The Once and Future World
By J.B. MacKinnon. Random House Canada, 256 pp, hardcover

Beautiful dream or frustratingly dreamy? That’s a fair question to ask about J.B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature as It Was, as It Is, as It Could Be, which addresses humanity’s increasing alienation from the natural world without ever advancing a plausible fix.

The 100-Mile Diet author’s basic contention is that the world’s resources have been dangerously impoverished by human exploitation, and he offers considerable evidence to back it up, from historical accounts of plenty to contemporary studies of extinction. Tantalizingly, he suggests that human activity can create abundance as well as destroy: First Nations forestry practices in the precontact era encouraged a ready supply of meat on the hoof in the form of deer, for instance. And he highlights 21st-century success stories, such as the reintroduction of the critically endangered bolson tortoise to its former habitat in New Mexico.

But when it comes to how we can build on these efforts, he’s disappointingly vague. We need to cultivate “a wilder way of being human”, he suggests, a quasi-religious understanding of the interconnectedness of all things.

One of the frustrating things about that stance, of course, is that MacKinnon is right. Collectively, we’re only able to despoil the earth because we’re unaware of the consequences of our actions—or, worse still, consciously ignore them in the pursuit of profit. But altruism, all too often, is a luxury afforded only the relatively wealthy, from billionaires like tortoise saviour Ted Turner to middle-class supporters of the Nature Conservancy and its ilk. When it comes to spreading the ecological message of “rewilding” to slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the Amazon or assembly-line workers in China, MacKinnon is mute—and they’re going to have to be onside, too, if any real change is to happen.

That said, and here I’m speaking as a member of the choir to which MacKinnon is preaching, The Once and Future World is a thoughtful reminder of what’s missing in most of our lives. It’s full of fascinating anecdotes, and offers a small flicker of hope in the midst of our greater darkness. But it’s not nearly enough.