This is a thoughtful and stimulating read. I enjoyed it very much.
The book is about how the world used to be, ecologically. We travel back in time through the author’s narrative to a few decades ago, or a few centuries or many tens of millions of years. And we travel in space, around the UK with the author and abroad through recounting the studies and observations of others. You can’t understand the present without knowing something of the past and that is a guide to how the future might be and the range of possible futures that exist.
The main message I took away from this book is that it is often difficult, more difficult than we think or sometimes admit, to return to a past ecological condition and that’s because the impacts of our species linger and are difficult completely to erase. Good examples are given. That has implications for how ‘re’ rewilding can sometimes be.
I learned a lot from this book – about the views of people I didn’t know dotted around the world and about places I’ve never visited (and some I have) and of the past ecology of the world. Why do we think of European Bison as forest-dwellers? It seems that they are pretty keen to get out of those forests and enjoy the open wetlands and farmland too. This is a bit like expecting Red Kites to be upland species because they hung on in mid-Wales when cleared away from the richer lowlands. Should we stick some Polar Bears in Antarctica if they might thrive there and be more likely to survive on this planet? What would the penguins say?
The author writes engagingly and well. We start with a visit to a deserted Northumberland village where there is no sign of that village unless you can spot the rather subtle physical and ecological footprint.
It’s a gentle book, without the author’s own views intruding much. We go on the author’s honeymoon and are almost present at the conception of her first child it seems as she knits the ecological narrative into a brief period of her own life. It ends with the birth of the author’s daughter, and her hopes for her.
The subtitle ‘The world we lost and how to bring it back‘ isn’t really quite right. Let’s blame the publisher! This book is about what we lost, but also about how the world changed before we were in it, and it is not so much about how to bring it back as whether to bring ‘it’, or something else, back, and quite honestly there isn’t that much about how to do it.
This is a fine book, and a very fine first book.
The cover? It’s a nice cover but it doesn’t give me many clues about the book’s contents. I like the pinkish tinge though. I’d give it 7/10.
Nature’s Ghosts: the world we lost and how to bring it back by Sophie Yeo is published by Harper North
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