This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible.

No cardinals.

Meaning, we don't deal with the natural world, only the built world.

So when I read John Mwellen's brilliant book called Wild Ones, a sometimes dismaying,

weirdly reassuring story about looking at people, looking at animals in America, I didn't

think I'd ever do an episode of 99% Invisible about it, I just read it for fun.

But then I saw John perform stories from the book Live with musical accompaniment, and

I thought, I need to put this on the radio.

I still call this radio.

Anyway, what you need to know about Wild Ones is that it isn't a book about nature.

It's a book about how we fit nature into our modern lives.

Humans is about the cutesy stuffed animals, the eco tours, and the Byzantine methods of

conservation that evolve when our experience with wildlife goes from something natural

to something designed.

Human animal interaction has become a designed experience.

And the story of that transition, as the title of the book suggests, is sometimes dismayed,

and also weirdly reassuring.

John Muellum is friends with the band Black Prairie, and as he was writing the book, they

can cock to this idea of the band creating a soundtrack to the book, and the result was

an extended EP called Wild Ones.

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