THE BEASTS OF THE EAST

A searching exploration of the survival and reintroduction of long-lost animal species east of the Mississippi.

Nature bats last, it’s said—but not when there’s nothing but parking lot around the diamond. So seemed much of the East Coast and Midwest in the go-go postwar years, when every turn revealed a new smokestack or suburb. But things have changed, as environmental writer Moore documents, opening on a hopeful note from an Indiana wetland and announcing, “it’s believed that there are more sandhill cranes today than at any point in history.” That would certainly make Peter Matthiessen happy, he who chronicled the cranes’ sad decline in his 1959 book Wildlife in America. Amazingly, and wondrously, other species that have long been absent from the eastern half of the country are flourishing, and Moore reports on their fortunes in welcome detail. At another Indiana venue, practically within walking distance of metropolitan Chicago, buffalo have been restored to a prairie along the Kankakee River. This restoration, he notes, is not an event unto itself; it has involved curing the ills of the land, too, by replacing invasive plants with native species and making habitat fit to support the ecosystems of old, of which bison, elk, red wolves, and other megafauna are but a part. Moore travels widely to look at reintroduction programs that leverage this habitat rehabilitation, taking in near-ideal refuges such as western Kentucky’s remote Land Between the Lakes but also less congenial sites that are the leftovers of mountaintop removal during coal-mining operations. Moore’s optimism and bringing of good news are refreshing but tinged with a cautionary note, as in the case of one of his highlighted species: “The red wolf is the charismatic mammal that often captures our attention, but it is the entire system that is in peril.”

An exemplary work of environmental journalism and advocacy that makes clear that there’s much more to be done.