John Yunker

One island, two women, and so many mysteries. Floreana Island is home to one of the rarest species of penguins on the planet and a haunting history. When Mallory arrives on Floreana, she finds herself torn between past and present, and then she discovers a hidden diary that reveals a century-old secret. And we, the reader, are in for a breathtaking adventure; prepare to be transported to the Galápagos.

I'm not sure how I heard about this novel, only that I had heard that there was an animal rights element to it. Yet in the early pages I struggled to find that element. This is a novel set in 1913 on a British estate in which a group of upper-class couples have gathered to participate in a shooting party.

And yet there is very much an animal rights element to this book, in the persona of a vegetarian named Cornelius Cardew.

When we meet Cardew, a socialist and anti-vivisectionist, he is making his way to the Sir Randolph Nettleby estate, intent on interrupting the hunt. As nears the estate he encounters Tom Harkin, the head-keeper. Tom attempts to make small talk but then realizes he has stumbled across someone with very curious questions about the upcoming hunt.

“Must we kill our brothers and sisters in order to eat?” said [Cornelius].
“I should hope not indeed,” said Tom stoutly but in total bewilderment.
“Until we can recognize the universal kinship of all living creatures we shall remain in outer darkness. In outer darkness.”
Tom dismisses the man as “bloody barmy” but they will meet again under very different circumstances.

Along the way, we get to know the participants of the party, the troubled marriages, simmering tensions as well as the children navigating this barmy world. Like young Osbert, who has befriended a duck and attends to her like a pet. When a guest threatens to shoot the duck during the hunt Osbert threatens to kill the man, which the adults find humorous but, later, two adults share the following dialogue:

“...[Osbert] will have to be educated and taught the ways of the world and made to be on the side of the guns and against the ducks. It seems such a pity.”
“We all have to learn to school our emotions to some extent.”
“Of course, but who invents the rules of manly behavior? Who says it's the height of heroism to kill? For every hero does there have to be a living sacrifice?”
Sacrifice is a recurring theme of this novel, of the world that Colegate describes, one about to be torn apart by World War I. And yet how familiar is this dialogue even today? How many husbands tell their wives that they must take the boys out hunting to learn how to kill. To be tough. To be “on the side of the guns.”

On the final day of the shooting party, Osbert's duck gets loose.

Elfrida Beetle is her name and Osbert, and his caretaker, go looking for her. And, yes, we will spend quite a few pages worried over the fate of Elfrida.

Colegate astutely contrasts the drama over the life of one Elfrida Beetle against the lives of hundreds of pheasants and other collateral victims.

Colegate captures the costumes, the suffocating small talk, and contrasts it with the lives of the laborers and one activist. By the end of the novel one can't help but see World War I as not only inevitable but perhaps somewhat of a relief. To give these poor birds a break and let the men direct their pointless violence at one another.

Sadly, shooting parties did not end with the wars.

And as Cornelius thinks to himself at the end of the novel, after a tragic scene that I won't spoil:

What the ritual was that required the sacrifice he could not exactly say, only that he was outside it, condemned by something in himself, some cowardice, some over-cerebration, only to watch, to comment, scold, diagnose, analyze, but not to cure; the cure could not come from a non-participant, from someone who was not part of the game, for how could a mere spectator be expected to be listened to when he wanted to tell the players not just that they were using the wrong rules but that they were playing the wrong game?

NOTE: This review first appeared on www.EcoLitBooks.com.

Published in 1969, The Edible Woman is Margaret Atwood's first novel.

As a vegan, I was curious to read this book because it features a protagonist, Marian, who discovers one day that she can no longer eat meat. While at a fancy restaurant with her fiancé...

She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and at and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it.

Unfortunately for Marian, she could not stop thinking of animals every time she looked down at her plate. Beef soon gave way to pork and then to chicken...

“I'm turning into a vegetarian,” she was thinking sadly, “one of those cranks; I'll have to start eating lunch at Health Bars.”

As one might guess from the title, consumption is the dominant theme of this novel, not just consumption of animals but the many products that define modern society. Marian works for a market research firm, creating and administering surveys on behalf of consumer brands. She is both a consumer and observer of those who consume (and one who is consumed by a male-dominated culture).

Everything we might construe to be normal about society in the late 1960s, Atwood is questioning and ridiculing, and for good reason. Consider a work lunch with her colleagues when Marian gazes around the restaurant to take in a scene that is both dated and, in our mad rush of modern society, still quite relevant:

...stolid, breadfaced businessmen most of them, gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too.

In the late 1960s (as is today), to consume animals is to be a normal member of society. Once you stop eating animals, you find yourself standing off somewhere on the outside of society looking in.

But Marian, despite her best efforts otherwise, remains an outsider. She views clothing as “costumes” and children as “its,” and a trip to the beauty parlor is compared, hilariously so, to undergoing a surgical operation (without anesthesia).

There are so many fascinating aspects of this novel, like the switching from first person to third and then back again. And Marian's roommate, who is trying to trick a man into impregnating her so she can be a single parent. And the graduate students who provide momentary escapes from adult society.

For Atwood, feminism and food are so finely woven together that it takes a magnifying glass to see the many ways that animals and women have suffered in a patriarchal society.

How does Marian rectify this desire to both fit in and not remain fully in? By taking a degree of control over consumption. By creating that thing that is consumed, by her fiancee, who says after eating, “It was delicious.”

“It” again.

This is not some dystopian future, it is our dystopian past. A past that remains all too present.

NOTE: This review was first posted on www.EcoLitBooks.com.

When we started EcoLit Books five years ago, this was the type of book I had in mind.

A novel that places nature in its proper place in relation to people. That is, above us — in this case, both figuratively and literally.

In The Overstory, Richard Powers has crafted an epic novel that stretches hundreds of years, culminating in a series of life-and-death environmental battles. But even more so, this is a novel about rediscovering the largest and oldest living creatures on our planet.

So many of the characters are alien to the trees they share the planet with until various events open their eyes. And they look. They smell. They see and feel the loss. And they act up.

The book could be used to teach a course on trees. And it should be used for just that purpose. I have books about trees — mostly identification. But identifying a tree is only step one. How does a tree relate to the creatures around it? How does it respond to insect attacks? How does it care for its siblings? And other species of trees? For example, the Douglas Fir, which we live among here in Southern Oregon, are called “giving trees” because the dying trees will send out nutrients to the Ponderosa Pines. Powers does an outstanding job of providing insights into beings we have only just begun to understand.

But there are oversights in the novel in regards to activism. While the novel addresses environmental activism in Oregon and elsewhere, the players are too often seen eating meat without any awareness of the irony of defending one living entity while eating another. I know that many of those activists who have served actual time behind bars for similar crimes are vegan. They don't differentiate between protecting trees and protecting non-human animals. And it must be noted that millions upon millions of acres of forests have been cleared for the sole purpose of raising cows and sheep for human consumption.

In many ways I feel that this novel begins where Barkskins by Annie Proulx ends. And I highly recommend reading them in chronological order. And I'm not just talking about time but about awareness — our collective awareness that the planet is not some all-you-can-eat buffet, that the planet is, like us, finite and fragile. If you are not a “tree hugger” before reading these two books, you will be afterwards.

And I think what I like most about this book are the voices he gives those who have no (human) voice. Such as: All the ways you imagine us–bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal–are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much belowground as above.

Like the trees Powers writes so beautifully about, this book towers above us and nurtures us. And, I certainly do hope, it motivates us to do more. And quickly.

This review was first published on EcoLit Books: https://www.ecolitbooks.com.

We want to believe that cows live happy lives. From our childhoods of Old MacDonald and his farm, field trips and cartoons and stuffed animals, we are raised to believe they are happy. The dairy industry tells us they are happy. The advertisements we see on TV reinforce the illusion. But it is only an illusion and more of us are awakening to the cruel reality of the world we have created for them. A world in which animals — cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and so many other species — are viewed and treated as little more than their component parts.

Why should a cow not receive the same degree of love and protection as the cat or dog we share our homes with?

This is a question in desperate need of an obvious answer. So I'm always happy to see more authors and publishers posing this question. Like this book by Kathryn Gillespie, published by the University of Chicago Press.

In The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 Gillespie takes us on a necessarily uncomfortable journey through America's dairy industry. The core illusion built around the dairy industry is that cows somehow want to share their milk with us. And that they want to be milked. But the truth is, the milk is there for a very specific reason, one that is stolen from them every year. Each year, dairy cows are artificially inseminated and separated from their newborn calves within minutes after birth. A mother cow may bellow for weeks, calling out to a child that has been taken from her. Of course we can imagine the terror of this because we can imagine ourselves losing a loved one. And yet this is how milk is made. Cows don't want to give their milk away. They create it for calves who are most often sent straight into veal crates, which the industry now euphemistically refers to as “hutches.” And the fact that the dairy industry is very much intertwined with the veal industry has long been the industry's dirty little secret.

Gillespie is not the first person to analyze animal agriculture, but she provides an honest and human element to the journey that I found deeply moving. Her candor throughout her visits to farms and auction houses had me squirming in my seat as she watched those poor animals being pushed and prodded along. And it was not surprising but sad that nearly every dairy farm she approached for her research turned her away under the sad excuse of “biosecurity.” This is an industry that thrives on ignorance. On illusion.

But this book is not all pain and misery. There are inspiring moments amidst the stories of those who have founded animal sanctuaries, like Animal Place and Pigs Peace. Gillespie takes us along with her, where we can get a sense for what it's like to care for an animal after it has suffered so much. As the founder of Pigs Peace noted, she had difficultly finding vets who understood how to care for aging pigs because in our world pigs aren't allows to age. They all die young, as do cows and chickens. Those few chickens who do make it to sanctuaries have great difficulty simply standing upright because they were bred to get large quickly, so large that they can barely support their bodies.

Gillespie notes that there are 9.3 million dairy cows in the US that are used for their milk until they are “spent” after about three years and then sent to slaughter, to the tune of roughly 3 million cows per year. As Carol Adams writes in The Sexual Politics of Meat, “Female animals are doubly exploited: both when they are alive and then when they are dead.”

This is world I was raised into. A world in which I assumed we needed meat to survive, that violence to animals was necessary. I know now it is not necessary. That humans don't need meat to survive and that we have never needed milk from a cow or a goat.

Gillespie is not out to belittle those who work in the industry — she is empathetic to the worlds they live in as well, and the emotional toll this work ultimately exacts on them. They are part of a system, a system that supplies a demand based on illusion, based on a tradition that so many of us except without question. Gillespie travels to a trade conference and notes how intertwined the dairy industry is with notions of family and patriotism and what it means to be an American. And it is these ideas that make it so difficult for people to give up milk and cheese and ice cream (even though they don't have to give up any of it — vegan alternatives are far tastier and healthier).

This book is a valuable addition to a growing canon of literature that challenges our understanding of “normal” and that will, hopefully, as more people become aware of the horror, lead to positive changes for animals. It's simple enough to start, really. You just stop eating meat and go from there. The Cow with Ear Tag 1389 is doing its part to opens hearts and minds.

NOTE: This review first posted on EcoLit Books: www.ecolitbooks.com.