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This review is for: Called by the Wild: The Autobiography of a Conservationist by Raymond F. Dasmann (Hardcover)

Raymond Frederic Dasmann claims he was attracted to the wild living in San Francisco as a young boy before World War II. If so, the remainder of this life seems to have been spent mostly in classrooms, conferences, committees, chairing this talk or that discussion whether with UNESCO or the United Nations after he'd received a federal grant or some intergovernmental funding for this or that project in Africa, in Sri Lanka, in San Francisco. Or maybe behind his desk writing a textbook. Mr. Dasmann is certainly no John Muir, capable of roughing it like a hermit and fending for himself alone in the wilderness. No, Dasmann shows himself to be more of a textbook cowboy -- or so the memoir shows.

Paul Ehrlich, that failed prophet of the "population bomb" from the Seventies, and an all-out eugenicist whom most sane people love to despise, has written the foreword to this "autobiography of a conservationist," as the subtitle goes, calling it "graceful." One wonders what he means by such an appraisal. I don't think Ehrlich could understand such a word really, but nonetheless, this pseudo-scientist wrote down just that word. Was it the author's aw-shucks/who me? the humility that caused this adjective to surface once he finished reading the memoir? Or was it the plain English style of writing that encases the memoir from the first page to last? Certainly the memoir contains both the elements of humility and a clear plain English writing style such that in relation to the element of humility one wonders finally why this memoir was truly necessary to be published and in relation to the writing, while the writing style is clear that even a grammar school child can understand it, it doesn't contain many insights or advancements in learning that a lover of earth or a wanna-be ecologist might benefit from. Certainly, the author's claim that he was "called by the wild" is in great dispute given the evidence in the memoir. Every instance of the major movements in his life seems either to have "happened" or was ignited by fate. He takes little responsibility for the direction his career took and while he, his wife, and his three daughters did travel extensively and regularly, as stated earlier, the memoir displays copious events memorialized mainly by the classroom, committee, or institutional clashes and the discussions and dilemmas derived therefrom.

From page 120, Chapter 12, "Influences and Efforts" up to page 195, Chapter 20, "Back to the Land," the reader is hit with a barrage, a verifiable tsunami of miscellanea and "facts" tossed hither and thither about all sorts of ideas and "ideals" and -- nonsense (global warming) -- all related to what can be said or heard inside Western civilization's main means of spreading propaganda, half-truths, and predigested conclusions, coming out of nowhere, without any build up from prior chronology or context in this memoir. The reader is offered what can only be called "received truths" or "received ideas" in a random torrent that made this reader feel he was besieged by an ugly paper origami Amazon river of vague words and unsupported assertions. These 70 pages literally broke the damn of a quiet and evenly chronological story that was flowing smoothly from beginning to end -- until the middle of the book was reached and a scary turn or curve was taken, leaving the reader to discover for himself or herself the rhyme and reason for such an ugly state of affairs. This was not in any way a graceful choice bit of writing, however easily an 8th grader might be able to read aloud the words. Without offering any prior research of his own or anything organic in terms of explanation for his ideas, Dasmann jumps right into conclusions only eugenicists like Paul Ehrlich might approve of: there are too many people on the planet; the ecological balance is being destroyed; global warming is leading the world to catastrophe and people must come to grips that they are responsible, etcetera, etcetera. How did Dasmann go from Africa where he saw this or that wild animal to conclusions about population? The reader is deliberately kept in the dark. When did he first learn about global warming and when he did he begin to understand the complex dynamics that were not merely computer models proving global warming is a valid scientific idea? The reader cannot possibly know this.

These middle 70 pages sound like regurgitations the author absorbed from pseudo-scientific technocrats at the UN, UNESCO (and probably the Council on Foreign Relations) whose agenda it is to make sure these scientistic but not scientific conclusions become "au courant" no matter how false or nonsensical they are.

From Chapter 20 through the last chapter, Chapter 24 or "Finale," the reader is set back on the chronological track of the life-history of a man who found himself in the role of a textbook ecologist who may have contributed something, however small, to an understanding of ecology -- or who may not have contributed anything finally at all. This reader can say with certainty that he enjoyed Dasmann's viewpoint on the word "eco-development" as against "sustainable development" since the former clearly is an objective and rational standpoint whereas "sustainable development" is -- and these are my words, not his -- Marxist and part of the United Nation's propagandistic rhetoric for a New World Order and Agenda 21, a phrase that hides much that is actually harmful, Dasmann explains, to the environment and much that is downright silly.

Throughout the entire memoir, I kept wondering if the author knew what he was doing if he knew that his efforts weren't for helping humanity at all but were for creating a totalitarian pseudo-scientific one-world government or did he hope he could play somehow the role of a humanist rebel against the dehumanization of man. Not once in this memoir does Dasmann show the balls necessary to prove he understood the absolute destructive power of absolute governmental authority. He never questions government's right to control and regulate the individual. The word freedom or liberty never appears on the papered lips of this memoir. On page 222, I found this: "A population limited in number, practicing a way of life, shown to be not harmful to the conservation of nature can be permitted to live in protected natural areas." What?!

Only a limited population "can be permitted" -- by whom? -- to live. Who is the final authority and arbiter? Do people need permission to live? Holy Bovine Excrement! And by "protected natural areas," the author means, ahem! - ecological reservations, folks! The rest of the world will be pristine, natural and wild while human beings will be "permitted to live" should they obey the rules of "limited population" and do not harm "the conservation of nature." Who gets to decide what the nature of that harm is? The reader can easily intuit the answer since the author spent most of his paid working life serving it: the government or its shadow -- the non-government, non-profit governmental organizations that have global influence.

The ending chapter dealing with the author's wife's death was touchingly written. However, even this chapter exposes the man as less than the sum of his parts. Instead of staying in his profession as an academic researcher who has studied and thought about ancient cultures, the plight of Western civilization's demise through being a poor husbander of Mother Earth's resources, the author reaches out to psychics and séances as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning when the 19th century was drawing to a close and they both feared the "end of the world." The author copes with his fears and the loss of his wife with psychic folderol about former lives and secret heretical groups from the distant historical past. Not much of a scientific basis for these ideas either.

(Originally published on May 16, 2011 at Amazon)

Called by the Wild is a joy to read. It is full of remarkable detail about an extraordinary career and development of the foundations of the MAB program and concepts of sustainable development.