Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild

Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture’s tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon–weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of one’s horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it, and considering how this enriches one’s understanding of humanity in the process.