Anthropocene – Yale Podcast Network

Ep. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

By yalepodcasts | November 18, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:12 — 80.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School. Launched in fall 2019, LEAP is a multidisciplinary “think-and-do” tank dedicated to empowering Yale scholars and students to produce positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend.

Kysar is Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a leading scholar in the fields of environmental law, torts, climate change, products liability, and risk regulation. In addition to his roles at Yale Law School, Lovvorn is Chief Counsel and Senior Vice President for Animal Protection Litigation at the Humane Society of the United States, where he built and manages the nation’s largest animal protection litigation program.

In this episode, Kysar and Lovvorn speak about how animal law, industrialized cruelty, and climate change are inextricably entwined; why advocates and academics must focus on “animal destruction” laws in addition to “animal protection” laws; the deep questions animals raise about our country’s larger legal structure; and the profundity of the Monsters of Folk song, “The Right Place.”

Ep. 23 – David Rothenberg on playing music with whales and nightingales

By yalepodcasts | September 23, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:50 — 83.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg has spent decades collecting and studying the calls of birds and whales. In the early 2000s, he began playing along with them, taking his clarinet and saxophone to some of the furthest corners of the planet. The result is a new form of music that invites us to question where art ends and science begins. We speak with David about his unorthodox project, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, and what it’s like to accompany the sounds and songs of beings who may vanish from the earth.

Ep. 20 – Gabriela Cowperthwaite on the legacy of “Blackfish”

By yalepodcasts | July 15, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:33 — 76.2MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

Film director and producer Gabriela Cowperthwaite did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of Sea World, and make her the unexpected enemy number one of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Her acclaimed film Blackfish tells the thrilling and heartbreaking story of Tilikum, an orca whale who killed three people while in captivity. Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful documentary films of all time. In the six years since its release, Sea World has ended its orca breeding program and pledged to phase out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. We speak with Gabriela about the making of Blackfish, the hazards of keeping cetaceans captive, and how her film catapulted her to the frontier of marine animal activism.

Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time

By yalepodcasts | June 24, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:55 — 78.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

“Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us,” Robert Macfarlane once wrote. “Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.” Macfarlane’s writing has done this for us and for millions of readers. It has shifted our climates for the better, deepened our sympathies, expanded our understanding of and attention to our moral and physical landscapes, and reminded us of the stakes of being alive. In this episode, Macfarlane joins us to speak about his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. In the book, Macfarlane explores how we humans shape value across expanses of “deep time” — geological time in which the units of measurement are eons and epochs, not days or years — and asks: Are we being good ancestors? “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.”

Ep. 14 – David Wolfson on pioneering the field of farm animal law

By yalepodcasts | April 15, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:16 — 29.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

In the United States today, 10 billion land animals are raised and killed for food annually. That’s over 19,000 animals per minute. About 1.1 million animals during the length of this podcast. Yet as far as federal law is concerned, farmed animals do not exist. They are not counted as “animals” under the country’s primary federal animal protection law, the Animal Welfare Act. Their status is finally changing at the state level, thanks to the remarkable work of our guest, corporate lawyer and activist David Wolfson and his colleagues. We speak with David about nonhuman personhood, about the importance of teaching in driving long-term social change, and about how he’s worked to make animals legible to the law.

Ep. 10 – Dale Jamieson on love and meaning in the age of humans

By yalepodcasts | February 25, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:40 — 49.1MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

In their book, Love in the Anthropocene, our guest, the environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson, and his co-author Bonnie Nadzam invite us to imagine a not-too-distant-future in which our technologies have continued to transform the face of the planet. In this world, the “sixth extinction” is long underway. Like the cities of today, rivers, lakes, forests, oceans, and fields are curated and managed by humans. Other animals remain only insofar as their existence contributes to human enjoyment. Most of them are bioengineered. We speak with Jamieson about the spiritual costs of this “narcissist’s playground,” and what we can do to preempt it.