The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be
J.B. Mackinnon
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0307362191
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From one of Canada's most exciting writers and ecological thinkers, a book that will change the way we see nature and show that in restoring the living world, we are also restoring ourselves.
The Once and Future World began in the moment J.B. MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. What remains today is an illusion of the wild--an illusion that has in many ways created our world.
In 3 beautifully drawn parts, MacKinnon revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and 20 times more whales swim in the sea. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. Finally, he calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. MacKinnon never fails to remind us that nature is a menagerie of marvels. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world," MacKinnon writes, "and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."
only one clone of a vanished animal—the Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of wild goat that went extinct in 2000—has ever been born, and survived just a few minutes before dying of physical defects in its lungs. A member of the team working on thylacine cloning once placed the odds of success at 30 percent over the next two hundred years. Few people are aware that a first step in the Ladder Ranch group’s Pleistocene rewilding proposal is also underway. Not with a lion, no, nor even a camel, but rather
islands, from the Channel Islands of California to Wrangel Island in Arctic Russia.* Elephants, mammoths, mastodons and the like have disappeared from 90 percent of their Pleistocene range, and they probably affected their habitats in much the same way as modern elephants do in Africa and Asia. One mystery that ecologists struggle with, for example, is why there are grasslands in many parts of the world that have adequate soil and rainfall to support forests. A possible explanation is that
said, might have been the end results of even earlier human impacts. Centuries before the sea otter became the gold standard of the maritime fur trade, a huge but almost totally forgotten animal, the Steller’s sea cow, was moving through the kelp in herds. Sea cows were related to the dugongs and manatees that today are found only in tropical waters—placid and bewhiskered, they resembled walruses without the tusks. Sea cows had once been widespread on both the Asian and North American coasts of
predominantly urban, who often spend more time in virtual landscapes than in natural ones, and who in large part have never known—do not have a single personal memory—of anything approaching nature in its full potential, it is hard even to wrap one’s head around where to begin. So: we might begin with an island. Not just any island, but the last major landform on earth to be discovered. It’s a rich and fertile place, happens to be large enough to sustain tens of thousands of people, and yet has
Press project, Jack Kittinger, Loren McClenachan, Keryn Gedan and Louise Blight. Anne McDermid, as always, believed in this book from the first. My editors Anne Collins and Courtney Young inspired critical improvements. As always, Alisa Smith walked with me every step of a journey that passed at times through the shadows. I really never can thank her enough. J.B. MACKINNON has won numerous national and international awards for journalism. As the originator of the 100-mile diet concept, he