On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature

Publishers Weekly

Award-winning poet Challenger (Galatea) imbues this ambitious meditation with the courage of an explorer, the scientific curiosity of a botanist and a geologist, the excited digging of an archeologist, the compassion of a cultural anthropologist, the long reach of a historian, and the urgent concern of an environmentalist. She travels from a writer’s solitary cabin on the Ding Dong Moor, close by the ruins of a tin mine in Cornwall, England, to a journey to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, back to the North Yorkshire town of Whitby, and on to the tundra of the Arctic where the language and culture of the Inuit barely survive. Eventually Challenger comes to rest in a narrowboat on the River Cam in Cambridgeshire. At every stop in her “peregrination,” she muses on evolutionary changes marked by extinctions past and present. The chief culprit of our “estrangement from nature” in the 20th century is, for her, “the urge to fuse humans and technology.” Throughout this beautifully written, moving, and important book, Challenger yearns to find that feeling of belonging to a particular place. Her connection, one comes to feel, is to the past and present of our whole precarious planet. Agent: Jessica Woollard, the Marsh Agency. (Dec.)

From the Publisher

Praise for On Extinction

“On Extinction is a strange hybrid of travelogue and natural science, misted over with a wanderer’s lonesome observations of a world in the process of disappearing… Amid this solid research, there is fine and truly poetic prose…The big loops of this peregrinating work intersect in interesting ways…a strangeness is evoked, a strangeness that conveys how, in spite of all our erudition, we walk the earth in the 21st century as in a dream." —The New York Times Book Review

"A deep look at the human capacity for extinction twined with roamings to the far ends of the earth, from poet and fledgling natural historian Challenger…She has a rangy curiosity that extends well past ignorance and alienation as the sole agents of the man-made extinction…A formidable inquiry into why the marvels of nature and the distinctiveness of cultures are constantly imperiled."—Kirkus

“Erudite and impassioned, Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction is a ruminative examination on the way our 21st century world is changing quickly . . . A timely and important book, On Extinction will make you think, one of the finest things a book can do.” —The Dallas Morning News

“[Challenger] has a keen awareness of how the past is layered beneath the present, and how transient both natural and human systems are… [On Extinction] lets the reader observe a creative and intelligent mind at work on problems that face all of us.” —Columbus Dispatch

"A book which eloquently explores the unhallowedness of species extinctions and which also depicts humanity's resultant bereftness: their loss is ours."
—Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

Kirkus Reviews

A deep look at the human capacity for extinction twined with roamings to the far ends of the earth, from poet and fledgling natural historian Challenger (Galatea, 2006, etc.). Spurred by her lack of belonging to a particular place and her sense of alarm over her ignorance of the natural world, the author struck out to investigate how such a mindset could lead to extinction of both creatures and cultures. She has a rangy curiosity that extends well past ignorance and alienation as the sole agents of the man-made extinction. As she travels from abandoned whaling stations on South Georgia Island to the wildness of Bird Island to the fraught lifestyle changes afoot in Nunavut, she examines such ideas as nostalgia being a trigger for extinction; the effects of a Hobbesian industry of survival; a grief-stricken burying of the past in a headlong rush that devastates nature; the notion, from early Christianity to Locke, of dominion; the rise of industrialization and globalization, in the process squashing the intimate and particular relationship with a place, that feeling of safety and confederacy with the land. She faces the elemental question of exactly what is natural, when all is in flux to the turbulent, indefatigable forces of change. What rises so pungently from her travels and ruminations are the vanishing cultures, the ways of life that capture the idiosyncrasy of place, how "[t]his move from distinctive cultural knowledge born of the varied attributes of landscapes to the universal cultural knowledge of technologies available worldwide is akin to the disappearance of diversity in nature." A formidable inquiry into why the marvels of nature and the distinctiveness of cultures are constantly imperiled.

Library Journal

Poet Challenger (Galatea) begins this book by recalling a childhood visit to a natural history museum and her burgeoning desire to understand why extinction matters. She ends with her return to Cambridge University by way of Antarctica, and in between engages in an extended discussion of humanity's estrangement from nature in concert with a dizzying number of references to ideas, names, and places. Challenger reflects on her past, her travels, and the extinction of languages, cultures, and species, returning to a nostalgia born of industrial change, creative destruction, and distance from the natural world. VERDICT Sometimes thought provoking, sometimes enjoyable, the book is also tiring in its frenetic movement from place to place and topic to topic. Nevertheless, there is much to appreciate here. Challenger writes well and delivers some beautifully descriptive passages. Recommended for those interested in an exploration of humanity's growing distance from nature and its connection to modern society and technological innovation.—Jon Bodnar, Emory Univ. Lib., Atlanta