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Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
My book pick of the week[B&N] Oh, the places we’ve explored with Mary Roach as the guide! The morgue, the afterlife, the bedroom, the battlefield, our own alimentary canals, and space. In Fuzz, we follow her gladly down the fraught path of human-wildlife conflicts. What to do when animals break laws meant for humans? Thorny matters indeed. Mary Roach, the science teacher we all wish we’d had in school, is never afraid to ask any question. "I’m here. I might as well ask," she states. That she unabashedly does so means we readers are by far richer for the delicious wildness and range of her curiosity. Join "America’s funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet. What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A grizzly bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? As New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. Roach tags along with animal attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller-blasters. She travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the Pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. Along the way, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and mugging macaques, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat. Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-09-19 |
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