Culture
Carl Safina - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author
In this episode, ecologist and bestselling author Carl Safina shares insights from his latest book, 'Becoming Wild,' exploring the emotional and social lives of animals. He discusses the pro...
Carl Safina - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author
Culture •
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Interactive Transcript
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Carl Safina is an ecologist, writer, and founding president of the Safina Center as the author
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of ten books, including the classic Songford Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Best
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Cellar, Beyond Words, what animals think and feel.
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His most recent book is, Becoming Wild, How Animal Cultures Raise Families Create Beauty
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and Achieve Peace.
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His lyrical nonfiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world and
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what the changes mean for non-human beings and forest all.
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His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action.
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Carl Safina, welcome to one planet podcast in the creative process.
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It's a really good opportunity to speak with you and the honoured that you're interested
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in hearing what I have to say, so thank you for having me.
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We're honoured to hear from you.
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You've written so many books you've done, documentary television work.
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I believe you're going to read from becoming wilds to give listeners a view into your
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written work.
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So, in this passage, which is about sperm whales, I'm in the Caribbean off the island of
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Dominica with a scientist named Shane Girro, and we are listening for sperm whales with microphones
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that are dropped over the side of the boat.
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The whales spend about 50 minutes out of each hour hunting thousands of feet below the surface.
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And their echolocation clicks that they use to create their sonar are the loudest sound
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made by a living thing.
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They have a social organisation like elephants, which is usually a matriarch or the oldest female
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and her daughters living together and it's a babysitting culture where
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when those whales are down for almost an hour at a time, the babies cannot follow,
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little babies cannot follow.
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So, there's always somebody who stays up with them if the mother is making one of those
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foraging dives.
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So, the way we find them is that we drop the microphone and then we listen and we either hear
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whales or if we don't hear any, we move along.
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So, here's the passage from the book.
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We've failed to find whales so far.
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And after some interval that I'm not closely keeping, our boat is again undulating across the
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massage of long swells over to the next spot where we will again listen to the sounds of the deep sea.
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The blue gray sea is slick and hazy bright.
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It is both eternal and instantaneous.
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We travel along in small ecstatic sparks of time.
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We transit in and out of the company of flying fish, of turns.
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The sea glittering rolls like a carpet of short blue flames.
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Something like time must be passing but I feel suspended in an infinite moment that seems to vibrate
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in place. Perhaps from the whales I have learned something about living.
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At this stop, Shane, listening to his headphones, raises one finger.
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He hears whales.
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More than one, their sonar goes tick, tick, tick.
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One whale goes silent.
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She has stopped hunting.
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Over the next few minutes, others also silence their sonars.
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From two or three thousand feet beneath the waves, in the frigid blackness where they earn
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their living, they are coming up, up, up.
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A few minutes later, the dark heads and backs of two whales shatter the hard sparkle of the sea
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like tiny newborn islands. The coastline of their bodies generating their own surf,
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their white puffs drift on the distance.
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I listen to them clicking out of their clacking coats of recognition,
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announcing themselves as individuals announcing their family membership,
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announcing the clan in which they claim membership.
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They are grading their message of bonding and belonging.
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Their sound, highly styled, is percussive and precise like castenets.
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As I listen, their coat is going in and out of phase with each other.
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Sometimes they are perfectly separated.
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Sometimes they are clicked coats completely overlap like conversations at a busy table.
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Three others burst the surface, so a total of five up now.
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And what I am left with is this impression.
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A whale is too big to see.
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At a time you get pieces.
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Now the head.
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Now the back.
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Now the flukes.
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Never the whole whale.
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In Rome once I said to my wife Patricia, we've now seen Michelangelo's painting of the creator.
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But what would the creator's own painting of creation look like?
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I think that is easy to answer now.
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It is these whales in this sea.
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The whales that this ocean has brought forth seem in their pacing and their scale
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to reflect the enormity of all things past and present.
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That's so beautiful.
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It really takes us into the minds and the bodies and the feeling as you say of being alive.
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Of these wonderful, I would say artists.
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I would say that when when do we reach that kind of level of performance?
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Like great artists or great athletes can do that.
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And your books and you're just your whole life's work has brought us into that deep empathy.
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Well, thank you very much.
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That's very kind.
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Well, it's so important because as you well know, most of us don't treat or consider the lives
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of animals respectfully.
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So it's really important that you bear witness to that.
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And also what you do at the Seffing the Center.
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What can you share with us about what you've learned about the language of animals,
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how they communicate, love, learn and teach?
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Well, I think that what I've learned is mainly for many animals, people for a long time have
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said that they don't have any thoughts or they don't have any emotions or they're certainly not
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capable of doing any planning, they have no sense of themselves.
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And none of that is true at all.
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I think that for many animals, we're talking mostly about vertebrate animals
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that are on the larger side.
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You know, I always have to say because I'm a biologist, animals is everything from sponges
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to whales.
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And when we talk about behavior, usually we're talking about the vertebrates and some of the
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crustaceans, crabs and things like that, as well as cephalopods.
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Those are the ones whose behaviors really do seem to reflect the obvious workings of a mind.
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I don't think all of the minds are the same.
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I don't think all human minds are the same either.
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And I think that what we see with these other animals is that their existence is very vivid to
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them with the social animals in particular.
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They know who they are because of who they are with.
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They understand themselves as individuals within the context of other individuals.
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They have group identities.
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And they are capable of communicating things.
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Sometimes would sound, you know, with what you might call verbal communication,
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like the whales and their click patterns, which are like clicked codes,
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or the alarm calls of birds or of a large variety of mammals have alarm calls or just
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intention movements that serve very well to communicate enough to coordinate everybody together.
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Most people have almost no experience with animals except for a few animals that they
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live with that are domesticated, such as dogs and cats.
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But I think those animals are nonetheless very instructive and I think that they represent
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to us and for us what many other animals are capable of doing.
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So just for instance with my dogs, we have three dogs.
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We have certain routines in life.
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They have to do with being around the house and leaving the house and going for walks
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of along the beaches and things like that.
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Because they know what the components of their life are,
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it takes almost no queuing to communicate to them what we're going to do next.
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They're very alert.
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They look to us for cues.
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Often if I'm going to tell my dogs to do something, a lot of people they bark
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commands to them.
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I often just whisper or a little word or a little intention movement is totally adequate
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for them to understand the whole message.
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The whole message is we're going someplace now or get in the car.
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We're going to take a car ride or come out here or come inside or whatever it might happen
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to be. You also see a little bit of planning in the case of the dogs.
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The people have said for a long time, humans are the only things that are capable of planning.
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Humans are the only things that have what in psychology is called object permanence,
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which means that when you cannot see something, you nonetheless know that it's still there.
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And they've said, oh, humans are the only ones that do that and they develop that at a certain
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age, a year and a half or whatever it is.
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Well, certainly not at all true that humans are the only ones that know that when they don't see
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something that is familiar to them, that they do know it's there because they go looking for it
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or they go looking for their people or they know where home is if you say go home or they know
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where the water is, they know where the food is, they know how to judge who's a friend,
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who's an enemy, who they still aren't sure about that they need to check out, who's a rival,
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who's interesting, what dog on the beach they've already said hello to that they don't have to
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bother with again. Just yesterday, one of our three dogs, we left the house to go to an event and
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instead of closing the glass door, I closed only the screen door because it was a hot day and I
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thought I could trust them, but no, one of the dogs shredded the screen and then somebody else
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pushed the screen door sideways. They've never done that before, first of all, but obviously they
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had a plan in mind and the plan was we don't want to be stuck here in the house. We want to go with
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Colin Patricia or find them wherever they went. Normally they just stayed there, but yesterday they
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weren't having it. So they had a plan and the plan was to get out. Now it might seem like
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breaking through the front screen door is not a plan, but after we went out a second time and
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closed the glass door, one of the dogs went over to a window to the side of the house. She had to
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jump up on a bed up on the window. She's never done that before. She's never known or learned that
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that's a way out. She popped the screen out and jumped out the window and when we came back again,
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she was outside again, waiting for us. Well, I wasn't too happy about any of that, except that I was
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pretty impressed with how smart she was. And then when I closed the door to that room and we went out
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again, now now she's never done this before yesterday, but yesterday she did it three times.
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She went and found a different window harder to get to, jumped up there, popped that screen out
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and jumped out of that window to get to us. So all of that because she's never done that before,
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and because it involved her figuring out where to gain access to the outside, it involved a plan,
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it involved her executing a plan. So what does that mean? It means that they know where they are
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and they have thoughts about what they want to do. And you can see that in wild, so-called wild
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animals, free living animals who are living more in natural lives, if you take the time to watch
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them and almost nobody can do that, except for professional people who do that for a living and can
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spend hours and weeks and many cases years getting to know free living animals and their lives,
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or who raised wild orphans. I've learned an enormous amount by raising a few wild orphans.
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And you can see that they have a really complex mental capabilities that have usually been denied
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to them by us, but they do nonetheless exist. I want to go into a few things about how we overvalue
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the sense of our intelligence or because of the size of our brain, which I think is true, but I feel,
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and as you know, intelligence or even consciousness might even exist in different parts of the body,
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I feel for animals. I want to say on that in terms of the creativity and the storytelling skills
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of animals. One ground Christmas time, my husband and I were taking a walk and there was this giant
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crow on a garbage bin eating and my husband was just teasing and he started to imitate what it
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I don't know, whatever the crow sounded and the crow looked at him, looked at both of us,
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like what are you looking at? It was like a confrontational thing. Then started crying out,
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flew up in the sky, crying out. We thought he was calling other birds and then was circling us
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in the sky. It was a church that's there in the corner and he was kind of always looking back at us
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and then he got something in the eaves. I thought it was a bit of old hay, but he dropped what it was
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right next to us on the ground and it was the carcass of a pigeon. I think this is story,
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daring skills, and he goes to the crow in a sense of humor. Well, certainly that does not seem
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remotely accidental, right? And whatever the crow might have been trying to express with that,
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I don't really know, but I would say that that is not an accidental thing.
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Not at all. So he remembered, I'm guessing it's a here, but remember that and for just a case when
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he might meet a joker who was trying to imitate him, and you recount many of the examples of
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creativity or communication across species, whether it's with dolphins or others, just tell us some
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of those stories. Oh, well, you just see really all the time that they know where they're going,
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they know who they're with and they know what they're doing. They're very aware of the kinds of
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decisions that they're making. And in some cases, they're aware of needing to get back to who is in
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their group or trying to find who is in their group. I mean, just for instance, you know, the whales
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that we call killer whales or orca whales, they travel about 75 miles a day. Where they travel,
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the visibility is almost never more than about 50 feet. And yet they go to different destinations
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that may be hundreds of miles apart, where they've been before. And two or three decades after
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somebody has started to study a particular group, they will see the exact same individuals still
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together because they recognize their voices in the ocean when they cannot see each other,
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and they know who was in their group and what they belong to. And that is not an accident. If a whale
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is next to the same whale, it was next to 30 years ago, after traveling thousands of miles in the
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ocean, it's because they have lives. They're not just bumbling around. They're not just unconsciously
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swimming forward, belping down things that they're motivated to eat. They do understand a lot about
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what they're doing in the moment. And you know, I'll say this for humans and our brains. I think that
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in terms of many kinds of things, we are the extreme animal. We're certainly technologically
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speaking. There's no comparison to what humans can do among all the animals that make some tools.
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Even though we should keep in mind that for close to 200,000 years, humans who were essentially
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identical to us had no tools that were more complicated than a bow and arrow. They had nothing
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that you could call a machine. A lot of that is relatively very, very recent in our history. We
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tend to think, oh, this is what we do. Humans have computers and airplanes and play sports and
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things like that. Well, that is all something that is pretty sudden and pretty recent in our own
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history. For most of the time we were on this planet, our lives were very similar in many ways
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to the lives of other animals. I think that we probably are capable of longer-range planning that
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seems that way to me. We certainly have languages with syntax and grammar that allow us to express
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many more details and do more planning and coordination than many other animals. But that's just a
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matter of degree, mostly not really a matter of kind. It's a matter of degree. And I think the most
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crucial thing is that while we are such extraordinary tinkerers that we can keep doing trial and error
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and figure things out and creating unbelievable kinds of technologies, we are not very smart about
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what we do with those things or seeing them through to the implications of what happens when we
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do these things. If we were wiser about it, we would conduct ourselves much more differently than
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all out what we do call it, all out charge that we conduct. Often we just follow some technology
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along without worrying about the implications of what will happen ultimately or caring about what
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will happen ultimately or denying what is happening as a result of the overuse of those technologies
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or the overpopulation of the world by human beings. And those are causing many of the problems
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that we have. The other thing that we cannot seem to tame is that we are capable of extraordinary
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violence, much, much more so than any other animals. And even though most people are very peaceful,
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most of the time, the amount of violence that we can unleash. And when you look at the reasons for it
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that are so literally insane are a tremendous lot, I think, on our intelligence. It's almost like
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as a species, we are just like chimpanzees with automatic weapons or we're just teenagers who
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are constantly doing stupid and reckless things, but we never seem to collectively as a species
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really grow out of it. And I think, by and large animals only kill to eat or defend themselves.
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There's another interesting insight that you've shared that everything that animals do is
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empirical and logical and as you point out, certainly we are not with all our technologies.
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Another way of putting it is that if we were as logical and as empirical as all the other animals
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and were capable of the technology we're capable of, we would not be creating planetary problems
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that we are not psychologically capable of solving. And that's what we are doing. We are creating
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planetary problems that we don't solve and that we don't even all acknowledge as the problems
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that they certainly are. Yes, and speaking of acknowledging these problems, you've talked about
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psychic numbing before, so the emotional overwhelm of the many horrible things happening,
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such as species extinction. What can you tell us about balancing the tough realities
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the world we live in and taking care of ourselves because you speak our myths a lot?
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Yeah, balancing, I mean, for people who really care about these kinds of things, it can be
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really tough. And I sometimes think it would quote by E.B. White where he says he wakes up in the morning
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is torn by the urges to save and to save the world. So, you know, in other words,
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like to be involved in solving the problems and yet not forget the tremendous beauty of being alive
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in this miraculous world. This is an issue for me all the time and for many people I know all the time,
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I do try to balance things because sometimes it gets very distressing or depressing to know about
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all the problems. But then if I just go outside and go to someplace that is not room and still beautiful
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and still full of living things, I realize first of all there's a lot left to continue to work for,
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work on the behalf of continue to fight for. And on the other hand, not all is lost. There are a lot
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of things that are going on as they should be. And also when I was young, there were things that
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looked like lost clauses to me, certain birds that were almost completely gone because of pesticides,
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like oscaras and paragraphalcans and bald eagles. I thought I would never see any of those things when
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I was a teenager. They were essentially wiped completely out of the region I live in Eastern
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North America. But because a few people worked to ban the pesticides that were causing all their eggs
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to break over the last few decades, they repopulated tremendously well. They're really quite
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common now. We see them all the time. Same as true of whales. Until about five years ago, I saw
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in my lifetime maybe two whales from shore. And now we see them most of the time in the summer when
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we go to walk our dogs because fisheries management has allowed many of the certain kind of fish to
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recover tremendous numbers off our coast. That feeds the whales. That brings the dolphins. It feeds
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the ospreys who have nests with big chicks in them right right at this time of the summer. The chicks
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all ready to start flinging. So yes, there are horrible problems and they are real. But there's also
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really a lot of life left. And that is real too. And sometimes when I feel just everything is simply
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too distressing and I need a break. It pays to put things in perspective and realize that
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my personal life is a very privileged one. I have essentially all the opportunities
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available to a human being at this time in history. I've been in places where people have almost
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nothing. And being offered money to kill an elephant is something that is almost impossible
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to say no to. I don't have those dilemmas. I don't have to kill elephants in order to
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feed a family. If I feel really depressed, I have the opportunity to pour myself a glass of wine
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or go out and get some ice cream. And I think it's really important to keep that in perspective.
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Sometimes I talk to people say, oh, it's too depressing. I can't face it. And I think, well,
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you know, really, you don't really have to do any of these hard things. So why don't you contribute
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a little bit to what you can do toward the solutions? Join some group, say some things,
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do a little something, contribute what you can instead of saying that it's too overwhelming for
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you. I feel like I can't justify the self-indulgence of saying it's too overwhelming because I live
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very privileged life. I've seen a lot of these really terrible things firsthand. And that gives me
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the perspective of understanding where I stand in the overall picture. And that helps me, I think,
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with this issue of balancing that you're asking about. And I wanted to bring the idea of the
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cultural diversity and knowledge of species that you also talk about into this conversation and
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ask you how are human impacts to the natural world changing or shaping what you would call this
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cultural diversity and cultural knowledge of species? Well, humans are putting unbelievable
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pressure on almost every living thing. Almost every wild population in the world is that it's
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lowest level that it's ever been in since humans appeared on the planet. And that has certainly
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accelerated in the last 100 years or so, accelerated greatly. So all of these creatures have to
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figure out a way of coping with our presence. And if they can't, then what happens is their population
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disappears. If enough populations disappear, the species goes extinct. In a few cases,
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animals have adapted to our presence in various ways. Some of them create conflict because
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humans invade their area, they plant farms, and then the animals eat what's growing in the farm.
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And that's a way that they are trying to adapt that creates conflict that is often fatal for them.
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Sometimes they adapt very well to our presence. One thing that I've noticed is that
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certain birds, particularly that were very shy around people, they simply learn over generations to
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tolerate the presence of people. The first time I ever saw a bold eagle's nest,
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the eagles got off the nest and disappeared while we were about 300 yards away.
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They don't do that around here anymore. The eagles that have started to move back into this
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region, Long Island, New York where I live, often are nesting in very close proximity to people.
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Even they find some secluded little place in a wood lot where they can have some privacy,
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or they nest kind of right out in the open at the edge of a salt marsh where people go by,
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and they're just getting used to the idea that people are part of their landscape.
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We don't have people who shoot them routinely anymore like in the past, so that's a way that people
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have accommodated to their presence. Not that we deserve much congratulations for simply not
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killing everything that's in sight. There's a pair of eagles that are nesting right behind a
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post office, not far from here. One of my neighbors lives on the shore of a nice quiet bay on the
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east end of Long Island. She caught some fish and put the fillade out fish racks on the edge of the
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shore, thinking maybe the gulls would like to pick at them, and a pair of adult eagles found them.
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We've never seen anything like that before, and those eagles just started coming back every day,
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looking for more fish scraps from my neighbors. In some ways, these are the accommodations that
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are being made. They kind of go two ways. People are looking toward more coexistence and are reacting
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less violently to some of these things, and in exchange or in return or in response,
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many of the animals that used to be very, very shy about being nearby are doing rather well
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in the suburbs. Those are just a few examples, I think. Of course, the industry not so very
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long ago, well, I guess over 100 years ago, of course, was wailing then in Long Island because it
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was built upon that industry and a few others. That's true. There were commercial whaling ports
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on Long Island. Many of them actually did not hunt whales around Long Island because there were
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one left for probably the last 100 years of those industries. They left Long Island and they left
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New England and they headed either to the Antarctic or into the Pacific, and they just continued to
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essentially deplete the whales everywhere that they went. But protections for whales started going
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in in the mid-1940s and by the late 1980s, we had near total protection from hunting for the whales.
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They have other problems. They get tangled up in lobster and crab trap lines. They get hit by ships.
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They do have other problems, but people don't intentionally hunt them anymore. That has made
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a very big difference. My last few trips out on the ocean, I've seen numerous whales and dolphins
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on each trip. That's a very wonderful thing and also contributes a lot to my sense of balance.
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You know, that despite these problems, there are some things that are coping and coping successfully
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with us. As I think of Moby Dick that was written by Hermelva was a local, I guess,
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Cyan Carver there. And this is a kind of warning call of how we should respect the environment and
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our oceans. So in all of your travels locally and around the world, how have you seen the oceans
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transformed over the decades? I guess there are three big transformations. One is that many of the
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fish are really depleted. There's a big exception and that is in coastal waters of the US because of
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the change in the law that I worked on a lot in the 1990s. Many of the coastal fish populations in
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the US waters are more abundant now than they were. The management has really improved a lot.
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A fish that swim out of our federal waters into international waters are much less abundant than
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they were when I was a kid. Some of them are recovering a little. In a lot of the rest of the world,
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depletion is really deep and still major. So depletion is one main thing that I've seen as a big change.
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Another thing I've seen as a big change is water temperature. The oceans are warming and the
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temperatures in our coastal waters locally here are about 10 degrees warmer at this time of the year,
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early August, then they were in the 1990s. So in let's say 25 years, the coastal ocean waters are
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about 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That's a really big difference for ocean animals. We have lost
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several species that used to be here all summer long. It's too hot for them.
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And we have gained some species that we never saw before on Long Island. They're now here
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very regularly. So the ocean is a different ocean because of the way that it has warm.
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Coral reefs are severely stressed by the warming. Many of them have died and are in the process of
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dying because of heat stress and the combination of heat stress and depletion. If you deplete
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the fish on a coral reef that eat algae, the algae grows. And if the algae grows a lot,
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it smothers the coral and the corals die. And what used to be a beautiful coral reef filled with fish
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turns into an algae-coded rubble field. I've seen quite a lot of that in different places.
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And the other change is there's a lot more plastic everywhere on coral reefs on the
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remotest beaches in the world, in the ocean floating around. I would say that problem is
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worse in the tropics in my experience than it is here where we live. We have a little bit more of
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an ethic about trying to be careful with our waste. We don't just throw things into the waterways
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because the rivers used to be much, much more polluted in North America when I was a kid.
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We have the clean water, a lot of the waterways are no longer filled with garbage headed out to sea,
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but in a lot of the world, that's exactly the way it is. They're filled with garbage headed out to sea.
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Not only was there very little plastic in use when I was born, but the population of the
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world, the human population of the world has tripled since I was born. So the world is a different
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place than it was and I actually remember and I've witnessed and I can testify to many of those
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major changes. Carl Sipina's words in this conversation truly moved me and provided me with a new
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sense of the wilderness towards the natural world. It was really lovely to have a conversation that
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deeply intertwined the beauty of the animal world with the impacts of climate change on it.
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Professor Sipina's words reminded me of the resilience of animals and how they managed to adapt
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to situations that they should not have to. It calls to mind the injustices of what the animal
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world has to go through in a responsive anthropogenic changes. Yes, animals have adapted to so many
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events and changes throughout history, but the damage we humans are doing now is occurring on a
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devastating scale that is entirely avoidable. I found the conversation that occurs later in the
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podcasts about how animals create meaning in their life are really striking one. Often we
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human see ourselves as the only beings capable of having a meaningful life. I think this helps us
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justify the changes we make to the natural world. Thinking that we are the only ones emotionally
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processing and understanding the changes means that we only have to be responsible for our own emotions.
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We don't have to consider the thoughts or emotions of other beings if we don't think they exist.
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Knowing that animals create meanings and are capable of emotion adds an extra layer of complexities
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to the changes we're forcing the natural world through. It also adds a new layer of
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all towards the natural world. To know that animals such as whales create bonds with each other,
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that they are able to recognize each other's voices and always travel with the same pod. It's so
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beautiful. There is always so much more to discover about these wonderful creatures of all kinds.
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It is just tragic to know that we are losing them at a faster rate that we can even know some of
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them exist. We are losing so much by them going extinct. Not only can animals give us scientific
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insight into solving problems in the field of medicine, for example, among other fields,
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but we can also learn so much from them in the way they live their lives. Later in the podcast,
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Professor Safina talks about the Safina Center. The work that the center is doing gracefully
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merges the beauty of the natural world with the need to save it. They look at these really
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existential questions about the world's human should claim the world. Because the
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extinction of many species is really an existential question for us as well. Is this who we want to be in
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the world? Is this space we want to take up? What do we value? How do we change?
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And Professor Safina will talk about this later in the episode, the way we navigate through the
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world individually and as a species is guided by our values. I found his answer to one of the
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questions about the role the economics playing climate change action, particularly poignant.
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You will hear him say that the way we're living has a very high cost, not factored in the price
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that needs to be considered, and that at its core, bringing economics into the climate change
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conversation is simply a matter of values. We just have to decide if we value money over
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habitat destruction, deforestation, extinction, and more. Although, of course, when I say we,
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I don't mean everyone. And Professor Safina doesn't either. Then she highlights and discusses the
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systems put in place to ensure the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet.
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Although the average person's individual actions will not shape the fate of the planet either way,
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we must all reconsider our values and mobilize to preserve the planet and all its wonderful species.
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We can use the amazing stories and the sense of bewilderment that Professor Safina has
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gifted us today as a way to move forward and urge us to save this wonderful world.
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Now, let's get back to the episode. And some tell us about the mission and objectives of the
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Safina Center. Yeah, well, what we're trying to do here at the Safina Center is to make an emotional
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connection with people between what we know scientifically and factually, and what the implications
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of that are, what needs to be done, where are we headed, where will we get to if we don't change
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course right now? There are plenty of reports and there's a lot of information about all of this
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stuff. That is not what we are about because what we realize is that information is not really
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what gets people to do things. What gets people to do things is their values. They filter information
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through their values. You can tell somebody about something you think is a terrible problem.
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And they might say, yes, that's a terrible problem. And other people say, I don't care about that.
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So we're trying to make people care, motivate people to respond, to do what it is that they can do
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through our work. And what our work is is we make fact-based creative products, meaning books,
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films, images, paintings, sound art, those kinds of things. And when I say we, it's basically our
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fellows. We have people who we call our fellows. We help to raise the profile of people whose work
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is excellent. They're making an emotional connection. We provide some money to help them continue
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their work. And this is in a sense, you know, what I try to do with my writing and my speaking,
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trying to find people who are like-minded and like-hearted and resonate with those kinds of efforts.
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And that's what makes up the crew of the Saphina Center. We're very far flung. We don't all work
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in the same place. We have some people in Europe. We have some people in North America. We have
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people from Africa. We have a couple of people from Hawaii. So we're pretty spread out.
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Definitely. We need to include the global South and well, all directions, really.
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Yes, all directions at all scales. Yes.
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And it's great to see how you're framing this need for change through an emotional and a
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moral lens. I wanted to ask what are your thoughts on shaping this need for change
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through an economic lens in order to convince certain groups of people that just won't be swayed.
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Well, I think we're trying to work a little more basically there because economics only reflect
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values. The prices we put on things and what we're willing to pay for things, how people
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value in a monetary sense. That is all arbitrary and it just reflects our values.
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So we're trying to work on values.
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Values, I think, are the fundamental thing. If you resonate with the values we're expressing,
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you would feel differently about the prices of things. Just for instance, oil and coal are
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really very cheap. They're priced cheaply. The price, the value and the cost of things are
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three really different things. So the price to boil and coal is very cheap. But the cost of those
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things involves, well, let's just say coal. So one example, it involves blowing the tops off of
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mountains throughout Appalachia, occasionally burying a few people, giving lots of workers lung
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disease, changing the heat balance of the entire planet and acidifying the ocean. That's the cost
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of it. It's nowhere in the price. So we say, oh, this is cheap. That's because we only have a
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transactional pricing on these things so that the companies can get us to buy that stuff because
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we've created a life for ourselves where we all use it. We're all complicit to one extent or
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another. And they price it so that the better options remain more expensive so that we continue
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to do things that actually have a very, very high cost. If we talk about oil, remember that it's not
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just gasoline, it's all the plastic, essentially all the plastic that's created is created by oil
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companies. That's all part of the cost, but it's not in the price. Why? Because they make things that
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are designed to be thrown away. So the cost is what happens when they're thrown away. Everything and
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everybody that suffers from all of that garbage that is essentially eternal, but it's nowhere
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reflected in the price. If our values were different and if we really understood this in a much more
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complete way, then those things would be very, very expensive. They'd be prohibitively expensive
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because we would understand that ruining the world and hurting people is something that you can't
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really morally put a price on. And we always look to these indexes as well about GDP, whereas
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people are now coming around to think about this global national happiness index. We're measuring
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that. Yeah. The person who invented GDP, gross domestic product explicitly said, this is only a
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measure of the size of the economy. It's not a measure of how good things are, but everybody ignored
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that. And they just use it to measure the size of the economy. And we have this Ponzi scheme,
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really, where the current economic system is completely predicated on the size that everything
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must keep growing and getting bigger on a planet that is not getting bigger. And the economy is
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based on the idea that you have to put more and more materials through the system. That is what
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growth is. That is not improvement. So, you know, like growth would be, let's say, bigger schools
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and more schools, but not caring about what is taught, whereas improvement would be better education,
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more comprehensive education, people who understand things better and feel included,
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that would be an improvement rather than growth. Our economy doesn't really care about education.
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What we care about is making consumers in the United States. We have free education,
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a form of socialism for everybody until grade 12. At grade 12, they're not really skilled at
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anything except buying stuff. And then we say, okay, that's the end of your free education.
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If you want to be a better citizen and more educated, you're on your own now. Good luck.
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And that has a lot to do with the pricing of things and where we put our money
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based entirely on our values. If we really cared about having an informed citizenry that was
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skilled and creative, we would simply extend free education through college. But we don't care
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about that. We only care about educating people enough to be consumers. And you are a teacher,
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and I believe that you value teaching and mentorship that you've had over the years.
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And there is an argument for maybe this apprenticeship or guild model that I think can be so helpful
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because the education doesn't always ensure a career. And it's kind of nice to be a member of a family.
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Just tell us about your teaching and learning experience.
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Well, I think in a sense, I teach at different levels. I think my books and my articles are just
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an attempt to share information and my thoughts about how I see the value of this world that we're
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in, this miracle that we live on. I also teach in a classroom. I teach graduate students who are
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getting mostly, they are getting a master's degree in ocean conservation and policy. I speak a lot
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at conferences or on podcasts such as this one. And our fellows program at the Sifina Center is
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also in a sense that I think you know, you just indicated it's sort of an apprentice guild in a
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way. It literally provides some fellowship like like minded people finding out about
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one another and hooking up to realize that we're not all working alone in our little corners because
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it can be a little lonely sometimes doing things like writing a book at your desk day after day for
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months. You know, it's good to touch base with and feel part of a larger family. I think we do that
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for ourselves and we do that for our fellows with our work at the Sifina Center. So I see it at
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different levels and I think obviously the most crucial job in any society is teaching.
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That's the only thing that can keep a society longer than one generation. And there are many,
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many really important things that need to be conveyed in our culture at this time. So we're doing
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our little part to do that. So thinking about AI, you and I, we're talking about animal
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sentience and different things like that. But as you think about the future education, we say if
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we won't have as much employment if that is outsourced to AI, then maybe there's a way forward
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that we can find ways that we can be lifelong learners. I don't know what the answer to that
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question is, but it's something that we have to consider. Yeah, there's a balance somewhere to be
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struck between let's just say mechanization, never mind AI. I mean, this goes back literally to
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the Luddites who were violently opposing the mechanization of the weaving industry because they were
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weavers. And society has to try to figure out what a society is for and what a culture is for.
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Is it to include people or to sell things to people and keep them on the fringes? I think there are
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a lot of jobs that are mechanized, a lot of functions that are mechanized that humans cannot
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really do with human dignity, but there are also a lot of people who are seeing their livelihoods,
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their meaningful livelihoods eroded by mechanization, including artificial intelligence.
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And no thought is really given, I think, to balancing that. I don't see it reflected in
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discussions about policies. What I see is just a huge push by the people developing the technologies
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to basically get the corporations who produce things to use the technologies and not care about
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employment levels in the culture and in society. I don't know where the balance should be,
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but it's not where it is. I always thinking about the future of work and if we don't work,
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what is our purpose and what is our value? If that's taken away, I don't know what happens.
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And that is distressing in itself to imagine the loss of livelihood and purpose. I can only
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imagine what happens for animals when their habitats are taken away. Well, what happens is those
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populations disappear. They can't really, some people say, oh, they knock down these woods over
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here. So all the animals had to move. Well, they can't move because they'll crowd in on other
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animals that are already there and then they'll fight for the territory that they need, which is
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usually already occupied. And then the population declined. That's the mechanism of extinction right
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there. You lose numbers. We've lost to enormous numbers. For instance, since I was in high school,
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there are about one third fewer birds in North America. Many of them are not considered
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endangered because there are still a lot of them, but that kind of a decline is to me as a catastrophe.
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And what did we get in return is civilization much better than it was. I don't see it as being
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much better than it was. I see it as being poor really and less enriched by the natural beauty
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because those declines are in most things all around us. They're very, very evident. But anyway,
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that's not really what you were trying to ask me about. The way I think about the meaning of life
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for other animals is that the different animals have different mental and emotional capacities.
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And the meaning of life for them is to live up to who they are, what they're capable of. So very
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social animals are who they are as they need to live in a social group where they will know who
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they are and they're always together. Other animals need to just be able to hold on to their own
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territory and raise their young. And that's what their psychology is primed to do. But if they are
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unable to continue because their habitat is eroded, it's toxified, individuals die, they lose
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their mates, their young ones will die. Well, then that is not life as they are prepared to experience it.
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And, you know, I can give you various examples of that. Just for instance, I mentioned the killer
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wills, the Orcas of the Pacific Northwest that live along the coast of Washington and Oregon,
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essentially all of their babies die. And this has been happening in the last 10 or 20 years. And
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that's largely because they don't have enough to eat because the salmon that they rely on are
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really depleted because of not just overfishing, but the degradation of the rivers that the salmon
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spawn in and that produce the salmon. And the other thing is the unbelievable toxic load from
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accumulating toxic chemicals with every bite of food. And the young ones cannot thrive and they die.
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So that's an example, I think, of the kind of thing that we're all trying to grow through the fog
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and understand something we don't understand right now. Exactly. And you've also written about the
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great feats of loyalty and fidelity and courtship. You've written about the albatross. Sometimes we
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feel like we're the only ones who could love and be loyal, but really in the animal world, there's
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many examples of that. And the nonhuman animal world, there are a lot of examples of bonding,
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a lot of pair bonding and a lot of bonding between adults and young and some species between
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siblings or among one generation and all their children, like elephants and sperm whales,
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just for instance, some of the apes, those animals tend to stay with family members for their entire
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lives. So those are emotional bonds. Wolves are the same thing. A variety of animals, by no means
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all, but a variety of animals more than you tend to think. Yes. And as you say, the communication is
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deep and complex. And sometimes I feel like our language hides the truth. I don't know the instances
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of animal world, but sometimes I feel like the emotional truth can be hidden by all of our
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complex vocabulary. Well, partly because our vocabulary is not complex enough. For instance,
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in English, you referred to a person as who, and you referred to every single other thing,
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whether it's a chair or a rock or a bird, as it, in some of the Native American languages,
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maybe all, I'm not sure, but definitely in some, there's a different pronoun for something
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that is or was alive compared to something that was never alive. That's a really important
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distinction. Our language devalues living things by speaking of them only as objects and not as
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beings. That's the commodification that you're speaking of. And rocks are alive or were alive.
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They're just to send it slow life, right? And we're fast-ly. Well, that's a matter of fact.
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I guess you and I understand the facts a little differently. I would say a rock is not alive.
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It has no metabolism. It is not capable of repairing itself. It is not capable of procreation
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and creating little rocks that will grow into big rocks. That is what life does. And life is
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categorically different from non-living things. So the way that I understand the world is that
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there are living things only on earth as far as we know. And there are non-living things
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throughout the universe and a lot of non-living things on earth. I think the distinction is gigantic
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and hugely important. I don't believe that rock is truly alive. Some things live on it. And it's
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certainly it's a home for many things. Of course, yes, that's certainly true. And contribute to the
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geochemical cycles, you know, geology is really the basis of where living things can be.
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In a sense, all of life traces back to geology. And the fact that how the world changes and creates
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opportunities for life to fit in and around. So all of that is very, very important.
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Yeah, we feel that the nature is not below us and we are not above it. And I guess we all share
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the same kind of cosmology. We have to find our common language. So, you know, as you think about
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the future and the many challenges we face and the kind of world we're leaving the next generation,
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what have been some important life lessons and teachers for you? And what would you like young people
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to know, preserve and remember? Well, for me, the living world is enormously enriching to human
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life. I think that was the first thing that I felt. I don't think I articulated it that way,
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but I just loved animals. I loved all the different things that he did, all the different ways
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they looked, how you can never know enough about them. They're always just totally fascinating.
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I think that was the first thing that I learned. I think the second thing that I learned
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was that they're not here for us. They're just here, like we're just here. They're of this world
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as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the
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circle of being. I think that might be the second thing I learned. And I think the thing that I'm
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constantly learning and appreciating more and more is that life on this planet is an absolute
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miracle in literal terms because we have laws of physics like the speed of light or gravitational
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attraction. And the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe. The speed of light is
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the speed of light everywhere. Gravitational attraction works the same everywhere. Those are laws
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of physics. The word we have for something that breaks the laws of physics is miracle and living
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things because they don't follow the second law of thermodynamics very carefully. They break that law
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by becoming more and more complex. The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe tends
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toward disorder. Well, a living thing is the exact opposite of disorder. It's self-ordering,
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self-recreating, self-prepetuating, self-proliferating. It breaks the laws of physics. That is
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literally a miracle and the only place in the universe where we have detected living things is
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this planet. Are there living things elsewhere among the billions and billions and billions of stars?
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Quite possibly, but life is at least extremely rare because everywhere people who've spent their
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careers looking for it, they have not found any. So we tend to take living for granted. I think
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that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with all and
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reverence and love that we live in a miracle, that we are part of, and that we have the ability to
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either nurture or destroy. Exactly. And also don't go looking for the miracle. You are the miracle.
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And it's so important to have a positive message in a negative world. So thank you, Carl,
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Safina, for your life of compassion and all you do to help us understand animals, what it's like to
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be behind their eyes and imagine what it's like to live in their bodies. And what the Safina
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Center does for fusing scientific understanding and emotional connection to inspire us to respect
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and live in harmony with animals. We all live on one planet. We call home. Thank you for adding
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your voice to one planet podcast and the creative process. Thank you for making it possible for me to
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add my voice, Mia. And thank you, Evelyn, as well.
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When planet podcast is supported by the Yan Mishalsky Foundation, this interview was conducted by
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Mia Funk and Evelyn Mall with the participation of collaborating universities and students.
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The associate interview producer on this podcast was Evelyn Mall. Digital media coordinators
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are Jacob A. Prysler and Megan Hagen-Murth. The music is written and performed by Juan Sanchez.
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We hope you've enjoyed this program. If you would like to get involved in one planet podcast and
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be part of the Climate Change solution, just drop us a line at teamat1planetpodcast.org. Thank you
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for listening.