It’s Only Post-Natural
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2016
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you take a trip to your local natural history museum, you’ll likely discover the story of our planet told through vast collections of species, vibrant dioramas and exhibits on the evolution of life on earth. But historically, these institutions have done a poor job of showing where humans have influenced “the natural world.” Some museums include the story of human impact on the environment — endangered and extinct species on display remind us of the dangers of hunting and deforestation — but humans have played an even more direct and intentional role in the evolution of certain organisms. And there’s a quirky museum in Pittsburgh that is finally telling that story.
Richard Pell is the director of the Center for PostNatural History. He defines post-natural organisms as ones that have been altered by people intentionally and heritably. “Heritably meaning we’ve altered its evolutionary path in some fashion. It affects its offspring, it’s not just a dog with a weird haircut. It’s we’ve bred dogs that have weird hair,” he said.
By including and preserving these often neglected species, the Center for PostNatural History interrogates the question of where what’s truly natural ends and what is influenced by humans begins.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | from PRX. |
| 0:06.8 | Studio 360. |
| 0:10.7 | Hi, it's Kurt, and this is one of our regular podcast shorts on Studio 360. |
| 0:16.7 | So, I don't know, Studio 90, Studio 45. |
| 0:20.3 | Anyhow, one of the great places to take people when they visit New York City is the American Museum of Natural History. |
| 0:28.3 | And that was true even before it became famous in those Ben Stiller movies. |
| 0:34.1 | It's easy to get lost in its vast halls, which are lined with life-sized dioramas of Siberian tigers prowling and Alaskan moose battling, and of course that giant whale suspended in midair. |
| 0:53.1 | In the hall of biodiversity, you can see endangered species and a skeleton |
| 0:57.5 | of a dodo bird. But one thing the museum doesn't really explore is how humans have intentionally |
| 1:06.1 | altered the evolution of certain species, like breeding chickens to lay more perfect eggs or all the |
| 1:14.9 | ways we've engineered dogs to make them hunt better or be cuter or be more best-friendly. |
| 1:21.6 | It is, after all, the Museum of Natural History, not the Museum of Unnatural History, which raises |
| 1:27.3 | the question of |
| 1:28.4 | where does what we think of as the natural world end? That's a question that a tiny |
| 1:34.5 | museum in Pittsburgh has been asking. Irene Jorov is a reporter for a radio show called |
| 1:40.1 | The Pulse out of W. HYY in Philadelphia. She visited the museum recently and sent us this postcard. |
| 1:47.4 | In a business district east of Pittsburgh's downtown, between a pizza shop and a Vietnamese |
| 1:51.8 | restaurant is an easy-to-miss storefront. |
| 1:54.5 | Welcome to the Center for Post-Natural History. |
| 1:56.9 | Richard Powell is the curator of the small museum. |
| 1:59.9 | He's 40 but looks younger, informal in a pair of shorts, |
| 2:03.0 | perpetually smiling sneakily. His museum is a collection of specimens, everything from seeds to mammals, |
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