20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The "Sand County Almanac" of our time!, March 7, 2005
This review is from: Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century (Paperback)
Nearly 60 years ago, Aldo Leopold gave the world a treasure: his "Sand County Almanac". "Rewilding North America" is the Sand County Almanac of our time, in eloquence as well as vision. Dave Foreman, who raised the conservation bar so shockingly (and successfully) with "Earth First!" 25 years ago, has now become an elder, a respected colleague of the leading lights in conservation biology, while carrying on his legacy of showing the rest of us new possibities for bolder and more biocentric paths of ethics and action.
"Rewilding North America" is THE environmental vision for this era and for this continent. The book begins with the most succinct and heart-stoppingly depressing summary of the bad news of biodiversity and ecological losses that I have yet encountered. But hang in there, because Foreman then masterfully unfolds a program of possibility that is both radical and realistic -- and inspirational beyond measure!
As we biodiversity and wilderness advocates continue the important work in the paradigm of preservation (that is, saving all the pieces we can against the onslaught of vapid consumerism), we can also begin to take the exciting first steps in a new form of ecological restoration. Dave's "rewilding" proposal is long-term in both directions: He considers a baseline for rewilding that goes back 13,000 years to just before the first humans arrived in North America, while setting forth a vision that is intended -- dare I say, destined -- to grow over this century and the next. That means we don't just stop at bringing back Wolf and Griz; we also start plotting paths for repatriating Cheetah to its continent of origin, and assisting Order Proboscidea in once again leisurely reshaping the tusked behemoths of the Old World into New World natives.
Onward with the Great Work!
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Saving the world, one continent at a time, June 9, 2008
This review is from: Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century (Paperback)
I'm often frustrated by books on "the environment," much of which talk about pollution, toxic chemicals, recycling and related topics. Those strike me as questions of human health and safety - - these issues don't really value the environment for itself, but only in terms of whether or not humans are fouling our nest.
This book lays out a different vision, one much closer to the kind of manifesto that I've been looking for. Foreman wants to "rewild" large chunks of land in North America. Some of these lands will be strictly preserved, such as wildernesses and national parks, but much of the action takes place in buffer zones, corridors between preserved areas, and thinking about how to make the human-occupied matrix more friendly to nature.
Foreman wants to create four "Continental MegaLinkages," which would preserve a network of preserved lands. The MegaLinkages are breathtaking: the Pacific MegaLinkage (Baja to Alaska); the Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage (Central America to Alaska through the Rockies); the Atlantic MegaLinkage (Florida through the Appalachian Mountains to New Brunswick); and the Arctic-Boreal MegaLinkage (from Alaska across Canada to the Maritimes).
Did you notice that the prairies of the United States and Canada are completely left out? Neither did Foreman. He never discusses them. That was my biggest single disappointment of the book, and it cost him that fifth star.
To make his argument, Foreman talks about how humans have caused extinctions from the Stone Age until the present - - 40,000 years of environmental destruction. Then he talks about the core ideas of conservation biology to set the stage for his proposed MegaLinkages. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of cores, corridors and carnivores.
Both the extinctions chapters and the presentation of conservation biology are well-written and clear. If you're not familiar with these ideas, this is a good place to get an introduction.
Then Foreman descends to the nitty-gritty details about how activists can survey a region and put together proposals for preserved lands and linkages between them. These chapters draw heavily on his own experience in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico. It's not obvious to me that they translate well to, say, boreal Canada - - or to the prairies. A greater diversity of examples would help him here.
Objections aside, this is an impressive and impassioned manifesto. Foreman makes a convincing case that we need to think about how to preserve a lot of lands on a very large scale. There are other books making similar cases, and I've reviewed a few others on Amazon, but this one is the best for the general reader.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bring on the predators -- a real vision for a renewed America, March 11, 2008
This review is from: Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century (Paperback)
Dave Foreman (of Earth First!) has written a powerful manifesto for the recovery of American wild space. What is so refreshing about his approach is that, like Leopold and Thoreau before him, he recognizes that the real problem for an environmentalist who values wilderness is not how to preserve pockets of wilderness against human activity, but how to reintegrate wilderness back into our lives and habitations. One reason for this is that pockets of wilderness are unsustainable --to flourish they need to be large enough to sustain populations of large predators and that requires much more space than we currently allot to our wildlife preserves, and even this amount of space is constantly under threat. The solution is to allow for corridors that connect wild spaces, and Foreman shows how this can be done and is already being done in certain parts of North America. Another reason is that in the long run to survive as a species we are going to have to move away from the fuel intensive and non-localized approaches to economy that have been largely responsible for the decimation of vast chunks of land. Finally, he argues that there is something about wilderness that is essential to our humanity, and that the presence of vital natural areas and even of large predators closer to home is an important factor in fostering the humility in the face of nature that we are going to need to rediscover if we are to learn to live sustainably. In some ways this all might seem like a utopian project, but what is powerful about the book is how elaborately it lays out the details of how such a project can be accomplished, and how it explains the conservation science at the root of this project, and identifies the networks of organizations already working with these concerns. The point is not utopia -- literally a non-place -- but learning how to get back into place as a culture. I don't know if his vision can be put into practice but I like the vision -- and find it much more exciting and realistic and motivating than, say, the vision of conquering space and going to Mars. I also think his vision of a recovered American wildness is compatible with and complementary to visions of a green economy. This is the kind of visionary book that young politicians and activists should be reading today.
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