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.”
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.”
