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Earth Matters : A world where we aren’t at the center?

By Monya Relles

Over the summer, I read and enjoyed “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” by Ed Yong. One of Yong’s central theses is that animal senses are so different from our own that it’s almost impossible to imagine the ways animals could be thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world.Yong calls the bubble of the world that an animal can perceive (through hearing, sight, electromagnetic senses, or senses even stranger) an animal’s umwelt. That umwelt, Yong argues, is often entirely foreign to our own.