Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent

Thanks to partners NetGalley and University of Minnesota Press for the digital ARC of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent.

As an English teacher at a school with an environmental focus, where I’m constantly exploring the ways that literature can fuel a deeper understanding of science, I was immediately intrigued by the premise of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, an anthology of essays, short stories, and poetry. Editors Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent organized their collection around six basic needs that all creatures share: air, food, water, shelter, room to move, and each other. Each need has its own devoted section.

The real hook is what comes next: within each section, the individual creative pieces are inspired by peer-reviewed articles that delve into specific conservation needs or concerns. For example, the article “Bumble Bee Species Distributions and Habitat Associations in the Midwestern USA, a Region of Declining Diversity” inspired Maggie Smith’s lovely poem “A Single Worker,” and “A Systematic Review of Potential Habitat Suitability for the Jaguar Panthera onca in Central Arizona and New Mexico, USA” fueled Sofia Samatar’s essay “The Sublime Is a Foreign Species.”

With each new piece, I eagerly anticipated the way that a given contributor would use the statistics or facts within an article as a springboard for their own reflections, often melding personal anecdotes with considerations of the interconnectedness of the lives of these creatures and our own experiences.

As with all anthologies, some of the pieces resonated more with me than others did, whether because of writing style or because of the way the creator navigated the bridge between the article’s objectively described focus and the subjective truths that often hit more deeply. As a whole, however, Creature Needs was just the text I hoped it would be.

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