What is J.B. MacKinnon reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be.

His entry begins:

First I have to define reading. On my desk right now for urgent consumption are books like California Condors in the Pacific Northwest, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, and the 1955 classic Birds and Animals of the Rockies, which brims with that decade’s pop-o-matic rhythms: “He is no fish hog, Rattles of the huge top-notch. He catches only what he can use for food, which is the sanest bag-limit ever devised. A sportsman to the core, the Belted Kingfisher is always a most enjoyable companion at the Old Fishing Hole.”

These are the books I read in order to write about historical ecology, or what I’ve come to think of simply as “the history of nature.” It’s often a pleasure, but it isn’t “pleasure reading,” and at the end of the day I seek relief in books where the human relationship to nature is explored only obliquely (it’s always present, of course).

I always have at least two such books on the go. Right now, I’m reading The Orenda, Joseph Boyden’s new novel about the intertwined stories of 17th century European missionaries and aboriginal people in what is now the province of Ontario. The experience reminds me of when I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: there are times when...[read on]

About The Once and Future World, from the publisher:

An award-winning ecology writer goes looking for the wilderness we’ve forgotten

Many people believe that only an ecological catastrophe will change humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world. In fact, as J.B. MacKinnon argues in this unorthodox look at the disappearing wilderness, we are living in the midst of a disaster thousands of years in the making—and we hardly notice it. We have forgotten what nature can be and adapted to a diminished world of our own making.

In The Once and Future World, MacKinnon invites us to remember nature as it was, to reconnect to nature in a meaningful way, and to remake a wilder world everywhere. He goes looking for landscapes untouched by human hands. He revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and ten times more whales swim in the sea. He shows us that the vestiges of lost nature surround us every day: buy an avocado at the grocery store and you have a seed designed to pass through the digestive tracts of huge animals that have been driven extinct.

The Once and Future World is a call for an “age of rewilding,” from planting milkweed for butterflies in our own backyards to restoring animal migration routes that span entire continents. We choose the natural world that we live in—a choice that also decides the kind of people we are.

Learn more about the book and author at J.B. MacKinnon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Once and Future World.

Writers Read: J.B. MacKinnon.

--Marshal Zeringue