The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

Kyle Harper Princeton University Press (2017) Ptolemy, the second-century geographer who lived in Roman-ruled Alexandria, Egypt, said it rained there every month but August. Now, the city has about one day of rain from May to September, says classicist Kyle Harper. He argues that environmental changes were as influential in destroying the Roman empire as human agency. His study mingles bacteria, volcanoes and solar cycles with emperors, barbarians, soldiers and slaves — including the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the first pandemic of bubonic plague. Andrew Robinson A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore University of california Press (2017) Sociologist-cum-activist Raj Patel and environmental historian Jason Moore have written an informed, sometimes acute, polemic against capitalism’s half-millennium of colonial exploitation. They argue that the ‘Capitalocene’ age has triumphed by “cheapening” seven things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They quote Christopher Columbus, who observed the Caribbean’s wondrous but unknown vegetation and wrote that many of its herbs and trees might be “worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines”. To the authors, this unquestionably devalues nature; others might differ. De/Cipher: The Greatest Codes Ever Invented and How to Break Them Mark Frary Modern (2017) People often use the same password on multiple websites. Such bad habits remain the best hope for the codebreaker as encryption becomes increasingly unbreakable, notes science writer Mark Frary in this eclectic introduction to the mathematics, technology and personalities behind cryptography. It ranges from the baffling ancient Indus script to Alan Turing’s crucial Second World War codebreaking and the promise of quantum cryptography. Brief biographies of codebreakers both famous and obscure enliven the challenging codes and compensate for occasional inaccuracies. The Lost Species Christopher Kemp University of chicago Press (2017) Only one-fifth of Earth’s species are named, observes Christopher Kemp. Our understanding of biodiversity resembles the sound of a symphony in which an orchestra plays every fifth note. A DNA barcode is an isolated note; only a taxonomist can determine whether an unmatched barcode signifies a new species. But taxonomists are a threatened species, too. This book pleads for their preservation with appealing stories of past and present discoveries, such as Charles Darwin’s rove beetle: found in Argentina in 1832, lost in a London collection and rediscovered and named Darwinilus sedarisi in 2012. The Unexpected Truth about Animals Lucy Cooke doUbleday (2017) Sigmund Freud’s first paper involved the dissection of eels in an attempt to locate their testes. To his frustration, Freud failed to find any. The eel’s life cycle remains slippery, notes natural-history broadcaster Lucy Cooke in her deeply researched, sassily written history of “the biggest misconceptions, mistakes and myths we’ve concocted about the animal kingdom”, spread by figures from Aristotle to Walt Disney. Other chapters spotlight the sloth, vulture, hippopotamus, panda, chimpanzee and others, and dismantle anthropocentric clichés with scientific, global evidence. and given up for dead, he and his remaining companions had much more experience ashore than they would have ever wished for. Here, Steller observed and described the behaviour, diet and life cycles of several new and endemic species: sea lions and fur seals, a large flightless cormorant and a “special sea eagle with a white head and tail”, today known as Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus). He dissected a male fur seal, making many measurements to add to his multipage description. It is said he also prepared a catalogue of birds and plants, although the island’s verminous blue foxes would sometimes carry off his papers or knock over his inkstand. Or worse: the foxes chewed on the corpses of the dead, and harassed the dying, until subdued by boot, axe or gunshot. Stellar died on the way back to St Petersburg in 1746. Secrecy in protecting Russian imperial interests meant that his contributions were little known to the wider world. In Russia, however, Bering’s voyage inspired sailors and entrepreneurs to turn their attentions east. Steller’s legacy as a naturalist is worth remembering, but there is a sober consequence to this voyage, as with many others sent out in the name of science and state: namely, later bloody encounters with indigenous peoples and habitat destruction. Just a year after the expedition’s return, a shipload of hunters arrived home “with a cargo of sixteen hundred sea-otter, two thousand fur-seal, and two thousand blue-fox skins”. Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), discovered in 1741 on the island that would later bear Bering’s name, was hunted to extinction in just 27 years. Despite the risks and hardships, the profits of the sea-otter trade also drew British and American traders north. This wave of hungry sailors wiped out the spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus) that Steller first observed, goose-sized and reportedly delicious. To understand the full significance of this fateful expedition, compare maps. Before 1720, Siberia and the North Pacific are riddled with curious fantasies or swathes of white space. On charts created after Bering’s final voyage, the region emerges in its full complexity. Alaska finds form and the Pacific fur trade opens. A vast archive of manuscripts and observations from Siberia has not yet been fully recovered from Russian archives, let alone published in English, but work by scholars supported by the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen is now bringing material into the public domain. There is much more to be discovered and, in terms of species loss, still so much that must be learnt. ■