An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature

by Jim Mason

A fully revised and updated version of the classic work on the origins of animal agriculture and our longstanding contempt for and hatred of nature and animals.

In 1993, Jim Mason, journalist, advocate, and pioneering figure in the contemporary animal advocacy movement, published An Unnatural Order —a sweeping overview of the origins of our hatred and destruction of the natural world and its creatures, from the dawn of agriculture to the present day. Now fully revised and updated to reflect developments in paleoanthropology and ethology, as well as greater awareness of, and urgency regarding, the climate crisis, An Unnatural Order  offers an expansive overview of what has changed (both for good and for ill) and what has unfortunately remained the same.

His message is until we grapple with the question of the animal, and our relationship with animality and the natural world, we will not be able to confront the consequences of our perpetuation of environmental destruction, biodiversity collapse, and our alienation from the Earth and one another. As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order  is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published March 23, 2021

Reviews

[Martin Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm the publisher of this book and thought I'd share a few thoughts on why I decided to publish it. Actually, this is the third time I've published AN UNNATURAL ORDER. I brought it back from oblivion with Continuum after Simon & Schuster put it out of print in the 1990s. Then, I redid it in the early 2000s with Lantern Books, and this newly revised and updated edition has been published by Lantern Publishing & Media. I've kept returning to AN UNNATURAL ORDER because it strikes me as a book that for all its flaws strikes at a profound truth: our hatred and wish to control the natural world stems from agricultural settlement's separation of animals into chattel and pests to be destroyed, and how that encouraged contempt and enslavement of the former as livestock and malevolent destruction of the latter as wildlife that should be hunted to extinction. For such an attitude, Jim creates a new word—misothery—"the hatred of animals," which deliberately echoes misogyny, as misothery contains with it a masculinist notion of domination and destruction as an expression of male power.

This edition has been substantially pruned (both the author and I recognized the first edition needed editing, after it was orphaned at S&S), and there's a new foreword that talks about how much has changed (or not) in the thirty years since it was first published.

[Robert Hawkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were spots that this book was too woohoo even for me. But the concepts are great and even challenging to think about. A lot to ponder.