I read this book last winter, but it's stuck with me as I've worked with clients on trying to reduce deer pressure on regenerating landscapes. It's biographical in structure, which personalizes it, very well written, and very thoughtful and non-ideological in its investigation of the human/deer interface, the history and complexities of this, and potential ways forward. In terms of the increasing emphasis on reducing human impact on the natural world and integrating human and non-human systems, in my opinion this book is a very important work. Ms. Howsare details and imagines an emergent reality, blending past, present, and possible futures, with an eye and sensibility rooted in affective, spiritual, ethical, and real world contingencies; perhaps most importantly she presents and holds apparent contradictions as not mutually exclusive, but as mutually informative, a knowing and weaving of borderlands into our rapidly changing everyday reality. In the end, the author constructs and suggests a deeply grounded worldview that can structure a way forward through this particular dimension of the mess humans have created of the natural world. I would consider this book an essential read for anyone who's at all interested in understanding who we - humans - are in relation to the world we've damaged so badly, and how we might rethink and recreate a way forward.
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