Tuesday, July 01, 2008

What is Maddalena Bearzi reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Maddalena Bearzi, coauthor, with Craig B. Stanford, of Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins.

Her post opens:
David Orr’s book Earth in Mind is a “must read” for those of us who feel our planet is becoming totally unsustainable or for those who doesn’t know enough about the environmental issues facing us in the near future.

Population growth, fisheries collapse, forest shrinkage, species extinction, temperature rise and many other issues are pushing the natural carrying capacity of Planet Earth to the limit. The emerging question is “how can we live sustainably?” [read on]
Bearzi is the President and Co-founder of the Ocean Conservation Society and is a visiting scholar in the Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has studied dolphins and whales in California and different parts of the world.

About Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins, from Adrian Barnett in New Scientist:
To see the world from someone else's point of view is hard enough but how much harder when that viewpoint is that of a marine dweller with flippers or an ape whose cognition is based on leaf-centered survival in a rainforest? Hand-signed chimp communications and distinguishing imitation from emulation are two of the topics covered here, the first book to investigate the lives of the dolphins and apes in parallel. It explains why both have big brains and, as far as possible, what is must be like to be them. Fascinating.
Writers Read: Maddalena Bearzi.

--Marshal Zeringue