The ecological destruction described in Caroline Fraser’s Rewilding the World (Metropolitan Books) could be ripped from the reels of a disaster movie. A horse is swallowed by a 15-foot-deep sinkhole in Arizona; 30,000 elephants succumb to drought in Kenya; seven orcas disappear in the Puget Sound; and a dust bowl develops in Australia. But Fraser, who traveled the world with wildlife biologists and conservationists to report on the global campaign to end animal extinction and restore biodiversity, is ultimately hopeful. She focuses on groundbreaking projects, such as turning the “war-torn wastelands” of former Iron Curtain countries into a green belt and revegetating the “spectacularly strange and varied” Australian bush. Throughout, Fraser underscores the miracles of nature, which, as she puts it, is “unique, fragile, locked in a relationship with a transient being on which it is utterly dependent: ourselves.”
