What I’m reading | Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild – Ellen Meloy

What it’s about

Ellen Meloy spent a year observing desert bighorns near her home in the Colorado Plateau’s canyonlands, with detours to New Mexico’s San Andres Mountains, Baja Mexico, and the southern Sierra Nevada. The sheep’s “amiable, nosy neighbor,” Meloy named her local herd the Blue Door Band, learned their habits and foibles over four seasons, and thought deeply about what “wild” means in a world of shrinking habitat and managed megafauna.

Bound by genetics and memory to a particular place, bighorns are especially vulnerable to disease born by domestic sheep, to human encroachment, and to mountain lion predation. Meloy dives into these issues, and while her stance is clear — the absence of John Muir’s “hoofed locusts” would be fine with her, thanks — she does not shy away from exploring varied perspectives and opinions, recognizing that we each bring individual values and biases to the thorny issues of wildlife management. Nonetheless, she concludes, a landscape of managed wildlife is poorer for its lack of truly wild creatures, as are we who live within it.

What I liked

I’ve read this book twice, once in the desert, where bighorns were possible if not always present, and once in the maritime Northwest during the rainy season. It’s one I’ll pick up again and again. Meloy’s writing is so rich, so unique and masterful, that I found myself slowing down, rereading sentences and paragraphs and chapters. She is wickedly funny at times, keenly observant always, puzzled and inspired by human nature. I first stumbled on her work when a book in the library caught my eye. It was The Anthropology of Turquoise, which I later learned was short-listed for the Pulitzer. I took Eating Stone with me on my first trip to the Southwest, reading about bighorns at night and searching for them during the day. Meloy died, young and suddenly, before this book was published, and the desert lost a vital voice. I’m grateful her voice lives on in Eating Stone and her other books.

Quotable

“Animals give us voice. They map a world we want to live in. Without them, we are homeless.”

“What remains of several million years of coevolution between humans and wild animals has become, in little more than a hundred years, mediated, barely experiential, and marginalized on crowded, surrounded scraps of refugia.”

“Desert bighorns may bring you to places where they live, but they may not show themselves to you. This does not matter. What matters is this: Look.”

“The end of the wild world, the emptiness, will come–indeed, has arrived. The absence may not be one of actual bodies, a physical loss of this bird or that mammal, a river of native fish or a band of homeless ungulates. Rather, it is a reduction of diverse nature into a simplified biota that is entirely managed and dependent. It is a loss of autonomous beings, the self-willed fauna that gave us metaphor, that shaped human minds capable of identity with all existence.”