On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature - Softcover

Melanie Challenger

3.55

129 ratings by Goodreads

9781847083616: On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847083617 ISBN 13: 9781847083616

Publisher: Granta/Portobello Omes, 2011

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How do we think about the things we have lost? How can we use what we know about extinctions �€“ cultural, biological and industrial �€“ to reconnect with nature?In Cornwall, hiking around the half-buried ruins of an old tin mine, Melanie Challenger started to think about the things that have disappeared from our world. When the gigantic bones of mammoths were first excavated from the Siberian permafrost in the eighteenth century, scientists were forced to consider a terrifying possibility: many species that had once flourished on the Earth no longer existed. For the first time, humans had to contemplate the idea of extinction.Challenger became fascinated by this idea, and started to consider how we think about the things we have lost, and, indeed, how we come to lose them. From our destruction of the natural world to the human cultures that are rapidly dying out, On Extinction is a passionate exploration of these disappearances and why they should concern us. Challenger asks questions about how we�€™ve become destructive to our environment, our emotional responses to extinctions, and how these responses might shape our future relationship with nature. She travels to the abandoned whaling stations of South Georgia, the melting icescape of Antarctica and the Inuit camps of the Arctic, where she traces the links between human activities and environmental collapse. On Extinction is an account of Challenger's journey that brings together ideas about cultural, biological and industrial extinction in a beautiful, thought-provoking and ultimately hopeful book.

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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.

Review:

Praise for On Extinction

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 big loops of this peregrinating work intersect in interesting ways a strangeness is evoked, a strangeness that conveys how, in spite of all our erudition, we walk the earth in the 21st century as in a dream." 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

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

"A book which eloquently explores the unhallowedness of species extinctions and which also depicts humanity's resultant bereftness: their loss is ours."
Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

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