On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature

by Melanie Challenger

Overview

Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640094635
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Melanie Challenger is the author of Galatea, an award-winning first collection of poems, and co-author, with Zlata Filipovic, of Stolen Voices, a history of twentieth-century conflict compiled through war diaries. She has received a British Council Darwin Award for her work. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition: The Rebellion Against Extinction xi

List of Illustrations xxvii

Beginnings: Natural History Museum, London 1

The First Peregrination: West Penwith, Cornwall 15

1 Wild flowers 17

2 Tin 55

3 Ghosts 77

The Second Peregrination: South Georgia, Antarctica and the Falkland Islands 99

4 Whales 101

5 Ice 135

6 Savages 180

The Third Peregrination: North Yorkshire, Manhattan Island and Baffin Island 213

7 Bones 215

8 Tundra 245

Endings: Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire 288

Notes 315

Acknowledgements 327

Illustrations Acknowledgements 331

Editorial Reviews

"On Extinction is a strange hybrid of travelogue and natural science, misted over with a wanderer's lonesome observations of a world in the process of disappearing . . . Amid this solid research, there is fine and truly poetic prose." —The New York Times Book Review

"A deep look at the human capacity for extinction twined with roamings to the far ends of the earth, from poet and fledgling natural historian Challenger . . . She has a rangy curiosity that extends well past ignorance and alienation as the sole agents of the man-made extinction . . . A formidable inquiry into why the marvels of nature and the distinctiveness of cultures are constantly imperiled."—Kirkus Reviews

"Erudite and impassioned, Melanie Challenger's On Extinction is a ruminative examination on the way our 21st century world is changing quickly . . . A timely and important book, On Extinction will make you think, one of the finest things a book can do." —The Dallas Morning News

"[Challenger] has a keen awareness of how the past is layered beneath the present, and how transient both natural and human systems are... [On Extinction] lets the reader observe a creative and intelligent mind at work on problems that face all of us." —Columbus Dispatch

From the Publisher

A deep look at the human capacity for extinction twined with roamings to the far ends of the earth, from poet and fledgling natural historian Challenger (Galatea, 2006, etc.). Spurred by her lack of belonging to a particular place and her sense of alarm over her ignorance of the natural world, the author struck out to investigate how such a mindset could lead to extinction of both creatures and cultures. She has a rangy curiosity that extends well past ignorance and alienation as the sole agents of the man-made extinction. As she travels from abandoned whaling stations on South Georgia Island to the wildness of Bird Island to the fraught lifestyle changes afoot in Nunavut, she examines such ideas as nostalgia being a trigger for extinction; the effects of a Hobbesian industry of survival; a grief-stricken burying of the past in a headlong rush that devastates nature; the notion, from early Christianity to Locke, of dominion; the rise of industrialization and globalization, in the process squashing the intimate and particular relationship with a place, that feeling of safety and confederacy with the land. She faces the elemental question of exactly what is natural, when all is in flux to the turbulent, indefatigable forces of change. What rises so pungently from her travels and ruminations are the vanishing cultures, the ways of life that capture the idiosyncrasy of place, how "[t]his move from distinctive cultural knowledge born of the varied attributes of landscapes to the universal cultural knowledge of technologies available worldwide is akin to the disappearance of diversity in nature." A formidable inquiry into why the marvels of nature and the distinctiveness of cultures are constantly imperiled.

Kirkus Reviews