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. 

• 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 and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. Her book, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science 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. 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 magazine.

Riddell: Science is extraordinarily powerful, yet scientists are

Seven Canyons Trust has several daylighting projects in different stages, which you can read about here. With joy and care, the work of the organization also includes advocacy, education, and community engagement. This year, the Trust celebrates its 10th birthday. 

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.

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

• Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s)

And one more! Audible commissioned Sophie to write an Audible Original, an audiobook called Love Without Sex—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.” You can also see more of her work on her website.

[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.

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?

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?

Riddell: What do you like about them?

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 unde...]]> 0:37:54 false Friendship, Bushtits, and the Vastness of Everything 5 40 5 https://podcast.show/stateoftheworld/stateoftheworld/150788939/the-warm-glow-of-helping-update/ 150788939 https://shapeoftheworldshow.com/?p=5400 Shape of the World Studios Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:00:00 -0500 Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, 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 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.

On Coursera, 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, which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter. Her most recent post has the full script of her “Aims of Education” address, a prestigious speech given to incoming students. 

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. 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. 

You can also find some of Marcia’s talks on YouTube.

In the podcast, Marcia talks about the Surtsey volcano. This could be the exact same film Marcia describes having seen in grammar school.

Ferris is a contributing writer to over a dozen major publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. You can find links to his articles on his website here. For more of his writing about ideas from this episode, we recommend reading his piece “The Earth is Just As Alive As You Are” for The New York Times.

Other articles by Ferris that particularly piqued our interest include “The Story of Storytelling” and “The Social Life of Forest”

Ferris mentioned the Gaia Hypothesis, the name given to the idea that life on Earth not only emerged but also actively shaped and sustained its environment to support life itself. The theory originated in the 1960s, when James Lovelock, a British atmospheric chemist and inventor, first proposed the concept. At the time, Lovelock was consulting with NASA on a project to detect signs of life on Mars, which required identifying chemical signatures that might indicate a living planet, such as atmospheric composition. He observed that Earth’s atmosphere was far from chemical equilibrium (e.g., with gases like oxygen and methane coexisting), which led him to propose that life plays an active role in regulating planetary conditions. Evolutionary theorist and microbiologist Lynn Margulis later collaborated with Lovelock, helping to develop and support the Gaia Hypothesis with evidence from microbial evolution and Earth’s early biosphere. Watch this video of her presenting it to NASA.

At first, many scientists initially rejected or even ridiculed the Gaia Hypothesis; it was viewed by as seeming too anthropomorphic, or unscientific, or simply too mystical-sounding. But as Ferris notes in this episode, today scientists widely acknowledge that life and environment have coevolved, and that feedback loops do exist between biological and geophysical systems. The underlying idea has become much more mainstream.

The new scientific field that emerged from this work, and which Ferris mentioned in the episode, is called zoogeochemistry. Here is one article that further describes that field.

It’s also worth noting that well before modern Western science began to evolve, worldviews of indigenous people in various parts of the world expressed some similar concepts of the earth as being alive through myths, rituals, and stories.

Ferris mentioned one of his favorite authors, Virginia Woolf, who sometimes wrote quite directly about the connectivity of life. Here’s one passage from The Waves (1931), in which one of the central characters, Bernard, speaks to that idea:

“Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.”s

She also wrote The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), which won the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize. It explores how artists and residents viewed the intersection of architecture and race in modernist, urban environments. You can purchase that wonderful book here.

Adrienne is the co-editor of Race and Real Estate (Oxford University Press, 2015), an interdisciplinary examination of race, property, and citizenship. 

At the University of Chicago, she is the Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life, a University initiative that uses education, community engagement, and artistic expression to foster community in the South Side of Chicago.

Adrienne described how mid-twentieth-century writers sometimes took “these odd detours to write pieces that are just about their neighborhood.” The main plot of the story might have been mostly about something else–but there were moments when they attempted to capture place: what suburbs were like, what race was like; what it was like to have a lot of resources or not to. Here are people she specifically mentioned: 

Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), a writer and scholar best known for The Invisible Man. He also wrote a series of essays about Harlem – here is one he published in Harper’s Magazine about how Harlem was full of energy and creativity, but how it also felt weirdly cut off from the rest of the country by its poverty and by American racism.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), a poet and teacher who powerfully captured Black experience, has a lot of things named after her in Chicago–schools, parks, buildings, monuments. She’s arguably the city’s most beloved literary figure. At the end of this episode of the podcast, Adrienne quotes from Brooks’s poem, “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” 

Thomas Pynchon (born in 1937), a novelist who—although not a California native—wrote extensively about Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Adrienne referenced his piece “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts,” published in the New York Times, which was an exploration of the Watts neighborhood after the 1965 riots. 

John Cheever (1912–1982), novelist and short story writer who depicted life in American suburbs just as the suburbs were starting to boom. Here at The Shape of the World, The Swimmer is one of our favorites of his short stories. In it, an affluent man in Westchester County decides to make his way home from a party by swimming the entire way, which in suburbia means he hops from one private backyard swimming pool to the next. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for him.) 

Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1964). Adrienne talked about Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which tells the story of a Black family in Chicago grappling with whether they should purchase a home in a white neighborhood. It’s one of the most well-known and familiar plays in the United States, and continues to be frequently staged; but if you haven’t seen the play, you probably know the movie with Sidney Poitier Ruby Dee, and Louis Gossett, Jr.

Adrienne referenced Marshall Brown, a current American architect who first made Adrienne question her use of the word “vacancy.” He is a professor in architecture at Princeton University, where he also directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. See more of his work here.

Adrienne mentioned Amanda Williams, a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Awards.” Williams is an architect-turned-artist whose work examines the relationship between race and space. Some of her work specifically comments upon Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is located. Williams’s best-known project, called Color(ed) Theory, drew attention to the discrepancy of investment in Black Chicago neighborhoods versus other neighborhoods in white areas. Williams repainted eight vacant houses in the palette of colors she’d observed in commercial products marketed toward Black consumers: one house got painted the color of dark purple of a Crown Royal whiskey bag; another was the bright reddish-orange color of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Learn more about Amanda Williams’s work here.

In Daniel’s life as an astrophysicist, he’s one of the collaborators in the  Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which works on the cutting edge of gravitational wave physics. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, triggered by cataclysmic cosmic events like the collision of black holes or neutron stars. LIGO uses incredibly sensitive laser interferometers—tools that measure tiny changes in light—to detect gravitational waves. It’s a big leap beyond what traditional telescopes can do, opening up to us lowly humans an entirely new way to observe the universe. You can read more about LIGO’s impact here. 

UChicago’s Existential Risk Laboratory (XLab) is a lab that uses risk analysis and research to study some of the world’s most significant threats. The idea for the lab came from a class Daniel co-taught with James Evans, a computational scientist and sociologist, called “Are We Doomed”? The class caught the attention of Rivka Galchen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Subsequently, her article in the magazine caught Jill’s attention. Jill’s been interested in the topic since reading Tony Ord’s book The Precipice.

The XLab’s purpose is to study existential threats so that people can be made more aware of them, and hopefully, so we humans can figure out how to prevent them from occurring. The XLab provides a venue for UChicago students to build expertise in the focus areas of concern.

When recording the episode, Jill asked Daniel to describe what it was like to be in the committee meetings when its members decide what position the hands of The Doomsday Clock should be set at. Daniel’s response and their conversation about it didn’t make it into the final cut of the episode, but you can listen to that outtake here. 

The Doomsday Clock is a device that alerts the public to how near we humans truly are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils of existential catastrophe. If the hands were ever to reach the position of “midnight,” that would mean the end of civilization.

Created in 1947, the symbolic clock was started by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Many founding members of the Bulletin were scientists from the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. (The same university where Daniel now teaches.) The scientists who helped to split the atom understood full well that the presence of atomic weapons threatened life on Earth like nothing else that had ever existed before. 

Since 2008, the Science and Security Board, which Daniel chairs, is part of the Bulletin, and this is the group of scientists and other experts who determine the setting of the hands.  Twice a year, they meet. As of this writing, the clock hands are set at 89 seconds before midnight. This is the closest to midnight that they’ve ever been at any point in history.

The new program Seth and Jill discussed in this episode was the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN). Its purpose is to find ways to make cities better places to live for both humans and nature. Seth helped establish this international alliance. A big part of what Seth and UWIN are trying to achieve is for all of the cities involved to use similar standards for what kinds of data they collect so comparisons and contrasts can be made among them. Ultimately, this coordination will create a greater pool of collective knowledge and can lead to quicker solutions in each city for improving wildlife habitat and minimizing conflicts. Each member of UWIN collects its own data independently and retains the right to use it however they see fit, but this additional alliance offers the opportunity for researchers in one city to work with other partners to ask and answer questions at much larger scales—from regionally to globally. 

To learn more about Seth’s camera trapping in Chicago and to see a map of the sites, visit this page.

To see some of the Chicago urban wildlife lore that Seth mentioned in the episode, see  Chunkasaurus and the Chicago Rat Hole. 

If you want to help create more wildlife-inclusive habitats in your own neighborhood, check out the Urban Wildlife Project, developed in partnership with the University of Wisconsin. This website has information on everything from yard management and gardening to native flora recommendations – all of which help make life easier for fauna.

To help Seth and his team identify animals that get photographed on camera traps, go to the website Chicago Wildlife Watch. For more information on how to join the Urban Wildlife Institute’s community science programs, visit this page.

“Why Study Urban Nature?” an essay by Seth in The Center for Humans and Nature Press.

“Wealth and urbanization shape medium and large terrestrial mammal communities,” written by Seth Magle and Mason Fidino, et al. and published in Global Change Biology.

Plus, when we—the most powerful species on the planet—stop listening, the relationship between humans and nature doesn’t exactly go terrifically well. David says, “If I’m not listening to the voices of my kin, the birds and the trees and the living rivers and the whales and neighbors, how can I expect to be a good relative to them? If I’m not listening, how can I expect to be a good member of the living earth community?”

“In my work as a teacher and as a citizen and a writer, I try to be on the side of beauty and connection and less on the side of disconnection and brokenness.”

– David Haskell is a writer, biologist, and professor at the University of the South in Suwanee, Tennessee.

Buy and read David’s books. The one we discuss the most in this episode is his most recent one, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and The Crisis Of Sensory Extinction.

The link will direct you to Amazon, but we’d be remiss not to mention that it’s more fun and aesthetically pleasing for you to buy it at your local bookstore or to ask them to order a copy for you. Or if you don’t have a bookstore near you, try Jill’s favorite shop, the Seminary Coop Books/57th Street Books. You can order from the Coop’s website—and if you live in Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood (or somewhere reasonably close by) a nice human being from the store will deliver whatever you order right to your doorstep. The book will arrive without that overeager, heavy-duty packaging that Amazon burdens you with.

Seminary Coop home deliveries have only a wee, barely-measurable environmental footprint, so check it out.

David’s other books are—all of which are excellent—are:

• The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors
• The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature
• Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree: Getting to Know Trees Through the Language of Scent

Insider bonus tip: if you purchase that last one as an audiobook, it’s accompanied by original violin compositions.

If you’re not really a book person but would like enjoy exploring other small hits of David’s way of thinking and being in other ways, check out what David has composed or collaborated on in other mediums:

The voices of birds and the language of belonging. Emergence Magazine. An article, yes, which means reading—but it also includes an audio essay with bird song.

The Atomic Tree. VR experience based on the last chapter of The Songs of Trees.

Concurrent-Dyscurrent. CD/digital tracks of 4-minute field recording compositions (also on all streaming services).

Eastern Forest Playing Cards, with artist Ellen Litwiller, from The Art of Play.

In the episode, sounds of the European blackbird singing in a courtyard: Mizu LOEB, XC548553. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/548553.

In the episode, we mentioned the organization Noise Free America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to, in their words, “making quiet happen”.

But recently, some urban rivers are undergoing transformations. Waterways that once were essentially sewers are becoming sanctuaries for wildlife and places people can access. The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It’s a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

“There’s a million different potential outcomes for things. Being open to the many various outcomes that can happen helps people make better plans.”

– Nick Wesley Co-Founder of Urban Rivers

When completed, the Wild Mile will have floating gardens, forests, public walkways and kayak docks. The Wild Mile will function as a public park, open-air museum, botanical garden, a recreation destination, a classroom for the community, and it will provide habitat for native wildlife.

The organization Nick co-founded, Urban Rivers has a robust and active volunteer program where you can do hands-on work. (In the interview for this episode, Nick said they have about 200 volunteers.) You can also donate money—which is an awesome act to perform to support ideas you love.

For information on the history and origin of the group, “Friends of Trashed Rivers, here’s an article Jill Riddell wrote for the Chicago Reader. It has some lively quotes from Laurene Von Klan, an activist mentioned in the episode.

For history on rivers: Watch Wendover Productions‘ wonderful video on “Why Cities Are Where They Are.” The source for the part of this episode about how long humans have been polluting rivers was archaeologist Russell Adams at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Adams and his colleagues studied a riverbed in the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan. Adams was researching this area for more than 30 years to understand the rise of metallurgy. Seven thousand years ago is around the time when we humans started to move away from making crude tools out of stones to making more specialized and precise tools out of metal. (For more on Adams’s discoveries—including the pollution of the river—read this article.)

For information on the river in Berlin: Nick mentioned Flussbad. The Flussbad (“river pool”) is a project that is cleaning up a polluted canal along the River Spree. Located in a highly visible and much-visited part of the city, the plan will add new wetlands and provide spots where people can literally dive into the river. You can learn more about how to visit it here and read more about the concept in Archinet and the New York Times.

For information on the Shedd Aquarium’s program: Nick praised the Shedd Aquarium for its energetic efforts to conserve the Chicago River, and specifically he called out the Kayaks for Conservation program, where anyone who’s interested can go out in a kayak and learn more about the river and help clean it up.

• Though only partly constructed, the Wild Mile already has active programming and many ways for people to get involved.
• The Wild Mile is located in an area of Chicago that formerly was (and is still partially) industrial. It’s in the middle of a massive real estate development called Lincoln Yards. In this photo, what appears to be an ordinary walkway in a natural area is actually a boardwalk that’s floating on the water surrounded by native plants growing on rafts which also are afloat.

Dr. Jennifer Smith is a behavioral ecologist and an assistant professor of biology at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.  

Guest Jenn Smith says that human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality occur also in the behaviors of animals. Privilege itself isn’t new–but it’s novel and shocking to learn that humans aren’t the only species who pass along tangible assets to certain individuals in subsequent generations and consciously exclude others. Applying the term “privilege” to the animal kingdom shines a new light on animal culture–and our own.

For the original version of Jenn Smith’s scientific paper, look here in the journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. For a less scientific take, see this piece in the New York Times.

For a bigger perspective on similarities in humans and other non-human animals, read the book, “Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals.” It was written by one of Jenn’s co-authors, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, and by Kathryn Bowers. You can buy it from an independent bookstore near you or order it from The Shape of the World’s favorite one in Chicago, 57th Street Books.

In addition to privilege, Jenn studies differences in cooperation between males and females in mammals and studies leadership in social mammals. To learn more about Jenn’s full body of professional work and interests, visit her lab’s website. (If you poke around there and look at the team page, you’ll find more cool photos.) Jenn’s scientific publications can all be found on Google Scholar.

Follow Jenn on Twitter: @JennSmithSocBeh

Additional Note: The Shape of the World’s interview with Jenn Smith was conducted in spring of 2022. Although Jenn was a biology professor at Mills College in Oakland at the time of that interview, from now on, if you want to take classes with Jenn or have her be an advisor for your PhD, you’ll find her in a new position in the biology department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. (We just wanted to make that clear in case you get incredibly inspired by what you hear in the episode.)

Dr. Jane Watson is a professor emeritus of biology at Vancouver Island Institute in British Columbia. Her research focuses on marine ecology and marine mammal biology.

When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious. As a marine biologist, Jane knew that hidden in the story of decimated seagrass, there had to be something in the relationship between it and its destroyer—sea otters—that wasn’t immediately obvious. Something layered and complex. In this episode, we explore how sometimes disruption can be valuable not just for the one doing the disrupting but for the organism being disrupted.

Watch this video from the Hakai Institute. A) because it’s beautiful and you’ll feel uplifted by seeing it, and B) because in it, Jane Watson explains the relationship of sea otters and kelp. It helps fill out some details missing from the episode, gives a bigger picture of the relationship of marine plants with sea otters.

Read this article, which includes a photograph of Jane and Dr. Erin Foster, the lead author of the study. (Erin is mentioned in the episode.) Erin is a research associate at the Hakai Institute, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to coastal studies and conservation, and Erin gets mentioned in this episode. (To hear Erin tell her version of events, listen here.)

Read this article in National Geographic about Jane’s and Erin’s work, and this one, from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. The latter has gorgeous photos of otters, including one of an otter “raft,” a phenomenon that Jane describes in the episode.

Jane is an emeritus professor at Vancouver Island Institute, and you can find more about her full body of professional work here.

Note: Shape of the World’s interview with Jane Watson was conducted November, 2021.

Sarah Cowles, Director of Ruderal, a landscape architecture studio in Tbilisi, Georgia

Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an artificial remaking of what once was there? Or do we go with the plants that long to grow there now, the ones that are perfectly suited to take on land that was once paved?

Sarah named her landscape architectural studio “Ruderal,” a biological term applied to plant species willing to grow in wastelands. Several years ago, Sarah established Ruderal after leaving the United States and going to live and work in the nation of Georgia. In episode 28, she talks about how the Soviet Union was dedicated to sustaining “big health landscapes,” large outdoor spaces intended to heal and renew—and what that legacy now looks like up close and in person in Georgia.

Ecologists use the term ruderal, from the Latin rudus (rubble), to describe disturbance-adapted species,” writes Sarah Cowles. “Ruderal species embody the unruly, tenacious, and opportunistic qualities of vegetation. They are metaphorically paradoxical: indexing catastrophe and abandonment, yet conversely representing resilience and renewal.” [Paper presented to and published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, available here.]

Landscape Architecture magazine publishes some wonderful pieces of Sarah’s. Here are links to some of her written work: After Extraordinary Conditions; Crisis Actors: Designers Find New Ways to Tell Communities About climate Change; and here are reviews of the books Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscape in a Digital Age and Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary. Pearly Jacobs, the audio producer who recorded Sarah’s end of the podcast interview over in Georgia, also made this cool video about Sarah’s Arsenal Oasis project. It really brings it to life.

This is the website for Ruderal; you can sign up for newsletters there. On Ruderal’s Instagram, you can see photos of Arsenal Oasis, the project Sarah describes in the episode. @_ruderal_ Facebook @ruderaltbilisi Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/ruderal

This didn’t quite make our final cut, but it’s important not to ignore the fact that within Georgia, more than a quarter-million people have been displaced from their homes and their land during several conflicts that have flared up in the nation’s relatively brief post-Soviet history. Here’s one seven-minute audio piece on the subject that gives a taste of what’s been going on.

In the unedited interview conducted for this show, in the context of our discussion of the resorts, Sarah said, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the resorts fell into disrepair. And then others were repurposed by displaced persons from the different conflicts in the nineties and the early two thousands. So some of the ethnic Georgians who had to leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia moved into those resort buildings and hotels. And since then, some have been upgraded and their conditions have slightly improved, but displacement is an ongoing crisis.”

Caitlin Rankin, PhD, RPA Research Geoarchaeologist Illinois State Archaeological Survey

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in southwestern Illinois was the site of the largest city in North America and at the pinnacle of its population in 1150, was larger than London or Paris. But over two centuries, its population waned.

Until Caitlin’s research findings found otherwise, a prevailing theory had been that residents of Cahokia caused the problem themselves; they caused the location to become uninhabitable because of poor environmental practices. But Caitlin’s examination of sediments on the site found evidence this wasn’t the case. “The people who lived in North America before the Europeans—they didn’t graze animals, and they didn’t intensively plow. We look at their agricultural system with this Western lens, when we need to consider Indigenous views and practices,” Rankin said in National Geographic magazine. (Article by Glenn Hodges, April 12, 2021).

Read her academic publication in the journal Geoarcheology. For a less-technical piece, read the article in the New York Times or this one from Washington University in St. Louis (the institution where Caitlin began this line of research when she was a graduate student.

Why not visit and see the site for yourself? Fly into St. Louis, which is only a half-hour from the historic site. Here’s some information. You could combine it with a longer trip to visit other ancient historic sites (including other mounds) in the Midwest; or make it part of a longer trip exploring the Mississippi River. In Illinois, Route 96 hugs the shores of this vast river valley for many miles. Hill prairies thrive on the bluffs.. (Late April and early May are a good time to visit to see spring ephemeral wildflowers, and any day in October is a good time for fall foliage.) 96 is one section of the Great River Road that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Note from Jill: “During the interview, when I asked Dr. Rankin about other cities and comparisons of their sizes simultaneous to the period of thriving for Cahokia, she and I spoke about London and Paris. (Two examples of cities that existed concurrently and that were much smaller than Cahokia.) What she and I didn’t cover (because I didn’t get around to asking!) was that during that same period, there were cities on Earth that surpassed Cahokia in size. These included (but weren’t limited to) Constantinople, Baghdad, and Kaifeng.”