Wild Souls
Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award * Winner of the 2022 Science in Society Journalism Award (Books) * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Thoughtful, insightful, and wise, Wild Souls is a landmark work."--Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
"Fascinating . . . hands-on philosophy, put to test in the real world . . . Marris believes that our idea of wildness--our obsession with purity--is misguided. No animal remains untouched by human hands . . . the science isn't the hard part. The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate place in that world." --Outside Magazine
From an acclaimed environmental writer, a groundbreaking and provocative new vision for our relationships with--and responsibilities toward--the planet's wild animals.
Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in fact, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? No clear guidelines yet exist to help us resolve such questions.
Transporting readers into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe--from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature-and our place within it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Environmental journalist Marris (Rambunctious Garden) ruminates on the "unpredictable complexity" and "strange beauty" of the nonhuman world in this wide-ranging if superficial appeal for humans to reconsider the ethics of their relationships with other species. Noting that, by weight, there is now "ten times as much humanity as wild mammals in the world," Marris describes modern humans as "super influencers" with uncanny effects on the natural world. Climate change and such human activities as farming and deforestation have created "moral dilemmas" for which conservationists have failed to find solutions, she writes, and wonders, for example, if humans are obligated to feed animals whose hunting grounds have been destroyed by human activity. Because of this, humans' relationships with animals have grown "knottier." Marris touches on many examples of odd (and at times troubling) human-animal relations, arguing that Justin Bieber's hybrid cats function as ornaments, and describing the strange new species Europeans introduced to New Zealand in the 18th century. But she fails to go deep in her advice, and some solutions seem unlikely (she imagines feeding endangered polar bear populations plant-based food). Readers hoping for a more grounded discussion of environmental issues should look elsewhere.
