humanity – Page 2 – Yale Podcast Network

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

By yalepodcasts | February 25, 2019

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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.

Ep. 9 – Being Charles Foster being a beast

By yalepodcasts | February 11, 2019

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What is it like to be another creature? What is it like to see, smell, hear, taste and feel the world as a different animal? Our guest today, the spectacularly imaginative writer and explorer Dr. Charles Foster wanted to find out. So, he got down on all fours and tried his best to do just that, living for weeks at a time as a badger, an otter, an urban fox, a deer and a swift. In this episode, Dr. Foster speaks about his adventures in non-humanness, how inhabiting the sensory world of other animals expanded his empathy, the shamanic quality of good nature writing, and his ambition to use language to subvert language itself. His explorations of mind and body are chronicled in his daring, hilarious and award-winning book, “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide.”