HOW TO BE ANIMAL

A searching examination of our intellectual divorce from the natural world.

Humans, wrote scholar George Kateb, are “the only animal species that is not only animal, the only species that is partly not natural.” Challenger, a British environmental philosopher, takes the idea and runs with it, noting that we are now the world’s dominant animal species, but one that dismisses its animal-ness and regards its human status “as if it is a magical boundary.” Yet recognition of our roots in nature is essential to a healthful relationship with a world that we have treated poorly for most of our history. Much as we might wish to separate ourselves, writes the author, there are definite aspects of animal behavior at work among our kind. “That we give each other love and support is a condition not of our rationalising,” she writes, “but of our compulsions as animals.” Challenger’s book is full of asides that beg for development—her observation, for instance, that “culture’s achievement is to store information outside the body” and that, whereas ants, as ubiquitous as humans, have diversified into more than 14,000 species, our species has speciated through cultural means—but she is convincing in her argument that we suffer from our divorce from nature. “Many of the tensions we experience derive from the dissonance inherent in being a predator with a rich moral faculty,” she observes, wanton killers of nearly every other being on the planet while knowing that we are doing wrong. Challenger proposes ways to retool our thinking, including recognizing the emerging fact that animals possess consciousness (whales dream, wolves carry mental maps in their heads, and so forth) and acknowledging that human consciousness is just one aspect of “a spectacle of richness before us all the while.” Throughout the book, the author invites us to accept our animal nature and the responsibility toward the world that comes with it.

A welcome, well-considered contribution to ecological thought.