Stephanie Rutherford is associate professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University.
Rutherford's broader argument remains compelling: anthropocentric attitudes lie at the heart of modern biopolitical power, and the persistence of wolves in the face of our attempts to exterminate them exposes the fiction that we can control nature itself. It's an arrogance that brings to mind Margaret Atwood's poem Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer, from 1968, in which the character of the title belittles the wilderness as the absence of order rather than recognizing it for what it really is: an ordered absence. Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin highlights the danger of this type of thinking and ... makes the case that something must be done to change it, lest we march so far down our current path of environmental destruction that, as one maligned wolf once put it, all of our houses get blown down. Literary Review of Canada