Love in the Time of Extinction

- [Anne] Hi, everyone, it's Anne. There's an experience that I think a lot of us have these days, although I'm not sure we talk about it all that much. You're outside somewhere with green things growing, flowers it might be. You notice a butterfly or a bee on one of them, and you feel that quick burst of pleasure followed by a stab of anxiety. Shouldn't there be more bees? How's the monarch population doing this year? And where are all the other butterflies? Thoughts like these are unavoidable today. Climate change is hard on all of us, but especially on the world's smallest species. And so the challenge is to live with that anxiety about the future of the natural world, but still find ways to take joy and even refuge in it. Today on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," "Love in the Time of Extinction."

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- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps and it's the season for insects, mosquitoes, and deer flies, wasps, and bees, and hornets, and everything else we love to- Swat. I'm actually not crazy about killing bugs, and I try not to, but that doesn't mean I wanna live with them in my house or on my porch. Maybe, though, I'm too quick to judge.

- [Heather] If we just get exposed to things, sometimes, we can discover that they're not actually scary at all, that they're actually these strange, but so elegant, delicate, and absolutely beautiful creatures that are living all around us.

- [Anne] This is Heather Swan, author, poet, and longtime friend of the show, also a beekeeper, and she's here in my backyard hoping to reintroduce us to some mutual acquaintances.

- [Heather] I'll tell you a story. It was one of those summer afternoons where a thunderstorm comes and drops a bunch of rain and then moves on really quickly. And all over my yard, the bees had been flying around. There were just bees that were wet in the yard and they couldn't fly 'cause they were totally soaked. So I was picking them up and taking them back to the hive. Suddenly, I had two bees in my hand at the same time, honeybees. They were both kind of taking their antennae and their legs and trying to sort of push all the water off of themselves and their little fuzzy hairdos were all just kind of like, they looked like they had just gotten out of the shower and they were sort of caring for themselves until they realized that there was a second bee in my palm. And one of them even had a broken wing that was torn a little bit. So both of them were kind of in a bad spot, but when they saw each other, they immediately went to start to caress the other and care for the other. And I thought to myself, human beings don't do that. You know what I mean? It was just this beautiful moment where they rose up out of their individual needs to care for their, I mean, we can argue that it's about caring for that community, which is a superorganism. So it's kind of considered one entity because those bees don't survive when they're by themselves. But it was just, it was so beautiful. And I don't know if you can call that love, but I can say that they do just beautiful things together.

- It was care.

- It was care. Yeah, it was care.

- [Anne] These are tough times for people who care about the world's tiniest creatures. The global insect population is plummeting, something like 40% of insect species face extinction, a terrifying statistic. The specter of ecosystem collapse haunts us all. And so here's the question we're asking this hour, how do you live with love and even hope for the natural world in a time of extinction? Some people are finding a way. Hold on, Healthy wants to go back inside. Hold on.

- Okay.

- [Anne] Heather Swan and I are getting settled on my back porch. We've got stick-on insect tattoos, I chose a praying mantis, and a copy of her new book, "Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection." Everybody should, sorry, take your class. Heather teaches environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her students are 18 and 20 year olds. And she told me about a day when she realized just how scared they really are.

- [Heather] Basically, this woman said, "This poem gives me hope." And I said, "Oh, tell me more about that." And she said, "Well, most of the time, I don't feel any hope at all and I don't wanna bring a child into this world." And she said, "But that poem makes me feel like maybe I could." And I said, "Oh my goodness, you're nervous about bringing a child into this environmental moment?" And she said, "Yeah." And I said, "Oh my goodness. How many other people in the room feel that you wouldn't have children because you're afraid of the environmental things that we're facing?" And all of them raised their hands. I don't have any interest in pushing people to have children. It wasn't about that. It was that I realized that they were not seeing a future that they could imagine anyone surviving in. And so at that point, I thought, okay, they need more than strategies for change. They need to be able to dare, to love, to have courage.

- [Anne] I'm really interested in the kind of conversations you're having with your students. Why don't we all have those all the time?

- [Heather] Yeah. It's almost like we don't really want to talk about it because it's a little bit sad and a little bit scary maybe right now. There's a lot of bad news out there, you know? And if you start caring for something, it can be really painful. But I think that the other side of that is part of the reason that we're in this moment is that we've shut ourselves off from the natural world. We have this idea that we've been told for a long time that we're somehow separate from nature. And I can think of one moment is when Descartes says, "All the animals are machines. They don't have feelings." We've been coming back from that for a long time. But often when someone's pet dies, for example, we don't give the space for grief that we do for another human. And that maybe sounds horrible that I would suggest that there's some sort of equivalence there. But I mean, I had a dog for 16 years as an adult, and when that dog died, Mojo, I remember feeling like he knew me in ways no human being knew me, in nonverbal ways, in ways that were like, I love so much that your dog is talking to us during this conversation. He's saying, "Yes, there's not enough attention paid." That's right.

- [Anne] So going back to those conversations, I was curious about your new book, that opening, the story you tell about, was it a year, a summer that you lived in a barn with your mother and your sister?

- [Heather] You know, it's so funny. I think we lived there for two summers, but we were there for long enough to really get comfortable. It was a traditional barn stone foundations.

- Foundations, yeah. And then it's like red.

- [Heather] Yep, timbers, right. It was a very porous building, and there were sort of these huge beams that went up, but all open. And so we lived there because it was a place that my mom found for us to live that was free. And the doors during the day, when it was warm out, those would just be open. So we had so much wildlife coming in and out of the house that we were living in.

- [Anne] And how old were you?

- [Heather] I think I was about nine.

- Okay.

- Nine or 10.

- [Anne] At nine or 10, I would've been freaked out.

- [Heather] Yeah, my mother was amazing because she had this brilliant strategy of just naming everything. And so we had Winthrop, the Wasp, and Junie, the June bug. And one of the most amazing things was the bats that came in. We all had curly hair. My mother and my sister and I had long, curly hair. And when it got to be dusk, my mom would say, "Okay, girls, time to put your hats on." So we'd tuck our hair up inside of our hats.

- [Anne] You had bat hats.

- [Heather] We had bat hats. We did. And it was interesting because as she was naming all of them, she named the bats Angel and her family. And so all of the bats were just Angel's family. And we never thought anything other than that they were benign beings that flew in at night and ate the mosquitoes, and it was just such a brilliant strategy to name the things that would've scared us.

- [Anne] You think she did that really on purpose?

- [Heather] I think so. And so we really weren't afraid. And then when we would go out into the fields, there were all kinds of other creatures that were doing interesting, complicated things. And I just assumed that they all had lives that were important, and whether it was a cricket or a frog or a chickadee, but there were also a coyote on that land, and they didn't seem to be other really.

- [Anne] Do you feel like you ever lost that sense of easy connection with the natural world and other creatures?

- [Heather] I would say that what happens sometimes is that I've had, I've struggled with anxiety and depression for different reasons. And in those moments, I might feel disconnected. But I find that if I'm able to turn toward the natural world again, that's where I can find my healing.

- [Anne] Yeah.

- [Heather] And it's definitely where I take all of my pain that we have living in this moment. You know, when my father died, I was trying to make sense of that grief. At the same time I was making sense of the pandemic, and at the same time making sense of climate change and extinction and all the things that we have. And I have this very clear memory of getting in my kayak and thinking, okay, it was the end of the day, it was just the sun was going down, and I thought, "I'm just gonna go out and be by myself. I'm just so sad, I'm just gonna go wallow in my sadness by myself." And I paddled out to this little island thinking I was just going to be all by myself and really, you know, just digging into my grief fully. And I got there and there were these three cranes on the edge of the water, and they were really curious about me, and I was watching them. And then I got closer to them and closer to them, and they didn't leave. And I decided to just stay with them. And they just had their evening habits of they were eating, and then it was getting darker, and I just stayed, and they allowed me to stay with them. And I realized that there was the sounds of the water around me and the sounds of the crickets beginning, and then some geese flew over and were calling, and then the cranes called up to them. And all of a sudden it was this feeling that I wasn't alone at all. I was completely surrounded by so much life. That was, in some ways, this message to me about the continuation of my dad's energy, that he was now part of this larger continuum, that felt like family to me. It felt like being held by something. And it was so instructive to me also because it's where I can always go.

- [Anne] Hmm, you're making me think about a, this was not long ago, it was earlier this year, and I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping and just feeling really stressed. It was one of those nights, I just, I woke up, I could not sleep. And normally I would maybe get up, wander around the house. For some reason, I just went outside and I just sat on that bench over there in the dark, and there were owls. And they live in that big tree over there. And they were hooting really loudly. I mean, I sat on the bench, it sounded like they were directly above my head. And that was so comforting, and I just sat there and listened to, you know, when you really listen to an owl hoot, it's such a deep kind of sound. There's nothing like it. I mean, I felt like I could feel it physically. And then there was this silent right over my head, and I saw these huge wings, and another owl flew right overhead and joined the others in that tree. And then they all just hooted back and forth. And I wasn't scared, you know, it was more just magical, this silent flight and this huge wing spread. And when I went back inside, I was in a completely different frame of mind, just totally different.

- [Heather] Mm. I can so relate to that. The hardest thing is just to let ourselves connect. Open yourself enough and quiet yourself enough. You could hear that, and then feel it in your body, Anne, that's amazing, right? We don't make time for that, we're so separate. And I think that we could, I mean, I wonder if part of the reason we have so much depression and anxiety in our country right now is that we don't allow ourselves to remember that we are part of that wild world. We are also animals in this world and that those voices calling all around us are part of this symphony that we can also be a part of, but we somehow separate ourselves from that. It's such a special sound.

- [Anne] It is. It's funny how many of those moments are sonic, like that late summer sound of the locusts humming, feeling like you're walking through sound. There's something about the sound of the natural world that just cuts right through all the other artifice.

- [Heather] It's such a part of our lives that we just don't acknowledge. I think that part of the reason that Rachel Carson's book was so powerful was because it imagined a silent spring. And what would that be like? The one danger is that if we don't know the sounds, or we don't know those beings to start out with, I don't know. I think about it in terms of thinking about the sound. It's like, if you said, "Well, this symphony's great, but let's get rid of all the strings. Let's get rid of the woodwinds. Oh, we really don't need the timpani." You know? I mean, just like start taking it away. And it would really, we would be so impoverished.

- [Anne] I'm talking with poet and essayist, Heather Swan, about her new book "Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection." I'm Anne Strainchamps, we'll be right back. It's To "The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio- And PRX. We're talking with ecopoet Heather Swan, who not only writes about insects, she also brings them into her classes. Undergrads who take environmental literature with her at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, come face to face with more than a few insects and get some of their preconceptions challenged.

- [Heather] It's not that they all leave my classroom being in love with insects, Anne. That doesn't happen. But I think that they are more willing to give space to them as creatures that deserve to be on the planet as well.

- [Anne] Like they have to build up to feel like a connection with insects.

- [Heather] You do. They're the things that we are most afraid of, I think. When I talk about insects with students, I have them talk about an experience they've had with an insect, and most of the time it's a scary one. And honestly, I feel like poetry is one way to really bring people into a closer relationship with the natural world. I mean, it's so funny to me that one of the poems that Mary Oliver wrote and is quoted all the time is a poem that ends, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" But the interesting thing about that poem that no one really mentions is that the first part of that poem is Mary Oliver with a grasshopper in her hand, looking really closely at it. And I think that in some ways, she's asking us to notice, to notice the things that are so small and unusual and beautiful about this life, and that that in fact is part of the answer. And what does it mean to slow down and pay attention to these creatures that live such complicated lives that are so really beautiful, but they're small, and so we don't recognize them. We look at maybe a polar bear and say, "Oh, that's awesome." Or, you know, a lion. And we have all this reverence for these things that are mammals that are really huge. But when something is very small and it moves quickly, then suddenly it's something that we wanna destroy. And so I think that part of inviting people into thinking about insects is my own love of them. If I express how much joy I've gotten through the years of spending time with insects, that sounds crazy to my students often. And then they get a little curious about it, and then they maybe open up to it. And one of my favorite stories is I brought insects into a poetry class a couple years ago, and I had a student in there. She was a weightlifter. She was one of the toughest women I've ever met, mentally and physically, she was terrified of bugs. She looked like a person that wouldn't be afraid of anything. And she was afraid, afraid, afraid of insects. And we had stick bugs in there, stick insects.

- [Anne] Oh yeah, the ones that look like stick, yeah.

- [Heather] Yeah, they look like a stick, and they have long pointy elbows, and they move kind of slowly. And this insect was walking all over different students that were trying it out, and they were saying, "Oh my gosh, that feels so cool." Things like that. And finally she said, "Okay, I'll try it." And so she put out her arm and I let this little insect step down on her palm, and then it crawled all the way up her hand onto her arm. And then she said to me, "You have to take a photograph of this. You have to take a photograph of this." And so I took a picture of her and she wrote to me later, and she said it absolutely changed her experience of insects. She had never wanted to be touched by one, she had a terrible phobia. And suddenly she had overcome a fear and discovered that it was amazing to have a little creature crawling on her arm.

- [Anne] When did you start liking insects so much? I know you're a beekeeper, so I know you've had a deep and long relationship with bees, but I didn't realize that it extends to so many insects.

- [Heather] Yeah. I think that when I was falling in love with bees and then discovering that there was colony collapse going on, and then I realized it wasn't just honeybees, it was in fact all of these native bees. And then in fact, it was all kinds of insects. It was moths and it was dragonflies. There are so many galvanizing moments, honestly. I mean, being sprayed with my daughter by a crop duster was one that made me so angry.

- [Anne] What happened?

- [Heather] I was living in a community, and there was a moment I woke up in the morning and there was a sound of an airplane that was flying, like it was coming down so close to the homes and flying out, and then coming, like I heard it turn around and it was coming back again. I still had 9/11 in my mind, and I thought, "Is this a person that's suicidal? Is this a person that is wanting to hurt someone?" And I thought, weirdly, I need to get out of the house. So I grabbed my daughter, who was quite small at the time, and ran outside. And it was right at the moment when I saw that the plane was coming down right over the treetops. And I didn't realize until it was moving away that it was spraying. And I could feel it all over my body and I could feel it in my skin and my eyes. And I ran in the house and I was washing us off. And in two weeks, my daughter had a lymph gland the size of a mango on her body. And she was very sick. And as it turns out, people that were sensitive to this, people that have asthma, things like that, there was a letter that had come to the community before we moved in that said, don't be here or don't be outside during the spraying. And I remember feeling like, "Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? We're spraying chemicals all over the community, including the people?" It was a moment where I felt like, what is wrong with us? That we're trying to get rid of one insect, and in the process, getting rid of so many other insects in that same family, butterflies, insects that people actually like. And so that was one moment where I felt like we're doing this wrong. And luckily, she healed from that. But my father died from Parkinson's. I just read a study that just came out in March that is naming more pesticides that contribute to Parkinson's disease. So that was a moment where I thought I had to speak up, not in a way that was condemning anyone, but to say, really? Do we need to be doing this?

- [Anne] You wrote at the beginning of this book that one of the animating questions you asked yourself was, is it possible to still have hope for this planet? And so we were talking about finding hope with your students, but you also went out to try to find people who are doing something.

- [Heather] Yeah.

- [Anne] Who's somebody you met who did give you hope?

- [Heather] Astonishing people. Honestly, there are so many people doing wonderful things. And one story is a woman named Maria Luisa Hincapie. She and her family decided that they were tired of finding out that orchids in Columbia where they live, were being stolen out of the forest, and that they were actually nearing extinction, many of these incredible orchids. And they decided that they would create a space, sort of a sanctuary for these native orchids.

- An orchid sanctuary.

- [Heather] An orchid sanctuary. They bought this piece of land that was completely denuded. They described picking up the soil, and it was basically like sand that would just fall through their hands. And they just began slowly rebuilding an ecosystem from the ground up. And as they were doing that, different pollinators would arrive and then they could start to plant the orchids. And the orchids, because they were native, needed a rich, rich population of pollinators. And now, when you go there, you walk through their forest of orchids and they have all of these extraordinary creatures. I mean, and what's interesting too is Maria, when talking about plants, she talks about them as if they are beings that have a life and a personality-

- Consciousness.

- [Heather] Yeah. Yes.

- [Anne] Does it feel different from the rest of the forest?

- [Heather] That space, to me, felt imbued with, I'm gonna say it, Anne, love. It was beautiful.

- [Anne] One of the most magical passages in your book, it actually kind of made the hairs stand up a bit for me, was you described the evening where you're hanging out with that family and they asked if you wanted to see an orchid pollinated.

- [Heather] Yeah. They were certain orchids that they have to pollinate themselves. And what happens is you actually, you're basically opening up this creature and fertilizing, so it's actually rather sensual and a little bit erotic in some ways. Everyone was silent. It was so respectful and beautiful, and he was absolutely so delicate taking this little tiny stick with a little soft end, with a tiny bit-

- It just sounds sexual.

- [Heather] It was very sexual. He was kind of, in some ways, giving us an indication that there is this sort of, this sensual erotic exchange happening around us all the time.

- [Anne] The way you wrote about it, just sounded both sacred and like sacred sex.

- [Heather] Mm.

- [Anne] And I just felt like there was, there's so much teaching in there, you could almost learn from flowers.

- [Heather] Yeah, absolutely. The birds and the bees.

- [Anne] Yeah. Going back to your students, your larger project is to bring them some hope too, or help them find it in themselves. At some point, one of them said she wasn't sure she wanted to have children because of climate change. Can you tell me that story?

- [Heather] It was interesting because I thought about, in my own life, a moment when it took every ounce of courage that I had to keep loving something. And it was after my daughter was born, I had had a C-section that didn't go well, but my baby was brought to me and I was holding her in my arms. And what happened was she started breathing quickly and her breaths were getting shallower. And they took her and examined her, and they realized that during the C-section, two holes had been punctured in her lungs. And so every breath that she took, a little pocket of air was building up between the lung and the chest wall. And that eventually her lungs were going to collapse. And the thing that I hate to admit is that in that moment when they told me that, the first thing that happened was that I thought, "I have to prepare myself for her death." And that meant steeling myself against that loss. But I somehow realized that I needed to be brave for her. And what that risk was, was actually just loving her in these moments that she was with me. And so I turned toward that being my daughter and loved her, knowing that there was a chance that I would lose her, but wanting to give her as much love as possible in these moments when she was on the planet. And so I stayed with her, and I watched as they did all of these things to her, they put her in X-rays, hundreds of times, they put all kinds of tubes and wires in her body. And I stayed with her, and I sang to her, and I held my hand on her. And miraculously, both of us survived.

- [Anne] Oh my God.

- [Heather] But the truth is that that moment, the thing is, it's very easy for us to turn away from something that might hurt. And loving things can sometimes hurt. And so what I wanted my students to know is that in my own life, the decision to love things, even though it's hard, and even though sometimes it's very painful, allows me to have more joy or richer existence. Because sometimes there is pain, but in part, it's because you're holding both of those things, you can actually have a richer experience of joy. And that when you're in the world and you're in love with it, it's really a great place to be. And so I tell them, please, please risk. Please have the courage to love.

- [Anne] Thank you so, so much. Thank you for the work, the writing you do, how much you help us open our hearts and love this place, and what's around us a little more. And it makes me cry to think about you helping those students. I'm so glad you're in their life. Thank you.

- [Heather] Thank you, Anne. It's been such a beautiful afternoon.

- [Anne] It has been.

- [Heather] Thank you.

- [Anne] That's Heather Swan, an award-winning poet, an essayist. We were talking about her new book "Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection." Her most recent poetry collection is called "Dandelion." Coming up, another take on how to find the courage to fall in love with the natural world, even in the face of environmental collapse. Biologist Andreas Weber's ecstatic philosophy of edible life, after this. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. German writer, Andreas Weber, is both a biologist and a philosopher. But that doesn't begin to explain how unique his work is. You could maybe call him a mystical scientist with a transcendental perspective on concepts like the carbon cycle and metabolic processes. He can tell you about the biochemical composition of a flower, but he is more interested in talking about what it might be like to be that flower, to feel the texture of the soil, to eat rays of sunlight. Andreas has a new book out in which he says, "Life is all about eating and being eaten," which may sound gruesome, but as Steve Paulson discovered, it's also kind of miraculous. The book is "Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology."

- [Steve] So that's where I wanna start. What does it mean to be edible?

- [Andreas] Yeah, it might sound a bit startling at first. Being edible means being eaten, actually.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Andreas] And the mutual edibility is, to me, one of the huge secrets of the living cosmos, that life feeds on life. And every life needs to live from life. So we could stop here and look at the food web, and nature red in tooth and claw and all this, but I would rather go to this amazing realization that in order to exist, every being needs to continuously rebuild itself from the stuff of other lives. Life is about transformation.

- [Steve] So one way to think about this is, of course, when we die, we will decompose and our molecules or whatever-

- [Andreas] And, you know, I would really put it like this. I wouldn't say we will decompose, because decomposing is actually a process of being eaten.

- Hmm, yeah.

- I see it like this. When I die, I will be a feast for other beings. Like, you know, the roast turkey, or in Europe, you have in Germany, you have the Christmas goose, family tradition, you know, and you have this great day with your family and it's just lovely to have this ritual in a way. And it will be like this. So there will be beings ecstatic about growing their bodies by transforming your body into the earth. And I find this absolutely spectacular. So if we call it decomposing, we already have a very static look.

- [Steve] Or a very sort of negative look.

- [Andreas] Very negative look, I mean, let's not hide that, of course, death is a huge challenge, but it also is always a rebirth.

- [Steve] There's another reference point here that I immediately thought about, and that is the Eucharist, eating the bread and wine in the Catholic mass, you know, which means you're becoming the body and flesh of Jesus.

- [Andreas] Yes.

- [Steve] How directly are you drawing that analogy?

- [Andreas] Yeah. I actually don't draw it at all consciously. Of course, I have realized how you could look back at the Christian idea or the Christian tradition of the Eucharist and more deeply understand that this is actually about life and about life giving. And so you could learn about how to understand the divine in terms of a living reality, a living universe, a life-giving reality.

- [Steve] Well, I mean, it seems to me that your project is to take us back into our bodies. Which is, maybe that's obvious, but it's not, because it seems like there's this tendency, especially in Western culture, to think of us as just minds. I mean, that's the whole push of generative artificial intelligence. We don't need our bodies. At some point, we're gonna download consciousness into machines. And this is fundamentally counter to everything you're talking about.

- [Andreas] Yeah, it's true. That's why I also would really be careful by even using the word artificial intelligence, because intelligence, as I define it, needs a body. I think what we can see, actually, we can see in the world and we can see in ourselves, is that every flavor of mind always has a material side. You are matter. And you're also the inside of matter, which I think is just an amazing privileged position. You know, I had this moment of revelation actually when I was, and I write about it in this book when I was standing at the shore of the Mediterranean in one October night, I was in some residency in Italy, and there was a colleague, a filmmaker, I think she was a filmmaker, and she was there and she was cheering at the waves. It was stormy. And the waves were crashing on the rocks, and she was cheering them on. And I was asking her, why are you so happy? And she said, I have no idea, but it makes me so happy. She just had a cosmic realization. And I was thinking, actually, it is so crazily amazing that I am, I am matter from this world. When I understand in soulness of everything, then it's already like, you know, I'm conceptually preparing a mystical experience, actually.

- [Steve] There's a beautiful passage you have in one of your essays. You tell a story about how you were sitting in a city park, soaking in all the sights and sounds, the birds, the trees, the wind, and then the outside somehow became the inside, and these experiences can be hard to put into words, but can you sort of walk me through that whole experience? Going into the park, what you were feeling, sensing all around you. And then what happened?

- [Andreas] On that day in that park, I met with a friend just to have a look at the early spring flowers, early March I think, or late February. So the time in Europe, these flowers will blossom only when there are not really leaves yet, they come out. It was just a sort of flower sightseeing. There were already some croci, I think that's the word-

- Crocuses.

- Crocuses. And snow drops. And I found it very beautiful. But that's far too shallow to talk about. I would say I had a pull, which I felt somehow going to my heart, somehow pulling my heart somewhere. It was a sort of call, I would say. Come closer to what you really see here, these flowers, these blossoms. So I sat down, I was thinking, okay, so I will try to somehow take them into my heart beyond that emotional level, be very present, and just sit there. In a way, I just resolved to do a meditation. A friend did the same. So we didn't really talk a lot. We just sat down on some low fence, and then I was basically not doing anything but just trying to stay present. So I didn't really think. I cultivated something like asking, somehow being to be really, somehow be on the same level as the flowers, in a way. I looked at the flowers, I looked at the branches, which had no leaves, and which somehow crisscrossed the pale sky. So it just popped up that I saw that all these connections of transformations, the flowers who drink the light and make their bodies from the carbon dioxide, they breathe in, which I breathe out. This was some incredibly tender, intimate, relational process. I was somehow part of it. I was somehow inside of it. I was somehow, it's a slightly psychedelic experience actually. You somehow dissolve, you lose your solid ego in a way. It was incredibly beautiful.

- [Steve] It's sort of like you've, I don't know, become one of the flowers almost.

- [Andreas] Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like this. You know, you really tempt me to try a little experience outside because many people have had this experience, but it doesn't pop up so often if do not cultivate it. And you can cultivate it and then you can, I would even say you can learn to go into this mode of understanding this. But that's also part of my practice when I do workshops, to really try to open up for participants to walk into this perception, which I think has been the cultural norm for many ancient cultures who, animistic cultures, who didn't see nature. They didn't have a concept of nature, but they had a concept of other subjects, other non-human persons, other than human persons with whom they share their lives, with whom they could interact, with whom they could shift shapes. So we can really go in the direction of these experiences without taking any substances. You see, this has really become my passion.

- [Steve] Sure, yeah, yeah.

- [Andreas] To do it totally sober, you know? Teach teetotal psychedelic experiences. Only helped by the flowers. I mean, isn't it wonderful?

- [Steve] Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna ask you about where this perspective on the world has come from for you personally. And I want to go back to your childhood, 'cause you've written about how at quite an early age, I think maybe even before you were a teenager, you became an avid gardener.

- [Andreas] Yeah, yeah.

- [Steve] And this wasn't just going out and planting a few vegetables. This was more than that.

- [Andreas] Yeah, that's true. That was actually a, it was a philosophical approach to gardening. I'm still obsessed with perceptions, which come from my early childhood, actually. It's this childlike wonder about reality, you know, just looking at it and saying, wow.

- [Steve] How old were you?

- [Andreas] I was maybe 12, maybe even a bit earlier. So it was on the other side of the street. Somebody had a garden there and this guy moved and the garden fell follow. And I was looking at it and I don't know, I just had this idea I could grow vegetables. And I asked my father if he could somehow talk to this guy. And it was a very low rent, actually. So my father paid that for me. But that was the only help actually he gave me. So everything was up to me, which was somehow a bit terrible, but also great because I could do it as I wanted to do it. I bought literature. I spent my whole pocket money, you know, I spent on books, gardening books. In the wintertime, I made these drawings, which goes where, cabbage goes in that plot. And I was there every afternoon, I think. I had my little Dachshund with me. And I also had a friend who was always helping. It was paradise. Only the attractive girls didn't look at me anymore. Really, it was a high price I had to pay, you know, and at some point I stopped gardening. So it became too serious. It was really, you know, I was this freak, you know, I was deeply in love with one girl for years in this innocent way, you know? And now she didn't really look at me. And then there was this moment I came back from the local farmer who had sold me two carts of manure. And I was so proud. Actually, he really, it was fraud. I paid far too much, I had no idea. But okay. I was proud, with this cart full of manure, and I met this girl, she came with her bike and she saw me and I saw, I was really hoping to have some eye contact and to show her my love through my eyes. And she looked at me and I saw really my, my cause had failed, it was super humiliating.

- [Steve] Why do you think that was so magical for you? What was it about what you were doing then that was, that made you obsessed?

- [Andreas] Very good question, because then I didn't really know. It was beautiful black earth, wonderful earth with lots of earthworms inside. There was also a blackbird who was also always there. And the blackbird wanted the worms. So the blackbird started to chide at me when I stopped turning the earth. That was very fuddy. And the dog also started to bark because the dog had his own excavation project, tunnel excavation project. And when I stopped, because I needed a break, because I was only 11, the blackbird started to screech at me because he wanted more worms. And the dog also because the dog thought I was kind of like leaving him alone in his huge building project. So it was actually very relational. And then I sewed salad and herbs and cabbage and beans, peas and carrots. And I mean, it was just wonderful and beautiful, when in the evening, with the sun setting, I was walking there and just looked at what was growing. I was gifted. I gave my labor and I was given back something. And that was wonderful. And then I could give this obviously to my family or to my friends' family. So we ate it also. That was also wonderful. So I would say I was just simply part of this circle of edibility. I made myself edible in terms of really toiling and sweating. So I really, really gave myself away into this. But then the garden gave itself away to me, this very short circuit of giving and receiving. And then I could give away that what I had received.

- [Steve] So there's something else that you write about in one of your essays that I found so interesting. And that's the boundaries that exist between the inner and outer world. So for the cell, it's the membrane. For a tree, it's bark, for vertebrates, the blood brain barrier, the skin.

- Yes, of course.

- Of the human body.

- [Andreas] We have several of these.

- [Steve] Yeah. And the point that you make is that all of these boundaries are both protective casings, they sort of hold what's inside. They're also permeable.

- [Andreas] Yeah. You know, that came to me also when I met a tree in spring, and I saw that this tree in the forest close to my place in Berlin, we went into this forest like regularly with my dog, and it was early spring, and I saw that this tree, I really see it like today, that somehow the bark had opened and the green shoot came from this bark at a place where before there was only bark. I was thinking, life is just both. Life is a wall and it is an opening. Life is a refusal and it is an emphatic yes. And it is both at the same time, a wall that is a door. So it always means that living beings create themselves as being separate through being connected. You could even say that your respiration is this membrane because what you do, now, it's another instance of being super edible. What you do when you breathe out is that you breathe out CO2, carbon dioxide, and the c, the carbon in this is your flesh. That's how it works. It's your fat, it's your proton, it's your meat. If you look into how the cell metabolism functions, what goes out as CO2 is part of the living being. You know, children are taught in school that we eat like cars are refueled, and then the food is burned, gives us energy, and then there's some exhaust. This is like biologically not right, it's wrong. It doesn't happen like this. It's because the food which you eat becomes yourself, becomes your flesh. That's the continuum. You eat the apple and you become the apple. You become the apple tree, and you breathe out yourself. So this blue sky is actually made by the bodies of all these being who breathe out every two seconds or even more often. And then you're breathing your body into the bodies of the trees and the plants. I find this so mysterious.

- [Steve] It's so beautiful.

- [Andreas] We are one huge continuum of bodies. That's, for example, something you can exercise with participants in a workshop just to do this very slowly, like a meditation.

- [Steve] What do you mean? What do you do?

- [Andreas] To sit with a tree and breathe and see how your feeling is. And I tell you from my experience with these workshops is actually things happen. It's not just you sit there and breathe, things happen. Like people come and sometimes people have this revelatory experiences. Like I had a participant in a workshop two weeks ago. She said, you know, suddenly, I was the forest. People were walking through me, which is very profound. On a certain level of our embodied nature, it's also plain truth. She had a deep insight in reality, people come back and they're so happy about them, but it's not so difficult to have them. You need some time, you need some patience. But I have become very confident that people can go very quickly, very deep, actually. Because fundamentally, this is our experience. I remember last year there was a student, I did this for a seminar of a colleague at the Berlin University, and there was a student who looked at me and said, "Hey, this is actually like taking mushrooms." And I said, "Yes, but without taking mushrooms, you know?" It's just sitting with mushrooms. You don't need any object. You don't need to consume anything. You can just be it. And it's possible, it's possible. It needs some training, but it's in ourselves.

- [Anne] That's Andreas Weber, a biologist and philosopher based in Berlin. He was talking with Steve Paulson about his book "Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology." It's not out in English yet. But while you're waiting, check out his earlier book with an equally great title, "The Biology of Wonder." "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin at the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Our producers are Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, and Angelo Bautista. Our technical director is Joe Hartke with help from Sarah Hopefl. And additional music this week comes from Martin Skelekons, Ketza, Kirka Samayo, Maiden, and Ergo Fismus. The executive producer of "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson, and I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening. Be well and come back often.