Zusatztext 43058693 Informationen zum Autor Jon Mooallem has been a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine since 2006 and is a writer at large for Pop-Up Magazine , the live magazine in San Francisco. He's also contributed to This American Life, The New Yorker, Harper's, Wired , and many other magazines. He and his family live in San Francisco. www.JonMooallem.com Klappentext "Intelligent and highly nuanced This book may bring tears to your eyes." -- San Francisco Chronicle Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls-while the actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America's endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it-from Thomas Jefferson's celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.During the Cold War, a joint U.S.-Canadian military installation was built outside the tiny northern town of Churchill, Manitoba, at the western edge of Hudson Bay. Those stationed at Fort Churchill had several jobs to do, like be ready to repulse the Soviets if they invaded over the North Pole and figure out how to lob nuclear warheads at Moscow through the Aurora Borealis, which was proving, mysteriously, to muck up the guidance systems on their rockets. A lot of the soldiers' time was also spent dealing with a nuisance: hundreds of polar bears that ambled across the tundra there every fall. In November 1958, for example, one ate a pair of boots at the firing range. Another smashed a building's window, poked his head in, and had to be blasted with a fire extinguisher. At least twenty polar bears were loitering near the mess hall and the dump, and, late one Sunday night, three turned up at the central commissary. Soldiers in station wagons drove them back into the wilderness. One report noted, The most effective, anti-dawdling weapon has been the small helicopter. Even so, occasionally the bears would rear up on their hind legs and try to tussle with the armored flying machines. One helicopter pilot described how unsettling it was to make a low pass and find some six feet of indignant polar bear throwing haymakers with paws the size of dinner plates. After a while, military contractors limited the amount of work done outside at night; the higher-ups decided it would just be easier to stay out of the polar bears' way. So this is civilization, began one newspaper article about military wives at Fort Churchill. By the time I arrived, one November a half-century later, the military was gone. The fort had been dismantled and carted off, though two massive, ruined radar domes still sat in the distance like some post-apocalyptic Epcot attraction. A dozen specially built vehicles called Tundra Buggies crawled along the network of dirt roads the military had built and abandoned. Each was stuffed with tourists, many of whom had paid several thousand dollars a head to fly to Churchill, now billing itself as The Polar Bear Capital of the World. They were mostly older vacationers, taken out to the tundr...

*A New York Times Notable Book of 2013*

"[An] ambitious and fascinating first book… [Mooallem] seamlessly blends reportage from the front lines of wildlife conservation with a lively cultural history of animals in America, telling stories of people past and present whose concern for animals makes them act in ways that are sometimes unexpected, sometimes heroic, and occasionally absurd."—New York Times Book Review

"A thoughtful parable of Americans’ complicated relations with conservationists and the wildlife they protect."—The New Yorker

"Intelligent and highly nuanced… This book may bring tears to your eyes. If so, they will be drawn out by the tragedy of what we have done and the all-too-often pathetic efforts to turn back the clock. But read through the tears, and you will find yourself more informed, more prepared to make a difference. Mooallem has done those of us who care deeply about nature and wildlife a favor, leaving us justifiably off balance but putting us in a better position to move beyond hubris to pragmatic solutions."—San Francisco Chronicle

"An engaging nature/environment book that goes beyond simple-minded sloganeering."—Kirkus

"Wild Ones heightens one’s awareness of the precipitous position of so many of our animal species, but it’s also filled with curiosity and hope. The men and women that Mooallem tails are dreamers, but you wind up rooting for them to keep on dreaming."—Smithsonian

"There is, in short, ridiculously lots to love about Jon Mooallem’s Wild Ones—starting with its thoughtful and troubling observation that our increasingly extravagant effort at species conservation is a corollary to, as much as a solution for, our habit of rendering wild animals extinct."—New York Magazine

"Mooallem argues conservation is and always has been about fulfilling people’s need for nostalgic wildness, however contrived and fictitious it may be. Every generation strives to return the Earth to some idealized former state. Although his journey is sobering, Mooallem’s conclusion is upbeat: Even small conservation victories matter."—Discover

"Mooallem manages to pinpoint something peculiar yet poignant about being human, and as a result, reading his pieces often feels like being tricked by an approachable wink masking a sharp jab to the gut... Be prepared to be surprise-gutted."—East Bay Express
 
"A clear-eyed look at our coy relationship with endangered animals."—Nature

"If I could write this review entirely in smiley faces and majestic animal emojis, I would: Wild Ones is easily one of the best books I've come across this year. It's more readable than most novels, stuffed with more fascinating, offbeat trivia than the last three issues of The New Yorker combined….It's incredibly well-researched, relevant, challenging stuff."—Portland Mercury

"'If we choose to help [polar bears] survive,' Mooallem writes, 'it will require a kind of narrow, hands-on management—like getting out there and feeding them.' Among a lot of environmentalists, those are fighting words. All respect to Mooallem for having the guts to say them.”—Outside Magazine

"This book is dense with both thought and fact… It is written with a vernacularly light touch, shot through with compassion and wit, not to mention open amazement, the only apt response to the story of our monumental hubris."—The Daily Beast

"Mooallem argues that by focusing on the animals themselves, we are overlooking the point of the Endangered Species Act, which stressed the paramount importance of ecosystems—a far more difficult thing to save than a species. He strives for the big picture here and gently guides readers through what ultimately becomes a poignant tribute to all who try to make the world a better place. This is a wise approach to a troubling subject, …