Martin Lee Mueller - Being Salmon, Being Human

PRAISE FOR BEING SALMON, BEING HUMAN

Here is a philosopher who has learned to think not only with his head but with his whole body. A keenly aware human animal, Martin Mueller dreams himself salmon flesh. Gill slits open along his neck as he glides between mountain streams and the broad ocean currents. His scales glint and ripple in the moonlight, their reflections posing ever more penetrating questions for our species. This is a game-changing culture-shifting book, ethical and eloquent, opening the way toward a more mature natural science, one thats oriented by our own creaturely participation and rapport with the rest of the biosphere.

DAVID ABRAM , author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Anima l ; creative director, Alliance for Wild Ethics

The salmon farming industry is not only cruel and environmentally damaging; it threatens to corrode wildness itself. No one has made a more compelling argument to support this fact than Martin Lee Mueller. Philosophically, scientifically, morally, and artistically, Mueller blows the industry guys literally out of the water. If you care about the future of salmon, you must read this essential, rigorously documented book.

SY MONTGOMERY , coauthor of Tamed and Untame d ; author of The Soul of an Octopus

What if looking at a salmon brought you into deep meditation, and at the end of that meditation you realized that you were looking at yourself, that the salmon was you, you were the salmon, and all is one? That realization is the greatest story on Earth. This book is that crucial meditation.

CARL SAFINA , author of Song for the Blue Ocean and The View from Lazy Point

We are slowly realizingin our dramatic cultural epochthat dualism has come to an end. Humans do not stand above the Earth; we are but one of its ways of imagining itself. The thinking and feeling of the coming era wont distinguish between imagination, matter, theory, and desire. Martin Lee Muellers book is one of the first works to radically imagine this new world that is dawning. He shows that reality is a weaving of yearning bodies expressive of innumerable existential stories. Here, outwardness and interiority, humans and salmons, physical descriptions, historiography, and memoir are continuously intertwining. They are equally important aspects of a multifaceted whole that calls for scientific descriptions as well as for personal expressions. Muellers work is a fine example of the new renaissance slowly gaining momentum, in which we understand our humanness as one strand of the worlds manifold desire to become.

ANDREAS WEBER , author of Matter and Desire and The Biology of Wonder

This eloquent, impassioned, and often poetic book offers something remarkable: a coherent philosophical and spiritual vision for this era of ecological fragility. Marked by clarity and compassion, Being Salmon, Being Human is a beautiful, important workand a necessary one.

JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ , author of Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight

With this beautiful and important book, Martin Lee Mueller has written a love song to the salmon, and a love song to all life. This book deserves to be read and understood, as an important step in helping us to remember how to love this wonderful planet that is our only home.

DERRICK JENSEN , author of A Language Older Than Words , The Culture of Make Believe , Endgame , and many other books

Muellers book carries both erudition and urgency secreted within its silvery scales. He understands the hour is late, and his intelligent push towards across-species storytelling is to be taken seriously. Bless his steps, and may his work carry its nutritional goodness far, far over the green teeth of the sea.

MARTIN SHAW , author of Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia

A marvelous exploration of what it means to belong within lifes community. Mueller integrates imagination and analysis to produce a book of rare and important insight.

DAVID GEORGE HASKELL , author of The Songs of Trees and Pulitzer finalist The Forest Unseen ; professor, The University of the South

What a fantastic gift from the nation that has given us both deep ecology and farmed fish. Martin Lee Mueller is the first to explain how strange this pairing can be. From Descartes to Naess, he knows his philosophy. But no one before Mueller has dared to ask our gravlax itself, Who are you? This is the wildest salmon book ever written.

DAVID ROTHENBERG , author of Survival of the Beautiful and Thousand Mile Son g ; distinguished professor of philosophy, New Jersey Institute of Technology

How refreshing to read a book on humanfish relations that actually considers the fishes own perspectives! With lyrical, empathic prose, Mueller beautifully expresses both the sensual world of a salmon and the tragedy of our self-absorption.

JONATHAN BALCOMBE , author of What a Fish Knows

In these pages you will find a well-referenced eco-philosophical story about some of the confounding origins of our separation from both self and all that is nonhuman. Martin Lee Muellers words are a song of celebration, offering a shared sense of salvation to see salmon and humans, as Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper Oren Lyons might suggest, as relatives rather than resources. Read this book as a clarion call and homecoming for a vision of a new Theory of Relatives-ity with the mantra being: Bring the Salmon H.O.M.E. Bring the Humans H.O.M.E. (Here On Mother Earth)!

BROCK DOLMAN , director, WATER Institute, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center

In Being Salmon, Being Human , Martin Lee Mueller brings the abstract categories and arguments of eco-philosophy vividly to life. Weaving together narrative, poetry, science, natural history, and economics, while contrasting Indigenous and modern perspectives on the meaning of salmon, he creates an eloquent, multi-layered terrain of thought and story.

FREYA MATHEWS , professor of environmental philosophy, Latrobe University, Australia

Copyright 2017 by Martin Lee Mueller.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The poem Sleeping in the Forest on page 90 is from Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver. Copyright 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted with the permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt on page 124 is from The Dry Salvages from FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1947 by T.S. Eliot, renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt on page 185 is from By Frazier Creek Falls by Gary Snyder, from TURTLE ISLAND, copyright 1974 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Cover artwork, Salmon Dance Chiin Xyaalaa , by April White. Please visit www.aprilwhite.com for prints and more information on Aprils artwork.

Project Manager: Alexander Bullett

Project Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Developmental Editor: Rory Bradley

Commissioning Editor: Shaun Chamberlin

Copy Editor and Indexer: Deborah Heimann

Proofreader: Paula Brisco

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing September 2017.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 18 19 20 21

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Being Salmon, Being Human was printed on paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.