Engineering Eden

In the summer of 1972, 25-year-old Harry Eugene Walker hitchhiked away from his familys northern Alabama dairy farm to see America. Nineteen days later he was killed by an endangered grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. The ensuing civil trial, brought against the US Department of the Interior for alleged mismanagement of the parks grizzly population, emerged as a referendum on how Americas most beloved wild places should be conserved. Two of the twentieth centurys greatest wildlife biologists testifiedon opposite sides. Moving across decades and among Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Sequoia National Parks, author and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith has crafted an epic, emotionally wrenching account of Americas fraught, century-and-a-half-long attempt to remake Edenin the name of saving it.