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

by MR J B MacKinnon

"An award-winning ecology writer goes looking for the wilderness we've forgotten. Many people believe that only an ecological catastrophe will change humanity's troubled relationship with the natural world. In fact, as J.B. MacKinnon argues in this unorthodox look at the disappearing wilderness, we are living in the midst of a disaster thousands of years in the making--and we hardly notice it. We have forgotten what nature can be and adapted to a diminished world of our own making. In The Once and Future World, MacKinnon invites us to remember nature as it was, to reconnect to nature in a meaningful way, and to remake a wilder world everywhere. He goes looking for landscapes untouched by human hands. He revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and ten times more whales swim in the sea. He shows us that the vestiges of lost nature surround us every day: buy an avocado at the grocery store and you have a seed designed to pass through the digestive tracts of huge animals that have been driven extinct. The Once and Future World is a call for an "age of rewilding," from planting milkweed for butterflies in our own backyards to restoring animal migration routes that span entire continents. We choose the natural world that we live in--a choice that also decides the kind of people we are"--

• ISBN10: 054410305X
• ISBN13: 9780544103054
• Publish Date: 24 September 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 21 April 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Houghton Mifflin
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[Beth C.]

Realistically, I *know* that we have changed our world. Animals are dying/becoming extinct at an ever-increasing pace, global warming is drastically changing what we have come to know as the norm...and I have often wondered how so many people can be so blind to the reality that is out there. In this book, we have the answer.

I find it both reassuring and terribly frightening that people can be so blind to their past, and willing to continue being blind, that there is actually a name for it. The idea that humans get used to the status quo, but then their descendents get used to a different (and often lesser) one, explains so much of the denial of reality of so many.

'The Once and Future World' is a great read, maybe even a must-read for many. It's written in clear language, and it's an interesting look into the very human nature that can both destroy and save the planet as we know it. We all have a choice to know our past in order to save the future - will you take up that challenge?
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