Bringing Back The Dodo: Lessons In Natural And Unnatural History - Hardcover

Grady, Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771035047 ISBN 13: 9780771035043

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2006

Synopsis

A penetrating book on the very roots of our relationship with nature.

Bringing Back the Dodo is about how the forces of evolution and extinction have shaped the living world, and the part that humans play therein. This strikingly thought-provoking book, in the tradition of John McPhee and David Quammen, explores the very roots of our relationship with nature and challenges us to look at ourselves and the natural world around us in new light.

Wayne Grady searches our history and prehistory to explain why humans love nature and fear it at the same time. He explores the repercussions of our manipulations of nature through science, as exemplified by the Harvard Mouse, and suggests which extinct species we could clone (sadly, probably not the dodo), and whether we ought to try. He looks into the ramifications of getting up on our hind legs to walk, and what it meant to humankind when we lost our nocturnal vision. A visit to the supermarket leads him to uncover our vestigial longing for subtropical foods, and elsewhere he ponders how our instinct for “home” compares to that of other animals.

These elegant and penetrating essays, based on pieces originally published in Explore magazine, linger long in the imagination. They speak to some of our most fundamental questions about the human and animal worlds, and confirm Wayne Grady’s standing as one of our foremost literary science writers.

About this title

About the Author

Wayne Grady’s eight books of non-fiction include The Dinosaur Project, The Quiet Limit of the World, Chasing the Chinook, and The Bone Museum. He is also a prolific magazine writer, an equally prolific editor of Canadian travel, fiction, and nature writing, and the translator of many French authors into English, including Antonine Maillet and Herménégilde Chiasson. His most recent book, the bestselling Tree: A Life Story, was written in collaboration with David Suzuki. Wayne Grady lives near Kingston, Ontario.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Generally speaking, in these essays I seem to be constantly alarmed at our tendency to ignore or deny the degree to which we are part of the natural world. I believe it is true that, as J.F. Blumenbach, the nineteenth-­century founder of anthropology, first observed, we are “the most perfect of all domesticated species.” Many of these essays are ruminations about what that means. But we have not taken nature out of ourselves — even the most domesticated cat eats, drinks, breathes, hunts, hosts fleas, and reproduces — rather, we have taken ourselves out of nature. To our cost. In many of the essays I try to remind us of the fact that when we destroy a segment of nature — by cutting down a forest to make a road, or killing wild animals for sport, or even ridding ourselves of pests and parasites — we destroy an essential part of ourselves. When we tamper with nature, by altering an organism’s genetic makeup to produce a new plant or animal, or bypass sexual reproduction through cloning or gene splicing, when we remove a species from or add a species to an ecosystem, we are interfering with a process that has evolved on its own, and which has taken us into account, for millions of years, and about which we know next to nothing. It ought to be a sobering thought that, when most of us encounter a bear in the forest, the bear knows more about us than we know about it.

I am not, however, a polemicist by nature. My inclination is simply to point out what we’re doing as a species, place that action in some kind of natural context, and occasionally ask why we persist in doing it. If the voice sometimes sounds plaintive, or incredulous, or impatient, well, that is often the voice of the essayist. An essay is a pearl that began with an irritating grain of sand.

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771035047
• ISBN 13: 9780771035043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240