2016 read #62: Return to Wild America by Scott Weidensaul.

Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Wild Soul by Scott Weidensaul
365 pages
Published 2005
Read from July 31 to August 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I first encountered Scott Weidensaul in The First Frontier, an overly speculative but winsome history of early culture contact along the Eastern Seaboard. So it was something of a surprise to discover that his main line is in natural history writing; when I first found Return to Wild America on my library's scrimpy science shelves, it took me days to place Weidensaul's name. This, of course, was a couple years ago -- I put the book back after checking the jacket flap, resolved to read the original Wild America that Weidensaul was returning to first, which I only got around to doing last month.

After that long wait, and after my disappointment at finding Peterson and Fisher's Wild America to be little more than a lengthy birding checklist mixed with a '50s travelogue, I'm not surprised that Return is merely adequate. Weidensaul is a competent but uninspired writer, someone I would have appreciated a lot more before I encountered the likes of Roger Deakin, Helen Macdonald, and Robert Macfarlane. Weidensaul's chapters tend to follow a formula, opening with him either in the thick of a wildlife refuge or approaching one by air or by car, segueing into background information and a broader topic in conservation that relates to the place in question, filled in with color quotes from naturalists and refuge biologists showing him around, before hitting with the heavy shit about how the given ecosystem has been stripped and altered and despoiled, and how perilous its future prospects are.

It's basic twenty-first century nature writing with few frills, reading like a series of National Geographic articles from back when they still published articles (so, maybe the mid-1990s?). And like magazine articles, Weidensaul's chapter-essays can't escape a tendency to reduce complex issues into a couple paragraphs, summarizing details and nuance and tricky perspectives into oblivion. A self-described rural Oregon hippie I know objected to the paragraph Weidensaul devoted to the problems of thinning stands of Western timber left packed with fuel after decades of fire-suppression and forest mismanagement -- I can only imagine he waxed glib about any number of convoluted issues in other chapters.

I'm entirely on the side of conservation, myself. Edward Abbey may have been something of a jerk, but I agree with his dictum that "compromise" between development and conservation should begin with half of all the land (and sea) set aside as wilderness. So here in our latter days of armed occupation of wildlife refuges and devious boondoggles to steal our public land for the benefit of some well-placed industry cronies, Weidensaul's doom-and-gloomsaying from the Dubya era seems almost quaint, his optimism about the future of the conservation movement sadly misplaced. All nature books seemingly have to end on that note of optimism, which gets more depressing the more time has passed since some author confidently predicted that "the tide has turned" in our (and our planet's) favor.