J.B. MacKinnon - The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be

Advance praise for
The Once and Future World

A gripping and convincing look at the nature that humans lost and the perspective that we gained. MacKinnon leaves us wanting to be wilder. Jennifer Jacquet, author of the Guilty Planet blog at Scientific American , assistant professor of environmental studies at NYU

MacKinnon is an eloquent guide through landscapes wild and tame. He takes the reader backwards through evolutionary time and forward into a delicate and unknown future. I devoured this book in a day and closed its covers marveling at our planets incredible abundance. Natural history at its best. Charlotte Gill, author of Eating Dirt

Henry David Thoreau warned us, in 1862, that not in wilderness but in wildness is the preservation of the world. Theres a difference. In The Once and Future World , J.B. MacKinnon brings this distinction up to date. Wilderness may be gone forever, but wildness can be recovered, and it is time to get to work. George Dyson

A lean, elegant and powerful essay on what we have done to the worldand what we might do to set things right. J.B. MacKinnon has made me think in new ways about our self-destructive trashing of the luckless garden into which we were so lucky to be born. Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

A re-enchantment with the natural world may be a necessary prerequisite to the changes we must make to keep that natural world more or less intact. This is deep and lovely thinking and writing. Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

The 100-Mile Diet forever changed the way I see a plate of food and it is still with me today. The Once and Future World changed the way I see everything . One can only hope it spawns a movement like The 100-Mile Diet dida moment of re-imagining, re-wilding and coming home. Leanne Allison, filmmaker ( Being Caribou, Finding Farley, Bear 71 )

This book should make your blood run cold; or boil with furious rage against the despoilers of our planet. But perhaps all is not yet lost. MacKinnon tells us that the crisis in the natural world is not yet fatal but its waiting. And then he tells us most convincingly what we can and must do to stop the rot. This is a handbook for those who hope to see the earth, and man, remain alive together. Farley Mowat

Like Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez and Tim Flannery, J.B. MacKinnon is an exceptional writer with an intense passion for the natural world. In The Once and Future World , MacKinnon combines eloquent storytelling with painstaking research to provide a persuasive argument for the need to not only protect the wildness we have today, but to restore at least some of the abundance we have lost. It may be too late to bring back the Tasmanian tiger, but, as MacKinnon writes, theres still time to create a planet that is far richer in natural wonders. James Little, former editor of Explore magazine

J.B. MacKinnon is one of the finest essayists of the natural world writing today. Andrew D. Blechman, managing editor of Orion and author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the Worlds Most Revered and Reviled Bird

This book is a delight. MacKinnon shows us afresh the world we thought we knew through a kaleidoscopic lens of startling facts, illuminating insight and flat-out wonderful writing. John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger

Praise for The 100-Mile Diet
(co-authored with Alisa Smith) NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Finalist for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize

A compelling, relevant story without preaching or darkening our minds with guilt. The Vancouver Sun

Eating locally isnt just a fad like the various diets advertised on late-night TVit may be one of the most important ways we save ourselves and the planet. Dr. David Suzuki

Smith and MacKinnon are gifted writers, and their inexperience at food sourcing makes them naturally more sympathetic. Winnipeg Free Press

Engaging, thoughtful essays packed with natural, historical and personal detail. The New York Times

Good writing trumps anything, and in Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnons 100-Mile Diet it brushes aside the inescapable but faint touch of preachiness. Its a finely rendered account of a year of eating locally. Macleans

The 100-Mile Diet is inspiring in its honest striving to discover what has been all but lost. The Gazette

A fascinating personal journey narrated by two excellent writers that take us for an informative and highly entertaining trip into a world that just a generation ago was commonplace but now seems exotic. Edmonton Journal

Praise for Dead Man in Paradise

Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

Dead Man in Paradise works as travelogue, thriller and much-needed antidote to the ways in which history is often buried and forgotten. Quill & Quire

The book is masterful. MacKinnon has the craftsmanship for the challenge. He uses flashback well, creates arresting images [and] has enough travel experience to take the bizarre in stride. The Globe and Mail

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2013 J. B. MacKinnon

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Excerpt from Eden by Ina Rousseau used by permission of the Taylor & Francis Group; the poem appeared in the 1954 A. A. Balkema book Die verlate tuin ( The Deserted Garden ). Translation copyright J. M. Coetzee, 2007.
All rights reserved. Used by permission of the Peter Lampack Agency, Inc.

Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

MacKinnon, J. B. (James Bernard), 1970
The once and future world : nature as it was, as it is, as it could be / J. B. MacKinnon.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36220-9

1. Human ecology. 2. NatureEffect of human beings on. 3. Restoration ecology.
I. Title.

GF75.M23 2013 304.2 C2012-905605-7

Cover design by Terri Nimmo

Cover image: Paul Fuller / Millennium Images, UK

v3.1

For my mother
and in memory of my father;
this was the last book he ever read.

CONTENTS

Fig. 1
THE NATURE
of
THE PROBLEM

Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,
does there still stand, abandoned, like
a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails,
the luckless garden? INA ROUSSEAU

Chapter 1 .

ILLUSIONS OF NATURE

P icture the first place you thought of as nature. Maybe it was nothing more than a vacant lot in the middle of a city, or a patch of scrub along a riverbank. It might have been a cottage or campground that you visited year after year, or perhaps your childhood home opened onto a forest, a beach, a mountain. Whatever your original vision of nature was, fix it in your mind.

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