Abundance

Karen Lloyd's collection of essays turns on the tension between plenty and depletion in the natural world. She follows people working on the front lines of conservation who refuse to accept that biodiversity loss is unavoidable. Her central questions are practical and personal: how should nature and individual species be restored, why does that work matter, and what would be lost, including parts of ourselves, if we stopped restoring and rewilding before it was too late?

Lloyd traces places where species and habitats are being pulled back from the brink, while others are allowed to disappear for good. She asks why people have become so entangled with nature, how we perceive it, and why some aspects of the living world hold our attention while others pass by as brief distractions. Along the way she examines public attitudes toward meaningful conservation. Her settings range from the Carpathian mountains of Romania and the Hungarian Steppe to the rivers of Perthshire, the dune forests of the Netherlands and the rice paddies of Extremadura in southern Spain.