Review of Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis
Corpses
of bison strewn across a field. An 1899 woodcut of a woman adorned in feathers,
a live bird, clutched by its tail, held aloft in one hand. A man wearing a
camouflage coat wades through snow, hoping to find wolf tracks, eager for “the
visitors from the north’s” return to Colorado. A man stands knee deep in Toms
Creek, grinning as he collects data about the bluehead chub, an innocuous river
fish that has captured his heart. These are just a few of the images found in
Michelle Nijhuis’s book Beloved Beasts, illustrating stories not just
about animals, but people who loved them in myriad ways. My husband read Beloved
Beasts aloud as we drove the fourteen-hour trek from Western North Carolina
to Northern Michigan on our spring break. As the landscape changed from
mountains to hills to flatlands and swamps to evergreens and birches of the
North Woods, I relished each chapter for the joy they revealed in the work of
conservation, mourned for the many losses we’ve witnessed, and sometimes
squirmed with horror at human folly.
Although
the introduction about Aesop’s animal fables and subsequent chapter about Carl
Linnaeus suggests the species conservation movement began long ago with our
first relationships with animals, Nijhuis’s primary focus tracks how species
conservation interests developed and changed over the last three hundred years,
interests that have influenced how we have come to understand conservation and
love and live with wild animals. She provides a sweeping historical exploration
of the current international species conservation movement and how Western
society has only just begun to understand how “conservationists need to pay a
lot more attention to human complexity” (p. 209). Nijhuis says that what we need to do is not
merely save those already endangered, to not only act at the point of crisis,
but also protect and appreciate the value in all creatures who contribute to
their ecosystems, which is all creatures, or “common species,” even if we
cannot currently fathom their future extinction.
Rather
than tracking the birth and efficacy of particular conservation policies,
Nijhuis develops her book by telling about people and their conservation
efforts, often highlighting one or two persons’ stories in each chapter, many
of whom appear in other chapters, while other people only appear on the
periphery. Nijhuis reveals the complexity and, often, irony, in how the
conservation movement grew and changed, demonstrating how conservation is a
collaboration of ideas and desires, often clashing ones. She is quick to point out
that “[t]o consumers of modern media, the story of species conservation doesn’t
look much like a story. It looks like a jumble of tragedies and emergencies”
(p. 6). And because much of the initial conservation movement began by hunters
desiring to preserve species in order to keep killing them, many of the stories
told hold tragedy, such as how the bison, which was once bountiful across the
whole North American continent, were hunted to near extermination. People
realized they needed saved, but our first method of “saving” a species was to
kill them, stuff them, and put them on display in a museum. The very idea
of what it means to conserve, as well as why we conserve has morphed
over time, and Nijhuis urges us to consider how we can continue to transform
the conservation movement.
What
emerges from Nijhuis’s book is not only the story of conservation, that it is
in fact a story, but also that the people who have contributed to it are
essential. How we perceive ourselves impacts how we conserve and our purposes
for conservation. Long have we been enmeshed in Enlightenment rhetoric that
says humans do not belong in nature, and so our purposes fail to make space for
not only understanding that humans occur as a natural phenomenon as much as
plants and animals, but also that by conserving with a holistic purpose, we
will inevitably help our own species. A cultural shift is beginning to take
root, however, and Nijhuis’s book is just one example of how we are discovering
that we humans are a natural part of our landscape. The longer we continue to
perceive ourselves as outside of our ecosystem, the Earth, the longer we will
continue to destroy it.
Beloved
Beasts, furthermore, demonstrates how we need more than a single story to
reveal meaning or come to an understanding. She didn’t just tell one
person’s story, but several. She didn’t only tell one policy’s history,
but several. She didn’t reveal one country’s conservation work, but
several. And we heard about many, many creatures. In order to treat animals as the beloved
beasts they are, we need to allow for more than a single narrative to direct
our action. That, yes, the Endangered Species Act is vitally important and
doing good work, but it needs to function beyond a mode of crisis and instead
“start with common species” (251). The dominant narrative has been to separate
people from place, to master and possess it, and to allow economy to dictate
our actions. What might a different narrative suggest? Beloved Beasts
provides just such a path that could allow our whole planet to flourish, one
that allows for a more complex meaning of conservation.
The
drive from Western North Carolina to Northern Michigan, and back again,
revealed just a snippet of the diverse landscape the United States contains.
Although the Interstates’ exit signs boasted mostly the same gas stations and
fast-food restaurants from the southeast to the north, suggesting a lack of
imaginative complexity in fulfilling our needs and desires, the landscapes we
passed held diverse arrays able to support abundant ecosystems, from
Appalachian Rhododendrons and Laurels, to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio’s Beech,
Ash, Oak, Pawpaw, and Loblolly pine; Indiana and southern Michigan’s Maples and
Buckeyes; and finally to the North Woods swamps full of Eastern White Pine, Red
Pine, and ghost white Birch. And although the animals we saw were mostly
creatures of the air and cows and horses, we knew many unseen beasts of the
woods filled the shadowy forests we passed; we knew that they belong and the woods
wouldn’t be the same without them.
Nijhuis, Michelle. Beloved
Beasts, Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. W.W. Norton &
Company, Ltd., New York, 2021.