Experiential, Empirical, and Disturbing Anthrozoologies

Abstract

In March of 2016, E. O. Wilson published his book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which, in his Prologue he speaks of the “fever swamp of dogmatic religious belief and inept philosophical thought through which we still wander” and added that “Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth.” Wilson concludes this chilling paragraph by suggesting, “I am convinced that only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.” That half-Earth is approximately the portion of the wild world—in total—that thrived prior to the onslaught of H. sapiens, he readies us. Wilson acknowledges Tony Hiss for suggesting the term “half-Earth”. Hiss himself acknowledges that “a version of this idea has been in circulation among conservationists for some time,” a key factor, under any number of guises and common denominators; of growing the “rewilding” movements and TransBoundary conservation efforts throughout the world, protected corridors from the Yukon to Yellowstone, to those efforts to save the longleaf pine forests now “reduced by 97 %” throughout the American Southeast. There is a tremendous effort underway to rescue longleaf habitat, an attempt by a close friend of Wilson’s, M. C. Davis to buy up vast tracts of the southeast and create what he’s called “Nokuse,” a protected series of connected corridors meaning “bear” in the indigenous Muskogee language and said to be “the biggest private preserve and biggest restoration project east of the Mississippi.” Hiss discusses the Wildlands Network out of Seattle with its “Western wildway” initiative, that would span areas from Mexico to Canada to Alaska, thereby, in combination setting the ecological preconditions for what Hiss describes as “Long Landscape parallels …” encompassing interconnected areas on all sides of north America, “a reimagining of the possible.”