Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

The first Europeans to set foot on North America stood in awe of the natural abundance before them. The skies were filled with birds, seas and rivers teemed with fish, and the forests and grasslands were a hunter’s dream, with populations of game too abundant and diverse to even fathom. It’s no wonder these first settlers thought they had discovered a paradise of sorts. Fortunately for us, they left a legacy of copious records documenting what they saw, and these observations make it possible to craft a far more detailed evocation of North America before its settlement than any other place on the planet.

Here Steve Nicholls brings this spectacular environment back to vivid life, demonstrating with both historical narrative and scientific inquiry just what an amazing place North America was and how it looked when the explorers first found it. The story of the continent’s colonization forms a backdrop to its natural history, which Nicholls explores in chapters on the North Atlantic, the East Coast, the Subtropical Caribbean, the West Coast, Baja California, and the Great Plains. Seamlessly blending firsthand accounts from centuries past with the findings of scientists today, Nicholls also introduces us to a myriad cast of characters who have chronicled the changing landscape, from pre–Revolutionary era settlers to researchers whom he has met in the field.

A director and writer of Emmy Award–winning wildlife documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, Animal Planet, National Geographic, and PBS, Nicholls deploys a cinematic flair for capturing nature at its most mesmerizing throughout. But Paradise Found is much more than a celebration of what once was: it is also a reminder of how much we have lost along the way and an urgent call to action so future generations are more responsible stewards of the world around them. The result is popular science of the highest order: a book as remarkable as the landscape it recreates and as inspired as the men and women who discovered it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780226583426

Steve Nicholls

Steve Nicholls is an award-winning television documentary producer and director based in Bristol. He holds a PhD in dragonflies from the University of Bristol and is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of London. He has spent thirty years making wildlife films, including ten with the BBC Natural History Unit, and his plant photographs have won several awards in the prestigious International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. Nicholls is the author of Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery and Flowers of the Field: A Secret History of Meadow, Moor and Woodland.

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Reviews for Paradise Found

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Steven Nicholls has turned his gaze 500 years to the past and inventoried what the natural world of North America used to be like. Using reports from early European explorers and colonizers, along with environmental history, he is able to piece together a picture of former wealth and abundance that is almost unbelievable. We've all heard of stories of buffalo herds that stretch as far as the eye can see, passing passenger pigeon flocks that blotted out the sun for hours, or cod fish schools so thick they stopped boats from sailing. The number of variety of wildlife Nicholls describes is jaw dropping and far reaching. It's both incredible and incredibly sad, because it's all mostly gone. Whatever natural world that still exists in North America, while often seeming rich and abundant, is really a mere shell of its former self. Our perspective in time, limited by our own short lifespan and those of our immediate relatives, gives a false sense of abundance compared to actual historical levels. The United States is stripped of its great natural wealth, and most people don't even know it. We know something is wrong, different. Nicholls shows what is once was like and what happened. Paradise Found is a long book and I found it somewhat hard going at times. Nicholls is a great writer and captures what it must have been like, but knowing it is gone and we will never see it is very difficult. Ignorance is a sort of false paradise.