“People often are best at learning when they encounter something that defies their expectations, where the gap between reality and expectation is the widest,” says Yong. “I think one wonderful thing about covering the animal kingdom is that there are so many such gaps. Animals constantly surprise us in what they do and what they are capable of; even the people who know them best and who study them, people who devoted their lives to the understanding of the animal kingdom, are constantly surprised.” Photo courtesy of Ed Yong.
“Every human being is a colony,” Pablo Picasso once said. The insight is made literal in Ed Yong’s acclaimed book, I Contain Multitudes, about our hidden relationship with the microbial world. “If we zoomed in on our skin,” he writes, “we would see them: spherical beads, sausage-like rods, and comma-shaped beans, each just a few millionths of a meter across. They are so small that, despite their numbers, they collectively weigh just a few pounds in total. A dozen or more would line up cosily in the width of a human hair. A million could dance on the head of a pin.”
These microbes are not just hitching a ride, but enabling us to become ourselves: they help digest our food, sculpt our organs, and craft and calibrate our immune systems. To be at all, Yong demonstrates, is to be in partnership with them. Yong’s work has contributed to a radical shift in how we understand animals — from discrete organisms motivated by competition to living islands, communities of hidden beings.
Ian Urbina aboard an Indonesian patrol ship called the Macan as it chases several Vietnamese fishing ships in a contested area of the South China Sea. Fishing boats in the South China Sea are notorious for using “sea slaves,” migrants forced offshore by debt or other illicit means. 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats. Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.
Over 40 percent of the Earth’s surface is open ocean that is over 200 miles from the nearest shore. These international waters exist outside national jurisdiction and almost entirely free of rule of law. World-renowned investigative journalist Ian Urbina spent five years reporting about what life is like for the humans who roam these seas and about the astonishing array of extra-legal activity that goes on there. Urbina travelled to every continent and every ocean — often hundreds of miles offshore — to report stories from this vast legal void. These narratives are compiled in his best-selling book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.
On the high seas, environmental crimes — such as overfishing and illegal dumping — are closely linked to human rights abuses on vessels around the world. Video by The Outlaw Ocean Project.
In his years of non-stop voyages, Urbina risked his life to bear witness to the inhumanity faced by humans in these waters. He witnessed shackled slaves on fishing boats, joined high-speed chases by vigilante conservationists, rode out violent storms, and observed near mutinies. He lived on a Thai vessel where Cambodian boys worked 20-hour days processing fish on a slippery deck, shadowed a Tanzanian stowaway who was cast overboard and left to die by an angry crew, and met men who had been drugged, kidnapped and forced to cast nets for catch that would become pet food and livestock feed. These stories and many others together make The Outlaw Ocean, a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a riveting portrait of a sprawling and often dystopian world where humans, animals and the environment are regularly treated with depravity.
Urbina is transferred up the coast by local, armed Somali police forces. “For all its breathtaking beauty,” Urbina writes, “the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.” Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.Continue reading Ep. 26 – Ian Urbina on the Outlaw Ocean
“When you start really trying to pin down the differences between the inanimate and the animate, that line becomes a lot blurrier and it becomes less clear what we mean by that in a non-colloquial sense,” journalist Ferris Jabr says. Photo by Shawn Linehan.
“One of the many obstacles to reckoning with global warming is the stubborn notion that humans are not powerful enough to affect the entire planet,” writes our guest, journalist Ferris Jabr, in a recent New York Times Opinion piece. “In truth,” he continues, “we are far from the only creatures with such power, nor are we the first species to devastate the global ecosystem. The history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking earth.”
Jabr argues that the time has come to revive an idea in biology known as the Gaia Hypothesis. Coined in the 1970s, the Gaia Hypothesis proposes that Earth is best understood not as a passive substrate or background to life but as a life form in its own right. It challenges us to rethink the definition of life—and with it, the process of evolution. To understand how sentient creatures have evolved on this planet, it suggests, is not only to grasp that animals are offshoots of an evolutionary tree; it’s to see the tree itself as one element of a dynamic, interrelated organism.
“When you start really trying to pin down the differences between the inanimate and the animate, that line becomes a lot blurrier and it becomes less clear what we mean by that in a non-colloquial sense,” Jabr says. “… Not only is the environment shaping organisms, but organisms in turn are shaping the environment…so we can think of earth as a kind of living entity.” Photo by Salim Jabr.Jabr on a reporting trip for a New York Times feature story on ethnobotany, “Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis?” “I think too much science writing stops at the level of translation, and there’s a great service in translating science into something that’s lucid and understandable, but I think really good science and non-fiction writing has to go beyond that,” he says. Photo by Kate Nelson.Continue reading Ep. 22 – Ferris Jabr on reviving the Gaia hypothesis
The early twentieth century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll studied the private worlds of animals, and the perceptual differences and similarities between our worlds. Uexküll used a musical metaphor to explain his idea that each organism has a distinct, subjective and all-consuming life-world. To Uexküll, in the words of Dorion Sagan, “Organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.” In his view, as Sagan writes, the multitude of earth’s organisms — a word derived from the Greek word, organon, for “instrument” — formed a many-membered orchestra of extraordinary richness.
“Our human gaze has been misdirected,” says journalist and poet Charles Siebert. “We look heavenward for deliverance when deliverance comes from looking down and back into the biology from whence we came and that great symphony we’re part of.” (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
Once, while attending a symphony by Gustav Mahler and sitting beside a young man absorbed in following along the score, Uexküll wondered if it is “the task of biology to write the score of nature.” “Each voice of a person or instrument is a being for itself, but one which melts into a higher form through point and counterpoint with other voices, which from then grows further, gaining richness and beauty in order to bring forward to us the composer’s soul,” he wrote. “Reading the score,” the young man sitting beside him told Uexküll, “one can follow the growth and branching off of the individual voices that, like the columns of a cathedral, bear the weight of the all-encompassing dome. Only in this way does one get a glance into the many-membered form of the performed artwork.” Our guest on this episode has devoted his career to observing and writing these interplaying “scores” of natures, the stories of animals, through prose and poetry. His work has allowed millions of readers to hear and appreciate anew strains of non-human animals in nature’s symphony.
“Words are all we have… We’re stuck with words, but there’s a way to manipulate them and use them to free our thoughts and our thinking rather than build cages,” Siebert says. The windowsill in Siebert’s office hosts a menagerie of animal figurines. Each represents an animal he’s written about, and many represent creatures that we are at risk of losing forever. (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
