Investigations into life through us
Imagine this fable: a species secedes. It declares that the ten million other species on Earth, its relatives, are “nature.” Namely: not beings but things, not actors but the scenery, resources at hand. One species on one side, ten million on the other, and yet only one family, one world. This fiction is our heritage. Its violence has contributed to ecological upheavals. This is why we have a cultural battle to wage regarding the importance of restoring the living. This book intends to throw its strength into it. By setting out to track animals in the field, and the ideas we have of them in the forest of knowledge. Can we learn to feel alive, to love ourselves as living? How can we imagine a policy of interdependencies, which combines cohabitation with otherness, with the fight against what destroys the fabric of life? It is about getting to know each other again: approaching the inhabitants of the Earth, including humans, as ten million ways of being alive.
Baptiste Morizot is a writer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille. His work, devoted to the relationships between humans and living things, is based on field practices, particularly tracking wildlife.