“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
“In a very short time period, essentially since the Great Acceleration after World War II, we’ve engineered these vast industrial systems the planet over that are designed to generate food in a particular way for humans, and as a result humans have been more and more distanced from the possibility of right relations with the non-human world,” Kysar says. “How do we recreate those conditions that enable understanding of ourselves as part of a community of communities with intercommunal obligations?” Photo by Harold Shapiro/ Yale Law School.
Our species’ treatment of other animals raises deep questions of conscience, of consciousness, and of the consequences of human actions for other living beings. These are questions of science, but also questions of law and of power. Often, they are questions of who counts and who doesn’t. Throughout their careers, in distinct but related ways, our two guests today have made the case — in writing, in the courtroom, and in the classroom — that harms to other forms of life, including animals, the environment, and future generations, matter profoundly. Rather than accepting that these “other” beings reside outside the scope of law, they have argued that we must work to expand our moral imaginations and strive, be it ever asymptotically, toward the goal of universal recognition and respect for life.
Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of Yale Law School’s new Law, Ethics & Animals Program, also known as LEAP. LEAP is a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to inspiring and empowering Yale scholars and students to address industrialized animal cruelty and its impacts, and to advance positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend. In fall 2017, Lovvorn and Kysar co-taught the first full-credit course on animal law offered in Yale Law School’s history, building on years of growing student interest and reading groups. The class marked the beginning of a creative partnership and a dynamic collaboration between one of the nation’s most distinguished environmental law scholars and one of the nation’s most accomplished animal law practitioners.
“When I started the book, the working premise of termites was that you could model them with a little robot,” author Lisa Margonelli says. “In a way that goes back to Descartes, who said that animals are soulless automata… What happened was the termites didn’t really act the way they were expected to act once they were in experimental situations… It was a revelation: the termites themselves were individuals.” (Photo by Lisa Margonelli.)
Nobody loves termites. We admire bees and ants for their industry and for their collective decision-making, but, as our guest has written, while parents dress their children in bee costumes and animated ants star in Dreamworks movies, termites are at best crude cartoons on the side of pest control trucks. These bugs are also comparatively unexplored in academic studies. Between 2000 and 2013, about 6000 papers were published about termites. 49 percent were about how to kill them. Despite the fact that termites collectively outweigh humans ten to one, they have lacked a popular writer to bring them to the forefront of public attention. Our guest, Lisa Margonelli, is that writer and champion for the termites.
“It was really kind of a revelation: the termites themselves were individuals,” Margonelli says. “To think that there’s a mound of 5 million termites and they’re individuals, that’s kind of a big thing.”
Her new book, Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, introduces us to termites and the scientists who study them, so we can see them — and ourselves — in a way we never have before. But this isn’t just a fascinating book about nature’s most underrated bug. What makes this book really special is that it uses termites as a new portal to explore some of the biggest questions we have about technology, power, morality, the nature of science and scientific progress, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.
There are at least 3,000 named species of termites. The genus Macrotermes, which is pictured here and found in Africa and south-east Asia, farms and builds its mound around a massive fungus. The maze resembles a giant wriggling brain, with folds and bends that increase the structure’s surface area. “[We] also have a brain that has a distinct architecture,” says Margonelli. “That architecture gives us certain limits to how to think about things without projecting narratives on them. And one of our biggest narratives is that they are little humans in insect suits giving us a demonstration of how life ought to be.”
(Photo by Lisa Margonelli.)
If you travel to Des Moines, Iowa and drive about 20 minutes southeast of the city center, you’ll find a large, unassuming cement complex with fenced in grounds. You’d never know it, but inside are five bonobos — including the world-famous 38-year-old Kanzi — thought to be the only remaining nonhuman apes capable of communicating verbally with humans. Not only have the bonobos in Iowa been shown to understand thousands of English words, but they are also capable of expressing wishes, plans, and opinions by pointing to pictograms developed by our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, as part of her extraordinarily ambitious thirty-year investigation into their minds. (Bonobos are humanity’s closest living relatives — an egalitarian, matriarchal cousin of the chimp, sometimes called the “make love, not war” ape.) The investigation has been polarizing among researchers who study language in recent years.
“We define humanness mostly by what other beings, typically apes, are not,” Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says. “With Darwinian theory, this idea that we were special because God created us special had to be put aside. And so language became, in a way, the replacement for religion.”
Our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, is a primatologist who has received global recognition for her contributions to the field of animal cognition and psychology. She is the author or co-author of over 180 scientific articles and of eight books, including Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind and the forthcoming Dialogues on the Human Ape with Laurent Dubreuil. Her numerous awards include honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Missouri State University, recognition from TIME magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2011, and selection by the Millennium Project as the author of one of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century. She currently teaches at Missouri State University and serves as president of the Bonobo Hope Initiative.
When We Talk About Animals is a Yale University podcast devoted to exploring the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human. On each episode, we bring you a conversation with a leading thinker whose work has furthered human understanding of what animals think and feel, questioned how our society commonly talks about and treats other creatures, and/or challenged us to rethink our place in the animal kingdom. We’ll be hosting field biologists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, sociologists, journalists, philosophers, artists, legal scholars, historians and other thinkers to speak on one of the most interdisciplinary and morally pressing topics of our time. The series is supported by Yale University’s Human Nature Lab and produced by the Yale Broadcast Studio. Listen and subscribe on iTunes,Soundcloud,Spotify, or Stitcher.
