For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic was a time of contrasts. While it provided an opportunity for many to connect more with nature and appreciate the joys of their home place, it was simultaneously a time of great loss and suffering that laid bare many of the flaws of our values and how we structure our government and society. For ecologist Carl Safina, the pandemic also coincided with rehabbing a fledgling Eastern Screech-Owl named Alfie. In his book Alfie and Me, Safina uses pandemic disruption and the life of Alfie to take a critical look at our sense of place and how those of us in so-called “Western society” interact with the natural world around us.

Alfie and Me covers the life of Alfie from being found as an abandoned and dying fledgling, to being released, to finding a mate, and finally, to raising a brood of her own. Interspersed with the narrative of one owl’s story, Safina relates how our modern relationship with nature has evolved. Starting with Plato and moving onto early Christianity, Descartes, and the joint Scientific and Industrial revolutions, Safina illustrates how European (and later, Euro-American) society came to devalue and detach itself from the natural world. It’s a compelling narrative and a timely one. Those of us in the biological field have much to grapple with as far as the unsavory origins of our science go. From imperialism to eugenics to industrial agriculture, biology has not always been in the pure pursuit of understanding that we would like it to be. Safina argues that the philosophical underpinnings of the West have led to harmful reductionism in which biologists have attempted to understand life as “a sum of its parts” while missing the bigger picture. In the words of Archaea discoverer Carl Woese, as quoted by Safina, “not seeing the forest for the trees (and not caring what a tree was in any case), molecular biology took the only approach open to it: it clear cut the forest.” Safina poetically traces this philosophical reductionism back to Ancient Greece and weaves it into narratives about our present inequalities and environmental catastrophes from climate change to mass extinctions to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast with this myopic, mechanistic biology is genuine awe for and connection with nature, as embodied by Alfie. The time at home granted by the pandemic allows the author to watch the life of Alfie and her offspring on a deep and intimate level, providing a rare look into the life of a non-human. What emerges is insight into biology that is much fuller and richer than a mere “sum of its parts.” Safina’s prose is at its best here as he writes about the beauty of the natural world and living interconnected with it. Some of my favorite sections of the book are those in which he describes fishing in Long Island Sound alongside Northern Gannets and Osprey, and he writes beautifully on the rationale for catching your own food as an antidote to the detachment of industrial farming. Safina’s adoration for nature is infectious.

Safina’s analysis of Western European and Christian philosophy is compelling, and his writings about Alfie are gorgeous and empathetic, but I feel the book falls short in the sections dealing with non-Western philosophy. In his book Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, British historian Noel Malcolm coins the term “shame-praising” to describe Medieval European writings that praised Islamic states as a way to provide contrast with the shortcomings of the West and to shame Western states into bettering themselves. In such works, the praise was less genuine and more a rhetorical tool to evoke embarrassing contrast with Christianity. In Alfie and Me, Safina pulls extensively from so-called “Asian religions” including Buddhism, Daoism, Jainism, and Hinduism as well as from non-Abrahamic belief systems in Africa, the Pacific, and among American Indigenous peoples as a way of presenting better ways of coexistence with the natural world and illustrating that the path “the West” has gone down is not the only available option.

As laudable as this is, Safina’s analysis often feels surface-level, cherry-picked, and shorn of context. “The West” receives an extensive narrative thread showing the origins and context of its philosophy. “The Rest” receives an assortment of examples pulled from a series of disparate spiritual and philosophical systems which do not always come off as three-dimensional, but instead appear as idealized generalizations that exist solely to contrast with “The West.” In a modern form of shame-praising, non-Western philosophy is reduced largely to the necessary hero to contrast with the Western villain.

Safina employs generalizing language to draw broad conclusions about non-Western belief systems—“native Americans universally” and “traditional African beliefs generally”—compressing a diverse set of beliefs into a single entity. He uses the term “Indigenous” loosely to refer to a panoply of nations and groups across the Americas, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia and then makes declarative claims about what “Indigenous” people believe without specifying what groups or people he’s referring to. The flimsiness of this surface-level analysis becomes most evident in discussions of China. After heaping praise on Daoism and Confucianism and their supposed superior framework for coexistence with nature, Safina includes throwaway lines about China’s invention of gunpowder and institutional capture of Confucianism by the the Chinese Imperial State. He shrugs these events off as inconveniences and seems to lay no blame on the underlying philosophies and religions of China—despite blaming Western religion and philosophy for similar destructive practices in the Occident. In Safina’s analysis, when Confucianism becomes a tool for the empire, it’s the fault of the Chinese monarchy, but when Christianity becomes a tool for the empire, it’s due to an inherent flaw in Abrahamic monotheism. From this use of “Asian religions” as a foil for shame-praising, a flattened and sanitized narrative emerges that does a disservice to everyone involved and is much less interesting than the more complicated reality.

Despite this criticism, this truly is a wonderful book. Its writing is lovely, its message timely, and its feathered protagonist charming. Safina beautifully blends the life of Alfie with environmental philosophy to produce a book that is one part Sand County Almanac and one part My Side of the Mountain. As 2020 starts to feel farther and farther away, it is a good time to start to look back on the “unprecedented” time of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflect on how it’s shaped us and our world in the years since. What better way to do so than through the eyes of a small owl?