Editorial: Creative Writing and Arts --- Special Focus on “Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman”

In his famous book The Others: How Animal Made Us Human (1995), Paul Shepard writes: Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence—a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play. (173) One of the founders of human ecology, Shepard (1925-1996) conceived of this discipline as an intersectional field, embracing biology as well as philosophy, environmental history along with anthropology and psychology, thus paving the way to what we now commonly call the “environmental humanities.” In all of his works, from Man in the Landscape (1967) to Nature and Madness (1982), a very special emphasis falls on the co-evolutionary pathway of our species. The way we experience, know, speak, and imagine the world—even our sense of the sacred— have been shaped, Shepard acknowledged, by this long encounter with nonhuman animals. Perception, language, creativity, culture: this is what happens “when species meet,” as Donna Haraway would say a few years later.