Wild Diplomacy

Cohabiting with Wolves on a New Ontological Map

By Baptiste Morizot
Translated by Catherine Porter

Subjects: Environmental Philosophy, Environmental Politics, Endangered Species, Ecology, Animal Behavior
Hardcover : 9781438488394, 330 pages, June 2022
Paperback : 9781438488400, 330 pages, December 2022

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Table of contents

Gallery of Diplomats
Acknowledgments

Part I: The Diplomatic Crisis: Cohabiting with Large Predators

Introduction

1. The Diplomatic Model

2. Seeking King Solomon’s Ring

3. Understanding and Influencing Behavior

4. Animal Political Philosophy

Part II: Diplomatic Intelligence: For a Wolf Science

5. Orienting Wolf Pack Cultures

6. Toward the Social Sciences of Wolves: Interiority, Variability, Sociality

7. A Laboratory Called Yellowstone

8. On Intentionality: Toward an Animist Epistemology

9. A Differently Rational Shamanism

10. On Tracking

Part III: The Diplomatic Project: An Ethics of Relations

11. The Power That Is Diplomacy

12. We Have Invented the Wolf

13. Constitutive Relations

14. What Mutualisms in Our Relations with Wolves?

Notes
Bibliography

Explores how humans and wildlife such as wolves can cohabit with mutual respect in the same territories.

Description

2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Starting from a specific case, the spontaneous return of wolves to France and the intense conflicts that event has triggered, the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot invites us to think about what he calls "diplomacy with living beings." How can we conceive of cohabitation with the most recalcitrant wildlife, large predators in particular, and what concrete solutions need to be invented to make this happen? Drawing on knowledge gleaned from history and philosophy as well as from ethology, scientific ecology, and biology, Wild Diplomacy prompts us to ask what relations we want to reinvent with living beings today and how we might fundamentally reimagine our status as living beings among other life forms. This prize-winning book has broken new ground in contemporary French environmental philosophy.

Baptiste Morizot is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille in France. His many books include On the Animal Trail. Catherine Porter is Visiting Scholar at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Reviews

"…Morizot's book makes for a fascinating read, brings something completely new to the study and practice of diplomacy, and is to be recommended to all scholars and students of Diplomatic Studies." — Hague Journal of Diplomacy

"Morizot systematically evaluates and expounds on the necessary biological, ethological, ecological, cultural, philosophical, and political elements necessary for cohabitating with wolves. This is a noble effort, clearly advanced and brilliantly argued." — CHOICE

"Wild Diplomacy is a book about political philosophy, but a philosophy which accepts and even welcomes its extension to participants who are in no way nice or accommodating. They are strangers, but strangers thanks to whom the occasion is given to some of those who encounter them to change their own way of considering their identities and their values. This is why the model of diplomacy is in no way a metaphor. but the foundation of what will become in the future the source of new forms of law, of properties relations and of sovereignty. It was a bombshell in France, no doubt it will have the same effect in the United States." — Bruno Latour