In late 2019, amidst record-setting heatwaves and droughts, bushfires swept across the Australian continent. The severity and scale of destruction wrought by these “Black Summer” blazes was unprecedented, burning more than 40 million acres of land, releasing over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and killing an estimated three billion animals. Amid the smoke and devastation, one animal in particular became the face of the fires’ toll — a face almost synonymous with Australia itself — the koala.
Author Danielle Clode poses with a koala munching on a eucalyptus leaf. Photo courtesy of Danielle Clode.
The fires killed and injured more than 60,000 koalas and incinerated the highly flammable eucalyptus forests on which koalas depend, leaving the species already beleaguered by habitat loss, infectious disease, and myriad other threats, even more at-risk.
Koalas, masters of sending their throaty, guttural bellows across long distances, soon became messengers to the world about the devastation that our actions are bringing to many other species. Heartbreaking images and videos of the large-nosed, fluffy-eared marsupials went viral around the world – koalas sitting in laundry baskets in rehab centers with singed fur and burned paws, koalas cowering and silhouetted in burning trees against apocalyptic orange backdrops, koalas sipping from the water bottles offered by firemen and good samaritans. Koalas evinced both the toll of climate destruction, but also humans’ capacity for action and compassion for non-human animals. Yet, as our podcast guest has written, for as visible as they are and how much they have to teach us about ourselves and our world, there’s so much we don’t know about these unique, often misunderstood creatures.
The fossil record acts as both a memorial to life’s spectacular possibilities and as a warning to humanity about how fast dominance can become forgotten history, according to our guest, Scottish paleobiologist Dr. Thomas Halliday. Halliday’s research investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. In his magnificent and daring new book Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Halliday translates cutting-edge science into vivid portraits of sixteen fossil sites and their inhabitants extending back 550 million years.
“To look at the skull of an extant freshwater crocodile is to read a character description. The buttressed processes and arches evoke Gothic architecture, here resisting not the weight of a cathedral roof but the powerful force of the jaw muscles. The high-set eyes and nostrils speak of low swimming, peering, and breathing just above the water surface; the long series of teeth, pointed but round, and set in a long, sweeping snout, suggest a feeding style of swiping, grabbing and holding prey, suitable for catching slippery fish. The scars of life are there, with fractures sustained knitted together. Lives leave their marks in detailed, reproducible ways.” – Thomas Halliday
In this podcast episode, we speak with Halliday about his travel guide to the history of multicellular life on Earth, the fragility of ecosystems, how entire extinct worlds are reconstructed from remnants in the Earth’s crust, and the importance of realizing that the lives and the worlds that we know were preceded by hundreds of millions of years of other life and other worlds, “simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.”
The rock record of the Earth is “an encyclopedia of the possible, of landscapes that have disappeared,” Halliday writes. “This book is an attempt to bring those landscapes to life once more, to break from the dusty, iron-bound image of extinct organisms or the sensationalized, snarling, theme-park Tyrannosaurus, and to experience the reality of nature as one might today.”
“When things get overwhelming in the larger world, what I tend to do is look at smaller things, pay attention to what’s living in my pollinator garden,” Margaret Renkl says. “This year we had a bird grasshopper. I’ve never seen one in this yard in 25 years in this house. One of those very large, finger-long grasshoppers. It was hilarious because it just set up camp there and watched me while I was doing what I needed to do. And that was just very encouraging, to see life going on.” (Photo by Heidi Ross)
In the long months we’ve all been confined to our homes, many people have become reacquainted with the vibrant life just outside their doors. Through the exploding interest in birdwatching, gardening, and other backyard adventures, even in the face of this year’s grief and pain, many people have found unexpected joy, companionship, and hope through partaking in the cycles of love and loss that happen in the skies and yards around us. The author E.B. White wrote, “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” It is this wonder, from the nesting chipmunk family under her house, to watching a monarch butterfly emerge from a chrysalis in her yard, that our guest in this episode captures so evocatively. Through her writing, Margaret Renkl offers a vast window to that wonder, conveying the profundity to be found in the wild–and not so wild–world and how we live in concert with other living beings.
But these days, loving nature and mourning it go hand in hand. At the foundation of our environmental crises lies humanity’s extreme disconnect from nature. From disappearing forests and rising seas to shorter winters and toxin-laced waters, humans have tried to dominate the natural world, attempting to see ourselves as distinct and untethered from the other living things around us. Renkl is a voice for celebrating our communion with the natural world once again and changing how we live. As she wrote in one of her recent New York Times columns on the mass killing of millions of minks in Denmark that contracted coronavirus, “Our mistake was only partly in believing that the natural world was ours for the taking. Our mistake was also in failing to understand that we ourselves are part of the natural world. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped. We must begin right now to make preserving biodiversity a priority, to make protecting wildlife habitats a priority, to make living in closer harmony with our wild neighbors a priority.”
“A whale is a wonder not because it’s the world’s biggest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity.” – Rebecca Giggs (Photo by Leanne Dixon.)
In her genius debut book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, writer Rebecca Giggs introduces readers to blue whales that exhale canopies of vapor so high that their blowholes spout rainbows, to spade-toothed beaked whales that are so rare they’ve never been seen alive, and to sperm whales whose clinks are louder than the heaviest space rocket ever launched from Earth. In prose so deft it ought to be called poetry, Giggs describes scientific research on how whales shift the chemical makeup of our atmosphere, how they respond to solar storms that migrate vast unseen geomagnetic mountain ranges, and how a bestiary’s worth of fantastic creatures flourishes in whale carcasses as they sink to the ocean floor.
“Every species is a magic well,” E.O. Wilson wrote. “The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.” But, as Fathoms illuminates, there’s more than just mystery and wonder in the wells these days. Animals’ bodies and lives are polluted with reminders of ourselves. Into these magic wells, we have dumped our plastics and our poisons. As one example, Giggs describes a sperm whale that washed up dead on Spain’s southern coast. In its ruptured digestive tract, scientists found an entire flattened greenhouse that once grew wintertime tomatoes, complete with plastic tarps, plastic mulch, hoses, ropes, two flower pots, and a spray canister. The whale had also swallowed an ice cream tub, mattress parts, a carafe, and a coat hanger. And that was just the obvious human refuse. Toxins build up in whale blubber over years such that the concentration of pollutants in some whale bodies far exceeds that of the environment around them. We have turned the world’s largest animals into hazardous waste. ‘‘Would we know it,” Giggs asks, “the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?”
In the past, Rebecca Giggs says, “we thought the sea was kind of timeless and it would remain as it was ever so. Now that we know that it’s not that way, we also need to recognize that our power to change is there too – that we are not condemned to be changeless. I hope that, while the extent of our influence is revealed to be vast, so then too is our capacity to withhold damage.”
“The science is very clear about fisheries,” Daniel Pauly, the world’s leading fisheries scientist and Principal Investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us initiative, says. “You have to get rid of subsidies, you have to manage them, you have to prevent the fisheries essentially from committing suicide. A fishery left on its own will build capacity, will build bigger engines on bigger boats, more people will get in, and it will destroy the resource. That’s what it does if there is no management. It’s like your kids – if you leave them alone with a pan of chocolate, they will eat until they get sick. You have to tell them don’t eat the chocolate, or give them one chocolate at a time. This is the paradox, that the NGO industry is seen by the fishing industry and fisher communities as the enemy. We are the people that prevent them from committing suicide.” Photo by Alison Barrat, courtesy of Sea Around Us.
Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. He did this by, as he quoted from Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, “sciencing the shit out of it.”
Dr. Pauly as a boy. “I’ve read a bit about children that had difficult youths,” Dr. Pauly says. “It turns out that most of us end up badly, but there is a small percentage that is resilient. And I have been one of them.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we.
If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.
In 1995, Dr. Pauly — photographed here on a boat in the Philippines — coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how each new generation accepts the state of the natural world in which they were raised as “normal.” Lack of historical data and awareness warps perception about the severity of ecosystem transformation actually taking place. “It is happening so fast that young people now are not used to the winters that old folks like me recall,” Dr. Pauly says of climate change. “They don’t recall snow all over the place. They don’t recall cold in the winter, because often it’s not cold anymore. And if you add two generations, the stories they will read about how things were will not be credible anymore, and they will not be motivated to make any sacrifice to get back to the past. And so we can have a situation where we have every generation accommodating itself to a change that overall can be devastating.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“We must now, more and more, have the scientists speaking up,” Dr. Pauly says. “Because if they don’t, they leave the field to the politicians and to the pundits and to people who don’t know, and who make an agenda that is science-free. Science is actually not only what you can do, but also what you cannot do. It is okay to know what kind of things you shouldn’t be doing.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“I’ve been at this for almost twenty years now, and in my time, the vast majority of protected areas that have been established and designated in Canada have been either led or co-led by Indigenous Peoples,” Valérie Courtois, founder and director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI), says. “The boreal forest contains up to a quarter of the world’s freshwaters and wetlands. It has the largest terrestrial storehouses of carbon in the globe. These are things that Indigenous Nations know intrinsically about those landscapes. And so what the ILI does really is to provide a national kind of voice and framework for advocacy of that leadership that is existing on the ground.” Photo courtesy of Nadya Kwandibens.
In 2017, seven Indigenous Nations and groups in Eastern Canada came together to sign an historic agreement to save a herd of caribou that had sustained all of them for time immemorial. The region’s caribou herd was once the world’s largest with 800,000 individuals. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples and the caribou met in this region. But then the herd began disappearing. By 2018, there were only 5,500 caribou left in the herd – a 99 percent decrease from 20 years before. Canada’s governments weren’t taking action, so these Indigenous Nations stepped in to save the herd. Overcoming long-entrenched divisions, and united by their common relationship to the caribou, these Nations created a groundbreaking framework for sustainably managing the herd and stopping its decline.
That agreement, known as the Ungava Peninsula Caribou Aboriginal Roundtable, or UPCART, is just one of many examples of how Indigenous Peoples across Canada are leading the way on protecting some of the world’s most ecologically important ecosystems and treasured wildlife. For millennia, Indigenous Peoples have been the caretakers of the land and have relied on animals–caribou, marten, goose, and the abundance of other animals that call Canada home. But industrial development, such as logging and mining, is putting much of the country’s wildlife and wild places at risk–along with the ways of life that depend on them. While Canada’s provinces drag their feet on needed protections, Indigenous Nations are combining Indigenous knowledge, western science, and thoughtful strategy to chart a new path for their people and for the rest of the world.
Prior to UPCART, “the only management tool that the governments were using with respect to the caribou was ‘hunting on, hunting off,'” Cortois says. “The UPCART’s strategy plan really takes much more of a nuanced approach that looks at the conditions on the ground, what we know about the population size, and the dynamics that are driving that population size – and then also prioritizes access to the Indigenous Nations as the rights-holders for those areas.” Photo courtesy of Pat Kane.
Zak Smith, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, works to safeguard some of the world’s most iconic and at-risk species.
Until recently, the wildlife trade, for many Americans, was a disturbing, but far-off, concern. Every so often, Twitter would erupt in outrage over pictures of someone engaged in trophy hunting, or the occasional Florida Man would have a run-in with an escaped pet python in the Everglades. But, over the last few months, the wildlife trade has hit very, very close to home, in one of the most disruptive possible ways. Many of the early COVID-19 cases were people who had direct exposure to a live animal market, where farmed and wild-caught exotic species were stacked in cages as they waited to be sold and slaughtered. This unnaturally close contact — among species that would rarely or never meet in any circumstance other than through the wildlife trade — creates ideal conditions for animal pathogens to jump species barriers.
Smith and experts discuss the boundaries of China’s Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, part of China’s ambitious new national park system. The territory is home to about 30 Siberian tigers and 40 Amur leopards, which need non-fragmented habitat for their populations to grow.
“The epidemiologist Larry Brilliant once said, ‘Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,'” science journalist Sonia Shah recently wrote in The Nation. “But pandemics only remain optional if we have the will to disrupt our politics as readily as we disrupt nature and wildlife. In the end, there is no real mystery about the animal source of pandemics. It’s not some spiky scaled pangolin or furry flying bat. It’s populations of warm-blooded primates: The true animal source is us.” Photo by Glenford Nuñez.
In recent weeks, as Covid-19 has killed thousands, brought public life to a standstill and crippled global markets, the pandemic has been called a “black swan,” a term investors use to describe severe events that are unpredictable and extremely rare. But this coronavirus was no black swan to the scientists and journalists — including our guest, investigative journalist Sonia Shah — who were paying attention to the environmental, social, and political conditions that fuel the eruption and spread of infectious diseases. Shah and scientists she writes about have been warning the public for years of the mounting risk of a pandemic like Covid-19 and the ways in which our treatment of animals and our planet can cause unseen, but deadly, consequences.
It’s now widely known that Covid-19 originated in wild animals before jumping the species barrier to humankind. It’s not alone. Roughly two-thirds of all emerging infectious diseases begin in the bodies of animals, mostly wildlife. Microbes have spilled over from animals to humans for time immemorial. But, as humans dominate the biosphere, the pace at which pathogens are making that jump is getting faster and faster. SARS, Zika, H1N1, Ebola, HIV– and now COVID-19 –can all be traced to how we are interacting with animals and their habitats.
“From cows, we got measles and tuberculosis; from pigs, pertussis; from ducks, influenza,” Shah writes in Pandemic. “But while animal microbes have been spilling over into humans (and vice versa) for millennia, it’s historically been a rather slow process. Not anymore.” You can buy Pandemic here.
Sonia Shah has spent years diving into the origins of pandemics and the complex interplay between humans, animals, and pathogens. The disease backstories that Shah has investigated are powerful illustrations of the devastating costs of treating human health as independent of animal and planetary health. Shah is the author of five critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, medicine, human rights, and international politics. Her work has been aptly called “bracingly intelligent” by Nature and “dazzlingly original” by Naomi Klein.
“In a very short time period, essentially since the Great Acceleration after World War II, we’ve engineered these vast industrial systems the planet over that are designed to generate food in a particular way for humans, and as a result humans have been more and more distanced from the possibility of right relations with the non-human world,” Kysar says. “How do we recreate those conditions that enable understanding of ourselves as part of a community of communities with intercommunal obligations?” Photo by Harold Shapiro/ Yale Law School.
Our species’ treatment of other animals raises deep questions of conscience, of consciousness, and of the consequences of human actions for other living beings. These are questions of science, but also questions of law and of power. Often, they are questions of who counts and who doesn’t. Throughout their careers, in distinct but related ways, our two guests today have made the case — in writing, in the courtroom, and in the classroom — that harms to other forms of life, including animals, the environment, and future generations, matter profoundly. Rather than accepting that these “other” beings reside outside the scope of law, they have argued that we must work to expand our moral imaginations and strive, be it ever asymptotically, toward the goal of universal recognition and respect for life.
Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of Yale Law School’s new Law, Ethics & Animals Program, also known as LEAP. LEAP is a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to inspiring and empowering Yale scholars and students to address industrialized animal cruelty and its impacts, and to advance positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend. In fall 2017, Lovvorn and Kysar co-taught the first full-credit course on animal law offered in Yale Law School’s history, building on years of growing student interest and reading groups. The class marked the beginning of a creative partnership and a dynamic collaboration between one of the nation’s most distinguished environmental law scholars and one of the nation’s most accomplished animal law practitioners.
In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.
In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey,the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.
Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”
In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen. Continue reading Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time
