Book #9: Wild Souls
Exploring "wildness" and our human relationship to it.
Hi friends! This is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis in community.
Meeting for this book is Sunday, December 19 at 1 pm EST.
A dear friend recommended I read Emma Marris’ first book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, a couple of years ago when I first got into gardening. And I’m now that friend, pushing this book into the hands of anyone I know who gardens or cares about conservation. Emma’s voice is clear, direct, and…obvious? She interrogates the concepts of “wildness” and “conservation” so simply and thoroughly that I was left wondering why everyone, especially those in climate justice and conservation movements, weren’t thinking and talking this way.
This is why I was so excited to hear that she was writing a new book about the human relationship to wild animals, just released this year: Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. By most estimates, wild mammals make up just 4% of animals on the planet, with humans (36%) and livestock (60%) accounting for the rest (Source: Al Jazeera, Oct. 2018). These numbers are especially unsettling when you place them in the context of our current Anthropocene mass extinction. This book couldn’t be more timely as we collectively grapple with what a responsible and ethical relationship to animals can and should look like for the years ahead.
For a preview of Emma’s approach, check out this excellent interview with NYT columnist and author Carl Zimmer:
As for our book club meet-ups, everyone is welcome to join, whether you’ve finished the book or not, and to engage in whatever way feels right to you. Maybe you’re coming to connect with others and work through these questions with a sympathetic sounding board, or maybe you’re coming to learn in a listen-only mode. You are welcome here! Our meetings last for about 90 minutes, but it’s totally ok to come for the first 45 minutes or an hour if that works for you.
For those who are new to our meetings, here’s how it works:
A few days before our meeting, I send out a separate Mailchimp newsletter with a Zoom registration link. Please register so I can plan appropriately for the size of our expected group. If you have unsubscribed to that newsletter (life happens and my email inbox perpetually has over 5,000 unread emails in it, so I get it!), please also make sure to unsubscribe to this Substack as well so I don’t accidentally re-subscribe you to the Mailchimp newsletter when I’m updating the lists every other month.
That’s it, for now! Happy reading!