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Get a jump on spring with Gardening for Your Table, Oregon Peace Tree Project, Plants for the Planet and more

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Events are free unless noted. Please email calendar submissions at least three weeks in advance to events@oregonian.com.ONGOINGPlants for the Planet Native Plant Sale: Browse profiles of more than 100 native plant species and shop for plants online through March 24 to be picked up at one of four outdoor pop-up events in April or early May. sparrowhawknativeplants.com.Portland Fruit Tree Project Home Orchard Workshops: Various dates and locations through May. These hands-on workshops are designed to empower participants with practical knowledge on fruit tree care, composting, grafting and more. $50; visit portlandfruit.org or email treecare@portlandfruit.org.Tualatin SWCD spring workshops: Various dates and times through May 30. Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District offers a variety of spring workshops, including Soil School, Weed Wranglin’, Sustainable Equine Management and more. Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District, 7175 N.E. Evergreen Parkway (#400), Hillsboro; tualatinswcd.org.Grow Your Own Produce: The Workshop Series: (online via Zoom) First Wednesday of the month through Nov. 6. Taught by permaculture expert Marisha Auerbach, each workshop features seasonally relevant information about planning, growing, maintaining and harvesting food from the garden. $130 for a five-class series, or $30 per class; fertileground.org.Walk With a Friend at Tualatin Hills Nature Park: 9 a.m. first Wednesday and third Sunday of the month. Take a guided walk and learn about the plants, wildlife and history of the park. Tualatin Hills Nature Park, 15655 S.W. Millikan Way, Beaverton; thprd.org.East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District free webinars: Discover how to care for land in ways that benefit people, water and wildlife. From stormwater solutions to biochar to water conservation, these workshops will help you save time, money and energy. Register at emswcd.org/workshops-and-events/upcoming-workshops.Greater Portland Iris Society meeting: 7 p.m. first Tuesday of the month in March, April, September, October and November. Enjoy discussions of irises with guest speakers. Ainsworth House, 19130 Lot Whitcomb Drive, Oregon City; greaterportlandirissociety.org.Happy Valley Garden Club monthly meeting: 9 a.m.-noon second Tuesday of the month. Happy Valley Baptist Church, 14095 S.E. King Road, Happy Valley.Ikebana for Every Season: 1-2:30 p.m. second Tuesday of the month; $45. Become knowledgeable about basic concepts, techniques, tools, equipment and care for ikebana. The Resource Center, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; GreshamJapaneseGarden.org.Portland Dahlia Society monthly meeting: 7 p.m. second Tuesday of the month February through November. Take part in a discussion of seasonal topics. Oaks Park Dance Pavilion, 7805 S.E. Oaks Park Way; portlanddahlia.com.Estacada Garden Club monthly meeting: 1-3 p.m. second Thursday of the month. Estacada Public Library, 825 N.W. Wade St.FRIDAY, MARCH 15Oregon Peace Tree Project Presentation: 1-2 p.m. Learn about the project that has helped Oregon have the densest concentration of trees outside Japan that were grown from the seeds of trees that survived the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Hoyt Arboretum, 4000 S.W. Fairview Blvd.; hoytarboretum.org.SATURDAY, MARCH 16Gardening for Your Table: 8:45 a.m.-4 p.m. Eight speakers will cover topics ranging from growing fruits and vegetables to backyard composting. $25 includes snacks, $12 optional lunch; Church on the Hill, 700 N.W. Hill Road, McMinnville; register at YCMGA.org.Northwest Native Garden Plants and the Amazing Insects They Attract: 10 a.m.-noon. Join garden writer and photographer Amy Campion for an exploration of some of the best natives to plant in your wildlife-friendly garden and learn about the insects they support. CASEE Center (Building B, Room 205), 11104 N.E. 149th St., Brush Prairie, Washington. $15 registration required at info@naturescaping.org, marlene52ns@gmail.com or 360-737-1160. naturescaping.org.Raising Mason Bees: 10 a.m.-noon. Join mason bee expert Ron Spendal for a class focusing on environmental needs, nesting behaviors and housing devices attractive to mason bees. PCC Rock Creek (Building 4, Room 103), 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.Early Spring Container Planter Workshop: 1:30-3 p.m. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn every step of the art of creating container arrangements using the thriller, spiller and filler method. $35; Al’s Garden & Home (all locations); als-gardencenter.com.TUESDAY, MARCH 19Healing Herbs of the Arboretum: Noon-2 p.m. Stroll around the arboretum to explore medicinal trees, weeds and native plants and talk about which parts to use and which plants to avoid. $25 registration required at hoytarboretum.org; Hoyt Arboretum, 4000 S.W. Fairview Blvd.FRIDAY, MARCH 22Hillsboro Farmers Markets presents “The Green Fork Initiative”: 6 p.m. Enjoy a special premiere of the short film capturing a segment of Washington County’s food narrative, highlighting the individuals and abundant agricultural diversity that shape the region’s distinctive fruits, vegetables, grains and pasture-raised meats. $15; The Vault Theater, 350 E. Main St., Hillsboro; bagnbaggage.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket#.SATURDAY, MARCH 23Tree School Clackamas: Opens at 7:15 a.m. Attend any of 73 classes covering forestry and tree grower topics key to the support of successful management of small woodlands. Participants will learn about forest management, tools and techniques, wildfire preparedness, marketing and business, forest health, wildlife habitat, weed management, forest fungi and more. $70 Clackamas County resident, $85 out of county, $35 ages 14-18 with adult; registration required at beav.es/tree-school-clackamas; Clackamas Community College, 19600 Molalla Ave., Oregon City.Newell Creek Canyon Spring hike and ecoblitz: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Join Metro for a spring hike, learn about local plants and birds and take an optional survey of plant and animal life. Registration required at oregonmetro.gov/GuidedActivities; Newell Creek Canyon Nature Park, 485 Warner Milne Road, Oregon City.SUNDAY, APRIL 7Mushroom hike at Smith and Bybee: 9:30-11:45 a.m. or 12:30-2:45 p.m. Discover the fascinating world of mushrooms on this woodland hike with local mushroom guide Leah Bendlin. Learn about identification, ecological roles of fungi, their forms and how they eat and reproduce. $6 registration required at oregonmetro.gov; Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, 5300 N. Marine Drive.SATURDAY, APRIL 13Soil School 2024: 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Open to all gardeners – from aspiring to advanced – this event offers eight sessions taught by experts to learn about how improving soil health improves plant, garden and habitat wellbeing. $35 includes breakfast and lunch; Portland Community College, Rock Creek Event Center, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; register at wmswcd.org/soil-school.Mushroom hike at Oxbow Regional Park: 9:30-11:45 a.m. or 12:30-2:45 p.m. Discover the fascinating world of mushrooms on this woodland hike with local mushroom guide Leah Bendlin. Learn about identification, ecological roles of fungi, their forms and how they eat and reproduce. $6 registration required at oregonmetro.gov; Oxbow Regional Park, 3010 S.E. Oxbow Park Road, Gresham.Spring Lawn Maintenance: 1-2:30 p.m. Get tips for keeping your lawn healthy and green throughout the summer in the Northwest. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.SATURDAY, MAY 4Gardenfest 2024: PCC Rock Creek, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.THURSDAY, MAY 16Florence Rhododendron Festival: May 16-19. Enjoy the rhododendron show, vendor fair, live music, art, festivities, activities and more at this family-friendly Oregon institution. FlorenceChamber.com.SATURDAY, MAY 18Gathering in the Garden: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Celebrate gardening and appreciation of community green spaces with a vendor fair, exhibits, live music and more. Eastmoreland Garden Park, Southeast 27th Avenue and Bybee Boulevard; eastmorelandpdx.org.Spring Maintenance on Pines: Noon-2 p.m. Learn the Niwa Method of candling and needling to maintain cloud-prune aesthetics and keep a manageable size and aesthetic focal point of your pines in a landscape. $45; Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.SATURDAY, JUNE 8Fundamentals of Pruning: 1-2:30 p.m. Take a tour, learn about tools and tool care, the four basic cuts of pruning and the subsequent reactions from these cuts. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.SATURDAY, JUNE 15Creating Pollinator Habitat for your Garden and Home: 10:30-11:30 a.m. This seminar will focus on information about bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and native host plants for creating your own pollinator yard. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.SATURDAY, JUNE 22Pruning Lace-leaf Maples for Character: 12:30-2:30 p.m. Discover the fundamentals of pruning as they pertain to lace-leaf maples and listen to a short lecture on basic botany and growth habits. $45; Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.FRIDAY, SEPT. 6Parade of Homes: Sept. 6-22. Explore three luxury homes on large lots at the Reserve at Lake River in Felida, Washington. clarkcountyparadeofhomes.com.SATURDAY, OCT. 26Gardening with Pacific Northwest Native Plants: 10 a.m.-noon. Learn about the native plants that thrive in the Northwest and how to naturescape in support of wildlife and pollinators. PCC Rock Creek (Building 4, Room 103) and WCMGA Education Garden, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.-- Corey SheldonStay in the loop. Sign up to receive a weekly newsletter and join the conversation at the Homes & Gardens of the Northwest on Facebook

Webinars and other events offer lessons in beekeeping, growing produce, ikebana and more.

Events are free unless noted. Please email calendar submissions at least three weeks in advance to events@oregonian.com.

ONGOING

Plants for the Planet Native Plant Sale: Browse profiles of more than 100 native plant species and shop for plants online through March 24 to be picked up at one of four outdoor pop-up events in April or early May. sparrowhawknativeplants.com.

Portland Fruit Tree Project Home Orchard Workshops: Various dates and locations through May. These hands-on workshops are designed to empower participants with practical knowledge on fruit tree care, composting, grafting and more. $50; visit portlandfruit.org or email treecare@portlandfruit.org.

Tualatin SWCD spring workshops: Various dates and times through May 30. Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District offers a variety of spring workshops, including Soil School, Weed Wranglin’, Sustainable Equine Management and more. Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District, 7175 N.E. Evergreen Parkway (#400), Hillsboro; tualatinswcd.org.

Grow Your Own Produce: The Workshop Series: (online via Zoom) First Wednesday of the month through Nov. 6. Taught by permaculture expert Marisha Auerbach, each workshop features seasonally relevant information about planning, growing, maintaining and harvesting food from the garden. $130 for a five-class series, or $30 per class; fertileground.org.

Walk With a Friend at Tualatin Hills Nature Park: 9 a.m. first Wednesday and third Sunday of the month. Take a guided walk and learn about the plants, wildlife and history of the park. Tualatin Hills Nature Park, 15655 S.W. Millikan Way, Beaverton; thprd.org.

East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District free webinars: Discover how to care for land in ways that benefit people, water and wildlife. From stormwater solutions to biochar to water conservation, these workshops will help you save time, money and energy. Register at emswcd.org/workshops-and-events/upcoming-workshops.

Greater Portland Iris Society meeting: 7 p.m. first Tuesday of the month in March, April, September, October and November. Enjoy discussions of irises with guest speakers. Ainsworth House, 19130 Lot Whitcomb Drive, Oregon City; greaterportlandirissociety.org.

Happy Valley Garden Club monthly meeting: 9 a.m.-noon second Tuesday of the month. Happy Valley Baptist Church, 14095 S.E. King Road, Happy Valley.

Ikebana for Every Season: 1-2:30 p.m. second Tuesday of the month; $45. Become knowledgeable about basic concepts, techniques, tools, equipment and care for ikebana. The Resource Center, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; GreshamJapaneseGarden.org.

Portland Dahlia Society monthly meeting: 7 p.m. second Tuesday of the month February through November. Take part in a discussion of seasonal topics. Oaks Park Dance Pavilion, 7805 S.E. Oaks Park Way; portlanddahlia.com.

Estacada Garden Club monthly meeting: 1-3 p.m. second Thursday of the month. Estacada Public Library, 825 N.W. Wade St.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15

Oregon Peace Tree Project Presentation: 1-2 p.m. Learn about the project that has helped Oregon have the densest concentration of trees outside Japan that were grown from the seeds of trees that survived the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Hoyt Arboretum, 4000 S.W. Fairview Blvd.; hoytarboretum.org.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16

Gardening for Your Table: 8:45 a.m.-4 p.m. Eight speakers will cover topics ranging from growing fruits and vegetables to backyard composting. $25 includes snacks, $12 optional lunch; Church on the Hill, 700 N.W. Hill Road, McMinnville; register at YCMGA.org.

Northwest Native Garden Plants and the Amazing Insects They Attract: 10 a.m.-noon. Join garden writer and photographer Amy Campion for an exploration of some of the best natives to plant in your wildlife-friendly garden and learn about the insects they support. CASEE Center (Building B, Room 205), 11104 N.E. 149th St., Brush Prairie, Washington. $15 registration required at info@naturescaping.org, marlene52ns@gmail.com or 360-737-1160. naturescaping.org.

Raising Mason Bees: 10 a.m.-noon. Join mason bee expert Ron Spendal for a class focusing on environmental needs, nesting behaviors and housing devices attractive to mason bees. PCC Rock Creek (Building 4, Room 103), 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.

Early Spring Container Planter Workshop: 1:30-3 p.m. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn every step of the art of creating container arrangements using the thriller, spiller and filler method. $35; Al’s Garden & Home (all locations); als-gardencenter.com.

TUESDAY, MARCH 19

Healing Herbs of the Arboretum: Noon-2 p.m. Stroll around the arboretum to explore medicinal trees, weeds and native plants and talk about which parts to use and which plants to avoid. $25 registration required at hoytarboretum.org; Hoyt Arboretum, 4000 S.W. Fairview Blvd.

FRIDAY, MARCH 22

Hillsboro Farmers Markets presents “The Green Fork Initiative”: 6 p.m. Enjoy a special premiere of the short film capturing a segment of Washington County’s food narrative, highlighting the individuals and abundant agricultural diversity that shape the region’s distinctive fruits, vegetables, grains and pasture-raised meats. $15; The Vault Theater, 350 E. Main St., Hillsboro; bagnbaggage.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket#.

SATURDAY, MARCH 23

Tree School Clackamas: Opens at 7:15 a.m. Attend any of 73 classes covering forestry and tree grower topics key to the support of successful management of small woodlands. Participants will learn about forest management, tools and techniques, wildfire preparedness, marketing and business, forest health, wildlife habitat, weed management, forest fungi and more. $70 Clackamas County resident, $85 out of county, $35 ages 14-18 with adult; registration required at beav.es/tree-school-clackamas; Clackamas Community College, 19600 Molalla Ave., Oregon City.

Newell Creek Canyon Spring hike and ecoblitz: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Join Metro for a spring hike, learn about local plants and birds and take an optional survey of plant and animal life. Registration required at oregonmetro.gov/GuidedActivities; Newell Creek Canyon Nature Park, 485 Warner Milne Road, Oregon City.

SUNDAY, APRIL 7

Mushroom hike at Smith and Bybee: 9:30-11:45 a.m. or 12:30-2:45 p.m. Discover the fascinating world of mushrooms on this woodland hike with local mushroom guide Leah Bendlin. Learn about identification, ecological roles of fungi, their forms and how they eat and reproduce. $6 registration required at oregonmetro.gov; Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, 5300 N. Marine Drive.

SATURDAY, APRIL 13

Soil School 2024: 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Open to all gardeners – from aspiring to advanced – this event offers eight sessions taught by experts to learn about how improving soil health improves plant, garden and habitat wellbeing. $35 includes breakfast and lunch; Portland Community College, Rock Creek Event Center, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; register at wmswcd.org/soil-school.

Mushroom hike at Oxbow Regional Park: 9:30-11:45 a.m. or 12:30-2:45 p.m. Discover the fascinating world of mushrooms on this woodland hike with local mushroom guide Leah Bendlin. Learn about identification, ecological roles of fungi, their forms and how they eat and reproduce. $6 registration required at oregonmetro.gov; Oxbow Regional Park, 3010 S.E. Oxbow Park Road, Gresham.

Spring Lawn Maintenance: 1-2:30 p.m. Get tips for keeping your lawn healthy and green throughout the summer in the Northwest. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.

SATURDAY, MAY 4

Gardenfest 2024: PCC Rock Creek, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.

THURSDAY, MAY 16

Florence Rhododendron Festival: May 16-19. Enjoy the rhododendron show, vendor fair, live music, art, festivities, activities and more at this family-friendly Oregon institution. FlorenceChamber.com.

SATURDAY, MAY 18

Gathering in the Garden: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Celebrate gardening and appreciation of community green spaces with a vendor fair, exhibits, live music and more. Eastmoreland Garden Park, Southeast 27th Avenue and Bybee Boulevard; eastmorelandpdx.org.

Spring Maintenance on Pines: Noon-2 p.m. Learn the Niwa Method of candling and needling to maintain cloud-prune aesthetics and keep a manageable size and aesthetic focal point of your pines in a landscape. $45; Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.

SATURDAY, JUNE 8

Fundamentals of Pruning: 1-2:30 p.m. Take a tour, learn about tools and tool care, the four basic cuts of pruning and the subsequent reactions from these cuts. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15

Creating Pollinator Habitat for your Garden and Home: 10:30-11:30 a.m. This seminar will focus on information about bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and native host plants for creating your own pollinator yard. Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.

SATURDAY, JUNE 22

Pruning Lace-leaf Maples for Character: 12:30-2:30 p.m. Discover the fundamentals of pruning as they pertain to lace-leaf maples and listen to a short lecture on basic botany and growth habits. $45; Gresham Japanese Garden, 219 S. Main Ave., Gresham; greshamjapanesegarden.org.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 6

Parade of Homes: Sept. 6-22. Explore three luxury homes on large lots at the Reserve at Lake River in Felida, Washington. clarkcountyparadeofhomes.com.

SATURDAY, OCT. 26

Gardening with Pacific Northwest Native Plants: 10 a.m.-noon. Learn about the native plants that thrive in the Northwest and how to naturescape in support of wildlife and pollinators. PCC Rock Creek (Building 4, Room 103) and WCMGA Education Garden, 17705 N.W. Springville Road; washingtoncountymastergardeners.org.

-- Corey Sheldon

Stay in the loop. Sign up to receive a weekly newsletter and join the conversation at the Homes & Gardens of the Northwest on Facebook

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Watch a Wolf Cleverly Raid a Crab Trap for a Snack. It Might Be the First Evidence of a Wild Canid Using a Tool

Footage from British Columbia shows just how intelligent wild wolves can be, but scientists are divided as to whether the behavior constitutes tool use

Watch a Wolf Cleverly Raid a Crab Trap for a Snack. It Might Be the First Evidence of a Wild Canid Using a Tool Footage from British Columbia shows just how intelligent wild wolves can be, but scientists are divided as to whether the behavior constitutes tool use Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent November 19, 2025 11:53 a.m. Members of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation caught the crafty female wolf on camera. Artelle et al. / Ecology and Evolution, 2025 Key takeaways: A dispute over tool use A female wolf figured out how to pull a crab trap from the ocean onto shore to fetch a tasty treat. Scientists debate whether the behavior represents tool use, or if the animal needed to have modified the object for it to count. Something strange began happening on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Traps set by members of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation to control invasive European green crabs kept getting damaged. Some had mangled bait cups or torn netting, but others were totally destroyed. But who—or what—was the culprit? Initially, the Indigenous community’s environmental wardens, called Guardians, suspected sea lions, seals or otters were to blame. But only after setting up several remote cameras in the area did they catch a glimpse of the true perpetrators: gray wolves. On May 29, 2024, one of the cameras recorded a female wolf emerging from the water with a buoy attached to a crab trap line in her mouth. Slowly but confidently, she tugged the line onto the beach until she’d managed to haul in the trap. Then, she tore open the bottom netting, removed the bait cup, had a snack and trotted off. Now, scientists say the incident—and another involving a different wolf in 2025—could represent the first evidence of tool use by wild wolves. They describe the behavior and lay out their conclusions in a new paper published November 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. This wolf has a unique way of finding food | Science News “You normally picture a human being with two hands pulling a crab trap,” says William Housty, a Haíɫzaqv hereditary chief and the director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, to Global News’ Amy Judd and Aaron McArthur. “But we couldn’t figure out exactly what had the ability to be able to do that until we put a camera up and saw, well, there’s other intelligent beings out there that are able to do this, which is very remarkable.” Members of the Haíɫzaqv Nation weren’t surprised by the wolves’ cleverness, as they have long considered the animals to be smart. That view has largely been shaped by the community’s oral history, which tells of a woman named C̓úṃqḷaqs who birthed four individuals who could shape-shift between humans and wolves, reports Science News’ Elie Dolgin. Scientists weren’t shocked, either, as they have long understood that wolves are intelligent, social creatures that often cooperate to take down their prey. People aren’t sure how the wolves figured out the crafty crab trap trick. The animals may have learned by watching Haíɫzaqv Guardians pull up the traps, or their keen sense of smell may have helped them sniff out the herring and sea lion bait inside. Or perhaps they started with traps that were more easily accessible, before moving on to more challenging targets submerged in deep water. Wolves are also largely protected in Haíɫzaqv territory, which may have given them the time and energy they needed to learn a new, complex behavior, reports the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni. Whatever the explanation, experts are divided as to whether the behavior technically constitutes nonhuman tool use, which has been previously documented in crows, elephants, dolphins and several other species. The debate stems mostly from varying definitions of tool use. Under one definition, animals can’t simply use an external object to achieve a specific goal—the creature must also manipulate the object in some way, like a crow transforming a tree branch into a hooked tool for grabbing hidden insects. Against this backdrop, some researchers say the wolves’ behavior represents object use, not tool use. However, some of the disagreement may also be rooted in bias. “For better or for worse, as humans, we tend to afford more care and compassion to other people or other species that we see most like us,” says study co-author Kyle Artelle, an ecologist with the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, to the Washington Post. Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved with the research, echoes that sentiment, telling Science’s Phie Jacobs that “if this had been a chimpanzee or other nonhuman primate, I’m sure no one would have blinked about whether this was tool use.” Regardless, scientists say the footage suggests wild wolves are even smarter than initially thought. In less than three minutes, the female efficiently and purposefully executed a complicated sequence of events to achieve a specific goal. She appeared to know that the trap contained food, even though it was hidden underwater, and she seemed to understand exactly which steps she needed to take to access that food. Tool use or not, the findings point to “another species with complex sociality [that] is capable of innovation and problem solving,” says Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and paleoanthropologist at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique who was not involved with the research, to the New York Times’ Lesley Evans Ogden. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters

When catastrophe becomes celebrity, we stop witnessing and start scrolling, turning suffering into spectacle. But we can break that cycle. The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.

Another environmental catastrophe season brought destruction and death to North America this summer. Amid extreme heatwaves and weather, fires raged in northern and western Canada. In Manitoba alone more than 28,000 people, largely rural or Indigenous, were evacuated from their homes. At the same time, floods washed out Hill Country in Texas when the Guadalupe River rapidly overflowed its banks, killing at least 135 people. Similar events could go on indefinitely. Chances are you’ve seen news reports about these disasters, or others like them, but this isn’t just the stuff of headlines. Fires and floods make news because they grab attention, unlike the daily realities of the economically depressed rural and Indigenous communities they often hit so hard. This is the strange logic of catastrophe in the digital age: Some crises become “celebrity” catastrophes while others remain “commonplace,” meaning they’re normalized and invisible on an ongoing basis. Who gets our attention — and who doesn’t — isn’t random. It reveals the value systems we’ve internalized and the limits of the stories we tell ourselves about suffering and survival, and in turn those that invite responsibility. The real currency of the 21st century is attention. And most people, if they’re going to pay attention, want something spectacular: an event worth watching. When Tragedy Turns to Spectacle Our engagement with this reality came from a course we taught at the University of British Columbia on the role of language in shaping environmental behaviors. What started as classroom conversations over a few years eventually evolved into our forthcoming book, Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future, as a way to continue this conversation in public. In characterizing different discourses we’ve been exposed to (and been a part of), we noticed trends in global reporting of catastrophic events. That reporting tends to emphasize spectacular events over those that are just as detrimental, if not more, but occur over longer periods of time without affecting highly visible populations — particularly visible in terms of people who attract mainstream media notice. Our aim is not so much to critique the ways certain types of media function, from traditional broadcasters to social news like TikTok, but to look at how meaning is made and conveyed as catastrophe stories. The ways in which meanings are socially constructed shape what people believe, how they act and interact, and create possibilities to nurture more broadly relational understandings of our roles and responsibilities on and for Earth. They can also hinder or inhibit other possibilities. The systems of language and environment are intricately interconnected. We find it useful to speak of catastrophe by using the term polycrisis — the overlaying of multiple crises where a breakdown in one system leads to cascading effects, causing reverberations through climatic, biological, social, economic, political, scientific, temporal (and so on) systems. The problem with catastrophe in contemporary environmental discourse is that the original meaning, the gravity of this word in ancient Greek — katastrophē, or sudden end — is completely lost. Catastrophe now is characterized as being visually spectacular, rooted in the notion of spectacle, making it newsworthy. To put it crudely, tragedy comes with a photo op or not at all. Yet catastrophe originally implied the point at which fate and destiny are sealed. All hope is lost. No Hollywood ending. Greek tragic theatre made the pain of such a loss accessible safely; it had the effect of making audiences appreciate their existence and work to prevent such events from happening. Today we’re saturated with an unending stream of high-profile catastrophes. They’ve gone from occasional newsworthy stories to a regular feature. But the truth is environmental catastrophe discourse at present has very little in common with ancient Greek theatre. Catastrophe isn’t witnessed as a universal condition. It’s more like getting voted out of a reality TV competition, with winners and losers. It signifies a form of virtual entertainment. It’s a money genre in the economy of attention. What Makes a Catastrophe ‘Go Viral’? Celebrity catastrophes, as we’ve come to call them, are disasters that strike at the right time, in the right place, and often to the “right” people — like the Los Angeles wildfires, which literally affected celebrities, among others, or the floods in Spain. They tend to be sudden and extreme, making them photogenic and emotionally gripping. There’s often an implicit narrative arc involving villains, victims, and often a final resolution or judgment; celebrity catastrophes provide an overabundance of social platforms to spread the story. But what about commonplace catastrophes? These are the slow, grinding emergencies — some might even say boring, meaning people won’t pay attention. In other words, they won’t pay for the attention. Such emergencies might include boil water advisories for rural communities off the grid that stretch into decades, the rising tide of the urban unhoused, lack of accessible healthcare for generations, or the multigenerational trauma of environmental injustice in poorer communities. These quotidian catastrophes don’t trend on social media. They rarely get press briefings in broadcast media. They certainly don’t receive attention from political figures. And yet they shape the lives of millions every day. Beyond being a digital communication problem, it’s also a societal pattern. As environmental educators, we see it in our classrooms often, where students feel despair over ecological collapse but struggle to connect that grief to local issues like energy poverty, food shortages, or environmental racism. It’s as though they understand tragedy, but catastrophe means its hopeless. But if they give up hope, then there’s no motivation other than individualistic ones, a competitive endgame everyone winds up losing. Without hope for the next generation, another turn of civilization’s wheel. There’s nothing they can do but watch catastrophes happen, transfixed by impending fate. That’s what’s selling. The problem isn’t apathy or lack of education. It’s attention. There’s simply too much on the celebrity catastrophes and not enough on the commonplace world they inhabit every day. The Ecology of Attention We often talk about ecosystems in scientific terms of carbon, water, species, and so forth. But attention is an ecosystem too. And like all ecosystems, it can be thrown out of balance. In a healthy attention economy, we would recognize and respond to both sudden shocks and slow harms. We could hold space for grief, not just in the wake of a celebrity wildfire in Maui but in response to ongoing loss — such as land, language, or life — in communities displaced by extractive industries. But right now our attention is hyper-curated. We’re all being filtered by algorithms in our social media feeds, Spotify playlists, or Google searches, among many other aspects of our daily lives, and this influences our political and societal conversations. That warped attention is like water on drought-stricken ground, particularly in how it rushes off quickly, collects in rivers, and overflows. This means that some people must fight for a cup of visibility, while others are flooded with it. It also creates dissonance. Why do we cry over burning vineyards in California but ignore scorched farmlands in Sudan? Why are floodwaters in Germany more moving than footage from Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season? Our attention has been hyper-curated to look for the extremes and pay (for) attention to the sensationalized events. Disaster as Event There’s a reason why celebrity catastrophes dominate headlines and grab our attention, whether we want it or not. They fit within a monetized logic that values spectacle and saviorism. Disasters become “events” with start and end dates, with heroes and villains, victims and saviors. They can be marked in time, which makes them easier to be marketed. More specifically, they can be monetized, as author Naomi Klein and others have shown. They can sell headlines, influence policy agendas, or affect branded charity campaigns. But commonplace catastrophes resist this framing. There’s no clear starting point to systemic racism or global warming and the cascading effect of “events” reverberates throughout the world. These slow emergencies demand long-term commitment, not quick PR campaigns. They’re part of larger complex of socioecological systems that are often uncontainable, like weather patterns or world hunger. In contrast, becoming more ecologically focused requires that we understand crises as entangled and complex. The flood is not separate from the housing crisis. The wildfire is not separate from extractive economies. Witnessing through this lens challenges us to see the whole picture and act from that place. We’re not suggesting we turn away from the immediate or the dramatic. But keeping up with the latest catastrophic event, and being affected by it, is not enough. It catches us in a loop of mental doomism or constant anxiety, especially when it becomes expected, like a performance — amplified one moment and forgotten the next. The truth is that our attention reveals what we value and what we make time for. And right now, too many people live and die in the fallout of commonplace catastrophes. But there are ways to make the commonplace more important. Witnessing as a Radical Act So how do we begin to rebalance our attention? Something that affects our responses to climate breakdown? One way is through the practice of witnessing. Not just seeing, but being present with, and responding to, what we encounter. Witnessing insists that we don’t turn away from the slow, uncomfortable, or inconvenient. Witnessing brings with it an ongoing responsibility. To bear witness means a duty to speak to what one has witnessed, requiring a different kind of attention. Calls for critical digital literacy are the typical way of addressing this social need to nurture a healthy information intake. But another way is to consider the language we use and how it gets used when we talk about the environment. What stories are being prioritized? Not every catastrophe fits neatly into a sound-bite narrative or a one-liner headline enticing people to click. There’s no easy resolution to poisoned water in Grassy Narrows, how much roadkill happened last night, or positive spins on colonial displacement. But those stories matter, and they need our attention. Language, the fuel of attention, is a powerful site of witnessing. It’s not just a medium of communication. Language is an adaptive, living system. Communication and dialogue are catalysts for ecological transformation. Words evolve, meanings shift, and sometimes, even a single word can carry the weight of an entire worldview. Consider words like “nature” or “climate.” The latter has become a euphemism for a justice movement as much as a science, on the one hand, and a political weapon of division on the other. When we witness deeply, we begin to understand that these so-called “commonplace” events aren’t background noise. And that insight can spark empathy, as well as awareness and action in more profound ways. A Call to Witness The choice isn’t simply between caring about celebrity catastrophes and caring about commonplace ones. It’s about learning to see how they’re connected and how the imbalance of attention itself causes harm. This is a polycrisis in which all the social, linguistic, and ecological systems we rely on are interconnected. Stories must be told even when they’re revealing what Al Gore famously termed an “inconvenient truth” — through them, we begin to see how all facets of our daily lives are interconnected with the sustainability of the planet. And this gives ground to hopefulness, to the sense that what you do and say does matter in the bigger picture. It is the bigger picture, even if there are no film crews and helicopters there to broadcast it, no smart phones to capture and post it within seconds. These actions and the language that promotes them form a periphery around the visible mainstream news. If we look at what’s just outside the camera frame or press release or keynote speech, we see a surrounding discourse, a complex ecosystem of discussion across languages and initiatives that are hidden from regular sight, the actual “movements” of environmentalism. Let’s take an example not from a celebrity catastrophe but from a celebrity event: the COP30 climate summit. Such events, where people tell stories from all over and come together to mobilize global effort toward planetary care, are invaluable for our hope for the future of the species. And yet, some profound ironies exist: To make this happen, we need to facilitate more harmful disruption of natural systems. We also need such events to have celebrity status in order to compete with attention. Ideally, they are exotic and photogenic. COP30 took place this year in Belém, a history-laden freeport town tucked away in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. To make it easy for attention-grabbing, celebrity global leaders and digital communication to reach the city, government contractors plowed a 13-kilometer road called Avenida Liberdade through protected rainforest. This is land where people and plants and animals coexist and co-depend. The devastation was all in aid of an environmental event that lasted for 11 days (Nov. 10-21). But those jungle-dwelling lives will be affected forever — a prime example of where celebrity meets commonplace. When we’re called to witness the impact on local environments of the attention economy, we start to become aware of how the celebrity and the commonplace are interwoven. We are no longer just spectators of hopeless collapse. As educators we’ve seen what happens when students begin to witness. Not just from a distance, but with proximity and purpose. They stop asking, “Why don’t people care?” and start asking, “What stories do we need to tell?” They begin to name the socioecological systems that make some lives visible and others disposable. In a time of overlapping catastrophes, witnessing isn’t passive. It’s an act of awareness and engagement. And perhaps more importantly, it’s an act of hope, one that integrates the celebrity and commonplace catastrophe in an increasingly unstable world. And sustained witnessing might just be the most radical act we have left. Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse? The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.

Animals
Climate
Crisis

How little plastic does it take to kill marine animals? Scientists have answers

Ocean plastic kills sea creatures. For the first time, researchers set out to find out how much it takes. The answer: Surprisingly little.

Ocean plastic kills sea creatures. It can obstruct, perforate or twist their airways and gastrointestinal tracts.Now new research shows it takes just 6 pieces of ingested rubber the size of a pencil eraser to kill most sea birds. For marine mammals, 29 pieces of any kind of plastic — hard, soft, rubber or fishing equipment — is often lethal.It’s the first time researchers have quantified how much and what kind of plastic — soft, hard, rubber or fishing debris — is needed to kill a bird, marine mammal or a turtle. “I think the lethal doses that we saw were smaller than I expected,” said Erin Murphy, a researcher with the Ocean Conservancy and the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Toronto.“Seeing the particularly small thresholds for rubber and seabirds, for example, that just six pieces of rubber, each smaller on average than the size of a pea was enough to kill 90% of sea birds that ingested it ... That was particularly surprising to me,” she said.The sea birds were less sensitive to hard plastic: It’d take 25 pieces of the pea-sized hard plastic pieces to ensure a 90% chance of dying. Murphy and her colleagues from the University of Tasmania, in Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, also from Australia, and the Universidade Federal de Alagoas, in Brazil, published their study Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.For decades, researchers have been documenting death by plastic in marine animals. They have reported it in the gastrointestinal tracts of nearly 1,300 marine species — including every species of sea turtle, and in every family of seabird and marine mammal family.The team analyzed data from 10,412 published necropsies, or animal autopsy reports. Of the animals studied, 1,306 were sea turtles representing all seven species of sea turtles; 1,537 were seabirds representing 57 species; and 7,569 were marine mammals across 31 species. They found that 35% of the dead seabirds, 12% of marine mammals and 47% of sea turtles examined had ingested plastic. Seabirds seemed to be particularly sensitive to rubber. For marine mammals, soft plastics — such as plastic bags — and fishing debris was most harmful. For sea turtles, their kryptonite was hard and soft plastics.“This was severe trauma or damage to the GI tract, or blockage of the stomach or intestines from plastic... and so these were physical harms that you could see, that you could see in the gut of these animals, and that were reported by scientists,” said Murphy describing the reports. The paper did not look at other ways plastic can kill marine animals — strangulation, entanglement and drowning. Nor did it look at malnutrition or toxicity caused by eating plastic.“So, this is likely an underestimate of the impacts of ingestion, and it’s definitely an underestimate of the lethality of plastics more broadly,” said Murphy.Nearly half the animals in their analysis were threatened or endangered species. More than 11 million metric tonnes — or more than 24 billion pounds — of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, according to several environmental and industry reports. That’s a garbage truck’s worth dumped every minute.According to the United Nations, that number is expected to triple in the next twenty years. “I find this piece a brilliant contribution to the field,” said Greg Merrill, a researcher with the Duke University Marine Lab, who did not participate in the study.“We have thousands of examples of marine animals ingesting plastic debris. But for a number of reasons, eg. lack of data, difficulty of conducting laboratory-based experiments, and ethical considerations, risk assessments are really challenging to conduct,” he said in an email. Such assessments are crucial for actually linking plastic ingestion to mortality, because “once we know some of those thresholds, they can help policy makers make informed decisions,” said Merrill.And that’s what Murphy said she and her co-authors are hoping for: That lawmakers and others can use this information to reduce plastic, by crafting regulations to ban or reduce plastics, such as plastic bag or balloon bans, and encouraging small, local events such as beach clean ups.“The science is clear: We need to reduce the amount of plastic that we’re producing and we need to improve collection and recycling to clean up what’s already out there,” said Murphy. Earlier this year, in internationals talks on limiting plastic pollution, oil and gas producing countries succeeded in preventing language that would reduce the amount of plastics produced.

Animals
Pollution
Science

See how this wolf steals fish, a new discovery of animals using tools

Video from the coast of British Columbia may be the first documented instance of a wild wolf using a tool, according to the researchers who published it on Monday.

The wolf seemed to know exactly what she was doing.She dove into the water, fetched a fishing float and brought it to shore. She then waded back in and tugged on a rope connected to the float. She pulled and backed up, pulled and backed up, until a crab trap emerged. When it was within easy reach, she tore it open and consumed the bait inside.Subscribe for unlimited access to The PostYou can cancel anytime.SubscribeThe scene, caught on camera on the coast of British Columbia in May 2024, may be the first documented instance of a wild wolf using a tool, according to the scientists who published the footage in the journal Ecology and Evolution on Monday.Although the intelligence of wolves is well known, the discovery adds to an expanding list of animals capable of manipulating tools to forage for food, a trait once thought to be unique to humans.“It’s not a surprise they have the capacity to do this,” said Kyle Artelle, an ecologist with the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry who published the footage. “Yet our jaw dropped when we saw the video.”The discovery also solved a mystery.People of the Heiltsuk Nation in central British Columbia had been puzzled about what was foiling their efforts to capture invasive green crabs along their shores.The crabs are a real problem — they eat through eelgrass that harbors marine life and they devastate the native clam, herring and salmon populations the tribe relies on for food. But the traps people were setting with herring and other bait kept getting damaged. Sometimes, there were just minor tears in the nets. Other times, the entire trap was torn to shreds.Some of the traps were set so deep that, at first, researchers thought the thief must be an otter, seal or other marine mammal. William Housty, director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, wondered whether tourists were tampering with them. The Heiltsuk Nation worked with Artelle to set up a trail camera to record the perpetrator.A day after the camera was installed, it recorded the female wolf in action.The efficiency with which she snagged the bait — in just three minutes — suggested to Artelle that the animal had done this before.“She’s staring exactly at the trap. Every motion she does is perfectly tailored to getting that trap out as quickly as possible,” said Artelle.In February, the team recorded a second video of a different wolf pulling a line attached to a partially submerged trap. The camera shut off before it could show whether the animal had learned to finish the job and eat the bait. But afterward, two traps were seen on the shore with their bait cups removed.The “weight of evidence,” Artelle said, suggests the female wolf or her full pack are responsible for the pilfering.The tribal territory in British Columbia is a rare place where wolves remain unharassed by hunters, potentially giving them time to learn.“We’ve always maintained a very respectful relationship with the wolves up here in the territory,” Housty said. The oral history of his people, he added, talks of a time when humans and wolves could shape-shift between one another.Researchers have seen tool use in captive canines before. Dingoes, for instance, have been observed opening latches and moving small tables to reach food at a sanctuary in Australia. And pets owners are familiar with the inventiveness of dogs, which can carry hockey pucks in plastic flying discs and move chairs to reach food.Biologists are witnessing more and more animals brandishing tools. Crows maneuver sticks in their beaks to collect grub from crevices. Pandas grab bamboo to scratch their bodies. Octopuses wield the severed tentacles of other animals as makeshift weapons to ward off predators.The wolf video raises a philosophical question: What does it mean to use a tool? Does the animal have to make the tool, as crows do when shortening sticks and peeling off their bark so they fit into crannies? Or can we call an animal a “tool user” if it uses an existing tool, as the wolf did with the rope?“I’m speaking to you on Zoom right now. I did not design this computer. I don’t know how it works, but I’m ‘using’ it, right?” Artelle asked.He said he hopes adding wolves to the list of tool-using animals will prompt some people to see them in a different light — the way public appreciation of chimpanzees grew after Jane Goodall discovered the primates dipping blades of grass into termite mounds to eat the insects.It is “an intelligence that is so familiar to us,” Artelle said. “For better or for worse, as humans, we tend to afford more care and compassion to other people or other species that we see most like us.”

Animals
Food
Science

The last frontier of empathy: why we still struggle to see ourselves as animals | Megan Mayhew Bergman

Champions of exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status. Yet there’s only one species recklessly destroying the planet it needs to surviveAt first light in Massachusetts bay, a North Atlantic right whale threads the shallows with her calf tucked into her slipstream. She surfaces, and the V-shaped breath – two brief feathers of vapor – vanishes in the cold air.The calf is roughly three months old, about the length of a small truck, still learning the rhythm: rise, breathe, tuck back into mother’s wake. They are doing what every mammal mother and baby do: moving toward food and a safer place. Continue reading...

At first light in Massachusetts bay, a North Atlantic right whale threads the shallows with her calf tucked into her slipstream. She surfaces, and the V-shaped breath – two brief feathers of vapor – vanishes in the cold air.The calf is roughly three months old, about the length of a small truck, still learning the rhythm: rise, breathe, tuck back into mother’s wake. They are doing what every mammal mother and baby do: moving toward food and a safer place.Across the same water, a different logic hums. Tankers and container ships steer by timetables set by a faceless executive an ocean away. Boston’s approach lanes have been shifted once to reduce whale collisions, but the traffic still keeps human time: fixed routes, double-digit knots, arrivals measured in profit and delay.I am the river and the river is meSeasonal speed limits exist, yet large vessels routinely ignore them as commerce sets the pace to satisfy us as we collectively demand fast shipping. We should have what we want when we want it, shouldn’t we?Many of us say we love whales, but for this endangered species, already down to only a few hundred individuals, this yielding to human desires can mean vanishing entirely.Every threat they face – speed, noise, nets – traces back to the same root assumption: that our needs matter more than theirs.This belief has a name: human exceptionalism. It is the conviction that humans are not just different from other life, but morally superior to it – and therefore entitled to first claim on space, speed, resources and survival.This belief underwrites what we eat and how we raise it; the habitats we clear for housing, highways and Dollar Generals; the way we extract, ship and burn; the emissions we send into the atmosphere, warming oceans and melting glaciers. Exceptionalism is so embedded in daily life that we barely feel it operating. It is a system constantly humming in the background – efficient, invisible yet devastatingly consequential.It is a sobering thought, for we could use our powerful brains to choose otherwise.Many cultures have modeled another stance. For the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand), people are kin with rivers, mountains and forests through whakapapa (genealogy). The saying “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au” – “I am the river and the river is me” – captures that reciprocity.In Lakota philosophy, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ – “all are related” – frames animals, plants, waters and winds as relatives rather than resources.In the Kumulipo, the 2,100-line Hawaiian creation chant, life emerges from Pō – the deep darkness – and the humble coral polyp is honored as an ancient ancestor, anchoring a spiritual genealogy that binds people to the natural world.Westerners could admit at any point that we have misread our place in the cosmos and shift toward this older, still living worldview: humans not as commanders of the natural world but as kin, interconnected equals among other beings and systems.This suggestion might sound sentimental and naive in a political moment when even extending compassion to other humans meets resistance. Refugees are being turned away at ports of entry – grim proof of how easily our empathy falters. But new ideas are hard precisely because they threaten the story that keeps our lives coherent. It is natural for our minds to leap to defend old ways before testing new ones.Psychologist Erik Erikson, writing in the shadow of the world wars, described our human tendency towards pseudospeciation – the desire to split the world into “us” and “not us” – in order to justify mistreatment. Pseudospeciation grants us the psychological distance to degrade other beings we deem inferior without troubling our conscience. That psychological distance becomes a powerful permission slip.But humans are capable of self-reflection and growth, and I believe this point in the Earth’s history requires us to use those abilities and begin to question the ways we center human experience. In fact, our very ability to use the best of our social human traits – and advanced scientific knowledge – could alter the course of life on Earth.When I studied anthropology in college, I had a professor with a crooked finger – allegedly from a monkey bite. He challenged us to see our own animal behavior, to recognize the 98.8% DNA similarities with chimpanzees, and the 98.7% similarity with bonobos. He advised us to be suspicious of our alleged altruism, and to be aware of our own animal nature.I remember going out to the bar that semester, watching men and women interact and thinking: oh. Once you start seeing yourself as an animal, it’s hard to stop.The real problem of humanity is [that] we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologyOnce, eating dinner on my front porch, my two beloved dogs approached me. My shepherd mix, Nemo, tried to steal bread from my plate. “No,” I said angrily, turning my body. I recognized resource guarding behavior in myself, a glorified dog growling over a bowl of food. I had to laugh.And nothing – nothing – connected me with my animal nature more than giving birth to my daughters. In those hours, I understood instinct as something ancient and physical, unmediated by thought. My body knew what to do before I did; I was acting from a primal, powerful place.And so it sometimes baffles me to look at my life, safely ensconced in my climate-controlled home, buying and selling things on the internet, buffered from the weather and the wild, estranged from my origins in the natural world. My comforts arrive at the tap of a screen; the true costs are distant and invisible. As biologist EO Wilson observed: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”Humans have long been fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of significant animal intelligence and emotion, or the humility of viewing ourselves as animals.In his lesser-known work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin argued that human feelings and their outward signs are evolutionary continuities shared with other animals. Those ideas were later pushed aside by 20th-century behaviorism and the taboo against “anthropomorphism”. Only with the rise of ethology (the science of animal behavior) and cognitive neuroscience did Darwin’s continuity thesis regain daylight.Primatologist Frans de Waal long argued that Darwin was right: there is no principled boundary around “human” emotion and intelligence. He named the refusal to see this “anthropodenial”: a blindness to humanlike traits in other animals, and animal-like traits in us.Why are we so unwilling to acknowledge our own animal nature? Perhaps because it would shift nearly all the ways we human animals move in our lives. It would threaten our self-concept.I am ready to admit that humans may not be the sparkling, superior, bright, moral species we believe ourselves to be. We may not have the divine-purpose hall pass we so desperately want to believe in. We may have to admit that in addition to our better social traits we are also greedy, territorial, tribal and violent.After all, there is only one species recklessly destroying the very planet it needs to survive.Now a professor of writing, with no broken fingers to show for it, I have often taught Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery. In it, a small town gathers for an annual ritual, drawing slips of paper from a box to determine who among them will be stoned to death – a sacrifice so enmeshed in their tradition and identity that no one remembers why it began. The horror lies not only in the act itself but in the town’s calm acceptance of it, the ease with which cruelty becomes customary.One of the aspects my students respond to most is the townspeople’s reliance on tradition: we should stone a person each year because that is what we have always done. The implication for our moment is hard to miss: sometimes the old ways of thinking must change, especially when we know they have helped usher in what scientists call the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.[Human] exceptionalism confuses evolutionary human difference with superioritySome who champion exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status and are the only full rights-holders; many ground that in religion, believing we are made in God’s image, and thus given dominion over the natural world. Others point to our brains – capable of abstract reason, language, cumulative culture – as proof that, when trade-offs arise, humans should get priority status.The counterargument is simpler than it sounds. From the jump, exceptionalism confuses evolutionary human difference with superiority. Uniqueness has never equaled higher moral rank. If it did, the bioluminescent lantern fish, or even the 2,400-year-old honey mushroom located in Oregon’s Malheur national forest with its vast, interconnected network of mycelium over 2,000 acres, might be a contender.With this logic, as some point out, if an alien species with superior intelligence and complexity arrived on planet Earth, humans would need to consent to being eaten.If we truly believed in the intelligence of the living world, how might we live differently? What would it mean to build, farm and move across the planet with kinship, not conquest, as our organizing principle? What would a different world – one that works with nature, and not against it – look like?While on assignment to write about Florida panthers and wildlife corridors, I learned that humans actually want better outcomes for wildlife. I met ranchers who leave gaps in their fences so panthers can pass through their land unharmed, and developers who leave borders along the edges of a neighborhood for wildlife passage – people who might never call themselves environmentalists but still act out of a quiet sense of stewardship. Yet, road construction and planning rarely take this bipartisan desire into account.But tides are turning in some places. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing over Los Angeles’s US Route 101 is under construction, while Utah’s Parleys canyon overpass has already cut wildlife–vehicle collisions dramatically, proof that strategic compassion and consideration works.When I asked the environmental writer Ben Goldfarb about human exceptionalism and policy momentum in the United States, he was measured: “I see only faint signs of progress … the political and regulatory mainstream still seems to consider the concept threatening.” Goldfarb acknowledges that the concept of decentering humans still seems to be “political anathema” in the US.“Even the idea of granting the Great Salt Lake the right not to be sucked dry by irrigators was so threatening to conservative Utah legislators,” he told me, “that they passed a law preventing personhood from being granted to any plant, animal or ecosystem.”That is not to dismiss the growing “rights of nature” movement – often led by Indigenous communities – that has made meaningful strides. Goldfarb cites the Yurok tribe’s declaration recognizing the inherent rights of the Klamath River as a crucial step in advancing dam removal efforts. But for now, Goldfarb says, those efforts remain exceptions to the rule; within most political and regulatory circles, extending rights to nature is still treated as a radical act rather than an ethical evolution.Colonialism is … subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe of beings – animals, trees, volcanoes, nutmegsIn the legal arena, the rights of nature have leapt from thought experiment to precedent. New Zealand’s Whanganui River and Colombia’s Atrato River now hold legal personhood; Spain’s constitutional court has upheld Europe’s first ecosystem personhood for the Mar Menor Lagoon; Canada’s Magpie River enjoys comparable standing through municipal and Indigenous resolutions. These are not a full move toward more compassionate regulations – but glimmers and proof that the concepts are real and growing in influence.Goldfarb, who has written about roadside ecology and the lives of beavers, also offered the path forward for storytellers: “Centering animals as literary characters in their own right is both a way of honoring non-humans and, I hope, enthralling readers.”In his book Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane notes how ordinary it is for a company to have rights while a river has none, and argues that story and statute can repair the mismatch. “Our fate flows with that of rivers,” he writes, “and always has.” Writer Amitav Ghosh has been vocal about decentering the human experience, offering that literature can help “restore agency and voice to nonhumans”. In his book of parables, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh emphasizes the colonial tendencies of humans, writing that “Colonialism is … subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe of beings – animals, trees, volcanoes, nutmegs.”These currents – court rulings, treaties, charters and a restoried public imagination – show that adopting a more-than-human ethic is not naive; it’s already happening.I began writing this piece the week Jane Goodall died – a coincidence that felt oddly fitting. In the tributes that followed, her words shone with what she had been telling us all along: that peace requires humility, and that we are not above the rest of life.“In what terms should we think of these beings,” she asked, reflecting on the primates she studied, “nonhuman yet possessing so very many humanlike characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes?”Policy will always be contested terrain. And when policy stalls in times like these, we can still move thoughtfully in our own lives: swapping lawns for native plants, skipping pesticides, feeding birds, keeping cats indoors, buying less, backing wildlife corridors, supporting dark-sky ordinances during migration, moving to a more plant-based diet.None of this is heroic, but all of it counts. Each step we take lessens suffering in the world and broadens the circle of consideration – not with perfection, but with sincerity.We are nearly out of time to do so, but not out of choices. The whale asks for more space. The river asks for standing. The tern asks for habitat and room. We can give it.Illustrations by Jensine Eckwall

Animals
Food
Culture

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Contrasts

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When Worlds Collide: A Formosan Black Bear's Deadly Dance with Civilization

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Conservation
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Animals
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