This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. By Alla Katsnelson 08.02.2023
Our understanding of animal minds is undergoing a remarkable transformation. Just three decades ago, the idea that a broad array of creatures have individual personalities was highly suspect in the eyes of serious animal scientists — as were such seemingly fanciful notions as fish feeling pain, bees appreciating playtime and cockatoos having culture.
Today, though, scientists are rethinking the very definition of what it means to be sentient and seeing capacity for complex cognition and subjective experience in a great variety of creatures — even if their inner worlds differ greatly from our own.
Such discoveries are thrilling, but they probably wouldn’t have surprised Charles Henry Turner, who died a century ago, in 1923. An American zoologist and comparative psychologist, he was one of the first scientists to systematically probe complex cognition in animals considered least likely to possess it. Turner primarily studied arthropods such as spiders and bees, closely observing them and setting up trailblazing experiments that hinted at cognitive abilities more complex than most scientists at the time suspected. Turner also explored differences in how individuals within a species behaved — a precursor of research today on what some scientists refer to as personality.
Most of Turner’s contemporaries believed that “lowly” critters such as insects and spiders were tiny automatons, preprogrammed to perform well-defined functions. “Turner was one of the first, and you might say should be given the lion’s share of credit, for changing that perception,” says Charles Abramson, a comparative psychologist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater who has done extensive biographical research on Turner and has been petitioning the US Postal Service for years to issue a stamp commemorating him. Turner also challenged the views that animals lacked the capacity for intelligent problem-solving and that they behaved based on instinct or, at best, learned associations, and that individual differences were just noisy data.
A mock-up of a 44-cent US postage stamp commemorating Charles Henry Turner. This design was created for educational purposes by psychologist Charles Abramson and his student Charles Miskovsky. Abramson, who published a biography of Turner, has petitioned the US Postal Service to issue a stamp honoring Turner.
CREDIT: C. MISKOVSKY & C.I. ABRAMSON / COMPREHENSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 2012
But just as the scientific establishment of the time lacked the imagination to believe that animals other than human beings can have complex intelligence and subjectivity of experience, it also lacked the collective imagination to envision Turner, a Black scientist, as an equal among them. The hundredth anniversary of Turner’s death offers an opportunity to consider what we may have missed out on by their oversight.
Had his work not been largely forgotten after his death, the field might now be in a very different place, says Lars Chittka, a zoologist and ecologist studying bees and other insects at Queen Mary University of London. Today, researchers are returning to many of the ideas that Turner’s work raised. “The remarkable developments that I’ve had the pleasure to witness over the last few decades might have happened much, much earlier if people had paid more attention to Turner’s writings,” Chittka says.
Testing tiny minds
Nineteenth-century Western scientists inherited the notion that a strict line separated humans from other animals. Humans had souls, which came with complex thoughts and feelings, and other creatures didn’t. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution disaffirmed this accepted wisdom, proposing a mechanism — natural selection of inherited traits — by which physical, mental and even emotional characteristics could be shared across species. Darwin’s young friend and collaborator George Romanes in 1882 published Animal Intelligence, a book that cataloged examples of cognitive abilities in a broad spectrum of animals. These ideas resonated so strongly with Turner that he named his third child Darwin Romanes.
Turner built an elevated maze, shown here as a photograph (top) and a diagram (bottom) to test how quickly individual cockroaches learned to navigate a new environment. The maze was made of copper strips that are supported by glass rods inserted into the cork stoppers of glass bottles. The whole contraption sat in a pan of water.
CREDIT: C.H. TURNER / BIOLOGICAL BULLETIN 1913
Darwin’s and Romanes’s notions, though, were largely based on theory, observation and a healthy dollop of anthropomorphism. Animal Intelligence was not especially scientific. Turner spent his career testing those notions with the scientific method.
In one of his early studies, Turner set out to investigate if spiders built webs through rigid instinct or if they could respond creatively to novel situations. Meadows make for fairly uniform conditions in which to build webs, he wrote in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in 1892. “But when the external environment becomes more heterogenous, it is interesting to note how the spiders become masters of the situation.” He meticulously described structures of 27 webs he found on windowsills, down railroad embankments, in log piles. “Was this web the result of blind instinct? I think not,” he wrote about an especially contorted web above a hole in a stone wall that effectively cornered insect prey.
Turner coupled his observations with experiments that forced spiders to deal with awkward spatial challenges in their web-building. He collected spiders and placed them first into cylindrical bottles, where they constructed circular webs, and then moved them into boxes, where a few made rectangular ones. Finally, he destroyed parts of existing webs and found that the spiders came up with clever solutions to efficiently patch them up. All these experiments pointed to a capacity for learning, contradicting the dominant scientific narrative. Although web-weaving is instinctive, Turner concluded, “the details of construction are the products of intelligent action.”
During the rest of his three-decade career, Turner continued pursuing research that ran counter to prevailing ideas of his time. Turner also studied birds, aquatic crustaceans, lizards and snakes, but he was particularly interested in the minds of insects. He cataloged surprising capacities for learning, memory, problem-solving — and possibly even emotions, says Chittka — in ants, bees, moths, cockroaches and other insects, anticipating perspectives that only reemerged in the 2000s.
Turner discovered that ants make big circuitous loops as they return to their nest after foraging. French naturalist Victor Cornetz named this meandering a “tournoiement de Turner.”
CREDIT: E.L. BOUVIER, TRANSLATED BY L.O. HOWARD / THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF INSECTS 1922
In a series of creative experiments that involved running ants of a dozen different species through an elaborate maze, Turner concluded that the creatures weren’t guided by a homing instinct, but instead relied on a variety of cues as well as memory, all coming together as a simple form of learning. In a separate study, he placed an ant on a small island and observed that the ant attempted to build a bridge to the mainland using materials at its disposal. The ant went beyond trial-and-error learning, seeming to size up the situation and come up with a goal-directed solution — something ants were not considered capable of at the time, Chittka says. He demonstrated that bees rely on their memory of spatial landmarks — say, a Coca-Cola bottle cap at the entrance of a ground nest — to get where they needed to go. That study was remarkably similar to one published a quarter-century later by the celebrated Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, Chittka says.
Turner may also have been a step ahead of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. About 13 years before Pavlov published a renowned paper on salivating dogs and the fundamental form of learning called classical conditioning, Turner published a report describing how he trained moths to flap their wings in response to whistling, revealing that they can hear pitch. “That very well may have been the first example of classical conditioning — certainly for invertebrates,” says Abramson, who published a biography of Turner in 2003, and an article about Turner’s life in the Annual Review of Entomology in 2007.
A legacy rediscovered
There’s no evidence that scientists intentionally claimed Turner’s discoveries as their own, says Chittka. In Turner’s honor, French naturalist Victor Cornetz named the sinuous meanderings made by some ants “Tournoiements de Turner.” John B. Watson, the father of behaviorism, which became the dominant psychological paradigm for decades starting in the 1920s, called some of Turner’s experiments “ingenious.”
Yet over time, Turner’s legacy faded.
Chittka himself, as a graduate student and young researcher in the 1990s, strongly pushed the field to recognize the complexity of insect minds, not learning until much later in his career that Turner had laid the foundation for key ideas in his research. “I have to admit that I was so much unaware of Turner’s work that I thought that I had pioneered that [direction] for insects,” he says. “Quite clearly, Turner was a century ahead there, and that was quite an eye-opener.”
Turner explored how bees use visual cues in addition to olfactory ones, and whether they can see color as they hop from flower to flower in search of food. He constructed small cardboard discs, cones and boxes and painted them red, green and blue. He put honey in the red cones, and then the red discs, and in both cases the bees learned to look for food there. He argued that his findings showed that bees can see color, but later research revealed that though bees can perceive most colors, they cannot see red. Turner’s study in fact showed that the insects could discern grayscale.
Without a doubt, the barriers Turner faced in establishing and maintaining his scientific career were extremely steep and were forged by flagrant racism and by the mundane circumstances that it engendered. He found a mentor at the University of Cincinnati, where he completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in 1887 and 1892, respectively. He earned a reputation as diligent and brilliant, which likely helped him gain a position as an assistant lab instructor, something few other Black students would have been considered for. But his luck on that front ran out when he sought a faculty position at the University of Chicago after he finished his PhD in zoology there in 1907, likely the first Black scientist to do so, Abramson says. He was considered for a post, but the professor who invited him to apply died and, according to sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, his replacement refused to hire a Black scientist.
Unable to secure the University of Chicago position, Turner became a science teacher at Sumner High School in St. Louis, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi. But he continued to run experiments in the parks of St. Louis and in the small research shed he built behind his home. Another asset he lacked was graduate students or scientific offspring to propagate his ideas and build on them in their own careers. Still, Turner toiled on, publishing more than 70 papers. “It’s just absolutely mind-boggling how he did all that as a one-man operation,” Chittka says.
Some think his ingenuity is what allowed him to build a career despite many constraints. “He was incredibly imaginative,” says Janice Harrington, a poet and author who teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and who researched Turner’s life for a 2019 children’s book about him. “It wasn’t like he could just go buy the equipment he needed or call on an army of lab assistants. When you have those limitations, then you have to think outside the box.”
Turner’s research was also driven by another motivation: He viewed biology as a lens for understanding the common bonds among living things, and also among all members of humanity, Harrington says.
“The marvelous structures and functions of animals, the demonstration that all animals are evolved branches of one common tree, and a knowledge of the laws that control the actions and relations of animals and man,” Turner wrote in an editorial for a newspaper called the Southwestern Christian Advocate, “lead one to recognize and respect the rights of others.”
Excavating the history of figures like Turner can be challenging, Harrington adds. “I think the frustration, if you’re researching someone who is African American, is that a lot of times there’s just going to be holes and big gaps because of the times they lived in,” she says. Key artifacts relating to their life were not deemed worth saving. Turner died of a heart condition at the relatively young age of 56, and neither his house nor his research shed in St. Louis remains standing. An especially sore point for Harrington is mention of a children’s book he wrote, the manuscript of which she has been unable to find.
Abramson has felt these holes too. He first encountered Turner’s work 45 years ago, as an undergraduate excitedly digging through old publications in his chosen field of ant behavior, and has tried to bring attention both to Turner’s science and to his perseverance. But he says a dearth of artifacts relating to Turner’s life has impeded his efforts to persuade a national museum to showcase him.
Yet in the past few years, as the accumulation of evidence begins to outweigh the history of prejudice, Turner’s work is regaining recognition. “We have witnessed over the last decade or so quite a Copernicus-style revolution in the sense of the appreciation of other animals having minds,” Chittka says. Seeing these ideas in Turner’s work from a century ago “is very reassuring,” he adds. “I think it shows that we are heading in the right direction, albeit with a big delay.”
A childhood spent outdoors yields more than just curiosity, resilience and a lasting respect for the environment. Mountains of evidence collected by the deeply influential Children and Nature Network suggest that children’s regular engagement with the natural world is essential for their physical, emotional and cognitive health. Given that we humans are, in fact, animals, this should come as no surprise. However, many children today have little opportunity to develop this bond. Children in the U.S. spend less than 10 minutes per day on average engaged in unstructured outdoor play — compared to more than seven hours in front of electronic screens. How can we reconnect children with nature and restore this essential relationship?
As we experience draconian moves to gut education budgets, national parks, and public lands (and much more), it’s important to remember that public support for basic goals like outdoor access for youth remains nearly universal and that there are thriving policy movements across multiple levels supporting this work. In this newsletter, discover how school environments can foster healing, the ecological benefits of the living schoolyard movement, how nature-inspired design builds resilience, and a program bringing the joy of birding to Chicago public school students.
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‘Schools That Heal’: How School Environments Shape Mental, Social, and Physical Health
What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. In “Schools That Heal,” landscape architecture professor and designer Claire Latané details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. In this excerpt, learn how school environments shape mental, social and physical health.
Schoolyard Transformations for Ecological & Social Benefit: Daily Acts’ Climate Resilient Schools Program
The modern American schoolyard is dominated by two elements: asphalt (hardscape) and lawn (softscape). The living schoolyard movement, lead by Sharon Danks’ remarkable project, Green Schoolyards America, seeks to transform schoolyards into lush environments that strengthen local ecological systems and provide opportunities for place-based, hands-on learning. While the conversation about living schoolyards has focused on asphalt removal, the transformation of underutilized lawns is an important tool for schools to conserve water, cool campuses, and encourage biodiversity, while expanding holistic and integrated educational opportunities. Photo courtesy of Morgan Margulies / Ten Strands.
Keynote Speaker Spotlight: Baratunde Thurston I Inspiring Change, One Story at a Time
What does it mean to truly citizen? Baratunde Thurston, a masterful storyteller and Emmy-nominated creator, explores this question and so much more as the host of the PBS series “America Outdoors” and the acclaimed “How To Citizen” podcast. From unpacking the human side of the A.I. revolution in his newest YouTube podcast, “Life With Machines,” to penning the bestselling comedic memoir “How To Be Black,” Baratunde is a voice for transformative ideas and action. His work blends humor, humanity, and a keen eye for innovation, making him one of the most compelling communicators of our time.
Catch Baratunde and other visionary speakers at the 36th annual Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, from March 27-29. ⚡Flash Sale: Register with code VISION20 at checkout before midnight P.T. on Feb. 28 and receive 20% off! ⚡
Ecological Literacy: Teaching the Next Generation About Sustainable Development
As societies search for ways to become more sustainable, Fritjof Capra suggests incorporating the same principles on which nature’s ecosystems operate. In his essay, “Speaking Nature’s Language: Principles for Sustainability” from the 2005 book “Ecological Literacy,” he weaves a blueprint for building a more resilient world on the foundation of concepts drawn from the natural world, such as interdependence and diversity. This essay advocates a shift in thinking to a more holistic view of living systems: taking into account the collective interactions between the parts of the whole, instead of just the parts themselves.
Birds in My Neighborhood: Connecting kids to the joy of birding — and nature
Birds in My Neighborhood is helping Chicago public school students discover their “spark bird”— the one that ignites a lifelong fascination with birds and nature. Founded by the Chicago-based regional conservation nonprofit Openlands, the program has introduced more than 12,000 students, primarily from the city’s south and west sides, to bird-watching in their own neighborhoods. By using birds as ambassadors, the initiative opens children’s eyes to the joys of bird-watching and the natural world around them. Read more about the Birds in My Neighborhood program in this blog post by Susan Pagani. Photo by Eduardo Cornejo, courtesy of Openlands.
“We Will Be Jaguars” Book Club with Nemonte Nenquimo & Mitch Anderson
The Bioneers Learning Book Club is honored to present an extraordinary new experience featuring “We Will Be Jaguars,” the powerful memoir by Nemonte Nenquimo. This groundbreaking book, a Reese’s Book Club Pick and one of Library Journal’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a fearless climate activist and Indigenous leader.
More than just a memoir, “We Will Be Jaguars” is a call to action—a bold vision for protecting our planet rooted in generations of Indigenous wisdom and resilience. Together, through this book club, we’ll not only explore Nemonte’s inspiring journey but also gather as a community to empower one another and discover actionable ways to champion change in our own lives and beyond.
Join us to reflect, connect, and draw strength from both this extraordinary story and the collective power of shared learning.
Register for this book club by March 3, and you’ll be automatically entered to win a free copy of “We Will Be Jaguars”!
What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools.
In “Schools That Heal,” landscape architecture professor and designer Claire Latané details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to create supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. In the following excerpt, learn how school environments shape mental, social and physical health, and how schools can be designed with wellbeing in mind.
Claire Latané
Claire Latané is a landscape architecture professor at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Her teaching and scholarship apply research connecting the mind, body, and environment to design places and processes that support mental health. Latané has practiced landscape architecture for 14 years. She has designed interactive environments for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities as well as for affordable housing communities and public parks.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Schools The Heal by Claire Latané, published by Island Press, 2021.
The average American spends 15 percent of his or her lifetime in primary and secondary school. Children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours there. Where we live, go to school, work, and socialize shapes how our minds and bodies function and how we relate to the world. Children and teenagers need positive and supportive school environments as they struggle to navigate their lives and futures. Overwhelming anxiety now affects nearly two-thirds of young adults. It has surpassed depression as the number one reason college students seek counseling. And suicide is now the leading cause of death for children and youth aged ten to eighteen.
In a recent survey of Los Angeles public school students, 50 percent of students screened suffered from moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma-informed education is growing as a teaching approach as more school districts acknowledge that the majority of students today have experienced at least one childhood trauma impacting their ability to learn. A groundbreaking study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly two-thirds of participants had endured at least one adverse childhood experience.
Plenty of evidence shows that nature-filled environments support mental health and well-being. But few designers, and even fewer school decision makers and educators, appear to be aware of the research.
The school environment—the organization and physical materials that make up a school—offers a powerful yet overlooked way to support everyone who learns, works, or otherwise finds themself there. Plenty of evidence shows that nature-filled environments support mental health and well-being. But few designers, and even fewer school decision makers and educators, appear to be aware of the research. Instead, schools too often present harsh environments with imposing fences, locking gates, window grates, and security cameras. These types of places don’t feel safer—they amplify students’ stress, anxiety, and trauma.
Supporting Trauma-Informed Education
Scientists’ understanding of the human brain has changed in recent decades to reveal a vital connection between our minds, our bodies, and the environments we inhabit. This mind-body-environment relationship means our mental health is connected to our physical health and the health of the environment we live in. All three shape who we are and how healthy we can be.
Psychologist Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory explains why. His work connects post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, depression, and anxiety with the autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. This principal nerve transmits feelings of emotional well-being through our bodies to regulate our heart rate, breathing, and digestive rhythms. It also works in the other direction: when our breathing and heart rate are regular and calm and our stomach is relaxed, the vagus nerve conveys feelings of safety to our brains. When we are overwhelmed or stressed, our heart rate goes up, our breathing quickens, and our stomach feels tight. And in reverse, when our stomach aches or our heart rate goes up, we don’t feel safe.
Often, our bodies react to trauma and anxiety without our being aware of what is happening or why. We jump at the slightest noise or movement. We feel on edge while riding in a car, waiting for an accident to happen. We can’t sleep or relax. These signs of hypervigilance—being supersensitive to our surroundings—are symptoms of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other anxiety-related disorders. Even if we don’t identify or remember the cause, our bodies do. Children and adolescents live with trauma that builds up in their bodies over time. Sometimes they remember the original physical or emotional trauma or traumas, and sometimes they don’t. Many remain unaware of the cause for their entire lives. We see the effects of trauma as aggression, irritability, skipping school, or “checking out.” This is our bodies’ “fight, flight, or freeze” response. While it is easy to visualize what a fight-or-flight response might look like, a freeze response is harder to recognize. Freeze is a state of numbness or of feeling stuck in one or more parts of the body. People in freeze often seem cooperative, quiet, or contemplative. Or they might have a hard time hearing you. Students who get in trouble for not paying attention could be in freeze. Since the likelihood is that students have endured one or more childhood traumas, trauma-informed educators suggest supporting all students as if they are impacted by trauma.
We can help children and teenagers by creating calming places where they have opportunities to both be alone and connect with other people or living beings to settle their fight, flight, or freeze response. Environments that help calm the nervous system help students feel safe.
Applying Evidence-Based Design
Nature-filled schools with hands-on and active learning and play opportunities calm students, reduce aggressive behavior, and improve learning outcomes. Being in nature helps students play cooperatively and creatively. Neighborhoods and schools with more trees have less crime and stronger social ties than neighborhoods and schools with less. By remaking schools to become welcoming, healthy, safe, and productive, we create models for students and the community to experience, learn from, and emulate in the larger world. While it sounds like common sense, these design solutions are not commonly applied. Too often, concerns about cost and long-term maintenance of supportive school environments take priority over student needs. Tight school budgets set up feelings of scarcity and competition for limited resources. Yet we can create safer, nature-filled, more beautiful school environments for the same or less money than hardened facilities and with greater chances that students and the community will take better care of them. Schools can become social and physical safety nets at the heart of our communities.
We can create safer, nature-filled, more beautiful school environments for the same or less money than hardened facilities and with greater chances that students and the community will take better care of them.
Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich first coined the phrase “evidence-based design” in his 1984 study showing that hospital patients healed faster and needed less pain medication if they were in a room with a green view. This is one of many studies that connect nature-filled environments or exposure to nature with mental health and well-being as well as physical health. Expanding on his hospital view study, Ulrich went on to discover that the environmental conditions of psychiatric facilities impacted patient aggression. His theory of supportive design suggests that perceived control, social support, and positive distraction are integral to a patient’s well-being. The study proposed a bundle of design elements to reduce patient aggression. Primary factors are nature-filled environments and a sense of belonging.
Attention Restoration Theory
For over fifty years, psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan studied which environments people preferred and how those environments affected them. Their attention restoration theory aligns with Ulrich’s work, finding that access to nature reduces stress and supports mental health and well-being. It sheds light on the types of places that make people feel most comfortable or most at home. Working with landscape architect Robert L. Ryan, the Kaplans translated their research into designable themes and spatial patterns for restorative environments—those places that best restore people’s minds after stress or mental fatigue.
The following are examples of restorative environments:
Places that offer quiet fascination
Places that separate us from distraction
Places that allow us to wander in small spaces
Places that contain materials with soft and natural textures, such as cloth, wood, stone, or weathered old materials
Indoor places that have windows with views out to nature
To be most effective, these places should give the sense of being far away, in a setting that is large enough or designed in such a way as to hide its boundaries. A restorative place offers fascination, such as a natural setting where we can see or hear leaves or water moving or watch wildlife. And the place needs to be designed or situated so that it allows us to do what we want to do there, for instance, sit, think, eat, read, walk, or be alone.
The design strategies that support students’ mental health and wellbeing can be organized around three general themes (which are explored in more detail in the next chapter): nurture a sense of belonging, provide nature-filled environments, and inspire awe. While these themes overlap and intersect, they help us to begin visualizing specific opportunities to create more supportive school environments.
End Notes:
1. Mary Ellen Flannery, “The Epidemic of Anxiety among Today’s Students,” NEA Today (National Education Association), March 28, 2018, updated March 2019, http://neatoday.org/2018/03/28/the-epidemic-of-student-anxiety/.
3. Vincent J. Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (May 1, 1998): 245–258, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8.
4. Alex Shevrin Venet, “The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching,” Edutopia, August 3, 2018, https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-and-why-trauma-informed-teaching.
6. William C. Sullivan, “Landscapes of 20th Century Chicago Public Housing” (paper presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Savanna, GA, May 1, 2007), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275032357_Landscapes_of_20th_Century_Chicago_Public_Housing; Rodney H. Matsuoka, “High School Landscapes and Student Performance” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/61641.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Schools The Heal by Claire Latané, published by Island Press, 2021.
We trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis. Our guests are Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Dr. Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan is Gitlan, Tsm’syen. Indigenous Knowledge and Natural Science Lecturer at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry, Forest & Conservation Sciences. As a fisheries/aquatic/forest ecologist, she is currently investigating relationships between salmon and healthy forests.
Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of the bestselling, Finding the Mother Tree, is a highly influential, researcher on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
Produced by: Cathy Edwards
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode of our series about nature’s intelligence, we trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis.
We meet Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.
Wander into an ancient woodland and the sheer diversity of pulsing life is breathtaking: birds flitting about high in the towering canopy – bright lichen hugging tree branches – animals scurrying about the undergrowth – moss and mushrooms underfoot – an invisible network of fungi underground.
Forests first appeared on planet earth some 390 million years ago. They’ve operated on nature’s slow time to evolve a mind-bendingly complex choreography. It’s a kind of forest kin-dom that breathes life into the world.
Western science – despite its virtues – has often not seen the forests for the trees. And extractive industries have reduced forests to board feet, devaluing the vast ecological web of relationships that make up forests, and that make them a key life-support system for planet Earth.
Today there’s a global awakening to a new paradigm of how nature operates. It’s actually a very ancient world view, long held by Indigenous and traditional land-based peoples.
Forests have long enchanted human beings as sacred places of mystery, transformation and wisdom. Cultures throughout the ages and around the world have fostered and maintained kinship with our tree relatives.
Suzanne Simard (SS): I just want to say a few names of these relatives. Grandmother tree, grandfather tree, father tree, mother tree, tree people, the tree of life, tree of knowledge, the banyan tree, the Bodhi tree, the cedar tree, the yew tree, the birch tree. Throughout our cultures, we have honored the tree, through Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Shintoism, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, Haida, Haisla, Tsimshian. The trees are always with us. We see them as symbols of life, of wisdom, fertility, continuity, growth, understanding, hospitality, generosity, peace, friendship, spirit.
Host: Suzanne Simard is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She has revolutionized forest science through her research into the relationship between trees and their underground fungal partners.
Born in 1960, she grew up among the old-growth forests of the Monashee Mountains. As the years went by, she became devastated by the industrial-scale destruction of the living treasures of her beloved forests.
SS: So I’ve spent my life studying these trees because this is where I come from. I come from this forest And through my lifetime, I’ve watched what’s happened to our trees. And in fact, in British Columbia, we only have two to three percent of the tall-treed ecosystems still standing. That is wrong.
And so what I did in my grief of watching my forest disappear in front of my eyes is I became a researcher, and I started looking at the underpinnings of what made a forest, because I thought: What are we doing? We’re taking the very things that make a forest and we’re ripping it apart.
Suzanne Simard speaking at Bioneers 2024. Photo credit: Nikki Richter
And I was building on other people’s knowledge, ancient knowledge. But I didn’t know it at the time. I was just trying to fight the corporate model of forest destruction. And so what I did is I started tracing where nutrients went through the forest floor. Where was the energy going; what happened to it when we got rid of the old trees? And in my quest to do this, I found out that, you know, that these trees are in community. Huh, no surprise. Right? The trees are in a forest in community and they’re actually communicating, like a community does.
I’ve worked with many brilliant students, and we’ve all worked on trying to understand how this forest works, how these connections work. And so what we’ve figured out is that when you’re walking through a forest, there’s this huge vibrant thing underneath called a network. And through our work, we changed how we viewed forests, from a bunch of trees that we see aboveground, to a whole network of belowground connections.
Host: This research into underground fungal networks found symbiosis at the heart of the forest’s own management. Cooperation and mutual aid between the trees and mycorrhizal fungal networks, as well as between older and younger trees. Big, elder “mother trees,” as Suzanne calls them, are especially foundational to the health of forests.
Nor does this dance of cooperation stop at the forest’s edge. Enter Teresa Ryan, Suzanne’s colleague at the University of British Columbia where she studies these connections closely.
Teresa Ryan (TR): So my name is Sm’hayetsk. I’m Teresa Ryan. I’m from the Gitlan tribe with the Tsimshian Nation, Ganhada Clan. And my mother is Loa Ryan. As an Indigenous person, I have my science background and I also have an Indigenous knowledge base that I pull from at all times.
Teresa Ryan speaking at Bioneers 2017. Photo credit: Nikki Richter
Host: As an Indigenous scientist, Teresa Ryan was unsurprised at the findings, such as how salmon from the ocean nourish the forest.
TR: These are beautiful systems that are interconnected. The salmon, when they come in from the ocean, they are bringing with them marine-derived nutrients, and particularly, marine-derived nitrogen, into the river system. They’re feeding many predators, the charismatic species that people see are the bears. They’ll take a salmon that they’ve caught to the riparian area alongside the river, up to their favorite spot, eating their favorite parts. And then they’ll leave the carcass there and go get another one.
And then this amazing thing happens when that carcass is decomposing into the soils, there’s other critters that are coming along and nibbling on it too. Then there’s the organisms in the soil that are also feasting on this annual abundance of food that just shows up on their doorstep.
And then there are nutrients that are carried along mycorrhizal networks in the forest. We actually had a student in our salmon forest project, demonstrated that marine-derived nitrogen is above waterfalls, where salmon can’t actually get to. So that shows us that this marine-derived nitrogen, which it’s coming from the ocean, is transmitted belowground in these vast networks of root systems belowground.
Host: It’s an awe-inspiring parable of the circle of life. Nitrogen from the ocean feeds these vast Canadian forests, courtesy of salmon, bears, microbes and the mycorrhizal fungi that nourish the trees through their roots. There’s nothing like 390 million years of R&D to get it right.
TR: Salmon are everywhere in the forest. And that’s pretty amazing when you think about the size of our trees that we have in these forests, they’re huge. Salmon play an important role in their life cycle.
It’s also beneficial for the salmon, so there’s a reciprocal relationship with the forest. The forest provides the shade, the canopy cover, to keep the streams cool. And that’s important for salmon because they need to have the cool water for the return migration and to lay their egg nests in the streams. And so it’s a feedback mechanism.
Host: Historically, Indigenous practices developed over millennia reflect an astute awareness of the intricate interdependence of forest life. Traditional salmon fishing methods have carefully avoided overfishing, for example, understanding that the rest of the forest needs the salmon too.
Traditional Indigenous teachings already recognized the underground fungal networks that Teresa and Suzanne documented through their scientific study- such as those of the Indigenous Skokomish elder, Subiyay.
TR: He was a very wise elder. And he would tell the stories about the tree people. We have stories about salmon people, and we have stories about tree people, about stone people—there’s all these different beings, and they’re equivalent; they’re people.Subiyay would tell stories about how a forest has so much to teach us, because there’s all of these connections belowground that are interwoven. And because they’re so interconnected it provides something that we can emulate in our communities. It shows us the strength of community.
Host: Community, mutual aid, kinship – these are powerful operating instructions for how to live for the long haul. Not to mention the majesty and genius of this slow-time natural magic.
In 2021, Suzanne Simard wrote a breakthrough book called “Finding the Mother Tree” where she chronicles these remarkable forest networks. It became an influential bestseller, upending the public’s view of forests.
Suzanne discussed the book with Bioneers producer JP Harpignies.
SS: My purpose of writing that book was just really to convey what this new research is showing, and a better-informed public, to me, is a public that will protect nature better.
And I felt like they needed to know, because what we were doing in forestry was destroying the very underpinnings of what made a forest, through forestry practices. And I think, they need to know. A plantation is not the same as an old growth forest, for example.
JP Harpignies (JPH): Right, right.
SS: And what my research is showing is that you need all these complex relationships that are intact and protected and really nurtured to create a healthy ecosystem that provides the life support that we need, that we need and all our relations need.
Host: A forest is known as a “complex adaptive system.” It’s self-organizing. It has dynamic, regenerative relationships that adapt and evolve with changing conditions, while creating conditions conducive to life.
Because the nature of nature is change, it produces emergent qualities fitted to the time and place. It’s far more than the sum of its parts – and the health of any one part depends on its overall health.
As complex adaptive systems, mature forests are wildly different from the mono-cultural tree plantations installed by industrial forestry. These projects are designed to reduce trees to a uniform commodity that’s easy to monetize in the global marketplace. As Suzanne Simard points out, plantations are not forests at all.
SS: My book is sort of like a different way of looking at the forest. That’s quite opposite to what mainstream forestry will tell you, which is you can replace an old forest and create a more productive forest if you use tree breeding and pesticides and fertilizers, and spacing, and thinning, and I’m coming along saying, actually, we need to work with these natural systems.
And, you know, as people look at natural systems and they compare them to these managed systems — you see it in the journals as well—these natural systems that are naturally recovering are in better condition than the ones that we’ve applied this industrial model against. And I’m saying that’s a better way to go. It doesn’t mean don’t do anything, but it means do it differently. And so that’s a threat to many decades of research that supported that industrial model.
JPH: It seems very much that what you’re talking about is a holistic, whole-systems approach as opposed to a reductionist efficiency model, and that that is really like almost an ideological struggle across a whole range of fields.
SS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot harder to manage a system as a complex adaptive system than to reduce it down to rows of trees. But the consequences of the rows of trees are much harder to deal with in the longer run than if you’ve managed this whole system. So a whole systems level approach is you’re looking at multiple scales of interaction; you’re looking at all the energy coming in and how it’s flowing through the system, how it’s flowing out of the system; you’re looking at socio-ecological principles and interactions. It’s bottom up, it’s top down at the same time. It’s all of that together, instead of saying, the industrial model is: we know best; we’re going to do it this way; we’re going to create this forest to look like this. That is really easy to do. It’s easy to clearcut and plant a forest. It doesn’t mean that the outcome is good.
It’s a lot harder to work in these systems level complex systems where there’s many actors and many complex relationships, but that is where the solutions to climate change are. It is in honoring the complexity of those systems. It’s working with the people that know these systems so well for so long. That is the answer to filling our carbon deficits and our biodiversity deficits. It’s working very, very sensitively with cultures and ecosystems.
Host: After the break, Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan suggest that now is the time to unite modern science and traditional ecological knowledge to bring about a genuine paradigm shift capable of restoring the Earth and enlisting human beings to become a blessing on the land.
Host: When the Europeans first came to Turtle Island, they thought they’d found a luxuriantly fertile and abundant wilderness where numerous Indians living there were simply living freely off the fat of the land. The newcomers couldn’t have been more wrong.
It was actually a vast cultivated landscape carefully tended by the Indigenous peoples living there. They understood that human beings are a keystone species on whom many others depend.
For Canadian Indigenous peoples, the colonial intruders arriving in the 17th century overran their homelands and ravaged their ancient cultural ties to the forest. It caused an epic historical discontinuity both for First Peoples and for the forests, as Teresa Ryan describes.
TR: Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia were surprised by colonialism when it landed on our doorstep one day. And so we’ve been tortured trying to figure out why can’t we do our stewardship practices; what happened to our management of resources?
And whatever goes on in the watersheds, such as forestry activity or agricultural activity, or mining or anything, it goes right into the streams and it affects salmon. So Indigenous people throughout the entire salmon forest region, which is in California, all the way along the coast north, all the way around Alaska into the Arctic. And the Indigenous people in these areas have observed changes over the last 150 years. And so how do we get back into expressing our traditions, compared to the way this colonial system has managed it?
Host: Early Native Americans had a widespread system of rules and regulations, and they recognized some limited land ownership because owning brought a responsibility to the land and incentivized moderation.
They also had shared lands. The fishing season was regulated up and down entire river drainages across many cultures speaking different languages. If you broke these kinds of laws, there were grave penalties—and spiritual consequences as well. With the arrival of the colonists, all that changed.
TR: When the colonial agent said you’ll be on this reserve and don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go fishing, you’re not allowed to do that.
Our economy was obliterated, and that has had a significant impact on Indigenous people for sure, but it’s also had a significant impact on the resources that we provided these stewardship activities for for thousands of years. And now that these resources are vanishing rapidly, there’s a sudden interest in these Indigenous knowledge systems. The land was taken, the culture suppressed, being assimilated, and it’s devastating.
And so critical imperative action is needed to restore the Indigenous stewardship to these systems, because the knowledge still exists. We still have it, and that’s something we don’t want to give up, not when we’ve lost all these other things. The knowledge is treasured. It has to be protected so that there are future generations that can take care of the resources.
Canadian Wet’suwet’en indigenous first nation people fishing salmon. Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Host: Indeed, there’s a global awakening today around the value of traditional Indigenous knowledge. It’s coupled with the Land Back movement and the intercultural need for First Peoples to be involved in land management decision-making.
Prioritizing the rights and engagement of Canadian First Peoples in protecting and restoring the forests is an explicit imperative for Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard.
So how can traditional ecological knowledge be integrated with Western scientific research? Can these two sometimes contradictory world views serve as complementary paradigms to guide humanity through this evolutionary keyhole? Suzanne Simard.
SS: I have this project called the Mother Tree Project, which I started 10 years ago, and we’re working with nations, as well as other people who are working on the land—communities, local communities, woodlots. We have this big climate gradient where we’re applying sort of these forestry practices to look for better ways than clearcutting, and then measuring the impacts on the ecological properties and processes.
The most exciting part is working with Indigenous people up and down the Pacific Coast and the interior British Columbia, finding different ways to re-engage with the forest, to get land back from colonial forestry, and then using a combination of our scientific knowledge with their objectives and goals for the land.
Because they’re the stewards of the land for millennia, since time immemorial, culturally connected to the land. And that governance and tending and responsibility its very complex and old systems.
It’s not just ecology and it’s not just culture. It’s the two of them together.
There’s a lot of things I don’t know. But it’s really, really rewarding. It’s the most exciting work I’ve ever done.
Suzanne Simard measures soil carbon in a coastal rainforest. Photo credit: UBC Faculty of Forestry
Host: Respecting traditional knowledge helps inform the design of the research. It might suggest a new avenue to investigate, or in some cases, standard scientific methods may simply be inappropriate. Suzanne sees this integrated approach as enriching the research.
SS: In working with the nations, you can’t just apply an experiment across this big landscape. Each place, what we do has got to be adapted to each particular nation and what their goals for their plants, and their medicines, and their trees are.
And so, for example, when we work with the Nlaka’pamux Nation there is no clearcutting allowed, which, of course, in an experimental setting you want to create this broad range of conditions so that you can make comparisons of the worst and the best, but we can’t really do that. We have to change it so that we’re saving these sacred trees, even though we’re trying to measure what is the protection of those trees; what does it mean for the ecosystem to measure it against; what if you don’t have them?
I’m working with the Ma’amtagila Nation, and we visited this grove of ancient sister cedars; they’re like thousands of years old, these cedar trees. They all live in this grove, and the generations of trees have come up around them, so there’s a whole multi-generational forest.
And I was, you know, invited to talk a little bit about connection between these trees that I’ve been studying, and out of that conversation, I thought we need to understand more about the kinship. How does that kinship work among cedar trees?
We’re doing all these experiments now to actually measure, what happens to their productivity or their biochemistry, or their reproductive ability when they’re around kin versus strangers. And it was really based on this conversation, and being in that forest, and understanding that traditional knowledge that led us to do that experiment.
Host: Simard’s research suggests a radical shift in perspective that values the social and cultural aspects of our relationship with trees and with nature. It challenges the increasingly discredited Western scientific ideology that intelligence is restricted to human beings. It elevates cooperation over competition as the driving force of evolution.
Unsurprisingly, Simard’s work has been attacked by some scientists who accuse her of anthropomorphizing the natural world. But as she points out, such language is actually nothing new.
SS: In biology, we’ve always used that kind of language. Think about like families, plant families.
JPH: That’s right, yeah
SS: We’ve been doing that forever. Or in forestry, we call things parent trees. I started calling these mother trees because it invokes the regenerative capacity of a forest. And there was a lot of backlash around that. But the term parent tree in genetics is used all the time, and it’s been around for a long time.
Our language is full of it. And it’s good. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It helps people understand. Automatically, you go, oh, I get that, because I can relate to that.
And regarding the intelligence of a forest, you know, again, language. Right? We have thought of intelligence as a human thing. We think of ourselves as the center of this anthropocentric center of all living beings, at least in Western culture. And that leads us to think that there can’t be intelligence in nature because it’s not us. We’ve assigned that to humans. It’s a bit of hubris, of course, around human dominance and superiority, but this intelligence of—How do we define that? Well, the ability to make decisions, that’s intelligent. To be adaptive and responsive. That’s a sign of intelligence.
In mycorrhizal networks, you know, the patterns are biological neural network patterns. And we can describe that mathematically. And decisions are made about how to propagate that network or support these trees.
And whole communities, whole ecosystems are working together, that’s an intelligent social phenomenon. So, to me, the forest has all the qualities of intelligence.
Host: Native American restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez offers this Indigenous perspective: “We don’t heal the land. We intervene no more than necessary to allow natural processes to heal the land. It’s about relationship. You have to love the natural world — the plants and the animals — and take care of them as you would your own family. It’s about our responsibility as human beings to participate every day in the re-creation of the Earth. It just goes on and on.”
Again, Teresa Ryan…
TR: Everything that is living has spirit. The way that we think we don’t want to offend those spirits. We don’t want to offend those beings. The way that we think about these beings has an impact on how we adjust our management. Because they’ll know. They’ll know that we are not honoring their life and they may not return.
So when we think about intelligence in the forest, from a science perspective, we are seeing responses of beings in the forest, particularly through the work on the mycorrhizal networks. We can actually demonstrate that we’re seeing responses. And it’s going to be a work in progress, but it’s come such a long way in helping us to understand these relationships in science. And how there’s reactions in these beings, in their habitats and in their life cycles, and the services that they provide.
So they’re probably smarter than us
Host: Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard… “Seeing the Forest for the Trees”.
If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together.
Jennifer Ackerman with a Great Gray Owl. Credit: Sofia Runarsdotter
With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? “What an Owl Knows” by Jennifer Ackerman tells the extraordinary story of how we’ve come to understand owls, their biology, brains, and behavior, and explores many of the surprising new scientific discoveries: how owls talk to one another, how they ‘see’ sound, how they court their mates in wild and outlandish ways and fiercely protect their nests, how they migrate huge distances and survive the radically changing conditions of our planet.
In the following excerpt from “What an Owl Knows,” Ackerman delves into the cognitive abilities of owls and what they can teach us about our own measures of intelligence. You can read more from Ackerman about owls’ impressive abilities, adaptations and “ways of knowing” in this conversation with Bioneers.
Jennifer Ackerman is an award-winning science writer and speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of “What an Owl Knows,” “The Bird Way,” and “The Genius of Birds.”
We used to think all birds were simple-minded, flying automatons, driven solely by instinct, and that their brains were so small and primitive they were capable of only the simplest mental processes.
An owl’s brain, like most bird brains, would easily fit inside a nut—a fact that gave rise to the derogatory term birdbrain. But we’ve known for some time that brain size is not the only—or even the main—indicator of intelligence. And the truth is, most owls have relatively large brains for their body size, just as we humans do. Scientists recently proposed the origin of their big brains: parental provisioning, parents feeding their young during a critical period of their development. When a group of animals called the “core land birds” (songbirds, parrots, and owls) arose some sixty-five million years ago, the theory goes, they brought with them something extraordinary: altricial young, chicks that are hatched in an undeveloped state, requiring parental care. With that trait came extensive parental provisioning of those immature young, which resulted in notably large brains in some bird lineages, including parrots, corvids (ravens, crows, and jays), and owls.
Size aside, bird brains have also gotten a rap because of a perceived difference in their architecture—an apparent lack of a layered cerebral cortex like ours—reinforcing that once-derisive view. The neurons in the cortex-like part of bird brains (called the “pallium”) are arranged in little bulblike clusters, like a head of garlic, whereas our neurons are arranged in layers, like a lasagna. We thought that an animal needed a layered cortex to be intelligent. But new research shows that the bird pallium is in fact organized a lot more like the mammalian cortex than we first imagined.
Moreover, scientists have discovered that what really matters in the intelligent brain—however it may be organized—is the density of nerve cells, or neurons. And while the brains of birds may be small overall, it turns out that in many species, they’re densely packed with neurons, small neurons. This gives the brains of some birds, such as parrots and corvids, more information-processing units than most mammalian brains and the same cognitive capabilities as monkeys, and even great apes. The more neurons there are in a bird’s pallium, regardless of its brain or body size, the more capable it is of complex cognition and behavior.
Also critical to intelligence is the connections between neurons—how they’re networked, wired together. And in this way, bird brains are not so different from our brains, with some very similar neural pathways. For example, to learn their songs, songbirds use neural pathways that are similar to those we use to learn to speak. Crows use the same neural circuits we use to recognize human faces.
More and more, the pillars of difference between our brains and those of birds are toppling. The latest to go is the capacity for consciousness. A 2020 study of Carrion Crows suggests that bird brains possess the neural foundations of consciousness. “The underpinnings are there whenever there is a pallium,” says neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel.
All of this is humbling and suggests we still have a lot to learn about bird intelligence.
Great Gray Owl coming in for a kill. Credit: Lynn Bystrom
But owls? The knock on owls is that most of the cortex-like part of their brains is dedicated to vision and hearing, some 75 percent, in fact, which supposedly leaves only a quarter for other purposes.
Not long ago, scientists conducted a classic test of intelligence on Great Gray Owls. The so-called string-pulling paradigm is widely used to test problem-solving skills in mammals and birds. The task requires animals to understand that pulling on a string moves a food reward to within reach. Crows and ravens peg the test easily. The experiment showed that Great Grays presented with a single baited string failed to comprehend the physics underlying the relationship between the objects—that is, they didn’t grasp that pulling on the string would move the food toward them.
But really, is this a fair test of an owl’s intelligence? As Gail Buhl remarks, “It’s kind of like telling a rabbit, fish, or antelope that in order to pass an intelligence test, they have to climb a tree.”
Owls may not be smart in the ways crows are smart, in the ways we are smart, devising technical solutions to physical problems or comprehending the physics underlying object relationships. But this may only point to the limitations of our own definitions and measures of intelligence.
Little Owls are a symbol of wisdom, companion to Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. Pavel Linhart points out that there may be something to this. The Little Owls that Linhart studies recognize people, distinguishing between the farmers they’re used to seeing several times a day and the researchers who sometimes band them, check their nest boxes, or observe them through binoculars, and behaving differently around the two types of people. With the farmers, they’re relaxed and don’t take off as quickly as they do with the ornithologists. “These owls are also very curious and investigate their environment,” he says, which can make them vulnerable to certain traps around human settlements—vertical pipes, ventilation tubes, hay blowers, chimneys, etc.—they can get in but can’t get out. (So curiosity can also kill an owl.)
Ask ornithologist Rob Bierregaard whether owls are smart, and he’ll tell you a story about wild Barred Owls. He trains the wild owls to come to a whistle so that he can tag them with a GPS tracker or retrieve the device. “I’ll put a mouse out on the lawn, and when they come down to catch it, I’ll whistle,” he explains. “Then I’ll put out another mouse and whistle, another mouse and whistle. After three mice, they’ll come when I whistle.” The owls learn this in a day, and it never takes longer than three sessions to get a bird completely trained. “I’ve had birds that were waiting for me the day after I trained them,” he says. “So my IQ assessment is based on how quickly they learn that a whistle means free mice.”
Bierregaard remembers one owl with an impressive memory for the training. “We called him Houdini because he got out of every trap that we could put up,” he recalls. “Three or four years after I first lured Houdini with mice, I went back to his woods to look for him. I whistled, and he came in. It had been years since I’d been in his woods, and he remembered that whistle!
For humans, the hoot of an owl in the night can stop us in our tracks, with the ability to both incite awe and raise the hair on the back of our necks. Science writer Jennifer Ackerman, author of the bestselling book “What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds,” remembers standing on a friend’s deck in Turin, Italy, and hearing two Tawny Owls calling to each other in the darkness.
“It was just so eerie and transporting,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, wow, that is their world, and it’s so unlike mine.’”
The hoots we hear — unique as fingerprints, signaling mates, allies and rivals — are only the beginning. Owls communicate through an array of vocalizations, each with its own context and significance. Their acute sense of hearing gives them the ability to construct a 3-D map of their surroundings and pluck a mouse from the grass without even seeing it. In this interview with Bioneers, Ackerman delves into owls’ impressive abilities, adaptations and “ways of knowing” that show us the intelligence of these enigmatic birds. You can read more about owls, including their ability to learn, in this excerpt from “What an Owl Knows.”
Bioneers: As you note in the introduction to your book, owls have specific meanings in many cultures, from symbols of wisdom to harbingers of death or victory. They appear in cave paintings, mythology, and stories, from ancient times to the present day (enter: Hedwig and her Hogwarts colleagues). It always feels special to encounter an owl in the wild (or in a backyard, for that matter). What do you think makes owls so evocative in the human imagination?
Long-eared Owl. Credit: Čeda Vučković
Jennifer Ackerman: I think it’s really a combination of things. I think we see ourselves in them. They have these round heads and forward-facing eyes, and some species even look kind of baby faced and cute. I think this resemblance to us is one reason that some cultures have viewed them as intelligent, such as the Greeks associating owls with the goddess of wisdom, Athena. But at the same time, they’re so radically different from us and from other birds, too. They’re creatures of the night and so well adapted to the world of darkness, which is a world we can’t navigate very well ourselves. They’re quiet in their flight, so they come and go without a sound. How they appear and disappear out of the dark without any kind of advance notice is kind of spooky. Living things really aren’t supposed to do that. Owls really break the rules in a way. I think that’s why we sometimes consider them almost supernatural, and they have a kind of mystical presence for us. It’s this whole package of the familiar and the strange and the mysterious and uncanny that really makes these birds so exciting and also sometimes so disturbing and troubling for people.
Bioneers: We mentioned the cultural association with wisdom, but that hasn’t typically been how scientists and those who work with owls have assessed them. How do owls challenge our traditional notions of animal intelligence? Why do you think some have viewed owls as more instinctual than intelligent?
Ackerman: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about bird intelligence, and I’m going to give you a roundabout answer to this question because I really think our understanding of the mind of other animals is still in its infancy. We tend to see intelligence through our own lens. Other creatures are intelligent if they can do the kinds of things that we do. But I do think there’s a growing awareness that there are different kinds of intelligence. There are different ways of knowing in the animal world, and we’re becoming more appreciative of that as we learn more about it.
There are different ways of knowing in the animal world, and we’re becoming more appreciative of that as we learn more about it.
On the question of owl intelligence, the science has swung back and forth quite dramatically. For a long time, it was just assumed that their behavior was hard-wired. They don’t demonstrate the kinds of intelligence that we can measure easily, such as physical problem solving, which we can measure well in crows and parrots. I think what we’ve come to understand is that owls may not be smart in the same ways that parrots and corvids [such as crows, jays, and magpies] are smart, but they have big brains for their body size, just as other birds do in some families. In “The Genius of Birds,” the way I define genius is this knack for knowing what you’re doing in your environment, and I think owls are really superb at that. Theysense and navigate their world through super acute hearing and sound location. Their knowledge and ways of knowing are very different from ours, but I think that’s one of the things that makes them so intriguing.
Bioneers: The excerpt from your book gives the example of how owls can be trained to come to a whistle in less than a day, demonstrating their ability to learn. What other compelling evidence have you found that exemplifies owls’ intelligence?
Ackerman: While writing the book, I learned from those who train owls and other raptors, usually as ambassador birds for education, that owls were once thought to be unintelligent because they were difficult to train. But what we’ve learned in the past decade or so is that it’s really we who need the training, because owl behavior and knowledge is very subtle and complex. It’s hard to read their body language, and we’re beginning to understand that they grasp a lot more than we thought they did. They’re just much more subtle in the ways that they express their responses.
Genes involved with flexibility of behavior, which is connected with intelligence, are also evolving.
One of the measures of intelligence is how flexible a creature is in response to new challenges in its environment, and we’ve realized owls are very flexible in this way. I think in particular of Barred Owls and Burrowing Owls that are adapting to life in the city. That requires great flexibility of behavior. They’re being faced with new challenges all the time. One of my favorite examples is the Burrowing Owls in South America, which have been studied over the past couple of decades. As the owls’ normal habitat disappeared because of agricultural development, they’ve moved into cities, and scientists have been studying them to try to understand how they have adapted so well. I spent time in the suburbs of Maringá in Brazil, and I couldn’t believe that these birds were just going about their breeding business in the middle of this suburb with loud music playing and bicycles going by and horns honking. It turns out that the brains of these birds are adapting very quickly. For instance, some of the genes that are involved in their ability to tune out ambient noise and focus on finding a food source have evolved. Genes involved with flexibility of behavior, which is connected with intelligence, are also evolving. So there are changes that are happening behaviorally and in the genetic makeup of these birds to adapt to city life.
We’ve also learned that owls learn throughout their lives, so they are not just hardwired with instinctive knowledge. They can learn from their environment and they can learn from each other, and I think that’s really good evidence of owl intelligence. The other evidence is their sophisticated communication skills. They have much more elaborate vocalizations than we ever imagined.
Bioneers: Given their nocturnal lives and the relative size of their eyes, owls obviously have amazing vision. But in the book, you also spend quite a bit of time exploring their truly extraordinary hearing and vocalization abilities, which are likely a set of skills that most of us don’t think about when (if) we take the time to consider, as you put it, “what it’s like to be an owl.” What really struck a chord with you?
Spectacled Owls. Credit: Pete Myers, Calidris Photography
Ackerman: I’m really fascinated by the sense of hearing in owls. I think it’s just so exquisitely sensitive, and at least for some species, like barn owls, it’s almost unequaled in the animal world. Unlike humans, owls don’t lose their hearing cells as they age, so their hearing remains acute throughout their lifetime. That’s an indicator of just how vital it is to their survival. In some species, the asymmetrical placement of their ears, one higher than the other, gives them the ability to really precisely locate the source of a sound, even the faintest sound, in three-dimensional space. All of that sound processing is happening very fast. The brain is comparing sounds arriving at each ear — how loud they are, which ear detects them first, and other information — in a matter of microseconds and telling an owl where to direct its strike. I think it’s quite amazing how this process of sound localization has evolved, and how it gives these birds this incredibly precise ability to locate their prey in total darkness.
I also have special affection for owl vocalizations, partly because I’m a communicator myself. People used to ask me what my favorite bird was, and I would tell them it was the Black-capped Chickadee, because it has one of the most sophisticated communication systems of any land animal. Then I learned about the vocalizations of owls, which may not be at the same level as chickadees but were one of the really delightful surprises of the book. Like most people, I thought, “Oh, owls hoot. That’s hardwired, and that’s all they do. There’s no vocal learning involved. It’s very simple.” But it turns out, those hoots are really filled with meaning. Owls have different kinds of hoots as well as different kinds of vocalizations. They chitter, and squawk and squeal, and all these vocalizations have very specific meanings and are used in specific contexts for specific purposes. I think it’s fascinating what we’re beginning to unearth, some of it with the help of technology such as machine learning. It’s helping us to understand in detail the individuality of an owl’s vocalizations and how you can actually fingerprint an owl with its individual hoots. That’s how the birds recognize each other and recognize mates, allies and rivals, all through these individual hoots, which are indicators of their individual identity. In Great Horned Owls, the owl chicks start to vocalize in the egg. You can hear their little chitters inside the egg. I thought that was pretty amazing.
Bioneers: Humans are clearly captivated by owls, as seen with Barry the Barred Owl and Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl, both of whom lived in Central Park and sadly died unnaturally (Barry by colliding with a truck and Flaco with a building). What do you hope a greater scientific understanding of owls, in combination with this natural captivation, can lead to when it comes to conservation?
Ackerman holds a Long-eared Owl. Credit: Solai Lefay
Ackerman: It’s a really good question. I have so much gratitude for the scientists and the researchers who are doing the hard work to understand owls and how they use their habitats so that we can protect them — both the birds and the habitats. I’m grateful to them for the light that they shed on these real marvels of owl biology and behavior. I think that those windows on these very mysterious birds awaken wonder and awe in people, and it helps them both understand owls and also love them and want to save them. On this point, I like to quote Rachel Carson, the great naturalist and writer and an inspiration for me. Carson wrote that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the life around us, the less taste we shall have for its destruction.” And I think that really captures what scientists and researchers can do; they can open our eyes to the wonder and reality of these birds.
From Soil to Soul: Young Filmmakers Explore the Local Food Sovereignty Movement
Through the powerful stories of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers, regenerative practitioners, food activists, and thought leaders, the film seriesFrom Soil to Soulcharts a path toward food sovereignty — a future where communities reclaim their right to control their local food systems. And by doing so, heal themselves and their communities. The three creators of this film series, a geospatial data scientist, an expert in sustainability and regenerative strategies, and a multimedia artist and filmmaker, share what they have learned in the process.
Ankur Shah uses satellite data to assess climate hazards and environmental issues, and is the Director of Operations at Mycelium, where he has designed sustainable food systems.
Jahnavi Mange has worked with grassroots organizations, local governments and global corporations to drive equity and environmental impact. Margaret To’s climate activism led her to start Studio SAKA, dedicated to social impact and climate education.
Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Ankur, Jahnavi, and Margaret.
ARTY MANGAN: In the process of making this project, did you learn things that you didn’t know about how people are taking control of their food system? And if you did, how did that reshape your vision of what you were trying to accomplish?
JAHNAVI MANGE: Around the time we started doing From Soil to Soul, I studied permaculture from David Shaw at Santa Cruz Permaculture. There I met a lot of people who were into ecological farming, or into building nurseries, or people who just wanted to learn about what goes into building a relationship with land, and growing your own food, and how the systems work. It was very eye-opening to get my feet on the ground, in the sand or mud, and to understand firsthand what’s happening. It helped me get a deeper appreciation for the challenges the folks we interviewed in L.A. and the Bay Area who are growing food are facing.
ANKUR SHAH: We’ve heard tech solutions that claim there is a single silver bullet to solve many problems, or they try to look for global food system solutions. But by interviewing people in community gardens and urban farms, we’ve found the answers to food system problems can vary by region and culture, and they need to be different. Different people in different parts of the world will have different solutions for what a food-just community and food-sovereignty community would look like. So we try to carve that out and pay attention to not aggregating solutions and to not look for a single answer to solve complex food systems issues. It’s not the way we’re approaching it. We want to be very careful about cultural, regional, and social nuances.
MARGARET TO: Echoing what Ankur said, there’s no one silver bullet. By interviewing these people, we got to know them as a person with an individual personality. Through this type of storytelling, we want our audience to also feel that they are connected with them; it’s not someone else’s issue, it’s actually all of our issue.
ARTY: Why is it important to tell the stories of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people?
JAHNAVI: In the present times we are in, Indigenous wisdom is so important. How do we use Indigenous wisdom as a mindset in order to improve our current systems? And BIPOC communities are not given the kind of platform they deserve. Those communities and individuals face even greater challenges than other people.
With our platform, we can create some equity by giving those youth and changemakers the voice and an audience to see what really goes on, and how those folks are championing different food sovereignty initiatives in their communities. And hopefully inspire our viewers also to participate and to take initiatives.
ANKUR: In the past couple hundred years, food systems have changed dramatically, partially or in some cases fully due to colonialism. Islands which were food sovereign before, like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and even Alaska, are no longer food sovereign. They rely mostly on U.S. food imports because of the breakdown of culture, which has led to the breakdown of food systems that were culturally appropriate and regionally sovereign. What’s been lost is the traditional knowledge of food systems, food sovereignty, food justice, and what foods to eat by region. We want to focus more on those kinds of solutions because in past decades the rise of monoculture, large-scale farming, pesticide and herbicide use, are weakening soil health. And that has led to the problems of the modern food system and health issues. So, we want to highlight regional, traditional and cultural solutions, and hence the focus on BIPOC, because the normalized, patriarchal voices have led us down the path we are on now.
ARTY: I’ve worked with Indigenous farmers and also with Black farmers, and sometimes I feel like the term BIPOC is too general. There are differences in perspectives, differences in experience. What’s the commonality that you have found among various BIPOC folks when you did this project?
JAHNAVI: As Ankur said, one commonality is being connected to the culture and the native wisdom. In Indigenous cultures, one common piece is that they have been following nature’s guidance. They are connected to how their ancestors ate and how they treated the soil and the land.
When you talk about different BIPOC cultures, whether they’re Pacific Islanders, or Asian cultures, or African cultures, there’s a system which has developed in a way that would attend to that particular bioregion. Through generations, people have been conscious about following that particular system and not generalizing it, because one solution doesn’t fit all.
ANKUR: One thing I can say from our experience is we found that Black and Indigenous farmers and stewards that we interviewed had more of a communal mindset when it comes to taking care of the community, rather than individualistic mindsets. We didn’t hear very much: “This is my farm,” or “my food system,” or “taking care of me.” Rather, we saw community gardens being built to take care of the health of the children living there, for the people living there. For example, a really great person we interviewed, who was also at Bioneers, is an Indigenous woman from Alaska. Deenaalee Hodgdon, is working on salmon food sovereignty. They are working with the community and native stewards, and it’s more communal driven. They’re creating a collective called the Smokehouse Collective, and it’s really inspiring to see. It’s not at all individualistic. We see a lot of people, especially in the prepper community, taking the “my farm, my land, my food,” “my prep” kind of mindset, and that is not what we saw in BIPOC communities. We’re seeing a very communal mindset to take care of people around them, and I think that’s what we need. We’re trying to highlight community-driven solutions.
JAHNAVI: We also saw that many are open to collaborations, even between the different cultures and communities. They are very much open to collaborations and continued learning rather than being siloed. That is something which we really want to address in our docuseries as well, the interconnected systems and collaborations, and how that would help us create a better future together.
ARTY: One urban farmer that you feature is Imani Diggs from Southern California. He healed his obesity by changing his lifestyle, and by doing so, he found his mission in life and is now helping empower others to heal themselves. This is a classic example of from the wound emanates the gift. His personal healing has inspired him to help others. Can you elaborate on how you see that, and did you see that in some of the other folks that you met?
ANKUR: There is an example which is not in the movie yet, but will be in our series at some point. We interviewed Miguel Villarreal, the interim director of the national Farm-to-School Network. He is bringing locally grown, healthy meals to schools to reduce child health issues such as child obesity by increasing child nutrition. His health was affected by a poor diet in school as a kid. I live in Alabama; I’ve seen kids at schools eating junk food for lunch.
What Miguel is doing with his team is incredible. He’s connecting local food supply chains and local farmers to procure meals for schools. In the process he is building community around food, including parents, children, farmers, and teachers. He is getting everyone on the same page regarding child nutrition and child health. It’s obviously in the best interests of the parents for their kids to be healthy.
Teachers have seen grades improve due to children eating healthy foods. The farmers benefit by having a local buyer of locally grown food. He’s creating a win-win-win solution in communities across the country, and it’s, for the most part, a bipartisan agreement that child health matters.
JAHNAVI: Talia Dotson, whom we have featured in the Palate of the Soul, her story starts from her personal journey in healing. She experienced a lot of health issues, and initially she didn’t realize that it had to do with the food she was eating – lots of processed foods. She started eating more fresh food, especially organically grown food, and became more connected to nature that way. That was her inspiration to help people understand what conscious consumption is and how to build a relationship with food.
ANKUR: One more example that comes to mind, and this is not in the film yet either, but we have a full two-hour interview with Deenaalee Hodgdon whose health had suffered from eating processed foods like processed greens in Alaska that were imported and not locally grown. That led them to pursue ancestral roots and knowledge of the traditional foods in Alaska that their people used to eat. That’s the journey which ultimately led Deenaalee to pursue salmon food sovereignty and create the Smokehouse Collective. They also work on other issues regarding commercial fishing in their region. That’s an example of how a journey of healing can lead to exploration of finding traditional foods, traditional roots, ancestral knowledge, and then bringing that back to the community in a beautiful way.
JAHNAVI: We traveled to Hawaii, and we learned about how systematically Indigenous traditions and culture were prohibited. They were not allowed to learn their native Hawaiian language in the schools. And were discouraged from growing food in their traditional agricultural manner. The island now imports 80 percent of their food. But there’s a revolution happening in Hawaii led by the people who still hold the knowledge of the ancestral Hawaiian food systems, agriculture, and languages. They are teaching and empowering the youth in these initiatives, and teaching them about Native Hawaiian culture.
ARTY: You mentioned Talia Dotson. In the film, she said convenience and fast are a problem and are the opposite of natural processes. She said being alive is hard, and gave the example of a seed struggling to break through its outer coat to get its roots established in the soil. What do we lose with convenience and fast?
JAHNAVI: When you are constantly hustling around, when you are constantly in the fast pace of life, you lose the conscious connections with yourself and with the entire ecosystem around you. To do anything meaningful in life, you need to pause, you need to reconnect–taking time out to connect to your food, being mindful and grateful about it, and sharing a meal with others in your family and community versus being in a hurry while you eat. What you eat, the way you eat, all of that contributes to who you are and the person you are becoming, and it influences society. That’s how I relate to Talia’s words.
MARGARET: The act of making food together is being lost, as we’re always just grabbing fast food.
There’s a part of the interview that didn’t make it to this cut of the Food Justice in L.A. mini episode. Talia talked about going somewhere to eat, and when she tasted the food she felt a kind of sadness. She realized that the cook must be upset. So, the energy of the person making the food goes into the food, and also goes into our body when we eat it. Who are the people making the food, and how your food is being made is important.
ANKUR: I agree, and to some degree I’m also guilty of that. I also think that this fast-paced life has given rise to many health issues, especially microwaving things in plastic containers. We are finding out that our brains and many organs have microplastics, and partially that is to blame on convenience because convenience has led us to this excessive usage of plastics, for beverages, for foods, for every little thing. So convenience, I would say, has given rise to a lot of health issues, which is ultimately sabotaging us. It’s not convenient in the long run, even though it might seem it is in the short run.
JAHNAVI: In India, there are certain seasons where specific kinds of foods are prepared. Growing up there, I have seen how a couple of families come together, especially the women in different families and neighborhoods come together, share food, and create some kind of fermented foods that are going to be eaten a few months later. When you eat that, you’re so grateful and thankful to everyone who prepared it.
At some churches or some temples, food is given to many people. There is a sense of satisfaction because it’s been prepared out of love and the sense of giving, and the sense of belonging. All of that makes a big difference.
ARTY: I read a study some time ago that families that eat at least one meal together most days of the week, the youth of those families, have not only better physical health outcomes but better emotional health outcomes as well.
ANKUR: Growing up, my grandparents always made it a point to make sure at least dinner is a full family meal, meaning everyone sitting in a circle or at least around the table and having a meal together.
ARTY: My next question is for you, Margaret. You work on developing cross-pollination among local communities, Indigenous Peoples, etc., to radically change the current food system. So the question I have is: What is needed to happen for all these efforts that you portray in the film to make an even greater impact?
MARGARET: I think it all starts with conversation. This project started by talking about these issues. We now know who some of the leaders and activists are and have met some of them in person. By making the film, we have been facilitating those kinds of conversations. It takes people from all different backgrounds to solve the problems of the food system. No one group is going to solve them. We all have to come together.
ARTY: Ankur, this is a question for you. You’ve designed sustainable food systems. There’s always a translation from the design stage to the implementation stage. How does grassroots food sovereignty fit into a sustainable food system design?
ANKUR: I think what’s needed is the preservation of local farming and local businesses. And over the past few decades, we’ve seen small communities that used to depend on local farmers, local farm stands and farmers’ markets that now have Walmarts, Costcos and other multinational corporations which they now rely on. That weakens the local economy and money is sucked out of the community. What is needed is local grassroots action to oppose such forces and to preserve and implement actions that enable the local economy and not weaken it.
What’s happening right now is this giant wealth transfer, and it’s been happening for a while, but it’s accelerating out from middle-class citizens and the poor to the rich. And one of the ways this is happening, of course, is the replacement of local businesses and the killing of them by large companies and large food conglomerates and tech companies. So grassroots action could help in collectivizing voices and collectively letting people at the state or city level know we don’t want a giant Walmart or some similar entity.
Preserving food sovereignty means preserving regional food production. And it doesn’t always have to be local. It may not even be local in some parts of the country and the world. But prioritize local at least to the extent that is possible, and culturally and socially appropriate. That’s where I’d say collective action comes into play.
ARTY: That leads me into the question for you, Jahnavi. You’ve worked with grassroots organizations as well as large corporations. Is it possible to build a bridge between grassroots organizations and corporations without big money usurping local food sovereignty?
JAHNAVI: Food sovereignty is about the collective grassroots actions that we see from the local region. But if we want to zoom out and expand it on a broader scale, if there is a corporate company whose mission includes sustainable sourcing and is working with local farmers, then it can work in collaboration. But if we see a corporation who’s just in the mindset of extraction and not collaboration, then that’s a kind of capitalism that works against food sovereignty.
When there is toxic capitalism, we need to empower more grassroots initiatives. But when there is truly a shared vision for a local economy, then it is possible to work in collaboration with larger corporations to empower local systems in order to make a global impact.
There are companies who are starting to understand that and starting to shift their perspectives, but not everyone is there yet. There is a lot of whitewashing and greenwashing happening. So that’s something we really need to be careful about.
Imagine an underground web of mind-boggling complexity, a bustling cosmopolis beneath your feet. Quadrillions of miles of tiny threads in the soil pulsate with real-time messages, trade vital nutrients, and form life-giving symbiotic partnerships. This is the mysterious realm of fungi. In this program, acclaimed visionary biologists Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake will guide us through the intricate wonders of the mycorrhizal fungal networks that make life on Earth possible.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Merlin Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He is currently a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the SPUN, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
Produced by: Cathy Edwards
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): Imagine an underground web of mind-boggling complexity, a bustling cosmopolis beneath your feet. Quadrillions of miles of tiny threads in the soil – pulsing with real-time messages, trading vital nutrients, forming life-giving symbiotic partnerships. This is the mysterious realm of fungi.
We visit the intricate wonder of the mycorrhizal fungal networks that make Life on Earth possible, with biologists Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake.
Fungi are one of the biological Kingdoms of Life. It’s a taxonomic category as broad as plants or animals. They evolved hundreds of millions of years ago – maybe as much as a billion – and they’re essential to the sustenance and evolution of life in all its diversity. Without them, we would certainly not exist.
Humans have long used and revered fungi for food, medicine, tools – not to mention for their consciousness-altering psychedelic effects. Yet despite fungi’s central role in evolution, in ecosystems and in human culture, they were recognized as a unique kingdom of life only in the 1960s. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.
But the word “kingdom” is a misnomer. After all, there are no kings in nature. Instead, let’s call it a “kin-dom” – because in nature, it’s all relatives – an intricate tapestry of evolutionary kinship.
Fungi are distinct from plants and animals, though intimately connected to both. We’re most familiar with mushrooms, the above-ground, fleshy, fruiting bodies of fungi. Yet far more extensive are the vast subterranean fungal networks spreading out across the earth, linking them to other forms of life.
At the forefront of seeking to understand these networks and their seemingly highly intelligent behavior are two visionary biologists: Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers.
Their focus is on mycorrhizal fungi, a particular type that has an intimate, symbiotic relationship with plants…
Merlin Sheldrake (MS): Almost all plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi, and these fungi are chemical wizards. They’re brilliant navigators in the wild, wet world of the soil. They’re able to grow and remodel their bodies, and forage using their chemical ingenuity for nutrients. And plant partners, in exchange for these nutrients, they provide the fungi with things that the fungi need to grow.
Mycorrhizal fungi mingle with plant roots, supplying them with nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. In exchange, plants trade sugars and fats they generate through photosynthesis.
These vast mycelial networks of fine tubes branch and tangle their way through the teeming life of the soil.
MS: This is really an intermingling of bodies, it’s one of the living world’s great intimacies. I suppose I would say that, but I really do believe it. And it is an astonishing way that organisms can come together to extend their reach, and to make things possible that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. This is really actually the roots of life on land. Plants would only make it out of water onto the land with the help of their fungal associates, who behaved as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own roots.
At any one moment, a mycorrhizal fungus will be remodeling itself to explore the soil. It will be doing crazy things with its metabolism to forage and acquire nutrients. It will be forming relationships with crowds of microbes across its network. It will be diverting nutrients around its networks, circulating them in just the right way to enable it to trade with its plant partners. It must be integrating information across an immense number of nodes, which at any one moment can be strung between multiple plants and sprawled over meters
Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal fungal mycelium in the top ten centimeters of soil is more than 450 quadrillion kilometers, which is over half of the width of the galaxy. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] These organisms are stationed at a vital point in global carbon and nutrient cycles, and they make up one of the circulatory systems of the planet, an ancient life support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world.
Host: Yet the ground truth is how very little we know about the wondrous invisible world that’s living right under our feet.
MS: Mycorrhizal fungi are bathed in rich fields of sensory information. They must determine when, where and how to move resources across their networks. They must integrate myriad data streams across billions of nodes in their networks. These are complex information processing systems, solving non-trivial problems on a moment-to-moment basis, and we have no idea how they can do what they do…to achieve the astonishing feats that they achieve. Right? These ecosystem engineers.
Merlin Sheldrake speaking at Bioneers 2024
So in Amsterdam, we, and amazing, amazing teams in these labs, working to decode the language of fungal information processing, to at last ask how fungi are able to coordinate these flows, to make decisions, to process information, and how to do what they do.
So to do this, we have a custom-built imaging robot. And this robot allows us to quantify both the architecture of the fungal network, so the branching patterns. You can think of that as the map of the roads in a city. But also the flows within the network. So you can think of this as the traffic movement on the roads within the city.
And we need to know both, because it’s in the flows that they’re encoding information but they’re only able to do that by creating a network and remodeling the network within which that information is flowing.
Host: Time-lapse footage from the lab’s imaging robot shows mycelial tubes delicately spreading and branching out – these are the fungal network’s relentlessly growing pathways.
Zooming in even further, a different video shows myriad blobs of light, rapidly flowing through tubes in real time – these are carbon and nutrients being transported around the network.
The researchers’ current technology can track over half a million fungal nodes across space and time – and they’ve discovered evidence of the networks’ extraordinary capabilities.
MS: If you could fit inside the network and ride on these flows, it would feel like you were traveling at about 40 kilometers an hour. These are rapid flows of carbon and nutrients; they’re changing direction; they’re going in opposite directions at once within the same section of pipe. Crazy things are happening at these branch points. And it’s really quite wild.
You know, we get together in the lab and sit in darkened rooms and look at these videos like children, [LAUGHTER] and just pulling our hair out. It’s like: How are they doing this? Look at this. [LAUGHTER] Do you see the blob? A blob of that junction in this video is going up the right hand branch now. Watch it. It’s going up the right hand branch, and oh, oh, no, no…
Host: The video shows a glowing blob stop in its tracks as if changing its mind, then reverse…
MS: [LAUGHTER] It’s going to come right back down, and what’s going to—oh. [APPLAUSE]
Host: The reversing blob reaches a junction in the network and now splits into two blobs. Each heads off down separate branches – apparently with purpose.
MS: What’s going on? [LAUGHTER] That’s one node in one small network, growing in one small dish in one laboratory in Amsterdam. [LAUGHTER]
Host: What is going on? The blobs look like they’re making deliberate decisions in real time. But is that an anthropomorphic spin on things? How can we interpret such behavior?
Well, the Amsterdam researchers are doing their best to analyze it – and their research is in review at the premier scientific journal Nature.
This sense of awe is all happening under the watchful eyes of evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, who works closely with Merlin. In a conversation they had, she described the bewildering experience of watching these networks in action.
Toby Kiers (TK): There’s this sense of unknown. And when people come to, especially when they come to work in the lab in Amsterdam, they leave different people, because they’ve seen things that they haven’t seen before.
And one of the things is that when you’re watching these mycorrhizal networks, you’re seeing things in real time. Like I just want—I really want to drive that home. Like those flows, that’s not sped up. We’re not like, oh, let’s put it on—This is in real time. And you’re studying behaviors of organisms that don’t have brains, and you’re still watching how they solve complex problems, like in front of your eyes.
We do these—It sounds really cruel, but we do these experiments because we have to understand how the networks work, where we cut them, and we see how long it takes for them to heal. And if you make a really clean cut, like a surgeon’s cut across the network, we came back after lunch and it had reconfigured. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] And those flows had just reinstated. Even just biochemically how that is possible is just mind-blowing.
When you watch another creature, you know, remodeling its body in that way right in front of your eyes, how could you not want to know more? How could we not all be studying this? And I think that, for me, is sort of the philosophy is just like, you get hooked. These organisms, they change your worldview.
Host: Witnessing such marvels, it’s hard to avoid the impression of a complex intelligence at work.
The Latin root of the word “intelligence” means to choose between – and it certainly appears as though deliberate, purposeful decisions are being made. After all, fungi do have hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary R&D under their belt.
Traditionally, Western science is reluctant to attribute intelligence to other-than-human creatures and organisms. This professional canon holds that we’d be anthropomorphizing, or losing “objectivity”, though objectivity itself is a questionable proposition.
However, might mainstream science accept these fungal networks as evidence of intelligence in nature? It wouldn’t be surprising. It’s well documented now that single-cell, brainless blobs of mucus called slime molds unerringly solve mazes, a traditional test for intelligence among many other traditional scientific tests that are now validating other-than-human intelligence throughout nature. In fact, we may well be living through a major paradigm shift.
Again, Merlin Sheldrake.
MS: A lot has changed in the last few years. So the cognitive sciences evolved, placing the human mind at the center of its studies, and that makes sense, because we’re humans and we’re proud of our brains and what we can do. But then, over time, that becomes very, very limiting, because you start to use the human mind and human intelligence as a yardstick by which to judge everybody else. And, of course, if you do that, then you’re going to find that, no, no, they can’t solve this problem that we can solve, and it can become very, very bigoted and very, very limiting.
So what started to change is that, and partly because people have become much more comfortable attributing intelligence to machines, the whole language and conversation has shifted. And so now the way it’s discussed in a growing number of circles in the biological sciences is that there are intelligent behaviors. These are things like the ability to solve problems, or make decisions, or adapt to changes in one’s environment. And that all organisms to some degree are intelligent problem solvers, it’s just they’ve evolved to solve different kinds of problems. So a fungus has evolved to solve very different kinds of problems to us.
And so I think this is not very controversial anymore, which is great. And I think that’s really helpful, because it invites us into a question that Toby and I love, this question of like: What’s it like to be you? You know? When you’re studying an organism, it’s—this really feels like the central question as a biologist: What’s it like to be you?
Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers speaking at a Bioneers 2024 panel
TK: One of the things that we do in the lab is that we set up these experiments to try to figure out that question, what it’s like to be you. And, you know, one of the things that these fungi do is they’re really good traders. Right? Their whole way that they live is dependent on getting carbon from plant roots. So they’re what we call obligate biotrophs, which means they can’t get carbon from anywhere except a root system. And so they have evolved very sophisticated trade strategies to be able to get that carbon. And because we are able to do these really, really high precision experiments, we can set up and actually track the way that they move resources to understand how they make decisions.
And the strategies they evolve are just mind-blowing. I mean, we can show that they discriminate among different plant roots and send more of the phosphorus to the root system that’s giving more carbon in return; that they can discriminate between where they’re getting the carbon.
They do these things where if you give them a lot of phosphorous, they’ll take it up into the network and actually hold back before giving it to the plant until the plant needs even more, and they get more carbon, right, if they hoard it for just a bit longer, they’ll get more carbon in return.
We were doing this experiment where we tracked the phosphorus. We attached a quantum dots, these nanoparticles, to phosphorus, and they fluoresce in really bright colors when you hit it with a UV source, and we could see that the fungi would take up the phosphorous from a very concentrated area and move it all the way across to another part of the network where the plant demand was higher, to be able to get more carbon. And so these are all laboratory experiments. Right? So be very careful about taking them to the level of the ecosystem or the forest. But when you bring these systems into the lab and actually study those very precise trading strategies, you see the kinds of problem-solving abilities that they’ve evolved.
And we’re just—It feels like very blunt, the questions we ask: Are you going to trade here? Or are you going to trade there? Just imagine what they can actually do if we could understand just that level of complexity.
Host: By asking detailed questions, Toby’s lab is starting to unravel just a tiny glimmer of what fungi can do.
These vast networks permeating intricate ecosystems around the globe are revealing nature’s operating instructions. To understand them in their ineffable complexity may well be beyond our comprehension.
After the break, we’ll hear more from Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake about just how crucial these fungal systems are to life on Earth, the threats they’re facing – and what we can do to protect them even as we learn more from them.
Host: Fungi have been experiencing a major cultural moment these days, from the globally popular film “Fantastic Fungi” to the cover story in National Geographic for the first time in the iconic magazine’s 130-year history.
Just watching the mind-bending behavior of mycorrhizal fungi has left scientists in awe. Just their activities trading carbon and nutrients with plants make them a vital life support system for planet Earth. As such, it implies a deep responsibility not only to observe and learn, but also to protect and conserve. Then again, seeing them is the crucial first step in what has been a blind spot, says Merlin Sheldrake…
MS: Mycorrhizal fungi funnel around 13 billion tons of CO2 into the soil every year. That’s as much as a third of the total CO2 emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels every year. It’s a significant amount of carbon. They stabilize this carbon in the soil, and power soil food webs, which contain over half above all species on the planet.
But despite their roles in supporting planetary biodiversity and regulating the Earth’s nutrient cycles and climates, mycorrhizal fungi are a global blindspot, largely absent from climate change agendas, conservation strategies, restoration strategies, agriculture, and forestry. This is a problem. [LAUGHTER]
It’s a problem first because mycorrhizal fungi lie at the base of the food web that sustain much of life on Earth and make a key lever in planetary ecology, and yet hardly anyone is touching this lever. It would be like trying to perform life-saving surgery without taking into account the circulatory systems of our bodies.
It’s a problem for another reason. What we are blind to, we tend to destroy. The destruction of underground ecosystems accelerates climate change, biodiversity loss. And what’s more, when we disrupt these communities, we destroy an ancient library of solutions that fungi have evolved to rise to the challenge of living. We have no idea how many of these solutions might prove vital to life on Earth moving forward. When mycorrhizal fungi suffer, so do the organisms and the ecosystems that depend on them.
SPUN aims to catalyze the protection of mycorrhizal fungi by mapping their biodiversity. They collect fungal data from multiple places around the world and feed the data into predictive maps.
TK: Underground ecosystems are incredibly important across the Earth, and they have been ignored in biodiversity, in climate agendas. And so we wanted to activate a network of caregivers and scientists and researchers, and local communities, to start paying attention to underground ecosystems.
And so, for example, just last month, I was in Ghana. The southern coast is, from our predictive maps, it looks like one of the most biodiverse mycorrhizal spots on Earth. And sea levels are rising really fast in Ghana, and so what worries us is that a lot of these fungal communities might actually be washed away into the ocean. And so it feels really urgent.
And when we go, we always work with local scientists, and go to places that are predicted biodiversity hotspots, and then actually sample the soil and extract the fungal DNA, and then feed that back into the pipeline.
And so we work with these local scientists to create high resolution maps in those countries, and then they use that for their own research. And then, based on that, they then share the data with us, and then that gets fed into an algorithm which then we share with everybody. So really, I think, the primary focus in these areas is to answer the local questions, but as we answer those local questions, we’re building a larger map.
Host: Both the local data and the larger maps are imperative first steps to help protect key ecosystems and related human communities.
Word about the work is spreading. One community it reached was the Indigenous Sarayaku tribe of Amazonian Ecuador. They’re urgently organizing to save their lands from the threats of mining – which decimates underground ecosystems.
MS: The Sarayaku have a vision of the living forest, Kawsak Sacha, an interconnected whole, an animistic interconnected whole of the living forest. And they’ve reached out to us and said, look, we see these fungal networks that you’re describing, living in intimate reciprocal dependence with the plants; we see these as really illustrating this point, and would you help us, and by coming to map these areas with us and provide the datasets for us to be able to go to the government and say, look, these mining companies that left tons and tons of dynamite buried in our territories, this dynamite needs to go; you have a legal obligation, because we won this case, to—they won this case—you need to get this dynamite out. And we can now show you quite exactly what is at stake because we can say who is living on the ground whereas before we couldn’t
TK: Yeah and local context, again, matters so much. So one of the projects that we were doing, one of the first ones in Chile, was sampling fungi under arguably the oldest tree on Earth, the Alerce in Chile. And, you know, we got to go there and sample under this magnificent tree that may be 5,000 years old—4 to 5,000 years old. Right? But people hadn’t looked at the fungal communities that are associated with these trees. Right? And they grow so slowly. They called them a slow growth rainforest. And they accumulate carbon on a scale of millennia.
People understand how important this tree is, but as soon as we went there and said there’s a whole other dimension underground, it started getting even more attention. And so by going there and sampling the fungi, you add this different layer that helps protect that whole forest.
Host: By helping illuminate a lifeform that’s largely invisible to humans, SPUN hopes to make it harder to ignore.
Although science recognized the true value of fungi only relatively recently, humans have long known of their precious importance. Much fungal knowledge is ancient traditional and Indigenous knowledge.
Take Otzi the Iceman – a European mummy dating back over 5,000 years, he was found with a pouch carrying multiple species of mushrooms, thought to be used for medicinal purposes and for sustaining and carrying fire for survival.
MS: So much of the body of what we call modern scientific knowledge rests on Indigenous knowledge that has been imported into the sciences and rebranded it as scientific knowledge at some earlier stage. So when male botanists were writing books about medicinal plants in the 17th century, a lot of the time they learned about those medicinal plants by going to markets and talking to wise women, herbwives, about what they used for what. And then that was kind of laundered of that ancestral property and became part of the body of modern scientific knowledge.
So, an interesting case, incidentally, is Albert Hoffman, when he isolated LSD, stumbling on this molecule, but the reason why he was working on it, he was working on these ergot fungi, which are fungi that live inside grains and they have a history of medicinal use by midwives and herbwives to stop obstetric bleeding, to induce contractions, uterine contractions, a very, very important set of functions. And he was working for Sandoz Labs, and Sandoz Labs had employed him to work on these fungi because of this history of obstetric drugs within folk and Indigenous knowledge systems, because they wanted to find new obstetric drugs to bring into the modern pharmaceutical industry, which was why he was doing it. So just that LSD story, when you follow it back, you know, you come back to a body of ancestral knowledge right there.
Giuliana Furci, Toby Kiers, and Merlin Sheldrake. Photo courtesy of the Fungi Foundation.
When it comes to fungi, today and in our work, our dear colleague, Giuliana Furci, who runs the Fungi Foundation, one of the projects of the Fungi Foundation is ancestral knowledge of fungi. And they are working with various traditional knowledge-holders around the world to learn about traditional uses of fungi, and to have these conversations, before a lot of this knowledge is lost. And that’s really, I think, very powerful and important work.
Host: Given today’s dire state of environmental destruction and the related precarity of the human experiment, it’s imperative to mobilize both traditional Indigenous knowledge and cutting-edge science in service of protecting the fungal kin-dom and learning from its ancient life-giving ways.
And we need to want to protect them. Part of that is inspiring people to share the “sense of wonder” that Merlin and Toby experience as they ask, “What’s it like to be you??”
As human beings, we’re hard-wired for story and metaphor, and they know that when stories change, the world changes.
MS: It is very mythological. And I think we see the story of how life of the oceans has been more and more discussed. And I think there are analogies there. And a lot of ocean conservation, and very effective ocean conservation has worked by helping to reveal the life that lives in these places, to invite us to feel a sense of vertigo as we float on the surface of these oceans.
And I think we can apply that to soils too. I feel a sense of vertigo when I walk on the ground. Like I feel this sense of the depths below me opening up, and it makes me dizzy sometimes. But I really think that that’s a deeply important thing for us to be working with these mythological dimensions, because a lot of what we’re doing is telling stories.
TK: But the life in the soil, I think, is also something that we don’t think about. We really think of it as sort of a chemical and physical structure. There’s just so much life, that’s what’s unimaginable for me, is like there’s all these creatures that have evolved such innovative strategies that power everything that we see aboveground, but we’re not paying attention to that. I mean, it’s like science fiction down there! [LAUGHTER] It is crazy down there.
And, you know, you see it and you want everybody to see it. You can’t make this stuff up when you really start looking at the creatures there. And I just don’t want them to disappear.
Host: Sometimes science feels more like science fiction, and it just blows your mind – and opens your heart. Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake…The Universe Beneath Our Feet: Mapping the Mycelial Web of Life.
If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together.
Water makes life possible. From the tiniest bacteria to the tallest tree, every living thing relies on this irreplaceable substance. Erica Gies, author of “Water Always Wins,” explores water’s unique role in the web of life, and how we might repair and reshape our relationship with it. Rather than telling water what to do, maybe we should start by asking what it wants?
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Erica Gies is an independent journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and the author of “Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge.” She covers water, climate change, plants and wildlife for Scientific American, The New York Times, bioGraphic, Nature, and other publications.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
Produced by: Cathy Edwards
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Producer: Teo Grossman
Production Assistance: Kaleb Wentzel Fisher and Monica Lopez
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
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Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): Water literally makes life possible. From the tiniest bacteria to the tallest trees, all living things rely on this irreplaceable wonder.
We hear from Erica Gies, author of “Water Always Wins”. She turned to people she calls “water detectives” to learn how we might repair and reshape our relationship with this blue gold that sustains life.
We live on a blue planet. Water is foundational to the chemistry of life on Earth. Leonardo da Vinci called it the ‘driving force of all nature’. Water transports nutrients, fills cells, and helps regulate the temperatures conducive to life. It also physically shapes the planet, too – carving out valleys, canyons and coastlines in slow geologic time – or sometimes in fast forward.
Water is ever-changing, traversing the globe as ice, vapor or liquid – yet every single drop stretches back into deep time. And all the water that’s here has been here for most of Earth’s history. Perhaps the water you drank today was once snow that fell on a wooly mammoth. Or shot out of a hydrothermal ocean vent, where life may have begun billions of years ago.
More recently, humans have sought to control water on vast scales: diverting mighty rivers, or building massive dams and reservoirs. But such brutalist interventions disrupt and damage the intricate relationships water has forged over geological timescales – creating unintended harms that plague civilization today.
So, rather than forcing water to do what we want, what if we start asking what it wants?
Erica Gies’ award-winning book ‘Water Always Wins’ maps the connections forged by water as it cycles through ecosystems.
One of the most startling examples is the interplay of water with forests. The symbiotic dance among forests, air and water illuminates a true marvel of planetary-scale ecology, which she described at a Bioneers conference.
Erica Gies (EG): Scientists used to think that most rain came from evaporation over the ocean, but now they know that at least 40% on average over continents, as high as 70%, comes from evapotranspiration from plants and soil. [APPLAUSE] And that vapor condenses into rain and falls again locally and regionally, something called precipitation recycling. And forests, with their rough surface, also help to create the rain because they are slowing the wind, and they’re releasing particles—fungal spores, pollen, and bacteria—which also help that vapor condense into rain. [APPLAUSE]
And these forests exhalations feed into jet streams and atmospheric circulation. So they’re seeding rain on the other side of the world. And on the flip side, forest loss can cause drought on the other side of the world.
People used to think that the temperature difference between the ocean and the land is what pulled in the vapor, and that trees grew where rain fell. But atmospheric physicist Anastassia Makarieva has shown that forests actively pull in the wind to deliver the rain that they need. Tree vapor condensing into clouds decreases local air pressure, which draws in more moist air from elsewhere. And she calls this the biotic pump. And that might sound radical to some ears, but it’s really not, she told me. All organisms possess knowledge of physical laws that allow them to make use of the environment.
Host: This biotic pump hypothesis challenges the conventional scientific paradigm. It asserts that forests don’t just grow where water happens to fall. Instead, they actually pull in winds to deliver rainfall. It depicts a whole-systems view of the climate, mediated by water’s dynamic relationships with all living things.
But humans have radically altered these elaborate planetary water cycles. The extreme floods and droughts we’re experiencing are often unnatural disasters related to climate disruption – and by failed attempts to control water in misguided ways.
EG: Humans have drained or filled as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands, dammed and diverted two-thirds of the world’s large rivers. The land area covered by pavement in our cities has doubled, just since 1992.
In the dominant culture, we concern ourselves with human needs, and that leads to a single focus problem solving. Worried about scarcity? Build a dam, bring in water from somewhere else. Worried about flooding? Build a levee, build a wall.
But putting ourselves first in this way isn’t working, and it’s because that single focus ignores water’s agency and water’s complex relationships with soil, and rock, and microbes, and plants, and beavers and people. And by ignoring those complex systems, it damages them.
It’s an environmental justice issue. Levees, for example, may protect one community, but in so doing, by cutting off the river from its flood plain, they’re raising the water level in the river, which increases flood risk for other communities who perhaps can’t afford a levee. Dams similarly are an environmental justice issue. A 40-year survey of dams built around the world found that they brought water to 20% of the world’s population but decreased water availability to 24% of the world’s population.
But this problem is also an opportunity, an opportunity to change our relationship with water. Instead of seeing water as a what, a commodity or a threat, many Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world instead view water as a who, a friend or a relative. [APPLAUSE] That lens allows them to better see and understand water’s relationships, including the relationship with people, and to understand that with rights comes responsibility for maintaining and caretaking these systems.
Host: Structures such as concrete dams, levees and seawalls subvert water from where it wants to go. Because water is such a powerful force, it presents a constant struggle against the laws of physics. Levees regularly fail, causing flash flooding. Seawalls may protect particular zones, but they worsen erosion elsewhere.
In the end, water will have its way. It has formed its relationships over billions of years of evolution. The dynamic complexity is likely beyond our comprehension. So it’s not surprising that Erica met many people working with water whose first principle is humility.
EG: Instead of trying to solve one problem at a time, the water detectives—as I came to think of them, because they approach water with respect and curiosity, and these are engineers, ecologists, landscape architects, Indigenous Peoples, urban planners, farmers, ranchers, foresters—are instead asking a radical question: What does water want? [APPLAUSE] And what I’ve come to understand…is that what water really wants is a return of its slow phases that are particularly prone to our disruption. These are wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows and forests that absorb floods, clean water, store it for later, store carbon, and support life that maintains the health of these systems that in turn support us.
Host: Figuring out what water wants requires some serious sleuthing. That’s especially the case in cities, where centuries of construction have dramatically altered the natural landscape. So these water detectives engage in what’s called historical ecology. They look for evidence of where water used to go.
EG: Water is inclined to go where it wants to go, which is where it went before we subverted it. And so by mapping what used to be, we understand that homes built on wetlands are often the first to flood. And doing this kind of mapping allows cities to plan for when buildings turn over. Perhaps instead of building something else that’s at risk of flooding, perhaps, you know, we can return that space to water and have a more resilient city. [APPLAUSE]
Host: Erica visited a project in Seattle that began with the goal of stopping local flooding. By uncovering the deep history of water there, they found they could benefit the area in myriad other ways, too.
EG: In Seattle, they used historical ecology to plan for the restoration of Thornton Creek, which was regularly flooding a road, a high school, and homes. And globally, the majority of urban streams are buried and built on top of them, and ones that remain on the surface first they’re deforested, then they’re straightened. That causes a kind of firehose effect, the ultimate in fast water, which scours, and so then it’s armored to prevent erosion. And this creates something that ecologists call “urban stream syndrome”, which is flash floods, unstable banks, heavy pollution, and waning life.
So restoration of urban streams has typically involved removing the cement, putting back some curves, putting in some wood and boulders. You know, making it look kind of habitaty. [LAUGHTER]
But what ecologists found is that the life that was coming back wasn’t very diverse. It was sort of a crows and cockroaches situation. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] And these restorations needed ongoing maintenance.
Erica Gies speaking at Bioneers 2024
So a biologist who worked for the city named Katherine Lynch realized it’s not just the stream we see, but the stream that we don’t see flowing underneath that channel. It’s called the “hyporheic zone”, which is from Greek—hypo-rheic, which is “under flow”. So there’s another river that is moving downstream through the soil and rock, but orders of magnitude more slowly.
On a creek, it could extend 30 feet from the banks. On a large river it can extend a mile on either side. And the hyporheic zone is home to all kinds of amazing critters— microbes, crustaceans, worms, aquatic insects, salmon lay their eggs there. And these critters play a pivotal role in nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon cycling. It’s basically like the stream’s gut microbiome. And so that’s why, when the hyporheic zone is scoured away, the waterway has very little hope of staying healthy.
Host: Because natural landscapes such as meadows and fields are porous, rainwater soaks in and disperses much more slowly, providing a steadier flow and temperature throughout the year, all of which fosters richer biodiversity. Slow water creates conditions conducive to more life.
Recreating these intricate water landscapes in built-up urban environments is especially challenging.
EG: This project that Katherine Lynch conceived of to rebuild this missing hyporheic zone, an urban stream, was the first in the world. [APPLAUSE] Yeah.
They put back in some of the curves. They took out the cement. They carefully designed the rock and wood so that it would drive water down into the hyporheic zone. And because they did their historical ecology, the project was just 1600 feet in a river that was 15 miles long, and yet, the reason this area was flooding is because it was a flood plain. So by returning the flood plain to the river, it had an outsize impact and has eliminated flooding in this area. [APPLAUSE]
They did a chemical study. They measured more than 1900 pollutants, things like lawn fertilizer and brake pad dust that are just rushing off the urban concrete and diving into this stream, and they found that spending just three hours in a 15-foot section of the hyporheic zone reduced 78% of the chemicals by at least half. [APPLAUSE]
A few other markers of success, it’s a wonderful place for the community, the city hasn’t flooded, and chinook salmon returned and spawned in this hyporheic zone they created. [APPLAUSE]
Host: The outsized success of this kind of project is inspiring water detectives to radically reimagine our approaches to water engineering.
After the break, we’ll learn more about the growing global movement to foster a more harmonious relationship with water that can help nature heal, and ourselves with it.
Host: A watershed is an area of land that channels rainfall and snowmelt to rivers and eventually to the sea. Human interventions in the water cycle can in fact be very beneficial, if we consider the question ‘what does water want?’
According to water ecologist Brock Dolman, the goal of managing a watershed sustainably is to “slow it, spread it, sink it.” Erica Gies discovered that humans helping to return water’s slow phases has become a growing “slow water” movement.
EG: The slow water movement is a global movement that goes by different names around the world, but they’re all looking to return space to slow water, so restoring or protecting wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows and forests. These projects are local; they are unique to each place. Every place has unique geology, ecology, and culture, and these projects work within that.
Slow water projects use systems thinking rather than that single-focus problem solving. They are environmentally just. They don’t take from some and give to others, or protect some at the expense of others. And they really do respect nature’s agency, and try to work with water and nature rather than try to control it.
And in all these ways, water slows in its path, and often has time to move underground, sometimes going down with tree roots, sometimes filtering through the hyporheic zone into the aquifer. But that water/land relationship and interaction is really, really important for the hydrological cycle in all kinds of ways.
Host: In contrast to huge, centralized water infrastructures that dramatically halt or speed water up in its path, slow water projects are, by design, smaller and spread out across landscapes.
EG: One thing about the slow water projects is, you know, in our dominant culture, we’ve gotten used to centralized water projects that are managed by experts. So that might be a giant dam and reservoir, for example. But slow water projects tend to be smaller and many of them distributed across the landscape. So instead of centralized, they’re distributed. And that makes sense if you think of that 87% of the world’s wetlands that we’ve eradicated, because you need lots of spaces throughout the watershed, following water’s entire path, for it to slow again.
And a lot of the places I went in the world, in places like Peru or India, I met people who were actually actively building these projects and working with their neighbors on the land to restore these systems.
Slow water projects are something that people can do in their own communities with their neighbors to make themselves much more resilient, and the impact is cumulative.
Host: While the slow water movement has been picking up speed in recent years, some of its methods draw on ancient water management techniques.
EG: So most of the projects I looked at were trying to conserve or restore, or mimic a slow water phase, so returning part of a flood plain to the river, restoring a wetland or protecting a wetland from development, or assisting beavers as their populations recover and they return to the landscape.
There’s a couple of chapters in my book where I look at older human techniques for managing water, and pretty much anywhere people had intermittent rain, you know, a longer dry season, and they were farming, they figured out a way to make the most of the water that came. And that often involved moving it underground in some way, because that dramatically extends the time in which the local rain that you get can be available to you locally.
I looked at a culture in Peru from 1400 years ago called the Huari. The Tamil people in South India for 2,000 years had a system called the eris system. These were not irrigation projects. These were people inserting themselves into the local hydrological cycle and sort of expanding what nature was already doing.
Host: Slow water projects in Peru today are reviving these ancient techniques in direct response to the climate crisis.
EG: In Peru, it’s a very water scarce place. They, like California, have a long dry season, and about 65% of the population lives on the very arid coastal plain, and they rely on mountain water from the Andes, which are right at their back. Historically, they’ve had glaciers, and so those glaciers have melted slowly throughout the dry season and they’ve had water year round. With climate change, some of those glaciers are already gone; other ones are melting rapidly, and the population is growing.
So one project involves restoring this 1400-year-old technique for extending water availability into the dry season. So there are at least three high Andes towns where communal farmers still use this system, which is called “amunas”, which is a Quechua word that means “to retain”. And when the river runs high in the wet season up at very high altitudes, they divert it into these natural infiltration basins, and then the water filters underground, and then it continues moving down the mountain, but much more slowly, because it’s moving through all that soil and rock. And then there are springs lower down the mountain where it emerges, and then they harvest it, and they have complex systems for sharing it and for maintaining this system.
A lot of it had fallen into disrepair, so in some cases they’re restoring it. Because ultimately, when the farmers take that water and water their crops, a lot of that is going to go underground again and ultimately make its way down into the valley bottoms into the three rivers that supply the capital city of Lima.
And similarly, there are these special high altitude wetlands called bofedales, which—or cushion bog—and those are a very important place for slowing water, particularly as the glaciers melt. And they have been victim of peat thievery for the nursery trade. And, you know, when you cut out a square of peat and you separate the bog from its neighbors, the whole thing dries out and dies. So some of the money is going to protect the remaining ones, and some to restore the ones that have been damaged, and there is actually an ancient technique for expanding the footprint of the bofedales. And so some research has been studying how that’s done and how effective it can be.
However, what water wants is to nourish the entire web of life, not just to fulfill human priorities. There’s good reason that cultures and religious and spiritual traditions from time immemorial have held water as sacred.
If we relate to water not as a commodity but as our beloved relative, the questions arise: Does the web of life have an intrinsic right to exist? Has the absence of such an ethic precipitated today’s ecological crisis?
Bofedales in the Andes of Peru
EG: The bofedales are an incredibly important resource for all of the critters and birds who live in the high Andes. But, in all of the projects I looked at, even if we’re looking at it from a selfish point of view, it’s these microbes, these plants, these animals that are also maintaining the water system. You know? They all work together to keep it healthy and functioning.
And so I believe that other beings have the right to exist separate from whether they benefit humans. However, when they are allowed to do what they do, they also benefit humans. And I think that’s something we’ve lost sight of, you know. The reason we’ve been able to do a lot of what we’ve done in terms of kind of controlling nature is because there’s still been a lot of buffer that has supplied these critical things that we need.
But now, like 75% of land on Earth has been degraded by our activities, so we’re running out of that buffer, and that’s another reason why we’re seeing this big uptick in floods, droughts, mega fires, etc., because we just don’t have that buffer anymore. So it’s so, so incredibly important for our own survival and health and quality of life, as well as the animals and plants who live in these systems.
Host: One thing’s for sure: when you fight nature, you lose. If water always wins, perhaps we can embrace our place as partners in the web of life by asking a most basic question: How would nature do it?
EG: I’ve come to understand that water absolutely has agency. It does. I think humanity, especially recent humans, in the dominant culture, have a history of undermining or ignoring animal intelligence, plant intelligence for sure, and I think a lot of it was really convenient. If you don’t think of other beings as being intelligent or as having agency or as being worthwhile or worthy, you create a permission structure where it’s okay to exploit them and not care about them and not think about them.
I write about science and I love science and I love scientists, but Western science is very reductionist, and that helps you get at certain specific answers, but often you miss the forest for the trees, literally, because you’re siloing what you are trying to figure out.So I think that natural systems definitely have intelligence, and that we, in the dominant culture, are only beginning to reacquaint ourselves with that. But, you know, if you spend any time with Indigenous people, that kind of observation, that close observation and care, will reveal a lot of this.
I was interviewing a Hopi farmer about dryland farming techniques, and he said, you know, 3,000 years of replication is a science. [LAUGHS]
Sooner or later, water always wins. So in the face of climate change, ecosystem collapse, water scarcity, we must shift our relationship with water. If we let go of our impulse for control and instead collaborate with water, we can win too. Climate change and the degradation of these natural systems that give us life can feel really overwhelming, but what I took away from meeting these water detectives around the world is that slow water projects are really empowering; it’s something that people can do in their own communities with their neighbors to make themselves, their neighbors, and their other-than-human neighbors more resilient to water extremes and climate change.
So I hope as you move through your own place, you’ll grow more curious about water, and ask yourself: What does water want?
Host: Erica Gies…
If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together.
This article has been republished with permission from Ten Strands. By Morgan Margulies January 8, 2025
The modern American schoolyard is dominated by two elements: asphalt (hardscape) and lawn (softscape). The living schoolyard movement, covered in Sharon Danks’s book Asphalt to Ecosystems, transforms schoolyards into lush environments “that strengthen local ecological systems” and provide opportunities for “place-based, hands-on learning.”
While the conversation about living schoolyards has focused on asphalt removal, the transformation of underutilized lawn is an important tool for schools to conserve water, cool campuses, and encourage biodiversity, while expanding holistic and integrated educational opportunities.
Daily Acts’ Climate Resilient Schools Program
Daily Acts (DA) is an environmental education nonprofit based in Petaluma, California, that connects people and builds community through education, action, and policy to address climate change. To demonstrate the effectiveness of schoolyard water conservation projects, DA has partnered with the Land Resilience Partnership to pilot the Climate Resilient Schools Program, a multi-benefit water conservation program to design and install projects at four schools through 2026.
Rain tank and rain garden to harvest rainwater from the roof at La Tercera School’s campus / Photo courtesy of Ten Strands
Three water conservation project-types were identified to improve student schoolyard experiences:
Lawn conversion to climate-resilient landscapes
Rainwater catchment and storage tanks
Rain gardens and bioswales
So far, DA’s Climate Resilient Schools project has partnered with two schools to transform 23,000 square feet of irrigated lawns to climate-appropriate gardens through sheet mulching and irrigation conversion. By first converting sprinklers to drip irrigation and then layering compost, cardboard, and mulch (sheet mulching), these lawns were composted in place and prepared for planting drought-tolerant and native plants. Additional water is saved through rainwater harvesting projects like storage tanks and rain gardens that sink water into the landscape.
Emerging Benefits of Schoolyard Transformations
These lawns were not only underutilized and devoid of biodiversity, they were also massive users of water, needing more than 660,000 gallons annually to stay green year round. Once installed, these landscapes use about 85 percent less water, needing 87,000 gallons of annual irrigation. New plants are supported by nutrient-rich rainwater harvested in seven tanks, totaling 23,000 gallons of storage and two rain gardens that sink approximately 4,000 gallons every rainstorm.
Lawn transformation and rainwater harvesting projects at just two schools has helped Petaluma save over half a million gallons of water annually while supporting pollinator and wildlife habitat, providing shade, building soil health, sequestering carbon, enhancing evapotranspiration, recharging groundwater, increasing food access, and filtering stormwater runoff.
In addition to ecological benefits, living schoolyard projects have emergent social, physical, and developmental benefits. According to Bikomeye et al, schoolyards with natural elements enhance physical and socioemotional health by creating shade, varied opportunities for physical activity, and improved mental health.
Furthermore, student exposure to natural systems and native California plants ingrains a sense of place by educating students about our unique Mediterranean climate. These transformations are impactful for students who, according to Wendy Titman, read elements in the schoolyard as a “hidden curriculum” that informs their sense of place, perceived value, and self-identity.
Facilitating Engagement in Living Schoolyards
Sustained community engagement and stewardship is key to successful implementation of living schoolyard projects. Through collaborative project development, community installation events, and curriculum-informed design, students and community members are more likely to feel connected, empowered, and responsible for stewardship.
Collaboration Through Listening Sessions
Community involvement in design through listening and feedback sessions is an iterative process that requires humility, openness, and collaboration. In DA’s most recent project at La Tercera Elementary School, various community engagement sessions solicited input from the following stakeholders:
Administrators: Project scope was collaboratively and iteratively developed with the principal, superintendent, and maintenance director.
Teachers: Through presentations at staff meetings and written surveys, teachers helped narrow the project scope, inform designed pathways, and determine gathering areas.
Parents: Opinions regarding the plant palette and landscape elements were solicited at back-to-school night and via survey.
Students: DA delivered educational presentations to classrooms on the water cycle, water conservation, and changes on campus. During these presentations, students voted for their favorite plants from our native plant palette, influencing the final planting plan.
A Unique Approach to Community Landscape Transformations
DA’s community-centered approach to design and installation facilitates public engagement, connection, and care. Volunteer planting days, supported by local community service partners, bring intergenerational community members together to learn and plant side by side. For other elements of installation, DA works with educators to provide workforce training to future conservation workers through partnership with Conservation Corps North Bay.
Students planting a Toyon with Daily Acts staff during student planting day / Photo courtesy of Ten Strands
The best way to empower student stewards to care for and engage with their landscape is through hands-on involvement. DA hosted two planting days with La Tercera Elementary School to plant fifty-three different species of drought-tolerant and rain garden plants, totalling over eight hundred plants!
The first program was open to volunteers including students, parents, teachers, organizations, and community members. For the second planting day, which involved students only, every student on campus (paired with their big or little buddy) planted and watered-in their plant, from yarrow and grey rush to coffeeberry and valley oak.
Student involvement in installation builds stewardship and leadership. Students who participated in the first planting day showed their peers how to plant during the second planting day. Additionally, students check in on the plant they planted, conveying a sense of ownership, responsibility, and care. Ongoing stewardship and involvement is encouraged by staff that designate class stewards and give school currency to students that pull weeds.
Designing Living Landscapes for Learning and Stewardship
Thoughtful and collaborative landscape design creates educational spaces in otherwise underutilized places. Teacher input to integrate plant design with curriculum and overall themes inspired the final planting plan.
Landscape transformation planting plan for La Tercera Elementary School designed by Angelia Rossi / Image courtesy of Ten Strands
At La Tercera Elementary School, various sections of the landscape highlight different educational and ecological themes:
The Nest includes a stump circle as an outdoor classroom, intentionally located outside the classroom of a teacher who often takes their students outside to read.
The Food Forest includes successional layers of edible and medicinal plants with cultural relevance, selected with input from a social studies teacher whose curriculum highlights indigenous cultures and the role of colonization in California history.
The Beaver Basin is the site of a rain tank and rain garden planted with riparian plants. Between the Beaver Basin and Nest is a wood edge of student art, a project spearheaded by their makerspace and science teacher.
The Sensory Spiral was designed by grouping plants based on their blooming color, texture, and smell, with a special spot for plants with animal names.
By integrating educational elements and existing curriculum in design, it is even more likely the landscape will be cared for in perpetuity by teachers and students.
Schoolyard ecology projects like lawn conversion to low-water gardens and rainwater harvesting transform the “hidden curriculum” of schoolyards. By not only teaching about ecology but demonstrating restoration, schoolyards communicate a “culture of care.” Starting with their school grounds, schools must plant seeds of change by inspiring students to appreciate the beauty of nature and become stewards of their environment.
Daily Acts is a holistic environmental education nonprofit that takes a heart-centered approach to inspire transformative actions that create connected, equitable, and climate-resilient communities. Be sure to check out their website for further case studies and educational resources to take action today.
This article has been republished with permission from Ten Strands.
Morgan Margulies is a land resilience partnership program coordinator at Daily Acts in Petaluma, California. With a BA in political science and sustainable development from Columbia University, Morgan finds his purpose at the intersection of ecology, equity, and governance. As a certified permaculture designer, Morgan works with his team at Daily Acts to conduct site assessments and develop integrated landscape designs for residential and public sites, with a specific focus on water conservation. The public site projects in schools and parks are particularly inspiring, as he has the opportunity to work collaboratively with a diverse array of community members to accomplish a goal of public access to green spaces. Growing up in the Yuba River watershed has ingrained in Morgan a sense of care and responsibility for the natural world, and he hopes that creating beauty through design will inspire others. As a passionate advocate for environmental justice, Morgan often returns to the quote “Justice is what love looks like in public,” by Cornel West. As Morgan continues on his path installing community-based ecology projects, he hopes to spread love to all corners.
Our connection to the Earth is fraying at a time when we need it most. To repair that bond and build a more resilient future, we need bold leadership and transformative solutions. Women leaders around the world are challenging broken systems, forging new pathways, and creating models for a just and regenerative world.
In this newsletter, explore how four trailblazing women are reshaping clean tech; hear humanitarian Zainab Salbi’s powerful perspective on feminine leadership; and dive into award-winning activist Sage Lenier’s blueprint for a circular and equitable economy.
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Women in Clean Tech Shattering the Glass Ceiling
The urgent need for a shift to clean, sustainable technologies is the most important challenge of our time, probably the most crucial our species has ever faced. In this conversation, some trailblazing women leaders in this domain share their thoughts on where we stand in the race to a clean and equitable transition and the challenges they face in what has for far too long been a male-populated sector. Hear insights from Emily Teitsworth, Executive Director of the Honnold Foundation; Charlotte Michaluk, award-winning young scientist and engineer; Kellie Macpherson, Executive Vice President of Compliance & Risk at Radian Generation; Kirthika Padmanabhan, Co-Pilot at X, the moonshot factory, in this conversation from the 2024 Bioneers Conference.
Taking Wing: Feminine Leadership from the Heartbeat of Earth with Zainab Salbi
Globally, women experience some of the harshest challenges in wartime and in dealing with the effects of the climate crisis while simultaneously remaining caretakers to their families and communities. In this episode of the Bioneers podcast, hear from humanitarian, author and media host Zainab Salbi, who has dedicated her life to empowering women on the frontlines in conflict and climate crisis zones. Her vision is that the fate of humanity depends on elevating feminine leadership that offers a model for a new way of being — for both women and men.
The “Leading from the Feminine” newsletter offers a vibrant resource to bridge divides and celebrate connections within the rich tapestry of trailblazers who are evoking the feminine to lead with courage, vulnerability, intuition and empathy. Co-creators, long-time collaborators, writers and activists Nina Simons and Anneke Campbell invite you to join us as we illuminate the most intersectional, effective and beautiful work offering insight and solutions to many of the gender-based challenges we face.
Sage Lenier – Towards a Just Transition: Blueprint for a Green Economy
We spend a lot of time talking about the ecological crisis and not nearly enough talking about real, workable solutions. If the ultimate goal is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, how must we transform our economy to make that possible? Award-winning activist and innovative educator Sage Lenier, one of the most impressive young leaders to emerge in recent years, sheds light on what a realistic and just transition looks like and the role we can each play in leading us toward a more circular and equitable economy.
Women’s Earth Alliance Co-Directors Amira Diamond, Kahea Pacheco, and Melinda Kramer co-lead Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), a global initiative dedicated to empowering women’s leadership in environmental justice and resilience. Under their guidance, WEA has equipped over 50,000 women with technical, entrepreneurial, and leadership skills, impacting over 24 million people in 31 countries. Their collaborative leadership fosters networks that enhance climate resilience and address critical issues from clean water access to regenerative agriculture.
“We Will Be Jaguars” Book Club with Nemonte Nenquimo & Mitch Anderson
The Bioneers Learning Book Club is honored to present an extraordinary new experience featuring “We Will Be Jaguars,” the powerful memoir by Nemonte Nenquimo. This groundbreaking book, a Reese’s Book Club Pick and one of Library Journal’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a fearless climate activist and Indigenous leader.
More than just a memoir, “We Will Be Jaguars” is a call to action—a bold vision for protecting our planet rooted in generations of Indigenous wisdom and resilience. Together, through this book club, we’ll not only explore Nemonte’s inspiring journey but also gather as a community to empower one another and discover actionable ways to champion change in our own lives and beyond.
Join us to reflect, connect, and draw strength from both this extraordinary story and the collective power of shared learning.
Register for this book club by March 3, and you’ll be automatically entered to win a free copy of “We Will Be Jaguars”!
…to reclaim our voices, express our truth, shed negative conditioning, identify what calls us, become who we yearn to be, awaken our vision, attract support, connect us with allies, and mobilize change…
In this excerpt from the award winning book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred, Nina Simons shares her learning about how the stories we tell shape our world. When we reclaim our narratives, we reclaim our power to create a future rooted in solidarity, empathy, and transformation.
Nina Simons is Co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust and leadership development.
Women’s oppression and the degradation of the ‘feminine’ in all its forms has been enabled, perpetuated, and strengthened by silence, shame, and isolation. When we contemplate the waves of women’s liberation and rights movements over time and throughout different parts of the globe, we can see that they are always preceded and combined with women getting together and sharing their stories.
It’s only when we stop being silent and start to speak and make our voices heard that real change starts to happen. It is no exaggeration to say that when a woman speaks her truth, the world changes. As Ursula K. LeGuin, the late great poet and novelist, says: “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
A cognitive linguist focused on political change, George Lakoff studies how we respond to stories and how our behavior is influenced by the narratives and metaphors we use. His research strongly suggests that we humans are hard-wired for story. That means that once we’ve heard a story and our hearts and minds have wrapped around it, no amount of facts to the contrary will get us to let go of that story. We environmentalists and social justice activists often assume that if we present the facts we can change people’s minds, but it’s become clear that the facts are not nearly as sticky or convincing as stories are. Only a more compelling story can alter people’s prevailing narrative.
The author N. Scott Momaday said: “We live in a house made of stories.” Stories are the seed forms of culture we carry around within us. Internalized, they define how expansively or tightly we offer the gift of our lives to the world. We decide how far we can go, how large a stand we’re willing to make, or what risks we’re willing to take, based upon the stories we tell ourselves.
Sometimes these stories that help define us stem from our family, culture, and social conditioning, and we carry them unwittingly, unaware of how they shape our lives, so it is crucial that we do the work of unpacking and making conscious the stories we tell ourselves.
About 10 years ago, I began unearthing my own hidden stories, and discovered that I thought of myself as the woman behind the man (and, as you may have heard: behind every great man is a woman, rolling her eyes). It was shocking to realize how self-limiting my inner narrative was. I was horrified to discover that this story or belief had unconsciously embedded itself within me. I asked other colleagues whether any of them — including my husband and partner — saw me that way. They did not. Once I understood that it was only my own story and not reflected by others around me, I understood that I held the keys to my own liberation. This insight expanded my definition of leadership, and an awareness of the centrality of stories has informed and guided my path ever since.
Sometimes stories can help us to reconnect with emotions that have been banished or anesthetized. Given the scope of the losses we face, with species extinctions happening at an unimaginable rate, anger, loss, powerlessness, and grief are totally appropriate responses. Culturally, however, we have no rituals, no safe places to express those anymore.
Stories can reopen us, allowing us to feel our emotions in a healthy way so that we can risk casting aside our numbness to respond to these crises from an awakened and alive place. Those kinds of stories are needed to heal our relations with our selves, each other, and this endangered, sacred Earth that is our home. We tend to be far more adept at resisting what we don’t want than articulating a future story of what we yearn for with all our hearts. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up where we’re heading.” I believe the need for a clear vision of where we want to go is essential to help us connect with and inspire a broad range of people, and to help us develop the stamina and persistence we will need in the years ahead. Much of Bioneers’ emphasis over the years has been to inspire people to act on behalf of a future they want, to understand how interdependent all the issues confronting us are, and to highlight those stories that can motivate us to help build the sort of movement of movements we now need to save our species from its own worst impulses.
It’s vital that we tell stories of a future that’s believable, emotionally accessible, sensually connectable, and that we passionately want. I agree with Charles Eisenstein that we’re in a time “between stories.” There’s a story of fear, separation, and scarcity, based upon domination, ranking, and greed. It’s got a long and bloody history, and we’ve all had lots of practice adapting to it.
The emergent story is one of solidarity, of relatedness, of empathy and equity, giving and sharing. It includes meaningful rituals to mark changes and to form new relationships and life passages, respect, and appreciation for diversity and for the sacredness of all life, and operates on principles of inclusion and mutuality. This new culture will simultaneously draw from the best of humanity’s ancient wisdom and the most positive emergent new ideas. It’s a story of the relationship economy, not one based upon exploitation and transactions. This story has at its foundation the shifting of focus and priority in our societies from counting things to mapping connectedness. It’s the story of a security that’s based upon love, rather than material acquisition.
We’ve learned that neither fear nor threat can change people’s minds or behavior. It’s having a more enticing story — a narrative that speaks to our hearts, that describes a future we would all wish to live in, one that we all want to be invited into. Oh, I want to live in that story. Yes, I want to contribute to that future, that vision that someone just so beautifully evoked in their poetry or song. That’s the world I’m motivated to give my time, resources, and love to co-creating.
Stories are also vital to mending the false separations, the pigeonholing that our society is so patterned to reinforce. They can enhance our empathy, our capacity to imagine walking in another’s shoes. Most of us yearn for intimacy and deep relationship. Really listening to others’ stories and sharing some of our own are among the most effective pathways to transforming our cultures and growing deep connections. They work on us through identification with the storyteller, connecting us with those we might not normally see or hear. They are medicine for our false isolation, a way to forge connection and community and help shift our course.
Jensine Larson’s global media project, WorldPulse, connects women from around the world to share their stories and create networks of mutual support. It’s an example of just the sort of story-based initiative we need. Fortunately, WorldPulse is not alone. In the last few decades, whole new bodies of story-based practices, some based in ancient indigenous ways, some emerging from newly integrated understandings of neuroscience and psychology, have emerged. The practice of “Council,” of which there are many variants, and a slew of hosting and convening approaches and methods that use storytelling as a cornerstone of their methodology, is spreading far and wide.
We’re all involved in midwifing a new world into being, as the old world is crumbling around us. How do we engage with the tremendous uncertainty of the current human predicament?
Joanna Macy uses an especially powerful storytelling-based exercise to teach us how to shift our relationship to time. This is an exercise that comes from her Work that Reconnects: Imagine that time travel is possible and that you’re about to be visited by someone from seven generations in the future. A young person is coming back in time to interview you because you were alive in this pivotal moment. Take a moment to imagine and notice what you anticipate the tone of that interview might be, and let your body feel it. Notice any sensations that come up in your body, your heart, your mind, or your spirit.
Joanna suggests that this young person is coming back from the future because you are a hero, or a shero, to them. They are coming back so excited to ask you how you knew what to do. They ask you: “How did you navigate this extraordinary moment when everything about human civilization had to change? What can you teach me about how you gave yourself to this immense and essential transformation?” Again, notice any changes in your body, heart, mind, and spirit, and then, very gently, when you’re ready, bring your attention back to the present moment.
Did you assume initially that somebody coming back from the future would be mad, or angry? I sure did. I was pretty convinced that would be their stance. When I heard Joanna frame it that I was the hero, that I was here, that I helped make the change, I thought, wow, look at that invisible bias that I carry!
It’s a story that anticipates and assumes — based in part on experience — that we good guys are losing. We have lots of reasons to have adopted that insidious belief: just turn on the nightly news, it gets reinforced all the time. But this is why it’s so radical and so important to monitor and question our inner stories. We can support each other in knowing that the outcome being predicted in the media spin is not the final word. Our attitude towards what happens is key, and if we can show up for a positive outcome in a wholehearted and believable way, we can engage others to join us.
As Gandhi said, “Social change occurs when deeply felt private experiences are given public legitimacy.”
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