Wild New World by Dan Flores

/

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America
By Dan Flores
W. W. Norton 2022

At a few points in his gloriously sobering new book Wide New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America, Dan Flores makes offhand mention of the staggering breadth of the natural world he’s discussing. Even a partial listing is staggering the more you think about it: “Woolly mammoths, Columbian mammoths, flightless sea ducks, great auks, heath hens, bison, pronghorns, beavers, sea otters, fur seals, bald eagles, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, snowy egrets, trumpeter swans, peregrine falcons, California condors. Jaguars, cougars, alligators, rattlesnakes, gray wolves, red wolves, Mexican wolves, eastern wolves, grizzly bears, wild horses, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, coyotes, spotted owls, and ivory-billed woodpeckers” – and on and on. The “sobering” part derives from how many species on even that abbreviated list are now extinct – and why.

Flores is a judicious and even-handed writer, and Wild New World provides readers with a sweeping and nuanced look at Pleistocene America, its vast array of animal species, its climatic conditions, and especially its ancient groups of humans. This is a pleasingly complex account, but even so, neither Flores nor his readers can avoid the grim numbers involved:

According to a 2018 National Academy of Sciences study, as our predatory genus Homo spread across the planet, Earth lost roughly three hundred mammal species, sacrificing more than two and a half billion years of unique evolutionary history. The migrations that ultimately led us to America during the Pleistocene erased a shocking two billion years of evolved mammalian genetic diversity. Across the past five hundred years human-caused extinctions have cost Earth another half-million years of cumulative genetics. 

Climate and habitat changes obviously play important roles in the sprawling story Flores tells, but at its heart, as he puts it somewhat oddly, this a tale of “a love affair gone bad” between the whole of the ancient American natural world and one single species. The passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the American wolf, the ivory-billed woodpecker … these and hundreds of other American species were exterminated by humans. The buffalo, the condor, at one point the beaver, and hundreds of others were nearly exterminated and only brought back from the brink by the actions of humans. This is the story of what humans have done to a virgin biosphere.

Have done – and are still doing, as is sketched in harrowing detail in the book’s remarkable final chapter, “How Are You Enjoying the Anthropocene?” Here Flores reprises many of the central contentions from the bulk of his book, mapping them onto the present moment. Flores is a wise writer, disarmingly keen-eyed even when surveying repulsive things (his book Coyote America has such long dark passages that a less resilient author would have abandoned the craft altogether), and his diagnosis of the state of the Anthropocene draws direct connections with how the world got to where it is:

We’ve thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America. 

Wild New World is full of wonders, even so; Flores does a consistently marvelous job conveying both the variety of that lost world and the interesting details of the various human populations and what we can know about them from their archeological remains. This is a much wider canvas than Coyote America, confidently handled. And after all, it’s not the author’s fault that he’s writing an elegy.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.