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PRT Must Set & Track Goals on Ridership, Service Reliability, Rider/Worker Satisfaction and Funding 

A bus network redesign is a tool for massive change—whether good or bad. With the Bus Line Refresh, Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) has the opportunity to make positive changes that our system needs. PRT has shown a commitment to rider needs by updating its Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 to include valuable new neighborhood connectors, expanding service frequencies on popular routes, and more. But in order to make the system work for its riders, PRT needs to commit to improving ridership, reliability, funding, and rider/worker satisfaction—regardless of what shape the Refresh ends up taking.

A strong transit system is one in which ridership is robust, buses and trolleys show up on time, and both riders and workers feel positive about their experience with the service. A strong transit system is also one in which there is stable funding to maintain and expand the service. 

Ridership, Reliability, and Satisfaction Metrics Should Come First

At May’s Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) Board of Director’s committee meetings, we were pleased to see some progress in our organizing for more transit system accountability, with PRT staff reporting to their Board on ridership and reliability trends by month. That’s a start: with more attention paid to these metrics, we hope to see clearer plans for how PRT is going to improve them. We have seen 40% of our total transit service cut over the last 20 years, and PRT service reliability is poor- as a result, transit ridership levels are now at a devastating low. That is why it is critical that PRT identifies goals and a plan for strengthening our system, and makes it clear how the Bus Line Refresh will help meet those goals. 

The Bus Line Refresh needs to be part of a coherent broader PRT strategy around transit restoration, growth and improvement-—not just managing or accelerating decline—and the public must be able to evaluate the success of the plan implementation against those metrics. A Bus Line Refresh that clearly lays out its purpose in strengthening our transit system to the benefit of riders can then be used as a tool to organize for stable and expanded state transit funding.

Since the Bus Line Refresh is cost-neutral, any service improvements in one community must come at the expense of others. Over the last several weeks, our participatory research committee has identified the potentially harmful impacts of this proposal as well as the improvements that riders would see under Draft 2.0.

4 Key Recommendations for a Successful Refresh 1 . PRT should establish specific goals for growing ridership, improving reliability, improving rider/worker satisfaction, and supporting advocacy for expanded state funding.

Whatever the Refresh looks like, our system cannot succeed without dedicated attention and clear progress towards these vital goals.

2 . PRT must create transparency and accountability towards these goals by collecting data related to the impact of the Bus Line Refresh—before, during, and after implementation. 

PRT should report monthly on these critical metrics to the PRT website and Board of Directors, as well as the Western PA Regional Data Center. Data to report include

• Average ridership by route
• On-time performance by route
• Crowding by route
• Number and type of customer complaints and their resolutions (in particular, as a way of daylighting ongoing communications, scheduling, disability and safety-related issues). 

In addition, PRT should run parallel transit rider and transit worker satisfaction surveys, before, during, and after the implementation of the Bus Line Refresh. This will provide critical insights on whether the Refresh has improved or worsened transit outcomes for its primary stakeholders- its users and its workforce. 

Some key questions to ask riders in these surveys are: 

• Overall approval of transit
• Ease of use
• Perception of reliability 
• Satisfaction with amenities at stops, stations or on vehicles 
• Satisfaction with the safety, accessibility and proximity of the bus stops to trip origins and destinations
• First-last mile accessibility
• Satisfaction with value for the fare paid
• Total commute time
• Do you have more or fewer transfers under the Bus Line Refresh than before?
• How long is the wait time for your transfer(s)?
• Do you feel like your trip is very fast, ok, or too long?
• Are you paying more, less, or the same for transit?
• Is your bus easier or harder to identify with the new naming system?
• Demographic and geographic data, to assess Refresh impacts based on those characteristics

3. PRT should maintain features that work for current riders—and make key improvements now, during regular service changes.

• PRT should not cut bus stops as a part of the Bus Line Refresh. Bus stop usage and accessibility must be carefully evaluated before any consideration of stop removals are advanced.
• PRT should maintain the existing route names to the greatest extent possible, to keep buses familiar and legible for riders.
• PRT must minimize the number of new forced transfers under the plan. Adding transfers where riders previously had direct connections causes riders to stop taking transit.
• Some widely beneficial aspects of the Refresh—like the restorations of the 61D and 71A/C/D Downtown—do not need to wait for a full Refresh implementation, and can be implemented during regular service changes. PRT can also make immediate changes to alleviate overcrowding, expand weekend service, and make other minor improvements as appropriate. 

4. The rollout of the Bus Line Refresh is just as important as the plan itself.

The Bus Line Refresh is a massive change to almost the entire system. Without a thoughtful, clearly communicated plan for implementation, riders will not be able to successfully navigate it. Here are some ways that PRT can ensure a clear, harm-minimized rollout:

• In implementing the full Refresh, it is important that neighborhoods gain any service improvements at the same time as any service losses, so that they do not suffer any gaps in transit service. 
• There must also be opportunities built into the implementation process in which PRT pauses and evaluates the impacts of the Refresh—and reverse course if necessary. 

• During implementation, PRT must pay careful attention to how they are scheduling multiple routes sharing a common corridor. PRT schedulers must ensure that those routes are evenly spaced, providing the most convenient level of service for riders, rather than having multiple buses arrive at the same time, with a subsequent large gap in service.
• PRT needs to ensure that their communications on their website, social media, Ready2Ride and third-party transit apps, on the printed schedule and at the bus stop are aligned, so that riders are clear about the changes before they happen.

The post How PRT’s Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 Can Benefit Our Region appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

The National Park Service is spending at least $67 million from national park entrance fees to help fund President Donald Trump’s beautification projects in Washington. According to a New York Times analysis of federal records, the Trump administration is funding nearly $60 million in repairs to nine ornamental fountains in D.C., and another $7 million toward the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In April, the administration awarded a no-bid contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to repair the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. Federal records show that the contract is worth $13.1 million, more than seven times what Trump initially promised the work would cost. Additionally, the firm is being paid an inflated profit margin, according to federal documents obtained by The New York Times. The profit margin for federal construction contracts is typically between 6 to 12 percent. Atlantic Industrial Coatings submitted a bid that charged 20 percent, adding at least $850,000 to what a more typical contract would have cost.

“Our parks and public lands have been underfunded for decades, and there are many genuinely urgent projects in need of funding across the country,” said Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is determined to divert millions of dollars to projects that President Trump can see out his window.”

The Park Service has a backlog of deferred maintenance projects for repairs to bathrooms, campgrounds, roads, visitor centers and other aging infrastructure that came to an estimated $23 billion at the end of 2024.

Quick hits Fast-track copper mine review put Arizona owl habitat at risk

Arizona Republic

National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects

New York Times | The Hill

Corporation claims it’s running out of money and can’t afford cleanup of a former Colorado uranium mill

Colorado Sun

Forest Service treated 35% less dangerous fuels for wildfire risk in 2025

KJZZ | KGVO

Colorado state forester says pine beetles’ assault on ponderosas expanded nearly 150% in 2025

Colorado Sun

Reflecting Pool contract has ‘inflated’ profit margin, according to analysis of federal documents

New York Times

Growing body of research examines the affect of wildfire smoke on fertility

High Country News

Opinion: Wyoming’s public lands—why they’ve always felt like home

WyoFile

Quote of the day

The Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant civic landscapes in the country, and it deserves care. The question is whether Congress and the federal government are providing enough funding for the entire national park system.”

—Natalie Britt, the president and chief executive of Zion Forever Project, New York Times

Picture This

@nationalparkservice

Ah, camping. It can be in-tents!

Sometimes spending a day in the wilderness isn’t quite enough to truly capture the feeling of a special place. Let’s be honest, though…sometimes it is. You know who you are. <slowly raises paw> For others, maybe you’ve really wanted to experience a park after dark: taking in the starry night sky, getting lost in the howling of a distant coyote (wait, what??), hearing the rustling sound of something on the other side of a very thin tent wall (why didn’t you splurge on the more moderately affordable tent with better zippers?), wondering if it’s just your partner…until you remember you’re single and out there alone. Then things get really existential. Is anyone ever really alone? Who am I? How far is the car? Also, something is definitely now crawling in the tent. How many hours until dawn?

Magical.

Story time: What are some of your favorite camping stories or experience from some nights spent in a national park? Are you in a tent right now and have a visual on the spider? It’s not a spider?

Well, good luck with that.

Image: Tent seen illuminated from within under a night sky @joshuatreenps NPS/ Hannah Schwalbe

Featured image: Contractors painting the Reflecting Pool surface blue. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The post National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Whether you live in McKeesport or McKees Rocks, the Hill District or the South Hills, our public transit system needs to work for everyone.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) will soon close their community engagement period for the second draft of their Bus Line Redesign (BLR). The redesign proposes a completely redrawn map of where transit routes will run. It includes new schedules for how frequently and how late at night buses and trains operate, and renames all the routes in the system.

Tens of thousands of people who use the system every day will be affected. Allegheny County Transit riders, transit workers, businesses, social service providers—we all have a stake in a Bus Line Redesign that works for all.

The Bus Line Refresh plan is complicated and will affect everyone differently. That’s why it’s very important that transit riders and transit workers review your routes and give feedback now! You can check out how your routes will be impacted and give feedback online, by phone, or at an upcoming PRT community event here. 

This is the last opportunity for the public to weigh in before PRT finalizes and ratifies this transit plan—one that will impact our transit service for generations! 

Notable Improvements Under the Proposed Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0

Under the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0, some communities are being proposed for transit service improvements: higher frequency service, or new direct connections to critical destinations. Other communities will see transit service cuts; this is the consequence of Pittsburgh Regional Transit deciding to develop a “cost-neutral” plan rather than a more visionary proposal for service restoration and expansion. 

But riders spoke up about Bus Line Redesign Draft 1.0 and Pittsburgh Regional Transit made important changes based on our feedback! In particular, PRT took our advice to scale back the proposed disruption to our routes. They also provided riders with a commute “calculator”, allowing riders to model proposed changes to our trips, and ensured that the proposed “microtransit zone” communities like McKeesport, the Southern Hilltop and Natrona Heights would be provided with expanded fixed route buses, not irregular on-demand shuttles.

Check the list below to see if your routes/communities would gain significant service under the Refresh Draft 2.0.

Note: Old route numbers are listed where those numbers are continuing to be used, otherwise the new route number is listed here. Routes are listed numerically regardless of alpha-prefix.

Service Restoration 

• Restoration of service to Arnold 
• N63 restored Jenny Lind Ave service
• 71C Restored to downtown and uptown 
• P78 restoration of weekend service

Service Extensions

• 6 Spring Hill extension to North Hills Village
• 12 McKnight extension to Wexford
• 16 Brighton extension to Emsworth
• 28X extension to Carnegie
• 79 extension from Lincoln Park to East Liberty via Larimer
• N1/N3 Extends and restores service to parts of Allegheny And Natrona Heights

Improvements in Service Span

• 7 Spring Garden all day service on weekdays
• D25 Moon/Robinson to Downtown all day, 7 day service ( Also restores 25A connection between Robinson and Moon cut over 15 years ago )
• N77 all-day weekday service on Universal Rd in Penn Hills

New Connections

• O9 new connection between the East End to McKnight Rd ( Pseudo 12U restoration )
• N17 new connection between Bellevue/Avalon/West View to McKnight Rd ( pseudo restoration of 15A / Partial 9/11C restoration )
• 27 new connection between McKees Rocks to Crafton-Ingram shopping center ( Partial Restoration of 24A )
• N34 new connection between Carnegie crosstown to Brentwood loop
• O35 new connection between West Liberty to Oakland 
• N41 new connection between Bower Hill Rd to Carnegie 
• O45 new connection between Carrick to Oakland to East Liberty 
• 54 new connections between Polish Hill to Bloomfield and the Southside Works
• D58 new connections between Swisshelm Park, Squirrel Hill and Greenfield
• 64 new connection to Millvale
• N66 new connection North Braddock to Walmart
• O73 new connection between Homewood to Bates St to Southside Works to Wharton Square
• 81 new connection between Lawrenceville to Bloomfield to Hill District to Mercy Hospital
• N84 new connection between the Hill District and the Strip District
• 86 new connection between the Strip District and Penn Hills
• 87 new connection between the Downtown to the Strip District to Garfield Heights
• D89 new connection between the Lawrenceville to Stanton Heights to East Liberty

The post The Communities that would Benefit Most from the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

For bassist and composer Garth Stevenson, improvisation is not just a musical practice. It’s a way of listening deeply enough to search for connection across species. Over the last two decades, Stevenson has explored music as a form of interspecies encounter, creating improvised performances in forests, on remote coastlines, and even underwater with whales. Rather than trying to mimic animal communication, he’s interested in something more elusive: the possibility that music can create moments of connection between beings that experience the world in fundamentally different ways.

Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.

The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.

GARTH STEVENSON: 

I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.

After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.

I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.

I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.

I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.

I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.

What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.

Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”

When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.

I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.

A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico. 

One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.

He said, “I want to hear the whales.”

I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.

We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.

Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.

Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.

We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.

Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.

When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.

Continue exploring interspecies intelligence and connection: Read how neuroscientist Gül Dölen used octopuses and psychedelics to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is uncovering the shared “forest pharmacies” humans and animals have relied on for generations in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.

Research is increasingly confirming what many Indigenous communities and traditional healers have understood for generations: Humans are not the only species that knows how to use the natural pharmacy of the living world. Around the globe, scientists are documenting how animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to birds seek out medicinal plants to treat illness, parasites, and injury.

For Elodie Freymann, a primatologist, botanist, filmmaker, and conservation advocate, that realization has reshaped the way she thinks about medicine, intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Freymann recently attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest documenting how wild chimpanzees use medicinal plants to self-medicate. But one of her most important discoveries came through conversations with local healers, who explained that many of the same plants used by the chimpanzees were already part of nearby communities’ traditional medicinal knowledge systems.

Freymann’s work now focuses on what she describes as “shared forest pharmacies” — the overlapping medicinal relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems. Blending primatology, anthropology, ecology, and art, her research explores how species learn from one another, how medicinal knowledge moves across generations and ecosystems, and what modern science still has to learn from Indigenous and local knowledge systems. She is currently expanding this research through the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Peruvian Amazon.

The following is an edited excerpt from Freymann’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Read more about Freymann’s incredible work in our recent interview.

ELODIE FREYMANN: 

I took a very winding path to end up where I am, doing what I’m doing. As a child, I was always fascinated by two things that I never thought went together. The first was chimpanzees. I’ve tried hard to figure out where that fascination came from, and I think it probably traces back to climbing as a kid and being called a monkey by family members, so I started associating myself with primates. Like many young people, I was also deeply influenced by the work of Jane Goodall. For me, she was a hero — someone I could look up to and think, “Okay, this is possible. I can do this too.”

I was also passionate about medicinal plants. I remember finding out when I was a kid that the Earth produces medicines, and I thought that was so cool. 

I think what those interests have in common is that, like many of us, I was raised within a culture that teaches humans to see ourselves as separate from the natural world: exceptional, more intelligent, more complex, and more emotional than the other beings we share this planet with.

But when I looked at chimpanzees, I saw cousins. I could look into their eyes and recognize something familiar. And with medicinal plants, I began to understand that we share a long and complex co-evolutionary history with them. Somehow, the chemicals plants produce to heal and protect themselves can also heal us when we consume them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because we are part of the same community of life. We’ve co-evolved for millions of years. We even share a common ancestor with plants.

So plants and chimpanzees brought me into the natural world. And as someone who grew up in New York City surrounded by buses and tall buildings and not a lot of trees, that was very intoxicating.

But it’s been a long, winding road. I did a lot of art as a kid. Both of my parents are artists, and for a long time, I never saw myself as a scientist. I briefly worked in documentary filmmaking and studied social anthropology in college, but I still felt this deep need to reconnect with the things that fascinated me as a child. Somehow, I ended up finding a master’s program where I could study how chimpanzees use medicinal plants. How cool is that?

I learned about this field no one has heard of and no one knows how to pronounce: zoopharmacognosy. When you break down the word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition/knowledge. It’s the study of how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems. 

It’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, but the more researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible. The more we study animal self-medication, the more examples we discover across the animal kingdom.

It turns out that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart; it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter and find food, know how to find medicine as well. 

When I began my master’s research at the University of Oxford, which later transitioned into a Ph.D., I wanted to start with a very simple question. I knew I’d be working in the Budongo Forest in western Uganda, and I wanted to identify new medicinal plants used by chimpanzees. At that point, researchers only knew about a small handful of plant medicines chimps used, partly because the field had slowed down for a while. Funding was limited, there were methodological challenges, and after several decades of research, we still only knew of a few plants chimpanzees used to treat internal parasites.

I wanted to expand that dataset so we could begin asking more complex questions, like how chimpanzees know which plants in their environment are medicinal and which are simply part of their regular diet.

To do this, I had to use a very interdisciplinary methodology, which for me was ideal, because I had a very interdisciplinary and weird past. I had studied social anthropology and had an art background, but I didn’t have much formal training in the quantitative sciences. I had never even taken a statistics class, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself, learning new methods, and talking with researchers who had found unusual ways to bridge disciplines and combine fields.

Then I headed out into the field, completely green. I had never seen a chimpanzee in the wild before. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic and began what became a completely life-changing experience: spending nine months living alongside wild chimpanzees at a research station.

And I learned so much, not just about the chimps but about the forest ecosystem. My first paper wasn’t even about chimps; it was about red-tailed monkeys. And I wrote another paper about birds from my observations there. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that science is everywhere and everything. You have to keep your eyes really wide open, and the more you do, the more you see.

As for the chimps, I was collecting a lot of their poop and examining it under microscopes to identify parasites. I was analyzing urine samples for signs of infection, carefully monitoring their diets, and paying close attention to any plants they ate that seemed unusual. I was also collecting plant samples themselves and bringing them to a lab in Germany, where we ran pharmacological tests to see whether they had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.

Spoiler alert: they absolutely did.

The final part of the research, and the part that excited me most, was having the privilege of sitting down with healers in nearby villages who also used the forest as a pharmacy and medicine cabinet. I spoke with them about several plants I had been watching closely because the chimpanzees were seeking them out in unusual ways. By that point, I had gathered evidence suggesting the chimps were occasionally using the bark of certain trees that were not part of their normal diet.

The healers generously shared that some of those same trees were also used as medicines in their own communities. Surprise, surprise.

It was groundbreaking for me. I had been so focused on these natural medicine cabinets from the animals’ perspective that I hadn’t been thinking about them as shared. I wasn’t thinking about all the many interspecies entanglements that must exist around the world when it comes to medicines different species, including ours, are using.

I published some of those results, and now I’m working on a new postdoctoral project. In many ways, the direction has stayed the same. I’m still studying how animals use medicine in the wild, but now I’m approaching it through the lens of these medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies. In some ways, it’s an expansion of the concept of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which is incredibly important.

At international forums, there are many conversations about the importance of medicinal plants as a primary source of healthcare for people around the world. But the more-than-human world is often absent from those discussions, even though many animals rely on some of the same medicinal resources.

We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities, though those protections are still far too weak and exploitation remains widespread. But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.

That has become my mission, both as a scientist and a science communicator: to change the way we think about medicine on this planet. Medicine isn’t something that exists only for humans. It’s something all living beings rely on to survive and flourish, especially amid the rapid changes ecosystems are facing today.

Right now, I’m working with colleagues and collaborators to draft what could become the first protections for the traditional medicinal knowledge of animals, along with safeguards for the resources themselves against exploitation, degradation, and biopiracy.

I also recognize what a privilege it is to spend time with animals in the wild, and I never take that for granted. I want to do whatever I can to bring those experiences to people who don’t have the opportunity to interact with animals on a daily basis. That’s part of why I’ve started working on films, using a handful of very small grants to help share this work with a wider audience.

This knowledge has existed for thousands of years. It’s not something we’re only discovering now. People living within these ecosystems have understood many of these relationships for generations, and science is only beginning to catch up.

I saw that firsthand while working in Uganda. I had become fascinated by a behavior called bark feeding, where chimpanzees strip and consume the bark of certain trees. In primatology, this had often been dismissed as a kind of “fallback food” behavior, something animals do when there are no better options available. But the more evidence I collected, the less that explanation made sense.

When I started speaking with healers in nearby villages, I asked whether they also used bark from certain tree species medicinally, and whether they thought chimpanzees might be doing the same thing. They just laughed at me. To them, the answer was obvious. Of course humans used those barks as medicine. Of course the chimps did too.

That experience deeply shaped the way I think about science now. I’m an outsider when I enter these ecosystems. I always try to begin by listening to the people who live there and know those environments intimately. Otherwise, trying to understand these medicinal relationships is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

There’s absolutely a knowledge interchange happening between humans and other animals. Across many cultures, people have learned medicines by observing animals. And in some cases, animals may even be learning from people as well.

That perspective is shaping my current work in the central Peruvian Amazon, where I’m collaborating with an incredible team that includes Asháninka scientists. Instead of beginning solely with animal observation, we’re starting by asking which medicinal plants and resources are already culturally important within local communities, and then studying how animals interact with those same species.

It’s also changed the way I think about scientific collaboration itself. Too often, researchers parachute into ecosystems, extract knowledge, and fail to properly credit local scientists and collaborators. That has been a longstanding problem in primatology and conservation science. For me, collaborative authorship and local expertise are non-negotiable. The people who live in and understand these ecosystems are not secondary contributors to this work. They are central to it.

A lot of what I’m trying to do now is listen deeply enough to learn the right questions to ask, and help build collaborative teams that bring together many different voices and ways of knowing from around the world. Then the goal is to carry those insights back into the scientific community until science finally begins catching up with local knowledge.

Continue exploring the hidden intelligence of the more-than-human world: Read how musician Garth Stevenson uses improvisation and whale song to search for interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how neuroscientist Gül Dölen is using octopuses to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses.

The post Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication appeared first on Bioneers.

What happens when a drug designed to make humans more social is given to one of the most evolutionarily distinct forms of intelligence on Earth?

That question helped launch some of the most unexpected neuroscience research in recent years for Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work explores psychedelics, critical periods, social behavior, and the evolution of consciousness across species. While leading a lab at Johns Hopkins University, Dölen and her collaborators made headlines after giving MDMA to octopuses and discovering that the notoriously solitary animals suddenly became strikingly social and playful. For Dölen, the experiment revealed something much deeper than an unusual animal behavior study: It suggested that radically different forms of intelligence may still share ancient molecular mechanisms linked to social connection and consciousness.

Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dölen’s research spans psychedelics, neuroplasticity, evolution, and comparative neuroscience, often using highly unconventional animal models to investigate how brains learn, adapt, and relate to the world. Her work increasingly asks what humans can learn by studying minds that evolved along entirely different evolutionary paths — including octopuses, which she describes as “about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth.”

The following is an edited excerpt from Dölen’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript.

GÜL DÖLEN: I’m a neurobiologist. I grew up in Texas, and most of my experience swimming was in chlorinated pools. But when I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Turkey and went to the Mediterranean. At least, that was the plan. The moment I saw all the sea urchins covering the ocean floor, I refused to get in the water.

My grandmother, who was a zoologist, wasn’t having that for a second. She picked up a sea urchin and showed me where its mouth was, then explained how it used its spines to move food toward that mouth. Suddenly, this thing I had been terrified of transformed into this spectacular, alien creature living on the ocean floor. I think that was probably the first moment I ever considered becoming a scientist.

Fast forward many years, and I had started my own lab at Johns Hopkins University. We had made what I genuinely believed was a really big discovery about psychedelics and critical periods, something that I think could fundamentally change how we understand these drugs and how we use them as medicines.

The problem was that, in the beginning, I was having a very hard time convincing anyone else that this was earth-shattering enough to keep funding. I think I was on my sixteenth rejected grant application at the NIH. I was feeling pretty demoralized, like maybe I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lab open or keep paying people. But I still had a tiny bit of money left over, so I thought: why not do something completely wild and fun as a sort of mic drop before I moved on to becoming a UPS driver or whatever my next career was going to be.

I had already been fascinated by octopuses because of that early interest in marine biology, and I was also deeply interested in evolution. The problem is that brains are notoriously difficult to study through the fossil record because brains don’t fossilize. You can look at brain endocasts, but that only gives you the rough anatomy. It doesn’t tell you very much about how a brain actually works.

Around the same time I was struggling to get NIH funding, a paper came out in the journal Nature describing the first octopus genome. I was completely stunned. I remember thinking: This is it. This is how we’re finally going to understand brain evolution. A genome is exactly what you need to reconstruct phylogenetic trees across evolutionary history, so suddenly, there was a way to begin understanding, at least at the molecular level, how brains evolve.

I was incredibly excited about all of this, and I had already started talking with people about how to somehow break into the octopus world. I had a collaborator at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who had been helping me think through some of these ideas, and one day he called and said, “You know, we have seven octopuses available. Do you have any experiment you want to do with them?”

And I said yes.

So he packed them into a box and FedExed them from Massachusetts down to Baltimore. Then he got on a plane himself and flew down too. I sent everyone else home from the lab so we could run the experiment ourselves.

The experiment we wanted to run was to give octopuses MDMA, a psychedelic drug known for causing humans and other mammals to become much more social. It’s the classic rave drug, but it’s also now being developed by several companies as a potential treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

MDMA is a completely synthetic compound. It doesn’t really exist in nature, though there are some related compounds in sassafras trees. So unlike many psychedelics, it’s not something animals would have naturally encountered or evolved alongside, even though there are other psychedelics that animals do use.

We thought there was almost no chance this would work because octopuses and humans are separated by something like 600 million years of evolution. Our last common ancestor was basically little more than a bacterium. We’re actually more closely related to sea urchins than we are to octopuses. Their brains look nothing like ours, and despite what you may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses are viciously asocial creatures. I like to joke that they’re the psychopaths of the ocean. They seem to have an incredible capacity for cognitive empathy, but very little obvious emotional empathy.

So we assumed MDMA probably wouldn’t do much because we didn’t think octopuses shared the same kind of social brain chemistry that mammals do. But since MDMA has some similarities to amphetamines, I thought maybe we’d at least see some kind of behavioral response.

We started with a very high dose because we had no idea how to translate human dosing to an octopus. At those higher doses, the octopuses behaved a lot like humans on amphetamines. They became hypervigilant, staring around the tank and looking at me suspiciously.

But as we gradually lowered the dose and got into the range that would roughly correspond to an effective human dose, something really strange happened. The octopuses started doing what we called “the ballerina move.” Normally, when an octopus knows there’s another octopus nearby, it becomes extremely reserved. It pulls all eight arms tightly underneath its body and keeps its distance. If it interacts at all, it might cautiously extend a single arm, touch the other octopus, and immediately pull back.

On MDMA, it was completely different. Suddenly, all eight arms were floating outward in the water, almost like they were dancing. They engaged in what looked to us very much like play behavior. They were doing backflips, exploring each other freely, and spending far more time near the other octopus than with the toy we had placed in the tank.

What made this so remarkable was that octopuses don’t have brain anatomy that looks anything like ours. They don’t have a cortex, an amygdala, or a nucleus accumbens, all the structures we normally associate with social behavior in humans and other mammals. And yet they were responding to this synthetic compound with behaviors strikingly similar to our own.

To me, that suggested that the thing we truly share is happening at the molecular level. This was a very clear demonstration of how two molecules interacting with each other can radically alter consciousness, in this case specifically around social behavior. The real mechanism isn’t necessarily brain anatomy itself. It’s the molecules and the ways they interact.

This completely transformed the way I think about science. My lab spent many years focused on circuit mapping and brain anatomy, but over time I’ve become less interested in anatomy alone and much more interested in comparative studies across radically different species.

I didn’t invent this idea that the best way to understand complex behavior is not by only studying ourselves, chimpanzees, and other animals closely related to us, but by studying species that are maximally different from us, like octopuses, which are about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth. That idea really came from J. Z. Young, one of the earliest modern neuroscientists. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called A Model of the Brain arguing that octopuses were actually the ideal animals for understanding the fundamental building blocks shared across brains. His point was that if you compare species that are too similar, it becomes hard to distinguish what is truly fundamental from what is simply an accident of shared evolutionary history, like whether a brain happens to have a cortex or not.

In some ways, this can be understood as a new example of what evolutionary biologists call “deep homology.” That’s different from the kinds of examples many of us learned about in high school biology, things like convergent evolution and the distinction between compound eyes and camera eyes. What molecular biology is increasingly revealing is that this kind of deep homology at the level of genes and molecules is far more common than we once realized.

We recently finished mapping another octopus genome, this time for the zebra pygmy octopus, Octopus chierchiae. What’s extraordinary is just how different octopus genome architecture is from our own. Their genome is roughly twice the size of the human genome and packed with repetitive sequences, many of which are thought to be jumping genes, essentially virus-like elements that invade genomes over evolutionary time.

What’s fascinating is that octopuses seem remarkably tolerant of these repetitive sequences, and we’re beginning to suspect they may actually play some important regulatory role.  We also found that octopuses continue growing neurons throughout their lives, so adult neurogenesis is fairly common in them. On top of that, there’s extensive RNA editing happening inside their neurons. They continue learning well into adulthood, they can regenerate lost arms, and they’re capable of adapting to wildly different environments, from the Arctic to the Caribbean.

They possess this astonishing range of learned and adaptive behaviors that makes them some of the most behaviorally flexible and cognitively complex invertebrates on Earth. And we keep discovering entirely new things they can do, these bizarre little superpowers we don’t have ourselves. They solve problems in ways completely different from humans, and honestly, that’s incredibly exciting to me as a scientist because who wouldn’t want to study superpowers?

Right now, there’s a huge cultural fascination with octopuses as cute, emotionally relatable creatures. I actually think that badly misunderstands what they are. Despite what people may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses did not evolve to cuddle middle-aged white guys going through a divorce.

Most octopus species are intensely asocial. They are extraordinarily successful predators with incredibly sophisticated learning, memory, camouflage, and problem-solving abilities, but they are not social in the way humans are social. Some species are so solitary that females may never even see the entire male. They only encounter his specialized reproductive arm, which he detaches in order to escape before being eaten.

I think it’s important to respect octopuses for what they actually are rather than trying to remake them in our own image. The truly remarkable thing is not that they are secretly humanlike. It’s that minds so radically different from ours can still reveal deep biological commonalities at the molecular level.

People are usually willing to protect what they know and love, so part of my job as a biologist is helping people understand these animals more deeply. That includes understanding just how alien they are and how fundamentally different they are from us, while still finding connection in the fact that we are part of the same biology, shaped by the same evolutionary history and built from the same basic materials.

Continue exploring consciousness, communication, and intelligence across species: Read how musician Garth Stevenson explores music as a form of interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is documenting the shared medicinal knowledge of humans and animals in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses appeared first on Bioneers.

RFK JR Lies Us Americans Die.

May 26, 2026: Read Truthout investigative article featuring Veronica Aguirre, Greenaction’s Central Valley Organizer and Program Coordinator:

“Residents of polluted areas say Trump’s rollbacks are getting really scary.”

Click here to read the article on Truthout.org

Fueled by major grassroots transit organizing effort and broad business and labor support,Connect Bay Area far surpasses the 186,000 signatures required to qualify regional transit funding measure. Read more.

Montana, Idaho, Oregon, California among the states with the largest declines

DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September. CWP’s analysis also reveals for the first time which states saw the largest declines in fuels treatment year-to-year.

Hazardous fuels treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and brush clearing — reduce the amount of vegetation that feeds dangerous wildfires. Thinning and controlled burns are known to significantly moderate the intensity and severity of wildfires that increasingly threaten Western communities and the forests and watersheds they depend on.

According to CWP’s analysis of publicly available USFS data, the Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in calendar year 2025, compared with roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.

Larger map | Full analysis

“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss. “Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season.”

“The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape,” Weiss added. “The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”

National findings

• The U.S. Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024 — a decline of about 35 percent.
• The drop represents a significant reversal from recent years, with 2024 having been one of the strongest years on record for fuels treatment work.
• The decline comes amid ongoing concerns over staffing shortfalls across the Forest Service workforce.
• While it is too early to make definitive statements about fuel treatments in 2026, early data suggest that 2026 is still tracking far behind the historical average, and nowhere close to digging out of the hole that the Trump administration dug for itself last year.

State findings

The analysis found severe declines in many of the states at greatest wildfire risk.

West

• Montana, which faces persistent high wildfire risk, treated just 87,845 acres in 2025 — down 63 percent from 239,112 acres in 2024.
• Oregon, which led the nation in acres treated in 2024, completed hazardous fuels work on 228,411 acres in 2025 — down 47 percent from 430,586 acres the year before.
• Idaho treated 230,788 acres in 2025, down 45 percent from 418,339 acres in 2024.
• California, which has experienced devastating wildfire seasons in recent years, treated 205,358 acres in 2025 — down 40 percent from 341,970 acres in 2024.

Southeast

The declines are not limited to the West. Some of the sharpest year-over-year drops occurred across the Southeast, where prescribed fire is a critical tool for managing fire-prone longleaf pine ecosystems.

• Florida treated just 124,372 acres in 2025 — down 68 percent from 385,017 acres in 2024. Florida routinely leads or nearly leads the nation in prescribed fire acres, making this collapse in treatment activity particularly alarming.
• Georgia treated only 20,827 acres in 2025, also down 68 percent from 65,352 acres in 2024.
• South Carolina treated 41,452 acres in 2025, down from 128,461 acres in 2024 — another 68 percent decline.
• Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee also saw significant drops in year-to-year fuels treatment.

About the Analysis

The Center for Western Priorities, in partnership with Redstone GIS Consulting, analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS), the agency’s standard system for managing information about activities related to fire/fuels, silviculture, and invasive species. The data covers hazardous fuels treatment activities completed in calendar year 2025. This analysis uses the same dataset and methodology as the October 2025 Grassroots Wildland Firefighters memo on wildfire preparedness, updated to reflect the full calendar year. The underlying data, including metadata, is available through the FSGeodata Clearinghouse.

The post New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025 appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.

Featuring

Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in February 2026. He is the author of nine previous books, all bestsellers. Pollan has taught writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow.

Dacher Keltner, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, is the host of the Science of Happiness Podcast and the author of many articles and books, including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Resources

MichaelPollan.com

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Michael Pollan’s Bioneers 2026 Keynote

Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery with Michael Pollan and Monica Gagliano

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): There’s a good reason that philosophers, who have been struggling to understand consciousness for millennia, call it “the hard problem.” Even in this modern era, with all our sophisticated scientific understanding, the mystery of how the matter between our ears leads to subjective experiences remains more confidently explained by poets, novelists, priests or shamans than contemporary gatekeepers of knowledge.

Meanwhile, advances in our understanding of the rest of life that we inhabit this biosphere with are yielding an understanding that intelligence, once considered a solely human realm, clearly extends deeply into the more-than-human world. It may well be the case that consciousness is similarly embedded throughout life itself – but our ability to understand, appreciate and plumb our own human internal experience remains in a nascent state, collectively.

According to Michael Pollan, one of the world’s most influential science writers, quote: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well.” [no end quote needed]

After transforming the way society thinks about food with his landmark book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan turned his attention from the stomach to the mind, writing the best-selling volume on psychedelics called How To Change Your Mind. That body of research and experiences led him naturally to write the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness…

Michael Pollan spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Michael Pollan speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Nikki Ritcher

Michael Pollan (MP): I’ve spent the last five years on a quest to understand consciousness, the hard problem. How is it that subjective experience arises, and who and possibly what has it and why? I looked at everything from plant consciousness, which we’ll talk about a little bit, to my own stream of consciousness, to efforts to build artificial consciousness in machines. And I want to talk about one of the biggest takeaways from this project. And that is this: that I believe humanity is approaching a Copernican moment, what I call a Copernican moment, that will force the issue of who exactly we are and how we fit into nature.

You’ll recall Nicolaus Copernicus, 500 years ago, blew everyone’s mind in the West when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. He displayed our sense of centrality in a way that was really hard for people to observe. This was the first of a series of takedowns of humanity. 

Darwin came next, showing that we were animals descended from apes. And one after another, our claims to being special have fallen – culture, language, reasoning, tool-making – all have fallen when we found that there are animals that can do all these things. 

But a different, and I think even more profound, Copernican moment is upon us. At the same time that we are discovering that a great many more animals and possibly other life forms like plants possess consciousness, we have the arrival of artificial intelligence, promising machines that are not only intelligent but possibly conscious. That these two developments are coinciding, are happening at the same time, I think is going to rock us very soon, prompting an identity crisis and forcing us to make some key ethical and moral decisions. 

Let me talk about animals first. So, go back 400 years, and René Descartes claimed that humans had a monopoly on consciousness. And we operated on that basis for many centuries. That belief, which was so powerful, allowed him to dissect dogs and rabbits while they were still alive. And he was able to dismiss their screams of agony as just physiological noise, because that idea was so powerful, it overwhelmed the evidence of his senses. 

But the same idea allowed the rest of us, beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and reason, to treat nature as unconscious, and therefore something we could exploit any way we wanted to. And we operated on that assumption for a very long time. It took us several hundred years to begin to recognize that other species shared this incredible gift that we call consciousness. 

But in recent years, things have been changing. We’ve been undergoing this process in which consciousness is being democratized. You know, a few decades ago, we came to appreciate that other primates are conscious. That was the first step. In 2012, a group of animal scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists got together in Cambridge, England, and issued a declaration on consciousness. And they declared that all mammals are conscious, and that some other species, some birds were conscious, and cephalopods, I think octopuses. And this was a real change, a real shift in the weather in science. 

Photo: Diane Picchiottino / Unsplash

Just ten years later, they issued an update signed by a great many more scientists and philosophers, in which they said that all vertebrates are conscious, possibly some invertebrates, and possibly insects. So how did this revolution happen?

Well, part of it is due to the fact that we had always assumed that consciousness is produced or generated in the cortex. The cortex, of course, is the most recent, most uniquely human structure in the brain, and it’s associated with higher forms of thought, like rationality, decision-making. So surely, consciousness must reside there. 

But the research has been shifting our sense of where it begins, and that instead of thought, consciousness probably begins with feelings, simple things like hunger and thirst, and warmth and cold, and itch. This is where consciousness begins, and therefore it begins in the upper brain stem. And lots of animals have brain stems, many more than have cortices. So that’s led to a real change. And this is a key point about feelings. Keep it in mind when we get to computers. 

And I take this, this expansion of the circle of conscious beings or sentient beings, a word I’m sometimes more comfortable with, as a very positive development. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that science is helping us to reanimate a world that we treated as dead for way too long. [APPLAUSE] 

And you know, this period of treating the world that way in the larger context of things is a very recent and short phenomenon, it’s a couple hundred years. The default of humanity is one form of animism or another. Most Indigenous cultures see the world as animated by spirit, which is a synonym for consciousness. Kids, the default of young kids, is that everything is conscious – their toys, their cars, their whatever. So it’s interesting that we had a departure from this very deep human assumption. And in fact, it’s a cognitive bias that things are conscious. You’re better off thinking that that boulder over there is a bear and then deciding, oh, it’s actually just a rock – this is called agency detection – than the other way around, and you assume that that bear is just a rock and not to worry about it. So it’s a good, sort of basic response to things. 

So that’s the good news. But now we have the prospect of conscious machines, and I think that this is a lot more troubling. We now have machines that speak to us in our language in the first person. We all already take this for granted, but it’s a stunning development, a momentous development that, of course, none of us were consulted about. And these machines are convincing many people that they are conscious. I’m talking about people who are having relationships with chatbots, falling in love with them, letting them convince them they’re geniuses or gods. But I’m also talking about the people who work on these machines. 

So for my book, I followed efforts to create a conscious AI. I had access to a project where this was going on. And, you know, the consensus in Silicon Valley is that it will be possible to make a really conscious AI, that maybe right now they’re fooling us, but it could happen. 

I argue why I don’t think this is true, and it has to do with the same reason: If consciousness depends on feelings, what are the feelings of a machine? Can a machine have feelings? I agree, no. [LAUGHTER] And if it tells us they have feelings, should we believe it? 

Feelings depend on having a body. Feelings depend on the fact that you have a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer and that can die. I don’t think simulated feelings are real feelings. I think simulated thoughts are as good as real thoughts, and that’s why we see computers mastering games like Chess and Go. They can make things happen in the world, but what will this—the weight of a feeling expressed by a machine have? Unless it can be mortal, unless it can actually have a vulnerable body—those feelings will be absolutely weightless. 

My argument might not matter, though, because people believe that these machines are conscious, and it’s understandable why. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything. 

So there is talk in Silicon Valley – I’m amazed how common this is – that we should consider when we have conscious AIs, giving them moral consideration, admitting them into this widening circle of moral consideration. I think it’s a big mistake to do that. I think it’s something we have to fight against, that when we, you know, grant personhood to computers, we will lose our ability to control them. 

And you will recall, we did this once before when we decided, in our lack of wisdom, to grant personhood to corporations. That did not work out very well. It seems to me that there are moral obligations we owe to people and other mammals that should come first. [APPLAUSE] 

So I’m going to leave you with this Copernican question and this choice: Where does that leave us now? We have pressure coming from these two sides – animals becoming more conscious, plants possibly becoming conscious, insects becoming conscious. That’s pressing on us in a way that we can decide is positive or negative. And then on the other side, at the same time, we have computers making claims for consciousness. Who do we identify with? Who do we have more in common with, the AIs who can speak our language in the first person, or the animals that can suffer and feel and grow old and die? Who’s team are we on? The choice we make, as a species, will have tremendous consequences for who or what we admit into this circle of moral consideration, and how we conceive of our place in the world. 

Host: More from Michael Pollan when we return…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: At a recent Bioneers conference, Michael Pollan was interviewed by Dacher Keltner, an author and Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who served as the lead scientific consultant for the two animated “Inside Out” films by Pixar that explore the role emotions play in our lives.

Dacher Keltner (DK): I remember talking to you five years ago or something, kind of in the wake of This is Your Mind on Plants, and then How to Change Your Mind. And I remember we were walking in the Berkeley hills, and you were saying, you know, it’s like, well, what’s up next, and you’re like: I think I’m going to write a book about consciousness. And I laughed at you. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, well, that’ll be the end of your career, [LAUGHTER] and no one will buy that book. You know? And you’ve just been sort of jaunting around the wo—it’s a sensation! I mean, it’s like you’re all over the place; it’s a best-seller; it’s stirring all kinds of conversations. What’s going on? 

MP: Good question! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I think— 

So I started on this book. It grew out of How to Change Your Mind. Right? I was having these psychedelic experiences, and like anyone who’s had psychedelics, suddenly consciousness is foregrounded. You’re like—the windshield of perception has been smudged, and you’re like: Shit, there’s a windshield. [LAUGHTER] And you start—You start thinking about that windshield, and why is it the way it is. And so I got curious. And my writing usually follows my curiosity. 

DK: One of the first persons to figure prominently is this kind of mysterious philosopher at NYU, Thomas Nagel. I love his book The View from Nowhere. 

MP: Yeah I do too. 

DK: It’s spectacular. What a great— 

MP: He’s a critic of reductive science. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: And, he wrote a famous essay in the early ‘70s, before there was a lot of scientific work being done on consciousness, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Provocative title. And his thesis was that if it’s like anything to be a bat, if it feels like anything, then a bat is conscious. 

Now, we don’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a bat. You know? We use light to navigate the world, and they use echolocation. Right?  So they bounce sound waves off of things. But we can sort of imagine that. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: Enough to say, yeah, they’re probably conscious. So that became the question you ask of any creature. Does it feel like anything to be X? It doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. How do we say for sure that anything is conscious?  How do I know you’re conscious? We infer it in the case of— 

DK: I’m insulted. 

MP: —other people. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, we have to infer it, I mean, because we don’t have access to anyone else’s consciousness. You know, we can use symbol systems to learn something about it,  like language.  But there is—I mean, William James said the breach between two consciousnesses is the greatest breach in nature, and so how do we cross that?  And imagination is an important tool. We have theory of mind, which is…you know, philosopher talk for the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view. 

DK: So one of the beauties of the book is, as always, you take us on a journey, and it’s interesting because you kind of flip the typical Western approach to the mind, the Cartesian approach of you start with reason and sophisticated thinking and syllogistic logic and so forth, and you go—you start with sentience, and you move upwards, out of the brain stem and into the cortex. And, you know, I want to see where you land, and keep pressing you. 

Sentience, just the registering of sensations in all the different modalities by which we receive sort of information from the outside, it’s remarkable. You know? It truly is. You think about the skin – it’s 7 pounds and billions of cells, and all kinds of information is going into your brain stem and your somatosensory cortex telling you where you are, and who’s touching you, what that touch means. You think about the new science of smell, how we create spaces and meaning and memory and childhood nostalgia out of smell. I mean, sensation’s deep. Right? And it’s great that you start there. 

MP: I would add one thing to your definition of sentience, which is kind of a more basic form of consciousness. I think it’s maybe universal,  I mean, among all living things. But there’s valence too. There’s a recognition of, this is good or bad for the organism. 

DK: Right. And then you take us to plants, and, you know, I think a lot of us in this room, in particular at Bioneers, revere your scientific reporting and experience in writing of plants. And the new science on sentience of plants blew my mind. You know? 

MP: Yeah. They have 20 senses. 

Photo: Sergei Aleshin / Shutterstock

DK: God! 

MP: I know. They can sense gravity, I mean, and pH, and all these things that we can’t sense. 

DK: And then they know kin, they know non-kin, they know cooperators. 

MP: They can see. I mean, you know, there are vines that will change their leaf form to imitate the plant they’re climbing up, to hide. I mean, how do they see what the leaf form is and then how do they change themselves? We have no idea. 

DK: Yeah. So what did that tell you about consciousness, the plant science? What did you start to think? 

MP: So, it’s quite remarkable what plants can do. We’re fooled by the fact that they’re so still. But they have behaviors. They’re just slower than ours.

So these scientists call themselves plant neurobiologists. They know there are no neurons, they’re just trolling more conventional scientists. And it drives them crazy that they talk about plant neurobiology. So there’s a whole lot of these very cool experiments showing that plants can hear and see; they—in ways we don’t really understand. 

I don’t conclude that plants are conscious because I think that word has specific meanings tied to being a mammal, at least. But I do think they’re sentient. And sentience, as I said, is a simpler form of consciousness that may well be universal. I think even single-celled creatures have sentience. I think you can’t survive in a world that’s constantly changing without sensing your environment and knowing what’s good or bad for you. 

And so, yeah, that’s kind of where I came out on plants. And then I realized, well, consciousness is the way humans do sentience. And so every creature has its own version of sentience that’s appropriate to its body type, its sensorium, the scale at which it lives, and it would be anthropomorphic of us to say that, you know, plants are conscious the way we are. And they’re not. They don’t have interiority, I think. They don’t have a voice in their head. They can’t talk to themselves, all these amazing things that we can do. 

Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Tammy Horton/Boris Zharkov Photography

DK: One of the things that scientists like myself appreciate about your writing is often scientists become unlikely heroes in your books, and one of your heroes is Michael Levin. 

MP: Yeah, he’s an amazing biologist. This is a biologist at Tufts who—I urge you to look him up. He studies how animals regenerate themselves. And he’s very interested in bioelectric fields.

Now, I didn’t know what these were. They were discovered in the ‘30s, but that any multi-cellular thing will have a bioelectric field that is organizing it, holding memories,  enforcing a division of labor among cells in a multi-cellular situation. The study of this didn’t really begin until the ‘80s, when we developed these voltage-sensitive dyes. Before that, when the cell died, the field was gone. So unlike DNA, which survives the death of this—of the animal, and you can study it—or plant, bioelectric fields were very elusive. But now with these dyes, you can study them. And he’s really shown how powerful they are. 

He works with planaria, which are these worms that, if you chop off a tail, they regenerate a tail; you chop off a head, they regenerate a head. They’re kind of amazing. And he teaches them something. He conditions them and then he chops off their head. They grow a new head, and they remember the lesson. Which means that the information that they had learned was stored in their bodies, in this bioelectric field, not in the brain.

So his kind of covert project is a takedown of the neuron and the gene. Which is, you know, pretty ambitious. So it’s a really interesting project, and he believes that the simplest beings are cognitive beings. The way evolution works is it creates cognitive beings that can solve problems, and that you can’t hardwire everything because our world is so changeable.  The world, the environment  in which they live is so changeable. So that creatures need sentience in order to navigate a world that’s constantly changing, and it’s a very compelling vision. 

Host: Over the course of his research for his book, Michael Pollan found at least 22 distinct and often divergent theories of consciousness, as well as a theory about the specific consciousness of consciousness researchers. He believes it’s a clear indicator of how nascent the field remains, and how ineffable a mystery consciousness is.

MP: Non-local consciousness is a term for idealism. I mean, that’s what the philosophers called idealism. And that is the idea that consciousness is outside of our brains, and the job of the brain is to channel it, and that we’re like radio receivers or TV receivers, and we’re tuning in to consciousness. And it can be different kinds of consciousness.

Aldous Huxley uses that model in Doors of Perception. And he argues that psychedelics expand what he called the reducing valve, because we only let in that amount of consciousness that helps us survive. That would be the Darwinian explanation of like we only know these, but psychedelics opens it up and suddenly you feel like you’re more conscious.

I don’t know how you prove idealism. I think it’s a metaphysical idea, so I don’t think it’s susceptible to scientific proof. It’s consistent with all the brain science we’ve done on consciousness, which sounds crazy, but, you know, the brain is obviously involved in that system as well, it just has a different role. It’s not generating, it’s bringing in, and so damaging or changing the brain in some way would change consciousness. So it holds either way. 

Cristof Koch, you know, he was the ultimate brain-centered researcher. He was the head of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, he worked with mapping individual neurons. He really believed brains generated consciousness, until he went to Brazil and had an experience on ayahuasca, which I talk about in the book. And he had an experience of consciousness outside of his brain, and it gave him this crisis. He was like crying to his wife, it was such a big crisis. And he got very interested in idealism. I don’t know where he is right now, but the last time I talked to him, he was engaging with this idealist philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup. 

So you know, I don’t know what to make of that, honestly. Same with panpsychism. That’s another theory that solves the hard problem, but at a high expense, the expense being consciousness didn’t evolve or arise, it was always here, and it’s part of matter, that all matter has some degree, small degree of consciousness, and somehow it gets combined from all these—you know, the consciousness of our individual particles and cells into the kind of consciousness we have. 

Another interesting idea – you’ve solved the problem. It’s sort of like physics when they say, well, we can solve quantum mechanics if we stipulate a multiverse, that there are 50 different worlds. Okay. That’s a high price to pay, but okay.

Host: Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner, “Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness”

The post Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner appeared first on Bioneers.

Even before the summer travel rush began this Memorial Day weekend, Yosemite National Park was seeing enormous crowds—more than 836,000 visits so far in 2026, according to National Park Service data, about 100,000 more than this time last year.

During the pandemic, Yosemite started using some form of reservation system to manage crowds. Yosemite had one of its busiest seasons in 2025, with about 2.9 million visits through August, up 7% from the same period in 2024. Despite the high visitation rates, the National Park Service announced in February that Yosemite would not require timed-entry reservations in 2026, saying a review of 2025 traffic and parking data showed that a season-wide reservation requirement was not the most effective approach.

Last weekend, wait times to get into the park exceeded 90 minutes, and in some cases visitors were told to turn around. Once inside, visitors experienced completely full parking lots and overcrowding at popular sites within the park. Andranik Arakelyan, a visitor who previously opposed reservation systems acknowledged their value, saying, “There’s just not enough capacity, like infrastructure and the employees to handle all of this traffic.”

“Without any limits on the amount of vehicles, the amount of people, it becomes overwhelmed,” said John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center executive director. “The best accessibility is when there’s managed park conditions so that the number of vehicles is balanced with the amount of parking and the capacity of the roads,” said Buckley.

Quick hits Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic and crowds as park ends reservation system

ABC7 News | San Francisco Chronicle

Wyoming lawmaker aims to block future roadless areas despite overwhelming support for roadless protections

WyoFile

Billionaire buys Idaho state trust land to keep it undeveloped

Jackson Hole News & Guide

Residents of Mountain West towns warned they could run out of water after a terrible winter turns to a summer of drought

New York Times

Could changes at the U.S. Forest Service impact wildfire response in Oregon?

KATU

Wyoming BLM in a bind between DOGE firings’ impacts and energy development push

Cowboy State Daily

Essay: Treat water like family, not profit

High Country News

Podcast: The most underrated sites at America’s national parks

Vox

Quote of the day

The Forest Service’s own assessment found that building roads in these areas would actually increase the risk of fire, and another analysis shows that 85% of wildfires are human-caused.”

—Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon, WyoFile

Picture This

@usinterior

Waves shimmer beneath the cliffs of Channel Islands National Park, where golden wildflowers bloom brightly above the Pacific.

Have a peaceful Sunday!

Photo by Tim Hauf

Featured image: Source: Yosemitenps

The post Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic, crowds as park ends reservation system appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

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Creating community around agroecology was the core mission of our educational pathways on youth leadership and ecoliteracy. These journeys culminated in Youth & Territory: Pathways in Agroecology and Citizenship, an event that brought together a diverse range of actors from the Lake Bracciano area.

Students, school communities, and local farmers met with representatives from the Ministry of the Environment (MASE), Mara Cossu and Tiziana Occhino, alongside regional councillor Marta Bonafoni and the mayor of Bracciano, Marco Crocicchi, to share their visions for a territory rooted in active citizenship and agroecological practices.

Students presented the projects they co-created during this year’s participatory processes focused on caring for the land: tangible outcomes of a collective journey in ecoliteracy and agroecology. A shared vision emerged: that of a living territory, where environmental protection and the production of healthy, local food become concrete, collective action.

At the close of the dialogue with institutions, the young participants had the opportunity to present their work through a collective art exhibition, while outside an aperitivo featuring local products was set up, to be enjoyed to the sounds of a student-led DJ set.

This is a tangible outcome of the Terrae Vivae program, whose results were shared within the framework of the Officine Municipali project, a community space offering free coworking and a collaborative platform dedicated to ecological action, ecoliteracy, and agroecology, open to all. An open, shared, and participatory space where agroecology becomes collective, community-driven action.

The projects are supported by the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security within the framework of the SNSvS6 Call – Sustainability Drivers and Ecology, and by the Italian Buddhist Union through its Ecology programme and 8×1000 funding scheme.

They were implemented in collaboration with the agricultural institute “Salvo D’Acquisto,” IIS Luca Paciolo, and the Ignazio Vian Scientific High School, together with the farms Fattoria Ecologica Le Bricchiette, Azienda Agricola La Argentina, and L’Orto di Clapi.

We thank Erbaccelab, together with Azienda Agricola Gentili and Fattoria Faraoni, for the agroecological catering.

The event was promoted within the framework of the project “Coworking Space Bracciano – Ecofficine,” co-funded by PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, and hosted at the Officine Municipali in Bracciano.

Project “Coworking Space Bracciano” – CUP F11I24000190009 – co-funded by the European Union under PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, Priority 1 Employment, Specific Objective ESO4.2 AC19, Call “Officine Municipali” (DD G05680/2023).
Beneficiary: Municipality of Bracciano. Managing partner: Navdanya International ETS.
CUP: F11I24000190009 – Sigem Code: 23019DC000000106

Photo credits: Maela Bonafede

This factsheet looks at how much land would be required for solar systems that could meet all of Ontario's electricity needs.  It finds that 4/10ths of one percent of Ontario's landbase would be enough area to meet all of Ontario's current electricity demand.  Ontario covers a massive land area bigger than many countries.  It has

The post Ontario solar generation land requirements appeared first on Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

The Green Economy Networks podcast Class & Climate is back, with new host Em Thompson.

On this eighth episode of Class & Climate: Perspectives on a Green Economy,  Em Thompson sits down with Martin Empson to reveal how COPs (Conferences of Parties) have bureaucratized climate organizing.

Martin Empson is a climate activist from the UK and the editor and a contributor to System Change not Climate Change, a book of essays from socialists around the world on the nature of capitalism’s ecological crisis and the radical response that is needed.

Class & Climate is a podcast series from Perspectives Journal and the Green Economy Network that maps how climate action can deliver jobs and long-term affordability for workers — while debunking myths that these goals are a zero-sum trade-off with a clean environment.

Boycott The Bezos Met Gala at the crown of the Chrysler Building, Boycott The Bezos Met Gala with Laughing Bezos Image.

Who Murdered Renee & Alex, Trump Did That!, & Impeach Convict Remove,Trump'sCorruptionBetraysUsAll,& More Science Less Fiction.

Deny the Magellan Pipeline permit! Support the NO BUILD alternative! The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) NOW OPENED a public comment period, after rescinding the permit to approve a pipeline under 1 mile for the Pipestone National Monument. The Magellan OneOK company violated PUC orders by refusing to work with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council! They chose […]

U.S. Representatives Joe Neguse of Colorado and Jared Huffman of California introduced a bill to halt potential layoffs at public land management agencies through fiscal year 2030.

The Public Lands Workforce Stability Act would reinstate a moratorium on layoffs that expired earlier this year for the Interior department and the U.S. Forest Service.

Neguse and Huffman note that the Trump administration’s firings, buyouts, and early retirements have created staffing shortfalls on public lands. The Interior department has lost 25 percent of its workforce since the start of 2025, and the Forest Service has lost about 16 percent.

“At a time when our public lands and nearby communities are struggling with water, climate, and wildfire crises, we cannot afford to lose any more expertise,” Huffman, ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement.

How a private billionaires’ club took over the Crazy Mountains

In the latest episode of The Landscape podcast, Floodlight News reporter Evan Simon joins Aaron and Kate to break down a controversial Forest Service land swap in Montana’s Crazy Mountains that quietly gave the owners of the Yellowstone Club—a private club for billionaires—near-exclusive access to what should be public land, and how Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s involvement in the club raises ethical concerns.

Quick hits Trump officials say they can build 250-foot arch without Congress’s approval

Washington Post | E&E News

Former NPS officials push back on Big Bend border plans

E&E News

Lawmakers swore the Boundary Waters vote wasn’t about greenlighting a mine. Their actions say otherwise

More Than Just Parks

Underground coal fire in Colorado prompts emergency wildfire prevention project

CBS News

Lawmakers look to freeze staff cuts at land management agencies

Aspen Times | E&E News

Federal agencies share ideas for boosting veterans’ access to outdoor recreation on public lands

KUNC

National parks are struggling, summer crowds are coming

Vox

Conservation groups, Forest Service add new public land near Yellowstone National Park

Idaho Capital Sun

Quote of the day

This is your land. Your wilderness. Your water. And they’re handing it to a Chilean mining company that paid a former cabinet secretary $380,000 to make sure they could take your copper and ship it to China.”

—Jim Pattiz, filmmaker and conservationist, on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, More Than Just Parks

Picture This  @nationalparkservice

When you reappear in people’s lives after inexplicably disappearing for several months…

Spring and early summer are periods of increased bear activity in many parks. Bears may be moving through habitat, asking about your car’s extended warranty, searching for food or protecting cubs. Visitors can reduce the chance of a dangerous encounter by staying alert, hiking in groups, making noise in low-visibility areas, not talking about your car warranty, storing food and trash properly and never approaching bears.

Visitors should check current park alerts before their trip and follow park-specific bear safety guidance. Bear species, terrain, food storage rules and bear spray recommendations can vary across parks.

Learn more ways to stay safe around bears at: NPS.gov

 

(Featured image: A Bureau of Land Management employee in the Johnson Valley OHV Area, California. Photo by Jesse Pluim, BLM; Flickr)

The post New legislation would freeze staff cuts at land management agencies appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Modern life has become remarkably efficient at creating distance. Distance from where food comes from. Distance from ecosystems. Distance from community. Distance from our own bodies and attention spans. Even as climate crises, biodiversity collapse, burnout, and political fragmentation intensify, many of the systems shaping daily life continue to encourage separation.

A growing number of scientists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, writers, and ecological thinkers are challenging the worldview beneath that separation. Across fields ranging from forest ecology to Earth systems science to Indigenous language revitalization, many are arriving at a similar realization: The living world is far more interconnected, intelligent, participatory, and relational than dominant industrial culture has long assumed.

In this conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, whose research transformed scientific understanding of forest communication and mycorrhizal networks; science journalist Ferris Jabr, who explores how life shapes the Earth itself; and Jeannette Armstrong, whose work centers Indigenous language, land-based knowledge, and relational worldviews, explored what becomes possible when humans begin to see themselves not as separate from the living world, but as participants within it.

Their discussion moved through ecology, language, colonization, restoration, science, ceremony, and healing — ultimately asking what kinds of cultural transformation become possible when relationship replaces separation.

The Fiction of Separation

Modern industrial society depends on a profound act of separation: humans from nature, forests from living systems, land from relationship, and even people from their own bodies and communities.

For Suzanne Simard, that separation is embedded deeply within industrial approaches to land management itself. Reflecting on her early career in forestry, she describes a system focused primarily on extraction rather than ecological health. “The goals were wrong in the first place,” Simard says. “It’s not about the health of the land, it’s about cutting down the trees, not regenerating trees.”

That mindset, she argues, has reshaped entire landscapes while also reinforcing the idea that humans exist outside the ecosystems they depend on.

Ferris Jabr traces this worldview through the broader history of Western science and philosophy. Earlier cultures often understood Earth as animate, interconnected, and alive. Over time, however, Western scientific thought increasingly focused on dividing the world into discrete categories: human and nature, animate and inanimate, organism and environment.

That shift, Jabr argues, coincided with systems of industrialization and colonialism that depended on treating the planet not as a living relationship, but as “a field of resources to be extracted and used.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, the consequences of that separation are not merely ecological, but deeply cultural and psychological as well. She describes generations of Indigenous youth being taught that connection to land, ceremony, and traditional lifeways was incompatible with modernity — that being rooted in the living world was somehow “backwards.”

But the rupture extends far beyond cultural loss alone. “The loss isn’t just a loss of language,” Armstrong says. “The loss really has to do with something much deeper than that.”

Language Carries a Worldview

The words used to describe the natural world are never neutral. They shape perception, reinforce values, and determine how people understand their relationship to the living systems around them.

In industrial forestry, language often reflects hierarchy, control, and extraction. Suzanne Simard describes being trained to classify trees as “dominant” or “sub-dominant,” while plants like huckleberries, salmonberries, and thimbleberries were labeled “competition” or “weeds” that needed to be removed so commercially valuable trees could thrive.

That vocabulary, she argues, reflects far more than scientific categorization. It encodes an entire worldview — one in which forests are treated primarily as production systems rather than living communities.

Simard’s use of the term “Mother Tree” intentionally pushes against that framework. The phrase became controversial in some scientific and forestry circles precisely because it challenged the detached language of industrial management with something relational, interconnected, and alive. “It was very female,” Simard says. “It was very connective, and it also talked about abundance.”

Even seemingly small linguistic choices can reveal deeper assumptions. Ferris Jabr notes that people commonly refer to “the earth,” while planets like Mars or Jupiter are rarely spoken about the same way. “Earth is a living entity with a name,” he says. “You don’t put ‘the’ before names.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, language is not simply descriptive; it is ecological knowledge accumulated over thousands of years of relationship with place. Speaking about the Syilx word tmixʷulaxʷ, Armstrong describes a concept that expresses life as an ongoing regenerative force: continuously moving, cycling, and renewing itself in the present moment.

“My sister described that as stepping into a flat world and then stepping into a three-dimensional world,” Armstrong says of speaking her language.

Across each perspective, language becomes more than communication alone. It becomes a way of organizing reality itself — shaping whether the living world is understood as a collection of resources, or as a web of relationships humans remain inseparable from.

Restoration Is About People, Too

Ecological restoration is often framed as a technical process: restoring habitats, replanting native species, rebuilding soil health, or protecting biodiversity. But in reality, restoration is human and relational: a process that can also restore belonging, agency, memory, and connection.

“When we’re talking about restoring land,” Jeannette Armstrong says, “we actually are restoring people to be part of that land.”

That restoration is deeply connected to healing intergenerational trauma for Armstrong. She describes how colonization, residential schools, and cultural erasure severed many Indigenous people from language, ceremony, food systems, and land-based relationships — ruptures that continue to reverberate physically, psychologically, and spiritually across generations. But she also points to a growing body of research and lived experience suggesting that reconnection itself can be transformative.

Referencing her work in ecopsychology and community healing, Armstrong describes an approach that shifts the focus away from viewing individuals as inherently broken. “Rather than treating the individual as being broken,” she says, “it’s the world around them that’s broken, and if you fix the world around them, and they are part of fixing the world around them, things happen in their lives that change them.”

That healing, she explains, is often profoundly embodied. The sounds of language, drumming, wind, birds, water, and land can reconnect people to forms of memory and relationship that exist beyond intellect alone. “Your body memory knows when it’s out there in nature,” Armstrong says. “Your body remembers.”

Suzanne Simard sees similar patterns in her own work with students and forest restoration. Again and again, she says, students working directly on the land experience a renewed sense of purpose and agency. “They feel really good,” Simard says. “I think it’s because they feel like they have agency in this world, that they’re doing something that they can see the results of.”

The Earth Is More Alive Than We’ve Been Taught

Modern science has often portrayed nature as passive matter — a backdrop against which life unfolds. But growing fields of ecological and Earth systems research are revealing that living systems actively shape the planet itself.

That realization became the foundation of Ferris Jabr’s work. Research into plant intelligence and communication first led him to Suzanne Simard’s work on forest networks, but it also opened a much larger question: What if agency, responsiveness, and collaboration are far more widespread throughout the living world than humans have traditionally assumed?

“There’s this co-evolution between Earth and life,” Jabr says. “It is able to regenerate itself in a way and for a period of time that completely dwarfs what’s happening on just the organismal or cellular level.”

That regenerative capacity appears across scales. Jabr points to ecosystems rebounding unexpectedly quickly after disturbance: rivers recovering after dams are removed, landscapes regenerating after fire, life continuously reorganizing itself in response to disruption. “Life is all about keeping itself going,” he says. “That’s one of its defining features.”

Even deep beneath the Earth’s surface, microbes are carrying out astonishing processes that challenge conventional definitions of life and metabolism. Some microorganisms, Jabr explains, survive without sunlight or oxygen by interacting chemically with rocks and metals, essentially “breathing” the Earth itself.

Simard’s work similarly challenges the idea of forests as collections of isolated organisms. Her research on mycorrhizal networks, forest communication, and Mother Trees points instead toward ecosystems built on connection, reciprocity, and interdependence. “We are one with the forest,” she says. “We are the forest.”

That shift in perspective echoes ideas long associated with the Gaia hypothesis and many Indigenous worldviews: Earth is not merely a planet inhabited by life, but a living system continuously shaped by life itself.

“The more-than-human world is doing that healing,” Simard says.

Reconnection Requires Participation

Modern Western culture often treats connection to the natural world as intellectual or symbolic — something to appreciate, study, or believe in from a distance. But relationship with the living world is fundamentally participatory. It is built through presence, stewardship, reciprocity, and direct engagement with place.

That means restoring habitats, learning the ecosystems where we live, planting native species, stewarding forests and waterways, rebuilding reciprocal relationships with land, and participating directly in the work of regeneration.

Suzanne Simard has seen firsthand how healing emerges through participation, particularly in students and research crews working directly in forests shaped by wildfire, logging, and ecological decline. “Doing stuff on the land is really crucial,” she says. “Being out on the land is absolutely essential to the joy in your soul.”

That work, she argues, restores more than ecosystems alone. “They feel like they have agency in this world,” Simard says, “that they’re doing something that they can see the results of.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, rebuilding relationship with land also means recovering forms of meaning, ceremony, and spirit that industrial culture has pushed aside. “We need to regenerate that,” she says, speaking about humanity’s relationship to the unseen dimensions of life and the sacredness many cultures once recognized in the living world. “That’s the thing that’s going to make the transformation.”

Even hope itself, Ferris Jabr suggests, is less important than relationship. “I do have hope,” he says, “but also I just love this planet and its peoples and its creatures way too much to give up.”

The post 5 Ideas That Challenge the Way We Think About Nature appeared first on Bioneers.