Jon Mooallem > Quotes

“Zoom out and what you see is one species--us--struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we've decided they ought to stay. In some areas, we want cows but not bison, or mule deer but not coyotes, or cars but not elk. Or sheep but not elk. Or bighorn sheep but not aoudad sheep. Or else we'd like wolves and cows in the *same* place. Or natural gas tankers swimming harmoniously with whales. We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“You're not what you were before," Jana told me, "but neither are you what you're going to be. The soup stage really sucks, but you just have to embrace being soup for a little while.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“The best of us are cursed with caring, with a bungling and undying determination to protect whatever looks like beauty, even if our vision is blurry. People keep warning me that Isla's generation will blame us for loosing so much of that precious beauty. But whatever: It's inevitable, and I'm trying to make my peace with it. It's comforting that they'll still imagine better, and it will occur to them to be angry.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“I was relieved not to find yet another crabby and wounded ex-environmentalist, and I asked her how she was managing to live in a world that she found so discouraging. The answer wasn't reassuring. She told me about the Taoists in ancient China. "They looked around and saw they were facing the same situation, a world that was disintegrating around them. And they realized the best thing to do is do as little as possible. Don't feed any new energy into a system that's falling apart, because you don't know what that energy will wind up being spit back as." Rather than try to change society, it's better to retreat.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“But there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes; when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about that instability, but we know it’s always there: at random, and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.”
― Jon Mooallem, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

“Maybe we keep giving animal stuff to kids because their imaginations innately brim with animals, but maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe we long to see children and animals together—free creatures living in an innocence we’ve strayed from.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“There was no way of knowing. But in the end, he told me, “I just want to be part of a generation that tries.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Ultimately, wildness is a matter of individual opinion, and not even the experts agree.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Conservation should strive to build healthy populations of animals that are “as wild as possible in a tame world.” But”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“That is, we are not just identifying uniqueness but creating uniqueness—uniqueness that, one day, we might be similarly impressed with and feel obligated to protect. We imagine conservation as keeping essential shapes of nature locked in place. But those shapes are sometimes just projections, a zone of ever-shifting fuzziness that we’ve chosen to draw a solid line around.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“The point,” Jana told me, “is to keep some uniqueness in the world.” Not just for her sons, but for their sons, too.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“My husband had Alzheimer’s,” she told me, “so our porch was a big part of our life.” By”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Playing games—ordinary kid games, with sticks and balls—seemed strange to him; he couldn’t get his head around it. “I felt an urge to do bigger things,” he said. He lasted a year. Then one night he stole a canoe, slipped off down the Mississippi, and never came back.”
― Jon Mooallem, American Hippopotamus

“The phenomenon that Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome... Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them... when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don't see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they'll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes... All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline -- an expectation of how things should be --and gauge the changes we see against that norm... It also can leave us , the public, unsure how to feel about conservation's supposedly feel-good success stories.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“I read that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passenger pigeons roosted in flocks of more than a hundred million birds. Flying in, they were said to block out the sun. One man on the Ohio River mistook the “loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness,” for a tornado. Trees snapped under their weight, and when the birds finally moved on, the locals were left to trudge through the many inches of dung that had accumulated under them like a fetid snowfall.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Over the years, the gaze of entomologists gradually magnified, each generation scrutinizing what the previous one hadn’t bothered with or noticed. By the time Powell was surveying the dunes in the late seventies and early eighties, the insects he was bringing home included the minuscule and the nocturnal—because that’s what a scientist of his generation was accustomed to collecting, and what was left to be caught. The biodiversity of the dunes hadn’t expanded. But people’s perception of it had. —”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Zoom out and what you see is one species—us—struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we’ve decided they ought to stay. In”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“But, as Holly Doremus writes, we’ve never asked “how much wild nature society needs, and how much society can accept.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Brooke froze; not knowing anything about geese, he worried they’d peck his son open like a bun. Instead, the birds only settled all around the little boy, put their heads down, and fell asleep. Brooke”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“As the night wore on and information kept raining in sideways, everyone seemed to move around the building so quickly, "with this brilliant, tense look in their eyes." Genie said--"everybody doing a job.”
― Jon Mooallem, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

“Importing antelopes and giraffes suddenly became politically impossible. The experience had left Burnham angry—mostly at himself. He’d been naive enough to believe that America made decisions about its future in a more commonsensical way.”
― Jon Mooallem, American Hippopotamus

“I'm not arguing that America would be a better or more beautiful place if it had imported hippopotamuses in 1910. But there is something beautiful about the America that considered importing them-an America so intent on facing down its problems, and solving them, that even an idea like this could get a fair hearing; where the political system and the culture felt so alive with possibility, and so confident in its own virtue and ingenuity, that elected officials could sit around and contemplate the merits of hippo ranching without worrying too much about how it sounded; where people felt free and bold enough to imagine putting hippopotamuses in places where there were no hippopotamuses.”
― Jon Mooallem, American Hippopotamus

“In Europe, for example, certain songbirds have forked into different rural and urban species, each uniquely adapting to the habitat we’ve built around it. Around the world, all kinds of species are now shrinking—their average body size is getting smaller—because generations of human hunters have removed the biggest, fittest animals from their gene pools. And”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“The sixth extinction and the end of Nature,” one slide read near the end. “We now live in a manmade world.” Mattoni”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“This animal, homely as a steam-roller, [is] the embodiment of salvation,” it wrote. “Peace, plenty, and contentment lie before us; and a new life, with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigor, new romance, folded in that golden future when the meadows and the bayous of our Southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami.”
― Jon Mooallem, American Hippopotamus

“he paid his teenage son fifty cents to watch Anchorage’s only other television channel and make a list of every commercial, so that KENI might poach its advertisers—”
― Jon Mooallem, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

“pretty simple stuff, rooted in the same lessons that Isla is now learning at preschool: Be considerate of others. Don’t take more than your share. Clean up your mess.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

“Remember us. Recognize us. It's one community's simple insistence that it mattered, made urgent by a suspicion that, ultimately, it might not matter. In other words, the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance.”
― Jon Mooallem, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

“The best of us are cursed with caring, with a bungling and undying determination to protect whatever looks like beauty, even if our vision is blurry.”
― Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America