ecology Archives - Page 2 of 2 - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 38 – Margaret Renkl on finding wonder, grief, and inspiration in backyard nature

*“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.”

Renkl’s columns are often love letters to the Tennessee’s flora and fauna. *“How lucky I am to live in a home with windows,”* she writes in “Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human.” *“Against all odds — the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators — these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild.”* (Photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination

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)

But on the cutting edge of modern science, this orthodoxy is being questioned by scientists — including our guest Dr. Monica Gagliano — who think that plants are radically more sophisticated and sensitive than we’ve been giving them credit for. These plant researchers are willing to imagine the possibility that plants have senses like ours: the ability to hear, smell, see, taste, and feel; capabilities like learning, memory, and social networks; as well as entirely distinct ways of interacting with the world, such as detecting and responding to vibrations, electromagnetic fields, and chemical signals. Thanks to this growing body of work, we now know, for example, that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by sweetening their nectar; that plants can send airborne, chemical messages to warn each other of dangerous pests; and that plants can exchange carbon and signals through the fungal “wood wide web” connecting their roots. This new understanding of plants as active, information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies has led to the exciting and controversial field of “plant cognition.”

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.'”

Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

YaleUniversity · Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

*“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.”

Ep. 35 – J. Drew Lanham on finding ourselves magnified in nature’s colored hues

YaleUniversity · Ep. 35 – J. Drew Lanham on finding ourselves magnified in nature’s colored hues

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.”

Ep. 31 – Zak Smith on ending the international wildlife trade

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.

Ep. 30 – Sonia Shah on how animal microbes become human pandemics

*“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.

Ep. 26 – Ian Urbina on the Outlaw Ocean

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.

Ep. 23 – David Rothenberg on playing music with whales and nightingales

“Science and art,” Rothenberg says, “have different criteria for truth.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

When our guest, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg, was seventeen, he landed a summer job tracking the flightpaths of birds in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. One day, while transcribing the sweeping flightpath of a hawk, he suddenly lost sight of the creature. He sat down, listening, and heard a rustle in the leaves above him.

The raptor was sitting on a branch “right above me,” Rothenberg writes in his new book, Nightingales in Berlin, “looking down at the map where I’d been tracking his movements, as if he’d figured out what I was doing, much to his displeasure.”

Rothenberg was suddenly inspired. He set the map aside, picked up a small penny whistle, and began to play along, joining the chorus of birdsong overhead.

“You hear this crazy music under the water. When you join into it you realize it’s a whole musical world in which each whale is singing their own song and we’re not sure how much they listen to each other, how much they overlap …” Rothenberg says. “So it’s not so surprising that they’d hear you and change what they’re doing.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

Ep. 22 – Ferris Jabr on reviving the Gaia hypothesis

“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.

Ferris Jabr has written about how fish feel pain, how chickens perceive time, self-consciousness in elephants, the microbiology of winds and clouds, efforts to revive the American Chestnut, Emily Dickinson’s garden, the impact of moonlight on coral, and the history of humanity’s attempts to harness bioluminescence. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American, and his work has been anthologized by The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. His debut book about the co-evolution of Earth and life, Symphony of Earth, is forthcoming from Random House.