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The End of the Wild (Boston Review Books)
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About The End Of The Wild
From Booklist Meyer presents a to-the-point, X-ray-explicit diagnosis of the state of the biosphere, and the prognosis is not good. So pervasive is humankind, he argues, instead of natural selection we now have human selection. Other species must adapt to our climate-changing presence, as have the common rat and the white-tailed deer, or face extinction. Hundreds of thousands of organisms, including such splendid animals as the African elephant and the giant panda, have become "relic species" as they struggle to maintain their foothold in environments radically altered by human development. The species we choose to protect for economic or aesthetic reasons are relegated to "boutique populations" in bioreserves, which are, in truth, the "-antithesis of the wild." Meyer outlines the human-spun "web of threats" to biodiversity and warns not of an end of life but of biodiversity, resulting in "a peculiarly homogenized assemblage" of human-adapted organisms. Brisk and shocking, Meyer's grim vision is a snap to attention. We must acquire an ecological perspective if we hope to save any remnant of life's many--splendored bounty. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Product Description A wake-up call that argues that although it may be too late to save biodiversity, we can take steps to save our ecosystems. With the extinction rate at 3000 species a year and accelerating, we can now predict that as many as half of the Earth's species will disappear within the next 100 years. The species that survive will be the ones that are most compatible with us: the weedy species―from mosquitoes to coyotes―that thrive in continually disturbed human-dominated environments. The End of the Wild is a wake-up call. Marshaling evidence from the last ten years of research on the environment, Stephen Meyer argues that nothing―not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, or "wildlands"―will change the course that has been set. Like it or not, we can no longer talk about conserving nature, only managing what is left. The race to save biodiversity is over. But that doesn't mean our work is over. The End of the Wild is also a call to action. Without intervention, the surviving ecosystems we depend on for a range of services―including water purification and flood and storm damage contro―could fail and the global spread of invasive species (pests, parasites, and disease-causing weedy species) could explode. If humanity is to survive, Meyer argues, we have no choice but to try to manage the fine details. We must move away from the current haphazard strategy of protecting species in isolation and create trans-regional "meta-reserves," designed to protect ecosystem functions rather than species-specific habitats. Review Meyer blends factual evidence with expressive prowess in such a way that his ideas cannot fail to make an impression. He offers enlightening illustrations and presents his argument with extraordinary clarity.―Rebecca S. Bundhun, New Statesman This book is an exemplar of clear, structured polemical writing, a 10,000-word essay in which each word serves a purpose. In just 97 quarto-sized pages, Meyer offers a more powerful and convincing dissection of the human predicament in relations to biodiversity than most full-length academic books.―Mike Hulme , Times Higher Education Supplement Review Stephen Meyer's The End of the Wild places the wilderness, and its destruction, at the heart of the human enterprise. Industrial society has defined human progress on the basis of how much nature we can colonize, how many resources we can waste, how much wilderness we can erase or tame. We need to change our ideas of human progress and measure our humanity in terms of how many species flourish with us. We are just one member of the Earth Family, and Meyer's important book is a stark reminder of how badly we have behaved towards our kin and how urgent it is that we change.―Vand
