Coyote America by Dan Flores ****

Coyotes are unique to North America. Coyote America by Dan Flores tells how they survived the Pleistocene Extinctions 10,000 years ago and the poisons, traps, and hunters of the current era. While “eighteen mammal, thirty-four bird, and nine fish extinctions have happened in America since 1600,” the coyotes have survived. In fact, they have increased their population and range. If you pronounce coyote with two syllables and hate these pests, you will learn why these control programs have failed. If you pronounce coyote with three syllables and love these tricksters, you will learn “Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere, and history demonstrates all too graphically that eradicating them is an impossibility.” Coyotes are here to stay.

How have coyotes survived against all odds? Coyotes exhibit “the zoological term: “fission-fusion.” Translated, that means that among a rare few species, evolutionary pressures have selected for sociality that allows for unusual flexibility among individuals, who can be either gregarious or solitary as conditions warrant.”

Wolves were driven to extinction because they depended on the pack. Coyotes can function in a pack, as a bonded pair, or as an individual hunter. While most of their diet is rodents, packs can hunt larger mammals. However, if the conditions require it, they can eat berries or insects. This flexibility has helped coyotes survive.

Depending on the conditions coyote litters range from two to seventeen. Populations have been stable even though millions have been killed in predator control activities. In addition, coyotes are good colonizers. When wolves are eliminated from areas, the coyotes move in. They have also benefitted from leash laws and efforts to reduce packs of feral dogs. Today, coyotes are in all states except Hawaii. They have colonized both rural and urban areas.

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Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Are you interested in some serious science? Evolutionary biology, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, extinction events. Do you care whether fungi use trees to supply them with hydrocarbons, or if it is the other way around, the trees use fungi to supply them with phosphorus? Do you care that mycologist Nicholas Money wrote a paper, “Against the naming of fungi?” Author Sheldon Drake of Entangled Life sees no reason to water down his enthusiasm for mushrooms or the science behind it.

Some interesting discoveries.

Truffles differ from humans in that either + or - mating types can be maternal or paternal—it is as if all humans were both male and female and equally able to play the part of a mother or a father, provided we could have sex with a partner of the opposite mating type. How the sexual attraction between truffle fungi plays out remains unknown.

Three years later, in 1869, the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener published a paper advancing the “dual hypothesis of lichens.” In it, he presented the radical notion that lichens were not a single organism, as had long been assumed. Instead, he argued that they were composed of two quite different entities: a fungus and an alga.

Even though Schwendener turned out to be correct, he was initially not believed.

“You see,” wrote the English mycologist Beatrix Potter, best known for her children’s books, “we do not believe in Schwendener’s theory.”

Lichen samples exposed to six kilograys of gamma irradiation—six times the standard dose for food sterilization in the United States and twelve thousand times the lethal dose for humans—were entirely untroubled.

Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of species on the planet.

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Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio *****

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio “is for everybody who wants to step away from the buzzwords in immigration, the talking heads, the kids in graduation caps and gowns, and read about the people underground. Not heroes. Randoms. People. Characters.” Aside from the author (Harvard undergraduate, Yale graduate student), there are no high academic achievers in this book. Alternately, there are no people taking jobs from American citizens or driving up healthcare costs. As the New York Times writes, this book “profiles undocumented immigrants across the United States: the trauma of those recruited to clean up ground zero; the loneliness of day laborers in Staten Island; the challenges of those facing the water crisis in Flint, Mich.; and the role of herbalists and healers in Miami.” If you want to know the real story of undocumented immigrants in the United States, this is the book to read.

The author documents the importance of (undocumented) day laborers. Hurricane Sandy “caused $62 billion in damages in the United States, killed 125 people, and left 7.5 million people without power. [New York City] had not prepared for that kind of devastation and was slow to provide aid. Day laborers were among the first people on the ground to help. ‘In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,’ one labor organizer told me.”

The same was true following September 11^th. “The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants.”

While the undocumented were to first to line up for hazardous work, they were the last to receive support.” The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities. When President Obama declared a state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint, making undocumented people even less likely to open the door.”

This book has “the stories of people who work as day laborers, housekeepers, construction workers, dog walkers, deliverymen,” who obey the law, pay their taxes, and live in fear.

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Babel by R F Kuang ****

Robin Swift was rescued from a plague in Canton China by Oxford University Professor Lovell. He was tutored in Greek and Latin. Together with English and his native Mandarin, he was accepted into the Translation Institute. There he learned the multilingual magic that drove the silver industrial revolution enabling UK imperialism to dominate the world with technology such as automated cotton and woolen mills and high-speed trains and ships. In exchange for his invaluable language skills, he was supported in a life of luxury. All was well until he understood the cost of UK imperialism on his home.

I read Babel by R F Kuang after a recommendation on the Lingthusiasm podcast - a lively, deep, language-y conversation with real linguists! The book, “about infinite worlds of languages, cultures, and histories,” is set at Oxford University in the 1830s. The heroes are linguists recruited from the British colonies. The antagonists are parliament and capitalists. The immediate conflict is the run up to the Opium Wars. A mixture of linguistics and the evils of imperialism.

Much of the book rants against the rich and powerful. “Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.”

Free trade and imperial domination: “Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?”

The failure of the French Revolution: “Victoire had grown up in the great contradiction of France, whose citizens in 1789 had issued a declaration of the rights of man but had not abolished slavery and had preserved the right to property including chattel.”

The epilogue refers to the Haitian slave revolt where the enslaved people defeated the European armies. “She also learned that to much of the rest of the world, the Haitian Revolution was not a failed experiment but a beacon of hope. She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. Good. It should.”

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