About the Author
Works by Jon Mooallem
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (2013) 241 copies, 11 reviews
This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together (2020) 162 copies, 5 reviews
The New York Times Magazine: Who's Killing the Monk Seals — Author — 1 copy
Associated Works
Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger, and Heartbreak from the Atavist Magazine (2016) — Contributor — 46 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
Members
Reviews
The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem
Wild Ones is an honest look into the status of endangered species and their relationship to humans in the present day. Mooallem makes three trips - sometimes bringing his young daughter - to see animals who may be extinct within our lifetimes. He first visits Churchill, Ontario, the only location where polar bears live adjacent to a human community and their strange celebrity status there. Next, he visits the Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge in the Bay Area of California where Lange's show more metalmark butterfly clings to survival in a post-industrial environment. Finally, he visits the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) breeding centers that attempt repopulate whooping crane populations with minimal interaction with humans (the staff where crane-like disguises) and follows the annual Operation Migration where cranes are lead by light aircraft. At each spot, Mooallem interviews the people trying to rehabilitate the endangered animal populations as well as amateur participants and observers.
Supporting his journalistic endeavors, Mooallem also researches the relationships of humanity to animals in America, focusing on figures ranging from Thomas Jefferson to 19th-century zoologist William Temple Hornaday to 1970s whale advocate Joan McIntyre. Mooallem frequently recognizes that the idea of wilderness is impossible in a world so widely-populated with humans. The idea that endangered species can be simply rehabilitated and reintroduced to the wild is being replaced with the reality that they will require perpetual management to survive. He also notes how people's appreciation of wild animals is inversely proportional to their populations, and animals once endangered - such as Canada geese and white-tailed deer - are now considered pests. But Mooallem also sees hope in a world where humans and animals are more interconnected as the ideas of a seperate wilderness are dismissed.
Mooallem writes in a snarky, fatalistic tone that, while understandable, I find off-putting. Nevertheless, I find this an informative and thought-provoking book. show less
Supporting his journalistic endeavors, Mooallem also researches the relationships of humanity to animals in America, focusing on figures ranging from Thomas Jefferson to 19th-century zoologist William Temple Hornaday to 1970s whale advocate Joan McIntyre. Mooallem frequently recognizes that the idea of wilderness is impossible in a world so widely-populated with humans. The idea that endangered species can be simply rehabilitated and reintroduced to the wild is being replaced with the reality that they will require perpetual management to survive. He also notes how people's appreciation of wild animals is inversely proportional to their populations, and animals once endangered - such as Canada geese and white-tailed deer - are now considered pests. But Mooallem also sees hope in a world where humans and animals are more interconnected as the ideas of a seperate wilderness are dismissed.
Mooallem writes in a snarky, fatalistic tone that, while understandable, I find off-putting. Nevertheless, I find this an informative and thought-provoking book. show less
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: In 1910, the United States—its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted—was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.
The only thing stranger than the hippo idea itself was show more the partnership promoting it. At its center were two hard-bitten spies: Frederick Russell Burnham, a superhumanly competent frontiersman, freelance adventurer, and fervent optimist about America’s future—Burnham would be the inspiration for the Boy Scouts—and Fritz Duquesne, a.k.a. the Black Panther, a virtuoso con man and cynical saboteur who believed only in his own glorification and revenge. Burnham and Duquesne had very recently been sworn enemies under orders to assassinate each other. They’d soon be enemies again. But for one brief and shining moment they joined behind a common cause: transforming America into a nation of hippopotamus ranchers.
In American Hippopotamus, Jon Mooallem brings to life a historical saga too preposterous to be fiction—a bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos, but also of a conflicted nation on the threshold of a bewildering new century, deciding what kind of country it would be, and what beasts it would eat.
My Review: This Kindle Single, produced by The Atavist...which company creates quite a few of these not-quite-enough-to-make-a-regular-book very long articles...was a whimsical purchase. American HIPPOPOTAMUS and Teddy Roosevelt and the Original Boy Scout?! It's like they mapped my brain and found all the crannies that need filling before putting this, and many of their other, projects out.
Mooallem (great name, don't you think?) found this weird little footnote in history heaven-knows-how, but I am glad he did. The more-or-less 70pp of the story don't give him all that much latitude to develop the sheer blinding weirdness of his tale into tedious show-your-work detail. He hits the high points and moves on, following the two central characters of Burnham and Duquesne from sketchily traced origins to endings. The men are documented fully in other books, as they deserve to be. This isn't intended to be a dissertation on either of them, or of their weird plot to introduce hippos to the swamps of the Gulf Coast...HIPPOS! they kill more people every year than sharks!...to solve something I'd only very glancingly heard tell of, "The Great Meat Crisis" that was afflicting the US a hundred years ago.
I know for a fact that the water hyacinth problem the hippos...hippos! can't get over that...were meant to help solve is ongoing, and the importation of exotic animals to help solve it is still bandied about. Austin, Texas, was all gung-ho to introduce sterilized Asian carp into one of its lakes to eat the damned weeds. A scary, scary prospect. Those are some very nasty fish with no local predators and no food value that I know of.
Anyway. Mooallem was obviously struck by the audacity of such a plan, and by the world that could imagine such a thing working well. He sums up the appeal of this read quite well and succinctly:
Well, well, well. Someone other than me noticed! Of course, the advantage to that timorousness is the guarantee of the supine acquiescence of our potentially rich populace to the damnable and insufferable rule of the banksters and plutocrats. Know what finally killed the hippos-in-Dixie plan? (Other than good fortune, can you even imagine the horrors of hippos charging through New Orleans?!) The nature of harvesting the meat (don't get that image too stuck in your heads) meant that the gigantic meat-packers couldn't use their huge slaughter houses and assembly-line methods to cut and pack the meat.
That, obviously, cannot be allowed. No more than could the egg farmers afford to acquiesce to the proposal, made around the same time, to replace fragile, quick-to-spoil hen's eggs with turkey eggs that have a larger volume of albumen, more yolk, thicker shells, and a vastly longer unrefrigerated shelf life.
Such, laddies and gentlewomen, is the nature of life in a "democracy" that's run for the benefit of the few against the interests of the many: pay more for less, and be grateful you're allowed to have it at all.
Ahem. The cost of this good evening's read is $2.99, and it's a darn good investment in an amusing side-light onto American history and human nature.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
The Publisher Says: In 1910, the United States—its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted—was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.
The only thing stranger than the hippo idea itself was show more the partnership promoting it. At its center were two hard-bitten spies: Frederick Russell Burnham, a superhumanly competent frontiersman, freelance adventurer, and fervent optimist about America’s future—Burnham would be the inspiration for the Boy Scouts—and Fritz Duquesne, a.k.a. the Black Panther, a virtuoso con man and cynical saboteur who believed only in his own glorification and revenge. Burnham and Duquesne had very recently been sworn enemies under orders to assassinate each other. They’d soon be enemies again. But for one brief and shining moment they joined behind a common cause: transforming America into a nation of hippopotamus ranchers.
In American Hippopotamus, Jon Mooallem brings to life a historical saga too preposterous to be fiction—a bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos, but also of a conflicted nation on the threshold of a bewildering new century, deciding what kind of country it would be, and what beasts it would eat.
My Review: This Kindle Single, produced by The Atavist...which company creates quite a few of these not-quite-enough-to-make-a-regular-book very long articles...was a whimsical purchase. American HIPPOPOTAMUS and Teddy Roosevelt and the Original Boy Scout?! It's like they mapped my brain and found all the crannies that need filling before putting this, and many of their other, projects out.
Mooallem (great name, don't you think?) found this weird little footnote in history heaven-knows-how, but I am glad he did. The more-or-less 70pp of the story don't give him all that much latitude to develop the sheer blinding weirdness of his tale into tedious show-your-work detail. He hits the high points and moves on, following the two central characters of Burnham and Duquesne from sketchily traced origins to endings. The men are documented fully in other books, as they deserve to be. This isn't intended to be a dissertation on either of them, or of their weird plot to introduce hippos to the swamps of the Gulf Coast...HIPPOS! they kill more people every year than sharks!...to solve something I'd only very glancingly heard tell of, "The Great Meat Crisis" that was afflicting the US a hundred years ago.
I know for a fact that the water hyacinth problem the hippos...hippos! can't get over that...were meant to help solve is ongoing, and the importation of exotic animals to help solve it is still bandied about. Austin, Texas, was all gung-ho to introduce sterilized Asian carp into one of its lakes to eat the damned weeds. A scary, scary prospect. Those are some very nasty fish with no local predators and no food value that I know of.
Anyway. Mooallem was obviously struck by the audacity of such a plan, and by the world that could imagine such a thing working well. He sums up the appeal of this read quite well and succinctly:
I'm not arguing that America would be a better or more beautiful place if it had imported hippopotamuses in 1910. But there is something beautiful about the America that considered importing them--an America so intent on facing down its problems, and solving them, that even an idea like this could get a fair hearing; where the political system and the culture felt so alive with possibility, and so confident of its own virtue and ingenuity, that elected officials could sit around and contemplate the merits of hippo ranching without worrying too much how it sounded; where people felt free and bold enough to imagine putting hippopotamuses in places where there were no hippopotamuses.
Somewhere along the way, our politics, and maybe our psyches, too, became stunted by a certain insecurity--by the fear that someone is quietly sneering at us, just waiting to skewer and betray us if we take a bold chance.
Well, well, well. Someone other than me noticed! Of course, the advantage to that timorousness is the guarantee of the supine acquiescence of our potentially rich populace to the damnable and insufferable rule of the banksters and plutocrats. Know what finally killed the hippos-in-Dixie plan? (Other than good fortune, can you even imagine the horrors of hippos charging through New Orleans?!) The nature of harvesting the meat (don't get that image too stuck in your heads) meant that the gigantic meat-packers couldn't use their huge slaughter houses and assembly-line methods to cut and pack the meat.
That, obviously, cannot be allowed. No more than could the egg farmers afford to acquiesce to the proposal, made around the same time, to replace fragile, quick-to-spoil hen's eggs with turkey eggs that have a larger volume of albumen, more yolk, thicker shells, and a vastly longer unrefrigerated shelf life.
Such, laddies and gentlewomen, is the nature of life in a "democracy" that's run for the benefit of the few against the interests of the many: pay more for less, and be grateful you're allowed to have it at all.
Ahem. The cost of this good evening's read is $2.99, and it's a darn good investment in an amusing side-light onto American history and human nature.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem
The subtitle is an excellent summary! Fascinating collection of stories about interactions between humans and wildlife, told in a very approachable down-to-earth manner. Full of weird historical tangents that end up giving great context toward current attitudes and perceptions. Environmentally-minded but absolutely open and honest about how conflicted the human heart gets around nature, this book is an exploration, not a problem/solution presentation. Deeply researched and sufficiently geeky show more without being pretentious or dense - a nonfiction book that I found just as compelling as my usual fiction reads. show less
In this book the author explores the attitudes of everyday people to threatened and endangered wildlife, and the convoluted efforts of conservationists and scientists to save them. Convoluted because the more closely you look at each issue, the more insurmountable and unrealistic the effort appears to be . . .
It starts with the author deciding to visit three areas where he can see in person animal species that are struggling, on the brink of extinction as it were. For some of the trips he show more takes his young daughter along- so part of this is also looking at what children understand of wildlife issues . . . He goes to Churchill to view the polar bears- which every year face a longer stretch of fasting waiting for sea ice to form, while more cubs starve and never make it to adulthood. He goes to Antioch Dunes, a place where the endangered Lange's metalmark butterfly lives on one host plant species that thrives on shifting dunes- but by the time it was made into a wildlife refuge so much sand had been mined and trucked away the ecosystem changed drastically, and now it's only through the constant efforts of humans to eradicate 'weeds' and plant the butterfly's naked stem buckwheat that keeps the species going. Finally, he travels to Michigan to join the team of Operation Migration and see how whooping crane chicks, raised in captivity by men masked in crane costumes, are led by ultralight planes on their first migration. In each case, the author talks with scientists, conservationists, and bystanders alike. . . He talks about shifting baselines, how the public's perception of wildlife issues is influenced and changes over the years, how charismatic species get all the attention while lesser-known and smaller ones quietly disappear. There's discussion on how bison were nearly wiped out and since recovered and how canada geese went from being seen as rare harbringers of changing seasons to outright pests. There's the true story about a humpback whale that swam up a river and stranded itself- and so many people came to view this one animal in trouble, they trampled all over the butterfly refuge which was even worse for that species and its host plant. The parts about the legal tangle of how individual species get protection, are listed or de-listed as endangered, and suffer from lack of funding, was a bit tedious to read through.
But it becomes very clear that for many species, people are obviously propping them up, and if we withdrew our support, they would simply disappear- in some cases, very quickly. How long do we continue that effort? I don't know what to think of the message this book gives me. On the one hand, it's encouraging to see how many people do care about wildlife and are going to great efforts to help our fellow creatures survive- even if some of them don't act as wild as they used to (whooping cranes visiting bird feeders, whitetail deer in backyards). On the other hand, the glum none-of-this-matters-in-the-end attitude makes me feel very depressed. What we have done to our Earth is dismal. As long as humans keep taking up so much space and increasing our numbers and use of resources, I don't see how things can change or even be sustainable. Much less remain habitable for the diversity of species it once supported, in the long run.
more at the Dogear Diary show less
It starts with the author deciding to visit three areas where he can see in person animal species that are struggling, on the brink of extinction as it were. For some of the trips he show more takes his young daughter along- so part of this is also looking at what children understand of wildlife issues . . . He goes to Churchill to view the polar bears- which every year face a longer stretch of fasting waiting for sea ice to form, while more cubs starve and never make it to adulthood. He goes to Antioch Dunes, a place where the endangered Lange's metalmark butterfly lives on one host plant species that thrives on shifting dunes- but by the time it was made into a wildlife refuge so much sand had been mined and trucked away the ecosystem changed drastically, and now it's only through the constant efforts of humans to eradicate 'weeds' and plant the butterfly's naked stem buckwheat that keeps the species going. Finally, he travels to Michigan to join the team of Operation Migration and see how whooping crane chicks, raised in captivity by men masked in crane costumes, are led by ultralight planes on their first migration. In each case, the author talks with scientists, conservationists, and bystanders alike. . . He talks about shifting baselines, how the public's perception of wildlife issues is influenced and changes over the years, how charismatic species get all the attention while lesser-known and smaller ones quietly disappear. There's discussion on how bison were nearly wiped out and since recovered and how canada geese went from being seen as rare harbringers of changing seasons to outright pests. There's the true story about a humpback whale that swam up a river and stranded itself- and so many people came to view this one animal in trouble, they trampled all over the butterfly refuge which was even worse for that species and its host plant. The parts about the legal tangle of how individual species get protection, are listed or de-listed as endangered, and suffer from lack of funding, was a bit tedious to read through.
But it becomes very clear that for many species, people are obviously propping them up, and if we withdrew our support, they would simply disappear- in some cases, very quickly. How long do we continue that effort? I don't know what to think of the message this book gives me. On the one hand, it's encouraging to see how many people do care about wildlife and are going to great efforts to help our fellow creatures survive- even if some of them don't act as wild as they used to (whooping cranes visiting bird feeders, whitetail deer in backyards). On the other hand, the glum none-of-this-matters-in-the-end attitude makes me feel very depressed. What we have done to our Earth is dismal. As long as humans keep taking up so much space and increasing our numbers and use of resources, I don't see how things can change or even be sustainable. Much less remain habitable for the diversity of species it once supported, in the long run.
more at the Dogear Diary show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 5
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 460
- Popularity
- #53,418
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 22
- ISBNs
- 13
- Languages
- 1