Once, though, I spoke to a mother and a daughter who had lived almost thirty years in grizzly country. The daughter had been raised there, a twelve-hour drive from the nearest major city, and I asked her what it was like to grow up where grizzly bears roam. It was like asking a child of the city what it was like to grow up among all those cars. She couldn’t make sense of the question—couldn’t parse into threads the whole she had always known. It was the pattern of ecological amnesia thrown into reverse: we are always only a single generation away from a new sense of what is normal.
Then I spoke to that woman’s mother. Her name was Sally, and she had not grown up with grizzly bears. She was fully an adult when she and her husband left New Mexico with that common but usually fleeting longing to live somewhere truly wild. Their search took them across America and finally into Canada, and even then they kept moving north. At last they discovered the Tatlayoko Valley on the remote Chilcotin Plateau of British Columbia, with the glacier-smoothed hummocks of the Potato Range on one side, ragged peaks on the other, and the cool eye of a frigid lake in between. Tatlayoko sits exactly at the line where coastal weather fades into the lee side of the mountains, and it does not always agree to go quietly. There are clear-sky days when wind will rage down onto the water, shatter the surface into droplets, and carry them up the valley as a sheet of instant rain.
Sally had told me a story that I only fully came to appreciate as I stood on the Yellowstone grasslands. It isn’t easy to adapt to a life in the wild, she said, especially as an adult. You have to learn your way in. Twice she had close calls. The first time, she startled a grizzly and, reacting without thought, she turned to run. Wrong move. It chased after her, a nightmare that ended only when her little dog, adopted from the streets of the nearest town, burst out of the brush to bite the bear on the nose. The second time, she surprised a sow grizzly and its cubs. Again the bear charged, but this time Sally stood her ground. The animal stopped only inches away, the cubs bawling around its feet. When it roared, Sally could feel the vibration pass through her stomach, through her bones. Then it swiped once with a paw, slicing through two layers of clothing and the skin of Sally’s thumb. With that, the mother bear’s fury drained away. The grizzly ambled off; the scales of life and death tilted back into balance; the crawl of time returned to its regularly scheduled programming.
“It was really a highly spiritual experience for me,” Sally said. She shared this revelation cautiously, aware that it would be hard to understand. But in those terrible instants, she said, she realized that the bear was only doing what it must, and so was she, and so, too, were even the meadow grasses and the trees, the earth and the sky, all of it blurred into a pattern too infinite and ancient to explain. At last, Sally found the words for the feeling: “It was just like coming home.”
* For comparison, people in Canada and the United States are 60,000 times more likely to die in an automobile accident.
Selected Bibliography
Taken together, the following sources can be considered this book’s compass. For complete notes and citations, visit jbmackinnon.com.
1. ILLUSIONS OF NATURE
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Marsh, George P. Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. New York: Charles Scribner, 1865.
Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
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2. KNOWLEDGE EXTINCTION
Assmann, A. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 261–73.
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Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001.
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Kahn, Peter H., and Batya Friedman. “Environmental Views and Values of Children in an Inner-City Black Community.” Child Development 66, no. 5 (October 1995): 1403–17.
McClenachan, Loren. “Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs.” Conservation Biology 23, no. 3 (June 2009): 636–43.
Paddle, Robert. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Papworth, S. K., J. Rist, L. Coad, and E. J. Milner-Gulland. “Evidence for Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Conservation.” Conservation Letters, April 2009.
Pauly, Daniel. “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10, no. 10 (October 10, 1995): 430.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Saenz-Arroyo, A., C. Roberts, J. Torre, M. Carino-Olvera, and R. Enriquez-Andrade. “Rapidly Shifting Environmental Baselines among Fishers of the Gulf of California.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 272, no. 1575 (September 22, 2005): 1957–62.
3. A TEN PERCENT WORLD
Carlton, James T. “Apostrophe to the Ocean.” Conservation Biology 12, no. 6 (December 1998): 1165–67.
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Lotze, Heike K., and Boris Worm. “Historical Baselines for Large Marine Animals.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, no. 5 (May 2009): 254–62.
McClenachan, Loren, Jeremy B. C. Jackson, and Marah J. H. Newman. “Conservation Implications of Historic Sea Turtle Nesting Beach Loss.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4, no. 6 (August 2006): 290–96.
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Mowat, Farley. Sea of Slaughter. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1984.
Myers, Norman. The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979.
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4. THE OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE
Barnosky, A. D. “Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents.” Science 306, no. 5693 (October 1, 2004): 70–75.
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Donlan, Josh. “Re-wilding North America.” Nature 436, no. 7053 (August 18, 2005): 913–14.
Kay, Charles, and Randy T. Simmons. Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original Stat
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Martin, Paul S., and Christine R. Szuter. “War Zones and Game Sinks in Lewis and Clark’s West.” Conservation Biology 13, no. 1 (February 1999): 36–45.
Rick, Torben C., and Jon Erlandson. Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Soulé, Michael, and Reed Noss. “Rewilding and Conservation: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation.” Wild Earth 8 (1998): 18–28.
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5. A BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Leopold, Aldo, and Charles Walsh Schwartz. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Viking Press, 1941.
Stutchbury, Bridget Joan. Silence of the Songbirds. New York: Walker & Co., 2007.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
6. GHOST ACRES
Barlow, Connie C. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Byers, John A. Built for Speed: A Year in the Life of Pronghorn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
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Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside. London: J.M. Dent, 1986.
Simmons, I. G. An Environmental History of Great Britain: From 10,000 Years Ago to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.
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7. UNCERTAIN NATURE
Bradshaw, G. A., Allan N. Schore, Janine L. Brown, Joyce H. Poole, and Cynthia J. Moss. “Elephant Breakdown.” Nature 433, no. 7028 (February 24, 2005): 807.
Dagg, Anne Innis. The Social Behavior of Older Animals. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Lotze, Heike K., Karsten Reise, Boris Worm, Justus Van Beusekom, Mette Busch, Anneli Ehlers, Dirk Heinrich, Richard C. Hoffmann, Poul Holm, Charlotte Jensen, Otto S. Knottnerus, Nicole Langhanki, Wietske Prummel, Manfred Vollmer, and Wim J. Wolff. “Human Transformations of the Wadden Sea Ecosystem through Time: A Synthesis.” Helgoland Marine Research 59, no. 1 (April 2005).
Pauly, Daniel, Villy Christensen, Johanna Dalsgaard, Rainer Froese, and Francisco Torres, Jr. “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs.” Science 279, no. 5352 (February 6, 1998): 860–63.
Terborgh, John, and J. A. Estes. Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010.
8. WHAT NATURE LOOKS LIKE
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9. THE MAKER AND THE MADE
Chivian, Eric, and Aaron Bernstein. Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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10. THE AGE OF REWILDING
Campbell, Karl, and C. Josh Donlan. “Feral Goat Eradications on Islands.” Conservation Biology 19, no. 5 (October 2005): 1362–74.
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11. DOUBLE DISAPPEARANCE
Kirch, Patrick V. “Hawaii as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 1 (March 2007): 8–26.
Kittinger, John N., John M. Pandolfi, Jonathan H. Blodgett, Terry L. Hunt, Hong Jiang, Kepa Maly, Loren E. McClenachan, Jennifer K. Schultz, and Bruce A. Wilcox. “Historical Reconstruction Reveals Recovery in Hawaiian Coral Reefs.” Edited by Stuart A. Sandin. PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (October 3, 2011).
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12. THE LOST ISLAND
Hunt, Terry L., and Carl P. Lipo. The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. New York: Free Press, 2011.
Quammen, David. “Planet of Weeds: Tallying the Losses of Earth’s Animals and Plants.” Harper’s, October 1998, 57–69.
Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
EPILOGUE
Gailus, Jeff, and Phil Condon. Original Griz: The History and Future of the Great Plains Grizzly. Diss., University of Montana, 2007.
Glavin, Terry. Waiting for the Macaws: And Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006.
Livingston, John A. Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1994.
Acknowledgements
More people helped with or inspired aspects of this book than I can hope to thank in this space; most of their names appear in these pages or among the citations. If you happen to be one of them, please know that your contribution was deeply appreciated. Several people made efforts on my behalf that were truly decisive. Jennifer Jacquet frequently broke trail for me into the world of historical ecology, and once even gave me a bed to sleep in on the road. Some of this book’s material first appeared in articles for the magazines Explore, Orion and The Walrus, and also as a chapter in Applying Marine Historical Ecology to Conservation and Management (University of California Press, 2013); I’d like to acknowledge my respective editors James Little, Andrew Blechman and Jeremy Keehn, and for the U of C Press project, Jack Kittinger, Loren McClenachan, Keryn Gedan and Louise Blight. Anne McDermid, as always, believed in this book from the first. My editors Anne Collins and Co
urtney Young inspired critical improvements. As always, Alisa Smith walked with me every step of a journey that passed at times through the shadows. I really never can thank her enough.
J.B. MACKINNON has won numerous national and international awards for journalism. As the originator of the 100-mile diet concept, he appears regularly in Canada and the U.S. as a speaker and commentator on the ecology of food. His book The 100-Mile Diet, co-authored with Alisa Smith, was a national bestseller and inspired a TV series in which the small town of Mission, B.C., learned to eat locally. He was also the co-author, with Mia Kirshner and artists Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, of I Live Here, a groundbreaking “paper documentary” about displaced people that made top ten lists in media as diverse as the Bloomsbury Literary Review and Comic Book Resources, as well as becoming a Los Angeles Times bestseller. His first book, Dead Man in Paradise, in which he investigated the assassination of his uncle, a radical priest in the Dominican Republic, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
The Once and Future World Page 21