Narnia, unlike its immediate neighbors, is inhabited by talking animals, who are clearly shown as companions, in some sense equals, in the service of Aslan. Just as in the science fiction stories, especially the first, we are made to see humanity in a fresh perspective; the “natural” pride or arrogance of the human spirit is chastened by the revelation that, in Narnia, you may be on precisely the same spiritual level as a badger or a mouse. Narnia is thus not only about encountering God in a new way; it is also about thinking of your humanity in a rich and surprising context. The “holy nation” includes those whom we think of as outside the all-important human story. But, as in the alien planets of the earlier trilogy, it is crucial to be able to look on humanity as, at best, part of a wider story, always in need of help from those with whom the planet is shared, and, at worst, a positively toxic presence, dragging its neighbours downwards. Lewis would have had plenty of questions to ask of fashionable environmentalism, but he sketches out with great prescience just the set of issues that more recent thinkers have brought into focus about the effects of certain conceptions of human uniqueness.
— Abp Rowan Williams,The Lion’s World
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