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embel 's review for:
The New Wilderness
by Diane Cook
There’s so much that I didn’t like about this book. Many reviews here have already articulated a lot of my thoughts, so I’ll focus on the biggest issues I had that I haven’t seen discussed in too much detail here.
As someone who's made fighting climate change her career, I love reading fiction about an imagined future that deals with climate change because it gets at a lot of problems I've spent years learning and thinking about, and although I thought that’s what this book would be about, it absolutely wasn’t. The general idea of the plot is very intriguing, but it was so poorly executed. It felt like this book was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about ecology nor climate science. For one, there’s only one “wilderness” area left? ONE? Either in the country or the world?! Although its location is never made quite clear (when writing a book about a natural landscape, why not give the reader a clue where it is? There are so many different types of ecosystems in the U.S. that have such vastly different life, it would've been a much more potent story if the natural world was given a better description). If it were true that there was ONE "wilderness" left, things would be so so so so much worse off than is described in the book. The entire continent would be uninhabitable for a variety of reasons, namely extreme weather and heat, drought, fires, and agriculture would not be able to exist. Things wouldn’t just be bad in “the city,” they would be bad everywhere. It doesn’t make sense that this “wilderness” area would have any better air quality than a city that seems to be geographically close. Therefore, much of this plot is just unbelievable, unconvincing, and at times, laughable.
Related to the point above, the fact that this book never directly or indirectly discussed indigenous people was an enormous fault. On one hand, obviously this landscape was/is the lands of the indigenous people of the area. Why did no one in the group consult the tribal ecological knowledge from the ancestors of the land? Are we to assume that there’s no surviving indigenous people anymore? If so, why wasn’t that addressed? How can you talk about surviving off the landscape in America without discussing indigenous people? Similarly, the entirety of this plot was based on harmful, white-washed conservationism. When white people came to America, the “wilderness” that conservationists were enamored by was defined as landscapes that were absent of people. However, that’s not what the landscapes of America were, and the creation of the concept of “wilderness” and the National Parks System resulted in the genocide and forced removal of indigenous people from their homelands. Now, we know that indigenous-based caretaking of land creates healthier ecosystems, and people could have a role in nature not as something that can leave no trace, but as inhabitants that respect that land, plants, and creatures, and positively impact it through thoughtful changes and relationships of reciprocity. This feels like important history to acknowledge in a book about “wilderness.” Perhaps the insanity of the rules and the fascism of the rangers implies a critique of that idea of “wilderness” which necessitates people have no personal relationship with the land they’re living on (in the book, this was addressed with the stringent rules they had to follow (they couldn’t even leave impressions in grasses? They couldn’t stay at one site for more than 7 days?) and the one scene where the ranger shoots the doe and fawn, on top of a number of different rules discussed). If we give the book the benefit of the doubt and assume the author had the intention of making this critique, it was extremely undeveloped even though there was room to make a stronger statement. The plot fell short due to lack of important details–why are the rangers so terrible, who came up with the rules in the manual, what was the point of this “experiment,” what is the state of the rest of the world outside of the U.S., why is there only one city, what happened to the rest of rural America?--and it feels like a total lack of awareness from the author about what this story was even about and any possible history that could have brought the characters there.
Finally, naming overpopulation as a cause for whatever “climate change” is happening in this story feels like a gross misunderstanding of the socioeconomic causes of real life climate change. Overpopulation has a long history with eugenics, and in academic and environmental justice circles, it is widely known that overpopulation is a myth created by eugenists in order to justify colonization and exploitation of the global south. In order to steer clear of this dangerous use of the concept, more had to be done to make clear that the “overpopulation” in this book was real and actually causing harm, and not that it was a problem with how resources are distributed, as is the case in our reality.
Overall, this book felt like a tired attempt at a really cool concept, but it fell far short of achieving what it set out to. Again, there were many other issues with character development, world building, and character relationships, but I’ll leave you to consider those from other reviews.
As someone who's made fighting climate change her career, I love reading fiction about an imagined future that deals with climate change because it gets at a lot of problems I've spent years learning and thinking about, and although I thought that’s what this book would be about, it absolutely wasn’t. The general idea of the plot is very intriguing, but it was so poorly executed. It felt like this book was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about ecology nor climate science. For one, there’s only one “wilderness” area left? ONE? Either in the country or the world?! Although its location is never made quite clear (when writing a book about a natural landscape, why not give the reader a clue where it is? There are so many different types of ecosystems in the U.S. that have such vastly different life, it would've been a much more potent story if the natural world was given a better description). If it were true that there was ONE "wilderness" left, things would be so so so so much worse off than is described in the book. The entire continent would be uninhabitable for a variety of reasons, namely extreme weather and heat, drought, fires, and agriculture would not be able to exist. Things wouldn’t just be bad in “the city,” they would be bad everywhere. It doesn’t make sense that this “wilderness” area would have any better air quality than a city that seems to be geographically close. Therefore, much of this plot is just unbelievable, unconvincing, and at times, laughable.
Related to the point above, the fact that this book never directly or indirectly discussed indigenous people was an enormous fault. On one hand, obviously this landscape was/is the lands of the indigenous people of the area. Why did no one in the group consult the tribal ecological knowledge from the ancestors of the land? Are we to assume that there’s no surviving indigenous people anymore? If so, why wasn’t that addressed? How can you talk about surviving off the landscape in America without discussing indigenous people? Similarly, the entirety of this plot was based on harmful, white-washed conservationism. When white people came to America, the “wilderness” that conservationists were enamored by was defined as landscapes that were absent of people. However, that’s not what the landscapes of America were, and the creation of the concept of “wilderness” and the National Parks System resulted in the genocide and forced removal of indigenous people from their homelands. Now, we know that indigenous-based caretaking of land creates healthier ecosystems, and people could have a role in nature not as something that can leave no trace, but as inhabitants that respect that land, plants, and creatures, and positively impact it through thoughtful changes and relationships of reciprocity. This feels like important history to acknowledge in a book about “wilderness.” Perhaps the insanity of the rules and the fascism of the rangers implies a critique of that idea of “wilderness” which necessitates people have no personal relationship with the land they’re living on (in the book, this was addressed with the stringent rules they had to follow (they couldn’t even leave impressions in grasses? They couldn’t stay at one site for more than 7 days?) and the one scene where the ranger shoots the doe and fawn, on top of a number of different rules discussed). If we give the book the benefit of the doubt and assume the author had the intention of making this critique, it was extremely undeveloped even though there was room to make a stronger statement. The plot fell short due to lack of important details–why are the rangers so terrible, who came up with the rules in the manual, what was the point of this “experiment,” what is the state of the rest of the world outside of the U.S., why is there only one city, what happened to the rest of rural America?--and it feels like a total lack of awareness from the author about what this story was even about and any possible history that could have brought the characters there.
Finally, naming overpopulation as a cause for whatever “climate change” is happening in this story feels like a gross misunderstanding of the socioeconomic causes of real life climate change. Overpopulation has a long history with eugenics, and in academic and environmental justice circles, it is widely known that overpopulation is a myth created by eugenists in order to justify colonization and exploitation of the global south. In order to steer clear of this dangerous use of the concept, more had to be done to make clear that the “overpopulation” in this book was real and actually causing harm, and not that it was a problem with how resources are distributed, as is the case in our reality.
Overall, this book felt like a tired attempt at a really cool concept, but it fell far short of achieving what it set out to. Again, there were many other issues with character development, world building, and character relationships, but I’ll leave you to consider those from other reviews.