Take a walk on the wild side

A methodical, lyrical report on global conservation efforts to establish and preserve migratory corridors, Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution traces projects that sprang from the ideas of Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, as recounted in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article, “Rewilding and Biodiversity.” Caroline Fraser takes their concepts into the very real world of threatened species and the humans who work to save them by restoring their wild spaces. She reports on rewilding projects on each continent, visits grassroots activists working in Costa Rica and on the Australian Gondwana Link project, and finds time to take a close second look at Aldo Leopold’s remarkable essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” as a means to understand the implications of the loss of predators to the rest of the ecosystem. If ever there was a conservation idea ready to take hold and change awareness, it’s rewilding.