Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators | 
| Author: William Stolzenburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 3336
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1596912995
Dewey Decimal Number: 577.16
EAN: 9781596912991
ASIN: 1596912995
Publication Date: July 8, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A provocative look at how the disappearance of the world’s great predators has upset the delicate balance of the environment, and what their disappearance portends for the future, by an acclaimed science journalist.
It wasn’t so long ago that wolves and great cats, monstrous fish and flying raptors ruled the peak of nature’s food pyramid. Not so anymore. All but exterminated, these predators of the not-too-distant past have been reduced to minor players of the modern era. And what of it? Wildlife journalist William Stolzenburg follows in the wake of nature’s topmost carnivores, and finds chaos in their absence. From the brazen mobs of deer and marauding raccoons of backyard America to streamsides of Yellowstone National Park crushed by massive herds of elk; from urchin-scoured reefs in the North Pacific to ant-devoured islands in Venezuela, Stolzenburg leads a startling tour through bizarre, impoverished landscapes of pest and plague. For anyone who has seldom given thought to the meat-eating beasts so recently missing from the web of life, here is a world of reason to think again.
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When the keystone is removed, how can the archway hold? July 11, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
These days, no one of good sense and alert conscience can fail to feel a deep and unprecedented anxiety over the fate of the planet. Climate change, pollution of the earth, air, and water, overpopulation, the end of nonrenewable energy sources: the environment seems to be pushed beyond its ability to recover. Even those public policies which at one time were thought to be innocently beneficial to humans have, in many cases, proven to be destructive of ecological stability.
One of them, as William Stolzenburg demonstrates in his excellent Where the Wild Things Were, is our centuries old declaration of war against predatory animals. In eliminating many of them, we thought we were improving the world. In fact, however, predators are "keystone species" whose existence holds up the "archway of life." Remove them, and the whole shebang comes down. A classic example of this, documented by Stolzenburg, is the rampant over-population of white tail deer in the U.S. and the devastating consequences to flora and fauna, that resulted from the near-eradication of wolves.
Even worse, essential predators can be eliminated unintentionally and unpredictably by interfering with the ecological balance. The killing of sea otters, for example, has allowed sea urchins (otter food) to flourish, which means that Pacific kelp (sea urchin food) is in grave danger of extinction, which in turn is creating havoc on kelp-eating whale populations. The complexity of the whole thing is exponentially increased when one stops to consider that all species are predatory--even those we'd never think of in such terms, such as starfish(to mussels)--and so everytime we deliberately or accidentally raise or lower species populations, we're risking grave upsets in the balance of the whole. When it comes to the ecological web, touching any strand shakes the entire structure.
Stolzenburg's Where the Wild Things Were is sober reading, but it's also essential. The author has the knack of explaining ecological systems in ways that the layperson (like myself) can follow. Reading his book doesn't only ratchet up the anxiety over the fate of the planet that I mentioned earlier. It also, thankfully, invites the reader to be wonder-filled at the connectedness of nature, and better resolved to cooperate with it.
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