Second Nature
Scenes from a World Remade
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Losing Earth, a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world that points the way to a new mode of ecological writing.
We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity's clumsy signature. The old distinctions—between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact—have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation.
In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories—obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported—point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.
From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost?It is, What world do we want to create in its place?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Humans have irrevocably altered nature, warns New York Times Magazine writer-at-large Rich (Losing Earth) in this vividly reported survey. The challenge now, he writes, is to harness those changes and conserve the parts of nature that are "beautiful and free and sacred, those that we want to carry with us into the future." Rich tells the story of Robert Bilott, a lawyer who defended chemical companies until he took the case of a cattle farmer whose herd was dying because of pollution runoff from a DuPont landfill; Nate Park, whose work creating plant-based meat is a source of pride and bafflement for his butcher father; and Shin Kubota, a Japanese scientist who believes a jellyfish called Turritopsis, about which he writes rhapsodic songs, holds the key to immortality. These profiles highlight "people who ask difficult questions about what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility" as humans' impact on the natural world evolves. Rich suggests, "It is impossible to protect all that we mean by ‘natural' against the ravages of climate change, pollution, and psychopathic corporate greed, unless we understand that the nature we fear losing is our own." Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich's study is packed with moving insight.
