Before Zion was a name for a national park, it was another word for Jerusalem. Eventually, it morphed into a metaphor,shorthand for the promised land. Its most famous description appears in the book of Isaiah: in Zion, the wolf “shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
As Emma Marris notes in her new book,, most of us interpret thisas allegory.Instead we understand the opposite to be true: eat or be eaten—such is life in the wild. But at least a few people thinkthat theideal positedin thebiblical text is oneworth striving for. The nonprofit , for example, believes we should reduce all kinds of animal suffering, even, perhaps, suffering due to predation. Is this a leap forward in ethical thinking, or softhearted nonsense? That’s one of the questions posed by Marris’s fascinating work, which examines our responsibility as humans towardwild animals.
Though Marris is trained as a journalist, here she finds herself “doing philosophy,” as she puts it early on. Don’t imagine thatshe holed up in a library carrel, though; this is the kind of philosophy that involves “getting coveredin mud [while] checking petrel burrows, sitting around campfires, touring genetic laboratories, and checking rat traps.” It’s hands-on philosophy, in other words, put to test in the real world.
The most famous philosophical works on animals—like Peter Singer’s , a central text in the veganism movement—have focused on pets and domestic livestock. As for all the lessthantamed creatures, our ethical obligations “are often presented as being straightforward: we should simply leave them alone and protect their habitat,” Marris writes. Wildness is a synonym for the nonhuman, right? So our presence can only muck things up.
This has led to an obsession with purity. We want landscapes “untrammeled by man,” as it’s put in the , a seminal 1964 law that protected nine million acres. We want wolves that are wolves—wild beasts, their bloodlines undiluted.
Marris describes a recent case in Washington State in whicha blackwolf was impregnated by a domestic sheepdog. One animalwas an endangered species, the othersomeone’s property; each is enmeshed in an entirely different legal infrastructure. What would the pups even be? State officials had a clear answer: a threat. The hybrids might taint the genes of nearby wolf packs. So the expectantwolf motherwas captured and spayed.
The ethical logic of this situationfeels something like a snake eating its own tail. In order to keep the wolf wild and separate, humanshad to capture the animal and performan invasive medical procedure. To Marris—and to many readers, I’d expect, myself included—there is something cringeworthy here. Not that it is inherently wrong; it’s just that our guts and our intellects begin to collide, which is, as Marris points out, a sign that we’re engaging in genuine moral reasoning.
The book begins with a tour of animals’ many capabilities—to , to feel emotions, to feel pain, , to outperform usintellectually, even. (A squirrel can’t count to ten, but it will “beat the pants off us when it comes to remembering the hiding places of thousands of nuts,” Marris notes.) Next is a surprisingly readable history of how philosophers have conceived nonhuman beings, beginning with ancient cultures and proceeding to Singer and beyond. Thus fortified for the journey to come, readers are dropped into a series of philosophical riddles. Is it justifiable to hold wild creatures captive, as pets or in zoos? (No, not really, according to Marris.) Can hunting be justified? (Not just justified but recommended, she writes,so long as it’s done in a way that reinforces our reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world.) The bulk of Wild Soulsis occupied by our efforts to protect threatened species,from genetic modification to the active slaughter of invasive species. (It’s a tangle; you’ll just have to read the book.)
Marris believes that our idea of wildness—our obsession with purity—is misguided. No animal remains untouched by the human hands. And not just because we’ve entered the Anthropocene. Yes, sure, our fossil-fuel economy has completely reshaped the landscape (Marris notes that one of the most obvious steps we can take to help wild creatures is to fight to keep the atmosphere as cool as possible), but even thousands of years ago, Indigenous people were grooming and cultivating nearly every corner of the earth. To call something wild is not just to indulge in romanticismbut also to engage in a “colonial power play,” as Marris writes: “Our ‘wildernesses’ are just places where colonialism left the trees standing.”
Once you toss out the fetish for the “natural,” new options emerge. We could, for example, build a high-tech Zion, a world where we feed tigers cutlets of cellular meat that’s been raised in labs. Or if we can’t end predation, we might temper it,planting sedative pellets under animals’skinsso that when the kid is seized by the leopard, a sensor can note that it’s time to release the drug. Marris, though, after conjuring this vision, concedes that it’s “faintly disgusting.” Humility matters, even if purity doesn’t. She’s not convinced humans are smart enough to pull off such a grand intervention without making ugly mistakes. Instead shecounsels readers to rethink the word “wild.” What matters is not purity but autonomy. Wildness can be reconceived as creatures doing what they want to do. This leaves room for humans to have a meaningful relationship with nature, so long as it’s by mutual consent.
Marris told me in an interview that she was terrified of philosophy until she moved in with a philosopherand the discipline began to unravel for her over dinner-table conservations. (Her husband, Yasha Rohwer, teaches philosophy at the Oregon Institute of Technology; in March, the couple copublished a .) But she realized the questions we face in the Anthropocene are not just scientific. They are ethical, which is to say they demand the tools of philosophy.
It’s an approach that leads Marris to a provocative argument: perhaps we need to stop worrying so much about entire species. The category of “species” is more human construct than biological reality—a leaky bag, as the half-wolf, half-sheepdog pups would havedemonstrated—and a snapshot in time, too, as every species is gradually evolving into something new. Some may need to change to survive in a hotter world. Rather than saving whole species, Marris encourages conservationists to focus on individual beings and their autonomy.
Here, then, is a shortcut to ethical thinking: If you were reincarnated as an endangered species, what conservation strategies would you submit to? Some people might be willing to have their genes enhanced, though as Marris writes, current ethical guidelines forbid the use of Crisprtechnology on human beings. But few people would want their baby killed because its genes were deemed impure. If a blackwolf wants to mate with a sheepdog, so be it. That’s what wildness means.
To grant to every animal this kind of autonomy requires a grand act of imagination. According to one estimate, there are more than a hundredbillion wild vertebrates on land alone. I try to think of each as an individual flicker of life, but the number is too big, really, for me to hold in my mind. And that is part of the problem we face. To get to the promised land—or at least the future I hope for, where the earth stays cool and an abundance of animals survive—the science isn’t the hard part. The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate place in that world.