In Beloved Beasts, Michelle Nijhuis asks what if any relevance early (western) conservation movements hold for ecologists and environmental activists today. Her thesis is that, though understandings of humanity's role in protecting nonhuman species have indeed changed drastically, a common thread of love for other creatures undergirds and ties together these evolving movements. Accordingly, Nijhuis is interested in the emotional connection that important conservationists of the past had with the species they encountered, as well as in the very different ways such love can manifest. For instance, she provides a fascinating explanation of William Hornaday, a naturalist who began his career as a hunter, even killing some of the last American bison to create a taxidermy display, then helped advocate for captive breeding programs to restore bison populations and for statutory limits on the number of birds that could be hunted each year for the millinery trade. Nijhuis describes both personal and institutional growth as the characters and movements she chronicles progressed from a focus on preserving game animals for hunting, to protecting charismatic animals of all kinds (even predators and animals considered a nuisance), to a holistic understanding of preserving ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity. Describing community-based conservation arrangements in Namibia today, which allow some heavily-taxed trophy hunting by wealthy tourists in order to fund their ongoing work (and also allow a degree of subsistence hunting in their own communities), Nijhuis makes an instructive comparison with Hornaday, who also loved and related to nonhuman species in ways other animal-lovers would find deeply alien. 

I also appreciated Nijhuis' consistent framing of conservation movements as an alliance between "passionate experts and passionate amateurs" (such as the early 20th century New York patrician and bird-lover Rosalie Edge), and her work documenting the ways in which other academic disciplines influenced conservation (most especially the work of Elinor Ostrom). The uneasy line between academic expertise and engaged citizenship is also well described in her chapters on the formation of "conservation biology" and the emergence of activist scientists in the second half of the 20th century.

Generally speaking, Nijhuis' writing is very efficient at conveying information, and while her relatively short chapters on individual conservationists only present a broad survey of each person's work, she is able to get across enough information in each chapter to advance her overall conclusions. I did feel that some chapters were less well-organized than others (notably the chapter on Julian Huxley), and that at times her efforts to describe the globalization of ecology and the role played by ecologists from the global south in these developments were somewhat halfhearted.