Book review – Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe (2024)

10-minute read
keywords: ornithology, philosophy

Ecologist Carl Safina needs little in the way of introduction, having written the lauded Beyond Words and Becoming Wild, and a score of earlier books. For me, he ranks right up there with modern science popularisers such as Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, and the late Frans de Waal for his thought-provoking and intensely beautiful writing. His latest book sees him captivated by a bird as he nurses back to health an orphaned screech owl. But Alfie & Me is far more than a memoir about one man’s friendship with a wild animal, as it sends him on a personal quest to better understand humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Come for the owls, stay for Safina’s philosophical reflections and piercing analysis of how the West came to see the natural world as a commodity to exploit and exhaust.

Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, written by Carl Safina, published by W.W. Norton & Company in November 2023 (hardback, 352 pages)

Safina is far from the first person to nurse a wounded owl back to health and write a book about it. Jennifer Ackerman mentioned several wildlife rehabbers in the recently reviewed What an Owl Knows; in 2014, historian Martin Windrow wrote about his 15 years with a tawny owl named Mumble; in 1985, biologist Stacey O’Brien committed to 19 years of caring for a barn owl named Wesley; in 1960, Jonathan Franklin wrote of his time with two tawny owls at Eton. It is a human-bird relationship that might very well stretch back to the dawn of human evolution.

This saga starts in June 2018 when Safina and his wife find a young, orphaned screech owl starving and near death in their yard in Long Island, New York. They nurse her back to health and name her Alfie. What follows are several years of intense caring as some of her feathers initially fail to develop properly. Tamed, Alfie sticks around as Safina dithers between caring for her and releasing her. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns offer the opportunity for near-constant monitoring while Alfie flies free, matures, finds a partner, and raises a brood. It is also accompanied by not a small amount of continuously shifting worries about her health, behaviour, and ultimate fate. With hindsight, Safina considers the shelter-at-home orders a blessing in disguise, allowing him to build up a particularly intimate picture with some unique behavioural observations that should appeal to birdwatchers.

“if you think this is a natural history memoir, you might get both more and less than you bargained for, neither of which is a bad thing.”

Advance warning though: if you think this is a natural history memoir, you might get both more and less than you bargained for, neither of which is a bad thing. Alfie’s story is a proverbial MacGuffin that functions as a doorway to two topics. First, Safina wants to understand how people have viewed humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Second—closely intertwined with, and flowing from it—it allows him to reflect on his personal philosophy and spirituality. Both are worth further consideration here.

For the longest time, Safina contends, our ancestors thought of the world around them in relational terms and, though he is hesitant to generalize, he thinks that many of today’s Indigenous cultures continue to do so. In other words, many people understood themselves “as living in a network of relationships” (p. 14) which “binds human existence into a moral drama of duty and conduct” (p. 23) and requires us to “move in the world with respect and care” (p. 29). Simply put, despite nature’s diversity, there is a unity; everything is connected. To the modern ecologist in Safina: “the currency of Life is the shuttling of energy […] there are only living nodes in flowing networks” (pp. 15–16). Yet, in Europe we came to believe differently, seeing ourselves apart from nature rather than a part of nature. Thanks to colonialism, that view went global and turned into a world-altering force in the last few centuries. “The great blindness of the West is to grope the world as inventory. The great wisdom of the Indigenous mind is to understand the world as relationships” (p. 30).

“Tracing the history of our collective disenchantment, Safina lands on the Ancient Greeks as the culprits and singles out Plato in particular”

Tracing the history of our collective disenchantment, Safina lands on the Ancient Greeks as the culprits and singles out Plato in particular. There is a fierceness here that brought Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth to mind as Safina does not mince his words. Plato’s dualist doctrine, his distinction between our world and that of eternal and idealised Forms existing on an abstract plane, “could very well be history’s biggest intellectual mistake” (p. 77). With the three main Abrahamic religions turning dualism into an article of faith, exhorting man’s dominion over nature while denigrating the needs of the flesh, “Plato casts perhaps the longest shadow across our lives—and thus the life of every living thing on Earth” (p. 91). René Descartes completes this short summary by releasing dualism from religion and offering a secularized version around which people of all persuasions could rally. By the time he was done, “the foundation of Western values was hard-set for the coming centuries. Remodeled for oncoming modernity, the physical world was ready for its role as strip mine and drainpipe” (p. 116). Thanks to the modern Western mindset in which “we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything” (p. 199, quoting philosopher Crispin Sartwell), we now face climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental destruction, etc. “Throughout it all, Platonist dualism has consistently whispered urgings of encouragement” (p. 213). And yet, Safina concludes, “Plato based his cosmic valuation on figments of his imagination. That’s all they are” (p. 77).

And you thought this was a book about owls.

So, can we pin the blame so squarely on one man and his ideas? Admittedly, Safina recognizes precursors in e.g. the Egyptian ruler Akhenaten as possibly the first to invent monotheism, and Zoroaster as possibly the first to portray a dualistic universe. The forthcoming Subjugate the Earth situates it in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation (I hope to investigate this further in a future review). I admit that my knowledge of the Classics is insufficient to weigh in on this further, but Safina presents a plausible scenario.

“Overt talk of wisdom [and] spirituality […] normally makes me cringe, hard. [but Safina’s] is the kind of writing I stick around for.”

The second topic that is intertwined with this, and informed by it, is Safina’s personal outlook. Like some other biologists (myself included), he is charmed by certain Buddhist ideas. Overt talk of wisdom, spirituality, and anything that smacks of New Age woo-woo normally makes me cringe, hard. That is my personal bias. But when Safina takes the observation that, chemically speaking, we are made of the same matter as everything around us, and marries this to the Buddhist notion that there is no separate self to conclude that “we are selves in a real sense—but not in a closed sense. As a river depends on new water, one’s body is an interchange” (p. 54)… When he adds that “Energy and matter constantly create and then leave us, but we remain recognizable” (p. 167)… When he quotes Carl Woese that “Organisms […] are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow” (p. 167) which so nicely gels with Kevin Mitchell’s observations in Free Agents that “life is not a state, it is a process […] persisting through time” (p. 26 therein)… When he quotes physicist Steven Weinberg that in a meaningless, uncaring universe, we create meaning through our actions by making “a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves” (p. 300)… When he concludes that his goal in life is “to care fiercely without apology” (p. 319) for all life around him… Then, yes, despite my scepticism, I am moved. This is the kind of writing I stick around for.

What helps is the balance and nuance in his outlook, steering clear of simplistic dichotomies. Though he regularly expresses his admiration for Indigenous thinking about the world, he remains beholden to science and logic: “For discerning objective reality […] science has the stronger claim” (p. 36). However, quoting Einstein, he adds that “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary” (p. 36). Safina criticizes the excesses of reductionism and dualism while recognizing it has made great strides in understanding our world. Where spiritually inclined environmentalists often heap scorn on reductionism, Safina pushes back: “Using a reductionist approach is not what devalues the world. The devaluation comes first” (p. 122). Despite spiritual leanings, he avoids falling for feel-good New Age claptrap. Are birds that show up when people die spirit messengers? “Is [there] more to life and death than you can know? Or simply […] more to bereavement than you can bear” (p. 233). And anyway, “why would birds, who existed for tens of millions of years on a planet without humans […] be “messengers” to us? Isn’t that just another self-aggrandizing delusion of our own importance” (p. 312)? The only aspect that might be problematic is his call to turn to Indigenous knowledge for solutions and alternative worldviews. There is a recent interest in various life science disciplines in Indigenous knowledge. The risk is that this devolves into yet another round of cultural appropriation and seeing what else we can take from others. I must add that I do not feel Safina is doing so here; this is a risk more generally.

“For me, this book contributes to a growing personal awareness that addressing the environmental polycrisis we face boils down to addressing our values.”

For me, this book contributes to a growing personal awareness that addressing the environmental polycrisis we face boils down to addressing our values. No amount of technofixes and scientific advances are going to salvage the situation if “the global Westernized economy [continues to gallop] along behind its three headless horsem*n: bigger, faster, more” (p. 235). This is an insight that I find as fascinating as I find it intimidating, as it requires interdisciplinary input from, for instance, ethics, philosophy, sociology, and politics. Science can inform this, yes, but much of it falls outside of its purview. Safina’s quote, here attributed to Freeman Dyson, is particularly apt: “The progress of science is destined to bring enormous confusion and misery to mankind unless it is accompanied by progress in ethics” (p. 271).

This leaves me with one last question: does the combination of these disparate strands work as a book? My short and rather unhelpful answer to this is “Sure, I think so”, so let me clarify. The individual strands are each impressive, insightful, and beautifully written—for the sake of brevity I have left out of this review several other points Safina makes eloquently. However, focusing for a moment on their combination, I was not left gobsmacked. Simultaneously, the book does not come across as a concatenation of ham-fisted non-sequiturs and forced pivots, which it might have become in the hands of a lesser writer. So, come for the owls, stay for the philosophical reflections and piercing history lessons.