I am a science journalist and former scientist who focuses on human-wildlife interactions, especially when those interactions turn sour. I’ve been fascinated by the animals people hate for years now, especially since I got to write on the earliest origins of the house mouse. To gain expertise, I was a 2019-2020 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and have spent the past three years immersing myself in all things pest—from reaching into a coyote’s stomach to taking a whiff of elephant repellant. My freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Science News, Sierra, and many other outlets.
We love wild animals, right? We love to see or go into the wilderness. But what makes wilderness wilderness, and how wild is wild? If and every California condor is bred in captivity, are those animals wild? When a rat is living on an island and threatening seabirds, is it right to drop tons of poison, and kill thousands of rats, to save 100 chicks? And whether it’s right or wrong, whose decision is it to make? Emma Marris tackles these questions with science, ethics, and beautiful, clear, sweeping prose, and comes to her own philosophical conclusions. This book helped me to form my own thoughts about how to tackle the ethical questions of pests, and her writing is an inspiration all on its own.
Winner of the 2022 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award * Winner of the 2022 Science in Society Journalism Award (Books) * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
“Thoughtful, insightful, and wise, Wild Souls is a landmark work.”--Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
"Fascinating . . . hands-on philosophy, put to test in the real world . . . Marris believes that our idea of wildness--our obsession with purity--is misguided. No animal remains untouched by human hands . . . the science isn’t the hard part. The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate…
When I began to research why we hate so many animals in our lives, I quickly came to realize that a lot of the scientific and common thinking about animals and their place in our world is based on some very Western, white worldviews. Braiding Sweetgrass is a great introduction to traditional ecological knowledge, showing that there’s more than one way to see our relationships with our environments, and how a different perspective leads to radically different actions. It is also just beautiful to read. Reading this book is like reading a meadow in summer, a sensual experience as much as it is educational.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
One of the things I quickly began to realize while researching my book is how much the animals we label pests reflect problems within our own society. They might reflect attitudes toward animals, yes. But they also often reflect our attitudes towards each other, and highlight social inequalities. Pests in the City is a study of different pests and how they highlight issues of social justice in urban environments. It’s educational and eye-opening, and you’ll never forget what you learn.
From tenements to alleyways to latrines, twentieth-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler argues that the urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space.
Community activists and social reformers strived to control pests in cities such as Washington, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Milwaukee, but such efforts fell short when authorities blamed families and neighborhood culture for infestations rather than attacking racial segregation or…
I mean, how could I not recommend a Mary Roach book about animals? Fuzz breaks down all the things animals do that, if humans did them, would be cause for a lot of jail time. Stealing, breaking and entering, poisoning, pooping in public, even murder. But what do you do when the perp is a bear, a bird, or…a bean? This is essential reading to make you the life of any fun cocktail party, and I hope that I can be as funny as Roach when I grow up.
What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in…
It seems like a bit of a long title for a New York Times Bestseller but I promise this book is educational, entertaining, and worth every second. Sullivan spent a year observing a rat-infested alley, and came away with a better understanding of our least-favorite rodents, as well as the many people who spend their lives trying to keep rats and humans apart. At first it might seem weird to sit outside and watch the rats every night, but by the end, you can’t imagine doing anything else.
New York Public Library Book for the Teenager New York Public Library Book to Remember PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year
"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.
Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller,…
An engrossing and revealing study of why we deem certain animals "pests" and others not-from cats to rats, elephants to pigeons-and what this tells us about our own perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as well as our place in the natural world
A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don't expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It's no longer an animal. It's a pest.
At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It's not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It's about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It's a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it's entirely a question of perspective.
Bethany Brookshire's deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
