My friend Julian Fisher recommended a book to me he thought I would enjoy. It was Baptiste Morizot’s On the Animal Trail from Polity books. I got it and began reading when he told me he had just finished the book and was working on a review for the journal Environmental Philosophy. In light of this, I asked him if he would like to do a “book report, not a review” with me, where we could just have a good conversation about what we were thinking and learning about through reading the work. Julian is a philosopher, and I am a tracker. Why not share in the feast of ideas that is On the Animal Trail together?
Baptiste writes beautiful accounts of tracking wolves, bears, panthers and worms, and describes some lessons he and we have been offered by these cohabitants. But he also asks us to look a little deeper into these lessons and into our relationships with these different, and in some ways not-so-different, communities. Can the tracker be a diplomat between communities helping to lessen the violence humans inflict on the more-than-human world? Can tracking change how we see the world by changing the way we interact with the world? Can following animal trails help us find a deeper sense of belonging to place because we are more in tune to the relationships happening around us? Julian and I get into it.
I have read a number of books by various authors where efforts are made to conflate tracking wildlife with deeper understandings of our human selves. There is even a phrase for this kind of work: “inner tracking”. A couple of those books were just bad, while some offered ideas I could get into. Baptiste Morizot’s book On the Animal Trail is different. Here is someone reflecting on real experiences in the field, tracking these non-human neighbours and learning to encounter the world with new senses. It is a great read.
This is potentially only part 1 of Julian and I’s discussions of this book. We hope to find the time to talk again and get a little deeper.
More info :
On the Animal Trail website
Julian Fisher’s instagram (@juleswfisher)
The tracking blog I mentioned where someone tracks their cat