Koala by Danielle Clode

Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future
By Danielle Clode
WW Norton 2023

The title of Danielle Clode’s new book, Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future, contains one fact and one bit of willful naivete. The fact is the “natural history” bit, since this delightful book is as full and loving a description of the natural history of the world’s one remaining species of koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, the last living member of its genetic lineage (“phylogenetically sterile,” as Clode puts it … just like humans). In these pages, readers curious about koalas – and who isn’t, them being universally recognized and adorable – will learn everything they could ever want to know about their genetic history, their geographical distribution, their Oxford-librarian mating habits, the specific adaptations of their anatomy (their eyes, we’re told, have vertical pupils adapted for life in a vertical world), and of course their eating habits, which don’t take long to describe since they consist of only one food, the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, which, as Clode describes, aren’t exactly appetizing to anybody else:

Everything about these leaves is sturdy and resilient … [they] are not disposable. They are built to last. Australia’s low-nutrient soils make it costly for trees to grow leaves, so they do not waste the ones they have. Nor do they let them parch under the fierce Australian sun. These leaves are thick and sturdy, closed off from the outside world, their waxy coating giving them their characteristically grey foliage. They are filled with cellulose, like all leaves, but these ones are also stiffened and strengthened by lignin, the material used to create wood.

It’s all wonderfully-done popular natural history, so it very nearly offsets the willful naivete bit, that mention of “an uncertain future” for these pudgy little creatures. The future of Phascolarctos cinereus is extinction. 

These animals aren’t fast (they move so little they might as well be book critics); they aren’t adaptable (they exclusively stay in their home parishes and usually die within 30 feet of where they were born); they aren’t dietarily resilient (again, they only eat the one thing); and they aren’t safe – their natural habitat is intensely vulnerable not only to human depredation but also to the ever-worsening super-fires spurred by human-accelerated climate change. Even extremely adaptable mammals like rats or coyotes will have a hard time dealing with such things. Koalas literally don’t have a single chance of doing it. They’re the very illustration of the kind of over-specialization that always gets wiped out by environmental factors before it can be improved by natural selection. 

So Danielle Clode has written one of the brightest, most enjoyable popular natural histories of the koala ever done, and that’s a joy that’s not necessarily diminished by the very likely fact that it, like its subject, is the last of its kind.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.