The Second Body

by Daisy Hildyard

Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.

The White Review Books of the Year 2018

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Memoir, Environment, Animals, 21st Century

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 6, 2017

About the author

Daisy studied English at Oxford, graduating in 2006. Her AHRC-funded MRes focused on taxonomic literature in the second half of the seventeenth century, and was awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers' Company Postgraduate Prize. Her PhD, also funded by the AHRC, will investigate some early Royal Society projects. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 3 out of 5]

Human/Nature Dualism…

Preamble:
--I love the title “The Second Body”.
…It immediately gets my brain whirling about how we conceptualize boundaries (self vs. environment), and how we need to build more sensitive/long-term socioecological relationships in a time of accelerating crises amidst extreme abstractions (the 3 major abstractions I’ve focused on are “capitalism”, “geopolitics”, and “the environment”).
--However, I was duped.
…When Naomi Klein mentioned this book in her 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, she described the author as a “novelist” …so I assumed this book would be a novel and got all excited (given how picky I am with fiction).
--Well, this turned out to be literary criticism, written like the academic papers you read in university. If I have little patience with fiction, imagine me reading further analysis of fiction… like reading tea leaves.
--It also turns out the author has written a novel based on the premise 5 years later called Emergency, so I will try again.

Highlights:
--At the end of the book, I was intrigued to read the author is a PhD in history of science; fascinating topic, although PhD can discipline your mind and derail your communication skills.
…Now, this short book is by no means an egregious example. I’m merely ranting given how highly-anticipated “The Second Body” topic was to me. Academic writing must have a role in turning radical thinkers with privileged access/time to investigate the world into the professional managerial class (I wonder if this is covered in Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives), which is why academic works get buried in the ivory tower while best-selling social theory are often marketing gimmicks.
--I’m staring at my notes on direct vs. abstract, binaries (esp. humans vs. nature), boundaries, scale (esp. global), contexts… I think these topics can all be communicated in more engaging and accessible manners rather than circulating patented (“intellectual property”) ivory tower jargon… What is the effort-to-results ratio for me to follow up by first deciphering the academic works cited (like Timothy Clark’s The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, which looks like an academic textbook, great...) and then translating it for wider audiences?
--For literary criticism on the climate crisis, I much prefer The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable thanks to novelist Amitav Ghosh using his story-telling craft for nonfiction, rather than relying on academic writing.
…On dualism, I must refer to one of my favourite books: Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (a great example of an academic who also puts in the effort communicating to the public).

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1.5) Daisy Hildyard has a PhD in the history of science and is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Northumbria University. The premise for her new book, an extended essay, requires some explanation. There’s your individual, physical body, and then there’s your “second body,” which has an unwitting global impact – by contributing to climate change, for instance. It’s a poor choice of phrase, I think, as the title does not immediately suggest anything about the content of the book and will confuse those who try to take it literally rather than as a symbol of agency and displacement.

To explore how all these secondary human bodies impact on the animal world, the author meets a butcher, a wildlife crime investigator, a biologist and a fungus researcher. In between these encounters she thinks about the pigeon that strayed onto her kitchen floor and her ability to make convincing pheasant noises. When the river rises and floods her house, destroying most of what her family owns, she sees it as physical evidence of the second body and remembers this is what many Pacific islanders have already experienced or soon will.

The various interviews and experiences that make up this book are moderately interesting, but don’t fit together to make any coherent argument. Moreover, the author undermines her own philosophizing by exhibiting no real anxiety or sense of urgency over the state of the world: it’s all an abstraction here, which lets both the author and readers off the hook. It’s hard to be other than disgusted by the choices she reports making after the flood: “I enjoyed throwing out my things” and “I booked cheap flights to an island in the Mediterranean.”

“I was insulated against any real horror,” she freely admits, and that’s the problem with this book. It pretends to be in search of evidence of indefensible human impact, but it only sees the odd selection of instances that it wants to see, and issues no call for personal change. Our environmental situation is so drastic as to make this not just pointless but almost immoral.

Originally published at Nudge.

[Vishy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered Daisy Hildyard's 'The Second Body' serendipitously when I was looking for something else. The premise sounded interesting and I couldn't resist getting it. This is my first Fitzcarraldo nonfiction book, so yay!

Daisy Hildyard's main thesis in the book is this – that each of us has two bodies, the first one is the physical body which we have and experience each day, and the second is the impact and footprint we leave on the environment by our lifestyle choices and the things we do. She says we experience the first body at the individual level everyday and though we don't experience the second body at that level because it is global, it is also a physical, real body. In the rest of the book, Hildyard tries to find out how she can bring both the bodies together, and for this she talks to different scientists to get more insights.

'The Second Body' is an interesting book. There is lots of food for thought and Hildyard's prose flows smoothly and the pages fly. I didn't find Hildyard's second body thesis very convincing though. The book doesn't appear to give any clear answers and I'm not sure which side Hildyard is on with respect to questions like 'Is it better to drive a car or is it better to walk?', 'Is it better to eat meat or is it better to be vegetarian / vegan?', 'Are humans part of the environment or is the environment there to serve humans?' But the book explores interesting ideas which makes us think. One of my favourites was the research on bacteria that a scientist called Paul did and the insights it revealed on whether an organism is an individual or a part of a mega-organism and whether this insight could be scaled up to humans. It is a fascinating thing to think about.

Daisy Hildyard's book has won good praise. One of my favourite descriptions of the book was this – "In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, 'The Second Body' might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard's book is as contemporary as the morning paper." However, this description of the book – "her sly variety of scientific inquiry is incandescent" – made me smile 😁 What does this even mean? So many adjectives!

I'll leave you with one of my favourite passages from the book.

"I always wanted to be a scientist, Paul told me, but I started off with this impression that there is universal truth – you find out a truth and then that is the fact. But now I know that most of the things you read are not right. No research project I have done has given me the answer I have expected.

The way that Paul talked about his work made it sound like a process of painstaking, almost painful disillusion. He spoke of learning as a process of realising his own mistakes. When he made a discovery, there was no self-congratulation, but another set of problems. His errors would outlive him. My impression then was that his research was only the container for a force – a sense that something was missing – that would have driven Paul even if he had been a hairdresser, writer or account manager."

Have you read 'The Second Body'? What do you think about it? I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you liked Hildyard's thesis and found it convincing.

[jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Kitty · Rating 1 out of 5]

some of the sparsest prose i've ever read. for an essay i'm very confused as to what the meaning is. i understand the concept of the first and second body, that's not confusing. hildyard uses up so many pages explaining the first/second body, but never felt i understood the broader meaning. what can i do to solve this disconnect? be more aware of my second body? okay, i already am aware, now what? most of the issues with my 'second body' are capitalism, what can hildyard's proverbial anesthetized patient due to combat this?

also some of her thoughts(?) like "there is nothing a hamster can do that isn't funny, especially if it is to die a slow and terrified death" were SO insane to me it took me out of the novel and made me concerned-- like why is this here? is it a joke? do i just not get this weird, fucked up dead hamster joke?

[Angelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

O to have as many perfect brain cells as daisy hildyard

[Jackie Law · Rating 1 out of 5]

The premise of this essay by Daisy Hillier is that every living being has two bodies – the physical body that can eat, drink and rest, and a body embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. Its purpose is to explore what the author calls the second body, and the alleged boundaries between all kinds of life on earth. It is not altogether clear if she is attempting to prove a conclusion she has already reached or to discover something new.

Her musings and anecdotes are wrapped around interviews with a number of individuals: staff working in a butcher’s shop; a criminologist specialising in wildlife crime; a PhD candidate working on micro biology; a senior researcher studying bio information; an evolutionary biologist. The author admits that she does not always fully understand the detail what these experts in their fields tell her.

There are repeated references to an Earthrise image which the author credits with making people consider the world as a single entity, something she appreciates herself when flying to a holiday destination. She also brings up climate change but does not make clear the point this raises, other than when she blames it for the flooding of her home.

“The river was in my house but my house was also in the river.”

To be clear, I make no argument against climate change but its inclusion in this essay comes across as a throw in.

There are mentions of the ordinary in her interviewees’ lives – opera, gaming, washing dishes – as if there is a need to prove empathetic aspects of the human condition. The author is seeking a definition yet fails to make clear the reasons for inclusion of certain subjects along the way.

She comes at the same points from numerous directions.

Each human being, as an entity, is made up of the same parts. However they look, when cut they bleed. The same could be said of other beings. Defining the boundaries between species can at times appear arbitrary. Each takes inside itself parts of others in food, air particles, water. A body expels skin, hair and other substances which are inhaled, absorbed or fertilise other living things. Around the world this process has an effect. Everything is in a relationship with everything else.

An individual’s impact on the world is consumption of resources and expenditure of waste, not what their life story may be. The human body replaces itself over time, shedding and renewing cells, yet each body is regarded as one separate being.

“This critical tradition speaks of psychology, the unfathomable depths of the individual, cultural identity and private individuality.”

There is symbiosis between cells, animals, people. Not everything acts purely in its own best interests. There is invasion, dependence and loss. Even amongst bacteria there is collaboration.

The author explores the boundaries between our first and second bodies as she seeks her definition. Interspersed with her commentary are musings on personal experiences, on Shakespeare, on death.

There were interesting aspects but overall the essay lacked coherency and innovation. I expected something more than a somewhat rambling discourse on man’s place within the natural world.

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s really rare that I’ve read something that proposes a genuinely new idea about how humans perceive themselves and also writes it in a manner that means the structure of the book and way the language of the author not only helps me to understand the concepts involved, but plays with them artistically too. This is genuinely incredible

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Late in this book, after her home is flooded, and all her cutlery covered in river water and mud, Hildyard wonders where tablespoons come from, and is fairly certain she has never bought one.

This unworldly aside is so casually placed, and Hildyard apparently sees nothing strange in it. It's a glimpse into the oddly shallow thought processes that seem to have shaped this book-length essay.

Hildyard is grappling with the idea that we have two bodies - our supposed individual body, and our extended connections to everything around us. Something that climate change has made dramatically real to many of us. But not to Hildyard. So she talks to a butcher, attends a lecture, interviews various scientists, reminisces on some of her experiences with people, animals, and things, and tells us about the flooding of her house, a moment when her second body comes back to visit the place her first body is housed, and a bit about her holiday afterwards.

It's all very inconclusive in the end. Hildyard isn't quite able to internalise the sense that we are both ourselves and selves with porous boundaries that bleed into everything around us. She riffles through a grab bag of intellectual tricks including literary analysis (only of Shakespeare, though), and etymology. She doesn't quite get anywhere. And it's a shame, because there are moments when she describes feeling viscerally connected to the world, but her discomfort with or inability in holding on to this idea isn't especially interesting in itself. We do struggle to climb up from the well of human solipsism. That struggle is banal, and what is more interesting is what we can learn once we climb out.

We really are all involved in, implicated in the world. We really do have a kind of second self, or perhaps it is better to accept it as our true, primary self, that extends beyond our skin. This frustratingly equivocal attempt at realising that truth, or tiptoing around it, doesn't change that fact.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second body is probably that sea lion at Chankanaab National Park that can sing Crazy by Gnarles Barkley

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is elegant, thought-provoking, and slim, with an extremely attractive package. However, I’m unsure what it truly is. Is it a novel, a meditation, or a theory? It has characters and a setting reminiscent of a novel, but it’s driven by a central philosophical idea: that we humans (and all creatures) possess two bodies. The first is our physical selves, our direct interaction with the world around us. The second is our connection to the entire world through systems and networks, both manmade and biogeochemical, from the logistics systems that bring us food to the anthropogenically altered atmosphere. This unique reading experience left me constantly guessing what would come next.

In this sense, it reminded me of Benjamin Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World.” Another book that blurs the line between fiction and science writing, albeit with a more defined narrative arc. Hildyard, on the other hand, invites us to pause and contemplate the ambiguity, an ambiguity that mirrors the ambiguity of our two bodies. Hildyard explores the entanglement of the individual within the global ecosystem, while Labatut delves into the disintegration of the individual under the weight of cosmic truths. One is an essay on presence, while the other is a novel of absence.

Their views on science also differ significantly. In Hildyard’s world, science (biology and ecology) serves as a tool for connection. It reveals that “individuality” is a biological myth—we are merely collections of bacteria and environmental inputs. Science here is a sobering mirror that demands responsibility. In contrast, Labatut’s perspective views science (quantum physics and mathematics) as a poison. He traces the lineage from the invention of Prussian Blue to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. For Labatut, the “purest” knowledge is inherently destructive because it forces us to inhabit a universe indifferent to human logic or morality.

[Harry Smith]

The way that Paul talked about his work made it sound like a process of painstaking, almost painful disillusion. He spoke of learning as a process of realising his own mistakes. When he made a discovery, there was no self-congratulation, but another set of problems. His errors would outlive him.

Dependence is necessary, but the human relationship is only one way to compensate for yourself.

[Miriam Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating. Often sort of cerebral and disembodied, and, also not promised as a memoir and written by an academic, and I am learning to appreciate books as they are, not as I wish they would be. Will be chewing on the ideas a long time. Also going to check out her novel - I got to this book from Doppelgänger by Klein, and others say her novel does it better.

[Marija Snie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awwwwesome. A must read for anyone who wants to think differently about the world. Ontologically.

[Tedmarriott · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️

[Beth]

I mean okay… what do we do about this second body then, I’m actively aware of it but is there any solution…. Daisy need a follow up here

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

Food for thought... mmm... delicious....

[Esme · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really like daisy hildyards style of writing, but the argument could have been a bit more nuanced and fleshed out -- why is it important that my second body exists in the saliva of a seagull in brighton ? i guess i will never know

[albus ~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

very lyrical for a non fiction, that was cool

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in her previous confections, Hildyard produces a generic synthesis of fact, fiction and first-person narrative. This book offers a discursive essay rather than a sustained argument in defence of the 'second body' thesis. While the concept of this alleged entity is comprehensible, its materialisation is not particularly constructive and would be better apprehended by its material effects. (Is a 'second body' any more substantial than the pre-existing 'footprint' that requires no physical foot?) It's difficult to determine Hildyard's stand on the global consequences of her first body, given her unresolved intellectual vacillations and physical peregrinations. Was it really necessary to travel the continent to interview her expert witnesses merely to compound her own confusion? The providential flood that engulfs her home may appease her Kondo-crisis of conscience about undesired consumerism, but consigning to landfill all her household goods, whether salvageable or not, does nothing to reduce her carbon count. It's hard to see the virtue in blowing the insurance pay-out on flights to mediterranean sunspots instead of replacing the metonymic teaspoons. In the annals of consumer crimes, possession of teaspoons seems, in any case, a petty offence. As a memoir of eco-fallibility, the author may be commended for making a public admission of her personal shortcomings and physical outgoings, but as a prolegomenon to a more substantial work it offers little promise of perfection. That said, I enjoyed her divagations, pursuing the ideas that interested me, and leaving aside those that did not.

[Bella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book was super interesting! It proposes some very cool ideas about personal responsibility on a global scale as well as a cool take on how humans view themselves in relationship to "animalness."

I think what I particularly enjoy is the interview aspect of it. I think to fully encompass complex ideas, people too often pull from one field to come to their conclusions, when in reality, the issue NEEDS the diversity of a multidisciplinary approach. Having the perspective of many people on different sides of this issue made for a much more nuanced take that I feel went a step further than most content I've consumed tackling this subject. However, I can't help but feel that because it took this multidisciplinary approach, it comes off as half baked. I want even more people to weigh in! I know that isn't always possible with time and financial constraints, but for me personally, the book would have been better off for it.

Overall though, I still very much enjoyed this experience and would recommend it to anyone! It also finally pushed me to begin Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels!

[james · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. […] Your first body is the one belonging to Richard, the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is the body belonging to Gina, a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence […] It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance. Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plants on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both.’

‘There is a sense of horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a physical thing with porous boundaries. Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body. Therefore each body is involved with every other living thing on earth. Your first body could be digesting a piece of bread in Lagos at precisely the same time as your second body is acting on the internal organs of a seagull in Kamchatka. The activity of a certain species of alga in the south Pacific has determined the composition of the air that you are breathing right now. […] This is not how it feels on the ground, however. You live in your own individual body.’

‘I really struggle to draw a line around what is not a relevant organism to any given organism anymore. You see, if we discover that this selection pressure is something which is consistent when scaled up, the organism is no longer an individual. The organism is no longer a human, but the human and all the other creatures which provide everything that the human lacks. Likewise for everything, a pigeon, a bacterium, a jaguar. The strict heritability of the phenotype is violated, and this is big for the scientists who want kin selection to explain everything. But actually, for those of us who live in the real world, it has always been plain to see that organisms live in symbiosis. When symbiosis erodes, things become volatile. […] The question is whether the collaboration between the human and all the other organisms actually determines her success, as an individual, and her young, and the young of her young. We need to put that to the test. If it’s true it will have amazing consequences for life and the origins of life. I am interested in trying to understand this phenomenon of invasion, dependence and loss, on an empirical basis. What we now know is only the problem. […] This was interesting to me. So I said, you mean that you can’t precisely describe whether an organism, on evolutionary terms, is actually a single individual, or a host of organisms co-evolving in symbiosis with one another? Yes, said Paul, we don’t know which is the truth. What do you want it to be? Paul laughed. I don’t mind whether it’s true or not, but I would like to know.’

//

what I admire most about hildyard’s essay is its practical irreverence – she talks of wanting to find, amidst the various microbiological, geopolitical, and literary perspectives on the entanglements of bodily life at various scales, ‘a foothold for a pair of size 39 Nike trainers’. none of what any of the experts or authorities have to say strictly matters unless it is compatible with some sense of what it is to be personally alive, now. hildyard insists, in her meetings with scientists specialising in DNA and bacterial behaviour, and in her readings of timothy clark and elena ferrante, on attempting to reconcile the experience of a body at the scale of the ostensible individual, and at the scale of global activity, of life: the attempt to ‘capture the second body, trapping it inside a real body.’

[I just laid out what exactly the ‘second/first body’ distinction entails in my notes on naomi klein’s ‘doppelganger’, a thesis which leans heavily on hildyard’s, so I won’t rehash it here for fear of an RSI.]

it is this reconciliation of different scales – using clark’s notion of a ‘derangement of scale’, whereby the implication of ‘seemingly trivial or small actions with enormous stakes’ causes ‘intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation [to] fold in upon each other’, as a point of departure – with which hildyard is principally concerned. she describes twice an actual ascent to the Archimedean point, via two plane journeys: one taken for a teenage holiday, the other in escape after her house suffers severe flooding. twice, hildyard recalls watching the globe reduce to the scale of the plane window. an Earthrise-picture-esque phenomenon whereby the world becomes conceivable, its size and nature apparent. able to be held between forefinger and thumb, traversable at a glance. humans become mere physical entities, levelled with all other forms of life, leaving their chemical traces, enmeshed with all life in an undeniably material co-existence. the sanctity of the individual Person, so sociopolitically relevant on the ground, dissolves at this height. or does it? does one not feel both – projecting the abstract shapes of the mind onto the patterns of terrain from above, as hildyard states, just as one sees faces in the clouds?

the underlying sentiment of hildyard’s treatise – the thread of resonant truth throughout the essay – could be put as, ‘it’s both, all the time, always’. this is what makes it so edifying, and so terrifying. the presence of the second body – the perennial material implication of any given live organism in the wider ecosystem, the undeniable interestedness [inter esse] of human life in all life on this planet, the obligations that arise thereof – is constantly over the shoulder of the first body. it does not require an opt-in to be true, but can be denied as a part of human reality.

[ClareT · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know how to review this book because I haven't quite answered the question why? Why has this book been written and what is it about. Maybe I am just not intellectual enough.
I think the idea behind it was about how we are individuals, but have an impact on all life on the planet - the second body. But that is what climate scientists and sustainability professionals have been saying for ages. Then there is the idea that humans don't think of themselves as animals or part of nature - and, again, nothing new here. Then the third idea in the book is that we can either concentrate on the individual, and not the wider picture, or concentrate on the whole and ignore the individuals. Also not new, and not necessarily true.
To explore these ideas the author interviews a butcher, briefly, and some scientists, and reads some books. She even talks at length (the entire last section of the book) about how friends and family cleaned her house when it flooded, as an example of how even when she could get up close and personal with her second body she didn't feel any closer to it.
My second 1 1/2 stars of the week, because I did finish it, and it was short.

[Jennifer Irving · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got life

[Matilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

4

Lots of food for thought. Makes me think of Latour

// reread in August 2025

4.9 even better on the reread. Still thinking about Tarde and Latour

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finishing this book, I had two immediate reactions. This person is a good writer and this book doesn’t quite hit the mark. Or maybe it’s because the mark the writer was trying to hit isn’t made exactly clear, and for all the gumption it took to put forth some novel conception of ecology under the big-stroke, theoretical sounding “second body,” the book doesn’t quite deliver. Over its brief length we are treated to some very professorial lit crit, personal essay, and journalistic interviews. It’s all a bit jumbled, and didn’t do much for me in terms of illuminating the idea of a “second body” other than in its broadest definition. If was to understand this idea on concrete level, I think this book would have to be two or three times as long, fleshed out with more examples from science, economy, and sociology to explain the necessary process of psychic expansion needed if we are to tackle the effects of climate change caused by the vast accumulation of individual consumption among wealthier members of the human community. But the writer explicitly sets herself against this abstract line of thinking and instead tries to understand the “second body” idea from a more subjective place. However, I feel like this does a disservice to the very objective nature of ecological destruction. Perhaps she felt that the marketplace was already thick with climate change books attacking the issue from this angle - this is true. But her more personal exploration of the topic is, to my eyes, not successful, padded as it is with interviews and literary analysis, that while well-written and interesting, seemed only tangential to the topic at hand.

The more interesting subtext of the “second body” idea, one that didn’t seem explicitly explored to me, was as a phantom of climate change induced anxiety that has come to haunt any informed member of the developed world. While the author never says that this is the genesis of the “second body” idea, I recognized thoughts parallel to my own, thoughts born of trying to wrap your head around the slow motion disaster that has been playing out my entire life and will continue until I die. We are told that climate change is driven by consumption, the avarice of global capitalism, the unfettered growth required for the functioning of society. And yet where do we draw the lines between us and this nightmare? How to account for our own responsibility? The writer seems hew this frontier right up against that of her literal flesh, making the reverberations of her wants, needs, money spent and decisions made into a phantom reaching out across the world. It’s a radical and radically unpleasant conception to live with, but perhaps one necessarily born of the situation we find ourselves facing as individuals and as a species. It’s unfortunate that this book doesn’t find time to more deeply explore this aspect.

I picked up this book because I couldn’t find Hildyard’s new novel online yet after seeing it on the Fitzcarraldo Editions website - I still plan on reading that when I get the chance, as I really enjoyed the style and topic of this book here.

[Yalena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I want to be extremely careful with my words. It is true that similar themes across two writers does not equal plagiarism but I find it difficult to see this as anything but a de-spiritualised and therefore ‘acceptable’ copy-paste of the Spanish philosopher Raimon Panikar. In Ecosofía: La sabiduría de la Tierra, he summarises his ecophilosophical position with a metaphor of the three bodies: “My first body is this body I see. The second one is humanity. Our third body is the Earth, nature. We are Earth, we do not only inhabit its surface and use it or exploit it.” [excerpt taken from Healing a Life out of Balance: Slowness and Ecosophy in Death Stranding (Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Mateo Terrasa Torres) in Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis].

Perhaps they stumbled on the same metaphor separately, but I cannot help be disappointed by what seems to be a plagiarised idea.

Now, if we understand Hildyard to define the second body as the “the global presence of the individual body”, far from recognising we share in the world, she subordinates life to the image of the individual. Perhaps this is due to the fact that is book is not intellectually rigorous (but why is anyone publishing an intellectual effort without sufficiently educating themselves on the idea they are proposing? Just like making use of blank space does not make a person Mallarmé, writing a memoir does not make a person Sebald). My less charitable interpretation is that despite her self-curated image as proposing an ecological view of humans in relation to nature, this is nothing but the typical English bourgeois and individualistic understanding of relationality.

And lastly, I’m from Yorkshire. It’s very pretty. But glamourising the play-pretend rustic life which doesn’t belong to you (‘Our house flooded! We used the compensation money to go to the Mediterranean!’) creates in me a sense of discomfort because it attempts to market a particular lifestyle. Also, increasingly I’m concerned with the fetishistic view of Mediterranean life British people have (or more broadly the lives of people in hot climates), when their only experiences of other cultures seems to be mediated through tourism (and indeed the reflections on the displaced people reveal this incapacity to relate to other people as people but material for her book).

[Paige · Rating 3 out of 5]

i loved that hildyard’s prose was unlike anything i have ever read before. i liked how it was very circular, in the way that she would mention a concept or specific detail many pages later. i can appreciate how artistically written her ideas were and how scattered the whole style was. at times though, it was a bit hard to follow, sort of like she was speaking in code. i think i would have a better understanding if i read this a second time through.

i randomly saw this book in a book store and felt like it was calling me. the premise of it is everything i love - talking about our environmental impact. hildyard’s explanation that every individual has a first body and a second body is my favorite part of this book, climate change being described in an artistic way.
the first body relates to our individual, everyday life- decisions that directly affect our own physical being. the second body is in how those everyday decisions have global consequences that permeate every inch of the Earth. so our second body is everywhere, in the plastic within the seagulls stomachs, in the water that floods people’s houses.

three of my favorite sentences that describe this: “a teenager in kolkata is missing a thumb and you are wearing a pair of inexpensive gloves. is there any connection there?” &&
“it is strange to think that turning on your kettle is an act of global consequence. but nonetheless, it kind of is. you don’t need to feel the solemn magnitude of your kettle boiling for it to be a matter of solemn magnitude. there is truth which exists somewhere beyond the reality of your own kitchen, your own body.” &&
“derangement of scale - a sense of confusion that is caused by the huge gap between the immensity of the humans global existence and the smallness of your own private everyday life”

[Terry Pitts · Rating 2 out of 5]

I admired Daisy Hildyard's first novel Hunter in the Snow, which came out about four years ago. I am - appropriately, I guess - of two minds about her new book-length essay called The Second Body. She defines the second body as "the collective global animal body." I'm not sure of I simply had trouble wrapping my arms around this concept or whether she failed to convince me that such a concept exists. Hildyard begins by thinking about animals and about our status as an animal and what global warming means for all animals. All animals and all other people are our responsibility, she writes - especially with global warming. "Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the whole world. It makes every animal implicated in the whole world."

Hildyard asks over and over, what is it to have a body? "I would like to know about species and genes and chromosomes and the atmosphere, but there is also a countercurrent: why would you want to ask those questions? Why can't you just get on with it?" Nevertheless, she interviews several specialists - a butcher, a molecular biologist, and evolutionary biologist - about animal life and their personal relationship to the animals or life forms that they study (or butcher). It's an interesting exercise, but, to my mind, an inconclusive one.

In the midst of her research, Hildyard's home was flooded and she lost almost everything. Somehow, it was this event that seemed to bring her closest to the understanding of the second body. Unfortunately, I failed to come to the same conclusion.

[Mahira]

I had to read this book in an hour for leading 'The Red Book Club' by Chantal Powell.

"Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it."

These days???

White people are only discovering now what has been known for centuries by indigenous cultures. She presents the idea of 'The Second Body' as if it hasn't been around for centuries. In Daoist tradition, the concept of eight bodies has been around for over 2 centuries. Cultural erasure is when white people borrow from Indigenous cultures and try to present ideas as 'original'. I have seen this so much so in white academia that it now seems absurd to me. Perhaps, it could be a lack of research.

As a personal quest, I suppose Daisy did a good job of narrating her journey about figuring out how the things we do and the decisions we make affect others.

The most fascinating part of this book was Paul's research:
"He works on what is apparently the smallest of possible scales: he looks at relationships between bacteria. He creates colonies of bacteria. Some individuals, within these colonies, are disabled – living alone, they would not be able to produce enough to stay alive.

Other individuals in the colonies that Paul creates are genetically adapted by him and his colleagues to be overproducers – they make too much nutrition, more than will go back into their own systems; they could exhaust themselves.

Finally, he makes ordinary bacteria who go about their everyday lives by looking after themselves – neither overproducing, nor underproducing.

The cool thing, Paul said, is that the cells whose abilities had been disabled seemed to be stronger in the long run than the normal guys. They grew more rapidly when they were forced to engage with others. It seemed that the over-producers, who had more than they needed, gave spare nutrients to the under-producers.

When we looked closely, we found this really super cool thing – that the bacteria who were reliant on one another grew tiny little limbs and held tightly onto one another! Their system became a megastructure, and through these limbs, which we call nanotubes, the dependent organisms actually began to give something back to the ones that were providing for them. This network excludes the non-co-operators – the parasite cannot find his way back into the system.

The generations of bacteria are short. This kind, which we use in the laboratory, reproduce every twenty minutes. We can use them to study evolution. Their bodies are similar to those of early life forms. In this study, it was only three generations before the collaborators – the collaboration between the disabled and the overproducing individuals – was growing exponentially. This creates a forceful selection pressure in

When the body interacts with another body, it speeds up the rate of change. What we found, through very few generations, was that the bacteria actually lose the genes for producing the substances they had previously produced. They make fewer substances, but they make more of those substances, and then share them with their neighbors. They become fatally dependent on their neighbors."

Yes, sharing is a big thing for us. We love to share and be 'fatally' dependent on each other. I personally dislike the word 'colony' but it's so enlightening to learn about community from a white person. Perhaps, experiencing a terrible loss of community has made depending on each other seem almost fatal. What heals us is a return to communal life.