Eradication: A Book Review

I don’t write many book reviews. What interests me isn’t whether I enjoyed a book. It’s whether a book leaves me asking better questions than I was asking before I opened it.

Jonathan Miles’s Eradication did exactly that.

I finished it this week, and ever since I closed the final page, I have found myself thinking back over my travels this summer. I spent several weeks driving through rural America, fishing alpine lakes, staying in campgrounds across the Mountain West, and talking with people whose lives remain closely connected to the land.

One morning, I found myself fishing with a man who, over the course of his career, had tracked and killed more than a thousand mountain lions—sometimes for private clients, sometimes under contract with the state. Another day, I was on the water with a man who has spent more than thirty years hunting and fishing the mountains of Idaho. Another fly fisherman had been returning to the same lake in the Eastern Sierras to fish for close to 40 years.

These were not people who knew wildlife primarily through reports or management plans. They knew individual drainages, animal behavior, seasonal patterns, and landscapes that had become as familiar to them as their own backyards. They understood nature from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

Two Ways of Knowing Nature

I came home thinking about how different that kind of knowledge is from the knowledge found in wildlife management plans and lawsuits filed by organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity. Not because planners and lawyers “haven’t been in nature,” but because they are often working from a different vision of what nature is.

That vision imagines ecosystems as diagrams with clearly defined categories—native, invasive, feral—and management as the work of restoring the diagram to its ideal state. It is knowledge shaped by charts, models, and policy language rather than primarily by sustained encounters with particular animals in particular places.

That difference was in the back of my mind as I read Miles’ fable.

Miles’ Moral Landscape

On its surface, Eradication tells the story of a coordinated effort between the state and a nonprofit conservation organization to eradicate an invasive population of goats from a remote fictional Pacific island.

A recruitment advertisement promises volunteers an “opportunity to save the world.” When the novel’s main character, Adi, asks how he will do that, he is told, “By killing thousands of feral goats who have taken over the island.”

It is an answer that sounds both straightforward and deeply unsettling—and that tension drives much of the novel.

The “Nameless Foundation” sees the island largely through categories: native, invasive, extinct, restoration. From that perspective, the moral equation appears simple. If killing one species preserves another, then the answer seems obvious. After all, the world has plenty of goats, but very few island warblers.

“Kill the goats. Save the warbler. Save the world.”

At the beginning of the novel, the goats exist only as a category. They are an invasive species introduced by whalers, left alone to multiply, and now blamed for threatening native wildlife. Their history explains why they are there, but it does not tell us what they are.

As Adi spends time on the island, abstraction gives way to encounter. The goats cease to be simply “the goats” and become individual living creatures, nowhere more powerfully shown than in his relationship with the nanny goat he names Harmony.

Miles creates an equally compelling tension through violence. Adi arrives as a state-sanctioned killer. His violence is not merely legal; it is celebrated as conservation. Later, he encounters two anglers illegally killing sharks, an act condemned by the state.

The novel never tells us what to think about the relationship between these acts. Instead, it places them side by side and leaves us with an unsettling question:

How much of our moral judgment depends upon the act itself, and how much depends upon who authorizes it and for what purpose?

Arizona’s Questions

As I read, I kept thinking about Arizona. The debates around the Salt River horses turn on labels — wild, feral, native, introduced — and those labels end up doing most of the work. They shape policy, legislation, and public opinion long before anyone talks about the animals themselves. Mostly importantly, labels aren’t neutral; they carry entire visions of what nature is and what it should be.

What I appreciated most about Eradication is that it never becomes a sermon. It never tells the reader which vision of the natural world is correct or how the moral tensions should be resolved. It would have been easy to reduce the conflict to a simple formula: They are feral, therefore they should be removed. Or: They are native, therefore they should be protected.

Once we decide what something is—native or invasive, feral or wild—we are tempted to think we have also decided what ought to be done. In Eradication, Miles refuses that temptation.

Instead, he suggests that the question itself may be too simple — that nature is more intricate than any of the categories, diagrams, or moral equations we create to explain it.

Epistemic Humility

What the book left me with wasn’t a new answer but a renewed sense of epistemic humility. The longer I’ve spent around wildlife — talking with hunters, reading management plans, watching the Salt River horses — the less certain I’ve become that any single way of knowing the natural world is sufficient. Science reveals things personal encounter cannot. Personal encounter reveals things population models cannot. Neither exhausts the subject.

Most of the heat in our debates comes from certainty — the belief that my vision is not only correct but self‑evidently correct. Once certainty enters the room, the conversation collapses into accusation: I know I’m right, therefore you must be wrong.

In Eradication, Adi begins to realize that certainty has its limits — even for someone who believes he understands the world he’s living in.

As Miles explains in one of the book’s insightful paragraphs:

“Splitting his gaze between the starlight and the firelight, the only conclusion he could muster was that everything in nature, which meant everything everywhere, was more intricate and indecipherable than an outcast man on an obscure island could possibly fathom. The thought was a surrender yet in its wake trailed a peculiar solace, a sudden disburdening: if the questions couldn’t be answered then the strain of asking them must be futile.”

That conclusion — that surrender — mirrors my own.