Taken in the Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tonight I watched the excellent and thought-provoking program featuring journalists Bryan Christy and Aidan Hartley and produced by J.J. Kelley for PBS. As an activist for elephants I was very interested in how the message of elephant poaching would be conveyed to a general audience. Here are some of main points that struck me:

805 of Chinese middle class owns ivory and China does not have a history of valuing the elephant as a live animal. The art of ivory carving has been flourishing in China for over 2,000 years and has become a perverted symbol of Buddhism as many of the elephant tusks are turned into buddhist icons in factories set up by the Chinese government.

The program followed Hartley as he traveled in Africa, mainly in Tanzania, to investigate the ivory trade on the ground with Christy who was stationed in China investigating the demand at the high end ivory shops which often sell pieces worth over one million dollars.

In 1800 there were 26 million elephants in Africa. The early 1900′s led to a large demand for ivory, not only for piano keys and pool and billiard balls and combs but as a symbol of manliness when wealthy men went on safari and killed an elephant. By 1979 there were only 1.3 million elephants left. By 1989 there were only 600,000.

Richard Leakey convinced Kenya’s president at that time to publicly burn the accumulated ivory which then evaporated the demand. With little killing over ten years the elephants rebounded to 1 million but decisions in 1999 and 2008 with CITES allowed two sales of stockpiled ivory. These sanctioned a legal trade in the tusks and has made a cover for all sales of ivory where sellers can claim that their ivory was legally acquired.

Only 16 percent of the ivory shown in China is legal.

The program spent a short segment detailing the wondrous qualities of elephants – that they mourn their dead, that they have rich social lives and communicate through their feet with subsonic sound. They showed elephants fondling the bones of fallen family members.

The program delved into the corruption with high level diplomats who apparently purchase ivory (Rhino horn and elephant tusks) from traders and take it back to China on diplomatic planes that are above being searched.

One of the most poignant moments was an interview with a man in China who owns a huge collection of ivory sculptures. When asked how he felt about the elephants he replied that he believed that the elephant smiled and gladly gave its tusks in the service of Buddhism. An example of the willful blindness that people have to justify their actions in spite of clear evidence of the cruelty and suffering behind them. Brian Christy looked at the camera and said “The elephants are not smiling.”

Ivory seized in Cameroon

There were some examples of positive efforts which nevertheless can’t withstand the rising demand for ivory and the illegal encroachments with helicopters and machine guns that have decimated elephant populations in other so-called protected areas. Most recently there were over 200 elephants in Cameroon gunned down in one day in 2012 which were in a protected area.

Hartley managed to convince a Tanzanian ambassador to allow cameras in to the largest stockpile of ivory in the world which houses over 50 million dollars worth of ivory. He suggests that Tanzania which is one of the poorest countries in Africa might be willing to burn its stockpile if someone was willing to donate that 50 million to help Tanzanians regain a financial foothold. The tension is ever present as Tanzania has asked for an exception to the ban from CITES which will be voting March 30-14 in Thailand which has been found to be a nexus for the illegal ivory trade.

The solutions

In a climate where both the black market price for ivory and its demand are so high, elephants’ lives are put at risk by the mere prospect of a sanctioned sale of ivory. If the poaching of elephants and ever growing trade in illegal ivory is to be seriously addressed, part of the solution to this complex problem must be a return to the full ban on the sale of ivory established in 1989.

The following is taken from www.bloodyivory.org/stop-the-ivory-trade

Other measures which must be taken with urgency include:

• Address the involvement of international criminal syndicates by means of strong law enforcement at both national and international levels along the full extent of the supply – demand chain. The effectiveness of this measure should be judged not only by ivory seizures and arrests recorded but also by convictions with proportionate penalties and the disruption of the implicated trade networds.
• Close down domestic (national) markets in ivory, to accompany the trade ban instituted by CITES.
• Educate consumers in order to stem the demand for ivory. A survey in China found that almost 70% of the public thought ivory did not come from dead elephants but that it fell out naturally, like teeth.

The alternative to taking the bull by the horns? Some countries continue to report localised extinctions of small vulnerable elephant populations, a number of others edge closer to losing all their remaining elephants and the larger ‘safer’ populations start or continue their own downward spiral.

Read more and sign the petition to stop the ivory trade.

About Naturestage’s Elephant Project

We are seeking producers to help create a series of short films that will be geared for viewing by high school students around the globe that use short true stories about people and elephants to evoke emotional reactions and responses in various art forms. These would then be used by the students to start a dialogue about how to manage other species and to look at human nature as a way to start to solve what is the largest species extinction currently underway, not just for elephants but for myriad other species. The series would be a gateway to looking at ourselves as well as finding solutions that stem from a heart connection. You can read more about it on the naturestage website and at www.theelephantproject.com

Related articles

• WATCH: ‘Battle For The Elephants’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Battle for the Elephants Episode 4: Massive Ivory Stockpile (newswatch.nationalgeographic.com)

Lupina is up for adoption at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. You can read about her below.

Naturestage is all about using the arts to foster a sense of kinship with other species, but sometimes it feels very satisfying to make a real difference that is tangible and as practical as a cat leaving a cage after months at a shelter and finding a home where he or she is cherished.

That is what we’re aiming for this holiday season, as I use my photographic skills to help make some of the cats needing homes stand out on Petfinder. Your donations help me afford to do more photography like this of animals in shelters, as well as the pursue the other Naturestage projects.

Here are some of the cats I photographed on Monday at the MSPCA Nevins Farm in Methuen, MA and their stories. You can request copies of the postcards of each cat to include inside your holiday cards this season. Samples of the cards are at the end of the post. Help spread the word by sharing this blog and ordering some postcards to enclose that will draw people to the naturestage website to see more animals needing homes and learn about our various large-scale projects like the One Language Project, The Elephant Project and Park Dreams.

Huge thanks to Peter Sward and Jackie Goreham for “cat wrangling” and the descriptions of the cat histories, and to Lensprotogo in Concord for lending lighting equipment, as well as to Susan Hughes of the Greening Touch for lending the orchids and other plants for the session.

THE CATS!

Available for Adoption as of November 12 at MSCPA Nevins Farm

Einstein is a gray and white male. He’s living in the staff offices because he doesn’t like cats. He must be the only king in the castle. He’s full of zest and would love to have a real home. He was very scared during the photoshoot as you can probably tell by his eyes.

Einstein Needs a Home! Available for adoption as of November 12 2012 at MSPCA Nevins Farm.

http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/24588019

Salem Needs a Home! Available for Adoption at MSPCA Nevins Farm as of November 12, 2012

Salem is a long-haired tabby.  Her previous family had no time for her and her two friends. They were both adopted. She is a very smart and curious cat, but a bit wary until she warms up. She loves affection – being petted and brushed. She is very terrified in the shelter and wanted to hide in this apple basket. Please help her feel loved and safe!

Salem Needs a Home! You can adopt her from the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. Come soon to have this regal and beautiful cat as your companion.

Daquiri Needs a Home! Adoptable as of November 12, 2012 at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen

Daquiri is a tortoise shell female. She is 3 years old and very talkative. Her ‘Dad’ in her family died and her Mom was allergic so she brought her to MSPCANevins. She has so much love to offer!

Daquiri is ready for a home! Available at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen as of November 12, 2012

Daquiri!

Rafiki Has Lots of Sweetness and Love to Offer. He is adoptable as of November 12, 2012 at the MSPCA Nevins Farm in Methuen

Rafiki is a playful and sweet gray cat. He was adopted but returned when the cat in the house was bullying him. He really likes other cats and you can read more about him here: http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/23296271

Rafiki Needs a Home! He is adoptable as of 11/12/12 at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen.

Tater Tot is a very distinguished cat with a huge heart. She wanted to stay on the rug in the set and get petted endlessly. She needs a home and is adoptable at MSPCA Nevins Farm in Methuen. Come soon!

Tater Tot is a beautiful black cat. She was a stray hanging around someone’s yard for a while and is declawed, so this was a very risky life she was living outdoors with no way to protect herself from raccoons, coyotes, and dogs. Without her claws, she especially loves being scratched and petted and is a big fan of head butts.

Tater Tot Needs a Home! Available from MSPCA Nevins Farm in Methuen.

Tater Tot needs a home! She is available at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen.

Sebago really needs a home soon. He is so sweet and good with kids and other pets but seems depressed. He came from another shelter and is now at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. Come soon!

Sebago is a loving black and white cat who came from another shelter. He is mellow and the caretakers at the MSPCA at Nevins are worried he’s depressed. He tolerates other cats as well as kids. Please give him his forever home! http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/24572962

Sebago needs a home! You can find him at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen, MA. Come soon!

Sebago Needs Home! He is at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. Please come soon!

Hidz hid in someone’s garage during hurricane Sandy. She has lots of zest and is just a beautiful cat. Come give her a forever home! MSPCA at Nevins

Hidz was a stray who hid in someone’s garage for Hurricane Sandy. While in there, she was polite enough to use a litter box. Total lapcat. She is actually sick right now with an upper respiratory infection which is common when cats come into the shelter. 

Hidz is ready to go to her forever home and feel safe and fully appreciated. She is available at MSPCA Nevins as of November 12, 2012

Happy will make a wonderful cat for someone who has time to listen to him and give him affection and playtime. He’s available at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm, and because he is a black cat, he really needs your help. People are still superstitious about black cats which is why there are so many in shelters. Come soon!

Happy is a black male with a little white on his paws.  He came in with his lifelong companion, Chloe, but they weren’t adopted together and he did not get along with the cat in the new family, so they returned him. He probably misses Chloe a lot, but we can see he loves to play. Give him a second chance!  http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/23844606

Happy is so handsome! Available for adoption at the MSPCA at Nevins

Lupina is ready for a forever home! You can find her at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen. Come soon!

Lupina is a very special cat and needs a forever home. You can find her at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen

Lupina is a tiny white tabby: She’s about 3 pounds and looks like a kitten but she’s about four years old. She has a heart murmur and they are hoping to get enough donations on her behalf to get her an echocardiogram so we can determine the severity of the problem. She came in with a friend who was adopted. Just as with us, it can be hard on other animals when their companions leave them for whatever reason. Come soon and give this beautiful little spirit a good home! http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/24588446   

Lupina needs a loving home! You can find her at the MSPCA at Nevins Farm in Methuen waiting for you.

Almond Joy is a gorgeous cat who adores being stroked and playing. He has FeLV but that just means he needs to be kept indoors and can be the only cat in a household. You can find this gem of a cat at Nevins Farm MSPCA.

Almond Joy has Feline Leukemia FeLV. He was abandoned in an apartment and has been waiting such a long time to find a home. He likes dogs. More info here http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/24520680

Almond Joy! Ready to go home with you at MSPCA Nevins.

Sally is full of playfulness and ready to be out of her cage and in someone’s home. She also has Feline Leukemia Virus but this just means she needs to be the only cat and can’t go outdoors. Come bring her home!

Sally: Tiger, FeLV cat. Feisty and fun. More info here. What a beautiful cat she is! http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/24243763

Sally needs a home! You can find her at Nevins Farm MSPCA in Methuen.

The Muffin Man is only one years old, but he caught FeLV from another cat and just needs to be in a home where he doesn’t go outside and he is the only cat. He’s the sweetest and you can find him at the MSPCA at Nevins in Methuen.

 

The Muffin Man is a Long Haired Ginger cat. He is only one year old, but looks so much older, probably because he has contracted Feline Leukemia Virus from another cat. He is so mellow and sweet, and an absolute purr machine. When I photographed him on Monday, he was getting over a case of the sniffles.

The Muffin Man is only one years old, but he caught FeLV from another cat and just needs to be in a home where he doesn’t go outside and he is the only cat. He’s the sweetest and you can find him at the MSPCA at Nevins in Methuen.

These 4 inch by 5.5 inch cards come in packs of 25 and cost $50 plus sales tax and shipping. They are a wonderful way to bring attention to Naturestage’s work as well as the MSPCA, and of course to the cats needing adoption. Email us at miranda@naturestage.org to order your cards in time for the holidays.

A sample card (there are twelve made for each of the above cats) which you can include in your holiday mailings this season to help raise money for Naturestage projects and make more photoshoots of animals needing adoption possible. They also bring awareness to the wonderful work of the MSPCA. We are about to launch a store on the Naturestage site. If you would like to order cards, they are $50 for 25 and they are 4 x 5.5 inches so that they fit inside a 5×7 envelope and folded card. To order your cards, email me at miranda@naturestage.org and tell me how many you would like for your holiday mailings or just to share with people you know.

Reblogged from One Language Project: Stories which show our kinship with other species:

On my way back from Camden, I stopped off in Portland and parked downtown. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Maybe it was because he looked so clean, his shirt and sneakers so new, or because he seemed so open. But it was his small pekingese huddled in the bike carrier, and the way he touched it tenderly under its chin that finally drew me to him.

Read more… 763 more words

On my way back from Camden, I stopped off in Portland and parked downtown. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Maybe it was because he looked so clean, his shirt and sneakers so new, or because he seemed so open. But it was his small pekingese huddled in the bike carrier, and the way he touched it tenderly under its chin that finally drew me to him. He said he needed money to get to Denver. I asked, Why Denver? He told me that Maine wasn’t friendly towards people with epilepsy in giving financial assistance and that Denver was known for being better. He told me that he was clean, just occasional marijuana and cigarettes. He had no record. I believed him because of what he told me next, and because of his hands and the gentle and absent-minded way he occasionally touched the dog beside him. He had been making good money in retail but found himself on the floor one day after a seizure and then without a job the next week. His roommate moved out on short notice, his girlfriend broke up with him, and he wasn’t able to prove that he had a recurring condition to qualify for financial assistance. He was able to find another job washing dishes in a cafe, but fell over in the kitchen with a severe seizure which he said was brought on from an overwhelming feeling of contentment. It was then that he lost his apartment and he and Buzzer moved to the streets. I didn’t realize that epileptic seizures can be brought on by strong emotions, both positive and negative. Without medication, he might never tame his predicament, and when I asked him if he would take medication, he said he believed in more natural remedies, like marijuana. He says he hasn’t had a seizure since the time in the cafe as long as he can self-medicate, but he also hasn’t been able to find a job because of his history of epilepsy. All the while I was sitting with him in the park, his tiny pekingese Buzzer looked forlornly out of the yellow bike carrier. A woman stopped by us in the park and handed him a bag full of cans of wet dog food and he thanked her as if they knew each other well. I was amazed at how much Steve knew about the nutritional needs of small dogs - how much protein and vitamins they needed. He told me it was a struggle to make sure Buzzer was getting the food that would keep him healthy and I asked him about his own food.  He told me that because of his height, he should be 250 pounds but was only 175. He says he often goes hungry so that Buzzer can have enough. When he teared up talking about Buzzer, his eyes grew red and he had to wipe away tears with his sleeve. it was as if he was letting his stress, his hopes, his disappointment and his love all leak out at the seams. He brought his arms back to rest on the bike tires that I hoped would carry him and Buzzer to Denver, to the promised land. He told me that he had rescued Buzzer from neglect 13 years ago in Rockland.  Buzzer's companionship kept him going when the people who said were his friends in Portland weren’t there for him. I asked him if Buzzer could tell how he was feeling and he said that often when he was working very hard to focus on the glass half full, Buzzer would whine and hold his head down between his paws. He said that he had never wanted Buzzer to grow old and to be without a home and sense of safety. I couldn’t help think he was talking about himself too. Hi earnestness opened a tremendous sense of compassion in me. When you love someone, whether a dog or another person, and want to protect them from any harshness in the world, it is all the more painful when you feel time running out. As Steve talked about the Occupy Movement while gently stroking the fur of his one true companion, I imagined the two of them, traveling beneath the open sky, heading west. And I worried if he might just feel too much joy... or too much freedom that he might be found on the side of the road, post-seizure, a little deaf and blind dog huddled at his side. It is partially for people like Steve and their emotional companions, whether two or four-legged, that I dedicate the One Language Project. For the people who can love and care for others despite their own challenges, and who aim to see the best in life despite their real failings and mental illness. To see more please visit www.onelanguageproject.com

This is a respost of the latest on the new naturestage blog for the One Language Project. If you’d like the latest videos and audio slideshows delivered to your inbox, please “follow” this new blog for our project closest to home. Your dog (or other pet) can be featured here too. Drop us a line at miranda@naturestage.org to find out more or just to make a tax-deductible donation to the project so that more people can participate. We are gathering stories people have about the animals in their lives for a variety of venues – radio and photo essays.

Many many thanks to Caroline from the wonderful pcatsitting and dogwalking company urbanpawprint for sharing her stories in this video.

Meerkat behind glass at the Brooklyn Zoo photo: Miranda Loud

I opened the New York Times today and discovered a video on Zoos in America. Last week’s Times featured a front page article on the commonalities between human animal diseases and non human animal diseases. Apparently, other species suffer from many of the same psychological and physical diseases as we do and veterinarians are being asked to chime in on human conditions with their solutions. PBS just broadcast two powerful documentaries on the connection we have with dogs and cats (Shelter Me and Why We Love Dogs and Cats.)

Video: Full Episode.

I am so heartened by the growing interest in what we share in common with other species. There is a long way to go but social change takes time.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/05/27/science/100000001553763/the-future-of-zoos.html

I am so happy to see the mainstream media start to venture into what in past years would have seemed the dangerous zone of anthropomorphizing. I keep envisioning it becoming more profound – nightly newscasters showing animals needing adoption, or weather forecasters mentioning that people should slow down on the roads because of salamander migrations and animals coming out of hibernation or babies being born who don’t know about cars…or of the devastation on our psyche, on the environment, on the unlucky animals in factory farms which wouldn’t exist without our tax subsidies and being far away from most of our viewing. (Factory farms have just lobbied to make it illegal for photographers or videographers to enter their facilities). With every day, I hope to bring this into focus through whatever means I have as an artist.

design and photos: Miranda Loud

The One Language Project – The photographs I am taking and the accompanying essays by the owners, will be expanding for use in an App for the ipad and for viewing on the website with hyperlinks and infographics. Check out the page and consider commissioning a portrait of your dog to be used in the installations or donating to the project. This public art project is a powerful way to put other species in front of us and show our interconnections across species divides through the one language of emotion we all share.

The questions I’m including in the next installation June 22nd of One Language: For the Love of Dogs:

“What would we do differently if we referred to all other individuals in other species as a someone instead of a something? Should we be drawing lines or should we instead by drawing circles?”

Handpaw photo: Miranda Loud

Next year, maybe cows, or cats, or ferrets or parrots or pigs? Our longing for connection with other species is that longing we have for touch, voice, relationship, belonging. Maybe it is as close as your yard, your rooftop, your living room. There is someone who needs you to listen – whether the cardinal at your window, the dog at your side, the elephants fighting for survival, or your neighbor next door, hidden from view in loneliness and struggle. We are all animals with similar needs and great capacity for bringing joy.

Fergus photo: Miranda Loud

Lou photo: Miranda Loud

Below is a short film that is thought-provoking. Please watch and share!

http://www.globalonenessproject.org/media/gop-player.swf

www.globalonenessproject.org

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dogs-yawn-when-they-hear-people-yawn-suggesting-they-empathize-with-humans/2012/05/14/gIQAz9EcPU_story.html

…and two photos of Gretta, whose owner told me that she rescued her from a puppy mill breeder, and that she hadn’t been adopted because of her wandering eye.

Gretta photo: Miranda Loud

Gretta photo: Miranda Loud

…and Diesel, whose owner told me that the bond between them was so strong, that Diesel wouldn’t let anyone else care for him.

Diesel photo: copyright Miranda Loud

…and this

TEN FAVORS A DOG ASKS FROM A MAN

1) My life lasts between ten to fifteen years. Every separation from you means suffering for me. Think about this before you decide whether or not to take me!

2) Give me time to understand what you are asking from me.

3) Instill confidence in me – I thrive on it!

4) Do not be angry with me for a long time and do not lock me up for punishment! You have your work, your pleasure, your joy – I have only you.

5) Talk often to me! Even if I do not understand you completely, I do understand the tone of your voice when you talk to me.

6) Know that, no matter how I am being treated, I shall never forget it!

7) Keep in mind, before you hit me , that my jaws could crush the knuckles of your hand with ease, but that I do not make use of them.

8) Before you scold me when working with me, consider: perhaps I am uncomfortable from digesting my last meal; perhaps I was exposed to the sun too long; or perhaps I have a worn-out heart.

9) Take care of me when I am old — you too are going to be old one day.

10) Be with me when my going gets rough. Everything is easier for me when you are beside me.

design and concept: Miranda Loud

One Language: For the Love of Dogs – is phase one of an expanding and ongoing exploration of the one language we share with with other species and one another – emotion.

I am absolutely thrilled to combine my love for photography, video and audio storytelling with the mission of Naturestage in this project which encapsulates much of my most recent work and which I think has the power to engage people in conversations about our role alongside the other species on the planet.

Here are photos from today’s new installation in the Dakota Puffin Dog Boutique on Charles Street in Boston. Many thanks to Nicole, the owner, for giving us wall space for the exhibit, and to the owners of the dogs who wrote heart-felt short essays and allowed me to photograph their wonderful dogs. It brings me so much joy to discover the stories of these animals through the eyes and hearts of their owners, and to involve more and more people and their pets in this project. We hope the idea will attract backers for parts of this project which will help bring the exhibit to different spaces and cover the cost of taking the photos and reproducing them on the canvases.

Here is where you come in. If you have a dog or know someone who has a story to share about their dog, please consider becoming part of this exhibition as it reproduces for the walls of office buildings, dental offices, restaurants, galleries, libraries, hospitals and schools. I will take photos of your dog on location and then work with you to write a short paragraph or two about how your dog has changed your life. One goal of the project is to bring the connection we share with other animals into mainstream conversation and shed light on our conflicting treatment of animals in society and how to build empathy, understanding and respect for those beings which rely on us to take their interests to heart. One Language – For the Love of Dogs, opened today!

Click the link above to see some of the parks we hope to visit for the Park Dreams podcasts and stories…

http://www.prx.org/pieces/75580-prospect-park-interview-1

To see Gary’s paintings, you can visit his website http://www.wix.com/gsuperhawk/garydunn/gallery#!__gallery

One of my friends has truly the most extraordinary collection of books of anyone I know, and I confess, I’ve photographed her books (with her permission). I thought maybe you’d be interested in some of the books lining my shelves, covering topics from fundraising in the arts, to empathy and compassion, economics, essays by naturalists, poetic writings on nature and animals, etc.

What are some of your faves?

illustration by Lief Parsons

Connecting the presidential pardon of a turkey on Thanksgiving to the need for a educational focus on empathy for other species, might seem a stretch. Then again, after reading much of David Livingtone Smith’s fascinating book, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, I’m not so sure.

It seems that, according to Livingstone Smith, humans in all cultures and throughout recorded history have prepared for war through dehumanizing their perceived enemy, often equating them with some type of animal or insect. As Smith points out in detail, recent examples of this abound in war reporting and in the language used by people involved in genocide. Inhumane treatment of prisoners of war seems closely tied with animal references – dogs, vermin, rats.  Jane Goodall has said that humans are the only animal capable of conscious cruelty, which makes this use of animal imagery to justify cruelty all the more ironic.

In a recent interview which I highly recommend reading, Goodall says “It simply doesn’t make sense that the most intellectually smart creature that has ever walked on planet Earth is destroying its only home, and destroying it so heedlessly. So how do we mend the damaged connection between brain and heart? Through the youth.”

Human activities are causing the sixth greatest extinction known on the planet. It seems as if there couldn’t be a more important moment in history to take action and stop such needless suffering and extermination of other species, whether willingly or unwittingly. Take, for example, the impending extinction of tuna due to overfishing and trawling in the oceans, the impending extinction of the Asian elephant in the wild, great apes and big cats on the decline, countless species that are less familiar to us but are dying from hunger, pollution and dwindling habitats. Although extinction is a part of the unfolding of life in its fluid and ever-shifting forms, it has never happened so quickly and pervasively due to human activities.

Goodall affirms the power of stories and of children’s hope and ability to change their parents but says that behavior change requires a multi-leveled approach. Most importantly, she emphasizes nurturing the hope that children naturally have about the world and giving them tools to implement their compassion. She also makes clear that she is not fighting for animal rights, per se, but for human responsibility. This is also my aim with Naturestage – to create connection and empathy that make audiences and students want to protect other species and ecosystems.

A recent column in The Stone, one of my favorite blogs on philosophy in the New York Times, discusses the link between the practice of pardoning a turkey on the eve of Thanksgiving and the “strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners.” If we were more empathic and sensitized to the needs of other animals, might this not extend to how easily we could be manipulated into becoming dehumanizers of other humans?

David Brooks, regular op-ed contributor and author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, has also written a thought-provoking post on the new buzzword, empathy. In his October article, “Empathy versus action: Don’t just feel – lend a hand”, Brooks suggests that feeling empathy is not enough; that for empathy to be connected to positive social action, it must be connected to moral codes. As Brooks points out, peoples’ codes often conflict.

He writes “In the early days of the Holocaust, Nazi prison guards sometimes wept as they mowed down Jewish women and children, but they still did it. Subjects in the famous Milgram experiments felt anguish as they appeared to administer electric shocks to other research subjects, but they pressed on because some guy in a lab coat told them to.”

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937 Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

Examining one’s moral values and talking about social codes is a thorny path to pursue as an educator. Enter art, the great means of forming empathy and simultaneously questioning our individual moral codes. Some of the greatest art causes you to examine your own inner limits of where your feeling urges you to act and why you do or don’t follow through on that urge. Picasso’s Guernica depicts the horrors of war, but does it turn the viewers into peace activists? Do people understand it without knowing its context? The painting did indeed raise world attention to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Picasso scholar Becht-Jördens writes,

In his chef d’oevre, Picasso seems to be trying to define his role and his power as an artist in the face of political power and violence. But far from being a mere political painting, Guernica should be seen as Picasso’s comment on what art can actually contribute towards the self-assertion that liberates every human being and protects the individual against overwhelming forces such as political crime, war, and death.

I discovered through my current interest in incorporating animation for The Elephant Project films, that a fellow artist, animator extraordinaire Ed Hooks, has coincidentally read and written about the same article by Brooks. He has this to say, and I agree completely. The most crucial element of the following is that humans can imagine what others are feeling based on what they see others doing. This naturally extends to how other animals behave. He writes,

http://www.filmcourage.com/content/making-your-film-matter-introduction-social-action-campaigns

I followed a few of the links and found three others which you should check out if you are an artist looking for collaborators to create social change

http://www.loveinstereo.com/

and if you are a charitable organization looking for other places which might promote your work

http://www.takepart.com/

and lastly if you are interested in how filmmakers are meeting in a new forum called The Good Pitch which has the potential to work worldwide on the TEDx model as a way to specifically ask for funding (TEDx doesn’t allow for this) from the organizations who need filmmakers to make films that help them as well. The stories we tell can make the world better, but as we all know, it takes money.

Naturestage is ready to benefit from all of the above. If you have any ideas along these lines to share to help our work, please drop a line to miranda@naturestage.org

On another note, we have been fine-tuning our vision and sending it as part of our project proposals to various foundations and want to share it with you!

Mission:

Through multi-media performances, stand-alone films and educational arts-based curricula Naturestage uses the emotional power of art and film to explore our relationship with other species and inspire action to become global stewards.

Vision:

Within the next five years, Naturestage aims to become the platform for creative collaboration for developing arts-based projects which highlight the complex human role in global stewardship taking the needs of other species into account.  The collaboration between artists –visual artists, animators, installation artists, filmmakers, composers, choreographers, musicians and actors–can be brought together with partnerships through organizations which are looking for more potent ways to achieve their own mission, whether in conservation, animal protection, and natural resource protection. With adequate funding and a designated studio for rehearsals and meetings, Naturestage can develop timely, innovative and art-centered projects that can be used in a variety of settings and by teachers across disciplines to engage students with their emotions and their creativity to explore and develop solutions to how we interact and care for other species.

Why Naturestage is Vital:

At this point in human civilization we have the technology, funding and knowledge to make life much better for more people on the planet in addition to the miraculous other species alongside us that depend on us to take their needs into account. On the flip side, we have the technology and capacity to make life worse for other beings as a by-product of our out-dated systems of consumption and energy use.

Naturestage is at the vanguard of a growing awareness that we need to help foster imagination and out-of-the-box thinking in tandem with understanding and caring about the sensitivities of other species as part of our successful flourishing as a human species. Although social change is enormously complex, it can only happen when the values of global stewardship are made real in what we teach the next generation of leaders – those students and audiences who will either create new systems or reconfigure old ones. There is a balance we need to find between unnecessary consumption and consumption based on the essential needs for healthy food, water, beauty, safety, and meaningful relationships, not only with one another but with the natural world.

The arts are essential in education. They help build empathy, self-knowledge, and this vital out-of-the box thinking that will make the world better. Creating and experiencing ideas through an artistic lens gives gives us tools to handle the emotional complexity of today’s world. Education is still very human-centric, yet surprisingly unfocused on teaching students about human nature.

Naturestage addresses this need to focus on the richness of the arts in education in educating tomorrow’s leaders. Our projects create spaces for connection, communication and deeper listening to one another and to the natural world.

Phil Zimbardo – psychologist, founder of the Heroic Imagination Project

(excerpt) Heroes make personal sacrifices for the good of others. What I’ve been doing is creating a program that tries to train, coach and produce heroes. In california I have a hero factory. Heroic action is behavior that is:

• engaged in voluntarily
• conducted in service to one or more people or the community as a whole;
• involves a risk to physical comfort, social stature, or quality of life;
• iniated without the expectation of material gain; and
• is learned, taught, modeled, not inborn

Heroes become special by doing that heroic act. We believe heroism can be trained, coached, taught, especially with the next generation.  Each of us has the power to influence unknown numbers of people.  When we do the opposite we can become a model for evil.  We should be aware of the ripple effect we have. The important thing is to speak up.

Bill Strickland - President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG), and Bidwell Training Center (BTC).

Strickland is nationally recognized as a visionary leader who authentically delivers educational and cultural opportunities to students and adults within an organizational culture that fosters innovation, creativity, responsibility and integrity.

Throughout Strickland’s distinguished career, he has been honored with numerous prestigious awards for his contributions to the arts and the community, including the coveted MacArthur “Genius” award. The past several decades have been dedicated to maintaining successful relationships with prominent national foundations and political leaders who share his passion and vision for a healthier future. To see more http://www.manchesterbidwell.org/ncat/index.php

“Entrepreneurs are, by definition, visionaries. The use of art to change students’ attitudes is at the heart of my vision of education. I see a connection between the creativity instilled by a love of the arts, and the skills needed for business success. Artists are by nature entrepreneurs. They can visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable.”

(Excerpt) People are born into the world as assets not liabilities.  So, I built a training center for poor folks in my neighborhood. I wanted the kids to know that you could bring the world to you. I built a center with a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. The whole theory is if you want to get people to perform like world class citizens you have to treat them that way. This is my vision for what a center should like like for training poor people. (photos of beautiful interiors of the centers he has built)

In 26 years we’ve never had one act of theft or vandalism in the highest crime rate area of Pittsburgh. We have no metal detectors. Environment drives behavior. Beautiful environments create beautiful kids.

Children deserve fresh flowers in their life. I figured out the cure for spiritual cancer – it’s sunlight, flowers, hope. I manufacture hope in this center. We take poor folks and make them gourmet cooks in ten months. We bring in chefs from all over the world . We took the design from a kitchen at the Ritz Carleton. We’ve made a fascinating discovery…

It’s how you think about people that drives behavior.

We subsidize a gourmet lunch for people in the school every day of the week. This is our dining room and our idea for how to treat people. One of my goals in life is to build one of these in every city in America. You come to Pittsburgh and I’ll show you welfare moms who are doing logarithmic calculus.  I got the welfare moms growing orchids because it’s good for their spirits as well as their pocket books. We took first and second prize in the orchid symposium.

I believe we can create these centers in every major city in this country and I hope I’ve given you a sense of what dreams can do. To read more about Bill Strickland, find his book http://www.randomhouse.com/book/174770/make-the-impossible-possible-by-bill-strickland/9780385520553/

Eddie Bocanegra – from The Interrupters and CeaseFire, Chicago

(Excerpt) We were fortunate enough to be filmed for a bit over a year. We allowed cameras to be in the communities we serve and expose some of the issues we deal with. If it wasn’t for cease fire I wouldn’ t be doing the work I do now. I’m an ex-felon. I served 14 years in prison. Cease Fire took a chance on me. All three of us put our dirty laundry out for everyone to see and I can tell you that we don’t take pride in the fact that we went to prison and did time. We are proud of the work we do now. It’s embarassing to share our past. But this film is about redemption, sacrifice and how one individual can make a difference in their community. There’s a scripture that says Jesus healed ten lepers and of these lepers only one came back. I want to be that leper. I want to come back and make a difference in the communities I serve. I’m in a position where I can help and spend the rest of my life serving others.

I came from a pretty good family, two parents that worked hard. My sisters have worked for the government, the military, but yet I still went to prison. I went to prison because I didn’t have an identify or know who I was and I believed in a false creed. It was at a high cost and I’ve pledged to make up for what I’ve done in my past.

CeaseFire has hired over 300 ex-offenders. I’m grateful for our staff. This is a combined and team effort. But in that team I include you as well because we are part of society and we do have to be held accountable for how we help our neighbors and our own kids.  It’s easier to pass judgement and criticize than it is to give a compliment. Thank you for everything.

Jerry Mitchell- Investigative Reporter, the Clarion Ledger

(Excerpt) Great to be with you. This is a poster, fbi poster, of three missing civil rights workers, one is James Chaney. I happened to visit his grave in Mississippi and brush away the leaves:

“There are those who are alive that have never lived and those who are dead, yet will live forever. Great deeds inspire the living.”

I’m here to talk about Medgar Evers and Bernon Damon. Medgar Evers fought the nazis, came home to Mississippi and turned around and had to fight racism all over again. On the same night that president Kennedy talked about how people still aren’t free Medgar Evers was shot in the back and his wife cradled him, his kids saw the blood and screamed.

I found Evers killer. Here he is.

I wanted those records. I was obsessed. A couple weeks later the jackson police cleaned out a closet and found the photographs of Evers’ murder and the prosecutor found the murder weapon in his father in law’s closet and Beckwith’s thumbprint on the murder weapon.

I was interviewing Beckwith without him knowing that I was opening up the case again. he was spewing one racial rant after another. As I left him he said if you write negative things about white people, god will punish you. In 1994 when a jury convicted Beckwith of Medgar Evers’ murder and the word guilty rang out, waves of joy cascaded down the hall.

It made me realize that the impossible IS possible. There were hundreds of these kinds of killings that took place that were never prosecuted.

Before hate there is fear and before fear there is dishumanization. I’ve had threats and yes that’s frightening but it’s given me a gift as well which is the gift of living fearlessly. we all can live fearlessly. It’s not about living without fear at all. It’s about overcoming those worries and fears that keep us from living lives that matter. It means standing up to hate. It means standing up even when we know we’re going to be ostracized for doing the right thing.

It dawned on me, each day we are etching the words of our lives. What will your headstone say?

Photographer Jim Richardson speaking at Chicago Ideas Week 2011

Chicago Ideas Week hosted four award-winning photographers, giving them a platform to talk about their work and share some of their spectacular photographs from the National Geographic, Chicago Tribune, and others. I transcribed much of what they said, although without the images to accompany their words it obviously has much less impact. What struck me about all four was their focus on relationships, whether between human and non-human animal, people of different cultures, men and women, people and the earth. Their images are stunning. I encourage you to check out each of their websites and google them to see more of their photographs. A picture says a thousand words.

Jim Richardson: Everyone is a photographer and it’s the language we speak. Out in Kansas, my wife and I have a gallery and every so often people come through and they walk down the wall and they see all the images I”ve taken from around the country and I can see one of two questions coming. The first one is easy to answer – do you actually go to the places you photograph? Honest to God, that is the question. And I go, yes, that’s the way it works. We actually go there.

The second question is more difficult because they say “what’s your favorite thing to photograph?” They mean do you do sports, weddings, nature, wildlife, culture? I often puzzle about that because I do all these things. I do what is necessary to tell the story and particularly I like unsung stories. I like stories no one else would pay attention to if I didn’t. The stories are the leverage by which I take the photography and hopefully do something that in some remote way might move somebody and provide that fulcrum point to help leverage the pictures into action and impact.

I want to start out our presentation today with how pictures tell stories and how they transmit from one place to another. He shows pictures from the Edinburgh Festival and Fring (National No-Smiling Day)

Image: Jim Richardson

I thought, let’s do this out in Kansas. Then the story grew. It became part of what was in Edinburgh’s culture became part of our culture here as well. That is how pictures work. If you think that pictures can do little things like this in great mass movements, they can. I like to put my energy into images and stories. The images together with the stories are the real leverage points.

I remember going to market on saturday and was entranced by this house on the north coast of Brittany because it tells you the bit of mystery. Who the HELL thought of putting a house there between the rocks? Same with who was putting up the statues on Easter island, or what happened when Mendelssohn went to Fingal’s Cave and it really changed our view of the natural world (he shows these extraordinary events in his photos)

So those are single picture story telling…

What I really have gravitated to in my life is things like this, (multiple photographs)
A Town Dying (story in Nat Geo)

Hunger, food, soil. I learned I had to adapt each story to the content. The first one I did with nat geo was on soil. So what I really had to do was make soil interesting to folks in urban areas and show them there was beauty and drama beneath their feet. What really worked in that story was the connection between the soil and the people. The other things that worked was that we took a forty foot long plant and we photographed it all the way down into the soil, 9 feet below the surface! It really changed peoples’ minds that there was something going on there. The second part of that was heirlooms, saving the seeds that we need to save our agriculture. What I really wanted was that relationship–the kind of relationship they have up in the Andes where they have 1300 varieties of potatoes. What does that have to do with us and why we should save these things? the fact that the irish had only two varieties of potatoes is why so many died. And the wheat blight. I loved being with these guys as they sang, harvesting out in the fields (in Ethiopia) and particularly to be allowed into peoples’ kitchens as they were cooking.

This story on the foothills of Kansas needed drama. Unloved Lands. It really needed drama. I talked with people in Kansas who said “I never knew it was something.” It’s my job as a photographer to put it up on the wall and say look, it’s something. Going out over texado hill in Kansas and chasing the fireflies on the plain. I knew that the pictures needed a flow, graphics, drama and give us a sense of where we were.
greenwood country flint hills Kansas. I lit the tree up with a flashlight in the middle of the night

That led me onto another story, The Death of Night. I had been an armchair astronomer. Eighty percent of the world’s population will never see the milky way again. It’s like putting up a billboard in front of the grand canyon. He shows images of Natural Bridges, national monument, Chicago, Illinois
These pictures had to speak to what we are doing and why. This was up over chicago at 10,000 feet (Chicago awash in man-made lights) or seeing the way the St. Louis Arch is lit up at night. That you could from 100 miles away see the glow from Salt Lake City, or how it is that birds fly around buildings and die from exhaustion. To end, here is an image of a turtle that I photographed which returned to this beach to lay her eggs. I was given the opportunity to name her and I named her after my wife Kathy. Now that she has returned again to the beach, her story has become our story. Thank you for letting me share these stories with you.

For more information on Jim Richardson, please see http://ipad.nationalgeographicassignment.com/?source=photobios

Ami Vitale:

Thank you so much that introduction. Jim, that was terrific. I think some of the things I have to say are similar. I worked in the Balkans, Angola, Palestine, Kashmir and even some places that nobody’s ever heard of… and my job was to show the brutality that was going on. That’s what the audience and my editors wanted. You might think that our job is to illuminate the dark corners of the world, but I believe our responsibility and obligation as storytellers and journalists is to illuminate and emphasize the things that unite us as human beings rather than accentuate our differences. I think it behooves us as journalists to not keep producing horror books. Who goes into a bookstore just expecting to see Stephen King? Our motivations are pretty similar, love, lust, greed or simply joy. I think highlighting the commonalities encourages empathy. But I’m here to tell you that the world is not such a scary place. Here is is one of my first assignments in the middle of gaza. in the upper right corner is a building being blown up. I actually would have been in that building if the batteries hadn’t fallen out of my camera. I was encouraged to get up close and bring back the most sensationalist images of the violence going on. There were literally several hundred photographers only photographing this because that’s what the editors wanted. That’s what they wanted to show. I think it was dishonest because there were other things going on, plenty of stories of love and courage that inspire empathy. I think our role as journalists and storytellers can’t be through one lens. we have to work harder to tell stories with a multitude or narratives and viewpoints.

I applied to a grant from the Alexia Foundation and got it to my delight and horror. I was allowed to work without deadlines. My sister and I spent time together and after my sister left I ended up living there, learning pular for half a year and trying to carry water on my head and eating rice. When the food ran out we all went hungry. The women embraced me and accepted me because they loved my sister. The best stories come from trust. The other important thing is listening to your subjects. Once I started to learn their language, they told me way more interesting things than I ever would have thought to have asked them. I think sometimes we think as journalists that we know what the stories will be before we’ve even left. We need to take time and let our subjects speak for themselves to let the stories unfold.

On my last night I was sitting with these kids under a sea of stars, and they were asking me, do you have mango trees and cashew trees in America? Then Alio asked me, do you have a moon in america? I can’t believe he would think America is a separate planet and we don’t share the same moon. This is the difference in storytelling rather than simply reporting. With all of that I moved to India and I quickly realized the scars of partitions (India and Pakistan were divided in 1947 and they haven’t really healed).

Almost as soon as I arrived rioting erupted between Muslims and Hindus. it was one of the most horrific moments of my life. it was like out of the Bible. i still have trouble talking about it. People were being killed in front of me and being burned alive. It still haunts me today with the suffering–how people could do that to one another.

It’s exactly in that moment that you don’t run away. We have to give a broader view and search for the humanity. There are so many other stories that deserve to be told, the humor of every day life. Some are pieces that help us understand complex political puzzles. It’s not in the headlines as much as other stories. It captured my heart and I stayed. It’s always been described as a nuclear flashpoint that could ignite war. But this human story and long forgotten conflict is destroying an ancient culture. It’s like poetry to me there (Dao lake in Himalayas). These are little boats made for honeymooners and tourists and now look at the reality. The military are using them. Every Kashmiri I talked to only wanted peace.. Their voices were never heard, totally drowned out by the political situation. In Kashmir we weren’t allowed to have mobile phones. Every day I would get a beep about military attacks. I met families on the border and yet there were always tender moments like these that showed humor. (photo of baby in a bucket) When we understand each other’s stories we are transformed. We can empathize.

I went to friday prayers and every day I was invited to a different home to have lunch. It’s really important to tell the stories that aren’t being told. This is Mr wonderful who came every day with flowers to my houseboat. I think we have to see ourselves in the faces of other people. Everybody wants the same things. Everywhere we go people want the same things. I believe we cannot afford to see the world through an optic of fear and hate. I’m doing film in Bangladesh due to the mass migration of people due to rising waters. Climate change is happening now. Every year half a million people move to Dacha. It was raining and all of a sudden these hands lifted me up on top on the train. What I love about this image is look at the joy on their faces. No matter where we go, our emotions remain the same.
Ami has an exhibition at the Chicago Field Museum. You can read more about her through myriad sites on the internet and see her photos on her website www.amivitale.com

Our next speaker is Alex Garcia. He has one of the most popular blogs in Chicago. Chicago Photography. Please welcome Alex.
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/assignment-chicago/about.html

Ami’s comments are so well put. The necessity of thinking in a universal way.

The secrets of storytelling – archetypes and symbols. (title slide)

Malcolm Gladwell says if you want to master something you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it. When it comes to photographers, about 20,000 hours. Why does it seem there are some photographs that become more popular and ignite the imagination? What is the secret of great storytelling? As a photographer working at a newspaper, my colleagues at National Geo may spend 500 hours on a single assignment but as a news journalist I may spend 500 hours on 500 assignments. As I gathered information for this lecture I realize a lot had to do with heroes.

Joseph Campbell talks about the prevalence of the hero archetype across cultures. I’m going to talk about how those heroic archetypes get manifested in the daily newspaper. In addition to those hero archetypes there are victim and character archetypes. I want to talk about how these get manifested in some of the long term projects I’ve worked on. We often talk about sports in militaristic terms. I don’t just see sports. I see heroes but conquering heroes coming back from war. Perhaps the epitome of heroes are astronauts. An archetype can become symbol.

I was working on a story in Texas and my editor told me to turn on the tv and I saw the news about the space shuttle columbia. I walked into the backyard of a home of an elderly couple through remains of metal and he showed the soul of the boot from one of the astronaturs. Another symbol is a clock (photo).. the exact time is when one of the buildings fell. it is a reminder that tomorrow is promised to nobody. A building fire represents our worst nightmare especially when it represents a monster. The symbolic concept of the storm common in literature and music and embodies the upending of the natural order. How fragile we are as human beings to the movement of weather.

The question is, if Campbell is right and archetypes are the way we communicate between cultures then if you have a hero of a thousand faces, you have a victim of a thousand faces and that’s why we need heroes.We have the poor and the homeless for whom the american dream is just a dream. There are two things you see at 6 am. You see the beautiful light in Chicago but you see the dark horror from what has happened the night before. We have victims of disease around the world. This is a woman dying in Rwanda
…and we have victims of injustice. I spent a lot of time in the cases that helped lead to suspension of capital punishment in Illinois. The thing that’s interesting and shocking to me as a newspaper photographer is what is behind the scenes. Illegal immigration. This is a problem so complex that it surpasses the idea of the hero. We accompanied the deportees all the way from Chicago to the border of huarez. This was his last view of Chicago before he got on the plane. When they get deported they are pulled out of night clubs, their homes and deported through the fifth most dangerous city in the world. Can you imagine being deported with pink pumps?

I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies and it’s something you never get used to doing.

characters

In addition to heroes there are a lot of characters you find. In Chicago you have those old-style politicians. We have the teen heartthrob. I had less than five minutes with Zack Efron. But with a face like that it just makes it so easy. This was a film director Kevin Smith. This was his idea (sitting on the toilet). Then we also have the good mother, the mom who fights for the good name of her family including her son. we have the unusual neighbor. Who has an unusual neighbor? I love artists because they can’t help but create things, works of beauty. Then we have the loner, sometimes we just want to be alone with our thoughts and the clouds.

So why do some photographs and projects have a greater hold on us? why would you spend 400 dollars or more? For me it is the idea of the Forbidden Island.

My father is from Cuba and I was told that it was illegal for me to visit my aunts and uncles. Year after year I was brooding on that growing up. So after 1994 when people were going on rafts in to the ocean to cross the divide, Ii thought I want to be a bridge. On my 30th birthday i found myself on a plane to Havana. I wanted to know my grandfather and my uncle. He actually was still living on the same property where my Dad grew up.

As time passed and I came to the Chicago Tribune, the first year I spent three months in cuba because the Tribune was the first to have an office in Cuba. That isolation from the U.S. has impacted cuba’s ability to care for its elderly. Some of these photographs were taken in cuba at a nursing home. I sympathized with their situation. This woman was suffering from demenstia and they don’t sell those medicines in Cuba. I saw they were becoming victims but there were also glimmers of heroes too. People who were able to take care of themselves through a variety of ways.

olympic hopefuls

I want to leave you with this story. It leaves you with archetypes of hero. This is a boxing gym in Cuba. If you want to be an olympic fighter this is the place to be. I related to them. Maybe I could have been one of them if my father hadn’t left Cuba. I’m rooting these kids on.

With archetypes, symbols and metaphors, I think they are our friends and ways we can teach the universals. I want to leave with a thought. I encourage you to tell the stories of the heroes around you. Whether it is for your family or the publication you serve it will inspire you in the process. This is a world that needs more heroes.

Superhero Christopher Reeve had this to say. “A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”

Our last speaker is Vincent J. Musi – Photographer, National Geographic Magazine
He’s the host of Look 3 in Charlottesville VA every year. Great place to go. Top photojournalism festival.

Taming the Wild
thanks mike, alex and ami. it’s a real honor to be up here with you guys and hosting this mega talk. The national geographic has specialists in everything from bugs, underwater…under no circumstances do they play the theme song behind me
i like to take the readers inside our hotel room for a great view of the parking lot. if i had previously photographed an animal it was make believe or paper mache it came with a cherry coke and a side of fries. so the notion of me becoming an animal photographer is all mike hughes fault. so with the unwavering support of national history editor kathy moran pitched me a story on animal minds, smart minds. you know, i’m thinking, lassie a was a smart animal and good thing for little timmy because he was always getting in trouble. so here i am on this story of animal cognition. to do these portraits of animals. now i don’t know a damn thing of animals. most animals are food motivated. you can do this. well mistakes were made. never never feed feed a pig right before you photograph them. if you’re going to photograph an animal you pretty much need to know where its head is. i think you ought to know cuz he knew where my head is. the screaming of animals is deafening, even under water. this marmoset is s. this prairie dog was rescued after he was hit by a car. his name is speed bump and he’s screaming of me for four hours. this is the one where i got desperate. i started talking to him. mr. bump, how does it feel to be living in wabash after. i got into this doolittle thing and they started to pay attention. animals will poop on everything. elephants have self awareness. they have self awareness. we wanted to create a set of photographs with eye contact and make it look like they were shot on the same day. betsy knows over 300 words. she is an extraordinary dog in vienna. this is whack a new caledonian crow. he spent two days trying to poke my eyes out. they are extraordinary animals and use tools. what i learned is that just like dealing with animals, body language is crucial. if i never looked at the lemur
this ape lives in des moines and communicates with laminated mats and can ask question respond to things. he wanted some starbucks grande drinks for him and his bonobo friends. in the scientific world these animals are more colleagues than subjects. they in every case they are truly the super stars of this world. this is alex born in chicago in 1977 and when i went to brandeis to photograph him they just gave him to me to photograph him in a hallway. i sat with him for three hours and at the end he said why don’t you tickle me. would you tickle me. and i said sure. these animals teach us the boundaries of human. we’ve learned so many things..maya the dolphin. i want to show you another body of work. they gave me this story about the domestication of plants and animals

we know nothing about it and i’m fascinated by this to how does an animal go from being hunted to being raised for food or from the dining room to the living room. this whole relationship with animals. there is a genetic marker that explains why some animals can domesticate.. these rats are friendly and nice and in the other room they have these rats that are not so nice. now, i adore dioramas in museums. they’re frozen in time and theatrically lit and that was my approach to this. to set up dioramas in everyday life. my assistant had a big light to create daylight wherever we went. we look at the differences in what’s happening with dogs. dogs are evoking more quickly than
we went to khazakstan to photograph horses. probably the most domesticated animal in the world is the chicken. 24 billion chickens worldwide. some of the purest ones are in the united states. what are we breeding for and what are we after
this is a story that will run in december on big cats and it will be a pull out in the magazine. this is a clouded leopard a jaguar. none of these animals are under our control. they are in a zoo, a cheetah and siberian tiger. are they stressed out should we go. it’s

“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” – Buddha

I landed in Chicago for a week of idea-sharing – participating in the Chicago Ideas Week, interviewing people in Millennium Park for the Park Dreams project for NatureStage, and presenting a version of my talk, Saving the Elephants, Saving Ourselves; The Role of Art in Social Change at the Humanist Sociology Conference in Evanston (Daring to Be Dangerous: A Sociology for Our Troubled Times).

Here is the first installment from Chicago Ideas Week with a synopsis of a few of the talks at the morning session on Social Entrepreneurship which included a tremendously inspiring group of social innovators: David Bornstein: Founder, Dowser; Emma Clippinger: Co-Founder and Executive Director, Gardens for Health International; Robert Fogarty: Founder, Dear World; Dave Gilboa: Co-Founder and Co-DEO, Warby Parker; Scott Harrison: Founder & CEO, charity: water; Leila Janah: Founder & CEO, Samasource; Jeff Nelson: Co-Founder & Executive Director, Urban Students Empowered.

October 10, 2011

The President and CEO of Better World Books, David Murphy, began the session by defining social entrepreneurship as a way to solve social problems on a large scale. When he created his company, he said he wanted it to be disruptive, scaleable, and a game-changer. He conceived of an online bookstore “with a soul” that would donate a portion of all book sales towards non-profit literacy partners worldwide. He pointed out the ongoing need for this type of business model and described the state of literacy in the world today. Almost 1 billion people are illiterate and 2/3 are women. Better World Books is founded on the idea that literacy is fundamental to breaking poverty and the dependency cycle which comes from illiteracy.

Murphy made a strong point of saying that social entrepreneurship is not “kumbaya”. SE is a vital way to harness the potential of business to solve social and environmental challenges at home and around the world. He pointed out that 70% of non-profit funding comes from the private sector and that this must change in order to solve the large-scale challenges we face.

David Bornstein, of Dowser - advocate for

The next speaker at the forum was David Bornstein, the founder of Dowser, which specializes in solution journalism. He described how he started off as a daily reporter wanting to help the world self-correct with his writing. He pointed out that one of the main reasons attempts to solve social issues are stymied is that “we’ve been asking bureaucracies to write poems.” He says that for problems to be solved at a large scale, it takes an extreme level of caring, similar to the way a mother cares for her child.

Bornstein then pointed out the staggering statistics of homelessness in the U.S. and that a systematic approach is often very successful when there is real time taken to understand the causes of a problem. He illustrated his point by describing the 100,000 Homeless Campaign. Their goal is to house 100,000 by July 2013, and to date they’ve housed @10,000. He describes how the specific needs of the homeless can be met through being registered and well-matched with housing that is available. For example, 5% of homeless can’t find housing because they have a pet. He then described the method which Friends of the Children in Harlem is able to succeed in their mission. They create a mentoring program so that requires the mentors stay for 12 years – from kindergarten through high school.

Bornstein had four overarching ideas: that it takes time for an idea to develop and be tested, and that solving large social problems takes an extraordinary level of caring, steadfastness, and a willingness to take in information and revise one’s idea. “Self-selected problem-solvers are emerging and creatively destroying the old institutions to make better ones.” He insists that the field of social entrepreneurship needs the same structural supports of other types of entrepreneurship — films made about the mission, geniuses at human resources, funders, governments to pay serious attention and integrate them into their public policies. He ended with the quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944).

“To live is to be slowly born.”

Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource

Leila Janah began her powerful talk by asking the audience to go back in time and imagine their first job. She describes how her first job gave her a glimpse of independence and worth in the world. She then asked us to imagine an alternate universe where you didn’t have that job opportunity and that you were born into the huge percentage of people on the planet who make up to 3 dollars a day. She pointed out that in Africa men are paid a dollar a day to join militias and riot in the streets and that these men need an alternative way to make a living. In Africa nearly 144 million youth are unemployed or working but living in poverty. She says we’ve internalized the idea that these people will always be poor, yet she describes how corporate influence is everywhere, indicated by Energizer batteries, Unilever soap, Malboro Lights, Coca Cola — even in the smallest villages. She points out that they are not beyond being thought of as consumers. What if all these people living in poverty were treated as four billion brains that could be innovators, creators and fully included in the global economy?

Janah then described the rise of manufacturing and segmenting of products into smaller pieces exemplified by Henry Ford. She used to think you couldn’t have manufacturing without infrastructure. Five years ago she had an epiphany while in India on a call center floor. She realized that people could work with just a cell phone, a cheap computer and a signal. She introduced the concept of microwork. What if you could break down large projects into small centers of virtual assembly lines?

Janah points out that there are 1 billion computers in the world. The cost for the average African to get online will go down soon by 90%. She founded Samasource 7 years ago with the mission to connect people to work via the internet. Apple has more money than most african companies combined. Why not use them to make a dramatic dent on poverty? She described how the entire fair trade industry including coffee, jewelry, furniture etc is only worth 5 million dollars annually. Although she supports fair trade in all its forms, she doesn’t believe this will end poverty in the long run. Through recruiting local entrepreneurs to teach local people seeking work how to do microwork, people at the bottom of the pyramid can have meaningful work that will help them escape poverty.

The most powerful of Janah’s illustrated successes with Samasource showed how much people want to feel their work is helping others–that it is meaningful and useful. She says we need to be intentional about fighting poverty and identify ways of outsourcing microwork in their company’s supply chain. The key is help people feel like producers rather than consumers. What I found implied in her talk was the idea that through more people participating in the global economy as workers, a sense of fairness and dignity could lead to a more peaceful world.

The next installment is a transcription of the meeting of the mayors from New York, Chicago and Atlanta and moderated by Thomas Friedmann, with Richard Stengal of Time Magazine. Join the blog for updates or follow on twitter @naturestage
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Randall Wood speaking about Worm Hunters at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in October 2011

Randall Wood is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and cinematographer based in Brisbane, Australia.  I caught up with him near the start of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival sitting outside in front of the Grand Tetons in full fall glory. We talked about protecting journalists in the documentary process, his latest film Worm Hunters, Laurie Anderson and the power of words, and the power of music in shaping a film. He was first trained as a classical pianist and composer. He started by talking about his current film in process called The Grammar of Happiness. You can see the trailer for this film here.

RW This is a great project for the Smithsonian Channel and ABC in Australia and Arte in France. It’s a film about language and a debate that’s occurring at the moment internationally about grammar theory.

ML What is the debate?

RW Well, the debate has been raging for about five years and it’s between Chomsky and his followers, of which there are many, who believe in a universal grammar, and Dan Everett and a number of other people who say his theories are flawed because of Dan’s findings with the Pirahã people in the Amazon. He says their language is so completely different that it flies in the face of Chomsky’s theory. That’s the baseline but the story itself is of a missionary who went up the Amazon to convert a tribe to Jesus and instead got converted by them after many years of working with them, to atheism, after trying over many years to convert the Bible into their language. So he became an atheist and left his missionary work and became an academic and quite well-respected. He wrote a book called Don’t Sleep. There are Snakes.

ML How would you summarize Chomsky’s theory?

RW Ah. Put me on the spot! Basically talking about a universal grammar saying that we are, as humans, born with the ability to speak with recursion.

ML What’s recursion?

RW Recursion is the ability to string concepts within concepts within concepts, phrases within phrases. So we almost always speak with recursion in english. We always put a sentence within a sentence, an idea within an idea within an idea. Daniel says that the Pitiha people don’t actually do this and only speak one point at a time with no reference to the past or the future.

ML So I don’t know remember what linguist said this, but the way one speaks impacts the way you perceive the world. Are you going to explore that in your film?

RW. Absolutely. Dan says language and grammar is culturally learnt whereas others say that’s not the case and that we as human beings are genetically imprinted with the capacity to speak with recursion as part of our grammatical toolkit. Chomsky would say whether we use that tool or not isn’t the point. It’s actually part of the human makeup. Daniel everett says that’s not the case. It’s kind of controversial in peoples’ minds

ML The implications are huge. I just saw a Laurie Anderson performance the other night and…

RW Brilliant. She’s great.

ML …she says, in describing her show “Delusion”, that words and stories can create the world as well as make it disappear (you can see a link to a clip from her performance here)

RW So true. I just think story is so powerful. Myth. I mean we ARE what we think. I mean look at everything about us. Every solid item is only constructed becasue someone thought of it, like this table. Somebody was inspired through story to put this here. Myth is just so intensely powerful for defining our responses to life. I love stories. You know Joseph Campbell

ML Yeah. The Power of Myth. And also I’m captivated with her ideas that our words can unravel or destroy things, because passing on belief systems, especially with the corporate control of certain parts of education in the States. Curricula is being sold in exchange for money for struggling schools. Kids are so vulnerable and are such sponges, you know.

RW I think as media makers we need to be really conscious of this power. We’re always working towards trying to find a point of truth in what we do.  You know there’s a guy who made this film called Crude. You know Crude?

ML Yeah

RW this is a case in point because basically the company, Chevron, wanted to subpoena all his video and sound, hundreds of hours he shot with the tribe because they wanted to use it in a court case. This is totally unethical to me and completely undermines the power of the filmmaker in terms of their relationship with the subject. If that material can’t be entrusted for anonymity by the filmmaker and can be subpoenaed by the court for whatever that court decides, it is immensely complex

ML and it undermines journalists all over the world

RW Exactly

ML who swear to their subjects who open their hearts and risk sometimes being killed for being honest

RW Yeah

ML and all of a sudden that relationship becomes one of betrayal

RW It’s important for the future of documentary making and for upholding the principles of true information that we don’t allow this kind of activity, these large multi-national corporations to be able to get away with this. I just detest this kind of unethical use of filmmakers’ materials

The view of the tetons during our interview (photo M.L.)

ML So I relate to your passion for telling peoples’ stories and sense of joy. So here’s a question…do you think people will be able to create robotic earthworms to aerate the soil?

RW Our current food system is based on the use of chemicals, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides for controlling land and landscapes and trying to grow stuff that will feed people, but actually some people would argue that the system’s beginning to crack and it can’t work the way it has work into the future. We can’t continue to pour vast amounts of nitrogen into the soil and not expect some sort of long-term impact. Earthworms for example, they hate chemicals. Their environments, in fact their skin gets burnt firstly by chemicals so they die. When they die we lose the ability for worms to generate microbes in soils and microbes make soil fertile and allow plants to uptake nutrients. So what you lose is the whole system. Soil is incredibly rich. In a pinch of soil there’s more microbes than there are people on the planet, so it’s a whole world that we know virtually nothing about. We know far more about outer space according to earthworm and soil scientists generally than we know about what’s under our feet. Which is extraordinary since we need soil. We need it for everything we eat. We need it for these chairs, this table, for this building we’re next to. Fertile soil is essential for not just the survival of the human race, but the planet. So, chemical agriculture and chemical processes haven’t done justice to the deep and rich ecological processes that are going on around us of which soil is a huge part.

ML What is the state of soil in parts of Australia? 

RW Generally speaking, soils in Australia have largely been stripped of a lot of their organic composition and nutrients. There’s a lot of nutrient runoff. There’s been very poor farming practices over the past hundred years both with plants and animals. I mean we have a lot of cattle in parts of Australia where cattle shouldn’t be run

ML Same here

RW It just busts up soil structures and breaks up small plants with their hard hooves. So what happens is the rain comes and washes or blows the top soil away. So we have large areas that have been desertified or turned to sod. It’s not good, basically. So that’s why earthworms are important. That’s part of the reason why I wanted to make this film because I learnt about this early in my research and I’d like to try to bring this up.  The film doesn’t end up knocking you over the head with it. It does it in a very subtle way.

ML Which is often more powerful

RW I think so, yeah.

ML Can you talk about the animation choices you made in that film (Worm Hunters)

RW Well, it was always going to be difficult filming worms having sex so the obvious place to turn was to the animator. I mean we had this lovely sequence with Victor talking about the sex life of a worm, but, something had to be done to bring that to life so that was one reason to bring in animation. Because worms are out of sight out of mind we had to find a way to illustrate some of their process, some of their biology, morphology and so on without trying to get really internal with the shoot. I mean, we could have shot the inside of a worm with some sort of a probe camera but it was much more interesting to get animators to get in there and illustrate it in a way that’s kind of different. I like that you feel as if you’re watching some kind of detective story.

ML I loved that shutter sound effect on the sequences with black with white text and then all of a sudden the images in the boxes start moving

RW Yeah, thanks. We decided we’d turn this into a bit of a detective story with a bit of a James Bond touch

ML The music is so perfect. You talked in the Q and A about the music. Do you want to talk more about the process of working with the musician and how you chose him

RW I remember years ago hearing Phillip Glass talk about a film, Koyanisqatsi, the process for making music for that film. One of those films he worked on and I remember hearing him talk about their process. He would write a draft, send it to the filmmaker and they’d  send it back to him and he’d rewrite his draft. I’ve always wanted to bring in that kind of process to my filmmaking because I know that making good music is an organic process and things need to find their own way of breathing and moving through time. You can’t just impose…I think the end result is more satisfying if you can get give and take between the image and the sound. I mean sound is the king and queen of my film. I love great music in a film. It’s the heart and soul of the film.

ML It trumps so much.

RW Hopefully with that you realize it takes your heart on a ride through the story. Basically it’s hopefully something, really good film music is something you don’t notice. It’s just there and it’s just carrying you. Yeah.

ML I know it’s a fine balance between being a musician where music is primary and isn’t supposed to be background but then in the film you do want it to be at the service of the story and not taking over, unless there are certain key moments when you do want the music to pop out, a slow sequence or something

RW Yeah, but I suppose what really drives the film is the emotional through-line. There’s the relationships between people so the music works with that. It works with that and underscores that.

ML Do you ever really get as far as doing leit-motifs. I’m wondering if for a documentary how artsy one can get, what the right balance is between, how can I put this, when the subject doesn’t merit the most gorgeous cinematography or how you balance the topic with the style

RW Yeah, it’s a very intuitive process. I usually just follow my gut feeling with somebody. And it’s something that changes too. I find as I build the relationship between the subject and myself, sometimes the style of shooting changes to match that. I mean, I could start only sometimes to begin a film it can be kind of, it could be like a messy process where you’re just following them around with the camera, really just trying to get a since of how they move and feel and relate with you on the screen, and then as things become more, as you get to know the person, you can settle down more and you can just find some stillness in the process. I certainly notice that in The Grammar of Happiness. I was flying in on that project literally off the deep end from Australia to the Amazon with the main character and shot him straight from, I mean I just shot him as I felt. It was a very intuitive kind of gutsy first association between him and the camera. He’s very direct on the camera in that footage. But now the stuff that I’ve shot more recently in Boston, it’s much more traditional actually. I mean it’s much more composed and he’s sort of almost more reflective in this point of the process

ML Noam Chomsky?

RW No, this is Daniel Everett. You can look this up on the internet. You’ll find a lot of information on himt. He’s pretty well publicized around the world. Interesting guy.

ML In order to do the kinds of projects that you do, do you ever sometimes wonder in the middle of a project, maybe the story that we should tell is actually something slightly different, or

RW Definitely

ML When you’re IN it, the more you learn, inevitably it’s going to shift your perspective and that’s one of the things I found really hard when I went to Thailand

RW Hm

ML and I came back I felt that I was just scratching the surface of the real issues

RW That underscores firstly the value of great research. Research where you actually visit people and really get to know them and understand them. And that’s why good films take time and a really great film I think, I mean I think a good process should preferably involve a research trip first. Meet the people you’re going to make the film with

ML Yeah

RW That said, even in a film I’ll often change, the film is always ever evolving and morphing into new dimensions. It’s part of the process and remaining open to that and recognizing strengths in accidents and strengths in mistakes I think is a really valuable part of growing a film, ’cause a film grows. The earthworm film started out being a film about vermicomposting as a way of saving the world’s cities from overflowing waste, and what did it end up being? It turned into a film about taxonomy, one of the rarified sciences, looking at finding earthworm species in far-flung corners of the globe. I mean, that’s a really different

ML This is a sort of tacky question for the filmmakers who might be reading this…So, your funding- when your film started changing from your original proposal…did you have to tell the funders that the film had shifted a little bit but hopefully you’ll let us keep the money?

RW Yeah we’d send redrafts and updates, but I think fundamentally the core of hte film is still about earthworms. It still has a strong ecological you know, angle

ML Huge

RW Yeah.

ML That sensitivity that not everyone has, you know that I think you definitely have for people and trying to be sensitive to the lightness and bringing humor to the topic, so you’re empathizing with the subjects to get them to show their full colorful lovableness

RW Yeah

ML  and then you’re also able to take a step back and think that not everyone will have the same point of view so how am I going to make this funny but still be simpatico and respectful to the subjects

RW Yeah

ML and I think that’s a very hard line

RW Difficult balance to find. You know what’s interesting about filmmaking is that there are two kinds of core relationships you have with your subject. The first relationship is the one you have on the field where you’re actually shooting with them and that’s much more a kind of, I suppose, a mutually balanced relationship because there’s a lot of give and take. When we get in the edit suite the balance swings back to our favor. As a filmmaker we actually have a lot of power in edit suite and that power needs to be used well and compassionately. So I like to work with the material to I suppose in a compassionate way, like, I love people and I want to make sure people are treated respectfully

ML Right

RW So I always try to bring out the best in a person. Yes, sometimes people are eccentric and I can find what they say funny but I prefer to laugh with them rather than at them. I hate to make a film that laughs at people

ML Me too and it’s that fine balance where you want to find people who are colorful, passionate about what they do, quirky, especially if you’re interviewing a lot of people

RW Yeah

ML And they can’t all be the same type

RW Exactly

ML You can’t have only serious intellectuals lined up

RW I think it’s important to negotiate that process with the subjects of your film. I mean I like to show people cuts, I like to show them what I’m doing. Even on the shoot I’ll often show them, this is what I’m doing. What do you think about this? This is how you’re going to look in this shot. I’m very happy to show people rough cuts. I think it’s important to get peoples’ feedback

ML Maybe some people are like, O didn’t actually mean it like that

RW There’s a basic tenet in you know, or requirement that you should offer your subjects the right of reply as well and I try to offer that in a film process. Give them an opportunity for them to respond if someone’s going to criticize them if there’s a debate. You should take that material back to the person and say look, he said this. Lately I’ve been playing people interview excerpts. I’ll take my laptop and show them and say, look this is what they said. Look at this. Or I’ll have one person pose questions to another person via the laptop so I can actually put it up there. That worked well

ML You’ve given me an idea that maybe Park Dreams interviews, since I’m asking everyone the same question. I could get a few people to ask other people questions

RW Yeah, this works well

ML On the ipad maybe. A homeless person saying, I’d like to know what it feels like to make over 100,000 dollars and the choices that you have, what charities you give to

RW or something

ML Thank you so much. You’re fascinating and I look forward to seeing all these films you’ve made and the ones in process!

Read more about Randall’s films at globalstorytv and join the blog for email updates about other interviews at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival 2011 and the Chicago Ideas Conference…and much more!

Charles Siebert

Charles Siebert looks like a movie star, and based on the impersonations he did in our conversation, he probably could be one, but he’s chosen to be a writer, a novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as a journalist. He’s a prize-winner in all these areas. It’s unusual to find a man writing about empathy, and especially about the plight of animals and giving credence to their inner life in major newspapers and magazines. This is just one of the reasons I sought him out. His article in the New York Times magazine back in 2005, An Elephant Crack-up?, moved me to tears and left an indelible mark on my conscience, in fact, such a profound one, that I swerved off of the well-worn channel of solely being a professional musician into a hybrid zone which became NatureStage. 

Siebert’s most recent article on elephants appeared in the September 2011 issue of the National Geographic. For a list of Siebert’s writings, please see the end of the interview.

Here are excerpts from our conversation in a Brooklyn cafe in early September 2011.

CS  (speaking about a television series in production)…so, we were going to start with the Janice Carter story. Janice Carter being the one who took Lucy from Oklahoma after her parents were done raising her as a human. The first act of hubris was bookended by the second which was ”oh, let’s let her be a wild chimp now” and poor unsuspecting  suburban oklahoman Janice Carter agrees to help Lucy make the transition to the wild and goes with her to the Gambia and first Senegal. Well, you know the story, it’s all in Wachula Woods Accord

ML  You’ll have to remind me ’cause I read it about a year ago and I’ve seen Project Nim six months ago and…

CS  It ends up just as you might expect, totally tragically. Lucy has no experience. Some of the other chimps at least knew other chimps. By other chimps, I mean other chimps in this transition center. Lucy had only known human beings. The only chimps she had ever seen were in National Geographic…so it was impossible for her and she just refused. And Janice, who was supposed to stay for two weeks to help with the transition, two weeks became two months, which became two years, and lo and behold, she’s still there. She’s never come back. But at one point she lived for eight years on this island with Lucy in the middle of the gambia river. And through much of that time, had a cage built for her to live in so that Lucy would be forced to go out and be a chimp. Now how’s that for a total inversion of the whole dynamic? A human being living by herself in the wilderness in a cage to force a chimp to be a chimp?

ML That is the quintessential irony, and also how we find ourselves trying to find our own wildness.

CS Exactly. And Janice became more wild than Lucy. That’s the crazy thing. This suburban Oklahoman girl became like a wild child. I mean, she was climbing trees and eating ants trying to get Lucy to climb trees and eat ants. So anyway, the whole thing, to cut to the chase, just ended completely tragically because Lucy started to seem to be able to fend for herself and was learning to go off and eat…and Janice finally decided it was time to leave.  So she leaves the island and would come back periodically, and every time she did come back Lucy would be on the shore of the island to meet her and this time she showed up and no Lucy and she had this really bad feeling.  She went back to their old campsite and Lucy was found with no hands, no feet, just her skeleton. There’s been all sorts of speculation as to what happened, but one of the scenarios that the press has fallen in love with is that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, approached, unwittingly, poachers who just served her up. But no one knows what really happened, but obviously it could have gone no other way but tragically, given the circumstances. But the weird thing is, Janice stayed on and she’s been there for thirty-three years on end. We still talk and she’s very hard to get to know, as you might imagine. A woman who’s just retreated from civilization as we know it. But she’s very sweet, and I sort of won her good graces.  She agreed to be part of this documentary that Christopher and I wanted to do, but long story short, when we heard that Marsh was working on Project Nim…

ML Speaking of which, I really think you should go to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. Have you been to one of these?

CS No

ML If you can find a reason to come, my sense is that it’s an incredible opportunity to network with…you’d be a superstar

CS I don’t know about that. I’d just like to go to Jackson Hole. I’ve always wanted to.  Sounds like it would make a good story, covering it

ML I’m sure

CS When I was writing essays for Harper’s Magazine years ago I did a series of cover essays for them and one was about t.v. nature shows and how we’ve always framed nature. It actually got me on a very funny radio show with Sir David Attenborough. So, he was coming from England, someone else from Australia, and me from Brooklyn. It made for the oddest conversation. He started out not liking me. I think he thought I was way cynical, but in the end, we ended up agreeing with each other on a lot of fronts. He was always one of my favorites ’cause, you know his famous transitions, where he’d be like in Patagonia and climbing some mountain and then going (british accent) there is of course, you know, only one other creature with exactly these characteristics and it is…” and boom, he falls through some trap door, and the next thing you know he’s somewhere like New Guinea and then it would be “the New Guinea lemur!”

I just love that he kept falling through those nature trap doors. Nature as opera…

ML I just think if you’re trying to make a movie, you should just go to the source because theoretically there will be lots of funders there and there will be photographers and videographers and cinematographers

CS there will be all kinds

ML plus, just as a writer as you said, you could be observing too

CS Yeah, one foot out the door. Yeah, even at Sundance, I was amazed ’cause I helped sort of present as a favor the movie One Lucky Elephant

ML Oh I haven’t seen that yet

CS Yeah, they contacted me because they had read some of my elephant stuff and they asked if I would come out to the LA film festival and lead a Q&A after that, and so I did that and that was quite fun. Then I did one here in New York at the film forum. I hadn’t seen those guys for months, and sure enough I go to Sundance and they’re the first people I run into and they were there to see Project Nim and also to screen One Lucky Elephant which even though it’s not perfect, is a very affecting movie, especially on that frontier of elephants in captivity and the quandaries it gives rise to

ML Is that about Flora?

CS Yeah, the circus elephant

ML who basically didn’t want to go to the sanctuary because she missed her owner. Did she eventually get used to it?

CS Yeah, she had some real issues. She became quite obstreperous after a point. But the big controversy became that the owner wanted to have visitation rights and Carol Buckley (founder of The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee) decided to put her foot down and say no, it’s only going to set Flora back.  It set off quite a controversy because Gay Bradshaw was called in to be the arbiter on this and she ended up ruling in favor of Carol and against the owner whose name now escapes me…the guy who raised Flora from an infant. And you know it makes for quite a Q&A afterwards  because people are sharply divided after they see the movie. “Raise your hands who thinks he should be able to visit Flora again?” It’s perfect because it gives rise to all the questions. If you’ve raised an elephant entirely in captivity does it become the next form of abuse to then deny that elephant any access at all to humans because they’ve become inculturated?

ML like what happened to Nim

CS Exactly. So that keeps coming up

ML I told you about the Elephant Project right?

CS I think you did and I read some about it on the internet

ML I’m trying to find different filmmakers who would like to make some of the films, including some I would make,  but I’m aiming to make a series of say, 20 short films that all show a quandary between the human and elephant for use in education

CS Oh I see

ML Artistically done, more than your typical science documentary, and I’d like to get an empathy curriculum that teachers can download

CS Oh interesting    

ML And being an artist, my second motive is to keep arts in schools and talk about how our connection with other species is directly related to nurturing the imagination which you need in order to have empathy. You can’t have empathy unless you can imagine how others might feel. These kinds of issues that you described coming up in the Q&A for project Nim…I’d like there to be these kinds of questions that come up to accompany the film set so that teachers, high school teachers and college teachers can say now can you address one of these questions and show how it connects to this particular situation in this film, using poetry and song and making your own movie, you know, using an artistic way to respond to the material and then applying the insights to one’s local community.

CS Yeah!

ML Getting people to start thinking about solutions that are locally based, so it’s not just about helping elephants, but how can we help the dog down the street we see get kicked

CS right, deal with the extension of empathy thing. That kind of vigilance which came up in the animal abuse story (Siebert’s article in the NYT magazine on the connections between animal abuse and domestic violence)

ML which I have right here

CS I just got a notice the last couple months ago that it won a “Best Science Writing.” It’s funny. I like that piece but this stuff doesn’t run on logic, I would have thought that the elephant breakdown story in the New York Times… you can’t predict this stuff, whoever’s choosing that year, who the judge is. But, that’s interesting about the teaching reaching out to kids because with the NRDC I just wrote a children’s book about whales that just came out.

ML Really?

CS Yeah, I should have brought it but I have no copies left. It’s called the Secret World of Whales. And we’re now negotiating whether to do a whole series and the next one would be elephants, of course. But, it was an eye-opener for me because I’d never written a children’s book before. To have to gauge the science down to that level, 9 to 14, it was very fun actually, since I’m dealing all the time with the high-flown rhetoric and philosophy and all this stuff and it was sort of refreshing to just say it so simply, and knowing you’re piggy-backing on whatever the imagery might be which was quite lovely. They did a really nice job. As a matter of fact, when I got back from the cabin, there was this box, and I’m going, why are they sending me this book again? And I opened it up and it is the Italian version. It’s the whale book and apparently the South Koreans are doing it too, so it’s getting out there, getting to the world.

ML That is great… so I keep envisioning going to the root of the problem

CS Uh hm

ML which is instead of viewing other species as other, saying of course they have feelings and an inner life and language, and how can we realize our power to be global stewards and that it’s our role… which is…I think a lot of people pay lip service to that but I don’t feel that it’s being taught to kids that it’s really amazing, you’re a human being and you can change the climate and create crops of any kind and do genetic mutations but you can also take care of all these other beings, you know

CS Yeah, well, you know, speaking of education, I mean, did you see Alex Shoumatoff’s recent piece about elephants in Vanity Fair? Very big spread. You know, I had my hackles up at first. It’s territorial, like I’m the only person to write about elephants, which is, of course, just a joke, but he really did a very thorough, broad sweeping piece, because he went just beyond the elephants and what’s left of their wild natural habitat, going all the way to the province in China where the ivory is still carved and sold.  What he revealed about China is that a lot of people there just do not understand what’s happening. They really think that elephants grow their tusks back, and some people, not just out of convenience, they really just don’t know, and with education, the same kind of empathy that you could generate here is spreading there, where there are people who of course love elephants.  But there’s where education is really really necessary because they’re the last big rapers of the species for ivory. They’re the biggest, not the only generator of the ivory trade, I mean there are other parts of Southeast Asia, but basically it’s China and where there’s a demand, you know, someone’s going to fill it, no matter what.

ML It’s all about status. Owning ivory in China, from what I’ve read, is for the super rich, owning ivory is an example of how wealthy they are

CS And what I like about Shoumatoff’s piece is that he took it even a step further than what you just said and says actually now the biggest scourge is the nouveau riche–the up and coming rising of new rich–with their booming economy who are trying out of a perverted sense of nostalgia, trying to recover the old rich’s coveting of ivory.  So it’s doubly perverse because they’re trying to bring back something that history would have otherwise shed if not for this economic boom.  When you travel around Africa, the Chinese have their tendrils in everything. I mean, they are everywhere. I mean, I was just there back in the fall in Ethiopia and Kenya and I’m telling you, no matter where I went in the most remote regions you’d pull into some little town and there’d be Chinese sitting at a table, you know, construction workers, because they’re building their country’s roads and they’re making all kinds of dirty deals and as you know, the governments are so corrupt in so many countries in Africa. it’s a mess, totally a mess.

ML Do you know about the company here in Brooklyn called Greenpoint films? I’m hoping to meet with this guy, Phil Buccaletto and I’ll send you the link. He’s just done a movie in Sri Lanka about human-elephant conflict called Common Ground

CS Oh yeah?

ML and I’m dying to find out what he thinks is one of the solutions to this. I definitely don’t think it’s just a matter of fire crackers, building trenches and electric fences

CS no

ML like giving the elephants space to self-regulate

CS I mean there are so many sides to this aside from just, you know, trying to ferret out the last of the poachers,  just the whole land issue and setting aside the minimal amount of space that allows…because even that is a tremendous compromise because elephants used to, pre-human, they used to wander the continents like whales do the oceans. They have these long migratory routes so already they’re being broken into unnatural land shapes. The best we can do is within those, try to maintain a vast enough region where they can regenerate the land because, in the immediate they really are quite destructive but they end up being vital because they

ML aerate (elephants are a keystone species which have myriad benefits to many other species from creating water holes with their tusks, to pathways through the savannah and spreading seeds in their dung)

CS They aerate the land but you need a lot of land to be left alone to go through those cycles and that’s just so hard to do. How do you pay for that? Is it ecotourism, with all these compromises and deals, but they’re the best, I mean that’s what being stewards means now. Gay Bradshaw would put it quite another way. With Gay, it’s more like can’t we learn to live alongside them? and it’s very funny because I just met with an old buddy of mine whom I wrote about in one of my earliest stories, Alan Rabinowitz. You know Alan?

ML no

CS He used to be with the wildlife conservation society in New York. He was a protege of George Schaller the great naturalist. Alan’s been devoting his life to saving the world’s last cats. It started with jaguars in Belize.

ML You have to come to this festival because I’m sure he’ll be there

CS Well I just met with Alan a week ago and we hadn’t seen each other in a few years and I said come on, we got to get together because he has his own organization now which is backed by a miner. He’s one of the world’s big mining magnates but he has a fixation with big cats, so he has given Alan millions of dollars to run this organization called Panthera and they have offices right next to the public library in Manhattan.  It’s really quite an operation ’cause from Jaguars he went to Siberian Tigers and all different big cats

ML Is he trying to, apparently there are more big cats in captivity in this country than there are remaining in the wild

CS Well that’s true of tigers but not of jaguars. He works on both. He’s trying to make corridors. The corridor idea works better for jaguars than it does for tigers because they have so little land left but by corridors I mean contiguous cross-country trans-continental regions that jaguars can move through. He found out that they migrate too often and that they don’t stay in cordoned-off patches which is a model that is really dying  and is a bad old conservation model – making little paradises

ML little islands

CS yeah, and it doesn’t work that way, and he says, you know, cats and unfortunately it doesn’t work for all species (it doesn’t work for elephants), but cats CAN  live around people. They’re stealthy by nature

ML and they come into cities a lot

CS Yes, so his whole deal is to get government by government from country to country to sign onto this idea of jaguar corridors.  What’s good about it is that it doesn’t mean putting aside land, it just means getting ranchers to cooperate and being more clever about how they keep their cattle. It means trade-offs so if the country agrees to develop this part of this land then they have to find a part that they’re not going to develop in that way, even if it means just keeping it a ranch, and then if the ranchers are vigilant about fencing off their land

ML They do that with wolves, the re-wilding idea

CS You know, but it’s causing all kinds of controversy now right, because a bunch of ranchers are now losing their sheep again

ML So here, you probably know this already but I read this last night.  This says that we’re closely related to chimpanzees but we’re AS closely related to the bonobos genetically so it’s like, given the right circumstances we’ll choose to be more peace-loving if we’re in the right environment and if we’re in a more competitive environment we’ll become more cut-throat and violent like the chimpanzee. But what I didn’t realize is that before ten thousand years ago when we started learning agriculture and we decided we needed ownership of land and therefore ownership of a partner and to create a family to till the land and we needed to own animals to work the land, that it was much more like elephant society. That human beings according to this were all about taking care of the youngest in the herd that it wasn’t about just MY child

CS Interesting

ML And this is I think a key thing that I want to mention in my talks because it says actually it IS in our nature to be compassionate and empathic but we have created this society that is all about segmenting, owning, individual territory…I mean there’s no way we can go back to that, and who knows what that was even like

CS but it’s in us, it’s inculcated in us, yeah sure

ML because one of the messages that I’m trying to get across is that if you look at elephants taking care of the youngest, if we took care of the children in our society with the same sense of urgency and love and shared responsibility

CS and shared compassion

ML and shared compassion, we’d have a much healthier society in general and then the more I read about human elephant connections the more I realize that government corruption often gets in the way with what many people want to do which IS to let the elephants have the space they need but without any other ways of making a living, it’s the same with poaching, so the idea with the elephant project is to have something kids in different countries can do, and of course they’d have to have access to a computer, but it can be translated into their language

CS It’s great, the, one of the more effective things, I thought behind what the Sheldrick’s were doing, they’re very clever, they you know, once every day for an hour in the afternoon, all these school kids just come and, well, just seeing their faces, they live, some of them, teeth by jowl with elephants where they’re afraid of them and they don’t really know them, and when they see the babies and hang out with the orphans and touch them and rub their tongues and you see their faces light up. You know, education on that level is incredibly important because then when you grow up, they’re suddenly no longer “the other.” Alan went through the same thing with jaguars in Belize with the local Belizans. He had to teach them a kind of first world romanticization of animals, where we’ve paved over our wilderness and yet we covet what’s left of it in countries where they are not at the same stage of development so we then ask them to put on the brakes of development so we can have our fantasy, and that’s not right. But part of getting them to agree to not develop their land, aside from explaining to them how they can make money off of that by not developing it, is also teaching them a kind of regard that they don’t really have. It’s the old romantic poet idea, there wasn’t the same regard for nature until we built these huge industrial cities and started sitting in apartments and longing for the natural world again

ML romanticizing it

CS Yeah, exactly. And that same dynamic happens with animals unfortunately

ML Do you want another coffee?

CS If I have another coffee my heart will explode, but go ahead. I’m just going to check on my dogs and make sure they’ve not been kidnapped (short break for taking care of his adorable and very patient dogs)

ML I was re-reading the National Geographic article and you say these factual things that are incredibly tragic. The pictures of course say a thousand words

CS Yeah, the pictures are pretty amazing but being understated is often more emotionally powerful

ML One of the reasons I decided to actually found a nonprofit instead of just being a musician is because I saw a couple films. It’s why I’m working on my filmmaking skills.  It’s so powerful for getting people to change behavior. I think you’re doing a great thing getting something on HBO. 

CS It’s so hard to get things going with film, but things just get held up all the time. I want to see some of these things just come to fruition. Could animals and animal shows be more popular? But we want to do a smart one. People can’t get enough of this new frontier, but it’s an old frontier. I kept saying in Wachula (his recent book The Wachula Woods Accord), it’s this endgame which we didn’t think we’d see in our own lifetime where the wilderness has become a big theme park which we have to fence off.  I want my next book to be about zoos–that zoos are being obviated because nature itself is becoming a big theme park

ML I discovered there is a zoo in Prospect Park (where I photographed the meerkats and baboons)

CS Yeah, that’s the zoo I was going start with ’cause that was my zoo as a kid

ML I didn’t realize there was a zoo

CS That zoo plays such a big part in my writing. It’s in one of my essays in Harpers and it’s also a big scene in Wickerby, my first book. I don’t know if you’re seen Wickerby. There’s a lot of stuff about us and nature. It’s out of print but you can get used copies of it. It’s called An Urban Pastorale. There’s a story in there about something that happened in there about the Prospect Park Zoo where a couple of kids snuck into the polar bear moat one night

ML There aren’t still polar bears?

CS No, that’s when they closed it down and renovated. It was the old inner city zoo of my youth and that story has a very tragic element.

(we digress into talking about equipment – cameras, lenses, sound recorders, transcribing software)

Well that’s quite a leap from mezzo soprano to this

ML Well I’m an organist too and I have to get back to play a wedding tomorrow

CS Oh, so you’re still doing…can you, I was interested when I saw the organist thing. Can you play the piano as well

ML Sure. I play parties and some services on the piano

CS We’re getting close to magic hour, aren’t we?

(I love that he notices that it’s dusk and there is indeed that sense of magic hour in the quality of the light. I take some photos of him in the cafe)

Magic hour in Brooklyn near Prospect Park - ML

You can do a favor for me because I’m going to in the next few days, send you…I do these essays for this online website called The Responsibility Project. It’s sponsored by Liberty Mutual Insurance, but what they do is they ask writers to do little profiles of people who are doing responsible things, so there are various ways of defining responsibility, so I thought I could do one about you

ML I love it. I’m so thrilled

CS It would be great publicity for what you’re doing. I noticed that you are asking these questions of people in the park and if you want to type out the answers you’ll be published in the Q and A. I just published a couple – one with Alan Rabinowitz (who founded Panthera  and one with Tony Frohoff who is working with the dolphins and whales who is in my whale story. So you’ll be there with Tony Frohoff and Alan Rabinowtiz and that would be good for you. Could you do that?

ML Of course. I’d be happy to. Thank you! Do you know Sanjay Khanna? Sanjay has also done a huge favor to me over the years because he wrote an extended interview with me for his Realistic Sanctuary blog and wrote for Yes Magazine and one for Nature where he quoted me when I was working on the honeybee project. and he wanted the artist perspective on how the arts can help get people to take action. I am in the process with the Park Dreams project…here, I’ll give you this card…it was inspired by a homeless guy in the public garden

CS Yeah that’s what I read. This is the guy who cleans up the cigarette butts

ML Yeah. I didn’t ask him what his dream was for humanity or anything.  He just said, “I don’t want your money. Why don’t you help me be a butt-picker.” And I said, “what are you talking about?” and he said, “see these butts here, my friends and I clean up the cigarette butts.” He had a huge hunch on his back and he seemed to be feeding expensive granola to the squirrels, hurling it out with his wrists because his arms didn’t seem to be able to move very easily, which is what prompted me to offer him twenty dollars…he had his cart of possessions and his crutch, and he refused the money. He refused the money twice and he said “I want you to help me clean up the park.”

CS Oh that’s amazing

ML He spontaneously said “I have a dream to see this country free of cigarette butts.” I don’t know, 70 years old, with a huge deformity and I couldn’t get him out of my head. It’s the same thing with the elephant project because the elephants I saw in the safari park south of Montreal is what prompted me to blend an organ recital with short films about elephants in 2005 which then led me to found NatureStage. I couldn’t get them out of my head

CS I could probably cobble it together with what’s online. It’s really good. A lot of people see this site. It would be good for your work

ML If you ever need anything…I’m happy to do whatever I can – video, photography. For instance, I was at the Animals in Society Conference in June at Wesleyan and got a bit exacerbated with some of the more esoteric viewpoints on the human/animal relationship and felt like I needed to get out and see the elephants at the circus which was in Meriden, CT. Ironically, I was invited by one of the board members to co-present at a sociology conference in October, the humanist sociology conference in Chicago about compassion and animals, and I wrote a blog on the NS site called Pink Poodles and Robotic Bees in Connecticutwhere I actually talked about going to the Cole Bros. Circus which is one of the worst circuses for elephants, and I had a still camera (no video) and I interviewed a six year old girl outside the back of the tent with my iphone, describe the horrors of seeing the tigers refuse to go through the ring of fire and how horrible she felt when they were hit by sticks, and I just used stills strung together of all these tigers pacing these cages that gave them maybe one inch to turn around, and then I found out that the USDA is suing that circus

CS Oh really?

ML and I sent that 30 second clip that is in the blog post to the lawyer who is taking them to court and she asked if she could use it, so one of the things I’m trying to convey to the students if I get more speaking gigs, is that if you just follow through on what moves your heart and you document it, even if you don’t feel that it’s great documentation, because, when I went to the safari park in Canada (you may have passed it on your way down from Wickerby) and I hope they don’t have elephants there still

CS Where is this exactly?

ML South of Montreal, not that far from the Vermont border.

CS So it’s sort of southeast of Montreal

ML If you google Park Safari 

CS Yeah I will. There’s a great sanctuary for retired chimps outside of Montreal run by a woman named Gloria Grow. She’s quite a dynamo but she’s been taking care of chimps. It’s called the Fauna Sanctuary.  On all my chimp travels and research I was told repeatedly to go visit her and never made it. Safari Park it’s called?

ML Parc Safari (french) whatever. I only went there because I’d never seen an elephant. I’d blocked out seeing the elephants my Dad said he’d taken me to Ringling Bros. when I was five.  So I kept seeing signs for elephants and giraffes…and I wondered what it would be like to see elephants and giraffes in the middle of the farmland of Canada. There were two siberian tigers, a bunch of chimpanzees, you know, playing with the grass, trying to make meaning out of their enclosure. People say, how did you get involved with elephants and I tell them that I was driving down this paved road watching the animals “on exhibit” where you’re not supposed to get out of the car. I came to the elephant enclosure and I thought, I’m going to get out of the car and I thought I’d pay them the respect of not staring at them out of the car window. And once I got out of the car I got this feeling from them of depression and they were swaying back and forth near this bull elephant in a stockade which apparently had tried to escape several times.

(we talk about getting public speaking engagements and Charles says his wife keeps telling him he should be on the moth radio telling stories. I tell him that sounds like a great idea, but if he also wants to get paid he could try animal behavior departments, public lecture series at colleges etc. I suggest Jay Allison on Transom radio should interview him.)

ML Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your stories in the Chinese press?

CS Yeah, totally. I might take a teaching job in Shanghai and that all depends on NYU

Meerkat in a glass enclosure with sand and rocks

ML So can I ask you two questions before we’re done?

CS Sure.

ML Do you think artists can really make a difference regarding the environment and our relationship to other species?If you could actually mobilize a bunch of people through money and time to do something that would help solve an issue with elephants or with zoos, I don’t know if you think they’re good or bad, or somewhere in between, obviously there are bad zoos

Gazing Back at the Children

CS Well those are two questions and I’m fascinated by both, especially the zoo one but maybe the answers are related which is that one, yes, obviously tremendous amount of difference, especially for the young that artists can make, because I think it’s such a different time that with what we’re learning but to put it across in a non-doctrinaire way, which is what art does, you know, art puts it across on almost a subliminal level, so it’s going right to the empathic pathways, especially for young brains where those pathways are still being formed, are more protean and mutable, so yeah, a difference there. And art is doing that more and more now because so much of the landscape of discovery is invisible which is to say biological. And therefore, poetry, what does poetry do? That’s where I started with an MFA in poetry. That’s where I thought I was going to stay and out of restlessness, got into journalism. But poetry is about building a bridge back from an unseen place to the knowlable. And that’s what writing about science is, whether it’s spindle cells or writing about viruses. The landscape now is not the visible, it’s the invisible.

So art can help make these connections that were kind of intuited all along. Of course elephants and dolphins and whales have spindle cells. We can’t know dolphin language but music can get that across. One of the next pieces I’m hoping to do for the Times or the New Yorker is about a woman who’s devising with the help of an acoustic engineer in Georgia, one of the first experiments to try to talk dolphin talk to dolphins and that’s perfect because what has it been all along…can they learn our language? Can Nim learn our language? And then we judge their intelligence based on how many words of ours they can speak which is totally ridiculous.

ML You know in the filmshort I made called Usthem, is that accurate that I say, one common language, emotion, one common wish, respect?

CS The first of those is more inclusion of both, the second is more speaking to you know us, about them, so there’s a slight difference there, but what this woman is doing, Denise Herzig, what she’s doing with this sound technician is really new to me because again, it’s trying to talk dolphin and that’s, but anyways, I think that uh there’s no gauging the amount of good kind of messaging that art can do in all kinds of forms, and I always love reading that article that comes out in the times in the art section how more and more artists are you know, trying to get across this landscape of biology because I deal with that all the time. I don’t just write about animals. I write about genetics and the microbiome and I’m fascinated by viruses and all that stuff.

ML Do you know about Catherine Chalmers’ work? She’s an artist who shows with these huge photographs, manipulating ants and cockcroaches in her lab in her loft, what animals disgust us and what animals we’re drawn to. I think she’s a brilliant artist and I I should send you her interview. At any rate, we were both mentioned in the same article by the San Francisco Chronicle on eco-artists. The reporter made a short video that includes Chalmers’ work alongside some of the images from the elephant film shorts I’ve made so far. The title of the film set is “can art save the planet?” an talks about artists who are trying to create on-the-ground change and call people to take some sort of action

Behind the Glass at the Zoo

CS and toward that, your second question, zoos, I’ve debated this for the longest time. There’s no doubt in my mind that they should be obviated but then you do get to that point that others make that zoos have to make this point for their very survival. What we do is by co-opting the one, we use them as a representative or ambassador for the…the argument is losing some part of its weight since the world they’re supposed to represent is rapidly dissipating, so what are they even representing

ML and people are often saying, we need to breed the elephants in captivity so we have elephants. What kind of world do we want these elephants to live in

CS it’s true that there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, that kind of perversion, and they’re perpetuating certain species and conservation, but you know, the question can be debated forever about really what effect educationally a zoo has, or isn’t really just a kind of you know, carnival day at the zoo fun and then you don’t think about them ever again. You just went and got your yucks. But I will say it’s hard to be too doctrinaire or too dogmatic as insofar as I grew up in Brooklyn and had my first exchanges with animals in zoos. But that gets to the cart before the horse idea of are you born with empathy or did you learn to feel by going to the zoo

ML and I saw these elephants in captivity and saw and felt their despair

CS All you felt is their despair

ML and how horrible that dull, too-small area was for them. That’s what propelled me to read Heathcote Williams’ Sacred Elephant. He, by the way, gave his permission to have his prose poem in the short films that I did in 2005 for From Trumpets to Trunks

CS cool

ML I managed to reach his agent. I mean the goodwill, when you’re talking about things at such a dire level of urgency, sometimes I

CS well you know, here’s the thing. One of the things I always wonder about, is that given what I just said about who are we to pontificate to the next generation of young kids that they can’t go to the zoo and have their zoo experience, it’s going to in the same way that the Chinese…it’s going to have to come from them, it’s going to have to come from the kids saying I don’t like zoos

ML a lot of kids DO say that

CS and why are they saying that? It’s because they’re smarter about one, animals, and two, the status has changed, you know. There was a kind of naivite and innocence behind the way animals were kept, at least when I was a kid. There was a kind of simple childlike joy in having like, Mr. Gorilla here. Look at Mr. Gorilla. He’s sitting here by a log in a subway bathroom. We got him here, and isn’t that great kids?

Now I think kids are going oh, this is creepy. Cuz look at what they can see now on television. They can see these nature shows, they can see them in the wild, and they’re traveling vicariously and now I’m going to say something vaguely classist, I think it’s almost become an underclass experience where you still go and get that jolly, but where kids are more educated, I think they’re discomfited by the experience. I mean there’s always going to be the base “aw look at the giraffe and look at the monkey sitting there”

ML It’s interesting. I wish I knew more psychology because I’ve often wondered what makes certain kids want to save the lobster in the tank and some kids want to tease the lobster in the tank

CS Well there you go

ML What is going on there? I’ve always been hyper empathic which is why when I read your articles, you usually end with something that pulls on the emotions…Alex the parrot story, his last words were ‘I love you.” The chimpanzee learns sign language and says, “get me out of here”, or “key”, or “give me a hug.”

CS It’s funny you bring this up because you know, thinking, there was the chimp in captivity story where I ended the piece or very nearly ended the piece with the now late Carol Noone who started the sanctuary in Florida that took all those chimps from the horrible Colson’s lab in New Mexico. She’s the one who saved all them and she told me that story, and whenever I’m reporting a story, the minute I hear the ending, I know, I usually know that’s gonna be the end. I can always recognize what will be the end.

I remember calling my wife from Kenya and saying I’ve got the ending to the elephant story and it was about how one elephant killed that guy in Queen Elizabeth national park and then the next day the rest of the herd buried the body the way they would a dead elephant

ML this was in the Elephant Breakdown article

CS I knew right away when Carol Noon told the story the first time that she took over the Colson chimp laboratory, that she opened the skylights and opened up all their cages that first night she was on the grounds in her trailer and she could hear them talking because they could see the stars for the first time and she said she’d sit up days after that and wonder what they were talking about and she said I think I know. They were thinking we live here too. We exist.

(we talk about Alex Shoumitoff’s piece in Vanity Fair on elephants)

I think it goes back to your thing about emotion and respect, I think there is no much more important thing to evoke when you write about these things, NOT to say, hey they’re like us. They are them. They are a parallel complexity, they are a parallel analogous version of biology. They are a different assemblage with their own dignity, their own language, their own music,

ML diverse personalities and history

CS and long before we came along. Yeah!

ML I think you mentioned in the whale article the possibility that whales have some sort of mystical sense. I mean certainly there are great apes that gaze at waterfalls as if in a state wonder, and elephants in Katy Payne’s book Distant Thunder, she’s also an organist. Did you know that?  but she’s an advisor for the Elephant Project. She says she’s seen elephants gazing at the sunset

CS It’s off the charts with elephants on this recent trip (to Kenya) in terms of the nuance of communication with each other about us, when the wild one would come back to the paddock down in Tsavo and those are the ones, the ones in the paddock were the ones on the verge to making a transition back to the wild, and you just see this massive group of matriarchs and bulls and young ones, and they’re all dying of thirst, but we’re right there, Nick the photographer and the keepers, and the only reason the wild ones approach is because the ones in the paddock are talking to them saying these humans are good. You can trust them. It’s so amazing and the interplay with each other

ML I’ve been listening to chickadees outside my back door at the feeders. The complexity and conversation of the bird language…I can tell that there are different things that they’re saying and I’ll never ever understand their language but at least I respect that they have one

CS Exactly

ML There are journalists who are journalists and then people who invoke layers of meaning, just the right word that’s not what you’d expect. That’s probably your poetry background as well

CS It is. I wonder sometimes whether I’m doing a disservice, like with Wachula, I could only write that book the way I wrote it and I think the press was hoping I’d do something more straightforward and informational, but I already did it in the article, even though my articles are not straightforward. I try to tell stories but you know, when it gets to the book, the only way I could write it was to imagine that night sitting in front of Roger  (the chimpanzee that had an empty gaze after years of solitude and exploitation) but then it gets to the point, Michael Pollan says to me, why don’t you just make it a novel? Then I always have to battle with that, should I just make it a novel, and then we called it the Wachula Woods Accord which drove my wife crazy because the press wouldn’t let me call it what I wanted to call it which was Humanzee. She said no woman would buy a book called Humanzee

ML You realize you’re at the forefront of shifting, of voicing something that is a zeitgeist. I hope it’s a zeitgeist.

Interdisciplinary artist and mezzo-soprano Miranda Loud explores through various media, the power of music, film and theater to inspire global stewardship, focusing on our kinship with other species. In addition to her singing and work as an organist, she has created several short films and multi-media performances for the non-profit she founded, NatureStage. Her work was recently highlighted by the San Francisco Chronicle in “Can Art Save the Planet?” and she is touring the country with a lecture/music/video presentation called “Saving the Elephants, Saving Ourselves: The Role of Art in Social Change” to encourage educators and general audiences to see the vital importance of arts education to heal our world and strengthen compassion and empathy, and to think outside the box. The University of North Texas recently added her to their roster of notable women in sustainability. You can read more about her current projects, Park Dreams and Elephantasia, on the NatureStage website at http://www.naturestage.org.

Siebert’s articles can be found here:

09/01/11  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/09/orphan-elephants/siebert-text

06/09 Watching Whales Watching Us New York Times Magazine

03/09 Something Wild New York Times Magazine

05/07 Falling Down Green New York Times Magazine

 04/07 New Tricks New York Times Magazine

10/06 An Elephant Crackup? New York Times Magazine

01/06 The Animal Self  New York Times Magazine

Founder of the Institute for Humane Education, Zoe Weil

August. Blue Hill, Maine.

Little did I know that my quick trip to the Blue Hill library to do some emailing would lead me to one of my mentors in humane education, Zoe Weil. Two women were sitting at the study table and we started talking. One of them mentioned that there was a center for the sorts of things I was writing about just up the street in Surry and she knew the founder. I sent Zoe an email and two days later we were face to face, sitting on the rocky beach with the waves of Penobscot Bay rolling up to our toes and Zoe’s two dogs galloping over the boulders in search of sticks.

Zoe is full of energy and ideas, as one might expect from a ground-breaker in calling for humane education to be a cornerstone within our current education systems. Here is an overview of our hour-long conversation.

I suggested to her that we build in empathy for other species into every grade and she responded which the idea of building empathy in general. It’s one of the four elements of humane education – Reverence, Respect, Responsibility, and Empathy – for all people, animals and the earth. I asked her about the correlation between narcissism and empathy, and she mentioned that Japan is not a particularly narcissistic society but neither is it empathetic, in particular, towards animals.

One of the most interesting facets of our conversation was the dialog on empathy and corporate regulations. Zoe believes there are many systems in place that prevent empathic people from changing systems (which is one of the reasons I am promoting the out-of-the-box thinking fostered by arts education to create new systems). She pointed out that in many of her talks she says that she might not want to participate in the genocide of mountain gorills and people in the Congo, but the coltan in her antilock brakes, computer and cell phone, tie her inadvertently to the conflict over the mineral resource. For more on this complex issue, see http://www.javafilms.fr/spip.php?article8

One of her colleagues is a corporate lawyer who is trying to change corporate codes in different states so that they can pursue profits but not at the expense of communities, the environment, the dignity of employees. He has yet to be convinced to add animals to the list. But, Zoe concedes, it will at least be part of the discussion.

Part of Zoe’s powerful work with the Institute for Humane Education is to help make it easier for corporations to do the right thing. She explains that corporations are given the same rights as people, but  unlike people, they are not held to the same responsibilities and obligations. She describes how her corporate lawyer colleague was able to create a corporation in Virginia called  ’License to Kill’ with the mission “to use tobacco products to make money for shareholders that will kill half a million people a year within the limits of the law.” He wanted to see if he could get incorporated with this title and mission statement. He did.

Zoe fervently underscored the need for critical and creative thinking towards system change to be added to empathy training. I mentioned that part of the power of the arts is that it strengthens one’s inner sense of richness and self-understanding, as well as self-confidence and cooperation skills, which counteracts the often destructive ramifications of much unchecked consumerism which often lacks responsibility towards the environment and the animals that live in it (and often people in poverty). All for the sake of corporate profit. I told her a bit about the Park Dreams project and how everyone I have spoken with mentions, in response to the question “what was most meaningful to you in your middle school and high school education” something about theater, music, band, english or art class. Zoe suggested that teaching the thinking behind using the arts could be a powerful venue for changemaking, and I told her that I would add this to the presentation  Saving the Elephants, Saving Ourselves: The Role of Arts in Social Change.

She told me that the dream comes true through persistence.

All in all, it was an inspiring visit and I look forward to attending one of her MOGO workshops this year in between all the other work I’m doing for Park Dreams and The Elephant Project.

To read more about current lawsuits surrounding the right of corporations to be treated with the rights of human beings

http://www.truth-out.org/local-resistance-corporate-personhood-wages-crucial-if-symbolic-battle/1316708417

Re: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/opinion/a-polarizing-polar-bear-investigation.html

It is the power of a free press which can help keep the sense of morality and justice afloat in a world in which denial and diminishing sea ice are often found in the same sentence. Thank you Op-Ed for a clear opinion on what is more important in the current news about the credibility of Charles Monnett’s research methods regarding polar bear drownings.

I agree that the emphasis on Monnett is missing the point completely and shows another case of blaming the messenger when we should be looking at the canary in the coal mine.

As founder of NatureStage and an interdisciplinary artist and environmentalist, I believe that any art form which reaches our emotions can melt the hardness we can develop towards suffering, whether of polar bears, majestic, immensely strong, drowning in the habitat they know best, or towards the animal, child or adult next door. It is vital that we remain empathic to the suffering we directly or indirectly cause other beings on the planet.

How often have I heard people say that they can’t do anything about it so why see something that will make them sad? The opportunity they are missing, is that they will potentially be moved to take action that can accumulate from lapping waves pushing against the sands of the status quo, to a tidal change which upends a system of cruelty and exploitation entirely. Living with integrity tends to strengthen us through each action, and to cause ripple effects of inspiration.

Can we have the courage to seek out the emotionally-laden images, films and music that will keep our hearts flexible, open, not only to the plight of the polar bears, but to one another? Can global warming and climate change, at the very least, melt our hearts to become more compassionate and to take action to alleviate suffering, not only in the future, but here, now?

Who will be the first to create landing spaces for the polar bears swimming, searching, looking for any place on the horizon to rest?

For more information on the ethics of bearing witness to the suffering done in our name, whether direct or indirect, please see the following blog post and the reference to philosopher Kathi Jennie’s paper, The Power of the Visual.

Miranda

Analysis by Kieran Mulvaney
Wed Jan 26, 2011 01:13 PM ET 

Researchers in Alaska have tracked a female polar bear swimming for 232 consecutive hours, during which time she covered 687 kilometers (427 miles) until she finally reached the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean. The finding underlines the enormous capacity of polar bears to survive in the water, but also demonstrates the immense cost to them of having to do so for long periods. By the end of the ordeal, the bear had lost 22 percent of her body mass, and her yearling cub had apparently died.

Writing in the journal Polar Biology, George Durner of the United States Geological Survey and colleagues describe capturing an adult female bear and her cub on Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast in late August 2008. Around the adult’s neck, the researchers placed a radio collar with GPS unit, satellite uplink, and an accelerometer to monitor the bear’s activity rate independent of the GPS measurements. (She was one of 13 bears so equipped by the researchers that month.)

The bear weighed 226 kg (498 lbs), and the yearling weighed 159 kg (350 lbs). When the scientists found the bear again, two months later, she weighed just 177 kg (390 lbs) and was not lactating; the yearling was nowhere to be seen.

By analyzing the recovered data and overlaying the bear’s movements with ice charts, Durner and colleagues deduced that on 25 August (two days after capture and release) she entered the water off the Beaufort Sea coast and swam north for nine days, before finally reaching sea ice. She then spent three days on the ice, another day swimming, and a further 49 days on the sea ice before being found again. http://news.discovery.com/earth/polar-bear-swims-for-nine-days-pays-heavy-price.html

Park Dreams Trailer from Miranda Loud on Vimeo.

A trailer describing the Park Dreams project, a NatureStage initiative seeking funding which involves asking people in different parks around the U.S. about their visions for a better society and covering the following topics: arts education, environmental stewardship, our relationship with other species, building more trusting neighborhoods, among others.
Produced and edited by Miranda Loud with music by Scott Joplin (The Strenuous Life) performed by Miranda Loud. Photographs by Erika Sidor, Ami Wang, Ana Caras with permission from all the participants to use their words and images to further the project which will be a podcast. Learn more at http://naturestage.org/projects/park-dreams/

Within a span of four days, I managed to visit a farm sanctuary, take a boat ride down the Hudson, visit the Vanderbilt “summer cottage” with a tour guide who should be in theater (maybe he is), make new friends with people at the B and B in Kingston, hear Strauss in the Frank Gehry concert hall at Bard College, learn a new, albeit take-no-prisoners card game, play through some beautiful Chopin Mazurkas I’d never seen before, catch up on sleep, rediscover an old children’s book about the emperor and the nightingale which I hadn’t seen since I was six, visit the Kingston colorful farmer’s market, talk to Peter at the B & B about the ins and outs of editing for radio, and forget about the debt ceiling debacle for at least 24 hours.

One of the motivations for this recent trip to the Hudson River Valley in NY was to see my old friend from Manhattan who is a wonderful baritone and in residence at Bard College for much of the summer. The google searching started…Bed and breakfasts near Bard…When I saw the listing for a Bed and Breakfast in a renovated church, hosted by an abstract expressionist painter and a composer and pianist, I knew my search was over. The deal was sealed when they mentioned that they liked to cook omelettes in the morning with herbs from the garden and, “was I ok with dogs?”

But, where exactly IS Kingston?

It turns out that Kingston is a short ferry ride away from the train station in Rhinebeck on the opposite side of the Hudson, and a mere 20 minutes by car from Bard College. It is a remarkably diverse town which has yet to be gentrified, and probably never will be, according to my host (infrastructure challenges). The town is home to many artists who have done time in New York City and want space and quality of life that is more affordable. Apparently there are several churches in Kingston which artists have renovated into live/work spaces. I look forward to my next visit, hopefully this fall…Thank you Julie and Peter!

To see some of Julie’s work, you can visit her site at www.juliehedrick.com

Peter’s radio show of composers talking shop is on http://www.wgxc.org/schedule/75

And for more information on other artists in Kingston:

http://www.artalongthehudson.com/kingston.html

The following photos are all taken with my new lens which I am getting used to, a 50 mm 1.8. Music is by my friend Jed Parish.

In April I was interviewed by journalist Christina Farr about my work as an independent artist and my vision for strengthening cross-species empathy through the arts, which is the work of NatureStage. I am excited and grateful to share this very interesting article, “Can art save the planet? New eco-cultural movement has its roots in the peninsula.”

There are a few things that I feel need clarifying: my talks around the country are more about how we can become better global stewards and the power of arts in education than about animal cruelty specifically. My work is more about our relationship to other species as a whole, currently using the Asian elephant as a mirror to looking at ourselves more closely. I still work as a classical singer and organist (as well as pianist) in addition to my work as a filmmaker and public speaker.

An excerpt:

Miranda Loud spends her days touring the country to educate people about animal cruelty and the environment. The former classical pianist embraced visual arts after reading about climate change, and the impact of species lost. Her goal is to promote empathy training to teach respect for nature, and to introduce mandatory art programs in schools.

“Would we have quieter oceans?” she asked, voice faltering. “Would we turn off the lights in skyscrapers so birds wouldn’t circle them, dying of exhaustion in their millions? If we had empathy training and an early introduction to art we’d be trained to take other species into account.”

Loud’s current focus is to preserve Asian elephant populations, and she travels on a shoestring budget presenting her short films. Similarly to Chalmers, her original intent was to de-stigmatize insects, primarily bees, but she changed course after hearing about the atrocities committed in Thailand.

Loud said art prevents people from watching to their comfort level or attention span. They must sit, and take it all in. After screenings of her films, she is often approached by well-wishers saying, “You have lit a fire under my apathy!”

Loud cannot quantify the effect of her work in helping elephants, but said she remains optimistic. “It’s hard to know what impact you’ve had as an artist, but half the people who watch my presentations are usually in tears,” she said. “And that’s got to count for something.”  Read the full article…

drawing by Ana Caras for NatureStage

Joy – with her toys in Zurich

The One Language Project European Edition is now in progress! Today’s adventures started in Zurich, Switzerland – one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. My goal was to find a few farmers to interview over the next few days about their cows, and I was working on a few leads thankfully prepared for me by a local landscape architect who will be traveling with me to the countryside on Friday.

My first stop was the Landes museum which was conveniently hosting an exhibit called Animali – animals used to inspire the imagination throughout the ages. The exhibit focused on the mythology of animals and the way humans have woven human longings, characteristics and physiology with other animals to create the unicorn, the griffin, the dragon, the satyr and mermaids. The video installation was the most compelling, with five large screens seamlessly projecting across the entire side wall of the exhibit with German-sounding mysterious electronica underlying the slow undulations of the various animals against timelapse clouds, milky waters and tree-filled glens. All desaturated colors and focusing on the animals that had become hybrids over the past centuries – the lion, the eagle, the deer, the stag, the snake, the horse.

exhibit photo

To watch the video about the exhibit http://www.art-tv.ch/9849-0-Landesmuseum-Zuerich-Animali.html

After coming out of my near hypnosis from the video installation, I retrieved my precious bag of camera equipment at security and went back to my mission. Cows! En route, I decided to add a couple of dog portraits and their stories, since they all fall under the One Language Project, and how could I resist?

Joy’s story was told to me by her owner Ursula, who runs a beautiful boutique in the old part of Zurich. Here is what she told me:

I got her as a puppy eleven years ago from a farm. She was a mix. She is absolutely crazy about men. She goes to them as if she is in heat. Children love her and she loves them. What touches me most about her is her sensitivity. I could put glasses on the floor and she would carefully walk around them. She’s very careful with everybody, especially babies. You know, she’s a Pisces; she feels a lot. I like that she is still playful, even at eleven years old. She has her toys and they help when she rides in the car. She’s so easygoing. It won’t be easy when she goes.

Joy’s Squirrel

Joy, eleven years old

I strolled along the cobblestone streets in the sun, admiring the beauty of the storefronts and the beauty of a walking city without cars everywhere. I love the cafe culture of people being accessible, sitting still, talking, enjoying the view, the sound of birds instead of cars.

I looked down a long street towards the sun-filled waterfront and saw a black dog lying in the middle of the street. I wandered down and started talking to the owner about her dog. This is what she told me about Santos:

Santos is 4 years old and I’ve had him since he was 8 weeks. He is the third black labrador I’ve had. He’s not castrated and isn’t in the slight bit aggressive. No troubles with anyone. He loves children, especially when they are running and playing. Every day we go in the forest for walks. We have our places.

Reblogged from One Language Project: Stories which show our kinship with other species:

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The One Language Project European Edition is now in progress! Today's adventures started in Zurich, Switzerland - one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. My goal was to find a few farmers to interview over the next few days about their cows, and I was working on a few leads thankfully prepared for me by a local landscape architect who will be traveling with me to the countryside on Friday.

Read more… 513 more words

As I get ready for my trip to Europe, I think how Jesse would climb into my suitcase when I was getting ready for a trip. He would lumber over and climb in and look at me. He wanted me to take me with him.

Jesse was so present. Always. He was never checking his cell phone, ipad, he was never looking away as if thinking of someone or something else. He was steady and only vocal with rich, loud purrs, which started to be less frequent as his heart disease progressed.

I used to talk about him as a feline tractor, his purrs were so loud.

His big beautiful heart just grew to be too big for his body.

He didn’t need witty repartee or active conversation. He seemed fairly content to roll on his back and hold my smelly socks in his paws like a river otter does with a mussel. He came to met me at the door without fail until he could no longer walk without too much pain or exertion.

Jesse loved to eat. Until a year ago he finished every bit of his food as if it was his last meal. He relished it licking his lips and sometime grunting with sheer pleasure. When I let him outside in the yard, he would amble towards the catmint and lie on top of the tender green leaves as if smothering them with his vast orange and white body was somehow symbiotically important. The catmint is flourishing now, so it must have been true. Jesse had very clear expressions and when he really wanted something he could look at me with eyes that seemed so wide that they reminded me of the Disney cartoon eyes jiggling with intention.

Sometimes Jesse would climb his staircase to sit on my lap on the couch and would squeeze my finger with his paw. I would squeeze back and he would squeeze me back again. He didnt’ care how I looked. He loved me no matter what, when I was sick, coughing, when I was lonely and feeling boring, when I was rushing and stressed, and when I came back from a trip. He never made me feel bad for leaving him.

In fact, he welcomed me home and then wanted to lie on my shoes.

He loved his catnip rainbow with an intensity only imaginable for a catnip addict.

He was happy riding in the car, showing great interest in the surroundings and looking calmly out the window.

As a tag team, he and George had it down. George would go outside and bring in the mouse and Jesse would execute it quickly, often scuttling across the floor much faster than seemed possible for his weight.

When I gave him baby food on my finger he would lick it with immeasurable gentleness.

He was always loving rolling from one side to the next and since he could not groom himself below the chest, would start rapidly licking his paw when I would clean him. When I brushed him and voluminous fur would come off in the brush, he would dig into the fur and try to eat it as if it were essential.

He snored.

He purred.

He was so loving.

And so loved.

Miranda

June10, 2013

Some good news finally on the elephant front!

Reblogged from Animal Blawg:

Spencer Lo

Behind the sanitized world of fast-food, everyday grocery shopping and culinary delights—all meant to satiate to our basic pleasures and needs—is an extraordinarily vast realm of brutality as normal and routine as our mealtime habits. I am referring, of course, to the often ignored truth of slaughterhouses: that billions of animals raised and slaughtered every year for food are forced to endure unimaginable suffering.

Read more… 723 more words

design and photos: Miranda Loud

The One Language Project exhibit of my dog portraits with essays by the owners opens officially today at Mass. General Hospital’s Yawkey Clinic as part of the Illuminations program at the hospital. I was told that I could make a few remarks along with the other artists during the reception and, although I think art should speak for itself, I delved for more inspiration into my treasure-trove of Naturestage books on animals, the environment, eco art, poetry and mind shift. The first page I found in David Abram‘s book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, was about our kinship with other species as Darwin had discovered and cultures long before ours knew intrinsically.

I found the passage that I thought would be worth sharing on the next page:

He writes…

Despite all our giddy technological dreams, this vast and inscrutable land–drenched by the rains and parched by the summer sun–remains the ultimate ground, and the final horizon of all our science. It is not primarily a set of mechanisms waiting to be figured out, this breathing land. It is not a stock of resources waiting to be utilized by us, or a storehouse of raw materials waiting to be developed. It is not an object.

It is, rather, the very body of wonder–a shuddering field of intelligence in whose round life we participate. And if, today, this dreaming land has been forgotten behind a clutch of flowing screens that intercept the fascination of our focused eyes–if it has been eclipsed by styles of speaking that deaden our sense, and by machinic modes of activity that stifle the eros between our body and the leafing forests–then it is time to listen, underneath all these words, for the animal stirrings that move within our limbs and our swelling torsos. It is time to unplug our gaze from the humming screen, walking out of the house to blink under the river of stars. There are new stories waiting in the cool grasses and new songs.

To reconnect with our kinship with other species and to find a compassion, humility, eradication of loneliness, and an inspiration for harmony and balance is the goal of this ongoing project of gathering animal portraits and stories of interspecies connection.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. 

John Muir