“Hope is the subject of much discussion in conservation circles, both the need for it and the lack of it,” Michelle Nijhuis writes inBeloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction. “Yet few if any of the most influential early conservationists were motivated by what might be called hope. They were motivated by many other things — delight, outrage, data — but they had little confidence that the work they were moved to do would succeed in rescuing the species they loved. They did it anyway.” Photo courtesy of Michelle Nijhuis.
In his seminal work on conservation, A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote of his view of humans’ moral responsibility to the natural world: “I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the result of a life journey.” Today, we tend to regard conservation figures like Leopold, and other giants like John Muir and Rachel Carson, as a pantheon, who penned a “conservation scripture” that reshaped our view of the natural world and pulled countless species back from the brink. Yet, as award-winning science journalist Michelle Nijhuis, writes in her superb new book, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, these vaunted figures have their own stories, filled with victories worthy of celebration, shifting ideologies, biases, imperfections, and unfinished work, all very much shaped by the worlds they lived in. And these stories–of how they loved, studied, hunted, preserved, and fought for animals both locally and around the world–ultimately tell a much broader tale of humanity’s relationship with animals.
In Beloved Beasts, Nijhuis tells the riveting history and evolution of the modern conservation movement. She introduces readers to the Swedish scientists who devised the system of naming and grouping species that endures today, the rebel taxidermist who led the fight to save the American bison from extinction, the New York City socialite who demanded that the Audubon Society stop ignoring the gunning down of game birds by sportsmen, and more. These inspiring, dogged, and often flawed characters transformed both the ecological communities and ideas that we inherited. In this episode, we speak with Nijhuis about what we can learn from the stories of past conservationists and their efforts to protect the wild animals that they loved.
In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician, he’d played guitar on Motown records as a teenager, replaced Pete Seeger in the folk band The Weavers in his twenties, and had become a pivotal figure in electronic music by age 30, mastering the synthesizer and introducing it to popular music and film. He worked with artists like The Doors and the Beach Boys, performed music and effects for iconic soundtracks for more than 130 films and shows like Apocalypse Now and Mission Impossible, and co-produced game-changing albums showing the world how the synthesizer could combine sounds into new timbres.
“My background is as a professional musician, so I have always thought of the sonic world as being a kind of chorus of sound,” Krause says. “It never occurred to me to take [animals] out and abstract them one by one. It’s a bit, to me, like abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the orchestra and trying to express the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You can’t really do it. You can play the theme, but it doesn’t give you the impact of it.” (Photo by Chris Chung, Press Democrat, Santa Rosa)
Then Warner Brothers commissioned his duo, Beaver & Krause, to create the first-ever album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats. Bernie headed into Muir Woods north of San Francisco with a portable recorder, mics, and stereo headphones. What he heard changed his life. A flowing stream; gentle winds in the tall redwood canopy; a pair of calling ravens, feathers resonating with each wingbeat. It was an immense new world of music. Listening to it made him feel calm, focused, and simply good in a way he hadn’t felt before.
Bernie decided he wanted to record wild animals for the rest of his life. And that’s what he did. He quit Hollywood, got a PhD studying bioacoustics (back when the field comprised about five people) and began traveling the world to record wild habitats. Over the past fifty years, he’s built what The New Yorker aptly called “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human.” His astonishing archive includes the sounds of more than 15,000 species, from barnacles twisting in their shells, to chorusing tropical forest frogs, to feeding humpback whales.
Visualizations of sound frequencies, known as “spectrograms,” are useful for understanding acoustic patterns in habitats. In 1995, in Vanua Levu, Fiji, Bernie Krause recorded two sections of the same reef: one alive and one dying. The first 15 seconds of this spectrogram capture what the healthy reef sounded like. Bernie estimates there were about 15 different types of fish. The latter 15 seconds were recorded within the same hour at a dying portion of the same reef, about 400 meters away. The diverse voices of fish are absent. All you can hear is snapping shrimp and the waves. (Courtesy of Bernie Krause)
Previous wildlife records isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Bernie recorded habitats as a whole. Hearing the interwoven sounds of plants, animals, and landscapes and the complex interplay between the timbres, pitches, and amplitudes, he proposed a remarkable new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like the individual players in an orchestra.
It cannot be overstated how impressive and important Bernie’s library is. There were no mentors, no guides for what equipment to use in extreme weather, no instructions for how to capture the subtle sounds of snow falling, the depth of a glacier cracking, or the whispers of wolves. Nor was there the scientific language to describe what he was hearing and what it revealed. Bernie and his colleagues had to figure all this out themselves, inventing a new scientific field called “soundscape ecology.”
“When we lived closely connected to the natural world, we learned these sounds from the animals,” Krause says. “We learned melody from the animals. We learned orchestration from the animals because that’s how they were organizing and creating this bandwidth for themselves. We learned rhythm by watching gorillas and chimpanzees mark out on the buttresses of fig trees. We have nothing original that we can claim here. All the copyrights are owned by the critters.” (Photo by Nick Nichols)
Bernie’s soundscapes were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Fifty percent of the habitats in Bernie’s archive no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din.
His work reminds us how much we have to gain by being quiet, listening, and saving the world’s animal choruses — and the gravity of how much animals and humans alike have to lose if we do not.
“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.”
Are plants intelligent? Can they think and feel? Can they communicate, learn, and solve problems? Throughout history, most Western philosophers and scientists answered these questions with a resounding “no.” Plants, despite having evolved so successfully that they account for about 80 percent of the world’s biomass, have long been treated as inanimate, silent, and unaware. In ancient Greece, Aristotle situated them below animals and just above minerals on his hierarchy of the perfection of living things. In this primitive yet still dominant view, plants are considered passive objects that form the backdrop to our active lives, rather than highly sensitive organisms with intelligence and agency of their own.
For centuries, indigenous healers and shamans around the world have learned from listening to plants. After conversing with plants in dreams and visions during a visit to the Peruvian rainforest, Dr. Monica Gagliano returned to her university inspired and began a series of groundbreaking and highly imaginative experiments on plant communication. “The plants themselves are the teacher,” she says. (Photo courtesy of North Atlantic Books)
Dr. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist whose daring and imaginative research has expanded our perception of plants and animals. Persevering against the scientific establishment, she pioneered the field of “plant bioacoustics,” the study of sounds produced by and affecting plants. The results of her groundbreaking experiments suggest that plants may possess intelligence, memory and learning, via mechanisms that differ from our own. Gagliano is a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia, and is the author of Thus Spoke the Plant. Her work has been featured by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker and on the RadioLab episode, “Smarty Plants.” She is currently based at the University of Sydney.
The plants used in Gagliano’s experiments, such as pea seedlings, rescued the scientist in her. “I was prepared to do something else,” she tells us, “but the plants were like, ‘Oh, not so fast! We’ve got some work for you. And you can take a sample, you can take a leaf, you can take whatever you need and that doesn’t kill us. So why don’t you work with us.'”Continue reading Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination
“A whale is a wonder not because it’s the world’s biggest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity.” – Rebecca Giggs (Photo by Leanne Dixon.)
In her genius debut book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, writer Rebecca Giggs introduces readers to blue whales that exhale canopies of vapor so high that their blowholes spout rainbows, to spade-toothed beaked whales that are so rare they’ve never been seen alive, and to sperm whales whose clinks are louder than the heaviest space rocket ever launched from Earth. In prose so deft it ought to be called poetry, Giggs describes scientific research on how whales shift the chemical makeup of our atmosphere, how they respond to solar storms that migrate vast unseen geomagnetic mountain ranges, and how a bestiary’s worth of fantastic creatures flourishes in whale carcasses as they sink to the ocean floor.
“Every species is a magic well,” E.O. Wilson wrote. “The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.” But, as Fathoms illuminates, there’s more than just mystery and wonder in the wells these days. Animals’ bodies and lives are polluted with reminders of ourselves. Into these magic wells, we have dumped our plastics and our poisons. As one example, Giggs describes a sperm whale that washed up dead on Spain’s southern coast. In its ruptured digestive tract, scientists found an entire flattened greenhouse that once grew wintertime tomatoes, complete with plastic tarps, plastic mulch, hoses, ropes, two flower pots, and a spray canister. The whale had also swallowed an ice cream tub, mattress parts, a carafe, and a coat hanger. And that was just the obvious human refuse. Toxins build up in whale blubber over years such that the concentration of pollutants in some whale bodies far exceeds that of the environment around them. We have turned the world’s largest animals into hazardous waste. ‘‘Would we know it,” Giggs asks, “the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?”
In the past, Rebecca Giggs says, “we thought the sea was kind of timeless and it would remain as it was ever so. Now that we know that it’s not that way, we also need to recognize that our power to change is there too – that we are not condemned to be changeless. I hope that, while the extent of our influence is revealed to be vast, so then too is our capacity to withhold damage.”
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.”
“The science is very clear about fisheries,” Daniel Pauly, the world’s leading fisheries scientist and Principal Investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us initiative, says. “You have to get rid of subsidies, you have to manage them, you have to prevent the fisheries essentially from committing suicide. A fishery left on its own will build capacity, will build bigger engines on bigger boats, more people will get in, and it will destroy the resource. That’s what it does if there is no management. It’s like your kids – if you leave them alone with a pan of chocolate, they will eat until they get sick. You have to tell them don’t eat the chocolate, or give them one chocolate at a time. This is the paradox, that the NGO industry is seen by the fishing industry and fisher communities as the enemy. We are the people that prevent them from committing suicide.” Photo by Alison Barrat, courtesy of Sea Around Us.
Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. He did this by, as he quoted from Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, “sciencing the shit out of it.”
Dr. Pauly as a boy. “I’ve read a bit about children that had difficult youths,” Dr. Pauly says. “It turns out that most of us end up badly, but there is a small percentage that is resilient. And I have been one of them.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we.
If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.
In 1995, Dr. Pauly — photographed here on a boat in the Philippines — coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how each new generation accepts the state of the natural world in which they were raised as “normal.” Lack of historical data and awareness warps perception about the severity of ecosystem transformation actually taking place. “It is happening so fast that young people now are not used to the winters that old folks like me recall,” Dr. Pauly says of climate change. “They don’t recall snow all over the place. They don’t recall cold in the winter, because often it’s not cold anymore. And if you add two generations, the stories they will read about how things were will not be credible anymore, and they will not be motivated to make any sacrifice to get back to the past. And so we can have a situation where we have every generation accommodating itself to a change that overall can be devastating.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“We must now, more and more, have the scientists speaking up,” Dr. Pauly says. “Because if they don’t, they leave the field to the politicians and to the pundits and to people who don’t know, and who make an agenda that is science-free. Science is actually not only what you can do, but also what you cannot do. It is okay to know what kind of things you shouldn’t be doing.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“I’ve been at this for almost twenty years now, and in my time, the vast majority of protected areas that have been established and designated in Canada have been either led or co-led by Indigenous Peoples,” Valérie Courtois, founder and director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI), says. “The boreal forest contains up to a quarter of the world’s freshwaters and wetlands. It has the largest terrestrial storehouses of carbon in the globe. These are things that Indigenous Nations know intrinsically about those landscapes. And so what the ILI does really is to provide a national kind of voice and framework for advocacy of that leadership that is existing on the ground.” Photo courtesy of Nadya Kwandibens.
In 2017, seven Indigenous Nations and groups in Eastern Canada came together to sign an historic agreement to save a herd of caribou that had sustained all of them for time immemorial. The region’s caribou herd was once the world’s largest with 800,000 individuals. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples and the caribou met in this region. But then the herd began disappearing. By 2018, there were only 5,500 caribou left in the herd – a 99 percent decrease from 20 years before. Canada’s governments weren’t taking action, so these Indigenous Nations stepped in to save the herd. Overcoming long-entrenched divisions, and united by their common relationship to the caribou, these Nations created a groundbreaking framework for sustainably managing the herd and stopping its decline.
That agreement, known as the Ungava Peninsula Caribou Aboriginal Roundtable, or UPCART, is just one of many examples of how Indigenous Peoples across Canada are leading the way on protecting some of the world’s most ecologically important ecosystems and treasured wildlife. For millennia, Indigenous Peoples have been the caretakers of the land and have relied on animals–caribou, marten, goose, and the abundance of other animals that call Canada home. But industrial development, such as logging and mining, is putting much of the country’s wildlife and wild places at risk–along with the ways of life that depend on them. While Canada’s provinces drag their feet on needed protections, Indigenous Nations are combining Indigenous knowledge, western science, and thoughtful strategy to chart a new path for their people and for the rest of the world.
Prior to UPCART, “the only management tool that the governments were using with respect to the caribou was ‘hunting on, hunting off,'” Cortois says. “The UPCART’s strategy plan really takes much more of a nuanced approach that looks at the conditions on the ground, what we know about the population size, and the dynamics that are driving that population size – and then also prioritizes access to the Indigenous Nations as the rights-holders for those areas.” Photo courtesy of Pat Kane.
“The sanctuary is a place where people can meet these animals, hear their stories, learn where they come from, and learn more about the food system,” Gene Baur, co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, says. “[People] recognize they can make choices that do not support this violent, cruel system and that they can relate to animals in a more friendly positive way. This is good for the animals and is also good for the people.” Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.
A few weeks before Charlotte’s Web was to be published, author E.B. White’s editor asked him to explain why he wrote the book about a livestock pig, Wilbur, who becomes friends with a heroic spider named Charlotte. In the now beloved novel, Charlotte saves Wilbur from slaughter by weaving messages — “SOME PIG,” “RADIANT,” “TERRIFIC,” and “HUMBLE” — into her web in the doorway of Wilbur’s stall. In doing so, she draws attention to Wilbur as an individual pig full of personality, and ensures that Wilbur is saved and cherished thereafter.
In response to his publisher’s request for explanation, White wrote: “A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree … that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. Anyway, the theme of “Charlotte’s Web” is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.”
That wish is also deep inside our guest today. For over 30 years, Gene Baur has been a heroic, real-life, highly strategic, two-legged “Charlotte” for thousands of farm animals, changing millions of hearts and minds about animals and food. Baur is the co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, one of the nation’s largest animal rescue organizations that provides refuge for animals who had been abused, confined, and commodified as part of the U.S. factory farm system. Compared to Farm Sanctuary’s rescues, Wilbur lived a great life. White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, just as factory farming was being invented and a decade before it began to rapidly spread – first with poultry, then pigs and cows. Today, 99% of U.S. farm animals spend their lives in large-scale industrial animal factories. Baur has made it his life’s work to try to change this.
Zak Smith, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, works to safeguard some of the world’s most iconic and at-risk species.
Until recently, the wildlife trade, for many Americans, was a disturbing, but far-off, concern. Every so often, Twitter would erupt in outrage over pictures of someone engaged in trophy hunting, or the occasional Florida Man would have a run-in with an escaped pet python in the Everglades. But, over the last few months, the wildlife trade has hit very, very close to home, in one of the most disruptive possible ways. Many of the early COVID-19 cases were people who had direct exposure to a live animal market, where farmed and wild-caught exotic species were stacked in cages as they waited to be sold and slaughtered. This unnaturally close contact — among species that would rarely or never meet in any circumstance other than through the wildlife trade — creates ideal conditions for animal pathogens to jump species barriers.
Smith and experts discuss the boundaries of China’s Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, part of China’s ambitious new national park system. The territory is home to about 30 Siberian tigers and 40 Amur leopards, which need non-fragmented habitat for their populations to grow.
