cover image Nature Wars: 
The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds

Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds

Jim Sterba. Crown, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-307-34196-9

In his latest, journalist Sterba (Frankie’s Place: A Love Story) provocatively and persuasively argues that just at the moment when humankind has distanced itself irrevocably from nature, its behavior patterns have put people in conflict with a natural world that they don’t know how to deal with. Dividing his work into three parts (“Forest People,” “Wild Beasts,” and “The Denatured Life”), Sterba boldly argues against the prevailing touchy-feely view of nature. Replete with statistics and a historical understanding of the cycles of humankind’s interaction with nature, Sterba tells of forests being cleared and animals hunted to extinction (until the conservation movement stepped in to curtail the damage), and people, already disconnected from the land, sprawled out into new artificial living arrangements that allowed “nuisance” animals to thrive. The deer, beavers, and brown bears that appear in exurbanites’ backyards have dire consequences for the ecological balance and our daily existence. Sterba takes aim at those who protest hunting as a means of population control, movies that anthropomorphize animals into harmless creatures, and Americans who no longer understand nature. Though Sterba can be self-righteous, the book presents a valuable counternarrative to the mainstream view of nature-human interaction. (Nov.)