The Beauty and Complexity of Animal Cultures
We are joined by ecologist and author Carl Safina, whose writing explores the human relationship with the natural world. We discuss how human supremacy keeps us from appreciating the incredible beauty and complexity of other creatures, and has led to the diminishment of most wild beings and places. Carl's work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action; he sees that the durability of human dignity and survival of the natural world will depend on each other; we cannot preserve the wild unless we preserve human dignity, and we cannot preserve human dignity while continuing to degrade nature.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Carl Safina 0:00
I've always found nonhuman animals to be just very, very interesting. They do so many things that are different. They do so many things much better than humans can. Many of them have superhuman senses of hearing and smell, speed, the ability to fly, the ability to breathe underwater, all these kinds of things. I mean, how can you not find all of this enormous diversity of ability, just not breathtaking, beautiful, enriching? There's everything about it that's positive. It's part of the incredible richness of this miraculous planet that we're on.
Alan Ware 0:33
That's today's guest, Carl Safina, an American ecologist and author whose writing explores the human relationship with the natural world. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. We'll hear more from Carl Safina on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:23
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and their combined devastating impacts on social, reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.
Nandita Bajaj 1:46
And before we move on to today's guest, we've got listener feedback from Rory in the UK. He says, "I became vegan three years ago, and now work at a leading vegan charity as a campaigner - as close to being a professional vegan as you can be. Increasingly however, I started to feel that I had stopped challenging my own behaviors. So while out running, I started to listen to podcasts on things that would butt up against my own preconceptions on different topics. I stumbled across the Population Balance podcast, and binge listened to numerous episodes. Previously, I had belief that overpopulation wasn't a problem yet. So as long as we transition to a land-use efficient, plant-based diet, and that it was a step too far to recommend smaller families to people across the world, especially the developing world who I thought had to experience population growth for economic growth. So much of what I had heard in the Population Balance podcast challenged everything I thought that I believed about population. But I was immediately struck by how rational, kind, empathetic, and evidence-based it was. I had written on my personal blog a bit about population before, and how I thought a plant-based diet would mitigate the problem. I have since rewritten that very blog and backpedaled a number of my own fallacies. So thank you Population Balance, you're still my favorite podcast to listen to while out running. Keep it up." Well, thank you so much, Rory, for sharing your fantastic story. We work very hard to break down these false barriers that stand between us and other kind-hearted people like you. And stories of transformation like yours are some of the most inspiring. We'll be sure to add a link to your blog post that's titled Backpedaling on Overpopulation, to our show notes, so our listeners can see what these common fallacies are, and how you've admirably addressed those within your own thinking. And thanks to listeners like you, we now rank in the top 2% of all the podcasts globally. In addition to this podcast, we also run virtual educational presentations at schools and conferences with a goal of empowering people to make liberated and responsible reproductive and consumptive choices. And we do all of this with a really small staff and we count on you to help to keep doing this important work. And we hope you'll consider supporting our transformative programs either by donating or by inviting us as a guest speaker to your community groups or school classrooms for free virtual presentations. And now on to today's guest.
Alan Ware 4:29
Carl Safina's lyrical nonfiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world and what the changes mean for nonhuman beings and for us all. His writing has won a MacArthur Genius prize, Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation fellowships, book awards from Lannon, Orion, and the National Academies. And the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up racing pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first endowed professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and as founding President of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at pbs.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale E360, and National Geographic, and on the web at Huffington Post, cnn.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books, including the classic Song For the Blue Ocean, as well as the New York Times bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. He lives on Long Island, New York with his wife, Patricia, and their dogs and feathered friends,
Nandita Bajaj 5:52
Carl, it's such an honor to have you with us today. As an organization whose core value, among others, is ecocentrism, we admire your work so deeply. You've spent decades exploring our relationship with the living world and also helping to cultivate a reverence for nature. And we're so excited about learning more from you today. Welcome to our podcast.
Carl Safina 6:15
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 6:17
One of the things that you've noted in your writings is that thinkers of the Western Enlightenment made a strong separation between human and animal, positing that animals didn't have feelings and couldn't feel pain or even plan or imagine into the future. And based on this strong belief in separating human and animal, much of Western science has warned against any attempt to anthropomorphize, which, as you define it, is to project human thoughts and feelings onto animals. But you've argued that our tendency to anthropomorphize is both natural and useful. Why do you think projecting human thoughts and emotions onto animals is both natural and on balance positive?
Carl Safina 7:02
Well, in a way, I agree that what I've said could be understood as saying that projecting human thoughts and emotions on animals is good. But I didn't quite mean to say that. Well, the thing about anthropomorphism in science is that you're not allowed to explain an animal's behavior or anything about the possibility that they have mental experience, in terms that would also apply to human beings. But the fact is, we all have the same central nervous system, all derived organically from the same source, it's all evolved from the same origins, it's substantially the same thing. So while I don't think it's a good idea to project human thoughts and emotions onto animals that are not human, any more than it would be sensible or good to project them onto a tea kettle that is whining because the water is boiling. But when you observe things in nonhumans, and the best explanation is that what they're doing is probably something that we would be very familiar with. In other words, you know, if a dog seems happy in a happy circumstance, it's very logical to say that the dog is experiencing feelings of happiness. Why is it logical? Well, how else would you explain the fact that they are happy, that they're jumping around, that everything seems good with them, that they're excited, because something that would cause those feelings in us has just happened. Somebody they know has just walked in or they're about to get some good food that they really like or something like that. You wouldn't say that a dog that appears to be cowering in fear is happy. You would say they seem to be cowering in fear because there's a great threat or the dog has a history of abuse or something like that, that makes sense. So it's not a good idea to say that explanations that seem completely logical and that comport with the fact that we are all organically related, and that makes sense in context are not allowed, that you are not allowed to observe something in a nonhuman that you would observe in a human. Now, I don't think that other animals worry about getting into graduate school or a lot of other things that are peculiar to the human experience. All things seek a sense of well being the nervous systems of different beings are organized at different levels, vertebrate nervous systems are substantially the same. And certainly all mammals have essentially an identical nervous system with some important minor differences. So that's what I'm talking about. It takes a lot of words to kind of explain that. I don't think it's a great idea to project human emotions any more than I would project them on to you and say, you know, "You should be satisfied with what you have," or something like that. I would say projecting is not good. But observing is good. And observing that not only do many people seem to share the same kinds of cognitive and emotional reactions to the world, but many other species seem to share very similar cognitive and emotional experiences.
Nandita Bajaj 10:20
To me, it seems like a helpful exercise to use what we understand to be human behavior and human emotions to then translate some of that to understand what animals might be feeling, especially for those of us who have experiences with companion animals, repeated predictable behavior does lead us to see that there is intentionality and there are a lot of similarities in the emotions that we see within humans and see within animals.
Carl Safina 10:48
Well, sure. I mean, what makes more sense, to think that if somebody is trying to kill a pig, and the pig is trying to get away and is screaming, that that the pig is frightened, or that the pig doesn't feel anything? You know, which of those explanations makes any sense? It doesn't make any sense that a pig that is trying to get away from somebody who is trying to hurt it, and is screaming, has no experience going on and cannot feel anything and does not think anything. That is just illogical on any level. And there's nothing scientific about that at all. If the basis of science is evidence and logic, then in the evidence that there is an animal in danger, the logic that it's trying to evade the danger and escape harm is simply a good conclusion to come to. A much better conclusion than that this creature has no experience and no understanding of anything. That just completely does not comport with what you were seeing in that event.
Nandita Bajaj 11:56
Right. And you've had experiences in your early life that led you toward this path, where you've said you've always loved animals. Is that the motivation behind your career choice?
Carl Safina 12:08
Well, yeah, it is. I've always found nonhuman animals to be just very, very interesting. They do so many things that are different, they do so many things much better than humans can. Many of them have superhuman senses of hearing and smell, speed, the ability to fly, the ability to breathe underwater, all these kinds of things. I mean, how can you not find all of this enormous diversity of ability, just not breathtaking, beautiful, enriching? There's everything about it that's positive. It's part of the incredible richness of this miraculous planet that we're on. But having said that, and having said that ever since I was a little child, I saw the lives of other animals to be substantially similar to ours. They tried to stay alive, they tried to stay well, they seek comfort, they need food, many of them are trying to keep their babies alive. In broad strokes, the arc of their lives is substantially the same. I think my emotional feelings about other creatures has changed. I do see them much more as individuals. I've learned a lot more about that over the years. I think their cognitive abilities, their ability to make choices, to know the map of their territory, to know who's a stranger who's a threat who's an ally, I think I understand and appreciate that better than I did when I was a kid, let's say. And, of course, the overwhelming conservation problems that we have, and the habitat losses and the population declines, all add layers of concern and urgency over these things so that whether another creature is capable of thought or emotion or at what level do they have individual personalities was simply a really interesting set of questions. But now the implications and what is at stake for those cognitive experiences and who we are poised to lose and who we are harming as we degrade the systems that are the life support of the world, there's just a lot more involved now than I used to understand.
Alan Ware 14:18
Yeah, you mentioned in there the differentiation, the individual personalities of different animals, and we humans often tend to think of them as an undifferentiated group, something we never do with fellow humans, and your work has helped us see animals as individuals who each have a unique personality in the same way that people have unique personalities. In your 2015 book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, you do a great job of weaving together field observations from around the world with new discoveries and brain science to create a deep exploration of the inner lives of animals, especially elephants, wolves, and killer whales. What were some of the surprising, the most surprising new understandings about animals you took away from the experience of researching and writing that book?
Carl Safina 15:03
Well, you know, I came to that book with a prior understanding and appreciation of a lot of things that we're talking about, I just learned a lot more about it in the course of working on the book and being out in the field with those researchers and those creatures. I just want to back up one step and say that one of the things you mentioned that we usually see other creatures as an undifferentiated mass, and we don't do that with humans, I mean, we do do that.
Alan Ware 15:30
Now, that's true.
Carl Safina 15:31
That's one of the biggest problems we have is our laziness in seeing the richness of diversity, you know, and you have to be careful how you say that, because you could say the differences among people. Seeing differences and leaving it as different undifferentiated masses is what, you know, results in bigotry and bias and racism and all these other horrible social problems. But the differences are important, because the differences are the diversity, right? So it's not just whether you see differences, it's how you think about differences that you see, and which differences you choose to see, which differences you choose to ignore. So getting back to your question about what surprised me. Nothing hugely surprised me, which is why I set about to write that book in the way that I did with those creatures. But a lot of the smaller details did surprise me. The tremendous social dynamics among wolves. I didn't know a lot about that when I went in. And we now understand in the last, I don't know, ten or twenty years, that the only ancestors, dogs or wolves, they didn't come from the hybridization of different kinds of wild animals or anything like that. Dogs are domesticated wolves. The domestication has gone pretty far, and that's why we have this crazy diversity among dogs. But watching wild wolves, I was really very struck with how dog-like they are, and it helped me understand dogs a lot. Because a wolf, what we call a pack, this terrible name, is family. It's a nuclear family. There's a mom and a dad and their young ones of several years. And one of the young ones reach adolescence, they leave to find their own state in the world. That's why we have wolves in our living room, because they understand how to live in a nuclear family. That's why we don't have our closer relatives, chimpanzees, because they don't live the way we live. And they seek dominance violently. Wolves don't do anything like that. And in a wolf, if you watch wild wolves, what you see is that the young ones defer to mom and dad, they watch the older ones for cues, what are we going to do now? They follow their lead in all the experience that they need to learn by watching and our dogs take all of those skills that evolved over so much time to make wolves the nuclear family living animals that they are and the only real difference with dogs is that they never grow out of that phase of being really cute to the parents, but we are their parents in their eyes. So they're always cute to us. With wolves, that lasts until adolescence and then they take charge of their own lives. Our dogs never take charge of their own lives. For their entire lives, they're basically young wolves in arrested development. And they're always looking to us for the cues about what is happening next. Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? You tell me because you're the mom and dad here. I think I grew to understand and appreciate dogs a lot, lot more by watching these wild wolves. And that was maybe the most surprising thing. And then developing a much deeper appreciation of the mental capabilities of orca whales or killer whales. A lot of that was very, very revealing to me, some of it shockingly so. Some of the things that I learned that they've done that look like not only planning, but the the ability to communicate in detail plans that they are about to execute. But we don't understand how they are communicating it. But the results are impossible to understand without them having something as detailed as a language the way we would understand language. They're really able to just say, "Okay, next, you do this, I'll do this. You go here while I distract them going here." How they could possibly communicate that without something like language, it's impossible to imagine. But we don't really know what their language is or how that's happening. We do know they vocalize really a lot. We haven't found patterns in the vocalizations that would allow us to transcribe them or interpret them. And it might be that they simply have a different modality that we don't know about, like up until the time I was in grade school people did not know that dolphins use sonar. They didn't know they had that modality. And it was only after quite a few years of experimenting with dolphins and wood bats that people finally realized that what they're doing is they're making sounds that we don't hear. And they're interpreting echoes from those sounds to navigate through the world. We just didn't know that that modality existed in bats and in dolphins. So maybe there's some other thing we don't know about yet that's the way that they communicate in detail. But dolphins do seem to communicate in detail, at least sometimes when they really need to.
Alan Ware 20:35
And you mention in the book that elephant communication is very complex, but you say the only real categories we have are snorts, barks, roars, grunts, cries, and squeaks. So we have, I suppose the physical manifestation, the sounds that we then categorize into snort, bark, roar, grunt, but the variation and what those are really communicating, we've barely scratched the surface, right?
Carl Safina 20:58
Yeah, I think that's kind of an unfortunate thing, that instead of trying to translate, people have just categorized sounds, and described what the sounds sound like to us, you know, like a bark or a grunt. Rather than saying that grunt means I'm looking for my young one, or something along those lines. A few years ago, we raised an orphan owl of a species called Eastern Screech Owl. They basically never screech unless you grab them, and they're frightened. Well or unless they are fending off an attack from birds that are mobbing them, I've heard them do that. But basically, if you read anything about them, you read that they have two calls. What's called a whinny and what's called a trill. If you get to know one as an individual, and you let them live free, and they decide to hang around the backyard and get a wild mate and raise young ones, and you are privileged to be at point blank range with owls that are completely tame and are going about their normal lives, you hear a range of calls that you will not read about anywhere because they don't say those things when they're alarmed at the presence of somebody nearby, or they just need to watch what those people are doing. But when they don't need to watch what the people are doing and they're completely ignoring you because they know exactly who you are and they're a little bored of seeing you all the time, and they're communicating with themselves, or they're using their communication to express things to you, what I got was a range of sounds that are easy to interpret. They're not that detailed, they don't have a lot of things that they seem to be saying and talking about. But in the intensity of calls that you might say, well they have this call, it's called a whinny. But the whinny is expressed in a huge range of intensity. And in different contexts, if the mate is out of view, or you are out of view, and they're trying to find each other, or they want to know where you are, they'll be much more declarative with it. And it will be simply louder. If you're right there or they just appear and they just want to say, "Hi, I'm right here." It's very, very soft, and it's not repeated very much. So there's this range of things that can be interpreted. And some of those elephant researchers, including Joyce Poole, who was one of the ones who was saying, you know, "They bark and they grunt," she'll say that in things she writes, but if you're with her and you're watching elephants, or you or she's interpreting a video of what some elephants are doing, it's unbelievable how much she understands what they're saying in context. But those nuances, they don't get into writing very often. The things I was talking about about my owl are in a book that I'm just finishing, and a little bit of that will be a little clearer in that book. But I do think that the frontier with animal communications is to stop describing the sounds and to start interpreting what they are saying, and the range and the intensity and the context, and how those all work together to provide a fair bit of nuance in what they're expressing and what comes across and what is understood by them.
Nandita Bajaj 24:20
In the earlier book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, you've provided evidence for the fact that they have a rich inner life that includes a wide range of thoughts and feelings. And in your latest book, Becoming Wild, you're laying out the evidence for cultural development and differences that are found in groups of animals. And specifically, you've looked at a group of sperm whales, scarlet macaws and chimps. Could you give us an overview of some of the biggest insights you've gained in studying the culture of the species which is, you know, a really new concept for people to be exposed to?
Carl Safina 24:57
Yeah, I think in academia twenty years ago, most people would say that humans are the only animals that have culture. They don't say that anymore. I think that argument is gone. And, and has been replaced by all the evidence for quite a bit of culture and the importance of culture in many nonhumans. Now, when you say culture, most people think of arts and sports and religion and things like that. And I would say none of those things are culture, they are the products of culture, and what culture is, culture is the set of answers to the question of how do we live here where we happen to live? That's why art and religion and sports and music varies so much, because different people do it differently in different places, the culture of it is the variation in it. So in a way, music is not culture. The fact that there's different music is culture. And as I said, it's the answer to how do we live here. So with humans, if you imagine somebody born in an Indigenous tribe in the Amazon, they will learn as a matter of course, how to live in the Amazon. If they're born in the Arctic, they will learn as a matter of course, how to live in the Arctic. And nothing about that will be particularly exotic to either of them. But if you take somebody who knows how to live in the Amazon and you let them off in the Arctic, they will die. If we take somebody who knows how to live in the Arctic, and drop them in the Amazon, they will die. That's the importance of culture that answers the question, how do we live here, and many other species have to learn how we live here. And so what culture actually is, culture is the learned and socially transmitted skills, knowledges, preferences, and even aesthetics that individuals don't develop on their own, they learn them in their social group. And so not only does culture tell you how do we do things, but because we do things the same way, it allows us to be together and live together. We might say, in humans, it allows us to cooperate, that's also true in some other animals. So for instance, the human brain has a template for learning a human language, but it doesn't come equipped with French or Vietnamese or German. You learn that culturally. And if you speak German, and everybody's speaking German, there's no problem. But if you only speak German, and you meet somebody who only speaks Vietnamese, it's very hard for you to cooperate, because you don't understand each other. And this is true if you pray a certain way, if you handle your food a certain way. If everybody does it, it's no problem. If people think they're supposed to do it in all different ways, then it's very confusing. So that's one of the reasons that culture exists. It's one of the reasons that some other species have culture. And the other thing is that because environmental conditions vary from place to place, what is food, where food is, when food is available, or ripens, what is dangerous, where is safe, where's the water, where do we go when the weather turns very cold? These are the kinds of things that have to be learned. And if there's no one to teach you, you probably won't be able to exist. So when we wipe out a population, and all of that learning about the regional culture is lost, it's not as simple as saying, "Well, we'll conserve the species by reintroducing them to this area where they were all shot out." Because often, when that's done, the individuals that are released don't know what to do there. It's kind of like they're just abandoned. And the mortality in the early years of many introductions is staggeringly high. Until basically, a few survivors develop new answers to the question of how do we live here?
Alan Ware 29:08
Yeah, that was a new understanding for me. Typically, we think in terms of genetic diversity being lost with depopulation of the species, but the cultural diversity, how do we live here? Answering that question gets lost.
Carl Safina 29:21
Right.
Alan Ware 29:22
And your writing opened my eyes up to that.
Carl Safina 29:24
Yeah, well, that was one of the surprises for me was to really come to that understanding. And that's kind of new, there are not that many people talking about it. But there are some, it's starting to be appreciated more in the context of conserving populations. The importance of not letting a population vanish thinking you can just get them back by throwing a few new individuals in the place, people are starting to understand that.
Nandita Bajaj 29:48
And of course, a big part of being part of a culture is the understanding that it's relational. That we are trying to follow certain norms, social norms that are considered acceptable so that we can fit into those cultures. Part of it is adaptive and part of it is survival. And we of course, notice evolution of cultures within human beings. There's pushback when there's negative manifestations of cultural values that are prohibitive or oppressive, then there's pushback and culture evolves. Is it still early stages to say that there is similar evolution of animal culture?
Carl Safina 30:28
Yeah, well, people have only studied behavior for a few decades. And they've already seen some cultural change over those decades. You know, if you read anything about birds, you'll read what their calls sounds like or what their songs sounds like. And it turns out that bird calls and songs are changing, and probably have always been changing. But it's, you know, it's taken these decades for people to realize that when they go back to a place where bird songs were recorded fifty years ago, some of them are noticeably different now. Just in the last couple of years, a bird that we have around here has developed a sort of a new variation on a standard song of that species and that's been noticed and written up. And I think I first noticed it after I'd read about it, and I think before I read about it, I just thought, well, there are some of these white throated sparrows around here, they're just sort of singing half their song. It turns out that this is a change that is noted and becoming widespread. And there are a few birds where that's been noticed. For the most part, since culture answers the question of how do we live here, and here isn't supposed to change very fast, a lot of cultures don't change very much. A lot of human cultures were the same for thousands of years, you know, especially Indigenous people and hunter-gatherer groups didn't change much for a very, very long time, because they had those answers for how do we live here. Now we are changing so many things about the world so rapidly. We're changing so many of the conditions under which we live so rapidly, that we live in an explosion of culture, and a lot of our culture is technological. So we think that that's what culture is and that's what culture means. And that if other people or other species are not rapidly changing, then they're not very cultural or backward or something like that. But really, there's nothing to say that culture should change. It should help you survive. If it helps you survive, it shouldn't change. And if it's working, you shouldn't take too many chances. You know, if you're a chimpanzee, and you know what we eat, and there's plenty of food, it's not such a great thing to try new seeds and new fruits, because some of them will be poisonous. So even if you're not sure, you might as well stick with what works and not do a lot of experimenting, because the experimenting can get you killed. And that's one of the reasons that a lot of culture tends to be very conservative. We think we live in an explosion of culture. But a lot of the human tendency to culture is very conservative, we're very uncomfortable around people who are trying to do new things. There's a lot of punishment for non-conformity. In the United States, the country is being pulled apart by people who don't want anything to change in terms of their values and how they understand who they are, and other people who want to do things differently. In some cases, simply differently, in some cases, a lot better I would say. And it's not going down very well.
Nandita Bajaj 33:43
Right. I heard in another interview that you've seen kind of a shift in the United States toward more conservatism than we have had in the past and there's this pining for traditional family values. Speaking of nonconformity, we even see in our work where, you know, people are challenging pronatalism either by having small families or no children at all. And that is a threat to the traditional sense of family values that keeps everything in order, according to kind of that conservative mindset. And you can see there's a lot of tension in the air, there's a rise of right wing nationalism to help bring things back into to order. I know we're moving a little bit away from from animal culture, but I just wanted to say.
Carl Safina 34:31
It's all the same thing. And if you try to make it not connected, or you think it's not connected, well, it is all connected. And it really is all related. It's all the same thing. I am interested in other animals because I'm interested in other animals, but it's inescapable that the more you understand about other animals, the more you understand about this animal that we are.
Alan Ware 34:54
You've written in Becoming Wild, where you're looking at a culture of being quite related to us, chimps, and how they're characterized by a male obsession with status and dominance, and you point out some of the uncomfortable similarities to human culture. As you've written quote, "With chimps, as with humans, male passions don't just waste everyone's time, they waste potential for better quality time. It's the testosterone talking." Now, we humans are as genetically related to bonobos as we are to chimps, and in contrast to chimps, in bonobo culture, the females have much greater power. And as you've observed that when females can use their greater power to help maintain peace, and what are your thoughts about these two very different primate cultures, and what insights they might give us thinking about our human animal culture?
Carl Safina 35:41
I think it's kind of obvious that we unfortunately, inherited for, in whatever way and for whatever reason, the chimpanzee model of male dominance being won usually in a fight at the expense of somebody else who was previously dominant. The kind of uselessness of that dominance and that quest for status, whereas in our other equally close relative, females are the most dominant, and they use their dominance to quell conflict, not to start it. They are peacekeepers, and their main modus is just equanimity, you know, everybody be good, everybody be happy. And very famously, when there are social tensions, they calm them down with sex, and they're not very choosy. And that helps to keep everybody happy and satisfied as well. Some of the researchers have observed that when they watch bonobos, it seems like bonobos enjoy their lives. When you watch chimps, it seems like chimps enjoy their lives except when there's a lot of tension. And there's often a lot of tension. And I read something the other day that was really, I think, very true and very sad. And that is that there's something in us or, or maybe just in our culture, where we say, you know, this group, they're happy all the time. And we think there's something stupid about being happy all the time. Rather than seeing there's some deep, deep wisdom in figuring out how to be happy all the time. We all say that we pursue happiness, when the US Constitution says we have a right to the pursuit of happiness, we're all obsessed with the idea of being happy. And then when we observe that somebody is happy, we think it's stupid.
Nandita Bajaj 35:54
Right, they're not working hard enough. We've heard that in the latest book you're writing, you're exploring the question of how the world has come to adopt a worldview based on both human separation and human supremacy. Can you give us an overview of the broad themes you're exploring in that book?
Carl Safina 37:45
Yeah, well, the book is about that little owl that I mentioned who we raised. And because our relationship very obviously blurred a sense of boundary between us and her, she had a wing in our world and we had a foot in hers, it prompted a much broader and deeper exploration of how have people seen the human place in the world? Because we can see it as humans are separate from everything else or we can see it as we're all one big, living family, and how have people seen themselves over the course of the last few thousand years. The idea of comparative religion or comparative belief systems was never anything that I thought I was interested in. But when I started looking into how have people seen their place in the world and in the cosmos, that immediately means what are the belief systems? And what I've seen, my perception is that there are four major realms of beliefs. You know, and there are exceptions to this. But just generally speaking, there are Indigenous people, people who are of their land and of their landscape and that's their deep roots and their deep identity. There are a lot of similarities among Indigenous groups, even as different as their cultures are in terms of how they see the human place in the world. Mostly the similarity is they see it with a lot of reverence. Then there are South Asian belief systems and East Asian belief systems. There's a lot of overlap there, a lot of belief in the way that souls may transit through different lifetimes through different species. The East Asian belief systems, some of them I would say are not really religions, they're more like philosophies. It's arguable, but I would say that they were kind of focused on how is it that in a world that is so diverse, there is such unity? How does unity create such diversity? How does such diversity create such unity? And they would see things like the necessary opposites that exist and that's called Yin and Yang, but what does that mean? It means that you cannot have up without down. You cannot have out without in, you cannot have hot without cold. These are necessary opposites that create something coherent. And then you have the West, and the West is really an outlier, because in the West reverence for the world was banished. And the idea of opposites was not that they are necessary opposites that create a unity but that there is a dualism, where the opposites are the strain, and often at odds with each other. So what you don't have is the idea that everything is enspirited, you have the idea that there's the material world versus the spiritual world, and that those things are opposed. And especially in the West, the idea that the material world is not nice, that it's full of decay, and that it is unspiritual, and that you should focus on and seek the existence that exists not only off the material world, but outside the planet, outside the universe, outside of space and time, that's where perfection lies. This is a tremendous fantasy for which nothing about the world actually indicates that there was any truth to that at all. And yet, that became the world's dominant view, which leads to the world's dominant set of values, which is an opposing dualism inherent in everything. So it's me against you, man against woman, man against nature, us against them. It results in all of these things that create most of the problems that we have, that we do not see a unity, that we do not think the world is a good place, that we think that we as individuals are more important than the world itself. A belief that we will exist forever as eternal souls while the world will pass and another world will come. This is all made up stuff. But this is the dominant made up stuff that people believe in the world today. And it really has resulted pretty directly in a lot of the catastrophes that we are causing to life on Earth, and a lot of the strife that we have caused among each other by seeing these differences, and then treating the differences as something that must be opposed and vanquished.
Alan Ware 42:38
And separating nature into an it to extract and use with as we will. It reminds me of the Great Lakes tribes in North America and their stories of Windigo. The Bigfoot-like creature that stalks winter nights and has a hunger that's never satisfied. A lot of white people, when they came here were described as Windigo by many of the Great Lakes tribes because they never seem to be satisfied with what they were taking from nature. And in that way, their culture, as you were describing the animals, how do we live here? We were importing some British or French or some notion of, "It doesn't matter where we are, we take what we take, and we don't need to understand where we are," in any real sense.
Carl Safina 43:21
Right.
Nandita Bajaj 43:22
When we make that separation between the here and now with this idea that there is the perfection that you speak about that exists in the afterlife, when we're lacking the reverence for what exists. It's a lot easier within that worldview to denigrate it, whether it's nature, whether it's the nonhuman animal world, or whether it's even other human cultures.
Carl Safina 43:46
Yes, that's exactly right.
Alan Ware 43:48
In your books and interviews, you've stressed the importance of beauty many times. Why do you think beauty is so important?
Carl Safina 43:55
Well just imagine an existence without beauty. That's why it's so important. If all you were concerned with was remaining in existence, well, remaining in existence takes a lot of work. So what would be the reward for any of that work if there was no experience of the beautiful? The beautiful can be aesthetics, or it can be feelings of bonding and love. There's a range of different kinds of beauties. But beauty is what makes life worth the effort. It's completely fundamental. And that's another thing that we often denigrate. We say, "Oh, those are just aesthetic concerns." Well, yeah, actually, they are just aesthetic concerns because that's more important than anything.
Alan Ware 44:41
Yeah. You talk about macaws and other species that use beauty and sexual selection, right? Where males having to attract the females, but you go beyond that natural selection and sexual selection reasons for beauty to this more all encompassing sense of what's it all for, what's it worth, what's the struggle to exist worth without the motivation of beauty? You need to be motivated to exist in some sense, right?
Carl Safina 45:10
Yeah, well, the other part of it is that beauty is not a quality of any thing. It's a perception of those things. When we say that a certain bird or whatever it is, is beautiful, or it's a beautiful day - the bird simply has feathers and they reflect light in a certain way. The beauty is something that happens only in our brain, it's only our perception, it's only our perception that a certain kind of day is a beautiful day and another kind of day is a nasty day. That's our perception. Why do we have the capacity to make those distinctions? That must be something so fundamental that our entire brain interprets many things all day long as being either more or less beautiful, or more or less pleasant or desirable, or food that is more or less delicious and enjoyable. We don't need that perception of, let's just say, good food. We could all exist on an IV with all our nutrients just dripping into us, and we'd be perfectly okay. But what kind of life would that be? So in a lot of ways, beauty is the thing that saves us, but we have to be the ones who save beauty.
Alan Ware 46:30
Right? And people respond so much to natural beauty of all types. And as you mentioned, blue and green are people's favorite colors, natural colors. So yeah, we've got to save natural beauty at this point. If we were going to exist on some Mordor, mining colony planet, it would be very hard to find beauty.
Carl Safina 46:53
Which we kind of do.
Alan Ware 46:54
Yeah.
Carl Safina 46:55
That's why those stories are potent and frightening.
Nandita Bajaj 46:58
Right. There seems to be an obsession with creating material beauty that is human made rather than appreciating kind of the miraculous beauty in the processes and the ecosystems and the beings that already exist. So there is that need to create something that we can take credit for, which cannot ever be compared to the beauty that exists because we can actually never understand the fullness of that beauty. And that's what makes it beautiful, is just how pristine and inconquerable it is, in so many ways.
Carl Safina 47:37
Yeah.
Nandita Bajaj 47:37
You also support the Nature Needs Half conservation initiative, which calls for the conservation of half of the Earth's land and seas. And some critics have objected to this initiative on the basis that it could create hardship for people living near protected areas, and that the initiative fails to confront the growth economy as the main engine of global ecological destruction. And in response, you and several co-authors, one of whom is Eileen Crist, she's on the Population Balance board of directors, wrote a paper last year responding to these critics. What are the main arguments in that paper and what has been the response from those critics?
Carl Safina 48:20
Well, I think the main argument is, we're just trying to point out that to keep the world functionally alive, you can't really kill more than half of it. A lot of what it would take to protect half of it from being functionally destroyed and having various living systems totally disrupted and broken, would be to, of course, preserve what is left. A lot of that preservation happens to include the need to preserve the lands and waters and habitats of Indigenous people. So it's not just ironic, it's wrong for the critics of this idea to say that it is against the interests of Indigenous people. What's against the interests of Indigenous people is non-Indigenous people taking them off their land and converting their land to the macerator that is the Western extractive monetary culture, usually first by breaking into it for agriculture, which not only grows a very simplified group of plants, but also usually poisons watersheds and land and destroys insect communities and everything else that goes with that. And then of course, there's just the broader industrialization, mining or the toxification of waters that go along with that. Those are the threats to Indigenous people. Trying to preserve their landscape is not a threat to Indigenous people. When I read these critics I say to myself, "What oil company is paying them?"
Nandita Bajaj 49:51
Yes.
Carl Safina 49:52
Maybe I'm naive. I don't think they're being paid by oil companies, but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. What I do think is that they just have a very bizarre dis-understanding of what it means to not ruin a place, which we call conservation.
Nandita Bajaj 50:08
Right.
Carl Safina 50:09
It's not that I don't understand the basis of their criticism, it's that as I understand it, their criticism is very wrong. They don't understand the risks, they don't understand the threats, they don't understand who the enemy is, and what's at stake, and what the solutions are. So the idea of Nature Needs Half is really that life needs half, and that if we're going to keep the world alive, we can't kill more than half of it. That, to me, is as simple as it is.
Nandita Bajaj 50:38
Yeah, there is this idea that really, you only have the capacity to care for one issue at any given time, and that as human beings, we cannot care for human rights and animal protection and environmental sustainability all at the same time. They don't have to be at odds with one another. And you're one of the few ecologists who's actually recognizing the critical role of human population in terms of destroying wildlife. What kind of impacts have you seen in your own work of human expansionism and its impacts on nonhuman animals in the wild?
Carl Safina 51:16
Well, whenever there are more people, they need more of everything, they need more space first of all, they need more water, they need more wood, they need more things because there are more of them. And that pushes every other living thing off of its foothold in the world. So I think we can't look at all the populations of living things all at once, but we have a proxy, and that is habitat types. All living things live in some kind of living space. All the habitat types of the world are at their most degraded and smallest extent in human history and that has accelerated enormously in the last few decades, and certainly since the Industrial Revolution a little over two hundred years ago. The only habitat that is getting bigger is deserts. Coral reefs are falling apart. Rainforests are being whittled down. A lot of tropical water is poisoned with mercury from the goldmining that happens in all these little streams in all these jungle rivers, the Arctic is melting, the grasslands are mostly farms. And so what that means is that basically, every single kind of living thing is in decline. And at its lowest population level ever. 96% of all mammals are human beings and the three or so species that we have as livestock cows, pigs, and goats - 96%. A few hundred years ago, that was probably completely reversed. 96% were all the wild mammals. 70% of all birds are poultry. That is a shocking, shocking thing. And it's the total simplification of the world. Some people say, "Oh, it's only developed countries that are the problem because of your carbon footprint." Well, the developed people have the hugest carbon footprint. Yeah. And rich people ruin the world in rich ways. And poor people ruin the world in poor ways. That, you ask me what have I seen, that's what I've seen. I've seen the poorest people utterly destroy landscapes, not in sophisticated ways, not because they have cars and airplanes and boats and use a lot of fossil fuels. But because they use a lot of land, and they scorch it with over-grazing goats, destroying the quality of the water, or just drying the water up. Those are very poor ways that people ruin things. And then rich people ruin things in much more sophisticated ways.
Nandita Bajaj 53:48
One of the points that often gets missed in that argument also is that carbon emissions are the only ways in which we can harm the planet or it's the only environmental impact we have. And what you're pointing to is ecological impact is a lot more than just emissions. It's the deforestation, it's the bushmeat hunting, it's the large mammals that are being killed for their horns and their parts for medicinal use or for selling on the markets. All of those things are ecologically devastating.
Carl Safina 54:23
Yes, it's it drives me crazy that often people think that the environment and carbon emissions are one and the same thing and that's the only thing that is the environmental problem, is climate change and carbon emissions. Well, before we ever thought about climate change, there was an entire environmental movement that resulted in the US and all of the major laws that we have, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, and all the rest of them that came online mostly in the 1970s because the rivers were catching fire, because the birds were declining, because the air hurt your lungs in places like Los Angeles. There are many, many ways that people hurt nature and degrade the human environment and degrade human dignity, frankly, that are not directly about carbon emissions, and carbon emissions are a gigantic problem. Climate change may be the biggest coming problem for the environment, because a lot of things sit within that. But it's not the only one and solving that alone or working purely to have clean energy - if you have clean energy for everybody then you still have ten or twenty billion bodies, they're all still going to need water and wood and land. I don't care how clean your energy is. It's not the only issue. It's a very important one. It's not the only one.
Alan Ware 55:56
And unlimited clean energy would mean just feeding more of the growth engine to take more resources and create other kinds of pollution.
Carl Safina 56:05
Right. That's right. So really, the biggest big picture needs to be kept in mind. And the biggest big picture does have to do with the human population.
Nandita Bajaj 56:15
Right.
Alan Ware 56:16
Right. So given all the devastation of the climate and nature, what has kept you going over the decades you've spent working so tirelessly, and admirably on studying human relationship to animals?
Carl Safina 56:28
Well, I think the answer is in that question. It's what's kept me going, is all the devastation and all the problems. I mean, I often say it would be really nice to be out of business. If there weren't any of these problems, I'd be a high school biology teacher and telling young people how miraculous the living world is.
Alan Ware 56:49
You have seen some positive, I've heard you mention the fish in Long Island that you did not see as a boy that now you do see as an adult, right?
Carl Safina 56:58
Yeah, it's super critical to go outside because I read about all these problems. And when I travel, I see all these problems much of the time, but living in the same place for basically my whole life, I've also seen some things get a lot better. We have major recoveries of fish, mostly from a lot, I said I worked a lot on fisheries policy reform, mostly result in some of the things we succeeded at in the 1990s. When I was young, nobody ever saw a whale. We saw a lot of bumper stickers that said, Save the Whales, but we never saw a whale. And now you can see whales all summer when you go to the beach. The unusual thing is if you don't see a whale, if you're there for half an hour taking the dogs for a walk, and you don't see a whale, that is now unusual. When I was a teenager, there were no ospreys left on Long Island. And now they are everywhere. And that's because a few people won some lawsuits that banned the widespread spraying of DDT all over the marshes and all over the shallow waterways. And we also have the return of peregrine falcons, which when I was in high school, the experts thought were doomed to extinction, nothing could be done for them, and bald eagles that were about to go extinct south of Canada. Those three birds all came back because of the ban on DDT and the other hard pesticides. And they are no longer rare. The ospreys are very, very abundant because they're also benefiting tremendously from these fish recoveries since they eat fish. Peregrine falcons are not that unusual to see, we have bald eagles nesting on Long Island. For about sixty years or so there were none. And now I don't even know how many nests there are here, I think there are something like fifteen nests at the moment. It's not that unusual to see them. I live here in a suburban neighborhood, we're about a mile from some marshes and saltwater, but we've had bald eagles fly over the treetops right in our backyard. And you know, if I could have seen myself as a teenager and think, "Someday you're gonna have bald eagles fly across the air right over the trees in your backyard," I would have found that to be thrilling. And now I've seen it a few times and I find it to be thrilling. So there are a lot of those local positives that show that there is a certain amount of resiliency that living things tend to recover. You know, recovery is a built-in tendency, if they get the chance that can happen. And when a few people succeed, it makes a huge difference.
Nandita Bajaj 59:34
Really well said. We saw some of the resilience come through in, during the COVID period when things were forced to come to a standstill and we started to see wildlife return, wild plants were growing in all sorts of places. So it's a matter of for us human beings to allow life to return to its natural state and to just back off from our domination worldview. This was such to a fascinating conversation, Carl, thank you so much for pushing the boundaries of our understanding of the nonhuman animal world and their inner lives and their cultures. It's so amazing to be able to speak to someone who's working on the leading edge of nonhuman animal behavior and understanding.
Alan Ware 59:34
Yeah.
Nandita Bajaj 59:35
Well, thank you very much. It's really, really a pleasure to talk with you and an honor to be with you both.
Nandita Bajaj 59:39
Well, that's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. And if you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also to help us expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:58
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
