All tagged Animals

The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way Of Raising Children / Darcia Narvaez + G.A. Bradshaw

Darcia Narvaez returns to the podcast, along with co-author G.A. Bradshaw, to discuss their new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities, published by North Atlantic Books.

By drawing on the ancestral legacies of child-rearing and broader nesting practices and contemporary breakthroughs in neurology and developmental psychology, we can better understand how integral intergenerational cultural practices bear on the complex development of human beings. But, what of our animal kin? What are their evolved nests, and what lessons can we learn from them? How does a broken or intact human evolved nest impact and interact with the evolved nests of other animals? 

Over the course of ten chapters of their new book The Evolved Nest, Narvaez and Bradshaw describe “different animal’s parenting model[s], sharing species-specific adaptations that allow each to thrive in their evolved nests.” Some examples include: how wolves build an internal moral compass; how beavers foster a spirit of play in their children; how octopuses develop emotional and social intelligence; and how, when, and whether (or not) brown bears decide to have children. 

For me, this discussion with these two women is a dialogue on non-dual consciousness and how the ecological and the social are the same. The brokenness of modern human societies bleeds into all systems of life, and while it may be difficult to imagine returning to lifeways that regenerate the integral components of the evolved nests of human and more-than-human beings, still, we can look to our animal kin and see ourselves—our pains and joys, our love and traumas, our brokenness and healing. Whatever the path to ecological regeneration may be at this late stage of biospheric collapse, it will involve looking to our more-than-human kin to recognize ourselves in them, to see what has been lost, and what yet can be reclaimed.

The Cultures Of Animals: Ecology, Community, & Beauty / Carl Safina

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.