In conversation, Graeme Gibson is a one-man resource centre for nature writing, casually referencing everything from J. A. Baker’s remarkably poetic The Peregrine to John A. Livingston’s chilling indictment of humanity Rogue Primate. And in print he performs a similar service, first with his 2005 anthology The Bedside Book of Birds, and now with its companion volume, The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany (Doubleday Canada, $40).

Both of these lushly illustrated compendiums of poetry and prose are dedicated to surveying human-animal interactions going as far back as biblical times and even beyond; the sculpture of a lion-headed human shown in Beasts is at least 30,000 years old. But where Birds documented our collective take on the avian world as essentially an aesthetic phenomenon, Beasts seems to start from an entirely darker premise—and not only because it’s populated by lions and tigers and bears and other potential man-eaters.

“I think that’s partially because the birds themselves are different from the beasts,” says Gibson, reached by phone at a downtown Vancouver hotel where he and his wife, novelist Margaret Atwood, are enjoying some downtime after a birding excursion to Tofino.

“The birds are imagination and longing and spirit,” he continues, “and so one is drifting around in that area of our existence. But when you get to the beasts, that’s the gravity. That’s the mortality.”¦You can’t deal with the animal body, ours or theirs, without examining mortality. And then you start thinking, ”˜What kinds of mortality?’ and ”˜Is it an individual one, or a species one?’ ”

Emboldened by the success of his first collection, Gibson delivers an explicit environmental message in Beasts. Along the way, he advances several provocative theories, including the idea that the invention of weapons fundamentally changed the way humans interact with nature. Wild predators, he stresses, cull the weak and the sick, thus serving as a positive stimulus to the evolutionary process. Armed predators, in contrast, go after the biggest and the best, thereby radically depleting the gene pool.

“I’m not saying that somebody else hadn’t thought about this, but if they did I don’t know who they were or where I got it,” says Gibson, who, while not a trained biologist, has spent a lifetime observing wild animals. “It just occurred to me at some level.”

The southern Ontario–based writer also hopes that Beasts will stimulate discussion about nature’s curative powers.

“What began to open up for me towards the end of the book is this whole thing of forest-bathing,” he says, crediting Tokyo-based environmentalist C. W. Nicol with introducing him to the concept. “And forest-bathing is not lying around, as in sunbathing, but going into the forest for healing. The Japanese are doing very specific and really interesting work on this. They’ve discovered that it lowers blood pressure, for instance.”

Gibson contends that this Japanese research—and that of crusading journalist Richard Louv, whose Last Child in the Woods argues that attention deficit disorder in children is more often nature-deficit disorder—will soon become a powerful tool for environmental activists.

“I bet that within 10 years, one of the major defences on behalf of nature will be public-health issues,” he says. “It’s well demonstrated that people who are recovering from operations, if they can look out the window at nature, they heal immeasurably better than those who don’t. In fact, one of the pathetic things is that they’ll heal faster if there’s a painting of nature in the room. It’s just that elementary a need.”

Reading Birds or Beasts is hardly an adequate substitute for time spent in the woods or on the water, as Gibson readily admits. But by bringing a bit of the wild world into our bedrooms, chances are he’s doing us a service that extends beyond winnowing the best nature writing of the past few thousand years—especially if his selections encourage us to lace up our boots and get out there ourselves.