To Wonderment + Awe: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe / Carl Safina
Ecologist and author Carl Safina returns to the podcast to discuss his newest book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. Part memoir, part philosophical musing, Alfie and Me contains vignettes of ecological dreaming and profound critique.
Safina traces a thorough line of Western thought from ancient Greece to the present day, ruminating on the brutal theologies and scientific reductionism that has informed the Western world’s relationship to more-than-human life for centuries. But also, this book contains an intimate glimpse into the earliest months of the pandemic, as Carl and his wife, Patricia, are forced to slow down and take up the delicate task of caring for a baby owl. Safina provides a day-by-day account of this complex responsibility, and of the relationship that formed between members of two seemingly vastly different species.
“Well, I think wonderment and/or a sense of awe—they are overlapping or maybe interchangeable—is fundamental to being human. If you look around at all the other animals, it certainly seems to me that humans have more of a capacity for certain things, and I think wonder is one of those. Other animals are very practical; they're real empiricists. They believe only what the evidence shows. But people can wonder about things in ways that I'm convinced—I’m pretty sure—go beyond what other animals can do.
“And so, to honor our humanness, we should honor this sense of wonder. And the result of wonder, I think, are two things. One is that we come to understand how little we know, and so we want to know the world better and maintain our curiosity. But the other thing is that it engenders respect for the world, and for the moment of time that we occupy as individuals, the sense that we're on a great sweep of time. We're just one little spark in a great sweep of time of everything that came before. That makes everything that we see now that we think of as just scenery depended entirely on everything that came before. None of this could happen without the whole history of the world. It's with us all the time, in every moment.”
Bio:
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Episode Notes:
Purchase a copy of Alfie and Me from Bookshop
Learn more about Carl Safina and The Safina Center
The song featured is “Deneb” by Nick Vander from the album Kodama (Nowaki’s Selection), used with permission by the artist.
