Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

One of the greatest barriers we have to understanding other life-forms is the burden of misinformation we carry in our heads.  - Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in The Hidden Life of Deer.

I don't know what I'm doing, but if there's one thing that I consider my job, my calling, the thing I'm supposed to do, it's trying to understand other life-forms.  That's why I'm a rancher, that's why I'm in agriculture, because I get to spend my days around other life-forms, and also because I don't think you can understand other life-forms without understanding how we are bound to each other in life and death, in feeding and in eating.  It's not enough to have some academic or intellectual or scientific or otherwise symbolic knowledge about the ways we are bound together as bodies, as matter.  It's necessary to be entangled and impure, in the middle of the struggle for survival, as close as possible to the transactions that keep us alive and to know, to see what that costs.  Otherwise it's too easy to forget and not see, to live in our entirely human world.

Here's another great writer to whom we will all be indebted if we are so lucky as to negotiate a way out of dystopian ruination that we seem to be headed towards so inexorably - the anthropologist-ethologist-novelist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.