Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
- Sep 3, 2021
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
I first learned about Jon Mooallem and Wild Ones from the podcast 99% Invisible. Host Roman Mars had seen Mooallem performing some of the stories from the book with live accompaniment from the band Black Prairie and asked if he could share it with his audience. It’s still one of my favorite 99pi episodes, and so I was thrilled when I happened upon a used hardcover copy in a shop in Grand Marais, Minnesota while vacationing on the North Shore of Lake Superior last November. It was only appropriate that I should bring it along on our next vacation, nearly a year later, this time in a cabin at 9,100 feet about 20 minutes west of Idaho Springs, Colorado.
Mooallem, writing not as an environmentalist or conservationist but merely as a deeply inquisitive father (and journalist) trying to make sense of the natural world we’ve created (and which his young daughter will inherit), has written, despite the often dim and gloomy subject matter, an effortless, infectious, and, shockingly, buoyant read. This is, after all, a look at three on-the-brink species and the efforts—sometimes Herculean, sometimes questionable, sometimes futile, sometimes maddening—people take in service of their goals.
It’s clear Mooallem doesn’t have an agenda, he’s not jaded or bitter or embattled, he doesn’t have anything to prove or disprove. No, he’s led by curiosity and that curiosity is infectious, resulting in perhaps one of the most exceedingly readable books about conservation (that’s not really about conservation at all). Rather, Wild Ones explores our relationship with the natural world; the ways in which we have, for better and worse, shaped it and continue to shape it; how much of what we choose to do and not do has effectively created a curated planet, a global zoo with invisible fences; and how, either because of or in spite of ourselves, we have determined the winners and losers—which species will likely die and which ones might yet live.
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