Is Wildness Over

Selected as one of The Progressive’s ‘Favourite Books of 2020’ Wildness was once integral to our ancestors' lives as they struggled to survive in an unpredictable environment. Today, most of us live in relative stability insulated from the vicissitudes of nature. Wildness is over, right? Wrong, argues leading environmental scholar Paul Wapner. Wildness may have disappeared from our immediate lives, but it’s been catapulted up to the global level. The planet itself has gone into spasm - calving glaciers, wildfires, heatwaves, mass extinction, and rising oceans all represent the new face of wildness. Rejecting paths offered by geoengineering and de-extinction to bring the Earth under control, Wapner calls instead for ‘rewilding’. This involves relinquishing the desire for comfort at all costs and welcoming greater uncertainty into our own lives. To save ourselves from global ruin, it is time to stop sanitizing and exerting mastery over the world and begin living humbly in it.

People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward. Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.

Winner of the 2022 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award * Winner of the 2022 Science in Society Journalism Award (Books) * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize “Thoughtful, insightful, and wise, Wild Souls is a landmark work.”--Ed Yong, author of An Immense World "Fascinating . . . hands-on philosophy, put to test in the real world . . . Marris believes that our idea of wildness--our obsession with purity--is misguided. No animal remains untouched by human hands . . . the science isn't the hard part. The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate place in that world." --Outside Magazine From an acclaimed environmental writer, a groundbreaking and provocative new vision for our relationships with--and responsibilities toward--the planet's wild animals. Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in fact, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? No clear guidelines yet exist to help us resolve such questions. Transporting readers into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe--from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature-and our place within it.

How environmentalism can reinvent itself in a postnature age: a proposal for navigating between naive naturalism and technological arrogance. Environmentalists have always worked to protect the wildness of nature but now must find a new direction. We have so tamed, colonized, and contaminated the natural world that safeguarding it from humans is no longer an option. Humanity's imprint is now everywhere and all efforts to “preserve” nature require extensive human intervention. At the same time, we are repeatedly told that there is no such thing as nature itself—only our own conceptions of it. One person's endangered species is another's dinner or source of income. In Living Through the End of Nature, Paul Wapner probes the meaning of environmentalism in a postnature age. Wapner argues that we can neither go back to a preindustrial Elysium nor forward to a technological utopia. He proposes a third way that takes seriously the breached boundary between humans and nature and charts a co-evolutionary path in which environmentalists exploit the tension between naturalism and mastery to build a more sustainable, ecologically vibrant, and socially just world. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Living Through the End of Nature provides a powerful vision for environmentalism's future

Introduction: into the wildness / Gavin Van Horn -- Wisdom of the wild. Wildfire news / Gary Snyder ; Conundrum and continuum: one man's wilderness, from a ditch to the dark divide / Robert Michael Pyle ; No word / Enrique Salmón ; The edge of anomaly / Curt Meine ; Order versus wildness / Joel Salatin ; Biomimicry: business from the wild / Margo Farnsworth ; Notes on "up at the basin" / David J. Rothman -- Working wild. Listening to the forest / Jeff Grignon and Robin Wall Kimmerer ; The working wilderness / Courtney White ; The hummingbird and the redcap / Devon G. Peña ; Losing wildness for the sake of wilderness: the removal of Drakes Bay Oyster Company / Laura Alice Watt ; Inhabiting the Alaskan wild / Margot Higgins ; Wilderness in four parts, or why we cannot mention my great-grandfather's name / Aaron Abeyta -- Urban wild. Wild black margins / Mistinguette Smith ; Healing the urban wild / Gavin Van Horn ; Building the civilized wild / Seth Magle ; Cultivating the wild on Chicago's South Side: stories of people and nature at Eden Place Nature Center / Michael Bryson and Michael Howard ; Toward an urban practice of the wild / John Tallmadge -- Planetary wild. The whiskered god of filth / Rob Dunn ; The akiing ethic: seeking ancestral wildness beyond Aldo Leopold's wilderness / John Hausdoerffer ; On the wild edge in Iceland / Brooke Hecht ; The story isn't over / Julianne Lutz Warren ; Cultivating the wild / Vandana Shiva ; Earth island: prelude to a eutopian history / Wes Jackson ; Epilogue: Wild partnership: a conversation with Roderick Frazier Nash / John Hausdoerffer.

'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' Nick Hornby

The central concept guiding the management of parks and wilderness over the past century has been “naturalness”—to a large extent the explicit purpose in establishing these special areas was to keep them in their “natural” state. But what does that mean, particularly as the effects of stressors such as habitat fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, pollution, invasive species, and climate change become both more pronounced and more pervasive? Beyond Naturalness brings together leading scientists and policymakers to explore the concept of naturalness, its varied meanings, and the extent to which it provides adequate guidance regarding where, when, and how managers should intervene in ecosystem processes to protect park and wilderness values. The main conclusion is the idea that naturalness will continue to provide an important touchstone for protected area conservation, but that more specific goals and objectives are needed to guide stewardship. The issues considered in Beyond Naturalness are central not just to conservation of parks, but to many areas of ecological thinking—including the fields of conservation biology and ecological restoration—and represent the cutting edge of discussions of both values and practice in the twenty-first century. This bookoffers excellent writing and focus, along with remarkable clarity of thought on some of the difficult questions being raised in light of new and changing stressors such as global environmental climate change.

The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the Tasmanian tiger—the memory of these vanished species haunts the fight against extinction. Seeking to save other creatures from their fate in an age of accelerating biodiversity loss, wildlife advocates have become captivated by a narrative of heroic conservation efforts. A range of technological and policy strategies, from the traditional, such as regulations and refuges, to the novel—the scientific wizardry of genetic engineering and synthetic biology—seemingly promise solutions to the extinction crisis. In The Fall of the Wild, Ben A. Minteer calls for reflection on the ethical dilemmas of species loss and recovery in an increasingly human-driven world. He asks an unsettling but necessary question: Might our well-meaning efforts to save and restore wildlife pose a threat to the ideal of preserving a world that isn’t completely under the human thumb? Minteer probes the tension between our impulse to do whatever it takes and the risk of pursuing strategies that undermine our broader commitment to the preservation of wildness. From collecting wildlife specimens for museums and the wilderness aspirations of zoos to visions of “assisted colonization” of new habitats and high-tech attempts to revive long-extinct species, he explores the scientific and ethical concerns vexing conservation today. The Fall of the Wild is a nuanced treatment of the deeper moral issues underpinning the quest to save species on the brink of extinction and an accessible intervention in debates over the principles and practice of nature conservation.