All tagged Ecology
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.
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.
Award-winning journalist Boyce Upholt joins me to discuss his article Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?, published at The New Republic.
Boyce begins his report, as well as this interview, by describing the troubling conditions in chicken facilities in Butler Country, Nebraska, and, by extension, across the industrialized world. This past spring, a highly deadly and contagious strain of avian influenza swept through bird and other animal populations. Considering the conditions described in his piece, there is a very real possibility of a spillover event occurring in the near future, leading to an influenza pandemic in the human population. Broadly, this discussion, while examining the real threat highly consolidated industrialized food production is having on human and more-than-human beings, explores the so-called First World's relationship with food, food production, and the ecologies we are inextricably tied to.
Anarchist writer and activist Peter Gelderloos returns to the podcast to discuss ecological revolution from below, beautifully documented in his book The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, published this year by Pluto Press.
Nothing short of revolution is required to address the global ecological crisis. The technocratic solutions presented to us by various capitalist nation-states are less than sufficient in mitigating the most dire consequences of biospheric collapse and runaway climate change. In fact, more than just merely insufficient, these top-down so-called “solutions” reimpose the dominant socioeconomic and political order producing the crisis to begin with. As Gelderloos describes and points to The Solutions are Already Here, numerous land-based movements around the world are rising to the occasion — actively protecting territories from extractive capitalist enterprises, reclaiming what has been taken and exploited for industry, and building resilient autonomous communities and networks, many of which that span the artificially imposed rural-urban divide. To really grasp the scale and scope of this ecological revolution from below, Gelderloos lets representatives of these movements speak for themselves, weaving them into a tapestry that enlivens a radical imagination of what a post-capitalist world may hold.
Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine.
Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get go. We were processing devastating news that morning: Hurricane Ida crashed and dragged itself from south to north across the East Coast, overwhelming the infrastructure, shutting down the grid and flooding cities. We discuss how climatologically, ecologically, we can feel how things have shifted tremendously — in the Northwest where I live, and in Hudson Valley where Sophie lives. While, personally, I tend to explore this broad subject on this podcast, Sophie writes about it.
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.
Anthropologist, experimental archaeologist, and historian Peter Michael Bauer joins me to discuss several major subjects of his work, including rewilding, collapse, and humanity's place within these frameworks.
