"The staggering losses in the first five thousand years of the Anthropocene pitted a superpredator species - us - against prey animals that either had no experience with us or whose evolutionary defenses were keyed to older dangers and were unable to protect them against our spread and efficiency. But animals confronting us over the past five centuries have faced something different. Since then we've thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America."

Wild New World is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful reflection on the relationship between human beings and other animals in America. Beginning with our early spread through the continent and moving to the present day, Flores highlights the initial extinction of megafauna hunted by our ancestors. He then moves to more recent extinctions - the result of habitat destruction, hunting, trade of animal parts, and attempts to eliminate "evil" predators. This segues into the rise of environmentalism in the 60s and ends with the reflection that, while many species will never be seen again, we have the chance to save the ones that are still here.

A thoroughly researched, devastating history. Thank you so much to Dan Flores and W. W. Norton & Company for this ARC through NetGalley. Wild New World is available as of October 2022 for purchase.

When I was a child I loved to visit the Denver Museum of Natural History. The dioramas there always excited me, from the bones of ancient dinosaurs to the displays of contemporary wildlife. I did not fully appreciate, though, just how much of that wildlife had been relegated to history. I certainly did not understand how and why that happened.

In his book Wild New World, Dan Flores looks at the history of the anthropocene in the United States. The “anthropocene” is a controversial word for some reason. Taken at its basic definition, it is the era marked by the presence of humans. However, that era is noted for two related though different effects on the world as humans spread from Africa. One is becoming more and more obvious in our current world: anthropogenic climate change. The other has a longer and notable history: extinction.

During the Pleistocene, well before humans arrived in North America, the continent was filled with its own megafauna rivaling any in Africa or around the world. Mammoths and mastodons, horses and camels, giant ground sloths and saber toothed tigers and dire wolves spread from coast to coast. When successive waves of humans came across the landmass of Beringia, much of that megafauna disappeared. This “coincidence” of mass extinction of large animals following the arrival of humans is a pattern that followed our dispersal around the world. Aurochs and Neanderthals in Europe. Mammoths and giant bears in Asia. Gigantic kangaroos in Australia and moas in New Zealand. North America also lost most of its largest herbivores and predators. They had evolved to deal with threats from each other, but these harless tool users were entirely different. WIthin a few thousand years, the continent was transformed.

As in other parts of the world, though, after this initial wave of extinction, a new normal came into being. The remaining animals adapted. They grew wary of humans. They bred more often to replenish populations. They colonized new areas that were less accessible to people. Animals became generally smaller and faster: giant bison replaced with the bison we know today, dire wolves replaced by gray wolves, smilodons replaced by cougars. Then everything changed when the Europeans arrived.

The initial effect of Europeans arriving was utterly devastating to the Native populations. Smallpox and other diseases from the old world wiped out entire villages and even tribes. Long before white men moved west, their diseases largely depopulated the continent. The removal of so many people initially created a population surge among the animals they had preyed upon. Deer, bison, pronghorn, rabbits, squirrels, all of the prey animals saw populations grow. Predators also saw a corresponding population growth. When horses escaped or were released, they took to the Americas as though they belonged here. In a way they did. Horses evolved in America during the Pleistocene then migrated to Asia where they were domesticated. The remaining horses in America were wiped out during the mass extinction event that accompanied the arrival of humans.

After this initial surge, though, the combination of economic pressure, advanced technology, and an utter disregard for animals combined to transform the continent. Passenger pigeons, once possibly the highest population of any species of bird in the world, went extinct. So did Carolina parakeets, Steller sea lions, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and auks. Other species nearly followed into oblivion: bison and white-tailed deer and mule deer and pronghorn and fur seals and sea otters. Within 300 years a natural balance that had held together for over 10,000 years fell apart.

Flores looks at social, economic, technological, and environmental causes for this transformation. He is unsparing in his criticism of the cultural dynamics that led to the emptying of much of the US fauna. And although his book does provide a little hope that things can and are getting better, it is hard to be left with anything more than a profound regret at the loss of this American wilderness and a lack of confidence that there will ever be an effective reversal of fortune for many of the native animals.

My parents liked to visit national parks. I fell in love with bighorn sheep as I watched them in the Colorado mountains. We saw elk and mule deer in Colorado as well, grizzly bears and bison in Yellowstone. It was many years later that I learned that all of these now rare and elusive mountain animals were once spread across the plains. What we were seeing were the remnants of populations that once filled the interior of the US. Now, they exist in small and scattered remnants in national parks and mountainous hideaways. And that is a real shame.

Dan Flores is an excellent popularizer and this was a fascinating, intriguing, and thought provoking book.
It's the story of animals and people but it's also the story of how the people cause ecological disasters tha brought to the climate crisis.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Dan Flores's WILD NEW WORLD is another masterful work by this talented author. Flores's careful attention to detail, his nuanced storytelling, and his ability to render complicated topics with elegant precision all serve him well in this text. WILD NEW WORLD will delight fans of Robert Macfarlane and other keen-eyed, sharp-minded writers of nature, deep-time, and man's place in the world.