"Between Light and Storm"

Esther Woolfson is the author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary, which was short-listed for the Wainwright Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability and is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Aberdeen University.

Woolfson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her recent book, Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Between Light and Storm describes the growth of 19th century industrial meat production, particularly in the United States.

I’m not sure I’d have chosen page 99 as a first introduction to the book not because it doesn’t adequately represent it, but because it does. The page is part of a chapter called ‘Blood’ which deals with our relationship with the animals we eat. It’s not an easy subject perhaps but it is a fascinating and increasingly important one. In the chapter, I trace the history of our meat-eating through the by-ways of religion and history, from developments in ancient Levantine thought to the industrialised food-production of today. On the way, I reach page 99 and the growth of the meat industry in the United States and one of the still-relevant dilemmas in which many people find themselves—where do our sympathies, if any, lie towards the fates of other species? I quote a book by Upton Sinclair. Published in 1906, it characterises the dilemma:

‘The Jungle’ (is) a lengthy account of the hardships and tragedies of a Lithuanian stockyard worker, his fellow workers and the unhappy creatures they dealt with. Although the book’s main purpose was to be a rousing call to socialist action by detailing the horrors of the industry, the appeal to readers for sympathy for the workers became eclipsed by their sympathy for the animals. ‘I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach,’ Sinclair declared.

As on page 99, I try in the rest of the book to hit the public, or the reader, wherever I can in reflecting on how humanity has reached the moment when vast numbers of species are facing extinction and as that sublime poet W.S. Merwin says in his poem ‘A Message to Po Chu-yi’, ‘we are melting the very poles of the earth.’ I write about animal cognition and question ideas of human superiority. I write about animals in art and literature and about the crazy and hidebound ideas of ‘tradition’ which underpin so much wanton cruelty to animals. I write about the love we may feel for some creatures and the inexplicable lack of love we may feel for others. Not only on page 99, I write on the other 297 pages about the urgent need for us to extend our compassion to other species.

Visit Esther Woolfson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue