Creature Needs Edited by Christopher Kondrich et al. Reviewed by Trish Zimmerman

Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation.

Edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent

Reviewed by Trish Zimmerman

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Publication Date: January 21, 2025.

ISBN: 9781517918316

Pages: 184

In ecology, habitat isolation dooms a species to minimal diversity and precarious instability. In climate writing, the same. What this intriguing collection promises is that understanding scientific and literary writing as a type of vital species interaction will repair fatal fragmentation and induce fecundity within the matrix.

A field guide to recent environmental science studies and creative literary arts, this hybrid handbook represents the future of climate crisis writing. It expands cutting-edge science by organizing excerpts in multiple bioregions around themes of air, food, water, shelter, range. Hovering on the edge of a long-standing anthropocentrism taboo in environmental writing, the authors offer a new register to manifest repair, resilience and interdependent thriving. Folklore, myth, and fairy tale have always used anthropomorphism; this collection plays with their power.

The project stems from the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve, which its mission vows is: “Growing art-sci pathways for wildlife conservation.” To that optimistic end, the book’s conceit relies on taking descriptive scientific reporting and inviting authors to draw out its full poetic weight. 

These polyphonic authors take up notables like Amitav Ghosh, who insists that the power to redirect us from climate peril lies, as it did for our ancestors, in power of myth and story. Instead of a dominant wisdom that non-human beings mutely and passively inhabit our world, we ought to explore the vital agency of the smallest among them, a nutmeg in his example, to reach no less than a “seismic shift in consciousness.” 

They join essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s artful retraining of our sensory observations into worlds of wonder. Invoking creatures as kin alongside Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for a radical animacy of language, they invite us to meet new species in magical corners of obscure ecosystems, studied in university labs yet forgotten in bookstores and voting booths. 

Alongside the brilliant epistolary exchange between climate activists Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson we find other ways to live, in fact “hundred forms of homespaces.” In fiction by L.B. Simpson or N. Scott Mommaday, characters merge across boundaries many thought fixed to repair the world. Readers won’t find all these towering figures of contemporary environmental writing named outright but will feel their strategies embodied. 

As with the best nature writing, we start by entering into the world of creatures and landscapes themselves. We find here a “cosmology of nibi” that takes us to the Minnesotan Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to “story ourselves with place.” Chickadee testimony, “ungrammars the tongue.” A sibilant story of soil and sea plays with language’s musicality. Tales of forest loss and whip-poor-will decline leave us “sore scared” and sorry. So sorry. 

The collection goes meta when a prairie dog collective issues its own legal brief excoriating murdering experts of “(hominid, omnivorous) megafauna.” We readers see ourselves dimly. The dogs call out the deadly hypocrisy of the human solipsistic research premises. Soulless scientific method is damned as hypocritical fallacy wherein “the cause of the disease is prescribed as its cure.”  Sure, it’s funny. Prairie dogs are cute. Their snark might be a comedic bit. As in all dramatic comedies, the tone corrects for deep flaws in moral lives of human societies. Captive-reared monarch butterflies accuse their experimental jailors of senseless and cruel enslavements “Doesn’t the tight scene control/strike you as lunacy disguised/as scientific rigor?”

While the parameters of scientific studies may find critique this is no anti-science manifesto. Unabashed love of observable detail enthralls here. Often the passive voice of the science paper resurrects into full agency. Some matter-of-fact reports will stop readers in their tracks to gasp, even weep. A snowy owl flying 3000 miles as the first of its kind to land in Hawaii mesmerizes, yet “the bird was shot upon arrival.” Why not a lei and a feast of rodent and pineapple? Introspection and contrition transpire.

Readers will meet the Sublime or Holy here, often with cosmological and biological traits superimposed. In one brilliant example, we read a litany of jaguar facts all the way to the sacred itself. Maybe those 16th-century chroniclers knew consequences we in modernity have forgotten in our supposed rationalism when they avoided saying this cat’s name – like a panther-bodied Tetragrammaton. When a community exiled a jaguar for preying on their sheep, they quickly begged the animal’s forgiveness, proffered ritual, incense, candles and flowers to “their jaguar of light.” The interplay between biological and spiritual description sing-songs us into the mystical. “Eats grass and avocados. Causes eclipses. When cooked and eaten, bestows the power to hypnotize enemies. Heart of the Mountain. God of the Underworld. Companion of shamans…Will descend to earth in divine form at the end of days.” 

In such a collection, we’re asked to own human shortcomings. “Logic fractures. Normal responses break down. Experience expands so rapidly that language is left behind.”Citing Burke and Kant and hosts of others whom those in the West have entrusted with enlightenment, the clever authors offer a hypocritical, fractured logic in genres of radiance.  “These are questions for the poets/and readers of poetry – for you./What if you believed what needs no proof,/that it’s all critically endangered, sacred,/and worth saving?…” 

Nothing settles simply. The reader finds a refreighting of “entanglement” so richly employed in current work on fungal and arboreal interconnections, but retains the dead weight of capture. When a right whale snared in fishing gear gives birth, the reader wails as both mourner and murderer. No adult whales die of natural causes but only human ones, with our ropes spewing from their mouths. So many mother/child stories to remind us of our ancestral collusions. 

Where do we find beauty and connection then? We push beyond the charismatic megafauna to see innate beauty in unusual species and characteristics. To the lament: “No one remarks on the beauty of a boreal toad” this volume assuredly makes amends. Here the bellwether skin-breather meets the gospel according to anthropologist Donna Haraway in her koan-like “…it matters what matters we use to think other matters with.” A meditation on sound moves apophatically within the tiny bone of a toad’s ear What do trout, boreal frogs and human storytelling have in common? They lead us into new more contingent forms of (un)knowing and sentient agency. 

The inclusive “we” here often surprises and the “you” of direct address accuses, often from a species humans have relegated to the background. Other times the comparison is more subtle like the jaguars spots compared to human fingerprints  or an oyster’s hinge opening like an absent father’s calling. Two short poems, one about a single bumble bee and one about a small American rodent remind us we are all looking for refuge. Often juxtaposition does the work: Lizards look around the room. Scientists look around the room. The reader begins to wonder which species is really in the lab. 

Having woven our fates together entirely throughout the many pieces, the volume offers multi-modal environmental activism in the Anthropocene or Eremocene or whatever we call our present catastrophic era. It concludes without ending “What heals,/here, will take time and time and —“We leave these pages with integration of new knowledge and creative relating. These too are, after all, range and habitat.

Trish Zimmerman, PhD is currently writing a book A Mysticism of Place which locates deep spiritual practices of interconnection amidst particular biomes and marvels how land and landscape move us in similar ways. She is Associate Professor of Practice in Religion and Environmental Studies at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Christopher Kondrich, poet in residence at Creature Conserve, is author of Valuing, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal. His writing has been published in The Believer, The Kenyon Review, and The Paris Review.

Lucy Spelman is founder of Creature Conserve, a nonprofit dedicated to combining art with science to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. A zoological medicine veterinarian, she teaches biology at the Rhode Island School of Design and is author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia and coeditor of The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes.

Susan Tacent, writer in residence at Creature Conserve, is a writer, scholar, and educator whose fiction has been published in Blackbird, DIAGRAM, and Tin House Online.

22 April 2026