The importance of connecting with nature, no matter where we live, cannot be overstated. While not everyone will feel renewed or benefit from paying careful attention to the small wonders of life all around them, many do and will.1 This is among the important messages in Dr. Kathryn Gillespie's new book, The Sound of Feathers, in which she makes it clear that paying careful attention to, and developing deep respect for, the magnificence around us will make the world a better place—a unified community—for all to enjoy—human and nonhuman alike. Here's what she had to say about her wonderful, thought-provoking, and powerful work of art that will change heads and hearts, rewild us, and save the world for future generations, a must-read for a broad audience.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Sound of Feathers and why did you choose this title?

Kathryn Gillespie: I’ve always tried to understand the world right around me, the things that are so mundane—so very much part of the “everyday”—that we may not notice them at all. Often our relationships with animals and the harm we do in those relationships are, in part, the result of a lack of attention both to their effects and to the larger structural forces (like capitalism) that so thoroughly shape how we inhabit and relate to the world. I wanted to write this book to interrogate these questions in my own life and, hopefully, to inspire others to do the same.

The title comes from my relationship with a family of crows. As I cultivated my attention to them and reveled in the mysteries and the things I would never know about them, the sound of their wings, the rustle of their feathers, became a familiar sound I had never noticed before. This became a kind of metaphor for what it means to slow down and observe—to........

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