Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300266184)

A compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives

Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment--a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they struggle to fathom animals today.

In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.

Author: Whitney Barlow Robles
ISBN-10: 0300266189
ISBN-13: 9780300266184
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/21/2023
Pages: 328
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2023 pg. 76
Choice 04/01/2024