In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science writer and editor Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.

Michelle Nijhuis is a project editor at The Atlantic, a longtime contributing editor of High Country News and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. After 15 years living off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, she and her family now live in White Salmon, Washington.

Daegan Miller is a critic and essayist. He writes about landscape, about how we make a place for ourselves in the world, and about how we make sense of that place-making. He is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, which Robert Macfarlane chose as a Best Book of the Year for The Guardian. His essays and reviews have appeared in Emergence, Slate, Literary Hub, Guernica, The North American Review, and many other places. He lives in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts with his family.