Radical Joy for Hard Times is dedicated to making beauty for wounded places. Of course, when places are hurt, the lives of the beings who live there are hurt, sometimes irrevocably. The Brazilian rain forest burns so cattle can graze. Fertilizers kill the life in ponds. Climate change disrupts patterns of blossoming and nesting.

Scientists estimate that between 30 and 50 percent of species living today will become extinct by 2050. How can we honor them? How can we learn more about their lives while they are still among us? How might we make life better for them?

In her new book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, philosopher and University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum argues for a new kind of justice that includes animals. In a conversation republished in The Daily Good, Nussbaum points out that, although our human concept of animal intelligence has greatly improved over the centuries, we have much to learn. For instance, we need to stop trying to assess the intelligence of animals by comparing it to human intelligence. Whales and ravens, Monarch butterflies and rabbits do not need human intelligence. They have evolved skills and perceptions and ways of being in the world that are unique and complex and that humans could not hope to attain.

Nussbaum wants lawyers to go to court to argue for the rights of animals to live their lives unharmed—and not just physically. For instance, she says, “The U.S. Navy sonar program is now ruled illegal because it disrupts the behavior of whales. Well, the question was, what’s bad? If you thought that only pain is bad, then you would think the sonar program is good because it does not inflict pain. But it does disrupt life activities. For example, interrupting reproduction, interrupting migration, creating heightened emotional stress.”

The naturalist and author Henry Beston wrote of animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” Let us get to know these other nations by reflecting on their astonishing intellige