Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals

Christopher Preston's Tenacious Beasts explores the inspiring stories of wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet. Despite dire news about wildlife extinction, some populations are back from the brink, offering hope and crucial lessons. Preston's book weaves together personal stories and philosophical shifts in how humans ought to think about animals, advocating for changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery. It is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, offering a road map for a future in which humans and animals can coexist.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 21 February 2023
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd

Wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet are inspiring. The Rachel Carson Environment Book Award Winner of the 2024 High Plains Book Award, Non-Fiction Category, and Finalist, 2024 PROSE Awards: Popular Science and Mathematics Category, is included in The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023, So Far. The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, and whales in the Atlantic are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences. Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery. Tenacious Beasts is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map—and a measure of hope—for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.

Weight: 630g
Dimension: 236 x 163 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780262047562