Being Alive with Melanie Challenger

Defining life with Melanie Challenger

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strachamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. Two thousand years ago, one of the most famous philosophers who ever lived posed a question we're still asking today. Aristotle stands on a pale hasp of land, on the crook of one of the crooked fingers that reach out into the Aegean. Writer and philosopher, Melanie Challenger. His gaze settles on a difference somewhere out on the distant sea. And then all of a sudden, an arc of flesh lifts clear of the blue

0:33like some of the depths tugged free. Not the wind then, but life, unmistakably. A dolphin. Not one, but four or five of them, maybe more. Aristotle feels a surge of excitement. Why, he asks himself. Why, and how, and when, and for what purpose. And that's the perennial question, isn't it? What is life? And if the answer seems obvious, just think of the many ways we're extending it all the time.

1:08The Rights of Nature movement considers rivers alive, and at the opposite extreme, there are software engineers who think AI models are conscious and alive. So, real-world consequences follow from how you define life. One of the most interesting people writing about life right now is Melanie Challenger. She's both a philosopher and a naturalist. A National Geographic explorer who spent years in the field studying birds and whales and other animals. And she believes that life is neither a machine-like organism programmed by genes

1:40or a disembodied intelligence. To be alive, she says, is fundamentally about being a body. And we're in danger of forgetting that.

1:51We met Melanie recently at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany. She was there talking about her most recent book, Alive, The Hidden Intelligence of the Natural World. Okay, bonus points for anyone who knows where I am in this picture.

2:10I am in the sub-Antarctic. Yeah. So, this is King Edward Point. This is an emperor penguin. This was really when I was starting. I was in my 20s here. I was a writer-in-residence for the British Antarctic Survey. But what I fundamentally cared about is why is that penguin and how is that penguin turning around and responding to me? Why are living beings acting in ways that matter to them? Where is that coming from?

2:41Why has it been left out of many of our discussions of life now? These were the questions I was concerned about. You've talked with Melanie Challenger a couple of times now. And I know her thinking has evolved over the years and maybe taken her to some unexpected places. Yeah. The last time we talked, she had just published How to Be Animal. You remember that book? Yeah. And that was a look at the long human history of pretending that we are not animals, of trying to separate ourselves from the rest of nature. So, it was kind of a call to return to a more embodied relationship with the world.

3:15But in this new book, Alive, it seems like it's less about bodies and more about cell biology and microorganisms plus ancient Greek philosophy. Right. So, in this one, she's extending her argument, making the case that all living beings have purpose and agency all the way down to the cellular level. And yes, then she winds up pre-interpreting Aristotle. But I know you. You are not a fan of big, abstract, philosophical ideas. So, I'm guessing that is not the main reason you wanted to talk with Melanie.

3:47You know, we just really connected the first time we met. I mean, we wound up talking about motherhood and breastfeeding and how having children changes you. But at heart, I guess, Melanie's project, I think of it as a form of re-enchantment. Because it's about restoring a sense of this pulsating aliveness that surrounds us at all times. And then thinking about what might follow if we really embraced that.

4:18And that really comes through every time she talks about any of these ideas. I wish people could see some of the photographs we've seen of her, you know, looking into the eyes of an emperor penguin or a puffin or just looking absolutely delighted to be holding a raccoon. But the other thing that I really admire is the moral drive behind her work. So, she doesn't actually talk about this all that much. But when she started out in her 20s, she was not a naturalist. She was working with war survivors and children of genocide.

4:49And that's the experience that led to everything else. Wow. You know, it is so interesting, the turn that a life can take.

Listening to survivors of 20th century conflict

4:58Listen, I want to take you back to your development as a naturalist, as a philosopher. Yeah. Because you started by interviewing and working with survivors of genocides, of war crimes. Will you tell me a little bit about that work? Well, that's right. So, I was growing up in a generation affected both by the environmental crisis, but I was also growing up in the shadow of the Yugoslavian conflict. From that, I got involved with a fantastic, very special person called Zlata Filipovic, who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, wrote a diary.

5:37She became known as the Bosnian Anne Frank. Her diary that the UN found, and it was eventually published in France, became the kind of helping hand that pulled her family out of the siege. And Zlata became then a bit of a sort of spokesperson for war in general. And together, we worked on an epistolary history of 20th century conflict. It was called Stolen Voices. And so, this wasn't just stories of the conflict in Yugoslavia? No. I mean, this was going back to World War II? This was all 20th century conflict. World War I, right the way through to then the Second Intifada and the Iraq War.

6:11The point of this is that right at the very beginning, I was listening to the testimony or reading the testimony of hundreds, hundreds of people who'd been affected by the worst that human beings are capable of. And that completely transformed me, actually. It continues to, that's active in you forever. I became very interested in dehumanization and the underlying conceptions of humanity, of nature, of other, of self, of agency, of intelligence, that justify violence.

6:53You wrote a really beautiful piece that I read some years ago. The title was either Death and Love or Love and Death. But you wrote about a particular woman who had been a Holocaust survivor who you spent quite a bit of time with, and it sounded like an extraordinary and devastating experience. Yeah, so separately to Stolen Voices with Zlata, I also got involved in an adaptation of the Diaries of Anne Frank, which was partly for the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust.

7:25Anne Frank's diaries have never been allowed to be adapted in its history, and suddenly we were given permission. Quite a responsibility. Yeah, and don't forget, I was only in my 20s at the time as well. So through that, I met a woman called Susan, who was just extraordinary, who I became friends with. She was a Hungarian Jewish woman. She had been on a death march from Hungary, survived that, and then ended up in Bergen-Belsen, survived Bergen-Belsen. And it's very difficult for me to talk about, and I haven't, in fact, ever talked about it publicly.

8:00I've written about it just once, but I've never told anyone what Susan said to me in those times that we spent together. But I learned something very important. I think this is something that it's not disloyal for me to share, which is that what it is that many survivors are sharing publicly is often a sanitized version of. So Susan would go through two registers with me. She would do what it was possible psychologically and emotionally for her to deliver to the journalists who were phoning in and asking her questions,

8:34and she would deliver the manageable version, and then she would soften and she would talk to me, and she would just talk to me. I didn't ask anything to say anything. And another testimony started emerging that was horrific. It's already horrific, but it was more horrific. And so obviously authentic. And that made me realize just the stakes.

9:08We are beings that are capable of such extraordinary moral decency and acts of beauty, but we must accept that we are capable of extraordinary acts of cruelty also and barbarism. We have to understand that, that we have all of that in our repertoire, and we can't just blame that on systems. That's something about what it is to be human that we need to confront. And so, yeah, she had a really, I can't really, I mean, you can't even put into words an enormous influence on me as a very young person.

Encountering blue whales in Chile

9:46Yeah.

Encountering blue whales in Chile

9:47You've written that you were really lost for a while after that, as I can imagine you would be, and you made a turn toward life. I don't know what the exact steps were, but you wind up, you know, I've seen all those photographs of you in the Antarctic, or swimming in the ocean with seals, and there is a kind of ecstatic joy and love on your face as you look eye to eye into the face of puffins or whales or other animals.

10:25How did this happen, and how transformative was it? Well, that was always in me. So, yeah, I was always in love with the living world and always felt a great kinship with and loved to be in nature. I was very curious about nature. Actually, you know, interestingly, Susan, you know, I remember her description of when she went to Sweden after she was rescued, and she and other young girls who obviously were emaciated, could barely metabolize food at that stage. They arrived into Sweden in Christmastime, and she remembered all the lights and the strangeness of the lights and the joy while they were dead inside,

11:04and also just, like, close to death physically as well. But then she describes this extraordinary spring in Sweden when her body started being able to take food, and all of their bodies started to put some fat on them, get some shape again, they started to bloom again, and they couldn't help themselves but start to feel joy, not so much probably at that stage with the human realm, but they started to feel joy in the blossom on the trees, on the sun, you know, on the living world around them.

11:39I think for me, obviously not remotely analogous to anything like that, but what happened for me was that kind of native interest that I already had in the living world became slowly also a moral way of attending to a different possibility. And, you know, we've done awful harms to the rest of the living world, and there is a relationship there between the harms we do to one another and the harms we do to other living beings.

12:12You can't ignore that. But that goes the other way. If you can convince people, and I think it's convincing people with the truth, that other living beings are also special, are also intelligent, are also capable and meaningful and have intrinsic value, the ability to dehumanize starts to weaken. Now, the effect doesn't last forever, but it's an effect and it's a meaningful effect, and it tells us something very important about the sorts of ideas we carry around in our heads.

12:46Well, it's a return to personhood or a return to selfhood, that there is a path back, not only for us in terms of how we treat ourselves and how we treat other human beings, but especially for how we treat the other animals around us. Were there moments for you of, I don't know if I want to say bliss or ecstasy, but... Well, I wouldn't use those words, but this was environmental philosophy.

13:19This was my first book on extinction. And I was looking at the history of whaling. So, you know, my time in Antarctica, where I was in the sub-Antarctic islands, like South Georgia, where we annihilated, almost to the point of extinction, blue whale population there, for example, but also the fin whales, the minky whales, and so on, reduced to units for the oil industry at the time. So that was just all so dark. Yeah, I was going to say, this does not sound like coming back to the light.

13:50No. So, and I was very determined that you can't do that work properly. You can't think that work properly. You can read the histories. You can theorize. You can't do that work properly. Who is a blue whale? Have you met a blue whale? Have you experienced a blue whale? How can you even conceive of what that harm might be if you haven't done that work? So I was lucky enough to join Rodrigo Gaeta and his team in Cocovado in Chile, where they were trying to identify and protect what they thought was a blue whale nursery.

14:23Cavan grounds? Yeah. So it was pretty great. So we were all, like, camping out with one another, like, all just, you know, being field biologists, and I was just tagging along. And every day we would go out onto the, well, some of us would go up onto the hill and would be, you know, getting on the phone, solar blow, and saying, there's a blow over there. And, you know, so, because they were trying to get genetic samples to prove that this was, you know, an important population and to protect them, which they succeeded in doing, I'm pleased to say.

14:54And then some of us had a lucky day on the boat. And so blue whales are super fast and they're super skittery. So they will get away from you as quickly as they can. And they'll be around for a while and then they'll go right down and then they'll pop up for, like, miles away. They're such fast swimmers. So I remember one day I was out with them and we kind of knew we were roughly where we figured this animal was going to surface. And suddenly I hear this right behind me.

15:24And, you know, that is immediately a breath full of fishy, kind of crilly, sort of slight grossness that's overpowering because this is a big exhalation that you're experiencing. And we turned around and he or she was just there. I like to say she was just there. Two feet away? She was just really there. And we were in a small boat. Now, if you've been close to a blue whale like that,

15:56your eye can't capture their size. It's too big. You can't take the whole body in. You can't take her all in in one go. So you take her in in pieces and you have to quickly try and puzzle her together. But at some point in time, I saw her eye. And that was one of those moments where it's a real, an encounter with another sentient intelligence that is impossible to put into words.

16:28So what is, you know, what is ecstasy? What is bliss? You know, another way we could say is that it's something that is untranslatable. That is the definition of a transcendent experience. And do you know that there is an entire literature in, I'm sure you do, in ecology of naturalists having those, it's the eye-to-eye experience it's called, which is they become famous. I collected them at one point. I love that you did that. And people's lives have been changed by these.

17:01So how did getting up close to a blue whale lead Melody to challenge reigning theories of life and rediscover Aristotle? We'll be right back.

Seeing human livestock statistics and bodily awareness

17:18Hey, it's Steve. I am so glad you're with us. And I have a favor to ask. This is a new podcast, and we're really hoping to reach more listeners. So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet, and it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and I'm talking with the philosopher and naturalist Melanie Challenger.

17:50So I have to say, reading your book, and I'm talking about both your books, the new one, Alive, and your earlier one, How to Be Animal, I had a few moments of feeling, oh my God, we are surrounded by life at all moments, never alone. And it did feel like a heightened experience. What it did for me was serve as a contrast to realizing the rest of the time, I walk around unaware of how much life surrounds me.

18:23And so how is it that I can treat the rest of the world as of no more importance than my car dashboard? That's a huge question. So initially with How to Be Animal, I was really looking at diagnosing that problem, like how have we come to see life in this machine-like way? And how does it serve us to do that? And it does serve us. It both helps us to feel good about ourselves, it buffers us, it makes us think we are unique and special, it helps our moral systems to function, it gives them a certain foundation.

18:53It also allows us to exploit other living beings. The fact that there's only 4% of wild mammals left, most of the rest of mammals are in our food systems, not able to live in autonomous lives. I mean, just to underscore this, 96% of mammals on Earth now are humans and our livestock. Correct. 4% of wild animals left. 4% are doing their own thing. And so that's how I really came into looking at agency.

19:25Just that's what a life is about. Really looking first at how we define life. And I define life as being in the world. To whom things matter. This is what is so remarkable about living beings. That whale didn't move past me as a stone might roll past me. That whale moved away from me when they didn't want to be near us. Came up and took a look at us when they did want to be.

19:56And I didn't just look at them as I look at an object. But I was looked at also. I think the important thing is if we've lost the ability to trust that when we are out in the living world and the hoverfly comes and I hear it, is eyeball to eyeball with this for a while. Or the hummingbird gets startled by us or whatever. However, this is a subject in the world who is responding to our disturbance because something matters to them and they can act on it. And I think we need to learn again how to trust

20:29that that's really what we're seeing and unlearn the idea that we're seeing a machine. And so that's really what the project was about. Well, and I think there's an emotional value, a psychological value to this. It's also our long history of denying that we are animals goes back to where we began. It goes back to death. Our terror and our desire to separate ourselves from the other fleshly beings.

21:00No, we're special. We have minds. We are not just bodies. Absolutely. So How To Be Animal was really looking at that. Why? You know, diagnosing it. Why? Why do we do this? And we can see some very strong reasons why we might want these sorts of ideas about the world. One of them is that it offers a source of salvation, that there's something in our minds, for example, some kind of unique mental identity

21:31that can outlive this messy, mortal body. And what I was doing in a live was saying, well, actually, the weight of evidence suggests that all that we value about our lives, the capacity to have feelings, the capacity for things to matter, all of those things follow actually from the living body doing the work of keeping your whole self alive.

22:03It's not like your brain is doing that, it's not thinking itself alive. This is just the way living bodies work, and it is continuous with all forms of life where we find it. The thing is that it is very easy to forget that because I don't want to confess this, but I am one of those people who kind of thinks of my body as a thing to carry my head around. And there's some great science on that. So there's some great research that's been done. I'm terrible with names,

22:34and I'm so sorry to the scientists who did these wonderful studies. I'm going to forget them. But there's some great work that's been done on where that kind of figment arises, that you're kind of located sort of in between the eyes. I know, like, why do we think myself is up here? But you can mess with that. So there's some fun things that you can do. You can do this in crowds by getting people to touch one another, and you can do it, you can just do it on a walk in the forest. So a really nice little trick to do is think.

23:05Think about the stuff that's worrying you. Proper kind of prefrontal cortex stuff, you know, really self-attentive action. Do those sorts of activities, and you will strongly have the kind of torch beam coming out of the middle of your third eye somewhere sensation. I can feel my forehead burning already. Then maybe there's a woodpecker in the forest. Stop and really listen to the woodpecker.

23:35And what happens to your attention is that you can't do that work while listening. It's impossible. If you're going to listen to something properly, that feeling evaporates. Then start moving and listening, and suddenly the whole of your body will come back into focus again. Who you are is not just your thought processes. You know, when we think about dementia, it's very common to hear people say, for example,

24:07well, my dad is gone. You know, my mum is gone now. You know, it's just a shell of who they were. Yes, I understand that, and I understand you grieve. But they are still who they always were. They are. They're not not themselves anymore because they're in a different stage of their life cycle, and they're aging, and they're degenerating. And it seems like then they're just body, and they don't matter anymore. The thing that's so strange is, you know,

24:41we have babies, and there's that long period where your baby cannot speak to you. They're all body, those tiny babies. They're just all body, and we adore them. And they think they're your body. We're both mums. Anybody who has spent a lot of time with a newborn baby knows they are just outraged to be removed from their mother's body. Sorry, dads, but I am going to say their mother's body. It's not the same. And, you know, that is a primary experience

25:12of being embodied and feeling that period of time when you and another body are kind of continuous.

25:22And, you know, there's, again, so much in this. You know, it would be easy for me to come on here and just talk about my philosophical project in all seriousness, and then I gain my credibility. As soon as I start going into these sorts of territories, then it's, you know, it's emotional. It's less, you know, it's less credible and so on. But where does our capacity, biologically speaking, to generalize our love to one another come from? That is repurposing, resurfacing

25:52the kinds of biological processes that have evolved to enable us, particularly mothers and infants, to bond with one another. Evolutionary process has given us the chance to kind of repurpose what worked well between mother and child and service that in the name of getting on with thy neighbour, getting along with your dog, getting along with, you know,

26:22all kinds of relationships become possible. And so there are lots of ways that we can think about, both political and also just scientific, about what it is to be a mother. But I think when you are a mother and you've been a mother, you cannot but be present with your body. You are all body, and you know it at the time. Many women do remove themselves from that. That's a frightening acceptance. But for many others, it changes them forever.

26:53Though it is easy to revert. We live, as we've said, in a very disembodied culture.

Growing sequoia trees from seed

26:59So moving on to your brand new book, Alive, Hidden Intelligence of the Living World, such a wonderful title. And that's the body, just to be clear what I'm talking about there. Just as a spoiler, the hidden intelligence isn't some sort of hidden mind or consciousness. It's a claim about the living body. So you open the book with this wonderful scene in the Sequoia National Forest. Yeah. And with the seed of, yeah, of a sequoia tree. Tell me why you began with a seed.

27:31Well, actually, that was partly through being a mom. So during the pandemic, my son just fell in love with giant trees. So we have some of the trees in Scotland that John Muir brought back. Oh my God, I didn't know that. Do you have sequoias? We have sequoias. And there are these wonderful maps that the great geeks of the world have created that allow us to kind of see where these big trees are in Britain. And so we started seeing some of them with my son and then he wanted to try and grow them. So we started growing them. Did you actually grow a sequoia?

28:01We not only grew sequoias, but we have them in our back garden now. How big are they? They're probably about a meter and a half now. Wow. Wow. We grew them from seeds. My goodness me, sequoias are very difficult to grow from seed, I will just say. They're tricksy little things. I really had to learn how to mother them. Well, this is kind of the point of the story because they're serotonous, right? So these are the seeds that only really hatch, if that's the right word, in a forest fire, in a fire.

28:31Yeah, sequoias need fire. They've adapted, you know, two fires in forests. So the cones open out and the seeds get dispersed. So I wanted to think about what is that seed? You look at that seed and it looks like nothing. It looks like a speck of dust. Yet inside that seed is actually a kind of little miniature tree. I don't mean I was in the genome in them. I mean, there really is a kind of almost a little sort of miniature entity in there.

29:03It's an embryo, correct? It's an embryo, right. I mean, it's already been fertilized. It's been fertilized. So it's been fertilized and it will wait and wait inside that seed husk. Yeah. Waiting for the right conditions. But the point is, is you would look at that and think that was dead. But then it's kind of, I think about 10% metabolism is still just ticking over. So there's still something that's going on in that seed, even though it looks like nothing is happening at all. It is.

29:33There's just a little bit of activity. But a sequoia seed isn't really a full agent yet, but it is alive because it's working to stay as it is. It's working to persist. It's acting still. I mean, here you are at the edge of life and not life. What is it that makes the sequoia seed alive? Can we name the difference between life and not life? I think that work matters. You know, all life is working really, really hard to keep itself together.

30:06It's effortful to be alive because life is cohering into a unique form of organization. It's not a walk. It's a giant step that life has taken in embodying in that kind of way. It's embodying values. It's embodying meaning to keep going, to keep persisting. And so I think I heard the answer or the beginning of an answer to this question.

30:36But what changes when you begin to think of life as purposeful? Firstly, it means that when you look at a honeybee, you are no longer looking at just a straightforwardly forgettable, squashable, pesticide-able object. And you're not looking at just a generic honeybee. And you're not looking at just a generic machine like honeybee. You're looking at something that is causally unique within the cosmos as best as we have

31:11seen up to now. I suspect there's life elsewhere, I should add. But as much as we have observed up to now, certainly different to planets, different to stars, different to anything else that we can see at the moment. These are beings that are doing work to act in ways that matter to them because of values that exist within them. And all life has that quality and nothing else does. An AI doesn't have that. A machine doesn't have that. So you found some answers to that question of what is it to be alive?

31:46What might be a new definition of life?

Reinterpreting Aristotle and living bodies

31:48You went back to Aristotle. And so I just wanted to ask you, what is so remarkable? Because you do kind of fall in love with Aristotle. I do. And Aristotle says some pretty crazy things, particularly about women that I don't love. But he roamed all over the place. And he was of his time. This is 2,500 years ago. So fourth century BC. But what is interesting about Aristotle, he was, you know, ostensibly a field biologist. He was observing, capturing. He was dissecting. He was trying to answer this same question. What is a living being?

32:20And what he hit upon was that was the quality that really differentiated life from the rest of the matter and environment around life was this purposeful quality. The fact that living beings both seem to have purposes and they seem to have the ability to act towards those purposes. But within his description, he uses, particularly in De Anima that he's most famous for, he writes

32:52about what he calls psyche or psuche. And this got translated as soul. Right. And it meant that he was kind of saying that this special something about life is because of soul. He had this idea that, in fact, being alive is empsuken. We could translate that as being ensold. But I think that's the wrong translation. I think the right translation of that is that to be alive is to be a living body.

33:22And for him, that meant that you weren't just the stuff you were made from, the matter. You were the kind of matter living your life, being alive. And he said that those things could not be separated out from one another. Body and life. Body and soul could not be separated out from one another. You were ensold as a living being. Matter and being and living coming together into this novel form, the living body.

33:56And that is not made of separate bits, nor is it separable. But there remains a very interesting question. And I think, you know, this is a scientific question. It's in some ways a theological question. It's a philosophical question, which was also the question that troubled Aristotle. And this is maybe a fun kind of mystery to leave it at, which is, where does the potentiality come from? That's an unknown. Thank you so much. It's always such a pleasure talking with you.

34:28Oh, it's a pleasure, yeah, to speak to you too, Anne.

Credits and upcoming conversations

34:30Thanks very much. It's always good, I think, to end in mystery. And that's Melanie Challenger, a philosopher and naturalist, National Geographic explorer and award-winning poet and opera librettist. She's the author of How to Be Animal and Alive, The Hidden Intelligence of the Natural World. I'm Anne Strain Champs. And I'm Steve Paulson. This episode was recorded at the Island of Knowledge, a small think tank in Tuscany, with support from the John Templeton Foundation and Dartmouth College.

35:02Thanks to them and to our audio engineer, Steve Gottscher, and our digital producer, Mark Rickers. Wonder Cabinet comes to you from two places we love, Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershawe, Vermont. You can send questions or comments to us on our website. It's wondercabinetproductions.com. We'll be back next week with a conversation about enchanted landscapes and rural folklore with Daniel Mason, author of the new novel Country People. Until then, be well.