Being (Almost) Eaten Alive Can Make You a Diehard Environmentalist

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Leonardo DiCaprio said, “Making The Revenant was about man’s relationship to the natural world.” Perhaps the film’s most gripping illustration of this was when a grizzly bear nearly mauls DiCaprio’s character, an American fur trapper, to death. To be eaten by a predator, after all, may be the most apt display of man’s vulnerable state in nature. Onstage, DiCaprio evoked that vulnerable state, and made a forceful plea for global climate change action.

It turns out this isn’t the first time a near-fatal mauling, a series of essays posthumously published in 2012. In its first and most riveting piece, “Being Prey,” she explains how her critique of anthropocentrism—the idea that humans stand apart from nature—became palpable.