How to Make a Myth, and Then Debunk It (Ep. 42)

How to Make a Myth, and Then Debunk It (Ep. 42)

Non-human primate societies originally were described by male scientists largely as dramas of alpha males: battles, heroics, and constant dominance over females. Those mid-20th-century men’s findings were riddled with reports and analyses of male aggression and hierarchy. But in the late 20th-century, during the global rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, a new cohort of female primatologists were allowed to enter the academic discipline. A few key women primatologists examined female roles within the troops, as well as the roles occupied by other less-dominant male individuals whom earlier scientists had dismissed as peripheral.  By asking new questions and challenging those early, widely-accepted theories, the women constructed an understanding of primate societies that was more finessed, accurate and complete. They were so successful in this endeavor and their work was so convincing, that male predecessors in the field of primatology readily agreed their own conclusions had been mistaken. They recognized that their narrow focus on the actions of what they labelled “alpha males” had been misplaced. Samara Greenwood is PhD candidate in the academic field called the “History of Philosophy of Science,” and in her dissertation, she examines why those first scholarly articles on the culture within primate societies were so widely read and accepted. She also has examined how those journal articles managed to influence the culture of the general public. Even today, outside of science and inside the general culture of the United States and Australia, the true picture verified by primatologists hasn’t yet overthrown the erroneous beliefs about the roles of alpha males.  In the episode, Samara describes ways that the newer story could potentially take hold–and encourages us to join in and make it happen. “Whether it’s right or wrong,” she says, “there’s a strong connection about how we imagine nature and how we imagine ourselves.” "The stories we tell about nature become the stories we tell about ourselves." – Samara Greenwood, PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Learn More About Samara Samara is an academic researcher, public humanities broadcaster, and postgraduate scholar in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on how the women’s liberation movement of the late twentieth century impacted the theories and practices of primatology in the United States. She is also interested in how interactions between innovative craftspeople, practical mathematicians, and natural philosophers contributed to the emergence of “Galilean science” in early modern Italy. Samara is the founding producer of The HPS Podcast, which features conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. You can listen to that podcast here. [https://www.samaragreenwood.com/] Her work was also recently featured quite beautifully in an interview on “The Philosopher’s Zone” podcast, which you can listen to here [https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/how-feminism-changed-primatology/105199142]. Seminal Books, People, and Theories on the Topic According to Samara, three women who revolutionized the field of primatology in the late 20th–century were: * Sally Slocum, one of the key feminist scholars who challenged the “Man the Hunter” theory. The “very famous and influential paper” Samara mentioned she published is called “Women the Gatherer: male bias in anthropology,” and you can read it here.  [https://www.scribd.com/document/791430551/Slocum-Male-Bias] * Jane Lancaster, Sally’s associate and another feminist primatologist who rethought the  military model. Her famous article was called “In Praise of the Female Monkey,” published in 1973 in Psychology Today. Jane teaches today at the University of New Mexico in the Anthropology Department as a Distinguished Professor. She is also an editor of Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective.  * Donna Jeanne Haraway, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Santa_Cruz] and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_studies]. Her book, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science [https://www.routledge.com/Primate-Visions-Gender-Race-and-Nature-in-the-World-of-Modern-Science/Haraway/p/book/9780415902946] examined how human cultural perspectives—particularly those regarding race, gender, and class—shaped scientific narratives and methodologies within primatology Samara also mentioned the book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, which was written by Frans De Waal, a Dutch scientist who challenged a number of assumptions about non-human primates. You can read it here [https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Frans-Waal/dp/0801886562]. The article that Jill read an excerpt from was called “The Camps Promising To Turn You And Your Son Into An Alpha Male,” by Charles Bethea. It was published in a March issue of The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/the-camps-promising-to-turn-you-or-your-son-into-an-alpha-male] magazine. Transcript of This Conversation Riddell: Science is extraordinarily powerful, yet scientists are still human beings embedded in culture so they don’t merely observe nature, they interpret it. And human interpretations are always going to be shaped by things like our upbringing in our family and the broader culture and our beliefs about things like gender norms and human nature. Sometimes what ends up changing science is not just new data, but new individuals entering an academic field and then being curious about different questions than their predecessors were. Today we’re going to be talking about chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, animals that share 98% of their DNA sequence with ours. And yeah, we’re going to be talking about how our understanding of our close relatives has changed over time. Welcome to The Shape of the World. I’m Jill Riddell. Greenwood: Hi, I’m Samara Greenwood and I am a PhD candidate in history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Riddell: Hi, Samara. Welcome to The Shape of the World. Greenwood: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here. Riddell: So Samara, what first attracted you to this arena of study of studying the people who study chimpanzees and gorillas? Greenwood: It is quite a convoluted story. Yeah, I was actually a practicing architect for the first half of my career. Really? Yes. So I am late to the academic scene, but absolutely love it. So what happened was that it was about 10 years ago, I had to drastically reduce my workload, health reasons, and decided to go back to study this thing called history and philosophy of science. And when I took my first class just as just a one-off subject, I just absolutely fell in love with the discipline of HPS. What we do is look at science and history and knowledge from this very different perspective. We sort of incorporate a whole lot of approaches from humanities and we really dig deep. So that’s what I kind of first was attracted to. Then as part of my studies, I came across this case study about the history of primatology and how primatology and feminism came to interact during the 1970s. And this stood out for me for lots of different reasons. I was really interested in how female scientists were really doing significant work to improve the discipline. Riddell: Yeah. So let’s talk about how you got interested in primatology in particular. I’m curious before coming into that program, did you like monkeys as a kid? Were you a fan of Curious George? Did you have any affinity with them or knowledge about them? Greenwood: The short answer is no. I wasn’t huge into monkeys as a kid or even as an adult. It was more that I’d always been interested in the human side of things. So in the scientists and in the social change and in social groupings. And this was a way into that through this case study. But I have since become very interested in monkeys and apes and particularly their social life. Riddell: So before we get into the late 20th century critique and the reevaluation of the earlier practitioners of primatology, what is the history of primatology? When did Western scientists start formally observing and theorizing about what they were observing when they looked at troops of primates? Greenwood: This is very much a 20th century story. There were sporadic kind of field studies done before that, but they were very anecdotal. So it’s really the 20th century where it becomes kind of systematized and becomes a discipline. And what you see is an important distinction between studying primates in captivity and studying them in the wild. So they’re both part of primatology, but the first studies were really done in captivity and it’s only really after the Second World War in the late 1950s through the 1960s that sustained study of primate social behavior in Africa and Asia really began to take off amongst Western researchers. Riddell: Okay. So that’s not even that long ago. That’s like 70 years ago. What was the prevailing narrative of those early days that the women that you were studying were responding to?  Greenwood: All right. So I want to tell two quick stories here. So one of the earliest influential theories in primatology actually came from those early studies that were done in captivity. So this is one that was actually studying baboons in a London zoo. The key figure here is Solly Zuckerman is his name. In 1932, he presented primate society as fundamentally organized around sex and competition among males for access to females. This is what he suggested bonded the group together, male aggression to get to the females. But when he was doing this study, he was drawing on really abnormal and very violent behavior in this really unusual circumstance that happened at the zo. So it’s not something that happens actually when you get out into the wild, but his theory was taken very seriously at the time. The first round of field studies going out into seeing baboons in the natural environment quickly undermined that picture. So they were working against this idea that sex is what bound primate societies together, but the replacement theory also had its problems. In what later became known as the military model of primate behavior, males were seen as the center again of the society. Supposedly the society was held together by a core of dominant aggressive males who maintained order through hierarchy and force. So if you can see why it’s called the military model, right? It’s like there’s a general, There’s some lower down ranking males and then everything else is just sort of peripheral to that. So particularly females, younger animals and what they would call less dominant males were treated as secondary to kind of the real action of the group. So although that older theory fell away, it was replaced by this second model that still gave a very highly simplified, very male centered account of primate society. Riddell: One thing that’s interesting about that to me is that essentially the first people that were trying to understand the behavior of, was it baboons, did you say, or was it- Yes. Yes. Yes, Greenwood: Baboons. Riddell: So the first people trying to understand the behavior of baboons, basically it would be like observing men in prison. They were in captivity. Yes. They happened to have females around in this case, but I mean it was a very, I think what you could describe it as a very abnormal conditions.  Greenwood: That’s right.  Exactly. And in this case, the one in the London Zoo was that the proportions were all out of whack. So there was so many males and only a few females. Females ended up getting killed as part of the aggression and the rage that went on, which is again, not what happens out in the wild. So exactly that. It’s a very artificial, abnormal, distorted situation, but the observations were used to create quite an influential theory. So you can see the problems there. Riddell: Yes, I can see that. I can see the problems there. So generally when we know the names, just general people in the public who aren’t in the sciences, when we know the name of a scientist, it’s generally a male scientist because the predominant gender that’s in the sciences are male. But interestingly, if you’re going to ask a person on the street, who do you know who is famous for studying chimpanzees, for example, it’s not impossible that that person is going to know Jane Goodall’s name. So when did Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey start their work and what was happening with the men working with the military model? Greenwood: So absolutely. So Jane Goodall begins in the late 50s, so very much at the start of this big boom in primatology. So as you say, she’s working with chimpanzees. She’s looking at all sorts of innovative tool use amongst chimpanzees. And so she’s coming up with some really radical observations that are very, very different. She’s getting lots of publicity, but it’s not seen as a contrast to this other one. They’re just two different kinds of studies happening at the time. Riddell: Oh, so it wasn’t perceived as a challenge to that model? Greenwood: No, no, not Jane Goodall’s stuff. It really came later. So there was studies being done in Japan, there were studies being done by all sorts of people, but the core theory got so much publicity that all of that other study that was showing much more diverse kind of actions and behaviors just wasn’t getting that same kind of traction. It was only when the feminist scientists really pointed out this disjunction, right? That you have all this evidence out there that this isn’t the right model and yet we’re still going along with it. Why is that? Riddell: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. I’m thinking about the time period that you’re speaking of when the men were first doing these studies and frankly, most men had to be in the military during that time period. Many of them, they themselves would have been in conditions where they were following orders or perhaps if they were an officer giving orders and the male hierarchy I think is a lot clearer when you’re in the military. Do you think that that had some kind of an effect on it? Aside from just the general conditions of patriarchy, I guess I’m really kind of hung up on this word military because I think that if you’ve lived through that and it’s been such a formative experience for you, I can see where you might look for replications of that in other places where maybe it doesn’t actually fit. Greenwood: That’s interesting. As far as I know, the two main people that generated the theory, Sherwood Washburn and Irven DeVore, I don’t believe either of them had military training. I would have to double check on that, but I’m pretty confident on that. And funnily, I’ve showed Washburn, who’s the supervisor, he actually has a background in supporting civil rights movement, for example, during the ’60s. So he’s more of a social progressive, I would say, in a light form. There is a bit of a disjunction there. It’s not a clear link between why they’re promoting this kind of military view and their own personal background. It seems to be more about just assumptions about how males and females work in everyday society, very much sort of family ideas about the head of the household and the wife being less dominant, less leadership material. Riddell: And I mean, they also were following on the heels of somebody who had done these studies in the zoo in this strange situation. So they had that kind of as a predecessor. Greenwood: Yeah. Yes, that’s true. Riddell: So let’s go forward and get to what you’re interested in. Tell us about second wave feminism and the women who began writing a history of that science and a critique of that science of primatology, how they began to come up with those ideas and how their ideas started to get a toehold. Greenwood: Right. So second wave feminism obviously starts in the 1960s, but what we get in the late 1960s, so around 1968 is a stream of second wave feminism, often termed the Women’s Liberation Movement, right? So this is a bit more radical and it’s trying to go beyond just asking for equality for women in the workplace and in terms of income to go, “Actually, what are some deep assumptions that we have about women in society and let’s question those assumptions. Are women really naturally secondary to men? Do women really not fit leadership roles? Is this a true story or is this just something that we’ve come to accept?” And so you get this broad movement happening in society and then what I look at is a couple of the earliest feminist scientists, these aren’t critics of science, they’re scientists themselves. They’re trained in primatology. They both have connections to Sherwood Washburn, who is one of the originators of this military model and they very much admire him, but yet they’re seeing this problem in this model based on what they’re learning from feminism. They’re going, “Oh, here’s this question that’s come up about what we’re assuming in society more broadly. We can see how this actually applies to this theory in this discipline that we are actively engaged in. This is something that should be talked about. Riddell: And why? What were some of the things that they were noticing? What were they observing that the male scholars before them had not? Greenwood: So when I looked at this, I look at the first two feminist scientists work. So you’ve got Sally Slocum who presents a very famous and influential paper in 1970. So this is very early on. We’ve got late 1968 is when Women’s Lib Movement is coming up and then just a year and a half later, she’s presenting a very influential paper about challenging male bias in society to in this case anthropology. So she’s not at primatology yet. She’s looking at theories of evolution also produced by Sherwood Washburn. So the same individual is doing theories in anthropology and in primatology and they are linked. And so his theory is called Man the Hunter, right? The theory is that the rise of hunting in early human life is what generated a whole lot of higher human capacities. For example, high levels of communication and cooperation, tool use. This we owe to the hunters of the past is almost a verbatim quote from Washburn’s work. Now, Sally Slocum is only a young graduate student. She’s a PhD student like me and she gets involved in the feminist movement. She’s drawn into a consciousness raising group. So if you haven’t heard of these before, this is what happened in the Women’s Liberation Movement. One of the main avenues for spreading these ideas was to have small groups of women get together across … They’d be based on universities or just different communities, particularly across the United States, but it spread to Australia and to Europe. You’d get these little groups together and you’d read challenging material like letters or articles that feminists had put together going, let’s rethink how all these assumptions that we’ve grown up with. So for instance, Sally Slocum says she went along kind of reluctantly to the first one, but she had that aha moment. She was given a piece about domestic work, right? So she’s married at the time and it was saying how even the most progressive male will not do the housework and they have all these excuses why … And through this article, she debunks what all of those excuses are. If we really are equal, surely these things need to be brought to the surface. And she said that because she could see that reality in her own life, it kind of helped her, sort of opened her eyes to seeing other examples where there was a disjunction between what was being presented as truth and real and natural and what actually potentially the real story was, that maybe that real story was quite different. And so with some of her friends who were also involved in anthropology, got discussing this particular topic and saw how it applied to Sherwood Washburn, the hunter model of evolution. Sally Slocum writes this paper, she presents it at a conference and it’s like it’s a bomb goes off. It’s like, ” I’ve had my consciousness raised and now I see we talk about man and man’s place in nature and we say that means humanity, but really does it? Because all the focus is on the males and not on the females and that doesn’t make sense. Surely females were equally important to evolution as males and so you’re saying this hunting thing’s really important, but you’re saying females didn’t do it. Where’s the females in this story? And when she digs into the research again that had already been done, what she finds is that there’s already loads of evidence Riddell: And what are some examples of things that it turned out that the female chimpanzees or gorillas or whatever the primates were that were being studied What were some of the examples of things that clearly the females were the ones that had developed those tools in the first place or they’re the ones that had created improvements on them? Did they have concrete examples of things that had just been overlooked? Greenwood: So what happens is Sally Slocum has an associate called Jane Lancaster who studies monkeys and apes. Jane’s also involved in feminism and she says, “Oh, this isn’t just a problem in how we look at the history of humanity. It’s also a problem in how we’re looking at primates.” So she’s taking that insight and moving it across to a new discipline. What she sees is that in this military model, there’s a lot of derivations of it so that it becomes popularized not just through the theorists, but also through scholars within primatology who write for the public. So you get sort of public books coming out. There’s tigers men in groups which take that and kind of apply it to humanity and they’re like, “This is ridiculous.” Here we are getting this theory that’s been formed on very little evidence and it’s being promoted as this answer to a whole lot of human issues when, and what she did is Jane Lancaster was very much across the current literature. So she didn’t just know the military model. She knew pretty much all of the primatology research being done at that time because as I said, it wasn’t a huge field, it was emerging and it was developing so you could know quite a lot about it at one particular point. And Jane was right at the center and she knew all of this. And so she started, as you said, bringing up these examples of, “Hang on, we’ve got all of these counter examples that just don’t match what’s saying.” So for example, there was evidence that rather than males and male hierarchies being what held primate society together, then in most cases it was really sort of small family subunits based around older females typically because what happens is the males move quite often, not always, but you get males moving from group to group. So they’re not providing long-term stability. It’s the females that are there all the way through their lifespan and who are producing offspring. You have females that are forming coalitions and acting aggressively towards males that are doing the wrong thing. So they’re showing some sense of control over the group through aggression as well as the males. So where does that come into the story? You have female monkeys and apes that are responsible for innovation and for translating innovation to the next generation through teaching. So for example, by finding a new way to forage for food. So there’s all of these kinds of examples that come out that just go, “This story is much more complicated than what we’re being presented with. ” And so I think she basically says in her own article, which I love the name of, it’s called In Praise of the Achieving Female Monkey. And so in her article, she’s really like, “Hang on, let’s stop and take stock here. Let’s rethink how we’re going about this business.” Riddell: I love that title too. So around what time, what year was the military model of primate survival truly rejected or recognized to be only on part of the story? Did it ever get to a place where it’s maybe even laughed about as one of those hilarious anachronistic mistakes that humans make? No one’s still defending it or does that theory still have legs within the academic field of primatology? Greenwood: Yeah. Well, my research really looks from 1950s through to the early 1990s. And what we see is that during the 1970s it gradually gets challenged on all sorts of fronts, but it’s still into the 80s, it’s still being challenged. And I would say it’s around the mid 80s is when it feels like it’s thoroughly debunked. Everyone’s understanding there’s a much more complex story than this and you even see Irvin Devor. So he’s one of the main authors coming out and going, “No, I got it wrong. I did one small study and we extrapolated from that and that’s not the way you go about doing these things.” So yes, it was very much thoroughly debunked as for if there’s still belief in it these days, I don’t know a lot about the contemporary scene, but I would be very surprised if there was strongholds anywhere within the scientific discipline. I will qualify this by saying that doesn’t mean that those behaviors aren’t part of the complex system, right? So you can identify male hierarchies and yes, there are aggressions and there is controlling behaviors, but that’s only one part of a much more complex overall view. Riddell: I think that’s pretty impressive actually that Irven DeVore was magnanimous enough to say I was wrong. Greenwood: Yes. And he said that it was conversations with his female colleagues that really pushed him on his theories and his thinking that changed his mind. So I think that’s interesting. Riddell: Samara, in the recent issue of The New Yorker, interestingly, I read something that seemed relevant to our conversation. It’s an article by Charles Bethea, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and he’s writing an article on camps for men where they crawl through mud and carry heavy objects and desire to be more manly and more formidable and perhaps unsurprisingly the word alpha male gets mentioned a lot. I’m actually going to read you this little paragraph because I thought this was interesting and I happened to be reading it right at the same time as we were about to talk. In 1982, Frans De Waal book, Chimpanzee Politics helped popularize the term alpha male. The book is an account of power struggles within a colony of male chimps at a zoo in the Netherlands. De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who taught at Emory challenged a number of assumptions about non-human primates. He noticed that the leaders of the chimps he studied were not necessarily the strongest or the most intimidating, but rather the ones who excelled at coalition building. They kept the peace impartially often by protecting underdogs when conflicts arose. De Waal called his alphas the consolers in chief. It’s not clear how closely people read the book. In the ’90s, Newt Gingrich handed out copies to freshman congressmen. After that, the term alpha male became very popular, De Waal explained in a TED Talk. On the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male and what they mean by an alpha male is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are the boss and don’t mess with me and so on. And basically an alpha male for them is a bully, which obviously was not what Dr. De Waal had observed and reported. And I just wondered what your take on that is to the degree that there is a leader, that the successful ones are good at restoring the peace and keeping the colony functioning well. Just any thoughts that you have on why it is that our sense of the alpha male or the leader is the biggest, baddest and in some ways the worst. Greenwood: Yes. I think Frans De Waal’s research is fabulous and he’s done other research where he’s looked at often there’s so much interest in when a conflict happens, like how the conflict happens within a primate society, which doesn’t happen that often, let’s just say that as well. And what he started to study was, well, okay, what happens after a conflict? And what he found that there was a whole lot of behaviors that were about recovering from conflict. So what do the primates do to come back together to become friends and allies again after conflict? And this is an important part of the story. I think what often gets missed out is there tends to be this monofocus on a particular minor aspect of behavior for whatever reason and all of these other really important behaviors, yes, they might be more subtle to see, but they dominate in terms of amount of time and amount of effort if you’re looking at all of the behaviors. And so the upshot is that I think yes, this more complex story is more accurate than when we narrow our focus and only look at certain behaviors and draw them out as being key like so often happens in that kind of public alpha male story, which just really doesn’t have any basis as far as I can tell in the science itself in animal behavior studies. Why does this story keep persisting? Surely there’s a whole lot of reasons. It’s not an area of study I do and if I was studying it, I feel like that would be a whole PhD in itself. But off the top of my head or things that I have considered are one interesting thing that I do know from the history is that that military model of primate behavior, that was actually taught in middle schools. So Irven DeVore was part of the system that in the 1960s set up this study of main American middle schools and was rolled out across the board and it was really the description there are very much about this traditional idea of an alpha male as sort of a military kind of leader. A whole generation got indoctrinated into that kind of thinking. So it’s really pervasive. You then see it repeated in films and in television. So the social environment reinforced it for a very long time and you don’t see any of that kind of thing happening with this newer story, with this corrective story that is about this more complexity. And even when you do, like as you said with Frans of all’s book, when it is spelled out in a public book, still only certain pieces are picked out and kind of focused on. It’s a sticky idea. Why is it a sticky idea? I think other people might need to answer that. I think that’s beyond me, but it does seem that alpha male as this, as you said, as a bully, just seems like a very sticky thing that’s very hard to break. Riddell: It really does. Was Irven DeVore in the UK or the United States or where were children being educated in those ideas? Greenwood: That was across the US. Across. And there was films. He’d done films of aggressive baboon behavior, again, a small part of the whole picture and that was part of this. So it was visuals, it was audio. He had a model of how he imagined. He said he’d seen this model of how primate societies were constructed with the lead males in the center and all the peripheral members around the outside always describing the females as peripheral or secondary and in need of protection. And this became a very quite strong kind of model, this picture. But then you have studies again and again coming after it, debunking it going, “This is not observable in nature at all. Where is it? ” You’re seeing females in every one of those positions. You’re seeing females leading the group. How did this come up? It seems to have come from some sort of pre-ideas about what was expected to be seen as opposed to what was actually seen out in the wild. Riddell: Or they were hoping to see. I mean, the term alpha female existed too, but it’s never had the same traction as alpha male. Greenwood: Yeah. I do think alpha in itself is a terrible, terrible term. If we can start to talk about leading individuals, I think it starts to soften the way that we’re talking about it. A leading individual has more capacity in our imaginations to encompass some of those things you were talking about, that cooperation, that protection of those that are in less strong positions, all of those kind of things we are starting to take on board that that’s what true leadership is. When you put the word alpha in there, I don’t know, the whole conversation changes. Riddell: Well, and then in the manosphere, there’s a lot of talk about Beta Boys as in the second and the lesser. I am a writer and we know that in stories it’s very, very helpful to have a single hero. More people will read the story, more people will pick up the book in the first place and we’ll keep reading it. Every movie basically is around a single hero. There does seem to be something about the human brain that’s better able to track the trajectory of a single individual rather than a collective. Greenwood: I also wonder if it’s just like a story, again, like a narrative type that can be shifted. We’ve just so often been geared towards the goodie and the baddie, right? The hero and the evil, this is real binary. Perhaps we can evolve. Perhaps we can change to see different kinds of stories as being truer and more interesting as well. I certainly do. Riddell: I like that. Now, how can you and I and our listeners mount a campaign to less the hold on our imagination that the alpha male story still commands? Greenwood: So this is something I have occasionally tried to imagine, but I can’t claim to have any grand plan. This is beyond kind of my expertise, but my intuition is if this story is going to loosen its grip, it’s unlikely to happen through academic arguments alone where as much as we do great academic arguments, it is a struggle to convince beyond sort of small groups of people. I do think it would need to be taken up in popular culture, right? Those films, those documentaries, even TikTok, once it starts to spread this sort of alternate, more complex, I think more interesting story, as well as it’s more accurate, right, that’s maybe when we can start to break down the old story because we’ve got something new that is more interesting and more captivating. Maybe one particularly captivating way to do that would be to tell the story of the scientists It’s like I’m doing, especially the women who helped expose the limits of that older model and opened up a richer understanding of primate social life. You’ve got a story where there are some heroes in there, but it’s not an old style kind of story. Riddell: I do think it’s possible that Gen Z has more of that knowledge of the importance of groups and community and have been raised in a different way where that model of the dominant male has lost some of its power. Greenwood: I think so too. It’s certainly my experience. I’ve got two daughters that certainly seem along that track, but it does seem, as we’re seeing with the manosphere, that there are niches where some of these old ideas are really not only just being perpetuated, but being accelerated. So that’s challenging. Riddell: Yeah. Greenwood: If we were successful, what might change? That was, I think, your other part of the question. Riddell: Yeah. So if we did succeed at this, if you and I come with a great campaign and the listeners get all excited about it and want to really make a change in this arena, what do you think might shift? Greenwood: That’s really important to think about. I think we underestimate how much the stories that we tell about nature become the stories we tell about ourselves. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s a strong connection about how we imagine nature and how we imagine ourselves. Hence why how we imagine primates, non-human primates, and how that relates to primates. So if we loosen the hold of that alpha male myth, we might also loosen some of the assumptions that we make about aggression, domination and control, which currently kind of seem natural, inevitable, and admirable to changing that to something else, to seeing them as a more minor part of a broader spectrum of behaviors. That could open up more space for people to think differently about masculinity, leadership, cooperation, and social life. We would have a more accurate picture of the natural world and that seems like a good place to start. Riddell: Well, it really does. Even when you just think logically about the natural world, even without firsthand observation, it makes sense that an organism is not going to deliberately put himself or herself in jeopardy. So I think that our idea that the alpha male is always looking for a fight is something that’s held by people who’ve never been in a fight and have never been punched. Nobody wants to get hurt unnecessarily. It’s a real risk to enter into a battle. So it makes a lot of sense that these animals would have the capacity to try to create peace in the group and to try to have the group function smoothly the way Frans de Waal described it. Greenwood: Exactly right. And it’s not just about the individual. Part of any social group is the good of the whole, right? The good of the whole means the good of the self. Once the whole breaks down, then you’re much more vulnerable. So yes, there’s a logic here, right? So it’s much more logical, this contemporary kind of view than the old view and yet the old view still sticks around. Riddell: Right. I mean, we care about our own self-interest. So if you’d commit an action that makes somebody else perceive you as a bully, the other person who sees you as a bully may well be plotting revenge. So it’s a big risk. Greenwood: Yeah. And you can see how that starts to break down all of those bonds that keep a social group together. And when you’re looking at, say, baboons or any other monkeys and apes out in the wild, that’s really important to their survival is keeping that group safe and bonded and functioning properly, as you say. Riddell: Right. And it’s a lot of work to keep a group cohesive and it is natural for things to gradually break down over time and to have a long surviving troop of chimpanzees has got to be relatively unusual, I would think. I mean, it takes work to do it, I guess is what I’m saying. Greenwood: That’s right. Riddell: So you’ve been studying the people who study primates and thinking about them a lot. Has that changed the way you see us, the way you see your human friends or your colleagues? Or if you pass by one of the beautiful city parks in Melbourne and you see a group of people playing, do you ever have this sudden image of us as the apes that we all actually are? Greenwood: What a cute question. I actually think it’s a little bit in reverse. By learning about the complexity of non-human primate societies, I now look at monkeys differently. I’m like, wow. If you just do some sort of casual observation, even at a zoo, you’re just noticing little bits of behaviors. But now that I understand some of the systematics behind their social behavior, I’m fascinated by when you do observe them, how that actually plays out. And I guess therefore the reverse, seeing some more of our complex human interactions in the primate world. So yeah, I think opened my eyes has been in the reverse direction. Riddell: So even though you weren’t crazy about monkeys as a kid, now you love to see them. Greenwood: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I do remember some of the people I interviewed as part of my research when they first started even entering into primatology in say the 1950s or the 1960s said the first big surprise for them was that primates had a society, that concept that there is a society amongst primate social groups was just mind blowing. And I’m like, “I can totally see that. ” That is a really interesting insight. Riddell: One thing that I think is a step forward is that when Darwin first posited the idea that we were related to apes, that was widely rejected and considered very offensive to humans. And I do think that most people understand now that we are cousins, that we are related and I do think that’s a step forward. Greenwood: Yeah, certainly. Riddell: Do you have a life philosophy or any basic tenets or a motto that you repeat to sort of help keep you going and on your track to finish your dissertation and on your track to be present in the world and the way that you want to be? Greenwood: Yeah. I do really like that quote by Ivan Ilick who was an Austrian theologian and philosopher, which says that if we want to change society for the better, we need to tell a more powerful story. And as he put it, one that kind of sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole and on that even shin some light into the future so that we can take the next step. So it’s one that when I first read this probably 20 years ago really just resonated really deeply with me because it gives you a sense not only how can we make some positive change in the world, let’s do our part in making this story, but it also tells us something about having to test our own assumptions to go, okay, something about our current story. If things aren’t working well, then something about what we’re telling ourselves now is wrong. What is that? Identifying that, trying to come up, do the research. Part of what I love about academia is actually getting to do the research and see what it tells us about building this better story. Riddell: Yes. Samara, is it possible that those women critiquing primatology at that time might turn out in the future to actually be wrong, that someone will gather fresh data and prove the fallacy of their views the same way that they proved wrong the men who came before them? Greenwood: So I get asked this question a lot and it’s one that has gone on in my head quite a bit because I know there’s something we’re not thinking through quite correctly when we ask this question. I’m going to try and articulate what I think it is. When we talk about sort of masculinism and feminism, they feel like they’re mirror images of each other or that you’re just replacing male bias with female bias. But what we need to realize is that the two cases aren’t the same. They’re not parallel. The earlier male bias perspective involved a genuine blind spot, right? It had a very narrow view where researchers were assuming sort of going into the field assuming that female primates were passive and secondary by default while males were assumed to be the natural center of social life almost as a foregone conclusion and that assumption was allowed to persist even when there was already evidence that pointed beyond it. Now the feminist intervention was not about installing some opposing female centric view that cut out the male behavior, right? So it’s not just the flip. Instead, it was about making that blind spot visible, highlighting it as a problem and about taking seriously evidence that had previously been overlooked or downplayed. So rather than narrowing the field to just half the story that had happened previously as in the case of male bias, what their job was to open it up to the fuller story to include all of this information that was being sort of downplayed or disregarded. And this in turn made it more difficult for future researchers to blindly ignore female agency variation in sex roles and the complexity of primate social life. Now, could some of those feminist interpretations later be revised? Absolutely. That’s true of any scientific claim, right? But that revision of their sort of first pass at what this new thing would look like, that’s not the same as saying that they were just another bias. Their major contribution was to reveal a hidden distortion in that earlier work and to provide ways of remedying that structural, deep structural problem. So even as they undoubtedly had limitations of their own and there are certainly future assumptions and current assumptions that still need to be challenged that does not cancel out the fact that they brought about an important and positive shift at that time. Riddell: You know what it’s making me think of as you say that? I’m thinking about stories and books that are written as a series and the first book actually is pretty minimalist and you really do only get to meet one character and maybe two friends and some other minor characters and that as the series progresses, they always start to populate it with more and more people, people in more complex roles and more complex relationships. And it’s almost as though when the science was being written, there was a very bare bones narrative. They chose one that was relatively convenient for the people that were doing the research and appeared obvious to them and that complexity and the value of the connections among the various players in that group of primates only comes with time and more looking and deeper understanding as things progress. Greenwood: I think that’s part of it, but as you mentioned before, we have the Japanese studying at exactly the same time and they are engaging in much more complex theorizing from the start. You definitely develop a more complex understanding over time, but part of it is the position that you’re starting from. So what are the assumptions you’re bringing to that study? And if you begin with a background assumption that it’s going to be complex and that you need to study all of the individuals, not just half of them in a serious equal kind of fashion, then you’re going to immediately get a different result. One of the analogies that I quite like is that you could compare it to looking at something with just one eye. So you’ve got a hand over one eye and you try to describe it with just one eye and then someone goes, “Hang on, you’re going to get a much deeper field of vision if you look with both eyes.” And that’s what these feminist scientists were doing. They’re going, “If you look with one eye, you’re going to get the wrong idea. You’re going to really distort the picture. Open up this other eye and you’re going to see things much more clearly.” So I think that was the major transition. Riddell: That’s beautifully put. And I’m also just thinking too about the value of coming into some sort of a research opportunity with the desire to be able to study all the individual organisms rather than just looking at ones that appear flashy or interesting and trying to make a lot of judgments based on a very small population sample. Greenwood: Yeah. And that correlates to the other big change that happened, which was that when they first started studying, they were really interested in old world monkeys and apes, so sort of African, larger kind of animals. And then when different groups started studying primates from different parts of Asia, from different parts of South America, the story just blossomed into much more complexity. You found different primate species were doing very, very different things. And so that challenged that core idea as well. So yes, very much what you’re taking as your subject, what you even just choose to look at can affect the whole sort of system.  Riddell: Samara, this has been amazing. I feel like I’ve learned so much. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Greenwood: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a delight. Riddell: The Shape of the World is about nature, cities, and people and the world we share. It’s a production of the Office of Modern Composition, a business that coaches writers and helps people and organizations tell their stories. If you have something you’re trying to write, the Office of Modern Composition can help. The Shape of the World is produced in the vital, vigorous, and beautiful metropolis of Chicago and the Prairie State of Illinois. The shape of the world is a completely carbon neutral endeavor thanks to reductions we made and from a carbon offset purchased from Tradewater. If you’re interested in eliminating your carbon footprint, go to the website tradewater.us. You can find Shape of the World on Instagram and Facebook and on our own website, shapeoftheworldshow.com. There you’ll find out more about Samara Greenwood and you’ll also find a drawing of Samara made by the artist, Olivia Cohen. This episode of The Shape of the World was produced by Max Hatlam. Our theme music was composed by Brad Wood. We are only three episodes into our seventh season, so you can expect another brand new episode to come out very soon. Thanks for listening.

Where Did All the Rivers Go? (Ep. 41)

Humans are incredibly intelligent creatures, and we have been smart enough to rely on the power of rivers for as long as we’ve been alive on this planet. Over a quarter of people dependent on them, yet in most cities, people may not even see the many miles of river that actively flow beneath their sidewalks. For a hundred fifty years, we’ve been burying streams and rivers under concrete in most American cities–and most of the ones in Western Europe as well. The Executive Director of Seven Canyons Trust, Ronnie Pessetto, is attempting to peel back the layers of concrete that cover many of the creeks in Salt Lake City, Utah. The process is known as “daylighting rivers.” And because Ronnie’s projects are happening right inside a city with a million people, it means the work is as much about civic healing as it is ecological restoration.  In this episode, Ronnie Pessetto explains why so many rivers got buried in the first place; how to dig them out of their vaults; and how insanely different the water management policies in the West are from those in the Eastern half of the United States. We also get into climate change (like we do almost always, it seems) and how it might reduce the amount of water in Utah, a state that’s already naturally very dry. Daylighting is one optimistic step that can create greater enthusiasm about urban rivers, and ultimately lead to healthier cities.  "When you uncover rivers, you're not only uncovering water—you're uncovering the stories and the lives and the people that have loved and touched the river." – Ronnie Pessetto, Executive Director of Seven Canyons Trust Above: Illustration by Olivia Cohen Learn More About Ronnie Ronnie Pessetto is the Executive Director of Seven Canyons Trust, an organization whose goal is to uncover and restore buried or impaired creeks in Salt Lake Valley. Before working at Seven Canyons Trust, Ronnie was a Public Lands Planner for Salt Lake City, where she helped manage various urban parks and trails.  Seven Canyons Trust has several daylighting projects in different stages, which you can read about here [https://sevencanyonstrust.org/work]. With joy and care, the work of the organization also includes advocacy, education, and community engagement. This year, the Trust celebrates its 10th birthday.  The Backstory of the Three Creeks Confluence Seven Canyons Trust began in a University of Utah class back in 2014, when a small group of students in an Urban Ecology course developed a 100-year plan for daylighting 21 miles of buried creeks in Salt Lake City. One of the centerpieces of that model was the Three Creeks Confluence, an area just Southwest of downtown Salt Lake City where the “three creeks” (Red Butte, Emigration, and Parsleys) meet the Jordan River. (Confluence is the term for where two or more rivers meet). Within just a few years, the students had had turned the project into a formal nonprofit, secured $3 million in funding, and launched a major daylighting effort. You can read the full original plan (the one they turned in to Professor Stephen Goldsmith) here [https://sevencanyonstrust.org/blog/100-years-daylighting].  The Three Creeks Confluence quickly became a national model, earning numerous esteemed planning and landscaping awards, and inspiring daylighting projects around the world. It’s also the perfect example of what Ronnie calls “cultural daylighting” in the episode. Water restoration, she says, goes hand in hand with creating accessible and robust community spaces. The Three Creeks Confluence isn’t just a success story in ecological restoration; it’s a public art site, a music venue, and a thriving community gathering space. If you find yourself in Salt Lake City, you can visit the Three Creeks Confluence at 1300 South and 900 West. See this webpage [https://sevencanyonstrust.org/three-creeks-confluence].  Above, you can see two maps of Salt Lake City. The first shows the Seven Major Creeks of the Salt Lake City Valley. The second highlights where these creeks overlap with recreation in the city – they run through a total of 29 parks! While some sections are still buried, you can see how much of the creeks now flow above ground.  The Spiral Jetty If you visit Salt Lake City, in addition to looking at daylit rivers, be sure to make the 90-minute drive out to see Robert Smithson's famous Spiral Jetty. It's a large-scale earthwork that extends out into the Great Salt Lake, and it's a truly incredible piece of art. It was built in the 1970s, but not too long after it was completed, the lake's water levels rose. For 30 years, Spiral Jetty was underwater and unviewable. Then, in the early 2000s, there were times when the water got shallower, and you could partially see Spiral Jetty again — and other times when you couldn't. Making a pilgrimage was always a gamble! It's really only been the past decade that it's been reliably visible. It now sits fully exposed in a lake bed of salt-encrusted sand.  On the drive out there, keep your eyes peeled for long-billed curlews and long-eared jackrabbits hanging out in the grasslands.   Transcript of This Conversation Jill Riddell: Hello, welcome to The Shape of the World. I'm Jill Riddell, and this particular episode of The Shape of the World was recorded in Salt Lake City, Utah. I traveled there to look at a cool project that's going on, something that's very pertinent to our show's topic of cities and nature: Rivers. Rivers are relatively rare. Did you know that? It's kind of funny to think of rivers that way, especially because most of us live near one. And the fact that we see rivers a lot makes rivers seem like they actually are something that's common and they just aren't. Of all the water that's found on earth, the amount that's found in rivers is far, far less than even 1%. Historically, rivers were one of the most important factors determining where enough people could gather so that eventually there would be enough of us to build a city, which is why today, so many of us live somewhere near a river. Rivers provided drinking water, irrigation to grow plants and crops, and if you had a boat, rivers were fantastic for transportation. People used them as trade routes. Dry land located next to a river was a perfect place for a city to come into existence. But I'm bringing this up to emphasize how special rivers are before I deliver the bad news, which is that we've loved rivers just a little too much. Or maybe I should say over time, we've been demonstrating our love in the wrong way, kind of taken them for granted. Today when rainfalls in a city, it gets channeled into storm grates and then into big pipes that are sealed off from our view under asphalt. No one is going to sit on the grass and have a picnic next to a river like that. But today we're talking with someone whose passion and whose job is to try to free up some of those rivers. Rivers that haven't seen even so much as a glimmer of sunshine in a long, long time. The technical term for this free the river's action she and others are instigating. It's called daylighting. Ronnie Pessetto: My name is Ronnie Pessetto. I live in Salt Lake City and I am the executive director of Seven Canyons Trust. Riddell: Welcome to the Shape of the World, Ronnie. It's good to have you here. Let's start with some background on this stream that you and your collaborators have managed to bring back to life. Pessetto: So back in the early 1800s, there was a really big effort to bury a lot of our creeks in the Salt Lake Valley. For that particular area on the Three Creeks confluence, it was a concrete pipe that tunneled through the city. Then eventually the water would pour out into the Torton River corridor. So beneath the parking lot was just a pipe or culvert that had water flowing underneath it, which is the confluence. Riddell: So what is the value of having a buried stream? Why did we generally pave over streams in city? What were the advantages? Pessetto: The reasoning was to protect the water supply. And for this particular area and for some other areas across the United States, it was around the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. So there was a lot of mines, there was a lot of refineries, digging for oil, steel companies. They tried to bury them to prevent chemicals entering to their waterways, their drinking sources, and damaging the aquatic life around it. Riddell: Wasn't it also the case that streams were often a public health hazard, that streams were often used as open sewage ditches before there were sanitation systems, people would dispose of debris and streams and sometimes streams would get smelly and foul. Pessetto: Yes, most certainly. They would throw their sewage and waste in there and have various different breakouts of cholera and things of that nature. So that would be another key benefit as to why they winded up actually having to bury them to keep the sewage and wastewater separate from these riparian zones. Riddell: When I think about it too, how cities develop and the desire that city planters often have to make a formal grid, streams don't really lend themselves to obeying straight lines. I just wonder also a part of it must have been just so that they would have more land and the places that they wanted in order to be able to make streets and roads and build buildings. Pessetto: I definitely think so. I know, for instance, City Creek, which is one of the seven creeks that we worked to restore and uncover, was probably one of the more manipulated creeks out of the seven. They altered the routes of them to really maximize land use and to utilize the water for agricultural purposes. So there was definitely a lot of human manipulation to get it to become beneficial to them. More of an asset than a liability, I guess you could say. Riddell: When I think about that time period of the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, it was also a time when there was a lot of optimism about technology and engineering was becoming much better than it had ever been before. And basically humans for several thousand years had been at the mercy of whatever water happened to fall from the sky, whatever stream happened to be present. And now suddenly human beings have the ability to be able to control that a little bit and to make water on demand and have water flow where they wanted it to and not overflow its banks and destroy somebody's home. I can see where there might've been just a lot of innate fervor to try out all these new tools. Pessetto: Yeah, for sure. There was a lot of innovation leaning into new ideas at that time. And given the knowledge that they had, they tried to do the best to protect their community. Now that we have acquired more knowledge, we're working to evolve our community in a new way. Riddell: Especially where there are opportunities like the one that the Three Creeks confluence, it makes a lot of sense. So who had the original idea that this parking lot, which didn't look like much of anything, could be something completely different and be transformed into a place with wildlife, an open stream, and people enjoying nature? Pessetto: Our organization started back in 2014 in a University of Utah classroom. We talked about our stream and the necessity to restore various streams in the Salak Valley. Our previous executive director, Brian Tonetti, was part of the classroom and actually some of our board members was part of that classroom. And the instructor, Steven Goldsmith, who is a board member, actually taught that class. Riddell: Did he already have an idea about daylighting? How did it emerge? Pessetto: So a little bit of background. Steven actually helped out with a daylighting project at City Creek Park, which is a 1990s daylighting effort. And he has knowledge about the area and its history and its waterways. And so fast forwarding to 2014, that class was centered around water restoration and the need for it. And so in that class, they wrote a document called A Hundred Years of Daylighting, talking about the story of our waterways, each of the different creeks that supply our needs and take care of us on a day-to-day basis. And so from there, the students after that class, they couldn't have enough of it and they decided to create this organization. Riddell: So the document was called 100 Years of Daylighting. Pessetto: Yeah. So the hundred years of daylighting, number one, acknowledges that history of bearing and controlling the flow of these waterways. The hundred years of daylighting more or less focuses on the value of actually bringing them back to the surface and restoring them. And that's really the sole focus of that plan was in a hundred years, we want to restore and really daylight these spaces and activate them within a hundred years time. Riddell: So it was not a historical document about the past 100 years, but really looking forward to the next century and what could be changed. Pessetto: Correct. Riddell: Oh, no wonder the students got excited. What happened from there? Pessetto: So after they finished it, they decided to create the organization and its first demonstration of the powers of daylighting was the Three Creek's Confluence. So while many people in the community walked by that space on a day-to-day basis, these group of college students saw it as something so much more than that. They traced down the flow of these waterways and they found that this space actually had a jewel right underneath it. And so they reached out to various different council members and then they loved that idea. And then the council members championed city administration to pick it up. And from there, we really gathered community support on it to raise the funds to daylight this space. Riddell: So first, the students had to be able to map those underground waterways and to even know if what wasn't beneath that piece of property. Did city engineers already know where the underground "streams" were? Pessetto: Yeah. So if you look at the old historic maps, they actually already have that spacelined out as water flowing beneath it. But in the hundred years of daylighting plan, it does go into a little bit more specifics in terms of the status and layout and location of these various different waterways and how they flow throughout the city in relation to common roads and things of that nature. So it wasn't too extensive to be able to find the location of these water bodies that flow underneath us. Riddell: So when Professor Goldsmith started the project, he was hoping that it would actually become something real, or was that the student enthusiasm that generated that actually happening on the ground? Pessetto: I think he most certainly saw the value and importance of stream restoration, but I don't think really any of the students who entered into that class nor Steven really envisioning that this would happen, that we would be so moved by this story and the value and importance of it. No one's really done and taken on this responsibility before. Riddell: What did they do to start making this happen? They'd identified that location as a possible place to do the daylighting. What did they do first? Pessetto: The very first thing they did was they had a conversation with local council members and really just talked about this envisioning, which for those who are not familiar with the location of Three Creeks Confluence, it's on the west side of Salt Lake City, which is known more as a lower income area that doesn't necessarily have as much equitable green space as I would say as the east side, which is the more prominent side of Salt Lake City. Them presenting this idea just really ignited a sense of passion and opportunity that was worth leaning into for this particular council member. And from there, they just began to work together and communicate with the city administration and the departments that oversee public spaces. From there, the council member allocated funding to do more research on this space and do community engagement and really just reimagine this parking lot as something so, so much more. Riddell: So it sounds like in this case, they had a pretty welcome reception right from the beginning. When you and I looked at Three Creek's Confluence together before coming into the studio, you told me that there were two stages in thinking about daylighting, that there's the architectural side of daylighting where the actual work is done, but there's also the cultural daylighting. Can you describe what you mean by cultural daylighting? Pessetto: Cultural daylighting is not necessarily about bringing the creek back to the surface or in its most natural state, which we love being able to do in architectural daylighting, but with cultural daylighting, you are uniting and utilizing various different art forms to bring it to the collective consciousness that water is flowing beneath us, that it's present, it's thriving, and to really view our waterways in a different manner, view the spaces that we walk past on a day-to-day manner. Water is just such a really great connector, not just within geographic boundaries, but it's a connector for people as well. And so to be able to utilize that value and truth has been really key in terms of leading us to being able to do that architectural daylighting and keeping that fire going. Riddell: Why is water a connector? Pessetto: I would say water is a connector because all of us really relies on it. Even the establishment of this modern day city, when the southers came down into this area, they came for water and they were able to connect with different tribal members in these water spaces. People have different ties and stories and experiences and various spectrums of their life that ties them to it. It's fascinating to be able to pause and hear the stories behind certain waterways even now with me like tabling or just talking to someone, a thought happens for them of, "Oh, I live, for instance, near Mill Creek and we used to fish here all the time." And so a story really unfolds and a tie-in and connection happens. And the more you unveil them, the more value strikes in terms of maintaining and preserving these spaces. Riddell: Utah's the third driest state in the United States in terms of average annual precipitation. You all only receive 13 inches of rain each year. What challenges do you face at a conservation organization somewhere else that's working on daylighting rivers might not have? And are there also advantages to being in a community like that, like maybe average people think more about water here and are a lot more water conscious? Pessetto: I think we're definitely growing in the ways of becoming more water conscious. We're seeing that our Great Salt Lake is declining in terms of its water volume. There is a slight disconnection with that of the lack of care for these particular creeks. When people typically think of the Great Salt Lake, they think of it as a entity on its own. Riddell: Oh, they don't think about what's flowing into it. Pessetto: And it makes it also worse when they're buried and you don't see them. Riddell: Or we're such a visual species. We rely on vision for 70% of all of our input compared with our other senses, and that just makes a lot of sense that if it's a complete abstraction, you're not actually seeing them flow into the Great Salt Lake. I can see where that would be difficult to make that connection. Pessetto: Yeah. Riddell: What are the climate change projections for Salt Lake City? What is expected to happen here? Pessetto: So we actually get a lot of our water from the Sunocap mountains and they slowly melt throughout the year and then they flow into these streams that we work to defend in the Salt Lake Valley. And so the danger as well with the climate change is that if it melts too fast, we won't have enough water supply. And that's not only dangerous to us, but dangerous to our species. I mentioned earlier that 80% of our species here in the state of Utah relies on these waterways. Riddell: Of animals and plants. Pessetto: Exactly. So if they dry up too soon, then we're mid-heat and summer. It gets pretty toasty here and in the state of Utah in the summer. And so if they melt too fast, we won't have water. And so our waterways are starting to dwindle down, so the projection's not very good. Riddell: I read that 60% at the very least of the water that people drink in Salt Lake City comes from that snow melt. And in years when it's bountiful, it might be as much as 90% and that you do have some deep water aquifers to take drinking water from, but it's small compared to what you're expecting just to happen naturally year after year as snow melt. I can imagine where that would be very sobering to think that that would be decreasing. So Ronnie, what is your story? How did you get interested in this subject matter in daylighting and in conservation in general? Did you grow up in the country? Did you have access to nature as a kid? Pessetto: Yeah, really great question. So I'm actually from Kentucky. I'm born and raised a Kentuckian, and there's lots and lots of water, in fact, too much water. We typically get flooded out in the spring season. Riddell: You must be by a big river then. Pessetto: Yeah. Right near the Ohio River. In fact, I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. And so water has just really been a big part of my life. I used to be very outdoorsy, rode my bikes and played in these creeks and waterways. Unfortunately, I personally experienced some environmental injustice and I am a cancer survivor. I had a childhood cancer growing up when I was about 11 or 12. I was stage three and having that experience of dealing with that really altered my perception in terms of how I relate with the world and the impact that I wanted to have. And so initially when I was an undergraduate, I thought my place was in the medical field, taking care of those kinds of patients. And the more I kind of dove into my academics, I realized that the structure of a city and its policies really tell the story in terms of the struggles and strengths of how people are navigating through their spaces. And then I thought, well, if I have an impact in terms of the policies and the way the structure of a city is formed, then maybe I can prevent people in the first place from experiencing the trauma that I've had to experience from something as innocent as playing in a stream or a waterway. And so I went ahead and got my bachelor's degree in environmental policy and then moved here to Utah to obtain my master's degree in city in metropolitan planning. Seven Canyons Trust has always kind of been sprinkled throughout my career and looking back now, I kind of chuckle because my first year we actually partnered with Seven Canyons Trust to do a Mill Creek feasibility study in South Salt Lake City. My second job that I took was with Salt Lake City working on general obligation bond projects. The city in 2012 actually received an $85 million bond. And so I worked on some of those projects and one of those projects is Falsome Trail and I collaborated with Brian Tonetti, who was the previous executive director. He was just wrapping up his engagement study and working on some concept plans for the daylighting effort. And then fast forwarding today, now I'm the executive director. Riddell: You were explaining to me that Three Creek's confluences on the west side of the city and that there's definitely a west side and east side divide. Does your own experience with environmental justice or injustice in your case help motivate you to want to do more of these kinds of projects for the people that live on the west side? Pessetto: For sure. My very first semester, we were collaborating with the city on creating a master plan for handling and addressing our open spaces in the city. And I remember we went out and we collected different surveys, just talking to different people in different areas of town. And I do remember seeing a drastic difference between the quality of parks and open spaces at that time and just feeling just so incredibly upset about that variation difference. The west side actually has more acreage than the east. Riddell: Potential open space. Pessetto: Yes, for open space that really hasn't been leaned into as an opportunity. Now I think the city is starting to realize that opportunity and the importance of giving these spaces the proper allocation that they need regardless of their location. But I do remember feeling just incredibly upset and noticing the stark, stark differences between the care and the attention that Eastside Parks received versus the West Side. And I think the general obligation bond really allowed to level that platform a little bit more and give all different parts of the city the opportunity to have equitable access to green spaces. Riddell: I'm sure that some of your job is very uplifting. It must be nice to see these things coming to existence that have been ideas in people's minds to actually see them physically occur on the land, but it also must be hard. Do you have any basic tenets that you live by? Any mottos or things you repeat to yourself to keep yourself going? Pessetto: I think a key thing that drives me is understanding that it took us 20 plus years to get to this point and thus it's not going to take a day or even a week. It's going to take time for us to be able to get out of this. And so really just taking our time and really embracing this journey is a really key thing that I really ground myself with because sometimes there's just so much pressure to just want to just solve it. You just want to solve it today. You just want to have that money in hand to really start getting going, but it took a lot of meticulous collaborative energy for our spaces to be the way that they are, and it's going to take that same energy, if not more, to get out of it. So that kind of grounds me a little bit in feeling like I don't need to solve the problem today. The other thing I would say is when dealing with these waterways, something that I've learned and acquired as a philosophy and way that I navigate through this line of work, is that place already exist with these waterways. When you're uncovering them, you're not only covering water, you're uncovering the stories and the lives and the people that have loved and touched it. The big scheme in question is whether or not you want to embrace that, embrace that reality, embrace that place, embrace that story. You're uncovering various different stories from the indigenous community or maybe the surrounding community, and you have the opportunity to make them feel seen in ways that they haven't experienced before and feel supported. And so there's definitely a healing process with the creeks, but there's also a healing process, I argue, for community members that happens when you're restoring these spaces. And so being able to take the time out to undergo this process with them is really key and it's something that I ground myself with. Not just breezing past it, let's just stay like these spaces and move on, but let's lean into this a little bit more. Not only in the way that we treat it and uncovering these spaces, but also establishing a new sense of community and a new script to read off of in ways that we haven't done before. Riddell: As you were talking about how we got here and how long things take, it sort of makes the sense then that Professor Goldsmith talked about that as being a century, right? So we're 20 years into that century, another 80 more to go to get this work done. Pessetto: Yeah, for sure. Like I said, there's just so much pressure to feel like you have to solve it all. And in reality, it takes a whole community to do this work. It does. Like I said, with the Three Creeks Confluence, yes, we had this vision and we approached various different members of the community, but it took us coming together as a community to make this vision come alive and we could have not done it without all of these different people, from residents to stakeholders, to political figures, city administrative people. All of these people came together and that is what made it successful. And so taking a time again to enhance those relationships, it's vital. It's a necessity. Riddell: I used to work for a group in Chicago called Open Lands that worked on urban open spaces. And I always remember one of my coworkers would say, "Well, just because we can say it fast doesn't mean we can do it fast." Pessetto: Sure. Yeah. It's based on the idea of moving at the speed of trust and working with the community through that. Yeah. Riddell: Moving at the speed of trust. I like that. So you pay attention to certain things that the rest of us aren't paying so much attention to, these underground streams that many of us don't even know exist, and also even your thoughts about community as well. Given that set of things, if there was one thing that you could impress upon people or change or help us to see that we're not seeing, what would that be? Pessetto: Just to be able to take in the various spectrums of life surrounding us. There are times when I'm near these waterways and observing just wildlife, I grasp lessons from them. So as much as I'm helping them, they're also helping me and navigating this crazy thing called life. And so when you're able to pause and think beyond just your individual kind of circumstance, you're able to realize this grand scheme of things of not only human life, but also wildlife. And that kind of alters your priorities of what kind of needs to be done and how we structure our community. So if that was one thing, I would just say just that awareness and that grounding of there's so much more than what our eyes can possibly envision and the various different spectrums of life there are. Riddell: And I hear embedded in that an encouragement toward a kind of slow, close learning observation noticing. Pessetto: Yeah. We live in just such a fast-paced world and we feel like we have to have everything solved and figured out. Moving in that way, I'm sure it has its perks, but it also has its downsides as well, and especially in us feeling like we have to have it all together. We have to know the answer to things. And maybe there's a joy in having a little bit of mystery rather than just being so focused on this destination of, I just want to daylight a creek and just enjoying that journey and discovery of other people, other life, and really yourself too. And I feel myself, even in the five months that I've been in this position growing in ways that I've never imagined, just from the interactions with people and nature and the creeks. And it's been a wonderful journey and I've just been trying to embrace that. And I wish if I could bottle it up into a jar and give it to people, I would. Riddell: I do think our culture's changing a little bit. I'm thinking also when you talk about that too, of that sort of wanting things to be done in a hurry, I do think that's been something that's been with us for a long time. And I think about the original people coming into Salt Lake City and being really quick to pave over streams because that was easy and it got it done and didn't have to think about it anymore. That same impulse is with us now of just to try to solve things fast. And what would it be like to be a little playful about it? Like, oh, why don't we cover some of the streams because we need some of them covered to be able to do this or that and they're solving that purpose. But what if we just let some of them be? There is a movement toward recognizing that. Pessetto: Yeah. I think when you're able to slow down a little bit more and lean in with curiosity, innovation can happen. Riddell: Right. Pessetto: A really true innovation where it addresses all these different values can officially happen. And when you're moving at a fast pace, you can't really pause to think about that and understand all of these different values and all these different interests and really address them in a unique way that's catered to this particular community. And I think that's something that's really special about, that I'm learning about these creeks is that each of them have their own personalities. They really do in relation to people in the human hands that have touched it and loved it, to the wildlife that really loves to be in a particular area, so on and so forth. Like I said, it's an incredible opportunity to just slow down, really just embrace it, embrace all that it has for you. Riddell: Ronnie, it's been great talking with you about Salt Lake City and daylighting rivers. Thank you so much for being on The Shape of the World. Pessetto: Thanks so much, Jill. It's most certainly been a pleasure sharing space with you and telling the story. Riddell: This is Jill Riddell. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Ronnie Pessetto and that you'll check out the Seven Canyons Trust website to learn more about what they are doing and maybe explore whether there's a river in your city that could do with a little daylighting. Check our website as well for more links and some additional history on daylighting that I think you'll find interesting. And if you happen to live in Salt Lake City or if you're going to be traveling there sometime this year, check out both City Creek, that first project Ronnie spoke of, and definitely go see the Three Rivers Confluence Project as well. Also, one more reason to check out our website, I couldn't resist, including some other touristy advice on that webpage, mostly about my making a pilgrimage to visit Spiral Jetty and all the curlews I saw on the dry of wildlife going out there. The Shape of the World is about nature, cities, and people and the world we share. It's a production of The Office of Modern Composition, a business that coaches writers and helps people and organizations tell their stories. If you have something you're trying to write, the Office of Modern Composition can help. And even though this time we've recorded in Salt Lake City, the shape of the world is mostly produced in the vital, vigorous, and beautiful metropolis of Chicago and the Prairie State of Illinois. The shape of the world is a completely carbon neutral endeavor thanks to reductions we made and from a carbon offset purchased from Tradewater. If you're interested in eliminating your carbon footprint, go to the website tradewater.us. You can find The Shape of the World on Instagram and Facebook and on our own website, shapeotheworldshow.com. There you'll find out more about Ronnie Pessetto, and you'll also find a drawing of Ronnie made by the artist, Olivia Cohen. This episode of The Shape of the World was produced by Gabby Gladney and mixed by Jeremy Thal. Our theme music was composed by Brad Wood.. And I'd be remiss if I didn't also thank my niece, Libby Brown and her husband, Sam Coldstein. If they hadn't moved to Salt Lake City and held their wedding there, I might not have made it out there. This was the first episode that we've ever done on The Shape of the World that examined the different challenges and opportunities that are faced by cities located in a really arid environment. So thanks, Libby. Thank you, Sam. And thank you for listening.

Friendship, Bushtits, and the Vastness of Everything (Ep. 40)

Sophie Lucido Johnson, cartoonist for The New Yorker and the author of Kin: The Future of Family. Jill Riddell speaks with her colleague, Sophie Lucido Johson, about comedy, community, and the social science of friendship. In her new book, Kin: The Future of Family, Sophie encourages us to reenvision “family” as a much larger network — not just genetic relatives but also neighbors and friends. We are living in an era that has the highest reported levels of loneliness, yet many forces encourage us to occupy more and more physical space and to spread out far apart from one another. In this episode, Sophie describes how taking up less physical space can be a radical act of restitution and care — both for ourselves and for the planet.  "Humor feels really good, and I think it's important for people to do things that feel really good. Otherwise, you mess everything up for everybody else." – Sophie Lucido Johnson, cartoonist for The New Yorker and the author of Kin: The Future of Family Learn More About Sophie Buy and read Sophie’s books. The one most discussed in this Shape episode was Sophie’s most recent one, Kin: The Future of Family [https://www.amazon.com/Kin-Future-Sophie-Lucido-Johnson/dp/1668060655/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QEGQFLMU5TFF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Tk76gPG9Zh8kZwcuKhxGksxBiFaS0Rxke94ZmiN8Fr7GjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.SVXNTASLQmyR1HTDt28OZzm8f8TGkV7_0RPtzhA4fTE&dib_tag=se&keywords=kin+sophie+lucido+johnson&qid=1776621706&sprefix=kin+sophie%2Caps%2C215&sr=8-1]. That link will direct you to Amazon, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention how much more fun and aesthetically pleasing it will be for you to buy Kin at your local bookstore, or to ask them kindly to order a copy for you. (And if you do the latter—you get to have a social interaction! Bonus!) Although those of us who make the Shape podcast all love Kin very much, Sophie’s new book didn’t showcase her funny cartoons and wonderful drawings quite as much as her other two previous books did. So here you go—links to those two:  * Dear Sophie, Love Sophie: A Graphic Memoir [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063040700/?bestFormat=true&k=dear%20sophie&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-v2_k0_1_9_de&crid=269TTLDIQ2DNB&sprefix=dear%20soph] * Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s) [https://www.amazon.com/Many-Love-Memoir-Polyamory-Finding-ebook/dp/B075RSBW82/ref=sr_1_3?crid=DNGI80B2LLJ0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.3KAmJo3u1IVknkuj6UzbnElNAJowvAIfF6q_Xkbc3Ctb7jDjdbwq2-o2iQENR9O9XQBiEPlyvR_fL7_rXbvyOw.1i5_gFxxV9cL-fCJ-VlftQnK9NnunNpDrJOuGDDQ8fA&dib_tag=se&keywords=sophie+lucido+johnson&qid=1776624652&s=digital-text&sprefix=sophie+lucido+johnson%2Cdigital-text%2C156&sr=1-3] And one more! Audible commissioned Sophie to write an Audible Original, an audiobook called Love Without Sex [https://www.audible.com/pd/Love-Without-Sex-Audiobook/B08K3SVRKV?srsltid=AfmBOorqUFNpRpXJKT1Zf7jVve6Yvdh6Hvsc8pUAHUYAASSg7BBXSV21]—that one is available only on their platform and is well worth it. Sophie has an outstanding Instagram and a superb, thoughtful (and yes, funny!) Substack called “You’re Doing a Good Enough Job.” [https://goodenoughjob.substack.com/] You can also see more of her work on her website. [https://www.sophielucidojohnson.com/] Transcript of This Conversation [Shape theme music starts] JILL RIDDELL: Welcome to the debut episode of Season 7. Typically on this show, I interview a person that I’ve never met before, somebody whose work I’ve admired only from afar. And I love doing that. It’s great to meet somebody new and understand better how they view the world we live in, how they think about cities or what they know about some aspect of nature. But today you’re going to be hearing, and honestly, it may even feel like you’re overhearing a conversation between me and a person whom I actually know very, very well. Because the guest for this episode is one of my colleagues and also a friend whom I work with at the Office of Modern Composition. The Office of Modern Composition, or OMC as we call it around here, is the entity that produces this podcast and also the Small Gold Objects Substack. And know OMC is not an invention of our imagination, something made up just for the show’s final credits. OMC truly does exist inside an actual physical space on the 20th floor of this art deco building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And inside this happy little hive, there are three of us writers who use that space to compose our own work. We each have our own individual projects, books, articles, cartoons, essays, podcasts. And we also work as a collective to make that OMC magic happen for other people too. We take on clients that we help with their writing projects and we host things like workshops and art shows and co-writes. So I think today’s conversation is going to be a blast. Welcome to The Shape of the World. I’m Jill Riddell. [Shape theme music fades] SOPHIE LUCIDO JOHNSON: Hi, I’m Sophie Lucido Johnson. I’m the author of Kin: The Future of Family and a cartoonist for the New Yorker Magazine and a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And I live in Chicago and I have chickens and I have bees. Riddell: Hi, Sophie. Welcome to The Shape of the World. Johnson: Thank you, Jill. I am so excited to be here. Riddell: Sophie, I’m really excited to have you on the show. And as you know, Shape of the World is a lot about cities and nature and humans. And I actually see you as a nature writer, even though you are probably more famous for your first book on Polyamory and your current book, which is really about how we humans can live together and create kin and families that are intentional. You write about a whole lot of things, but I’m still sticking by my guns. I still see you as a nature writer. Does that strike you as fair? Johnson: Thank you so much. I have to thank you because it’s very flattering. It feels … It’s my truth. It’s really interesting you say that too, because recently I think I had someone in my newsletter comment that they come to my newsletter for parenting polyamory or … The third one I think was maybe birds. Parenting, polyamory, and birds. Riddell: The Holy Trinity. Johnson: And I was like, oh, that’s actually … Those are not things I write about that often to be truthful. I mean, I have a book about polyamory, but I don’t really write about it very much. Parenting, I don’t feel like I have any right to write about. I’m terrible at it and I don’t know anything about it, except that I’m living it, but I feel like, oh God, I can’t write about it. What I mostly write about is the seasons changing and how that affects our animal bodies. And that feels like the center of everything, all of the work that I do and make. But I strongly identify as being a nature writer. Riddell: Yeah. In addition to your interest in nature, you also have some experience with the other topic of the show, which is cities. You’ve lived in a few different American cities in Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans and Chicago. In addition to liking nature so enthusiastically, do you also have a love of cities or is that just where the jobs happened to be, so that’s where you ended up? Johnson: Oh my gosh. I’m obsessed with cities. I think everyone should live in cities. And I mean, I listen to your show. So I think a lot of people have discussed why people should want to live in cities, but I am a firm evangelist for cities and Chicago’s the best city. Riddell: What do you like about them? Johnson: I love having access to different types of people and different types of spaces. And I love how efficient cities are. I actually think cities are amazing places for nature and humans to interact and to take care of one another. I do think it’s pretty symbiotic in a city. I think cities are less wasteful. I just think everything is good about cities. My intro to my book is about how irritating it is when men tell me they want to live in the woods by themselves. Riddell: Can you say a little bit more about that? Johnson: I mean, there’s this idea, if you want to live in the woods by yourself, that you’re sort of a nature lover or a person who cares about the world. I mean, it is not how we humans as animals live best. We don’t live best by ourselves. And actually, if you’re living by yourself, you have to buy one thing of each thing that there is, and you have to drive great distances to get your food and your provisions. And you’re not actually contributing to anything. You’re just taking up space in a forest, maybe with your dog and feeling proud of yourself. Riddell: I think that the thing too about cities that I like, and I have a feeling you might share this feeling, is also that cities are kooky. Johnson: Oh my gosh. Riddell: And goofy. Johnson: Yes. Riddell: And there’s opportunities to just see crazy things just that happen on a regular basis. So you’re just pumping gas at a regular gas station that you’re always at. And then some guy walks by you who has a giant macaw sitting on his shoulder without any explanation. Johnson: That’s not even that weird. Riddell: It’s like you have entertainment all the time in a city. Johnson: You have access to so many different people and a lot of people are weird, including us. Including us. Monday was such a sunny day here in Chicago, and I got to sit in the busier part of Millennium Park. I sat underneath those trees. And off to my right, it was just there were these people, they must have been 27. I mean, I’m fairly sure I have that exactly right. And they were so in love. They weren’t doing anything but being in love. She just had her head on his shoulder and they had their eyes closed and they were holding each other’s hands and you just knew how they were feeling. It was just such a gift to get to … I mean, I didn’t stare, stare at them, but I just felt so lucky to get to borrow for a second there euphoria. You get to see that in a city. Riddell: Right. If you were alone in the woods, you wouldn’t see that. Of course, you’d see other things too…. Johnson: I mean, sure. Go to the woods for a couple days. I’m not anti-like going to the woods, but I think living in a city is ideal. Riddell: Tell me what you were like as a child. What was your gateway to nature or when did you first start noticing it, paying attention to it and liking it? Johnson: So I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and Portland is a very natury city. And wherever you grow up, you take for granted what is special about the place because it’s all you know. So you don’t realize that not every city has just tons of pine trees everywhere and birds and walking trails that go off the highway, which Portland has all of that. My mom had bird feeders. In Portland, there’s a kind of a bird called a bush tit, which incredible already. A bush tit? That’s incredible. And they move in swarms, that’s really the word. And they are so cute. They’re just like ping pong balls. Oh God, they’re so cute. And as a kid, just to be so close to something so cute, you couldn’t touch it or have it, but you could watch it. It was nice to sit with my mom and look at birds, and that sort of evolved as I got older. Riddell: What about science? Most people associate the study of nature with science. Johnson: Yeah. So I hated this. I hated… I hated science. I really hated it. I thought I was naturally bad at it. Biology was my least favorite class I maybe ever took. I had a teacher who wanted you to learn the scientific names of the birds and the plants. So not even bush tit, like bush tidious birdius or whatever. That’s correct. Don’t look it up. Just trust me. That’s correct. Also, we had to dissect a lot of animals in that class, like a fetal pig. And it was awful to dissect an earthworm because they were still alive and you were supposed to see how their blood moved. And that was just so heartbreaking to be responsible for an animal dying. So I hated biology. I look back at that and see it as a huge missed opportunity because I’m almost 40 and now I’m thinking, “Oh, I think biology might be my favorite subject.” Riddell: A couple days ago, you told me that story about your friend Ben challenging you on that front. Johnson: Yeah, sure. I always thought I only loved art and language and the girl subjects, things that were for girls. And I was amusing to my friend Ben, who is an engineer about how it’s frustrating for me when people tell me they’re bad at art because I don’t think people can be bad at art. And he said, “Oh, I feel the same way about math. I feel similarly when people say they’re bad at math because I don’t think you can be bad at math.” And that shook me. It made me think, oh my God, maybe art and math are really similar. And in both cases, if you’re taught when you’re young that there’s a right and a wrong way to approach them, you lose them. You just lose them because you think you’re bad at them. And so you don’t engage. I mean, it’s so human, isn’t it? To think that there’s a right and a wrong way to engage with information rather than just to have curiosity about it or interest in it or fervor for it. It’s such a shame. Riddell: Now that you’re saying that, I’m having a thought that I haven’t really ever had before. And that is that there are so many different paths to be able to follow when you’re young, that maybe it’s a relief to have some of them closed off for you. Johnson: Yeah, that might be true, but I also am thinking about all the shame that comes from having a door close for you, even if you’re the one closing it. And that’s the thing. If you’re told you can do anything, you try more things. And I don’t know, it’s fun to try things, isn’t it? I’m really loving getting into science as an adult. Riddell: How do you feel about names for things in nature? Does it matter? Do they need names? What might we gain or lose by taking that extra step to learn the names of say different species of birds? Johnson: So, I’m so sorry to do this, but I have to turn that one around on you because my answer is that my friend Jill has a lot of thoughts about names. Could you tell me what you think about names in nature just briefly? Riddell: Yes. I had a sister who was very good at learning the names of things and it was very important to her. I was five years younger and didn’t have that kind of orderly mind. And I knew the names of the common birds around our house for sure. But when I got to work at the Nature Conservancy, I still was carrying around this idea that not knowing the names didn’t interfere with my ability to observe them, appreciate them, think about them, maybe even connect with them. Once I got to the Nature Conservancy, I had to learn everything’s name because I needed to be able to communicate. It was much harder, it was much faster to say the violet wood sorrel than it is to say that small purple one that blooms around May and it’s got leaves that are shaped like this and then hold up my fingers the way the leaves are shaped and expect somebody to know exactly what I was talking about. So I did have a change of heart about names. Johnson: I think that that’s exactly how I feel about them. So I mostly think we over-privilege humans. I think we think humans are way better than we are. We have beliefs about other animals that we couldn’t possibly know. We’ve just decided that other animals do this for that reason, and we can’t read minds. We just don’t know. The one definite advantage I think people have is we have the most complex language system of any animal, and it’s incredible what we can do with language. And so we’ve come up with naming, that’s a human tendency and it allows us to connect with each other. But when you’re starting to learn about nature, there’s this also mystical element that doesn’t need to be quite so regimented and right and wrong. Riddell: Your most recent book, Kin: The Future of Family – how does that relate to the environment or cities? Johnson: Kin is about how we belong to each other and can connect to each other, and that connection is accessible to people, that people can find one another. We have the highest level of loneliness in human history, so much so that it has been named an epidemic and is known to be more unhealthy than smoking 15 cigarettes per day. That is essentially connected to the environment because you take up less space when you’re sharing space with other people. On a very practical level, if you are interconnected with people, you are buying less stuff, so you’re making less waste because, for example, on our block, we have one lawnmower for three houses. That is so simple, but that happens on a large scale. This makes a difference because we’re consuming less. We as humans are destructive and we have done terrible things to this planet. And one of the ways we can start to reverse or repair the damage we’ve done is by taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves through that, taking care of each other. Riddell: Was there something that startled you in the writing of that book that has really changed something for you? I feel like you’re somebody who has practiced this kind of a lifestyle for quite some time, but was there a finding or just an anecdote? Johnson: I read a lot of sociological studies and one of them shows that every seven years, half of your closest friends turn over, which means think of the six friends who are closest to you right now and then know that half of them are probably new to you now and half of them might not be your closest friends in seven years. Riddell: Is that because our situations change, that we make friends from being at a certain job or starting school at the same time as somebody else, or that there are ways in which we make friends and then we evolve and change and we just grow out of them? Or do people ditch us? Johnson: Yes, and. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why friendships change, but I think rather than that latter reason, rather than the people ditch us, it’s not because the relationship is broken or it didn’t matter or you shouldn’t have had it. It’s because it’s normal and natural for relationships to not necessarily last forever, and some do and they’re very valuable to us. But as we grow and change, it’s natural for there to be changes in our closeness circles. You can’t guarantee that you’re going to hold onto that relationship. People have an obsession with forever. “I want to hold onto this thing. I want to keep it. I want to keep it in place. This is how we accumulate so many objects. We want to make things stay the same because it keeps us from thinking about our own mortality and that’s just not the nature of living things. We change. Riddell: Right. It’s that scarcity mindset that I’d better hang onto this one because I might not ever find another one. To me, it points out the value of kind of keeping your eyes open to bring new people into your orbit and into your world, not in an accumulative, grasping way. It’s okay to have some people that pass through for a relatively short period of time and some that stick around for longer, and maybe not that we have total control over this, but kind of giving some consciousness to the idea of having different friendships that are at different stages. Johnson: That relationships change is really a big foundational philosophy to my work. It does feel related to how we move through the natural world as well, because this is a water thing. This is a flow when you’re not trying to hold on to everything and you’re moving with the tides. Once again, you are going to take up less space and contribute more to the species. I think I feel obsessed with contributing to the species or being a member of the species, like wanting the species to survive. Riddell: Being a booster. Johnson: I think the ocean over the droplet sort of… I think about that a lot. [Music interlude starts and fades…] Riddell: All right. Let’s switch it up a little bit. So Sophie, a lot of people think that one of the coolest professions in the world would be to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker. Are they right? Johnson: Yes. Riddell: Do you love it? Johnson: Yes. Riddell: And why? Why do you love jokes and humor and games and comics? Johnson: Well, okay. There’s a very noble answer to this question, which is like, look, I feel like I have to say the noble answer, which is like humor is important because we need to laugh because it’s how we get to deeper truths, blah, blah, blah. There’s a period in which I wanted to be a comedian and in order to justify the amount of time and energy that took, I had to be like, but this is for the greater good because humor is essential for our wellbeing. Riddell: And you were a comedian. You did stand up. Johnson: Yeah, I did it. I did. Yes, I did it. And that was when I was making these sort of proclamations. And people around me too, “Oh, this is important. This matters.” And I don’t know if that’s really true. I mean, is it really that huge of a deal that we are famous comedians? Riddell: And does everything have to matter in that quote unquote matter? Johnson: Yeah. I think humor feels really good and I think it’s important for people to do things that feel really good, quote unquote, important. Moving through the world, you should be doing things that feel good because otherwise you mess everything up for everybody else. Riddell: Being unhappy and… Johnson: Being unhappy. Riddell: … in the wrong place. Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. So that. And then I notice that a sense of humor is more important to me than anything else. And then that’s like, well, what’s that all about? Riddell: In yourself or in others? Johnson: Everyone. And even in a novel, I have no tolerance for something that doesn’t have a sense of humor at all. And it’s hard at an art school where a lot of things just totally lack humor. Riddell: And just FYI, we both teach at the same art school. We teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson: There is a lot of humor there, but there’s also this humorlessness, this like, oh, it’s all so serious. I think a lot of it has to do again with fear of mortality and us being afraid of death because if we take everything very, very seriously, then our lives will really, really matter. And then we can push against the inevitability of dying. And actually, I think my cats have a really good sense of humor and my chickens definitely do. Your cats have a good sense of humor? I just think animals have a good sense of humor. And we know that other animals laugh. And I just think you can hear me thinking a lot about the human animal and what is our animal body doing in space. And I think humor is just, again, we have language. I mean, we should use it for cool stuff like humor. Johnson: I moved to cartooning because I didn’t like staying up late. Riddell: And the standup comic, you’re waiting to get on stage till who knows when. Johnson: Oh my gosh, yeah. Riddell: And then you feel like you need to wait for your friends set and … Johnson: Right. And this moves at a pace that works for me. I can write my jokes and pitch them at 9:30 in the morning and then go back to sleep. Riddell: So are you getting used to hearing from the cartoon editor at the magazine that they’ve accepted one of your cartoons? I mean, it’s happened a lot at this point, but what did it feel like the first time? Johnson: Oh my gosh. I thought I want my enemy to know that this happened. Riddell: Oh, wait, what? Yeah, you’re going to have to unpack that for me. That’s not what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to … There must be some fist pumping involved and maybe a little dancing around the room. Johnson: I mean, that’s my look… Oh my gosh, Jill, that’s just my honest answer. I was just thrilled. I had never experienced joy like that. It was mid-pandemic. I made myself a gin and tonic. I went and sat on my roof with my husband and my roommates and just felt euphoric. I write them with a writing partners, Sammy Skolmoski, who writes for The Onion, and we both write the jokes and pitch in batches of 10. So just the vast majority get rejected. The vast majority get rejected. But we have sold dozens and every time one gets accepted, like last Friday, I keep the email in my inbox for weeks just so I can look at it. The email that you get when your comic is, your cartoon is accepted just says okay, O period K, period. And it’s just this clean joy. Oh, it feels so good. Riddell: Oh, I’d love hearing that. Yeah. That’s so great. Johnson: Yeah. So I don’t know. I do think it is … Okay, well, I’ll say this because this is not about cities or nature, but it feels so good to get something accepted. It also feels really good just to make jokes. And I like writing with a partner because I really like to be sharing how fun it is to make a joke. And I usually can make her laugh or she can make me laugh. And it’s really nice to not have that in isolation. Laughter is about … There’s a theory about humor that I subscribe to, which is that there’s no such thing as a joke. What there is, is a sense of play. So it’s this play theory to humor, which is why you would not laugh at my cartoon if you read it in The New Yorker. You might go, “Huh.” And then you’d show it to a friend, and then when you’re with your friend, you and your friend will laugh at it. Riddell: Oh, yes. Johnson: And so humor is not an isolated experience. It is a communal experience, and it is about feeling safe and trusting of the person who’s delivering the humor. And the New Yorker is a very highbrow way of you can feel safe because you’re being smart and here you are being smart and here’s a little picture for you, but there’s so many ways that this is true. And I’m fascinated with that. A more modern example is if you see a meme and you’ll go, “Oh my God, you’ll send it to three people. ” You don’t think, “Ha ha ha ha.” You don’t like laugh out loud. If you are laughing out loud, you’re probably thinking about sharing it with people. That’s the thought you’re having. And that’s really interesting. Riddell: Right. And that feeling of sharing a laugh, it’s like you’re both thinking about the same thing at the same time and feeling the same way about it. And it’s audible that you’re both feeling the same way about it. Johnson: Right. So when people say humor has to be relatable, it actually needs to connect you to somebody else. It’s important. So it doesn’t have to be relatable. If it’s super absurd and you and a friend connect over absurdity, then it will succeed. Riddell: Sophie, do you have a life philosophy or any basic tenets that you live by? Any mottos or things you repeat to yourself to keep yourself going? Johnson: You are doing a good enough job, but– Riddell: That is a good one. Johnson: Yeah. I think when I was in my 20s, I had a couple of words that guided me. One of them was curiosity. One of them was celebrate, and one of them was laugh. And so I think those do feel still like the words that root me to my existence. I am a big fan of celebrating. I think it’s important and of playing and just having fun. Riddell: If you could change one thing about the human world, you only get to change one. What would it be? Johnson: Okay. Are you ready for this answer? You might have a reaction to this that is negative, but I definitely know my answer. I understand that there are problems with it, but my answer is I would make it so that physical attractiveness was linked to virtue so that anytime you did something that was kind or compassionate, you became more attractive immediately. And if you did something that was selfish just for you, greedy, war-like, you immediately got uglier. You’re walking around either looking really, really hot and people are thinking, “Oh, that’s a nice person,” or looking like a troll and everyone’s thinking, “Oh, that person has committed war crimes.” I understand that there are problems with this, but I don’t think there’s that many. Riddell: If you could change one thing about the natural world, what would that be? Johnson: I mean, just more of it. It feels heartbreaking how much of it is just rapidly disappearing. The number of birds who have gone extinct in my lifetime is, that’s heartbreaking. So quadruple it and maybe what I can’t think of what you would call it if you multiplied it by a bigger number, but multiply it exponentially, just like have us take up about a quarter of the space we’re taking up and just give the rest of it back. Riddell: Is there an aspect about life here on earth that you wish people would pay a little bit more attention to that wasn’t so invisible? Is there something that you see that you feel that many of us are not seeing? Johnson: I don’t really think that I’m special enough to say yes to that, but I think that we are not … How to put this? People don’t have a great sense of how small they are. And I think that grasping one’s own smallness is essential to our survival as a species and also the way that we move through the world. I think we do sort of give ourselves too much import. I think we think we’re too important on an individual level. And I’m not trying to say beat yourself up or hate yourself. I’m just trying to say like, “Oh my God, it’s not that big a deal.” You have this one life and it really is amazing to have a life. And I really think it’s mostly mysterious to have one. I don’t really understand a lot about being alive, but the number of people who are also alive, we cannot conceptualize of it. That gets in the way of us taking care of each other, not understanding how many of us there are and how important we are to each other’s survival. Riddell: Thank you. Johnson: It’s interesting to be in conversation with you because I want to know so much about what you think about all of these topics. I’m so curious about your own perspective. I’m sorry that that’s my reaction, but I keep wanting to be like, Jill, tell me what you think about it. Riddell: You can ask me. Johnson: Well, I really want to know what you think about humor. You are very funny to me. And I think on this podcast you take care of, you make sure people look like heroes and I think that’s beautiful and important. But in my experience with you, you’re very, very funny, just incredibly funny. And so I am curious to know what you think the importance of humor is or if you think about it. Riddell: I think humor is what keeps us alive. Johnson: Oh my God. You do? Riddell: It’s not the only thing. Oxygen’s pretty important. Water. It just makes the day better if there’s something to laugh about. And I came from a family of big laughers. And I loved when we’d get together with my dad’s side of the family because every one of his sisters was a good storyteller. And we would literally call out our favorites from the stories. And they had kind of bits that they would do, that they had these funny things that had happened to them. One of the ones that still makes me laugh as I think about it was that my dad had driven this red Buick to pick up his sister from the telephone company where she worked and was parked outside. And he and his other sister were sitting there in the car waiting for her and waiting for her and waiting for her. And finally, they looked across the street and she was sitting in another red Buick on the other side of the street staring out the window with them. She had gotten into the wrong car. And they just loved that story. I think that part of it was just that confusion. I don’t know what it was in there. Johnson: It’s got a good image in it, doesn’t it? You can see it. Linda Berry says an images are really, really important. And because it’s a red Buick, it’s just a very strong image. Riddell: Yeah. And so they were big on stories like that. I think that there’s also something about humor too, is that sometimes you don’t get something at first and then you get it a little bit later and it makes you laugh a second time. Maybe the first time was a little bit of a false laugh because everybody else was laughing and then suddenly it dawns on you what it was. So there’s that pleasure. It’s also the pleasure of sometimes feeling just that sense of connection that that came out of somebody else’s head. And it wasn’t a thought that you had before, but you really relate to that thought. And it’s like, oh yeah, you see me, I see you. We share that. And it’s fun. Johnson: Yeah, man. I mean, I think as I’m listening to you talk, I’m just thinking we are living through a mass extinction, an era of climate disaster that is totally unstoppable and that’s just crushing. And if we don’t have the humor, how are we surviving? How are we surviving? And I think a lot of it is putting one foot in front of another and figuring out how to move forward. And if you think about the vastness of everything, it’s impossible to do it. But if you are with the people you love and you’re laughing and you’re telling stories to each other and you’re thinking you’re making memories that feel important, then you can. You can keep going and we have to keep going. Hearing your story is really powerful to me because it really shows how something simple like that can keep a family connected. Riddell: I’m also thinking about the solidarity that comes from humor. So we know that the reason that armies marched together was because walking in synchronicity like that with one another was incredibly bonding. It really does make you feel like you’re part of a single unit. And it really, really works for building that kind of necessary, we’re in this together feeling. And singing does that. And so if they sing the same anthem or do the same chant while they’re marching, it builds a sense of solidarity. And I put humor as that third thing, laughing at the same thing at the same time. I mean, that sense sometimes of being in an audience and everybody being surprised by what was just said on stage and getting it at the slightly different intervals with some people laughing immediately and others like taking in a deep breath and then laughing, but everybody laughing together, those things make us feel whole and make us feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Johnson: Yeah. I mean, yes. Oh, I did not know that about soldiers, and that’s really interesting. You and I have tried to walk and sync together around the office once or twice. And it is. It’s pretty compelling. I know that the health benefits of singing in unison are similar to regularly exercising. So… Riddell: It’s…really? Johnson: Yes. I mean, I think that was a piece of research that came up in the book too. Riddell: Well, that next thing we’ll do at Office of Modern Composition, start a choir. Johnson: Oh my God, I’d love to. But you know, look, if it’s about survival, then these things are important. And yeah, I think you’re totally right. Have you ever tried to watch a videotaped improv show? Well, no, you haven’t because that’s not a thing because you can’t watch that because it’s about being in an audience of people who are all going to see this show. It’s only going to happen one time this one way just for them and it doesn’t live outside of that moment. God, that’s so cool that we still have stuff like that. How lucky are we? Riddell: Yeah. Johnson: Yeah. So thank you so much for sharing that. Riddell: Sophie, thank you so much for being on The Shape of the World. Johnson: Thank you so much for having me. I love this podcast for the record. I’m a big fan, so I feel kind of nervous and excited to be on it. Riddell: Also, just for the record, then this is a true fact, is Sophie is the person that came up with the name for our podcast. Johnson: Oh my gosh, I forgot. Yes, that’s true. I feel so lucky to get to name things with you. Riddell: And it’s been too long of a time that I waited to have you on. So thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. [Shape theme music starts] Riddell: The Shape of the World is about nature, cities, and people, and the world we share. It’s a production of The Office of Modern Composition, a business that coaches writers and helps people and organizations tell their stories. The shape of the world is produced in the vital, vigorous, and beautiful metropolis of Chicago and the Prairie State of Illinois. The shape of the world is a completely carbon neutral endeavor thanks to reductions we made and from a carbon offset purchased from Tradewater. If you’re interested in eliminating your carbon footprint, go to the website tradewater.us. You can find Shape of the World on Instagram and Facebook and on our own website, shapeoftheworldshow.com. On the website, you’ll find out more about Sophie’s terrific books and learn more about her. This episode of The Shape of the World was produced by Gabby Gladney and mixed by Jeremy Thal. Our theme music was composed by Brad Wood. Additional Assistance was provided by Emma Stout. Three weeks from now, we’ll have a new episode for you. In the meantime, enjoy your kooky, goofy city. [Shape theme music fades]

The Warm Glow of Helping (Update)

On the occasions when we humans go out of our way to help another person who is in distress, we are acting out our biological inheritance. And if we don’t help someone in trouble, that’s because we’ve had to actually actively suppress what is natural for us to do. That was the finding of the neurologist Peggy Mason. whom we interviewed in Shape of the World’s second season. We’ve re-released that episode because that particular finding of Peggy’s and the others she spoke about remain incredibly relevant and still come across as a bit shocking.  As a child, Peggy Mason was a biology prodigy. By the age of nine, she was assisting the zoologist Dr. Charles Handley in teaching taxidermy at the Smithsonian. Today, as a neurobiologist, Peggy still works with mammals, but now she’s studying whether they experience empathy and act to help one another. Peggy was studying the subject of pain modulation until a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal [https://en-social-sciences.tau.ac.il/profile/inbalbe], asked if she’d be interested in expanding her work to collaborate on a project about empathy. “I went over to see her that same day,” says Peggy, and the upshot was the discovery that, like humans, rats have an aversion to witnessing the distress of others and a strong motivation to help someone else who’s suffering. In addition to leading the research laboratory at the University of Chicago, Peggy is a committed teacher of neurobiology, teaching both formally (at the University) and informally, through her blog and a popular free, online course. “It’s our biological mammalian inheritance to help. It’s not helping that’s the weird thing.” – Dr. Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Want to Learn More, See More, Know More? You’ll love this video from Nova [https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvsn6.sci.bio.rats/do-rats-feel-empathy/#.XNMP5NVKGu4] that shows one rat deliberately setting free another rat that’s trapped. Later, the rat is confronted with the question of which to do first: save some rat it had never even met before, or wolf down the chocolate Peggy offered? Also, here’s the article in Science magazine [https://www.science.org/content/article/rats-forsake-chocolate-save-drowning-companion-rev2]. How can I take a class with Peggy? On Coursera [https://www.coursera.org/learn/neurobiology], take “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Every Day Life,” a free course taught by Peggy. You can also gain more insights from Peggy by subscribing to her blog [https://thebrainissocool.com/], which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter. Her most recent post has the full script of her “Aims of Education [https://thebrainissocool.com/2025/09/28/aims-of-education/]” address, a prestigious speech given to incoming students.

How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Change the World (Update)

In 2020, we sat down with structural geologist Marcia Bjornerud on the Shape of the World for a conversation that reshaped how we think about time. We decided to revisit and re-release that episode. Marcia has continued to research and to write, and she has a new book out that we love; it’s called Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250875891/turningtostone/].   Marcia Bjornerud has published many professional papers (read mainly by expert academics in her field) and wrote two popular books that, in the opinion of this podcast, ought to be read by every inhabitant of our planet: Reading the Rocks (2005) [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/marcia-bjornerud/reading-the-rocks/9781668630167/?lens=basic-books] and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Change the World (2018) [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691181202/timefulness?srsltid=AfmBOoqBTqQeGxrI6_v0VoLVo0suXol8rJOTF4PO9wGbhw_3A2Ug-buK]. The first was an awe-inspiring, sometimes amusing and always relatable way of understanding the Earth itself. The second showed us a way to live on the Earth that respects how remarkable this planet is. Acquiring a better grasp of our planet’s long history is what Marcia describes as “timefulness.” The concept of timefulness pushes back against the narrow perspectives and super-short time frames in which our modern societies generally operate. We each tend to think of our everyday life as singular, without precedent. Yet our lives are built upon a series of processes set in motion billions of years ago–and it’s entirely possible that life on Earth may roll comfortably on for another billion. "Thinking like a geologist is about expanding our time frame, not seeing ourselves as the center of the cosmos, learning patience, understanding what lasts and what doesn’t." – Dr. Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Geosciences and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She conducts structural geology field research in Norway, New Zealand, arctic Canada, Italy and the Lake Superior region. How to Find Out More Read Marcia’s books. Order them from your favorite local bookstore. Her first two books, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018) and Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities (2022) were published through Princeton University Press and can be found here [https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/bjornerud-marcia?srsltid=AfmBOoohWGiPHaTwN9MD64Iz6Sein5fHV32XLPJrN821XudKxmtxltRW]. Her most recent book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks, was published by Flatiron Books in 2024 and can be found here [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250875891/turningtostone/].  You can also find some of Marcia’s talks on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=marcia+bjornerud]. In the podcast, Marcia talks about the Surtsey volcano. This could be the exact same film [http://youtube.com/watch?v=2LYsxUilo-o&feature=youtu.be] Marcia describes having seen in grammar school.