Rebecca Giggs: The world as reflected in the whale (ep384)
“The way that we’re changing the ocean acoustically impacts upon those the ability of the whales to hear one another.... We are impacting upon whale culture, not just during the era of whaling, when we were removing large old whales from the sea, presumably some of the most experienced singers, but today, when we’re also changing the context in which they sing.”
In this episode, we welcome Rebecca Giggs, an award-winning author from Perth, Australia. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Emergence, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and in anthologies including Best Australian Essays, and Best Australian Science Writing. Rebecca’s nonfiction focuses on how people feel towards animals in a time of technological and ecological change. Rebecca’s debut book is Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Some of the topics we explore include how whaling accelerated and shaped the historical process of industrialization, what impacts various industrial activities have had on whale songs and cultures, the critical role of migratory species, such as the Bogong moth, on enriching the habitats that they pass through, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Ali Dineen
Episode-inspired artwork by Lucy Haslam
Episode references:
Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs’ debut book
Ben Yeoh & Rebecca Giggs, In Conversation about Fathoms
“Noiseless Messengers,” an essay by Rebecca Giggs
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, a book by Jack Bittle
Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy, rereleased by the Library of America
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Rebecca Giggs: The whale family is an extraordinarily diverse clade of animals. You have everything from toothed whales like orca, or killer whales as we call them here, all the way to the largest animal on the face of the planet, the blue whale. So they all have different ways of living in the world, different family structures, different acoustic environments that they live in, the way they sing, different kinds of diets. But among the most interesting things that I learned in the course of the research for Fathoms, I'll give you a few little stories.
One has to do with a kind of whale called a beaked whale, which is in its body shape, a little bit like a dolphin, but much larger and more kind of barrel-shaped. Beaked whales are best thought of as very deep sea living whales. They only really surface to breathe. Some of them spend hours, many kilometers, beneath the ocean surface, hunting. So they live in darkness. They live in an acoustic environment [such] that I guess their sensory acuity is really honed to interactions in sound. They hunt by biosonar, they communicate with one another under the water.
Scientists have been really interested, for a long time now, about the shape of the beaked whale's skull. It has all these weird bumps and crenulations and flutings on it. Quite unusual for a marine mammal. So the exterior of the animal's head is smooth, but the skull is quite idiosyncratic. And one theory for why that might be is that their biosonar allows them to effectively see inside the bodies of one another. So it's not just that they're bouncing their echowaves off the surface of objects underwater, but in the case of interacting with other whales, they're actually able to apprehend one another's skeletons.
And if that's the case, then it may be that these interestingly-shaped skulls are almost acting in the same way as the antlers of reindeer. They're a kind of competitive display, effectively, that the males have and that they're capable of sensing. So I thought that was sort of stupendous, because it speaks to ways of interacting as animals that are so different from the ways that humans as a highly visually emphasizing species, as a really ocular species. It's such a different way of imagining interaction, through sound.
The other thing that I will say about whale voices is that I was interested to learn that whale voices are changing.
Since the 1960s, the voices of blue whales have dropped the equivalent of three white notes on a piano.
They're getting deeper. And there are different reasons for why that might be so. Some people say optimistically, that there are simply more blue whales in the sea now, and they no longer have to yell to hear one another, for a few different morphological reasons. When a whale is louder, it's at a higher pitch—just simply the way that the whale's anatomy works; so if they're being quieter then their voices are going to drop a bit.
Other people say that simply because the ocean is becoming slightly more acidic over time and a more acidic ocean carries soundwaves further, [so] the whales are able to communicate over a long distance using less effort and less volume, but that that speaks to the degradation of the environment, rather than simply our conservation efforts boosting those populations.
Kamea Chayne: Something else that I hadn't known before was how intricately connected whales are to the atmosphere. And this becomes especially important as the conditions of the Earth's atmospheric imbalances become more severe. So, beyond how climate change has been affecting whales, which I think tends to be the directionality of the narrative which we will get into later, I'd love it if you introduce us to the role of whales on the climate and on the systemic atmospheric health of our planetary body.
Rebecca Giggs: I had always thought of whales as being animals that were locked into their marine environment. So they die and they fall to the bottom of the ocean floor and they're decayed and picked at by all kinds of weird deep sea animals, and they participate in marine food webs, they eat little crustaceans, they eat krill or they eat fish. I had no idea that…
There’s this interesting ecological balance happening between the activity of whales and the chemical composition of the air. The way it works is this. Really large whales, and most particularly what we know as the baleen whales, so those that have pleated throats like an accordion, the surface of an accordion, as well as the sperm whales, which are the animals you commonly sit on the front cover of Moby Dick, the ones with the really big blocky heads and big teeth, squid eaters... These big whales tend to feed at depth. They dive down, they chase squid, they get food from the lower surfaces of the sea, and then they move back up to the surface of the sea.
In the process of resurfacing, they drag up some organic matter from the slower-moving layers of the ocean up towards the, they call them, photic layers, the layers where the sun penetrates. But they do another thing as well. They literally move nutrients.
So you imagine they eat at depth, but it's not until they come to the surface, that they defecate. And they do that because their bodily functions under pressure are kind of released as they come to the surface and they're under less pressure. They release these wafty, in the case of sperm whales, these huge manure on the surface of the ocean.
In an ocean that's very nutrient-poor, that manure is acting as this amazing catalyst to instigate the growth of phytoplankton, these tiny little algae that populate the sea, kind of like stardust. Plankton is responsible for the absorption of carbon dioxide and the emission of oxygen, on a scale that actually is greater than the world's rainforests. It is this amazing carbon capture and storage mechanism. It's also, as I say, an oxygen emitter.
The activity of whales is like a pump feeding the growth of plankton in the open ocean. There have been studies showing that when we depleted the number of whales, we also affected the growth of these microscopic plants in a way that can be reflected in the chemical composition of the air.
It's so interesting to think about animals not just as passive victims of anthropogenic climate change, but actually as a key mechanism in the repair, or in the stabilization of our environment.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. It's really interesting to think about the interplay between a species and how they reflect their environment, and at the same time that they are co-creators of their broader environments.
In our past conversation about the various energy transitions and later energy use expansions, I recall us having touched on how whale oil was critical to help fuel the earlier stages of industrialization. But, I would love for you to elaborate more on how industry reflects an intimacy with the whale's body, as in, how did industrialization drive the practice of whaling, and on the flip side, how did whaling and the products from their bodies change or accelerate industry?
Rebecca Giggs: In the 19th century, our forebears lived in constant close proximity with products that had come from the whale's body. So that might be whale oil, which was used as an industrial lubricant in manufacturing, so in textile factories, leather work factories and other industrial factories.
It might be products that were made from the baleen of whales. Baleen is a fibrous substance that some whales have in their mouths, where we would have teeth, kind of like a mustache inside your upper lip. And it has this pliability to it that when it's heated, it can be shaped and turned into all manner of different commodities. So it was used in women's corsetry, famously. It was also used in medical supplies. It was used in furniture stuffing, the springs in watches, police batons. It was used basically as the thermoplastic of the era, molded into all different kinds of products.
And then finally, a certain kind of whale oil, particularly this sort of creamy whale oil that came out of the heads of sperm whales. This was used as an illuminator and was put into lamps and made into candles, and basically was the means of illuminating the factory floor to extend the working day. So whaling really isn't just a commercial product, it's also the context in which industry takes its modern shape. And I mean that by the sense that whale oil allowed for automation, whale oil in the form of an illuminant allowed for the extension of trading hours both on the shop floor and on the factory floor, and it also brought on the age of consumer culture, in the form of these different thermoplasticesque commodities.
[Whale oil] wasn't just one product among many. It was the early form of the extractive industry age that we live in now.
Kamea Chayne: I don't think enough of us realized how integral whaling was to our history and to realizing the industrial world that a lot of people live as a part of today.
I recently spoke with Thom Van Dooren, another brilliant author who's looked at various species endangerment and extinctions. But in our discussion, we'd highlighted how the culture of the Hawaiian crow had been compromised after first their species endangerment and then the attempts to breed and raise them in captivity.
Because the same calls, and place-based knowledges and behaviors of how to live and find food and avoid dangers in their non-captive habitats haven't been able to be passed on in the same ways to the newborns raised in entirely different environments, which makes it more difficult for them to be successfully reintroduced into their ancestral habitats.
But this idea about the culture of various communities of animals is one that has been really fascinating to me. And you touched on this earlier with the changes in the tone or voice of a paticular species of whale, but I wonder what else you've thought through or learned in terms of how industrial activities or climate change may have changed the cultures of whales?
Rebecca Giggs: That's a fantastic question. And he is just a beautiful writer on the subject of animal cultures.
When I spoke to whale researchers, they drew a line between some species of whales and others. Famously, sperm whales, which are very long-lived, very brainy animals, and seem to have different kinds of dialects between their groups—they're actually called clans rather than pods in this case—are thought to have a culture that evolves across time. The same is also true certainly in the oral expressions of humpback whales.
The humpback whales that you hear recorded on records from the 1970s are not singing in the same way that the humpback whales today do. Their songs evolve and they even have seasonal trends where a particular motif, almost like an advertising jingle, will get kind of stuck in the voice of one whale and others will begin repeating it and they'll carry it out across ocean basins. Almost like a whale pop song, actually. It will kind of lap the globe, in the course of a year, and they tend to move towards greater complexity, until it gets to the point where to be a virtuosic humpback whale singer, you're really pushing the edge of your ability, and then it seems like suddenly a singer comes along who's singing a very simple song and that stands out. And scientists actually call them cultural revolutions, when they see this big change in humpback song take place.
I was fascinated to learn that in the larger whale species, there are distinct traditions or cultures, I suppose you would call them, that passed through generations. And of course, the way that we're changing the ocean acoustically impacts upon those the ability of the whales to hear one another, and to some extent, in the case of sperm whales, to hunt for prey because they use the biosonar to locate their prey.
We are certainly impacting upon whale culture— not just during the era of whaling, when we were removing large old whales from the sea, presumably some of the most experienced singers, but today, when we're changing the context in which they sing.
Kamea Chayne: Before we take a step back, and perhaps this is an invitation to that as well, one of the most jarring, at first metaphoric but in reality quite literal, things that we know is how we have actually discovered various elements representing the world in the whale.
Can you share more about this and how your view of pollution from so-called byproducts of industry has been challenged and has evolved, and to extend that further, what we know about how the pollutants from industrial regions have made their ways to places farthest away from their origins?
Rebecca Giggs: When I originally went down and saw this humpback whale that had stranded in Western Australia, I didn't have in my mind that I would write a narrative nonfiction book about that topic. I was actually working on some short fiction, so I had thought that that whale would turn up in a short story. And I kept notes and I thought about it for a while and I played around with it in a few different contexts. But eventually I put that idea down, and it wasn't until a few years later, when I read a news story, that I began to realize that actually what I had in mind was something much more factual.
The news story was a report from Spain, where a sperm whale had washed up on the coast. This one had died in the open ocean and then its body had washed up and scientists had done and necropsy on the animal to look at why it died. So humans get an autopsy, and whales and other animals get a necropsy.
They looked at the stomach contents of the [sperm whale] and what they found inside—it was stupendous to me—an entire greenhouse.
This animal had swallowed all this bundle of burlap and flowerpots and hose pipes and plastic sheeting from a greenhouse. This isn't far from the greenhouse district in Spain, which is known as the kind of salad bowl of Europe, where a lot of vegetables are grown over winter, in that part of Europe. So perhaps it's not surprising that that kind of agricultural waste would end up between the whale and its world.
But to me, I read that story and I thought to myself, you know, if I was to put that in fiction, a whale, this amazing icon of the 1980s environmental movements, turning up with a greenhouse—like literally the metaphor that we use to describe the climate era, the greenhouse effect—I would be doing something really leaden and sort of clumsy. But here it was actually happening in the real world. One of those cases where the truth is stranger than fiction. I got interested in how even though whales are this mysterious animal and very remote from us, living lives in an entirely different medium to us, that they are returning to us as evidence of our consumer culture.
There are whales that have washed up now that have been found to have in their stomachs such a weird plethora of objects, things from pairs of jeans to golf balls to cases from DVDs. They're really kind of an archive of the human culture, and I guess a kind of jettisoned set of desires and fashions and things that have turned up inside of whales.
But in terms of that question of how far that influence has spread, not only as material objects, but also as the trace of pollutants... Whales are very fatty animals. Of course, because they need to regulate their internal temperature and they live in some cases in quite cold environments. They have this layer of blubber around their bodies insulating them. When they encounter the kinds of industrial runoff that comes off agricultural areas: pesticides, herbicides, those kinds of chemicals tend to be quite lipophilic, as in they suspend well in fat. So these animals will collect a chemical ballast both from their diet and also from exposure in the water, and it will stay in their fat. In some cases, it's quite metabolically stable, so it doesn't circulate back into the body, it's sequestered into this fat layer.
But the one vulnerable moment in a whale's life cycle, where it does get re-exposed to this chemical ballast it's carrying, is in pregnancy and birth. So some whales will discharge that chemical ballast to their firstborn young. And that firstborn may be a weaker animal, or an animal that's likely to die. They'll also pass it through their breastmilk, as well. Now, you can imagine for traditional peoples living up in the Arctic who consume whale meat, not sort of irregularly, but in some seasonal instances as a cornerstone of their diet; if they're eating the fat from beluga and narwhal, and other species up there, as part of a traditional food source, they will also take on that chemical ballast.
There were studies done to show that certain Arctic peoples had a higher chemical freight, particularly in breast tissue, because that's where the chemicals tend to collect in the human body. We think of these places as incredibly far from sites of industry and those people as living lives in strong connection with nature and traditional diets, but in many cases, they're also still encountering the leftovers of agrochemicals elsewhere.
Kamea Chayne: That really just goes to show how interconnected the Earth's various systems and communities are.
Something that stood out to me was when you shared in past interviews about how it's more difficult for you and many people to empathize with something like the changing biosphere on that vast level, because it can feel too large in dimension to wrap our heads around. And so this has led you to ponder how we might tell global stories now that can unite and draw in empathy from people across borders the same way that the whale was able to, for sparking collective care for the ocean.
I think what I'm curious about is the interplay between finding charismatic, emblematic creatures that people find easier to empathize with to unite more people, versus inspiring an expansion and decentering of our capacities for empathy from the human or the human-like. Because I wonder whether the inability for most people to empathize with something like melting ice caps or mountaintop mining doesn't come from the scale per se, but rather because their cultural stories and histories and upbringing aren't rooted in those specific places. I can imagine that those whose livelihoods depend on ice and are interwoven with glaciers would be able to empathize with their disappearance much more than other people might.
And just to toss in another element here, I'm aware there also have been critiques about what it means that it often takes charismatic animals like the polar bear to get people to care about climate change, when at the same time, black, brown, Indigenous, and other disenfranchised communities right within much closer proximities have been facing the disproportionate impacts of pollution, climate change, economic injustice, and so forth. What comes to mind most immediately for you here?
Rebecca Giggs: Yes, that's a fantastic way to draw together a few of the themes in the book. Thank you for that. I think that when I say it's hard for us to wrap our heads around the large-scale terraforming of the globe that's taking place in the form of sea ice loss, or I suppose the more intangible and non-sensory, but nonetheless weather-accelerating change in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere... Perhaps I mean less that it's dismissible I guess because we can't wrap our heads around it, but it is humiliating in the way that it can defeat the impulse for action, because there is simply so much grief bundled with the events of the disappearance of the glaciers and there's the molecular level on which we've changed things as well.
And so the whale was this wonderful Trojan horse in a way, as an animal that is transhemispheric—it migrates from the poles to the tropics, it speaks across ocean basins, it's embedded in deep time because its evolutionary history stretches further back than our own—and so it became possible to talk about the past in a way, using the whale, that was really interesting to me.
But at the same time, I do also wrestle with that question of reifing charisma of big animals and falling into default modes of, we need something to be human enough, as in whales as sort of social, and they have languages, and they have families, and they're almost sporty—they're playful. Those are grounds for empathy... because of course, that's a really problematic notion, if we're going to protect the environment at large that we identify first and foremost with the most human elements of it.
One of the projects of Fathoms, was really to try to get into the whale as an ecological being. So I had this phrase in my head, from Gary Snyder, when I was writing the book, and he says something like, life is not just the property of the big charismatic animals, but it's also anaerobic, it's cannibalistic, it's about decay, it's about the deathliness, that's in life. So at the very beginning of the book, I do have this scene about the decay of the animal on the deep sea, and the way in which the whale's body, even after life, is kind of like a springtime. It energizes these deep sea ecologies and creates this huge energy boost.
I guess that story that I told a minute ago about industrial pollutants moving through the body of the whale is also putting a networked or ecological lens on the animal, rather than treating it as important or impactful just because it's an animal that we've historically invested with a certain amount of character. I think that's one way to answer your question. Certainly, it was a bit of a mercenary attempt to try to write about global change through a subject that I knew there was already going to be a lot of feeling about, and I'm subject to that feeling as well.
I also find it awesome to come eye to eye with a whale, and be beheld by a whale, and I can't escape those cultural histories, my own self. I can only try to find a bit of critical distance on them and look back on them.
Kamea Chayne: You've also written about less charismatic creatures like the bogong moth, so I want to pivot to your piece, The Noiseless Messenger, in which you follow the mass migration of the bogong moth in alpine Australia, a story of superabundance and apocalypse.
From the piece, you wrote: "The moth’s habitat has not disappeared, taking the moth along with it. … What has changed, what is changing, is that the topographic features of the landscape, coded into the bogongs’ migratory instincts, are decoupling from the climatic conditions necessary for the moth to complete its life cycle.”
And to further illustrate this message, later in the piece, you write, "Though we customarily speak of needing to save a habitat to save a species, per those animals that move in vast numbers, the opposite is also true. The preservation of habitat, its energetic balance, pivots on the transient animals that pass through it. A depletion of migratory animals can be a force as atrophying as plunging the land into darkness."
Seeing as both the bogong moth and various species of whales as well are migratory creatures, I'd be curious to hear you expand on what you've thought through in terms of what the disruption of migratory pathways has meant for these beings—emotionally, culturally, again with how that then shapes their environments differently, or otherwise.
Rebecca Giggs: Since I finished Fathoms, I've written about leeches, I've written about spiders, I've written about moths, and snails as well. I've gone to the micro, mini, fauna since I left the megafauna. So it is interesting to think about the question of animal migration and energetic inputs into environments all the way across the scale, of this interesting little migratory moth we have on the east coast of Australia, to the humpback whales that we see traveling in the ocean.
The bogong moth used to be massively abundant, so much so that it literally darkened the skies.
Think passenger pigeon, but with an Australian inflection. I had wanted for a while to write a story about what is globally known as the insect Armageddon, a phrase coined by the journalist Brooke Jarvis, and I'd been looking for a Southern Hemisphere story to explore that question, of the kinds of insect depletions that we're seeing worldwide. And the bogong moths was just such a gift to a writer, because the scale of it is immediately apparent, and it's within living memory, that people remember, the migration and the way in which you'd have to sweep them off your porch every day when they died in the light fixtures on the veranda.
There are [even] stories about garden party and government house, and all the moths getting stuck in the icing on the cakes, or federal buildings having to shut down the elevators because the mechanism of the elevators [would be] so jammed with moth bodies. And of course, that stretches way back to Indigenous traditional knowledge as well, there was a period in which alpine Indigenous Australians would have collected moth bodies and cooked them in ashes and then created a kind of durable paste that was formed into patties and was a food that could be transported and lasted a long time.
At any length, there are two reasons that the bogong moth population collapsed, and it has collapsed in recent years by 99%—a huge disappearance. One of them has to do with drought in the areas where the animals pupate, in the agricultural fields. And then [the other] has to do with the changing climate of the actual destination of their migration, which are caves up in the top of mountains, in the Brindabellas and the Victorian Alps. So they're losing their habitat, not because of anything like deforestation or ocean acidification: they're losing it simply because the temperature is changing, and they're either not emerging as pupae, or they're not making it... Once they get to Alpine Australia, they're not finding the cold caves that they used to over summer.
It's a complicated story because it runs counter to a few traditional understandings of animal migration in the Northern Hemisphere. So these are animals that migrate to escape the heat of the summer, rather than hibernating over winter. And simply the scale of it is immense. But I learned a lot about the ways in which tiny bits of life, like insect life, are responsible for these huge flows of energy and genes as well, between plants, like DNA flows. It opened my eyes to that question of the transience of insect life as well. So it was a pleasure to write that piece.
Kamea Chayne: There are also people of various cultures who historically were migratory but in present day haven't been able to in the same ways, with the introduction of things like private property or national borders and so on. So, as an extension, I would be keen to consider how the inability for people to migrate in those same ways has affected the landscapes that those migratory impacts used to shape.
Rebecca Giggs: There had been native title cases, or what it would have called in the top of Canada—Indigenous land rights cases, but to do with migratory entitlement in areas where ice has disappeared and the terrain has changed. So I think there are precedents for people challenging the right to migrate in the context of a climate-changed environment.
There's a wonderful book coming out soon called The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, specifically focused on the ways in which climate is impacting migration within the US. It's written by Jack Bittle, who's an author whose work is really powerful and well worth checking out.
Kamea Chayne: I want to prompt the closing of our main discussion with this hauntedness you talk about.
As you say, "What is most cryptic about animals in this moment, many people suspect, are things we cannot yet gauge about our own impacts on their habitats and their bodies. The ability to identify damage is lapped by the ability to do damage. We stand in the wake of something we cannot yet comprehend. What is at the heart of an animal, governing its behaviour, may reveal itself in time not to be a compelling mystery, but instead, a shameful familiarity: the rubble of the marketplace (still displaying its trademarks), or the polluted air. Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours."
What are some final lessons you've learned that you wish to pass along to us here, and what is a call to action or deeper inquiry you'd like to close on?
Rebecca Giggs: When I wrote that passage about hauntedness, I was thinking about an old way of understanding animals that we've really inherited from antiquity, from the Romans, which was that, we used to look to animals as moral problems, and we can imagine a time in which the behavior of flocks of birds or, there used to be healers who would look through the entrails of animals to see messages, like, should I go to war? Should I get married? And also, I think as a sort of palimpsest of information that arrived from a spiritual dimension. At that point, we thought that it was something godly that moved in animals.
Now it seems, again, that animals have returned to us as moral messengers. But this time, we fear that actually, the message they're bringing has something to do with our own culpability for global change.
When we see an animal that's migrating in a new way, into a new habitat, or behaving in a new way, or perhaps there's a surge of invasive species, or there's a decline of a local species, endemic species, we wonder, is there something going on here that we are responsible for, that we've not yet fully gauged the magnitude of? And that's a really interesting space to be in. We're sort of at this place where the natural world has moral meaning again, and therefore, there are ways into thinking about the natural world that exceed the scientific, and are more to do with our connections to one another and our responsibility in imagining the future.
I think that in terms of a final takeaway message for the book, there's one very direct-to-camera moment where I talk about hope and it's quite stylistically unique in the book, because while I'm a kind of active narrator, moving around, having experiences and describing scenes... this is a book that's written two steps back from any particular activist agenda. The reason for that is I wanted it to be a kind of place where you can consolidate your nerve. I didn't want there to be a step-by-step, instructional, like, if you feel moved by this book, you should go to x, y, z. I'd much rather that people look at their local communities, maybe also do an accounting of their particular talents and resources and privileges and what they have to bring to the fight, and then really think about, how can I engage, if I feel moved to action, in a way that nourishes me?
Maybe you're really great at spreadsheets. That's what you do. That's what you've got. Well, the best thing that you could do would be to donate half a day, doing some office admin for an NGO, right? Or maybe you're someone who is a real outdoors person. Maybe then the best thing for you to do is go down to the beach and engage with groups that collect litter. You've got to work in the streamline of the things that you enjoy and that you're good at, because it's very easy to burn out in any activist undertaking.
So I think trying to work within your talents, trying to see change on the level of like 2 to 5 years, not trying to have the longshot goal of saving the Earth, but having a 2 to 5 year goal of trying to inch forward an issue or save something that's close to you, working in the service of your talents. Because at the end of the day, I do believe that hope is not an intellectual process. It's actually in the doing. It's not about finding hope from reading a book or having an inspirational experience.
Hope comes from action. Hope comes from making yourself useful. In fact, I don't think you are entitled to hope until you make yourself useful.
That inversion for my own self has been really formative.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Rebecca Giggs: I read a lot of magazine journalism, and I think that The New York Times Magazine is doing a terrific job with animal stories at the moment, and the journalists that I look for there: Sam Anderson and Brooke Jarvis. I particularly like Kathryn Schulz when she writes in The New Yorker about animals, as well. She writes about animal navigation, weather, insects, taxonomy. She's really great.
And this year I had the pleasure of rereading the Rachel Carson Sea trilogy, which has been rereleased by the Library of America as this beautiful hardback. Her three books on the ocean, which I've actually just finished reviewing for the New York Review of Books, and it's just such a pleasure to go back to those rich, amazing works of environmental conscience, even before she wrote Silent Spring. The scale of attention in them, and the lyricism. I even think the last one interestingly, focused on rock pools, would make a lovely gift for a young adult who's interested in nature, if you're looking for Christmas presents, at this point of the year. And it's very charming and beautifully, scientifically literate.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra or practice that helps you to stay grounded?
Rebecca Giggs: In 2022, I started keeping an audio journal and, I'm not much of a journalist usually, but at the end of the day now I have a voice to text app on my phone and I just spend 5 minutes reviewing the day, particularly around my writing and what I struggled with or what I achieved. Looking back at that audio journal has been really helpful for me, thinking about how I plan big projects, how I stay buoyant through creative projects. I would say that that's something that's kept me on track.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Rebecca Giggs: In 2021 we had a series of lockdowns in Australia, and I was in Melbourne at that point. So we went through, I believe it was world's longest lockdown with like a five-kilometer radius and no leaving the house, all of that, which was very strenuous. But during that time I joined a wildlife rescue volunteering charity as a means of engaging with other people and with animals at a time when we couldn't really go very far, which meant that within the kind of five-kilometer radius of home, I was going out every so often with my little fluorescent jacket on to help, if a possum was trapped in someone's garage or these bluetongue lizards or wombats that have been injured and ferrying them between veterinarians and sanctuaries.
I mention that as a source of inspiration, because just even being on the phone network for that job, when you get a text that says, can someone help with a cockatoo in this suburb? And then you get a response from somebody else in another suburb saying, I'm on my way to the cockatoo—it was lovely in terms of just realizing that there are all these ordinary people who, in the corners of their days when they're not working, are engaging with their native fauna and dedicating time and space and resources to the individual animals in cities and urban fringes. So that was a real pleasure and actually counteracted a lot of that difficult time.
Kamea Chayne: Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a pleasure and an honor to speak with you. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Rebecca Giggs: I come back to that point about hope being in the doing, and that if you're finding the environmental sphere at the moment, a space of anxiousness and of sadness, that the answer to that is not to look for the remedy in the lofty idea space: it's to get active. It's to find some small way of doing some small local action. And you'll connect with other people in that space who are feeling the same way.
