Meet … Meet the Neighbors!

In which the newsletter emerges from the ground, climbs a tree, and starts making noise.

Three years ago I posted my Substack welcome page. Today marks … ahem … my first post.

That entire cicada broods have cycled in the interim is something I feel slightly mortified about. From now on, though, the catbird will sing rather more frequently, as Meet the Neighbors—the book I’ve been working on these past years, and on on which I’ll blame my newsletter dormancy—is complete.

The book is about what knowing animals as persons—as thinking, feeling beings—means for nature and our relations to wild animals. My premise is that understanding animals this way has led people to think anew about the animals we use for food, research, labor, and companionship. When it comes to nature, though, those conversations have lagged. Most people learned to see the wild world through cultural lenses crafted in eras when animal intelligence was ignored our outright rejected.

But that is changing! Hence Meet the Neighbors, which begins by mapping the last several decades of animal intelligence research onto the denizens of a suburban neighborhood before telling stories of people putting a new awareness into practice: calling for animals to be considered legal persons and even citizens, treating so-called pests with kindness, coexisting with coyotes, wrestling with the ethics of wildlife management and conservation and ecology.

It will be published by W. W. Norton in July and is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

This newsletter isn’t going to be a book-flogging platform, and that I’ve spent about half an hour on this sentence is a measure of just how awkward I feel saying “Buy my book!” … but if you’re thinking of buying Meet the Neighbors, then now is a great time. Preorders matter enormously to the almighty algorithms.

Beautiful Facts

One of these days I hope to write about the grand evolutionary duet between flowering plants and animals. The fossil record suggests that when flowering plants emerged about 130 million years ago, new forms of animals arose in response, which in turn led to further plant diversification—a back-and-forth of organisms attracting and evading, consuming and repelling, that would eventually produce the kaleidoscope of life that exists today.

A new entry in this saga comes from a study, recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and led by Alan Dorin and Adrian Dyer of Monash University, on the origin of color in flowers. “Flower colour evolves under pressure from visual systems of pollinators,” they write—but what about the very first flower colors of all? Those, they suggest, evolved to stand out against a drab background of rocks and leaves and dead plants. From those dashes of color perhaps emerged life as we know it.

Good Reads

The Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer had a big influence on Meet the Neighbors. In When Animals Speak: Towards an Interspecies Democracy, Meijer confronted the idea, articulated by the ancient Greeks and influential today, that language is what qualifies humans for political membership. (Not political membership in the Democrat-or-Republican sense, but in the sense of belonging to the community of people whose interests deserve formal consideration.) Many other creatures have rich communication systems and group decision-making customs, argued Meijer; shouldn’t they be part of our political life too?

That, however, is not what this lovely new essay is about! Instead Meijer writes about the lives of ten lab mice whom she adopted.

Laboratory mice are generally seen as replaceable exemplars of a certain species. This essay focuses on their social lives and draws attention to their ways of being, their individuality, sense of community, language, and practices of care, showing their many forms of creating meaning.

Mice are a tiny fascination of mine. Expect more mouse content in the future.

Things That Happened

One wonders: What was this mouse thinking?

That’s all for now. Thank you for spending some time with my words, and have a wonderful day 💚

Illustration: Mattias Lanas