RaveScience NewsAn absorbing and nuanced blend of philosophy and science, the book explores what we owe the nonhuman world ... Wild Souls questions the very concepts of wildness and nature. The result challenges readers to reconsider how they relate to nonhuman animals, from caged creatures to polar bears in the warming north ... The book makes a clear case for the moral value of individual sentient creatures, providing a rundown of the latest science that dissolves the distinct line often drawn between humans and nonhumans ... Marris finds no set formula for making ethical choices about animals’ fates. Instead, readers may realize something profound: There are no perfect ways to act ethically toward all animals and all species when incommensurable values collide. As we try to mend the mess we’ve made of nature, all we can do is act with thoughtful humility.
Elizabeth Kolbert
PositiveScienceNews... will satisfy readers keen on a skeptical survey of how innovation could save coral reefs or turn climate-warming carbon into stone ... Each chapter builds on this theme of increasingly elaborate (or desperate?) interventions intended to limit the fallout of previous problem solving. The scale of the problems widens too, which could leave a reader’s head spinning, but Kolbert keeps her globe-trotting grounded in immersive reporting and recurring nods to the tragic, and often comic, absurdity of it all.
