About this item
An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet.The news about wildlife is dire - more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles.
About the Author
Christopher James Preston lives and writes in Missoula, MT where he teaches environmental philosophy at the university. A native of England - who has studied and worked in Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Washington DC, and South Carolina - his life in the US is oriented in many ways around the power of wild landscapes. In addition to being a professor, he has worked as a commercial fisherman, a tool librarian, and a backcountry Park Service Ranger. His first book, Grounding Knowledge, is a philosophical exploration of the power of place. His second, Saving Creation, is a biography of Holmes Rolston III, the "father of environmental ethics." His 2018 title, The Synthetic Age, is the most hard-hitting and political of his works. It catalogues the ways that scientists and entrepreneurs are using powerful emerging technologies to replace nature with an artificial world. From atom to atmosphere, he shows how the public is sleep-walking into a synthetic age.In the academic arena, Preston has published extensively on climate engineering, synthetic biology, and the new epoch of the Anthropocene. He edited the first collection of essays on the ethics of solar radiation management as a response to climate change in 2012. Four years later, he published another edited collection on climate engineering titled Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene. To recharge his batteries, he is a mountain biker and a skier.
