Unnatural Selection: Does Wilderness Have A Place in the 21st Century?
In a world dominated by people and rapid climate change, species large and small are increasingly vulnerable to extinction. Journalist M.R. O'Connor explores the extreme measures scientists are taking to try and save them, from captive breeding and genetic management to de-extinction. Paradoxically, the more we intervene to save species, the less wild they often become. O'Connor investigates the philosophical questions of an age in which we "play god" with earth's biodiversity, incorporating natural history and evolutionary biology to interrogate the heart of the human enterprise. What should we preserve of wilderness as we hurtle toward a future in which technology is present in nearly every aspect of our lives? How can we coexist with species when our existence and their survival appear to be pitted against one another?
M. R. O'Connor's reporting has appeared in Foreign Policy, Slate, Salon, Harper’s and The New Yorker. Her investigative reporting on topics such as disappearances in Sri Lanka’s civil war, global agriculture trade, and American development enterprises in Afghanistan have been funded by institutions such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Phillips Foundation, and The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. An alumna of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, her first book Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and Precarious Future of Wild Things from St. Martin’s Press received support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, & Economics. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
