Entwined Lives: Bridget Lyons on the Intersection of Species, with Carl Safina on Alfie and Me

Interview Transcript

Summary

Bridget Lyons joins Writer’s Voice to talk about her acclaimed book Entwined: Dispatches from the Intersection of Species, a collection of essays that asks what it would mean to extend our sense of community beyond humans to “the 8.7 million other species who share our planet.” Lyons describes how wonder and attention — to a spider in a kitchen, kelp in the surf, a whale offshore, or a sea star clinging to a rock — can lead to empathy, humility, and a deeper understanding of value. Through stories of kelp forests, sea stars, whales, and fireweed, she reflects on how humans might learn to see other beings not in terms of usefulness, but as fellow participants in a living, evolving world, and how shifting that perspective could change the moral choices we make in the face of extinction and ecological crisis.

The episode also features an excerpt from Francesca’s 2023 conversation with ecologist and author Carl Safina about his book Alfie and Me, the remarkable story of a baby screech owl he helped raise during the COVID lockdowns. Watching Alfie grow, find a mate, and raise her own young led Safina to rethink what animals know — and what humans merely believe. He reflects on how deeply attentive, practical, and perceptive animals are, and asks why humans so often miss the extraordinary lives unfolding all around us. Together, Lyons and Safina offer a powerful invitation to step out of human exceptionalism and into a more attentive, curious, and connected way of being on Earth.

Interview with Bridget Lyons

Francesca: Bridget Lyons, welcome to Writer’s Voice.

Bridget Lyons: Thank you very much. I’m so excited to be here with you.

Francesca: This book is really about inviting the reader to extend their sense of community beyond humans, to include the, quote, 8.7 million other species who share our planet. You write that when you engage with other living things, you inevitably find yourself comparing your life to theirs.

Some people dismiss this as anthropomorphism, but you celebrate it as the seed of connection. How do you see the act of imaginative empathy, of finding the human in the non-human, not as projection, but as a bridge toward true understanding?

Bridget Lyons: Yeah, great question. I think that all of this can start with wonder and amazement. So my part of the reason I wrote this book was to encourage people, inspire people to just go outside and look around and see who else is living around you.

And that might be a tree in your yard. That might be a spider in your kitchen. That might be an ibex in France, a million miles away. Doesn’t matter. There are so many creatures that inspire wonder and amazement. And then as you think about them, connect with them, observe them, learn about them, you become more connected to them.

And as you become more connected to them, you feel more empathy for their life situation and what’s going on with them. And I feel like that piece is what’s missing so much in our narrative about how we live on the planet as humans, that we share it with so many other beings. And so my take on it is that recreating this connection that’s been there all along, that Indigenous cultures have celebrated for a really long time, but Western European cultures have not, rekindling that relationship, nourishing that relationship in a way that can help us to remember that we are entwined and that we are part of a network and that we have kindred brothers and sisters of non-human varieties all around us all of the time. And so that’s kind of the gist of the bottom line of a lot of the essays in my book. And some people might call that anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphism is typically defined as ascribing human emotions or human traits to other creatures. And I think that can be done wantonly, like having a fox see you while you’re out running, for example, and saying like, oh, I can tell he likes me. He thinks I’m cute. He’s coming over because he knows this, that, and the other thing. And that may be true. And putting that much of a narrative onto another creature might be a lot.

However, saying that here’s this fox, this fox seems to be curious. This fox seems to be wary. This fox is smelling. I have a feeling they’re trying to get in touch with what’s around them, who’s around them, what’s going on. And they’re pausing. And I think there’s a difference between giving them a human style narrative and trying to get into their senses, trying to get into their reality, which, of course, we can never fully do because every creature has a different set of senses, as Ed Yong explains so well in An Immense World, his fabulous book.

Every creature has different senses. And those different senses are not going to enable us to be in their reality. So we can do our best.

I think just the process of trying is really, really helpful.

Francesca: And you connect this in one of your essays, Entangled, and this is a collection of essays in Entwined. You connect it to the idea of how do you decide what is valuable, what is worth. So I wonder if you could extend that.

It is exploring the life of kelp, actually, that sparks this question in you. So how did that exploring the life of kelp shape your understanding of value, both your own value and that of other living things, in a world in which we tend to think of value in purely economic terms or productivity, or what’s useful to us?

Bridget Lyons: In that essay, I situate myself, the narrator, out in a surf break where I spend a lot of time in Santa Cruz. I’m a surfer. And so I’m floating around in beds of kelp somewhat frequently.

And in that bed of kelp, start thinking about kelp’s relationship with the other organisms around it. And there are plenty of people who are like, oh, the kelp is annoying. It’s getting in my way.

I get up on a wave and then the kelp wraps around my surfboard fin and, oh, it stopped me. And that is certainly true. And there’s a whole other side of kelp, of course, that has nothing to do with how it affects us either as surfers or all the many things that we can do with kelp.

And folks might know that kelp is a source of food for many cultures. It is the base product of all sorts of things from toothpaste to paint additives. We use it in a number of ways.

And it’s really useful to other creatures in its environment, both as a habitat. Fish, otters, all sort of protozoans, nudibranchs, all sorts of sea creatures live within the kelp beds. And the kelp beds provide them with both protection and nourishment.

So useful in a myriad of ways. And I personally get an immense amount of pleasure walking down the beach, just looking at the stipes, what looks like leaves, but they’re called stipes of giant kelp. They’re beautiful, beautiful.

They have an incredible texture on them. They’re translucent. They’re that sort of brownish green color that a lot of us are probably familiar with.

And that texture on them has a pattern, but it’s not always repeated in the same way. So it’s a patternless pattern, you know, and I just think they’re beautiful. And I have spent a lot of time just contemplating, you know, forget their use to the entire biodiversity interface, forget their use for humans, forget their annoyance to surfers, etc.

And just look at them. They’re beautiful. And can I, as a person, learn to value this creature for just being who it is, rather than for how it serves me, how it bothers me, etc.

And then in the essay that you’re talking about, which is called Tangle, and it’s the first essay in the book, what I do is then extrapolate that thought process to myself, because I’ve, I’m one of those humans who has spent a lot of time wondering about, you know, am I useful enough to the planet? A huge amount of resources went into creating this body and nourishing it and getting it to this age, you know, between food and my parental resources and, you know, heat, gas, a million things. Am I useful?

Am I valuable? And, and in the process of trying to connect with kelp and, and think about kelp’s role in the world and its, and its ability to just be beautiful and be what it, who it is. Can I do that for myself?

Can I accept myself as being, you know, intertwined with all of these other creatures and useful in that way, but also just valuable for being me, for being a product of the creative process of biological evolution. And I don’t think that’s an easy project, but that’s, you know, one of the endeavors that I’m in this game for. And, and part of the reason I opened the book with that essay is because I like the idea of just putting that out there to readers, like, okay, how do you measure value?

What do you think value is on this planetary level? And are you willing to see your value, but also then see the value of literally every living thing around you and take them all in and appreciate them all?

Francesca: This is a wonderful question to ask oneself and the world. And I think it’s also connected to another question that you ask, and that is, or not so much a question, but an observation, which is that our understanding is limited, and yet we seem to think it’s omnipotent. We seem to think we know everything we need to know.

I mean, recently I’ve been reading about geoengineering as an option if we fail to control our, our carbon emissions in time to avert total disaster. And I think we’re, you know, rushing headlong toward that. And yet we really don’t understand how we are entangled with everything else, how we are entwined with everything else.

How can we possibly repair the world if we do not understand enough about it?

Bridget Lyons: I think that that human hubris is definitely one of our greatest limitations and challenges. And, you know, the Greeks identified that a long time ago and plenty of cultures long before then, way much more ancient mythology has acknowledged the fact that human hubris can be problematic. And I think that it really does manifest itself in examples like you just gave that, okay, we can, we can geoengineer our way out of this problem.

We will come up with a technology, whether it’s like cloud seeding or the myriad things that, that get tossed around these days that will fix the climate solution problem. And that may be, and there’s also a really high likelihood, as you point out, that there will be downstream effects of that, that we didn’t see because we don’t fully understand the degree to which we’re woven into this tapestry. I think a great example of this is, you know, Susan Simard’s work that her book, Finding the Mother Tree, and talking about mycelial networks is really recent work.

And we’ve been, you know, we’ve been altering forests for a really long time as a species. And, and while indigenous cultures had a different understanding of this, certainly European cultures have thought that like, you cut down the trees, you plant new trees, what’s the big deal? And Susan Simard’s work and a lot of other people who work on, on, on fungal communities and fungal networks have now shown us that it’s way more complicated than that because so many, most trees are entwined with one or many fungi that they cohabitate with, that they work with in order to spread nutrients around, in order to metabolize the soil, the, the, the minerals they need in the soil, et cetera. And to me, that’s a fabulous example of, wow, we only really found out about this, hmm, 10, 20 years ago. What are the, what about the, all the other things we haven’t found out about yet, which we know are, are significant.

And one of the essays in the book that is on this topic is, I wrote about in an essay called Losing Refuge, I wrote about the national wildlife, or excuse me, the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I used to live outside of Jackson for quite a long time. And the history of the elk refuge is fraught with these sorts of issues.

Like we have this fabulous intention. Let’s set aside a chunk of land for these creatures that are starving because we’ve displaced them by cattle ranching. Okay. Fair enough. We’ll set aside a big chunk of land and we’ll put the elk on them on that chunk of land. And then, oh, we’ll feed the elk because there’s not that much feed for elk in the lowlands of the Jackson Hole area in the winter.

So we’ll provide supplemental feeding. Great. Turns out, you know, 40 years down the line, 80 years down the line, those elk are starting to get a variety of diseases like brucellosis and like chronic wasting disease in feed grounds all over the West because they’ve, the elk have been concentrated in these really tight spaces.

So now we’re faced with this situation of like, oof, do we, do we continue to feed them and keep them there? Because that way we’re helping them get nourishment and we’re giving them a safe place to live, but we’re, we might be killing them by putting them in such tight quarters that these viruses, these bacterial pathogens are spreading too quickly and too vehemently through their populations. Or do we spread them back out, but then they’re probably not going to make it because there’s not enough habitat for them.

Like we couldn’t possibly have seen that coming. I mean, some people did actually, but, but it’s hard for us to see all the variables in play like, oh, this is going to entice a virus into the picture. And, and there are just so many cases of this over time in, in human’s history of interacting with our environment that we should know by now that there are other forces more complex in play than we know about.

And we learn more about them every day, but there’s still so much that we don’t know. So I really think that the bottom line to, to respond to your question is we all need a hefty, hefty dose of humility. And I would argue that that humility comes from the same place that I think the wonder comes from, which is step outside your door, look at all the creatures around you, admire them for their amazing beauty and creativity, and give them a heck of a lot of credit for having survived on this planet for far longer than we have.

And with that wonder and humility, then go back and look at our human actions through that lens.

Francesca: Yes, I, I think that is the key to it. And it brings me back to the notion of anthropomorphism, which, which seems to me a kind of way of saying we are separate from animals, pretending respect for their difference, but actually putting up barriers to understanding that despite that difference, we are connected to them.

Bridget Lyons: Oh, absolutely. And I think, you know, I’m going to cite another writer. I feel very entwined with other writers in the environmental community. So I cite their work a lot. And in this case, Carl Safina is a fantastic voice on this subject, particularly in his most recent book, Alfie and Me, he, he takes on this question of, of how did we end up with this separate mindset? And how did we, how did we arrive at this place of not just we’re on, either we’re on top of the hierarchy, or we’re just not even in the same hierarchy, we get our own hierarchy apart from everyone else.

And again, that’s not always been the case through all human societies through all time. It’s absolutely a Western European construct. And he traces where that came from.

And he, as a scientist talks in particular about the fact that this don’t anthropomorphize no matter what, come hell or high water, that that’s been drilled into, into many generations of scientific students of students of science. And his take on it is the drilling in of that mindset has created this very separate attitude, just like you, you mentioned a moment ago. And that wall isn’t helping us.

In fact, it might be the source of, of the crises that we’re in. And we’ve got to take that wall down. And we’ve got to get off the top of the pyramid.

And we’ve got to, you know, step across whatever line we’ve drawn between us and, you know, quote, unquote, us and them, and recognize that there’s a much more entwined nature that there’s a much more flowy, entangled web of living beings than we have wanted to believe for quite some time in the in the Western European tradition.

Francesca: Yes. And I know Carl Safina, he, he actually has a summer home just a couple of miles from me. And I’ve spoken to him quite a bit over the years.

One of the things I love is the way he actually negotiates this idea of how we are connected to these animals and how animals have things that we think of as exclusively human, like culture, or like intelligence or appreciation of beauty, without putting the human dominance on that. And so, you know, I think he really does give a path forward to, and I think the key element is respect and humility. I think as you have, I think you’ve used that word humility here in this conversation already.

Bridget Lyons: Yeah, respect and humility. And I would curiosity too, you know, I think that if you become curious about the fact that bumblebees see a completely different set of wavelengths of light than we do, for example, then it occurs to you that they’re looking through different eyes than we are and the whole world is going to look different. Or you consider that sharks and rays have a, have a sense of electricity.

They literally can sense the electrical impulses being given off by other living things. We don’t have that. They do.

What is it like to move through the world as a shark or a ray and electrically sense every other creature around you? We have no idea. One of my essays in the book is about octopuses.

Everyone loves octopuses these days, including me. And there’s an example of a creature that we know is incredibly intelligent, but in a very different way than we are intelligent. And we’re trying to get a grasp on that.

And we’re learning more and more about them every day. And we’re probably never going to have much of a clue of what it’s like to be in an octopus’s dispersed neural network body. But getting curious about it creates more respect.

The more you learn, or the more you learn that you don’t know, or the more that you marvel at something that another creature is doing, the more I think you’re creating a bridge and, or knocking down this wall that, that we’ve put up. So yes, I would say that I like those terms you came up with, and I would add curiosity on top of them.

Francesca: If you’ve just joined Writer’s Voice, we’re talking with Bridget Lyons about her book, Entwined. Another essay that I actually really loved because it was, it was short, but very surprising. You were leading a sea kayaking tour in Baja, this is the essay Beneath the Surface, for an outdoor school.

And it moves from anticipating a solitary death to witnessing an unexpected birth. And the whale’s breath is a kind of leitmotif for you. Tell us what was going on.

Bridget Lyons: Yeah, I was working for an outdoor school in Baja, California. The school I worked for, for a really long time leading 30-day wilderness expeditions. And this particular course, we were getting toward the end of the course, sea kayaking along the Sea of Cortez there.

And we came to a camp where we ended up having to camp for a number of days. And just offshore, we heard a humpback whale breathing and spouting. And we were initially excited until over the course of a few days, that breathing got more and more labored, much slower.

And we were kind of stuck on that beach because of winds, etc. And it was sort of a depressing end of the course because we just weren’t going anywhere. And then of course, so our attitude was like, great, we’re not going anywhere.

And now we’re going to have a whale die right offshore. This is going to be terrible. And just before we were wrapping up the course and heading to the beach where the school’s trucks were going to come and pick us up, that morning, I woke up and went down to the water and was fully expecting to see a dead whale floating or coming our way or something.

And then I heard the breath and then I looked out. And in fact, there were two spouts. So what we had been experiencing was not a dying whale.

It was a pregnant whale. And that’s just such a classic example of what you and I were talking about earlier, which is how much we don’t know. That here we are sitting here for three days, absolutely certain we’re witnessing a dying whale.

And in fact, we’re witnessing a whale in the process of giving birth. And like, what a big miss. What a big, massive misunderstanding.

And humpback whales, there’s a lot of things we know about them, but there’s a lot of things we don’t. The male humpback whales sing. We don’t exactly know why.

We’ve done a lot of studies about how the leitmotifs of their songs, riffs, if you will, get encoded and moved around through populations as they migrate. Fabulous stuff. But I think last time I checked, we still haven’t seen a humpback whale give birth.

So we don’t quite know what that process looks like. Clearly, I didn’t even know that it was a possibility when I thought a whale was dying. So again, we seem to be circling around this theme of how much we don’t know that we don’t know.

And having to keep that in mind and be prepared to be flummoxed, be prepared to be surprised, be prepared to be put in our place by our lack of understanding of other creatures’ lifestyles and habits.

Francesca: Another example of a very strange creature, one that I used to see around here, I live on the coast on Long Island, I saw many times and have not seen now in years, is a sea star. Did I see sea star or did I see starfish? Are they the same or not?

Bridget Lyons: They are the same. We are generally trying to move away from the term starfish because they are most decidedly not fish. They are echinoderms, totally different classification in the Linnean tradition.

So most folks have been trying to gently prod us toward the term sea star.

Francesca: Okay, that makes sense. They’re profoundly not like us. I don’t think anybody could really anthropomorphize a sea star.

And yet their biology offers lessons you say that humans desperately need. And you center this idea around their superpower, which is, I don’t know how to pronounce it, autonomy?

Bridget Lyons: Yeah, autonomy. Sounds like autonomy, oddly enough, but with one letter changed.

Francesca: And that’s the ability to sever a body part and then regenerate it. What can we learn from that?

Bridget Lyons: I mean, I think the starting place of learning there is, again, I’m going to start with wonder and amazement. That’s just cool. Who would think that nature would come up with this idea that, okay, things are getting too dangerous out here on arm number two.

Someone’s coming after me. It’s either ditch the limb or lose my life. Okay, I’m going to ditch the limb.

And there’s a whole biological process, a chemical, it’s literally a chemical process through which the sea star’s body through its catch connective tissue is able to drop that limb and move on. And I just love that concept for its creativity for starters. And also for me, it doesn’t feel hard to then want to look at that and apply it to myself and be like, wow, there are some parts of me I would like to drop like that, or some parts of my past or my narrative that I would like to drop in that fashion.

And can I do that? Or if I do that, am I endangering myself too much? Is my past, is my narrative, are these parts of myself that I don’t love?

Are they so much a part of me that I wouldn’t want to drop them? And that would be dangerous. And again, I think sea stars sense reality is very, very different from ours.

We know this for certain. Echinoderms are pretty far from us when we look at the relationships genetically that we have with other creatures. And yet I can feel wonder and amazement for this incredible superpower.

And I can use it to appreciate the sea star and what it can do and what its life might be like. And I think it’s perfectly legitimate for me to reflect on how, if I had these qualities that a sea star has, how might that help me to be a better person? How might that help me to appreciate myself more?

How might that help me to walk in the world in a way that is more rooted in kindness, wonder, et cetera, rather than in competitiveness or beating myself up or trying to be perfect or all the things that we humans can get wrapped up in doing. So yeah. And again, back to anthropomorphism, am I anthropomorphizing by looking at the quality of another creature and applying it to myself?

Maybe. But what harm is that doing? I don’t think it’s doing any harm.

I think actually it’s doing good. I think that it’s creating, for me, more of a connection with the sea star, which in turn is creating more empathy with the sea star. Sea stars, one sea star species in specific here on the West Coast is struggling hugely, the sunflower sea star, thanks to a horrible wasting disease that they underwent a number of years back, like six or seven years ago now.

And my empathy for sea stars encourages me to follow the news about sea star wasting disease and about our efforts to regenerate the sunflower sea star population because I feel a little bit of connection with them and because I feel like they’re fascinating and that they have this incredible superpower that I’m envious of. So I’m tracking their efforts and doing what I can to support those efforts. So I’m not seeing any harm there.

I’m only seeing good.

Francesca: And actually, I think it’s the opposite of anthropomorphism that you’re describing because you’re not ascribing human qualities to the sea star, but you’re ascribing sea star qualities to yourself.

Bridget Lyons: Exactly, exactly. And I’m not sure that we have a term for that, but it’s what I do in all of the essays of the book because it’s like, meet a creature, get to know the creature, and then in some fashion or another, I wonder about, what about this creature’s qualities could I stand to adopt in order to continue my journey as a human and make it as growth-oriented as possible? So yeah, it’s some opposite of anthropomorphism type process that we have yet to come up with a name for, which I suppose I should work on.

Francesca: Zoomorphism.

Bridget Lyons: Right, right.

Francesca: Now, very much underlying your book, of course, is the whole crisis of extinction that we’re facing. We’re in the midst of the sixth extinction, mass extinction, and I could really relate to how you oscillate between that sense of resignation in the cosmic, you know, well, life will regenerate on Earth even if it takes 10,000 years or even 10 million years, depending on how badly we do, versus real grief at the loss of all these wonderful, wondrous creatures when it didn’t have to be. It’s all because of us.

So it’s very much about collapse and renewal. How do we heal individually? How do we heal collectively?

What do all these parallel stories, this entwinement in this book, entwined of your personal and ecological stories, what have they taught you about the nature of healing and how systems find equilibrium again?

Bridget Lyons: I think that healing from what we are currently going through needs to happen as a collective process. I think there’s an individual level as well, for sure. And I think it needs to be collective.

I think, again, the book being called Entwined, the purpose of each essay being to show how we’re all connected, not just within our species, but between our species and, you know, the 8.7 million other ones that we coexist with, that any kind of healing we do also needs to be collective. And the final essay in the book is about fireweed, which is a fantastic species of plant, beautiful as well, that has these lovely magenta flowers and grows a lot in alpine environments. And I experienced a lot of it when I lived in the Tetons outside of Jackson Hole, and it grows all over the mountains there, especially in August.

And it particularly likes to move in after fires. And it comes into areas where the soil has been denuded by high temperature fires. And oftentimes it’s the only species that can really tolerate the poor conditions of the soil.

And so it takes over and produces a crazy amount of seeds, like 80,000 seeds per plant. They’re these wispy wool looking seeds. They’re very beautiful too.

And because of this high seed production and the way they can tolerate the poor soil, they can just completely blanket a denuded hillside and turn it from a denuded hillside into this beautiful fireweed hillside, which over time then helps the soil to regenerate and then invites other species in. And then those other species invite other species in. And before you know it, you have an increasingly complex forest once again.

And you end up, ironically, with a hillside that is no longer hospitable for those fireweed. And the fireweed is done there. It moves on to somewhere else, literally.

And so I call it, it’s like the healing team. It’s the regeneration team. And they do their job and then they keep moving on.

And one of the things that I’m really hoping to accomplish through writing and talking about this book is encouraging people to be on that team as well and to, yes, heal ourselves, but also find ways that we can coexist with other species so that we see this as a team process and one that exists collaboratively and it exists horizontally, not in a dominant way. And again, I’m going to go back to your example of geoengineering and things like that. When we look at technological examples of how we might solve, quote, unquote, solve climate change, can we adopt a mindset that is less human dominant and more one of how does this shift the relationships on the planet?

And really underlying my whole book is there are so many fantastic books out on the market for years now about concrete things we each can do to mitigate the effects of our lifestyles on climate change on the planet. And so I don’t feel the need to write another one of those because there’ve been a lot of them written. And so what I’m trying to write is material that works at a deeper, almost subconscious level of can we shift the way we think about how we are situated on the planet, how we are related to all the other species on the planet.

And if we can shift that perspective on who we are and how we interact with everyone around us, then I think making all the other decisions that we need to make to treat all these other species better and to have a more nourishing future collectively, I think that becomes easier. Because I think rather than making decisions that feel like depriving us, like, oh boy, I would like to have my Starbucks coffee out of a paper cup this morning, but I forgot my, and it sure would be easier. But oh, I’m going to not go to Starbucks because I forgot my mug.

Tiny example, but every, or I don’t want to buy this thing in clamshell because I don’t want to buy a clamshell, but boy, I do really want that salad. It can often feel like so many of the decisions that we should make, whether it’s something like not buying a clamshell or not deep sea mining for, for minerals we think we need for various technological gadgets. Those feel like, they feel like depriving ourselves of something we are, you know, are due or something that we really want or something that would be convenient.

And I don’t think that’s the greatest space to operate from. It is hard as a human to consistently deprive yourself of stuff and not that many people want to do it. However, it’s not that hard as a human to operate from love.

It’s not that hard as a human to operate from connection. It’s not that hard for a human to operate from empathetic longing to be helpful. And so I feel like if, I feel like my role in the healing brigade here is to try to write about and talk about interactions that perhaps can help people assume a different perspective.

And that’s one of like, Hey, these are my, these are my horizontal brothers and sisters. These are my, I am entwined with all these creatures. We are all in this thing together.

No, I don’t think we should be deep sea mining because what about all those creatures who are going to be affected? Some of whom we haven’t even discovered and named yet, let alone the, all the ones we already do know that are down there. Like, no, that just feels wrong.

I’m going to protect these beings that I love. I feel like that is a far easier place to make complex moral decisions from than a place of, Oh, I need to deprive myself of this thing because the planet is suffering. Fine.

Okay. If that makes sense. And so I’m in the game for this like perspective shift, if you will.

Francesca: Absolutely. And I think at heart, it is really a moral question as well as an existential one. And I think the more we understand our relationship, as you say, the intersection of species, we understand our relationship to that, the more human we actually become.

Bridget Lyons: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we humans evolved alongside many, many, many other species. We didn’t evolve in a vacuum and get dropped off here in an alien spaceship.

All of this evolution has happened in a very, very complex way over a very, very long time. So it makes sense for us to appreciate that complexity, appreciating that complexity, the complexity through which we evolved absolutely makes us more of who we are because we’ve, we’ve been part of that complexity since before we were a we, since before we had branched off into our own little Homo sapiens section of the genetic tree. So yes, I absolutely agree that it’s been encoded in us from day one that we are a complex creature that’s very much made up of all the creatures around us.

And I think the more we can adopt that mindset here in 2025 toward how we interact with the landscapes around us and the other living things around us, the more likely we are to nourish the planet and just feel good about who we are as a species on it.

Francesca: Well, I loved your book, this wonderful collection of essays, Entwined Dispatches from the Intersection of Species. Bridgette Lyons, it’s just been a delight to talk with you about it. Thank you.

Bridget Lyons: Thank you. Thanks so much for reading and for giving me the opportunity to share and for asking great questions. I really appreciate it.

Bridget Lyons is a writer, editor, teacher, and creative consultant. Go to Writer’s Voice.net to find out more about her work.

Excerpt from Archive Interview with Carl Safina

Intro (Francesca):

Not long before the COVID-19 epidemic locked our nation down, ecologist and author Carl Safina and his wife Patricia were handed a tiny raggedy ball of fluff by a wildlife rescuer. It turned out to be a baby owl on the brink of death the rescuer had found lying on the ground. Safina and Patricia raised the chick they named Alfie.

Through the process, Safina learned more than he ever imagined, not only about Alfie the owl, but also about how the world actually works and how people have become so blind to that. We’ve talked with Safina about his recent books Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild, which is about animal cultures. They show the intelligence and conscious agency that are everywhere in the animal kingdom.

His book, Alfie and Me, goes further by exploring on the one hand, his unfolding relationship with one particular owl and on the other, how we humans adopted the truly bizarre belief that we’re unconnected to the rest of life on the planet. From its origins in Plato’s philosophy to the French Enlightenment to modern science, it’s a belief that will doom us sooner or later to extinction.

Carl Safina, welcome back to Writer’s Voice.

Carl Safina:

Thank you. It’s really nice to be with you again.

Francesca:

You know, I love all your books, but I actually love this one the best.

I think it’s a real development, a trajectory that I’ve noticed in you over time, especially the last several books where you have kept on kind of approaching and talking about that space about animals being other beings like humans. You know, humans and the other animals instead of humans and animals.

But this goes furthest of all to really talk about our place in the world and the place of animals in our world. It’s very much about a personal relationship that you had with an owl, and it’s about how humans relate or don’t relate with the other sentient animals with whom we share our world. The title and the subtitle say it all, Alfie and Me.

Tell us about that subtitle, “What Owls Know What Humans Believe.”

Carl Safina:

Yeah, well, the subtitle alludes to the idea that Alfie and really all the other animals, they’re pragmatists and empiricists. They know things.

People have often said humans are the only logical animals, but I think that’s almost completely backward. We’re really the only illogical animals. We’re the only ones who carry on through the world based on our beliefs rather than on evidence about how the world is and what the world around us is.

We believe things that people tell us and teach us. We believe things that have been handed down for centuries, and we fight sometimes ideologically and sometimes physically and very violently over things that we simply believe, that people have told us that have come down for centuries, rather than looking at the world around us and believing the things that we know to be true. In a moment, we’re going to talk about some of how those beliefs got created, but first I want to introduce our listeners to Alfie.

Francesca:

How did you meet Alfie?

Carl Safina:

Alfie was a little nestling screech owl that was somehow dropped on somebody’s lawn. My best guess is maybe a crow was raiding a screech owl nest, and this little nestling...

I mean, she was very, very small. She was only about a week or 10 days old, I’m estimating, and weeks away from being old enough to leave the nest on her own. So, she was found by somebody, some homeowner, who called a wildlife rehabber.

The rehabber didn’t even know what kind of bird this was because it was so far gone. I mean, she looked like she was just some... she looked like a dead rag in the photo that I first saw of her, and when I realized that I was actually looking at a bird in the text photo from the rehabber that said, do you know what kind of bird this is?

I thought, well, that looks like a dead owl chick, but the bird was not dead, very near death, but the rehabber did a really superb job of cleaning her up and stabilizing her and getting her on the road toward thriving, and we decided mutually... So, the rehabber contacted me because I’ve had a lot of experience with owls and hawks and keeping and raising and training other birds, and I started a wildlife rehabilitation organization, or I co-founded a wildlife rehabilitation organization a long time ago that is still going strong. So, the rehabber was working a little bit with me on the owl, and we decided that a good place to release this owl would be in my backyard, because we are up against about 30 acres of woodland.

So, the owl started to thrive, and that was the idea. There would be a soft release. The owl would not be caged, and like in nature, as soon as she was ready to...

She’d leave and fly around a bit, learning how to fly, how to maneuver, starting to learn how to hunt, while we would continue to put food out for her. This is very close to a natural way that that would work. In the wild, the adults would, in fact, care for their young ones for about three weeks after they’re out of the nest and flying around, until the young ones just wander off on their own.

That’s very similar to a particular technique in falconry, and a technique that we used when I worked for the Peregrine Fund all the way back in college, when they were reintroducing peregrine falcons bred in captivity. We did that reintroduction in a very similar kind of way. So, I knew how to do that, and it was decided that we would do that from our backyard here, but there was a flight delay.

The owl’s long wing feathers that provide flying power and lift mostly did not come out, so she could only flop around when her brain was telling her it’s time to fly. That really meant that she would just probably get killed in the first night flopping around the backyard at that rate by a cat or a raccoon or a hawk or a great horned owl or something along those lines. There’s plenty of things that would like to make a snack of any young bird.

So, we held her in protective custody through a molt, and when we realized that yes, indeed, her feathers are going to come in, they came in, and she could suddenly fly, but by that time, it was getting to be toward winter, and the food was going to be at its yearly low out there. She did not have any hunting experience, and I decided that rather than face almost certain starvation, we’d keep her through the winter, and then the following spring and summer, I would get her in condition for, you know, I’ll say release, but basically just leaving the door open and letting her decide what to do. Right, and why did you not want to keep her captive?

Because that is not life. It’s pure safety, but there’s no shot at being part of the world or part of the future. It wouldn’t be the life she was born to live or the opportunity to use all the capacities that she had.

You know, all of us face the possibility of being totally safe all the time. We could just stay in bed, but we all choose the risks and the rewards of freedom. Most of us want to fulfill the whole cycle of living, and that includes really, you know, all of the other creatures.

That’s their preference. If you leave the door open, they will leave, even though when she was in that coop, it was the outdoor part of our chicken coop, which I modified into a nice comfortable space for her. She never tried to get out.

She never acted confined. She was always very comfortable in there, but when the door was open eventually, and it wasn’t the first night, but eventually she started to come and go a little bit, and then she left. She left for what I thought might be, you know, permanently.

We left food around. It was not getting eaten. She was not around, but then she suddenly returned, and actually she’s always been around since then.

It’s now years later, but as far as the book is concerned, that first free-flying year coincided with all of the COVID shutdowns of 2020, and my calendar got completely erased, and I had nowhere I needed to go, and I had nothing better to do than to watch Alfie, this little owl, in her new free-flying life in our backyard. She very soon attracted a suitor, and I watched with amazement the development of the bond between them, which started out with her being hesitant, not trusting, then a little more comfortable. Then he started bringing her gifts of food, which at first she didn’t take or sometimes would take, and then she got more and more comfortable.

The bond, you know, became more and more solidified, and she’d come out of the place she was roosting in the day. She’d call for him. We called him Plus One.

She’d call for him. He would appear. They would go together near a nest box that I put up.

I saw her prospecting around in some tree holes, and I put a nest box up right outside my writing studio. They liked the nest box, so they would start to meet right outside there. He would go get her a gift of some kind of food, usually a moth, and they began to act like a mated, bonded couple.

Then it came time for actual physical mating. She was very awkward at that at first. She didn’t really know how to adopt the proper posture for fertilization, but then one night I saw her kind of realize suddenly how to do it right, and then I noticed that she was not coming out, that the schedule and the routine had changed.

She was in the box a lot. I thought she must be incubating eggs, and in fact she had laid three eggs. I didn’t know at that point whether they were fertile or any of them were not fertile, but much to my absolute delight, all three of them hatched, all three of them fledged, all three of them survived, and eventually dispersed.

I was watching all of this for about five hours a day, taking lots and lots of notes. In the 1980s, I studied seabirds for a living, and I spent hundreds of hours observing their behavior and writing science papers and things like that. I was looking for generalizations and studying things like what was the average number of chicks per nest that they fledged, average clutch size that they laid, things like that.

What I had never done was to get to know so intimately a bird who knew me very intimately, was completely tame and trusting of me, and yet totally acted normal, like a normal owl with regard to her mate and her new brood. She was a really competent mother. I would watch her, I’d go and find the young ones.

After they fledged, they tended to roost in one particular area, right at the edge of my backyard in some young maples. I’d go and find them there, and I’d watch the male come with food. I’d watch Alfie feed the young chicks.

She was very doting. She would go to each one, make sure that they got enough. Often, those chicks were so well-fed, they would actually move away from her when she had food.

It was like, I don’t want to eat my peas, mom. She would be saying, eat your peas, they’re good for you. She would follow these young ones around, making sure that they all were fed.

It was just a fantastic story full of nuance and subtlety and capacity that I did not suspect owls harbored. I got to know something about these birds, and then I started to ask myself, well, why are we so blind to all of this? These lives happen all around us all the time.

I actually studied birds for a living for a long while. Why was all this a surprise to me? What’s wrong with us that we are so unacquainted with the world around us?

Is this a natural thing about the human mind that we’re not interested or we’re so limited in our ability to pay attention and understand? Or is it a cultural thing that we’re simply taught that the rest of the living world is of no real interest and no real value to us? So I went on a bit of a journey myself, trying to answer that question.

Francesca: Carl Safina, talking with us in 2023 about his book, Alfie and Me.