Book Passage Presents

Tues., August 3, 2021 • 1:00pm PT • Live • Online

In conversation with Carl Zimmer

From an acclaimed environmental writer, a groundbreaking and provocative new vision for our relationships with—and responsibilities toward—the planet's wild animals.

Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in fact, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? No clear guidelines yet exist to help us resolve such questions.

Transporting readers into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe—from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature—and our place within it.

Emma Marris is an award-winning journalist whose writing on science and the environment has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, High Country News, and many other publications, including Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her previous book, Rambunctious Garden, was the subject of her TED Talk, which has over 1.4 million views. She was also featured on the TED Radio Hour and the series Adam Ruins Everything. She is based in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

Carl Zimmer is the author of fourteen books about science. His latest book is Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. Zimmer’s column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award and The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018. Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.

Emma Marris photo courtesy of author; Carl Zimmer photo by Mistina Hanscom