“Charles Darwin reduced humans to just another species—a twig on the grand tree of life,” Nelson writes in his book’s afterword. “But now, the paradigm has shifted: humankind is no longer just another species. We are the first to knowingly reshape the living earth’s biology and chemistry. We have become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth. Surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature paradoxically constitutes an unwitting monument to the very thing that we have lost.”
As Jon Mooallem observed in Wild Ones, his cultural history of wild animals and our relationship to them, “We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.”