Browse

The golden age of field biology in North America lasted from the last half of the nineteenth century until perhaps just after the Second World War. During this time, natural history surveys were organized, museums constructed to house their specimens, and field stations cobbled together to civilize the experience. At this time, many of the finest field biologists in history came out of the U.S. Midwest. They grew up at a time when the Midwest was frontier; when hunting and fishing and trapping were a part of a boy’s life, and to be successful you had to know the habits and habitats of the animals you sought. Today, field biology is enjoying a resurgence due to several factors, including the recognition that ecological relationships are complicated—much more complicated than even our most sophisticated computer-generated statistical/mathematical models can offer. It is now time for field biologists to explore their origins, claim their history, and ask fundamental existential questions such as where did we come from, do we have a cohesive story we can tell, and do we have a legacy? This book offers some answers to these questions. It is a history of field biology in North America and what it meant to the world. It is a bottom-up, field-based, rubber booted history of a life style conducted by some of its most talented early practitioners. The world today is a far better place today than it would have been otherwise, thanks to field biologists and the consequences of their discoveries.

Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. Far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin. From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from animals and plants thriving in urban areas to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. This book illuminates what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.