Animal dreams.

• Author: Lorenzsonn, Erik
• Position: Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America - Book review

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

By Jon Mooallem

Penguin. 368 pages. $27.95.

Something extraordinary happened in Northern California in October 1985: A forty-foot-long humpback whale entered the San Francisco Bay and swam up the Sacramento River for sixty miles. The animal--soon nicknamed Humphrey by the national media--came to a stop near a small town, where Woodstockesque crowds gathered along the river. They rallied around Humphrey, cheering on rescue attempts of the seemingly marooned creature and buying Humphrey-themed T-shirts and kitsch.

Eventually, Humphrey was rescued--but not before Thousands of people had trampled through a national wildlife refuge by the river. In an ironic twist, they destroyed endangered plants and jeopardized the existence of an endangered butterfly to get a glimpse of the whale.

The journalist Jon Mooallem writes about Humphrey in Wild Ones, but he doesn't use the story to moralize about human folly, as a stodgier environmentalist might. Rather, he tells Humphrey's tale to illustrate how our cultural perceptions of animals impact the real, breathing ones around us.

"American wild animals have inhabited the terrain of our imagination just as much as they've inhabited the actual land," he writes. "They are free-roaming Rorschachs."

Americans indeed live in imaginary animal kingdoms, fostered from childhood with Beanie Babies and books about hungry caterpillars. They're informed later on by everything from the Geico gecko to Shark Week. These imaginary worlds inspire us to cheer on Humphrey--the "gentle giant" who looks so lost and hopeless--and ignore the anonymous butterfly.

Mooallem's exploration of the imaginary animal kingdoms and the actual ecosystems among us is an utterly essential read. A thirty-four-year-old writer for the New York Times Magazine, Mooallem is not a polemicist. His book is no expose, call to arms, or treatise on the ineffable value of nature. Instead, it's a book to inspire critical thinking about conservation--something that is increasingly necessary at a juncture when half of all species are likely to be extinct by the century's end. After all, we live in the Anthropocene, a geologic era in which the human race, more than any other force, steers change on Earth.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The parable of Humphrey and the anonymous butterfly touches on one of the big questions Mooallem asks in Wild Ones: Why do...