Cohabiting the Wild

Drawing on pragmatist and ecofeminist philosophy, this timely book challenges dominant narratives of human exceptionalism and offers new ethical approaches to human coexistence with wildlife.

This timely book explores the tangled relationships between humans and wild animals in a rapidly changing ecological landscape. Drawing on pragmatist and ecofeminist philosophy, Erin McKenna, Mary Trachsel and Tess Varner challenge dominant narratives of human exceptionalism and offer new ethical approaches to coexistence with wildlife.

Combining philosophical inquiry with interviews and site visits across the USA – from wolf educators in Yellowstone to the Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest – the authors examine how animals are categorized as predators, pests, or exotic. Interrogating the three terms, they demonstrate how these labels shape public policy, conservation efforts, and human responses, both positively and negatively. As such, this volume does not focus solely on romanticized wild animals like bears and big cats but also considers overlooked species such as prairie dogs, feral pigs, and ticks, which are similarly central to debates about coexistence and biodiversity.

Rather than prescribing fixed solutions to conflicts between humans and other species, this book embraces pluralism and contextual ethics. Recognizing that wolf management, for example, must adapt to different ecological, cultural, and political contexts, it advocates for adaptive and reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world. It interrogates the rhetoric of wildness and civilization and, inspired by the notion of ‘connectedness’ foregrounded in pragmatism and ecofeminism, asks what it means to live ethically within, and not apart from, nature.

Urgent, interdisciplinary, and deeply humane, Cohabiting the Wild is essential reading for scholars and students in environmental philosophy, animal ethics, and feminist theory, as well as anyone seeking new ways to think about wildlife and human-animal coexistence in the Anthropocene.