Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Carl Safina.
Carl Safina is an ecologist, author, and founding President of the Safina Center. He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University. His work centers on animal psychology and the relationship between humans and nature. His book "Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe," is a moving account of raising, then freeing, an orphaned screech owl, whose lasting friendship with him illuminates humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Don’t wait! Grab your copy of Alfie & Me here
When I set out to read Alfie & Me, I had an expectation in mind about what I was getting into. Carl has a storied career as an ecologist advocating for the inner lives of animals—the ones on land and sea—and Alife & Me promised an up-close-and-personal view into his relationship with a screech owl. And to be clear, it succeeds tremendously at this, depicting a journey full of excitement and concern, tenderness and ferocity, as we see the growth of this owl, Alfie, through his eyes (with the benefit of his expertise as an ecologist). We so rarely get stories of human-animal bonding in which the human in the equation is trying to really understand the animal on its own terms, without anthropomorphizing it—experiencing Alfie’s maturation, from fledgling to parent, is a true joy in itself.
But the book does something else that I was less prepared for: it surgically dissects how Western philosophy, and Plato in particular, have created the conditions for a kind of hell on Earth. By creating the conditions to believe that true reality occurs on a different realm than this Earth, Carl argues, Plato and ensuing luminaries of Western philosophy have thoroughly devalued life on Earth—and with it, the lives of our fellow earthlings. We don’t need to look far to find supporting evidence; the value systems of Western modernity are unraveling the biosphere and driving many species to extinction. This degree of suffering is devastating to consider, and it’s also just foolish. We’re robbing ourselves of a livable planet and the joy and wonder that comes with connecting to the kin we evolved with.
For someone who appreciates philosophy in an armchair capacity, as well as other Westernized disciplines like science, Carl’s provocation makes for an interesting moment of reflection. How can we retain the gems from these fields while working to radically shift our collective values—away from extraction and toward ones that will valorize sustaining a stable planet for ourselves and our many marvelous Earthly relatives?
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode on conspiracy theories, Jean Baudrillard, and more with David Guignion (of Theory & Philosophy fame):
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