In this episode of the podcast, Kate sits down with author and poet Melanie Challenger to discuss her two books How to Be Animal and On Extinction. Melanie also hosted the beautiful podcast ‘Psychosphere’ exploring the minds of animals outside of the human animal. This episode explores our disconnection with nature and how it begins in childhood and how it might separate us from the truth that we, as humans, are also animals. It explores what it might mean to come home to the realization that we are animals. Death, mortality, and grief and their roles in our animal bodies are explored as is our human superpower ability to love. This is big episode with a lot of beautiful explorations into what it really means to be human. 

Find Melanie:

How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger

On Extinction by Melanie Challenger

Galatea by Melanie Challenger

Resources Mentioned:

Animals in the Room

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Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another. Communities

above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos. As the saying goes, as

above, so below. Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much

more. I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you. Hello, everyone. I am your host, Kate Cavanaugh,

the Mind Body and Soil podcast. Soon to return to the name, the Groundwork podcast, where we explore the threads of what it

means to be humans woven into this earth. And I think that some of our upcoming episodes are truly going to exemplify that

statement, what it means to be humans woven into this earth. And we are going to explore a lot of the built world that we

have woven out of a variety of materials from sand to steel to petroleum and how those have been woven into the natural world

as they are from the natural world. And they are derived from the natural world, mined from those places, wrought from the

ground with human labor. And throughout that, one of my biggest concerns is that some of these explorations can become a little

bit dark, that they feel a little bit heavy. And I can attest to that just in how I have experienced it, as I have been exploring

this for months on end. And some of the times where I have found myself feeling a little low, a little depressed, and a little

lost. And what I want this week's episode to do is to provide us with an anchor of the knowledge that to be human is to be

animal and that one of the things that we have as humans that make us special and not special both, number 1 is thumbs and

I always come back to this. I feel like there's some luck of the draw in the fact that we are able to manipulate the natural

world and turn it into a built world in a way that I think is perhaps only rivaled by something like a beaver, which we explored

in the episode with Ben Goldfarb. But in this week's episode, I have invited Melanie Challenger on to discuss the human animal.

And I think it really comes back to this quote that her and I will discuss on the on the episode. There's there's 2 pieces,

and I just want to make sure that we really drive them home before we dive in. And the first is this, the world is now dominated

by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal, and the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal.

This matters. We are that animal. And our connection back to what Mary Oliver would call our animal bodies is more vital now

than ever because we share these animal bodies with other animal bodies. Right? As Alana Collins taught us in her episode,

we are only 10% human. 1 out of 10 of our cells is our own while the other 9 out of 10 are those that belong to our microbiome

and all of the animals that depend on us. If we just take one step outside and reach into the soil, we will find 1,000,000,000

microorganisms per teaspoon. Every, almost everything that we touch and that we utilize in our daily lives is made up at some

point in the supply chain of animal bodies and earth body. And whether that is, you know, the petroleum that we pull out of

the ground that used to be a whole manner of plant life and phytoplankton and bacterial life that has degraded over 1000000

of years or we are talking about our food, right? We've talked a great deal about food on this podcast, especially through

the lens of regenerative agriculture and eating animals and eating animal bodies and that incredible intimacy that comes with

that. We wear clothes made of natural fibers. Again, these are things, I'm sitting here, I'm wearing a wool sweater that was

once a part of an animal body, and so animal plant bacterial fungal bodies surround us. And so it's important that we look

at what it is for us to be woven into what might be considered a holobiont, which is the sum total of all the creatures and

biomes that we're constantly interacting with, really challenging that idea of self and other. The other anchor I want to

come back to in Melanie's work is that it is our ability to love that is perhaps what will buoy us into the future. And let

me read this quote, which I believe I read in the episode. For all our destructiveness, humans are also promiscuously compassionate

and thoughtful. In fact, humans are what I like to call love generalizers. Our bodies reservice hormones like oxytocin from

maternal child bonds and our later affiliations with one another and also when we bond across the species boundary. It is

a marvel of nature that a creature like us has evolved in such a way as to be able to love a skink or a pig or a python or

a wren. Okay. Perhaps we don't love these other species quite as forcefully as we do our own kind. Our love for one another

is incredible. But we can love completely unrelated members of our species. And, yes, perhaps we don't love them quite as

much as we do our children, but we are still extraordinarily promiscuous with our affections. We are a strange marriage of

possible loves, an infinity knot of infinite possible relations, and we don't tell ourselves this anywhere near enough. The

generalizable nature of our affiliative biology is our real superpower. So perhaps we might make space, we might place a little

more faith in our bodies. I want to come back to this time and again through upcoming episodes where we really do explore

what I think is a darker side of our humanity and of the built world and of our relationship with the natural world where

we too have this incredible superpower in our affiliative biology to love beyond our species, to love and know a tree, to

love and know members of other species, be it our dogs, our cats, our goats, or to perhaps begin to love the bacteria inside

the soil for the incredible gifts that it gives us. I think that Melanie's work in her books, How to be Animal and On Extinction,

are incredible benchmarks both for some of the history of the destruction we have wrought and also the possibility that we

have. And this is a sort of philosophical and ethical space that gets a little bit tricky. And I think throughout this, we're

weaving into some spaces that perhaps if you have come to this podcast from a regenerative agricultural background, and it

might tweak something a little bit. If you're coming to this podcast as someone who is still skeptical about raising animals

for meat might tweak you a little bit. And so I think that we are continually going to get into some territory where we're

in some gray areas, and we're crossing over into camps and finding middles that might be a little bit uncomfortable. And I'm

excited about that because I love the gray area. I love the nuance. I love challenging explorations that force me to reevaluate

my own worldview and perspective of what it is to be woven into this earth. And again, I think that our weaving, the thread

that each of us represents as an individual is inextricably connected to every thread within this tapestry of life that is

so unlikely here on our little blue planet. And I want us to hold in our hearts the infinite possibilities of stories we could

tell ourselves going forward because it is this moment right now, it is always this moment right now in which we have the

spread of opportunities to tell ourselves a new story. And I think that, first, we must examine what is the story that we

are currently telling ourselves, where do we find ourselves at this moment in time. And then we must examine our values, our

true values, peeling back the layers of what society has told us of the little silos that we have found ourselves in in terms

of our little social media camps or the identity markers that we wear, whether that's carnivore or homesteader or environmentalist,

and truly beginning to deeply assess where our hearts are. And I think that through this balance, some of what I hope to achieve

here is to be able to craft a new story. And so I deeply appreciate you coming along for that ride. I think this episode with

Melanie Challenger is a beautiful anchor point for us, and it will couple with a solo episode where I'm going to talk about

why I have chosen to explore some of the topics that I am choosing to explore right now. As always, I am incredibly grateful

to you for tuning in to the Mind Body and Soil soon to be Groundwork podcast. This is a solo production of Passion. I edit,

produce, market, make the reels, am the videographer. I do all of the things for this podcast and it is not free to produce.

And so your support means the world. If you would like to support the podcast, you can either subscribe to my Substack or

you can leave me a one time tip in the show notes if you're interested in helping me purchase books or to pay for my time

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the show notes and shoot me that little snapshot, and I'll send you a note. Thank you so much for tuning in to this labor

of love that absolutely fills me with passion and joy. It is such a pleasure to build this podcast together because you are

very much a part of it by listening to it, by communicating with me in DMs via email and letting me know what you think of

these books, of these episodes, and getting a chance to connect. So without further ado, here is the incredible Melanie Challenger.

And, again, I just cannot recommend enough that you pick up her books, How to Be Animal and On Extinction. She also has some

beautiful poetry. I have her book Galatea and some beautiful essays online. So Melanie is everywhere and I encourage you to

find her. Without further ado, here we go. I really do mean that. I was just telling you this, but I really do mean like it's

been such a delight to read your books, to read your poetry, to listen to you speak with various experts on the psychosphere

and to just get a little peek inside of your brain and spend a lot of time there and considering what might come out of this

interview. So so I'm I'm just delighted to have you here.

Oh, thank you. I mean, I have had a very diverse career and, of course, I haven't thought about it in that kind of way. I

haven't planned it. I've it's you know, I'm moving authentically through the world, right? I'm going on the inquiries that

I go on but I have to say now that I'm in my forties, I do I am starting to reflect back and look at how I can recognize that

it's quite unusual, I suppose, to work in simultaneously in so many different areas. But it's somewhere in my head, it's logical.

So if it's if it's made sense to you, then that's delightful to me.

Oh, I think it makes perfect sense. And I do think it is actually in looking backwards that we can see sort of how we followed

trajectory and curiosity and inquiry to arrive at the unique constellation points of our work and career in a way that we

never could have planned.

I think that's right. And very often, that's when we are confronted by the parts of our intelligence that are not necessarily

immediately obvious to us. Mhmm. Where there are different kinds of of, ways in which we are guiding ourselves forward that

are not not immediately, accessible, you know, to to to rational thought at first. And actually, when you look back at it,

you say, I I see what I was doing, I see where I was going. And it is it can take a while for it to surface. And I, I'm at

that stage where I think everything is starting to surface simultaneously. And I'm starting to see the connections between

the different sort of creative or, intellectual kind of roots that I was I was just following. They're all sort of starting

to converge now, so it's quite exciting for me in some ways.

I love that. And I love that idea. I mean, that you what you said initially, that you're you're just sort of following inquiry,

and that that reveals different kinds of intelligences. And I think there is sort of a an animal ness to our to our curiosity

and and following that and and what it reveals. I I I just really appreciate that perspective.

Oh, absolutely. I think it's it's animal through and through.

Through and through. I thought we might start there, and I actually thought that we might start in childhood. I was struck

as I was I was reading all your pieces and listening. You weave some of your childhood and your children's childhoods into

your work. And, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to interview Andreas Weber. I don't know if you're familiar with

his work. Yeah. Yeah.

But he

had said something in one of his books that really struck me that we are so quick to catalog every developmental stage of

childhood, every rollover and a holding up of the head and all of these different developmental benchmarks. And yet we don't

define the place where a child reaches for any animal, almost falling out of their carrier to do so. And I was thinking about

this in the way that you speak of children and of that innate curiosity. And you have a quote and you say they're interested

because they assume that these living things matter. They've not yet been brainwashed by a cultural view that tells them living

things have no intrinsic value other than in their uses for humans. And so I kind of have this this I hope this interview

is a little bit like a life cycle. And so I wanted to start here at childhood when we are so beautifully and acutely interwoven

into this this web of animal species and animal ourselves before we've been told otherwise.

Well, I mean, children have to be taught how to be human in the modern sense. Children obviously don't stick to any of the

rules that govern polite society. So they explore everything through their mouths, for starters, which would not be acceptable.

Then they explore everything through touch, and we've got very far removed from touch in some ways. We're all about, you know,

adults. The adult stage of the life cycle is much more about negotiating through language and through visuals. But, obviously,

children are much more, engaged in a completely fully embodied way. And that lack of boundary also is there in terms of human

and non human. It's there initially between their own bodies and their mother's body. So yes fathers as well, but it's more

more strongly between the maternal body and the and the child body that there's, it takes a while to grasp the fact that that

these are 2 separate beings. And that's the moment that kind of vulnerability can sometimes, emerge in young children when

they realize, actually, hang on a second, I'm not just a nice, cozy, extra limb of my mother's super nice. I'm a separate

entity that can be harmed, you know. And again, the so that that that is a process of learning of separation and so forth.

And sadly, one of the separations that happens also, which starts very much from a togetherness, is the one between humans

and the rest of the living world. So it's not that young infants, you know, don't understand that there is that they are looking

out on beings that that are furred, have furry faces, or growling, or behaving in different ways, have lashing tails and and

don't appear to be humans. Of course there's distinction but there isn't exceptionalism. So there's distinction and curiosity,

there's distinction and fascination, there's distinction and respect, that that seems to come naturally. And what happens

over time is that, and and we can unpack this later. You have to learn how to look out on the rest of the living world and

see these other beings as not intelligent, as somehow emotionally bereft or somehow subhuman as somehow less important rather

than as as unique worlds of being that are very much on their own terms. That has to be taught, and it is not there for young

people. So that's very much I think a separation that is driven into us and that we when we want to make sense of how that

creeps in, you have to go back to the the early stages of life and and spend your time immersed in the kind of mindset where

that we're all born into. Where when it when it's not when it's not in place, when the separation hasn't been, hasn't been engendered.

I thought that that was such a beautiful distinction that you make that that that we're sort of inculcated in this worldview

that it it's it's something that we swim in a societal milieu of this more hierarchical idea, that that isn't there in that

innate sense that there is a a separateness or division, but but not a hierarchy. And at the beginning of how to be animal,

you say something that I think is really crucial and has kind of just been echoing around in my mind, for the last 6 months

since since I popped open the book. And you say the world is now dominated by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. This matters. And as I've kind of gone through

other books and other readings this year, this couple of sentences has really stood out to me. And so I just wanted to pass

that back to you and to begin that conversation.

So, you know, it's funny. A lot of people have, either written to me or spoken to me about those first lines. And I would

like to say that they just emerged from from native wit effortlessly but in reality I worked really hard on that first few

sentences. I was talking to someone yesterday about the fact that my writing process appears to be spending about 10 months

now and I've spent a year just writing the first very, very short opening part of the current book that I'm working on, How

to be an animal. The first kind of 2 or 3000 words took about 10 months and those sentences that took a really long time to

distill and to get to. The rest of the book then writes itself relatively fast. That's the interesting thing about the way

that I appear to work. I can't, you know, I haven't written enough to know that that will always be the case but certainly

for the moment it takes me a long time to get to that stage. With How to be Animal I was trying to find a way and in those

sentences of capturing for people an essential point that would navigate that they could use to navigate the rest of the territory

because I was going to go all over the place with How to be Animal. You know, the book is essentially, an inquiry into the

psychological, the moral, the historical consequences of the fact that we are animals ourselves. That's going to take you

into vast, you know, terrains and across historical time, across different cultures, different ways of seeing the world, different

knowledges, and also just different facets of our lives that will be affected from the political to the social, and so forth.

Because of the breadth of the terrain, I felt that I had to find a way of of having a kind of touchstone, something that readers

could come back to each time to help to to go around them again and what the essential point was here. And so in those sentences,

I had tried to just get down. I know the book is about a lot more, but I essentially tried to get down to how this was a syndrome

of sorts that resonated both through history and and at the moment. And so the world is dominated by an animal that doesn't

think it's an animal. In some ways, that allows us to recognize that that that this is a worldview that has come to dominate,

it isn't necessarily inevitable. The idea there is that we are living our lives at some level as if we're not really animals

and there are lots of ways that we can look into what what that means. But I think one of the one of the immediate ways is

that we our entire legal system, for instance, or even our how we ground our right to vote or any of these sorts of kind of

really crucial aspects of of human society are often based on the idea that there is some sort of exceptional human essence

that only we possess, that gives only us moral, true moral status. And that is a profoundly non animal thing. You have to

argue that this is exclusive to humans. It has to be something therefore that we do not share. Despite the fact that we are

highly related to other primates, we're we're related to mammals, we're related to all of the life on earth going back far

enough. We have to somehow pull something out of animality and and stamp our unique moral identity. That would that that's

just one aspect of how we in some ways, even though we accept that we're animals, we don't think and act as though we are.

So and then the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. That's about looking at some of the

psychological things that follow from being an animal and how that's manifesting in the world. So trying to live forever,

for instance. Mhmm. Trying to control the aspects of our animality that we fear, our aging bodies, our diseased body. These

sorts of things. It's really, looking at the way that that ripples through, through our lives and, and our technologies and

our approaches to to the meaning of our lives. That's that's kind of what the second bit follows through. And and it's really

a response to how serious that is now when the current industrial revolution is very focused on the biological, being able

to control and engineer the biological to to control and engineer intelligence and so forth. So that that's that was what

I was trying to do. I was trying to get sort of all of those different things patched down into something really kind of tight

that at least people could take with them, even if the even even if the discussions were going to get a bit bewildering at

times. That was the aim.

Well, it's a stunning touchstone and something I've come back to in not just this interview with you, but actually in other

interviews as well. And, you bring up a point that was initially how I found you was through an essay that you had written

for Emergence Magazine on death and love. And I am struck in the second part of that, of not wanting to be animal, but the

idea of death, which you discussed both throughout On Extinction and in How to be Animal is, oh no, and some of the explorations

that I've had this year, I think that death is the point where we take the idea of growth in perpetuity that, that we have

realized throughout at least the industrial revolution, if not even further back into the agricultural revolution and this

idea of sort of limitless and very linear growth, that to come home to the idea of death is to recreate a sense of circularity.

And you talk a lot about the idea of eschewing death and the ways in which we've done that and that that has continued to

make us separate. And and even I was fascinated. You just there was a little bit about feelings of disgust being heightened

in those that are asked to consider death or even a sort of pushing away of loved pets. And so I wondered if we just might

dive at least briefly into the idea of death as, I mean, for me very much, it's something that brings us back to the idea

of that there are limits to growth, that there are that it is an equalizer as well, that it is very beautifully animal. And

I I know that we both we both walk our own respective forests most mornings and get a chance to to see death a little bit more intimately.

I mean, there's a huge amount to, unfold there. So the idea I suppose another way of talking about growth could be to talk

about progress. This is the idea that human beings have to be on a progressive trajectory in order to give their lives. Meaning,

we hear this a huge amount. We hear the idea that exploration, so progress through space, through landscape, the idea that

breaking through, scientific and technological barriers, progress in that sense, the idea of economic progress so of, growth,

economic growth, the that kind of narrative, which isn't sustainable, frankly. We all know this. It has to be it has to be

reimagined certainly. But the idea that progress is in some sense a kind of reaction to the ultimate limit, The fact that

we're all going to die and that we fear that at some really primal level. The real architects of thought about that was probably

Ernest Becker who wrote The Denial of Death in I want to say 1972 or something around then. I I've been mulling this actually

before where I came across Becca's work simply as a consequence of having children. One of the things that's really difficult

when you're a parent, and I would imagine this is the same whether you are someone of faith or whether you are an atheist,

whether wherever you are on your belief in afterlife, or whether you're panpsychist, whether you you're a complete materialist,

what whoever and whatever your way of orienting yourself in the world. When you have a little child who maybe 3, 4 depends

on the child suddenly realizes that their their mom and dad are gonna die or their parents are gonna die or their grandparents

are gonna die or maybe it comes through, observing it somewhere else or maybe it's an experience that they've already had

in their lives. That moment of mortality and then that they will be more club 2 is it's an assault on the mind of the child.

You can see it when it when it hits them for the first time. And that I think again going back to childhood that it's just

it's made very apparent it's naked in the child that fear of death. Whereas for adults, we suppress that. We don't admit it.

We don't admit that we remain very frightened about mortality. I think human beings are in a really we are in a unique position

in this regard, in that I think other animals certainly have a concept of death. I think other animals are capable of grieving

and mourning one another. They recognize death, especially among social animals. But human beings can think about death in

the past, think about death in the present, and anticipate death in the future. That is unique certainly, as far as we can

tell. I wouldn't 100% say that that wouldn't be in some other primates, but it's it's definitely the heightened and amplified

in human beings. And that has shaped human history. You know, I was walking around the, Amsterdam recently. And if you go

into the earlier stages of art in Europe, it's it's only about death. I mean, pretty much all of the great cultural works

are about squaring up to death in one way or another. So death is is terrifying for human beings regardless of of what they

tell themselves about it. It's, the kind of permanent state of death, whether it's a complete extinction or whether it's it's

just a a a changing form to something else. Regardless of that, it's frightening. And we've got we've got very good evidence

in all aspects of our culture for the ways in which we culturally culturally resolve that and can psychologically resolve

that fear. But I think it's some of the invisible aspects of the way that that our fear of death can can affect us. So you

you were talking about something it's called terror management theory. So this is a kind of field that came out of Becca's

work looking at the impacts of of death or mortality salience on human beings. So when they're made aware at some level of

of death, does it alter the way that they behave in the world? So and many studies have found in different kinds of societies

have found that it tends to make human beings more groupish. So they'll seek reassurance at some level. Interestingly, it

can also tend to make people favor the idea of human uniqueness and human exceptionalism because that idea itself buffers

buffers them from what they fear of death. So whether or not the fact that we can't quite get to grips with the fact that

our lives are mortal and therefore our entire sort of modern industrial complex is to a certain extent An attempt to master

death and or not is it may be a little wildly reductive but there is something there, there is something there and I think

certainly when you see the existential way in which people respond to the possibility of an industry having to change and

come to an end Or the possibility of a nation having to rethink its identity. Those things are people respond to those as

they respond to death. And so I think that's somewhere that we can we can start to see, that that connection is live and active.

You you said something in the process of this and and sort of brought it home towards the end that progress is a reaction

to the ultimate limit, which is death. And you you have a quote in I think it's how to be animal, it might be on extinction,

that large industrial societies live at a remove, determined to evade the constraints of nature. They ease many of the burdens

and dangers of existence. Today, the dominant cultures of progress still tell us we must continue on this trajectory, pulling

further and further from the rest of life on our planet. And I think what you said there I

don't know which book which book that's wrong. I think it might be from on an extension, actually, but I wouldn't swear to it.

It's fantastic. And I pulled it out because because of and what you said is so salient, right? That progress is a reaction

to that ultimate limit. And I think I see this made manifest in a lot of the ways that we are carrying on within industry.

And I often come back to, and I Mark Fisher attributes that to somebody else, Mark Fisher's idea that it is easier to imagine

the end of the world than it is to imagine the death of capitalism. And I think that that kind of comes back to to that idea

of the death of industry and just how resistant we are to it and how much this has been couched in the terms of progress.

Well, I think that's right. I think if you look through industrial history, however, we're actually remarkably adaptable.

So sometimes when a resource runs out or it becomes uneconomic to pursue that resource. So an example could be tin mining,

which I talk about in On Extinction, where it just got so difficult to access the the tin with the current with with with

the available engineering, but it didn't make economic sense anymore. Now individuals, human beings are deeply, deeply cultural

animals and there are all kinds of aspects not just of how we might relate to the idea of death but just existential, really

fundamental existential needs that get pressed on when your cultural knowledge you've inherited maybe over multiple generations

is in danger or when your sense of identity that you've built around a particular way of life again that you may have inherited

and may go back multiple generations, that is immensely difficult. And again the kind of experiences that individuals who

were at the frontier of having to shift elsewhere into a different a different future, different unknown economic or cultural

future and identity. They experienced that light grief and I remember listening to the audio and reading the transcripts of

some of the miners in in Cornwall when they realized that the industry was going to be gutted, that this was the the dead

end. And they experienced profound grief. Some of them to the point of suicide. You know, this is this is not it's it's in

in no way psychologically trivial. That said, human beings do adapt. It's not easy but they do do it with remarkable skill.

We we still transfer elsewhere, we we rebuild and reinvent the the meaning of the landscape, we carry our prior histories

forward as, as heritage. You know, you think about cowboys, very few cowboys drove in the way that they want stood, you know,

might use helicopters, maybe, but they're not going to be on their horses drove in the kind of way that they were many, many

years ago, that has changed. And yet the insignia, the cultural identity, what you wear your Stetsons, and so forth, those

things have all carried through, you know, that's how human beings cope with the change, they they bring with them what they

love and what what they want to remember. And that informs a new and a fresh and a reimagined identity. So we're actually

very good at doing it both economically and and in our heritage. It's really tough psychologically and so one of the things

that frustrates me is that when we have to we come up to a point where we're going to have to shift how we do things economically

or or what industry remains an acceptable one with the new new cultural or social ideas that we have for the time. The first

bit of work that you need to do is invest in supporting those individuals who are at the frontline of the change, the individuals

who will need psychological support. We focus so much on providing economic support but actually the first bit of work that

you need to do is psychological support people and ready people, talk to people and listen to people who are going to have

to shift into into a different line of work or into a different, a different way of being in a landscape or a different way

of thinking about the meaning of their lives. We're not even having that kind of conversation when it comes to capitalism.

It's not it's not even on the agenda, but that for me is the first first and most important piece of work that you should

do, you know, in terms of due diligence as as things change and shift.

I don't think I've ever heard anybody bring that up, and I think that's really important because as I was looking at this

and one of the things that I think anytime you're talking about death, I think you're also talking about grief. And one of

the conversations I had earlier this year was with, just a home funeral arranger. I was talking about, I think, for me, the

scariest part of death is actually my own experience of of grief. That grief is an emotion that is so big. And I think that

this is something you really cover beautifully in terms of looking at the ideas of grief and nostalgia. And I'm going to I'm

not going to pronounce this correctly. I'm going to try so hard. Dasha Wang And

How did I do?

How did I do? How did I do? Was it okay?

It's good. Yeah. It's good. Okay.

I I

think we can't go we can't go back and be absolutely sure. All of these pronunciations are, to a certain extent, you know,

we're doing the best job that we can with something that was spoken 1500 years ago.

But this idea that think a lot of what we are experiencing collectively and then individually and and perhaps within industry,

just like you said, is a sense of grief that isn't being looked at, right? That we're not having the psychological support

for the grief that we experience as the 6th mass extinction goes on, as ways of life are changed. You know, and you say something

on extinction. You say, I begin to see that the idea of loss was riveting to the imagination, like shrapnel, to believe too

that this was an involuntary response to losses discovered both in the external world and in the internal life of an individual.

But why did people suffer these aching emotions if not for some purpose? Were they the consequence of some other aspect of

sentience or were they in themselves rewarding feelings? And then you go on to define Doshiowang, while studying the early

English language at university, I came across an ancient English word for the fascination experienced by someone looking at

a ruin, das shiawong. A word of startling precision for which no modern equivalent exists. A kind of daydream of dust, a pondering

of that which has been lost. Dust seeing, dust chewing, just dust cheering. The daydream of a mind strung between past and

present. And I love how much you've incorporated the importance and the instinctiveness of grief within our processes as animals.

Yeah. So it's funny. It's not it's not it's not just a Western idea, this one as well. I remember being really struck when

I was in Nunavut in the north far north of Canada, and I was talking to a a hunter, from the Inuit community there, And she

she showed me it actually. I can't remember what the word was in Inuktitut, but there was a word that's very similar in some

ways for a way of keeping looking back that that was brought to life again in the present. So it was a kind of non linear

sort of relationship with the past, a kind of mindset that that was both in the present and alive to a kind of particular

moment in the past. It's got me as being very similar in quality. So this is a really deeply human impulse. And, you know,

some of it is is the kind again, it ties into why we're uniquely frightened of of our deaths, because our minds are time traveling

minds. They move between the past, and they track possible future states. And our whole identities are built through that

shuttlecock, you know, across across time, across across the past, not just our past, but the past of our ancestors, and into

into future possibilities. That that is both wonderfully flexible for an animal. It gives, it gifts us the imagination. It

it offers strategic planning. It offers ways of imagining what could go wrong and and therefore flexibility choice in in in

your action moment by moment. There's a huge amount that's that's available from having that kind of time travel in mind.

But of course, with it, comes unique fears, particular kinds of, of, ways of suffering that that originate in in that, flexible

sort of, time management that's enliven us all the time. I think we can see and what concerns me perhaps the most at the moment

is that going back to what we were talking about earlier, There's good robust, you know, repeated evidence that human beings

respond to existential threats in ways that are both positive. So we can build connections. We can be nudged into more affiliative

behaviour. So we kind of buffer ourselves from these kinds of things that we fear through building positive connections. An

example of that would be, let's say the pandemic comes in. It's a novel virus, it's essentially frightening to human beings,

how many people would have got straight on their phones and looked up an old connection or reinforced their relationship to

those that they love, or made sure they go to church a little bit more than they were beforehand. That's a really positive

response to fear where we seek reassurance through togetherness. The other thing is that we can tend to get groupish. So then

we get very spiky about, those that are outside of the group. We can find ourselves, pushing into that more othering kind

of state of mind where we we're reinforcing group connections, but those can come at the loss of others. And within that,

there's further complexity. When we get into a groupish state of mind we tend to infer more intelligence, more secondary emotions

to those that are within our group and less intelligence, less secondary emotion, less trust in those that appear to be outside

of our group. I worry that we're in a time where all of these things are playing out in our these are very animal things to

do with our particular behaviors as a highly, highly social animal, are playing out in in ways that we have very little charitable

giving, in in lots of different kinds of ways in which it's impacting our behaviour. But one of the things that concerns me,

I suppose, most about the the environmental crisis is that unless we understand the way that we respond to fear, then these

very fear driven narratives that are only becoming more alarmist may actually be counterproductive. That's something that

greatly worries me. We talk about generation dread. Fine. But we really need to understand what plugging our existential anxieties

are likely to do in terms of behaviors, in terms of norms. If you want people to be agents of change for good, you've gotta

get on top of how do we respond to fear. And that's something that that, you know, really bothers me.

Yes. And I think I think anybody anybody listening to this, I think that you see some of that that in group othering behavior

in so many different facets of the microcosm and the macrocosm both. And I'm curious because I think that you speak so beautifully

about the idea of affiliative love being a sort of human superpower. And I have a little quote from you and I'm a little bit

curious about what you think, how you think we can, I don't really wanna say leverage, but how we can lean into that space?

And and for listeners just to kind of define this, I have this quote from the essay, in Emergence Magazine. You say for all

our destructiveness, humans are also promiscuously compassionate and thoughtful. In fact, humans are what I like to call love

generalizers. Our bodies reservice hormones like oxytocin from our maternal child bonds and our later affiliations with one

another, and also when we bond across the species boundary. It is a marvel of nature that a creature like us has evolved in

such a way as to be able to love a skink or a pig or a python or a wren. Okay. Perhaps we don't love these other species quite

as forcefully as we do our own kind. Our love for one another is incredible, but we can love completely unrelated members

of our species. And, yes, perhaps we don't love them quite as much as we do our children, but we are still extraordinarily

promiscuous with our affections. We are a strange marriage of possible loves, an infinity knot of infinite possible relations,

and we don't tell ourselves this anywhere near enough. The generalizable nature of our affiliative biology is our real superpower.

So perhaps we might place a little more faith in our bodies.

I quite like that myself, actually.

Isn't it nice when you when somebody reads it back to you and you're like, oh, actually, that sounds good.

Well, I guess I guess in some ways, it doesn't really feel when when you have distance from when you wrote something, it doesn't

really feel like it's you or yours anymore and in any case these ideas don't they feel like found objects If you see what

I mean rather than necessarily things that are owned by me. So I I, you know, it's that's what I love about writing is that

for me, it's gregarious. It's a gregarious form of thinking. We're thinking together as readers and writers, and that's that's

what's really beautiful about the act of writing.

I love that. A gregarious form of thinking. I love that.

Okay. But I think that, yes. So it is for me something that we don't we when we talk about what's exceptional about us, we

we so often go for our intelligence, our, you know, only we have souls, only we have consciousness, only we can think in certain

kinds of ways, only we have language etcetera etcetera. Actually, firstly, I think our moral our moral flexibility, our moral,

possibilities, our ways of caring about others and acting for others is is really what's most remarkable. And then in in a

simple sense, as I've said, the fact that we are capable of loving, of resurfacing, because that is very often what biology

is doing. Biology won't invent something afresh. It won't come up with something new. It will just repurpose what it already

has there available to it. So what we can see is that the maternal child bond within mammals has been resurfaced the same

sorts of hormones, the same sorts of pathways, the same sorts of mechanisms, which is why those naught to 3 years are often

so very crucial for people's well-being. Those can be those are reworked later in life in our relationships with our our romantic

relationships, in our friendships, and even in how we relate to those who are who are not related to us directly at all. Similarly,

we we use the same sorts of things across the species boundary, and it is remarkable that human beings can really form a loving

relationship with any other kind of life. That is so incredible. That's such a degree of emotional flexibility. That it is

incredible. We don't don't notice it, to the degree that we should do. We'll talk about that as being what should center our

identity as exceptional. And so that's guess, I guess, just a a case of human identity. What is it that we think that really

matters about us? For me, that that's it. That's what's really special. Of course, there are things that follow from that

that that are more uncomfortable for people because that's a very inclusive, starting place in terms of the rest of the living

world. Whereas an exceptional value that is based around something that we think only we possess is is a very exclusive kind

of way of thinking about human identity. I'm much more interested in the inclusive one, and I think it has more to offer than

that because I I talked a little bit about social buffering. So social animals buffer themselves. Well, by that, I mean that

when they experience something that's very difficult or distressing. So let's say you are a young animal that has gone out

on its first foraging, and has come across a predator. You've escaped that, but you've gone back to your the rest of your,

related members, that animal will have be packed full of stress hormones. And those stress hormones will have they'll stay

in the body for a good 2 weeks, for starters, and they'll have implications in terms of the well-being of the animal, and

and stress through life, high levels of stress or lots of stress, affect the immune system, affect long term survival and

so forth. So social animals use their inter their relationships, their affiliations with one another in order to buffer themselves

from the stress, those sorts of stresses. So it has an immune and a physical benefit. We know this happens widely. Human beings

do it as well. And we see all sorts of ways in which, just even going to the hairdresser and having your, being groomed in

a very formal way will release some of the positive hormones and and get your kind of respiratory rate, your resting heart

rate into a a better kind of state. This is all buffering. This is all social buffering. Human beings psychologically buffer

themselves as well. So we use ideas to do the same kind of thing and some of when those ideas are exceptionalists, so as in

human beings are are special and a uniquely special, and this is what gives meaning to our lives, or we have to, you know,

earn more money or progress in a certain kind of way, and this is what makes us special. If you're buffering yourself with

something that is essentially going to be, maybe positive for you but toxic for everybody else, then we're in trouble. What

I like about this sort of love generalising is that if we were to buffer ourselves with a sense of relatedness with the rest

of the living world. If we were to buffer ourselves with the beauty of being alive, with greater connection with the rest

of the living world, with nurturing the rest of the living world, with thinking in a multi species community rather than only

in a human community. Decision making in a much more we expand our our social community to embrace the whole of the planet

and the whole of the biotic community. For me that that offers not only a more morally consistent way of looking out on the

world, But it offers us, one of the ways that we can start to counter the things that we with that that we've been so frightened

of throughout throughout our lives. But that's how we can kind of square up to the human condition a bit. So it may sound

fanciful, but I actually think that it it would be, beneficial to

people. I don't think it I don't think it's fanciful at all. And and I I think just the ways that I know I have benefited,

from feeling a sense of interconnectedness and and from leveraging that that sort of affiliative nature are are so multifold

that I couldn't I couldn't even begin to to speak of them. And I you know, you had a you had a really great great quote in

here because I think some of this is about telling ourselves a new story, right, that that we tell ourselves the story of

of fear and of separation. And and what if we did focus on this idea of, our affiliate of love and our generativeness. And

and the quote was, it's time we told ourselves a new story of revolutionary simplicity. If we matter, so does everything else.

And to to add to that a little bit, just to to feel a sense of interconnectedness within that space of of everything.

Yeah. I mean, it's that said, I'm I am a deeply practical thinker as well. Immediately I I do what I would imagine a lot of

people do which is think, well, what what would this actually look like in the world? What would this do to our food systems

for instance? What would this do to the way that we practice conservation? What would this do Dismantling the way that that

exceptionalist approach that I've been talking to at different points in this interview. Really, really doing something to

dismantle that is colossal work. Because it's it, you know, its tentacles are in absolutely everything. Thing. The way in

which for instance we entirely steer and control the reproductive behaviors of of large numbers of animals as part of our

food systems. I don't really see how you could support those sorts of actions if you took seriously the subjecthood and you

you really connected with the intelligence and feelings of other living beings. I don't see how you could continue that kind

of practice in the world. And so there there is some very severe limits. I don't think it necessarily mitigate sorry. I don't

think it necessarily argues against killing or utilising other animals or other living beings at all. I think that's a more

nuanced question but it certainly makes problematic some very ordinary everyday practices that we take for granted. You know

even in conservation the idea that you can just take one kind of animal because you think it's doing some kind of function

in the ecosystem and plonk it somewhere else. You know, that's gonna get very difficult if you really take seriously the subjective

and intrinsic value of a living being. It's gonna get very difficult to say, well, let's eradicate that particular animal

because it's it's getting in the way of another that we've, for whatever reason, given higher conservation value to. These

sorts of things or any kind of way of thinking about living beings in aggregate are gonna become very problematic if you take

this kind of affiliation seriously. So so I think there's that there are very radical implications to really doing this, but

I think that the benefits, even though the ructions would be enormous, would also be considerable. You know we we are we're

very lonely. We're a very lonely animal. We have no other humans around us. There should be other humans alongside us. We

don't often think about that enough but there should be other humans. It's very strange to be an animal with no other, no

other of I mean, chimpanzees is as close as we get, and this is over 6000000 years ago. And yet only you know 30, 4000 years

ago we would have had more diversity than we have now. Going back 250,000 years ago there would have been you know we we thought

of ourselves as there is you know again this is where we can get our ideas so wrong until really very recently we thought

human beings had just come into being in a nice linear line of progress. They're ending in us. We now know that the human

line was branched. There were other humans alongside us and they're not here anymore. We must ask the question why. Homo Sapiens

has not lived comfortably alongside any other large mammal. We've tended to take out large carnivores. We know this. We take

out competitors within our environment. That's been going on for more since pre homo sapiens actually. That's a kind of homonym

problem but, yeah, there's definitely we're a lonely being and that now we're lonely because we're killing off both the abundance

and diversity of the other life alongside us. That to me is the most enormous moral harm And so anything that could push against

that and I think in ways that ultimately would be emotionally nourishing to us rather than necessarily stripping us of the

meaning that we seem to hold so dear. I think would be a positive step forward.

Thank you for for for that. I I don't I don't know if you've read the work of Daniel Quinn, but I think it it hearkens back

to that. I think you'd really enjoy him. He's a fiction writer that that has spoken a lot about, what a lonely animal we are, and how

I'll lick them up.

And how there there were other branches of humans. And this idea of prehistory that we market the agricultural revolution

is really not pre at all. It is is deeply a part of our history and our relationship with other animals that we are the only

other animal that that destroys entire species, in the way that we do in in competition for for food and energy resources

and has sort of terraformed the planet, in this pursuit of progress, whatever that means. I'll I'll send it to you after this

after this interview. I think you'd really appreciate his work. I think that when you say that I'm struck that we're lonely

on every level, right? Like, we are lonely in terms of the amount of biodiversity loss that we are experiencing lonely and

that there would have been other, species of of homo around us. We are lonely at the level that we no longer live in community

with one another as we might have many years ago or even lonely and that we no longer live in intergenerational houses where,

you know, we have access to more of a community. And so I think our loneliness is pervasive, at sort of every space in this.

And I think that while some of these ideas are problematic and that it upends our entire way of life as we know it. What we

stand to gain is something that I don't even think we can imagine. And in the ways that you recount nostalgia, in some ways

for something that we have never experienced, If you think about shifting baselines or walking through a certain ecosystem

and sort of missing something that you never knew was missing within it because of the loss of biodiversity that we've experienced.

I think there is at that same time a longing for a future that we can't even fathom because it would involve such a break

from our current paradigm. And I don't I don't think there's a word for that either. Does that does that make any sense?

It does. It does. I while you were talking, I was thinking about the fact that in some ways, we suffer from too much togetherness

as well, which is the loneliness problem, but we we probably live cheek by jowl, perhaps more than is is easy for human beings.

Yeah. More than gosh. What is it going to be? It's over 3 quarters of the human population are going to be living in urban

centers in the coming, decades which is almost a complete reversal of where we were at a 100, 200 years ago.

Yes.

So we're now town and city dwellers and while there's lots that's wonderful in towns and cities there's also often gross inequity

socially. There's also just many many people, many many strangers, lots of pathogens spreading. There's all sorts of things

that can make us a wee bit prickly and a little bit defensive and that's a lot for us to cope with. So, and you know population

levels are high for human beings, I know we get squeamish about talking about this but we have to be honest again if we follow

from our animality we have to recognize what difference that makes. I remember being struck by a very interesting study on

communist prejudice basically looking at human prejudice and how the prejudice followed on and particularly for certain kinds

of populist mentalities, how much that related to a real or an imagined population increase in an area. What was interesting

is that if we could be convinced there'd been a population increase, even if there hadn't been, we would react in a certain

kind of hostile way. And if there had also been a population increase that we weren't necessarily aware of but we're only

ambiently aware of it, we would also be affected by that. I can't remember where the study was. Maybe a a savvy reader out

there will will know the study I'm referring to. It will be somewhere hidden away on my computer. I can I can find

it too and and include it in the show notes?

Yeah. So it is it was an interesting survey. What struck me was that we are affected competitive, that we are reactive, that

we do get affected by by our population sizes in ways that we're not always able to track. I think the other thing that's

interesting about what we fear about change is that we will have to face change whether we like it or not. As all animals

have always had to do throughout history and we with all of our technologies will be no different. If we get to a stage where

we are exploiting or destroying our environment to a to a beyond its its plasticity, then things are going to go horribly

wrong. Would we not be better to exploit the kind of intelligence that we have, and the the mental and literal resources available

to us, in order to steer that ourselves, rather than have it imposed on us externally by the environment. That for me is it's

always going to be better to try and do that for yourself. Make that change happen for yourself with your own agency than

it is to have the agent of change come through disaster externally. That that that's your choice. You're gonna have to change.

You either change in a disastrous reactive way or you change in a positive, proactive way. What what what are you gonna do?

That's that's that's become a take home for me.

I I love that you brought it there. I know we're coming up close on time, but one of the ways that I considered wrapping up

was to speak about agency, which I think you do really beautifully, not just at the human level, but also really at the level

of the organism. And I was struck, I think in the first episode of The Psychosphere, you talk about how often we lose the

organism when we talk about ecosystems or certainly when we talk about genes as well. And I pulled a little quote from you

that I just love. You said reflecting on the B and the B Orchid, a focus on agency and biology restores the organism as a

self sustaining goal directed entity. As Albert Schweitzer put it, I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that

wills to live. Organisms, in pursuing their goals, make value based choices. As such, they make our world, our planet, a meaningful

one. In undermining the value of organisms and their agency, we strip our own world of its value too. It is time to foreground

organisms and their willful beauty. It is time to recognize the rebellious autonomy of our living world. And so perhaps here

at the end, we could touch on the agency, not just of the the human animal, but the interconnected web of life around us.

Yeah. So this is really the first little hint out in sort of bits of the public stuff that I've done of the project that I've

been working on for the last few years and that that I'm I'm going to be publishing next when I when I've got it finished.

I'm having a very very slow wade through this book but it's called Life is an Act of Rebellion and the subtitle I think I

may change it is on the revolutionary nature of humans and other living beings. So it's about it's about agency very much,

it's about purpose more broadly it's about the autonomy that is at the heart of life and is for me is definitional of life.

So I have to be honest I did something that's in some ways probably gonna seem counterintuitive. I I went heavily down the

reductive path. I really got I was I I went right down to the molecules. Utter kind of just bloody minded curiosity to be

honest. But I was it was also driven by causation. I was trying to understand why it is that all living beings pursue their

interests in this really remarkable way. You know, we we have a lot of talk about, you know, in one of the tools to try and

overcome the kind of ruthless extractivism that, and the kind of exceptionalism that we talked about in this interview. One

of the instruments within law is rights of nature, right? Which which is a fantastic instrument in order to try and counter

some of these these, toxic ways in which we're interacting with the living world and and despoiling the living world. But

within that is is this sort of legal personhood for rivers. And I I was thinking about this a while ago, and it's a beautiful

idea. And yet one of the things that really I was struck by in terms of ecosystems thinking this was what really led me into

the book a number of years ago. Actually, let's think about a river for a moment. So a river is an agent, right? A river is

an agent of change, in one sense in the way that we talk about chemical agents, right? So it's something that changes something

from one form to another. It it it acts in a way that generates change. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking

about an agent in that sense. A river is an agent, but all of the causation comes externally. So the river cannot decide,

do you know what? I I don't want to go into this. I'm not I don't like the idea of just being dispersed into the sea. I like

to be this river that I am. I'm not gonna just flow out there into this other body and become this sea and lose my identity

as the Danube. I'm not up for that. I want to stay the Danube. So I'm gonna flow in the opposite direction. A river could

never do that because it's not alive. But the salmon can flow in one way and it might be following certain kinds of instincts,

but if it needs to that individual salmon faced with a predator it did not anticipate can flip round and turn it against the

flow of the river. We do not pay enough attention to how absolutely mind blowingly extraordinary that is. How did that come

about? What is it that drives that extraordinary movement away from the predictable determined kind of motions of physics.

That is what's so incredible about life. It's that autonomy and I think what and and it is shared by absolutely every form

of life from a paramecium to a single celled organism to an e coli to a human being. It is the ability to act for meaning.

So what life is about is a singularity of meaning that that manifest in very particular kinds of actions in the world that

are unique to living beings. The change starts on the inside, and then it happens in the in the external world. And I suppose

that's it's when we think about how can we make a change in in the face of the destructive things that we're doing in the

world. It is precisely the fact that we are that kind of living agent, a biological agent in that sense. We're not rivers

who inevitably have to flow into dispersal. We don't inevitably have to move through time in the arrow of destruction. We

can change direction. That's what is so particular and we do it because it means something to us to do it. So that for me

is what is so special about life and that's the subject of my next book and for me it's a really hopeful one. It's really

helping me in this somewhat dark time that we're living in at the moment to remember that that is really what is at the heart

of life is the ability to rebel against the inevitable and that that's that's for me what agency is all about.

I wanted to to end on this because I find it so hopeful. And I I thank you for bringing this into the narrative, this aspect

of hope and our ability to it's it's funny that you would touch on Sam, and I just did an interview with Ben Goldfarb who

wrote Crossings. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Do you do you know Ben?

I don't know personally, but I know the yeah. I know the work.

We we talked a lot about salmon and circular economies, And and I think that there is something so hopeful too in the idea

that we as humans can can swim upstream, which I think is a little bit of what we talked about in the course of this interview,

what it might mean to to go a little bit against the current, a little bit uncomfortably, but with with meaning and and purpose

and to change that direction. And so I'm really grateful for the way that you consider agency. And I'm really looking forward

to your next book and and seeing how you explore that and how how you explore that across all life. And just I'm really truly

grateful for your work. It is a keystone in in many ways. And and so just thank you. Thank you for being here.

No. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I'm a ways away from finishing up, but I'm I'm doing my best. I've gone over that

first bit as I was telling you about where I I've managed to crack the first chapter, then hopefully the rest of it should flow.

Well, I'm I'm excited to to read it whenever it makes its way into the world. And I think that the the beauty of these things

is oftentimes they can't be rushed. It is just it is just the pace at which it unfolds. And so I'll be looking forward to

that. Melanie, thank you so much for being here. I'll have links to your work in the show notes. Is there anywhere else that

you would like to be found or anywhere else that that people can look?

I suppose the only other thing I would add people to is the work that I do more widely in ethics and and applying these sorts

of ideas in the world. And I I work with a wonderful group, partly at New York University but also around the world at various

different, institutes and it's called Animal Syndrome And so, yeah, maybe look us up if people are interested in what it what

it looks like if you take some of these ideas and you actually do them in the world.

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. And it was just a joy to talk to you.

No. Thank you. It's been a lovely conversation.

Thank you so much for listening listening to this episode of the Mind Body and Soil podcast. If what you found resonated with

you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? This act

of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil. If you're looking for more, you can find us at groundworkcollective.com

and at kate_kavanagh. That's k a t e_kavanagh on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth

Kent of the band Alright Alright for the clips from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible. You

can find them at Alright Alright on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.