Being Salmon Being Human

Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In search of a new story for our place on earth Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture’s tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon—weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it, and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process. Being Salmon, Being Human is both a philosophical and a narrative work, rewarding readers with insightful interpretations of major philosophers—Descartes, Heidegger, Abram, and many more—and reflections on the human–Earth relationship. It stands alongside Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, as well as Andreas Weber’s The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire—heralding a new “Copernican revolution” in the fields of biology, ecology, and philosophy.

"Examines Western culture's ... alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon--weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest"--Amazon.com.

"Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. As fish are enrolled in new regimes of marine domestication, traditional distinctions between fish and animals are reconfigured, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal welfare legislation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Australia, the author traces farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial practices, and shows how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and alien in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to the economic context of industrial food production as well as the mundane practices of caring for fish, it offers novel perspectives on domestication, human-animal relations, and food production"--Provided by publisher.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance. Alexandra Morton came north from California in the early 1980s, following her first love--the northern resident orca. In remote Echo Bay, in the Broughton Archipelago, she found the perfect place to settle into all she had ever dreamed of: a lifetime of observing and learning what these big-brained mammals are saying to each other. She was lucky enough to get there just in time to witness a place of true natural abundance, and learned how to thrive in the wilderness as a scientist and a single mother. Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the whales away. Her fisherman neighbours asked her if she would write letters on their behalf to government explaining the damage the farms were doing to the fisheries, and one thing led to another. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast. Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising that built around her as ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn't obey their own court rulings. She has used her science, many acts of protest and the legal system in her unrelenting efforts to save wild salmon and ultimately the whales--a story that reveals her own doggedness and bravery but also shines a bright light on the ways other humans doggedly resist the truth. Here, she brilliantly calls those humans to account for the sake of us all.

WINNER OF THE JOHN AVERY AWARD AT THE ANDRÉ SIMON AWARDS If we can save the salmon, we can save the world Over the centuries, salmon have been a vital resource, a dietary staple and an irresistible catch. But there is so much more to this extraordinary fish. As international bestseller Mark Kurlansky reveals, salmon persist as a barometer for the health of our planet. Centuries of our greatest assaults on nature can be seen in their harrowing yet awe-inspiring life cycle. Full of all Kurlansky’s characteristic curiosity and insight, Salmon is a magisterial history of a wondrous creature. ‘An epic, environmental tragedy’ Spectator ‘These creatures have nurtured our imagination as surely as our bodies. This book does them justice!’ Bill McKibben

Simon has always longed to catch a salmon. But when his luck suddenly changes and an eagle accidentally drops one into a tidal pool, Simon is torn between sympathy for the fish and the desire to catch something of his own. All summer long, Simon, a young First Nations boy, has been desperate to catch a salmon. He goes fishing every day, but has no luck. Then one day a high-flying eagle drops a salmon into a clam hole right before his eyes, and Simon must decide whether to take it home or let it go. This simple story, with its evocative watercolor paintings of the Northwest Coast, was an environmental fable before its time when it was first published in 1978. But its true power rests in the magical combination of text and pictures, which have made it a best-selling classic.

"Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.

Our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. Goldfarb shares the powerful story about one of the world's most influential species. He explains how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. -- adapted from jacket