Ecologist and prolific author Carl Safina joins me to discuss his work with the more-than-human (animal) world, particularly his writings about the cultures and emotional lives of various animal communities, beautifully documented in two of his most recent books, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.

Human beings, or to be more specific, human beings within modern industrial cultures, tend to believe that Homo sapiens are the only species on Earth that are cultural. As Safina has documented in his work, this is simply not the case. Numerous species have culture, including, but not limited to, various primates, birds, and whales. What we can learn about the evolutionary function of culture from these animal communities, including the role the perception and appreciation of beauty, plays in the evolutionary process? At the very end of this interview, I ask Safina to discuss his appreciation of Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick, represented in his essay Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed published in The New York Times.