The anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley writes, “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.” Surrounded by animals, he says, we humans find ourselves separated from our natural kin by self-awareness, by language, by history.

While amassing our analytic truths and deploying our technologies, we became more and more impervious to the needs of the living land, oddly inured to the suffering of other animals and to the fate of the more-than-human world.