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

by J.B. MacKinnon

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."

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Environment, History, Animals, Natural History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

J.B. MACKINNON is the author or coauthor of five books of nonfiction. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, National Geographic, and the Atlantic, as well as the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. He is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches feature writing.

MacKinnon also works in documentaries, most notably as writer for Bear 71, an internationally acclaimed digital interactive that explores the intersection of the wired and wild worlds through the true story of a mother grizzly bear.

He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Reviews

[L.G. Cullens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different voice to discussing environmental issues humankind faces.

The first section, The Nature of the Problem, taking up nearly 60% of the book discusses at length how Nature is a dynamic entity. There is no fixed baseline from which to determine the state of Nature on the whole. All species affect their environment to varying degrees, and it is simply a matter of environment evolving to a point that it is no longer conducive to a species' existence. Perhaps such will foster a thought or two about where humans are currently headed.

In the second section, Human Nature, the author first plays devils advocate relative to conservationism, then discusses choices humanity must wrestle with to integrate with varying levels of wildness in Nature.

This book is all the more telling if one has previously read Robert M. Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

Reading this book may also better attune one to the propaganda and distractions in our culture, distorting mitigation of environmental problems.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently saw that J. B. MacKinnon's book The Once and Future World was shortlisted here in Canada for the RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, and I wondered at that term "literary non-fiction". Intrigued, I picked up the book and right from the beginning, MacKinnon showed me what it means:

My childhood landscape was the northernmost tip of the rain-shadow drylands that sprawl up most of western North America, and I could have stepped out of my house and walked three thousand kilometers to Mexico and been thirsty all the way. It was rattlesnake country and black widow country, and as a boy I was brown-skinned and blond-haired and so much a son of that sun-baked earth that I wouldn't flinch if a two-inch-long grasshopper thudded down on the bare skin of my ribs as I ran through the fields.

MacKinnon packs this volume with interesting facts, cites innumerable studies and books, but as he writes with such an expressive style and emphasises a philosophical approach to ecology, it was a pleasure to read; neither dry nor preachy.

The first interesting idea I encountered was called "change blindness" or "Shifting Baseline Syndrome". Essentially, it means that we all assume that the environment we grow up with is the "normal state". Even if we have grandparents who tell us that the forest used to stretch as far as the eye could see or that the streams were boiling with fish when they were kids, we look at the last stand of trees and spy minnows in the shallows and think everything is still pretty wild and free. According to a study, even children who grow up in a poor and terribly polluted community in Houston think that their environment is the normal state and only a third of them agreed that pollution affected their lives at all. Like the frog in a pot of gradually boiling water, this explains why we're not all alarmed by the degradation we see around us -- we can't actually see it.

The level of degradation is the next amazing fact: MacKinnon claims that we're living in a "10% world". The variety of species in the wild is 10% of what it used to be, their gross numbers or biomass are 10% of what they used to be, and the range that the surviving animals occupy is 10% of what it used to be. When we start talking about how things "used to be", talking about how to restore the presumed original natural balance, things become complicated: Some people think, to take North America as an example, that "used to be" means in 1491 -- before Columbus. But every corner of the Americas had already been changed by the presence of its Native population before the Europeans came. There's a plan to reintroduce bison to Banff, because they used to live there, but it turns out that that population was probably the Natives' attempt to herd and keep them in the natural corral of the surrounding mountains -- so is a penned-in group of bison a return to the natural or not? Or as others have proposed, should a parade of elephants be allowed to range free across Texas because mastodons used to be there before the Natives hunted them off?

The next broad principle explored is that of "double disappearance": Every time a species goes extinct, or is extirpated from its traditional range, it has a profound effect on the human population who once interacted with it -- whether culturally, like the fading away of the Chandelours ("bearsong") festivals across Europe as the bears disappeared, or even physically, like the increase in myopia among populations that no longer need acute vision for hunting. Citing conservation biologist Michael Soulé, MacKinnon writes:

When we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made.

In an interview with Harper's Magazine , MacKinnon sums up The Once and Future World:

We need to remember, reconnect, and rewild — in that order. We first need to take a careful look at the past in order to understand nature’s potential and to guide our decisions, for example about what species we might need to remove or reintroduce. We need to reconnect with nature, to become more ecologically literate, so that we are alert to the impacts of our choices. Finally, we can remake a wilder world.

The concept of "rewilding" is the final idea, and although it might even be considered the point of the book (the "future world" of the title), it was the least developed to me. After sharing various cautionary stories about the unintended consequences of man's attempts to interfere with rebalancing nature (like on Macquarie Island -- a manmade nightmare of cats and parakeets and bunny rabbits), the ultimate solution seemed unclear. I can accept that I have "change blindness" and suffer from "double disappearance" to the extent that of course I don't want bears or moose or, I can't even imagine, elephants ambling down the street I live on. I understand that rewilding means not only allowing nature to recover and reintroduce itself to the spaces we've pushed it out of but also rewilding ourselves -- recreating connections to the natural world that will allow us to live in harmony with the species that do return to us -- but I cannot see how wishing it will be so can make it so.

In the end, this is not a handbook of solutions, but as a philosophical overview, it was fascinating and optimistic and an enjoyable read. I wish I had the courage to fulfill the promise of its vision:

The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained only by physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness.

[David Sasaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few weeks ago I cycled from our downtown neighborhood in Mexico City up to the foothills of Cuajimapla, which greets visitors with expansive views of the valley floor below. On just a handful of days after the rainy season, which pushes out the city's infamous smog, the view of the valley is bookended by the massive volcanic range of Popocatépetl ("the Smoking Mountain") and Iztaccíhuatl ("white woman"). 



Riding down the steep grade at 50 kilometers per hour, those volcanoes felt so close that I could stretch out my arms and touch them. At that moment I wondered, as I often do, what Mexico City looked like before it was Mexico City. Before the bloody arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, before the Toltecs and Aztecs established Anahuac and Teotihuacan and Tenochitlan, before the first humans made their migration across the Alaskan Strait and down the continent that would come to be called the Americas. 

We all ask that question -- What would this place look like without humans? -- and it's at the center of JB MacKinnon's The Once and Future World.

The book sits somewhere between ecological history and philosophical inquiry. MacKinnon reaches back into the historical record to remind us what "nature" once represented. "To know what [nature] is," he writes, "you must know what was." And so, much of the book is filled with rich descriptions of the natural world 100, 200, 500 years ago. But a significant portion of the book is philosophical, questioning just what we mean when we speak of "the natural world." Where do we fit in nature? And what is our role in its evolution?

Looking back in time, MacKinnon argues convincingly that, as a generalization, we live in a 10% world. Compared to a few hundred years ago, the seas now have ten percent as many fish, the forests ten percent the number of birds, the land ten percent the former biodiversity. Imagine, for every whale we see today, we should have expected to see 10 a few centuries ago. If this massive impoverishment of biodiversity had happened during a single generation, them surely we would have done something about it. But instead it happened across centuries. 

For MacKinnon, our inaction is rooted in the "shifting baseline syndrome." Each new generation takes for granted that the world always has been as it was when they were born. We picture the natural world as we inherited it, not as it once was. If we don't read ecological history, then we don't realize how vastly we have transformed the planet across generations. Our cultural amnesia forgets what house prices were just ten years ago or the portion size at a restaurant, or what that hillside looked like before it became a suburban development. 

There is much talk about conservation and sustainability, but MacKinnon doesn't want all the humans in the cities, isolated from the biodiversity in natural reserves. Rather, he advocates for a wilder world, one in which humans, animals and plants all commune together. 

"The crisis in the natural world is one of awareness as much as any other cause," MacKinnon writes. We move into cities where we become more isolated from nature, and as a result we care less about it. Unlike our grandparents, we're not able to name the species of local birds or flowers, we know little about their characters or habits. "For most of us, familiarity with corporate logos and celebrity news is of more practical day-to-day use than a knowledge of local birds and edible wild plants."

MacKinnon is an able writer. Even when he is occasionally repetitive, I read on because his prose is so frictionless and each chapter is littered with nuggets of wisdom. The book changed how I see the world. Its history of how we as a species have become isolated from nature parallels my own increasing isolation from the natural world over the past ten years. I'm ready for more wild -- in my life and in the world around me.

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and thought provoking exploration of humans' relationship (or lack there of) with the natural world. The book--broken into three parts: nature as it was, as it is, as it might be-- offers lyrical descriptions of the natural world as well as an examination of how human denial and "change blindness" has led to a world where countless species are either extinct or on the verge of extinction. It concludes with suggestions on how we might learn to co-exist with nature in a different, less destructive way. Where to start? The author has many suggestions but here's one we can all do today. “Pay attention,” MacKinnon writes, “and we will value nature more.” What we value, we might also try to preserve

[Neal Aggarwal · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Danger Of 'Success'

What if the planet's ecosystem, as J.B. MacKinnon puts it, "is reduced to a ruin, yet its people endure, worshipping their gods and coveting status objects while surviving on some futuristic equivalent of the Easter Islanders' rat meat and rock gardens?"

Humans are a very adaptable species. We've seen people grow used to slums, adjust to concentration camps, learn to live with what fate hands them. If our future is to continuously degrade our planet, lose plant after plant, animal after animal, forgetting what we once enjoyed, adjusting to lesser circumstances, never shouting, "That's It!" — always making do, I wouldn't call that "success."

The Lesson? Remember Tang, The Breakfast Drink

People can't remember what their great-grandparents saw, ate and loved about the world. They only know what they know. To prevent an ecological crisis, we must become alarmed. That's when we'll act. The new Easter Island story suggests that humans may never hit the alarm.

It's like the story people used to tell about Tang, a sad, flat synthetic orange juice popularized by NASA. If you know what real orange juice tastes like, Tang is no achievement. But if you are on a 50-year voyage, if you lose the memory of real orange juice, then gradually, you begin to think Tang is delicious.

On Easter Island, people learned to live with less and forgot what it was like to have more. Maybe that will happen to us. There's a lesson here. It's not a happy one.

As MacKinnon puts it: "If you're waiting for an ecological crisis to persuade human beings to change their troubled relationship with nature — you could be waiting a long, long time."

[source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/201...]

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Once and Future World, J.B. MacKinnon draws our attention to shifting baseline syndrome. Greens often use "shifting baseline syndrome" to explain our inability to recognize ecological change, a phrase that usually refers to ecological degradation. But this book's best moments capture the awe of the wild world.

Today, we often think about shifting baseline syndrome as something that's happening from generation to generation in the climate change era. Kids don't realize how much warmer the world is and they don't feel the eeriness of climate change due to their ignorance about the past. Their baseline for what's "normal" has shifted. A second quick example would point out how large and how many fish used to be caught in the ocean and lakes relative to now.

MacKinnon wants to complicate shifting baseline syndrome to draw out that maybe we cannot find any baselines. At the centuries level, there seemed to be so many animals in North America at the time of contact between the Europeans and the indigenous Americans. But what if those populations exploded because so many among the First Nations died from contagion, thus reducing the animals' human predator population? A disturbing subject to consider. At another point, MacKinnon considers the top speed of the pronghorn antelope, which is much faster than any surviving predator. What "ecological ghost" (a term I'd never encountered) generated the evolutionary pressure that led to that speed? Maybe we don't know, but these ghosts are more present in our lives than we realize, so how do we find the baseline? I was also surprised by how many extinct species were considered fictional / legendary. It's unsettling to consider how blind we are to what we have lost--or that we may never fully know how much we've lost. What are we trying to recover when it comes to biodiversity other than "increasing it?"

All that is fascinating, but the best chapter by far was about whales. MacKinnon points out that plankton get their iron in part from whales, plankton absorb CO2, and that there used to be many more whales. In reducing whale populations, to what extent did we exacerbate global warming? MacKinnon further discusses whale falls, which occur when a whale dies and falls to the seafloor, thus starting a local scavenger ecosystem. He suggests that one whale fall in the deep ocean might generate 50 years of scavenging. I found this mind boggling.

The Once and Future World can be read as a meditation that often inspires awe in the face of the world. Or it can be read as a work of philosophy about what's "natural" or what our relationship with the environment should be. In terms of policies, MacKinnon advocates for massive rewilding conservation projects. Recommended.

[Steven Langdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fine book is an urgent and a thoughtful plea to counter the ecological degradation of our world -- and to move toward "rewilding" the lands in which we live. Drawing on a sweeping range of historical, scientific and archaeological research, and on a vivid set of personal experiences from diverse countries, MacKinnon shows how, almost without realizing it, we have lost as much as 90% of the animal and plant life that characterized nature in its baseline state. "The sheer abundance of life," the author notes, "recorded in documents ranging from naturalists' journals to fisheries reports is an astonishment."

The complexity of this book is admirable. MacKinnon presents no easy analysis nor straightforward answers. Ecological insight requires careful study -- as of the grassland environment in which the author himself grew up. His probing discovers, for instance, that the vanishing foxes that he had perceived as a sign of environmental distress had themselves been an invasive species that had earlier caused the disappearance of indigenous grasslands animals. Similar in complications, the protection of whales after World War Two led to the marked decline of various seal species and sea otters, because they were the prey of the larger number of killer whales, says MacKinnon.

These unexpected sorts of interactions mean that it is difficult to make any sort of economic case for the expansion of wilderness. The analysis has to be, says the author, more fundamental. We live, MacKinnon underlines, in "a beautiful world, and it is its beauty, far more than its emptiness, that can inspire us to seek more nature in our lives and in our world."

This takes the book to a deeper examination of the idea of "rewilding." The idea, says the author, is to get back to a context not just where more wilderness is being conserved (through expanded natural parks, for instance,) but to increase the juxtaposition of human beings and wildlife (even predators) within the world. In his Epilogue, indeed, MacKinnon seeks out the experience of interaction with grizzly bears in the grasslands environment in which he was raised. "The child raised among foxes," he muses, "is different than the child raised among grizzly bears. . . . Who might I have been as a son of grizzly country?"

Such a provocative question underlines the fascinating issues which MacKinnon treats. This is a book that leaves the reader inspired and even hopeful -- "not only to stop the endless decline of the natural world but watch it return to astounding, perpetual life."

[Wen Zeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, friends you meet on the internet will send you books and when that happens, you should not wait months to read them because they could be truly wonderful books. Thank you, internet.

"I came to realize that we, you and I, cannot hope to make sense of this thing we call nature by looking at what surrounds us, or even by seeking the wilderness. Instead, as science has begun to recognize, we need to reach back and revisit the past--tens, hundreds, even thousands of years ago. What we find there is the living planet at its most extraordinary, often so far beyond what we know today that it challenges our expectations of what life on earth can be. The good news is that time travel is just the way we imagine it, full of marvels and surprises, odd beasts, ancient mysteries, and lands that have never known a human footfall. But the history of nature also takes courage. It calls on us to remember losses, not only in the wild, but within ourselves. The past asks us how, what, and why we allow ourselves to forget."

[Abigail Spracklen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing, amazing, amazing. It completely opened my eyes to what has really happened in nature and also what has happened and may happen with humans as apart of the natural world (or separated as we seem to be today.) Which should be changed so we can form a balance between the two so they're not seen as two but as one.

[Justus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Once and Future World is a book about rewilding the world. MacKinnon does a tremendous job of delving into a wealth of pre-20th (and often pre-19th) century sources to evoke just how different the world used to be. But he also does a very good job of not being too hippie-nostalgic about it and showing just how complicated a notion the idea of rewilding actually is. There are some stumbles -- like a lot of Western environmentalists he is writing from a position of rich privilege and he, along with nearly everyone he interviews, assumes that -- of course -- they would among the extremely small number of humans privileged to experience a rewilded nature.

Most readers will find that the first part "nature as it was" is the best part of the book. MacKinnon gives us a rule of thumb, we are living in a "10% world". That is virtually every species has declined by 90%. He trawls through journals of old explorers to try to evoke a picture of what the world was like centuries ago when everything had 10x the population. It is hard not to make dozens of highlights & notes during this section, even when you were vaguely aware of it all.

Lions in the south of France; elephants in California and the Channel Islands; lost sailors in the Caribbean navigating by sound of vast shoals of sea turtles migrating to their nests in the Cayman Islands; a ship off the coast of Australia sailing from noon to sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see; the first European to cross the Texas panhandled claimed to have never once been out of sight of bison.

And it is more than just "there were lots of animals". MacKinnon shows that our relationship with animals was very different. Every day people simply knew more about the natural world. MacKinnon quotes several people talking about how, for instance, random aboriginal people will know as much about local flowers as PhD trained botanists.

Professional hunters in Germany in the eighteenth century were expected to be able to look at a wolf’s tracks and determine not only its size, sex and rate of travel, but also whether or not it was rabid.

So what happened? While the preceding is very moving and evocative, it is here that lies the true strength of MacKinnon's writing. Because he makes clear that the entire notion of "nature" and the "wild" is almost impossibly compromised.

MacKinnon tells us how the brown rat was introduced to the Britain in the 18th century. They have driven the native black rat almost to extinction. Yet, it turns out, the black rat isn't native either. It was introduced to Britain from ships in the 1st century AD.

The entire continent of Europe is a tastefully appointed ecological wasteland—rich in human culture, antiquities and innovation, but poor in the abundance and variety of species.

He repeatedly shows that this isn't (just) a question of what has happened since 1900. Or even what has happened since 1800. He shows that the "golden age of fishing" likely ended over a 1,000 years ago. And, of course, the extinction of megafauna tens of thousands of years ago is well known.

Fifty thousand years ago, humans reach Australia and twenty-one entire genera (groupings of species with similar characteristics) disappear over the following millennia; every land-based species with an average weight above one hundred kilograms is wiped out.

In many cases there isn't even a notion of a "world before humans" affected it. When last ice age ended and the glaciers began retreating from northern America, northern Europe, and northern Asia, humans were among the first species to arrive. There was no "nature" in any of those places before human arrival.

An account of the Tlingit people in northern British Columbia and Alaska is especially vivid, describing a journey by canoe down a river that had tunnelled between towering sheets of ice.

This is all very good but it leaves MacKinnon with a nearly insurmountable problem. Even if you acknowledge this is a problem to be solved, how do you even begin to solve the problem? Rewilding, sure. But to what baseline? To 1900? To 1600? To 5000 BC? And even once you introduce a baseline, he gives us numerous examples of how complicated it is.

He interviews one scientist who gives a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what true, sustainable fishing of the world's oceans might look like. First, regrow global fishing stocks 10x. Second, only harvest 10% of that global supply each year. Third, all of that only replaces 40% of the current worldwide annual catch so fish consumption needs to be cut in half and all the billions of people relying on it for food need an alternative.

The weakest part of the book is that he rarely grapples with what I'll call the "mass tourism problem" of rewilding. In the epilogue he has a fantastic example that a "wild" world is not exactly safe for humans. Humans used to be scared of the wild -- and for good reason. It wasn't the perfectly safe national parks countries have today. There was a reason Louise & Clark didn't just go tramping around the wilderness as a duo, taking selfies and meditating on the light in the trees. They went with 45 people. And we know that even small numbers of humans have pretty large impacts.

Can we accept that a recreational hike in the Lost Island wilderness may demand a minimum of five people, possibly armed?

Imagine a truly wild national park. That has quotas of just a few dozen people allowed in every day. In a world of mass tourism, we already have this with things like rafting the Grand Canyon (which has a multi-year waiting list) or Macchu Picchu or Iceland (where people argue the number of tourists is too high). And that's without even getting into distributional issues about how rich Americans get to see the Grand Canyon but poor Mexicans can't, despite most Mexicans being geographically closer to it than most Americans.

MacKinnon -- and all of the scientists and activists he interviews -- all say that they want to experience a wild world. But what if the reality of those quotas means they never can? Are they really still willing to make that sacrifice? Are they willing to ask others to make that sacrifice? We see the same kind of issue play out around global pollution: developed countries, where every citizen has an iPhone, asking developing countries, where not every citizen even has running water or electricity yet, to reduce growth for the environment.

Ultimately, though, it is hard not to be sympathetic to MacKinnon's broader point that, instead of getting paralysed by these kinds of questions, let's just do something. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. After all, even a baseline rewild to 1900 would be a dramatic improvement.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new perspective on the increasingly popular concept of 'rewilding,' which suggests that we restore the natural environment by reintroducing native species and generally making nature 'more wild' again. MacKinnon asks what point of nature we hope to return to, raising interesting questions regarding how we have reached this level of environmental degradation in the first place. In particular, MacKinnon expands upon the idea of shifting baseline syndrome, wherein each generation recognizes their current environment as 'normal,' having never experienced what a more biodiverse/less polluted planet looks like, so that environmental losses accumulate over time and we never realize the severity or scope of those losses.

The ideas of ecological ghosts (species whose adaptations reveal past natural environments/interspecies interactions that are long gone), and the many many cases where people flat-out denied the extinctions or extirpations of once-abundant species, were very new and frankly shocking to me; the stories that MacKinnon weaves about how changes in one species affect their entire ecosystems (ex: whales and plankton having a positive feedback loop where they support each others' abundance) were vivid and extremely interesting.

The Once and Future World is short, very readable, and introduces many under-explored ideas about how humans relate to nature.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depending on what you think is the goal of this book, it's five stars or two stars. So I've split the difference. J.B. MacKinnon constantly seems on the verge of declaring humans to be a huge problem for the planet but never gets around to an actual declaration. On the other hand, if this is supposed to be a lyrical reflection on our relationship to nature without any real thesis, then fair play and may there be stars aplenty.

Perhaps MacKinnon was earnestly attempting to be balanced and nuanced. Perhaps he wanted to write a pastoral, nay, Edenic reflection in the style of the Romantics. Where I'm going with this is that it's difficult to say quite what type of book he wrote.

Not that I hated it. It is gorgeously written and the theme of "nature as a concept is itself fluid" emerges often enough to constitute a central idea. So this book, more than others perhaps, is really a matter of taste. If you're happy to meander through our wildernesses then you'll take great pleasure in it. If you need an actual argument, it's possible you'll be able to tease one out where I haven't.

But make sure you read the grizzly bear stories of the final pages.

Follow me on Twitter: @Dr_A_Taubman

[Karen]

I found myself smiling and delighted through many passages, and feeling a strange sense of loss through others (fortunately, not overwhelmingly so). This book was illuminating and valuable as a person engaged in city-building activity. I haven't and probably will never have the kind of experiences with nature that MacKinnon describes. But I have been fortunate enough to scratch the surface of the sense of awe and admiration for nature which infuses his prose. It butts up against a lot of my sensitivities, but for its effort, it makes its case well and clearly.

It was interesting for another reason, which was to intersect this book's thesis about re-wilding with the work of Natalie Jeremijenko, who inquires into the role art can have in making us aware of our relationship with the natural world.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book reminds me of guns, germs, and steel as far as changing the way I think about the past. there is so much astounding in it, from just sheer facts about this or that species to wider ways of thinking about human consciousness.

I think the biggest impact was just the realization that although the past century+ has been a time of incredible environmental degradation, it's not just a product of the modern world. human beings have ALWAYS wiped out species and altered ecosystems, all humans. indigenous societies didn't possess an innate wisdom about living in balance with nature that colonial societies had forgotten. where an indigenous society did live more in balance with nature, they learned that from being out of balance and making corrections - there's a striking example of this in the book regarding hawaii, which, being an isolated island chain, made coming into balance critical. there is also a theory that the indigenous peoples in the US at the time of contact/conquest by the europeans had learned their environmental wisdom the hard way, rather than just being some sort of bearers of pre-industrial garden of eden knowledge that had been preserved. he also mentions that one tribe called europeans "the starving" because although they moved into a zone of plentiful natural resources, they were cut off from hunter-gatherer traditions and experienced the difficulties of trying to transform that land into agricultural production.

also, he points out that what we think of as "wilderness" isn't very wild at all, by the standards of history. not only in the apex predators and megafauna that are missing, but in the ways those species formed the landscape. what we see isn't just the land and vegetation that used to be here, minus a bunch of animals. everything is different - the flow of the rivers, the percentage of trees, the texture of the soil. but also, very much our safety in the wilderness, and the state of "participatory consciousness" you have to be in, the alertness and awareness of what other animals are doing, in order to be in wilderness. wearing a bell in bear country doesn't begin to touch it.

and then again, he points out that people used to be able to live in close contact with predators in very different ways. in india, people had "village tigers" that they fed. some native americans considered mountain lions as providers because they would scavenge their kills. hawaiians who would swim through waters teeming with sharks and just smack away the snout of one that came up towards them. we didn't eradicate predators like these because we were scared of them - we killed them because we thought they would take our livestock. and then, once they became rare, we became afraid, because we no longer knew what it was to live with them, and then we sought to get rid of the remaining few.

there was also a whole part about how whales disseminate iron through the ocean ecosystem via their excrement, and how this is also a carbon sink - so the save the whales bumperstickers of the 70s were prescient, in a way, because whales, if we were to bring their population back up, can help with climate change.

and the discussion of how we have literally made animals smaller through our hunting and fishing, and how we don't have a memory of it, but the big fish that are caught now and lauded as trophy fish are puny compared to what used to be, even in 1900.

so yeah, he doesn't pull any punches about how despoiled our world is, and how we are down to abot 10% of what we used to have, and how we will have to think very differently about living with the other beings on this planet - we will have to remember how to do it, recreate that. he doesn't talk about going vegan - he actually talks about hunting more, with very established parameters, to free up agricultural land, which is an all too common failure even among environmentalists. going vegan is really a no brainer if you are an environmentalist - much of the cropland now is used to grow fodder for domesticated animals that are later eaten, which is a very inefficient and wasteful (not to mention unspeakably cruel) way of getting calories and nutrition. a lot of people are so entrenched as omnivores though that they can't conceive of giving up meat on a mass scale. I was at a social gathering the other week where a couple of guys were talking about how insects were the future, we were going to have to give up our western cultural squeamishness and start eating insects in order to save the world. I told them, lol, go for it, but I'm just going to keep being vegan and deal with it that way. if you are so into meat that you would rather eat bugs than give it up, ok, but it doesn't have to be like that.

so that would be my only criticism, and in mackinnon's case, he is probably thinking of the social relationship people have with animals when they eat them - sort of the whole ducks unlimited conservation thrust. me, I'm devoted to any given species continuing to exist whether we eat them or not.

well worth reading, though. and also beautifully written.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. B. MacKinnon grew up on the edge of a Canadian prairie. “I knew the prairie in the hands-in-every-crevice detail that only a child can, and it was, for me, a place of magic.” He developed a healthy relationship with the living ecosystem, an experience that is no longer ordinary. Years later, as an adult, he returned to visit home, and his sacred prairie had been erased by the Royal Heights subdivision. He could find no trace of the red foxes that he had loved so much. It hurt.

By and by, curiosity inspired him to spend some time studying books about the days of yesteryear. To his surprise, he learned that the foxes of his region were not indigenous, nor was much of the prairie vegetation. His childhood home bore little resemblance to the wild prairie that existed several centuries earlier. Before he was born, the land was home to caribou, elk, wolves, and buffalo, all absent in his lifetime. What happened? Could the damage be repaired? MacKinnon explored these questions in The Once and Future World.

The world we experience in childhood is typically perceived as being the normal, unspoiled state. We can comprehend the damage that has occurred during our lifetime, but not all that has been lost since grandma was little, or grandma’s grandma. This ecological amnesia is called shifting baseline syndrome. It whites out the past.

Thank goodness for the venerable grandmothers of the temple of history. They can take us to sacred mountains offering views of eons past, and help us remember who we are, where we came from, and how much has been lost. We can see the Pleistocene cave paintings, aglow with reverence and respect for the family of life, created by a culture in which humans were “just another species on the landscape.” Later Greek paintings illustrate a culture of total disconnection — human gods, goddesses, warriors, lion killers — starring the one and only species that mattered (as does our culture).

Like MacKinnon, the world of my childhood has been erased. Three hundred years earlier, it had been a paradise of forests dotted with many pristine lakes, home to unimaginable numbers of fish, turtles, waterfowl, and assorted woodland critters. Thousands of years earlier, in the wake of the melting glaciers, Pleistocene Michigan had been home to giant beavers, walruses, whales, mastodons, mammoths, peccaries, elk, moose, caribou, musk oxen, and bison.* I had been completely unaware that they belonged in this ecosystem, and that their absence was abnormal. I did not dream of their return, since I didn’t know they were missing.

MacKinnon says that we have inherited a 10 percent world, because 90 percent of the planet’s wildness is largely gone. We can’t begin to comprehend all that has been lost in the last century or three. But the tragedy can also be medicinal. “The history of nature is not always a lament. It is also an invitation to envision another world.” Indeed! Our current vision is suicidal. His mantra is remember, reconnect, and rewild. “We need to remember what nature can be; reconnect to it as something meaningful in our lives; and start to remake a wilder world.” Great!

The rewilding bandwagon is picking up momentum now. Twenty years ago, it meant reintroducing missing species, like elephants, mountain lions, and wolves, acts that would spark firestorms of opposition. Lately, it has expanded to include smaller, doable tweaks that can be done right now, around the neighborhood, to make the ecosystem a bit more wild — reconnection. Tiny successes are likely to feed the soul, and inspire bolder acts of healing. It all adds up.

Importantly, rewilding directs some of our attention to the ecosystem that we inhabit, a form of awareness that’s getting close to extinction in consumer societies. MacKinnon doesn’t fetch his paddle to spank capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, incompetent activists, or the consumer hordes that live high impact lives whilst dishonestly denying all responsibility. Instead, he suggests that most people simply don’t get it. Industrial strength cultural programming makes it difficult or impossible for most people to wander beyond the mall parking lot. Listen to this:

“Standing on the globe as we know it today, among people who are 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 to even wrap one’s head around where to begin.”

Most people are focused on short-term human interests, and nothing else. They have been taught to inhabit a world of pure fantasy. On the walls of their caves are paintings of trophy homes, SUVs, smart phones, tablet computers, big TVs, and on and on. Most of them will never find their way home.

The tiny minority of folks who have found the power to think outside the box, like biologist Michael Soulé, feel “profoundly alienated from mainstream society.” Communication is nearly impossible. He says, “We are different. We’re wired to love different things than other people are.” I know what he means. We don’t feel at home in this society. Maybe we’re pioneers, scouting a new and safer path.

Mark Fisher is one of the different ones, an advocate for rewilding. He works with the Wildland Research Institute in northern England, a devastated nation where people sometimes strongly oppose even the reintroduction of trees (let alone vicious man-eating beavers). On a visit to America, he was overcome with emotion when he saw wolves running wild in Yellowstone. When he stood on an overlook at White Mountain National Forest, and observed 800,000 acres of woodland, “I just cried my eyes out.” Ancestral memories returned with great beauty.

Once upon a time, MacKinnon met a mother and daughter who had lived for 30 years in a remote region of British Columbia, in grizzly bear country. The mother had had two brushes with the bears, and perceived them as “highly spiritual experiences.” Being reminded that humans were not the Master Species helped her remember who she was. “It was just like coming home.” The daughter had no notion that living near grizzlies was unusual. MacKinnon found hope in this, “We are always only a single generation away from a new sense of what is normal.”

Finally, I was fascinated to learn about our olive baboon relatives of Ghana. Like us, their diet is omnivorous. Like us, they evolved in a tropical climate, where they needed no clothes or shelter. Like us, they can inhabit rainforests, deserts, and savannahs, but prefer savannah. On average, males weigh 53 pounds (24 kg), and females weigh 32 pounds (14.5 kg). Despite their size, they have been able to survive for millions of years in a world of powerful carnivores — without tools — without becoming hopelessly stuck in the toxic tar baby of innovation and technology, with its enormous bloody costs.

Instead of chasing large herbivores with spears, baboons hunt a wide variety of small critters with their bare hands and teamwork. Hunting provides a third of their food. Unlike us, they never migrated out of Africa, into chilly climates where they could not survive without techno-crutches. Unlike us, they didn’t exterminate the predators that kept their numbers in balance. They have never had any need for fire, psych meds, or cell phones. Might there be a lesson here?

* Wilson, Richard Leland, The Pleistocene Vertebrates of Michigan, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. LII, 1967.

[Leni - From The White Cottage · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made."

What an amazing book!
I really like to read non fiction books about the environment but am not the biggest fan of the books styled like a collection of magazine articles. This book was really refreshing in that way.
It is divided into three parts: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be; all connected like one big story.
This book filled me with sadness for what we have lost but also gave me hope that there is a possible way for us to live alongside nature in a "wilder world". It gives a reason for why we let this change happen other than having our own needs in mind.

All that I have left to say is: read it!

"Nature was here long before we were, and will linger long after we're gone."

[Reuben · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible inspiring read. The knowledge, thoroughness and messaging of this book compels me to do more and learn more.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

the perfect book to finish on the day a harrowing ipcc climate change assessment report was released. this book offers hope in the midst of worry. highly recommend.

[Victor Salander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great eye-opener to how ignorant we are all primed to be of the countless waves of human disruption to earth's ecosystems. We barely understand a fraction of the impact we're currently having, but the full extent of each iteration of impact from previous generations is almost completely lost to us. Can we humans even conceptualize nature and wilderness?

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite book so far this year. I loved that the book is free of the illusion that nature is somehow purer or in some sense better than humans, but instead looks underneath to show in often surprising ways how humanity has always shaped their surroundings and how the surroundings have shaped us. It reminded me of Pollan's concept that plants and animals use humans to thrive even as we use them for our own ends. He explores deeply the concept of the shifting baseline in our conception of what nature was and is and explores how we can rewild the world, not necessarily from abstract principles, but because we like our world to be diversely populated with the wild and crazy fecundity of the world. And he shows in captivating examples how we live in an age of species extinction, when we live in a world denuded of much of its diversity. Our very success as a species has led to others decline. Have we loved our neighbors as ourselves? We are impoverished when we can't even notice other species around us, as we tend to do when we live in wholly human built environments. I count myself lucky to have lived in Alaska most of my life and to have felt the pulse of wild(er) nature, though I know that my baseline for wild is different from the past. This book wears no rose colored glasses on any of the subjects that it tackles. It is fair and forthright in telling that story hand it does it, in frankly beautiful, clear, and illuminating prose. Here is a sample I loved, "The planet
's other life forms reveal so many ways of being that we could never imagine them if they didn't already exist in reality. In this sense, other species don't' only have the capacity to inspire our imagination, they are a form of imagination. They are the genius of life arrayed against an always uncertain future, and to allow that brilliance to wane out of negligence is to passively embrace the death of our own minds."
This is a book about the waning of the depth of life that has engulfed the planet in the past, the reduction of life as we have know it in that past and mostly ignore now. I can't really say enough about this book. Read it. I would love to hear how others respond to it.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent......offering ideas on how to reconcile our modern day non natured lives with a far distant path teaming with nature as we cannot remember it because we have never known it that way. A book about what an ecological human might be like and an imagined 'Lost Island,' where nature is reclaimed as 12 percent of the whole where large beasts run huge swaths of land unhampered by humans. Definitely food for thought. I live in closer proximity to nature than most of my brothers and sisters in a small valley alongside Elk Creek in Wilkes County, NC. Surrounded on all sides by dense forest, I began to realize as I was reading this book that this land is most likely nothing like it used to be before humans came here to live. Nothing like it used to be before the European invasion. Decades of timber retrieval have left many mountainsides raw and few old growth forests still survive. I have always wondered what lies over the next mountain, but like the author's mother, I have always been afraid of the forest critters. And being a child of western NC, I've always heard the stories about wild animals that discourage free exploration. My brother-in-law tells a tale of being surrounded by a pack of feral dogs in the wilderness and I've heard other tales about deer populations being low in certain areas due to roving packs of feral dogs. Black bears were reintroduced into the area by hunters and they seem to be enjoying a thriving comeback. Reading this narrative gives me a different feeling about the Bears and makes me wonder how we can coexist....how could I feel less limited in my desire to explore and still survive living alongside these creatures. We've always had our nature stories and I see now the everlasting theme of man against nature. The theme is expressed even in our gardens, where we rip out all the weeds and damage our soils with chemicals. Having always felt a deep sense of place, a soul connection with the land of my mother and father, I have come to realize that this is a rich gift, one worthy of pride and reflection, and hopefully preservation. MacKinnon's writing fires the imagination.

[M.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

J.B. MacKinnon’s “The Once and Future World” was a very pleasant surprise. If not for a nuanced interview I heard with the author, I might not ever have purchased this book out of the fear that it—so easily labeled an essay on humanity’s responsibility for ecological change—being a preachy bore (no matter how correct it may have been). Instead, it is well-written and informative and manages to reshape perceptions and biases without ever becoming shrill or hectoring.

MacKinnon starts from a very point: that which we know to be nature—he returns often to the image of a prairie of his youth—is already so changed from the centuries and even decades the preceded it that the very baseline for what constitutes a wilderness is almost perpetually in flux. Humans, he convincingly argues, have had a profound impact on all aspects of the world stretching back to our hunter-gatherer days. The size of the effect has grown substantially, of course, and an innate process of mass forgetting results in fading of collective memories of areas that once teemed in diversity and quantity of life. What is remarkable is how he manages to turn this not into a fatalistic lament, but a call for greater reflection and self-awareness of our individual and collective actions.

The book is easy to read and at times possesses a simple sort of poeticism that not only effectively conveys key points and information, but manages to subtly sway the reader. It is a wonderful long-form essay examining the historical role of mankind in changing (both actively and passively) the environment in which we live. Fascinating, tragic and yet hopeful, “The Once and Future World” somehow manages to be a high-level overview of ecological history of the proposed ‘anthropocene’ age shaped by humans to even the geological level, which also successfully speaks to the present and a more mindful future.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

MacKinnon uses an array of lenses to examine humans' relationship with the natural world: sometimes a journalist's; sometimes a scientist's; sometimes an artist's. These are all important, but the author is most effective, when he forgoes the lenses and chooses to relate things from the point of view of a simple observer... when he relates, for example, what happens in a city park during the sixty minutes he decides to give nature his fullest attention. MacKinnon is at the edge of a pond in a city park. "The results were immediate. Mallard ducks were push-pushing across the surface of the water or dunking their heads to feed in the shallows. Then the pond exploded. Every bird was in motion, scrambling for the reeds, diving, bursting upward into flight. In the trees along the shoreline, the songbirds spiralled down into the undergrowth, and the air rang with chittering and honking and squawking. I saw the shadow first - a dark triangle rippling over the water, and then the eagle itself, swooping down as fast as I could lower my eyes."
This is the book's most important thesis: that to the extent there is a crisis in the natural world, it is one of awareness as much as any other cause. "The issue today is not whether you see heaven in a wildflower, but whether you look at the wildflower at all." Stop and stare, he is suggesting: awareness is it's own reward. So true! So true!

[Micaela Sauve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was rather disappointed by this book. While this book did share a unique perspective and asked a lot of hard hitting questions that we need to be asking ourselves, it was primarily just a big long rant that continuously jumped around. Quite often I found myself confused as to what he was really talking about because he jumped around so often. No point ever felt truly finished before he was onto the next.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like reading essays about nature from someone who gives a shit and don't want to be caught up in the collective amnesia that our society has about the natural world...oh...and if you are interested in how to maybe possibly start correcting our course as a species, check it out. Whales for life.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an ode to nature and wildlife from that increasingly rare breed of biophiliac individuals. I count myself as one and so our values are aligned when it comes to viewing mankind as just one among the pantheon of lifeforms on Earth not deserving of special treatment. Though I cannot help feeling that it would only appeal to those already sympathetic to the plight of our disappearing wildlife, and ineffective at making the majority feel the same regret. As the author puts it, it seems sadly possible that humanity would continue surviving in a biologically impoverished planet and that most would not care if species continue vanishing, such is the tragedy of shifting baselines that it would hardly be noticed by passing generations.

Most of the chapters detail the once unimaginably prolific sheer mass of wild creatures that inhabited this world, from the teeming seas thick with fish, whales and turtles to the hordes of grazing animals and flocks of birds on land and air respectively. The places we deem 'wild' today are mere shadows of their former glory during the time before Homo sapiens rose to ascendance. Attempts to restore nature to that previous lost state would be an impossible task, but that does not mean we should not make efforts to rewild whenever possible.

Now for the flaws. Considering the attention paid to marine ecosystems the author found the 'upside down' trophic pyramid of pristine reef systems a contradiction - where the mass of predators outweigh their prey and the plants they in turn feed on. However as any ecology text would point out, this is perfectly normal and a characteristic of the seas simply due to the much higher turnover of smaller prey and plant organisms compared to longer lived and larger bodied consumer predators. It should therefore come as no surprise to observe huge schools of sharks at Kiribati while there appear to be far fewer smaller fish to support them at first glance.

The last couple of chapters on Hawaii and Easter Island attempt to draw lessons from the different historical trajectories of these two places. The author concludes from the pre-colonial population density of the former, one he deemed a sustainable society, as a workable number for Earth as a whole. Thus seven billion humans would be the possible carrying capacity of the entire planet. Though he acknowledged the very different habitats on the planet as a whole that make extrapolation difficult, MacKinnon still went ahead with the statement, which I found bewildering to say the least, as we have quite obviously overshot multiple planetary boundaries.

The book is also very personal as the author pens his own experience of nature as a child and trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a 'pristine' world filled with megafauna, which is the subject of the rather long winded epilogue.

Despite these faults the book overall would be an enjoyable read for all nature lovers and an education for those not already familiar with mankind's long history of wildlife decimation.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a coauthor of the 100-mile diet, full of fascinating anecdotes, and beautifully written, the author show that we all suffer from "Shifting Baseline Syndrome" – we are not aware of how impoverished the natural world is, and has been ever since humans left Africa and began to wipe out the large animals of the rest of the world, and then many of the plants and smaller animals as we took up farming and cleared the land, and then… The author longs for a return to a wilder world, not only for the sake of the millions of other species we share the planet with, but for our own sakes.
Errata:
p. 6-7: In ‘The origin of recently established red fox populations in the United States: translocations or natural range expansions?’ J. of Mammalogy, 2012, Statham et al claim that mitochondrial DNA shows that most red foxes in North America descend from range expansion of native populations, although there is a European contribution, especially on the US west coast.
p.7 least Bell’s vireo is a California form of Bell’s vireo, not a species.
p.79 ‘English language once had a word for the characteristic impression that a plant or animal offers… “jizz”’ Actually the term is still in general use, at least in the birding community, per personal experience, and confirmed by Wikipedia and the Canadian Oxford dictionary (1998), where it is the only meaning given.
p.106 The Waddensee only received silt from the Rhine (through its minor distributary the Ijssel) if you consider what is now the Ijsselmeer part of the Waddensee, which is a long stretch.

[Pankaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well researched and written thoughtful and thought-provoking book. The first half of the book was rather depressing as it laid out how humankind had slaughtered entire species of fauna, sapiens and flora through centuries of greed and exploitation. A few excerpts underlying these conditions stood out for me:
- Change blindness blindness is the failure to see that we so often fail to see
- A trans-generational memory is better known as a myth, a fable, a testament, an icon.
- Denial is the last line of defence against memory. It helps us to forget what we’d rather not remember, and then to forget that we’ve forgotten it, and then to resist the temptation to remember.
- Yet living things are defined not by frailty, but diehard tenacity. Three billion years ago life on earth came into being, a miracle still beyond our understanding, and has carried on through every conceivable calamity. If anything can be said to be the mysterious “spark of life,” it is this singular impulse: to be. Extinction is not mere death; it is the death of the cycle of life and death

The author also built hope by highlighting efforts underway for "rewilding" and that since 1962, the growing list of countries that now have redesignated parks or conservation areas has grown to 125, giant turtles are starting to populate again and some other species, while close to extinction not so long ago, might now slowly be starting to survive and grow.

We cannot and must not forget. We cannot allow what we have done for so long to continue. That is the underlying message.

[Tasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended by Linda Nagata, a science fiction writer whose opinion I respect highly, so I picked it up and finally gave it a whirl. I must admit: I was hoping for more "future" in the author's discussion of our natural world. While the writing itself is beautiful and chock-full of fascinating facts (I had never come upon the concept of ecological amnesia before, but it makes total sense; I never knew that Polynesian swimmers knew to punch a shark on the snout to make it go away; I had no idea tortoises expressed joy), the text is largely an elegiac litany of lost species of animals. It's almost too sad to go on reading. But I did read it to the end, because the very least I owe this planet is my acknowledgement of humanity's role in this sixth extinction event we're all experiencing in slow motion. There is some discussion of rewilding, the attempt to re-introduce endangered species to their native habitat and bring that habitat back to some pre-human equilibrium now lost. It seems to me that humanity's voracious need (want?) of natural resources will always be at odds with most other animals' habitats and the ecology as a whole, until some environmental singularity decides the 12th round for us all. Not a comforting thought, but a rational one. For anyone looking for environmentalist non-fiction, this should be on your shelf.

[Amelie-Linden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderous and contemplative meditation on our relationship to nature. What parts of it we chose to honour and accept into our modern world, and what parts of it we collectively choose to forget. This is an incredibly important book for our modern age as humanity decides what nature we deem necessary in an age of climate change and mass extinction.

Growing up in a small country town, I know the feeling of strange disconnection J.B. MacKinnon describes when you return after many years and the field you used to run barefoot in has been transformed into a housing development. And you must grapple with what has been lost and consider what was there before you, what creatures roamed and what plants sprouted before your own childhood home was built.

This book is beautifully written and deeply considered, and is still relevant over 10 years after it's release despite all the changes in climate science and public perception since it's release. Shame that it's so hard to find a copy of it though as I think it should have the same reach as Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer has. Had to buy my copy secondhand off of Abebooks, turns out it was once the Winnipeg Public Library's copy. I have no idea if it was withdrawn and never returned or if the library sold it off but I'm grateful to have it in my book collection nonetheless.