Richard Louv’s bio states “he would rather hike than write.” It is posted on the website of the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit he helped start after the 2005 publication of his influential Last Child in the Woods.

Today, the journalist and author of 10 books, most recently Our Wild Calling: How Connecting With Animals Can Transform Our Lives—and Save Theirs  (Algonquin Books, Nov. 5), is 70 and lives with his wife, Kathy Frederick Louv, in the pine mountains east of San Diego. He agreed to a telephone interview with Kirkus.

You write about spending much of your boyhood “in the Missouri woods with Banner," your collie, whom you call  “an arrow of joy.″ Would this new book exist without him?

This book started out with me thinking I would write about Banner or dogs more generally. No, I guess not—I don’t think I would have written it without him.

Wild  Calling is clearly in conversation with books by Frans de Waal, Carl Safina, and John Berger, perhaps especially Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Did it provide a template?

I read Berger a long time ago—his book is about seeing, noticing. And one of the themes of Wild Calling is just noticing—just noticing all these other worlds around us. Last night, I watched this documentary, Emptying the Skies, based on a Jonathan Franzen article. It’s about people protecting birds in Europe and it’s quite moving. And Franzen says something like, “There aren’t that many moments in your life where you become aware of a dimension of the world that you’ve been completely unaware of. It dawned on me gradually that the world was full of birds.” This idea is collected in the stories of the people I interview, that it is important for us to notice other animals and to notice this “species loneliness” we’ve allowed ourselves to fall into.

You recommend finding a set spot, “a sit place,″ to regularly watch animal life. Where is yours?

My sit place is a walk place. In the mountains we live in, there are deer everywhere, and mountain lions—I’ve seen their tracks but not them, so far—and many bird species. I’ve become addicted to walks here. I usually walk five miles or so. When I was a kid, my spot was next to a creek, where I would sit very still and watch the frogs pop back up to the surface. I learned to wet my nose to pick up more scents. These sits could last an hour. I would pretend I was Mowgli.

Can’t there be a point of too much, of people fetishizing their animals?

We can spend a lot of time judging or stereotyping other people—for, say, carrying teacup dogs in their purses, or for being ranchers or vegans. Or we can recognize that human beings from different experiences and backgrounds share a hunger for a deeper connection with other life. There’s a wide spectrum of relationships between people and other animals, and we can all move on that spectrum toward empathy.

Wild  Calling makes the interesting observation that children’s literature is full of animal stories.

Yes, and older traditions of peoples around the globe were very much more aware of the animals around them. They told stories as animals and acted them out. Today, we are almost embarrassed to tell them, these stories our ancestors told about fellow travelers on the planet, and we’ve cut out a whole swath of meaning, the depth of meaning found in truly transformational encounters with other animals. Are we going to sit around the fire and tell stories about our iPhones? And I love my iPhone.

In the context of climate change, you make the interesting point that Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech was called “I Have a Dream,″ not “I Have a Nightmare.″

It’s easy to give in to the dystopic trance. But where does that leave people? Why would they get up to act? In that documentary about birds, the activists are risking their lives for these creatures and it’s a drop in the bucket. It’s not going to save the birds. But Franzen says something else might. And meanwhile, these people are performing love. Saving the birds is performing love. And one of the places we can perform love is toward the animals around us.

Karen R. Long is the manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for the Cleveland Foundation.