On Extinction
How We Became Estranged from Nature
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning poet Challenger (Galatea) imbues this ambitious meditation with the courage of an explorer, the scientific curiosity of a botanist and a geologist, the excited digging of an archeologist, the compassion of a cultural anthropologist, the long reach of a historian, and the urgent concern of an environmentalist. She travels from a writer's solitary cabin on the Ding Dong Moor, close by the ruins of a tin mine in Cornwall, England, to a journey to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, back to the North Yorkshire town of Whitby, and on to the tundra of the Arctic where the language and culture of the Inuit barely survive. Eventually Challenger comes to rest in a narrowboat on the River Cam in Cambridgeshire. At every stop in her "peregrination," she muses on evolutionary changes marked by extinctions past and present. The chief culprit of our "estrangement from nature" in the 20th century is, for her, "the urge to fuse humans and technology." Throughout this beautifully written, moving, and important book, Challenger yearns to find that feeling of belonging to a particular place. Her connection, one comes to feel, is to the past and present of our whole precarious planet.
