Being salmon, being human

About this book

"In the pages of Being Salmon, Being Human, Martin Lee Mueller confronts Western culture's tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon--weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a critique of human exceptionalism, challenging the four-century-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process. Being Salmon, Being Human rewards readers with insightful interpretations of major philosophers--Descartes, Heidegger, Abram, and many more--and reflections on the human-Earth relationship, heralding a new "Copernican revolution" in the fields of biology, ecology, and philosophy"--Jacket flap.