“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.
“If I were to have my way on public lands, if I could do anything I wanted in a program of action to save them from destruction, top of the list would be a cow exorcism,” Ketcham writes. “[If cows were removed,] we would have an ecological recovery the likes of which has never occurred in modern history.” Photo courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
For the past ten years, investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham has documented the battles being waged over the fate of the federal public lands in the American West. Ketcham has extensively roamed this landscape of deep canyons, 10000-foot plateaus, sagebrush seas, mountains, deserts, and forests — “places of beauty and wildness,” he writes, “where no one person, or institution or corporation, is supposed to be privileged above the other.” This land, as Woody Guthrie once sang, belongs to you and me. It belongs to every citizen of the United States.
But today, Ketcham writes in his new book, “the government agencies entrusted to oversee it are failing us. The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government. The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only. I went west to see what we were losing as a people.”
Map of federal public lands in the western United States. “It is still possible in this country to find wild, clean, open spaces, where the rhythms of the natural world go on as they should, relatively undisturbed by industrial man,” Ketcham writes. “I fear the opportunity, though, could disappear in our lifetime.” Courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
“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.Continue reading Ep. 23 – David Rothenberg on playing music with whales and nightingales
“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.
“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,” Jabr says. “… Not only is the environment shaping organisms, but organisms in turn are shaping the environment…so we can think of earth as a kind of living entity.” Photo by Salim Jabr.Jabr on a reporting trip for a New York Times feature story on ethnobotany, “Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis?” “I think too much science writing stops at the level of translation, and there’s a great service in translating science into something that’s lucid and understandable, but I think really good science and non-fiction writing has to go beyond that,” he says. Photo by Kate Nelson.Continue reading Ep. 22 – Ferris Jabr on reviving the Gaia hypothesis
David Barrie in the land of the bogong moth. Bogong moths fly a thousand or more kilometers in their annual nocturnal migration from their breeding grounds in southeastern Australia to high, mountain caves in the Australian Alps. Like migratory birds, these moths rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to guide their routes. New discoveries indicate that the moths also use the alignment of the Milky Way to navigate. Photo by Eric Warrant.
It has been said that the Sahara desert ant, Cataglyphis fortis, is a navigational miracle. These tiny insects live in the barren salt pans of North Africa, where ground temperatures soar to 145 F — too hot for almost any animal to survive. They live underground and leave their nests at the hottest time of day to avoid predators and to forage for food (typically other insects that have died of exposure). To avoid being burned to a crisp themselves, the ants must be as efficient as possible in returning to their nest. How does the desert ant find its way back, sometimes over distances of 100 meters, via the fastest route? The answer, our guest, award-winning author David Barrie writes, is astounding and flat-out humbling. So too is the ingenuity of the scientists who study them. Here, he writes, is “a small insect capable of performing navigational feats that we humans can only manage with the help of instruments.”
Barrie with a bogong moth on his right thumb in the snowy mountains of New South Wales. “Discoveries about animal navigation can help us recognize what is at risk…” he writes. “Even if our own lives did not depend on the health and vitality of the planet we inhabit, the preservation of the almost infinitely complex web of life from which such wonders emerge is surely an ethical imperative … We must plot a new course.” Photo by Eric Warrant.Continue reading Ep. 21 – David Barrie on the wonders of animal navigation
“When I see people standing on the faces of cetaceans, what is it that they’re doing? We’re mastering,” Cowperthwaite says. “We’re trying to be bigger than and better than them. What does that say about us?”
The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of SeaWorld, and make her an unexpected enemy of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Cowperthwaite wasn’t a marine mammal activist before she made the documentary Blackfish. She was a mom who had taken her kids to SeaWorld, and she was a talented filmmaker, with over a dozen years of experience creating TV documentaries. She set out to tell the truth, and the truth — told by Cowperthwaite — proved to be, like the orcas themselves, complicated and powerful.
Blackfish is the story of a single 12,000-pound protagonist, a performing orca bull named Tilikum, who killed three people while in captivity. In tracing Tilikum’s narrative, from his violent capture in the wild as a two-year-old orca to his life as a highly feeling and intelligent animal becoming psychotic while living in what one interviewee calls “a bathtub,” Cowperthwaite reveals the orcas’ extraordinary nature, the horror of how we have treated them in captivity for so long without understanding or acknowledging the consequences, and the profound regret of trainers who once cared for Tilikum. In doing so, Cowperthwaite illuminated for the American public the profound disconnect between Sea World’s public image and the reality of what it means for humans to treat orcas this way.
“As a little kid, the thing you do when you go to [zoos] is knock on the glass,” Cowperthwaite says. “It’s the first thing you do. Even as an adult you have to stop your impulse to tap on the glass. It’s not that you want to see [the animal], it’s that you want it to see you. The idea that we will be acknowledged by something ‘out there’ is electrifying to us.”
Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful and successful documentary films of all time. Sea World’s stock price plummeted 60 percent following the film’s theatrical premiere, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to provide $1 million toward a study on the effects of captivity on orcas, and celebrities, airlines, fast food giants and musical tour groups spoke against and dropped associations with Sea World. Eventually, the company responded to public pressure by announcing changes at its theme parks, including officially ending its orca breeding program and phasing out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. Cowperthwaite’s David slayed SeaWorld’s Goliath not with a sword, but with a story.
In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.
In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey,the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.
Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”
In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen.Continue reading Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time
“If you think that other animals are stupid and exploitable and basically just available to us, typically what that has meant is that we exploit them more and more,” Anthony West says. “What this produces is a totally non-adapted, genuinely stupid creature.”
In his paper “A New Cosmogony,” the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem asked how it can be possible that from the vast cosmos, most likely filled with intelligent beings other than ourselves, we have so far heard nothing. The problem is more commonly known as the Fermi Paradox: given the high probability that other intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, why does it seem that none of them has ever tried to contact us?
In his blazingly original paper, “Radio Astronomy as Epistemology,” our guest, philosopher Anthony Weston, formulates a response to the Fermi Paradox. What we take to be the silence of the universe, he suggests, may teach us more about ourselves–and the challenges of receptivity to nonhuman minds in general–than about the prevalence of other life. “Suppose,” he writes, for the sake of argument, “that some extra terrestrial intelligence briefly scans our portion of their sky in search of ‘messages.’ Could they recognize our TV transmissions–for them just one fluctuating electromagnetic impulse among billions of others…–as a product of intelligent beings? … A TV signal is certainly not constructed to be easily decoded by anyone else. We cannot assume,” he continues, “that the ETIs are so unlucky as to have thought of television.”
