ABSTRACT
Contemporary writing on loneliness focuses on relationships that humans have with other humans. Authors might acknowledge that having a pet is good for a person psychologically, but this is downplayed as secondary to proper human-human sociality. At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity finds itself in the most significant period of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out. In this chapter, I draw on writers of ecological memoirs to argue for the historic and contemporary fitness of a discomfort of loneliness that motivates people to enter into inter-species sociality.
