Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

by Dan Flores

Winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature

Shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award



A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2022



A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America.


In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.


Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.


The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.


In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

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

446 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 25, 2022

About the author

Dan Flores is an environmental writer who from 1992 to 2014 held the A. B. Hammond Chair in the History of the American West at the University of Montana. A native of Louisiana and currently a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine. Along with appearances on Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on CNN and on Joe Rogan's podcasts, he was a consultant for and is featured in Ken Burns's 2023 documentary on the story of the American buffalo. Flores's eleven books and numerous essays have won nearly three-dozen literary prizes. His most recent works are American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, a 2017 New York Times Bestseller that won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and was a Finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing; and Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2022.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dan Flores butchered his chance with this book. The subject matter here is so ambitious; a complete history of North American wildlife, truly from the beginning. This could have been perfect. I wanted this to be perfect so badly. This book should have been my shit. And yet I found myself slogging through chapter after chapter.

There's no real coherent organization. It's roughly (with as much emphasis as possible) chronological, but bounces around so drastically from species to species, region to region. You quickly get whiplash trying to follow not only the species, but the various human characters involved in the stories of their extinction or rescue.

Flores also injects himself into the story at several points. Not only are these sections tedious, they break up what little narrative he's been able to cultivate.

This book is the most infuriating mix of mind-blowing facts and tidbits, interspersed with long meandering buried ledes and near-constant changes in setting. 3/5, I'd still recommend it purely for the information it holds, but jesus I'll never read a Flores book again.

[Nick Buccongello · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting and valuable information. Dan Flores clearly has done his home work and cares deeply about sharing his knowledge with the world. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish this book due to his writing style. Bouncing back and forth between the past and the present so often left me struggling to follow along and stay invested.

[Lizzie S · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The staggering losses in the first five thousand years of the Anthropocene pitted a superpredator species - us - against prey animals that either had no experience with us or whose evolutionary defenses were keyed to older dangers and were unable to protect them against our spread and efficiency. But animals confronting us over the past five centuries have faced something different. Since then we've thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America."

Wild New World is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful reflection on the relationship between human beings and other animals in America. Beginning with our early spread through the continent and moving to the present day, Flores highlights the initial extinction of megafauna hunted by our ancestors. He then moves to more recent extinctions - the result of habitat destruction, hunting, trade of animal parts, and attempts to eliminate "evil" predators. This segues into the rise of environmentalism in the 60s and ends with the reflection that, while many species will never be seen again, we have the chance to save the ones that are still here.

A thoroughly researched, devastating history. Thank you so much to Dan Flores and W. W. Norton & Company for this ARC through NetGalley. Wild New World is available as of October 2022 for purchase.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was recently asked, “Which books have you read have changed the way you think about the world or yourself?”. My list was very short but now I have another to add to it.

This is a “Big Time” history of the American continent and its animals, starting way back with the mass extinction caused by the huge meteorite strike that doomed the dinosaurs. We next see America in the Pleistocene, with its mammoths, wild horses and camels, sloths, giant beavers, etc. and big predators such as the saber tooth tiger. And then came “biological first contact” with humans. Mass extinctions followed as Clovis Man stampeded and slaughtered the big herd animals to the extent that some species were left with such low numbers that they disappeared from the continent entirely.

Native Americans then evolved the cultures that Europeans encountered, that lived much more in harmony with the other creatures and were able to hunt & practice agriculture in a manner that preserved the remaining fauna.

And then, 10,000 years later, there was “cultural first contact” with Europeans who had developed a herding culture that despised and feared predators such as wolves in a way that Native Americans did not. They quickly established a market economy and the Natives were soon hunting & trading furs in a way that upset the ecology of the land . . . and then the European hunters and settlers amplified that so that very quickly species either went extinct or were just a shadow of their previous population.

Book covers more than this — there’s stories of the personalities that gradually came to understand what happened, efforts at change, some successes, some failures, etc.

But most fascinating is the idea of how far back in time humans have been having major impacts on the animals of the world. And how much we have resisted the idea.

It was only in the 1800s that humans accepted that animals could go extinct, could completely disappear from world.

Thought about the Peter Heller mystery, The Last Ranger, set in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone as I was reading about the wolf reintroduction to the park.

There’s an extensive bibliography, author is a scholar, obviously book was well researched. But I would have liked footnotes.

Fascinating book. Thanks to Libby/Overdrive for making this their “unlimited access” ebook/audio “Big Read” for the spring.

[Kylie Sparkle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to order this book thinking it would be a deep dive into North America's ancient animal behaviors and interaction. Intertwined with native American tribes and European colonialism. Unfortunately, that is not what this book is.

This book is a sporadic and unorganized 'neat facts' collection regarding various naturalists, pioneers, and scientists. These 'neat facts' are also repetitive because there is no structure to the book, so later on, the same naturalist that only got a few paragraphs devoted to them is reappearing. It's also 200+ pages of bemoaning the unchecked killing of animals. Do I agree that it's a pity our ancestors murdered wantlessly? Yes. Do I want continuous chapters that blur together with no sense of timeline nor focus other than moaning about animal overkill? No.

There's a few sentences that try and cover all the various native American tribes religious deities and the stories behind them. Not what I was expecting from a book proclaiming itself an "epic" starting from North America's origins.

Too much narrative and author insertion as well. Page 240 Flores felt it necessary to write "f***ing pathetic" in regard to the massacre of buffalos in the plains.

A huge let down of a book since I was considering it to be laymen academic.

[Ma'Belle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this was a pretty well-told book of popular eco-science: both ecologies and economies. It is mostly an examination of humans' effects on land mammal and bird populations throughout history and prehistory. Almost no attention is paid to aquatic life in the Americas or the almost unfathomable decreases in insect populations over the past 50 years, except when referencing Rachel Carson's landmark book Silent Spring.

I wasn't impressed by some of the speculative claims Flores makes, such as the awareness prehistoric humans may or may not have had that the herd sizes of large "game" animals was drastically lower than it had been a few thousand years earlier. I believe it was in The Sixth Extinction that I recently read another account of extinctions caused by humans expanding in geographic location and population, and that author specifically pointed out that it wouldn't have been obvious at all to the many generations that passed as animals like mammoths and mastodons went from being abundant to scarce.

Here are a few things that were new and interesting to me, or that I noticed and was bothered by while listening to the audiobook.

Newish DNA evidence has uncovered a lot of revelations about prehistoric life in the Americas. Apparently some kind of *horses* and *sheep* were here LOOOOONG before the bison/American buffalo, despite the latter later becoming iconic to North America and the pervasive teaching that there were no horses or sheep (Dine’ creation story-related!) until the Spanish brought them.

English settlers had never known wolves in their lives until coming to America because they’d killed them all off in England in the 1400s! They dreamed of an America without wolves.

When 50+ million Native Americans, reliant on fire economies/ecologies, died in a short timespan called the “American disease holocaust,” it may have caused what is known as the Little Ice Age from ~1550-1850 .

The narrator mispronounces Navajo and Dine’ *back to back*! (putting the emphasis accent on the second “a” and a long accent on the “i” respectively)

[Bridey · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

the first part of this book about the ice age was great, i learned lots, and was interested (aside from the times when the author discusses fertility symbols in cave paintings that are drawings of the “human vagina” when i’m nearly certain he could’ve spent 30 seconds on google and learned the word he was looking for was “vulva”). i think he handled the discussion on colonialism very poorly, but i came back around and enjoyed the final chapter about the birth of the modern environmental movement. all in all, i enjoyed about half this book, hence the 2.5 stars

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Wild New World’ by Dan Flores is an extremely fact-heavy book. I can definitely call it out as a book of infodumps. However, in this case, I loved it! But as wonderful a book as it is, dense with history and science about the animals of America, the fact of one of its subjects being primarily an accurate political chronicle of the killing off of most American wildlife by people it is also heartwrenching and soul-destroying to read. Humans suck.

I have copied the book blurb as it is very accurate:

Winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature

Shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2022


A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America.

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

‘Wild New World’ has faults, though, which makes it a bit difficult to read. The author only roughly organizes the material into a chronology from the Paleocene Period sixty-six million years ago to today. He often changes from a chronological overview to describing in the next chapter events from regional history, in which he restates facts from his previous chapters because he returns to the chronology but with more of a closeup focus on regional happenings. When he jumps from a region to another, such as from western America to eastern America, or from the Midwest to the South, he will mix in new facts. However, while names and places change, decade after decade the determined destruction of all wildlife in every region continued. Although the killing happens in different regions, and different animals are sometimes involved, I often felt I was reading the same chapter over and over for 400 pages. Ultimately, I was full of rage, disgust and horror.

The history of the millions of native American animals which met horrible deaths devised by men, often involving painful torture, is not simply revolting and horrifying because of how they died, but also because of the mistaken and ignorant ideas people believed about the animals. Religious-based ideas of human authority over animals permitted folks to justify killing animals in mass murders, often leaving the bodies to rot since hunters never intended to eat them, or using the few feathers of birds for hats from a small part of their bodies, or only using some of the meat, or an organ or two, sometimes because of myths of sexual prowess. Hunting is a drive as powerful as the one for sex for many men, regardless of other concerns such as economic production of goods using animal parts or the perception of farm animals being in danger. But the skins and pelts of many animals were valuable when made into clothes which were the fashion of that year to wear and the hat of the season every elite must have. There were no regulations for almost two-hundred years of America’s existence about how many animals could be killed in pursuit of financial gain. When the American government finally began setting aside lands for parks, setting up rules that the animals in the parks were not to be hunted, it did not provide any funding for policing the parks. The hunting continued despite that it occurred on “protected” public lands. The hunting of an animal species stopped only when all of the animals had been thought to be killed in every area and region of America. Only scientists took notice of the devastating side effects on flora and remaining fauna of the total removal of what was considered an alpha predator. Forest lands became grasslands because of human logging, which in turn became animal and vegetation deserts as species were cleared out of any spaces humans felt valuable, upsetting “the balance of nature.” Species such as deer exploded in population, which lead to horrifying years of mass starvation and spread of disease because the deer, as one example, ate what sustained them until their food was all gone.

The list of extinct animals is in the thousands of species, and billions of individual animals. Many current species still alive today were numbered only in the dozens of individuals before conservation laws were taken seriously in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Weirdly, conservation laws were only finally passed and given the teeth of some limited enforcement when hunters began to be alarmed by the disappearance of their favorite hunted beast in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Hunting clubs, populated by elite gentlemen, finally politically organized for the purpose of creating parks and the buying of private lands for the stocking of and protection of animals, which they had initially lobbied against for many decades in Congress. The passage of laws protecting animals was for the purpose of not killing them all to the last beast, which elite hunters, primarily Republicans in the 1970’s, finally got behind. For the first time, people got in trouble if they killed a pregnant female animal or a female with cubs. Hunters finally recognized extinction of animals was a possibility despite whatever understanding of God’s promises in the Bible or whatever the customs of a region regarding hunting. Books, such as the one written by Rachel Carson in 1962, Silent Spring, opened the eyes and minds of many regular folk, and hunters, too. However, the author notes, as do I, it was only when most people felt their own lives were under threat of extinction that they cared about the wild animals. Poison chemicals, effective at killing ALL life, seemingly tipped the balance of the majority of people caring enough to do something about the mass animal deaths.

The author is very comprehensive in naming names, important figures of history and politics, throughout the history of America in how animals were treated and why. He lists and tells in detail of a lot of books that were written by proto-naturalists and scientists which influenced philosophical and political discourse about animals. Of course, no book is complete today without noting how global warming is affecting the animal world, easily observable by any common person, not only the scientists.

After putting down the book, I am full of pessimism about many animal species we know of today being around in the future. I’m sure life will continue as long as the Earth doesn’t get hit by a moonsize meteor, until the sun goes supernova, but I am certain the life that continues on to the end of the Earth will not be the life we see around us today.

The book has extensive Bibliography and Index sections. There are a lot of photos, too.

[Tallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

natural history of north america! interesting read and flores does a good job at painting the picture of what our continent looked like a long time ago up until how our modern day understanding/laws around wildlife came to be. While the book title does highlight "america" flores really only talks about north america and doesn't dive too deep into south america.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don't consider yourself an environmentalist, perhaps Dan Flores' history of human and animal interactions in North America will change your mind. Even the fond old idea of ancient indigenous tribes living in balance with the natural world is overturned by Flores, who seems determined to show that humanity has largely been a scourge upon the landscape.

By the end of Wild New World, you'll no doubt agree. Ancient peoples certainly weren't as destructive as colonizing Europeans and post-Civil War Americans, who really get the short end of the stick here. Perhaps you've heard tale of bison and passenger pigeon being shot by the thousand? Prepare yourself for detailed versions of those tales and more horrendous examples of human-animal interactions.

Okay okay, so we're awful. Is there anything else to the book? Actually, yes. Amidst the aggression against animalia, there's a fascinating evolution of the New World from a vast unspoiled landscape, filled with giant creatures, to what we now experience: farms and cities and a few natural refuges. Even with the sad ending, it's still really fascinating. Flores does makes sure to note when a wild and intriguing animal was bound to die off of its own accord - this is a Big History book, working on long time scales, so the extinction of one species isn't necessarily a tragedy because another species fills the gap.

Fortunately (so fortunately), Flores offers numerous examples of this sort of change in the landscape. It's not that we're depopulating the natural world (though we are to some degree) and more that we're attempting to mold it in our ideal image. All told, Wild New World is a hugely interesting, if often sad, read that I enjoyed just as much, if not more, than some of the other Big History books I've explored in the past. Definitely seek this one out if you're especially interested in how the natural world and landscape have changed in the Anthropocene age.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating overview of people vs. animals (really) in the Americas from like 21,000 years ago to the 21st Century. Basically, the author makes the case that the human animal over millennia has combined a "henhouse syndrome," more scientifically known as surplus killing, w/biological first contact where animals do not know to fear humans to head toward extinction or near-extinction. This goes from archaeological evidence of mass killing for only a few choice cuts, which I have read about in Time Detectives: How Archaeologists Use Technology to Recapture the Past to the disruption caused by disease spreading in the 15th and 16th Centuries by Spanish explorers. This is interesting for the early primary sources observing animal density declines with proximity to human settlements, but returns once those human populations were decimated. This is also the first time I recall reading that Little Ice Age is deemed by some to have a root cause in decreased human population. The Stone Age approach to herd management was taken up by more European visitors taking out the bison herds as well as completely eradicating the great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, etc. and wreaking a devastating toll on otters, wolves, etc. and through DDT birds including the national symbol. These are sad and dispiriting histories including a conspiracy theory that wiping out the "buffalo" herds was an American government conspiracy as well as the reckless abandon of the wolfers dispensing cyanide and strychnine causing untold collateral damage.

The author grew up in Louisiana and tells much of Louisiana animals, including how Louisiana alligators went from threatened to thriving. The author is not as hopeful about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, dismissing all evidence brought forward through September 2021. I am saddened by the implication this includes the video evidence I saw on YouTube.

Overall this is very educational, enlightening even. I am only somewhat disappointed in the narrator.

[Joshua Keaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wild New World was an wonderful read. It got me thinking about many things but mostly, it made me melancholic that we were are living in a significantly less wild America.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dewey 591.97 F663w

Tries too hard to be prosy, and to describe his own presence at the prehistoric sites.

[Jim Bobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I certainly feel more informed about the journey of humans and animals in the New World - I’ll never forget some of the lessons of prehistoric man in America and the animals of the Pleistocene age that Dan Flores taught. I found it fascinating to hear the interwoven tales of man and animal throughout. From the dawn of European settlement things got more depressing. The impact on earlier Americans and the animals already on the continent was drastic. The plight of the wolves, buffalo and passenger pigeons loom large. However at times I felt the second half of the book got lost in a history of environmental and conservation law together with that of naturalists and conservationists and related disciplines. Things got a bit bogged down and jumped around quite a lot. Four stars for the fact this is an epic that brings a natural history to the world that might never have seen such an audience before.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting book with lots of information for me way too much.

How did this book find me? It was selected for the Topeka and Shawnee Public Library’s Big Read.

[Alyssa Bergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Are you listening to a textbook?” Jake to me when I put this over the car speaker 😂 Finally! done with this mammoth of a book, pun intended. It was very information dense to the point I’m not sure I’ve retained much. The content, although intriguing, was all over the place and a bit dry. Another extremely depressing example of humanity. I know American history is steeped in wrong choices and cruelty, but you don’t often hear about the natural world side of view. We sure were shit to this continent. Oh well, onto the book I actually want to read now!

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Human beings are a blight on the planet. If any species deserves to go extinct, it's homo sapiens.

This is possibly the most depressing book I have ever read. It's a long and detailed (and probably exhaustively researched) description of animal life in North America and man's need to senselessly and ruthlessly slaughter it.

Trigger warning: detailed information about the extinction of the passenger pigeon at the hands of man. I hope I never read another book describing this indefensible, tragic, and pointless event in human history.

Is this a good book? I don't know, probably, but after reading it I feel utterly hopeless about what mankind has done and is doing to Earth and the other species on it. (Especially combined with the recent news story about that psychopath Cody Roberts in Wyoming who tortured a wolf to death for fun.)

Also the ending is a mess. The epilogue was unnecessary. Was he trying to hit some page or word count?

This was Overdrive's Big Library Read for May 2024.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating nonfiction portraying the evolutionary origins, pre-human abundance and post-human plunder of North America’s wildlife and wild lands. This book is spread out in a narrative journey that is easy to digest and connect with.

Flores paints a picture of ancient North America that is so starkly contrasted with our modern reality. It’s jaw dropping to think about how wild it really was before the onset of the Anthropocene and European colonization.

Despite the tales of loss, organized into the stories of specific beloved species, Flores incorporates elements of conservation and hope as we grapple with modern environmental challenges. This book is a powerful educational tool that encourages fierce and swift protection of the majestic and unique wildlife of North America.

[Carter Tielkemeier · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give it 100 stars, I would. Wild New World is the Magnum Opus of Dan Flores illustrious career. Successfully weaving in deep history, personal knowledge, and cutting edge science, Mr. Flores creates an enthralling masterpiece of non fiction, with great despair for what we’ve lost, and small hope for the future. It should be considered as one of the best books on North American Ecological history and Flores a modern Thoreau with North America his Walden Pond.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never been one for reading about prehistory which is the first chapter of this book and is sort of dry. But I've read other books by the author and thoroughly enjoyed them, and so too did this book expand into an informative polemic on our war against nature- the real American carnage indeed. Flores takes us through our sordid history with the casualties: auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, buffalo, and wolves- to name a few. Surplus killing or habitat loss, what does it matter? It was all due to the selfish, self absorbed, and arrogant behavior of a primate who denies his true animal nature. This book left me angry as we seemed poised to return to our madness and reverse the progress we made all in the name of economy, political conservatism, and resurrection of false fairy tales about predators. You can't have balance and a real world without predators and wildness.

[Anshuman Swain · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 rounded down to 4.

Extremely well researched book about the state of American fauna from prehistory to the present. Initially, I assumed more of the book was dedicated to the former but the book pleasantly surprised me. The thorough history of the bloody and mindless eradication of American wildlife, presented chronologically almost, is mind-boggling and heart-wrenching. The author does a great job of introducing important human characters in this history and seeing familiar names with unfamiliar connections to wildlife is quite interesting. Definitely suggested for folks who want to know more about how America interacted and interacts with its wildlife.

[Lillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a solid overview of the relationship between humans and animals in North America. This is a topic I have read about fairly extensively and it did deliver some new information, though I wish the author had either leaned in or leaned out of the poetic descriptions of fauna and the personal anecdotes about the landscape. These were much more prevalent at the end of the book, and I felt like the beginning (Pleistocene) and end (genetic advances, recent rewilding success, bison) were two entirely different books. I think this would have made for an excellent road trip read

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book covering a mammoth (no pun intended) topic. Beginning with the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago and ending with Colossal Bioscience’s efforts to bring back the woolly mammoth, this book covers the natural history of North America in astounding detail. I think the most shocking parts were the wanton destruction caused by man — of passenger pigeons and buffalo, yes, but also of mammoths and saber toothed cats in the Pleistocene. Turns out we might all be killer apes after all.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I read this book as part of the Big Libby Read and also because I thought the information could be useful in my environmental work. But holy cow this book was a bit too much. The author is definitely knowledgeable on the subject but it was a lot of information to put in one book and not have an organisational pattern (sort of chronological) for the reader to follow easily. On the plus I did learn a lot so I’m giving it 3/5

[Becs]

I got talked into reading this with my partner, and it quickly became my book of the year. I am now obsessed with natural history and prehistory, which I didn't know I had an interest in previously.

[Tony Avila · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that paints a portrait of the relationship between humans and animals in North America throughout the last 13,000 years. There were many valuable lessons and pieces of history that tied in previous knowledge about ancient America, which helped me grasp an understanding of how certain time periods blended and impacted each other. Highly recommend to non fiction readers.

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

It lost a star because it wasn't nearly as interesting as it ought to have been.

It lost another when it explicitly said that Indigenous people in the Americas were not slaves. You can literally read Christopher Columbus's diary, in which one of his earliest observations of the people he meets in the Bahamas was that they would make great slaves, after which he soon kidnapped hundreds of them to bring back to Europe—as slaves.

Then it lost another star when he framed Darwin as the only person in the history of the world to figure out evolution. Even the most cursory research into Darwin should bring up Darwin's contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, who—independently of Darwin—ALSO figured out evolution by natural selection but was overshadowed because Darwin's work was finished and published first. Darwin was also not the first to speculate on the idea of natural selection, but he was the first to do so systematically and at a time when the printed word and high enough literacy rates could spread his specific findings.

Then it lost another star when the author dismissed the idea that the near extinction of the bison had nothing to do with a targeted campaign to fix the "Indian problem" in the ever-expanding west by eliminating their food source. Instead, he picked one crazy conspiracy theory which was not true, and in debunking that specific falsehood, whole cloth brushed aside the possibility of any racism (on behalf of whites) behind any of the killing of bison. I can think of more than a few historians the author ought to have spoken to before making such sweeping generalizations.

I'd take away another star if I could for how it presented Rachel Carson as a "trained ecologist." I am an ardent environmentalist and one of my greatest goals in life is to teach students about the importance of environmentalism and the real costs of the system we have that causes such environmental damage. However, Carson was a pseudoscientist, as Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong shows. Carson not only exaggerated the negative affects of DDT but knowingly lied about bird populations which had actually been increasing as a result of DDT (as it turns out, killing the parasites that kill birds actually helps birds to survive). While I strongly support the environmental movement she inspired, the chemophobia she incorporated within it from the very beginning has had a tremendous cost on both human and animal lives.

[Desirae · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a fan. The book is primarily about how the Europeans/colonists/Americans decimated the ecological balance causing the extirpation/extinction of iconic animals. The tale includes the passenger pigeon (well known) and Carolina parakeets (lesser known but equally disturbing). The narrative is filled with anecdotes and written accounts which makes the story even more poignant. Justifying wanton slaughter defies how we think today.

For specifics which actually caused me to waiver between scoring a 4 or 5. I initially understood that the author's effort would cover more immediate post-Pleistocene human involvement. A few butchering sites are described, then the arrival of the Spanish. Secondly, the author provides explanations that seem to lack evidence. Page 234, Native Americans stole several dozen horses from the Spanish. Within 150 years, dozens of Indian tribes are relocating as horse-riding hunters of bison while giving up subsistent farming. Also, vast herds of wild horses are in competition for the same grass lengths as the bison.

A score of 5 is my grade. One example is John Gast's painting of American Progress as a subsection intro. I thought it was a powerful use of Americana. The second is John Cook's (pg 230) fabricated story of how a secret Federal effort was in place to encourage Americans to slaughter bison as a way to starve Native Americans into submission and their eventual move to reservations. The Texas legislature, a bending bill to protect bison populations, and a speaker (Philip Sheridan) are given to establish credibility. Unfortunately, no archival evidence is found, and Sheridan died several years prior. Like other more current conspiracies, lack of evidence was not an issue that prevented its repeated use.

Offering a 4 out of hundreds of gleanings from the book only illustrates the array of information a reader is exposed to in the book. The tragic story of our abuse of this land, native peoples, and the ecological balance is comprised of facts. This a story that is well written and deserving of praise for the work and its author.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woo hoo! After starting this book over 4 months ago, I've finally finished. I picked it due to randomly opening the Salt Lake County Library app during the time when this book was offered as a free, no wait, download as part of the Big Library Read program. (By the way--I just now realized that they do this three times a year. I had no idea.) It’s non-fiction and although it's very readable, it's also a bit dense of a topic, so it took me forever to finish. I just wasn't always in the mood to read for hours on end about wildlife history. Then, the program ended before I finished the book, so my loan expired and there was a very long waitlist. I ended up re-checking the book out two more times, with weeks long waits in between, before I could get through it.

That said, I kept with it because the book is factually extremely interesting, I just had to be in an intellectual frame of mind to want to read it. I have accumulated a bunch of little factoids that I've been sharing with my husband, so that's fun.

The book is really epic. I'm really impressed by the scope of the author's work and would give him big kudos on this. It doesn't relay every single fact or story possible, but as a collective, he presents a really beautiful semi-comprehensive picture of the overarching story he was trying to tell. Some have downgraded their reviews due to the author's insertions of his angry opinions of human actions like market hunting, for instance. But for whatever reason, that didn't bother me.

One of the more particularly noteworthy things about my response to this book was not just the facts it taught me, but the paradigm shifts it gave me in a few ways. Number one, I got a different perspective on the relationship that Native Americans had with animals. We tend to have this vision of Natives being at complete harmony with nature and animals, and while that is mostly true and certainly more true than how white people interacted with nature, it's not really the whole story. Native people are humans with the same human instincts as any other human on the planet.

What I learned is that Natives had profound impacts on animals as well. Ancient/prehistoric humans had really significant impacts on many animals that ultimately became extinct before Europeans met, for the first time, with the more "modern" Natives living in this country. And even then, the author notes that it was well known that from the 1600s through the 1800s, "wild animals grew rare in close proximity to Native villages." William Clark of Lewis and Clark noted that "a consistent theme in their travels was that wildlife was always more abundant distant from Indian villages."

The author also calls the idea of America being "virgin" was a bit of a myth, at least in regards to the fact that with the presence of Europeans came an enormous kill off of approximately 56 million people, which in turn resulted in a temporary cooling of the atmosphere (fewer fires) and an explosion of wildlife due to the reduction in Native hunters. Europeans were left with the impression of an America that was only really that way because of the "Great Dying" of Natives. I found these ideas really interesting.

Another interesting concept woven throughout the book is the way Americans (European Americans at least) have such strong roots of freedom and divine superiority that it greatly shaped the way we interacted with wildlife, and still does to this day. He creates a historical link starting from Aristotle and his concept of the Great Chain of Being, where life occupied descending links in a great chain, with a deity and angels above, and lower life forms at the bottom, but with humans being at least the top of the terrestrial beings.

Next is the Judeo-Christian concept of divine creation and "constant biology," wherein a divinity created everything all at once, exactly as it is, in their proper place, and that most things are here for potential use for humans. Additionally, the concept of the soul inherently divided us from the animals (and thus Darwin's theories were and are derided for taking away our soul and superiority, making us animals).

Next is the fact that many European settlers in America came from a feudal system where the King owned everything, and hunting the King's wildlife without permission was illegal. The idea of being able to hunt as much as one wants with no government or king to stop you was seen as almost a sacred freedom in America. Any attempts to curb out of control animal killing were severely fought against, and the first game wardens in this country often ended up mysteriously disappearing.

Another link in our historical paradigm regarding wildlife is our desire to continue "Old World" practices in regards to predators, namely, the wolf. The Big Bad Wolf from fairy tales is such an ingrained archetype in our psyches, and it was and still is hard for Americans to overcome that bias.

Despite the author's absolute derision of humanity's actions in the central part of the book, he actually ends with some positive thoughts as well. He lauds the shift that humans took in the last century towards conservation and preservation of species. He's right in describing this as a monumental shift in action, almost against our very human nature, and thus a revolutionary act. He shares how utterly lucky it is that circumstances were just right for the Nixon administration to support the enactment of environmental laws like the creation of the EPA and the Endangered Species Act. Even 10 years later and the Republican party would have never taken actions so adverse to business interests. And ever since, there has been a tug and pull in regards to how much progress we're willing to make. But still--the success we have had is noteworthy.

The author's concluding advice or "prescription" as he puts it is to "know the heaven and earth that was, but experience the world that is." Enjoy what we have, now, while also being aware of what has been lost. He makes a really good point that the wild world we know now feels "normal" because it's all we've ever known. We can only imagine what it would be like to experience a sky filled with billions of passenger pigeons making formations in the sky for days on end. The bird songs and beaver tail slappings that would be so familiar to one resident in history are so unknown to us now that we don't even know what we're missing. At some point, the changes become "normal." It's good to know where we've come from and what we can't experience, but don't forget to enjoy the world that we do have, right now.

[Philip McCarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I went into this, I wasn't ready for the emotional rollercoaster I was stepping into. Following the greater strokes of humanity and animals in what is now called the United States, this book takes you from the creation of a hugely biodiverse and balanced world to one in which humans ruthlessly slaughtered millions of animals for their own design. It's a frustrating, upsetting, and angering thing to read about what was done to the animals of the country. Such magnificent creatures we may never see again, lost to what we did. But thankfully the book is not all doom and gloom and is speckled with personal experiences of wonder that the author has had in our current era. And the work that has been done in just the last 100 years to remedy the past actions taken is surprising uplifting. I found this book to be highly readable and well written without ever getting to bogged down by specific scientific terms. Also, a quote I found to be worth ruminating on is, "Know the heaven and the earth that was, but experience the world that is."