Second Nature
by
36/99
Critics' Rating Index
24/99
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Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
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About This Book
We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity's signature. The old distinctions—between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact—have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation. In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories—obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported—point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich's stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we've lost?It is, What world do we want to create in its place?
Reviews
"This landscape is uncanny, but the figures that populate it are by now familiar: heroic scientists, arrogant capitalists, slippery politicians, noble advocates, innocent bystanders."
"Such conciseness is welcome."
"[a] vividly reported survey ..."
"Flowing and deeply researched prose paints scene after scene of the ubiquitous entropy that is gaining momentum ..."
"Rich sees the present era as one of 'terrible responsibility,' and the stories he collects here of scientists, lawyers, community organizers, and 'average people' at the center of so many storms are composed to evoke concern while also presenting the ethical questions at the heart of our complex, in-flux times."
"The author doubts that genetic manipulation will save the environment, but he does offer entertaining stories about the efforts to restore the extinct passenger pigeon, create a rabbit that glows in the dark, or get people to 'buy burgers composed of cultured animal cells, if they tasted good enough.' Another disheartening but important book from Rich."
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