A Planetary Pulse of Connection: Exploring the Ocean, Science, and Beyond with Helen Czerski

Helen Czerski_mixdown

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Helen Czerski_mixdown: Howdy, I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another. Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

As the saying goes, as above, so below. Join me as we take a curious journey into the unknown. to agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more. I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

Hello everyone. And welcome to the groundwork podcast, formerly the mind, body, and soul. Soil podcast, though, it all started as the groundwork podcast. We are exploring the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth. And I don't think anybody exemplifies this more than this week's guest, who is Helen Chersky.

d is also the co host of the [: 00:01:30

Earth. I just finished recording with Helen and I wanted to jump on here immediately because I am so excited to bring you this episode. I could have talked to Helen for a good while longer, but I only had about 75 minutes of her time. And so we don't quite cover everything I wanted to touch on on this interview, though.

I really, I really hope that it entices you to pick up the blue machine to pick up storm in a teacup, both of which are fantastic on audible. She narrates the blue machine. Um, because I think that this really is about our. Deep interconnection to the cycles of earth and the way that energy and atoms and the earth's structure is flowing throughout this planet and throughout us at any given moment.

I didn't get to read on the [: 00:03:00

And who better to talk about it than a physicist. This is Helen Chersky and the blue machine. This is the way the ocean does things. Not as a one way pipe, but as an unending cycle. One living creature's discarded material is reorganized, rebuilt, and reused by others nearby. All life on earth. You, me, blue whales, sloths, the ocean.

The oldest tree and the most fleeting phytoplankton cell. All of it is made from recycled material. There could be atoms in your body, which were once a part of Julius Caesar, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, giant two meter long millipedes from many tens of millions of years before. For T Rex, ancient grasslands, exotic iridescent beetles, and smoke from the early industrial revolution.

e has an explorer, fantastic [: 00:04:30

This book, to be honest with you, and I, I'm sure that's coming through, you know, one of the things that we've been exploring a lot of lately is some ideas around circularity around just how deeply interconnected everything on life is and how everything that we touch on a daily basis has this origin point and these processes that underlie it.

And I think that some of what I actually didn't. Expect to get out of this interview was some of how Helen thinks about the framework of how we ask these questions and uncover these processes. And as we point to at the beginning with a quote from Richard Feynman, how beautiful these processes are. And I hope that this episode invites you to cultivate a childlike sense of asking Until you can't find the answer and knowing that there, there very well might be an answer out there and that it is through these.

ing a question about how our [: 00:06:00

And what I didn't realize was that when she wrote this book, she was asking herself what the ocean means and to put that in both a human cultural context to look at it as the ocean engine itself. And just what an incredible breathing system it is here on planet Earth, as well as the ocean engine itself.

Tell the stories of some of those shareholders within the oceans, the animals, the humans, the bacteria, the uh, the atoms, honestly, the, the calcium ions, the coca lithos, and, and how all of these machinations are affecting us on a day-to-day basis, and how our machinations here on earth are affecting it. In turn.

on planet earth and how tied [: 00:07:30

And I think that this could not be more important, especially as somebody who grew up in, in a high desert. And as we consider. Water into the future, something that we've been exploring a lot of here on the groundwork podcast, whether it's with Jay Owens and her book dust, which is in is really exploring water.

Um, or some of the ways we've explored water with, uh, Ben Goldfarb and his book, Eager About Beavers, uh, something that, that Helen explores on her BBC radio show, The Rare Earth, whether we are exploring the way that our, uh, Agricultural systems and phosphorus runoff with, with Dan Egan who wrote the devil's paradox affect the oceans and change them.

And so we're looking at these bi directional systems and ourselves as participators in those systems. And as Helen puts it, one of the best things that we can do is to begin to talk about this. And if you follow me on social media, you know that I am, um, Frequently discussing that I will turn up at a party and cannot talk about, cannot stop talking about sand or beavers or whatever that may be.

king to everybody that I can [: 00:09:00

And number two, to find these things. To better understand so that you can care for them in a different way. Um, and I hope that you'll continue these conversations with me off the podcast by dropping into my DMS on Instagram at Kate underscore Kavanaugh. Or if you want to shoot me an email, Kate at groundwork collective.

com. I love hearing from you. This is also a bi directional system and a place where I really. Really want us to be communicating one another together. And I am really appreciative of your listenership because it indicates your curiosity right alongside me. And I just can't get enough of some of these explorations.

rom word of mouth alone. And [: 00:10:30

You can also leave a rating and review on, on apple podcasts or a rating on Spotify. This podcast is fully just produced by me. And. Your support is in your sharing. So, so please share it around. There's also a link to my sub stack in the show notes. And I just really want to dive into this episode with Helen Chersky, author of the blue machine, how the ocean works, as well as storm in a teacup, the physics of everyday life and co host of the awesome BBC four radio show and podcast rare earth.

and porter meaning to carry.[: 00:12:00

I think all of you know how much this work on the podcast lights me up and my genuine joy at what it is to share with you. The podcast is, however, a lot to carry. It is a lot to produce. It is a lot of research and care that goes into every episode. It's really important that I feel supported in this work, and that's something it's taken me a really long time to say.

lationship that I have built [: 00:13:30

And so with that, I am just so excited to have this sense of. Having someone to help carry this podcast forward into the world into your ears as it does good and it's, it's a lot to produce this thing. It's, it's a big, it's a big piece. And so I would love if you would. Delight in the support in the same way that I am delighting into it and show our sponsors some big love and if these products resonate with you, please purchase them through these links and that helps support.

ing for so many years. And I [: 00:15:00

Team of people that are bringing us something so foundational to life salt, which we're, we're going to see a lot of in this episode with Helen, as we talk about the ocean. And so without further ado and brought to you by Redmond real salt and sundries farm garlic is Helen. I have a bit of a funny place to start.

Uh, I thought that we could, I'd love for you to introduce yourself, but I thought we would start with a little quote from Richard Feynman. Um, I had, I had dove into Freakonomics radios, the curious Mr. Feynman, uh, at your, I had seen you post about it somewhere. And I love Richard Feynman and have thoroughly enjoyed it and pulled a little piece where he's in discussion with a friend of his that's an artist and talking about maybe the way that artists.

And scientists might might appreciate beauty and in slightly different ways, though I think it's possible for all of us to appreciate beauty and in both an aesthetic and a sort of processes, reality, and Richard Feynman says. I could imagine the cells in there. He's talking about a flower. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty.

eauty at smaller dimensions, [: 00:16:30

Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I, I loved this because as I traversed your work, I was really, Caught at how beautifully you illustrate both the beauty and connectedness of, of all of these different systems and life.

And you traverse from the very small to the very big and time scales, you know, from explosions and bubbles that I think are amongst the most transient of things to the deep time scales of the machinations of the ocean. And throughout all of it, you really retain this. This sense of participatory interconnectedness with the web of life and maintaining a sense of connection that I really appreciated.

man, and it gets used a lot, [: 00:18:00

And that is boring. Whereas I look at the beauty. And I think the thing that, um, Feynman said that I agree with is that. Beauty is kind of fractal, you know, the more, the more you look, the more there is, and everything has a story behind it. Everything has something interesting. And one of the great things about being human is that we are curious and we want to know.

And so basically everywhere you look, there's an interesting story. And of course I look for the science stories because I'm interested in the mechanisms of how the world works. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning, really. Uh, it's, it's like, I want to know. I want to kind of see the clock ticking.

If you like, I want to see the workings behind it. And because it's always interesting and it's always unexpected and it's always doing something much more intricate and fascinating than people normally give things credit for, I think. And so I guess maybe partly as a professional scientist, but partly also just because life took me that way in a way I've made a career out of poking around in the details.

ngs with everyone else. And, [: 00:19:30

Because, uh, systems were still, even then, people talked about systems separately, and now people talk a lot about connection. It's become a really fashionable word, but it wasn't back then. But, but it didn't, it never seemed that, you know, studying languages had to be different from studying history, which had to be different from studying science.

Of course they're all connected, and that's the fun, and that's the interesting bit. So, You go poking around, you always find something like that. And you know, that's what I do. Basically. I go poking around in the details and then I come back with stories of what I found. You do it so well too. And I think that you create a space that ignites others curiosity.

And I've explored a lot on this podcast, the idea of asking that question of, of why to, to deepen our. Inquiry into things using that word in the same way that the children do, and I love that kids will ask why until they've exhausted the knowledge of the adults around them. And I always wonder how I can turn that on within myself in a way that sort of uncovers these questions.

[: 00:21:00

Um, so just, I lost you a bit during that, but I think I've got the beginning and end of what you said, but I've got an answer to one of the earlier bits. So I'll just carry on. Great. Um, yeah, so I think, well, I think it's a habit, isn't it? That. Humans as adults, we learn that the world is complicated and we can't, we haven't got the time to look at everything.

So we learned to put blinkers on and that to some extent is a practical thing to get through everyday life. You know, you would never walk very far down the street if you got distracted by every paving stone and every flower and every car. So we're taught to filter as adults, to filter out the interesting questions because they are a distraction from the important stuff of everyday life.

That's, that's the impression that's given. And kids haven't got that filter. And, and so really, like you say, all kids have this and adults lose it. And I think it's a bad habit because I don't still ask those questions and you hear it. I mean, most often in, in Britain, you hear it sometimes. It's usually at the pub, to be honest.

isn't, isn't important in a [: 00:22:30

It's that we learn to shut them down very quickly. As adults, we're taught to shut them down very quickly instead of going, Oh, why is it like that? I don't know. Let's go. I don't know if it's a seed, let's plant it and find out, you know, if it's a thing that does something that let's do that. Um, and, and it's, it's, it's bad to lose that habit.

I think you need to be able to talk, turn that door on and off. And, um, so everyone's got it in them. I am convinced about that, but I think everybody lets the question slide away very quickly. Um, and then on the processes, I think. One of the things about being human is that we, we have had historically a very, uh, sort of arrogant view of ourselves, I guess, you know, if you go back in the history, you get sort of this, um, this idea of, you know, humans being at the center of the universe and you get these models of the solar system, which obviously have the earth at the center, because why wouldn't you have?

And then you sort of go through Ptolemy and Copernicus and humans become sort of. Moved slightly to the edge. And then Darwin comes along and says, Oh, well, you know, we're just another animal really. And humans get moved a little bit further to the edge. And that's not to say that humans aren't special.

ill look at, um, you know, a [: 00:24:00

And it doesn't move for five minutes and they go, Oh, there's nothing happening here and wander off. Whereas actually, if you look at either very fast or very slow timescales or very big or very small timescales, there almost always is something going on. It's just that our particular speed of looking at things and size of looking at things isn't where it's happening.

And I think that's another habit to be able to, that takes imagination. You've got to know a little bit. You've got to know that, for example, what's happening in this picture. desert is that maybe the dunes are being blown along by the wind in these beautiful patterns. And maybe there are insects that come out at night and go back or, you know, whatever else might be happening in this particular desert.

Um, but you have to look at it on a different timescale and then it becomes interesting. And I think that's, that's the key to a lot of this is that. There's, it takes a bit of imagination to understand that there are so many different pairs of binoculars to look at the world with, you know, you can use, if you want to carry on with that analogy, you can slow things down or speed things up or make things bigger or make them smaller.

Um, or look at what they're doing now, you know, and there's, and what they look, what they look like to different animals and what they look like to different humans and what would they look like if you could see them in the infrared, or if you could see them, if you only knew they were there because of sound, for example, and so.

. You've got a framework for [: 00:25:30

And that's the bit that, that's what school education, um, You know, there should be a fundamental part of it should be about that. It's about providing a framework so that you know, which question to ask to get to the interesting bit. Um, and, and, and that's, but it is just a habit, but you, but you do need, but now, you know, we have YouTube and Wikipedia and I guess people like me write columns and someone's probably thought about it or someone's probably thought about something slightly to the side of it.

And you can usually find out something interesting just by looking.

Maybe this episode about the ocean is making you as thirsty as it's making me. Some people say that we carry the ocean with us in the salt that's in our blood, driving our nerve impulses, muscle contractions, our water and mineral balance. As you're learning from Helen, the nutrient cycles of the ocean cover deep time, as they work their way from land to sea, through the bodies of plants and animals, into the land, and back into the sea again.

plus [: 00:27:00

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dies with Redmond, real salt.[: 00:28:30

But it's interesting how I did a thing if online a few years ago, so it was, um, it was for some, so I, one of the things I do is this kind of, it's not even really an organization, it's a kind of group of interested in individuals called cosmic shambles. And I said, I don't remember why I said, I want to do an advent calendar, but I want to do an advent calendar where we put out on social media requests for people to send the most boring photo that they can think of.

And they'll send, so this was in November. So I, so we got like loads of people sent in like pictures of, I don't know, parking lots and I don't know, pebbles and things. And my job was for every day of, you know, December to write a blog about one interesting thing in that image, you know, every day. Um, and it was, you know, It was surprisingly easy.

Like, I mean, I've, I recognize that I, I have spent a lot of years thinking about things like this and sort of perhaps noticing having the habit of noticing things, but it really, I, cause I did it and I thought maybe I'm going to, maybe, you know, I'm going to be proved wrong here. I'm going to be, it's going to be proved that there is a boring photo.

Um, but. Everything, because it's fractal, you just need a little way in and then you're off into some story that links something to something else. Whether it's, you know, like rabbits eating their own poo or the hydraulics of how car, um, what do you call it in the US? The trunk of a car goes up and down.

s, there's a bit of a story. [: 00:30:00

We are able to look through telescopes at space. And you mentioned these many binoculars of changing timeframes, which you have a whole chapter in storm in a teacup. And I think one of the things that I pulled out of, of your work as a whole is how often you speak to the idea of finding a different perspective.

you use the word perspective a lot. And, and through a lot of different lenses. And I think it is that application of lenses for the very small, the very big time scales that are very slow, that are very fast. Um, and all of these different things and, and, you know, I pulled a little quote here. Um, and you said putting ourselves in perspective is almost like a drug.

But instead of inserting chemicals into our body, it involves mentally inserting our body into the universe and then standing far enough back to be amazed at the comparison. And so I do just wonder. What perspective means to you? I think especially because what you've just said and how frequently it reappears in all of your books.

ntists, obviously, you know, [: 00:31:30

If you want the, the contribution of scientists to culture, to human culture. It is perspective. The I, it's the idea. I think a lot of people think that, I mean, I actually hate the phrase science communication because we don't have art communicators or history communicators. I don't see why we need, so, you know, just communication.

Great point. It's an expert sharing a thing. But anyway, um. But a lot of it is about, um, uh, I have suddenly lost my point. Let me regain where I was going. Um, yeah, people. So a lot of people think that it's about facts. It's about communication of facts that I'm going to tell you that a frog weighs 20 grams and it lives in a forest and it calls twice a day or whatever it does.

And there's this list of facts and it's not about that at all. It's the point that it's the fact that if you have in your head, if you've spent your time learning and studying, you're You know, how things are and what they're doing, it gives you a different perspective on what's going on and sharing that perspective.

y else? And, and it's almost [: 00:33:00

And it's just a way of looking at things. But you kind of need a bit of specialist knowledge to see it a bit differently. Everyone's got their own, you know, the things they see in the world. Everyone's got different experiences. So everyone has a different perspective. But if you have. A deeper knowledge of processes and what's going on and the numbers give you the scales, right?

Is it big? Is it small? Um, then you have a perspective that is different and then you've got something to contribute. So I think it's interesting. And when you, so when you talk about how to explain, you know, so, you know, like you said, I wrote one book about physics, the physics of the everyday world and the more recent one about how the ocean works.

And really the reason the ocean is an interesting case. Well, actually both of them are interesting because, um. Well, no one had really tried writing a book about the physical nature of the ocean, right? People write about, um, what's in the ocean, whales and pollution and fish and so on. No one had really looked, but looked at the water itself.

And it takes, you know, You need to know that there's something there you need to know the physical environment, but what ocean scientists have mostly done in the past is share facts. They've said, Oh, the ocean is four kilometers deep on average, or, you know, the ocean has this kind of fish in it. And those facts don't resonate with anyone.

hey affected our history and [: 00:34:30

And so, you know, this This is what we, I don't know, this, this seems like good stuff to share. So this is what I spend my time doing, but it takes a lot of thinking. You know, it's, it's a lot of, none of this is straightforward. It's not, most scientists don't think about this. Actually. Most scientists don't think very deeply about really what, how they do, how it relates to the world.

Because they're so interested in the technical aspects of it, that they don't have the time often to take two steps back and think about what it means and what it means almost always comes across as a perspective. But so, so blue machine was interesting, sort of slightly terrifying to write in a sense, because there's so many, not only there were so many people who might like it, but there were so many people who might be annoyed by it.

And it turns out the ocean scientists really like it. They come up to me and tell me they like it, which I did not expect. You do not expect your scientific colleagues to come up and you expect them to nitpick on the technical details and they haven't done that. They've said, Oh, I didn't know those stories.

They didn't have. That perspective on what they were doing. And so no wonder they can't share that with anybody else. You know? Um, so, so, so it was, it was interesting to get stuck into that subject because. I mean, I study the ocean, I study the physics of the ocean. That's how I come at it. But, um, I had to, like, I thought I, I didn't do a degree in oceanography.

degrees are in physics. So I [: 00:36:00

Um, yeah, so, so I, I did it cause I knew there was a story, but I also did it out of frustration that why is no, there's this. Huge, great, big story. There's this huge perspective on what it means to live on planet earth. Why is no one talking about it? So, yeah, sometimes it's just born of frustration rather than anything else.

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com. I'm, I'm really struck by that. I'm really struck by you saying that it was an exploration of what the ocean means because it is, as you've put it, it's a collection of perspectives. It's also a collection of stories that weave in and out of one another that give picture to this, this machine that the ocean is this living dynamic breathing machine.

t it means in our connection [: 00:39:00

the reader is able to gain a sense of close contact and intimacy with something that feels so unseen. And, and, and I think that's another piece of this is that a lot of your work in the ocean in particular is uncovering these unseen, Processes, it's, it's looking past the shape of something and into those underlying, underlying processes that, that really give it, that give it life and, and that tie us into it.

Um, and it's, it's funny. I, I, I wanted to. Touch on this piece about the unseen, because I've been reading Rose George's, uh, The Big Necessity. I don't know if you're familiar with Rose George's work. I think you'd like it. Um, but it ties back into the history of, of sewers, um, which I think that you and I and Rose George share a bit of a passion for.

and this is what you've said [: 00:40:30

Well, I mean, it's the presence and not an absence thing starts quite close to home, actually. So I live on the, um, on the Thames in London, not literally on it, but just, um, uh, sort of 100 meters or so back from it. So, so I walk up and down it all the time and cycle. And it's very noticeable to me that Londoners Uh, treat the Thames as though it's not there.

They sort of walk, very carefully walk around it, and over it, and past it, and they don't see the thing itself. Um, and it matters, so Thames isn't, the Thames down here is an estuary. This is where it starts to open out to the ocean, and of course this is why the City of London is here. It's, it's, it's England's gateway to the global ocean.

And, and so it's tidal here. The, the, the tidal range just outside my window here is seven meters, which is a lot, which is partly because of humans, but partly because it really is a massive great big estuary with a lot of water going up and down it. Um, but it's really fascinating to me and annoying to watch people avoid it.

It's like, it's like, it's like a kind of blindness that you can ask them what they think about London and what they like about London and where they go in London and they sort of carefully avoid. Ever mentioning the Thames as a thing. They just talk about north of the river or south of the river, but they never talk about the river itself.

It's only a [: 00:42:00

Um, they won't, they, they just, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not They don't think about it like that. And so it's the same with the ocean. It's this thing of being hidden in plain sight. Like if you were, if you, and it's really interesting because at the same time, if you take an aerial shot of London, the thing that everybody recognizes is the river, they recognize the bends, they identify where they are in relation to the bends of the river, but.

They don't, but they, so they sort of use it. They, they know where this absence is, but they don't have a look at it. It's really weird. Um, so anyway, obviously drives me nuts, but it's, but it's interesting even here where you can see something where, you know, there's such a huge tidal range. So there's animals doing different things at different times of day.

There's different amounts of water at different times of day. It affects where you can go and what you can do, and they still don't see it. And it's right there. And it's ridiculous. Um, And it's also partly because, and you get back to this kind of humans thinking our way of seeing things is the only way of seeing it.

t goes, Oh, it must be dead. [: 00:43:30

And yet I've seen, you know, there, I've been at a fish surveys down. So there's a very downstream of me. There's a very large, the sort of, uh, banking finance, the bit with the big glass buildings called concrete store buildings called Canary Wharf and right opposite that I've been on fish surveys where they've collected, you know, baby flounder and baby sea bass and there's eels up there in the European eel.

It's an endangered species and it's right there. And yet. This is, it's sort of, it's, it's as though it wasn't, you know, it's as though it's, it's, it's very frustrating. So yeah, so this business of things being hidden in plain sight, I mean, it's great for me because I can, I can easily interest people by, by pointing at the things that are hidden in plain sight.

Sometimes it feels like a bit like the emperor's new clothes, you know, where the small child points at the thing that nobody, every, everybody sort of is avoiding seeing. And of course, most of the time, it's not like there's some nefarious thing going on. It's just that. We're trained to have blinkers in that way.

And I think sometimes it's good to take those blinkers off. Um, because it's interesting. And that, that's, you know, that comes back to Feynman's point. There's all these reasons for knowing all of this, you know, especially in the case of ocean and rivers, it's part of our life support system. It's, it's kind of like, if you want to, if you want it to be healthy, if you want it to keep us healthy, if you're purely self interested in all you care about is your own health, you still need to understand how this thing works so that, so that it can do things for you.

ow, there's that side of it. [: 00:45:00

It's almost never a stupid question. Pretty much never, I think. I'm sure there is at least one stupid question out there, but I've never, you know, very few. And the thing about the strides actually, by the way, is that, um, our legs are pendulums. So the way we walk is that we lift one foot off the floor by lifting a hip slightly, and then we let our legs swing.

And then when it's swung to the other side, we put it down again and it is the nature of pendulums. And this was discovered a long time ago, you know, several hundred years, people observing pendulum swinging, um, the, uh, a larger pendulum, a longer pendulum swings more slowly than a small pendulum. So if you've got short legs, your stride rate will be faster because your pendulums don't take as long before they get to the end and it's time to put your foot down.

Um, so, so even like even walking down the street, you can see these things. Uh, and so if you've ever wondered, I wonder why some people have longer strides than others. It's not just because some are tall and some are short. There's a more interesting thing in that and you can always dig about and find it.

walk many, many miles a week [: 00:46:30

Pigeons are great. And it's really surprising to sort of uncover that. And I think to that point, you know, something that you come back to as a, as a quote by Lacey Veach, who was a NASA scientist that says, you can't protect what you don't understand. And you won't if you don't care. And I think that when we, Remove those blinkers and learn to remove those blinkers even too, because I, I want to speak to that, that there is sometimes a process of learning how to ask why again, or how to cultivate that sort of childlike sense of asking why.

And, um, Reveal the inner workings of our surroundings, and especially those things that are unseen right outside our door. You know, I fancy myself a bit of a citizen soil scientist, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about soil, which I don't think is unlike the ocean and that it is. It is very omnipresent and very there and yet very glossed over.

It is an absence and not, and not a presence. And I part of the habit of, sorry, part of the habit of asking questions, I think is that is knowing that there is an answer is having the confidence that there's an answer. Cause I think that stops people. A lot of people asking is they assume that it's just because.

[: 00:48:00

What. What is happening is that pigeons see the world very slowly, so they kind of need to look at something for a long time to build up enough of a picture so it's not all blurred. So what they do, and obviously if they're walking forward, they're kind of blurring the image all the time as they walk. So what they do is they shove their head forward, and then they keep their head still while the rest of them walks to catch up.

And so the head has stayed in the picture. Same position for long enough to get a good idea of what's going on. And then when it's kind of collected that picture, then it, and its legs have caught up, then it shoves its head forward again, and then its legs catch up. So that's what's going on with the pigeon.

And the thing that is brilliant about this is that the paper where they studied this, um, has one, so it's not often that scientific footnotes make me laugh out loud, and there should be more of them, I think, in proper scientific papers. But the people who did this did the most to discover this image, this, this thing that pigeons do, what they did is they put pigeons on treadmills.

Do not ask me how the training for this worked. But with the motivation for that is that if you put a pigeon on a treadmill, then as it's walking, it, its surroundings are staying the same. So their heads, so they don't bob their heads when you put them on a treadmill. Their head just stays in the same place and the pigeon walks and it all sort of, there's no need to bob its head.

footnotes said on this paper [: 00:49:30

And so very, very slowly the treadmill was still moving backwards. And what happened was that the pigeon just slowly stretched its head. So it's, so the image stayed the same until it fell over on its beak. And just. You know, and then you've got a whole other set of experiments, right? Cause it was clearly, even though it wasn't probably consciously aware of it, it was keeping its head in the same place.

So it didn't know it, the treadmill was moving too slowly for it to really realize it was moving backwards. But at some point it just keeled over, which is also a video that I would love to see, so, you know, these, these little. And they, the thing about these little things is that they always bring joy.

One of the great things about being human is that if you tell anyone these little things, like everybody loves it, they remember it, they go and tell their friends, it changes how they see the world. And by telling something that is memorable, you also encourage people to think, Oh, maybe there is an answer.

So then it's worth asking the question. And then the hard bit is just finding someone who knows the answer or knowing how to work it out for yourself or where to look it up. But, um, you can always ask. you know, there's almost always something interesting there. It's just the habit. I think, so I think, you know, and even now there are answers that are still not known, plenty of them actually.

y that annoys me quite a lot [: 00:51:00

And I've got this question. So why is it, what's it doing to make the noise? Like what is actually happening inside the frog to make a noise? And sometimes you go looking for these things and nobody's, no one's worked out the answer, right? Cause who is going to fund us? Although I've got, I think they're good questions.

Funding agencies, apparently. Not so keen to fund scientists just to go off and say, well, why does a frog do that? So sometimes it happens, but, but there are a lot of interesting questions that actually we don't, you know, science doesn't know the answer to all of these things yet, but we can still look at it and learn interesting things by asking.

You know, I think that you bring up something that, that I hadn't considered asking you, but I do want to ask now that it's here, which is, you know, we talked about, you talked about at the beginning that, that oftentimes. Scientists will become so interested in the technical details of something that they might not zoom out to that bigger picture of of what it means.

t UC San Diego and is really [: 00:52:30

Place as the ocean and, and how physics might apply to that situation. And, um, yeah, so I, I think there's a, there's a question in there of, if we have more interdisciplinary, uh, communication for lack of a better word, does that help to illuminate some of this? And also, you know, one of the things I really love about your work is it puts Physics in the everyday reality of our objects and out of a out of a vacuum and out of a, uh, theoretical perfect place that nature is the most interesting place to explore this.

And I have this little quote from you. Um, it. The end of it is our definition of exploration now has to be about processes about humility and sitting in a place where we think we know what's going on and watching nature prove us wrong, which I love. Okay, well, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, a lot that on the interdisciplinary thing, I think that it's not that scientists don't want to or don't have the time it's what is it?

get money, which is taxpayer [: 00:54:00

You have to be studying something which is going to be useful to somebody. And so there is generally not very much money around for studying stuff just because it's interesting. And there is a bit. Um, in both the UK and the US, but it's very, very, very hard to get it just because it's interesting. Like, almost no one will, they'll say they'll fund you for that, but they won't.

So, um, so part of the problem is, it's not that all these scientists don't or can't talk to each other. It's that we've built a system, which, focuses on goal oriented science. And the problem is that narrows down the possibilities. And of course it's, it's drastic. It's rare. It's, it's a very short term way of doing things because the interesting things always come from the thing you hadn't thought of, and you're much more likely to find the thing you hadn't thought of if you're a physicist talking to a biologist, rather than if you're a physicist who's doing like making an incremental step on what they knew before.

So, so I don't think. It's that I don't think it's to do with the, uh, organization of universities or interdisciplinary conversations. I think it's the, the, the way we fund science squeezes that out almost completely, because if you want to survive in science, you have to, you Do some work, which means you have to get some money to do some work.

science for its own sake at [: 00:55:30

Yeah. What they fund science for is because it's in the national interest, but mostly in the short term and the more enlightened ones realize that. Of course, you don't know in the short term, what's going to be useful and what isn't. So you need a broad foundation of science done because then when one of it, when you need the thing that will turn out to be useful, then it's already there.

And so this funding model of science, where you try and pick winners, you try and pick the thing that's going to make the next big tech company or whatever. I mean, it's kind of doomed to fail if that's the only thing you do. Because you need to have this broad foundation of here's all the things that we, we're sort of exploring and we're, we understand that we're investing in this because it's all going to come in useful eventually, probably, but we, it's not got an immediate application yet.

So, so yes, interdisciplinary conversations are great. Um, but it's not that we can't have them or it's not that we don't have them really. It's that. We are incentivized not to have them because we haven't got the time because the other thing that all scientists are is too busy to think Yes, so there's that there's that um, and then um, you asked me about quotes Oh, I had the piece about where Our definition of exploration now has to be about processes, about humility, sitting in a place where we think we know what's going on and watching nature prove us wrong.

, it's, I guess it's kind of [: 00:57:00

And you can now just clear off and go and draw the next one. You know, it's this habit, this idea we've got, we we've got a culture in the Western world, which has told us that what exploration is, is to go far away on a ship. For the benefit of some King, probably, and to discover some new land, new in inverted commas, usually.

And then you, you give it a name, you do the mapping. So it's got, you, you sort of, you know, give it a geographical shape and then you stick a flag in it and you clear off back home and some, some, somebody gets some extra gold. And the problem with that view of exploration is that it's extremely superficial and it, it focuses on.

conquest, like, because it's based on the idea that if you draw the map of it, you then somehow know everything and you sort of own it somehow, but you don't need to do anything else to deserve owning it. You just, you know, you've just, you sort of own it because you know about it in the sense that knowledge is power, which was very much, you know, 400 years ago, that is very knowledge very much was power.

ored? And I kind of want to, [: 00:58:30

Because Exploration is not about, we're going to draw a line behind it, you know, around it. And then we sort of own it and we ticked the box. We've done everything we need because that is not, that's not even the start. That's just knowing where the start is. And then it's about what is happening. It's having the humility to hang around and to watch for processes that you didn't know were happening and to try and understand what's happening on the time scales and the size scales that are not yours.

So you've basically got to make yourself small. And so you've got to invert this idea of exploration from making yourself big. From being the big Explorer who planted the flag and who has it named after him to making yourself small by putting yourself inside a system and just watching from the inside.

And so of course the plenty of the ocean has been mapped, but that doesn't mean it's been explored. I mean, we're doing our best. A lot of ocean science. It's not, I've got a whole beer in my bonnet about that thing about knowing more about the deep sea and the moon than we do about the deep sea. Cause it's not true.

need to, to turn that on its [: 01:00:00

Because that is not what exploration should be. I love that and I'm really appreciative of that because I think that so much of this is about exactly what you said. It's about the humility to make ourselves small and to observe on time scales that are not our own as as you so perfectly put it and I I'm just I'm very appreciative of that because I Agree.

And I think that there are ways in which our language, our colonial language in terms of how we view the word explore even has shaped us, but also how how maps have shaped the world. I was struck by that by the British cover of your book is the spill house projection of the oceans, which I spent a long time staring at because it just absolutely upended anything that I felt like I had ever seen.

seen or known in terms of just the shape of something, much less the processes that, that underlie it. And so I think that so much of what we are taught shapes our view of things. And some of this may be taking off of the blinkers is to, to. Find a different perspective. And I should say that I love maps, you know, maps are really important and I love that framework for the world that they give it.

So it's [: 01:01:30

And since I don't have the pleasure of talking to physicists very often, I would love to explore a little bit, especially around the recycled energy of the ocean. And I have a couple of quotes here. And maybe first we ought to just give just a short primer about the ocean engine and just how much it's tied into everything.

But I have some fantastic little pieces about the How much recycled energy is in the earth system and then the ocean system as well? Oh, well, the, so the physics is fundamentally the study of energy and stuff, stuff being matter, you know, atoms and energy moves around and it makes atoms do things that's.

That's basically what the universe is. Um, and so I think there's two fundamental rules to planet earth and what earth is, is a big ball of atoms and it's, you know, it's mostly spherical and it's spinning around in space and it's extraordinarily unusual to have a big ball of this many different types of atoms.

an, most of the universe is, [: 01:03:00

So we've got this ball of stuff that energy can get to work on. Um, and so the way that this planet works is that energy comes in from the sun. And it arrives, that bit's quite easy in sunlight and it might get absorbed by different bits of the system. It might warm up some ocean water. It might warm up some rock.

It might, um, Get turned by a plant, by a photosynthesis into stored sugars. It could be become stored chemical energy that way. Um, it could power winds, it becomes energy in all kinds of different ways. And it sort of hangs around the earth system, making all the atoms move. But then the bit we don't talk about is that.

If energy just kept arriving and arriving and it never left, then we'd just get hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. And so that doesn't happen because if it had been happening for four and a half billion years, which is the age of earth, then we'd have all have boiled away in space by now. So what happens is that because the earth is.

Uh, it, it radiates heat away. Just like if you put your hand near a warm fire, you feel heat energy coming off it. That's infrared light. Everything that has a temperature is giving away its heat slowly. It's kind of radiating it away into space in the form of light that we usually can't see. So the earth is glowing.

. is really going on is that [: 01:04:30

So energy is like giving a system a kick up the bum, basically, you know, you add in some energy, you kind of displace something and then it's got to do something as a consequence. And so the earth engine runs on the sun's energy. So energy is constantly flowing through. And then of course the ball of atoms that we've got, you know, the atoms.

Unless we launch some rockets and things like that, they stay here on earth. So they're constantly recycled around the system. You know, the copper, for example, that is within you, and I was previously part of a plant, which was previously part of a rock, which was previously part of something else. You know, you sort of go back, so all the atoms go round and round.

So those are the two rules of planet Earth. The energy is constantly flowing through and the stuff is going round and round, and then you have to ask. So this starts to sound like an engine, right? Because you've got heat energy effectively that is making something move. So how does this engine work? And when you look at it, the most important physical component of it is the ocean because liquid water is very, very weird.

which are in a liquid form, [: 01:06:00

But it can also flow around. So you get ocean currents and you don't just get horizontal currents. You sometimes get water that moves down and up through the ocean. And so you have this, three dimensional overturning engine, which is what the ocean is doing with most of the energy in Earth's reservoir.

Um, and then of course, all the other energy is, you know, making the weather and helping plants grow and all that kind of thing. Um, and so this, this engine, the way that it turns is distributing heat. Around the system because it's this liquid engine and not only is it moving heat energy around. It's also carrying other things.

So it's carrying Uh nutrients, for example, it's carrying other, you know, it's carrying atoms of different types It's carrying life. And so it's carrying things around as it's turning and that delivers stuff to us and you know, so Quite you hear on the news sometimes certainly here in the uk um In a coastal area, you hear occasionally they'll say, Oh, well today, hundreds of thousands of jellyfish washed up on the shore of Cornwall somewhere.

not what's happening. What's [: 01:07:30

Somewhere near the coast and then they appear, uh, at the surface, which is probably not where they were before. And then people go, Oh, there's jellyfish. But actually it's just, you're seeing just the surface of a three dimensional engine turning underneath. And some parts of it has just popped up to the top and then humans notice it.

But it's not because it's random. It's because of what was happening underneath. And you're just kind of seeing one part of it. So. So that's, that's the basic idea, the way this engine turns, first of all, makes life on earth possible, but it also, even if you live a long, long way from the ocean, the way it pushes around energy influences you, it influences where you can live and how warm it is, and what lives there, and what comes and goes through, you know, what migratory birds you get, all that kind of stuff, and it influences our culture and our history, like I said, I live on the Thames in London, the reason London is here is because the ocean is there, If the Thames didn't go anywhere, there wouldn't be any reason to have a big city here.

But because we, you can go out on the ocean and get things and trade, and we've got, you know, a shallow sea, which was very full of fish a thousand years ago, because that was useful. So you get communities that are built up where the fish live and where people can trade and where, you know, and so once you start to look at our history and culture, it's enormously influenced by water and it's not just the presence of the water.

funny because it's so, it's, [: 01:09:00

But the reason, if you go one, only one or two jumps back down the chain of why, the why is the ocean. And so, and just for one, you know, one other example of that, which I like because it surprises people. Um, so we, you know, I learned in history class at school about the ancient Egyptians and the Tomb of Tutankhamen and this amazing civilization that grew up in the Nile Valley because of the inundation.

So the idea was that every year you got this reliable flood, which deposited a load of really rich soil. It, it basically watered it for you. And then you could grow lots and lots of crops. So you could grow such a bounty that you had time and energy left over to make pyramids and sphinxes and things like that, to have this enormously elaborate culture, but that's where it stops.

Right? Everyone just goes, Oh, there's no, there was an inundation. And, and it's just, okay, obviously there was an inundation. So why was there an inundation? Well, if you follow the Nile back up to its source, it's kind of got two sources. You end up in the mountains in the Ethiopian highlands. And the reason it rains in the Ethiopian highlands is because just on the other side of the mountains is the Indian Ocean.

tion twice a year. When they [: 01:10:30

It rains really, really, really hard. in the Ethiopian highlands. And that is what goes down the river and gives you the inundation, which gives you the ancient Egyptian civilization. So it's because of something that is happening in the ocean. It's the ocean and the atmosphere, but the water comes directly from the ocean, just on the other side of the mountains.

And so that's why ancient Egypt is there. So you wouldn't have Tutankhamun or any of the other pharaohs, these guys living in a desert. If it wasn't for the ocean, even though they almost certainly live their entire lives and never saw it. And so when you start to look at the world like that, then you see the ocean engine is not just a curiosity.

It's the framework for everything we do. And I think having that framework is important, partly because it's You know, it's a sense of our own identity, right? Who are we? We're people that live on the blue planet. We talk about that blue planet all the time, isn't it? About time we talked about the blue itself, not just the fish in it.

Fish are very nice, but it's like talking about a person and only talking about their kidneys. Um, no, you wouldn't like go into a bunch of, you know, go into a party full of interesting people and say, Oh, I met some very interesting kidneys today. Yes. This one had big kidneys and that one had small kidneys.

stem. And it's about time we [: 01:12:00

So not only is it wonderful and fascinating and curious, so it satisfies our curiosity and all those kinds of things. It also, Is pretty important for keeping this planet habitable. So, you know, we better know how it works, um, not just because it's nice, but also because it's necessary. Absolutely. I think, um, as, as you were talking, I was thinking about, you kind of talk about the way that humans followed kelp forests.

And I think it's, forget what the statistic is, but I think half of the population of Earth lives within 65 miles of a coastline. Yeah. Just because the ocean has been that essential to our survival. And I think as somebody, I grew up in Colorado, grew up landlocked, and that made water all the more important to me for a lot of different reasons.

One of them being drought. I know you mentioned Cadillac desert in, in your, your book is also a great place to find more books to read. You're very good at. Recommending other books. Um, you mentioned Cadillac desert. And so I think that my connection with water has always been driven by, by its absence, by, by drought.

Um, and then in, in how it flows back into the oceans, but then connect me back to that space. But I think that.

ged the way I view all of my [: 01:13:30

Chili fish might be white at washing up on the beach, and I do think that that is something that again that we have to sort of begin to teach ourselves, um, especially because this is flowing in and out of us throughout deep time, both in the atoms that accumulate in us. I was struck by the conversation in the book about coccolithophores and their calcium and how calcium makes its way, you know, as, as something that isn't highly concentrated in the ocean, um, into the bodies of these animals and, and then back into limestone, back into geology throughout deep time that land and ocean are cycling in and out of one another and out of us.

To, and now into concrete as well. Well, Oh yeah. Well, I mean, even, even though, I mean, so that even the water is cycling while you were talking, I remembered to say that, to think that, um, so rivers are also two way systems just to come back to the Colorado river that people think, you know, as it, as it empties out, you know, that we think it's all about the water going downstream, but of course, rivers are also connections back up.

then spend their adult years [: 01:15:00

And so there's a continual crossing of this boundary. Will you say just a little bit more about that? I think that this has been another exploration on the podcast is a crossing of, of boundaries and, and the eels really struck me as representative of that because their entire biology changes to be able to.

To live in, in, in seawater or, or fresh water and to traverse the space between them over what was a shockingly long lifespan and, and many, many miles that they migrate from the Sargasso sea. If I remember correctly. Um, but yeah, but sort of breaching that boundary. Go ahead. The interesting thing, the interesting thing about eels, and there's a whole, there's two classes of fish that do various things related to this, is that, so saltwater, when it's as salt as the ocean, is, is effectively poisonous.

And freshwater, is a different kind of poisonous because it hasn't got enough salt. So most life, so our cells have salts in them, and the ocean is saltier than us, and fresh water is less salty than us, and either one of those is a really dangerous situation for a cell, because one of them will dry you out, and the other one will fill you up with water until you burst, both of which are very bad for your health.

And so, um, [: 01:16:30

She would. Occasionally take, collect the slugs in a bucket, take them off to the garage and sprinkle salt on them. Um, it's not pleasant, but it does get rid of the slugs. Cause it basically dries them out. Um, and so, well, yes, it's too much salt is you can see the effect that it's, it's poisonous. Um, so, so fish have these mechanisms for coping with too much salt, but then these ones that cross the boundary, the salmon and the eels, they have to basically change their entire biochemistry to go from, you know, the Trying desperately to hold on to enough salt to physically getting rid of it as quickly as they can.

So they've kind of got to change. It's a really fundamental part of their biology and they've got it. They've, as they swim up an estuary from the saltwater into the freshwater or, or down and go the other way, they, their biochemistry has to keep up so that they are not poisoned by their environment. And we just sort of go, Oh, well, you know, fish is swimming up a river and it's much more complicated than that.

y the Gulf stream, basically [: 01:18:00

You've got these tiny, tiny sort of fragments of life that are some type of fish and, and they pop up in Europe as, as a glass eel, which is, you know, Uh, maybe about 10 centimeters long, I think. Um, and they just appear from nowhere. So no one knew where they came from. So there was this one guy whose name I've forgotten, who basically took samples from across the, from across the Atlantic ocean and got other people to help.

And he measured. How long the eels, the baby eels were in each of those places. And he discovered that you've got the smallest baby eels in the Sargasso Sea. And as you went across the Atlantic, whatever you found got bigger and bigger and bigger. And so he came to the conclusion that they must be starting on the Western swimming East, getting bigger and growing as they went, which turned out to be the right answer.

But he spent years, you know, just on that one question of where do baby eels come from? And so, yeah, so they swim up. They swim through the saltwater, uh, they get to the outpourings of the rivers. If you imagine a river pouring off a land into the ocean, if you're a fish that can sensing, especially can smell, and fish do have good senses of smell, um, It's reeking with the stink of the land, right?

ow flowing out into the sea. [: 01:19:30

You know, which one's what and so they will pick a river and they will swim all the way up. It's helped by the tide and go through this extraordinary transformation as they go. And then they find themselves a bit of freshwater somewhere miles in land. I mean, it's the Thames where I am is almost fresh and you can go another 20 or 30 miles in land and you'll find the eels there.

Um, and they just park themselves in freshwater streams and they grow. They, they live for 10 to 20 years. It depends on whether they're male or female. Um, and then they get to maturity. At some point, they decide it's The day. And then they swim all the way back down the Thames without feeding. They change their biology.

Again, they swim back at depth across the Atlantic, back to the Sargasso Sea. And they, and they lay eggs. They make their legs and they die. So they do that whole thing once. And there. You know, and they're really, the heart, it's a long lifespan. Like you said, so there are eels in captivity that have lived for more than 20 years, but no one thinks, I think, think 20 years is pretty much how old people think they get, like the females get in the wild, the males go back slightly sooner, um, but you've got this.

lly, that they're evolved to [: 01:21:00

And if they take these steps, they will end up able to spawn again, because that worked for the last lot. And that worked for the generation before that. And the generation before that. And so the world is full of these, these like. Woven lives, woven together, as well as physical features that are woven together.

And, and we have this amazingly rich and complex system that is full of these stories. And so many of those stories and, and, and to pluck at this before we begin wrapping up so many of those stories, there is that expectation that this will be the same. This has been a generational migration for eels for, for an incredibly long time, but all of the sudden the waters metaphorically are beginning to shift and change.

And, and. We and our human scales, our human activities have begun to shift and change the way that the ocean engine functions, is that correct? And, and that interconnected web of lives, but also the machinations of the ocean itself are changing. Yeah, so the ocean has anatomy and physiology. It's quite helpful to think of it like that.

e water everywhere. It's got [: 01:22:30

And so these, these physical features, which we're learning to identify from satellites and other things, but the biology is just knows that they're there, you know, so there are animals that go off out, they go out, they swim out into the ocean to feed. And I think the impression that we're you know, we're Nature documentaries, some sort of give us this, Oh, well, they just swim out and they find some fish and then they sort of come back and of course, that's usually not what they're doing.

They are going to a known feature or they live next to a known feature in the ocean, a known part of that anatomy, which is always there and which is reliable. And so they know they can go there and they know they can get back and so the system carries on. And so, um, the, most of the book. Almost all of it is about all these, you know, this is the story of the ocean, right?

Here is how it works and all these wonderful things it's doing. And then I had to write the last chapter and I really did not want to write the last chapter because the last chapter is where you get to, well, what are we doing now, having established that there's this wonderful engine with all these fascinating things happening, and it's this network of physical and chemical and biological processes, and it's all kind of creating all these amazing stories.

ou know, the ocean engine is [: 01:24:00

And the problem is if you shift the shape of the engine, even a little bit, all these things that were predictable are suddenly not predictable. So species that, that, that, that. Based their life cycle, having a predictable ocean now have to go a bit further, or they don't find as much food when they get there, or they get there at a different time to the other species that used to always get there at the same time.

But also just the physics of the ocean itself shifts and that shifts weather patterns for us on land because the heat energy is in a different place, for example. Um, it's distributed differently. It's not global warming is not about everybody. Everybody, everywhere getting warmer by 1. 5 degrees or two degrees.

It's about if you have more energy in the engine, the engine changes shape a bit. And it's about, so some places might get a little bit colder. Some places will get a lot warmer and the shape changes. So yeah, so the last chapter is kind of a quick whiz through. What we're doing to the ocean. And I think by that point, you don't need a lot because if you already understand how this thing works, then if someone says, Oh, and this happened, you can immediately see why it might matter.

, but the important thing is [: 01:25:30

I mean, to some extent it probably should be depressing, but the point is, if you understand it, you have agency, you can do something about it. You can change the way you think about the world. And that's the bit that that's that, that quote by Lacey Veach that, you know, we won't, we won't look after it if we don't understand it.

And we can't look after it if we don't understand it. And we won't, if we don't care is that you have to care first, but then once you've got a different perspective on the ocean to come back to that word, um, then you know how to think about it. And then it changes how you make your decisions. And I think that.

That's the, that's the bit that's important that once we see it like this, then we see it in a context where we can choose what we do. And we understand the consequences of those decisions. And a lot of this isn't about, you know, there are things that individuals can do, but a lot of it is how we see the system, how we see our society, how we see what our civilization is doing.

And those civilization level decisions get made because of cultural perceptions. And at the moment, the dominant cultural perception, uh, you know, in the Western world, not in all communities, by any means, has been that the world is there for us to use up. Yes. But once you understand this business of There's a limited number of atoms and the energy flows through and the atoms go round and round.

place called away. And so we [: 01:27:00

You know, you, I think sometimes people hear me say that and they kind of think I'm well into the, uh, one extreme of the view of what Gaia is, and that I see Earth as a, you know, as a, uh, an organism which is looking after itself, and I don't, because I don't need to, because the physics says that this is an interconnected system, the physics and the science says that these are the rules of how it works, like, Stuff goes round and round and there's no way of getting around that.

So the only way to live for any length of time is to fit in with those rules because there are no other rules and there's no changing the rules. This is the way a planet works. And actually, if you built a spaceship for all those, um, Elon Musk fans who want to clear off to Mars, the same rules are going to apply, right?

You've just got a much less rich system. It's a stupid idea, basically, because you're, why would you, you start so far ahead. with earth with all this richness and all of these advantages. And then you go to a bare piece of rock and say, let's start again. And you know, you have, you have nothing to start with.

this life support system is [: 01:28:30

If we fight against it, we will always lose in the longterm. And to ask ourselves too, I want to bring in what it means. And I actually want to pull a quote from that last chapter. As we begin to wrap up, um, you know, you, you said in it, we are defined by our connections of all sorts, our relationships with our families and friends, the interactions we have in our communities, our connection to the physical world around us.

Via what we eat and what we build and our intellectual connection to the rest of humanity as ideas circulate. The threat of the vacuum of outer space is not that it's harsh, although there is a lot of damaging radiation out there, but that it represents absence. There may be trickles of energy, whooshing outward from the stars, but there are almost no atoms for that energy to act on.

There is nothing to connect with. So our connections are all here on earth. We are wonderful living components of the richest and most beautiful environment any of us will ever see. This is the beauty of being human to be able to appreciate participating in our surroundings and communities. And I think that hopefully this ties together some of what we've discussed.

hroughout this conversation, [: 01:30:00

And also the boundaries of our own fear of there not being an answer or asking the wrong question that we have to find these points of connection and meaning and to recognize our civilization level participatory nature that can change the culture of how we view some of these incredible interconnected systems.

Well, the great thing about that is it's a wonderful thing to be. This isn't what limits us. I think. Sometimes people see any change away from our current way of doing things as a limitation, as a sort of hair shirt exercise where everything has to become worse. And of course it isn't, um, for lots of reasons, but one of them I think is that, you know, if you give the constraints, Inspire creativity.

So if you give an engineer, you know, a massive workshop and a blank slate and say, build whatever you want, they won't do anything. But if you say, well, you know, here's a problem. We've got these constraints on it. We've only got this amount of time, do something interesting. Then they will come up with an interesting and creative solution because they have to.

know, why wouldn't we revel [: 01:31:30

And that we can be so creative. We don't have to lose our creativity or our curiosity or our humanity. It's, they, it only, it only offers more opportunities. It is. To be more human. So we're not losing anything by having a different view of the world. Um, and, and if we hold that as an aim, then I think we can do much better.

We can choose to do much better. And. It's the, it's the perspective that's going to get you there. Because if someone just gives you a list of rules to follow, that's just a list of things to do. It's like homework. But if someone gives you a framework for what it means, then you don't need a list of rules because you'll work those out for yourself as you face those individual decisions, sometimes with a bit of help.

So it, it, it's. You know, I, I did, it is true that I set out to write a book about how the ocean works and it ends with what it means to be human, but I think they are very deeply connected and our viewers, our, our view of ourselves, our identity, uh, of being. Citizens of an ocean planet, that's the missing thing.

at have caused problems, the [: 01:33:00

It is not too late to do better. And we can learn those lessons and we can choose to do better. That's important. And, and all we have to do is choose. And sure, it's hard, it's a big project, it's going to take a long time. But if you share that point of view, if you take on board that perspective, then you're, you've got the tool and you talk about it.

Then you've got the tools you need. For creating something better. And that is a very positive thing. And then we all get to celebrate living on a planet with a wonderful ocean. And we enjoy all the wonderful, fascinating things that the ocean gets to do, and we get to be human and creative and all the rest of it.

And, um, and life is great. Doesn't that sound nice and simple? It sounds, it sounds beautiful. And it's. All of its complexity. And I want to thank you for giving me a different, a deeply different perspective. Um, just getting to traverse your work gave me a different perspective on many things. Um, the ocean, uh, most of all in many ways.

And, and I want to thank you for that and for Helping teach people and me how to remove the blinkers and ask these big questions that I think we, we owe it to this interconnected web of life we're participating in to, to ask and to learn to ask ourselves. Um, and so I know we're running out of time, but I, I do.

ed, those are the, those are [: 01:34:30

So thank you for sharing that. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Absolutely. Um, I'll have notes for where everyone can find you in the show notes and the books as well. But if there's anything else that you want to highlight right now, um, just let, just let me and our listeners know. Uh, just Rare Earth, actually.

So I've just started co hosting a radio show on BBC Radio 4, which is, um, it's broadcast on the radio in the UK, but it's also a podcast. Uh, it's, it's eight weeks on, eight weeks off. So the broadcast schedules, we've just finished our first series and we will start again in May. And it's all about climate and environment and discussing what to happen, what, what could happen and what might happen.

And instead of being, You know, just sort of quick, a quick touch on a lot of topics. We, we get into things a lot more and we, we have some of the hard discussions and we try and get to answers and we try and work out how to be human while we're doing it all. And so that, that's an exciting new project. So look out for more of that.

Uh, the discussions are great. I, uh, the, I just finished the episode on rivers. I loved the episode on wood and I loved the episode on waste with Oliver Franklin Wallace and, and his book Wasteland. And the conversations have been. It's been really great to hear dialogues about some of this and to, and to sort of get into some of the, the tension and the solutions and the ideas that are floating around out there.

can't, I can't recommend it [: 01:36:00

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast. If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil. If you're looking for more, you can find us at groundworkcollective.

com and at Kate underscore Kavanaugh. That's K A T E underscore K A V A N A U G H on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to Chyna and Seth Kent of the band All Right All Right For the clips from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible. You can find them at All Right All Right on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.