‘Our Wild Calling’ Examines The Benefits Of Connecting With Animals

Speaker 1: 00:00 Most of us relate to animals through our experiences with pets when it comes to wild animals, maybe visits to the zoo or for those who can afford it, a Safari or other excursion with guides in the wild, but the fact is we coexist with animals in our increasingly threatened planet and there are lots of benefits of those relationships. That's the message in the new book, our wild calling, how connecting with animals can transform our lives and save theirs by San Diego. Author Richard lube. He joined KPBS round table host Mark Sauer to discuss his book. Speaker 2: 00:34 We spent four years researching and writing this book. I start with your original idea, what it just set out to do here. Speaker 3: 00:39 Well, this is a a lesson in never write a book based on a feeling I had a feeling, which is I'd done a bunch of books on the, what I called, nature deficit disorder, last child in the woods and all of that, but I was on an Island on Kodiak Island one day when my son and I was walking along a trail and us and a Fox, a big Fox. These are the largest foxes in the world or some of the largest, stopped me dead in my tracks. I was glad it was a Fox because I should have been looking up. I was counting my money for the tip for my son who was my guide because there's a lot of Alaskan Brown bears there. And I looked in this Fox's eyes. He wasn't moving and I thought, is this guy rabbit? Am I in trouble? The whole book is, it's very difficult to explain what people feel when they have that kind of encounter and what that is. And I collected hundreds of stories from people who had had similar encounters or relationships with wild animals or domestic animals over time. Speaker 2: 01:40 Well, that there are, as you mentioned this and I segue into my next question. There's a number of transformative encounters between people and wild creatures in the book. Give us a couple of examples that really stand out to you. Speaker 3: 01:50 Well, one of them is Paul Deighton oceanographer at Scripps institution of oceanography. One of the great guys ever. He was on the bottom of the ocean once when he was a student and he was collecting samples and he felt something very large come above him and stop. And he looked up and he saw a big tentacle coming down. Then another tentacle, and this was a 12 foot long, a wingspan of a octopus, one of the giant octopuses. And it came down and got him and he couldn't get out of its grip. And without going all the detail, he kicked off the bottom as best as he could. And they went up and up in the spiral of water. And as they did, the octopus moved around, uh, Paul's body and he could feel the razor sharp beak on his neck as it moved around. I mean, this animal could have killed him. Speaker 3: 02:37 Oh yeah, yeah. And at some point, as they were going up in the water, he says, Paul said, we made a nonaggression pact. Right? Then they hit the surface, both of them, and he ripped off his mass because he had realized at the bottom that he was almost out of oxygen and he's looking down into the water under the surface and here's that octopus still looking at him and then it turns around in, it disappears into the darkness. What does Paul do? This is the best part of story. What does Paul do? He puts the mass back on and he chases the octopus back down into the, why did you do that, Paul? And he said, he doesn't know. He just didn't want that moment to end. Speaker 2: 03:14 Yeah, and you've got a number of, of those kinds of encounters in the book where people look an animal in the eye, and these are wild animals and some of them are deadly animals. You know, you've got, you talk about a, a polar bear is tracking a pair of women, experienced, very experienced women way out on the ice, and this is the deadliest of the bears. Of course, they didn't want to shoot it. They had a gun and could have shot it, but they didn't. And they just engaged and it worked out for them. Speaker 3: 03:39 And it doesn't always work out. I mean, I'm not saying that nature is safe. I never say that. In fact, that's one of its attractions. One of the reasons that this has an effect on people's physical health, mental health, even cognitive functioning is because of all, when we feel all, it's usually because we've stepped out of our comfort zone and it often involves danger. This all I think is essential for the development of our children, for our feeling fully alive. Uh, and that's what people describe again and again, even if they were scared, in fact, sometimes, especially if they are scared Speaker 2: 04:15 now, you write about a kind of magic that sometimes happens in these encounters that we're talking about. And I want to quote your wonderful line here that whisper of recognition between two beings when time seems to stop. And what do you mean by that? How are the, the experience described by the people who've had them this magic? Speaker 3: 04:33 Um, Martin Boober on always have to be careful not to say Justin Bieber. Uh, Martin Boober the great, um, uh, philosopher, uh, wrote a great essay called [inaudible]. He said that you and I don't really exist. What exists is right here in between us. It's the relationship. He considered that a kind of electricity that some people call God whether you're religious or not. Many people who are not religious in this book have felt that. So in the book, I call that the habitat of the heart. And I think there are two habitats. There's the physical habitat that many of us work very, very hard as we should to protect. And then there's this other habitat, the habitat of the heart. We don't hardly do anything to protect and nurture that in our kids or in ourselves. Here's the deal. If one of those habitats goes, so does the other one, we've got to start paying attention to that because what we're doing now isn't working. Recent studies show that almost a third of songbirds in the United in North America have disappeared since 1970. You know, what are we doing? What are we so, so clearly treating animals as data is not working. We have to make this deeper connection. Speaker 2: 05:43 Well, that brings me to the question I have on the climate crisis. Of course it imperils all living things, you know, to world wildlife fund report showing wildlife population shrunk by 60% worldwide over the past half century. Alarming die offs. A birds, as you mentioned here, constantly making news. You've got a proposal that some, certainly the dwindling number of climate skeptics would see as radical. Explain how you'd like to see the earth divided. Speaker 3: 06:08 Uh, well there's a couple of radical ideas in that. One I think you're referring to is half earth now. Uh, EO Wilson has written a book about that. He didn't come up with that concept. Basically, in order to preserve the biodiversity we need for our survival on this planet, we need to have about half of earth set aside for, for awhile wildness. That doesn't mean the Northern hemisphere and the Southern hemisphere. That means that there'll be a kind of a checkerboard, hopefully connected with wildlife corridors and all of that. Not necessarily excluding people. The Adirondack park in New York is a great example. How people brought back that forest after had been decimated by logging. They still live there in small hamlets. It's a different kind of distribution of population and they make their living there. It's not impossible. Make your living in a place like that. We need that, but we need a lot more cities. Speaker 3: 07:00 As of 2008 more people in the world live in cities than in the countryside. Huge moment in human history. We don't talk about very much right now. Wild animals are moving into cities in very large numbers. We're moving into their territory, but they're moving in with us too. What are we going to do about that? We got a choice. Either we're going to exterminate all those animals coming in or we're going to love them. We're going to learn to coexist with them. Uh, one of the ideas is to create a wildlife, uh, watch groups, which are kind of like neighborhood watch, but you know, the parents and the kids and the, and the, and the uh, uh, retirees at the corner would watch the animals that are coming in and moving out as climate change chases, uh, changes as well as the domestic animals. They do two things. One is that they protect people from the aggressive animals and they would teach your neighbors don't feed the animals for example, for example. The other thing they would do is learn about those animals and have a relationship with those animals and deepen their lives. Steve deep in their sense of being alive. Speaker 2: 08:06 Now those running for president, at least the Democrats have plans to address the climate crisis. What do you think we need to do at least start doing to protect humanism and animals? How do we get people to see that damage to the earth is indeed damage to ourselves? Speaker 3: 08:20 I think what I said earlier about data, about, uh, too often this is treated as numbers and I think we need to start paying attention to the habitat of the heart. I don't think anybody protects anything unless they love it. And we need to learn to do that. And our kids in our schools need to do that. And there's this great payoff. Our lives become much richer when we do that. Speaker 2: 08:43 Right? And if we're not good stewards of the earth for our sake and all other living things, uh, then game over really. Speaker 3: 08:49 Right. And it's touch and go as to whether it's too late or not. You know, I, I do a lot of speaking around the country and I, a lot of college students I've met, one young woman leaned across this table to me and she said, Mr. Lewis, I'm 20 years old in all my life I've been told it's too late. You know, Martin Luther King said and demonstrated that any movement, any culture will fail if it cannot paint a picture of a world that people will want to go to. We haven't been doing that. Most of our images of the future look a lot like blade runner and mad max. And at best the hunger games at least there's a few trees. Unless we change those images and we can do this, there's incredible ideas out there, incredible stuff happening that we don't see because certain people in high office have taken over the airways at this moment. We didn't see it before either and it's especially cute now and our profession, Mark journalism needs to pay more attention to those images of what a good future could be. Speaker 1: 09:50 Well, I've been speaking with Richard [inaudible], author of our wild calling, how connecting with animals can transform our lives and save theirs. Thanks very much. Speaker 3: 09:58 Well, thanks Mark. Good. See and again, Speaker 1: 10:00 Richard lube will be speaking at 6:30 PM today at the Casa Del Prado in Balboa park. More information about the event and an interview with lube about reducing nature deficit can be found@kpbs.org and you're listening to KPBS mid day edition.