Local Author Spotlight: Andrew Moore

By Emily King

Long before humans reshaped the landscape with their Walmarts, factory farms, and superhighways, bison, elk, and wolves roamed the eastern United States. Large herding mammals and beasts of prey that we now associate with the west were once abundant in Western Pennsylvania. Now, some conservationists are leading an effort to “rewild” our environment by trying to reintroduce some of these species back into our local ecosystem. In his new book The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness, writer Andrew Moore chronicles the little-known history of how these animals were impacted by human progress and the efforts to bring them back to their original homes.

Moore has been interested in conservation since his childhood in Central Florida, a place teeming with unique species found nowhere else on earth. He has now spent most of his adult life in the Pittsburgh area and has shifted his focus to the eastern United States and Appalachia in particular. 

Moore’s first book, PawPaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, is a deeply researched work of storytelling that chronicles the history of the largest edible fruit native to the United States, one that most people don’t even know about. The book became a 2016 James Beard Award finalist in the Writing and Literature Category.

 Moore has now spent the past few years interviewing hunters, conservationists, biologists and botanists to learn more about the disappearance and reintroduction of elk, bison, and red wolves across the East. 

“I traveled 10,000 miles over six years, from Maine to East Texas, visiting public lands, private lands, nature preserves, and reclaimed strip mines. I collected canid scat in Maine, camped on former coal mine sites in Appalachia, joined controlled burns in Illinois, attended a public bison auction in Kentucky, and witnessed the release of wild elk in West Virginia,” he says. 

As adventurous as this all sounds, he spent just as much time on research, poring through historical documents, archived newspapers, journal articles, and hours on the phone interviewing experts in the field. 

Moore hopes that Beasts of the East, which is set to be released on June 2, will be a reminder of the impact and responsibility we have toward the ecosystem and these native species we coexist with.

“I hope we all begin to take heart that, for better and for worse, our society is responsible for what exists in modern landscapes. And that the large mammals of the East, especially, live and die at our hands. We might at any given time, in any particular location, seem to have what might be an overabundance of whitetail deer, racoons, or black bears—but we would do well to remember that we also have the capacity to extirpate these populations—or drive them to local extinction—because we’ve done it before,” he says.

“And that if we want to live among fully functioning, diverse ecosystems in the East, it’s up to us to conserve what still exists, and re-introduce what might be missing.”

Moore says he has been inspired and supported by Pittsburgh’s creative arts community, as well as the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, and organizations such as the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Allegheny Land Trust, and Hollow Oak Land Trust.