Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species

by Esther Woolfson

Overview

A landmark examination of the fraught relationship between humans and animals, taking the reader from Genesis to climate change.

Beginning with the very origins of life on Earth, Woolfson considers prehistoric human-animal interaction and traces the millennia-long evolution of conceptions of the soul and conscience in relation to the animal kingdom, and the consequences of our belief in human superiority. She explores our representation of animals in art, our consumption of them for food, our experiments on them for science, and our willingness to slaughter them for sport and fashion, as well as examining concepts of love and ownership.

Drawing on philosophy and theology, art and history, as well as her own experience of living with animals and coming to know, love, and respect them as individuals, Woolfson examines some of the most complex ethical issues surrounding our treatment of animals and argues passionately and persuasively for a more humble, more humane, relationship with the creatures who share our world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639362776
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Esther Woolfson is the author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary, which was short­ listed for the Wainwright Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability and is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Aberdeen University. 

Table of Contents

Beginnings 1

1 Sharing a Planet 9

2 A Thing Apart 33

3 Souls 56

4 Blood 83

5 Rights 119

6 The Museum 157

7 Tradition 185

8 The Hunt 215

9 The Coat 244

10 What is Love? 270

Acknowledgements 299

Bibliography 301

Further Reading 339

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/07/2022

Woolfson (Field Notes from a Hidden City) examines humanity’s relationship with animals in this bracing investigation. In tracing “the development of the philosophical and religious ideas that have formed our views and how we’ve seen, described and portrayed other species,” she considers animal breeding and their use as food, which are “closely related to the way we look at our own species and the extent to which we give ourselves the privileges apparently bestowed by history and by God,” as well as their role as subjects of experiments. Elsewhere, Woolfson examines how “tradition” is used “to justify some of the most outrageous, discredited and damaging human behaviour,” specifically the “persecution, the killing and infliction of suffering” on large numbers of animals. (Her chapter on the cruelties in the fur trade is especially harrowing.) Throughout, the descriptions can be brutal, but they are balanced with passages of beauty: “Red kites hunt above me... their feathers changed in an instant to flashes of copper taffeta, light as fragments of fine silk blown by the wind.” It adds up to a fascinating look at how and why humans “consider ourselves superior” to other beings who live on the planet. With gorgeous writing and well-considered insight, this is a must for nature-minded readers. Agent: Jenny Brown, Jenny Brown Assoc. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Insightful, erudite and eminently readable, Between Light and Storm is a wide-ranging meditation on the history and ethics of human-animal relationships. Tthought-provoking, perceptive and crammed with interesting ideas presented in an accessible way."

Bookbrowse

"Between Light and Storm is a compelling read about a patriarchal, capitalist system that has reduced animals to commodities. If animals are soulless automatons, Woolfson reminds us, then humans can use them for any and all purposes."

Earth Island Journal

"Woolfson writes with arresting grace and vibrant immediacy. The book is a necessary and beautiful plea for us humans to do better by our fellow creatures."

Science

"The book is as impressive a memoir as it is a work of clear-headed and highly informed journalism. Woolfson writes without a sense of privilege. Her voice is humble, passionate, and sensitive."

Forbes

"We live in a time in which our disrespect for nature is coming back to bite us. Timely and wide-ranging, Esther Woolfson's book offers sensitive reflections on how we relate to the animals around us as well as the animal within."

Frans de Waal

"Asserting that Earth’s survival is in jeopardy, Between Light and Storm is passionate and powerful in arguing that people’s attitudes and behaviors toward the Earth need to change in significant ways."

Forward Reviews

"Esther Woolfson has crafted a work that is at once theoretical, yet applicable and relevant; personal, yet clinical; and dark, yet extremely hopeful."

The Jerusalem Post

"Woolfson writes with arresting grace and vibrant immediacy. The book is a necessary and beautiful plea for us humans to do better by our fellow creatures."

Science

"This expansive book traces humanity’s relationship with other species through scientific studies, philosophical, literary, religious, and historical writings, and personal anecdotes"

Booklist

"This expansive book traces humanity’s relationship with other species through scientific studies, philosophical, literary, religious, and historical writings, and personal anecdotes"

Booklist

"This book is so entertaining and intelligent."

The Spectator

"Nature writing at its best.

The Sunday Times (London)

Praise for Esther Woolfson:

From the Publisher

"Between Light and Storm brings together a wealth of literature about humans and other animals. At every turn, Woolfson has an astute remark, whether from Tolstoy or J. D. Salinger.

The Financial Times

"Woolfson possesses a sense of humour and a gift for fine writing.

The Daily Mail

Elegiac, haunting and piercingly intelligent, Esther Woolfson's exploration of our relationship with other species is sometimes painful to read but her articulacy and lightness of touch, and her own beautifully observed experiences, are a joy. A profoundly moving and important book.

Isabella Tree

"I know of no better introduction to the study of human–animal relations.”

Boria Sax

"When turning the pages of Wolfson’s spellbinding books, you can’t help but wonder what creatures may have been peering over her shoulder as she wrote. Intimacy feeds into her new examination of our relationship with the wilder world. Read and be caught.

The New Statesman

"A powerful, poignant, and urgently important reflection on our relations with the non-human world. Immaculately researched and compulsively readable."

Charles Foster

"Exquisitely written. Stands as a serious corrective to the notion that only exotic animals are worthy of attention.

The Observer (London)

★ 11/01/2022

Recent developments, including climate change and widespread drought and flooding, have forced people to examine their relationships with the physical environment and the animal kingdom. In this work, popular and critically acclaimed British nature writer Woolfson (Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary) analyzes, in exquisite detail, numerous issues concerning the relationships between humans and animals and their many complexities. Ten chapters flow together well to provide a useful historical context, beginning with prehistorical societal norms and going up through debates on the morality of current related issues including guns, hunting regulations, factory farming, and the animal fur industry. Woolfson's writing style is highly academic; the book concludes with a comprehensive source list. However, her style is also very elegant and personal. Readers will find it familiar and will likely be uplifted. Stories of her personal relationships with animals, especially birds, are interspersed throughout, providing a beautiful framework. VERDICT This work has the capacity to forever change the thinking about humans' relationship to animals and to lead to constructive ways of dealing with issues for the betterment of both. It belongs on the shelves of all academic and large public libraries.—Steve Dixon

Library Journal

★ 2022-09-17
A beautifully written reflection on the enduring conceit of human exceptionalism and the resultant harm caused to animals.

Two suppositions guide this book. One is that all Earth’s creatures possess “an indefatigable determinedness of self”—for this reason, they have a right to flourishing lives. Humans are neither behaviorally nor morally superior, nor are animals “a thing apart.” Animals and humans are equal in moral standing: “If I have a soul, so do my birds,” writes Woolfson, acclaimed author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. Our response to the “egregious, destructive, purposely and wantonly cruel” treatment that animals often receive from humans should be nothing short of indignation. The other supposition is that “our behavior towards the natural world” is shaped by the diverse ways that we interact with it. Woolfson weaves together a rich array of personal anecdotes, historical documents, novels, religious scripture, philosophical ruminations, and scientific studies to explore human-animal encounters: killing them for food, hunting them for pleasure, subjecting them to experiments, displaying them in museums, farming them for use in clothing, and living with them as pets. Woolfson is particularly concerned about arguments that defend human cruelty, as when “tradition” is called on to justify hunting whales and killing birds. Throughout, Woolfson’s prose is lyrical—e.g., “the heavy hum of insects in scented air”; regarding vivisection, she recalls accounts “so graphic and disturbing that, like the whispered memories from prolonged and punishing sieges, peculiarly sanguinary battles or wanton massacres, they live to be revisited.” While the author exercises restraint when it comes to justified outrage, she does not wholly resist: “Eric and Donald Trump Jr., enthusiastic ‘big game hunters’, were famously photographed with their kill—a leopard, an elephant, a buffalo. One of them holds up an elephant’s severed tail. They smile, as they all do, bathed in the full glow of their malignant vacuity.”

Learned, compassionate, and disconcerting, this is a major contribution to the literature on animal welfare.

Kirkus Reviews