Being Salmon, Being Human

Description

In search of a new story for our place on earth

Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture’s tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon – weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest.

Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it, and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process.

Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment 

“Here is a philosopher who has learned to think not only with his head but with his whole body. A keenly aware human animal, Martin Mueller dreams himself salmon flesh. Gill slits open along his neck as he glides between mountain streams and the broad ocean currents. His scales glint and ripple in the moonlight, their reflections posing ever more penetrating questions for our species. This is a game-changing culture-shifting book, ethical and eloquent, opening the way toward a more mature natural science—one that’s oriented by our own creaturely participation and rapport with the rest of the biosphere.” – David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal; director, Alliance for Wild Ethics

Published 2017
Chelsea Green Publishing
Softcover, 368 pages.
ISBN: 9781603587457