Species Unite

"It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. It's emotion. You know, like if I say, "have you read this or that," or… "do you know Alice Coltrane? Do you know John Coltrane?" Whatever it is you've got a language and there's a connection going on. And, we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of like an artistic sensibility to the world. We do have that with other things. People can talk about movies and they feel connected in a way. Religions connect people… we should be all connected by the Earth." – Warren Ellis Musician and composer, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had an extremely productive pandemic. Not only did he release two albums, two film scores and a book, but he also opened a wildlife sanctuary in Indonesia. Last spring, Warren co-founded Ellis Park, a forever home for disabled wildlife in South Sumatra. It's a haven for animals who have been rescued from wildlife trafficking who are either too traumatized or too handicapped to be returned to the wild. ​ Ellis Park will also be used as a hub to educate the public, locals and visitors to the park about the negative impacts on wildlife used in the tourism industry and those saved from the illegal pet trade and wildlife smuggling. Last fall, Warren published his first book, Nina Simone's Gum. It's about a piece of gum that Nina Simone was chewing during her final concert in London. As she left the stage, she placed the chewed gum on her piano. Warren noticed and quickly snatched the gum. He kept it for over two decades… until a few years ago, when the gum took on a life of its own. The book is about meaning and connection and trusting intuition when it calls on you to follow a thread, and it's about the love and the magic that we humans are capable of. In many ways Ellis Park has a very similar story. ​ Links: Ellis Park: https://www.ellispark.org/ Ellis Park Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ellisparksumatra/ Ellis Park facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EllisParkWildlifeSanctuary/ Ellis Park Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllisPark2021 Warren Ellis Twitter: https://twitter.com/warrenellis13?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Warren Ellis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewarrenellis/

Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF). He is a former Australian Royal Navy clearance diver and a special operations military sniper who became an anti-poaching crusader and an environmental and animal welfare activist. In 2009, while traveling through Africa, he was inspired by the work of rangers and the plight of wildlife. He liquidated his life savings and established the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. Over the past decade, the IAPF has scaled to train and support rangers which now help protect over 20 million acres of African wilderness. In 2017 Damien founded 'Akashinga - Nature Protected by Women,' an IAPF program that has already grown to over 240 employees with 7 nature reserves in the portfolio. They are the only group of nature reserves in the world to be protected by women. And, these women are changing the game in terms of what it means to fight poaching. Damien was featured in the James Cameron documentary The Game Changers and has now released another documentary with James Cameron and National Geographic about his work with the women of Akashinga – "The Brave One's." He is a resident of the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, has spoken at the United Nations, is featured in June 2019's National Geographic Magazine, and has been featured three times on 60 Minutes. And, if you haven't seen it, watch his TEDx Talk at the Sidney Oprah House, it's just awesome. It was an honor to spend time with Damien. He is a warrior, a hero, and a man who understands what it means to never stop evolving.

"This is their second chance. They were rendered extinct in the wild. And so now this is our second chance to get it right. We killed them off and hopefully they have enough of what they need that they can take the second chance and run with it." – Maggie Howell This is the last episode in a series that we are doing on wolves. It's probably not the final episode because I'm not going to shut up about wolves until they're all back on the endangered species list. But for the moment, it's the last. It's a conversation with Maggie Howell. Maggie is the executive director of the Wolf Conservation Center, an organization that is working to protect and preserve wolves in North America. And they do it through science-based education, advocacy, and they participate in the federal recovery and release program for two critically endangered wolf species, the Mexican gray wolf and red wolves. Maggie is also a founding member of Relist Wolves, a campaign to put all wolves back on the endangered species list. Please listen and share and quickly go to Relist Wolves to help get ALL of these remarkable animals back on the endangered species list. Wolf Conservation Center https://nywolf.org/ Relist Wolves https://www.relistwolves.org/

"Packs that are continuously trapped and snared and hunted, the packs are smaller and things are a lot more chaotic in the pack because you're killing uncle, you're killing dad, you're killing mom. The pups may get good leadership training and learn how to hunt or the family could be broken up and the puppies never fully learn how to hunt. And so all this hunting and trapping lowers the pack size, fragments them often and might cause a pack to break up, and those broken packs can actually send out more wolves in more places. So, all this intense wolf killing, in my opinion, it's not justified and it's unnecessary because what it's creating now, instead of biological carrying capacity, they're managed politically on social carrying capacity. How many wolves will people tolerate?" - Carter Niemeyer Carter Niemeyer is a wildlife biologist who has been working with wolves since the 1980s. Afetr decades as a trapper of wolves (and many other predators) he transformed into one of their biggest champions. He worked as a state trapper and conducted wildlife studies for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and by 1990, he was a full-time wolf specialist, negotiating situations where wolves were in conflict with people. In the mid 90s, he became a core member of the Wolf Capture Team in Canada. They were there to capture and bring wolves back to the US for the Federal Wolf Reintroduction Program. Carter's stories are seriously astonishing stories and span more than five decades of work with large predators. He's been a naturalist since he could walk and his love of nature and the outdoors are at the core of his very being. I spent the afternoon with him at his house in Idaho. I wanted to better understand the wolf hatred and hysteria that's been going in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana for centuries - but currently seems to be at an all-time high. I wanted to hear Carters perspective, the thoughts of a former trapper on the wolf massacre that's taking place today in the Northern Rockies and, also to ask him if there's anything that we can do to stop it. LINKS: www.carterniemeyer.com

"The alpha female dug a den and had puppies. And we got there as they were squealing in the pack. And what was just amazing is to see how the pack reacted to this. They were so excited. Even when she started digging the den, the other wolves start digging other holes… they weren't helping at all, they were just caught up in it." – Jim Dutcher I've talked about this before and I'm going to talk about it a whole lot more, there is a mass slaughter of wolves taking place in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. This is the first episode in a series that will hopefully get a whole lot more of us to care and then do something to stop this madness before it's too late. And, as you will hear in this conversation, there are real things that we can do. But first, wolves need as many of us as they can get on their team, and they need us to fight like crazy for them, or in the very near future, they'll be gone. This conversation is with the two people that have made humans care about wolves more than anyone that I know of. Jim and Jamie Dutcher spent six years in the nineties living with and filming a pack of wolves called the Sawtooth. And since then, they've focused their lives on the study and documentation of wolf social behavior, their photographs, books, and Emmy Award winning films Documenting the lives of these remarkable animals have changed the way that many people see these deeply social and family oriented animals. Links: https://www.livingwithwolves.org/ https://www.livingwithwolves.org/wolf-issues/how-you-can-help/ https://www.instagram.com/living_w_wolves/ https://www.facebook.com/LwWolves/ https://twitter.com/LWWolves

Today we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Alexandra Horowitz. "I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has; and then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn't to say being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers. I think we're a little way off from doing that, but boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures. "And of course, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs… It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, where we kind of get to use them sort of, for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals." – Alexandra Horowitz If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She's spent much of her life researching and writing about what it's like to be a dog. She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves; Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking. She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. I wish this conversation had lasted all day long as I had about five thousand more questions for Alexandra - mostly, everything I've ever wanted to ask my dog. The time that we did have together was pretty amazing and felt like an absolute gift. Visit Alexandra's Website Learn More About The Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College Alexandra's Books: Inside of A Dog Our Dogs, Ourselves Being A Dog On Looking

"Let's say I own a gun shop, and I want to drum up business, right? I can host a coyote killing contest, which they'll call predator hunting, where cash prizes of let's say $1000 goes to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period. You might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state, and through any means necessary thermal scopes at night, any technology, electronic game calls to lure them in, hunting over bait... The competitive killing of coyotes happens for cash prizes all over the United States, today." – C.J. Dirago The most persecuted carnivore in North America is the coyote, their poisoned, they're trapped, their aerial gunned, and killed for bounties and contests constantly. Over half a million coyotes are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I really haven't thought about coyotes all that much. They just haven't really come into my radar until recently, when I met C.J. Dirago. C.J. knows a ton about coyotes and is doing everything he can to protect them and give them a better rap. He's the founder of Bombazine, an organization seeking to protect wildlife and habitat in reciprocity with nature. Their inaugural project is called Song Dogs. It's an NFT collection of trail camera photography, with all proceeds funding coyote conservation.

"Our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on four to eight companies around the world to produce all these products." – Shely Aronov Shelly Aronov is the founder and CEO of InnerPlant. InnerPlant is kind of like Google Translate for plants. They're bioengineering plant genes so that crops can send messages to farmers, and the farmers will literally be able to understand what's going wrong with the crops. So that when they're under attack, the farmers will know much earlier than they do now. The reason I'm so excited about what Shelly and InnerPlant are doing is because once they're launched and scaled, this will greatly reduce the use of pesticides in farming. And the faster we move away from pesticides the better as they are destroying everything in their wake. "Plants communicate all the time, sending chemical signals to warn each other about threats. InnerPlant makes it possible to understand what plants are saying." InnerPlant "How do you increase biodiversity and how do you increase the microbial density of the soil? You just stop killing everything out there. Right, if we stop killing every single weed, if we stop putting a ton of chemicals that are really toxic on the soil, then everything's going to bounce back and nature is really good at bouncing back." – Shely Aronov

"I put on the coat, I looked at myself in the mirror, I was going to a party in Brooklyn and I just thought, 'you cannot go to this party like this, you will be shunned and you don't want to be this person." And I took off the coat and I never looked back." – Kym Canter Kym Canter is the founder and creative director at House of Fluff, a New York City-based, animal free, material innovation studio and outerwear brand. They also happen to make some of my favorite faux fur coats on the planet. All of their products are made from cruelty-free sources. Their fur products are also vegan, because in addition to not using animal fur or leather, their furs do not contain wool or silk. Most faux furs contain non-biodegradable fibers such as polyester and acrylic, so when using recycled fibers made from these virgin synthetics, House of Fluff makes sure that they meet the Global Recycled Standards (GRS) and are sourced from post consumer waste. And, to begin solving for virgin synthetics, House of Fluff launched the first of their BIOFUR™ innovations in November 2020. All textiles in their BIOFUR™ collection are recyclable and made from either plant-based or 100% recycled materials. Back in the day, in another lifetime, Kym was the creative director at J. Mendel, a global luxury brand known for its animal furs. Kym's transformation is one of the best stories I've heard in a long time. Links: House of Fluff https://houseoffluff.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hofnyc/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hofnyc

This week we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Jonathan Balcombe. "…gazing up to the night sky saying, 'are we alone?' …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet… there's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with, if we can." - Jonathan Balcombe Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a Ph.D. in ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is the author of four books on the inner lives of animals, including the New York Times bestseller, What a Fish Knows. He has published over 60 scientific papers and book chapters on animal behavior and animal protection. Jonathan has spent his life studying animals, how they think and feel, and why they matter. Quite often, he focuses on the ones that most of us tend not to think about very much, like fish and in his newest book, flies – Super Fly comes out in May. I thought I knew a little bit about fish, but after reading Jonathan's book and after this time spent with him, I realized that I knew very little. There are 33,000 species of fish and what many of them are capable of is absolutely mind-blowing . For eons, we have categorized species by who we deem worthy and who we don't. Fish are almost always very near or at the bottom of that list. Clearly, that is because most of us know so little about them. Jonathan knows a lot. If you haven't read his book, read it. It will astonish you. Jonathan can most recently be seen in the Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy. Visit Jonathan's Website Read Jonathan's Books Follow Jonathan on Twitter Like Jonathan on Facebook