Green Options

Quick: What is your favorite ungulate? If Monte Hummel and Justina C. Ray have their way, you will answer with one resounding word: “CARIBOU!”

In Caribou and the North: A Shared Future, Hummel and Ray use their expertise on these cold-loving herbivores and on the science of conservation to provide a fact-filled, highly persuasive bio-graphy of caribou and the “North” they inhabit. (Hummel is President Emeritus of the World Wildlife Life Fund-Canada, and Ray is Executive Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society.) Even if you are not an ungulate lover or prefer tropical warmth to boreal chill, Caribou and the North is an engaging introduction to these animals and how crucial they are to their environment.

Hummel and Ray begin with the biology of caribou, giving readers a head-full of distinguishing facts. For example, they make clear that there is not just one type of caribou but instead three “ecotypes,” classified by their habitat: migratory tundra, boreal forest, and mountain. While sharing the qualities that make caribou unique, such as a diet consisting mostly of lichens and the reuse of particular calving grounds each year, the different ecotypes each have special characteristics, habits, risk statuses, and sensitivities.

But whatever their differences, the three ecotypes of caribou all share an essential, symbiotic relationship with the places and peoples of the North (i.e., Canada and Alaska). Hummel and Ray do a beautiful job of presenting this symbiosis through both data and anecdotes from a wide spectrum of Northerners. As the authors note, caribou “sustain people, but they are revered for more than the essentials of life, such as food and clothing. Caribou weave their way through stories of creation, values, and respect for the land itself.”1 Because “caribou have both shaped and been shaped by the North,” the two do indeed have “a shared future,” being “inseparable, braided together by the larger forces of nature that have produced both” (38).