In the not-too-distant future, twelve years after the last non-cloned giant panda has died, when biobanks of genetic data are the sole remnant of tens of thousands of vanished species, extinction has become an industry unto itself. A market of extinction credits – vouchers granting the right to kill off the last of a species – has made the eradication of the world’s biodiversity just another cost for companies. A cost that, thanks to loopholes and definitional workarounds, has become almost negligible. It’s a bleak future that, in the hands of British novelist Ned Beauman, becomes the backdrop to an arresting, cutting, and devastatingly funny story of two peoples’ quest to hunt down a very ugly, very intelligent, and very vengeful fish, the venomous lumpsucker.
“I think in the universe, there’s a whole spectrum of other minds,” Beauman tells us. “Some of them are probably in clouds of cosmic gas, some of them are in fish, some of them are on a server at Microsoft somewhere. They can all do different selections of things. There’s a whole rainbow of different minds in the universe. It’s like one of those n-dimensional scatter graphs. The minds are in different locations on the graph, but there’s no pyramid where humans are at the top. The idea that we could ever be at the top is an illusion that I think will only last ten more years.” Photo by Alice Neale.
Venomous Lumpsucker, Beauman’s satirical, vivid, tour-de-force fifth novel, follows Karin Resaint, an animal intelligence biologist, and Mark Halyard, an environmental impact coordinator for a multinational mining company, who each, for very different reasons, have a whole lot riding on finding any survivors of the eponymous species. Their mission takes readers across a Northern Europe 15 or so years in the future–one that’s been shaped by now-crumbling neoliberal efforts to rein in species collapse and climate change. From a biodiversity reserve that runs on revenue from extinction credits to a floating city that’s a regulation-free haven of biotech development, Resaint and Halyard search across set pieces at once both shocking and deeply believable. All the while, these two ill-matched, profoundly memorable characters debate the morality of human-caused species extinction and what cost–or even penance–we should have to pay for our destruction.
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.
Most books about puppies are dog-improvement manuals, guiding readers on ‘How to Raise the Perfect Dog’ or how to achieve ‘Perfect Puppy in 7 Days.’ Dr. Alexandra Horowitz‘s profound and totally delightful new book is not that type of book. It’s an unprecedented look at the complex, overlooked, and often hilarious journeys of puppies becoming themselves.
Horowitz spent a year studying the science of how puppies grow up while closely observing the development of her own new family member, Quid. “Instead of following an instruction manual for a puppy, I wanted to follow the puppy: through introductions to a new world, meeting suspicious older dogs, a playful feline with long claws, and an adolescent boy who, in his enthusiasms and energy, bridges the world between dog and human,” writes Horowitz. “By slowing down to observe the changes in our new charge from week to week, I hoped to make new sense of the dog’s behavior in a way that is missed in a focus only on training.” Photo courtesy of Alexandra Horowitz.
“Instead of following an instruction manual for a puppy, I wanted to follow the puppy,” she writes. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously watched his own three children grow into adults and his observations of them helped inspire many of his theories about how young human minds develop. Horowitz, a world-renowned expert in dog cognition, set out to do the same for her family’s spectacularly eye-browed, exquisitely sensitive, and rambunctious new bearded lady, Quiddity. In The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves, Horowitz observes, documents, and revels in the first year of Quid’s life from her birth on Day One through the puppy equivalents of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Horowitz is a bestselling author of multiple books on dogs, the host of the podcast Off Leash, and the founder and leader of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. She combines deep scientific expertise with the doggedness of an investigative reporter, the gift and imagination of a master storyteller, and the infectious enthusiasm of, well, a puppy. She has devoted her career to trying to answer the question, “what is it like to be a dog?,” and has inspired people around the world to try to better understand the complex inner lives of our closest four-legged companions. In this podcast episode, we spoke with Horowitz about the science of puppyhood, how Quid is enjoying her big literary debut, and what we have to learn from trying to understand how puppies encounter and make meaning of the world.
In The Year of the Puppy, Horowitz compares the development of young dogs and young humans. On the topic of dogs’ often downplayed communication abilities, she writes: “When a researcher (or parent) gushes over the creativity of a two-year-old child’s ability to put together words in a novel way, to express a new meaning—water plus bird for a duck, say—I smile, nod my head agreeably, and remember the moment that Quid put together two actions—walking over to the stairs to our bedroom, and looking at us—to express a new meaning: I need to pee. I’m just sayin’.”
“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.”
“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.”
Are plants intelligent? Can they think and feel? Can they communicate, learn, and solve problems? Throughout history, most Western philosophers and scientists answered these questions with a resounding “no.” Plants, despite having evolved so successfully that they account for about 80 percent of the world’s biomass, have long been treated as inanimate, silent, and unaware. In ancient Greece, Aristotle situated them below animals and just above minerals on his hierarchy of the perfection of living things. In this primitive yet still dominant view, plants are considered passive objects that form the backdrop to our active lives, rather than highly sensitive organisms with intelligence and agency of their own.
For centuries, indigenous healers and shamans around the world have learned from listening to plants. After conversing with plants in dreams and visions during a visit to the Peruvian rainforest, Dr. Monica Gagliano returned to her university inspired and began a series of groundbreaking and highly imaginative experiments on plant communication. “The plants themselves are the teacher,” she says. (Photo courtesy of North Atlantic Books)
Dr. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist whose daring and imaginative research has expanded our perception of plants and animals. Persevering against the scientific establishment, she pioneered the field of “plant bioacoustics,” the study of sounds produced by and affecting plants. The results of her groundbreaking experiments suggest that plants may possess intelligence, memory and learning, via mechanisms that differ from our own. Gagliano is a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia, and is the author of Thus Spoke the Plant. Her work has been featured by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker and on the RadioLab episode, “Smarty Plants.” She is currently based at the University of Sydney.
The plants used in Gagliano’s experiments, such as pea seedlings, rescued the scientist in her. “I was prepared to do something else,” she tells us, “but the plants were like, ‘Oh, not so fast! We’ve got some work for you. And you can take a sample, you can take a leaf, you can take whatever you need and that doesn’t kill us. So why don’t you work with us.'”Continue reading Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination
“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.”
