Join us for an evening with Andrew Moore, who will speak about his new book, The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness. A conversation with Nell Boeschenstein Yager will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern US, elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden—towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.
Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina’s coastal marshes, and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster—but not without controversy.
In The Beasts of the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists, and nature lovers as they confront herculean challenges: How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness?
About the Author: Andrew Moore is the author of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, which was a James Beard Foundation Book Award finalist in Writing and Literature. Pawpaw was featured on PBS News Hour and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Saveur, The Washington Post, and more. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Daily Yonder. He lives in Pittsburgh.
About the Moderator: Nell Boeschenstein Yager is a cultural landscape historian and interpretation consultant who collaborates with place-based preservation design firms. Her work includes projects with Liz Sargent Historical Landscape Architecture, Riggs Ward Design, and Trace Collaborative. She is also an erstwhile creative writer, whose work has been published in The Oxford American, Granta, and Ecotone, among other outlets. She lives in Charlottesville with her husband and son.
