Emma Marris - Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

Advance Praise for WILD SOULS

What is wildness? How do we resolve conflicts between the needs of individual animals and the work of preserving species? Wild Souls asks readers to think deeply about these and other important questions around our relationship with wildlife. Everybody who cares about animals should read this fascinating book. Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human

In this profound and philosophical book, Emma Marris examines the fiction of a primeval world untouched by human intervention. We have messed with the world in such complex ways that the notion of wildness is at best speculative and at worst entirely artificial: wildness is permitted to exist in designated areas; animals are bred in captivity to repopulate what were once their natural habitats; endangered species are tagged and followed, prioritized over others. In luminous, captivating prose, Marris plumbs the contradictions of our often foolish attachment to the world not as it is, but as we would like to imagine it into being. This is a deeply felt and deeply thought book, brimming with compassion and rue, that throws out revelations like a stream of arrows, each one aimed at the very heart of the matter. Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree

Thoughtful, insightful, and wise, Wild Souls is a landmark work. With thorough reporting and piercing moral clarity, Emma Marris forces us to think deeply about every aspect of our relationship with wild animals, and what the concept of wildness even means. It should be a guidepost for our thoughts and actions for decades to come. Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

In Wild Souls , Marris asks the thorny, necessary questions for our time: What exactly is our responsibility to the wild(-ish) animals in the world, and why is it so uncomfortable to figure it out? She challenges us not only to do the right things, but to be our most humane selves in the process. This is the best thinking-and-feeling persons guide to sharing the planet that I know. Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix

Like many others, Emma Marris loves wild nature. But unlike most of us, she thinks hard about what words like wild and nature mean . As Marris journeys from Northwest wolves to rats in New Zealand, she finds answers that are as fascinating as they are unexpected. Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and The Wizard and the Prophet

Through stories that marry adventure and philosophy, Emma Marris works to reconcile the jarring truth that sacrificing individual animals is sometimes the only way to save entire species. Ultimately, Wild Souls proposes a new framework for resolving the moral dilemmas that arise as we try to be good stewards of a thoroughly humanized world. Beth Shapiro, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Santa Cruz, and author of How to Clone a Mammoth

Wild Souls challenges us to be better citizens of the planet. How do we think about our relationship to other living things on Earth? With an epic sweep worthy of the subject, Emma Marris links cutting-edge science with deep compassion to provide us tools for approaching the decades ahead. Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish and Some Assembly Required

In this masterpiece of environmental philosophy, Emma Marris cross-examines every claim and subverts every shibboleth of modern conservation. Wild Souls brings razor-sharp reasoning and unflinching moral clarity to a field that occasionally suffers from fuzzy logic. This is a book meant to be argued with, in the best possible sense. Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

Eloquently, skillfully, Emma Marris wrestles with the dilemmas that define our relationships with animals and the environment, emerging with provocative but necessary answers. I dare any nature lover to read this book and not come away profoundly changed. Douglas W. Smith, Senior Wildlife Biologist, Yellowstone National Park, and Project Leader for the Yellowstone Gray Wolf Restoration Project

Where do wild animals fit in a human-dominated world? The answer, for better or worse, will be determined by humans. Emma Marriss exploration of this question is at once thoughtful, thought-provoking, and thoroughly absorbing. Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction and Under a White Sky

For Yasha, my favorite animal

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

All flourishing is mutual.

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

CONTENTS

For my fortieth birthday, I went to see extinction in paradise.

On a clear, windy December day, I reported to a helicopter landing zone at Lihue Airport on the island of Kauai, where several ecologists in flight suits were waiting for a ride. Around us fluttered red-crested cardinals, striking birds with gray backs, white breasts, and cherry-colored faces and crests. These beautiful songbirds are native to South America. They were introduced to Hawaii in 1928, just one of more than 50 species of birds that have established themselves in the archipelago since humans arrived. In the lowlands, it is these newcomers who are most visible and numerous as they flit among plants introduced from Brazil, Australia, Madagascar, and elsewhere. To see the original inhabitants, we must ascend into the mist-shrouded mountains.

When the Hawaiian islands were born in volcanic convulsions millions of years ago, there was no life on them. They were bare rock. Until the first humans arrivedquite recently, in geologic termsevery species that lived on Hawaii could be traced to an ancestor that somehow made it there across thousands of miles of ocean. All the birds were descended from about 27 species that flew, or were blown, to these islands in the distant past. Once they arrived, their offspring gradually evolved to eat new foods and thrive in their new habitat. The common raven made it to the islands and evolved into the smaller Hawaiian crow, or alal. Over time, a single species of honeycreeper gave rise to 47 different species. Back then, Hawaii lacked mosquitoes, so the birds stopped maintaining immunological defenses to the many diseases those insects carry.

A red helicopter touched down, just briefly, and three ecologists clutching dry bags scrambled aboard. The pilot never even cut his engines, and they were off again into the sky. A car pulled up and a small curly-haired woman emerged: Lisa Cali Crampton, leader of the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project since 2010. She handed me a flight suit and zipped one up herself, looking very much like a determined military officer about to go on a special mission. In this case, her mission is saving several species of birds from the abyss of extinction. The helicopter returned and we scuttled over to it, hunched over, and hauled ourselves in. We lifted off and swung into the blue, fields and roads giving way to impossibly steep mountains draped in green foliage and shining with waterfalls. Next stop: Bird Camp.

Humans discovered Hawaii during the golden age of Polynesian exploration, between 800 and 1,000 years ago. They brought a whole ecology with them: livestock; dogs; and plants for food, medicine, fiber, wood, and decoration. They also learned how to use local resources, including the beautiful feathers of birds like the bright red apapane.