The Natural Curiosity Project

Just some intriguing thoughts about Halloween.

Philip Caputo wrote more than a dozen books, including ‘Notes from the Longest Road’ about a trip he took with his wife that started in Key West, Florida, and ended in Point Barrow, Alaska, towing an Airstream camper behind their pickup. The goal? Answer one question: After nearly 250 years, a Civil War, countless other conflicts, racial divides, and political turmoil, what is it that holds this country together, still governed by the same Constitution that the nation’s founders adopted in 1789?

As I was reading Caputo’s book, I was also reading Walter Isaacson’s ‘Benjamin Franklin.’ And in fact, I finished them at about the same time. The weird thing is that both authors reached similar conclusions about the country. In this episode, I weave them together. Enjoy.

60 years ago, Peter Sugarman began a project that would consume his entire life: how could he develop a linguistic bridge between humans and another sentient species, specifically dolphins? In this interview, Peter walks us through the research, his ups and downs, and the remarkable aUI language that he believes will serve as that bridge.

The world is currently gaga over AI—artificial intelligence. It is a remarkable technology, with the potential to create remarkable opportunities in many fields in the coming years. It is, however, enormously powerful, and in my opinion, requires rigorous oversight and strong regulation. As I was thinking about the topic—something I find myself doing a lot—I began to think about the movie Jurassic Park, especially three quotes uttered by Ian Malcolm, the Chaos Theorist played by the inimitable Jeff Goldblum.

I hope this episode makes you think.

The quotes from Jurassic Park are used exclusively for education purposes and generate no revenue for the producer of this program. Jurassic Park is owned exclusively by the estate of Michael Crichton and by Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

This is part two of my series on soil ecosystem health. In this episode I’m in the Mad River Valley in central Vermont with ecologist Curt Lindberg, listening to the sounds of the soil in areas with and without invasive species present. The results are fascinating.

In 1942, Simon & Schuster, in partnership with Western Publishing, released a new book series for kids. The initial print run of one-and-a-half million books sold out in five months, including one of the initial twelve titles that became and continues to be the number one bestselling children’s book of all time in the United States. In this episode, we talk about that book series, and about the magic of books and reading.

I just finished reading my 83rd book of the year, Bernd Heinrich’s “The Common Uncommon.”

Bernd is the author of many books about the natural world, including Mind of the Raven, Winter World, The Geese at Beaver Bog, A Year in the Maine Woods, and many, many others. Oh—he’s also a world record holder for ultra-marathon running: In 1983, he set an American record for a 24-hour run of 156 miles, 1388 yards in a race in Maine. A year later, he set an American record for running 100 miles in a little over 12 hours. And a year after that, he set the American track record of 7:00:12 for running 100 kilometers, in the process becoming the only American man to hold both the road and track American records for the same event. In fact, he wrote a book about running called Why We Run, which is fascinating.

“The Common Uncommon,” the book I just finished, is all about curiosity, and it takes place in the woods surrounding his cabin in Maine, where much of his field research takes place.

But as I was reading Bernd Heinrich’s book, I was also re-reading Karen Bakker’s book, “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.” The two books together hit me hard.

A lot has been written about the ages of human existence, beginning with the Stone and Iron and Bronze Ages, then going all the way through to the Information Age. But I believe that there are actually more identifiable periods that aren’t talked about—13 of them in fact. In this episode, I’m going to talk about them and why I think they’re important. I’m also going to discuss how they relate to one another and what their contributions and liabilities have been.

It’s all around us. It lies beneath our feet, it gets embedded in our clothing and skin, and the air is filled with it. It makes us sneeze. Great clouds of the stuff are lifted from the African Sahara by harmattans and sciroccos and carried high into the atmosphere, where great westward-flowing aerial rivers carry it across the Atlantic to South America, where it falls like rain and feeds the equatorial rainforest. Weird, right? I’m talking, of course, about soil, or as most of us call it, dirt.

This is the first part of a two-part series on soil and what lives in it. Enjoy.

In 1940, author John Steinbeck and his good friend and marine biologist Ed Ricketts set off on a six-week collecting expedition in the Sea of Cortez. The book that resulted from that journey isn't well known, but it is wonderful. Here I offer a few thoughts about the book and their journey.