Everything is alive. If we believed this, we might treat our planet, other life forms, and each other rather differently. In fact, believing that everything is alive might be the best thing we could do, not just to save the planet, but also to enrich our lives.

We can’t believe something just because we think it would be beneficial to believe it, however. We believe things when we are convinced that they are true. And it seems, to many of us, that ‘everything is alive’ is blatantly untrue.

With his new book, Ashley Curtis wants to change that. In nine vivid and entertaining chapters, he takes us on a magical mystery tour of the assumptions behind both animist (everything is alive) and non-animist (few things are alive) worldviews. Through playful encounters with philosophers and physicists, hunters and shamans, and talking trees and receptive rivers, our seemingly well-ordered world of subject and object, mind and matter, consciousness and inert material, is turned upside down and inside out. At the end, we find ourselves in a new world, one that is not only saveable, but all the more worth saving.