historical cases: "The first part...Setting the Stage, surveys the history of exotic invasions. Part II, Careless Ambitions, looks at the groups of pests brought to Australia deliberately...while Part III, Invasions by Stealth, assesses unintentional introductions. Part IV, Australian as Pests, looks at all the pests we have sent to other land. Part V, A Rogues' Gallery...then introduce Australia's worst villains (Introduction, xviii)".

Only 200 pages later, in the last two parts Low addressed future trends and suggested courses of action (Part VI Where Are We Headed and last Part VII, Thinking and Acting; in total a bit over 100 pages).

My first reaction was this is another book that talked a lot about problems but offered a little solutions. But at least one purpose of this book was to show how serious the invasion problem was and could become in an era of "The world is flat". Considering the book was written in almost 10 years ago, when globalization was mostly applauded, one has to give credit to the author for his perception about our "feral future" (although again the first 2/3 of the books was mostly about the "feral past".

Another thing annoyed me (especially at my bedtime) was the author's pessimistic tone most of the times. If I were not paid to do biosecurity research, I wonder if I would have been tough enough to read until the last four pages, a section titled "Life goes on", or for that matter the "Eight principles of eco-friendly living" Low proposed on pages of 308-9 (The book in this edition has 317 pages in total).

Overall the book is an informative (though uneasy) read, especially for people who don't know much about the gravity of the invasion issues or who wants to learn bio-invasion history of Australia like myself.