climate change, justice, and numerous other topics in environmental philosophy. Preston teaches environmental philosophy at the University of Montana and lives in Missoula, MT.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Christopher J. Preston's website.Taking milt and eggs from hundreds of salmon is a challenging way to spend an afternoon. It’s cold. The rain gear is uncomfortable. Everything smells of water and slime. But it doesn’t take much imagination to realize something remarkable is going on. Despite the absurdity of spraying sperm from an unconscious fish into a bucket of gelatinous spawn, you are a witness to the culmination of thousands of years of evolution. The banter of college-age fisheries students and the scrape of buckets against cold cement masks a breathtaking act of creation.The test works! Page 99 offers a solid feel for the book and nicely illustrates the techniques I employ.
Hatcheries like this one in Prince William Sound provide a glimpse of the astonishing productivity of fish. One mating pair can hatch thousands of young alevin. When you add this to the hardwired drive of salmon to spawn, you get an eye-popping potential for resurgence. This is true across much of the fish world. The sheer fecundity of fish makes possible rapid recoveries in rivers restored to their former health.
The story of river recoveries is both inspiring and exasperating. It is always complicated. River restorations involve laborious clean-ups, spectacular dam removals, and controversial hatcheries. They also involve a whole heap of arguing. When they go right, the rewards can be astonishing feats of wildlife recovery. But to go right, they demand an honest answer to a pressing question. It’s a question that a species inclined toward great feats of technical manipulation finds difficult to ask, let alone to answer. The question is this: can humanity reign in its insatiable desire to engineer the flow of water?
The story is anchored in personal experience, in this case, an afternoon spent manually spawning salmon at a hatchery in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Salmon are one of a dozen species I profile in the book with massive potential for recovery. Many fish have an “eye-popping potential for resurgence” thanks to the thousands of eggs each female deposits. In this section, we are witness to a biological miracle in action, a system fine-tuned by evolution to generate life.
This is one of the cases of wildlife recovery profiled in the book. These are species that can – or have – come back from the brink of extinction. I revel in the potential of tenacious beasts. There is hope out there!
The section gives a hint of a deeper lesson teased out from species recovery. Sometimes it’s a species that wants to be left alone and will recover spectacularly on its own (e.g. humpback whales, wolves in Europe, and sea otters in the Pacific). In others, it’s a species that needs concerted help to inch its way back from the precipice (e.g. Marsican bears, Iberian lynx, and the northern spotted owl). Whichever it is, there are profound lessons to be learned from recovering species about how to improve our relationship with wildlife.
The “Rivers” section focuses on salmon and beavers. Dams and fish hatcheries treat rivers as soulless machines. We spent a century forcing “an industrial glove onto a biological hand.” But when we take out dams and let beavers work their magic, the system immediately springs back to life.
There’s a lesson in humility spilling from the banks of rivers. If you want a river restoration to be successful, ask the experts. What would beavers do?
--Marshal Zeringue
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