Poet and linguist Melanie Challenger tours half the the world in On Extinction: How we became estranged from nature
“THIS consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.” Thus mused the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in his classic 1869 book The Malay Archipelago. He was describing his first sight of the king bird of paradise, an exquisite red and golden denizen of the forests of New Guinea – a “perfect little organism”, he called it – and reflecting on the relationship between our species and the many others with which we share the planet.…
