Goats, Grief, and the Hard Math of Saving Nature
Which hard decisions are you willing to make?
As you’ve probably seen, the Trump administration just took its most damaging climate step yet by scrapping the EPA’s endangerment finding—the scientific and legal backbone for regulating greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.
It’s a move that doesn’t just weaken specific rules; it tries to erase the underlying obligation to protect people from climate harm at all. In effect, it says: we refuse to see the danger, and therefore we will not act on it.
Turning away from a well-documented, almost certainly existential threat because it’s politically or economically inconvenient is a deeply cynical move, even for politicians.
But more often, the decisions made by leaders who care about the environment involve hard tradeoffs about what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of “saving” something bigger. Sometimes we are direct about those tradeoffs; sometimes we bury them in legalese, euphemisms, or wishful thinking. But almost all the time, novels can be more honest and capture what policy papers cannot.
That’s why Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Eradication: A Fable, is so compelling. It dives headfirst into one of these classic quandaries in nature conservation: what happens when saving an ecosystem means killing something that’s alive and looking right back at you?
[Spoiler alert: the remainder of this post reveals some—not all—of the primary contours of the plot.]
The novel introduces us to Adi, a recently divorced and grieving schoolteacher, who signs up for a seemingly easy five-week job on the remote Pacific island of Santa Flora. The island has been wrecked by feral goats that eat through rare plants and destroy nesting habitat for endangered birds.
Adi’s task is simple enough. Live alone, bring a rifle, and “remove” the goats so that “nature” can recover. It’s classic conservation logic—the same rationale behind real-life goat and rat eradications around the world.
But once there, Adi realizes this isn’t the clean, data-driven mission he expected. It’s actually the case of a solitary man methodically killing intelligent animals, one by one. Adi starts to feel an uneasy kinship with the goats, whom he comes to see as creatures just trying to survive in a place they never chose to be.
Then he stumbles onto darker truths about the island: the goats are only part of Santa Flora’s problem. That’s when the story mutates from tidy ecological fable into something rawer, riskier, and more human.
Eradication lives in the gray zone that real-life conservation often occupies, capturing the human side of the tradeoffs we must make. Restoring damaged ecosystems in this case means taking lives to save others—sometimes a necessary but brutal part of island and wildlife management.
Miles doesn’t condemn that reality; he humanizes it. The novel captures what conservationists already know: even morally justified actions can leave emotional scars, and the moral math of restoration is not always clean or fully satisfying.
The book also probes a deeper, more haunting question: what if our idea of “original nature” is just nostalgia? Is it always right—or even possible—to rewind ecosystems to a lost paradise? Or should we accept hybrid, changed worlds rather than waging endless war to reset them? Santa Flora becomes a perfect microcosm for that debate: beautiful, broken, and impossible to fix cleanly.
As the story unfolds, Adi starts thinking like a field biologist mid-breakdown—balancing compassion against triage, life against system survival. He starts to see how money, politics, and ego all shape the mission as much as the science. Everyone has a stake: funders seeking storybook outcomes, scientists chasing data, exploiters working quietly offshore. The “save the island” gambit was never really the whole story.
That moral fog makes Eradication a worthwhile read. Short, unsettling, funny, and strangely beautiful, it reminds us that every tidy success metric hides a tangle of tradeoffs—about whose lives count, what losses we accept, and how far we’ll go in the name of protecting nature.
Eradication lingers long after you finish it—especially if you’ve ever wondered what “saving nature” really means, and whether you would pull the trigger on Santa Flora.
Onward,
PS. Stephen Markley’s The Deluge seems quite prescient now and worth reading if you missed it. You can read our interview with the author here.