The New Wilderness

The New Wilderness

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020 "THE ENVIRONMENTAL NOVEL OF OUR TIMES" --Lemn Sissay, Booker Prize Judge "The New Wilderness is a virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure." --Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, MAN V. NATURE. Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter's life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways. At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.

Landscape Modelling

Landscape modelling integrates the differing perspectives of the many disciplines that deal with the landscape. It is motivated not only by the desire for scientific understanding, but also by the real-time demands of 21st century postindustrial society, which include the twin imperatives of stabilizing damaged ecosystems on the one hand, and finding effective ways to use the landscape on the other. The discipline has the specific goal of designing and assessing future scenarios of landscape development, while not losing sight of its past history, both ecological and socio-cultural. This book encompasses the interrelated disciplines of geography, landscape ecology and geoinformatics, and by drawing on their theories and methodologies introduces the concept of a living landscape with human action an inseparable part of its evolution. It offers researchers and decision-makers a number of ideas on how our landscape can best be utilized. The content reflects the need for sustainable landscape development, at the same time as considering long-term continuity as a major condition which enables us to maintain the diversity and multifunctionality of landscapes at regional and macro-regional scales. Employing advanced terminology and methods, this book provides specific results especially for scientists and landscape professionals.

The New England Magazine