Study Coral: A Pessimist In Paradise Fabricated By Steve Jones Available In PDF

is one of the best science books I've ever read, While I am an environmental scientist, I generally prefer reading fiction in my down time, Yet from the first pages I was fascinated by this narrative, Jones uses coral as an anchor point to touch on topics as wide reaching as island biogeography, the history of exploration, antiaging technologies, evolutionary theory and mitochondria's function.
. . it's fascinating and, years later, I often think back to this book, Not about coral at all, really, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise is a book that starts heavy but ends packing a punch, At my time of reading this book is over ten years old, I feel that a quick revision and update would make this a more brilliant book, Admittedly, I initially started reading this beforeand due to library restraints and personal plans I had to return it before finishing, Needless to say the memory this book has been squirrelled away somewhere in my memory until I recently decided to buy a copy and read it in its entirety.
In many aspects it was worth the wait,

The book links many real life world issues to coral and its importance on the world stage, It covers a very broad range of topics and is divided into essays, more or less, with some cross referencing, It is pessimistic in places but it could be argued that optimism comes from realising and addressing issues on the way to problem solving,

Overall a good heavy read which is well written, A very interesting guide to corals,through the clever and dexterous weaving of geology,history,politics,chemistry and other subjects to make us understand the role corals pose,to the wellfare and survival of the planet.


There are quite a few instances where you can feel the doom breathing down you neck,especially when the author explains the meteoric rise of carbon dioxide,the one made by humans,and how much it costs to the environment,and most importantly the oceans,as they absorb the excess.
We never really sink into the depths of despair though,as we do get an incentive to slow down and repair the damage before it's too late,

Alas,given that this book is over a decade old,and having gone through a pandemic,where we glimpsed the planet taking a breath of relief through the lockdowns,one is more keenly aware of the delicate balance of the ecosystem,and more determined to protect species that work towards our benefit,prevent any unethical practices and promote behaviours that will ensure a more prosperous future.


While we may grieve the loss of our forests and animals on land as they fall victims to exploitation and carelessness,one should remember that there is a system of equal and greater value in the seas that deserves the same consideration.


Corals are more than mere trinkets to be worn, Steve Jones is a big fan of Charles Darwin, In an earlier book, Almost Like A Whale, he took on the extraordinary task of updating The Origin of Species, which he described as the “most original book of the millennium”.
His latest book, Coral, follows once more in the footsteps of Darwin, who also wrote a detailed study of coral reefs,

For a book with such a humble title, Coral covers a lot of ground, including Captain Cooks bones French nuclear tests invitro fertilization the De Beers diamond cartel color blindness chaos immortality and, of course, Charles Darwin himself.
In the hands of a lesser author, such a seemingly disparate range of topics would result in a disjointed and rambling mess, But Jones weaves them around his theme to create a coherent and wellformed whole,

Jones explores what coral can teach us about life on Earth, from the survival and decline of species to the role of cooperation in interspecies relationships.
Drawing not only on biology, but also on history, politics, literature, economics and mythology, he leads the reader on a wideranging and always interesting exploration,

He adds that if you have never visited a coral reef, now might be a good time, The book is subtitled A Pessimist in Paradise, and Jones foresees a grim future for the worlds reefs, Today, less than one fifth are protected, He argues that “greenhouse gases have proved impossible to control and marine pollution has been almost as intractable”, The decline of the worlds reefs has already begun and within about fifty years, Jones believes that many more will be gone,

Jones is one of the best popularizers of science writing today and this book matches the high standards set by his earlier work, Despite the deeply pessimistic message, at times he still manages to elicit an almost Carl Saganesque sense of awe about the natural world,

The threat to coral reefs from global warming and damage caused by agricultural runoff have become common topics of media reports, Yet, no matter how much you think you know about coral and coral reefs, you will learn plenty more from this book, COSMOS Magazine Steve Jones uses the state of thw world's coral as a jumpingoff point to describe some of the changes that are happening to our planet, and weaves in Darwinian history.
Very readable popular science.

It will also make you want to visit all the world's coral reefs, Praising polyps' performance: The world of coral seems so distant and obscure, Tropical lagoons or long stretches of underwater realm, To us, it may be a paradisical mystery, remote and hidden with little to offer to our daily lives, Steve Jones, whose career has centred on these strange creatures, knows better, Those silent, tiny creatures which are capable of vast engineering monuments have much to convey about our world and ourselves, With a strong facility in writing about nature and the science studying it, he gives us a fascinating look at the world beneath the waves,

It begins with Darwin, of course, as any writing about life should, Charles Darwin's voyage in HMS Beagle was about much more than finches and iguanas, Beyond the Galapagos Islands, he travelled across the Pacific, encountering numerous reefgirdled islands, Studying them closely, he reasoned that coral reefs surrounding the islands were the result of their sinking centres, It was this discovery that made his reputation as a naturalist long before the publication of "Origin", He had noted that corals cannot thrive in deep water, away from the sun's nourishing light, That observation, as Jones goes on to explain, would later lead to momentous discoveries, some of them of significant medical importance, As a tribute to Darwin's discoveries, nearly all the illustrations in this book are his maps of various coralringed islands,

Among the captivating facts Jones provides us is that some polyps, such as the Hydra, are immortal, The genetic commands leading to ageing and death in creatures such as ourselves, don't function in the polyps, They just go on budding and proliferating so long as conditions permit, The quest to understand polyps like Hydra was long on the track, The Romans, Jones explains, understood their need for water to survive, but it was two millennia before serious advances took place, Only in theth Century did an unacknowledged French researcher deem them animals and not plants, Modern molecular biology has demonstrated that polyp DNA is nearly as large and complex as that of the "higher animals", Their harsh living conditions have developed complex protective systems we are only now beginning to comprehend, Oxygen, which we need to live, is also an effective tissue destroyer, The polyps, with their tiny, vulnerable bodies, have devised means of coping with that, Their methods are far superior to ours, and all the antioxidants we consume to fight ageing are of little worth,

Coral makes stone, the foundations of reefs being limestone the living polyps build on over the ages, As the seas rise and fall, the coral either extends its bastion or dies off, awaiting better times, The key to their survival is more than

simply the availability of a watery home, Temperature changes, the proportion of atmospheric gases and pollutants scythe the polyps down, They are clearly under threat just at a time when knowledge of them can be put to effective use, Jones uses this knowledge to extend our recognition of the polyps' role in life, To explain the importance of coral, he follows the history and personalities that have, one way or another, contributed to our understanding, His reach encompasses such elements as the painter Gaugin and the unexpected contribution of De Beers' diamond monopoly, No stone, especially if made by Jones' favourite creature, is to be left unturned, stephen a. haines Ottawa, Canada An eclectic collection of facts, anecdotes and stories, many scientifically themed, bound together by professional narrative powers, this book still fell way short of the mark for me, despite being extensively well researched and, notionally, about one of my favourite topics.


Notionally. That is the word: As an experiment, after reading over half of the book, I started holding it up to random acquaintances and asking "what do you think this book might be about" The same cover and title as above, the majority of people said 'coral', some said 'ocean' but all the answers were variations on this theme.
This is exactly what I thought it was about when I bought the book because the title is "Coral" the cover suggests ocean and coral lives in oceans.
We were all kind of wrong however, this book is only notionally that word again about coral,

While a moderate amount of knowledge about coral is imparted over the book, and coral is kind of a invisible narrative running throughout, in fact most of you reading time has nothing to do with coral at all.
Jones writes a half a page, maybe a whole page about coral then for the next ten to twenty ages we digress and digress and digress, It is all interesting stuff, but mostly not related to coral and frequently far from any ocean,

Jones likes Darwin, and Darwin was the first Western scientist to study coral atolls and he also drew a lot of them, the sketches are scattered through the book, though the typeface is often too small to read.
Darwin, almost magically, inferred how coral atolls were created and though the validation of his theory had to wait for decades, it was eventually validated this I already knew because I, too like Darwin.
I also read about him a fair bit but was not expecting to here,

Basically, Jones will give us a tiny teaser about coral/history, then masses or disconnected and often unrelated history, A teaser about the geological connection to corals, then masses and masses or geology information, Tiny bit about the social geography of coral atolls, then pages and pages about human geography and human extinctions due to disease, . . You get my drift.

All of it is well written, extensively researched and interesting in its own right BUT mostly nothing to do with corals,

Sadly, the narrative is often disjointed and jarring, as though Jones had to edit out huge tracts of interesting factoides and missed bits, For example, while he is chatting about the habits of bird watchers, a topic nestled in the greater topic of the power law, of which we have already been given many dissociated examples, we get a disconnected statement: "The silvereye is a bird with its headquarters on the Australian Mainland which has reached several atolls.
Birds from the islands furtherest from the mainland lose much of their genetic variability" pg, Yes, animals further from the mainland lose genetic variability, we know that, What we don't know is anything else about the Silvereye which was never previously mentioned, about which we are given no more detail and only another glancing mention at the bottom of the page.
Why Steve Why

At the end of the book we get to the 'pessimist in paradise'part, as Steve Jones hammers home the massage that the oceans in general and the corals in particular are dying, probably beyond our ability to save.
This part was once again interesting to me, as it was obviously coral/ocean related, Steve Jones had set up the arguments of how this was the case slowly, diversion by diversion throughout the book and the summing up was passionate,

This passion occasionally occluded sense, such as when, on pagehe mentions that in Brisbane QLD ", . . parts of that subtropical suburb are the cinders of burned corals, " He is probably quite right about the burned corals and cement companies QLD has always been an environmental terrorist, politically speaking he is wrong about Brisbane being a 'subtropical suburb' however, Brisbane is a state capital city.
Even more mystifyingly bewildering is when later on the same page he goes on to passionately disclaim that "The city's yachtsmen, when they escape to the Barrier the Great Barrier Reef, I assume to drop anchor in some isolated spot, smash what lies below.
"

Um.

Steve, Brisbane is nowhere near the Great Barrier Reef! it's aboutkilometers away, as the plane flies and I doubt that the city's yachtsmen do that on a Sunday afternoon.
We won't go into the question of general usage vs protected areas, that has probably changed sinceanyway, Probably beside the point really: I agree, the GBR as we know it is dying, I just twitch at incorrect facts, it makes me doubt what I have read elsewhere.


Sorry to harp on a theme but I did just slog for seven days throughpages of random collected facts mashed together to fit the txt no matter what, so I might be feeling a trifle vindictive.
The Crown of Thorn Starfish COTS infestations have been horrific, corals have been devastated and reefs denuded, For further information on how creepy and terrible these infestations are go to the GBRMPA website, they have videos, While watching the video, you will notice few COTS 'Half a meter and more across" as Jones promises us pgbecause normally the largest they get iscm.


Anyhow, enough of nitpicking, This book might suit people who like 'general science' and are more fond of multiple trivia then of a steady narrative, People who like geology, corals or reading about environmental decline may also find enough to enjoy this book, People who love Charles Darwin will have found a friend, I wanted to enjoy it more than I actually did and while I am pleased that I finished it I will not be returning to it, .