Episode 6: Being Creaturely and the Myth of Human Exceptionalism with Dr. Christine Webb

Flo: Welcome to Blessed Uncertainty, where faith is a wide and wandering path. Our guest today is Dr. Christine Webb, primatologist and author of The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters. Dr. Webb is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University, where she is part of the Animal Studies Program. This is a really fun episode, connecting the vulnerability of children and animals with the wonder and natural compassion children have for other creatures and the world we are all a part of. Thanks for listening.

Danny: Dr. Christine Webb, we're so thankful to have you today — so thankful that you joined us. I was introduced to your work when I substitute taught for one quarter for a human geography class at a local high school. As I was researching what I could read to jump in with these high school students, I found your book, The Arrogant Ape, and just devoured it. Texted Flo — I think I was just a few pages in and I was like, you've got to read this. I'm still telling my wife she's got to read it as soon as possible. It just immediately impacted us. And what we're trying to do here at Blessed Uncertainty is lean into the mystical wonder and connection of all things, which you've so beautifully offered in your work. So thank you for being here. Really glad to have you.

Christine: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Flo: When we started talking about asking if you would come on — and we were fangirling and fanboying over the fact that you said yes — it was the ideas that come out of those early chapters, connecting to children, and how children have what I think you called a natural moral compassion, and this connection with all things. Just their acceptance of being a creature among creatures is so beautiful, and it ties in so well with what we think about and talk about in terms of children's spirituality, which is this season of our podcast.

I work primarily with children, and I do some spiritual direction with children. What I've noticed in the lives of children — well, first of all, there's the science coming out that talks about the innate spirituality of children. Which doesn't need to be Christian spirituality, just that there is something there, a need to connect to themselves and to other people and to something bigger than themselves, in some sacred capacity. And how often that is, for children, outside. That's where it happens.

So many adults I talk with talk about their first experience of feeling that wonder, or that sacredness, or even an experience of what they might call God, as being outside. It's always one of the first experiential formative moments they have. I would love it if you could talk a little about — my favourite chapter is the unlearning curve — and maybe a little of your experience as a child, how that shaped your work, and some of the connections you've made with children having a lens for the world that's so different from adults.

Christine: Yeah, sure. It was interesting to hear you say this unlearning curve operates in religious spaces, because I write mostly about the unlearning process that happens in conventional scientific education and classrooms. So it'll be really cool to talk about those things side by side, and the parallels that exist.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a house with woods and a pond in the back. I spent a lot of time outdoors and, like many children, just loved other animals, loved being outside. E.O. Wilson has a term for it — biophilia — this innate affinity that children and adults have towards other forms of life. I definitely experienced that.

I'm an only child. I think that also played a role, because I grew up with dogs in the house, but they were really like my siblings. When I look at who knew my parents as much as I did, the only other being was the dog I grew up with — first Jeeby, and then Amber, who I really grew up alongside.

I was always not just interested in being around other animals, but really questioned what they were feeling and thinking. I was concerned about them. Are their needs met? Do they have interests?

And then I entered middle school and started learning about Darwin, about his theory of evolution by natural selection. I was drawn to that in large part because it gave a scientific credit, or authority, to this feeling of kinship I had with the rest of nature. His theory that all beings are related and share a common origin — it really resonated with what I had experienced as a child.

If you combine an early childhood love of other animals with an interest in evolutionary theory, you can kind of get to primatology, which is what I ultimately ended up pursuing in graduate school. That's the nice, neat, linear-ish story. But really, a lot of it was luck and circumstance. As an undergrad I got to take a course with an incredible primatologist, Frans de Waal, who the book is dedicated to. He became my mentor for many years.

I was so fortunate that I got to see this as a career path. I think for people who love other animals, they think, okay, maybe I'll become a vet. But I didn't even know you could get paid to study other animals' behaviour and ask these questions — what are they thinking and feeling, what are their interests, what about their welfare. That that was a proper career path. I don't even know if I had heard of Jane Goodall and these iconic figures at that stage in my life. So it was very fortunate to encounter Frans de Waal's work in my university education and realise, this is something I could actually do — not just a hobby or an interest.

Flo: My mind is going a million miles a minute. Immediately I was thinking about how you speak about — first of all, it's so beautiful — curiosity about an animal's interests. That's so honouring.

Danny: Isn't it?

Flo: And I was thinking about my work, trying to convince adults that children need that kind of attention, because that's not given. My work is trying to convince adults that children are not just deficient adults. They are human beings with their own experiences and feelings, and they have interests. So what are their interests? And I'm thinking about the connection, which made me wonder if that's part of a child's connection — that they understand they're misunderstood.

Christine: Yeah, I think that could very well be true. I have a young daughter, and it's been so interesting to me, because I've written this book in part to challenge a lot of these invisible biases that we have about the living world and animals in particular. And yet somehow I still —

I feel like I need to give an example before I share this overall insight. We moved around a lot in the first year of her life. People would say, well, she's not going to know the difference, right? Because as long as you and her father are consistent and stable, it's not going to matter to her what side of the ocean she's on or what house she's in. And I was like, okay, I guess that's true. I'm not going to worry about it.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. She's so in her body that of course she knows we're in a different time zone, a different home, a different climate, a different latitude. She is so wise in that way, and so attuned to her surroundings.

I remember we brought her into the house in Cambridge that we'd spent some time away from. She was six months old. She wouldn't go to sleep until I took her in every room of the house. She wanted to understand — where are we now? What is this new experience?

I share that story because I started to realize: I've put my life's work into understanding how we've underestimated other animals. Why would I just listen to what other people are saying about young children, as if it's also not subject to those same biases and assumptions?

And I still find myself catching myself on it. But yeah, you're right — there are similar mechanisms at play. And that experience on their side of things might be one reason for the friendships and the bonds that form. I don't want to call it commiserating, but a shared experience. Like, kids are ignored, or not taken seriously.

Flo: Or not taken seriously. Yeah.

Danny: It reminds me of the Mary Oliver poem you quote, about the dog — that they can't tell us what they know through sniffing, but we're aware of what we don't know in that space. And just the idea — I have four children, and when they have not gone to sleep, it has never occurred to me to do that. But I think about your work, and your connection to all of the — what's the best word? Our friends? All the animals, the beings we're connected to. That you have that practice, and maybe that muscle memory, is such a gift of being attuned in such a unique way. Even to be led by your child into her need. [unclear]

Christine: I'm in a mom's group, and a lot of people talk about how they're excited for the day when their kids can finally string together sentences and communicate. And it's so interesting — I don't feel that way at all. I think it's in part because of my work with other animals that I'm so used to reading behaviour and body language.

Again, I make mistakes all the time, and I'm learning her individual way of expressing herself, which is very different from a chimpanzee's, or any individual chimpanzee's. But it has made me more confident in behaviour and body language as a form of communication and evidence. And it's made me more distrustful of language. So I found myself the only one in the group who was like — yeah, it's not that I'm not looking forward to it, or that I don't want it to come, but I'm not super pumped about it. I'm kind of worried about it a little bit too.

Flo: I remember, once my kids started talking, it was like — that was all in there that whole time. They're not just blank and then suddenly, you know. It's all the things they have already been thinking and feeling.

Even to relate this — we've had a lot of rescue dogs that are over a hundred pounds. You have to work really, really hard to help them be safe in all these situations. We've had behaviourists for several of those journeys, and it's how much you learn to speak a language that isn't there, by reading a dog's whole face. She's looking out of the side of her eye, she's uncomfortable — let's change and do something different. And how communicative life can be together, if you are willing to be curious about it.

Christine: Totally. And how the dogs are also paying very close attention to you and your body language and communicative cues. Together you're developing a shared language that is dynamic and changing. It's such an important point.

I think we're so often fixated on trying to teach other animals our language. Or, more recently, trying to decode theirs through these AI translation technologies.

Flo: Yeah, for sure.

Christine: I'm skeptical for a number of reasons. But one is because I like to see language as co-constructive, and participative, and shared. Think of how we teach children language. It's not that they have to sit there in silence while they hear us speak, or that we're just trying to decode all of their babbles and other sounds. We're co-constructing it.

I say all kinds of things that you guys would not understand, but it's a shared language with my daughter. And I'm sure you've had versions of that too. That's something to really be cherished, and a lesson we could apply towards other forms of life who don't communicate in a language we know as readily.

Danny: In the children's space — I taught high school this time, I used to be an elementary school teacher. So many people put nature into competition so quickly. The shadow work there is so intense, because of how competitive we are as a society, and how competitive capital is. But the suspicion of it is often, I've been told, that it's too competitive to look at evolution, or whatever, in those spaces.

I don't know if it's like this elsewhere, but in Nashville it's very common for people to have children who aren't born yet on waiting lists for a preschool at three, or a kindergarten at five. So competition is in utero. And believing that a child is feeling, and is already being formed, and is already in that communication and that play back and forth —

What ways come to your mind for the better story? I think, so often, you talk about it being through relationship — that we'll heal through relationship with each other, with the world. How do we push back on competition, especially when we think about our kids, so it's not just part of it all?

And one of the things you write about, when you talk about fear — even the fear of death being lessened by relational body. To think about becoming, for our ancestors, part of the earth and part of this story. I'm curious what comes to mind in ways to resist the competition, even for our children, and move into those relationships.

Christine: When people ask me how we could reimagine our education, our caregiving, our parenting to adopt a less hierarchical worldview or cosmology — whether that's within human societies or towards the more-than-human world — I often say this.

I feel like we should mostly just be giving young children permission to hold on to what they already know to be true about the world. What they already know in their heart is right and real, which is that relationships come first. That you are not an individual.

Danny, when you were talking, I was thinking — because you said in utero — even textbook images of pregnancy will show an individual fetus in a body, as this separate organism inside a larger organism. And actually, even conventional biology would tell you that's not all that's going on there. There's so much osmosis.

Pregnancy is this amazing thing that challenges notions of individuality, and it should be taken more seriously in Western philosophy. I think it's been ignored in large part because of how it defies conventionally masculine notions of individuality and separation.

Flo: Yep.

Christine: So, two things. Coming back to this point of teaching kids what they already know to be true — about what they are, what they've experienced about the world, how they came into the world, the communities and families in which they live.

It's often evident. When we take a baby, and you bring them home and they're crying in their crib, they're saying: well, I was just in community, and now you're telling me I'm an individual being. And no judgment — mine sleeps in the crib, all that. It's just that there is this felt sense of communion and relationality. Our education needs to be geared towards not basically brainwashing them out of it, but allowing them to hold on to it — validating and reinforcing it as true.

Part of that may come from rethinking classic textbook images of things like pregnancy. I talk about many other versions in the book, about how we picture nature. I think it's turning the tables, listening more to them, and validating their existing cosmology.

Danny: As I read your book, I thought of people I would like to ask to read it who I know would feel threatened. None of them would say, "but what will happen to the children if we did this?" It would never get to something so tangible — the fear. Because that's such an obvious question. What would happen to the children? We would stop using them. We would stop treating them the way we feel entitled to treat the rest of the world.

But the viewpoints are so absent of wonder, and absent of awe and curiosity, and of that space of practicality — like, it'd be great for children if we stopped categorizing everything. And back to the picture of pregnancy, and coming together, which is so clearly [unclear] — coming from tradition. Even the word salvation. The horror of Christian capitalism is individual salvation. When that became individual souls, it was over — maybe for the planet. And when you come back into soul salvation, that being us in this web, is such —

Christine: Yeah, no.

Danny: Sorry, I'm kind of ranting. But just the obvious nature of it — nobody would ever say "what will happen to the children." Usually it goes to their idea of God's ego. Well, God would be upset if we said a monkey was made in God's image, or whatever. The practical answers to all of this feel so obvious.

Christine: It's threatening to some. I've had such a spectrum of reactions to this book, as you can imagine. Even the knee-jerk reaction to the title alone — assuming that by "arrogant ape" I'm talking about all humans, or even a particular culture of humans. I'm not surprised, in a way, to be receiving that.

But there is some sense in which our dominant culture's emphasis on individuality is so strong that when ideas threaten it, the individuals themselves feel threatened. And then they're unable to embrace, or even tolerate, ideas that counter it. It almost becomes self-fulfilling.

Danny: Yeah. "You will leave me. If I question this, you will leave me. So let's carve out our little —"

Christine: What you were saying about individual salvation, I hadn't thought of before, but it's very relevant. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day who suffered from long COVID, and all of the emphasis in our culture on healing — how healing is something done as an individual and not in community, with one another. You just see this in all aspects of our society. In religious spaces, in scientific classrooms, where we're emphasising the individual fetus and the separate vessel. It has seeped into so much of our society.

Flo: I think I was most surprised — I went into the book already thinking, well, religion has pretty much made a mess of any kind of collective compassion, and of the willingness to be part of a humbling of self, to be part of creation. All those things. And even the language of dominion and all of that stuff on top of it.

But I was pretty surprised at the scientific community having some of those same biases. I was ready to be like, yeah, we suck. Danny and I are ready to tear our collars off and say, let's burn it all down. But it's interesting to see the different systemic ways it's perpetuated and the harm that's so pervasive across so many spaces. And I don't know — I see a hope of maybe a shared vision towards something different.

Christine: The way one of my colleagues put it is that power is always going to use the powerful institutions. The church is a very powerful institution. The sciences — university sciences — are also a very powerful institution. So powerful ideas will seep into those institutions to gain power.

But to this point about finger-pointing at your own discipline, or practice, or space, or community. It was funny — the other day I was in a meeting with a bunch of social scientists and humanities scholars, and then there were natural scientists in the room. We were talking about how anthropocentric natural science is, going through some of the arguments in the book about the way human exceptionalism shapes the construction of scientific knowledge about other animals and the environment.

And then the social scientists and the humanities scholars in the room said: but wait, the humanities and social sciences are way more anthropocentric. We don't ask a single question about other animals. And I was like, no — social scientists and philosophers and historians of science understand that science is socially constructed and biased, and has all sorts of norms based on the culture in which it operates. So I always feel like social scientists kind of get it more. And they were like, no, no — we don't talk about another animal in a single history textbook.

Basically what we were all doing in that group was trying to say it was worse in our own field. That's the one we were familiar with. We almost all wanted it. It's like — no, it's not worse in your field, it's worse in my field.

Danny: Reading your recounting, from a little girl through your training, through teaching now — it's just this gift. Your love of life. Both living, and living together, and living forms and consciousness, and that curiosity.

I kept coming back to Judaism, and God saying in the Hebrew Bible: I put before you life and death, and choose life. And Jesus, it's abundant life, and other places. But it just feels like that's the other thing — that powerful thing. It is a religion, a worldview, of death that isn't committed to life.

Christine: I love this, and we're going to have to talk more about this very topic, maybe offline at some point, because my next book project is about birth in other animals.

Part of my argument in the book — and this isn't actually my argument, it's drawing from the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia — is that it's only in a certain patriarchal culture that we would know way more about death than we do about birth. There's hardly a field of study where we look at birth in other animals. I think it's related to bigger questions about what we value.

Without going too much on a tangent — I'm just starting to get excited about this, and about the broader context, how I want to frame this next project. I would really like to talk more about this emphasis on life compared to death.

Because even in my field, we ask a lot of questions about whether other animals understand death. There's a whole field of research devoted to it. It's called comparative thanatology, named after the Greek god of death and dying. So we ask a lot of questions — do other animals have a concept of death? How do they respond to the death of group members? You might have heard about elephant burial sites, and chimpanzees inspecting the mouths and teeth of corpses. There's really interesting work in this space, which I think started a couple of decades ago, in the 2010s.

And we don't have a corresponding field of study dedicated to understanding animal birth. I'm actually, with colleagues, starting that field — we just had an academic publication about it come out yesterday. So it's all very timely. Gosh, sorry, we're on a tangent. Feel free to cut this at some point.

Danny: You're in good company.

Christine: There's this great book called Natality, by a philosopher of science, Jennifer Banks. Hannah Arendt basically argued that we need a corresponding term for birth, as we do for death. We have mortality — which is a word that comprises the social, the psychological, the cultural. It's not just about the biology and the anatomy of death. Mortality is all the spiritual pieces of it too. We do not have a corresponding term for birth, even though we should be taking a holistic approach to it.

So Arendt talks about natality as the corresponding term that we need, and she uses it as a metaphor for understanding the rebirth of societies, and regeneration. It's a really beautiful book, for a number of reasons — it's trying to bring birth back into the Western philosophical canon. So that's all top of mind, and I'd genuinely like to dive deeper into it with you offline at some point.

Flo: That reminds me of two things. First of all, that's amazing work, and I didn't realise that wasn't a topic being pursued.

I was thinking about how, in a former life, I did a little bit of birth doula work — helping women in birth. I stopped because I had little kids, and it wasn't conducive to leaving in the middle of the night to be at the hospital with somebody having a baby. But I did that for a few years.

And then recently I had a very close loved one pass away, and I was at her bedside the whole time — those last few weeks. And how similar the experiences were. Helping be with her, preparing for dying, was so much like being with her when she'd had a baby. It was profoundly the same. It was life-changing to see that connection.

At the end of my divinity school experience, I was in a thesis group with other folks working on their theses. Mine was all on children's spirituality, and the ethics of introducing language — the ethics of prayer with children, when we're imparting adult language onto what a child is experiencing, instead of trusting the child with what they're already feeling.

A colleague of mine was a chaplain, and he was working on death-denying in religious spaces, and how harmful that is. He'd been spending time with folks at the end of their lives, and people were praying for a miracle at the end, which was causing so much more emotional and spiritual — existential — anguish than accepting that this was a normal process, and looking at that as a holy thing. Instead of, well, the holy thing would be if my grandma was healed of cancer. So it's really fascinating. In our tradition there is an opposite way of denying death that's just as unhealthy.

Christine: There's been quite a lot of research on that denial of death, and the need to deny our own animality — the fact that we are animal bodies. It's related also to the conversation about birth and pregnancy, because these studies have looked at disgust towards pregnant bodies. There is a disgust towards pregnant bodies that men and women experience in the US, in part because of this reminder that we're mammals. That we're animals.

In my view, being more in touch with our animality — I mean, we are animals — is something to celebrate. It feels like getting in touch with something true and authentic, and to be honored. So it's such a shame that on some level we fetishize and celebrate birth and pregnancy, and on another level what it really signifies is deeply terrifying to many people, given this broader cultural frame.

Danny: Since you mentioned bodies. I got to help a classmate — we were in grad school together — and I spent, I want to say eight to twelve weeks, checking in each week with a midwife, just asking her questions about what she did. She did home births. And she said there is one group she almost always knows will not be able to have the baby at home. One subgroup. She says it's evangelical white women, and Mormon women. She said they can't get in their bodies to have the baby.

And then my project was working with hospice spirituality. As I was talking to hospice chaplains and doctors, they said: old white men, usually veterans, can't get in their body to die.

You talk about just that acceptance of — we are bodies. This is good. This is part of it. Even death. What's more human than birthing, or being birthed, and dying, and this life? These two things everyone will have, that make us a community. And these two groups have a lot in common — the expression of the things we're talking about, colonialism and greed and capitalism, all the different things. These two groups that are the fruit of that can't get in their bodies.

Flo: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned white women. In your book you reference Robin Wall Kimmerer, and that there's already this knowledge that is deep and ancient. Her experience — I haven't read it in a long time, but it's one of my favourite books, Braiding Sweetgrass — her experience in academia, and being dismissed for her deep ancestral knowledge and connection to the land and to creation, to creatures.

I'm so disconnected as a white woman, thinking that this is — I guess what I'm trying to say is, this is not a new thing. Obviously it's not a new thing. But people have been talking about this for a long time, and we just have not been listening to these voices.

Christine: Absolutely. And it's been my experience in rethinking, alongside great scientists like Robin Wall Kimmerer, and colleagues I work with directly — Monica Gagliano and Becca Franks and Barbara Smuts, all of whom I've written about in the book.

We've had this realisation in trying to chart another course for science that is less anthropocentric. Less individualistic, competitive models of nature. More understanding of cooperation as a fundamental force in evolution, as well as competition. Taking animals' perspectives and interests seriously when designing research — their own sensory worlds and capacities. Studying them on equal footing, with trust. Taking the relationship that develops between the scientist and the being you're studying more seriously. Not trying to detach oneself from the knowledge that is produced, but understanding that your own subjective values and experiences shape the knowledge that is produced.

All of these things feel like unorthodox science, and are being more and more spoken about in my field, and recognised as frontiers, as cutting edge. And it's like — none of it's new. None of it is new at all. There's nothing cutting edge about it. Everything that I just said is embedded in many indigenous and animist and pagan traditions, past and present.

It's so funny. These colleagues of mine and I were writing an academic paper around this stuff, and we originally called it "The New Scientific Paradigm" — thinking this is important enough to be called a paradigm shift. But then we thought, it's not new. It's not new. So let's come up with another term. So we were like, maybe it's "Another Scientific Paradigm." And then that didn't feel as catchy, and also didn't feel true, because it's not just a scientific paradigm.

And by the end of the discussion, the paper title we came up with was just: What If.

Flo: It's like our podcast.

Christine: Exactly. We just realised — it started as "a new scientific paradigm," and then by the end of the conversation, after many months of collaboration, we were like, yeah. It's just what if. And we still haven't published it. It's just sitting there. And we might never. It's just like — what if? Who knows?

Danny: Yeah, the Elmo shrug got Flo and I through a lot. That's how it became our little logo.

Christine: And back to it being very much a natural bent of childhood to be curious and open to learning, in a way that gets sadly shut off, or disconnected, through whatever system you wind up being funnelled through.

Danny: Willie James Jennings is a theologian I love, and he defines whiteness as possession, control, and mastery — words that are throughout your work. And even as I hear that, it's like: what if we admitted we weren't in control? The joy that is just in that space. It's just calling.

James Baldwin has a quote about [unclear] — that the old world is dying, and a new one can't be born until the old world does. But he says that we need midwives for that new world. And as I listen to what you're endeavouring to do, and working and talking about that "what if" project — like midwifing the new. Which is new, but new in the sense of —

Christine: We also need death doulas to usher out the other, right? I feel like we need both. Or maybe the midwives are performing the same role — doing it across the death and the rebirth.

And on this definition of whiteness — I hadn't heard that, but I'm very glad to know it. These words figure a lot in the book. I also came to realise that the word "mastery" in the English language has taken on this dual meaning, where we say someone has mastery in something if they fully understand it. And yet it also refers to domination and control. It's not a coincidence that we've confounded the two in our society. Or equated them — as if to fully understand someone else is to dominate them. As if those mean the same thing. It's telling, and indicative.

I feel like in a past life, I don't know — I'm like an etymologist. I love the origin of words.

Danny: I love that part of your writing. Keep doing it.

Christine: You learn so much about what we actually mean if you just look at the history of a term, and how the meaning of it has changed over time.

I had a class today where my students and I were reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, who Flo just mentioned. She writes a lot about the language that we use. And this is part of the unlearning curve, and the education children are exposed to, where they come to use these euphemisms for other forms of life. Pork instead of pigs. Beef and veal instead of cows and calves. We say chicken, not the chicken. Lobster, not the lobster, or a lobster. There are all of these ways in which our language is commodifying and warping other forms of life.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes a lot about pronouns, and how we would never deem it appropriate to refer to our grandmother as an "it." And yet when it comes to a maple tree living near my house, we somehow accept — okay, well, that's an "it." Not a he, she, or they. There's so much that language reveals about our relationship with the world.

I'm thinking about it a lot these days too, in the representations of other animals — not just in storybooks, but in toys and all sorts of things my daughter is being exposed to. A little cart with happy farm animals on it. Well, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of chickens and cows and pigs do not live like that. And what do we do with her about not wanting to hide these uglier truths?

I think that's another thing about children — and I'm sure this is part of your work, Flo — it's that kids are not deficient adults. They can understand and grapple with complex realities, and with scary things.

Flo: And they probably already are. Even if they don't have language for it. That's happening.

Christine: Rather than shield them from it and make it all as if life is — you know, another animal is fine and happy in these settings.

Flo: I was thinking about a story from when I was little. I grew up on a ranch in California — we rented a little house that was part of a ranch in very rural, central-ish California. It was a place where people would often drop off feral cats. Somebody had dropped off three pregnant feral cats, and they all had kittens.

And of course, as a kid, I was like — this is the best day ever. I didn't know any of the implications, like why it's good to spay and neuter your pets. Little plug for that. But I was just so excited. I think I faked being sick so I could come home from school and find the kittens, which I did. I remember that because I was also a very outdoorsy child, climbing trees, experiencing what I think is the sacred outdoors, among creatures and the life that was outside my door.

But then I remember learning that the rancher was going to drown the kittens, because it was too many kittens. That was their standard practice. And there were probably — because it was three cats — probably like twenty-five kittens. It was something crazy. It was so many kittens.

I remember telling my mom. I remember the feeling of rage that made my body hot. I just felt so upset and frustrated and sad. And, fortunately, I had a mom who very much took me seriously as a child. So we came up with a plan, which was — I gave them all little baths and put bows on them and brought them to the grocery store.

And I sat in front of the grocery store, and I made a box with a sign on it that had little cartoon kittens with angel wings, like they'd been ascending to heaven. And I wrote: the farmers where we live will kill them. And every kitten was taken immediately. Somebody took two kittens — I remember them asking, where do you live?

That experience was — it's funny. I have a picture of it. My mom and I laugh about it now. But it was so formative, in this justice, in that moral compassion space. This isn't a cutesy story. I feel like people would reduce that to a cutesy, romanticized story about a child loving animals. But for me it's all wrapped up in how I feel about injustice anywhere. It was the same feeling as a kid that I remember.

Christine: And it was an example of you not turning away from injustice, but taking an active stance against it.

My own experiences of witnessing animal cruelty growing up — I write about seeing the lobster tank at our local grocery store. Seeing a chicken truck driving down the highway. And over time, because I felt unable to do something about that — in the case of the lobster tank, I made this whole plan to rescue them, and then the next day I saw the next cohort of lobsters ready to go, and I just felt very hopeless and helpless.
And then the chicken truck example. I was driving in the car with my mom, and she knew how sensitive I was to this kind of thing. And she was just like — just turn away. The chicken truck comes, just turn away. With my best interest at heart, truly, trying to make sure my mental health was okay.

I think adults and authority figures can facilitate that kind of turning away — turning away from injustice, in order to function in our society. But I also had examples growing up where I didn't turn away, where my parents allowed me to care, in a way that is not about children being naive or cute or sweet. No — there are so many lessons in that for our ways of life.

It comes back to this issue of biophilia, this innate affinity we have towards other forms of life. It's not just that. There's a moral component to it that kids have. It's not just being interested in something. It's a recognition that there is another minded, and souled — whatever you want to call it — being, who has interests, and we need to take those interests seriously. It's way more complex than just interest or ability.

Danny: I feel like it's so transcendent. A few minutes ago, when we talked about people not being able to get into their bodies, I saw your hand go to your heart — just feeling compassion for those people. I don't know if anybody's going to listen to this who would be threatened by it, but the invitation is not judgment. The invitation is not anger.

You write early on — and these are my notes, I might not be quoting you — that to be part of it all isn't really activism. It's just being part of it. It's just: welcome back, let's get to work. I think, even over the last few years for me, what I think sin is in this context is just refusing to be a part. And that healing and salvation isn't individual souls being cleaned up and shipped out. It's: come be a part.

And when you write about remembering to remember — for us, it's the Eucharist each week. It's this remember, remember, to all of creation and all of this world. Participate in it.

Which gets me to a question. Elon and Jeff, and how they think we can just fly off to Mars and do this — and how exactly that is of belonging. I even thought of that when you were talking about your daughter, and her saying: I can't just move around. I belong to something. There's a rhythm here. There's a cellular connection to where I am. I'd love to hear you talk a little about that. Why can we not just go do this on Mars?

Christine: Just one quick point about remember, because you were saying it — I must have read this somewhere, and I'm sure many people have already recognised it, but the sort of "re-membering" — you're re-membering yourself to a particular more-than-human community. That's amazing.

So, in the book I write mostly about human exceptionalism — this belief that humans are somehow separate from and superior to the rest of nature. But a related concept that I came across in researching for the book was human exemptionalism, which is the idea that humans are somehow exempt from ecological forces.

That, I think, is absolutely at play in this belief that we could live on a place like Mars, as healthy biological and psychological beings — as if our bodies and our minds did not evolve over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years in close contact and relationship and interdependence with the forces of this planet, this Earth.

They've done a number of studies. There's Biosphere 2, this in some respects failed experiment, planting trees in an environment meant to simulate the atmosphere of Mars, to figure out whether life could exist there. And the trees were not growing.

Scientists ultimately realised it's because trees need wind to grow. They actually resist the wind, and that's what makes them stronger, and makes them grow in a way that's balanced. If you remove wind from the atmosphere, you can't have that — as they couldn't have it in the simulation. Then they're not going to flourish, because they've evolved in a particular environment.

It was a perfect example of an almost invisible force that shapes an organism's survival. And that's one of many that we're not taking into account. What does that imply for all of the things we're not fully taking into account for human beings?

I argue in that chapter of the book that these earth exit strategies — and to some extent also solar geoengineering, and these other techno-fixes for the ecological crisis, which are only really scaling up the human factor and not scaling it down — are new and arguably more powerful forms of human exceptionalism. They're a version of human exemptionalism too, in that they assume humans are separate from nature, and that we know better, and that we are our masters and possessors and controllers. When in fact —

I'm forgetting the name now, but there's a famous quote from an ecologist: that nature is not only more complex than we think, it's more complex than we can think. In that we are unaware of all of the interdependencies that exist within nature — like wind and trees, but also between ourselves and other forms of life, and all the microorganisms who inhabit our bodies and our environments.

It calls for such humility in these strategies for trying to control nature, or trying to create a different nature on another planet. Which I don't think these earth exit strategies and geoengineering approaches always embody.

Danny: Thank you. That was such a good explanation. And I love that point in the book — it's there in our tradition. I don't know if you've heard of this rumour of the rapture. Jesus is going to show up one day and take some of us and leave others.

I don't know if I can say I've taken this all the way to prayer, but it has crossed my mind: just do it, God. All the people who hate it here — I don't want them to suffer. I hope they're happy forever. Give them their cloud, and let those of us who love it here get to work.

But I hear it in the Mars thing as well. It's like — wake people up to the fact that it's amazing to be alive, it's amazing to be here. I didn't know a tree needed the wind. I would have never thought about that.

Christine: What about us? I've thought about this a lot. I think it's like a nightmare. Imagine waking up on Mars and never feeling wind on your face again. Can you imagine? Even that needs to be taken seriously as a variable in whether or not humans would survive on Mars. What would it mean to never feel the wind move across your face again? Will we be okay with that? Maybe some will be. I will be — probably not. I love feeling the wind move across my face.

Danny: Which speaks to your love of human existence. It's not that your book says humans suck. It's that it would be a tragedy not to feel the wind on our face. So even that exceptionalism — it's like, no, just come back and be part of it all, and then be fully human in that space as well. But not in a way that would step on the fullness of anyone else. A child. An animal.

Christine: I love that you see it that way. Because I do feel like the criticism — to some extent, and it's not substantive, in that people haven't necessarily read the book — the criticism from fundamentalists is that I'm basically making human life less sacred. And I think, well, if I'm doing that, then you're right. I don't want to do that. But I don't feel like that's what the book is doing at all. It's not about denigrating the human underneath nature. It's about celebrating the human condition alongside all of these other forms of being, and by doing it all at once we only enhance that celebration. It just becomes more incredible. I want to be a part of that one, and not one that focuses on a single way of being.

Danny: I don't want to make you uncomfortable — you get it, we like your book. But that criticism is so unwarranted.

Christine: Even thinking of that — I mean, I have that sense, but it's great to hear it from people in your community, however on the margins of it you might be operating. It's still good to hear it from people like you.

Flo: You mentioned Saint Francis, and I'm like — yes, he's a good one. On my ordination, I had a pro and con list on my ordination sheet that I did with Danny. On the con list was preaching. But on the pro list was getting to bless the animals at the Festival of Saint Francis. Because that feels true, and beautiful. But I was curious, because I just love having an open, genuinely curious conversation with someone in the scientific field. Is there room for spirituality in a way that's not going to harm? If that makes sense. Do we need to burn it all to the ground? [unclear]

Christine: On Saint Francis — I think it's sort of what we were talking about before, where within our own disciplines, areas of study and practice, we have these dominant stories and figures who are well known and highlighted. In Western science and philosophy you have Galileo and Descartes and Kant. But you always have, even within those traditions, these totally unorthodox figures and ways of relating to other animals and the environment. Saint Francis is a great one. David Hume is another one within Western philosophy. And this is again within the Western tradition — we've already talked about non-Western traditions. Those figures, or those stories, are often ones we have to come across on our own. They're not part of the main education that we receive. They're not as venerated or celebrated or known in our field. So I think that's interesting.

And then, can science and religion coexist? I read — this question was posed to a bunch of scientists and religious scholars, but I think predominantly scientists if I remember correctly, in a paper published by the Templeton Foundation. I remember reading it, and so many of the scientists there were writing about how science is a process of trying to gain knowledge with the understanding that we'll never have it fully. Thinking of Rachel Carson's quote about every mystery solved bringing us to the threshold of an even greater one.

I think the best science is absolutely acknowledging that uncertainty and mystery. But there shouldn't just be that acknowledgement. It's then: okay, well, what do we do with that? And I think there's so much in religion that is useful. Ritual, and the role of community. I could go on — there's so much here that can help us deal with those other questions. So I don't see them as mutually exclusive.

I'm thinking of a Wendell Berry quote. You guys probably know it.

Flo: I've met him. I love him. Yes.

Christine: Incredible. He wrote something like: care for what we do know requires care for what we don't. I feel like that's probably a part of what you guys are doing here. And I think that's a way of thinking about the relationship between science and religion too. That in order to care for what we do know, we have to care for what we don't.

I have this dream. We have all these workshops and conferences in my field on particular themes — it might be consciousness, or communication, or wisdom, or whatever. And I'm like: what if the theme of our conference was what we cannot know? And what we should not try to know? Or what we should recognise as unknowable — and celebrate that?

I feel like that is, in some ways, at the heart of science. This desire to know comes from a recognition that we don't know something already. And science is filled with wonder and awe.

Danny: It is so good to meet you.

Christine: So good. Yeah, it's great. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Danny: Thank you for listening to another episode of Blessed Uncertainty. Special thanks to Kyle Locke for producing, his brother Adam Locke for our logo, and Jay Lynde for our theme music.