The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be. This item is unavailable.The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be

From one of Canada's most exciting writers and ecological thinkers, a book that will change the way we see nature and show that in restoring the living world, we are also restoring ourselves. 

The Once and Future World began in the moment J.B. MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. What remains today is an illusion of the wild--an illusion that has in many ways created our world.
 
In 3 beautifully drawn parts, MacKinnon revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and 20 times more whales swim in the sea. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. Finally, he calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. MacKinnon never fails to remind us that nature is a menagerie of marvels. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world," MacKinnon writes, "and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."

J.B. MacKINNON has won numerous national and international awards for journalism. As the originator of the 100-mile diet concept, he appears regularly in Canada and the USA as a speaker and commentator on ecology and food. His book, The 100-Mile Diet, co-authored with Alisa Smith, was a national bestseller and inspired a TV series in which the small town of Mission, BC, learned to eat locally. He was also the co-author, with Mia Kirshner and artists Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, of I Live Here, a groundbreaking "paper documentary" about displaced people that made top 10 lists in media as diverse as the Bloomsbury Literary Review and Comic Book Resources, as well as becoming a Los Angeles Times bestseller. His first book, Dead Man in Paradise, in which he investigated the assassination of his uncle, a radical priest in the Dominican Republic, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction.