James Bernard MacKinnon

A look at how the natural world has changed because of the impact of humans and what we should be doing to help restore it for future generations.

Nature as it Was, as it Is, as it Could be

The Once and Future World

Hannah Yang

A new perspective on the increasingly popular concept of 'rewilding,' which suggests that we restore the natural environment by reintroducing native species and generally making nature 'more wild' again. MacKinnon asks what point of nature we hope to return to, raising interesting questions regarding how we have reached this level of environmental degradation in the first place. In particular, MacKinnon expands upon the idea of shifting baseline syndrome, wherein each generation recognizes their current environment as 'normal,' having never experienced what a more biodiverse/less polluted planet looks like, so that environmental losses accumulate over time and we never realize the severity or scope of those losses.

The ideas of ecological ghosts (species whose adaptations reveal past natural environments/interspecies interactions that are long gone), and the many many cases where people flat-out denied the extinctions or extirpations of once-abundant species, were very new and frankly shocking to me; the stories that MacKinnon weaves about how changes in one species affect their entire ecosystems (ex: whales and plankton having a positive feedback loop where they support each others' abundance) were vivid and extremely interesting. 

The Once and Future World is short, very readable, and introduces many under-explored ideas about how humans relate to nature.

The Once and Future World Nature as it Was, as it Is, as it Could be

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