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Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back
Even ‘untouched’ natural landscapes bear witness to millennia of human influence, a lyrical book argues — with implications for how we seek to rewild them.
Weaving into her narrative an understanding of ecological niches, previous biodiversity crises and the deep environmental legacy of Roman farming, Yeo demonstrates the fallacy of trying to return the environment to any point in the past, whether that be pre-Roman Great Britain or Pleistocene Europe. Most continents — save for Africa, where large animals live on, and Antarctica, the surface of which has long been buried under kilometres of ice — are, as Yeo puts it, “haunted by the ghosts of the megafauna” that disappeared in the past 50,000 years, yet left an imprint on soil nutrients or made holes in ecological communities. Yeo asserts that properly understanding the past can be a key to building a richer future, not by trying to rewind the tape of history to some pre-human idyll, but by reinvigorating the natural world in a way that is sustainable and enriches lives.
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