The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness – A Natural History of Elk Bison Wolves and the Effort to Restore the Wilderness

"A magisterial work of natural history and reportage." —WALL STREET JOURNAL A fresh and fascinating portrait of the eastern wilds, The Beasts of the East is a celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S.—an astonishingly abundant landscape that was once the center of American wildness before its despoliation—and a revelatory journey through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves, and other creatures to their native landscapes “A REVELATION. Andrew Moore recreates a lost world of not long ago, when the eastern part of North America was wild, when there were elk in Illinois, bison in Indiana, and much of Ohio and Michigan were covered by swamps. This book is both an elegy for what we’ve lost over the last few centuries of so-called human progress, and a clarion call for conservation, rewilding, and finding wonder in those pockets of history that still remain.” ―STEVE BRUSATTE, author of The Rise and Reign of the Mammals and The Story of Birds Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed.