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The Nature Wars (2000)

by Jim Sterba(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 3

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English

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review 1: Sterba takes on the increasingly vexed problem of human-wildlife conflict in the US attempting to get to its roots. His journalistic approach is both entertaining and frustratingly shallow. He describes well the growth of the urban sprawl and the gradual rewilding of America that sets the stage for this conflict. Yet, when he tries to attribute reasons for conflict he finds much to blame - perhaps to much. It is difficult to deny that an increasingly 'denatured' demography, grown up on a diet of faux nature served up by Disney, Discovery and doggies-in-the window find themselves in a troubled, warped relationship with anything truly feral. Sterba believes his own farm upbringing - decapitating chickens and eating the family cow - was a much healthier way to engage wit... moreh animals, guts and feathers and dung. It is hard to argue that there is something profoundly irritating about the naive conflation of ecological integrity, environmental protection, habitat conservation and animal rights. Yet Sterba's arguments sound just a tad partisan when he sides with the game hunters as an 'elegant' solution to the problems posed by the wild species that have taken over American backyards. Sterba is able to point fingers at every other lobby group - pet owners, humane societies, conservationists - except the game hunters for whom he has a special regard. Sterba's analysis makes for an interesting but ultimately unfulfilling thesis.
review 2: Explores the compelling fact of the regrowth of the Eastern forest and the resurgence of many animal species in surprising proximity to humans in numbers not seen since Europeans first arrived in the Continental U.S. The book does not try to be a comprehensive overview of species and their situations, but looks at several exemplars, such as beaver, deer, wild turkeys and Canada geese, as well as at specific problems related to human interaction -- roadkill, bird feeding, and feral cats -- to see the complexity of how these different interactions are creating a new, complex ecosystem. Humans can no longer afford, he says, to think of nature as something of which they are not a part, but recognize that they are immersed in it and part of it and need to realign their thinking as a result in order to cohabit with it successfully. less

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