In Your Neighbor Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement author Tom Harris has written a comprehensive history of the battles won and lost in the UK, US and around the world as animal rights activists fought to free animals from testing laboratories and put the vivisection industry out of business. Harris is an authoritative …
Nearly 30 years ago, the first genetically modified (GM) seed produced a tomato known as the Flavr Savr. The tomato was engineered for longer shelf life which was where it spent most of its time. Consumers didn’t like the way it tasted and it soon went the way of history. But that didn’t stop Monsanto …
If history is written by the victors, then this book is a much-needed step forward in our awareness and understanding of the non-human animals who have suffered at the hands of humans for millennia. Judging by the title, I expected to find a book weighing in at a thousand or more pages. But at just …
Tin House, 2023 Hermann Hesse once wrote that the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees. There is also great pleasure to be had from reading about trees, and now you can enjoy arboreal texts translated into Tree. Conceptual artist Katie Holten has reimagined the alphabet, centering trees instead …
More than 35,000 people from more than 100 countries visited EcoLit Books this year. And this post shows where they spent most of their time. Here are the top 25 most-visited book reviews and web pages from January until now. The first page is no surprise but the second did surprise me given that it …
When the British colonized India throughout the 18th century they imported their narrative about the relationships between human and non-human animals. A narrative of violence and cruelty, in which wild animals were born to be hunted. But as author Sadhana Naithani writes in The Inhuman Empire, India was home to folk narratives that had existed …
Reading non-fiction books about climate change has, over the years, come to feel like a form of masochism. Rarely do I come away feeling optimistic about the future of this planet and, honestly, it has taken an emotional toll. Which is why I’d much rather read novels that tackle climate change (and not necessarily of …
We have the pandemic to thank for this eye-opening, empathetic and long-overdue tribute to one of our most misunderstood and widely despised relatives. The rat. And I use relative intentionally as I learned from the book that the human species descends from rats. During the early days of Covid, while so many people were out …
Random House, 2023 “Shivers of lust passed through his elytra as he found her scent grow stronger,” and there we are, in the head of an Elm Bark beetle, one of many POVs in the thoroughly enchanting novel North Woods by Daniel Mason. The beetle had been deposited in this wooded piece of land in …
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) was not the first scientist to test on animals, nor was he the last. But he is perhaps the most famous. And he has somehow escaped mainstream scrutiny in how he and his lab treated dogs. In college, when I learned about Pavlov and classical conditioning, I never considered how Pavlov tested …
Imagine it is 1866 and you are strolling the streets of New York City. The first thing you might notice are the hundreds upon hundreds of horses pulling people in packed trolleys up and down the streets and avenues, the closest thing at the time to subway cars. You may find yourself suddenly surrounded not …
