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Rewilding Wolves & Ourselves with Author Charlotte McConaghy

August 20, 2021 by in On Books

 

The world is full of stories about wolves—scary wolves, endangered wolves, wolves who eat grandmothers, wolves who fiercely protect their cubs–but here is one you may not have heard:

Wolves can heal our planet.

It’s true. I first learned this fact several years ago while listening to a park ranger. Decades after being exterminated within the national park, wolves were returned to Yellowstone in 1995 and the re-balancing effects they’ve had since have astounded everyone. Although no one was particularly surprised that the wolf packs began hunting the local elk, few realized how this would domino through the ecosystem, allowing trees (previously eaten or stomped on by the elk) to regrow, which provided new habitat for songbirds and beavers, whose activities changed the flow of rivers and improved water quality, which increased fish.

So imagine my delight when I heard about the new novel Once There Were Wolves, a book about a biologist working to restore the forests of Scotland by returning wolves to their ancient homeland. The title was already on my to-read list when I learned its author, Charlotte McConaghy, would be speaking as part of a local online event held by the Miami Book Fair and my favorite independent bookstore, Books&Books. And small world: it turns out, McConaghy’s novel was inspired by the same Yellowstone success story I’d heard.

“[Wolves] have such power. They can move the course of rivers and regrow forests … and I knew I had to write about them,” she explained during the August talk. “They generate so much fear and hatred despite the fact that they are such essential creatures and are, in fact, quite shy and family oriented and don’t pose much of a threat at all against humans.”

Like an ecosystem, Once There Were Wolves has multiple plot layers and characters whose interactions and conflicts push-pull each other in unexpected directions. In addition to struggling against the distrust of local sheep herders, the protagonist—biologist Inti Flynn— has her own haunted past and must care for her twin sister, who has been so traumatized by an act of violence she is nearly catatonic.  Things get even more complicated when a man turns up dead in the woods and Inti, worried her wolves will be blamed, makes a terrible choice. 

“It’s a bit of a crime mystery, it’s a love story, it’s a story of family and sisters. And I think, ultimately, it’s a story about rewilding not only the landscape but ourselves,” McConaghy said. “I really liked the idea that reconnecting with nature … is such a healing force, such a powerful thing in people’s lives.”

Parts of this book reminded me of other ecological novels. Barbara Kingslover’s Prodigal Summer also features a female biologist and staunch defender of maligned apex predators (in that novel, it’s the coyote). Richard Powers’ The Overstory certainly reigns supreme over all attempts to bring the forest to life.  And when the dead body showed up, I wondered if McConaghy was unconsciously tapping into the same successful formula as Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (“Difficult” woman + gorgeous natural setting + murder whodunnit = bestseller).

But McConaghy — whose previous novel Migrations is about a woman following what might be the last migration of Arctic terns, and whose next novel will center around whales — said she is nonetheless resistant to being classified solely as a writer of “climate fiction.”

“It’s slightly problematic to turn it into a genre because this is not something we have to suspend our disbelief about. I think writing about climate can fit into any genre,” she said.

I’m still processing the novel’s twist ending, but without a doubt my favorite part of the book is the exposed, damaged nature of Inti and the gift-yet-curse of her unusual neurological condition. Amid so many traumatic world events, her rawness felt especially real and relevant to me.

McConaghy explained her this way:

“[Inti is] a complicated woman; she’s very prickly. In a way, she’s lost her faith in people–she’s very angry–she’s witnessed so much harm of people doing to the natural world and also to each other.

“The closing off of empathy is what the book is really about–the empathy and its lack and what that does to people and makes them do. We need nature but we also need people. We need packs, and we need to trust each other the way that wolves do.  “

Watch the full conversation with McConaghy here.

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