The Bone Pile

What does it mean to be human in a world we have spent centuries trying to place ourselves above?

In The Bone Pile, Maximilian Werner brings together essays that explore the uneasy and often contradictory relationship between human culture and the natural world. Moving from trout streams and hunting grounds to encounters with wolves, hawks, deer, fire, death, and the altered landscapes of the American West, Werner examines what the lives of other animals, and our treatment of them, can teach us about ourselves.

At once personal, philosophical, and grounded in ecological thinking, these essays challenge familiar assumptions about civilization, morality, religion, technology, and human exceptionalism. Werner draws on evolutionary biology and lived experience to consider humans not as observers standing outside nature, but as animals shaped by the same forces that govern every other living thing.

Provocative without losing its sense of wonder, The Bone Pile asks readers to look more closely at the stories we tell about ourselves and the living world around us, and to consider what becomes possible when we begin to see ourselves as part of nature rather than apart from it.