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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, author of Becoming Earth, claims that it is: that Earth is a vast interconnected living system and we humans (and all other living things) don’t just live...

Dr. Adrienne Brown reads cities the way professors read novels: carefully, and with lots of attention to what’s written between the lines...

Daniel Holz studies black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmology, all while also running the Existential Risk Laboratory...

Biologist Sara Lewis doesn’t just study fireflies—for her, fireflies are a living reminder that the world is pure magic. In this episode...

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.

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.