Paradises wounded, but not lost
The Wild Places
By Robert Macfarlane
Penguin, 340 pp., paperback, $15
Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
By Barbara Hurd
University of Georgia, 160 pp., $22.95
Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
By William Stolzenburg
Bloomsbury, 291 pp., $24.99
If you're worried about the future of the last wild places in the United States, be glad you don't live in the United Kingdom. There are around 33 million cars in the UK, and more humans per square kilometer than in all but four of our 50 states.
About Ireland and Britain, E. M. Forster wrote in 1964, "There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, and no deserted valley." Twenty-six years later, William Least Heat-Moon called Britain "a tiny garden of a toy realm where there's almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it."
In his new book, "The Wild Places," a skilled young writer named Robert Macfarlane sets out to see if any wildness might still be found in the UK.
Does he find any? Yes. No. Sort of. Macfarlane delivers crisp, engaging scenes in a number of isolated spots: swimming in phosphorescent seas off the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales, climbing a wedge-shaped mountain called Ben Hope in Scotland.
Are these untrammeled wildernesses? Not usually. "There were warnings here too against dreams of purity or invulnerability," Macfarlane writes about Coruisk, a lonely valley on the Isle of Skye, "in the plastic debris that gaudied the beaches, in the oil that slicked the kelp and the seabirds: evidence of incursion and change." Besides his talents as a terrific writer and reader (he makes scores of literary allusions), Macfarlane's singular strength may be his youth. He was only 31 when "The Wild Places" came out in the UK, and I hope it's not unfair to suggest that he may be part of the shifting baseline syndrome - an idea that argues that the world we see as children programs us for how an ideal world should look, even if we're seeing only a shadow of the biodiversity our ancestors knew.
Unlike so many writers concerned about environmental degradation, Macfarlane is not a mourner. "The Wild Places" is decidedly not an obituary. By the end of his peregrinations he had won me over completely, and I found myself nodding along with him as he began to redefine his sense of wildness. "The weed thrusting through a crack in the pavement," he writes, "the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake."
Another gifted naturalist with a new book out is Barbara Hurd. In "Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains," Hurd delivers 19 pithy and gorgeously written meditations on the places where land and ocean meet.
High tides seem to present Hurd not so much with seaweed and shells as with stripes of superencrypted code, hieroglyphics that ultimately elude her attempts to decipher them. "A lot of things don't make sense," she writes, "and often seeing clearly has less to do with searching for coherence and more to do with accepting the disconnected, unwieldy disparities that surround us."
Hurd's is not a scientific or emotional investigation as much as poetic one. An encounter with a jellyfish on a beach in Cape Ann becomes a rumination on incompletion. A starfish in the hand becomes a reverie about loss; a length of driftwood becomes a study of the soul, then of alertness, then, obliquely, of the death of a parent.
"Walking the Wrack Line" is neither memoir, though, nor confessional. The book has less of a guiding narrative than "The Wild Places," and its overriding allegiance is to exploration through language. Hurd is magnificent at translating the world into words, in witnessing some small incident on a beach - coming upon the dark impression a melted iceberg has left in the sand on an Alaskan shoreline, for example - and spiraling it out into a sustained series of questions about impermanence.
In "Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators," science writer William Stolzenburg looks into some wild places, too, and finds them wounded. His book presents a meticulous and convincing argument that alpha predators are the primary regulators of ecosystems, and that their removal is crippling our planet's biodiversity.
Yank all the starfish off a sea stack in coastal Washington, and within months the mussels that the starfish would normally eat form a diversity-crushing monopoly. Take sea otters out of the ocean around an Aleutian island, and the sea urchins the otters would normally eat mow nearby kelp forests into oblivion. Remove cougars from the Eastern Seaboard, and white-tailed deer lay waste to forests. Take wolves out of Yellowstone, and elk decimate the cottonwood, willow, and aspen seedlings.
In example after example, many of them cinematic, all of them engrossing, Stolzenburg argues that when superpredators are pushed out of places, biodiversity plummets.
This, of course, is a foundation of ecology. Cats are linked to flowers; wolves are linked to aspen seedlings. The question for Stolzenburg is: Are keystone predators what ultimately regulate the stability of the vast, ultracomplicated interconnections between creatures?
"In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world," he concludes, "we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. . . . They come as haunting demons of the human mind."
Anthony Doerr is the author of "The Shell Collector," "About Grace," and "Four Seasons in Rome." 