Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

I’d started reading historical accounts of wildlife in America—a little obsessively. Part of what I was hoping to do for Isla by showing her endangered animals in the wild was offset the environmental generational amnesia that would inevitably take hold between her and me—to help her know a world, a baseline, that preceded her. But I was also learning about the world that preceded me. And what always leapt out of those accounts was the simple fact of abundance: people’s descriptions of being dwarfed and engulfed by wild animals, or even just massively inconvenienced by them. Americans are still inconvenienced by wildlife all the time, of course: the raccoon in the attic, the deer eating the backyard flowers, a recent incident of black bears rubbing against wiring in Idaho and shorting out Internet connections. But, as with the turtles at the airport, these confrontations usually highlight how inflexible our own species has become, and how much space we take up. You’d never know that the animals used to be the teeming and inflexible ones.

abundance