Brian Griffith's Blog - Posts Tagged "frontier"

In sum, it was the greatest case of multi-species ethnic cleansing in world history. In the wake of that ecocide frontier, Henry David Thoreau surveyed his New England landscape and confessed, “When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear … I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.” In watching the forests vanish around Walden Pond, he added, “Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds.”

War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals