THE ART OF REWILDING

An accordion-folded introduction to rewilding projects in Yellowstone and elsewhere.

The pages unfold to reveal a single long illustration by Majewski that tracks the recovery of a riverine habitat that starts out stripped by elk but gradually regains both lush greenery and diverse animal life after wolves are reintroduced to prey on them. On the flip side, images of individual wild creatures illustrate brief before-and-after accounts of how select animal populations have been encouraged to recover—mostly in Yellowstone but also in the Alps, where the bearded vulture has made a return; the importance of bison and wild bees to ecosystems is also discussed. The flowing, roughly brushed, painterly art features burgeoning numbers of stylized but recognizable flora and fauna filling the vivid front landscape and, on the back, illustrating a diagrammatic “trophic cascade” or posing alertly in isolation. The impact of the images is only fitfully echoed in the narrative, though, which was originally published in French and suffers from not only what are probably translation issues (in one section elk and deer are used interchangeably, and two consecutive sentences make the same observation), but also fuzzy logic in claiming that the reintroduction of brown bears to the Pyrenees fosters ecotourism but “doesn’t really have an impact on its ecosystem.” (How that even counts as “rewilding” isn’t addressed.) (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Visually effective; textually lacking.