Is it time to embrace the so-called Anthropocenea'the age of human dominion'and to abandon tried-and-true conservation tools such as parks and wilderness areas? Is the future of Earth to be fully domesticated, an engineered global garden managed by technocrats to serve humanity? The schism between advocates of rewilding and those who accept and even celebrate a post-wilda world is arguably the hottest intellectual battle in contemporary conservation.
In Keeping the Wild, a group of prominent scientists, writers, and conservation activists responds to the Anthropocene-boosters who claim that wild nature is no more (or in any case not much worth caring about), that human-caused extinction is acceptable, and that novel ecosystemsa are an adequate replacement for natural landscapes. With rhetorical fists swinging, the book's contributors argue that these new environmentalistsa embody the hubris of the managerial mindset and offer a conservation strategy that will fail to protect life in all its buzzing, blossoming diversity.
With essays from Eileen Crist, David Ehrenfeld, Dave Foreman, Lisi Krall, Harvey Locke, Curt Meine, Kathleen Dean Moore, Michael Soulé, Terry Tempest Williams and other leading thinkers, Keeping the Wild provides an introduction to this important debate, a critique of the Anthropocene boosters' attack on traditional conservation, and unapologetic advocacy for wild nature.
Foreword Introduction: Lives Not Our Own \ Tom Butler
PART I. Clashing Worldviews Chapter 1. Rise of the Neo-Greens \ Paul Kingsnorth Chapter 2. The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness \ David W. Kidner Chapter 3. Ptolemaic Environmentalism \ Eileen Crist Chapter 4. With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies \ David Johns Chapter 5. What's So New about the 'New Environmentalism'? \ Curt Meine Chapter 6. Conservation in No-Man's-Land \ Claudio Campagna and Daniel Guevara Chapter 7. The ""New Conservation"" \ Michael Soulé
PART II. Against Domestication Chapter 8. The Fable of Managed Earth \ David Ehrenfeld Chapter 9. Conservation in the Anthropocene \ Tim Caro, Jack Darwin, Tavis Forrester, Cynthia Ledoux-Bloom, and Caitlin Wells Chapter 10. The Myth of the Humanized Pre-Columbian Landscape \ Dave Foreman Chapter 11. The Future of Conservation: An Australian Perspective \ Brendan Mackey Chapter 12. Expanding Parks, Reducing Human Numbers, and Preserving All the Wild Nature We Can: A Superior Alternative to Embracing the Anthropocene Era \ Phil Cafaro Chapter 13. Green Postmodernism and the Attempted Highjacking of Conservation \ Harvey Locke Chapter 14. Valuing Naturalness in the ""Anthropocene"": Now More than Ever \ Ned Hettinger
PART III. Values of the Wild Chapter 15. Wild World \ Roderick Frazier Nash Chapter 16. Living Beauty \ Sandra Lubarsky Chapter 17. Wilderness: What and Why? \ Howie Wolke Chapter 18. Resistance \ Lisi Krall Chapter 19. An Open Letter to Major Wesley Powell \ Terry Tempest Williams
Epilogue: The Road to Cape Perpetua \ Kathleen Dean Moore Acknowledgements Contributors
"Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth is an extraordinarily important book. It identifies the great and irreversible damage to Earth's biodiversity that will follow if the 'Anthropocene' ideology is allowed to stall the global conservation effort."
