Jason Bradford
Hi, I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
I'm Asher Miller.
Rob Dietz
and I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town, where the menu consists of barbecued habitat, fricaseed ecosystems, and coral reef pudding
Melody Travers Allison
Quick warning sometimes this podcast uses swear words. (LANGUAGE!)
Rob Dietz
Hey, it's good to be here in Crazy Town.
Asher Miller
You sound like a radio show host.
Asher Miller
Geez louise.
Asher Miller
"Hey, everybody."
Rob Dietz
Hey, everybody. It's good to be here with my friends Jason and Asher in Crazy Town, I think.
Jason Bradford
W-H-Y-Z.
Asher Miller
That's where we put the crazy in Crazy Town.
Rob Dietz
Okay, I have an opening question for you two. Maybe this is because of all the superhero movies that have dominated pop culture. But I want to know --
Asher Miller
Dominated your mind at least.
Rob Dietz
Well, not just mine. I mean, come on. It's all over the place.
Asher Miller
I boycotted those movies.
Rob Dietz
Well, I'm gonna force you in because I'm asking you, what is your favorite superpower from another animal, or plant, or organism that you would have if you could. You can pick anything.
Jason Bradford
I know. Should I go first?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, go ahead.
Jason Bradford
Okay, I love the birds, of course, that have evolved the ability, of course, to not only fly, but they dive underwater to fish.
Jason Bradford
And we're talking like cormorants, anhingas, grebes, murres, diving ducks.
Rob Dietz
Wow.
Rob Dietz
Pelicans?
Jason Bradford
Pelicans. I mean, it is so awesome because they're adapted to both flying and then they can swim.
Rob Dietz
You should totally take Pelican because not only does it fly and then dive and swim, but it also is like the eating champion, right? It's like Joey Chestnut with the hot dogs.
Jason Bradford
Cormorants are also kind of amazing in how much they can eat. I think grebes are just adorable.
Asher Miller
What about penguins? They just flopped into the water.
Jason Bradford
They can't fly but they're the best swimmers. I mean, just incredible. They can go down hundreds of feet. Anyway, I can go on. I gotta stop.
Rob Dietz
That's a pretty good one. You're getting a lot of skills in there.
Jason Bradford
Yes.
Rob Dietz
I'm more limited. I was thinking closer to home, mammal, cheetah. How cool would it be to I'm just walking down the street and suddenly I'm going like 65 miles an hour on my own power.
Asher Miller
Suddenly?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Have you ever seen a cheetah take off?
Asher Miller
No, I know.
Jason Bradford
They go quick.
Asher Miller
I was just trying to think about what would suddenly get you to take off like that.
Rob Dietz
Whatever I want. There's an ice cream over there and I just run up and get it.
Asher Miller
There's a bag of Cheetos.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, a car is about to hit me. I'm out of the way.
Jason Bradford
Wouldn't it be cool if we could look down on the farm over here and there were cheetahs chasing stuff. Oh my gosh.
Asher Miller
Like your dog Dylan? That would be cool.
Rob Dietz
Or what if it was me at 65 miles an hour chasing stuff?
Asher Miller
Well, I'm scared of death. So, I'm going with the tardigrade.
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah.
Asher Miller
I mean, they could survive anything.
Jason Bradford
That's incredible. Way to bring it to like the simple little creatures. Thank you.
Asher Miller
Yeah, little, little microscopic.
Jason Bradford
Very little creatures.
Rob Dietz
You know, we had a whole episode on terror management theory that I can recommend to you.
Asher Miller
No, I know. Well actually, that put the fear of God in me. So I want to be a tardigrade someday.
Jason Bradford
That's good.
Rob Dietz
So I bring up the question of what animal superpowers you would want because today's topic, it's kind of the opposite of that. Instead of praising the animals and the plants and treating them with respect, this is all about us. This episode is about humanocentrism. Or you might call it anthropocentrism. Or you might call it human supremacy.
Asher Miller
Or I might call it the natural order of things.
Rob Dietz
Right. You might.
Asher Miller
What God bestowed upon us.
Rob Dietz
Coming from the mouth of the tardigrade over there. But you know, basically, this is the belief that human beings are the most important entity on this planet. It is a philosophical worldview that sees that we are somehow separate from and superior to what else we find in nature. You know, they're just components of whatever's out there for us to exploit. For us to take and use how we want. I've met Eileen Crist in the past. She's an environmental philosopher and was a professor at Virginia Tech. And she really delved into this issue quite a bit. She says that this idea of human supremacy or human exceptionalism, it professes that we, because they were so special, with our consciousness or ability to remember things, that somehow we're distinct and superior. And then everything follows off of that, you know, how we treat the natural world.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and it's funny. You call it philosophy, which it is, but I think you could argue that it's such a deeply embedded philosophy that people don't recognize it as such. At least in in Western culture, right?
Rob Dietz
Yep.
Asher Miller
And it's arguably the oldest and maybe most pervasive paradigm of Western society. I mean, you might be able to argue some other things. But the whole idea of Dominion goes straight back to the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
Jason Bradford
Genesis.
Asher Miller
I'm gonna quote my favorite band from the 1970s. This is one of their top songs.
Jason Bradford
Peter Gabriel, or . . .
Asher Miller
I'm going to Phil Collins.
Jason Bradford
Phil Collins, okay.
Asher Miller
And in one of their best songs there's a lyric in there, "God bless them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. And rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Okay, it's not actually a Genesis lyric, it's from the book of Genesis
Rob Dietz
That's ruling over Jason as the bird that goes into the sea. It covers all of it.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it does.
Asher Miller
Yeah, that's an expression, I think, of a belief system, but certainly has expanded, been adopted by all forms of at least religions that came from that part of the world. In might be the ultimate example of cultural materialism, which we've talked ad nauseam about.
Asher Miller
And will continue --
Asher Miller
And will continue to on this podcast, the Marvin Harris view of infrastructure influencing structure and superstructure. So, I think it's a sound argument to say that that belief, that human centric worldview, comes from the infrastructural change in terms of how we actually source energy and food for ourselves, and society. So when some human societies moved from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies, they created hierarchies
Jason Bradford
Or even pastoralism to more, you know, settled agriculture even.
Asher Miller
Yeah. You could say it's a product of that infrastructural change. Now, of course, hunter gatherers also exploited nature. They rendered other species extinct, particularly when they came across new, abundant ecosystems. So it's not exclusive to sort of agrarian or pastoral societies. But I think you could say that many of those hunter gatherer societies sort of learned lessons from overshoot. And if they survived that, they learned how to live in greater balance with nature. And that shifted their understanding of the relationship of humans to the more than human world. We haven't done that, those of us whose descendants come all the way back to the Levant and Mesopotamia, particularly, have not internalized that.
Jason Bradford
Well, this then leads to this sort of idea of this fruitful and multiply, and have dominion to the growth then of humanity at the expense of other inhabitants on Earth. And of course, you can look at the incredible statistics. There was a paper published, Green Spoon et al. 2023 titled, "The Global biomass of Wild Animals" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the ratio of humans plus human domesticated animals to wild animals, which includes sea mammals.
Rob Dietz
This is all mammals, right?
Jason Bradford
All mammals.
Rob Dietz
We're not talking fish and birds, just mammals.
Jason Bradford
Yes. We're not talking fish and birds, unfortunately. But we're talking about all the mammals of which we're mammals and are domesticated mammals. The ratio is 17:1. So humans and/or domesticated mammals out number, out biomass, non domestic. It's 17: 1. And then if you take the global human made mass, right? We're talking all the concrete, especially etcetera, steel, glass, there was a crossover point when anthropogenic mass started to exceed biomass. And that happened about the year 2020.
Rob Dietz
God, can we can we just appreciate for a second --
Asher Miller
Appreciate?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, you know, lament, I guess, is a better word. But 17 to one. Like you think about all the wild mammals out there.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you can go out there and look at them and say, "Wow, how glorious and abundant," but --
Rob Dietz
And how much bigger -- like the all the world's oceans, the whales, the frickin' dolphins.
Jason Bradford
Sea lions. I know. Yeah.
Asher Miller
It's also a really relatively recent phenomenon. That's really remarkable to think about. I wonder what the ratio used to be.
Jason Bradford
Right. The opposite. Flip it.
Asher Miller
Was it completely flipped? It was probably more than that.
Jason Bradford
Of course.
Asher Miller
It might have been 10,000 to one in the other direction.
Rob Dietz
You're talking about the writing of Genesis and, you know, around that time, you could measure human population in I think it was like around 190 million, right. And now it's in the 8 billion range. So that's the speed of that change, right? It's us multiplying.
Jason Bradford
But I mean, even with that biomass measurement, a lot of it's for us. Like think about the managed forests, you know, the timber and the cropland. This is all included in biomass.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. So that's crazy.
Asher Miller
I see no problems with this.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I don't know. Stats like that . . . When you start unpacking them, it's just, it's astonishing. So that kind of thing that's happening, the consequences of us and our economies exploiting nature to this level, you could file that under what I find to be a terrifying word, ecocide. So, you know, that's the killing of the ecosystem. This includes consequences, like loss of habitat, loss of species and species diversity, and then the loss of things like water as we irrigate crops in the desert or the erosion of topsoil, mining of sand and other things you find in nature for our own economic use, and then you go on down to the alteration of climate. It all flows so naturally from the humanities centric worldview.
Asher Miller
You know, you could look at Dominionism, you know, sort of the idea of what was laid out, let's say, in Genesis. It doesn't necessarily have to lead towards ecocide. In fact, you could argue, hey, you have a responsibility as a species to care for the other living beings or the natural world around you. We didn't just say, it's our responsibility, we were like, let's exploit the living shit out of it, or get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter to us, basically.
Rob Dietz
Do you ever wish, Jason, that Asher had been the one who had written Genesis? He would say instead of subdue, he would say, "exploit the living shit out them." And people will be reading that in church.
Asher Miller
It's hard to translate from the old Hebrew or Aramaic.
Jason Bradford
That's maybe what they were trying to write at the time, but we didn't have the translation. It was lost in translation.
Asher Miller
You're right.
Rob Dietz
We need a new Bible.
Asher Miller
I'd be happy to write a new translation. That'd be great.
Rob Dietz
New PCI project.
Asher Miller
Yeah. So not only ecocide, the just a massive obliteration of the natural world, the more than human world to suit our purposes. Vut also, some of the aspects of it that are like, I don't know, is it for entertainment purposes? How would you describe it? Like in Episode 49, the season that we did on watershed moments in history, we cover the founding of the first zoo, right? And that was in 4000. BCE. That's over 6000 years ago. And it was an expression of wealth and power, right, to show that you had, you know, all these creatures. Like what is that? What is it in us that would lead us to think that that was cool.
Asher Miller
What was your favorite character in the movie "Roadhouse?" What was the guy's name?
Asher Miller
Come on, it's gotta be Dalton, the lead guy?
Jason Bradford
Well, what about the bad guy?
Rob Dietz
Oh, you're talking about the bad guy, Brad Wesley.
Jason Bradford
Wesley had a whole room of like, you know, animals' heads on the wall.
Rob Dietz
Trophy animals that he had hunted from the world.
Asher Miller
I gotta say, when I was living in Sonoma County, there was an environmental group that was doing something, I can't remember what the group was. But on their board, actually, I think it was a climate organization. On their board, or a supporter of theirs was a woman, and I'm not going to name names here, who was married into this family that owned like shopping malls in the area. And she had married a man who is now quite a bit older. And they had like a fundraiser at their house up in the hills. So I went up there into the hills, and I walk into this great room, and the whole thing, the entire periphery of this great room is basically parts of dead animals that this guy had hunted. You know, the legs of like zebras. Like what the fuck is going on here? And then straight ahead was an enormous head of a bull elephant with its ears stretched out and pinned against the wall. And I was like, we are here for what? Like it was so horrific. And everybody else in the room was like, what the fuck is going on here? Just so disturbed. And he was proud. He was like proud to show off his trophy room.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I'm affected right now. The elephant taxidermy . . . That is . . .
Asher Miller
Yeah, unbelievable.
Jason Bradford
Well, okay. Now, there's an interesting way you can think about critique of humanocentrism, or questioning the wisdom of it from an actual self-interested perspective, which is kind of ironic.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that's a pretty humanocentric way to think about this.
Jason Bradford
But, you know, this is one of the ways that --
Asher Miller
So you're saying even if we just cared about ourselves, there's a critique of it.
Jason Bradford
Yes. Okay. And so, this is one of the kind of utilitarian or instrumental arguments that people who are trying not to humanocentric make to try to counter humanocentrism. I'm going in circles here.
Asher Miller
It's a tongue twister, brain twister.
Jason Bradford
So, it takes a systemic view of nature, right, and in removing and degrading critical components of nature we are putting the broader system at risk. So you know, there's this whole thing about you know, the tapestry of life. And you start removing species and populations, you fray that tapestry, and then it becomes weak and can fall apart. So the basic life support functions become at risk.
Jason Bradford
I think our life support functions --
Jason Bradford
Ours, exactly.
Rob Dietz
I think about it in other systems. Like if you have a car. And if you start removing parts from that car, like, you know --
Asher Miller
The wheels.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's okay. You could take like the interior panel off the door and it would still run.
Asher Miller
The radio. You don't need the radio.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you could take the radio. But yeah, you start taking the wheel, or you take the engine out, or whatever.
Asher Miller
The gear shift.
Rob Dietz
It's like, okay, this thing's no longer a car.
Jason Bradford
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
It doesn't function.
Jason Bradford
Right. I mean if you lose the cigarette lighter, just forget it. You're not going anywhere.
Rob Dietz
When was the last time you had a car with a cigarette lighter?
Jason Bradford
My car's pretty cool. I gotta a 1998 Tacoma. Anyhow, a good example people say you know, pollinators are now -- the new darling in biodiversity conservation is pollinators because people can relate to the fact that they eat and --
Asher Miller
And we are heavily dependent on pollinators. Let's be honest.
Jason Bradford
I know. So a lot of our food that we eat requires that there's some little insect that flies around and spreads the pollen. So obviously, a loss of pollinators is significant. And in 2017, a German study documented a more than 75% decline in flying insect biomass over a 27 year period. And there have been other studies that have come to similar kind of estimates for different parts of the world. So at first, it was like, is this just a German problem? But it seems like this is actually a global problem.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I actually remember when that study came out reading how they were looking at areas that were pretty naturally intact too. It wasn't like the apartment block in a big city, or whatever.
Jason Bradford
It's like a National Park kind of thing.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, okay. Well, if we're going to question humanocentrism, how about from maybe instead of our own self interest and our own survival, there's a moral and ethical piece to this too, right. Like, it seems like more and more by the day we're learning that animals have complex feelings, complex emotions, certainly the ability to feel pain, to understand lots of things.
Jason Bradford
I know. When I step on Dylan's tail or something like that, he yips.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Well, we see that they are capable of communication and complexity.
Jason Bradford
Well, I just want to say, so far we've been emphasizing animals a lot. What about plants and fungi, single celled organisms.
Asher Miller
I talked about the tardigrades.
Jason Bradford
I appreciate that. But single celled organisms with or without organelles are something we should consider. You know, what about slime molds?
Asher Miller
I care deeply about the COVID-19 virus.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. What about prions?
Rob Dietz
This is good, right? One advancement from humanocentrism would be maybe mammalianism and then we're just human and animalism. But you're bringing in the whole tent here. I appreciate that.
Asher Miller
You don't want to do this incremental movement away from humanaocentrism?
Jason Bradford
I mean, I look at lichens. I'm looking at lichens on that tree right there. I mean, they're just so cool. Come on, come on.
Rob Dietz
Well, so if you're talking about sort of a philosophical perspective on this, I have to recommend Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael." I'm not going to go into a big plot summary here, but --
Jason Bradford
It involves a gorilla, I think.
Asher Miller
Well, and there's a version of taker and leaver that can also be humanocentric in the sense of like, if you're just concerned about the welfare and sustainability of future generations of humans, you might also consider the downside of being in a taker culture versus a leaver culture. There's actually a podcast called "Human Nature Odyssey" that was produced by a guy named Alex Leffe. And it's, I thought, a really well done podcast. A lot of soundscaping and kind of an immersive experience. It's a bit of a journey that he went on discovering both that book and sort of wrestling with a lot of these questions.
Rob Dietz
It does. But the book really is talking about the distinction between taker culture and lever culture. And so the whole idea is taker culture is what we've been saying. This humanocentric worldview, widespread adoption of agriculture, and it's centered around the belief that humans are above other organisms. And you know, we're meant to expand ourselves and to dominate the planet. Whereas leavers try to live within what nature provides, try to have a relationship with nature. They don't see themselves as the inheritors of Earth. And if they're really good at it, you take what you need to live, but you also give back what the rest of nature needs to live.
Jason Bradford
Ishmael?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And I listened to it as well and thought, yeah, he did a really good job of tying it to his own neighborhood where he grew up in the broader city, from Philadelphia. And he's kind of looking at, what was my relationship to nature during all of that?
Asher Miller
Yeah. And this is why I've actually heard from a lot of people that Daniel Quinn's work has been really impactful. Our friend, Tom Murphy, who we've had on the podcast before, who is as steeped as you can get in sort of Western scientific thought. Having been an astrophysicist and a university professor, shooting lasers at the moon. I think he was deeply impacted by reading Ishmael. You know, he's already on a journey, but certainly now he's gone into a very interesting place. And we publish a lot of pieces by him at Post Carbon Institute's website, resilience.org, where he's exploring human exceptionalism and modernity. And I think really challenging those notions in a way that I think is really powerful coming from somebody who's so steeped in the scientific method, you know, the rationalist discourse.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I think his personal journey is fascinating. It's fun to talk to him about that, you know.
Asher Miller
You know, we're talking about questioning humanocentrism in different ways. And I actually want to question a little bit of the environmentalist, take on humanocentrism, too. Because typically, you'd say environmentalists are obviously concerned about the welfare of the planet or ecosystems. But oftentimes, what you see is still a very humanocentric approach. You know, sometimes conservation efforts are really around conserving something you have a personal connection to, which is wonderful. I mean, I take that over not having that. And we've argued a lot for people actually getting out into nature and having a connection with nature. So I'm not poo-pooing that. I m just saying, it's still kind of often driven by us having a personal connection to something and people caring about a specific place because of their own interest in it. And sometimes that leads to nimbyism on things, like I want this green space so that I could walk my dog in it, or whatever. But it also, you could look at it in terms of efforts, I think, probably within environmentalism to work within the system, right. And that is things like putting a price on nature. So trying to show that nature has ecosystem services -
Jason Bradford
Yeah, value that has monetary --
Asher Miller
Maybe if we can convince people it's worth this amount of money or provides this much, you know, to the global economy, it's worth kind of keeping. Which is still saying it's for us, basically. What's the benefit to us humans? Rather than having intrinsic value on it.
Jason Bradford
I play that game with wetlands. You know, they're worth so much because we don't have to pay for the cleanup of the water.
Rob Dietz
I struggle with it because I don't want to be aiming our anger at environmentalists who are probably just trying to do whatever they can to save the whatever, the last of the wetlands.
Jason Bradford
And they're having to talk to an insane society.
Asher Miller
Or get money from capitalists, you know.
Jason Bradford
Guys with like elephants on the wall.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
Now I say that, and let me tell you might personal one that kind of grates on me. The putting a price on nature stuff is very grating, but the whole idea of maximum sustainable yield. Like this is a commonly used term in fisheries. And the idea there, on one hand, it's like, okay, we want to maintain a viable population of fish, but on the other, we want to take out the most possible that we can without crashing that population. And to me, it's like, what are the rights of the fish, or even of the ocean? Or, you know -- And I get that people are hungry, but if you wipe out every fish species out there, you know. I don't know. I just have trouble with that whole, you know, it's very humanocentric.
Jason Bradford
Sure. The other thing I think about is, what species or ecosystems do we decide are worthy of our attention and conservation. And so the classic is the World Wildlife Fund has the panda as their as their logo, their icon.
Rob Dietz
Charismatic megafauna.
Jason Bradford
Yes. By contrast, you know, there's a newer organization called the Xerces Society, which has a butterfly, and so it's insects that are suddenly getting attention. But that hasn't been the trend, right? The trend has been these big, charismatic, maybe umbrella species that perhaps the conservationists know if you have enough habitat preserves for pandas, then you're probably getting a lot of other species going along. So that's the rationale. But it really ties into having a sell it to people.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I mean, I do think people feel more kinship with animals that look like them. I look like a bug. So I like the Xerces Society.
Asher Miller
Yeah, a dung beetle, right.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Way to bring the poop in.
Jason Bradford
Thank you.
Rob Dietz
This episode's listener feedback comes in from Michael who says, "We are big fans of Post Carbon Institute and Crazy Town." I'm sure that means Michael and their squirrel collection.
Asher Miller
Or Michael could have multiple personalities.
Jason Bradford
Could. That'd be fine.
Rob Dietz
No judgment. So, being big fans of PCI and Crazy Town they go on to say, "The frank and humorous but also factual way you talk about the converging crises has sharpened the way we frame our work, and has given us courage to call a spade a spade."
Jason Bradford
A spade is a wonderful garden tool for sure.
Rob Dietz
Well, I call it a shovel.
Jason Bradford
Yes. Excellent. Excellent.
Rob Dietz
Actually, it's my favorite suit of cards as well.
Jason Bradford
Well what is it then?
Asher Miller
Wait, which spade is Michael referring to?
Rob Dietz
I don't know. As long as they call a spade a spade.
Asher Miller
But Michael said, "A spade is a spade."
Jason Bradford
Write back and help us out here. You're leaving us hanging.
Asher Miller
Which spade, Michael.
Rob Dietz
Thank you for listening and thanks for the kind words.
Rob Dietz
Welcome to the Marvin Harris Memorial lens of doom where we explore cultural materialism, starting with infrastructure, the environment, things that we build, the stuff that surrounds us. And how that influences structure, which is the laws and the policies of the land. And how that then influences superstructure, which is the culture and the beliefs and the worldview. Which is really what we're talking about today, the worldview of humanity centrism. So I'm going to I'm going to start with the most obvious infrastructure of humanocentrism and that's the way that we've replaced nature with human built environments. And especially talking about modern urban environments where you've got big apartment blocks and skyscrapers and roads, and you know, sort of all the pavement and the transportation networks.
Jason Bradford
Well, that's the obvious thing to look at. If you can imagine the city and what was there before, right?
Rob Dietz
I like to be known besides the 80s cultural guy, as the purveyor of obvious things.
Asher Miller
Well, at least we did an homage to nature by making sure everything is like straight lines. That's ubiquitous in nature.
Jason Bradford
But also, you know, the city has occupied places that were formerly covered in soil, obviously, or forests, or wetlands. They may have like filled in the bay, right? So aquatic habitats --
Asher Miller
Usually cities were put near water of some kind, right?
Asher Miller
So there's the infrastructure of, in a sense, removing the natural world. There's also the infrastructure of us sort of putting remaining parts of the natural world into a box of some kind, right. And those efforts are often wonderful and laudable efforts, like the National Park system, for example.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly. Right? Like the like the San Francisco Bay is half its former size or something ridiculous, right. But also, I think about the farms and when I drive around and look at farmland because I live, you know, the country, I've also seen places that have gone back. Where they've taken a farm field and within 10 years it's now a prairie habitat. And you just realize, wow, the extent that this used to be. That the amount of flower, like this is the springtime and with the prairie in bloom it's just so stunning. And to imagine that this landscape was actually dominated by, you know, millions and millions of these plants and all the richness and color. And what do we replace it with? You know, mostly these mono cropped big fields. It's rather shocking.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, love me some National Parks. Love them.
Asher Miller
Yeah. It is a little weird, though. I mean, you think about it. It's like, what is the experience? You know, it's people going in there with their cars and RVs, you know, riding their ATVs or their snowmobiles.
Jason Bradford
I guess getting that permit to get into Yellowstone is almost impossible. You need to get it a year ahead of time. You're going to be in a line of traffic the whole way through the park on that one road or something.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I've tried to do some hikes in Yosemite where you have to actually pay money to get in a lottery system. And then you lose your money and you don't get picked in the lottery. So, you don't get to do that hike.
Asher Miller
It's weird because we've decided these are the lands that are worth preserving, versus others. And it reminds me a little bit of the whole thing we're just talking about with sort of charismatic megafauna.
Rob Dietz
A really special case of major infrastructure of humanocentrism that I want to highlight is dams. The big dams on major rivers. Think of the hubris it takes to block up a river and just utterly change the habitat, change the species composition, change the kind of --
Jason Bradford
Flood a canyon.
Asher Miller
But Rob, we're creating cheap and clean electricity.
Rob Dietz
Clean, yes. Well, I started looking up. Well, just how much damming are we doing? And National Geographic reports that two thirds of all the world's longest rivers are damned. Two thirds. Like we're well on our way to --
Asher Miller
That means we still have 1/3 left to go. Opportunity awaits.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, so that's 60,000 large dams worldwide. So, to your point, Asher, there's more than 3,700 that are currently planned or under construction. So we're still going in that direction.
Asher Miller
That's a lot.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Well I want to talk about the infrastructure of human physiology.
Jason Bradford
What do you mean by that?
Asher Miller
Yeah, not something you typically think of, right?
Rob Dietz
My physiology is excellent. Look at these biceps.
Jason Bradford
Oh my god you're huge.
Asher Miller
We have certain physical traits as a species, right?
Rob Dietz
Biceps.
Asher Miller
Yeah, shut up. Certain number of cones in our eyes. The range of things that we could smell. Our taste buds, like, our senses.
Jason Bradford
The distribution of hair in my nose and ears.
Asher Miller
Exactly. Which is more in the years, and more coming out of the nose than it used to.
Jason Bradford
Right, totally.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I mean, it changes over time.
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry.
Rob Dietz
Well and think about glass, right, and the windows. And how many bird strikes and kills that causes.
Asher Miller
You're evolving. But, we have kind of created the world in an infrastructure around our particular physiology versus the physiology of other species, right, and the way experience the world. And we don't even think about it. There's a great book by the journalist Ed Young who wrote a book it's called, "In the Men's World," and he documents the differences in senses between humans and other species. And it just goes to show how, I mean some of it is absolutely antagonistic, maybe not even intentionally antagonistic of species. The whole idea of like LED lights. It's because we experience it a certain way, and others other species experience it completely differently. Well, and all the shit that we're doing the oceans with with sonar and . . .
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh, yikes. Looking for more oil deposits and just like ruining the lives of the cetaceans. I know. It's just awful. That was fun. Let's talk about the structure of humanocentrism. These are the rules, right? Well, property rights, right. So ownership of animals and land. So when you have ownership, you can kind of do what you want. Now we do play some restrictions. You can get in trouble for abusing animals. There are laws, or lack of laws, related to mining and logging and tilling, paving, damming, hunting, fishing, release of pollutants.
Rob Dietz
I feel like all of that stuff, you know, you have restrictions as a hunter, right? There's a hunting season for example -
Jason Bradford
Licenses.
Rob Dietz
But it's not like there's a restriction on paving, right. The zoning laws are mostly there to help you pave when you want to pave.
Jason Bradford
Well, I don't know. I mean, they're talking about, you know, encouraging, I know you see parking lots around here nowadays. They tried to have some permeability, and they tried to have a catchment area so that the water runs to a filtering wetland. So I think they're trying to use structure, rules of the structure, to mitigate to some extent.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and most parking lots also have a tall grass prairie for Buffalo to roam wild as well.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it is all absurd.
Asher Miller
I mean, but it's true. You said, I guess you probably need to get a permit, but you could, on your own property, you could just like lay down a huge fucking concrete pad if you wanted to, right?
Rob Dietz
You know how many places I've seen --
Asher Miller
So that my helicopter can land.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
Well, you know many places I've seen in Portland have astroturf for their lawn, you know, it used to be grass, I guess. But they don't want to mow it, so you just put down plastic lawn.
Jason Bradford
Oh, this is driving me crazy. That's one of my pet peeves.
Asher Miller
I love plastic lawn. It's so fun to lay on.
Jason Bradford
All the kids playing on plastics and oh gosh.
Asher Miller
Eating it.
Jason Bradford
I mean, here's the thing is like, we do not have a voting system right now for the slime molds. Alright. So again, here's a structural thing. We're the ones that get to decide their fate without any say, and that's frustrating to me.
Rob Dietz
Well, that was almost more fun than the infrastructure conversation. So let's turn it to the superstructure the culture and beliefs that surround humanocentrism. And I think this is really where it's at. Because we're talking about a worldview here. I want to dive in with Robin Wall. Kimmerer's book, "Braiding Sweetgrass." It's not braiding Jason's nose and ears hair.
Jason Bradford
Please, you don't have to bring that up again. I'm going to shave them after this.
Rob Dietz
It's "Braiding Sweetgrass."
Jason Bradford
I'm going to get the clippers out.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, Shaving Sweetgrass is not as good a book, but It's an excellent book where she is describing kind of the confluence of indigenous thinking and science. But she opens it with a comparison between two origin stories. One is Eve's origin expulsion from the Garden of Eden, versus Sky Woman, an indigenous mythology. And the difference is, Eve eats the apple and gets thrown out of the garden. And then it's basically like, you were going to roll around in the dust and fight your way, struggle against nature for survival. It's you against them kind of thing. And the mythology of Sky Woman is she gets dropped out of the sky into a giant body of water. And then the turtle rises up and helps her get to shore and all the other animals are helping her get a foothold in this land and become part of the community.
Jason Bradford
That's why they call it Turtle Island. I never knew this. It was always confusing.
Rob Dietz
I don't know if that's true or not.
Jason Bradford
It must be.
Rob Dietz
Maybe so. But two very different views on humanity's relationship with nature.
Asher Miller
Talking about superstructure, there's the origin stories, the myths, the narratives that we have. There's also maybe the more subtle, but pervasive use of everyday language. Consider terms like natural resources or natural capital, resource. Like we use these terms, regularly.
Jason Bradford
I hate doing it.
Asher Miller
It's so common. And actually, it took Gloria Flora, somebody who used to be a Post Carbon fellow to challenge me on this a little bit. She was talking about oil production --
Asher Miller
Right, it's extraction.
Asher Miller
It's extraction. And so it's just like the everyday language that we use. Natural capital, again, turning it into financial context. We don't think about it. Just it's ubiquitous everywhere you look.
Jason Bradford
I love it when someone calls me an animal.
Rob Dietz
Animal!
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Like, "You're an animal man!"
Asher Miller
Animal is my favorite Muppet.
Rob Dietz
He is an incredible Muppet.
Jason Bradford
But for most people, that's a derogatory term. And some people reject the idea that humans are even animals which drives me crazy. But a lot of these terms are used to denote being uncivilized or brutish, which itself drives me crazy. So what are some other euphemisms? Like treating them like a dog. Or you know, squash you like a bug. Or beat a dead horse. Or kill two birds with one stone, you know.
Rob Dietz
You got a lot of these.
Jason Bradford
Or like freeze that tardigrade.
Rob Dietz
I wish you would treat me like a dog because you treat your dog very kindly.
Jason Bradford
Thank you. And you treat me like --
Asher Miller
Do you want a belly rub?
Jason Bradford
If you had a tail, it would be cool. And I could see when you're happy.
Asher Miller
You gotta work on wagging your nose, Rob.
Rob Dietz
Wagging my nose hairs. The one that gets me with language is the way we name so many of our natural features. And you see this in the landscape all around us. So many things are named after dead white guys. And of course, mostly colonialists. Like I used to go camping in Jefferson and Washington National Forests. You got Mount McKinley named after a President that probably would have been forgotten.
Jason Bradford
At least they changed that.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I know. I do love that more people know it as Denali now. That's really cool. And then you got the Columbia River, Vancouver Island. I mean, isn't it kind of weird? Like, can you fathom the level of arrogance to say, I'm sailing past this island? I'm gonna name it after myself. It's the way Trump names all of his businesses.
Asher Miller
What's even better is near Vancouver Island is Cortes Island, one of the most sadistic killer people.
Rob Dietz
You know that one of the things about when Vancouver was sailing in the Puget Sound region, he really liked the mountain that we know as Mount Rainier. And you look at the spelling of it, I thought, oh, maybe it's Rainier. Like it's a rain thing. Or maybe that's an indigenous word. No, it was one of his buddy s names. He's like, Oh, I like this guy. This Admiral. So I'm going to name the most massive, awesome, awe-inspiring natural feature on the landscape after my buddy over here.
Jason Bradford
Well, you know, they're going to change a lot of these bird names now to be not the names of old dead people, because they, you know . . . So that's interesting. I think that's kind of nice.
Asher Miller
So while they're out there, maybe they want to change the official name of Canada.
Jason Bradford
What's that?
Asher Miller
Because the official name of Canada is actually the Dominion of Canada.
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh. I did not know that.
George Costanza
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be.
Jerry Seinfeld
If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite what have to be right.
Rob Dietz
Alright, let's think about some personal stories of doing the opposite. And I want to start with birds, Jason. You're gonna like this, okay.
Jason Bradford
Let's just keep talking about that.
Rob Dietz
Let's do it. So we know the population of wild birds in North America has fallen by 3 billion over the last 50 years now. Sad.
Jason Bradford
Ouchie.
Rob Dietz
Sorry to bring that up. But I had a problem with a bird. Or maybe it was a couple of birds recently. So you know, when I come down here to work with you guys on the podcast, I stay in a tiny house that's over at my friend's place.
Jason Bradford
It's adorable.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, sometimes in the morning, you hear some knocking. And it's flickers, northern flickers banging on the side of this thing. And so --
Jason Bradford
They're cheeky. They're cheeky.
Rob Dietz
I know. Beautiful bird. Yeah, I mean it looks a lot like to me trout look in the water. With beautiful spots and red streaks
Jason Bradford
In the woodpecker family.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Bradford
So anyway, continue.
Rob Dietz
Anyways, it was doing some damage. It's knockin little holes, you know. And I'm like, God, that's bad. And I hadn't realized how much damage. So I went around. And there was a fist sized hole in the side of the tiny house. And so I'm like, ah, how am I gonna deal with this? And luckily, there's a lot of resources for, you know, I didn't want to poison the bird and want to kill the bird. So the idea that I did, and it's kind of working, is you put up a birdhouse that a flicker could move into. So rather than trying to excavate a hole in your house, it could just move into the home you gave to it.
Jason Bradford
That's so heartwarming.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, and I use the home to cover the hole. No flicker has moved in yet, but they're not pecking the house anymore.
Jason Bradford
Oh that's cool. Well, let's keep talking about birds because I like that. So I'm kind of proud of the statistic. I'm like 25th in the county or something like that for like bird sightings for the year for species. So I'm kind of a middling birder. But this is a competitive County, Benton County,
Rob Dietz
But you're a novice. You're good. You're good.
Jason Bradford
I'm good.
Asher Miller
You take this seriously though.
Jason Bradford
I do take it seriously. But I'm good. I'm just not elite. But guess what is elite? What's elite is my yard. My yard is my personal birding location, which is the farm here.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, let's not -- your yard. I mean, this is a what? Like a 100 acre property here?
Jason Bradford
115 if you include everything. So yeah, I mean, but that's elite. I got 96 species for the year, which is yard numero uno for the entire state of Oregon by a good margin right now. I'm thinking about by about five species over my nearest competitor, which is up towards like my sister's area.
Asher Miller
I'm feeling -- did you hear our episode we did on individualism?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so this isn't about --
Asher Miller
Did you learn anything from that?
Jason Bradford
This isn't about me. This is about the birds. The fact that this is a paradise for them.
Asher Miller
This is a very humanocentric conversation about birds.
Jason Bradford
I just happened to be the one walking around observing them.
Asher Miller
I will say coming here, the thing that I'm always struck by when I come to your house and the farm is the sounds of birds just everywhere.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. It's noisy. Sometimes they're noisy like the flickers.
Asher Miller
It's amazing. I love it.
Jason Bradford
It is interesting.
Asher Miller
And there are so many different ones.
Rob Dietz
And when Jason comes to our houses, he's amazed by the diversity of motors and cars and blowers.
Jason Bradford
It is true.
Asher Miller
The leaf blowers, the lawn mowers.
Jason Bradford
I am a bit shocked by it.
Asher Miller
It's great. Lots of diversity in two stroke engines.
Rob Dietz
I can't go to sleep at night without like starting a weed whacker in the bedroom and having that motor running.
Asher Miller
You just have it running on the side. Some people use, you know, sounds of nature to fall asleep to, you're doing that.
Rob Dietz
I've actually hired a team of weed whacker and blowers to do that.
Asher Miller
You're contributing to the economy. That's one thing,
Jason Bradford
I wish a whip-poor-will would come here and I could hear that at night. That would be nice. Haven't had one of those yet.
Asher Miller
How about a cougar? You could hear one of those hunting on the property.
Jason Bradford
They're around for sure.
Asher Miller
Back to Ed Young's book. You know, when I was reading that, there's, early on in the book, he talks about the sense of smell of dogs. And how they experience the world, so much of it through that olfactory experience. And it really got me to think differently about the experience that my dog Willow would have when he and I go on walks together.
Jason Bradford
He's such a good boy.
Asher Miller
And you know, I have to walk them on a leash in the neighborhood. I do take him places where he can go off leash, and he's the happiest on the planet when he's able to run around. But even just walking through my neighborhood or nearby neighborhoods, I would find myself, and actually it started from both reading Ed's book and then trying to be a little bit more mindful when I go on walks. I have all these podcasts I like to listen to. I mean, the one I listen to the most is our own.
Jason Bradford
Of course. Over and over.
Rob Dietz
Love the sound of your own voice.
Asher Miller
I love listening to us. Yeah. But there are a couple others. But no, I love listening to podcasts and learning about things, but I realized, like, I'm just constantly filling my head with noise, with inputs all the time. So I need to stop that. I need to go out and be more present. And then thinking about what Willow's experiences are like when we go on these walks. And realizing that when he stops to smell something, there's a whole experience there for him. And me being like, no, we gotta hurry up. Or you know, stop yanking on the on the leash because all of a sudden you've got a new sense of smell. I really try to -- I can't experience the world that he experiences it. Sometimes I try to think of it in terms of more visual things. So it'd be like if I dropped acid or something and I'm walking around and seeing all of these vibrant colors. That's what I sort of imagine what his experience must be like.
Jason Bradford
But it's through the nose.
Asher Miller
It's through the nose. And I can't see that but I can at least try to be empathetic and realize like --
Jason Bradford
Do you know how much dog piss he's smelling along the way from different dogs? I mean, it must be incredible.
Asher Miller
It's dogs but there's also other creatures, and there's probably other things that I'm not even aware of.
Rob Dietz
What I appreciate about what you've changed is how sometimes you let him leash you up and he walks you. That's the coolest part.
Asher Miller
He loves that part. He yanks on it so much.
Jason Bradford
That choke chain, jeez.
Rob Dietz
Okay, here we are in the do the opposite. We've shared some personal stuff. But let's look at the visions for different infrastructure superstructure and structure. And starting with infrastructure, what could we do different? Well, maybe you've heard about this idea of rewilding. It's kind of a land acquisition, but also ecological restoration strategy. And these are happening in various places around the world. The one that I became familiar with more than a decade ago is the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative. And what they're doing there, they're making a huge partnership, collaboration among conservation groups, of course. But also local landowners, businesses, government, indigenous governments, nonprofits, scientists. Anyway, the whole idea is let's make a connected, well protected habitat all along the spine of the Rockies. And they've done things like get proposals accepted for land acquisition that helps make the already protected areas more protected, bigger, connected. They've done ecosystem restoration, you know, things like tree plantings, and all that. And they've also gotten animal crossings over roadways built and other things that help animals have that connectivity in the landscape that they need.
Jason Bradford
That's a massive scale, right. And so, you know, one of the things I've been interested in is how can how can this happen is smaller scale, maybe less funded. And one of the places you can go to see what other people are doing, and maybe be inspired is a place called Restore. And it's r-e-s-t-o-r.e-c-o. And there's a breadth of efforts out there. They are kind of documenting sites from 140 countries, you know, 1000's of sites. And it's inspiring to see like the care that people have from all walks of life in all parts of the planet to make their place more beautiful and more biodiverse. So interesting to check that out.
Asher Miller
The good news is there are plenty of ecosystem restoration efforts out there across all kinds. I mean, there's reforestation efforts marine reserves, wetland conservation, farmland habitat. You've talked about that, Jason. There's also the Half-Earth proposal, which is probably the most bold idea that's been put out there. And that's, you know, reserving half-earth you know, for biodiversity. I do have a little bit of a critique of that, which is, it's still sort of this idea of separating humans from the rest of the world, you know, the natural world. And that's not really how indigenous cultures have sustained themselves over time. You know, they've actually lived with ecosystems, as part of ecosystems.
Jason Bradford
So you think that's part of the Half-Earth mindset or worldview? Is it sort of the sacred and profane, or you know how much fluidity there is?
Asher Miller
I don't know. It all depends on how things like that are done. But it does feel a bit to me an extension, maybe the most bold version of this idea of like, let's concentrate humans into their places.
Jason Bradford
In cities and stuff.
Asher Miller
In the cities, and then we can protect nature from us.
Jason Bradford
When it should be the whole earth.
Asher Miller
Which is, that's still humanocentric in the sense of like, no, the shift that has to happen here is a reorientation in terms of our relationship with the more than human world.
Jason Bradford
Every place is sacred and worthy of protection.
Rob Dietz
And taken to its extreme, the proposal is to literally cut the earth in half. And humans are on one side and everything else is on the other and we just orbit around the sun together.
Jason Bradford
Oh that's fascinating.
Asher Miller
Is that a flat earth, or a round, or like. . . What's in the center?
Rob Dietz
Well, we will be on the flat part of earth for sure.
Jason Bradford
Well, if you want more inspiration on what to do, Douglas Palamedes, a professor in the U.S., wrote a book called "Nature's Best Hope: A new approach to conservation that starts in your yard. And I think it's a great book. What I got out of it was how critical native plants are. And a good example is like the Norway Maple. And I've actually got a pair of Norway Maples out here.
Rob Dietz
I'm gonna guess where they're native.
Jason Bradford
Good. I'll keep that in mystery. But you can guess.
Asher Miller
Norway, Oklahoma.
Jason Bradford
Right. And if you were to like look at, say, a Norway Maple versus, say the native maple here, like say the big leaf maple. And you were to count how many insect species and the biomass of insects on the two, there might be 100 times more insect biomass on one versus the other. So it's remarkable the difference. And what that translates into is little lepidopteran larva. That would be like caterpillars. And the ability for little birds that are trying to feed their young to go out and grab those and bring them to the nest. You know, a little chickadee pair might feed off of a few 100 little caterpillars a day for their nest. And they just aren't available when you have these landscapes of non-natives. And then of course, the same thing happens with all the pollinators. When you have a diverse landscape that's not just a lawn but has all these native plants, then you can support all of the insects that require pollen and nectar as food sources. So really interesting organization that then also helps people figure out how to read landscape where they live.
Rob Dietz
It really feels humanocentric to think you could take whatever tree species you want, plant that on your wherever you are, and think that it would do the same thing that the thing that evolved there overall time would do.
Jason Bradford
Well, it reminds me of what Asher was talking about like not being aware of the dog's point of view. We're so unaware that all these species were relying on -- We think we think, oh, it's a tree. It's creating shade, it's green, it's photosynthesizing.
Asher Miller
It will give us oxygen.
Jason Bradford
It's fine. And realize that we're just shredding all these important relationships.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Speaking of that, I get really excited thinking about how we might teach children differently. So there are efforts like at the Center for Eco-literacy and others who have been doing projects in schools, working with young children, in particular, to create more connection to the natural world. And some of the things that they do are actually trying to teach science through either like a school garden project or other kinds of things. It's in some ways, multidisciplinary. But imagine if we taught kids to recognize what Ed Young talks about in his in his book, you know. The different ways that other living beings experience the world, the different senses that they have. Imagine seeing kids with their imagination and trying to have them experience as best they could, with our limited senses, what their physical environment might be like for other species. And then try to think about how to change that infrastructure, even on a small scale, to better suit and be more -- This sounds stupid, but we were more mindful now, right? We think about ADA compliance, and we think about physical spaces that are more conducive to different humans, right, with their different abilities. If we try to do that for other species as well, and particularly starting with young kids, then that sort of gets embedded in them. Even though it's an infrastructure project, in some ways it's a superstructure project.
Rob Dietz
The problem is the rats and the roaches and the crows and the other things that really liked the infrastructure we have, they're gonna be pissed.
Asher Miller
It's true. It's true.
Jason Bradford
Well, so you know, what you're talking about makes me think about the structural changes that may evolve with a society that's thinking like that. They would want to make different rules, right? And there are these discussions, these notions of rights of nature, and so called, you know, personhood for members of the more than human community, which fascinates me that you can actually do or say that. But I see it as like, we're using the legal system, because it cares so much about individual rights. So it's weird.
Rob Dietz
Like corporate personhood.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. Okay. If they can be a person so can, you know, a butterfly or a river, right. Ecuador was the first nation to include the rights of nature in its constitution. And that happened actually as far back as 2008.
Rob Dietz
Ancient times, 2008. Well Panama. also kind of followed suit and has some constitutional provisions about protecting nature. And there's actually some teeth to that. So there's something that happened recently where the legislature in that country had granted a Canadian company a 20 year permit to run this huge copper mine.
Asher Miller
Awesome.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, there were massive protests of this copper mine, including a lot of indigenous folks and communities. And they were protesting the damage as you might imagine that a big open pit copper mine would cause. And towards the end of 2023, Panama's highest court ruled that the issuing of that permit was illegal.
Jason Bradford
Sit down Dominion of Canada!
Rob Dietz
It was unconstitutional, and they had environmental and human rights violations. So think about the consequence. They actually closed this mine, okay? Took an economic hit. It's the biggest open pit copper mine in all of Central America. So this was 7,000 direct jobs, 33,000, maybe indirect jobs. 5% of national GDP.
Jason Bradford
Wow.
Rob Dietz
I mean, it's the biggest case I'm aware of where you said nature has rights and it's more important than these dollars and economic benefits.
Asher Miller
But it also goes to show, you bringing that up, I mean, that actually has consequence. And we've talked about escaping capitalism. You know, it's such an indication of how locked into capitalism we are that it's a pretty brave act. A politically brave act, maybe. It comes with actual real consequences for the people that worked at this mine and others because of the economic system that we have. To me, it's really, it's not just reassuring, it's inspiring to see what feels like a real acceleration and growth in rights of nature work and efforts that are happening around the world. We have friends, Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey at the Center for Democratic Environmental Rights in the U.S. They've been working all over the world, with national governments, like in Ecuador, and regional governments, but also local communities in the U.S. on rights of nature of protections. And there's an organization called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. That actually has a really great timeline on their website. That goes back to 1972. It feels like 1970 was a real seminal year. We've talked about limits to growth -- This is the year I was born so of course it's an incredibly important year.
Jason Bradford
Transformative.
Asher Miller
But they have like a 50 year timeline of kind of what's been happening. And it really does accelerate. It has been accelerating in more recent years, which does give me some inspiration.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there was a podcast recently, our friend Nate Hagens interviewed us. A Swedish environmental environmentalist, Pella Thiel, on the great simplification. And she was discussing the rights of nature as we've just covered, but also the idea of making ecocide a crime in international law. Similar to how we have human rights violations that are illegal. And you could charge corporations and CEOs, you know, with the crime of ecocide. That would be -- I think that would be really cool.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And you would think that sounds kind of like, okay, an environmentalist coming on a show and saying, "Hey, let's make this a crime," but it's actually happening. She talked about an organization called Stop Ecocide International, and they're trying to get this into international law. And just this year, Belgium became the first country in Europe to actually recognize Ecocide as an international crime.
Jason Bradford
Extradition.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and the punishment pretty big. If you commit ecocide, you could be thrown in prison for 20 years, and have a fine of up to 1.6 million euros.
Jason Bradford
Interesting.
Asher Miller
I think he's they should just take those people and throw them into like remote wilderness and see if they could survive on their own.
Rob Dietz
No, they'd be taking down trees. Throw him into a really big shark pit. How about that?
Asher Miller
There's this other effort that's been happening, I think, growing some attention and focus around the concept of multispecies justice. Some of our listeners may recall an episode that we had done -- An interview we had done with Danielle Celermajer who's a professor at the University of Sydney, on the work that she's been doing there. She's become a great friend of mine, someone I really adore. And she defines multispecies justice as quote, "A theory of Justice that includes not only the interests of all humans, but of the nonhumans such as other animals, plants, forests, rivers and ecological systems. Taking their interests seriously as justice claims means there's a moral and political obligation for the basic institutions of society, including our political and legal systems to take those interests into account when making decisions. They can't be dismissed simply because they're inconvenient and costly. And attending to them is not a matter of charity or generosity." So, I mean, just think of it in simple terms, like, how we would view human rights.
Rob Dietz
That is really comprehensive. But Jason, I did not hear a mention of slime mold anywhere in that.
Asher Miller
I'll talk to Dani about that. And see if she has a . . .
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I was gonna you've got a connection here. Maybe we can slip that in.
Jason Bradford
I would appreciate that. Yes. I would appreciate that.
Asher Miller
I'll talk to her about that. Yeah, it should be written into law.
Jason Bradford
So I'm just imagining a society that goes through the change infrastructure we talked out and the structural laws that are being worked on. I think that what you would get -- You would get this sort of superstructure or mythologies, belief systems, more akin to what might be called deep ecology nowadays, as opposed to the environmentalism that you were talking about, Asher. And so what we mean by that is that these other species and nature has an intrinsic versus an instrumental value. And humans are connected and part of everything else, as opposed to being separate and special. And there's a good quote from Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac. I can't remember what year that was written. But that, you know, that's early to mid 20th century, right? "We abused land, because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
Asher Miller
We talked about language earlier. So thinking about a shift in language, Rob, you mentioned Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, "Braiding Sweetgrass." She discusses how her indigenous language, Potawatomi -- Did I pronounce that right?
Rob Dietz
Maybe? Potawatomi is how I would've guessed, but I'm not sure.
Asher Miller
How it differs from English, right? Objects and animals are spoken of as persons as well. Not only are the plants and animals intimate, but the rocks of mountains and the rivers. I do think that that's an edge for a lot of people. So when people talk about the more than human world, the reason I think that they use that language versus just talking about other species is because it includes things that may seem inert or inanimate to us.
Rob Dietz
Well, I remember in New Zealand, like the tallest mountain in English is called Mount Cook, named after, whatever, Captain Cook. And the indigenous word for it is Aoraki or cloud piercer is what that means. Which is yeah, you know, which one is poetic? Which one is the one that you're in relationship with, right? Utterly amazing. I have an example to share from the Tuvan language, which is people of South Central Siberia, Mongolia. Tt has a very nature centric vocabulary, and really descriptive words for animals and natural processes. And some of their words sound like things that you would hear in the landscape around you. So that's kind of cool. But apparently, nature is also built into the structure of their grammar. So the preferred way that they say to go somewhere, it refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current.
Jason Bradford
Huh.
Rob Dietz
So yeah, it's kind of wild.
Jason Bradford
An example would be helpful.
Rob Dietz
Well, so they keep track of that information, which way the river is running as they're moving around the landscape. And so there was this linguist who was studying Tuvan, and then he wants hosted a friend in Manhattan. And the Tuvan friend said, "Hey, where's the river?" So the linguist took him over to the west side of Manhattan, and showed them the Hudson River. And the linguist said that he took note of it so he could use Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City. I was just thinking, the Tuvan in that moment probably became more indigenous to New York City than most of the longtime residents, you know, the probably don't even . . .
Jason Bradford
I mean, if you can find a good deli that way, too, I'm sure. You know?
Asher Miller
That's how the Jews in New York orient.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Dietz
One other thing that I want to mention about superstructure is we have our sister podcast, "Holding the Fire." And the second episode of that featured Anne Poelina who talked extensively about viewing the river as a relative of hers, and even listed as a co-author on one of her peer reviewed journal papers. So it's a real shift in thinking to think that the river is your co-author. I want to bring up one more initiative of do the opposite that I think kind of ties everything together. This is something I've been thinking a lot about. It's the un-damming of the Klamath River. Remember I said how damming seemed like the most hubristic humanocentric thing you could do? Well, we have an excellent do the opposite going on right now where a series of four dams that have been run by the Pacific Power Company, they were built starting in 1918. These things you can imagine the hit that they caused to salmon on the Klamath River.
Jason Bradford
Yes. And this river runs essentially through the northern part of Washington and into southern Oregon. And so it goes to the Pacific Ocean.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And through California is where they built these four dams. And, you know, the indigenous cultures were all tied up with the salmon in community. And it wasn't just putting dams in the physical barriers that disrupted the spawning of salmon. But recently, there was problems with excessive growth of toxic cyanobacteria in the reservoirs, and it degraded the water quality. And in 2022, there was an outbreak that killed more than 34,000 fish, most of them Chinook salmon. Anyway, after decades of indigenous activism, finally, the federal agency responsible for dams, FERC, approved the removal. And that is underway as we speak. Those dams, you know, you maybe think, "Oh, what about the clean electricity they were producing?" There was only a very, very small percentage of what Pacific Power was producing. So just a time to get rid of these dams on that river system.
Jason Bradford
And I've been following this a bit. And you know, it's not just that the water is now running free of the dams and you're done. These tribes have been really busy getting ready, right? Gathering seeds, developing nurseries, 1000s of trees and shrubs are going in along the riverbank to just increase the rate at which you can restore that ecosystem. But it also turns into a cultural restoration. The members of the Karuk tribe participate in ceremonial salmon fishing using handheld nets. And in many years, there have been no salmon to catch. And so when this river runs freely again, then they're going to be able, of course, to have better salmon runs and really feel like their tribal lifestyle and ways are back as well. This is then all part of then allowing a people who are part of this place to really, really reconnect with it. Probably better than they have in a long time.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Sammy Gensaw III was Yurok leader, I think put it really well. He said, quote, The restoration is not just about meeting the state conservation goals or adapting to climate change. It's about justice, and healing, and returning to a more balanced relationship with the natural world." Sammy is the director of a group called Ancestral Guard. And they're focused on teaching traditional fishing and farming methods to indigenous youth. So in some ways, this is like superstructure, structure, and infrastructure all coming together in this one sort of project.
Melody Travers Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Jason Bradford
Dominionist theologian Walter Crankship was walking on his Branson, Missouri lawn one morning when he came across a congregation of Fuligo septica, also known as dog vomit slime mold. His fascination with this curious organism was so great that by that afternoon he was asking, "Do Slime Molds Go to Heaven?" Such is the title of Reverend Walter's new book, where he uses his understanding of Hebrew, Greek and Sumerian to reinterpret original biblical texts. What he discovered is bound to transform Christian thought. We now know that the phrase, "Be fruitful and multiply" was meant to apply not only to humans, but to all of God's creation, including slime molds. And that the Romans mistranslated the original word of God, inserting the Latin, the dominimum, meaning lordship or right of ownership, instead of what our creator intended, which was deminimis, meaning to be small and humble. Get your copy of "Do Slime Molds go to Heaven?" today and experience the discomfort and potential social isolation of now thinking everything you used to believe is bullshit.
Hi, I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
I'm Asher Miller.
Rob Dietz
and I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town, where the menu consists of barbecued habitat, fricaseed ecosystems, and coral reef pudding
Melody Travers Allison
Quick warning sometimes this podcast uses swear words. (LANGUAGE!)
Rob Dietz
Hey, it's good to be here in Crazy Town.
Asher Miller
You sound like a radio show host.
Asher Miller
Geez louise.
Asher Miller
"Hey, everybody."
Rob Dietz
Hey, everybody. It's good to be here with my friends Jason and Asher in Crazy Town, I think.
Jason Bradford
W-H-Y-Z.
Asher Miller
That's where we put the crazy in Crazy Town.
Rob Dietz
Okay, I have an opening question for you two. Maybe this is because of all the superhero movies that have dominated pop culture. But I want to know --
Asher Miller
Dominated your mind at least.
Rob Dietz
Well, not just mine. I mean, come on. It's all over the place.
Asher Miller
I boycotted those movies.
Rob Dietz
Well, I'm gonna force you in because I'm asking you, what is your favorite superpower from another animal, or plant, or organism that you would have if you could. You can pick anything.
Jason Bradford
I know. Should I go first?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, go ahead.
Jason Bradford
Okay, I love the birds, of course, that have evolved the ability, of course, to not only fly, but they dive underwater to fish.
Jason Bradford
And we're talking like cormorants, anhingas, grebes, murres, diving ducks.
Rob Dietz
Wow.
Rob Dietz
Pelicans?
Jason Bradford
Pelicans. I mean, it is so awesome because they're adapted to both flying and then they can swim.
Rob Dietz
You should totally take Pelican because not only does it fly and then dive and swim, but it also is like the eating champion, right? It's like Joey Chestnut with the hot dogs.
Jason Bradford
Cormorants are also kind of amazing in how much they can eat. I think grebes are just adorable.
Asher Miller
What about penguins? They just flopped into the water.
Jason Bradford
They can't fly but they're the best swimmers. I mean, just incredible. They can go down hundreds of feet. Anyway, I can go on. I gotta stop.
Rob Dietz
That's a pretty good one. You're getting a lot of skills in there.
Jason Bradford
Yes.
Rob Dietz
I'm more limited. I was thinking closer to home, mammal, cheetah. How cool would it be to I'm just walking down the street and suddenly I'm going like 65 miles an hour on my own power.
Asher Miller
Suddenly?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Have you ever seen a cheetah take off?
Asher Miller
No, I know.
Jason Bradford
They go quick.
Asher Miller
I was just trying to think about what would suddenly get you to take off like that.
Rob Dietz
Whatever I want. There's an ice cream over there and I just run up and get it.
Asher Miller
There's a bag of Cheetos.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, a car is about to hit me. I'm out of the way.
Jason Bradford
Wouldn't it be cool if we could look down on the farm over here and there were cheetahs chasing stuff. Oh my gosh.
Asher Miller
Like your dog Dylan? That would be cool.
Rob Dietz
Or what if it was me at 65 miles an hour chasing stuff?
Asher Miller
Well, I'm scared of death. So, I'm going with the tardigrade.
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah.
Asher Miller
I mean, they could survive anything.
Jason Bradford
That's incredible. Way to bring it to like the simple little creatures. Thank you.
Asher Miller
Yeah, little, little microscopic.
Jason Bradford
Very little creatures.
Rob Dietz
You know, we had a whole episode on terror management theory that I can recommend to you.
Asher Miller
No, I know. Well actually, that put the fear of God in me. So I want to be a tardigrade someday.
Jason Bradford
That's good.
Rob Dietz
So I bring up the question of what animal superpowers you would want because today's topic, it's kind of the opposite of that. Instead of praising the animals and the plants and treating them with respect, this is all about us. This episode is about humanocentrism. Or you might call it anthropocentrism. Or you might call it human supremacy.
Asher Miller
Or I might call it the natural order of things.
Rob Dietz
Right. You might.
Asher Miller
What God bestowed upon us.
Rob Dietz
Coming from the mouth of the tardigrade over there. But you know, basically, this is the belief that human beings are the most important entity on this planet. It is a philosophical worldview that sees that we are somehow separate from and superior to what else we find in nature. You know, they're just components of whatever's out there for us to exploit. For us to take and use how we want. I've met Eileen Crist in the past. She's an environmental philosopher and was a professor at Virginia Tech. And she really delved into this issue quite a bit. She says that this idea of human supremacy or human exceptionalism, it professes that we, because they were so special, with our consciousness or ability to remember things, that somehow we're distinct and superior. And then everything follows off of that, you know, how we treat the natural world.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and it's funny. You call it philosophy, which it is, but I think you could argue that it's such a deeply embedded philosophy that people don't recognize it as such. At least in in Western culture, right?
Rob Dietz
Yep.
Asher Miller
And it's arguably the oldest and maybe most pervasive paradigm of Western society. I mean, you might be able to argue some other things. But the whole idea of Dominion goes straight back to the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
Jason Bradford
Genesis.
Asher Miller
I'm gonna quote my favorite band from the 1970s. This is one of their top songs.
Jason Bradford
Peter Gabriel, or . . .
Asher Miller
I'm going to Phil Collins.
Jason Bradford
Phil Collins, okay.
Asher Miller
And in one of their best songs there's a lyric in there, "God bless them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. And rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Okay, it's not actually a Genesis lyric, it's from the book of Genesis
Rob Dietz
That's ruling over Jason as the bird that goes into the sea. It covers all of it.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it does.
Asher Miller
Yeah, that's an expression, I think, of a belief system, but certainly has expanded, been adopted by all forms of at least religions that came from that part of the world. In might be the ultimate example of cultural materialism, which we've talked ad nauseam about.
Asher Miller
And will continue --
Asher Miller
And will continue to on this podcast, the Marvin Harris view of infrastructure influencing structure and superstructure. So, I think it's a sound argument to say that that belief, that human centric worldview, comes from the infrastructural change in terms of how we actually source energy and food for ourselves, and society. So when some human societies moved from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies, they created hierarchies
Jason Bradford
Or even pastoralism to more, you know, settled agriculture even.
Asher Miller
Yeah. You could say it's a product of that infrastructural change. Now, of course, hunter gatherers also exploited nature. They rendered other species extinct, particularly when they came across new, abundant ecosystems. So it's not exclusive to sort of agrarian or pastoral societies. But I think you could say that many of those hunter gatherer societies sort of learned lessons from overshoot. And if they survived that, they learned how to live in greater balance with nature. And that shifted their understanding of the relationship of humans to the more than human world. We haven't done that, those of us whose descendants come all the way back to the Levant and Mesopotamia, particularly, have not internalized that.
Jason Bradford
Well, this then leads to this sort of idea of this fruitful and multiply, and have dominion to the growth then of humanity at the expense of other inhabitants on Earth. And of course, you can look at the incredible statistics. There was a paper published, Green Spoon et al. 2023 titled, "The Global biomass of Wild Animals" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the ratio of humans plus human domesticated animals to wild animals, which includes sea mammals.
Rob Dietz
This is all mammals, right?
Jason Bradford
All mammals.
Rob Dietz
We're not talking fish and birds, just mammals.
Jason Bradford
Yes. We're not talking fish and birds, unfortunately. But we're talking about all the mammals of which we're mammals and are domesticated mammals. The ratio is 17:1. So humans and/or domesticated mammals out number, out biomass, non domestic. It's 17: 1. And then if you take the global human made mass, right? We're talking all the concrete, especially etcetera, steel, glass, there was a crossover point when anthropogenic mass started to exceed biomass. And that happened about the year 2020.
Rob Dietz
God, can we can we just appreciate for a second --
Asher Miller
Appreciate?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, you know, lament, I guess, is a better word. But 17 to one. Like you think about all the wild mammals out there.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you can go out there and look at them and say, "Wow, how glorious and abundant," but --
Rob Dietz
And how much bigger -- like the all the world's oceans, the whales, the frickin' dolphins.
Jason Bradford
Sea lions. I know. Yeah.
Asher Miller
It's also a really relatively recent phenomenon. That's really remarkable to think about. I wonder what the ratio used to be.
Jason Bradford
Right. The opposite. Flip it.
Asher Miller
Was it completely flipped? It was probably more than that.
Jason Bradford
Of course.
Asher Miller
It might have been 10,000 to one in the other direction.
Rob Dietz
You're talking about the writing of Genesis and, you know, around that time, you could measure human population in I think it was like around 190 million, right. And now it's in the 8 billion range. So that's the speed of that change, right? It's us multiplying.
Jason Bradford
But I mean, even with that biomass measurement, a lot of it's for us. Like think about the managed forests, you know, the timber and the cropland. This is all included in biomass.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. So that's crazy.
Asher Miller
I see no problems with this.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I don't know. Stats like that . . . When you start unpacking them, it's just, it's astonishing. So that kind of thing that's happening, the consequences of us and our economies exploiting nature to this level, you could file that under what I find to be a terrifying word, ecocide. So, you know, that's the killing of the ecosystem. This includes consequences, like loss of habitat, loss of species and species diversity, and then the loss of things like water as we irrigate crops in the desert or the erosion of topsoil, mining of sand and other things you find in nature for our own economic use, and then you go on down to the alteration of climate. It all flows so naturally from the humanities centric worldview.
Asher Miller
You know, you could look at Dominionism, you know, sort of the idea of what was laid out, let's say, in Genesis. It doesn't necessarily have to lead towards ecocide. In fact, you could argue, hey, you have a responsibility as a species to care for the other living beings or the natural world around you. We didn't just say, it's our responsibility, we were like, let's exploit the living shit out of it, or get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter to us, basically.
Rob Dietz
Do you ever wish, Jason, that Asher had been the one who had written Genesis? He would say instead of subdue, he would say, "exploit the living shit out them." And people will be reading that in church.
Asher Miller
It's hard to translate from the old Hebrew or Aramaic.
Jason Bradford
That's maybe what they were trying to write at the time, but we didn't have the translation. It was lost in translation.
Asher Miller
You're right.
Rob Dietz
We need a new Bible.
Asher Miller
I'd be happy to write a new translation. That'd be great.
Rob Dietz
New PCI project.
Asher Miller
Yeah. So not only ecocide, the just a massive obliteration of the natural world, the more than human world to suit our purposes. Vut also, some of the aspects of it that are like, I don't know, is it for entertainment purposes? How would you describe it? Like in Episode 49, the season that we did on watershed moments in history, we cover the founding of the first zoo, right? And that was in 4000. BCE. That's over 6000 years ago. And it was an expression of wealth and power, right, to show that you had, you know, all these creatures. Like what is that? What is it in us that would lead us to think that that was cool.
Asher Miller
What was your favorite character in the movie "Roadhouse?" What was the guy's name?
Asher Miller
Come on, it's gotta be Dalton, the lead guy?
Jason Bradford
Well, what about the bad guy?
Rob Dietz
Oh, you're talking about the bad guy, Brad Wesley.
Jason Bradford
Wesley had a whole room of like, you know, animals' heads on the wall.
Rob Dietz
Trophy animals that he had hunted from the world.
Asher Miller
I gotta say, when I was living in Sonoma County, there was an environmental group that was doing something, I can't remember what the group was. But on their board, actually, I think it was a climate organization. On their board, or a supporter of theirs was a woman, and I'm not going to name names here, who was married into this family that owned like shopping malls in the area. And she had married a man who is now quite a bit older. And they had like a fundraiser at their house up in the hills. So I went up there into the hills, and I walk into this great room, and the whole thing, the entire periphery of this great room is basically parts of dead animals that this guy had hunted. You know, the legs of like zebras. Like what the fuck is going on here? And then straight ahead was an enormous head of a bull elephant with its ears stretched out and pinned against the wall. And I was like, we are here for what? Like it was so horrific. And everybody else in the room was like, what the fuck is going on here? Just so disturbed. And he was proud. He was like proud to show off his trophy room.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I'm affected right now. The elephant taxidermy . . . That is . . .
Asher Miller
Yeah, unbelievable.
Jason Bradford
Well, okay. Now, there's an interesting way you can think about critique of humanocentrism, or questioning the wisdom of it from an actual self-interested perspective, which is kind of ironic.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that's a pretty humanocentric way to think about this.
Jason Bradford
But, you know, this is one of the ways that --
Asher Miller
So you're saying even if we just cared about ourselves, there's a critique of it.
Jason Bradford
Yes. Okay. And so, this is one of the kind of utilitarian or instrumental arguments that people who are trying not to humanocentric make to try to counter humanocentrism. I'm going in circles here.
Asher Miller
It's a tongue twister, brain twister.
Jason Bradford
So, it takes a systemic view of nature, right, and in removing and degrading critical components of nature we are putting the broader system at risk. So you know, there's this whole thing about you know, the tapestry of life. And you start removing species and populations, you fray that tapestry, and then it becomes weak and can fall apart. So the basic life support functions become at risk.
Jason Bradford
I think our life support functions --
Jason Bradford
Ours, exactly.
Rob Dietz
I think about it in other systems. Like if you have a car. And if you start removing parts from that car, like, you know --
Asher Miller
The wheels.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's okay. You could take like the interior panel off the door and it would still run.
Asher Miller
The radio. You don't need the radio.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you could take the radio. But yeah, you start taking the wheel, or you take the engine out, or whatever.
Asher Miller
The gear shift.
Rob Dietz
It's like, okay, this thing's no longer a car.
Jason Bradford
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
It doesn't function.
Jason Bradford
Right. I mean if you lose the cigarette lighter, just forget it. You're not going anywhere.
Rob Dietz
When was the last time you had a car with a cigarette lighter?
Jason Bradford
My car's pretty cool. I gotta a 1998 Tacoma. Anyhow, a good example people say you know, pollinators are now -- the new darling in biodiversity conservation is pollinators because people can relate to the fact that they eat and --
Asher Miller
And we are heavily dependent on pollinators. Let's be honest.
Jason Bradford
I know. So a lot of our food that we eat requires that there's some little insect that flies around and spreads the pollen. So obviously, a loss of pollinators is significant. And in 2017, a German study documented a more than 75% decline in flying insect biomass over a 27 year period. And there have been other studies that have come to similar kind of estimates for different parts of the world. So at first, it was like, is this just a German problem? But it seems like this is actually a global problem.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I actually remember when that study came out reading how they were looking at areas that were pretty naturally intact too. It wasn't like the apartment block in a big city, or whatever.
Jason Bradford
It's like a National Park kind of thing.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, okay. Well, if we're going to question humanocentrism, how about from maybe instead of our own self interest and our own survival, there's a moral and ethical piece to this too, right. Like, it seems like more and more by the day we're learning that animals have complex feelings, complex emotions, certainly the ability to feel pain, to understand lots of things.
Jason Bradford
I know. When I step on Dylan's tail or something like that, he yips.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Well, we see that they are capable of communication and complexity.
Jason Bradford
Well, I just want to say, so far we've been emphasizing animals a lot. What about plants and fungi, single celled organisms.
Asher Miller
I talked about the tardigrades.
Jason Bradford
I appreciate that. But single celled organisms with or without organelles are something we should consider. You know, what about slime molds?
Asher Miller
I care deeply about the COVID-19 virus.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. What about prions?
Rob Dietz
This is good, right? One advancement from humanocentrism would be maybe mammalianism and then we're just human and animalism. But you're bringing in the whole tent here. I appreciate that.
Asher Miller
You don't want to do this incremental movement away from humanaocentrism?
Jason Bradford
I mean, I look at lichens. I'm looking at lichens on that tree right there. I mean, they're just so cool. Come on, come on.
Rob Dietz
Well, so if you're talking about sort of a philosophical perspective on this, I have to recommend Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael." I'm not going to go into a big plot summary here, but --
Jason Bradford
It involves a gorilla, I think.
Asher Miller
Well, and there's a version of taker and leaver that can also be humanocentric in the sense of like, if you're just concerned about the welfare and sustainability of future generations of humans, you might also consider the downside of being in a taker culture versus a leaver culture. There's actually a podcast called "Human Nature Odyssey" that was produced by a guy named Alex Leffe. And it's, I thought, a really well done podcast. A lot of soundscaping and kind of an immersive experience. It's a bit of a journey that he went on discovering both that book and sort of wrestling with a lot of these questions.
Rob Dietz
It does. But the book really is talking about the distinction between taker culture and lever culture. And so the whole idea is taker culture is what we've been saying. This humanocentric worldview, widespread adoption of agriculture, and it's centered around the belief that humans are above other organisms. And you know, we're meant to expand ourselves and to dominate the planet. Whereas leavers try to live within what nature provides, try to have a relationship with nature. They don't see themselves as the inheritors of Earth. And if they're really good at it, you take what you need to live, but you also give back what the rest of nature needs to live.
Jason Bradford
Ishmael?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And I listened to it as well and thought, yeah, he did a really good job of tying it to his own neighborhood where he grew up in the broader city, from Philadelphia. And he's kind of looking at, what was my relationship to nature during all of that?
Asher Miller
Yeah. And this is why I've actually heard from a lot of people that Daniel Quinn's work has been really impactful. Our friend, Tom Murphy, who we've had on the podcast before, who is as steeped as you can get in sort of Western scientific thought. Having been an astrophysicist and a university professor, shooting lasers at the moon. I think he was deeply impacted by reading Ishmael. You know, he's already on a journey, but certainly now he's gone into a very interesting place. And we publish a lot of pieces by him at Post Carbon Institute's website, resilience.org, where he's exploring human exceptionalism and modernity. And I think really challenging those notions in a way that I think is really powerful coming from somebody who's so steeped in the scientific method, you know, the rationalist discourse.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I think his personal journey is fascinating. It's fun to talk to him about that, you know.
Asher Miller
You know, we're talking about questioning humanocentrism in different ways. And I actually want to question a little bit of the environmentalist, take on humanocentrism, too. Because typically, you'd say environmentalists are obviously concerned about the welfare of the planet or ecosystems. But oftentimes, what you see is still a very humanocentric approach. You know, sometimes conservation efforts are really around conserving something you have a personal connection to, which is wonderful. I mean, I take that over not having that. And we've argued a lot for people actually getting out into nature and having a connection with nature. So I'm not poo-pooing that. I m just saying, it's still kind of often driven by us having a personal connection to something and people caring about a specific place because of their own interest in it. And sometimes that leads to nimbyism on things, like I want this green space so that I could walk my dog in it, or whatever. But it also, you could look at it in terms of efforts, I think, probably within environmentalism to work within the system, right. And that is things like putting a price on nature. So trying to show that nature has ecosystem services -
Jason Bradford
Yeah, value that has monetary --
Asher Miller
Maybe if we can convince people it's worth this amount of money or provides this much, you know, to the global economy, it's worth kind of keeping. Which is still saying it's for us, basically. What's the benefit to us humans? Rather than having intrinsic value on it.
Jason Bradford
I play that game with wetlands. You know, they're worth so much because we don't have to pay for the cleanup of the water.
Rob Dietz
I struggle with it because I don't want to be aiming our anger at environmentalists who are probably just trying to do whatever they can to save the whatever, the last of the wetlands.
Jason Bradford
And they're having to talk to an insane society.
Asher Miller
Or get money from capitalists, you know.
Jason Bradford
Guys with like elephants on the wall.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
Now I say that, and let me tell you might personal one that kind of grates on me. The putting a price on nature stuff is very grating, but the whole idea of maximum sustainable yield. Like this is a commonly used term in fisheries. And the idea there, on one hand, it's like, okay, we want to maintain a viable population of fish, but on the other, we want to take out the most possible that we can without crashing that population. And to me, it's like, what are the rights of the fish, or even of the ocean? Or, you know -- And I get that people are hungry, but if you wipe out every fish species out there, you know. I don't know. I just have trouble with that whole, you know, it's very humanocentric.
Jason Bradford
Sure. The other thing I think about is, what species or ecosystems do we decide are worthy of our attention and conservation. And so the classic is the World Wildlife Fund has the panda as their as their logo, their icon.
Rob Dietz
Charismatic megafauna.
Jason Bradford
Yes. By contrast, you know, there's a newer organization called the Xerces Society, which has a butterfly, and so it's insects that are suddenly getting attention. But that hasn't been the trend, right? The trend has been these big, charismatic, maybe umbrella species that perhaps the conservationists know if you have enough habitat preserves for pandas, then you're probably getting a lot of other species going along. So that's the rationale. But it really ties into having a sell it to people.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I mean, I do think people feel more kinship with animals that look like them. I look like a bug. So I like the Xerces Society.
Asher Miller
Yeah, a dung beetle, right.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Way to bring the poop in.
Jason Bradford
Thank you.
Rob Dietz
This episode's listener feedback comes in from Michael who says, "We are big fans of Post Carbon Institute and Crazy Town." I'm sure that means Michael and their squirrel collection.
Asher Miller
Or Michael could have multiple personalities.
Jason Bradford
Could. That'd be fine.
Rob Dietz
No judgment. So, being big fans of PCI and Crazy Town they go on to say, "The frank and humorous but also factual way you talk about the converging crises has sharpened the way we frame our work, and has given us courage to call a spade a spade."
Jason Bradford
A spade is a wonderful garden tool for sure.
Rob Dietz
Well, I call it a shovel.
Jason Bradford
Yes. Excellent. Excellent.
Rob Dietz
Actually, it's my favorite suit of cards as well.
Jason Bradford
Well what is it then?
Asher Miller
Wait, which spade is Michael referring to?
Rob Dietz
I don't know. As long as they call a spade a spade.
Asher Miller
But Michael said, "A spade is a spade."
Jason Bradford
Write back and help us out here. You're leaving us hanging.
Asher Miller
Which spade, Michael.
Rob Dietz
Thank you for listening and thanks for the kind words.
Rob Dietz
Welcome to the Marvin Harris Memorial lens of doom where we explore cultural materialism, starting with infrastructure, the environment, things that we build, the stuff that surrounds us. And how that influences structure, which is the laws and the policies of the land. And how that then influences superstructure, which is the culture and the beliefs and the worldview. Which is really what we're talking about today, the worldview of humanity centrism. So I'm going to I'm going to start with the most obvious infrastructure of humanocentrism and that's the way that we've replaced nature with human built environments. And especially talking about modern urban environments where you've got big apartment blocks and skyscrapers and roads, and you know, sort of all the pavement and the transportation networks.
Jason Bradford
Well, that's the obvious thing to look at. If you can imagine the city and what was there before, right?
Rob Dietz
I like to be known besides the 80s cultural guy, as the purveyor of obvious things.
Asher Miller
Well, at least we did an homage to nature by making sure everything is like straight lines. That's ubiquitous in nature.
Jason Bradford
But also, you know, the city has occupied places that were formerly covered in soil, obviously, or forests, or wetlands. They may have like filled in the bay, right? So aquatic habitats --
Asher Miller
Usually cities were put near water of some kind, right?
Asher Miller
So there's the infrastructure of, in a sense, removing the natural world. There's also the infrastructure of us sort of putting remaining parts of the natural world into a box of some kind, right. And those efforts are often wonderful and laudable efforts, like the National Park system, for example.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly. Right? Like the like the San Francisco Bay is half its former size or something ridiculous, right. But also, I think about the farms and when I drive around and look at farmland because I live, you know, the country, I've also seen places that have gone back. Where they've taken a farm field and within 10 years it's now a prairie habitat. And you just realize, wow, the extent that this used to be. That the amount of flower, like this is the springtime and with the prairie in bloom it's just so stunning. And to imagine that this landscape was actually dominated by, you know, millions and millions of these plants and all the richness and color. And what do we replace it with? You know, mostly these mono cropped big fields. It's rather shocking.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, love me some National Parks. Love them.
Asher Miller
Yeah. It is a little weird, though. I mean, you think about it. It's like, what is the experience? You know, it's people going in there with their cars and RVs, you know, riding their ATVs or their snowmobiles.
Jason Bradford
I guess getting that permit to get into Yellowstone is almost impossible. You need to get it a year ahead of time. You're going to be in a line of traffic the whole way through the park on that one road or something.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I've tried to do some hikes in Yosemite where you have to actually pay money to get in a lottery system. And then you lose your money and you don't get picked in the lottery. So, you don't get to do that hike.
Asher Miller
It's weird because we've decided these are the lands that are worth preserving, versus others. And it reminds me a little bit of the whole thing we're just talking about with sort of charismatic megafauna.
Rob Dietz
A really special case of major infrastructure of humanocentrism that I want to highlight is dams. The big dams on major rivers. Think of the hubris it takes to block up a river and just utterly change the habitat, change the species composition, change the kind of --
Jason Bradford
Flood a canyon.
Asher Miller
But Rob, we're creating cheap and clean electricity.
Rob Dietz
Clean, yes. Well, I started looking up. Well, just how much damming are we doing? And National Geographic reports that two thirds of all the world's longest rivers are damned. Two thirds. Like we're well on our way to --
Asher Miller
That means we still have 1/3 left to go. Opportunity awaits.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, so that's 60,000 large dams worldwide. So, to your point, Asher, there's more than 3,700 that are currently planned or under construction. So we're still going in that direction.
Asher Miller
That's a lot.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Well I want to talk about the infrastructure of human physiology.
Jason Bradford
What do you mean by that?
Asher Miller
Yeah, not something you typically think of, right?
Rob Dietz
My physiology is excellent. Look at these biceps.
Jason Bradford
Oh my god you're huge.
Asher Miller
We have certain physical traits as a species, right?
Rob Dietz
Biceps.
Asher Miller
Yeah, shut up. Certain number of cones in our eyes. The range of things that we could smell. Our taste buds, like, our senses.
Jason Bradford
The distribution of hair in my nose and ears.
Asher Miller
Exactly. Which is more in the years, and more coming out of the nose than it used to.
Jason Bradford
Right, totally.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I mean, it changes over time.
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry.
Rob Dietz
Well and think about glass, right, and the windows. And how many bird strikes and kills that causes.
Asher Miller
You're evolving. But, we have kind of created the world in an infrastructure around our particular physiology versus the physiology of other species, right, and the way experience the world. And we don't even think about it. There's a great book by the journalist Ed Young who wrote a book it's called, "In the Men's World," and he documents the differences in senses between humans and other species. And it just goes to show how, I mean some of it is absolutely antagonistic, maybe not even intentionally antagonistic of species. The whole idea of like LED lights. It's because we experience it a certain way, and others other species experience it completely differently. Well, and all the shit that we're doing the oceans with with sonar and . . .
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh, yikes. Looking for more oil deposits and just like ruining the lives of the cetaceans. I know. It's just awful. That was fun. Let's talk about the structure of humanocentrism. These are the rules, right? Well, property rights, right. So ownership of animals and land. So when you have ownership, you can kind of do what you want. Now we do play some restrictions. You can get in trouble for abusing animals. There are laws, or lack of laws, related to mining and logging and tilling, paving, damming, hunting, fishing, release of pollutants.
Rob Dietz
I feel like all of that stuff, you know, you have restrictions as a hunter, right? There's a hunting season for example -
Jason Bradford
Licenses.
Rob Dietz
But it's not like there's a restriction on paving, right. The zoning laws are mostly there to help you pave when you want to pave.
Jason Bradford
Well, I don't know. I mean, they're talking about, you know, encouraging, I know you see parking lots around here nowadays. They tried to have some permeability, and they tried to have a catchment area so that the water runs to a filtering wetland. So I think they're trying to use structure, rules of the structure, to mitigate to some extent.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and most parking lots also have a tall grass prairie for Buffalo to roam wild as well.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it is all absurd.
Asher Miller
I mean, but it's true. You said, I guess you probably need to get a permit, but you could, on your own property, you could just like lay down a huge fucking concrete pad if you wanted to, right?
Rob Dietz
You know how many places I've seen --
Asher Miller
So that my helicopter can land.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
Well, you know many places I've seen in Portland have astroturf for their lawn, you know, it used to be grass, I guess. But they don't want to mow it, so you just put down plastic lawn.
Jason Bradford
Oh, this is driving me crazy. That's one of my pet peeves.
Asher Miller
I love plastic lawn. It's so fun to lay on.
Jason Bradford
All the kids playing on plastics and oh gosh.
Asher Miller
Eating it.
Jason Bradford
I mean, here's the thing is like, we do not have a voting system right now for the slime molds. Alright. So again, here's a structural thing. We're the ones that get to decide their fate without any say, and that's frustrating to me.
Rob Dietz
Well, that was almost more fun than the infrastructure conversation. So let's turn it to the superstructure the culture and beliefs that surround humanocentrism. And I think this is really where it's at. Because we're talking about a worldview here. I want to dive in with Robin Wall. Kimmerer's book, "Braiding Sweetgrass." It's not braiding Jason's nose and ears hair.
Jason Bradford
Please, you don't have to bring that up again. I'm going to shave them after this.
Rob Dietz
It's "Braiding Sweetgrass."
Jason Bradford
I'm going to get the clippers out.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, Shaving Sweetgrass is not as good a book, but It's an excellent book where she is describing kind of the confluence of indigenous thinking and science. But she opens it with a comparison between two origin stories. One is Eve's origin expulsion from the Garden of Eden, versus Sky Woman, an indigenous mythology. And the difference is, Eve eats the apple and gets thrown out of the garden. And then it's basically like, you were going to roll around in the dust and fight your way, struggle against nature for survival. It's you against them kind of thing. And the mythology of Sky Woman is she gets dropped out of the sky into a giant body of water. And then the turtle rises up and helps her get to shore and all the other animals are helping her get a foothold in this land and become part of the community.
Jason Bradford
That's why they call it Turtle Island. I never knew this. It was always confusing.
Rob Dietz
I don't know if that's true or not.
Jason Bradford
It must be.
Rob Dietz
Maybe so. But two very different views on humanity's relationship with nature.
Asher Miller
Talking about superstructure, there's the origin stories, the myths, the narratives that we have. There's also maybe the more subtle, but pervasive use of everyday language. Consider terms like natural resources or natural capital, resource. Like we use these terms, regularly.
Jason Bradford
I hate doing it.
Asher Miller
It's so common. And actually, it took Gloria Flora, somebody who used to be a Post Carbon fellow to challenge me on this a little bit. She was talking about oil production --
Asher Miller
Right, it's extraction.
Asher Miller
It's extraction. And so it's just like the everyday language that we use. Natural capital, again, turning it into financial context. We don't think about it. Just it's ubiquitous everywhere you look.
Jason Bradford
I love it when someone calls me an animal.
Rob Dietz
Animal!
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Like, "You're an animal man!"
Asher Miller
Animal is my favorite Muppet.
Rob Dietz
He is an incredible Muppet.
Jason Bradford
But for most people, that's a derogatory term. And some people reject the idea that humans are even animals which drives me crazy. But a lot of these terms are used to denote being uncivilized or brutish, which itself drives me crazy. So what are some other euphemisms? Like treating them like a dog. Or you know, squash you like a bug. Or beat a dead horse. Or kill two birds with one stone, you know.
Rob Dietz
You got a lot of these.
Jason Bradford
Or like freeze that tardigrade.
Rob Dietz
I wish you would treat me like a dog because you treat your dog very kindly.
Jason Bradford
Thank you. And you treat me like --
Asher Miller
Do you want a belly rub?
Jason Bradford
If you had a tail, it would be cool. And I could see when you're happy.
Asher Miller
You gotta work on wagging your nose, Rob.
Rob Dietz
Wagging my nose hairs. The one that gets me with language is the way we name so many of our natural features. And you see this in the landscape all around us. So many things are named after dead white guys. And of course, mostly colonialists. Like I used to go camping in Jefferson and Washington National Forests. You got Mount McKinley named after a President that probably would have been forgotten.
Jason Bradford
At least they changed that.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I know. I do love that more people know it as Denali now. That's really cool. And then you got the Columbia River, Vancouver Island. I mean, isn't it kind of weird? Like, can you fathom the level of arrogance to say, I'm sailing past this island? I'm gonna name it after myself. It's the way Trump names all of his businesses.
Asher Miller
What's even better is near Vancouver Island is Cortes Island, one of the most sadistic killer people.
Rob Dietz
You know that one of the things about when Vancouver was sailing in the Puget Sound region, he really liked the mountain that we know as Mount Rainier. And you look at the spelling of it, I thought, oh, maybe it's Rainier. Like it's a rain thing. Or maybe that's an indigenous word. No, it was one of his buddy s names. He's like, Oh, I like this guy. This Admiral. So I'm going to name the most massive, awesome, awe-inspiring natural feature on the landscape after my buddy over here.
Jason Bradford
Well, you know, they're going to change a lot of these bird names now to be not the names of old dead people, because they, you know . . . So that's interesting. I think that's kind of nice.
Asher Miller
So while they're out there, maybe they want to change the official name of Canada.
Jason Bradford
What's that?
Asher Miller
Because the official name of Canada is actually the Dominion of Canada.
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh. I did not know that.
George Costanza
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be.
Jerry Seinfeld
If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite what have to be right.
Rob Dietz
Alright, let's think about some personal stories of doing the opposite. And I want to start with birds, Jason. You're gonna like this, okay.
Jason Bradford
Let's just keep talking about that.
Rob Dietz
Let's do it. So we know the population of wild birds in North America has fallen by 3 billion over the last 50 years now. Sad.
Jason Bradford
Ouchie.
Rob Dietz
Sorry to bring that up. But I had a problem with a bird. Or maybe it was a couple of birds recently. So you know, when I come down here to work with you guys on the podcast, I stay in a tiny house that's over at my friend's place.
Jason Bradford
It's adorable.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, sometimes in the morning, you hear some knocking. And it's flickers, northern flickers banging on the side of this thing. And so --
Jason Bradford
They're cheeky. They're cheeky.
Rob Dietz
I know. Beautiful bird. Yeah, I mean it looks a lot like to me trout look in the water. With beautiful spots and red streaks
Jason Bradford
In the woodpecker family.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Bradford
So anyway, continue.
Rob Dietz
Anyways, it was doing some damage. It's knockin little holes, you know. And I'm like, God, that's bad. And I hadn't realized how much damage. So I went around. And there was a fist sized hole in the side of the tiny house. And so I'm like, ah, how am I gonna deal with this? And luckily, there's a lot of resources for, you know, I didn't want to poison the bird and want to kill the bird. So the idea that I did, and it's kind of working, is you put up a birdhouse that a flicker could move into. So rather than trying to excavate a hole in your house, it could just move into the home you gave to it.
Jason Bradford
That's so heartwarming.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, and I use the home to cover the hole. No flicker has moved in yet, but they're not pecking the house anymore.
Jason Bradford
Oh that's cool. Well, let's keep talking about birds because I like that. So I'm kind of proud of the statistic. I'm like 25th in the county or something like that for like bird sightings for the year for species. So I'm kind of a middling birder. But this is a competitive County, Benton County,
Rob Dietz
But you're a novice. You're good. You're good.
Jason Bradford
I'm good.
Asher Miller
You take this seriously though.
Jason Bradford
I do take it seriously. But I'm good. I'm just not elite. But guess what is elite? What's elite is my yard. My yard is my personal birding location, which is the farm here.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, let's not -- your yard. I mean, this is a what? Like a 100 acre property here?
Jason Bradford
115 if you include everything. So yeah, I mean, but that's elite. I got 96 species for the year, which is yard numero uno for the entire state of Oregon by a good margin right now. I'm thinking about by about five species over my nearest competitor, which is up towards like my sister's area.
Asher Miller
I'm feeling -- did you hear our episode we did on individualism?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so this isn't about --
Asher Miller
Did you learn anything from that?
Jason Bradford
This isn't about me. This is about the birds. The fact that this is a paradise for them.
Asher Miller
This is a very humanocentric conversation about birds.
Jason Bradford
I just happened to be the one walking around observing them.
Asher Miller
I will say coming here, the thing that I'm always struck by when I come to your house and the farm is the sounds of birds just everywhere.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. It's noisy. Sometimes they're noisy like the flickers.
Asher Miller
It's amazing. I love it.
Jason Bradford
It is interesting.
Asher Miller
And there are so many different ones.
Rob Dietz
And when Jason comes to our houses, he's amazed by the diversity of motors and cars and blowers.
Jason Bradford
It is true.
Asher Miller
The leaf blowers, the lawn mowers.
Jason Bradford
I am a bit shocked by it.
Asher Miller
It's great. Lots of diversity in two stroke engines.
Rob Dietz
I can't go to sleep at night without like starting a weed whacker in the bedroom and having that motor running.
Asher Miller
You just have it running on the side. Some people use, you know, sounds of nature to fall asleep to, you're doing that.
Rob Dietz
I've actually hired a team of weed whacker and blowers to do that.
Asher Miller
You're contributing to the economy. That's one thing,
Jason Bradford
I wish a whip-poor-will would come here and I could hear that at night. That would be nice. Haven't had one of those yet.
Asher Miller
How about a cougar? You could hear one of those hunting on the property.
Jason Bradford
They're around for sure.
Asher Miller
Back to Ed Young's book. You know, when I was reading that, there's, early on in the book, he talks about the sense of smell of dogs. And how they experience the world, so much of it through that olfactory experience. And it really got me to think differently about the experience that my dog Willow would have when he and I go on walks together.
Jason Bradford
He's such a good boy.
Asher Miller
And you know, I have to walk them on a leash in the neighborhood. I do take him places where he can go off leash, and he's the happiest on the planet when he's able to run around. But even just walking through my neighborhood or nearby neighborhoods, I would find myself, and actually it started from both reading Ed's book and then trying to be a little bit more mindful when I go on walks. I have all these podcasts I like to listen to. I mean, the one I listen to the most is our own.
Jason Bradford
Of course. Over and over.
Rob Dietz
Love the sound of your own voice.
Asher Miller
I love listening to us. Yeah. But there are a couple others. But no, I love listening to podcasts and learning about things, but I realized, like, I'm just constantly filling my head with noise, with inputs all the time. So I need to stop that. I need to go out and be more present. And then thinking about what Willow's experiences are like when we go on these walks. And realizing that when he stops to smell something, there's a whole experience there for him. And me being like, no, we gotta hurry up. Or you know, stop yanking on the on the leash because all of a sudden you've got a new sense of smell. I really try to -- I can't experience the world that he experiences it. Sometimes I try to think of it in terms of more visual things. So it'd be like if I dropped acid or something and I'm walking around and seeing all of these vibrant colors. That's what I sort of imagine what his experience must be like.
Jason Bradford
But it's through the nose.
Asher Miller
It's through the nose. And I can't see that but I can at least try to be empathetic and realize like --
Jason Bradford
Do you know how much dog piss he's smelling along the way from different dogs? I mean, it must be incredible.
Asher Miller
It's dogs but there's also other creatures, and there's probably other things that I'm not even aware of.
Rob Dietz
What I appreciate about what you've changed is how sometimes you let him leash you up and he walks you. That's the coolest part.
Asher Miller
He loves that part. He yanks on it so much.
Jason Bradford
That choke chain, jeez.
Rob Dietz
Okay, here we are in the do the opposite. We've shared some personal stuff. But let's look at the visions for different infrastructure superstructure and structure. And starting with infrastructure, what could we do different? Well, maybe you've heard about this idea of rewilding. It's kind of a land acquisition, but also ecological restoration strategy. And these are happening in various places around the world. The one that I became familiar with more than a decade ago is the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative. And what they're doing there, they're making a huge partnership, collaboration among conservation groups, of course. But also local landowners, businesses, government, indigenous governments, nonprofits, scientists. Anyway, the whole idea is let's make a connected, well protected habitat all along the spine of the Rockies. And they've done things like get proposals accepted for land acquisition that helps make the already protected areas more protected, bigger, connected. They've done ecosystem restoration, you know, things like tree plantings, and all that. And they've also gotten animal crossings over roadways built and other things that help animals have that connectivity in the landscape that they need.
Jason Bradford
That's a massive scale, right. And so, you know, one of the things I've been interested in is how can how can this happen is smaller scale, maybe less funded. And one of the places you can go to see what other people are doing, and maybe be inspired is a place called Restore. And it's r-e-s-t-o-r.e-c-o. And there's a breadth of efforts out there. They are kind of documenting sites from 140 countries, you know, 1000's of sites. And it's inspiring to see like the care that people have from all walks of life in all parts of the planet to make their place more beautiful and more biodiverse. So interesting to check that out.
Asher Miller
The good news is there are plenty of ecosystem restoration efforts out there across all kinds. I mean, there's reforestation efforts marine reserves, wetland conservation, farmland habitat. You've talked about that, Jason. There's also the Half-Earth proposal, which is probably the most bold idea that's been put out there. And that's, you know, reserving half-earth you know, for biodiversity. I do have a little bit of a critique of that, which is, it's still sort of this idea of separating humans from the rest of the world, you know, the natural world. And that's not really how indigenous cultures have sustained themselves over time. You know, they've actually lived with ecosystems, as part of ecosystems.
Jason Bradford
So you think that's part of the Half-Earth mindset or worldview? Is it sort of the sacred and profane, or you know how much fluidity there is?
Asher Miller
I don't know. It all depends on how things like that are done. But it does feel a bit to me an extension, maybe the most bold version of this idea of like, let's concentrate humans into their places.
Jason Bradford
In cities and stuff.
Asher Miller
In the cities, and then we can protect nature from us.
Jason Bradford
When it should be the whole earth.
Asher Miller
Which is, that's still humanocentric in the sense of like, no, the shift that has to happen here is a reorientation in terms of our relationship with the more than human world.
Jason Bradford
Every place is sacred and worthy of protection.
Rob Dietz
And taken to its extreme, the proposal is to literally cut the earth in half. And humans are on one side and everything else is on the other and we just orbit around the sun together.
Jason Bradford
Oh that's fascinating.
Asher Miller
Is that a flat earth, or a round, or like. . . What's in the center?
Rob Dietz
Well, we will be on the flat part of earth for sure.
Jason Bradford
Well, if you want more inspiration on what to do, Douglas Palamedes, a professor in the U.S., wrote a book called "Nature's Best Hope: A new approach to conservation that starts in your yard. And I think it's a great book. What I got out of it was how critical native plants are. And a good example is like the Norway Maple. And I've actually got a pair of Norway Maples out here.
Rob Dietz
I'm gonna guess where they're native.
Jason Bradford
Good. I'll keep that in mystery. But you can guess.
Asher Miller
Norway, Oklahoma.
Jason Bradford
Right. And if you were to like look at, say, a Norway Maple versus, say the native maple here, like say the big leaf maple. And you were to count how many insect species and the biomass of insects on the two, there might be 100 times more insect biomass on one versus the other. So it's remarkable the difference. And what that translates into is little lepidopteran larva. That would be like caterpillars. And the ability for little birds that are trying to feed their young to go out and grab those and bring them to the nest. You know, a little chickadee pair might feed off of a few 100 little caterpillars a day for their nest. And they just aren't available when you have these landscapes of non-natives. And then of course, the same thing happens with all the pollinators. When you have a diverse landscape that's not just a lawn but has all these native plants, then you can support all of the insects that require pollen and nectar as food sources. So really interesting organization that then also helps people figure out how to read landscape where they live.
Rob Dietz
It really feels humanocentric to think you could take whatever tree species you want, plant that on your wherever you are, and think that it would do the same thing that the thing that evolved there overall time would do.
Jason Bradford
Well, it reminds me of what Asher was talking about like not being aware of the dog's point of view. We're so unaware that all these species were relying on -- We think we think, oh, it's a tree. It's creating shade, it's green, it's photosynthesizing.
Asher Miller
It will give us oxygen.
Jason Bradford
It's fine. And realize that we're just shredding all these important relationships.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Speaking of that, I get really excited thinking about how we might teach children differently. So there are efforts like at the Center for Eco-literacy and others who have been doing projects in schools, working with young children, in particular, to create more connection to the natural world. And some of the things that they do are actually trying to teach science through either like a school garden project or other kinds of things. It's in some ways, multidisciplinary. But imagine if we taught kids to recognize what Ed Young talks about in his in his book, you know. The different ways that other living beings experience the world, the different senses that they have. Imagine seeing kids with their imagination and trying to have them experience as best they could, with our limited senses, what their physical environment might be like for other species. And then try to think about how to change that infrastructure, even on a small scale, to better suit and be more -- This sounds stupid, but we were more mindful now, right? We think about ADA compliance, and we think about physical spaces that are more conducive to different humans, right, with their different abilities. If we try to do that for other species as well, and particularly starting with young kids, then that sort of gets embedded in them. Even though it's an infrastructure project, in some ways it's a superstructure project.
Rob Dietz
The problem is the rats and the roaches and the crows and the other things that really liked the infrastructure we have, they're gonna be pissed.
Asher Miller
It's true. It's true.
Jason Bradford
Well, so you know, what you're talking about makes me think about the structural changes that may evolve with a society that's thinking like that. They would want to make different rules, right? And there are these discussions, these notions of rights of nature, and so called, you know, personhood for members of the more than human community, which fascinates me that you can actually do or say that. But I see it as like, we're using the legal system, because it cares so much about individual rights. So it's weird.
Rob Dietz
Like corporate personhood.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. Okay. If they can be a person so can, you know, a butterfly or a river, right. Ecuador was the first nation to include the rights of nature in its constitution. And that happened actually as far back as 2008.
Rob Dietz
Ancient times, 2008. Well Panama. also kind of followed suit and has some constitutional provisions about protecting nature. And there's actually some teeth to that. So there's something that happened recently where the legislature in that country had granted a Canadian company a 20 year permit to run this huge copper mine.
Asher Miller
Awesome.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, there were massive protests of this copper mine, including a lot of indigenous folks and communities. And they were protesting the damage as you might imagine that a big open pit copper mine would cause. And towards the end of 2023, Panama's highest court ruled that the issuing of that permit was illegal.
Jason Bradford
Sit down Dominion of Canada!
Rob Dietz
It was unconstitutional, and they had environmental and human rights violations. So think about the consequence. They actually closed this mine, okay? Took an economic hit. It's the biggest open pit copper mine in all of Central America. So this was 7,000 direct jobs, 33,000, maybe indirect jobs. 5% of national GDP.
Jason Bradford
Wow.
Rob Dietz
I mean, it's the biggest case I'm aware of where you said nature has rights and it's more important than these dollars and economic benefits.
Asher Miller
But it also goes to show, you bringing that up, I mean, that actually has consequence. And we've talked about escaping capitalism. You know, it's such an indication of how locked into capitalism we are that it's a pretty brave act. A politically brave act, maybe. It comes with actual real consequences for the people that worked at this mine and others because of the economic system that we have. To me, it's really, it's not just reassuring, it's inspiring to see what feels like a real acceleration and growth in rights of nature work and efforts that are happening around the world. We have friends, Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey at the Center for Democratic Environmental Rights in the U.S. They've been working all over the world, with national governments, like in Ecuador, and regional governments, but also local communities in the U.S. on rights of nature of protections. And there's an organization called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. That actually has a really great timeline on their website. That goes back to 1972. It feels like 1970 was a real seminal year. We've talked about limits to growth -- This is the year I was born so of course it's an incredibly important year.
Jason Bradford
Transformative.
Asher Miller
But they have like a 50 year timeline of kind of what's been happening. And it really does accelerate. It has been accelerating in more recent years, which does give me some inspiration.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there was a podcast recently, our friend Nate Hagens interviewed us. A Swedish environmental environmentalist, Pella Thiel, on the great simplification. And she was discussing the rights of nature as we've just covered, but also the idea of making ecocide a crime in international law. Similar to how we have human rights violations that are illegal. And you could charge corporations and CEOs, you know, with the crime of ecocide. That would be -- I think that would be really cool.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And you would think that sounds kind of like, okay, an environmentalist coming on a show and saying, "Hey, let's make this a crime," but it's actually happening. She talked about an organization called Stop Ecocide International, and they're trying to get this into international law. And just this year, Belgium became the first country in Europe to actually recognize Ecocide as an international crime.
Jason Bradford
Extradition.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and the punishment pretty big. If you commit ecocide, you could be thrown in prison for 20 years, and have a fine of up to 1.6 million euros.
Jason Bradford
Interesting.
Asher Miller
I think he's they should just take those people and throw them into like remote wilderness and see if they could survive on their own.
Rob Dietz
No, they'd be taking down trees. Throw him into a really big shark pit. How about that?
Asher Miller
There's this other effort that's been happening, I think, growing some attention and focus around the concept of multispecies justice. Some of our listeners may recall an episode that we had done -- An interview we had done with Danielle Celermajer who's a professor at the University of Sydney, on the work that she's been doing there. She's become a great friend of mine, someone I really adore. And she defines multispecies justice as quote, "A theory of Justice that includes not only the interests of all humans, but of the nonhumans such as other animals, plants, forests, rivers and ecological systems. Taking their interests seriously as justice claims means there's a moral and political obligation for the basic institutions of society, including our political and legal systems to take those interests into account when making decisions. They can't be dismissed simply because they're inconvenient and costly. And attending to them is not a matter of charity or generosity." So, I mean, just think of it in simple terms, like, how we would view human rights.
Rob Dietz
That is really comprehensive. But Jason, I did not hear a mention of slime mold anywhere in that.
Asher Miller
I'll talk to Dani about that. And see if she has a . . .
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I was gonna you've got a connection here. Maybe we can slip that in.
Jason Bradford
I would appreciate that. Yes. I would appreciate that.
Asher Miller
I'll talk to her about that. Yeah, it should be written into law.
Jason Bradford
So I'm just imagining a society that goes through the change infrastructure we talked out and the structural laws that are being worked on. I think that what you would get -- You would get this sort of superstructure or mythologies, belief systems, more akin to what might be called deep ecology nowadays, as opposed to the environmentalism that you were talking about, Asher. And so what we mean by that is that these other species and nature has an intrinsic versus an instrumental value. And humans are connected and part of everything else, as opposed to being separate and special. And there's a good quote from Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac. I can't remember what year that was written. But that, you know, that's early to mid 20th century, right? "We abused land, because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
Asher Miller
We talked about language earlier. So thinking about a shift in language, Rob, you mentioned Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, "Braiding Sweetgrass." She discusses how her indigenous language, Potawatomi -- Did I pronounce that right?
Rob Dietz
Maybe? Potawatomi is how I would've guessed, but I'm not sure.
Asher Miller
How it differs from English, right? Objects and animals are spoken of as persons as well. Not only are the plants and animals intimate, but the rocks of mountains and the rivers. I do think that that's an edge for a lot of people. So when people talk about the more than human world, the reason I think that they use that language versus just talking about other species is because it includes things that may seem inert or inanimate to us.
Rob Dietz
Well, I remember in New Zealand, like the tallest mountain in English is called Mount Cook, named after, whatever, Captain Cook. And the indigenous word for it is Aoraki or cloud piercer is what that means. Which is yeah, you know, which one is poetic? Which one is the one that you're in relationship with, right? Utterly amazing. I have an example to share from the Tuvan language, which is people of South Central Siberia, Mongolia. Tt has a very nature centric vocabulary, and really descriptive words for animals and natural processes. And some of their words sound like things that you would hear in the landscape around you. So that's kind of cool. But apparently, nature is also built into the structure of their grammar. So the preferred way that they say to go somewhere, it refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current.
Jason Bradford
Huh.
Rob Dietz
So yeah, it's kind of wild.
Jason Bradford
An example would be helpful.
Rob Dietz
Well, so they keep track of that information, which way the river is running as they're moving around the landscape. And so there was this linguist who was studying Tuvan, and then he wants hosted a friend in Manhattan. And the Tuvan friend said, "Hey, where's the river?" So the linguist took him over to the west side of Manhattan, and showed them the Hudson River. And the linguist said that he took note of it so he could use Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City. I was just thinking, the Tuvan in that moment probably became more indigenous to New York City than most of the longtime residents, you know, the probably don't even . . .
Jason Bradford
I mean, if you can find a good deli that way, too, I'm sure. You know?
Asher Miller
That's how the Jews in New York orient.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Dietz
One other thing that I want to mention about superstructure is we have our sister podcast, "Holding the Fire." And the second episode of that featured Anne Poelina who talked extensively about viewing the river as a relative of hers, and even listed as a co-author on one of her peer reviewed journal papers. So it's a real shift in thinking to think that the river is your co-author. I want to bring up one more initiative of do the opposite that I think kind of ties everything together. This is something I've been thinking a lot about. It's the un-damming of the Klamath River. Remember I said how damming seemed like the most hubristic humanocentric thing you could do? Well, we have an excellent do the opposite going on right now where a series of four dams that have been run by the Pacific Power Company, they were built starting in 1918. These things you can imagine the hit that they caused to salmon on the Klamath River.
Jason Bradford
Yes. And this river runs essentially through the northern part of Washington and into southern Oregon. And so it goes to the Pacific Ocean.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. And through California is where they built these four dams. And, you know, the indigenous cultures were all tied up with the salmon in community. And it wasn't just putting dams in the physical barriers that disrupted the spawning of salmon. But recently, there was problems with excessive growth of toxic cyanobacteria in the reservoirs, and it degraded the water quality. And in 2022, there was an outbreak that killed more than 34,000 fish, most of them Chinook salmon. Anyway, after decades of indigenous activism, finally, the federal agency responsible for dams, FERC, approved the removal. And that is underway as we speak. Those dams, you know, you maybe think, "Oh, what about the clean electricity they were producing?" There was only a very, very small percentage of what Pacific Power was producing. So just a time to get rid of these dams on that river system.
Jason Bradford
And I've been following this a bit. And you know, it's not just that the water is now running free of the dams and you're done. These tribes have been really busy getting ready, right? Gathering seeds, developing nurseries, 1000s of trees and shrubs are going in along the riverbank to just increase the rate at which you can restore that ecosystem. But it also turns into a cultural restoration. The members of the Karuk tribe participate in ceremonial salmon fishing using handheld nets. And in many years, there have been no salmon to catch. And so when this river runs freely again, then they're going to be able, of course, to have better salmon runs and really feel like their tribal lifestyle and ways are back as well. This is then all part of then allowing a people who are part of this place to really, really reconnect with it. Probably better than they have in a long time.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Sammy Gensaw III was Yurok leader, I think put it really well. He said, quote, The restoration is not just about meeting the state conservation goals or adapting to climate change. It's about justice, and healing, and returning to a more balanced relationship with the natural world." Sammy is the director of a group called Ancestral Guard. And they're focused on teaching traditional fishing and farming methods to indigenous youth. So in some ways, this is like superstructure, structure, and infrastructure all coming together in this one sort of project.
Melody Travers Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Jason Bradford
Dominionist theologian Walter Crankship was walking on his Branson, Missouri lawn one morning when he came across a congregation of Fuligo septica, also known as dog vomit slime mold. His fascination with this curious organism was so great that by that afternoon he was asking, "Do Slime Molds Go to Heaven?" Such is the title of Reverend Walter's new book, where he uses his understanding of Hebrew, Greek and Sumerian to reinterpret original biblical texts. What he discovered is bound to transform Christian thought. We now know that the phrase, "Be fruitful and multiply" was meant to apply not only to humans, but to all of God's creation, including slime molds. And that the Romans mistranslated the original word of God, inserting the Latin, the dominimum, meaning lordship or right of ownership, instead of what our creator intended, which was deminimis, meaning to be small and humble. Get your copy of "Do Slime Molds go to Heaven?" today and experience the discomfort and potential social isolation of now thinking everything you used to believe is bullshit.
