Reimagining a Place for the Wild ed. by Leslie Miller and Louise Excell (review)

This essay collection was inspired by the inaugural Reimagine Western Landscapes Symposium in Montana's Centennial Valley, a gathering of writers, ranchers, artists, and environmental policy makers whose goal was to take stock of the current state of wildness in the American West and envision a future in which wild places endure and humans and other animals thrive. The location itself, in a remote corner of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, provides the backdrop for these questions as a place where ranching, wildlife conservation, and wilderness preservation are lived experiences. The result is a range of accessible and thought-inspiring perspectives that both reinforce the value of wildness and reframe longstanding debates over the value of wilderness and the presence of charismatic megafauna.

The collection is grouped into four sections, each offering a different take on the possibilities and challenges of living with the wild in the Anthropocene. The first section, "Encounter: Understanding Human-Wildlife Connections," begins with an invocation of the familiar presence of charismatic megafauna like wolves and grizzlies, while also challenging some of the easy assumptions that might accompany such encounters. In "Waiting for Wolves," for example, Jeremy Schmidt argues that wildness cannot disappear from a world in which antlions, "gram for gram vastly more ferocious than any grizzly," share space with other denizens of the urban and suburban wild, including humans (6). Julia Corbett attempts to reimagine the practices of sharing her residential neighborhood with the black bears that routinely arrive looking for bird feeders and concludes that a social science analysis of human attitudes toward wildlife doesn't entirely capture the deep-rooted human longing for connection with other species. "What we need," she argues, "is a cosmology that is able to see ourselves as just one species in a global circle of circulating hearts" (29). The essays in this section, and indeed throughout the collection, share an implicit critique of conventional, data-driven approaches to wild lands management, affirming instead the value of affective bonds, existential questions, and spiritual epiphanies that reductionist scientific approaches tend to avoid or dismiss.

The second section, "Reimagine: Forging a New Ethic," steps back from the immediacy of personal encounters with wildlife to consider the ethical, spatial, and historical dimensions of western landscapes more broadly. Essays by Harvey Locke and Gregory E. Smoak situate the contemporary West as a space with roots that defy national borders and assumed timeframes. In "Beauty as a Foundation for Conservation Ethics," Kirk C. Robinson seeks to update Aldo Leopold's famous land ethic by promoting the aesthetics of "Beauty" as a defining characteristic of wild places.

These ethical arguments confront the pragmatics of making a living in the wild in the third section, "Practice: Programmatic Approaches," which features reflections by ranchers like Yvonne Martinell, whose family has been working in the Centennial Valley for generations, and mining geologist Kerry C. Gee, who describes the restoration of tailings ponds and the need to deal with the legacy of mine waste contamination as an ongoing collaboration between different stakeholders. These essays reflect the strength of this collection, which lies in the breadth of voices gathered here. The diversity of perspectives and approaches would make it a good fit for an introductory environmental studies course, where the practical, the philosophical, and the personal could all be explored.

The final section, "Ethos: Wither Humanities," offers a starting point for an important conversation: what role will the humanities play in an era when the fundamental ecological and cultural parameters that once defined the West are changing. What to make, for example, of the one hundredth meridian, long seen as the ecological and cultural boundary between East and West, as changing rainfall patterns shift arid conditions eastward? As the conditions on the ground change, how will the culture of the West respond? "We have the data," Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy concludes, "but our community needs the stories" (219). This collection offers a heartfelt...