Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, I'm going to get to this episode with journalist and author of Beloved Beasts, Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, Michelle Nighouse.

But first I'm going to talk about a little bit about my journey with science and environmentalism, conservationism, because I don't really talk about that stuff on the show that much,

which is one of the reasons why I wanted Michelle on was to talk about it all.

But let me sort of jump back to when I was an undergraduate. which is one of the reasons why I wanted Michelle on was to talk about it all.

But let me sort of jump back to when I was an undergraduate.

I don't know if you all remembered this period of time, depending on how old you were, but, you know, like, let's say from the late 90s into the early 2000s, and so then when I was in grad school as well, I noticed that people were using at the time science as a sort of blunt instrument to silence people

without really knowing what the fuck they were talking about.

So like this was when there was a lot of concern that postmodern philosophy and critical theory would undermine science by, you know, hammering too hard on objectivity.

Or that creationism would overwhelm the battle for evolution to be taught in schools, especially in the U.S.

And I think that, you know, though there was some striving for truth back then and some

healing of wounds inflected by religious fundamentalism and defending against new wounds

from the same, people were just throwing around scientific

jargon constantly, like as a way to reduce the gift of philosophy, as a way to put out books

that, or they would buy books, but if they're writers, they would put out these books and get

these big book deals about like how love is only chemicals and why, you know, we need scientists to be key political figures and that sort of stuff.

And really to just put science on a kind of cultural pedestal without really getting it.

I know you might be saying, well, that's how it is now,

but let me just say, the fever pitch of that time

where science was trying to establish some sort of weird cultural dominance,

it was pretty intense.

And I think one of the intensities was actually an error on the part of people who were throwing the jargon around and not understanding it or the people who were curating the publication of shitty mechanistic books or whatever.

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