In pursuit of the unknown

Tim Flannery, the Australian scientist and explorer who is believed to have discovered more species than Charles Darwin, shares his inspiring view 
of the world in a new compilation of essays, Matthew Price writes.

The Australian  zoologist, mammalogist, explorer, writer and climate-change activist Tim Flannery is the author of An Explorer’s Notebook: Essays on Life, History and Climate, which chronicles his treks around the world over the past three decades. Aaron Francis / Newspix / REX
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The Australian zoologist, mammalogist, explorer, writer and climate-change activist Tim Flannery is something of a throwback to another age. He doesn’t sport a pith helmet, but call him a latter-day Victorian adventurer. He has been called a real-life Indiana Jones. Either way, Flannery has a keen taste for adventure that has taken him to exotic locations in search of specimens and scientific findings.

In the 1980s and 90s, he trekked deep into the jungles and the high mountains of New Guinea and the chains of islands off its coast. He journeyed to Fiji and New Caledonia. Antarctica may have a reputation for tough sledging, but the South Pacific terrain where Flannery did his pioneering field work – it is said that he has discovered more species than Charles Darwin – is some of the most difficult on Earth. Few westerners had ever ventured into the dense forests and high mountain peaks Flannery visited on his research trips. By dugout canoe, helicopter, foot and boat, he made his way across thousands of kilometres.

Flannery endured physical challenges – at times, he subsisted on a diet of tinned tuna – and dangerous conditions in his quest for species. Among his quarry were marsupials such as the tree kangaroo, as well as bats and – yes – rats, which sent Flannery into raptures. (Don’t say ick: they are actually very interesting creatures.) A renowned expert on the fauna of Australia and Melanesia, Flannery made several notable contributions to science on his journeys; for example, discovering a species of fruit bat long thought to be extinct after eight years of searching. Such is his reputation that he even had a bat named after him, Pteralopex flanneryi, in honour of his scientific contributions.

A prolific author, Flannery is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he writes on science, biology, ecology, natural history and evolution. (He once wrote an essay on spiders that, fully paid-up arachnophobe that I am, gave me nightmares.) In recent years, Flannery has earned a wider reputation outside scientific and intellectual circles for his books on climate change and the environment, writing works of ecological history – The Weather Makers and Here on Earth – aimed at a general readership. In these works, the caution of the scientist sometimes gives way to the impassioned conscience of the campaigner; but Flannery has written about the issues in the clear, straightforward prose that marks all his writings.

His newest book, An Explorer's Notebook: Essays on Life, History and Climate, gathers up three decades of material. Taken together, they form a kind of intellectual autobiography, showing us the different phases of Flannery's life. We meet the young researcher in the field, pursuing rare rats on Guadalcanal, skinning possums and kangaroos as he studies their anatomy; the wise reviewer writing on a variety of topics; and the climate change activist who writes with fear and passion about global warming and its effects on the planet.

For me, the essays on his home country, Australia, “the wide, brown land”, are among the most noteworthy in the collection, forming the book’s spine. Australia, Flannery tells us, is “a separate experiment in evolution”. “For 45 million years, Australia has wandered across the Southern Ocean, carrying with it an ark full of ancient life forms. Over this immense period, the other continents have experienced violent change – profound swings of climate that transformed them from tropical paradises into bare rock sheathed in miles of ice. Their nature has been irrevocably altered by multiple invasions of plants and animals, their ecological stability denied. Australia, however, has remained almost unique in its stability.”

But this stability doesn’t mean that Australia was an easy place for life to flourish. Its soils are poor; its rainfall precarious and unpredictable, wildly variable: “It was a harsh land for any creature that demanded much from it,” Flannery writes. Such harshness has had a profound influence on the kind of animal life that prevailed in Australia.

In The Case of the Missing Meat Eaters, Flannery engages in a fascinating bit of evolutionary speculation. Why does Australia lack large mammalian carnivores? (The lower 48 states of the United States, by contrast, have an abundance of such creatures.) Looking across the vast expanse of geological time, Flannery looks to environmental factors for an explanation. Australia's infertile soils mean less grassland, which means fewer herbivores, which in turn deprive carnivorous mammals, which have considerable energy needs, of food supplies. Cold-blooded carnivorous reptiles, which flourished, require less food and energy.

Flannery looks across the vast expanse of geological time, when Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea constituted a single island. (They all sit on the same tectonic plate; some scientists dub the agglomeration “Meganesia”.) Even further back in time, the Australian land mass had rainforests. Biodiversity and the unique fauna of his homeland are of special concern to Flannery. With the coming of settlers, many alien species were introduced to Australia. He decries the planting of European trees in and around Sydney. “We have 25,000 native species from which to choose. Must we continue to choose our street trees from the 6,000 or so species to be found in Europe?” he asks. He does not look fondly on the habits of his fellow Australians. He decries their excessive energy use and wasteful habits. “Even though we call ourselves Australian and are privileged to inhabit one of the world’s most wondrous environments, we still expect our parks to have lawns, deciduous trees and introduced pigeons,” he writes.

Flannery’s appreciation of his native country’s unique geological and ecological development is a virtue, but such scolding, which also creeps into his writing on climate change, will not take him far if he’s out to persuade those who might disagree with him.

Still, Flannery has garnered considerable renown for his works on climate change – he was named Australian of the Year in 2007, despite vigorous disagreements with the Liberal government in power at the time. He strikes a plangent tone when he asks all Australians to share in their country’s future, writing “that we have no other home but this one, and that we cannot remake it to suit ourselves. Instead, we must somehow accept this land’s conditions, surrender our ‘otherness’ and in doing so find our distinctive Australian way in a very different world”.

My preference is for Flannery in the field, cheerfully recalling his time island-hopping as a young researcher – he includes an essay on an expedition to New Guinea’s Star Mountains, which are utterly remote – or writing on the history of science and ideas.

His contributions to The New York Review and the Times Literary Supplement see him delving into the world of John James Audubon and his stunning work, Birds of America, insects, man-eating predators and invertebrates.

Here, he writes with clarity and precision about the unique features of the scorpion. Be afraid: “Scorpions possess advance warning systems that sense where you are and what you are doing. Their six pairs of eyes are strategically positioned so as to leave no blind spot, and although lacking sharp focus they are capable of detecting the tiniest variations in brightness – and thus movement. Yet they cannot be dazzled because each one has its own built-in ‘sunglasses’, composed of pigment granules that cover the lens as light increases.”

In another essay, Flannery writes about the discovery in eastern Indonesia in 2004, on the island of Flores, of Homo floresiensis. It was thought that rats and komodo dragons were the only large land animals who had called the island home. But a Dutch archaeologist started poking around a cave, finding remnants of tools; then he found the remains of one of the makers.

Flannery likens the humanoid skeleton uncovered to a hobbit: Homo floresiensis stood barely 95 centimetres tall.

This “hobbit,” he notes, “bore unmistakable similarities” to Homo ergaster, an ancestor of humans that lived in Africa some 1.8 million years ago. “On reflection,” Flannery concludes, “the fact that over a million years ago Homo ergaster joined those few elite mammals that could cross water makes humanity’s spread around the globe during the past 50,000 years less surprising.”

Flannery’s vision of the big picture of human evolution and the immense span of the Earth’s history is both inspiring and thought-provoking.

Matthew Price’s writing has been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Financial Times.