The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was As It Is As It Could Be

About this book

An award-winning ecology writer goes looking for the wilderness weve forgotten Many people believe that only an ecological catastrophe will change humanitys 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 makingand 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 ina choice that also decides the kind of people we are.