Bekoff - Rewilding Our Hearts

In this wise and passionate book, Marc Bekoff brings a lifetime of scientific research and deep personal reflection to bear on our deepening environmental crisis. In his characteristically insightful and engaging style, Bekoff advocates for compassion as the basis of new understandings of ourselves and prompts us to reimagine the kinds of relationships that we might yet have with the rest of our living world. Rewilding Our Hearts is a tragically honest and yet powerfully uplifting response to the challenges of our time.

Thom van Dooren, environmental philosopher, University of New South Wales, Australia, and author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction

As one has come to expect from Marc Bekoff, this is a wonderful book of scientific stories about animal minds, consciousness, and emotion. But Rewilding Our Hearts goes beyond this, showing how wildness in nature, animals, and our hearts are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. This book will bring a new audience to Bekoffs work.

Dale Jamieson, director of the Animal Studies Initiative and professor of environmental studies and philosophy, New York University

Sadly, most of our relations with other animals are dominionistic transactions between masters and slaves. In Rewilding Our Hearts Marc Bekoff argues persuasively that such top-down interactions are bad for creatures, bad for nature, and bad for humans. The key, Bekoff asserts, is to rewild ourselves and to respect the individuality of other beings and their homes. When we are unkind to individual creatures, we demean them and hobble our own moral development. Being the most powerful creature, he concludes, does not give us the license to ruin a spectacularly beautiful planet, its wondrous webs of nature, and its magnificent nonhuman residents. Who could disagree with that?

Michael Soul, research professor emeritus in environmental studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, and coeditor of Conservation Biology: An Evolutionary-Ecological Perspective

Rewilding Our Hearts is about healing healing our self-destructive attitudes toward the Earth by adopting a more compassionate and ethical treatment of animals. To rewild our hearts is, then, to heal our current dysfunctional and alienated relationship to the planet. Bekoff passionately argues that we must care about other life, and through our caring, we will bring about our own salvation. His argument that we should treat animals with kindness and compassion is an ethical extension of the values that support civil rights that no humans are truly free until all humans are liberated from repression and fear. In Rewilding Our Hearts, Bekoff makes a cogent argument that all of us have both a moral obligation and a need to embrace a new, more encompassing and empathic behavior toward all animals, and that in doing so, we will increase our own well-being and happiness. Read Rewilding Our Hearts and you will whoop, smile, and definitely gain a new respect for all life, including your fellow travelers on the planet.

George Wuerthner, ecological projects director, Foundation for Deep Ecology

Marc Bekoff has been a great pioneer in the scientific study of animal emotion. Now, in Rewilding Our Hearts, Bekoff beautifully and simply articulates a philosophical attitude to guide us in the restoration of nature, which has suffered so terribly from human assaults upon it. Whats more, Bekoff shows how a new attitude toward nature can help us develop compassion and humility in our own lives. Bekoffs message offers hope for genuine healing, of both our natural environment and ourselves.

William Crain, professor of psychology, City College of New York, and author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children: Insights from a Farm Sanctuary

Marc Bekoff writes about how to harness compassion in a frantic world full of concrete and steel, neon and commerce; a world in which nature is crumbling around us. Finding this book is like finding a pot of glue with which we can fill the hole in our hearts and the ozone.

Ingrid E. Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

Calling for a reawakened caring for nature and animals that is both passionate and informed, Rewilding Our Hearts provides the healthy challenge we need in todays critical and confusing times. And Marc Bekoff mountain man and noted academic is the right man for this job. A lively, inspiring, and unsettling book that helps us reconnect with our inner wisdom and remember the deeper truths about our shared life on this fragile Earth.

Will Tuttle, PhD, author of the bestselling book The World Peace Diet, recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award, and cofounder of Circle of Compassion

This book is a reminder that all living things are our family, and we cannot live a spiritually rich and happy life unless we acknowledge and act on our connections. Marc Bekoff suggests compassionate and practical actions, small and large, that we can take to repair our bond with all other species.

Louise Chawla, professor, environmental design program, University of Colorado, Boulder

This is a book to make us all think. Drawing as only he can from a wide range of scientific research and personal experience, Marc Bekoff argues that we need to rethink our relationship to animals. Rewilding Our Hearts asks humans to give up a little control, act with a little humility, and recognize the connections we have to the rest of nature. Bekoffs examples and illustrations remind us that sharing our planet with other species is a source of resilience as well as delight and that caring for the natural world is essential for human well-being.

Susan Clayton, PhD, Whitmore-Williams Professor of Psychology and chair of environmental studies, the College of Wooster

For many years award-winning scientist Marc Bekoff has been writing about the cognitive, emotional, and moral lives of animals. Now, in Rewilding Our Hearts, he lays out a practical way for people to reconnect with natural landscapes and animals through understanding and compassion. Far too many of us have become alienated from nature unwilded, as Bekoff puts it. It is desperately necessary for us to rewild ourselves, to nurture a sense of wonder and a sensitivity to the perspectives and needs of those around us. To this end, Bekoff calls for a rewilding of the education system that would teach young people the importance of connecting with the natural world and stress the need for empathy and compassion for animals and for one another. I believe this is the path toward social justice and peace for all.

Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, founder, Jane Goodall Institute, and United Nations Messenger of Peace

Dr. Marc Bekoffs latest work of art of compassion in action is a deeply philosophical, extraordinarily accessible, and powerfully composed message for our times: try to imagine being the person or dog, rattlesnake, white-tailed deer, prairie dog, horse, tiger, spider, coral reef, rainforest, wolf, fish, wasp, old friend, or enemy you perceive in order to most effectively empathize with and help her or him. Bekoff reaches back to the most ancient Pythagorean and Semitic concepts of love and translates them into the context of a modern all-out ecological crisis, the worst extinction spasm in tens of millions of years, the most outrageous amount of pain being meted out by humans to hundreds of billions of fellow inhabitants of the Earth. But in doing so, he finds good reason and plenty of scientific and social-scientific evidence to be cautiously optimistic, and to rejoice in the prospect of becoming reunited with the millions of other species on this planet. Rewilding Our Hearts is a blueprint for compassion that will change the way you think, feel, and act toward others all others. It is absolutely essential reading for students K12, as well as undergraduate, graduate, and general readers. A breakthrough work of the highest order. A simply