Kristin Ohlson is the author of Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World. Her other books include The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, and Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil. Olson appears in the award-winning documentary film Kiss The Ground, speaking about the connection between soil and climate. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Discover, New Scientist, Orion, American Archeology, and has also been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, and Best American Food Writing. 

"I think it's really interesting how we humans are a massively cooperative species. That's why we dominate the world to the extent that we do. We're very good at working together and stories and metaphors are a lot of what drives us to work together, that drives us towards goals. So that's why I thought it was very important to push against the metaphors that have informed so much of our culture for the last couple of hundred years.

So we have the idea of survival of the fittest, not directly from Darwin, that argued that the growing human population would outstrip the earth's resources and there would inevitably be death and weakness in parts of the population. And Darwin had read Malthus and took that idea of progress through struggle and the weeding out of weaker members by the harsh exigencies of nature, and that was how he came up with his theory of natural selection. Those are phrases that have stuck with our society, and I think our thinking about how nature works and how we work.

So those are phrases that came out of science that affect the culture. And the culture, of course, affects science in terms of what we push science to ask for, what we tell science we want to know about the world. And I'm hoping that the new crop of scientists who are looking at all of these cooperative relations among living things - how that holds together ecosystems, how that determines how species can survive - that that new crop of scientists will inform and reform the metaphors that we use, the stories that we tell ourselves about how nature works, how we work, how the culture works. That's what I'm hoping will happen."

www.kristinohlson.com
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