“The first part of a manatee that I saw was a big white scar,” Patrick Rose says. “As I got closer, I could see how that was affecting the manatee itself. That is still imprinted in my mind today. It just really endeared me to them. It strengthened all the thoughts and feelings that I had already: that we need to do more to protect these defenseless animals from this type of cruelty, even though the cruelty is not intended.” Photo by Patrick Rose.
Florida’s waterways are home to beloved and iconic gentle giants, manatees. These half-ton, lumbering mammals – with their wrinkled, whiskered skin and paddle-shaped tails – are believed to have evolved from the same grass-eating land ancestor as elephants over 50 million years ago. Florida manatees are famously playful, sensitive, and inquisitive. They spend much of their lives grazing, cow-like, on meadows of seagrass; congregating in warm-water refuges; expressing emotion through complex chirps, whistles, and squeaks; nursing and caring for their young; nuzzling each other with their noses; hugging with their flippers; and maneuvering slowly at around 3 to 5 miles per hour through the state’s rivers, estuaries, and shallow coastal waters. These remarkably peaceful herbivores have no natural predators and express no aggression towards other creatures. Despite being so gentle and defenseless, they can live more than sixty years in the wild. But, today, few do.
The iconic Florida manatee is facing a multitude of intersecting, human-caused crises. Nearly all of the estimated remaining 7500 Florida manatees have been scarred by boat strikes, while more than half are estimated to have the toxic pesticide glyphosate coursing through their veins. Years of worsening water quality from Florida’s unfettered agricultural pollution and real estate development have resulted in increased toxic algae blooms that block sunlight from reaching the seagrass meadows upon which the manatees depend. Fishing gear entanglement, habitat loss, and climate change are also driving major manatee losses. In 2021, Florida’s manatees died en masse, with a record 1,100 manatees – more than 12 percent of the state’s total manatee population – perishing. Most died of starvation.
“Even though it is a large and strong marine mammal, the manatee is defenseless,” says Patrick Rose, a leading Florida manatee expert and advocate. “They’re not capable of being aggressive. They’re that wonderful animal that just wants to go along and get along with everyone. The problems they have are really all problems that man has caused, and if we fix those problems, we fix them for man, too.” Photo courtesy of Save the Manatee Club.
It’s hard to imagine a more lovable or compelling creature than a manatee, but enthusiasm is not enough to save them. For manatees to have a chance, that love needs to be translated into enforced protections for both these animals and their habitats.
Our guest, Patrick Rose, has devoted the past 45 years to propelling Florida manatees to public prominence and to advocating on their behalf with extraordinary dedication, creativity, and effectiveness. Rose is the executive director of the Save the Manatee Club. An aquatic biologist, he is one of the world’s leading experts on the Florida manatee. He was the first biologist hired by the State of Florida to do work related to protecting manatees, and has advocated on their behalf before the Florida Legislature, governor, and Cabinet, provided policy guidance and direction for state-wide recovery efforts, and served as a member of every federal manatee recovery team. As one of his colleagues once put it, Rose is the ‘MVP of manatee protection.’ Over the past couple years, as manatees have made headlines for the crises they face, he has served as their spokesperson and much needed champion.
In 2020, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil published her first nonfiction book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. In the book’s thirty dazzling essays, Nezhukumatathil weaves love stories about being a daughter, a partner, a mother, and a teacher with reverence for wild animals and plants and what they give us – their ability to expand our imagination and empathy, to connect us to others, to unearth memories, to break our habits of thinking, to teach us lessons big and small, and — perhaps most of all — to simply leave us gobsmacked, humbled, and thrilled to remember that creatures like narwhals and newts exist in this world.
“Wonder is contagious. Awe and astonishment is contagious. I think this book has served as an invitation for people to say, ‘God, I remember this!’ or ‘I did this with fireflies’ or ‘did you ever see this kind of firefly?” … And oftentimes, the most heartwarming stories involve siblings or parents who aren’t around anymore, that they hadn’t even thought of a particular outdoor memory of them for so long. I just feel so grateful that for whatever reason, my book has served as a spark or conduit to get them thinking.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Photo by Caroline Beffa)
At a time when reflection on the natural world is often defined by despair and loss, Nezhukamatathil’s work is exuberant and full of contagious joy for the beauty and kinship that the world still offers us. The daughter of a Filipina mother and a Malayali Indian father, Nezhukamatathil writes about the human and non-human organisms she has learned from and who have shaped her. The peacocks that she fell madly in love with as eight-year-old on her first trip to India, and then proudly drew in class in small town Iowa, only to be reprimanded by her teacher for not drawing an “American” animal. The beloved and lost pet cockatiel, Chico, that her parents spent hours frantically searching for, and eventually found safe and sound on the tip-top of the persimmon tree. The superb bird of paradise whose spectacular courtship moves parallel the ebullient synchronicity of the dance floor at her wedding when the DJ played the “Macarena.” The fireflies that remind her of summer nights with her parents and sister in their Oldsmobile.
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.”
“These laws [of biology] are often very much at odds with our daily behavior,” says Dr. Rob Dunn. “In the context of a world that we’re rapidly changing, they seem actually to be growing in their importance, rather than contracting. And they’re not really a part of our discourse. We tend to get caught up with Elon Musk flinging himself out into space, and not pay attention to the fact that whatever we do in space, the species that we bring with us into space are still going to obey the rules of life that we’ve come to understand here on Earth.” Photo by Amanda Ward.
Humans try hard to control the natural world. We’ve dammed and straightened meandering rivers and filled in wetlands. We’ve transformed primordial forests into farms and turned oceans into highways. Humans and our domestic animals now account for an estimated 96 percent of all terrestrial mammal biomass. Wild mammals account for just four percent. Amid the cataclysms of the Anthropocene, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary shapers of our planet. But for all our efforts to tame, simplify, and cordon off nature, we remain just as beholden to the world’s ecological laws as we were more than 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Like the laws of physics, paying attention to our planet’s biological laws empowers us to understand how the world works and to make predictions about the outcomes of our actions. In his latest book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn – an extraordinarily creative author and ecologist – warns that continuing to ignore these laws will cause us to fail again and again in our attempts to build a sustainable future for our species.
Dunn makes the case that the human species will survive not by simplifying and isolating, but through embracing biodiversity and living in accordance with the knowledge that we are at the mercy of the law of natural selection, the species-area law, and the diversity-stability law, to name a few examples. These laws aren’t merely fascinating phenomena. Understanding these inescapable rules of ecology is key to our survival and quality of life. Whether or not we heed them will have profound consequences for our future.
When Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872, gray wolves — which had roamed and shaped North America’s landscape for millions of years — were being massacred nationwide in a government-led extermination campaign. The eradication of these predators, who were cast as livestock-threatening villains, began soon after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Bay. The colonists set bounties on wolves and the war escalated in the decades to follow. As our guest once documented, wolves and their pups were shot, trapped, hunted with dogs, poisoned, dragged from dens, baited with fish hooks, set on fire, and intentionally infected with mange. One community even paved a road with wolf carcasses. In Yellowstone, the job was completed in 1926 when the last two pups in the park were killed.
Wolf 21 — one of Yellowstone’s most revered and beloved alpha males — howls as he approaches the long-dominant Druid Peak Pack. Born in 1995, Wolf 21 was known for never losing a fight, never killing a defeated opponent, and for his deep commitment and visible affection for his mate, Wolf 42. Video still by Bob Landis.
The loss, brutality, and profound ecological consequences of this atrocity slowly began to sink in. Seventy years after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed, the U.S. government took unprecedented measures to reclaim what it had destroyed. In 1995 and 1996, more than thirty wolves from multiple packs were brought to the park from Canada and released in a grand experiment that would become the most successful wildlife reintroduction effort in history. Within years, more than 100 wolves in 10 packs were thriving across the 2.2 million acre park and the ecosystem was rebounding spectacularly. The roughly 100 wolves that live in the park today — which awe, inspire, and fascinate millions of visitors each year — are their descendants.
Our podcast guest, the internationally renowned wolf expert Rick McIntyre, has dedicated his life to those wolves. As a ranger naturalist, he spent more than 40 years observing wolves in America’s national parks. For the past 26 of those years, he’s observed the wolves in Yellowstone nearly every day, accumulating more than 100,000 sightings — more than any other person in history. What Rick saw unfolding through his telescope is awe-inspiring: epic adventure stories of wolf family dynasties. He watched wolves perform acts of bravery and kindness, suffer crippling injuries, conquer enemies and then treat them with benevolence, wage war over territories, form lifelong partnerships with touching loyalty, and play exuberant games of king of the castle. His work leaves no doubt that wolves are individuals with unique personalities, emotions, and complex relationships like our own. His stories have shown millions of people that these still-persecuted animals deserve our respect and need our empathy.
“One of the things that strikes you, probably more than anything else, is what emotionally fulfilled lives they live,” says McIntyre. “They have deep emotional connections to each other.” Photo by Julie Argyle.
Since retiring from the park service in 2018, Rick has published a magnificent series of biographies of some of Yellowstone’s most noteworthy wolves. These include The Rise of Wolf 8,The Reign of Wolf 21, and his latest book, The Redemption of Wolf 302. As the writer Nate Blakeslee aptly put it: “With this third installment of Rick McIntyre’s magnum opus, the scope and ambition of the project becomes clear: nothing less than a grand serialization of the first twenty years of wolves in Yellowstone, a kind of lupine Great Expectations.”
After retiring from the National Park Service, McIntyre wrote a series of biographies of Yellowstone’s greatest wolf leaders: Wolf 08, one of the first reintroduced wolves who grew from a runt into a powerful pack leader; his adopted and brave son, Wolf 21, known for his long and successful reign as king of the park’s Druid Peak pack, his deep devotion to his mate, and his unusual benevolence to his defeated rivals; and 21’s nephew, Wolf 302, who started life as an irresponsible Casanova, but transformed his character and died as a heroic father.
These stories are especially important right now. Wolves desperately need federal protection from extreme and cruel wolf-killing laws recently enacted in the states of Montana and Idaho. These laws could destroy the state’s wolf populations, undoing decades of progress. In this episode, McIntyre tells the extraordinary stories some of Yellowstone’s greatest wolves, describes the wolves’ unique personalities and the pack’s dynastic dramas, and explains why science-based federal action is needed to protect these wolves, who are at risk of being massacred once again due to draconian new state laws.
Wolf 302, whose life is the subject of McIntyre’s latest book, showed little promise as a renegade young wolf of living up to the legacies of the great Yellowstone wolf leaders who came before him. But Wolf 302’s character matured as he got older, and he ultimately came to lead — and sacrifice for — a new pack in his old age. “302 was a free spirit who marched to a beat that was different from the other male wolves I’ve known,” McIntyre wrote. Photo of Wolf 302 by Doug Dance.
McIntyre’s first book on the Yellowstone wolves, The Rise of Wolf 8, tells the story of the reintroduction of wild wolves to the park through the life of one of the original reintroduced wolves, Wolf 8. Born in Alberta, Wolf 8 (far left), his parents (center), and his three much-larger brothers (one of which is on the far right) were released in the park in the mid-1990s. The smallest of his brothers, Wolf 8 was mercilessly bullied in the pack’s temporary acclamation pen. As a yearling, he encountered a mother wolf, Wolf 9, and her eight pups in desperate straits after the pups’ father was illegally shot by a hunter. Unexpectedly, Wolf 8 bonded with the family and became the alpha male of the park’s largest pack until his death in 1999. Photo by Jim Peac, National Park Service.
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.
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.
