Species Unite

“Anybody with half a heart could understand that this is a very bad deal for these feeling beings. Waking up every day at the same place where these horrible things happened, it's not right.” – Gene Grant   It’s been almost a decade since the National Institutes of Health ended the use of chimpanzees for biomedical research. But today we still have scores of chimpanzees sitting in labs. They’re not being tested on, but they are still waiting to be moved into a sanctuary. This is happening even though there is a law in place that established a federal sanctuary system to provide lifetime care for chimpanzees retired from medical research.   26 of these former research chimpanzees live in the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. I asked Gene Grant, the chief program and policy officer for Animal Protection New Mexico, to come on the show and talk about why all these years later, these chimps have still not been moved to a sanctuary. And how that changes.   LINKS Animal Protection New Mexico https://apnm.org/ Chimp Haven https://chimphaven.org/donate/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/science/chimpanzees-research-retirement.html

“There was a farmer who I met. He had the craziest [story], but not crazy because it's happening everywhere. A hog horn rammed into him and he got a disease. No one had any idea what it was. He went septic. He almost died. And he figured out that his herd had gotten an antibiotic resistant bug because of the way he was farming.” – Chloe Sorvino   Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer at Forbes. She writes the newsletter, Mind Feeder, and founded the Forbes newsletter Fresh Take.   Chloe is also the author of Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, an exposé into the power and corruption of America’s meat industry.   Nearly a decade of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, and Costco's rotisserie chicken slaughterhouse in Nebraska. Sorvino serves as a steward on the Forbes Union unit council. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fast Company, the Financial Times, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, Salon and many more.   Chloe Sorvino: https://www.chloesorvino.com/  

“We want to know that we're not separate from all beings - because most of our grief, our fear, our anger comes from feeling separate, not feeling connected, we're constantly finding ways to connect.” – Nina Rao   Nina Rao runs an organization called Saving Wild Tigers, a project that raises funds and supports conservation efforts for tigers throughout India. Three of the eight tiger subspecies that roamed Asia only 50 years ago are gone. And the remaining population is under severe threats from habitat loss, hunting of its prey and poaching. The future is uncertain for tigers.   Saving Wild Tiger’s supports the immediate needs of the wild tigers: protecting the tiger, its habitat, its prey and its protectors; supporting the surrounding villages (community-based conservation), scientific studies to understand the needs of the tigers and control of poaching and international trade of tiger parts.   Nina also is a chantress. She learned traditional chants (bhajans) from her grandfather in a village in south India when she was nine years old. The chants quietly stayed with her until she rediscovered chanting with Krishna Das, in New York in 1996. Krishna Das is a singer/chanter  known globally or his performances of Hindu devotional music called kirtan. Nina is Krishna Das' business manager and accompanist as well as a chant leader on her own.   Nina is also a podcast host on the widely-heard Be Here Now Network, exploring spirituality, practice, and conservation of wilderness and Nature.    Links: https://www.savingwildtigers.org/ https://www.ninaraochant.com/

"I think that's often the solution when feeling sort of bogged down in the issues of our day is when you zoom out and you look at sort of the whole arc of change, you can sort of get inspired that, yeah, we've come a long way." - Monica Murphy  Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their latest book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, comes out today, April 23rd. It's a book about moral change and a moral revolution, one that took place from the 1860s to the 1890s in the United States. Over those three decades, the way we treated animals completely changed. It was the time of the birth of the ASPCA, of many SPCAs, of the anti-vivisection movement, and of the first animal shelters. It was a time of massive change. Even though I think most people who listen to this podcast know that we need a much larger moral revolution in terms of how we treat animals, this book gave me so much hope that it can actually be done. Please listen, share and read Our Kindred Creatures. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634494/our-kindred-creatures-by-bill-wasik-and-monica-murphy/

“Wouldn't it be amazing if you went into Nike Town and the same pair of shoes or the same style [but]each pair was different because it had been grown and was not the result of a plastic, you know, a plastic polymer or an animal that had been so heavily finished that they all look the same. That, or me, would be mind blowing, where you and I could have the same handbag, but they're from the same brand, in the same shape, it's the exact same model, but the material is slightly different on every single one, like the leaves on a tree.” – Suzanne Lee Suzanne Lee is the Founder & CEO of BIOFABRICATE, a global network that serves the needs of bio innovators, which are material makers, consumer brands and investors. BIOFABRICATE is where design meets biology. Suzanne is a pioneer in this space. She started growing materials from microbes for the fashion industry in 2022, coining the term 'Biocouture™'. She is also the author of Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe. She is a special advisor to Parley For The Oceans, The Mills Fabrica and Fashion for Good on biomaterials, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Launch Material Innovator - an initiative of NASA, Nike, USAID and the US State Department. Formerly Suzanne was the Chief Creative Officer of Modern Meadow, a biomaterials start-up in New York (2014-2019).

“He called me into his office and he said, ‘you see that picture above my desk?’ I said, ‘yes.’ It kind of looked like an animal that reminded me of a squirrel. He said, ‘that is a lemur that we think is extinct in the wild. If you can, please go to Madagascar and find out if it's extinct or not.’” – Patricia Wright   Dr. Patricia Wright is an anthropologist, a conservationist, and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and she's probably the world's leading expert on lemurs.  There are over 100 species of lemurs, which are prosimians - a type of primate and they only exist on the island of Madagascar. Patricia spends half her time, six months a year in Madagascar studying lemurs, and has done so since the 80s, when she discovered a new species of lemur, the Golden Bamboo Lemur, and she also established Ranomafana National Park. It is almost an understatement to say that Patricia is a trailblazer— she has done the impossible again and again. Her story is will astound you.        

“When those fires happened, it was about 8 o’clock in the morning. It goes completely black, so the sky is completely black. There's no light. The sound is like being under a train. It's unbelievably loud. And of course, the heat. You are right in the heat of the fire and the smell and the taste. So, every one of his senses was taken from one world. A world where it was light, where he could move around to another world without the meta narrative that human beings have, that we're in an age of climate catastrophe.” – Danielle Celermajer   Danielle Celermajer a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Sydney. She's deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. Her research focus is on Multispecies Justice, or how the concepts, practices and institutionalization of justice needs to be transformed to take into account ecological realities and the ethical standing of all earth beings.   Danielle lives on a multi-species community in rural Australia. She lived through Australia’s Black Summer fires in 2019/2020 and wrote a book about them called, Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. It’s a book that should be required reading for the entire world.   Please listen, share and read Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future.   To learn more go to speciesunite.com  

“There's this hidden curriculum, right? With dissection you're supposed to be learning the anatomy, the physiology of a particular animal. But really, what students are learning is that these animals are meaningless. They're basically just a tool for you to cut into and then discard after you're done with your so-called learning.” – Nicole Green    In US schools, kids dissect on millions of animals - frogs, dogs, cats, pigs and many other species and none of it is necessary. We have solutions and alternatives that are far better than cutting up dead animals.   Nicole Green is the director of Animalearn, a national advocacy program that helps educators and students find innovative, non-animal science teaching resources. For over 20 years Nicole has worked to enlighten the public about the latest technology that is available in the science education sector, including AR/VR.   Nicole and Animalearn are bringing these solutions to teachers, schools and kids all over the country.   If you want to learn more, or rent free, humane alternatives for your classroom, go to the Science Bank.  

“We live so disconnected from the natural world, and many people live much more disconnected than I am because I've made the natural world my life, my work. But if it's still surprising me and we live so disconnectedly, why is that? Because these owls have been here, all these other creatures have been here since before we got here. They're a normal part of the world. And yet what they do and what they can do, what they're capable of, is so surprising. Why is it so surprising? Why don't we know? Is it a limitation of our human intelligence and our human emotional capacity, or are we taught our disconnection?” - Carl Safina   Carl Safina is an ecologist and author who writes extensively about our human relationship with the natural world and what we can do to make it better.  His most recent book is called, Alife and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. It’s about rescuing a baby owl, watching her grow up, and what he learned from her and himself in the process. And, it's about our relationship with nature and the beauty and the magic that surrounds us.  His writing has won several awards, including a MacArthur Genius Prize, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and the John Burrows, James Beard, and George Rabb metals. He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and the founding president of the not for profit, The Safina Center.

“One after another, citizens came up. And they just hammered that council with additional concerns. You know, one of the guys, his place is 500ft from there. He's like, ‘what do you think this is going to do to me, to my family? How dare you expose me and my family and this community! None of you all live around there. How could you have not brought this to a vote?’ A woman got up and started talking about the research modernization deal. Another woman got up and started talking about land values. A man got up and started talking about malaria. I mean, it's just one after another. They came up and I just, I don't know… I could have just started levitating because I was so buoyed by what this community was doing. And it has not stopped since then.” – Lisa Jones-Engel   There's a small town in Georgia called Bainbridge. It has 15,000 residents, and recently those 15,000 residents were duped by their city and county officials. What happened was that some people came in and proposed a deal to build a $400 million monkey breeding facility, and city and county officials not only agreed to do it, but they gave them almost $60 million in handouts, a 20-year tax abatement, and hundreds of acres of public land. And when the people of Bainbridge found out, they reached out to PETA’s Senior Science Advisor, Dr. Lisa Jones Engel. Lisa spent many years working with primates in biomedical laboratories. She knows more about the industry than just about anyone. In 2019, when she couldn't take it anymore, she left the biomedical world and joined forces with PETA with the aim to take the primate testing industry down. And that is exactly what she’s doing.