Keeping the Wild
Subtitle: Against the Domestication of Earth
By: edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, Tom Butler
Contributors: Butler, Tom, editor; Crist, Eileen, editor
Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics; Imprint: Island Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Washington, DC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781610915595; 9781597264488
Subjects: Ecology; Animal ecology; Nature conservation; Euthenics; Nature and nurture; Adaptation (Biology); Environmental sciences; Nature Conservation
Description: Is it time to embrace the so-called “Anthropocene”—the age of human dominion—and to abandon tried-and-true conservation tools such as parks and wilderness areas? Is the future of Earth to be fully domesticated, an engineered global garden managed by technocrats to serve humanity? The schism between advocates of rewilding and those who accept and even celebrate a “post-wild” world is arguably the hottest intellectual battle in contemporary conservation. In Keeping the Wild, a group of prominent scientists, writers, and conservation activists responds to the Anthropocene-boosters who claim that wild nature is no more (or in any case not much worth caring about), that human-caused extinction is acceptable, and that “novel ecosystems” are an adequate replacement for natural landscapes. With rhetorical fists swinging, the book’s contributors argue that these “new environmentalists” embody the hubris of the managerial mindset and offer a conservation strategy that will fail to protect life in all its buzzing, blossoming diversity. With essays from Eileen Crist, David Ehrenfeld, Dave Foreman, Lisi Krall, Harvey Locke, Curt Meine, Kathleen Dean Moore, Michael Soulé, Terry Tempest Williams and other leading thinkers, Keeping the Wild provides an introduction to this important debate, a critique of the Anthropocene boosters’ attack on traditional conservation, and unapologetic advocacy for wild nature.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Lives Not Our Own; title: 1. Rise of the Neo-greens; title: 2. The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness; title: 3. Ptolemaic Environmentalism; title: 4. With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies; title: 5. What’s So New about the “New Conservation”?; title: 6. Conservation in No-Man’s-Land; title: 7. The “New Conservation”; title: 8. The Fable of Managed Earth; title: 9. Conservation in the Anthropocene; title: 10. The Myth of the Humanized Pre-Columbian Landscape; title: 11. The Future of Conservation: An Australian Perspective; title: 12. Expanding Parks, Reducing Human Numbers, and Preserving All the Wild Nature We Can: A Superior Alternative to Embracing the Anthropocene Era; title: 13. Green Postmodernism and the Attempted Highjacking of Conservation; title: 14. Why the Working Landscape Isn’t Working; title: 15. Valuing Naturalness in the “Anthropocene”: Now More than Ever; title: 16. Wild World; title: 17. Living Beauty; title: 18. Wilderness: What and Why?; title: 19. Resistance. 20. An Open Letter to Major John Wesley Powell; title: Epilogue: The Road to Cape Perpetua; title: Acknowledgments; title: Contributors; title: Notes; title: Index.