Martin Lee Mueller

What are the somatics of truth? When something feels true, I notice that it often brings tears to my eyes. A wave of sensation passes through my body, rising and falling with my breath. The tiny hairs on my skin stand up and tingle. There's a backwards-moving sensation that passed through the center of my head.

"Being Salmon, Being Human" is the truest book I've read this year. The cover of the book is adorned with an image exuding interbeing, crafted by the Haida artist April White. At first glance, the image depicts two salmon. On closer inspection, human forms reveal themselves within the salmon forms.

Before reading the book, you may take this illustration as simply a poetic metaphor. By the end, you may realize that we humans are beholden to salmon for many aspects of our humanness. As salmon runs decline, as genetically-modified feedlot salmon proliferate, we lose not only a venerable elder of the animal kingdom; we lose key aspects of ourselves, of our humanness.

Although Mueller's writing is exceedingly approachable and relatable, it is also deeply philosophical. Mueller is a phenomenologist and an animist, and he deftly sums up the past four centuries in the evolution of philosophy to call out the key ways in which cosmology and epistemology affect ontology.

One of the ongoing themes in the book is the inquiry of "interior" and "exterior" space, and its reversal. Mueller (and his mentor David Abram) suggest that, before the Copernican Revolution, the world was one vast interior. Both the divine and the mind surrounded us in our landscapes, and were palpably manifest. The Copernican Revolution collapsed this order, moving the ego inside each of us, creating what we now refer to as the "individual." Interior space is now within each of us, the collective world becoming an exterior, an other, a separate self.

But as Charles Eisenstein maps out in "The Ascent of Humanity," this inversion of perspective cannot escape the larger arc of history and of time. Inexorably, the Story of Separation is failing us. It is failing us pragmatically through phenomena like climate change, and it is failing us existentially, through an epidemic of suicides. A new (or old) narrative is beginning to emanate its gravity. Mueller is one of those listeners who can feel this gravity with keen senses and an open heart.

Also in an Eisenstein vein, salmon culture is gift culture. River ecosystems and their species—grizzly, spruce, and numerous others—have come to rely on salmon to bring nutrients from the oceans back upriver. This gift comes with a contract; their gift must be honored and reciprocated. Needless to say, most of the salmon industry is in breach of this contract.

During the five years Mueller spent researching and writing this book, he lived with the Klallam people of the Elwha River region in the Pacific Northwest of North America. The Klallam are a salmon people, the salmon being their sister nation. The Elwha was dammed in 1910-13, resulting in a collapse of salmon runs in the region. This also coincided with the flooding of their genesis site along the river, where the Creator had made the Klallam people. In 2012, the dam was removed, starting the process of a restoration of salmon runs (although global environmental issues have created other issues for the salmon).

When futurists speak of the year 2050, the term apocalypse is rarely far afield. First Nations like the Klallam have survived an apocalypse spanning centuries. What can we learn from them?… (más)