September Book Club

September’s Book for Book Club is Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

This book is a 2021 nonfiction book by Mary Roach. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, it details the “curious science of human-wildlife conflict.”^[1]

In the book, Roach details many ways humans have tried, often unsuccessfully, to handle animals that might harm humans or damage crops and livestock.

The work mostly follows her first-hand accounts of wildlife researchers on the job. For example, Roach follows Colorado Parks and Wildlife when they get called in after bears break into restaurant dumpsters late at night (a hyperphagic black bear, Roach notes, can consume double or triple its usual amount of calories), she tags along as the Wildlife Institute of India holds meetings to warn residents about migrating elephants (for an elephant that smells something delicious, small things like doors and walls don’t get in their way), and she visits Vatican City to witness lasers set up to guard Easter flowers, after a famous 2017 debacle where gulls destroyed the arrangements.

Interspersed throughout the book is a history of previous efforts to handle species considered pests, often with poison or explosives. For example, she notes that between 1934 and 1945, an estimated 3.8 million crows were killed in Oklahoma. This was approximately 1-2 percent of the crow flock and didn’t have a noticeable effect on farmer losses.^[2]

“Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America,” Roach wrote. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word come to mean what it means now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing.”