The Shape of the World

On the occasions when we humans go out of our way to help another person who is in distress, we are acting out our biological inheritance. And if we don’t help someone in trouble, that’s because we’ve had to actually actively suppress what is natural for us to do. That was the finding of the neurologist Peggy Mason. whom we interviewed in Shape of the World’s second season. We’ve re-released that episode because that particular finding of Peggy’s and the others she spoke about remain incredibly relevant and still come across as a bit shocking.  As a child, Peggy Mason was a biology prodigy. By the age of nine, she was assisting the zoologist Dr. Charles Handley in teaching taxidermy at the Smithsonian. Today, as a neurobiologist, Peggy still works with mammals, but now she’s studying whether they experience empathy and act to help one another. Peggy was studying the subject of pain modulation until a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, asked if she’d be interested in expanding her work to collaborate on a project about empathy. “I went over to see her that same day,” says Peggy, and the upshot was the discovery that, like humans, rats have an aversion to witnessing the distress of others and a strong motivation to help someone else who’s suffering. In addition to leading the research laboratory at the University of Chicago, Peggy is a committed teacher of neurobiology, teaching both formally (at the University) and informally, through her blog and a popular free, online course. “It’s our biological mammalian inheritance to help. It’s not helping that’s the weird thing.” – Dr. Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Want to Learn More, See More, Know More? You’ll love this video from Nova that shows one rat deliberately setting free another rat that’s trapped. Later, the rat is confronted with the question of which to do first: save some rat it had never even met before, or wolf down the chocolate Peggy offered? Also, here’s the article in Science magazine. How can I take a class with Peggy? On Coursera, take “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Every Day Life,” a free course taught by Peggy. You can also gain more insights from Peggy by subscribing to her blog, which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter. Her most recent post has the full script of her “Aims of Education” address, a prestigious speech given to incoming students.  Rats from Dr. Mason and Dr. Bartal’s trapped-rat empathy experiment. Amazingly, the black-and-white rat will venture into the “danger zone” of the arena to help the trapped rat. Photograph of Dr. Mason and Dr. Bartal together. Rat-nibbled Hershey’s kisses. Electrophysiological recordings of a rat, illustrating how different parts of a rat’s body (the right forepaw, the left hindpaw, etc.) respond to certain stimuli.

In 2020, we sat down with structural geologist Marcia Bjornerud on the Shape of the World for a conversation that reshaped how we think about time. We decided to revisit and re-release that episode. Marcia has continued to research and to write, and she has a new book out that we love; it’s called Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.   Marcia Bjornerud has published many professional papers (read mainly by expert academics in her field) and wrote two popular books that, in the opinion of this podcast, ought to be read by every inhabitant of our planet: Reading the Rocks (2005) and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Change the World (2018). The first was an awe-inspiring, sometimes amusing and always relatable way of understanding the Earth itself. The second showed us a way to live on the Earth that respects how remarkable this planet is. Acquiring a better grasp of our planet’s long history is what Marcia describes as “timefulness.” The concept of timefulness pushes back against the narrow perspectives and super-short time frames in which our modern societies generally operate. We each tend to think of our everyday life as singular, without precedent. Yet our lives are built upon a series of processes set in motion billions of years ago–and it’s entirely possible that life on Earth may roll comfortably on for another billion. “Thinking like a geologist is about expanding our time frame, not seeing ourselves as the center of the cosmos, learning patience, understanding what lasts and what doesn’t.” – Dr. Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Geosciences and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She conducts structural geology field research in Norway, New Zealand, arctic Canada, Italy and the Lake Superior region. How to Find Out More Read Marcia’s books. Order them from your favorite local bookstore. Her first two books, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018) and Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities (2022) were published through Princeton University Press and can be found here. Her most recent book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks, was published by Flatiron Books in 2024 and can be found here.  You can also find some of Marcia’s talks on YouTube. In the podcast, Marcia talks about the Surtsey volcano. This could be the exact same film Marcia describes having seen in grammar school. Marcia Bjornerud in front of what she calls her dream house in the Italian Apennines, not far from the famed Carrara Marble quarries. In fall of 2016, she taught a semester-long field course in the Marche region and returned to the United States around the time of the 2016 Presidential election. That election and its outcome was a major catalyst for her to write the book “Timefulness.”

Ferris Jabr Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth, claims that it is alive: that Earth is a vast interconnected living system and we humans (and all other living things) don’t just live on the earth– we are the Earth. We’re an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. In this episode, Ferris (a contributor to the New York Times and a bestselling author) explains how we and our environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates climate–and how the Earth isn’t merely a stage where life plays out, but is an actual swirling, bubbling body that’s alive in its own right. There’s no universally agreed-upon definition of “aliveness” in science. But in his new book, Becoming Earth, Ferris argues that this planet meets the mark. He points to the self-regulating chemistry of the atmosphere, to the vast networks of microscopic plankton that alter global climate, and to something as ordinary (and astonishing) as soil, which can turn dead matter into living things.  We’ll dig into the ancient myths, the modern science, and the stories that shape the question of Earth’s aliveness. What happens when we stop thinking of the Earth as a rock with stuff growing on it, and start seeing it as a living system — a responsive, complex whole with its own kind of agency? And if the planet really is alive (or at least behaves in a way that’s uncanny to our living peers), how might that change the way we think about it and how we behave? “Life is a planetary phenomenon. It’s not that Earth had life evolve on it, but rather that Earth came to life itself. It is a garden that made itself. It sewed itself. It nurtured itself. It waters itself. And we are all part of that large, living architecture.” – Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth and contributing writer for the New York Times Learn More About Ferris’s Work Ferris’s debut book, Becoming Earth (Penguin Random House, 2025), was a New York Times bestseller and has been selected as a “Best Book of the Year” choice by seven major sellers. You can ask your local independent bookstores to order it for you, take it out of the library, or purchase it here or anywhere linked on this page. Ferris is a contributing writer to over a dozen major publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. You can find links to his articles on his website here. For more of his writing about ideas from this episode, we recommend reading his piece “The Earth is Just As Alive As You Are” for The New York Times. Other articles by Ferris that particularly piqued our interest include “The Story of Storytelling” and “The Social Life of Forest” Sources of Inspiration Mentioned in the Episode Ferris mentioned the Gaia Hypothesis, the name given to the idea that life on Earth not only emerged but also actively shaped and sustained its environment to support life itself. The theory originated in the 1960s, when James Lovelock, a British atmospheric chemist and inventor, first proposed the concept. At the time, Lovelock was consulting with NASA on a project to detect signs of life on Mars, which required identifying chemical signatures that might indicate a living planet, such as atmospheric composition. He observed that Earth’s atmosphere was far from chemical equilibrium (e.g., with gases like oxygen and methane coexisting), which led him to propose that life plays an active role in regulating planetary conditions. Evolutionary theorist and microbiologist Lynn Margulis later collaborated with Lovelock, helping to develop and support the Gaia Hypothesis with evidence from microbial evolution and Earth’s early biosphere. Watch this video of her presenting it to NASA. At first, many scientists initially rejected or even ridiculed the Gaia Hypothesis; it was viewed by as seeming too anthropomorphic, or unscientific, or simply too mystical-sounding. But as Ferris notes in this episode, today scientists widely acknowledge that life and environment have coevolved, and that feedback loops do exist between biological and geophysical systems. The underlying idea has become much more mainstream. The new scientific field that emerged from this work, and which Ferris mentioned in the episode, is called zoogeochemistry. Here is one article that further describes that field. It’s also worth noting that well before modern Western science began to evolve, worldviews of indigenous people in various parts of the world expressed some similar concepts of the earth as being alive through myths, rituals, and stories. Ferris mentioned one of his favorite authors, Virginia Woolf, who sometimes wrote quite directly about the connectivity of life. Here’s one passage from The Waves (1931), in which one of the central characters, Bernard, speaks to that idea: “Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.”s

Dr. Adrienne Brown reads cities the way professors read novels: carefully, and with lots of attention to what’s written between the lines. Adrienne teaches in the departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, and she draws on buildings and literature to trace the ways in which space is racialized—both geographically, in where people live, and conceptually, in how we define complex concepts like vacancy, ownership, and home. In this episode, Adrienne walks us through the ideas in her book, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership. It uses textual archives to examine the long-entwined relationships between race and mass homeownership. In it, Adrienne highlights how Black women’s experiences reveal a fuller picture of what property ownership looked like in the United States over the past century. She points to the work of  artists and architects who challenge our understanding of space and the built environment, and she poses questions about how America might imagine more just ways of living in urban environments. “The stories of mid-20th-century authors were very much about a new silence around race, even as race continued to shape everyone’s lives in those emerging urban and suburban spaces.” – Dr. Adrienne Brown, Associate Professor in English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago Learn More About Adrienne’s Work Adrienne’s most recent book, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024), uses textual archives to examine the tightly-woven relationships between race and mass homeownership. You can purchase the book here. She also wrote The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), which won the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize. It explores how artists and residents viewed the intersection of architecture and race in modernist, urban environments. You can purchase that wonderful book here. Adrienne is the co-editor of Race and Real Estate (Oxford University Press, 2015), an interdisciplinary examination of race, property, and citizenship.  At the University of Chicago, she is the Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life, a University initiative that uses education, community engagement, and artistic expression to foster community in the South Side of Chicago. Sources of Inspiration Mentioned in the Episode Adrienne described how mid-twentieth-century writers sometimes took “these odd detours to write pieces that are just about their neighborhood.” The main plot of the story might have been mostly about something else–but there were moments when they attempted to capture place: what suburbs were like, what race was like; what it was like to have a lot of resources or not to. Here are people she specifically mentioned:  Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), a writer and scholar best known for The Invisible Man. He also wrote a series of essays about Harlem – here is one he published in Harper’s Magazine about how Harlem was full of energy and creativity, but how it also felt weirdly cut off from the rest of the country by its poverty and by American racism. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), a poet and teacher who powerfully captured Black experience, has a lot of things named after her in Chicago–schools, parks, buildings, monuments. She’s arguably the city’s most beloved literary figure. At the end of this episode of the podcast, Adrienne quotes from Brooks’s poem, “Beverly Hills, Chicago.”  Thomas Pynchon (born in 1937), a novelist who—although not a California native—wrote extensively about Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Adrienne referenced his piece “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts,” published in the New York Times, which was an exploration of the Watts neighborhood after the 1965 riots.  John Cheever (1912–1982), novelist and short story writer who depicted life in American suburbs just as the suburbs were starting to boom. Here at The Shape of the World, The Swimmer is one of our favorites of his short stories. In it, an affluent man in Westchester County decides to make his way home from a party by swimming the entire way, which in suburbia means he hops from one private backyard swimming pool to the next. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for him.)  Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1964). Adrienne talked about Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which tells the story of a Black family in Chicago grappling with whether they should purchase a home in a white neighborhood. It’s one of the most well-known and familiar plays in the United States, and continues to be frequently staged; but if you haven’t seen the play, you probably know the movie with Sidney Poitier Ruby Dee, and Louis Gossett, Jr. Adrienne referenced Marshall Brown, a current American architect who first made Adrienne question her use of the word “vacancy.” He is a professor in architecture at Princeton University, where he also directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. See more of his work here. Adrienne mentioned Amanda Williams, a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Awards.” Williams is an architect-turned-artist whose work examines the relationship between race and space. Some of her work specifically comments upon Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is located. Williams’s best-known project, called Color(ed) Theory, drew attention to the discrepancy of investment in Black Chicago neighborhoods versus other neighborhoods in white areas. Williams repainted eight vacant houses in the palette of colors she’d observed in commercial products marketed toward Black consumers: one house got painted the color of dark purple of a Crown Royal whiskey bag; another was the bright reddish-orange color of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Learn more about Amanda Williams’s work here.

Daniel Holz studies black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmology, all while also running the Existential Risk Laboratory at the University of Chicago. In this episode, Daniel helps us shed light on some of the biggest threats facing humanity—the kind that could really do us all in. On Daniel’s list: a flat-out nuclear war erupts, climate change worsens, biological warfare and bioterrorism, the possibility that the chaos of misinformation could make good governance impossible, and that artificial intelligence might decide we humans are too irrational and inefficient to keep around. (Along with some other cheery topics.) Daniel also is part of the group that set the hands of the Doomsday Clock, which signifies how close (or how far away) we are from the end of life as we know it. (He chairs the group, officially called the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.) Right now, the clock reads 89 seconds to midnight. That’s the closest we’ve ever been to a global catastrophe. “When it’s all out in the open, you see that doom is not inevitable. There really are things that can be done, and there is a path forward. There’s definitely risk. Things are not guaranteed. But there is a path away from doom. I just hope we take it.” – Daniel Holz, professor in Physics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics; Chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; and founding director of UChicago’s Existential Risk Laboratory (XLab). Learn More About Daniel’s Work In Daniel’s life as an astrophysicist, he’s one of the collaborators in the  Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which works on the cutting edge of gravitational wave physics. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, triggered by cataclysmic cosmic events like the collision of black holes or neutron stars. LIGO uses incredibly sensitive laser interferometers—tools that measure tiny changes in light—to detect gravitational waves. It’s a big leap beyond what traditional telescopes can do, opening up to us lowly humans an entirely new way to observe the universe. You can read more about LIGO’s impact here.  UChicago’s Existential Risk Laboratory (XLab) is a lab that uses risk analysis and research to study some of the world’s most significant threats. The idea for the lab came from a class Daniel co-taught with James Evans, a computational scientist and sociologist, called “Are We Doomed”? The class caught the attention of Rivka Galchen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Subsequently, her article in the magazine caught Jill’s attention. Jill’s been interested in the topic since reading Tony Ord’s book The Precipice. The XLab’s purpose is to study existential threats so that people can be made more aware of them, and hopefully, so we humans can figure out how to prevent them from occurring. The XLab provides a venue for UChicago students to build expertise in the focus areas of concern. The Doomsday Clock When recording the episode, Jill asked Daniel to describe what it was like to be in the committee meetings when its members decide what position the hands of The Doomsday Clock should be set at. Daniel’s response and their conversation about it didn’t make it into the final cut of the episode, but you can listen to that outtake here.  The Doomsday Clock is a device that alerts the public to how near we humans truly are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils of existential catastrophe. If the hands were ever to reach the position of “midnight,” that would mean the end of civilization. Created in 1947, the symbolic clock was started by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Many founding members of the Bulletin were scientists from the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. (The same university where Daniel now teaches.) The scientists who helped to split the atom understood full well that the presence of atomic weapons threatened life on Earth like nothing else that had ever existed before.  Since 2008, the Science and Security Board, which Daniel chairs, is part of the Bulletin, and this is the group of scientists and other experts who determine the setting of the hands.  Twice a year, they meet. As of this writing, the clock hands are set at 89 seconds before midnight. This is the closest to midnight that they’ve ever been at any point in history.

Biologist Sara Lewis doesn’t just study fireflies—for her, fireflies are a living reminder that the world is pure magic. In this episode, the author of Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies unpacks the science of fireflies. These members of the beetle family are one of only a handful of terrestrial creatures capable of generating light. How fireflies glow, why they glow, and how their living conditions and populations are changing—Sara explains all of this and describes the relationship between us and them. Sara uses fireflies to make a case for wonder, which she says is something we can and should practice every day. “For me, paying attention to the natural world feeds my sense of wonder, and I actually think that’s one of the most important senses that we have–and that it may be underused.” – Dr. Sara Lewis, Professor Emerita in Biology at Tufts University; Chair of the Firefly Specialist Group in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Learn More About Sara’s Work The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it. The Firefly Specialist Group that Dr. Sara Lewis leads is dedicated to protecting firefly species whose populations are threatened. Its members engage in research, advocacy, and public outreach (like the establishment of an official “World Firefly Day”). To learn more about the work they do, visit IUCN’s firefly webpage. You can also read their most recent report here, which includes detailed information on how specific species of fireflies are doing.   Sara is the co-founder of Fireflyers International Network, a group of firefly researchers and enthusiasts. This is the group that first coined the word “Fireflyer” to mean a “firefly chaser. A person who thinks about lightning bugs.” Learn more about their work here. How Do Fireflies Make Light? In this episode, host Jill Riddell confessed how difficult it was for her to fully comprehend how fireflies are able to light up. She promised listeners that we would include something on this webpage that would hopefully make firefly’s most glorious accomplishment more understandable — for her and for others. So… here goes. Think of a firefly as having a tiny lantern embedded inside its body — and that lantern takes up about 10 percent of the firefly’s overall size. Even more amazing: the lantern has an on-and-off switch. But that “switch” is not mechanical or electrical — it’s entirely chemical. You know those glow sticks at parties and concerts? Well, the firefly’s lantern works on the same basic principle: chemistry. There’s no fire involved. The light a glow stick or a firefly makes is cold — it doesn’t give off heat like a candle or a lightbulb. Both glow sticks and fireflies produce what’s called “chemiluminescence” — that’s a light that gets created as the result of a chemical reaction. Inside the firefly’s lantern, there’s an enzyme scientists call “luciferase.” This enzyme is a kind of protein shaped like a baseball glove. It holds a smaller molecule called “luciferin,’ which fits right into that glove. Then, using oxygen (and a few helper molecules), luciferase sets off a chemical reaction. As luciferin gets excited and then returns to a calm state, it gives off a tiny flash of light. Cool, right? Image by Scholastic, Science World Image by New Zealand Geographic Relevant Readings Order Sara’s book, Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies from your local bookstore, online here from the book’s publisher (Princeton University Press), or from Amazon. Also, check out the website for the book, which has additional writings and resources, and the beautiful trailer.  To learn more about the firefly habitat restoration efforts in Taipei, read Sara’s blog post on the initiative.  As Sara mentions in the episode, fireflies hold a special place in Japan. During Japan’s period of rapid industrialization, the number of fireflies was radically reduced. Communities began organizing local clean-up efforts and “firefly festivals” (hotaru matsuri), and slowly, populations recovered.  Historically, in Japan, poets used fireflies to symbolize summer and its ephemeral beauty. One of the famous writers of haiku, Kobayashi Issa, utilized them extensively. Here’s an example of one that speaks to the tensions between nature and cities:  Don’t go firefly! Even at night Kyoto is noisy. Read more about fireflies in haiku in this article. 

Biologist Dr. Seth Magle wants to rethink what a city is – and who it’s for. As part of an alliance with 50 cities around the globe, Seth and other wildlife researchers have discovered an overlooked truth: that our large cities teem with interesting native wildlife. Foxes, birds, coyotes, and turtles live successfully within many cities’ borders: they share our sidewalks, our lawns, and, sometimes, even our grocery stores. Have we humans learned to live in communion with wild things? And are we beginning to see cities not solely as culprits of climate change and perpetrators of a biodiversity crisis but also as sources of potential resolution? “If we want to connect people to nature, most people live in cities. To me, it makes the most sense to start where people are. We can’t just keep writing off the city as a loss.” – Dr. Seth Magle, Director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo and Executive Director of the Urban Wildlife Information Network. Learn More About Seth’s Work The Urban Wildlife Institute (UWI) that Seth directs is housed at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois. It’s an initiative that studies both the zoo’s own property and many other nature areas within Chicago. A lot of UWI’s work is collecting data and developing scientific standards that help minimize conflict between the needs of animals and the needs of humans in Chicago. For more about UWI, visit this page. Plus, here’s some press on UWI: “People Can Learn to Coexist With Urban Wildlife,”  “Give Animals a Seat At the Table,” and “How Cities Can Help Solve the Biodiversity Crisis.” You can also learn more about UWI from Jill’s earlier interview with Seth in season one of our podcast: “We All Live in Nature.” The new program Seth and Jill discussed in this episode was the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN). Its purpose is to find ways to make cities better places to live for both humans and nature. Seth helped establish this international alliance. A big part of what Seth and UWIN are trying to achieve is for all of the cities involved to use similar standards for what kinds of data they collect so comparisons and contrasts can be made among them. Ultimately, this coordination will create a greater pool of collective knowledge and can lead to quicker solutions in each city for improving wildlife habitat and minimizing conflicts. Each member of UWIN collects its own data independently and retains the right to use it however they see fit, but this additional alliance offers the opportunity for researchers in one city to work with other partners to ask and answer questions at much larger scales—from regionally to globally.  To learn more about Seth’s camera trapping in Chicago and to see a map of the sites, visit this page. To see some of the Chicago urban wildlife lore that Seth mentioned in the episode, see  Chunkasaurus and the Chicago Rat Hole.  How to Get Involved If you want to help create more wildlife-inclusive habitats in your own neighborhood, check out the Urban Wildlife Project, developed in partnership with the University of Wisconsin. This website has information on everything from yard management and gardening to native flora recommendations – all of which help make life easier for fauna. To help Seth and his team identify animals that get photographed on camera traps, go to the website Chicago Wildlife Watch. For more information on how to join the Urban Wildlife Institute’s community science programs, visit this page. Relevant Readings “Why Study Urban Nature?” an essay by Seth in The Center for Humans and Nature Press. “Wealth and urbanization shape medium and large terrestrial mammal communities,” written by Seth Magle and Mason Fidino, et al. and published in Global Change Biology. A camera is set up by Seth Magle and his associates on a tree. Close-up shot of a camera placed by Seth Magle and his team in order to find animals in locations. Cameras are set up by Seth Magle and his associates to capture what animals are found in which locations. This is a key tool for the team.

Artist Laurie Palmer believes they can. In her book, The Lichen Museum, Laurie explores what we can gain from learning to see life the way a lichen does. Laurie explains how our understanding of the world is filtered constantly through our own physical selves – we have a certain height and breadth; we can see for long distances; we are transient and ephemeral beings; and our brains tend to break reality into neat, distinct pieces and then give those things names. But what if we were more like a long-lived lichen? Laurie is fascinated by lichens, these small and mostly overlooked organisms. Individuals of some species can stay alive for literally thousands of years. Laurie discovers that lichens have a lot to teach her (and the rest of us) about resiliency, adaptability, diversity, and perhaps most importantly, about how connected we are with other beings. “Opening up relations with other beings that are seen as dirt or detritus is a way to diminish some of our own hubris.” – A. Laurie Palmer, American artist, writer, and activist, and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz HOW TO BUY & READ LAURIE’S BOOK, “THE LICHEN MUSEUM” Easy enough to acquire: order it from your local bookstore! You can also purchase it directly from the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press. Laurie Palmer’s earlier book was In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2015), which studies humans’ effects on nature through her decade-long exploration of mineral extraction sites in the U.S. You can read her interview with Art21 Magazine about that. HOW TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT LAURIE’S WORK Best place is Laurie’s own website at alauriepalmer.org. But there are also some other gems out there, like articles either written by Laurie or articles written about her. Here’s a lovely piece Laurie wrote for Orion Magazine. The article contains five tips on how to live like a lichen. And here’s an article that provides insights into her art practice, published in SFMOMA’s Open Space series. MORE DETAIL ON VARIOUS THINGS REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE Taking a Lichen Walk 1. Purchase and use a 10-power magnifying hand lens, like this one for only $13.75 from ASC Scientific. A “10-power lens” or as Laurie referred to it during the interview, a “10x lens” means that the lens will make an object appear ten times its actual size. 2. Keep your eyes peeled and expect to encounter lichens in unexpected places – sidewalk cracks, electrical utility boxes, car doors. And of course, don’t neglect more typical spots like on the bark of trees, the surfaces of damp stones, and the walls of neglected wooden sheds. 3. Get close to the ground. As Laurie explains, “To look at lichens, you have to bend down and kneel, and get inside their world in a way that reduces your stature and vertical human body, which is in control of the world through long distance vision. You become myopic, and they become really huge, and you enter into their tiny world, and so there’s a loss of your own sovereignty, just in the act of looking.” ADVICE ON BINOCULARS Another scientific tool that’s useful to have for observing nature are binoculars. In the course of the interview, Laurie asks for advice on which ones to buy. Jill suggested that for a pair that is adequate and costs less than a hundred dollars, try these fun colorful ones made by Nocs Provisions. “BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER” Written by Herman Melville and published in the 1850s, the short story titled “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is about a worker who, whenever his boss asks him to do something, consistently answers, “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby’s quiet refusal becomes a powerful act of passive resistance. The story is rather an odd one with elements of absurd, dark humor and ultimately, a descent into nihilism. But it’s at its best and most memorable when it’s challenging the modern world’s assumptions about obedience, productivity, and purpose. Bartleby came up in this “Shape” interview when Laurie described lichens’ resistance to cultivation. While lichens produce unique chemical compounds that could potentially be useful and economically profitable to humans, lichens grow too slowly for those products ever to be scaled up. Laurie portrays this “failure” as successful resistance on the part of the lichen. They cannot be used or commodified.

Season Six will launch this Friday, May 9th New episodes, new guests, and new insights about nature and our built environments coming soon with season 6 of Shape of the World. And more on how we can live together–with nature, with cities, and with one another. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform.

The world is full of sound. Yet we happen to be a species who, at the moment, is directing most of our attention to our own voices and not so much to the voices of other living things. Biologist David George Haskell says this collective inattention is a huge loss for each of us. It’s like leaving money on the table because paying attention to the living world is a source of beauty, joy and renewal—one we can access at anytime from anywhere. Plus, when we—the most powerful species on the planet—stop listening, the relationship between humans and nature doesn’t exactly go terrifically well. David says, “If I’m not listening to the voices of my kin, the birds and the trees and the living rivers and the whales and neighbors, how can I expect to be a good relative to them? If I’m not listening, how can I expect to be a good member of the living earth community?” “In my work as a teacher and as a citizen and a writer, I try to be on the side of beauty and connection and less on the side of disconnection and brokenness.” – David Haskell is a writer, biologist, and professor at the University of the South in Suwanee, Tennessee. How to Find Out More Buy and read David’s books. The one we discuss the most in this episode is his most recent one, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and The Crisis Of Sensory Extinction. The link will direct you to Amazon, but we’d be remiss not to mention that it’s more fun and aesthetically pleasing for you to buy it at your local bookstore or to ask them to order a copy for you. Or if you don’t have a bookstore near you, try Jill’s favorite shop, the Seminary Coop Books/57th Street Books. You can order from the Coop’s website—and if you live in Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood (or somewhere reasonably close by) a nice human being from the store will deliver whatever you order right to your doorstep. The book will arrive without that overeager, heavy-duty packaging that Amazon burdens you with. Seminary Coop home deliveries have only a wee, barely-measurable environmental footprint, so check it out. David’s other books are—all of which are excellent—are: The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree: Getting to Know Trees Through the Language of Scent Insider bonus tip: if you purchase that last one as an audiobook, it’s accompanied by original violin compositions. If you’re not really a book person but would like enjoy exploring other small hits of David’s way of thinking and being in other ways, check out what David has composed or collaborated on in other mediums: The voices of birds and the language of belonging. Emergence Magazine. An article, yes, which means reading—but it also includes an audio essay with bird song. The Atomic Tree. VR experience based on the last chapter of The Songs of Trees. Concurrent-Dyscurrent. CD/digital tracks of 4-minute field recording compositions (also on all streaming services). Eastern Forest Playing Cards, with artist Ellen Litwiller, from The Art of Play. Credits In the episode, sounds of the European blackbird singing in a courtyard: Mizu LOEB, XC548553. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/548553. In the episode, we mentioned the organization Noise Free America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to, in their words, “making quiet happen”.

Many of us are anxious about everything related to nature and climate—and also worried about a slew of other social and political challenges. But what should we fix first? Author and New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl gives us her answers. Margaret Renkl’s new book “Graceland at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” is a graceful mix of observations about nature and practical solutions. “We have a lot of different sources of anxiety right now, but what it all really comes down to is, is climate change and the loss of biodiversity,” says Margaret Renkl. “If we could fix those two things, we could go back to worrying about smaller things. But if we can’t get those things sorted out, the other things we worry about will be made so much worse in the world that’s coming: the income disparity, the racism, the misogyny, the ugly things that happen when people are under duress.” “If every single person with a little bit of lawn begins to plant native plants, ones that feed native wildlife, collectively we will have the equivalent of the biggest national park in the country.” – Margaret Renkl, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and author of Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South(Milkweed Editions, 2021) How to Find Out More You can absorb more of Margaret’s observations on a regular basis. She has a column in The New York Times that appears each Monday. Buy and read both of Margaret’s books: Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (Milkweed Editions, 2021). Ask for your local bookstore to order them for you, or try Jill’s favorite, Seminary Coop Books/57th Street Books. You can order from their website—and if you live in Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago (or somewhere reasonably close) they’ll deliver you order right to your doorstep—without the heavy duty packaging of Amazon and with only a wee, barely measurable environmental footprint. In the episode, Margaret mentions the Xerces Society, an organization that asks people to take the Pledge for Protection of Pollinators. The Xerces Society’s Bring Back the Pollinators campaign is based on four simple principles: Grow pollinator-friendly flowers, provide nest sites, avoid pesticides, and spread the word.

Humans started trashing rivers 7,000 years. Since then, century after century, the water quality of many rivers deteriorated. At first, changes occurred slowly. But by the time the Industrial Revolution rolled around, humans’ harsh treatment of rivers and its nasty impacts picked up momentum and it scaled up from a few random rivers to most of Earth’s rivers being affected by pollution. But recently, some urban rivers are undergoing transformations. Waterways that once were essentially sewers are becoming sanctuaries for wildlife and places people can access. The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It’s a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue. “There’s a million different potential outcomes for things. Being open to the many various outcomes that can happen helps people make better plans.” – Nick Wesley Co-Founder of Urban Rivers How You Can Help Nick Build The Wild Mile When completed, the Wild Mile will have floating gardens, forests, public walkways and kayak docks. The Wild Mile will function as a public park, open-air museum, botanical garden, a recreation destination, a classroom for the community, and it will provide habitat for native wildlife. The organization Nick co-founded, Urban Rivers has a robust and active volunteer program where you can do hands-on work. (In the interview for this episode, Nick said they have about 200 volunteers.) You can also donate money—which is an awesome act to perform to support ideas you love. Sources for the Facts & Stories in this Episode For information on the history and origin of the group, “Friends of Trashed Rivers, here’s an article Jill Riddell wrote for the Chicago Reader. It has some lively quotes from Laurene Von Klan, an activist mentioned in the episode. For history on rivers: Watch Wendover Productions‘ wonderful video on “Why Cities Are Where They Are.” The source for the part of this episode about how long humans have been polluting rivers was archaeologist Russell Adams at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Adams and his colleagues studied a riverbed in the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan. Adams was researching this area for more than 30 years to understand the rise of metallurgy. Seven thousand years ago is around the time when we humans started to move away from making crude tools out of stones to making more specialized and precise tools out of metal. (For more on Adams’s discoveries—including the pollution of the river—read this article.) For information on the river in Berlin: Nick mentioned Flussbad. The Flussbad (“river pool”) is a project that is cleaning up a polluted canal along the River Spree. Located in a highly visible and much-visited part of the city, the plan will add new wetlands and provide spots where people can literally dive into the river. You can learn more about how to visit it here and read more about the concept in Archinet and the New York Times. For information on the Shedd Aquarium’s program: Nick praised the Shedd Aquarium for its energetic efforts to conserve the Chicago River, and specifically he called out the Kayaks for Conservation program, where anyone who’s interested can go out in a kayak and learn more about the river and help clean it up. Though only partly constructed, the Wild Mile already has active programming and many ways for people to get involved. The Wild Mile is located in an area of Chicago that formerly was (and is still partially) industrial. It’s in the middle of a massive real estate development called Lincoln Yards. In this photo, what appears to be an ordinary walkway in a natural area is actually a boardwalk that’s floating on the water surrounded by native plants growing on rafts which also are afloat.

Guest Jenn Smith says that human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality occur also in the behaviors of animals. Privilege itself isn’t new–but it’s novel and shocking to learn that humans aren’t the only species who pass along tangible assets to certain individuals in subsequent generations and consciously exclude others. Applying the term “privilege” to the animal kingdom shines a new light on animal culture–and our own. “We see privilege popping up across the tree of life, not just in humans. When there are these legacies of exclusion within human societies, there needs to be some structural change to be able to address these issues.” – Dr. Jennifer Smith is a behavioral ecologist and an assistant professor of biology at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. How to Find Out More About Jenn Smith’s Work For the original version of Jenn Smith’s scientific paper, look here in the journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. For a less scientific take, see this piece in the New York Times. For a bigger perspective on similarities in humans and other non-human animals, read the book, “Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals.” It was written by one of Jenn’s co-authors, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, and by Kathryn Bowers. You can buy it from an independent bookstore near you or order it from The Shape of the World’s favorite one in Chicago, 57th Street Books. In addition to privilege, Jenn studies differences in cooperation between males and females in mammals and studies leadership in social mammals. To learn more about Jenn’s full body of professional work and interests, visit her lab’s website. (If you poke around there and look at the team page, you’ll find more cool photos.) Jenn’s scientific publications can all be found on Google Scholar. Follow Jenn on Twitter: @JennSmithSocBeh Additional Note: The Shape of the World’s interview with Jenn Smith was conducted in spring of 2022. Although Jenn was a biology professor at Mills College in Oakland at the time of that interview, from now on, if you want to take classes with Jenn or have her be an advisor for your PhD, you’ll find her in a new position in the biology department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. (We just wanted to make that clear in case you get incredibly inspired by what you hear in the episode.) A California ground squirrel mother and her young offspring greet each other in a friendly exchange at Jenn Smith’s long-term behavioral ecology field project Briones Regional Park in the San Francisco Bay Area. . [Photo by Jenn Smith] Spotted hyenas forming a coalition at the Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya, East Africa. Individual hyenas inherit their social rank from their mother. The young pups learn where they are in the pecking order through associative learning (also called classical conditioning.) The young don’t innately know whether they’re supposed to eat first or last; they have to be taught. The social rank of each individual influences their destiny, privileging some over others. [Photo by Kate Yoshida]

When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious. As a marine biologist, Jane knew that hidden in the story of decimated seagrass, there had to be something in the relationship between it and its destroyer—sea otters—that wasn’t immediately obvious. Something layered and complex. In this episode, we explore how sometimes disruption can be valuable not just for the one doing the disrupting but for the organism being disrupted. “Some of the best science that’s done today comes through natural history. It comes through people having their eyes open and being wide open to new ideas.” – Dr. Jane Watson is a professor emeritus of biology at Vancouver Island Institute in British Columbia. Her research focuses on marine ecology and marine mammal biology. How to Find Out More About Jane Watson’s Projects Watch this video from the Hakai Institute. A) because it’s beautiful and you’ll feel uplifted by seeing it, and B) because in it, Jane Watson explains the relationship of sea otters and kelp. It helps fill out some details missing from the episode, gives a bigger picture of the relationship of marine plants with sea otters. Read this article, which includes a photograph of Jane and Dr. Erin Foster, the lead author of the study. (Erin is mentioned in the episode.) Erin is a research associate at the Hakai Institute, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to coastal studies and conservation, and Erin gets mentioned in this episode. (To hear Erin tell her version of events, listen here.) Read this article in National Geographic about Jane’s and Erin’s work, and this one, from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. The latter has gorgeous photos of otters, including one of an otter “raft,” a phenomenon that Jane describes in the episode. Jane is an emeritus professor at Vancouver Island Institute, and you can find more about her full body of professional work here. For sea otters, the family unit consists solely of a single mother and a single pup. [Photo by Michael L. Baird] Eelgrass and other seagrasses are imperiled worldwide. They’re important as a food source for sea turtles; they filter harmful pollution and bacteria from the water; and the habitat they create serves as a nursery for many fish and crustaceans. [Photo by Evie Fachon] Note: Shape of the World’s interview with Jane Watson was conducted November, 2021.

Season Five Will Launch July 2022 New episodes, new guests, new insights about nature and our built environments are coming soon. And more on how we can live together–with nature, with cities and with one another. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app or check back here.

Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an artificial remaking of what once was there? Or do we go with the plants that long to grow there now, the ones that are perfectly suited to take on land that was once paved? Sarah named her landscape architectural studio “Ruderal,” a biological term applied to plant species willing to grow in wastelands. Several years ago, Sarah established Ruderal after leaving the United States and going to live and work in the nation of Georgia. In episode 28, she talks about how the Soviet Union was dedicated to sustaining “big health landscapes,” large outdoor spaces intended to heal and renew—and what that legacy now looks like up close and in person in Georgia. “We so finely tune infrastructures to the nth degree but what if we put a little bit extra in there as a kind of wild card? I wish more people could see the potential of setting aside a little bit of surplus.” –Sarah Cowles, Director of Ruderal, a landscape architecture studio in Tbilisi, Georgia How to Find Out More About Sarah Cowles’ work Ecologists use the term ruderal, from the Latin rudus (rubble), to describe disturbance-adapted species,” writes Sarah Cowles. “Ruderal species embody the unruly, tenacious, and opportunistic qualities of vegetation. They are metaphorically paradoxical: indexing catastrophe and abandonment, yet conversely representing resilience and renewal.” [Paper presented to and published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, available here.] Landscape Architecture magazine publishes some wonderful pieces of Sarah’s. Here are links to some of her written work: After Extraordinary Conditions; Crisis Actors: Designers Find New Ways to Tell Communities About climate Change; and here are reviews of the books Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscape in a Digital Age and Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary. Pearly Jacobs, the audio producer who recorded Sarah’s end of the podcast interview over in Georgia, also made this cool video about Sarah’s Arsenal Oasis project. It really brings it to life. This is the website for Ruderal; you can sign up for newsletters there. On Ruderal’s Instagram, you can see photos of Arsenal Oasis, the project Sarah describes in the episode. @_ruderal_ Facebook @ruderaltbilisi Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/ruderal What Didn’t Make It Into the Episode But Is Important To Know About Georgia This didn’t quite make our final cut, but it’s important not to ignore the fact that within Georgia, more than a quarter-million people have been displaced from their homes and their land during several conflicts that have flared up in the nation’s relatively brief post-Soviet history. Here’s one seven-minute audio piece on the subject that gives a taste of what’s been going on. In the unedited interview conducted for this show, in the context of our discussion of the resorts, Sarah said, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the resorts fell into disrepair. And then others were repurposed by displaced persons from the different conflicts in the nineties and the early two thousands. So some of the ethnic Georgians who had to leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia moved into those resort buildings and hotels. And since then, some have been upgraded and their conditions have slightly improved, but displacement is an ongoing crisis.” Sarah Cowles at the Sycamore Pool of the Arsenal Oasis. The project, designed and built by Ruderal for the 2020 Tbilisi Architecture Biennial and discussed extensively in this episode, was recently shortlisted for the LILA International Public Landscapes Award. Giorgi Nishnianidze, Giorgi Vardiashvili and Elia Katamadze of Ruderal stand near the rainbow Sarah describes in the episode. It’s formed by the spray from a broken water main that provided the genesis for Ruderal’s project at Arsenal Oasis in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Salt Mountain Disturbance: Brine Dam” Xerox transfer and colored pencil on paper. on Arches paper. 22 in x 30. 2008. Drawing depicting brine flow impoundment and salt stockpile on the former railyard and ruderal forest in Columbus Ohio. Artwork by Sarah Cowles.

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in southwestern Illinois was the site of the largest city in North America and at the pinnacle of its population in 1150, was larger than London or Paris. But over two centuries, its population waned. Until Caitlin’s research findings found otherwise, a prevailing theory had been that residents of Cahokia caused the problem themselves; they caused the location to become uninhabitable because of poor environmental practices. But Caitlin’s examination of sediments on the site found evidence this wasn’t the case. “The people who lived in North America before the Europeans—they didn’t graze animals, and they didn’t intensively plow. We look at their agricultural system with this Western lens, when we need to consider Indigenous views and practices,” Rankin said in National Geographic magazine. (Article by Glenn Hodges, April 12, 2021). “Sometimes you need to be careful to ask the right question because you already have assumptions built in to the questions you’re considering.” – Caitlin Rankin, PhD, RPA Research Geoarchaeologist Illinois State Archaeological Survey How to Find Out More About Caitlin’s work Read her academic publication in the journal Geoarcheology. For a less-technical piece, read the article in the New York Times or this one from Washington University in St. Louis (the institution where Caitlin began this line of research when she was a graduate student. How to Find Out More About Cahokia Mounds Why not visit and see the site for yourself? Fly into St. Louis, which is only a half-hour from the historic site. Here’s some information. You could combine it with a longer trip to visit other ancient historic sites (including other mounds) in the Midwest; or make it part of a longer trip exploring the Mississippi River. In Illinois, Route 96 hugs the shores of this vast river valley for many miles. Hill prairies thrive on the bluffs.. (Late April and early May are a good time to visit to see spring ephemeral wildflowers, and any day in October is a good time for fall foliage.) 96 is one section of the Great River Road that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Additional Information Note from Jill: “During the interview, when I asked Dr. Rankin about other cities and comparisons of their sizes simultaneous to the period of thriving for Cahokia, she and I spoke about London and Paris. (Two examples of cities that existed concurrently and that were much smaller than Cahokia.) What she and I didn’t cover (because I didn’t get around to asking!) was that during that same period, there were cities on Earth that surpassed Cahokia in size. These included (but weren’t limited to) Constantinople, Baghdad, and Kaifeng.” Samples of sediments from Cahokia Mounds await analysis in Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s laboratory. A study site at Cahokia Mounds. Here you can see a hint of the different layers of sediments as Caitlin described it in the podcast. Soil is brought to the surface for close examination. The research work site at Cahokia Mounds.

Dr. Scarlett Howard’s research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can understand the concept of zero. How Scarlett came to prove this is one of the things we discuss in this episode. The importance of zero is a topic we cover in this same episode with help from Faruck Khan, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Scarlett is currently working on understanding the effect of urbanization on native and introduced bee species in Australia. Is the presence of people possibly beneficial to some bees? Detrimental? No one yet knows. Her research explores conceptual learning, neurobiology, and visual perception in honeybees as well as insect diversity, pollinator preferences, and plant-pollinator interactions. “There are really interesting comparisons we can make between humans and bees, especially considering that we’re separated by over 600 million years of evolution from them. And yet we’re able to do similar things, sometimes in similar ways.” – Scarlett Howard, PhD, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia How to Find Out More About Bees & Zero “It’s been said that the development of an understanding of zero by society initiated a major intellectual advance in humans, and we have been thought to be unique in this understanding. Although recent research has shown that some other vertebrates understand the concept of the ‘empty set,’ Dr. Howard’s work shows that an understanding of this concept is present in honey bees. This finding suggests that such an understanding evolved independently in distantly related species that deal with complexity in their environments, and that it may be more widespread than previously appreciated.” So says a 2018 article in Science Magazine that put Scarlett and her work on the map. It’s one of the better places to glean details about the experiments and results. For a less technical rendition, see the article from the New York Times or this one from Quanta Magazine. In the full interview, Scarlett emphasized that she isn’t working in isolation. Other scientists are working on bee cognition; Dr. Adrian G. Dyer is one of several close collaborators, and the team also includes behavioral researchers, statisticians, color and vision scientists, photographers and theoretical physicists. How to Find Out More About Scarlett Howard’s Work To keep up with new information coming out of Scarlett and her colleagues’ work, follow her on Twitter. @TheBeesearcher. How to Help Scarlett Howard in A Community Science Project If you live in Australia, check out Bees At Home, a citizen science effort where you upload photos of bees you see out in the wild or in your backyard to Flickr using the hashtag #beesathome. In Australia there over 2,000 species of native bee species yet relatively little is known about them. Each bee photo is a data point that helps Scarlett and her colleagues uncover more information about native bee behavior and distribution. You can follow Bees at Home on Twitter @BeesAtHomeAus, and Facebook. Here we see a female bee confronting the Existential Void of Nothingness. Or perhaps in this photograph, she’s actually being caught right in the midst of figuring out Scarlett’s math problem. The bee might be thinking, “Is something with no spots upon it at all representing a number that’s smaller than a card that has spots? Or is this something else entirely? Can ‘nothing’ be considered ‘less than,’ or is this a blank slate utterly without meaning?” This is what the math experiments look like. Bees see cards with different amounts of spots on them and are rewarded with sugar water for choosing the correct answer. Here, they’re learning to discriminate between lower and higher quantities. Lasioglossum lanarium, a species of bee native to Australia. Scarlett Howard works with honeybees for the math experiments, but is interested in learning more about Australia’s native bees as well. Honeybees aren’t native—in fact, they’re a domesticated species. Bees At Home is a community science competition to map native bees across Australia. People send in photos and win prizes.

Tony Hiss’s new book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting 50 percent of the Earth’s land by 2050. This will save millions of species and slow climate change. Tony Hiss discusses what this might look like if it were to happen and he also reflects on his own interesting life and travels. For thirty years, Tony was a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1999, Tony wrote a memoir that reflected on what it was like to grow up as the son of Alger Hiss, a government lawyer in the State Department accused of espionage. “He actually went to jail for four years or so,” Tony says of his father. “And he would write me as a way of staying in touch. He’d say, ‘I’m not going to be able to get to Central Park this year, I wish you would go up there and be my eyes and ears.’ That tuned my senses. Writing him letters was probably the reason I became a reporter.” “Protecting biodiversity is a scramble, still a daunting task, but it looks like something that’s within our reach. I find that extraordinarily hopeful and encouraging.” – Tony Hiss, Author How to Find Out More About the “Half Earth” Proposal The wonderful writer and scientist E.O. Wilson is someone who really embodies what Tony Hiss talks about in the show: a “planetary feeling.” He’s behind the Half-Earth Project, an organization promoting this concept. How to Find Out More About Tony Hiss Read his books! Tony has written fifteen of them and they’re all in print from major presses and easy to find. Also you might be interested in reading this review of Tony’s book in the Wall Street Journal. How You Can Help Save Half the Earth Here are five things you can do that will matter. Think about accomplishing two. One is to contribute to the organization that’s working hard on making this concept a reality, and the other is to do something directly. You know yourself, and you’ll know which of these you’re best suited for: Contribute $ to the Half-Earth Project. Do it here. Seek out a local effort in your community that is physically restoring a natural area. In Chicago, here’s one and here’s another one. Find a group or agency that is cutting brush or pulling weeds or planting seeds or monitoring a population of an endangered species and go out and volunteer your assistance. Promote educational initiatives that connect students and adults with the natural world and that encourage them to take a tiny step toward becoming a conservation steward. Advocate for conservation action and collaboration within your community—we here at The Shape of the World can’t know what that looks like for you precisely, but often it’s attending meetings related to city planning and zoning decisions and starting to understand how decisions get made. Over time, you can work your way into participating in committees and commissions that make decisions. Or if that’s not your thing, then you can be a thoughtful advocate who speaks up at meetings. You might be surprised by how easy this is—usually because only a handful of people ever take the time to do any type of citizen involvement at the municipal or county level. And that’s where the rubber really hits the road on this enterprise of protecting biodiversity. People who live near natural areas (or open spaces that potentially could become restored and protected natural areas) have to be paying attention. Expand the Half-Earth movement culture by sharing your commitment with friends and family and encouraging them to join you in signing the Half-Earth Pledge. Tony Hiss’s most recent book is available now, published by Penguin Random House. Mark Anderson and Tony Hiss at Sanderson Brook Falls in 2018 This is a photo Tony took of the trees he describes in the podcast episode, the ones blooming behind his Greenwich Village apartment. ”The top half of this view is all sky — a great, arching, almost Western-sized sky,” he wrote in the book, The View from Alger’s Window. “Below the sky and neighboring rooftops, there’s a forest-canopy view of a miniature orchard of ten ornamental Japanese crab apple trees.”

Architect Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earth’s atmosphere. Jeanne’s breakthrough moment was the design of Aqua, a residential tower in Chicago. Opened in 2009, Aqua was the tallest building ever designed anywhere in the world by a female architect. Jeanne conducted personal research and analysis to invent design features that would make Aqua less likely to be a building where birds strike the glass and perish. International design awards and prestigious commissions piled up for Studio Gang after Aqua. In June of 2020, Phaidon press issued a new monograph on Studio Gang.  The high profile Gilder Center, a new wing on the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is currently under construction.  This fall, the first residents of Vista Tower—a new hotel and condominium building taller even than Aqua—will move into new homes in the bird-friendly building.  “I’ve always thought about not only humans but also the other living things around us as part of our realm, one that we can work with and relate to… Many animals live in social societies, and I believe that we are driven by social relationships. We are animals, and we need to better understand our co-inhabitants on the planet.” – Jeanne Gang is an architect and the founder of Studio Gang, an architectural design firm located in Chicago, Paris, San Francisco and New York. What Jeanne Has to Say About How Her Practice Works “I’m an architect, but the way that I see our practice working is similar to and parallel to the way an ecologist would work. We’re studying the relationships between living things and between us and our habitat, our planet, our cities. It’s about studying relationships and not the individual elements themselves… what we try to do is to design so that we facilitate better relationships, improve our relationships, between each other and the environment.” (Excerpt from podcast) How to Find Out More About Jeanne’s Work Visit her buildings, either virtually or in person. For more on the principles and insights that inspire her, watch these extraordinary short videos: Toward Terrestrial, Rhythm, and Flow. And check out the work of the French philosopher Jeanne mentions in the podcast, Bruno Latour. You can also buy and read the Phaidon book on Studio Gang’s work from Seminary Coop Books (or your own local bookstore) and watch this video about it. Or watch her Ted Talk, “Buildings That Blend Nature and City”. Jeanne and Studio Gang have authored two books you can order from your local book store: Reveal (2011) and Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways (2011), the latter of which explored the possible reversal of the flow of the Chicago River, returning it to its original path. And if, sadly, you live oceans away from any city where Jeanne has buildings, book a ticket to fly through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago five years from now. The design team led by Studio Gang was selected to design the airport’s new international terminal. How Can I Help Make the Built Environment Better for Nature, Too? If you live in Chicago, ask your alderman and the Mayor to support the Chicago Bird Friendly Design Ordinance. Chicago is a major fly-through-and-rest-awhile zone for migrating birds in both spring and fall. For thousands of years, birds have taken this same journey—but now big tall buildings sticking up in the sky cause the birds to sometimes smack into them. In the past, this was no one’s fault exactly—no one intended to put something up that killed birds. As Jeanne Gang has proven, if architects avail themselves of the knowledge that is out there on why birds collide with buildings, steps can be taken in the design stage that will prevent it from happening. This type of thing may sound small but it’s not. In the podcast, Jeanne Gang talks about why having citywide regulation is so important. Find out what’s going on in your own city—and if the answer is nothing, think about how to start something up.