Overview

Combining nature writing, history and moral philosophy, this is a wide-ranging and radical new take on the human story and what it means for us today.

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9780143134350

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Reviews

Advance praise for How to Be Animal With this book, Melanie Challenger fearlessly plunges into the biggest question of our time: how can we rediscover our animal selves, before it is too late? How can we discover our true place in the wider world we are destroying? Each of us has to answer this question for ourselves. This book is a guide for you on the journey. --Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake Erudite, lyrical, delightfully troubling, and full of unexpected convergences. A wonderful exploration of the tensions that beset the human animal trying to find our way. I was entranced by this beautiful weave of history, biology, and philosophy. --David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees What an interesting book! The recognition that we are animals should come less as a slap in the face than as a welcome reminder of the great resources that can come from paying attention to the ways we and our various cousins handle our journeys on this difficult but beautiful planet. --Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Melanie Challenger's wonderful book teaches me this: our blazing continuity with the depth of time and the whole of life. It is a huge, complex and triumphant thing: challenging, but also celebratory, courageous, mournful and apprehensive. Her language is lovely: exact and lyrical and sparklingly full of suggestion and implication. It is a hymn to generosity. I know it will be something I will return to again and again. --Adam Nicolson, auhor of Sea Room Throughout our vexed shared history, animals have suffered from our insistence on comparing them to us, as if we were entirely separate organisms. Melanie Challenger's extraordinary, profound book turns the situation on its head. Perhaps only recently we how come to realise that this presumptive, if not arrogant hierarchy does not exist. Only by seeing ourselves as animals are we going to survive. How to be Animal is an utterly challenging, wholly essential book: it shows us how to be human. --Philip Hoare, author of The Whale In How to be Animal, Melanie Challenger offers a poetic and erudite meditation on the relationship of our species to the rest of the organic world, and especially to the species to which we are most closely related. Her compelling argument against human exceptionalism synthesizes the insights of scientists and philosophers from many times and places, and uses them, along with reflections on her own experiences, to analyze some of the most troublesome current political issues. She is particularly aware of the human desire for firm boundaries--between ourselves and other species, for example, or between our bodies and our minds--and she therefore stresses the elusiveness of such boundaries and the potentially devastating effects of our pursuit of them. --Harriet Rivto, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT Melanie Challenger's erudite book confronts the refusal to embrace our animal nature and wrestles with the delusion and fear that underlie that refusal. In a time when so much of 'the rest' is collapsing, deconstructing the myth of human specialness, and the ways it is implicated in nonhuman suffering and destruction, is urgent. Challenger shows us that our moral awakening is not only about changing how we treat the Earth, but also about transforming how we see ourselves. --Eileen Crist, author of Abundant Earth: Towards an Ecological Civilization

Advance praise for How to Be Animal [A] brilliant, thought-provoking book. It is so wise and so well researched and makes you realize that so much of where we go wrong as a species--socially, psychologically, environmentally--involves forgetting or trying to escape our nature. --Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library, via Instagram This is a brilliant book that, like many brilliant books, explores what it means to be human. The difference here is that the author answers this by highlighting one central human dilemma: we are an animal in denial that we are actually an animal. --Observer [A] fascinating and cutting-edge meditation on humanity . . . humbling [and] timely . . . Every chapter is more riveting than the last, a truly remarkable read. --Booklist A searching examination of our intellectual divorce from the natural world . . . [Challenger] 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. --Kirkus Reviews With this book, Melanie Challenger fearlessly plunges into the biggest question of our time: how can we rediscover our animal selves, before it is too late? How can we discover our true place in the wider world we are destroying? Each of us has to answer this question for ourselves. This book is a guide for you on the journey. --Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake Erudite, lyrical, delightfully troubling, and full of unexpected convergences. A wonderful exploration of the tensions that beset the human animal trying to find our way. I was entranced by this beautiful weave of history, biology, and philosophy. --David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees What an interesting book! The recognition that we are animals should come less as a slap in the face than as a welcome reminder of the great resources that can come from paying attention to the ways we and our various cousins handle our journeys on this difficult but beautiful planet. --Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Melanie Challenger's wonderful book teaches me this: our blazing continuity with the depth of time and the whole of life. It is a huge, complex and triumphant thing: challenging, but also celebratory, courageous, mournful and apprehensive. Her language is lovely: exact and lyrical and sparklingly full of suggestion and implication. It is a hymn to generosity. I know it will be something I will return to again and again. --Adam Nicolson, auhor of Sea Room Throughout our vexed shared history, animals have suffered from our insistence on comparing them to us, as if we were entirely separate organisms. Melanie Challenger's extraordinary, profound book turns the situation on its head. Perhaps only recently we how come to realise that this presumptive, if not arrogant hierarchy does not exist. Only by seeing ourselves as animals are we going to survive. How to be Animal is an utterly challenging, wholly essential book: it shows us how to be human. --Philip Hoare, author of The Whale In How to be Animal, Melanie Challenger offers a poetic and erudite meditation on the relationship of our species to the rest of the organic world, and especially to the species to which we are most closely related. Her compelling argument against human exceptionalism synthesizes the insights of scientists and philosophers from many times and places, and uses them, along with reflections on her own experiences, to analyze some of the most troublesome current political issues. She is particularly aware of the human desire for firm boundaries--between ourselves and other species, for example, or between our bodies and our minds--and she therefore stresses the elusiveness of such boundaries and the potentially devastating effects of our pursuit of them. --Harriet Rivto, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT Melanie Challenger's erudite book confronts the refusal to embrace our animal nature and wrestles with the delusion and fear that underlie that refusal. In a time when so much of 'the rest' is collapsing, deconstructing the myth of human specialness, and the ways it is implicated in nonhuman suffering and destruction, is urgent. Challenger shows us that our moral awakening is not only about changing how we treat the Earth, but also about transforming how we see ourselves. --Eileen Crist, author of Abundant Earth: Towards an Ecological Civilization

Author Information

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and on environmental philosophy. She is the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. She lives with her family in England. Challenger is the host of the  “Enter the Psychosphere” podcast, where she dives into the world of the diverse intelligences that exist on the planet in conversations with guests like Peter Godfrey Smith and Daniel Dennett.

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