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Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with. If we don’t care about the value of other lives, whether human or animal, then we won’t be motivated to protect those lives.

ed yong • What Counts as Seeing

In Darwin’s language, the open connections of the tangled bank have been just as generative as the war of nature. Stephen Jay Gould makes this point powerfully in the allegory of his sandal collection: “The wedge of competition has been, ever since Darwin, the canonical argument for progress in normal times,” he writes. “But I will claim that the w

Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From

The biophilia hypothesis is the belief that humans are genetically predisposed to be attracted to nature. It states that all humans inherently love the natural world.

This idea that we are drawn to and need nature was first put forth by a man named Edward O. Wilson in his book, Biophilia , published in 1984.

The idea that humans have an innate love a... See more

Understanding the Biophilia Hypothesis

The one constant was 21 and 42. Rick never tired of watching the alpha pair, especially 21, who was unlike any wolf he had ever seen. Even before 21 left his natal pack, Rick had known he was unusual. One morning in the spring of 1997, two years after Doug Smith and Carter Niemeyer rescued 21 following the death of his father, Rick watched the hand

Nate Blakeslee • American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.

Yuval Noah Harari • Homo Deus

Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin’s own comments regarding the survival value of the social instincts are widely ignored. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described how animal species in which cooperation among individuals replaced competitive struggle were able to secure the best conditions for survival. He implied that, in such cases, the fit... See more

Gary B. Walls • Just a moment...

A curious legal crusade to redefine personhood is raising profound questions about the interdependence of the animal and human kingdoms.

Lawrence-wright • The Elephant in the Courtroom

Darwin provided a proto-description of ecology, describing an ‘entangled bank’, wherein plants of many kinds, birds, insects and other ‘elaborately constructed forms, so different from one another’ were produced by the complex forces of evolution, yet depended utterly on one another.

James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson has written on his “Half Earth” proposal, an “achievable plan” to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature.