In her magnificent new book, The Sound of the Sea, journalist Cynthia Barnett explores the epic and often overlooked history of humanity’s relationship with seashells and the marine mollusks who make them. “This book is about seeing what has gone unseen,” she writes. “The life inside the shell; the Maldivian queens and others left out of history books; the connections between the human condition and that of the sea. Just as we’ve loved seashells for the gorgeous exterior rather than the animals that build them, we’ve loved the oceans as a beautiful backdrop of life rather than the very source.” Photo by Aaron Daye.
As kids, we learn that if you place a shell against your ear, it becomes an auditory portal to the ocean. It’s a powerful illusion as, merged with your ear, the shell creates an echo chamber of noises that transports us to breaking waves and sea breezes, creating a moment of intimacy and wonder between us and the natural world. Much as shells have done throughout human history, as journalist Cynthia Barnett writes in her exquisite new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. Since the dawn of humanity, our history has been inextricably tied to the pearlescent, the ribbed, the spiraling, the speckled, and the iridescent calcium carbonate wonders and the unsung animal artists of the ocean that create, inhabit, and leave them behind.
Shells are the legacies of some of the world’s most inventive and prolific architects: mollusks. Biomineralization, the process by which these animals recycle ocean minerals into hard protective structures, evolved in microorganisms more than 500 million years ago, which eventually gave rise to the tens of thousands of known mollusk species today. These soft-bodied creatures have, quite literally, shaped the world as we know it. As Barnett writes, “We walk on a world of shell.” From limestone aquifers, to chalk, to marble, shells made by soft-bodied animals are the foundation for much of life on earth and are a blueprint for our ever-changing planet, their fossils even documenting Mount Everest’s more humble origins in the seas.
“Something small reflecting something big – that is what this book is about,” Barnett tells us. “You mentioned that I teach journalism at the University of Florida, and part of what we teach young journalists is the beauty of finding something tiny to tell a big story. And I’ve been teaching that lesson for my whole career, and now, at this more advanced time in my career, I actually did that in a really huge way.” Photo by Betsy Hansen.
Early in her career, the ocean explorer and scientist Dr. Edie Widder received a phone call from a distraught physicist. The physicist was working on a major project aimed at detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that can give off faint flashes as they move through water. He and his colleagues needed the darkest place they could get, so they placed their ultra-sensitive light detectors deep in the ocean, beyond the reach of the sun’s rays. But there was a problem. The sensors were detecting a lot of light. A colleague suggested the light could be from animals. ‘Could it be true?’ the physicist asked Dr. Widder, now a world authority on marine bioluminescence. ‘Yes,’ she told him. And then, after a long pause, he followed up: ‘Is there some place in the ocean where there isn’t any bioluminescence?’ ‘Not that I know of,’ Dr. Widder replied.
“The open ocean is a place without hiding places,” Dr. Edie Widder tells us, explaining the origin of bioluminescence in the ocean’s creatures. “As the ocean filled up with predators that could see at a distance and swim fast, the only hope for prey was either to out-swim their predators or find a way to hide. And the best way to hide was to go down into the darkness. The problem is, the food is produced at the surface through photosynthesis. So animals would hide in the dark depths during the day, and only come up and feed in the surface waters under the cover of darkness. As a consequence, most of those animals spend most of their lives in darkness or near-darkness. So there’s been a lot of selective pressure to develop more sensitive eyes and advanced visual signaling, which is where bioluminescence comes in.” (Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
Like many of us land-lubbers, the physicist had assumed that light-making among ocean creatures is an exotic and rare phenomenon. But that’s wrong. The majority of animals in the ocean — which means the majority of animals on the planet — are capable of making light. From top to bottom, the ocean is absolutely teeming with unforgettably beautiful and extraordinarily diverse light shows made by living things that we’re only beginning to understand. There are deep-sea shrimp that spew glowing mucus like fire-breathing dragons to distract predators. Single-celled algae that glitter en masse as a form of burglar alarm. Crustaceans that put on complex, twinkling courtship displays. Fish that counter-illuminate their bodies to match the water above them for camouflage from creatures looking up from below. Squids that backlight their body tissue in flickering patterns that seem to coordinate group hunting. These are just a few examples of the roughly 75 percent of ocean animals that can make their own light. According to Dr. Widder, there are possibly quadrillions of light-producing fish in our seas.
Deep-sea shrimp, Heterocarpus ensifer, releasing bioluminescent “spew.” (Photos by Sönke Johnsen and Katie Thomas, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.)
Ecologist, author, and hedgehog advocate Hugh Warwick is leading a national campaign in the United Kingdom to make “hedgehog highways” — 13 centimeter holes in the bottom of fences that allow hedgehogs to move freely among gardens — a legal requirement for new housing developments. Warwick’s Change.org petition that has garnered almost a million signatures and international attention. Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.
European hedgehogs are perhaps the most beloved mammal in the United Kingdom. When the BBC Wildlife Magazine ran a poll a few years back asking readers which species should be the national icon, hedgehogs triumphed. But these endearing, small, strange, slug-munching, spiky creatures — named for their pig-like noses and the hedgerows in which they thrive — are being destroyed across the country that holds them so dear. It’s estimated that Great Britain’s hedgehog population has dropped by 90 to 95 percent since the second world war. Today, there are less than 1 million.
Industrial agriculture has driven the loss of hedgerow habitat that long characterized the British countryside, while farms’ use of pesticides is wiping out the insects that hedgehogs eat. Meanwhile, housing developments are breaking up habitat into smaller and more fragmented parcels, and motor vehicles every year mow down around 100,000 hedgehogs. That’s about one hedgehog in every five nationwide. There are other, smaller threats too that add up, from drowning in uncovered swimming pools to getting caught in litter rubber-bands and fast food cups. In 2020, hedgehogs were listed as vulnerable to extinction in the next twenty years on the Red List for British Mammals. Tragically, they have a lot of company. More than 40 percent of UK species have seen their populations plummet in recent decades.
But while the future of hedgehogs remains precarious, there is grounds for hope. Across Britain, people are turning their love for these creatures into action to try to save them in significant, surprising, and delightful ways. Take the country’s hedgehog highway, for example. Hedgehogs need up to 30 hectares worth of territory — around the size of an 18-hole golf course — to forage for food and find mates, but the average U.K. garden is a tiny fraction of that size.The Hedgehog Street project was launched ten years ago in an attempt to link these habitats by asking homeowners to put 13 inch diameter holes through their garden fences to give hedgehogs the pathways they need to survive. Nearly 14,000 such holes have since been created, linking entire neighborhoods and towns.
“We live in a landscape that has been turned into a linescape,” writes Warwick in Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife. “The hedges, ditches, roads, power lines, canals act as barriers for wildlife. We need to work with the linescapes to reconnect landscapes for wildlife. The habitat fragmentation that these barriers cause is one of the greatest threats to Britain’s wildlife.” Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.
This up-swelling of attention, love, and effort for hedgehogs is thanks in no small part to the contagious enthusiasm, relentless obsession, vision, and passionate career-long commitment of our guest, ecologist and hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick. Warwick has studied, celebrated, written about, and fought to protect hedgehogs and other British wildlife for more than 30 years. He is the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the author of five brilliant books on British fauna, including most recently TheHedgehog BookandLinescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife, which explores the impacts of manmade lines — including hedges, roads, walls, powerlines, and canals — on the ability of wild animals to thrive.
In this episode, we speak with Warwick about why hedgehogs need our help, his role as the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, the national campaign he is leading to make “hedgehog highways” a legal requirement for new housing, the extraordinary impacts of manmade lines — such as walls, roads, and power lines — on the ability of wild animals to thrive, and the importance of loving your hedgehogs.
“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.”
For Dr. Joseph Drew Lanham, love is a necessary component of science. “The left brain part of us is important as scientists, but ultimately what made me want to be a scientist was my love of birds: wondering where those snowbirds came from, wondering how those bobwhite quail survived from one thicket to the next, understanding that those eastern king bird were making these flights from tropical places every year to be at the home place. That was the beginning of the scientist, of the ornithologist, but that wouldn’t have happened without the love.” Photo courtesy of J. Drew Lanham.
From his earliest days growing up in the piedmont forests and fields of Edgefield South Carolina, Dr. Joseph Drew Lanham dreamed of flight. As he writes in his beautiful and deeply moving memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, this longing to join the aerial journeys of the blue jays that stole his grandmother’s pecans and the crows that invaded his father’s cornfield, led to Dr. Lanham’s lifelong dedication to studying birds and to exploring what it means to be a ‘rare bird’ himself: a black man in a field that is overwhelmingly white and an ecologist finding freedom through wildness on land where his ancestors were enslaved. While the cardboard wings he made as a child never achieved the skyward paths of the feathered beings he studies, his work — both academic and literary — has uplifted and inspired people around the world, and elevated and illuminated conversations about race, nature, history, freedom, and the power of birds.
Dr. Lanham believes ecologists experience a “trifecta of love, mourning, and loss – we’re in it because we love it, we mourn because we’re losing it, and we work hard because we want to save it. Hopefully in some of the saving comes celebration; and the celebration comes through hopefully in the writing. That’s part of my celebration, is to write, is to be able to talk about it, is to be able to hopefully sometimes bring some idea of the wonder of some rare bird to more people than might ever see it.” Photo courtesy of J. Drew Lanham.
In Dr. Lanham’s field of wildlife ecology, loss and hope are yoked. Since 1970, scientists estimate that three billion North American birds (nearly one in every three) have vanished — a staggering loss includes many backyard species that we have long taken for granted: sparrows, warblers, finches, blackbirds. In his research, Dr. Lanham has focused on the impacts of forestry and other human activities on the lives and disappearance of birds, butterflies, and other small forest creatures. You don’t just hear and see these animals, Dr. Lanham has said. You feel them, and when they’re gone, their absence is akin to the absence of a lover or a friend.
John James Audubon’s portrait of the now-extinct Carolina Parakeets. In his essay “Forever Gone,” Lanham points out that the escaped enslaved and Carolina parakeets both found refuge in the same deep swamp forests of the American South. “In the convergence of demands for human dignity and freedom, and nonhuman survival and existence, there are islands of empathy that emerge between our braided-river beings.
Lanham has written extensively about the deep and often overlooked connections between how we treat nature and how we treat our fellow humans. In 2013, he published a groundbreaking essay called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” that conveys the very real dangers that he and Black birders face–dangers brought to the national spotlight earlier this year from Christian Cooper’s assault while birding in Central Park. Racism and driving other creatures to extinction, Dr. Lanham says, are both built on the corrupt human belief that some are worthier than others. For humans and animals alike, he has said, “the fine line between life and death” is “defined by how intensely we care.”
“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.
“The sanctuary is a place where people can meet these animals, hear their stories, learn where they come from, and learn more about the food system,” Gene Baur, co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, says. “[People] recognize they can make choices that do not support this violent, cruel system and that they can relate to animals in a more friendly positive way. This is good for the animals and is also good for the people.” Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.
A few weeks before Charlotte’s Web was to be published, author E.B. White’s editor asked him to explain why he wrote the book about a livestock pig, Wilbur, who becomes friends with a heroic spider named Charlotte. In the now beloved novel, Charlotte saves Wilbur from slaughter by weaving messages — “SOME PIG,” “RADIANT,” “TERRIFIC,” and “HUMBLE” — into her web in the doorway of Wilbur’s stall. In doing so, she draws attention to Wilbur as an individual pig full of personality, and ensures that Wilbur is saved and cherished thereafter.
In response to his publisher’s request for explanation, White wrote: “A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree … that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. Anyway, the theme of “Charlotte’s Web” is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.”
That wish is also deep inside our guest today. For over 30 years, Gene Baur has been a heroic, real-life, highly strategic, two-legged “Charlotte” for thousands of farm animals, changing millions of hearts and minds about animals and food. Baur is the co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, one of the nation’s largest animal rescue organizations that provides refuge for animals who had been abused, confined, and commodified as part of the U.S. factory farm system. Compared to Farm Sanctuary’s rescues, Wilbur lived a great life. White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, just as factory farming was being invented and a decade before it began to rapidly spread – first with poultry, then pigs and cows. Today, 99% of U.S. farm animals spend their lives in large-scale industrial animal factories. Baur has made it his life’s work to try to change this.
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.
