Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution

Rewilding the World is about the importance of biogeography, the biodiversity of nature, and the implications of biodiversity loss. It is about the environment, climate change, and why a diversity of animal and plant species matter. Fraser answers the question: Do we have to save every species and subspecies? And the question: Why are predators so important?’ – this includes foxes, wolves, coyotes, bears, jackals, lions, sharks, and crocodiles.Fraser highlights Michael Soule’s 1990 paper on complementary goals for continental conservation: cores, corridors, and carnivores. For example, core protected areas; corridors for animals to roam freely, migrate, and disperse; and carnivores (meat-eating predators) to maintain healthy ecosystems because they regulate other predators and prey.Rewilding – a biodiversity campaign (since the 1990s) – aims to restore species by protecting and restoring habitats, creating migration corridors, and promoting peace between people and predators. It’s about equilibrium in nature. Unlike environmental campaigns that oppose dams, construction, drilling and so one, rewilding focuses on the positive – a connectivity of animals with their own environment, and a connectivity between humans and animals.Fraser discusses the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative (Y2Y), launched in 1997, to forge a single wildlife corridor connecting isolated parks, national forests, and some of the largest roadless areas left in America. She discusses the Panther Path in South America, launched in 1994, a corridor for the wild cat; the European Green Belt established in the 1990s replacing the barbed wire of the former Iron Curtain with nature reserves; the wildlife corridors in Africa (an Africa without fences) and the trans-frontier Peace Parks; and Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape project to reconnect a ‘green necklace’ for the Bengal tiger, one-horned rhinoceros and Asian elephant – to name a few mentioned.This is a fascinating comprehensive exploration of the rewilding philosophy. With example after example, Caroline Fraser presents a landscape of biodiversity conservation from grassroots to governmental levels, and globally from Africa to Asia to Australia, reinforcing the fact that rewilding is about making connections. Rewilding also connects science with social movements that realign human behaviour with the environment.

I’m a conservationist, 29, working in the field for 6 years, living between Indonesia and kenya. I’ve been thrust into the middle of many of these arguments - protect or restore? Forests or biodiversity? Empower locals or restrict their actions? Fraser does a wonderful job of synthesizing 100 years of conservation thinking and philosophy. After all this time working in the field I now have my bearings. I cannot thank her enough for writing this! In her last chapter she also voices an argument I’ve been trying to make for many years - other species, or nations, should have the rights to coexist with us. As controversial as it is true, Fraser had the bravery to end a technical book with an impassioned and informed call to arms for compassionate conservation!!

I heard about this book from a friend of mine who as she talked about the book - telling about it to a group of friends - she actually wept. The book is not only interesting, fascinating at times, and very well researched (Caroline Fraser has truly done her homework) - it offers HOPE so it is NOT just one sad tale after another. She covers stories from around the globe. I have bought this book also for friends so that they could read it too.

Drought parches the USA as this book irrigates my mind. Can we build the trickle of biodiversity into a flood? Fraser's work, a rewilding Bible, constructs an ark of what can be Earth's saving grace: Cores, Corridors and Carnivores. If only the Occupy Movement will acknowledge the real 99%: other species. We need a De-Occupy revolution, giving space to wilderness.And we need radical ideas of how to implement, like  Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue  and  Pax of Wildly Women ... How scorching must the summer be, before we give Mother Nature some juice?

Extremely readable for anyone, teens and up. The author is amazed and delighted, sometimes frustrated but often joyous. Readers travel the world with her and meet the people who are passionate about saving animals, plants and their habitats. I found myself saying Wow! on nearly every page. Today's conservation efforts, strategies developed in the last 20 years, are made clear. It's not the old tree-hugger versus developer story any more. Caroline Fraser will let you in on the latest stuff. Warning: readers could become a menace at cocktail parties.

REWILDING OUR SPECIES KEEPS HUMANS ALIVE

Very good book on why we need to take care of our natural world and share resources. I would recommend for everyone.

Thought this was a great book and it got here really quickly despite me remote location. Defiantly worth reading even if you're not that into conservation.

This book gives an up to date account of the new thinking that informs many of the more ambitious and successful attempts to conserve - and restore, one of the aspects that sets 'rewilding' apart from traditional conservation - wilderness around the world. The author describes well the developments that led to the new departures, and why the new approaches are essential if we are to seriously attempt to slow the current rapid rate of biodiversity loss - the Sixth Great Extinction. She also examines diverse examples on the ground, each faced with a varying set of challenges to be overcome, analysing their successes and failures in order to arrive at some general conclusions.A couple of the chapters in the middle of the book that deal with Africa didn't hold my attention to quite the same extent as the rest, but that is likely just me and my particular interests (forest). Fraser is clearly passionate about her subject and writes with insight and intelligence. Her writing style is for the most part very readable, sometimes exhilarating, and often quite entertaining. As soon as I finished the book I went back to the beginning and am now re-reading it.If you are really interested in understanding where we are at in terms of the devastation being wreaked on this planet's ecosystems and how that might be turned around, reading this book would be an excellent start.

I had not done my research, so thought the UK would be involved as we have done quite a lot for conservation.