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      Feral Future
      The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders
      by Tim Low
      The University of Chicago Press, 2002
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      Australia has never been invaded by foreign armies, but it has suffered numerous bioinvasions from exotic plants and creatures that have been just as devastating. Cats, foxes, starlings, cane toads, starfish, prickly pear, rabbits, fire ants, bumblebees, tree lupins, and long-tailed macaques are just a few of the species introduced to the continent with horrific ecological and economic consequences,
              This book provides a stirring chronicle of Australia's exotic invasions and ponders the frightening likelihood of ecological calamities around the world. Its chapters examine how invasive species like the mosquito fish and pond apple arrived in Australia and what's been done to try to control them. It also documents, with some perverse pride, pests that Australia has exported to the world, like tobacco blue mould, wallabies, saltbush, Australian carpet beetle, blackwood, sweet pittosporum and swamp stonecrop.
                "A major theme of this book is that we do not learn from history, that we continue to emulate the mistakes of the past," writes Australian author-biologist Tim Low. He complains that most of his countrymen are unaware of most of the invaders in their midst. "Even among conservationists few can name harungana, hymenachne, pond apple, tilapia and green crabs, although these pests may pose a greater threat to wilderness than any tourist resort or mine."      		 More than 2700 new plants have colonised Australia in the last two hundred years; compared with one or two per millennium before that. The trickle is now a flood, as millions of years of natural migration are compressed into centuries. 

      		            The story Low recounts in Australia is being repeated with different species and diverse ecologies all over the planet as the natural pace of biological change and adaptation is being accelerated exponentially with frequently dire consequences. This book looks into the future and finds it feral.

       

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