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

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. 29 – Amanda Hitt on why the animal agriculture industry needs whistleblowers

*“Truth, no matter how unfortunate or unsavory, needs to be told*,” Amanda Hitt says. Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.

In an age where almost everything we eat is produced outside of public view, whistleblowers are critical to maintaining the integrity of our food systems. These principled insiders are often the first people to warn the public — often at grave personal cost — when food is unsafe, when workers face inhumane conditions, when food labels mislead consumers, and when animals and the environment are being abused. But who defends these front-line defenders?

Attorney Amanda Hitt has been a champion and visionary for protecting and empowering food system whistleblowers for over a decade. Hitt is the founder and director of the Food Integrity Campaign of the Government Accountability Project (GAP). Based in Washington, DC, GAP is one of the nation’s leading nonprofits dedicated to whistleblower advocacy and protection. Hitt’s clients have included USDA food safety inspectors in ultra-high-speed slaughterhouses, contract poultry farmers faced with exploitative contracts and company retaliation, and animal researchers privy to taxpayer-funded waste and cruelty.

Hitt and Government Accountability Project CEO and Executive Director Louis Clark present an award for truth-telling to former contract poultry grower Craig Watts at the Food Integrity Campaign’s 10th Anniversary Conference in 2019. Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.

In addition to litigating whistleblowers’ cases, Hitt and her team work to draw public attention to these whistleblowers’ stories and to turn their revelations into systemic legal reforms. In this episode, Hitt takes us inside the world of animal agriculture industry whistleblowers. We speak with Hitt about her clients’ stories and motivations, the patchwork of laws that provide protections and redress for whistleblowers, the reality behind her video game “Bacon Defender,” and why food animal welfare, public health, and worker rights are inextricably intertwined.

In 2018, the Food Integrity Campaign launched Bacon Defender, a satirical online game that draws attention to corporate greed in our feed system and challenges the Trump-era deregulation of the pork industry.

Founder and Director Amanda Hitt at the Food Integrity Campaign’s 10th anniversary conference in fall 2019. *“I’ve witnessed horrible outcomes as a consequence of whistleblowing [for the whistleblower],”* Hitt says. “They take a huge personal hit. But not one whistleblower, in the twelve years of my doing this, has ever said [they wouldn’t do it again] if faced with the opportunity … They know there is no sense in playing a game where one of the players is changing the rules.” Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.

Jennifer Skene and Amanda Hitt wearing FIC’s “Growing Resistance” campaign hats in the Yale Broadcast Studio.

Recommendations:

Every Twelve Seconds by Timothy Pachirat

“Bacon Defender: The Game“

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Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and Arctic ecology

For most of human history, bowhead whales interacted with human beings only as an occasional and relatively minor threat along the edges of their migration routes. When industrial whaling ships arrived at the turn of the 20th century, bowheads at first demonstrated little fear, approaching the vessels with curiosity and at times bumping into them, Demuth’s research revealed. As their kin were slaughtered, the whales’ behavior soon changed and they began to use sea ice in new, strategic ways to avoid hunting boats. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.

Were you to pass under a streetlamp at night in New England in 19th century, chances are good that you would find your path illuminated by a substance that originated in the Arctic Ocean. Whale oil, the waxy matter found in the skulls and blubber of these aquatic giants, lit the West during the industrial revolution. Producing a bright, odorless flame, it lit houses, roads, and factories, guided ships toward land, and lubricated the waterwheels and looms that helped drive the industrial revolution. It was the hunger for this substance, writes our guest, historian Bathsheba Demuth, that nearly wiped these leviathans off the planet and brought two warring world powers into contact with another way of relating to nature.

“The lack of ability to separate industrial killing from indigenous subsistence hunting emerges out of the sense that, well, we’re kind of above consuming at all as human beings, we’re special in some fundamental way; we don’t actually need to depend on animals or ecology in a direct sense; we can kind of coast above it all,” says Demuth. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.

“Commercial whaling ships,” writes Demuth, “sailed into a place where whales were not for sale, but were understood as souls by the Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi [peoples], who hunted them with expectations of a world constantly reincarnating and never easy to survive in. And there were the whales themselves, animals who, in the first years of this revolution, learned the danger of American ships and chose, with their behavior, to frustrate the desires of commerce.”

In her acclaimed book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, Demuth explores how capitalism, communism, and ecology have clashed for over 150 years in the remote region of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters stretching between Russia and Canada. Long before Americans and Europeans arrived to recruit its creatures into their economic programs, indigenous peoples living in these territories have practiced drastically different modes of association with the elements colonists regarded as natural resources. In reconstructing the confrontation between these practices and the rituals of early industrialization, Demuth remakes the possibilities of her genre. “What is the nature of history,” she asks, “when nature is part of what makes history?”

Ep. 27 – Ed Yong on telling the grand, urgent and surprising stories of animal worlds

*“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.

“Toughie,” the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, died in captivity in September 2016. The species is now considered extinct. Yong wrote about Toughie and the people who cared for him in his story, “Animal Extinction Caring for the Last of a Species.” Photo source: Brian Gratwicke.

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. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

“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.

“After I figured out the basics of how to be a lawyer, I quickly set about trying to make more animal lawyers because there weren’t enough of them,” Lovvorn says. Photo by Hope-Bigda Peyton.

Ep. 12 – Novelist Lindsay Stern on “The Study of Animal Languages”

“We spent most of our evolutionary history surrounded by other beings, not having conquered the earth, and with a very limited material culture,” Stern says. “There are tremendous emotional costs to becoming the only act in town, costs that I think we feel in how we relate to one another and how we think about who we are. One way to look at these draconian, absurd experiments [on animals] going on all over the world is to see them as a symptom of that.”

In March of 2016, a group of scientists reported a discovery from the forests of central Japan. Writing in Nature Communications, Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki and his team announced that compositional syntax, the property of speech that enables it to “express limitless meanings,” was not unique to human languages. It had been observed in the vocal system of a bird. The paper sparked a flurry of tweets. It was also picked up the popular press, and for good reason. Given the putative role of syntax in expressing higher order thought in humans, its presence in an avian vocal system suggested that when a bird sings it is not simply naming a stimulus in its immediate environment but, rather, expressing a thought.

“It’s amazing, the parts of yourself you can reach [writing fiction],” Stern says. “It’s an endless surprise, and that’s part of what makes it frightening.”

Ep. 10 – Dale Jamieson on love and meaning in the age of humans

Philosopher Dale Jamieson, pictured here with co-professor Danny, leads the NYU Animal Studies Initiative. “Part of the problem that we have is that we think we’re too important in all sorts of different ways,” he says.

For most of our planet’s history, geologic change on earth was steered by inanimate forces. Then modern humans arrived, triggering a new geological epoch now known as the “Anthropocene.” Coined in the 1980s by biologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized in 2000 by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, the word marks the transformation of the biosphere over the past 250 years—a change wrought not by solar radiation, tectonic activity, or volcanoes, but by human beings.