Brennan’s debut book chronicles a classic American fight between private business and public interest in conservation: ‘It’s so unclear who was in the right’
In two weeks, Yellowstone National Park will deliberately poison all the fish in Wyoming’s Soda Butte Creek. In an effort to quickly and cheaply cull non-native brook trout, introduced in 1890, federal and state officials plan to deploy a neurotoxin that will decimate all insect and aquatic life. Before doing so, park biologists will try to wrangle as many native cutthroat as possible and store them in clean water until the creek is again safe for fish. They hope it will reset the ecosystem and restore the habitat to a more natural state. They don’t know if it will work.
This sort of madcap re-engineering of wild spaces happens all the time, as Summer Brennan points out in the new book The Oyster War, which sets out to tell “the true story of a small farm, big politics, and the future of wilderness in America”. In her debut title, Brennan explores our often contradictory relationship with wild places and the sometimes tortuous justifications for how we manage public lands.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment