Dieses Buch berichtet über die Dreharbeiten einer Doku über aussterbende Arten in den 80er Jahren und ich dachte eigentlich, als ich mit dem Buch anfing, dass es wahrscheinlich veraltet und nicht interessant ist, wollte es aber mal ausprobieren. Aber ich muss sagen: Falsch gedacht! Es ist brandaktuell! Und ehrlich gesagt, wenn man sich den Inhalt so betrachtet, kann man sich gar nicht genug die Schläfen massieren über den Fakt, dass wir das alles schon so lange wissen und nichts getan haben. Der Jangtzedelfin ist heutzutage leider schon ausgestorben und sollte uns am besten daran erinnern, dass wir das bei den anderen Tierarten nicht zulassen.

Aber das Buch ist nicht nur mahnend, sondern eigentlich ist der Schreibstil, wie bei Douglas Adams, gewohnt witzig, fluffig und lesenswert. Die Erlebnisse auf ihrer Reise sind einfach interessant und spannend. Große Leseempfehlung!

Adams was an amazingly humorous fellow, but it can be easy to forget that the source of his humor is always surreal profundity. It's as if he sees a completely different world than the rest of us, but one which looks precisely the same. In this book (out-of-print when I found an editor's proof copy) Adams takes that hilariously disparate view and directs it like a spastic and noodly laser at the mis-management of our natural world. There is a reason that Richard Dawkins recalls Adams so fondly as a compatriot in the fight for reason. Adams is as honest, sublime, and disarming as ever.

I personally don't believe in a static view of nature. Extinction--even mass-extinction--has been a constant theme throughout prehistory. Humanity isn't even the first single species to cause the mass extinction of a huge variety of animals: algae did it millions of years before humans even existed.

Animals compete for the same resources, and whenever there are changes in the environment, be they geographical or climatic, there are going to be extinctions as different species come into contact in new ways. Despite what a lot of badly-researched sci fi might tell you, evolution is not a process of improvement: no species is any more evolved than any other species, each species has simply evolved in different ways to meet the requirements of a different ecological niche.

The coelecanth was a fish that first crawled out of the water hundreds of millions of years ago, and which we assumed had gone extinct until one was caught in 1975. That fish's descendents eventually produced the first lizards, which produced the first mammals, which produced the first primates, which eventually produced human beings. Yet, just because we evolved from the lowly coelecanth does not mean that we are 'more highly evolved'--stick a human being and a coelecanth in the middle of the ocean for a few days and it should be clear that we are just evolved to do different sorts of things.

Part of the reason we're experiencing high rates of extinction right now is that there are more species now than at any other point, and a huge number of those species are extremely specialized to a certain type of lifestyle, meaning even a small adjustment in their environment is likely to drive them to extinction. Mr. Tibbles was a naughty cat: he hunted an entire species to extinction by himself. This was the Stephens Island Wren, a flightless bird which had evolved to live on nothing but the algae that accumulated on the rocky island.

This is not evidence that Mr. Tibbles was more evolved than the wren, because Mr. Tibbles, left alone on the island, couldn't do what the wren did: survive off the island's resources. The reason cats, goats, rabbits, and pigs have been successful when introduced in new areas is because they are generalists, not specialists. They can survive in a wide variety of environments even when they are not the animal best-suited to that environment, because in times of change and upheaval, generalists outperform specialists.

A group of scientists were testing the behavior of flies and discovered that if the flies entered an area and there was no food there, almost none of the flies would ever return to that area. Then, the scientists began to wait until the flies had checked an area, and then put food there after they left. Within a few generations, the flies who returned had been much more successful, and so their offspring predominated. Now nearly all the flies would return to the same areas, again and again.

Yet, when the scientists reset the test to the original conditions, the specialized behavior died out, after only a few generations, because spending the time and energy and brain space on that behavior was just not worth it. It's the same reason that isolated bird populations tend to become flightless: flight is great for moving around and escaping enemies, but it takes a lot of energy to maintain, so if all you have to sustain you is algae, and there are no predators to flee, you might as well drop the showy flight thing and use those calories to keep your body warm and alive.

One of the great benefits of this process to humans is that all of those horrible, terrifying treatment-resistant diseases we have produced by overuse (and misuse) of antibiotics are highly specialized, and so, if we just drastically reduce antibiotic use, normal, generalist strains of e. coli will drastically outperform specialist, antibiotic resistant strains and drive them out of the ecosystem, which is exactly what has happened in Scandinavia where antibiotic treatment reduction is already in place.

No matter what humans do, we won't wipe out life, and we won't 'destroy the environment', we'll just change it. There are bacteria that live on radioactive rods in the middle of nuclear power plants, and on boiling, magma-fed vents at the lightless bottom of the sea, and there are even bacteria that can live in a sterile, sealed container eating nothing but solar radiation. Sure, we could change the environment so much that we would kill off all the large animals, including ourselves, and most plants, but something else will just survive and take over. The Chernobyl site is now one of the most lush and wild natural preserves in all of Russia.

There is no single, static way for the world to be--the environment and the animals that live in it are always changing, and to some degree, humans complaining about the extinction of certain specialized animals is like an old person complaining that the world isn't 'like it used to be'. Just because the environment was the way it was when humans evolved, that doesn't mean it is the only way for the environment to be, or that it won't change, or that change is bad, or that we should or could stop that change.

But we should ask whether we want to destroy ourselves, whether we want to set up an environmental system that favors superbacteria and destructively invasive species, because in the end, it's not about the world, it's about us and what we have to live with. The world will get along fine without us, after all.

Douglas Adams humour mixed with non fiction is wonderful. I managed to learn about the kakapo in New Zealand where I now live too.

I found the German version of the paperback many many years ago in a bargain box of a local bookstore and only picked it up because that edition had one of my favourite animals on the cover: the Komodo dragon.
Some books are simply destined to be in your life and determined to do whatever it takes to get there.

In the meantime, I not only know the author, Douglas Adams, but am a little fangirl. He was hilarious and very smart, tech-savvy, and died much too early. He was also a bit of a prophet. From the ideas made immortal in his most well known scifi-series, owning the first Macintosh in the UK and being convinced that this "electronic mail" would win the day, to writing this travelogue and rallying people to the cause in order to save animals from extinction (he even ran up and down a mountain in a rhino costume to collect money for conservation efforts).

He was passionate about things and he found ways to get involved because that was just how he rolled. So he talked his friend, Stephen Fry, into housesitting and taking calls in the middle of the night when some travel arrangement or other fell through, talked the BBC and others out of a considerable amount of money, bought one hell of a lot of (heavy) filming equipment with his own money, and teamed up with zoologist Mark Cawardine. The plan: to find 5 endangered animals that are the prime example of the impact we humans have on the natural world.

Here are the five stars of the show:
The Aye-Aye from Madagascar:

The Komodo dragon from (surprise!) Komodo island:

The Northern white rhino from Africa:

The kakapo from New Zealand:

The Yangtze river dolphin (of Baiji) from China:


I am very sad to report that chances of the Chinese dolphin having survived were slim in the 80s but it has been declared extinct in or around 2009.
Some poachers killed Max, the last male Northern white rhino with no less than 17 shots (it was definitely not just about getting his horns) leaving only two females of the species. For a full account of how the last 4 Northern white rhinos got from a Czech zoo to the plains of Africa, watch Fry's documentary - it's brilliant. Scientists haven’t given up yet but we’d need Hammond and his Jurassic Park in order to save the species.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa...
The Komodo dragon, interestingly, is doing relatively fine for an endangered animal.
The Aye-Aye is a more silent victim of deforestation (interestingly, often for „eco-friendly" packaging - oh, the irony - and V-Day flower fields) and will only be able to survive if at least a small portion of its habitat is not cut down. Are you an optimist?
The kakapo is definitely the wonderful example of what we humans can achieve through tenacity and perseverance: they had been declared extinct until some were found back in 1970 and New Zealand has gone to quite some lengths to ensure their survival. The birds left (147 adults in total, of which only 50 are females that can lay eggs) are now living on 4 islands off the coast where no cats, rats or other predators can get to them. Humans wanting to visit have to jump through quite some hoops (as is only right). Last year, they were in the news because a fungus threatened to kill the entire species. While I’m writing this review, scientists are more optimistic, especially since climate change had a certain fruit tree (the Rimu tree) bear an unusual number of fruit and that is always directly linked to how many chicks are being born - 2019 thus had a record of 249 eggs, of which 89 chicks hatched, with an estimated 75 hopefully surviving. However, this video explains (amongst other things) why it’s so hard breeding kakapos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV6-o...

It proves that there is always hope - if we get our asses moving.

DNA and Mark Cawardine went on a trip all around the world, meeting all kinds of people and thus being in situations one can hardly imagine and that make you laugh so hard you might need medical assistance. That is another highlight of this book: it’s not just informative, it makes you care, it makes you gasp - but through it all, it also makes you LAUGH. The writing is typical for this author and I wholeheartedly agree with DNA that this is his best and most important work (he always said he was proudest of this one).

For context: this book is so fantastic, I listened to the author reading it to me (a rare audio version I couldn't find here on GR, the one available on Audible right now is narrated by Stephen Fry and also rather enchanting), have the afore-mentioned German paperback, went to considerable lengths to procure the newest paperback edition as it has Stephen Fry's foreword, own Stephen Fry's follow-up book as well as the two corresponding DVDs.
Because Mark Cawardine didn't need to be persuaded to step in the footsteps of his and DNA's first expedition with Stephen Fry back in 2009 and another 10 years later, they once again checked to see what had changed.

Therefore, this paperback edition treats the reader to an enigmatic foreword by Stephen Fry and a more sombre (and yet still charming) afterword by Mark Carwardine all these years later.

If you like, check out my review for the audio edition here.

Douglas Adams. Author of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Writing a nature book? Huh?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that this is Douglas Adams, but Last Chance to See is an excellent and thought provoking book, which is part laugh-out-loud travelogue (including an interesting reminder of what China was like just 25years ago), and part conservation plea

It's power as a book lies is in the juxtaposition of the sharp observations and comic stories of his travels with Mark Carwardineand the plight of the animals it describes. Sadly the Yangtse River Dolphin, subject of one of the chapters, has now been declared functionally, and perhaps actually, extinct; with the Northern White Rhino about to follow it into history.

As he says towards the end of the book "It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed."

When are we going to learn?

This book is all around lovely. It's educational, adventurous, meaningful, and funny but finds the right moments to be serious. It added so many animal fun facts to my arsenal, which honestly we all need more of.

Adams perspective as a science fiction comedy writer and completely non-qualified ecologist worked so well for me - it made me feel as if this were a book I would write if I were both smarter and funnier. The writing often trails off into what I'd describe as observational comedy, which some might feel is not important to any narrative to the point it could be distracting. But I'd argue it helps paint the picture of "I don't know where the hell I am or what's going on and neither would you" that I really appreciate about traveling to foreign lands.

Fun travel romp through far-off places to look at cool animals. A little shallow, though-- not enough science to make it educational and interesting, too little culture or political commentary to make it opinionated and interesting. Give me more of all of it, more descriptions of ecosystems and the roles of these animals within them, more discussion of the impact and interactions of different human economies and cultures on these ecosystems, and more hilarious travel dialogue of Adams realizing that just because some place is far away and exotic for him doesn't mean it's undiscovered and empty of other people.

So, shortly after Dirk Gently's second novel, Douglas Adams takes off across the world with a zoologist and, together with a ton of misadventures and great photographs, they meet dragons, tough-skinned 17-month gestating aliens, birds that have forgotten how to forget how to hit the ground, and we learn that DNA has a major *issue* with aftershave.

Multiple aftershaves. *shudder*

Back in the day, I saw this book in the bookstores and I said to myself... "Hey! Buddy! Where's the next fiction novel? I mean, sure, raising awareness for animals that are on the way to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe IS a good cause, but I WANT MY FICTION."

And so I took thirty years to get around to reading this.

I feel slightly bad. This is a shame-read. The book has shamed me on many levels while making me laugh.

Well! At least there's that!

We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors, but have borrowed it from our children.
~ Anonymous

Evolution is an ongoing process, and each species simply evolves in different ways to meet the requirements of its ecological niche, extremely specialized to that ecology and lifestyle. There is generally enough time, in the case of a natural change to its ecology, for the species to try to adapt and evolve further. To try to survive. Extinction is nothing new to Earth and 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are now nonextant. One species playing a role in completely wiping out another species is again something that's been happening since the days of algae. Homo sapiens, though, are unique in two aspects: 1) in being the only species to have the cognitive ability to identify and understand the micro- and macro-level impact and repercussions of their decisions and actions; and 2) in being the single largest factor in history to have the power to change an environment quite dramatically and suddenly, intentionally or otherwise, and positively or otherwise. And yet, the rate of extinction has increased exponentially in the last few decades and we're reviewing a book titled Last Chance to See.

This book is as evocative, poignant and funny as some of Charlie Chaplin's best work. And that's not a comparison I'd ever make lightly. Light but with a heavy heart, the book drives home the affecting point that, with our anthropocentric view of Earth, we are slowly but surely driving a lot of species towards extinction, while also not exactly helping in the evolving of new species, thanks to our truly global footprint. Just imagine, an entire type of animal, gone forever with a zero percent probability of ever wishing them back. As the book sums up, There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

The book also has some wonderful anecdotes and observations from the travels of Adams and Mark Carwardine, and can quite easily take a place just as a remarkable and entertaining travelogue. All with some wonderful, wry British humour laced with a tinge of witty profoundness. Bryson-esque, and with the context and content, maybe even better. An absolute delight.

Travelogue + Evolution + Douglas Adams. 5 stars.

Brilliant book. So funny, yet so deeply saddening... this is among the most evocative and life-changing books that I have read. This title still haunts me and informs a lot of my concerns about the environment and human inaction.

Douglas Adams vísindaskáldsagnahöfundur og Mark Carwardine dýrafræðingur ferðast heimshorna á milli í leit að dýrum í útrýmingarhættu. Hún er svo fyndin og skemmtileg þrátt fyrir að rauði þráðurinn sé óþægilegur: hvað mannkynið sökkar mikið. Mæli með! Adams er með svo næmt auga fyrir furðulegheitum hversdagsleikans að það er hrein unun að lesa hann lýsa ferðasögu um þessa staði og fólkið og DÝRIN!

It's no secret that I am a fan of Douglas Adams, since I recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to all of my friends, all the time. I'm now considering to switch my number 1 Douglas Adams recommendation to Last Chance to See, since this book has sparked my interest in natures beauty like no piece of media I have consumed before. This delighting story is packed to the brim with humor, deep wonder and tragedy and in the end you can't help but feel for every single Kakapo still living on this not so green earth.