Eye-To-Eye Animal Encounters

Wonder Cabinet

Wonder Cabinet Productions

Society & Culture, Wonder, Philosophy, Ttbook, Knowledge, Interview

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

Original Air Date: February 08, 2020

Guests:

Gavin Van Horn — Jenny Kendler — Ivan Schwab — Jane Goodall — Alan Lightman

Interviews In This Hour:

In The Eye Of The Osprey: A Physicist's Wild Epiphany — 100 Bird Eyes Are Watching You — The Look That Changed Primatology — Watching the Fierce Green Fire Die: Animal Gazes That Shaped Conservation Movements — The 600 Million Year History Of The Eye — 'We Are The Feast' — A Feminist Philosopher's Life-Changing Encounter With A Crocodile — How Do You Practice Kinship? A Brief Meditation — Sharing Eye-To-Eye Epiphanies With The Animal World

Further Reading:

"The Disruptive Eye" by Gavin Van Horn—"6 a.m. on LaSalle Street" by Katherine Cummings—"Salmon Speak ~ Why Not Earth?" by Bron Taylor—"The Eyes of an Owl" by Greg Ripley—"From Bestiary" by Elise Paschen

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Anne's Train Champs, and today's to the best of our knowledge is all about the eyes,
0:12.4	about a kind of visual encounter that for some people is life-changing.
0:18.5	I'm talking about a cross-species gaze, the experience of looking directly into
0:23.5	the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. This happens more often than
0:29.4	you'd think, and it can be so profound. There's a name for it, an eye-to-eye epiphany.
0:36.0	What is it? How does it change people?
0:38.3	And what can it teach us?
0:40.3	Keep listening.
0:56.1	It's to the best of our knowledge. It's to the best of our knowledge.
1:02.7	Can an eye-to-eye encounter with an animal change your life?
1:12.2	My wife is a painter, and every summer we spend on a little island in Maine,
1:16.2	and there's an Osprey's nest that's a couple hundred feet from the house.
1:22.6	This is Alan Lightman. He's a physicist at MIT and a novelist.
1:32.3	Every year, for 15 years or so, the Ospreys would conduct their family life there. And one summer I had been watching the babies as they grew from the beginning of June to mid-August.
1:39.3	We sort of watched each other all summer along, and then middle of August the baby Ospreys took
1:46.3	their first flight, the first time they had left the nest all summer.
1:54.6	I was washing them from the second floor of our house, which has a circular deck.
2:00.2	They did one loop around the island,
2:02.6	and then they headed straight for me
2:05.6	as I stood on this circular deck.
2:08.6	These were young adult Ospre, so they were pretty big,
2:11.6	and an Osprey has very powerful talents.
	...

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