Overview
- A timely and much-needed contribution to the ongoing and passionate debate about the importance of wild places
- Includes chapters by luminaries in the fields of ecology and conservation
- Edited by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, a mission-driven organization that works across platforms to advocate for wild nature
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Table of contents (20 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Against Domestication
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Front Matter
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The Value of the Wild
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Front Matter
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Keywords
About this book
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.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
George Wuerthner is the ecological projects director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, where he does research and writes about environmental issues. For many years he was a full-time freelance photographer and writer and has published thirty-five books on natural history, conservation history, ecology, and environmental issues.
Eileen Crist teaches at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society, where she is advisor for the undergraduate program Humanities, Science, and Environment. She is author of Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind and coeditor of Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis.
Tom Butler, a Vermont-based conservation activist and writer, is the board president of the Northeast Wilderness Trust and the former longtime editor of Wild Earth journal. His books include Wildlands Philanthropy, Plundering Appalachia, and ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Keeping the Wild
Book Subtitle: Against the Domestication of Earth
Editors: George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, Tom Butler
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-559-5
Publisher: Island Press Washington, DC
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental Science, Earth and Environmental Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Foundation for Deep Ecology 2014
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61091-559-5Published: 17 May 2014
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 272
Topics: Nature Conservation, Animal Ecology, Ecology