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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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”

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: 

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.

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. 

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.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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”.