New York Times Archives - 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. 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. 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.