Benjamin Hale: 6 books

A brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu. Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers—embracing majestic redwoods,...

“Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from” (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory,...

Russell Banks, Temple Grandin, and other renowned writers contemplate animals—and the way our own species interacts with them.   Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie gathers essays, fiction, and poetry that imagine the world of our fellow beings, animals. Cultural mythologies and pantheons are populated...

Advances in our scientific understanding and technological power in recent decades have dramatically amplified our capacity to intentionally manipulate complex ecological and biological systems. An implication of this is that biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached...

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management discusses the ethical issues associated with deliberately engineering a cooler climate to combat global warming. Climate engineering (also known as geoengineering) has recently experienced a surge of interest given the growing likelihood...

Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes...