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Published Mar 2021
304 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
From the author of Losing Earth, a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world that points the way to a new mode of ecological writing.
We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity's clumsy signature. The old distinctions―between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact―have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation.
In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories―obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported―point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.
From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich's stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we've lost? It is, What world do we want to create in its place?
"In this outstanding collection of pieces...Rich provides vivid, often disturbing portraits of individuals and events contributing to 'the death rattle of the romantic idea that nature is innocent of human influence'...Another disheartening but important book from Rich." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] vividly reported survey...Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich's study is packed with moving insight." - Publishers Weekly
"Rich's elegy to a planet he likens to a critical care patient is lyrical, erudite, and devastating...[His] investigation of 'crimes against nature' and the people who are trying to stop them is alarming, enlightening, and necessary." - O, the Oprah Magazine
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History, which received awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physicists and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; and the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue. He is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to the Atlantic, Harper's, and the New York Review of Books. Rich lives in New Orleans.
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