Practicing Landscape Field Guides are a series of publications that Reading Landscape has developed from a series of online seminars run during academic year 2021-22, entitled Practicing Landscape: Landscapes of Energy and Extraction.

Field Guide No. 1, 'Landscapes of Energy and Extraction: Mining the Animal', has been developed from the original seminar to form the first in this series of publications. As a result of participating in the online seminar, Michael Mersinis, Elizabeth A. Hodson and Jim Harold continued their dialogue offline, discussing lingering questions that the seminar had prompted for them. The resulting publication reflects the subsequent expansion and consolidation of their ideas. These essays also pick up on where both the 'Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation' online symposium (2020) and the 2021-22 seminars concluded: drawing out the tensions and legacies between the human and non-human environment.

In the collaboratively authored Foreword, Brind and Bird provide a context for consideration of these ideas, teasing out how 'Mining the Animal' directs attention to the relation between the more than human, landscape and people. Specifically, the way in which contributors discuss how the voice of the animal reveals itself; whether through its absence or artistic intervention.