Finding Hope in Conservation History
by Michelle Nijhuis
In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. Over the decades since, the modern conservation movement has evolved from early campaigns to save charismatic species like the American bison into an effort to defend life on a larger scale.
Journalist Michelle Nijhuis is the author of the book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, which is a new history of the conservation movement. She will share some of her research on the accomplishments, oversights, and outsized personalities of the movement, and discuss how this colorful history can guide and inspire today’s activists.
Michelle Nijhuis is a project editor at The Atlantic, and is also a longtime contributing editor at High Country News and an award-winning reporter whose work has been published in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. After 15 years off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, she and her family now live in the Columbia Gorge.
