"Ambitious and fascinating... Mooallem] seamlessly blends reportage
from the front lines of wildlife conservation with a lively
cultural history of animals in America." --"New York Times Book
Review"
Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world
overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliqued owls--while the
actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of
extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the
century, and scientists now concede that most of America's
endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep
rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures
into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond
childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real.
"Wild Ones" is a tour through our environmental moment and the
eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America
that inflects it--from Thomas Jefferson's celebrations of early
abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear
to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, "Wild Ones"
discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our
imagination as much as the actual land.
The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day
endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change
and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the
little-known Lange's metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of
industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as
it's led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight
airplanes. The wilderness that "Wild Ones" navigates is a scrappy,
disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling,
sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to
control the polar bear's image while Martha Stewart turns up to
film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most
comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem
forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild
ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.
With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy
moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older
guard, "Wild Ones" merges reportage, science, and history into a
humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and
bring a life into, a broken world.
--And don't miss the album based on the book: WILD ONES by Black
Prairie. Digital release on May 14; physical release on June 11--
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