London Bertoch’s Reviews > The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species > Status Update

Humans, well-fed and fecund with the products of their agricultural evolution, began converting the great forests of Europe into farmsteads… And what of the wild aurochs? Deity of the Pleistocene, majestic urus of the Romans, it could only retreat to the shadows as its dull-witted progeny, harnessed to wagon and plow, helped their masters shred the wild landscape on which the last of the ice age bulls depended.

"Britain has been shorn of its big predators for centuries. The last lynx died out before the Romans, the last brown bears in the 10th century, and the last wolf was run down in the Scottish Highlands in the 1740s. It is hard to see a red fox or a badger as the heirs to wilderness; they are beautiful, but they cannot fill the empty space in the land or in a human heart."

“our species is, at long last, coming to grips with the consequences of its actions—scrambling in the embers of a global biological holocaust, hoping against hope to save something priceless”