Book Recommendations, Reviews and Author Interviews from All-Creatures.org

An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature By Jim Mason

Publisher: Lantern Publishing & Media (2021)

SEVERAL REVIEWS

REVIEWS

First published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and then by Continuum in 1998, Jim Mason’s An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature has become a classic. Now in a new Lantern edition, the book explores, from an anthropological, sociocultural, and holistic perspective, how and why we have cut ourselves off from other animals and the natural world, and the toll this has taken on our consciousness, our ability to steward nature wisely, and the will to control our own tendencies.
~ Lantern Publishing & Media

“This visionary but tempered critique of the cultural evolution of animal agriculture is a brilliant account of our biblically mythologized Fall. Jim Mason links this with the escalating suffering of humans and animal, and with the desecration of the natural world. The revolutionary and redemptive remedies he offers will indeed help humanity heal and replenish the earth.”
~ Michael W. Fox, author of Superpigs and Wondercorn

“A painstakingly researched and beautifully written book that explains and explores the many factors that shape our relationship with animals and the environment. This book is a ‘must read.’”
~ Gary L. Francione, author of Animals, Property, and the Law

“An eloquent, important plea for a total rethinking of our relationship to the animal world. Mason analyzes the West’s ‘dominionist’ worldview, which exalts humans as overlords and owners of other life... His powerfully argued manifesto will change many readers’ attitudes toward hamburgers, animal experimentation, hunting, and circuses.”
~ Publishers Weekly

“Mason’s slant on history... the human-animal orbit’s clever and subversive.”
~ Kirkus Reviews

“A wonderful and important book."
~ John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and Reclaiming Our Health

“Jim Mason has broken new ground in the history of how human/animal relationships have affected the development of culture and civilization. His insights and discoveries will help all of us better understand the critical importance of the human/animal nexus. Now we have a new history — one that places us in nature.”
~ Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef

“Jim Mason directs our attention to the way attitudes toward animals undergird our current environmental crisis, and the relationship between this and other forms of social oppression. An Unnatural Order is path-breaking, visionary, stunning, and wise. Anyone concerned about our world should read it and make sure their friends do, too.”
~ Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast

“Jim Mason paints a vivid and disturbing picture of our own species’ obsession with total domination of the earth, the animal nations, and each other. But he does not leave the reader debilitated; he offers a plan to end our individual and collective spiritual death. Truly a poignant, not preachy, work with the potential to revive all that is good in the human animal.”
~ Ingrid Newkirk, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

From Jim Mason: On Food, Family, Animals, Nature:

Strong feelings for animals have driven the course of my life. From the age of 5, when I rescued baby mice from the barn and kept them warm in a shoe box behind the kitchen stove, to today’s work of getting funding to grassroots groups working for animals in rural areas, helping animals has been my joy and my passion.

It all began as a child on a Missouri farm and it feeds me today as a writer and attorney in big cities back East. I am a human being who feels deep kinship with my fellow beings. I want to spare them my species’ worst behavior.

I feel love, sometimes anger; I feel kinship, sometimes alienation. These drive me to places where I can see and report the sorry ways we treat animals. They push me to places within as well, where I find the courage to write and act against millennia-old traditions that exalt one species over all others.

I take heart and have hope now. I have acted on my empathy for animals instead of stifling it. I take heart now that there are so many others who are doing the same. Although the traditions we fight are old and deep-seated, they are cracking. So many people now are waking to the joys of a sense of kinship with animals and the living world.

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