Book - Dancing At The Dead Sea

By Alanna Mitchell

At the 150-year anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Mitchell travels around the world in a quest to understand how human behaviour will shape species' future. In Darwin's day, the struggle was for Victorians to understand that evolution had been a force of the past and that some species, including the dinosaurs whose bones were being unearthed in Britain then, had gone extinct. She discovers that today, the challenge is for humans to comprehend that evolution is still the guiding force of life on the planet and will continue to be in the future. It's Darwin Round Two, now not just about the past, but also the present and future. So as we destroy the living space of plants and animals, they will adapt by perishing. If we destroy enough life forms, we imperil our own life-support system.

Going from the Middle Eastern shores of the receding Dead Sea, to the vanishing forests of Madagascar to the dying Azraq oasis in Jordan, to the melting permafrost of the High Arctic, the thriving forests of Suriname and finally to Darwin's living laboratory of the Galapagos Islands, Mitchell takes the reader on a journey with her to bear witness to ecological disasters and triumphs. It is a quest of hope for both Mitchell and the reader. In the end, Mitchell urges readers to acknowledge the danger we are in, yet press for change: to be dancers at the metaphorical dead sea.