Wade Davis: Life without wild things

This is an excerpt from the new book, Memory, published October 1, 2018 by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.

Some years ago, I visited two places that in a different, more sensitive world would have surely been enshrined as memorials to the victims of the ecological catastrophes that occurred there. The first was the site of the last great nesting flock of passenger pigeons, a small stretch of woodland on the banks of the Green River near Bowling Green, Ohio. This story of extinction is well known. Yet until I stood in that cold, dark forest, I had never sensed the full weight, scale and violence of the disaster.