00:17 - 00:25

Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

00:26 - 00:34

land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another. Communities

00:34 - 00:41

above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos. As the saying goes, as

00:41 - 00:51

above, so below. Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much

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more. I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you. Hello, everyone. I am your host, Kate Cavanaugh,

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the Mind Body and Soil podcast. Soon to return to the name, the Groundwork podcast, where we explore the threads of what it

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means to be humans woven into this earth. And I think that some of our upcoming episodes are truly going to exemplify that

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statement, what it means to be humans woven into this earth. And we are going to explore a lot of the built world that we

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have woven out of a variety of materials from sand to steel to petroleum and how those have been woven into the natural world

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as they are from the natural world. And they are derived from the natural world, mined from those places, wrought from the

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ground with human labor. And throughout that, one of my biggest concerns is that some of these explorations can become a little

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bit dark, that they feel a little bit heavy. And I can attest to that just in how I have experienced it, as I have been exploring

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this for months on end. And some of the times where I have found myself feeling a little low, a little depressed, and a little

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lost. And what I want this week's episode to do is to provide us with an anchor of the knowledge that to be human is to be

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animal and that one of the things that we have as humans that make us special and not special both, number 1 is thumbs and

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I always come back to this. I feel like there's some luck of the draw in the fact that we are able to manipulate the natural

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world and turn it into a built world in a way that I think is perhaps only rivaled by something like a beaver, which we explored

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in the episode with Ben Goldfarb. But in this week's episode, I have invited Melanie Challenger on to discuss the human animal.

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And I think it really comes back to this quote that her and I will discuss on the on the episode. There's there's 2 pieces,

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and I just want to make sure that we really drive them home before we dive in. And the first is this, the world is now dominated

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by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal, and the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal.

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This matters. We are that animal. And our connection back to what Mary Oliver would call our animal bodies is more vital now

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than ever because we share these animal bodies with other animal bodies. Right? As Alana Collins taught us in her episode,

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we are only 10% human. 1 out of 10 of our cells is our own while the other 9 out of 10 are those that belong to our microbiome

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and all of the animals that depend on us. If we just take one step outside and reach into the soil, we will find 1,000,000,000

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microorganisms per teaspoon. Every, almost everything that we touch and that we utilize in our daily lives is made up at some

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point in the supply chain of animal bodies and earth body. And whether that is, you know, the petroleum that we pull out of

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the ground that used to be a whole manner of plant life and phytoplankton and bacterial life that has degraded over 1000000

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of years or we are talking about our food, right? We've talked a great deal about food on this podcast, especially through

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the lens of regenerative agriculture and eating animals and eating animal bodies and that incredible intimacy that comes with

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that. We wear clothes made of natural fibers. Again, these are things, I'm sitting here, I'm wearing a wool sweater that was

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once a part of an animal body, and so animal plant bacterial fungal bodies surround us. And so it's important that we look

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at what it is for us to be woven into what might be considered a holobiont, which is the sum total of all the creatures and

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biomes that we're constantly interacting with, really challenging that idea of self and other. The other anchor I want to

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come back to in Melanie's work is that it is our ability to love that is perhaps what will buoy us into the future. And let

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me read this quote, which I believe I read in the episode. For all our destructiveness, humans are also promiscuously compassionate

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and thoughtful. In fact, humans are what I like to call love generalizers. Our bodies reservice hormones like oxytocin from

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maternal child bonds and our later affiliations with one another and also when we bond across the species boundary. It is

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a marvel of nature that a creature like us has evolved in such a way as to be able to love a skink or a pig or a python or

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a wren. Okay. Perhaps we don't love these other species quite as forcefully as we do our own kind. Our love for one another

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is incredible. But we can love completely unrelated members of our species. And, yes, perhaps we don't love them quite as

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much as we do our children, but we are still extraordinarily promiscuous with our affections. We are a strange marriage of

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possible loves, an infinity knot of infinite possible relations, and we don't tell ourselves this anywhere near enough. The

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generalizable nature of our affiliative biology is our real superpower. So perhaps we might make space, we might place a little

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more faith in our bodies. I want to come back to this time and again through upcoming episodes where we really do explore

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what I think is a darker side of our humanity and of the built world and of our relationship with the natural world where

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we too have this incredible superpower in our affiliative biology to love beyond our species, to love and know a tree, to

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love and know members of other species, be it our dogs, our cats, our goats, or to perhaps begin to love the bacteria inside

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the soil for the incredible gifts that it gives us. I think that Melanie's work in her books, How to be Animal and On Extinction,

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are incredible benchmarks both for some of the history of the destruction we have wrought and also the possibility that we

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have. And this is a sort of philosophical and ethical space that gets a little bit tricky. And I think throughout this, we're

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weaving into some spaces that perhaps if you have come to this podcast from a regenerative agricultural background, and it

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might tweak something a little bit. If you're coming to this podcast as someone who is still skeptical about raising animals

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for meat might tweak you a little bit. And so I think that we are continually going to get into some territory where we're

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in some gray areas, and we're crossing over into camps and finding middles that might be a little bit uncomfortable. And I'm

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excited about that because I love the gray area. I love the nuance. I love challenging explorations that force me to reevaluate

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my own worldview and perspective of what it is to be woven into this earth. And again, I think that our weaving, the thread

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that each of us represents as an individual is inextricably connected to every thread within this tapestry of life that is

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so unlikely here on our little blue planet. And I want us to hold in our hearts the infinite possibilities of stories we could

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tell ourselves going forward because it is this moment right now, it is always this moment right now in which we have the

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spread of opportunities to tell ourselves a new story. And I think that, first, we must examine what is the story that we

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are currently telling ourselves, where do we find ourselves at this moment in time. And then we must examine our values, our

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true values, peeling back the layers of what society has told us of the little silos that we have found ourselves in in terms

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of our little social media camps or the identity markers that we wear, whether that's carnivore or homesteader or environmentalist,

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and truly beginning to deeply assess where our hearts are. And I think that through this balance, some of what I hope to achieve

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here is to be able to craft a new story. And so I deeply appreciate you coming along for that ride. I think this episode with

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Melanie Challenger is a beautiful anchor point for us, and it will couple with a solo episode where I'm going to talk about

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why I have chosen to explore some of the topics that I am choosing to explore right now. As always, I am incredibly grateful

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to you for tuning in to the Mind Body and Soil soon to be Groundwork podcast. This is a solo production of Passion. I edit,

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produce, market, make the reels, am the videographer. I do all of the things for this podcast and it is not free to produce.

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And so your support means the world. If you would like to support the podcast, you can either subscribe to my Substack or

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you can leave me a one time tip in the show notes if you're interested in helping me purchase books or to pay for my time

11:47 - 11:55

on editing. This podcast has made an impact on you. If you share it, that's one of the biggest gifts that you can give. And

11:55 - 12:06

as with everything else, sharing is an act of spreading the word. It is an act of letting someone else know that you think

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that they might enjoy some of this long form content. If you have shared and have not yet If you shoot me a little snapshot

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of your review, I'm always happy to send you a little bit of snail mail in return, and so you can find my Instagram link in

12:29 - 12:38

the show notes and shoot me that little snapshot, and I'll send you a note. Thank you so much for tuning in to this labor

12:38 - 12:47

of love that absolutely fills me with passion and joy. It is such a pleasure to build this podcast together because you are

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very much a part of it by listening to it, by communicating with me in DMs via email and letting me know what you think of

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these books, of these episodes, and getting a chance to connect. So without further ado, here is the incredible Melanie Challenger.

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And, again, I just cannot recommend enough that you pick up her books, How to Be Animal and On Extinction. She also has some

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beautiful poetry. I have her book Galatea and some beautiful essays online. So Melanie is everywhere and I encourage you to

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find her. Without further ado, here we go. I really do mean that. I was just telling you this, but I really do mean like it's

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been such a delight to read your books, to read your poetry, to listen to you speak with various experts on the psychosphere

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and to just get a little peek inside of your brain and spend a lot of time there and considering what might come out of this

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interview. So so I'm I'm just delighted to have you here.

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Oh, thank you. I mean, I have had a very diverse career and, of course, I haven't thought about it in that kind of way. I

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haven't planned it. I've it's you know, I'm moving authentically through the world, right? I'm going on the inquiries that

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I go on but I have to say now that I'm in my forties, I do I am starting to reflect back and look at how I can recognize that

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it's quite unusual, I suppose, to work in simultaneously in so many different areas. But it's somewhere in my head, it's logical.

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So if it's if it's made sense to you, then that's delightful to me.

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Oh, I think it makes perfect sense. And I do think it is actually in looking backwards that we can see sort of how we followed

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trajectory and curiosity and inquiry to arrive at the unique constellation points of our work and career in a way that we

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never could have planned.

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I think that's right. And very often, that's when we are confronted by the parts of our intelligence that are not necessarily

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immediately obvious to us. Mhmm. Where there are different kinds of of, ways in which we are guiding ourselves forward that

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are not not immediately, accessible, you know, to to to rational thought at first. And actually, when you look back at it,

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you say, I I see what I was doing, I see where I was going. And it is it can take a while for it to surface. And I, I'm at

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that stage where I think everything is starting to surface simultaneously. And I'm starting to see the connections between

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the different sort of creative or, intellectual kind of roots that I was I was just following. They're all sort of starting

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to converge now, so it's quite exciting for me in some ways.

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I love that. And I love that idea. I mean, that you what you said initially, that you're you're just sort of following inquiry,

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and that that reveals different kinds of intelligences. And I think there is sort of a an animal ness to our to our curiosity

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and and following that and and what it reveals. I I I just really appreciate that perspective.

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Oh, absolutely. I think it's it's animal through and through.

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Through and through. I thought we might start there, and I actually thought that we might start in childhood. I was struck

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as I was I was reading all your pieces and listening. You weave some of your childhood and your children's childhoods into

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your work. And, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to interview Andreas Weber. I don't know if you're familiar with

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his work. Yeah. Yeah.

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But he

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had said something in one of his books that really struck me that we are so quick to catalog every developmental stage of

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childhood, every rollover and a holding up of the head and all of these different developmental benchmarks. And yet we don't

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define the place where a child reaches for any animal, almost falling out of their carrier to do so. And I was thinking about

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this in the way that you speak of children and of that innate curiosity. And you have a quote and you say they're interested

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because they assume that these living things matter. They've not yet been brainwashed by a cultural view that tells them living

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things have no intrinsic value other than in their uses for humans. And so I kind of have this this I hope this interview

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is a little bit like a life cycle. And so I wanted to start here at childhood when we are so beautifully and acutely interwoven

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into this this web of animal species and animal ourselves before we've been told otherwise.

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Well, I mean, children have to be taught how to be human in the modern sense. Children obviously don't stick to any of the

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rules that govern polite society. So they explore everything through their mouths, for starters, which would not be acceptable.

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Then they explore everything through touch, and we've got very far removed from touch in some ways. We're all about, you know,

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adults. The adult stage of the life cycle is much more about negotiating through language and through visuals. But, obviously,

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children are much more, engaged in a completely fully embodied way. And that lack of boundary also is there in terms of human

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and non human. It's there initially between their own bodies and their mother's body. So yes fathers as well, but it's more

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more strongly between the maternal body and the and the child body that there's, it takes a while to grasp the fact that that

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these are 2 separate beings. And that's the moment that kind of vulnerability can sometimes, emerge in young children when

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they realize, actually, hang on a second, I'm not just a nice, cozy, extra limb of my mother's super nice. I'm a separate

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entity that can be harmed, you know. And again, the so that that that is a process of learning of separation and so forth.

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And sadly, one of the separations that happens also, which starts very much from a togetherness, is the one between humans

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and the rest of the living world. So it's not that young infants, you know, don't understand that there is that they are looking

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out on beings that that are furred, have furry faces, or growling, or behaving in different ways, have lashing tails and and

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don't appear to be humans. Of course there's distinction but there isn't exceptionalism. So there's distinction and curiosity,

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there's distinction and fascination, there's distinction and respect, that that seems to come naturally. And what happens

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over time is that, and and we can unpack this later. You have to learn how to look out on the rest of the living world and

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see these other beings as not intelligent, as somehow emotionally bereft or somehow subhuman as somehow less important rather

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than as as unique worlds of being that are very much on their own terms. That has to be taught, and it is not there for young

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people. So that's very much I think a separation that is driven into us and that we when we want to make sense of how that

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creeps in, you have to go back to the the early stages of life and and spend your time immersed in the kind of mindset where

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that we're all born into. Where when it when it's not when it's not in place, when the separation hasn't been, hasn't been engendered.

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I thought that that was such a beautiful distinction that you make that that that we're sort of inculcated in this worldview

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that it it's it's something that we swim in a societal milieu of this more hierarchical idea, that that isn't there in that

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innate sense that there is a a separateness or division, but but not a hierarchy. And at the beginning of how to be animal,

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you say something that I think is really crucial and has kind of just been echoing around in my mind, for the last 6 months

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since since I popped open the book. And you say the world is now dominated by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

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And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. This matters. And as I've kind of gone through

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other books and other readings this year, this couple of sentences has really stood out to me. And so I just wanted to pass

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that back to you and to begin that conversation.

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So, you know, it's funny. A lot of people have, either written to me or spoken to me about those first lines. And I would

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like to say that they just emerged from from native wit effortlessly but in reality I worked really hard on that first few

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sentences. I was talking to someone yesterday about the fact that my writing process appears to be spending about 10 months

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now and I've spent a year just writing the first very, very short opening part of the current book that I'm working on, How

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to be an animal. The first kind of 2 or 3000 words took about 10 months and those sentences that took a really long time to

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distill and to get to. The rest of the book then writes itself relatively fast. That's the interesting thing about the way

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that I appear to work. I can't, you know, I haven't written enough to know that that will always be the case but certainly

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for the moment it takes me a long time to get to that stage. With How to be Animal I was trying to find a way and in those

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sentences of capturing for people an essential point that would navigate that they could use to navigate the rest of the territory

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because I was going to go all over the place with How to be Animal. You know, the book is essentially, an inquiry into the

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psychological, the moral, the historical consequences of the fact that we are animals ourselves. That's going to take you

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into vast, you know, terrains and across historical time, across different cultures, different ways of seeing the world, different

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knowledges, and also just different facets of our lives that will be affected from the political to the social, and so forth.

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Because of the breadth of the terrain, I felt that I had to find a way of of having a kind of touchstone, something that readers

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could come back to each time to help to to go around them again and what the essential point was here. And so in those sentences,

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I had tried to just get down. I know the book is about a lot more, but I essentially tried to get down to how this was a syndrome

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of sorts that resonated both through history and and at the moment. And so the world is dominated by an animal that doesn't

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think it's an animal. In some ways, that allows us to recognize that that that this is a worldview that has come to dominate,

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it isn't necessarily inevitable. The idea there is that we are living our lives at some level as if we're not really animals

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and there are lots of ways that we can look into what what that means. But I think one of the one of the immediate ways is

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that we our entire legal system, for instance, or even our how we ground our right to vote or any of these sorts of kind of

25:31 - 25:40

really crucial aspects of of human society are often based on the idea that there is some sort of exceptional human essence

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that only we possess, that gives only us moral, true moral status. And that is a profoundly non animal thing. You have to

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argue that this is exclusive to humans. It has to be something therefore that we do not share. Despite the fact that we are

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highly related to other primates, we're we're related to mammals, we're related to all of the life on earth going back far

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enough. We have to somehow pull something out of animality and and stamp our unique moral identity. That would that that's

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just one aspect of how we in some ways, even though we accept that we're animals, we don't think and act as though we are.

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So and then the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. That's about looking at some of the

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psychological things that follow from being an animal and how that's manifesting in the world. So trying to live forever,

26:41 - 26:48

for instance. Mhmm. Trying to control the aspects of our animality that we fear, our aging bodies, our diseased body. These

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sorts of things. It's really, looking at the way that that ripples through, through our lives and, and our technologies and

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our approaches to to the meaning of our lives. That's that's kind of what the second bit follows through. And and it's really

27:04 - 27:12

a response to how serious that is now when the current industrial revolution is very focused on the biological, being able

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to control and engineer the biological to to control and engineer intelligence and so forth. So that that's that was what

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I was trying to do. I was trying to get sort of all of those different things patched down into something really kind of tight

27:26 - 27:32

that at least people could take with them, even if the even even if the discussions were going to get a bit bewildering at

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times. That was the aim.

27:34 - 27:41

Well, it's a stunning touchstone and something I've come back to in not just this interview with you, but actually in other

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interviews as well. And, you bring up a point that was initially how I found you was through an essay that you had written

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for Emergence Magazine on death and love. And I am struck in the second part of that, of not wanting to be animal, but the

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idea of death, which you discussed both throughout On Extinction and in How to be Animal is, oh no, and some of the explorations

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that I've had this year, I think that death is the point where we take the idea of growth in perpetuity that, that we have

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realized throughout at least the industrial revolution, if not even further back into the agricultural revolution and this

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idea of sort of limitless and very linear growth, that to come home to the idea of death is to recreate a sense of circularity.

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And you talk a lot about the idea of eschewing death and the ways in which we've done that and that that has continued to

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make us separate. And and even I was fascinated. You just there was a little bit about feelings of disgust being heightened

29:02 - 29:11

in those that are asked to consider death or even a sort of pushing away of loved pets. And so I wondered if we just might

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dive at least briefly into the idea of death as, I mean, for me very much, it's something that brings us back to the idea

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of that there are limits to growth, that there are that it is an equalizer as well, that it is very beautifully animal. And

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I I know that we both we both walk our own respective forests most mornings and get a chance to to see death a little bit more intimately.

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I mean, there's a huge amount to, unfold there. So the idea I suppose another way of talking about growth could be to talk

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about progress. This is the idea that human beings have to be on a progressive trajectory in order to give their lives. Meaning,

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we hear this a huge amount. We hear the idea that exploration, so progress through space, through landscape, the idea that

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breaking through, scientific and technological barriers, progress in that sense, the idea of economic progress so of, growth,

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economic growth, the that kind of narrative, which isn't sustainable, frankly. We all know this. It has to be it has to be

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reimagined certainly. But the idea that progress is in some sense a kind of reaction to the ultimate limit, The fact that

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we're all going to die and that we fear that at some really primal level. The real architects of thought about that was probably

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Ernest Becker who wrote The Denial of Death in I want to say 1972 or something around then. I I've been mulling this actually

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before where I came across Becca's work simply as a consequence of having children. One of the things that's really difficult

31:21 - 31:28

when you're a parent, and I would imagine this is the same whether you are someone of faith or whether you are an atheist,

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whether wherever you are on your belief in afterlife, or whether you're panpsychist, whether you you're a complete materialist,

31:37 - 31:47

what whoever and whatever your way of orienting yourself in the world. When you have a little child who maybe 3, 4 depends

31:47 - 31:56

on the child suddenly realizes that their their mom and dad are gonna die or their parents are gonna die or their grandparents

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are gonna die or maybe it comes through, observing it somewhere else or maybe it's an experience that they've already had

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in their lives. That moment of mortality and then that they will be more club 2 is it's an assault on the mind of the child.

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You can see it when it when it hits them for the first time. And that I think again going back to childhood that it's just

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it's made very apparent it's naked in the child that fear of death. Whereas for adults, we suppress that. We don't admit it.

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We don't admit that we remain very frightened about mortality. I think human beings are in a really we are in a unique position

32:42 - 32:50

in this regard, in that I think other animals certainly have a concept of death. I think other animals are capable of grieving

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and mourning one another. They recognize death, especially among social animals. But human beings can think about death in

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the past, think about death in the present, and anticipate death in the future. That is unique certainly, as far as we can

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tell. I wouldn't 100% say that that wouldn't be in some other primates, but it's it's definitely the heightened and amplified

33:17 - 33:30

in human beings. And that has shaped human history. You know, I was walking around the, Amsterdam recently. And if you go

33:30 - 33:39

into the earlier stages of art in Europe, it's it's only about death. I mean, pretty much all of the great cultural works

33:39 - 33:48

are about squaring up to death in one way or another. So death is is terrifying for human beings regardless of of what they

33:48 - 33:57

tell themselves about it. It's, the kind of permanent state of death, whether it's a complete extinction or whether it's it's

33:57 - 34:06

just a a a changing form to something else. Regardless of that, it's frightening. And we've got we've got very good evidence

34:06 - 34:12

in all aspects of our culture for the ways in which we culturally culturally resolve that and can psychologically resolve

34:12 - 34:19

that fear. But I think it's some of the invisible aspects of the way that that our fear of death can can affect us. So you

34:19 - 34:25

you were talking about something it's called terror management theory. So this is a kind of field that came out of Becca's

34:25 - 34:33

work looking at the impacts of of death or mortality salience on human beings. So when they're made aware at some level of

34:33 - 34:41

of death, does it alter the way that they behave in the world? So and many studies have found in different kinds of societies

34:41 - 34:49

have found that it tends to make human beings more groupish. So they'll seek reassurance at some level. Interestingly, it

34:49 - 34:57

can also tend to make people favor the idea of human uniqueness and human exceptionalism because that idea itself buffers

34:57 - 35:08

buffers them from what they fear of death. So whether or not the fact that we can't quite get to grips with the fact that

35:08 - 35:18

our lives are mortal and therefore our entire sort of modern industrial complex is to a certain extent An attempt to master

35:18 - 35:29

death and or not is it may be a little wildly reductive but there is something there, there is something there and I think

35:32 - 35:40

certainly when you see the existential way in which people respond to the possibility of an industry having to change and

35:40 - 35:50

come to an end Or the possibility of a nation having to rethink its identity. Those things are people respond to those as

35:50 - 35:59

they respond to death. And so I think that's somewhere that we can we can start to see, that that connection is live and active.

36:01 - 36:08

You you said something in the process of this and and sort of brought it home towards the end that progress is a reaction

36:08 - 36:15

to the ultimate limit, which is death. And you you have a quote in I think it's how to be animal, it might be on extinction,

36:16 - 36:23

that large industrial societies live at a remove, determined to evade the constraints of nature. They ease many of the burdens

36:23 - 36:31

and dangers of existence. Today, the dominant cultures of progress still tell us we must continue on this trajectory, pulling

36:31 - 36:37

further and further from the rest of life on our planet. And I think what you said there I

36:37 - 36:44

don't know which book which book that's wrong. I think it might be from on an extension, actually, but I wouldn't swear to it.

36:45 - 36:51

It's fantastic. And I pulled it out because because of and what you said is so salient, right? That progress is a reaction

36:51 - 37:00

to that ultimate limit. And I think I see this made manifest in a lot of the ways that we are carrying on within industry.

37:00 - 37:08

And I often come back to, and I Mark Fisher attributes that to somebody else, Mark Fisher's idea that it is easier to imagine

37:08 - 37:14

the end of the world than it is to imagine the death of capitalism. And I think that that kind of comes back to to that idea

37:14 - 37:24

of the death of industry and just how resistant we are to it and how much this has been couched in the terms of progress.

37:26 - 37:37

Well, I think that's right. I think if you look through industrial history, however, we're actually remarkably adaptable.

37:37 - 37:48

So sometimes when a resource runs out or it becomes uneconomic to pursue that resource. So an example could be tin mining,

37:48 - 37:59

which I talk about in On Extinction, where it just got so difficult to access the the tin with the current with with with

37:59 - 38:09

the available engineering, but it didn't make economic sense anymore. Now individuals, human beings are deeply, deeply cultural

38:09 - 38:19

animals and there are all kinds of aspects not just of how we might relate to the idea of death but just existential, really

38:19 - 38:28

fundamental existential needs that get pressed on when your cultural knowledge you've inherited maybe over multiple generations

38:29 - 38:38

is in danger or when your sense of identity that you've built around a particular way of life again that you may have inherited

38:39 - 38:48

and may go back multiple generations, that is immensely difficult. And again the kind of experiences that individuals who

38:48 - 38:56

were at the frontier of having to shift elsewhere into a different a different future, different unknown economic or cultural

38:56 - 39:07

future and identity. They experienced that light grief and I remember listening to the audio and reading the transcripts of

39:07 - 39:13

some of the miners in in Cornwall when they realized that the industry was going to be gutted, that this was the the dead

39:13 - 39:21

end. And they experienced profound grief. Some of them to the point of suicide. You know, this is this is not it's it's in

39:21 - 39:32

in no way psychologically trivial. That said, human beings do adapt. It's not easy but they do do it with remarkable skill.

39:32 - 39:41

We we still transfer elsewhere, we we rebuild and reinvent the the meaning of the landscape, we carry our prior histories

39:41 - 39:50

forward as, as heritage. You know, you think about cowboys, very few cowboys drove in the way that they want stood, you know,

39:50 - 39:56

might use helicopters, maybe, but they're not going to be on their horses drove in the kind of way that they were many, many

39:57 - 40:05

years ago, that has changed. And yet the insignia, the cultural identity, what you wear your Stetsons, and so forth, those

40:05 - 40:11

things have all carried through, you know, that's how human beings cope with the change, they they bring with them what they

40:11 - 40:18

love and what what they want to remember. And that informs a new and a fresh and a reimagined identity. So we're actually

40:18 - 40:27

very good at doing it both economically and and in our heritage. It's really tough psychologically and so one of the things

40:27 - 40:34

that frustrates me is that when we have to we come up to a point where we're going to have to shift how we do things economically

40:34 - 40:46

or or what industry remains an acceptable one with the new new cultural or social ideas that we have for the time. The first

40:46 - 40:53

bit of work that you need to do is invest in supporting those individuals who are at the frontline of the change, the individuals

40:54 - 41:01

who will need psychological support. We focus so much on providing economic support but actually the first bit of work that

41:01 - 41:08

you need to do is psychological support people and ready people, talk to people and listen to people who are going to have

41:08 - 41:17

to shift into into a different line of work or into a different, a different way of being in a landscape or a different way

41:17 - 41:22

of thinking about the meaning of their lives. We're not even having that kind of conversation when it comes to capitalism.

41:22 - 41:29

It's not it's not even on the agenda, but that for me is the first first and most important piece of work that you should

41:29 - 41:33

do, you know, in terms of due diligence as as things change and shift.

41:35 - 41:41

I don't think I've ever heard anybody bring that up, and I think that's really important because as I was looking at this

41:41 - 41:48

and one of the things that I think anytime you're talking about death, I think you're also talking about grief. And one of

41:48 - 41:54

the conversations I had earlier this year was with, just a home funeral arranger. I was talking about, I think, for me, the

41:54 - 42:05

scariest part of death is actually my own experience of of grief. That grief is an emotion that is so big. And I think that

42:05 - 42:14

this is something you really cover beautifully in terms of looking at the ideas of grief and nostalgia. And I'm going to I'm

42:14 - 42:19

not going to pronounce this correctly. I'm going to try so hard. Dasha Wang And

42:19 - 42:20

How did I do?

42:21 - 42:23

How did I do? How did I do? Was it okay?

42:23 - 42:24

It's good. Yeah. It's good. Okay.

42:25 - 42:26

I I

42:26 - 42:35

think we can't go we can't go back and be absolutely sure. All of these pronunciations are, to a certain extent, you know,

42:35 - 42:40

we're doing the best job that we can with something that was spoken 1500 years ago.

42:42 - 42:55

But this idea that think a lot of what we are experiencing collectively and then individually and and perhaps within industry,

42:55 - 43:03

just like you said, is a sense of grief that isn't being looked at, right? That we're not having the psychological support

43:04 - 43:13

for the grief that we experience as the 6th mass extinction goes on, as ways of life are changed. You know, and you say something

43:14 - 43:25

on extinction. You say, I begin to see that the idea of loss was riveting to the imagination, like shrapnel, to believe too

43:25 - 43:32

that this was an involuntary response to losses discovered both in the external world and in the internal life of an individual.

43:32 - 43:39

But why did people suffer these aching emotions if not for some purpose? Were they the consequence of some other aspect of

43:39 - 43:46

sentience or were they in themselves rewarding feelings? And then you go on to define Doshiowang, while studying the early

43:46 - 43:52

English language at university, I came across an ancient English word for the fascination experienced by someone looking at

43:52 - 44:01

a ruin, das shiawong. A word of startling precision for which no modern equivalent exists. A kind of daydream of dust, a pondering

44:01 - 44:10

of that which has been lost. Dust seeing, dust chewing, just dust cheering. The daydream of a mind strung between past and

44:10 - 44:26

present. And I love how much you've incorporated the importance and the instinctiveness of grief within our processes as animals.

44:29 - 44:37

Yeah. So it's funny. It's not it's not it's not just a Western idea, this one as well. I remember being really struck when

44:37 - 44:55

I was in Nunavut in the north far north of Canada, and I was talking to a a hunter, from the Inuit community there, And she

44:55 - 45:02

she showed me it actually. I can't remember what the word was in Inuktitut, but there was a word that's very similar in some

45:02 - 45:12

ways for a way of keeping looking back that that was brought to life again in the present. So it was a kind of non linear

45:12 - 45:22

sort of relationship with the past, a kind of mindset that that was both in the present and alive to a kind of particular

45:22 - 45:32

moment in the past. It's got me as being very similar in quality. So this is a really deeply human impulse. And, you know,

45:32 - 45:40

some of it is is the kind again, it ties into why we're uniquely frightened of of our deaths, because our minds are time traveling

45:40 - 45:49

minds. They move between the past, and they track possible future states. And our whole identities are built through that

45:50 - 45:59

shuttlecock, you know, across across time, across across the past, not just our past, but the past of our ancestors, and into

45:59 - 46:11

into future possibilities. That that is both wonderfully flexible for an animal. It gives, it gifts us the imagination. It

46:11 - 46:20

it offers strategic planning. It offers ways of imagining what could go wrong and and therefore flexibility choice in in in

46:20 - 46:27

your action moment by moment. There's a huge amount that's that's available from having that kind of time travel in mind.

46:27 - 46:41

But of course, with it, comes unique fears, particular kinds of, of, ways of suffering that that originate in in that, flexible

46:41 - 46:54

sort of, time management that's enliven us all the time. I think we can see and what concerns me perhaps the most at the moment

46:54 - 47:05

is that going back to what we were talking about earlier, There's good robust, you know, repeated evidence that human beings

47:05 - 47:14

respond to existential threats in ways that are both positive. So we can build connections. We can be nudged into more affiliative

47:14 - 47:21

behaviour. So we kind of buffer ourselves from these kinds of things that we fear through building positive connections. An

47:21 - 47:29

example of that would be, let's say the pandemic comes in. It's a novel virus, it's essentially frightening to human beings,

47:30 - 47:36

how many people would have got straight on their phones and looked up an old connection or reinforced their relationship to

47:36 - 47:44

those that they love, or made sure they go to church a little bit more than they were beforehand. That's a really positive

47:44 - 47:55

response to fear where we seek reassurance through togetherness. The other thing is that we can tend to get groupish. So then

47:55 - 48:07

we get very spiky about, those that are outside of the group. We can find ourselves, pushing into that more othering kind

48:07 - 48:15

of state of mind where we we're reinforcing group connections, but those can come at the loss of others. And within that,

48:15 - 48:23

there's further complexity. When we get into a groupish state of mind we tend to infer more intelligence, more secondary emotions

48:24 - 48:31

to those that are within our group and less intelligence, less secondary emotion, less trust in those that appear to be outside

48:31 - 48:40

of our group. I worry that we're in a time where all of these things are playing out in our these are very animal things to

48:40 - 48:57

do with our particular behaviors as a highly, highly social animal, are playing out in in ways that we have very little charitable

48:58 - 49:06

giving, in in lots of different kinds of ways in which it's impacting our behaviour. But one of the things that concerns me,

49:06 - 49:17

I suppose, most about the the environmental crisis is that unless we understand the way that we respond to fear, then these

49:17 - 49:23

very fear driven narratives that are only becoming more alarmist may actually be counterproductive. That's something that

49:23 - 49:33

greatly worries me. We talk about generation dread. Fine. But we really need to understand what plugging our existential anxieties

49:33 - 49:41

are likely to do in terms of behaviors, in terms of norms. If you want people to be agents of change for good, you've gotta

49:41 - 49:46

get on top of how do we respond to fear. And that's something that that, you know, really bothers me.

49:47 - 49:55

Yes. And I think I think anybody anybody listening to this, I think that you see some of that that in group othering behavior

49:55 - 50:05

in so many different facets of the microcosm and the macrocosm both. And I'm curious because I think that you speak so beautifully

50:06 - 50:15

about the idea of affiliative love being a sort of human superpower. And I have a little quote from you and I'm a little bit

50:15 - 50:27

curious about what you think, how you think we can, I don't really wanna say leverage, but how we can lean into that space?

50:27 - 50:36

And and for listeners just to kind of define this, I have this quote from the essay, in Emergence Magazine. You say for all

50:36 - 50:44

our destructiveness, humans are also promiscuously compassionate and thoughtful. In fact, humans are what I like to call love

50:44 - 50:51

generalizers. Our bodies reservice hormones like oxytocin from our maternal child bonds and our later affiliations with one

50:51 - 50:59

another, and also when we bond across the species boundary. It is a marvel of nature that a creature like us has evolved in

50:59 - 51:07

such a way as to be able to love a skink or a pig or a python or a wren. Okay. Perhaps we don't love these other species quite

51:07 - 51:14

as forcefully as we do our own kind. Our love for one another is incredible, but we can love completely unrelated members

51:14 - 51:20

of our species. And, yes, perhaps we don't love them quite as much as we do our children, but we are still extraordinarily

51:20 - 51:28

promiscuous with our affections. We are a strange marriage of possible loves, an infinity knot of infinite possible relations,

51:28 - 51:36

and we don't tell ourselves this anywhere near enough. The generalizable nature of our affiliative biology is our real superpower.

51:37 - 51:40

So perhaps we might place a little more faith in our bodies.

51:43 - 51:45

I quite like that myself, actually.

51:46 - 51:51

Isn't it nice when you when somebody reads it back to you and you're like, oh, actually, that sounds good.

51:52 - 51:57

Well, I guess I guess in some ways, it doesn't really feel when when you have distance from when you wrote something, it doesn't

51:57 - 52:07

really feel like it's you or yours anymore and in any case these ideas don't they feel like found objects If you see what

52:07 - 52:16

I mean rather than necessarily things that are owned by me. So I I, you know, it's that's what I love about writing is that

52:16 - 52:23

for me, it's gregarious. It's a gregarious form of thinking. We're thinking together as readers and writers, and that's that's

52:23 - 52:25

what's really beautiful about the act of writing.

52:25 - 52:29

I love that. A gregarious form of thinking. I love that.

52:29 - 52:40

Okay. But I think that, yes. So it is for me something that we don't we when we talk about what's exceptional about us, we

52:40 - 52:49

we so often go for our intelligence, our, you know, only we have souls, only we have consciousness, only we can think in certain

52:49 - 52:59

kinds of ways, only we have language etcetera etcetera. Actually, firstly, I think our moral our moral flexibility, our moral,

53:01 - 53:12

possibilities, our ways of caring about others and acting for others is is really what's most remarkable. And then in in a

53:12 - 53:21

simple sense, as I've said, the fact that we are capable of loving, of resurfacing, because that is very often what biology

53:21 - 53:29

is doing. Biology won't invent something afresh. It won't come up with something new. It will just repurpose what it already

53:29 - 53:39

has there available to it. So what we can see is that the maternal child bond within mammals has been resurfaced the same

53:39 - 53:46

sorts of hormones, the same sorts of pathways, the same sorts of mechanisms, which is why those naught to 3 years are often

53:46 - 53:55

so very crucial for people's well-being. Those can be those are reworked later in life in our relationships with our our romantic

53:55 - 54:06

relationships, in our friendships, and even in how we relate to those who are who are not related to us directly at all. Similarly,

54:06 - 54:15

we we use the same sorts of things across the species boundary, and it is remarkable that human beings can really form a loving

54:15 - 54:24

relationship with any other kind of life. That is so incredible. That's such a degree of emotional flexibility. That it is

54:24 - 54:33

incredible. We don't don't notice it, to the degree that we should do. We'll talk about that as being what should center our

54:33 - 54:40

identity as exceptional. And so that's guess, I guess, just a a case of human identity. What is it that we think that really

54:40 - 54:47

matters about us? For me, that that's it. That's what's really special. Of course, there are things that follow from that

54:47 - 54:54

that that are more uncomfortable for people because that's a very inclusive, starting place in terms of the rest of the living

54:54 - 55:05

world. Whereas an exceptional value that is based around something that we think only we possess is is a very exclusive kind

55:05 - 55:13

of way of thinking about human identity. I'm much more interested in the inclusive one, and I think it has more to offer than

55:13 - 55:22

that because I I talked a little bit about social buffering. So social animals buffer themselves. Well, by that, I mean that

55:22 - 55:32

when they experience something that's very difficult or distressing. So let's say you are a young animal that has gone out

55:32 - 55:40

on its first foraging, and has come across a predator. You've escaped that, but you've gone back to your the rest of your,

55:40 - 55:52

related members, that animal will have be packed full of stress hormones. And those stress hormones will have they'll stay

55:52 - 55:59

in the body for a good 2 weeks, for starters, and they'll have implications in terms of the well-being of the animal, and

55:59 - 56:07

and stress through life, high levels of stress or lots of stress, affect the immune system, affect long term survival and

56:07 - 56:15

so forth. So social animals use their inter their relationships, their affiliations with one another in order to buffer themselves

56:15 - 56:21

from the stress, those sorts of stresses. So it has an immune and a physical benefit. We know this happens widely. Human beings

56:21 - 56:29

do it as well. And we see all sorts of ways in which, just even going to the hairdresser and having your, being groomed in

56:29 - 56:38

a very formal way will release some of the positive hormones and and get your kind of respiratory rate, your resting heart

56:38 - 56:46

rate into a a better kind of state. This is all buffering. This is all social buffering. Human beings psychologically buffer

56:46 - 56:54

themselves as well. So we use ideas to do the same kind of thing and some of when those ideas are exceptionalists, so as in

56:54 - 57:01

human beings are are special and a uniquely special, and this is what gives meaning to our lives, or we have to, you know,

57:02 - 57:08

earn more money or progress in a certain kind of way, and this is what makes us special. If you're buffering yourself with

57:08 - 57:16

something that is essentially going to be, maybe positive for you but toxic for everybody else, then we're in trouble. What

57:16 - 57:25

I like about this sort of love generalising is that if we were to buffer ourselves with a sense of relatedness with the rest

57:25 - 57:34

of the living world. If we were to buffer ourselves with the beauty of being alive, with greater connection with the rest

57:34 - 57:40

of the living world, with nurturing the rest of the living world, with thinking in a multi species community rather than only

57:40 - 57:49

in a human community. Decision making in a much more we expand our our social community to embrace the whole of the planet

57:49 - 58:00

and the whole of the biotic community. For me that that offers not only a more morally consistent way of looking out on the

58:00 - 58:08

world, But it offers us, one of the ways that we can start to counter the things that we with that that we've been so frightened

58:08 - 58:15

of throughout throughout our lives. But that's how we can kind of square up to the human condition a bit. So it may sound

58:15 - 58:19

fanciful, but I actually think that it it would be, beneficial to

58:20 - 58:27

people. I don't think it I don't think it's fanciful at all. And and I I think just the ways that I know I have benefited,

58:28 - 58:37

from feeling a sense of interconnectedness and and from leveraging that that sort of affiliative nature are are so multifold

58:37 - 58:43

that I couldn't I couldn't even begin to to speak of them. And I you know, you had a you had a really great great quote in

58:43 - 58:50

here because I think some of this is about telling ourselves a new story, right, that that we tell ourselves the story of

58:50 - 59:00

of fear and of separation. And and what if we did focus on this idea of, our affiliate of love and our generativeness. And

59:00 - 59:08

and the quote was, it's time we told ourselves a new story of revolutionary simplicity. If we matter, so does everything else.

59:09 - 59:16

And to to add to that a little bit, just to to feel a sense of interconnectedness within that space of of everything.

59:18 - 59:29

Yeah. I mean, it's that said, I'm I am a deeply practical thinker as well. Immediately I I do what I would imagine a lot of

59:29 - 59:36

people do which is think, well, what what would this actually look like in the world? What would this do to our food systems

59:36 - 59:45

for instance? What would this do to the way that we practice conservation? What would this do Dismantling the way that that

59:45 - 59:54

exceptionalist approach that I've been talking to at different points in this interview. Really, really doing something to

59:54 - 01:00:03

dismantle that is colossal work. Because it's it, you know, its tentacles are in absolutely everything. Thing. The way in

01:00:03 - 01:00:13

which for instance we entirely steer and control the reproductive behaviors of of large numbers of animals as part of our

01:00:13 - 01:00:23

food systems. I don't really see how you could support those sorts of actions if you took seriously the subjecthood and you

01:00:23 - 01:00:31

you really connected with the intelligence and feelings of other living beings. I don't see how you could continue that kind

01:00:31 - 01:00:40

of practice in the world. And so there there is some very severe limits. I don't think it necessarily mitigate sorry. I don't

01:00:40 - 01:00:54

think it necessarily argues against killing or utilising other animals or other living beings at all. I think that's a more

01:00:54 - 01:01:03

nuanced question but it certainly makes problematic some very ordinary everyday practices that we take for granted. You know

01:01:03 - 01:01:10

even in conservation the idea that you can just take one kind of animal because you think it's doing some kind of function

01:01:10 - 01:01:17

in the ecosystem and plonk it somewhere else. You know, that's gonna get very difficult if you really take seriously the subjective

01:01:18 - 01:01:26

and intrinsic value of a living being. It's gonna get very difficult to say, well, let's eradicate that particular animal

01:01:26 - 01:01:32

because it's it's getting in the way of another that we've, for whatever reason, given higher conservation value to. These

01:01:32 - 01:01:39

sorts of things or any kind of way of thinking about living beings in aggregate are gonna become very problematic if you take

01:01:39 - 01:01:50

this kind of affiliation seriously. So so I think there's that there are very radical implications to really doing this, but

01:01:50 - 01:02:03

I think that the benefits, even though the ructions would be enormous, would also be considerable. You know we we are we're

01:02:03 - 01:02:11

very lonely. We're a very lonely animal. We have no other humans around us. There should be other humans alongside us. We

01:02:11 - 01:02:20

don't often think about that enough but there should be other humans. It's very strange to be an animal with no other, no

01:02:20 - 01:02:29

other of I mean, chimpanzees is as close as we get, and this is over 6000000 years ago. And yet only you know 30, 4000 years

01:02:29 - 01:02:40

ago we would have had more diversity than we have now. Going back 250,000 years ago there would have been you know we we thought

01:02:40 - 01:02:47

of ourselves as there is you know again this is where we can get our ideas so wrong until really very recently we thought

01:02:47 - 01:02:55

human beings had just come into being in a nice linear line of progress. They're ending in us. We now know that the human

01:02:55 - 01:03:03

line was branched. There were other humans alongside us and they're not here anymore. We must ask the question why. Homo Sapiens

01:03:03 - 01:03:12

has not lived comfortably alongside any other large mammal. We've tended to take out large carnivores. We know this. We take

01:03:12 - 01:03:19

out competitors within our environment. That's been going on for more since pre homo sapiens actually. That's a kind of homonym

01:03:19 - 01:03:29

problem but, yeah, there's definitely we're a lonely being and that now we're lonely because we're killing off both the abundance

01:03:29 - 01:03:40

and diversity of the other life alongside us. That to me is the most enormous moral harm And so anything that could push against

01:03:40 - 01:03:49

that and I think in ways that ultimately would be emotionally nourishing to us rather than necessarily stripping us of the

01:03:49 - 01:03:53

meaning that we seem to hold so dear. I think would be a positive step forward.

01:03:56 - 01:04:03

Thank you for for for that. I I don't I don't know if you've read the work of Daniel Quinn, but I think it it hearkens back

01:04:03 - 01:04:14

to that. I think you'd really enjoy him. He's a fiction writer that that has spoken a lot about, what a lonely animal we are, and how

01:04:14 - 01:04:15

I'll lick them up.

01:04:15 - 01:04:24

And how there there were other branches of humans. And this idea of prehistory that we market the agricultural revolution

01:04:25 - 01:04:34

is really not pre at all. It is is deeply a part of our history and our relationship with other animals that we are the only

01:04:34 - 01:04:42

other animal that that destroys entire species, in the way that we do in in competition for for food and energy resources

01:04:42 - 01:04:53

and has sort of terraformed the planet, in this pursuit of progress, whatever that means. I'll I'll send it to you after this

01:04:53 - 01:05:00

after this interview. I think you'd really appreciate his work. I think that when you say that I'm struck that we're lonely

01:05:00 - 01:05:09

on every level, right? Like, we are lonely in terms of the amount of biodiversity loss that we are experiencing lonely and

01:05:09 - 01:05:18

that there would have been other, species of of homo around us. We are lonely at the level that we no longer live in community

01:05:18 - 01:05:27

with one another as we might have many years ago or even lonely and that we no longer live in intergenerational houses where,

01:05:27 - 01:05:39

you know, we have access to more of a community. And so I think our loneliness is pervasive, at sort of every space in this.

01:05:39 - 01:05:49

And I think that while some of these ideas are problematic and that it upends our entire way of life as we know it. What we

01:05:49 - 01:06:00

stand to gain is something that I don't even think we can imagine. And in the ways that you recount nostalgia, in some ways

01:06:00 - 01:06:07

for something that we have never experienced, If you think about shifting baselines or walking through a certain ecosystem

01:06:08 - 01:06:17

and sort of missing something that you never knew was missing within it because of the loss of biodiversity that we've experienced.

01:06:17 - 01:06:28

I think there is at that same time a longing for a future that we can't even fathom because it would involve such a break

01:06:28 - 01:06:34

from our current paradigm. And I don't I don't think there's a word for that either. Does that does that make any sense?

01:06:35 - 01:06:42

It does. It does. I while you were talking, I was thinking about the fact that in some ways, we suffer from too much togetherness

01:06:42 - 01:06:58

as well, which is the loneliness problem, but we we probably live cheek by jowl, perhaps more than is is easy for human beings.

01:06:58 - 01:07:05

Yeah. More than gosh. What is it going to be? It's over 3 quarters of the human population are going to be living in urban

01:07:06 - 01:07:14

centers in the coming, decades which is almost a complete reversal of where we were at a 100, 200 years ago.

01:07:14 - 01:07:14

Yes.

01:07:15 - 01:07:22

So we're now town and city dwellers and while there's lots that's wonderful in towns and cities there's also often gross inequity

01:07:22 - 01:07:30

socially. There's also just many many people, many many strangers, lots of pathogens spreading. There's all sorts of things

01:07:30 - 01:07:40

that can make us a wee bit prickly and a little bit defensive and that's a lot for us to cope with. So, and you know population

01:07:40 - 01:07:47

levels are high for human beings, I know we get squeamish about talking about this but we have to be honest again if we follow

01:07:47 - 01:07:55

from our animality we have to recognize what difference that makes. I remember being struck by a very interesting study on

01:07:58 - 01:08:06

communist prejudice basically looking at human prejudice and how the prejudice followed on and particularly for certain kinds

01:08:06 - 01:08:16

of populist mentalities, how much that related to a real or an imagined population increase in an area. What was interesting

01:08:16 - 01:08:23

is that if we could be convinced there'd been a population increase, even if there hadn't been, we would react in a certain

01:08:23 - 01:08:30

kind of hostile way. And if there had also been a population increase that we weren't necessarily aware of but we're only

01:08:30 - 01:08:39

ambiently aware of it, we would also be affected by that. I can't remember where the study was. Maybe a a savvy reader out

01:08:39 - 01:08:44

there will will know the study I'm referring to. It will be somewhere hidden away on my computer. I can I can find

01:08:44 - 01:08:47

it too and and include it in the show notes?

01:08:47 - 01:09:02

Yeah. So it is it was an interesting survey. What struck me was that we are affected competitive, that we are reactive, that

01:09:02 - 01:09:10

we do get affected by by our population sizes in ways that we're not always able to track. I think the other thing that's

01:09:10 - 01:09:22

interesting about what we fear about change is that we will have to face change whether we like it or not. As all animals

01:09:22 - 01:09:30

have always had to do throughout history and we with all of our technologies will be no different. If we get to a stage where

01:09:30 - 01:09:39

we are exploiting or destroying our environment to a to a beyond its its plasticity, then things are going to go horribly

01:09:39 - 01:09:50

wrong. Would we not be better to exploit the kind of intelligence that we have, and the the mental and literal resources available

01:09:50 - 01:10:01

to us, in order to steer that ourselves, rather than have it imposed on us externally by the environment. That for me is it's

01:10:01 - 01:10:08

always going to be better to try and do that for yourself. Make that change happen for yourself with your own agency than

01:10:08 - 01:10:16

it is to have the agent of change come through disaster externally. That that that's your choice. You're gonna have to change.

01:10:16 - 01:10:23

You either change in a disastrous reactive way or you change in a positive, proactive way. What what what are you gonna do?

01:10:23 - 01:10:26

That's that's that's become a take home for me.

01:10:27 - 01:10:33

I I love that you brought it there. I know we're coming up close on time, but one of the ways that I considered wrapping up

01:10:33 - 01:10:41

was to speak about agency, which I think you do really beautifully, not just at the human level, but also really at the level

01:10:41 - 01:10:49

of the organism. And I was struck, I think in the first episode of The Psychosphere, you talk about how often we lose the

01:10:50 - 01:11:00

organism when we talk about ecosystems or certainly when we talk about genes as well. And I pulled a little quote from you

01:11:00 - 01:11:10

that I just love. You said reflecting on the B and the B Orchid, a focus on agency and biology restores the organism as a

01:11:10 - 01:11:18

self sustaining goal directed entity. As Albert Schweitzer put it, I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that

01:11:18 - 01:11:25

wills to live. Organisms, in pursuing their goals, make value based choices. As such, they make our world, our planet, a meaningful

01:11:26 - 01:11:33

one. In undermining the value of organisms and their agency, we strip our own world of its value too. It is time to foreground

01:11:34 - 01:11:42

organisms and their willful beauty. It is time to recognize the rebellious autonomy of our living world. And so perhaps here

01:11:42 - 01:11:49

at the end, we could touch on the agency, not just of the the human animal, but the interconnected web of life around us.

01:11:50 - 01:11:59

Yeah. So this is really the first little hint out in sort of bits of the public stuff that I've done of the project that I've

01:11:59 - 01:12:06

been working on for the last few years and that that I'm I'm going to be publishing next when I when I've got it finished.

01:12:07 - 01:12:18

I'm having a very very slow wade through this book but it's called Life is an Act of Rebellion and the subtitle I think I

01:12:18 - 01:12:28

may change it is on the revolutionary nature of humans and other living beings. So it's about it's about agency very much,

01:12:28 - 01:12:37

it's about purpose more broadly it's about the autonomy that is at the heart of life and is for me is definitional of life.

01:12:38 - 01:12:44

So I have to be honest I did something that's in some ways probably gonna seem counterintuitive. I I went heavily down the

01:12:44 - 01:13:00

reductive path. I really got I was I I went right down to the molecules. Utter kind of just bloody minded curiosity to be

01:13:00 - 01:13:10

honest. But I was it was also driven by causation. I was trying to understand why it is that all living beings pursue their

01:13:10 - 01:13:19

interests in this really remarkable way. You know, we we have a lot of talk about, you know, in one of the tools to try and

01:13:19 - 01:13:25

overcome the kind of ruthless extractivism that, and the kind of exceptionalism that we talked about in this interview. One

01:13:25 - 01:13:34

of the instruments within law is rights of nature, right? Which which is a fantastic instrument in order to try and counter

01:13:34 - 01:13:43

some of these these, toxic ways in which we're interacting with the living world and and despoiling the living world. But

01:13:43 - 01:13:52

within that is is this sort of legal personhood for rivers. And I I was thinking about this a while ago, and it's a beautiful

01:13:52 - 01:14:00

idea. And yet one of the things that really I was struck by in terms of ecosystems thinking this was what really led me into

01:14:00 - 01:14:08

the book a number of years ago. Actually, let's think about a river for a moment. So a river is an agent, right? A river is

01:14:08 - 01:14:16

an agent of change, in one sense in the way that we talk about chemical agents, right? So it's something that changes something

01:14:16 - 01:14:24

from one form to another. It it it acts in a way that generates change. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking

01:14:24 - 01:14:34

about an agent in that sense. A river is an agent, but all of the causation comes externally. So the river cannot decide,

01:14:35 - 01:14:42

do you know what? I I don't want to go into this. I'm not I don't like the idea of just being dispersed into the sea. I like

01:14:42 - 01:14:50

to be this river that I am. I'm not gonna just flow out there into this other body and become this sea and lose my identity

01:14:50 - 01:14:57

as the Danube. I'm not up for that. I want to stay the Danube. So I'm gonna flow in the opposite direction. A river could

01:14:57 - 01:15:08

never do that because it's not alive. But the salmon can flow in one way and it might be following certain kinds of instincts,

01:15:09 - 01:15:18

but if it needs to that individual salmon faced with a predator it did not anticipate can flip round and turn it against the

01:15:18 - 01:15:27

flow of the river. We do not pay enough attention to how absolutely mind blowingly extraordinary that is. How did that come

01:15:27 - 01:15:38

about? What is it that drives that extraordinary movement away from the predictable determined kind of motions of physics.

01:15:38 - 01:15:46

That is what's so incredible about life. It's that autonomy and I think what and and it is shared by absolutely every form

01:15:46 - 01:15:56

of life from a paramecium to a single celled organism to an e coli to a human being. It is the ability to act for meaning.

01:15:57 - 01:16:04

So what life is about is a singularity of meaning that that manifest in very particular kinds of actions in the world that

01:16:04 - 01:16:12

are unique to living beings. The change starts on the inside, and then it happens in the in the external world. And I suppose

01:16:12 - 01:16:19

that's it's when we think about how can we make a change in in the face of the destructive things that we're doing in the

01:16:19 - 01:16:27

world. It is precisely the fact that we are that kind of living agent, a biological agent in that sense. We're not rivers

01:16:27 - 01:16:35

who inevitably have to flow into dispersal. We don't inevitably have to move through time in the arrow of destruction. We

01:16:35 - 01:16:44

can change direction. That's what is so particular and we do it because it means something to us to do it. So that for me

01:16:44 - 01:16:55

is what is so special about life and that's the subject of my next book and for me it's a really hopeful one. It's really

01:16:56 - 01:17:05

helping me in this somewhat dark time that we're living in at the moment to remember that that is really what is at the heart

01:17:05 - 01:17:14

of life is the ability to rebel against the inevitable and that that's that's for me what agency is all about.

01:17:15 - 01:17:24

I wanted to to end on this because I find it so hopeful. And I I thank you for bringing this into the narrative, this aspect

01:17:24 - 01:17:30

of hope and our ability to it's it's funny that you would touch on Sam, and I just did an interview with Ben Goldfarb who

01:17:30 - 01:17:34

wrote Crossings. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Do you do you know Ben?

01:17:34 - 01:17:37

I don't know personally, but I know the yeah. I know the work.

01:17:37 - 01:17:44

We we talked a lot about salmon and circular economies, And and I think that there is something so hopeful too in the idea

01:17:44 - 01:17:49

that we as humans can can swim upstream, which I think is a little bit of what we talked about in the course of this interview,

01:17:49 - 01:17:58

what it might mean to to go a little bit against the current, a little bit uncomfortably, but with with meaning and and purpose

01:17:58 - 01:18:05

and to change that direction. And so I'm really grateful for the way that you consider agency. And I'm really looking forward

01:18:05 - 01:18:16

to your next book and and seeing how you explore that and how how you explore that across all life. And just I'm really truly

01:18:16 - 01:18:23

grateful for your work. It is a keystone in in many ways. And and so just thank you. Thank you for being here.

01:18:24 - 01:18:30

No. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I'm a ways away from finishing up, but I'm I'm doing my best. I've gone over that

01:18:30 - 01:18:36

first bit as I was telling you about where I I've managed to crack the first chapter, then hopefully the rest of it should flow.

01:18:37 - 01:18:43

Well, I'm I'm excited to to read it whenever it makes its way into the world. And I think that the the beauty of these things

01:18:43 - 01:18:51

is oftentimes they can't be rushed. It is just it is just the pace at which it unfolds. And so I'll be looking forward to

01:18:51 - 01:18:59

that. Melanie, thank you so much for being here. I'll have links to your work in the show notes. Is there anywhere else that

01:18:59 - 01:19:03

you would like to be found or anywhere else that that people can look?

01:19:04 - 01:19:11

I suppose the only other thing I would add people to is the work that I do more widely in ethics and and applying these sorts

01:19:11 - 01:19:20

of ideas in the world. And I I work with a wonderful group, partly at New York University but also around the world at various

01:19:20 - 01:19:28

different, institutes and it's called Animal Syndrome And so, yeah, maybe look us up if people are interested in what it what

01:19:28 - 01:19:31

it looks like if you take some of these ideas and you actually do them in the world.

01:19:32 - 01:19:38

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. And it was just a joy to talk to you.

01:19:39 - 01:19:41

No. Thank you. It's been a lovely conversation.

01:19:44 - 01:19:52

Thank you so much for listening listening to this episode of the Mind Body and Soil podcast. If what you found resonated with

01:19:52 - 01:19:59

you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? This act

01:19:59 - 01:20:06

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01:20:08 - 01:20:23

and at kate_kavanagh. That's k a t e_kavanagh on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth

01:20:23 - 01:20:30

Kent of the band Alright Alright for the clips from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible. You

01:20:30 - 01:20:34

can find them at Alright Alright on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.