Review of 'The New Wilderness' by Diane Cook

This book is most important for what it made me think about rather than the writing or the plotting. It's set in a near-term dystopian future where the environmental crisis has become noticeable worse, but is still not catastrophic. Life in cities goes on, but it's more horrible. Life outside the cities is mainly lived in areas of industrialised agriculture or extractive industries,  but an area is fenced over and preserved as 'wilderness'. The book centres on a small group of people who are allowed to live in this wilderness area, provided that the give up all technology and live as nomadic hunter-gathers. The terms of their existence are policed by rangers, who can order them about and fine them for non-compliance.

The book describes how hard this life is, and sometimes how beautiful too - but it's mainly hard, with existence on the margin of starvation, and the fear of death from illness, accident or predators. The principle character is a girl, Agnes, who grows up within the narrative but barely remembers life back in The City, and her mother, who moved to the Wilderness without wanting to, because her daughter was so sick from the bad air in The City. There's a lot of mother-daughter stuff, and some contrived plot elements to create tension. There's really good description of small-p politics within a small group, including a transition from consensus to authoritarian decision-making.

It rather reminded me of an idea that I think originated with James Lovelock...that it would be necessary to preserve one third of the Earth as wilderness without people, and that the rest should be...as described in the book, given over to either cities or industrialised agriculture. This describes what it would feel like to live in such a world, particularly under conditions of environmental crisis (though climate change barely gets a mention, it's in the background all the time), economic scarcity and political failure. It also made me think about how it is for people who live in areas designated as 'wilderness reserves' by conservation agencies; in this book the people are managed rather like one more species of animal in the reserve.

Well worth a read.