Sarah Pye

This chapter is a post-project reflection which explores the challenges I faced in researching and crafting a non-fiction biography of Malaysian ecologist Dr Wong Siew Te in relation to the inclusion speculative life stories of sun bears in his care. It compares my use of anthropomorphic empathic speculation to imagine the experiences of individual bears with the fictional biographical speculation of non-human animals in two seminal works, Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Flush, and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone . It concludes that species-inclusive narratives are important, since if we fail to address the disconnect between humans and natural systems, unsustainable human behaviour has the capacity to lead to our own eventual demise.