How to Be Animal (eBook)

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and environmental philosophy. She is the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research in the Canadian Arctic, and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. melaniechallenger.com

Praise for On Extinction: Wide-ranging and often beautiful . . . Challenger is an exquisite writer

Lovingly crafted and beautifully executed . . . Challenger is a poet by trade and has written a wonderfully thoughtful examination of the concept and reality of extinction, ranging from travelogue to philosophy, and biology to environmental exploration

Challenger is a poet of some standing: her descriptions of the places she visits are dazzlingly good

Amid solid research, there is fine and truly poetic prose. The big loops of this peregrinating work intersect in interesting ways . . . A strangeness is evoked, a strangeness that conveys how, in spite of all our erudition, we walk the earth in the twenty-first century as in a dream

A poignant, beautifully written account of how extinction makes us feel. Poets and philosophers have tackled this subject before, but this exquisite meditation goes straight to the top of the literary charts . . . an honest book that will devastate and uplift you in equal measure