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Episode Summary
Venturing into nature and experiencing wildlife can be transformative. Safe interactions with wildlife encourage us to be more in relation with nature, and each other. In this episode, we hear from Craig Foster of “My Octopus Teacher” and how his interactions with sea creatures have changed his life. We also hear from environmental researcher Liz Lev about the effect on our well-being that being in wild spaces provides.
How To Do This Practice:
The next time you want to explore the outdoors, find the “wildest” space you can think of. Explore the “wild spaces” in your neighborhood or city, and reflect on your experiences with wildlife.
Today’s guests:
Craig Foster is the director of My Octopus Teacher, and the co-founder of Sea Change Project.
Liz Lev is an environmental researcher that specializes in the intersections of environmental and climate justice issues, mental health, and urban planning.
Science of Happiness Episodes like this one:
Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher (Encore): https://tinyurl.com/aj34s585
How Exploring New Places Can Make You Feel Happier: https://tinyurl.com/4ufn2tpn
Why We Should Look up at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/mpn9vj2t
How Birdsong Can Help Your Mental Health: https://tinyurl.com/3tey4rb5
Happiness Break Related Episodes:
Feeling the Awe of Nature From Anywhere, With Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/y4mm4wu9
How to Ground Yourself: https://tinyurl.com/2wv69kws
Tell us about your experiences with wildlife!
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Transcript
CRAIG FOSTER quite recently, I had this extraordinary interaction with a fish. This is a sea bream. They're quite a common fish in the Great African Seaforest.I've swum past thousands and thousands of these animals and we'd actually just had an enormous fire raging, through our area.The biggest fire that ever raged through the Western Cape There were these choppers everywhere lifting, water out of the sea to try and douse the flames and I desperately just needed to go in the water because it was a stressful time.
And I swam out far into the sea forest, and it was difficult because I was breathing through my snorkel and I was breathing quite a lot of the smoke from the fire, and I was way out in the ocean and looking back, these giant clouds of smoke. And the sea bream came up to the surface and really looked at me, which is very unusual for a sea bream, and then it came closer and closer and I was like, “What's going on here? This doesn't happen with these animals.”
They're very beautiful, they can change color from dark, almost black, to silver.
They've got beautiful big, um, silver eyes. Um, they've got fins on the side that they can lift out. A big strong tail. Um,and, um, tiny little sharp teeth. And this animal just came closer and closer, and then it was doing a beautiful thing. It was opening up its fins and displaying at me. And then it made physical contact with my skin, with my arm, a number of times. And I just kept dead still, and, I was a bit traumatized from the fire.
We'd almost lost a friend's house, and had to evacuate her. And it was incredible to feel the relief somehow. And this animal just kept with me for about a half an hour in the water, looking into my eyes, making physical contact. And it is a strange thing that sometimes these animals come to you often in times of need. I've had this and even now when I speak about it, I get the tingles running up my legs and spine, because that's a very, very powerful thing.
So sometimes these extraordinary, mysterious things happen and nature's mirror is playing out in this beautiful unusual way.
SHUKA KALANTARI Welcome to The Science of Happiness, I’m Shuka Kalantari. This week we’re continuing our summer outside. In our last two episodes we explored new places in New York City, and practiced mindfully sweeping outdoors in Kyoto, Japan. Now we’re going deep into the ocean near the Cape of South Africa to encounter wild animals, in a safe way. We know these kinds of natural encounters can help with mood, lower stress levels, and make us feel more connected. And research out of Seattle suggests it also pays to see wildlife in urban parks.
LIZ LEV Encountering wildlife in this kind of setting can connect us with this deeper part of ourselves that really craves this kind of interaction. I mean, people even build zoos where we keep animals in cages because people will pay money to have those kinds of experiences, even if it's not the same.
SHUKA KALANTARI We hear from environmental researcher Liz Lev. But first, Dacher speaks with Craig Foster, the director of My Octopus Teacher, about his relationships with the animals of the ocean. All that after these messages from our sponsors.
DACHER KELTNER Welcome to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. This week we're seeing what happens when we do something that I think is very deep in our evolution, but something that we've lost touch with, which is to get close to other animals out in the wild in a safe way.
Our guest today is somebody who astonished me with his work, who is Craig Foster. Many of you may recognize his name from the film, My Octopus Teacher, for which he won an Academy Award, and I think it'll really, if you haven't seen it, change your view of the human to other species connection and how deep it is. Craig is a long time South African documentary filmmaker, and a founder of the Sea Change Project, which is a community of scientists, storytellers, journalists, and filmmakers who are dedicated to the ocean.
He's also the author of Amphibious soul finding the wild in a team world, which was recently published and who Jane Goodall, another hero of mine wrote will inspire hope in you, which is so important in these very complicated times. Craig, thanks so much for being on the show.
CRAIG FOSTER I'm so excited to be here and meet you, Dacher. Thank you.
DACHER KELTNER I want to start our conversation with my octopus teacher and, Uh, over a decade ago, you decided to return, near your birth home in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to dive in this great African sea forest each day and, and you vowed that you would do it for, uh, a long time. And that led to this award winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher, about this relationship that you formed with an octopus. What drove you to start diving into the wilds of, of those ocean waters?
CRAIG FOSTER I felt, in a way, it was a kind of birthright. I mean, we're all born wild and expecting a wild existence from, you know, millions of years of evolution. So I was thinking, well, what would happen If I sacrificed a lot of my work and, you know, everyday existence and I just immersed myself in this great African seaforest, this place of my childhood, what would happen? So that was a massive motivation for me. Could I connect with that wildness that I felt sitting deep inside me but hadn't grasped?
DACHER KELTNER How would you describe that emotional connection to your octopus teacher? Is it love? Is it biophilia? Is it spiritual? What did you make of it?
CRAIG FOSTER The closest word that I can get to describe it, which doesn't quite do it, is kin. You feel this tremendous kinship. And in very rare sort of moments of grace you see a part of yourself. I think it activates a deep love, for the wild, for nature. And for all it’s tremendous intricacy and sophistication and wonder
DACHER KELTNER I could not agree more. It's something we need so desperately right now. I want to ask you about your new book, Amphibious Soul, Finding the Wild in a Tame World. Sort of reporting in the written word on all the experiences that you've had tracking animals all over the world. I want you to give our audience a sense of what animals you've tracked. How do you do it? What's involved? You've had this deep experience with it over the decades.
CRAIG FOSTER I have focused on the tracking underwater because I,grew up in the intertidal environment. Half of our house was in the intertidal. So the water used to touch the house at most spring tides. And this, Great African Seaforest was my childhood magical kingdom. So I wanted to see if I could track, underwater.
One of my favorite animals is an animal called a tuberculate cuttlefish. And another, is the giant clingfish and why I'm talking about both of them, because with tracking, you start with just seeing everything quite separately, but as the conversation with wild grows, you can see this incredible interaction. So I was diving, just to give you some idea, I was diving every day, and it took me three years to see my first cuttlefish. Because the camouflage is so extreme. These animals camouflage better than octopus. And they're small. Once you've seen the animal, then you're trying to understand its form and understand where its habitat is. And then you can start unlocking some of its life. And at the same time I'm tracking these giant clingfish that surf out of the water. Two meters out of the water. But what's so fascinating in the relationship between the cuttlefish and this giant clingfish is that both in their adult form are extreme predators for the other one. The cuttlefish has a very poisonous bite, and the clingfish can just swallow things. But over the time of this tracking, and immersing in these secret lives, for, you know, thousands of dives, I realized that they have this incredible truce. So they have an alliance where they do not harm each other, even though they could, you know, and benefit from that on an individual level. They have a truce and they do not, uh, predate each other. And that was a very powerful moment to realize that.
DACHER KELTNER There's new research out that I, I suspect you would find inspiring that, from Australia, that when we encounter wild animals, it really helps people with their well-being. It gives them a sense of love, like you've talked about, and belonging, fulfillment, and a sense of perspective. And I'm curious, as you write in Amphibious Soul, how these contacts and immersions, years in the making with other species, how it's improved your life, what it's taught you.
CRAIG FOSTER What I found was when I started establishing these, um, deeper relationships with hundreds of species in the kelp forest, um, I started to feel less reliant on my human relationships. I wasn't sort of, I guess the word would be in a way as needy. Somehow, it was easier to have human relationships. I didn't need as much from them. For instance, my relationship with my wonderful wife was even better, because I was having, these relationships with these wild animals. And, of course, we've had from the beginning of time up till very recently, every person, has had these relationships. So I think it's quite traumatic in a way for the psyche to break those. And it's very, very powerful when you start reestablishing them. What I found after, many years of doing this, that I had a much greater sense of belonging on the planet. And I felt part of it and not the separation. And that was really good for, my general feeling of well being. Made a massive difference.
DACHER KELTNER One of the things, um, you write about in Amphibious Soul is It's just this love of nature and this opening of your heart that your tracking experiences bring to you. And there's work, again, same study from Australia that when people really encounter wild marine animals, they want to care for things, they want to take care of it. Talk to us about that in your own work, how this has led to compassion and altruism.
CRAIG FOSTER What happens especially when you're tracking, you observing signs that animals are leaving and you're throwing your mind into those tracks. You keep doing that. You throw your mind in, and you're trying to imagine what it could be. And sometimes it's very complex and takes a long time to figure out. But as you keep throwing your mind into the track, into the track, into the track, you're developing incredible empathy for that animal you're tracking. It's a natural thing that happens when you put your mind into the mind of the track and therefore the mind of the animal. In a, in a some sense. You're taking on that animal's way of thinking because you're trying to imagine why it's moving in a certain way. If you want to get people to care about nature, you can't lecture them about how important it is. You've got to, um, you've got to take them in there and let them come to their own conclusions, fall in love, and then leave them and they will naturally, start doing the good work. Some of the politicians in South Africa I’ve taken into the great African sea forest and then done nothing, and then the next minute I see they're trying to help policy, they're trying to change, um, things for the good, looking after the place, and it's just because nature is the one that needs to speak, not us.
DACHER KELTNER I'm curious how these deep experiences of feeling kin with other species have helped your body, your physical health. You know, there's wonderful research coming out of the UK that, when college students go to Safari Park and they have these contacts with lemurs, their cortisol levels, the stress hormone actually drops, you know, so there's something about the love or wonder absorption in, in lemurs. Sort of being near these lemurs actually helps their bodies. How's it helped you doing this work?
CRAIG FOSTER So great to hear all these examples you pull up. So what I've attributed a lot of the physical health to has been the immersion in the cold water. So, you know, going in, I don't dive with a wetsuit in winter or summer.
But I think it's the combination of the cold and then the interaction and these relationships built with animals together are, incredible combination for mental and physical well being. Another interesting thing. Is I have this feeling that we can somehow sense biodiversity. And I've noticed in areas of very, very high biodiversity where, largely all the plants and animals groups are intact, that has a radical effect on my physical and mental health, like in a very profound way. You know, when I travel away, which I haven't done for a long time, I definitely can feel, my physical health, getting stressed a lot more when it's much more difficult to feel physically good, even though mentally I'm very in high spirits.
DACHER KELTNER Yeah. And I've been reading up on these new efforts to bring, to rewild or wild cities like Singapore and increasing biodiversity, and you can imagine how that's going to affect our bodies, which is a really promising, hopeful line of work. I want to get a little philosophical, Craig, I'm astonished at the depth of these of your contact with other species, minds and spirits, if you will, and emotions. How would you talk about the minds and consciousness of other species? What's unique to humans, if there's anything, how we share common things, how do you think about that?
CRAIG FOSTER I can't pretend to, know how an animal is feeling. It's very, very difficult to figure that out….. but for the octopus, you know, two thirds of its consciousness is not in its brain, It's in its body. So these are animals that are seeing the world and in an utterly different way to what we are. The octopus when it's touching me is tasting me as well. Each sucker can taste as well. So imagine your fingers could taste everything that they touch. I mean, all animals are very similar in this way, but I've known many different, individual octopuses, in my lifetime. And the personalities are incredibly different. Most of them actually have very little interest in humans. And then you just occasionally get one or two that are really interested and very curious. So then once you get to know a single animal, they have tremendous moods from day to day and even from hour to hour. So those moods change radically like us humans.
All I could say, and I've sort of mentioned this before in a way, it does in these tiny moments of grace feel like we're actually made of the same thing. We are products of raw consciousness that are showing themselves in an octopus or amphibian or a piece of the kelp forest. And, it's an incredible feeling and then it kind of goes away and you feel separate again. It is / it’s pretty remarkable, and the deep mystery, that goes with that it's awe inspiring.
DACHER KELTNER Craig Foster, thank you for your film, My Octopus Teacher. Thank you for your book, Amphibious Soul, Finding the Wild in a Tame World. I feel hope in conversation with you and inspiration. So thank you for being here.
CRAIG FOSTER Absolute pleasure, Dacher. Thanks for all you do.
SHUKA KALANTARI Hello everyone, this is Shuka. Coming up next, we’ll hear part of my conversation with an environmental researcher who explored the benefits of immersing oneself in nature and really observing wildlife – in an urban park in Seattle, Washington.
LIZ LEV We think that one of the big benefits of it is it encourages us to be more in relation with not just nature, but also each other as people.
SHUKA KALANTARI More after this break.
SHUKA KALANTARI Welcome back to The Science of Happiness, I’m Shuka Kalantari, and we’ve been talking about the ways in which our interactions with animals in the wild can shape our well-being. Now we’re turning to a unique study conducted at Seattle's Discovery Park. I spoke with Liz Lev, a co-author of the study, about how these encounters with wildlife not only connect us to nature, but also impact our sense of self, and our relationships with others. Here’s part of our conversation.
LIZ LEV Discovery Park, is a very special park in Seattle. A lot of people really love going there.
So it is a huge park. It's over 500 acres and has almost 12 miles of hiking trails. It spans different ecosystems, so there's the forest that even has old growth trees, there's natural meadows. There's the beach, which is, I think, what people find the most special feature. One thing that's special about Discovery Park is the beach has somewhat limited access. You essentially have to hike down to it for at least a couple miles. You know, walking the trails and going through nature. Through that experience, just trying to get to the beach, all of these other things are happening.
At the same time, the park is historically under pressure of some form of development, some urban development, just given the pressures of, a growing city, increasing population. And so, our lab at the University of Washington we developed this research study where we would ask as many people as possible who visited Discovery Park to log on to our website and respond to a prompt, which was, essentially, please describe a meaningful interaction you had with nature and Discovery Park. Why was it meaningful? What were you doing? And our intention with that is to get narratives, at least a few sentences, from as many people as possible. Essentially, quantify all of the ways that people are interacting with the nature in Discovery Park.
What came to the top as most meaningful was, uh, the interaction of encountering wildlife. And then the next was walking through open space and exploring the beach, and then finding views.
SHUKA KALANTARI Why do you think that is?
LIZ LEV My research team and I were not surprised to see encountering wildlife coming up as the most meaningful interaction. Looking at our evolutionary history, where humans and non human nature have been deeply interconnected for, for our entire existence as species. And only in our relatively recent history have we started to perceive ourselves as something separate from or even in dominion over non-human nature. So for people who have been so deprived of that healthy interaction with nature, encountering wildlife in this kind of setting can connect us with this deeper part of ourselves that really craves this kind of interaction. I mean, people even build zoos where we keep animals in cages because people will pay money to have those kinds of experiences, even if it's not the same. And, that I think speaks to something deeper about us as humans. And there's so much research that's already done on this, you know, our research, and then others that are really trying to get at the neural mechanisms behind this phenomena, and we could always talk about that, but I think it ultimately comes down to that more simple answer that, you know, we're reminded of our smallness and our interconnectedness to everything around us. Like we feel awe when we see the power and the beauty of the wildness. And again, I think it pokes at something deep in us humans, reminding us that we're really not in control over nature, like we often think that we are, and that we have to live in balance with it to flourish.
SHUKA KALANTARI Thank you. Your own research found that encountering wildlife makes us feel more connected to each other. Can you share some of those findings, how one thing leads to another?
LIZ LEV So even while we asked participants to describe an interaction they had with nature, many did share the ways that. Those nature interactions led to more positive social interactions, which we thought was special enough to include in this research, even though that wasn't what we were looking for.
So we found two themes related to this, and one was participants writing about the interactions that helped generate new social relationships, like, you know, with strangers we meet at the park, and then the other was interactions that deepened existing social bonds, and so people you come to the park with.
So we think that if we could get more people to interact, not with domestic nature, but really that rich, relatively wild nature. That they'll grow up with that perspective that we are interconnected. That maybe we don't want to continue to cause such harm to something that is essentially a part of us.
SHUKA KALANTARI Well, Liz, thank you so much for the work that you do, um, on preserving our environment. And thank you for joining us on the Science of Happiness.
LIZ LEV Thank you so much for having me.
SHUKA KALANTARI Our next Science of Happiness episode is an old favorite of mine – we learn about how to catch ourselves in a dream, and what happens when we do.
BENJAMIN BAIRD When people have lucid dreams the night before, they do tend to be in a better mood the next day, at least the next morning
SHUKA KALANTARI We explore lucid dreaming, and the expanding scientific literature on how it affects us. Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our research assistants are Dasha Zerboni and Selina Bilal. Our Associate Producer is Aisha Wallace-Palomares. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our producer is Haley Gray. Our host is Dacher Keltner. And I’m Shuka Kalantari – Have a wonderful day.
This episode was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation on "Spreading Love Through the Media."
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