Tenacious Beasts
Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals
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- ¥3,200
発行者による作品情報
An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet.
First Honorable Mention, The Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
Winner of the 2024 High Plains Book Award, Non-Fiction Category
Finalist, 2024 PROSE Awards: Popular Science and Mathematics Category
Included in The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023, So Far"
The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.
Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery.
Tenacious Beasts is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map—and a measure of hope—for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rewarding study, environmental philosophy professor Preston (The Synthetic Age) provides reason to be hopeful about endangered species. He digs into the rehabilitation of such animals as bison and chinook salmon to suggest how humans might better accommodate them, such as by embracing beaver dams, which are often more effective in rejuvenating habitats than human intervention. Preston recounts accompanying researchers to study how a hunting moratorium has allowed humpback whales off the coast of Alaska to flourish, and he suggests that humans should see whales as "partners in the climate change struggle" because their consumption of phytoplankton, which "suck carbon out of the water," reduces carbon levels. He details the comeback that wolves made in Europe and encourages reader to see as "heroic" the travails of a female wolf who in 2018 left her pack in Berlin and became the first wolf to live in Belgium in over a century, before likely getting killed by hunters. Though Preston mostly stays upbeat, he's clear-eyed about the need for meaningful change, contending that "we need greater tolerance for the company of nonhumans, thinking of them not as adversaries but as kin with common goals." The surprisingly intimate accounts of species bouncing back from the brink of extinction serve as glimmers of hope against the backdrop of climate despair. This will hearten nature lovers.
