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A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines by Yvonne Baskin, Island Press (distributed in Britain by Eurospan (fax +44 (0)207 379 0609)), $25, ISBN 1559638761

STAR THISTLE and cheatgrass have taken over millions of hectares of American rangeland; avian malaria has wiped out much of the bird life of Hawaii; and comb jellies clog the Black Sea. The routes these invaders took are typical: the thistles arrived in alfalfa seeds brought in from Turkey, the mosquitoes came by boat in the 1850s, and the jellies, innocuous off the coast of Maine, hitched a ride in some of the 10 billion tonnes of ballast water that slosh from one corner of the globe to another each year.

And as free trade becomes the most widely shared political and economic idea of our time, the transfer of invasive plants, animals and pathogens is accelerating. Yvonne Baskin quotes a disease researcher: 鈥淭he more airplanes you have flying back and forth every day from fairly exotic places to other places, the greater the chances of introducing diseases.鈥� Those will be the flights Baskin took to research Plague of Rats, then.

Countermeasures are hugely expensive. From New Zealand, she reports the attempt to inspect every shipping container, parcel and suitcase arriving by sea or air, even to the point of loosing beagles among passengers to sniff for hidden meat and fruit. And from the Galapagos, those tiny islands off Ecuador which figure so prominently in biology, she shows the influx of wealthy tourists鈥攄rawn by unspoilt tortoises and finches鈥攂ringing both prosperity and accelerating environmental degradation. There will be no easy answers.