The Once and Future World : : Finding Wilderness in the Nature We've Made

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Part I. The Nature of the Problem -- Illusions of Nature -- Knowledge Extinction -- A Ten Percent World -- The Opposite of Apocalypse -- Part II. The Nature of Nature -- A Beautiful World -- Ghost Acres -- Uncertain Nature -- What Nature Looks Like -- Part III. Human Nature -- The Maker and the Made -- The Age of Rewilding -- Double Disappearance -- The Lost Island -- Epilogue.
"An award-winning ecology writer goes looking for the wilderness we've forgotten. Many people believe that only an ecological catastrophe will change humanity's troubled relationship with the natural world. In fact, as J.B. MacKinnon argues in this unorthodox look at the disappearing wilderness, we are living in the midst of a disaster thousands of years in the making--and we hardly notice it. We have forgotten what nature can be and adapted to a diminished world of our own making. In The Once and Future World, MacKinnon invites us to remember nature as it was, to reconnect to nature in a meaningful way, and to remake a wilder world everywhere. He goes looking for landscapes untouched by human hands. He revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and ten times more whales swim in the sea. He shows us that the vestiges of lost nature surround us every day: buy an avocado at the grocery store and you have a seed designed to pass through the digestive tracts of huge animals that have been driven extinct. The Once and Future World is a call for an "age of rewilding," from planting milkweed for butterflies in our own backyards to restoring animal migration routes that span entire continents. We choose the natural world that we live in--a choice that also decides the kind of people we are"-- Provided by publisher.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Environmental History and Amnesia submitted by sdunav on June 16, 2014, 1:00pm I liked this a fair amount, but not as much as I would have if I hadn't recently read Wild Ones, by Jon Mooallem - which was better written and covered many of the same issues, including shifting baselines for evaluating ecological degradation, extinction, environmental amnesia, the value of environment to people, etc.

There were some memorable parts in this book, especially if you enjoy history. Red foxes in the Canadian plains, the history of beavers and wolves in Great Britain, whaling in the Pacific and growing taro and harvesting birds for feathers in Hawaii in late prehistory, the buckskin trade in the southeast US in colonial times - MacKinnon touches on all of this and more.