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Alyne Ellis, AARP Radio, March 25, 2009
A dramatic, comprehensive look at the yin and yang interrelated species perform. The survival of the fittest really does depend on all creatures great and small.” (Listen to the entire review.)
Alex Altman, Time magazine, July 21, 2008
Nature's underdogs have no shortage of human protectors, but don't count William Stolzenburg among them. In Where the Wild Things Were, the seasoned wildlife writer reminds us that predation, not parity, is nature's organizing principle. Beyond his affection for fierce carnivores, he argues persuasively that keystone predators function as biological linchpins--without them, ecosystems plunge into chaos. To underline this point, he whisks readers from kelp forests to arctic tundra, revealing the "evolutionary dance between predator and prey"--how a dearth of wolves and cougars helped spur an infestation of white-tailed deer that munched Wisconsin's forests to the nub and how an absence of jaguars paradoxically caused a Panamanian reserve's bird population to wither. Stolzenburg narrates these cautionary tales with a conservationist's attention to ecological detail and a childlike reverence for flesh-tearing beasts. His infectious enthusiasm should spark even in bug-wary urbanites a renewed appreciation for nature's complexity.
Thomas Hayden, Christian Science Monitor
An absorbing and delightful work of natural history. One of those rare books that provide not just an enriching story, but a new, clarifying lens through which to understand the world around us. (Read the entire review)
Kyrille Goldbeck, Library Journal (starred review), July 15, 2008
As the title implies, this work is an examination of a world without the top predators of an ecological niche. Exploring the history of predation from the first microscopic predator through the age of the dinosaurs to today's modern mammals, science writer Stolzenburg, who has studied predator-control techniques and monitored endangered species, reveals the devastating ecological consequences that result (e.g., marauding deer and raccoons in suburban backyards, huge herds of elk in Yellowstone Park) once a top predator is removed from its position. Throughout, Stolzenburg follows the studies of several ecologists looking at the food chain from the top down and furnishes hard-core evidence that an ecosystem is more diverse with the top predator acting as a checks-and-balances measure to provide multiple-prey species with the chance to survive. A comprehensive bibliography offers both professional and amateur ecologists, naturalists, and biologists further readings to learn more about predator-prey interactions. The easy-to-read and captivating prose will introduce readers to species of animals they've never heard of before, as well as give a greater awareness and appreciation for the complexity of the world in which we live. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Mark S. Garland, Birder's Bookshelf
This is a masterpiece. (read the entire review)
Bill McKibben, Boston Globe
Remarkably engaging. (read the entire review)
Publisher's Weekly (starred review), April 14, 2008
In this impassioned debut, wildlife journalist Stolzenburg examines predation's crucial role in the preservation of ecological diversity, painting nightmarish pictures of what happens when top carnivores are exterminated from ecosystems. Without sea otters to keep ravenous sea urchins in check, some ocean floors in the North Pacific have been stripped of kelp. In Yellowstone National Park, the eradication of wolves has resulted in a glut of elk that have trampled river banks and chewed down young trees. White-tailed deer have denuded the undergrowth in the forests of the eastern United States, because wolves and cougar have disappeared. Without large meat eaters, mid-size predators —raccoons, blue jays, crows, squirrels, opossums—have proliferated, to the detriment of songbird populations. In dazzling descriptions, Stolzenburg demonstrates how the delicate balance between predator and prey is so essential, and his book, rich in dramatic accounts of life and death in the wild, is powerful and compelling.
Seed magazine, July/August 2008
As recently as the 1960s, it was thought that food chains worked from the bottom up—kelp supply, for example, determined sea urchin population, which determined sea otter number, and so on. In this brilliant melding of biography, natural history, and scientific experiment, Stolzenburg describes how a handful of maverick ecologists upended the theory, proving that top predators also shape the populations beneath. If wolves in Manhattan sounds terrifying, Stolzenburg makes clear that a world without carnivores is actually much scarier.
Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe, July 20, 2008
In "Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators," science writer William Stolzenburg looks into some wild places, too, and finds them wounded. His book presents a meticulous and convincing argument that alpha predators are the primary regulators of ecosystems, and that their removal is crippling our planet's biodiversity.
Yank all the starfish off a sea stack in coastal Washington, and within months the mussels that the starfish would normally eat form a diversity-crushing monopoly. Take sea otters out of the ocean around an Aleutian island, and the sea urchins the otters would normally eat mow nearby kelp forests into oblivion. Remove cougars from the Eastern Seaboard, and white-tailed deer lay waste to forests. Take wolves out of Yellowstone, and elk decimate the cottonwood, willow, and aspen seedlings.
In example after example, many of them cinematic, all of them engrossing, Stolzenburg argues that when superpredators are pushed out of places, biodiversity plummets.
This, of course, is a foundation of ecology. Cats are linked to flowers; wolves are linked to aspen seedlings. The question for Stolzenburg is: Are keystone predators what ultimately regulate the stability of the vast, ultracomplicated interconnections between creatures?
"In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world," he concludes, "we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. ... They come as haunting demons of the human mind."
Weston Cutter, Corduroybooks.com, September 28, 2008
Where the Wild Things Were is at least two great things simultaneously: it's one of the top three or four environmental books I've read in ages, but way, way cooler, it's the best counterintuitive natural-world book since Richard Manning's head-bustingly interesting Against The Grain (Manning was the first person I read to argue that the rise of agriculture was as (if not more) closely tied with the creation of wealth and poverty as/(than) it was with foodstuffs). Stolzenburg's and the book's central argument is this: though the process might make our imaginations calmer, clearing the world of the largest, apex predators is actually a surefire way to disrupt ecologic balance, and to keep clearing them away it to assure a certain level of doom (Stolzenburg wouldn't say doom, but it's all but shouted throughout).
What's so great about the book is how, if you can bring yourself to buy the argument (I don't think you should have to: Stolzenburg writes convincingly, and the argument seems unimpeachable, but it's worth acknowledging that we're presently living in a time in which black and white are no longer the sure things they once were, and in which we're all seemingly free to 'interpret' or 'believe' things as we wish), your most fundamental view of the world—and by extension of humans—has to change. The implications of the book—that we're part of natural food web which we're just fucked if we try to jimmy it too much—have long-reaching implications that stretch to all sorts of fields (imagine how the health 'industry' would shift if there was a sweeping shift in attitude and people started to live and accept treatment with the understanding that death was a natural part of life's cycle, or how the psychological field would shift if forced to, for non clinically depressed/anxious patients, admit that a certain level of fear is not only natural but probably a good thing).
Stolzenburg's book, with its stories about orca whales and sea otters in Amchitka (remember where it is if you can recall the old Risk boardgame), or the starfish along the pacific coast, or the overcrowded deer in Wisconsin, has some of the finest, zippiest writing I've seen just about anywhere. At almost random:
"To be a naive fur-bearing mammal or a fresh piece of meat lounging in the path of the promyshlennik—as the Russian fur hunters were called—was most unfortunate."
"An elk with speed to burn would throw its head high and break into an exaggerated trot, or stiffly bounce into a four-legged pogo gait called stoting. Either gait was far slower than galloping. Both were akin to an Olympic miler looking back on the field and skipping into a schoolgirl's hopscotch."
It's actually unfair: I just paged through thirty pages and found at least one line per page with more rhythmic kick and wordy play than you'll find just about anywhere else. Seriously: read the book. It came out in JULY, that's how lame and late I am. Don't be as dumb as I am: you're finding out now, right? Read it now. Right now. Set down the Roth's Indignation, pick up Stolzenburg's debut.
Chris Spatz, The ECF Update: Newsletter of the Eastern Cougar Foundation, September, 2008
Wildlife managers need a jolt of stiff science. Alpha predator recovery is no longer a matter of redemption; it is an ecological imperative. For my part, I'll start by recommending Where The Wild Things Were to anyone willing to listen. (read the entire review)
Juliet Eilperin, National Public Radio, Living on Earth, July 24, 2008
Beautiful — and haunting. (read and listen to the entire review)
Angie Drobnic Holan, St. Petersburg Times, August 26, 2008
When sea otters came back in force to a tiny island off the coast of Alaska, scientists were confounded by the changes that followed.
The sea otters ate sea urchins all day, a seemingly small thing. But that kept the urchins from eating the kelp beds down to nubs. And the long, undulating strands of kelp became habitat for a panorama of fish and sea creatures. No otters eating urchins meant no kelp beds and no ecological diversity.
That calculus has become the new math for a legion of ecologists. It turns out that top predators like wolves, killer whales and mountain lions could be vital to maintaining biological diversity, from the top of the food chain on down.
William Stolzenburg's book Where the Wild Things Were tells the tale of that discovery with the tension of a mystery novel, casting top scientists as detectives who set out to connect the dots between those Alaskan otters, wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone Park, and deer overrunning the northeastern United States.
Stolzenburg doesn't exempt the topmost predator. Human beings get their share of blame for extinctions happening today, and for those over and done with centuries ago.
The giant mammals of North America — mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats — were likely driven to extinction by the continent's first people, the ancestors of those who met Christopher Columbus. One of the book's most intriguing chapters explores bringing those creatures back. Elephants in New Mexico, anyone?
Where the Wild Things Were makes a thought-provoking argument that the top predators who capture our imagination also ensure that the planet teems with life.
James Neal Webb, Quincy Public Library
Where the Wild Things Were is everything that’s good in a science book: clear, understandable prose; a reasoned, logical argument and a subject that is both compelling and fascinating. It’s well worth your time. (read the entire review)
Eric Larson, Conscious Choice magazine, September 2008
In Where the Wild Things Were, William Stolzenburg has given himself the admirable task of explaining why ecosystems the world over are experiencing unprecedented explosions in the populations of certain species — ants in Venezuela, elk in Yellowstone. The short answer, it turns out, is that predators, the big bullies at the top of the food chain — the cats, the owls, the eagles, the sharks — are in decline, due to none other than poaching, hunting, building, polluting humans, of course. While the history behind the plummeting numbers of the world’s most feared flesh-eaters would make Stolzenburg’s book well worth its weight in pages, his vivid and animated portraits of the evolutionary biologists whose passion and meticulous scholarship drives the book are even more captivating.”
Michelle Nijhuis, High Country News, September 15, 2008
A deft and engaging exploration of the ecological power of predation. (read the entire review)
Barnes & Noble, Fall 2008 Selection, Discover Great New Writers
Where the Wild Things Were is a challenging and provocative study of the importance of predation. Successful ecosystems -- which ultimately support humanity -- require top predators, so-called nuisance animals like gray wolves, jaguars, pumas, and sharks. Contrary to the lore that surrounds such animals, they're not indiscriminate killers. That title rightly belongs to Homo sapiens, the sole creatures with the ability and determination to put immediate gratification above the long-term health of our environment. Our own instincts, it seems, are borne primarily of cowardice and greed: when an animal scares us, competes with our interests, or boasts a soft pelt or ivory tusks, we shoot, poison, trap, electrocute, or simply squeeze it out of existence.
Stolzenburg recounts many carefully researched examples of predator eradication and its disastrous aftermath, including the eventual extinction of everything from the smaller prey species to trees. In every case, the unintended consequences are nearly impossible to predict, but will most certainly wreak ecological havoc on animal and plant life alike.
This is a humbling book because in its vivid descriptions of wild kingdoms past we see what might have been the natural world of today. Yet it is also a hopeful book because it may still be possible to turn the tide against the mass extinctions we've set in motion, and begin to heal the planet.
Jennifer Winger, Nature Conservancy magazine, Fall 2008
Where the Wild Things Were, by former Nature Conservancy senior editor William Stolzenburg, may sound like an elegy, but it reads like a mystery. When Stolzenburg investigates the disappearance of some of Earth’s most common carnivores, he discovers habitats in peril for lack of predators. Examples of the ecological wreckage are varied: Kelp forests without otters are razed by sea urchins; deciduous forests without cougars have been denuded by deer; and in the absence of wolves, Yellowstone aspen groves have been overgrazed by elk. Research shows that the loss of top predators is a global problem — pumas in Patagonia, cheetahs in Namibia, jaguars in Mexico are all at risk. While skeptics wonder if we can afford to welcome top predators back into the fold, Stolzenburg asks if we can afford not to. |
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WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE
Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
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