THE CALL OF THE HONEYGUIDE: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Nature, by Rob Dunn
In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, birds known as honeyguides once used a specific call to lead humans to beehives so they could split the spoils of wax and honey. In southeastern Australia, wild orcas partnered with Thaua people to hunt baleen whales. The Inca empire banned the killing of cormorants and pelicans whose droppings fertilized their crops.
These relationships are known as “mutualisms,” the subject of Rob Dunn’s eighth book, “The Call of the Honeyguide.” Dunn suggests such dynamics were once common and could be again in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of how different species interact in cooperative ways.
His argument is rooted in ecology and evolutionary biology, but skillfully interwoven with digressions on art, literature and history. The author delves into ancient relationships between humans and other species as diverse as fruit trees, cats and gut-dwelling microbes.
Dunn’s quirky humor and love of the obscure energize his academic questioning. In fascinating asides, he offers examples of purely nonhuman mutualisms: ants that tend orchards; mites that ride on ants’ heads and beg for food like “toy poodles.”
When describing a human-nonhuman mutualism, Dunn twists the perspective delightfully. Perhaps it’s dogs who take their people on walks, he posits. And did you know that yeasts in fact domesticated humans and drove the invention of writing? (“Or anyway, this is how the yeasts would tell the story.”)
English doesn’t contain other precise terms to describe such partnerships, and at times Dunn grapples with the limits of language. Scientists measure a mutualism by the number of offspring produced by the species involved; strictly speaking, humans and chickens have a mutualistic relationship. Chickens, after all, technically “benefit” from our appetites — because we breed them. Undeniably, many also live short and miserable lives.
Dunn wonders if we might choose a different yardstick, such as longevity or well-being, to judge the success of our relationships. It’s not always straightforward: Pet dogs and cats don’t improve a human’s ability to reproduce (they’re associated with fewer children, in fact) but they may offer us something less tangible — inspiration, beauty, a sense of wholeness. “There is not an answer,” he writes, since “individual humans, and the collectives of humans, cultures, differ widely in the choices they would make about future mutualisms.”
This delicacy is admirable — but also maddening. Many readers will feel instinctively that the world is off-kilter when the domestic animals make up 58 percent of Earth’s biomass of mammals and most of our calories come from just eight crops.
Dunn’s question is not how we can merely coexist with other forms of life, but how we can live well with them — and science isn’t completely equipped to answer this. Philosophy, spirituality and ethics come into play. Dunn wanders these waters, but he’s not concerned with leaving a clear wake for others to follow, emphasizing that “rather than one answer, we need many.” The book maps myriad possibilities but offers few signposts.
Dunn’s writing is most captivating when rooted in the deep past, sketching pictures of how humans benefited from surprising partnerships. His futuristic visions, on the other hand, are more fanciful than practical. Dunn speculates briefly on technical advances that could allow humans to communicate with other species — though it’s hard to imagine, under current economic and political systems, that many societies would act on anything a chipmunk or a robin had to say.
At another point, he suggests that scientists should collaborate with artists, chefs and architects to invent sustainable solutions, such as microbe-based meats or bricks grown out of fungus. A subtle optimism about technology threads these visions, even if, in a postscript, Dunn describes cross-species partnerships as an alternative to a machine-driven existence.
It’s worth noting that chef-made meals and architect-designed homes cater to a privileged class. It’s left to other writers to consider how mutualisms might (or do) play out in communities more vulnerable to a climate-changed world; Dunn’s own historical examples point to subsistence hunters, farmers and Indigenous wisdom-keepers as vital collaborators in this quest.
Dunn joins a growing cadre of writers who emphasize nature’s cooperative side over the long- held cliché of a brutal fight, “red in tooth and claw,” and suggest humans can take part in that cooperation — if we so choose. His invitation to envision new mutualisms echoes Robin Wall Kimmerer’s concept of reciprocity and George Monbiot’s calls for rewilding. “The idea that other species benefit us, and we them, has become almost radical, something that is at once very old and also new,” Dunn notes.
The honeyguides, he writes, “no longer call because the humans no longer listen.” Dunn’s plea is that we pay attention; listen hard enough to hear when the nonhuman world offers us a chance for kinship. It’s a refreshingly upbeat take on what the future could be.
THE CALL OF THE HONEYGUIDE: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Nature | By Rob Dunn | Basic Books | 340 pp. | $30
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