Interested in nature and the history of conservation? Join us on Sunday June 7 for an author visit with Andrew Moore for his book, "The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness." Enjoy a conversation with Andrew, led by staff members of LEAF and Erie Bird Observatory at 11 AM, followed by a book signing from 12-1 PM. Andrew Moore is a Pittsburgh writer and author of the books "Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit" and now "The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness." "Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit" was a James Beard Foundation Book Award finalist in Writing and Literature and was featured on PBS News Hour and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Saveur, The Washington Post, and more. Andrew's writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Daily Yonder. --- 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? Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., 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.
