Consider human ecological loneliness and our longing for reconnection with all creation. What healing is available in an era defined by environmental loss and exploitation? Can we strengthen the fragile connection between modern society and the space we inhabit? “Loneliness is the symptom that desires its cure.” In this episode Macie Bridge welcomes writer, translator, and poet Laura Marris to reflect on her essay collection The Age of Loneliness, a meditation on solitude, grief, and the ecology of attention. Marris considers what it means to live through an era defined by environmental loss and human disconnection, yet still filled with wonder. She shares stories of tardigrades that endure extreme conditions, how airports reveal our attitudes toward birds, and the personal loss of her father that awakened her to “noticing absence.” Together, they explore how ecological loneliness might transform into longing for reconnection—not only among humans, but with the creatures and landscapes that share our world. Marris suggests that paying attention, naming, and noticing are acts of restoration. “Loneliness,” she writes, “is the symptom that desires its cure.” Episode Highlights 1. “Loneliness is the symptom that desires its cure.” 2. “There are ways, even very simple ones, that individuals can do to make the landscape around them more hospitable.” 3. “I don’t believe that humans are hardwired to exploit. There have been many societies with long traditions of mutual benefit and coexistence.” 4. “It’s really hard to notice an absence sometimes. There’s something curative about noticing absences that have been around but not acknowledged.” 5. “Ecological concerns are not a luxury. It’s actually really important to hold the line on them.” Helpful Links and Resources The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris — [https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/age-loneliness](https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/age-loneliness) Underland by Robert Macfarlane — [https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140) E.O. Wilson on “Beware the Age of Loneliness” — [https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/beware-the-age-of-loneliness](https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/beware-the-age-of-loneliness) About Laura Marris Laura Marris is a writer and translator whose work spans poetry, essays, and literary translation. She is the author of The Age of Loneliness and has translated Albert Camus’s The Plague for Vintage Classics. She teaches creative writing and translation at the University at Buffalo. Show Notes The Ecology of Loneliness and Longing * Laura Marris discusses The Age of Loneliness—“Eremocene”—a term coined by E.O. Wilson to describe a speculative future of environmental isolation. * Fascination with poetic form and environmental prose emerging during the pandemic. * Ecological loneliness arises from biodiversity loss, but also offers the chance to reimagine more hospitable human landscapes. Extreme Tolerance and the Human Condition * Marris describes tardigrades as metaphors for endurance without thriving—organisms that survive extremes by pausing metabolism. * “How extremely tolerant are humans, and what are our ways of trying to be more tolerant to extreme conditions?” * Air conditioning becomes an emblem of “extreme tolerance,” mirroring human adaptation to a destabilized environment. Birds, Airports, and the Language of Blame * Marris explores how modern air travel enforces ecological loneliness by eradicating other species from its space. * She reveals hidden networks of wildlife managers and the Smithsonian’s Feather Identification Lab. * Reflects on the “Miracle on the Hudson,” where language wrongly cast geese as antagonists—“as if the birds wanted to hit the plane.” Loneliness, Solitude, and Longing * “Loneliness is solitude attached to longing that feels painful.” * Marris distinguishes solitude’s generativity from loneliness’s ache, suggesting longing can be a moral compass toward reconnection. * Personal stories of her father’s bird lists intertwine grief and ecological noticing. Ground Truthing and Community Science * Marris introduces “ground truthing”—people verifying ecological data firsthand. * She celebrates local volunteers counting birds, horseshoe crabs, and plants as acts of hope. * “Community care applies to human and more-than-human communities alike.” Toxic Landscapes and Ecological Aftermath * Marris recounts Buffalo’s industrial scars and ongoing restoration along the Niagara River. * “Toxins don’t stop at the edge of the landfill—they keep going.” * She reflects on beauty, resilience, and the return of eagles to post-industrial lands. Attention and Wonder as Advocacy * “A lot of advocacy stems from paying local attention.” * Small, attentive acts—like watching sparrows dust bathe—are forms of resistance against despair. Cure, Absence, and Continuing the Conversation * Marris resists the idea of a final “cure” for loneliness. * “Cure could be something ongoing, a process, a change in your life.” * Her annual bird counts become a continuing dialogue with her late father. Wisdom for the Lonely * “Take the time to notice what it is you’re lonely for.” * She calls for transforming loneliness into longing for a more hospitable, interdependent world. Production Notes * This podcast featured Laura Marris * Interview by Macie Bridge * Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa * Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun * A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School [https://faith.yale.edu/about](https://faith.yale.edu/about) * Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: [https://faith.yale.edu/give](https://faith.yale.edu/give)
Consider human ecological loneliness and our longing for reconnection with all creation. What healing is available in an era defined by environmental loss and exploitation? Can we strengthen the fragile connection between modern society and the space we inhabit?
“Loneliness is the symptom that desires its cure.”
In this episode Macie Bridge welcomes writer, translator, and poet Laura Marris to reflect on her essay collection The Age of Loneliness, a meditation on solitude, grief, and the ecology of attention. Marris considers what it means to live through an era defined by environmental loss and human disconnection, yet still filled with wonder. She shares stories of tardigrades that endure extreme conditions, how airports reveal our attitudes toward birds, and the personal loss of her father that awakened her to “noticing absence.” Together, they explore how ecological loneliness might transform into longing for reconnection—not only among humans, but with the creatures and landscapes that share our world. Marris suggests that paying attention, naming, and noticing are acts of restoration. “Loneliness,” she writes, “is the symptom that desires its cure.”
Episode Highlights
Helpful Links and Resources
The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris — https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/age-loneliness
Underland by Robert Macfarlane — https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140
E.O. Wilson on “Beware the Age of Loneliness” — https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/beware-the-age-of-loneliness
About Laura Marris
Laura Marris is a writer and translator whose work spans poetry, essays, and literary translation. She is the author of The Age of Loneliness and has translated Albert Camus’s The Plague for Vintage Classics. She teaches creative writing and translation at the University at Buffalo.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Laura Marris: Loneliness really does stem from these kind of like unacknowledged absences.
That if you, especially in ecological sense, take the time to notice what it is you're lonely for and to start to push that loneliness toward longing for how to create the world that would feel less lonely to you. That would feel more has. Fitable to other species. I mean, I think loneliness is like solitude attached to some kind of longing that feels painful.
Loneliness often feels like much more cut off than solitude does. For me at least. I grew up as an only child. There are times where I actually really enjoy being alone, but then there's the loneliness of grief and then the loneliness of like longing for something that feels inaccessible. But I actually think there's quite a bit of strength in continuing to long for something that feels inaccessible.
You know, rather than receiving loneliness as a kind of weakness, it's actually something that preserves that longing for a more connected community. It's important to pay attention to, and I think loneliness is this really beautiful way of like picturing what would heal it. I say this in the book, it's like the symptom that desires its cure.
And so I think loneliness, disconnected from longing, disconnected from desire is a really dangerous. Thing. But I, I think at least with ecological loneliness, there are these ways to become reconnected. And there are ways, even very simple ones that individuals can do to make the landscape just around them more hospitable.
And part of that is paying attention to other animals and other stories of the landscape that come from other living beings that might take a little bit more effort to notice.
Macie Bridge: I'm Macie Bridge with the Yale Center for faith and culture, and this is Solo, a series on solitude, loneliness, and being alone.
Former US poet laureate Ada Limon opens her 28. Teen Collection The Carrying with a poem titled A name. It reads When Eve walked among the Animals and named them Nightingale. Red Shoulder Hawk, Fiddler Crab, follow Deer. I wonder if she ever wanted them to speak back. Looked into their wide, wonderful eyes and whispered, name me, name me.
Lim's poem is a creative reinterpretation of the Genesis creation story we know so well. Her imagining of Eve explores the art of naming and vocalizes a plea to be named in return. Name me. This rendering of Eve illuminates a raw and true aspect of our humanity. It is not enough to simply witness the world around us.
We want to be named. In return to know and to be known, to be wanted and to be loved. Many of us go about our daily lives inattentive to the natural world around us. It's the easiest to do when most of our activities involve getting things done inside our homes, driving the car to our commitments, which then land us.
Inside other buildings and so on and so forth. But if we spend a moment outside our homes and turn our attention to the natural world, we'll quickly begin to notice the innumerable living creatures that share our environments with us. We've made. Our species, the center of this world, often to the extent of exploitation, yet from birds to bugs.
This globe is very much alive with our creaturely neighbors. In her essay collection, the Age of Loneliness, author and environmentalist Laura Marris, reflects on the ways we might tend to feelings of loneliness alongside our cultivation of ecological attention. Laura joins me on today's. Episode sharing of her own life story and that of her father.
She offers us ways that we may view experiences of loneliness as a thing of beauty and how we might turn to ecology for hope and inspiration to become more deeply connected. Talking through species, isolation, birds and airports, and the concept of extreme tolerance. I hope you might hear in Laura's expertise just.
How much we have to gain from turning our attention outside our windows a little more frequently. Thanks for listening today,
Laura, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Laura Marris: You are so welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
Macie Bridge: I thoroughly enjoyed your book of essays that just came out um, this last summer, the Age of Loneliness where you, you cover these themes of species, isolation and environmental degradation and also quite a lot of your own personal story and your relationships. As we are getting into these themes of solitude and loneliness on the podcast, I'm super excited to be picking your brain on how solitude comes into play in our contemporary day on this super large scale of the whole of creation our, our whole ecosystem.
Before we get too much into the specifics, I would love if you could preface for us, your background as a writer and a translator, and how did you get into these themes that show up in this essay? With such concern and attention to the environment and are creaturely brothers and sisters.
Laura Marris: Thanks so much, Macy. so I actually I have been a writer and translator. I got my MFA in poetry, so I began really seriously writing poems. and I still write poems, but over time, been writing more and more prose. And really in the pandemic, I got very interested in the essay form and got interested in the essay form, for many reasons.
But I think partly it was that there is this kind of poetic continuity with it, when you're thinking about. Transitions between paragraphs and things like that. I really, I like my essays to have some kind of poetic resonance.
Macie Bridge: They're really Beautiful.
Laura Marris: thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. and then I think also, I grew up as the child of a kind of amateur naturalist and community scientist. So I was really lucky to have that experience growing up, just walking with someone who knew plants and birds and animals and wanted to talk to me about them. So that's always been kind of part of my uh, sense of the world and you know, when we were in quarantine during the pandemic, I started to think more and more about ecological loneliness as something that I wanted to put into essays. But even before that, I was commuting a lot for my job and just thinking about the loneliness of that commuting time and reading a lot about.
Ecology and environmental history is a way out of that loneliness as a way to contextualize my own small piece of it within the wider world. And the book really came out of those conversations I was having in my head with other environmental writers. And specifically I started thinking about, the name Aine, which is one of these sort of like alternative names for our era, like the Anthropocene or the Kaulu scene. But the, i, the scene means the age of loneliness. And what's interesting about that term is it's speculative. it's something that might happen if we don't, pay more attention to environmental losses around us.
Macie Bridge: But it's not necessarily a given. And so I think just at this time when there is a lot of biodiversity loss happening, but there's also this kind of like great potential for reconsidering human landscapes to be more hospitable. It felt like a really good time to dig into something Absolutely. Would you define for us this term ene, we hear the Anthropocene so often. where is this term coming from right now?
Laura Marris: It was coined by EO Wilson actually. But it's come up a bunch among kind of like environmentalists and writers and even artists and musicians and people who are thinking about biodiversity loss as well as like climate change and other things like that. But the root of aine is remos, which can mean a lonely person, but it can also mean like a desolated place.
Um, so there's kind of an interesting, like reciprocity baked into that root,
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Something that was interesting to me. I encountered it through Wilson, but I also encountered it through uh, the writer Robert McFarland, who wrote, you know, Underland, you might know.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Laura Marris: But he has this really interesting quote in an interview where he's talking about his students and how they had assumed that they were already in the re scene. And when I was beginning to work on these ideas, I realized I caught myself out with that too. And that was maybe an assumption worth questioning, but maybe in pushing back against or thinking about these sort of big quasi taxonomic names for our era.
I actually, with these essays got more interested in like ground truthing, the theme, you know, and figuring out what kind of ecological loneliness was actually taking place in the landscapes that I have known best
Macie Bridge: yes. You do a really beautiful job of striking a balance of not necessarily positing an answer toThe forthcoming loss of environmental community and the forthcoming age of loneliness. And instead really being present with where things are today and now I'd love to open up some of the examples that you offer in the book for our listeners.
One of the first that you start with is the idea of these. Extreme tolerant, species that are just exceptionally resilient and have been here long before us and will likely long outlast us. And you have a really fun relationship with them in this series.
So would you tell us a little bit about those?
Laura Marris: Sure. So the one that I speak about most in the book are tardigrades. And so extreme tolerant animals, they occupy this kind of interesting space, probably more people have heard of like extremophiles species that thrive in really extreme environments, like super high heat or high salt concentration, things like that.
And they have their whole life niche in those spaces. Tardigrades are. Even more strange and interesting to me because they can tolerate a lot of extremes of salinity or pressure or heat or cold. But they don't thrive in those extremes. They can just withstand them. So we've sent them into space and tested them in all these kinds of different ways.
And they go into this dormant state at least, many species of them do. And so they have this way of withstanding extremes by slowing down their metabolism. Just like putting their life functions to sleep for a little while until the conditions are better. And then they can reemerge again and reproduce again.
And they're tiny, they're just like a couple millimeters and, sometimes people say they look like gummy bears with too many legs. under the microscope. They're called water bears sometimes. they don't quite look like a bear as you would imagine them.
But yeah they've been given these nicknames that are like vaguely cute. I got really interested in them because to me, like thinking about tart grades in the context of, environmental change and especially like really fast environmental change that species are struggling to adapt to.
how extremely tolerant are humans and like what are our ways of trying to be more tolerant to extreme conditions?
Macie Bridge: I was wondering, as I was reading that kind of description of uh, not quite thriving in extreme environments, but able to withstand them, sounded sort of familiar to
the ways that we, we strain ourselves.
Laura Marris: you know, In some ways in a, to a much lesser extent, like when there's a massive heat wave and it's too hot to go outside, like air conditioning is a form of extreme tolerance. So things like that um, that become more and more necessary. I think that is like one metric of keeping track You know, how much are we having to do to be comfortable?
How much of the change happening outside of the kind of bubble or interior space that we create are we really feeling.
Macie Bridge: And how much of that, bubble that we're creating is at the expense of these other species.
I was thinking as I was reading your work, is the question that kept coming to mind was is this overcoming of the changing of our environment and figuring out ways that we can thrive as a species?
frequently at the expense of other species. Is that just hardwired into our being? tell me more about your thoughts on that.
Laura Marris: No, I don't think so at all. think that's like a very American, a very western idea that it's hardwired into us that humans have this, evolutionary drive to exploit. I don't believe that at all. there have been many, all across the world, many human societies that have had long traditions of mutual benefit and coexistence and sustainable livelihood.
And especially, you know, in the US like a lot of indigenous traditions indigenous traditions of gardening where, it's like cultivation of the land, but not to the point where it becomes extractive. you know, I think that there's many models. Other than
The one where ensuring our survival means the degradation of something else.
Macie Bridge: Sure. Yeah. It's just a shift that needs to happen on a cultural level.
Laura Marris: Well,
I think it feels really hard. To imagine solutions when you know it's a hundred degrees outside and you have to run your AC you're an older person, you're someone who's vulnerable to that. That is very real. And so like the long-term view of what would it be like to try to cultivate an ecosystem around here that would reduce heat that takes a lot more than one person.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. I would love to hear a little bit more about your relationship with birds then, because I've since finishing reading your essay collection, I've been noticing even more than usual all of the birds around my environment and thinking especially of the local airport and research that you did with the ways that our, our. Airway systems are interacting with birds and their natural rhythms and habitats. Would you share about that for our listeners?
Laura Marris: Yeah. I'm really glad that reading the book has been making you think more about birds.
Macie Bridge: Yes.
Laura Marris: That's one of the things that I was hoping for. Uh, Yeah. So. The birds come into the book in a couple ways. My father was a really big bird watcher and used to do the winter bird count every year and he would take me with him so I kind of learned a lot about birds through him, but also he died when I was a teenager, and so his bird lists were something that he left behind. And I found and became really interested again when I started thinking about loneliness both through a personal and a more ecological or environmental history sort of way.
but yeah. When I was commuting, I began to think a lot about birds as they relate to airports. Um, Because we think of ourselves when we're on a plane. Um, it's sort of like the height of the bubble. You know, you're, You're able to fly through this,you know, this vehicle, this ship in the sky.
you know, you're closed off from the atmosphere around you for many reasons. But I think sometimes people forget how much work it takes to keep birds out of the way of planes. Most airports have environmental managers or. Wildlife managers that are hired to make changes to the landscape around the airport to prevent bird life from congregating there.
And then also within the fences themselves. you know, often like a major airport like JFK, like they have a wildlife biologist and several wildlife managers kind of patrolling the runways at all times, making sure that there aren't flocks of birds coming in. It becomes like a safety issue.
You know, If a plane hits a flock of birds um, it could damage the engines, but bird strikes happen. All the time, but mostly there you wouldn't even notice. The chances of it damaging a plane that you're on enough for it to land are negligible. So it's this interesting thing when you realize that planes are hitting birds all the time.
It changed for me, like my sense of how of being alone in the sky and the sort of human loneliness of a landscape that has to be forced into an ecosystem by eradicating everything else that wants to be there. But then I also really started to think about like a ecology, abiology, like the ways that animals and you know, even like microscopic animals can travel through the air.
so like tardigrades can ride on the feet of migratory birds and um, clouds are full of microbial life. So there's this sense that even when we think we're totally alone we're actually moving through an ecosystem that's really important to a lot of animals. It's just not one that we tend to think about.
we tend to think about preserving habitats for them to land when they're migrating or things like that. But preserving spaces of air is also really important.
Macie Bridge: I was also struck by how much our language around these things seems to impact the ways that we think about them. You bring up the example of what we know as the miracle on the Hudson the plane flight that was taken down by a flock of geese that.
Essentially were struck by both engines and then we know the story of the plane landed on the Hudson River and everyone was safe. but you point out in your essay how it, the language that was used was really placing the, the blame on these birds that seem to choose to fly into the engines.
Laura Marris: Yeah, there's a scholar Christopher Berg, who's done really good work thinking about language with bird strikes and how it becomes this sense that the birds somehow like, wanted to hit the plane. Like that they were responsible for hitting the plane.
Macie Bridge: Which we laugh because it's ridiculous to think that these birds would be on a mission to take down the airplane. But then that's really how that becomes ingrained in our
literature
about it.
Laura Marris: right. And well.
a couple of the scientists that I talked to so Travis Deval, who does a lot of work around like, wildlife hazard mitigation and wildlife collisions, human wildlife conflicts and collisions specifically with like highways and airplanes. He did a study where he actually found that birds are often struck on their backs.
They're trying to drive dive outta the way. And then also Carla Dove, who runs the Feather Identification Lab in Washington, dc which is this lab in the basement of this Smithsonian, where they receive all the fragments of pulverized birds that. Pilots and airports find and actually do visual and like DNA analysis on them to figure out what got hit so they can better figure out how to keep those birds away.
She and her team were. Tasked with analyzing the feathers of the geese that got hit in the miracle on the Hudson Bird strike. And it turned out those birds were migratory, you know, they weren't actually living in the area. So yeah, it becomes a strange,contortion of language where the animal becomes. very threatening because it's in the way.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm.
Laura Marris: you know,
We have really good radar that can detect birds, especially like really huge flocks of birds. Like There's no reason why that couldn't be worked into the imaging and, instruments that airports have. So it becomes an especially big issue in migration 'cause that's when most birds get hit. And so it, it just is one of these things where it would be possible to use something we already have to just be a little bit more aware of birds passing through airspace.
But it Mm-hmm. yet.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. Yeah. That would be, I'm sure, an undertaking. that's one of those cultural expectations that we'd have to grapple with.
Laura Marris: Yeah, it's definitely a cultural expectation. But it would, improve safety for everybody.
Macie Bridge: Yes, I'm curious. So along with this, focus on bird strikes with airplanes and the research you were able to do at the Smithsonian. You talk a lot about your relationship with your father and learning birdwatching from him, as you mentioned. Tell me a little bit more about what that relationship to birds and,
the environment that you grew up in, in Connecticut how that informed your thinking about loneliness. And also I'm really curious about the, how you would differentiate solitude from loneliness in that context.
Laura Marris: I mean, I think loneliness is like. Solitude attached to some kind of longing that feels painful. I think loneliness often feels like much more cut off than solitude does. for me at least, I grew up as an only child. There are times where I actually really enjoy being alone.
But then there's the loneliness of grief and then the loneliness of longing for something that feels inaccessible. But I actually think there's quite a bit of strength in continuing to long for something that feels inaccessible. And this is one of the arguments that I make in the book.
you know, Rather than perceiving loneliness as a kind of weakness it's actually something that Preserves that longing for a more connected, community. So it's important to pay attention to. And I think loneliness is this really beautiful way of like. Picturing what would heal it.I say this in the book it's like the symptom that desires is cure. And so I think loneliness, disconnected from longing, disconnected from desire is a really dangerous thing. But I, I think at least with ecological loneliness. There are these ways to become reconnected and there are ways, even very simple ones that individuals can do to make the landscape around them more hospitable.
Part of that is paying attention to other animals. and other stories of the landscape that come from other living beings. That might take a little bit more effort to notice. But yeah, I think with birds and with my dad just like. Growing up there was a real sense of the importance of noticing them of tracking seasonally, like which birds were coming through.
Thinking about the movements of other species as like valid markers of passage of time, And justYou know, That I was living alongside the rhythms of all these other animals. And I think that it's very simple. Like I think many people grow up with this um, especially people who grew up in rural places, which I grew up somewhat in rural places, but somewhat in more, most of my childhood was in suburban Connecticut.
But I had the luxury of being close to these marshlands where, I could just get needy and marsh mud and look at all the crabs and the birds and things coming through. I think that kind of proximity combined with my dad's nudging to notice to name. Also, I think names can be kind of important.
Not for like some kind of exact classification or memorization, but The name of, a plant or an animal can be the beginning of that creature's story, you know, their life history. So if you stay with like very general categories like birds or trees,
It's harder to think about these animals as having like individual, ecological goals or ecological ways of being that they're thinking through on a daily basis alongside your own. So I think that push towards specificity is also really important.
Macie Bridge: Before we share the rest of today's episode, here's what's coming up next time. In our limited series solo,
Felicia Wu Song: we talk about identity, we talk about community, but we all know that those words mean something really different for us now in 2025 compared to what it meant a hundred years ago. When people were still using the same words.
And so as a sociologist, what I like to bring together is trying to understand how does the technology that we use mediate or shape how we. Experience, personal identity, how we experience community, how we experience relationships, and also how does our society work with these technologies in shaping these ways of life.
Macie Bridge: Glad you're with us. Now back to the episode.
I am really interested to get into more of the ways that you experience relationship between yourself and other human beings as intertwined with your relationship to the natural world, because I think that so often. When we think of ecosystem or um, wildlife, it's something that's happening apart from our daily life our cities and our systems.
Macie Bridge: But your writing really encourages us to look beyond that and realize, oh right, we're, we're all in one big ecosystem. but that's not just on a practical, walking down the street kind of level you really bring in your individual relationships, both with your husband and your father, um, and others.
Uh, Would you speak to that a little bit?
Laura Marris: Yeah well, I the book begins with maybe more alienated places like the airport orthis like fake city for self-driving cars that really exists in Michigan.
Laura Marris: And then, over the course of the book, I really started to weave in more and more the stories of community scientists who are, people who go out and just like volunteers usually who do the bird count or they count horseshoe crabs or you look for a certain kind of plant or you go weed, the bittersweet that's taking over your local interest.
And community scientists are really like people who are out there ground truthing, what's happening in the landscapes around them. Uh, so ground truth is a concept that comes from data collection that relies on remote sensing. When we have like a weather report, when we have radar ground truth are the people on the ground who are storm spotters, who are actually seeing if there's a thunderstorm there, if it's raining.
So it's this kind of granular moment to moment data collection on the ground. And so for me, there's a lot of human community and a lot of. Potential, shared loss, but also shared sense of um, maybe imagining what you would want your local landscape to become more hospitable to you what you might wanna cultivate.
And I found a lot of community in like talking to local volunteers who are doing that kind of work. And I think in general in the current climate, politically, like community care is such a huge thing and that applies to human and like more than human communities around you. And I think there's often this perception that, somehow the ecological is like separate or it's like a luxury. But I really push back against that because I think the idea that ecological concerns are a luxury is something created by corporate interests. Who might want to take a little piece of the land or chop it up or poisoned a little bit, and just say like, yeah, but it's still good enough.
So there's these sense that, ecological concerns are not a luxury, and like it's actually really important to hold the line on them. Because if they do become a luxury, then the people that they're taken away from is often Communities that are on the fence line, like communities that um, then become isolated by that toxicity or that environmental change.
I think that thisway that corporate interest might view. The ecological is separate from the human. Um, Something that can be cordoned off. Like it's such a fallacy.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Laura Marris: You know,
Toxins don't stop at the edge of the landfill. They
keep going.
as we know in Buffalo where I live
Macie Bridge: yes. You give this example in the book of wanting to warn your friends about eating cherries from a cherry tree. That sort of gets at that complicated relationship
Laura Marris: Yeah. that was one of the stories in the book that was a little bit harder for me. so I live in Buffalo. I live on the west side of Buffalo. Pretty close to the Niagara River for a long time. Um, There was a real industrial corridor along the river because it was one of the places where electricity was invented.
And there was just this like huge amount of water power. And so very early on there was like a big industrial presence especially on the US side of the Niagara River and along the edge of Lake Erie as well. And so moving here and thinking about the ways that this landscape we're sort of now in this post-industrial aftermath where everything is regrown back along the river, there's parks but there's also a lot of brown fields and some of the brown fields are fun stuff and kind of recognizable and others are just more wild. And the wild places are really interesting to me because they are. Ecosystems that people often thought of as like discarded.
But for me there is also this real sense of a possibility aftermath. A kind of watching in real time this strange recovery that is full of surprises that is quite unpredictable
sometimes.
these places just surprise you.
Like you're walking through them and then you read the reports of the contaminants that have, you know, moved through the soil in this place. But you're there and there's bald eagles sometimes, or like huge flocks of kinglets and you're like, okay, what does this mean?
So I find this constant process of like reassessment and rethinking and being challenged by place here and the ecological potential of everything that we don't know that exists outside of the framework of um. What we're imagining, you know, no one's exactly watching these sites along the Niagara River to see what the microbes in the soil are doing to, live alongside this toxicity.
So it fascinates me. And I think that, there's also an incredible amount of community work here in Buffalo, especially around the Buffalo River that's been done by Buffalo water keepers and local groups. To really try to restore and to dredge. And they've had some great success.
it's really interesting to live in this place where we're all sort of like thinking about the way that the unseen stories of the land might be coming into our bodies. But, it's also a privilege, I think, to watch spaces regrow that were really devastated in the 1970s.
Macie Bridge: I wonder what do you think the relationship then between Wonder and Attention is to reconciling our relationship with the environment and also advocacy work towards ecological rebuilding?
Laura Marris: That's such a good question. I think that a lot of advocacy does stem from paying local attention. In Buffalo, in South Buffalo, there's like Tiff Nature Preserve, which was really a dump site. It's like the end of a railroad. And people just kept reporting that, oh, there's beavers back here.
Oh, like the birds come back here. And it's one of the Largest native wetlands in this area. And so eventually, you know, they were like, maybe we should create something here, a park of some kind. And so that site got cleaned up. And I think local advocacy can be really powerful and I think that, more and more what feels hopeful to me is people deciding that they are going to make space around them. whether it's a community garden or their backyard, or a park locally. Something that is you know, maybe a little bit more like full of food or full of habitat than it was before. And so those places gimme a lot of hope. I thinkmore than that. It's hard to say right now. It's hard to talk about.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Laura Marris: Um, We're in a pretty dark time.
But again, I think hanging onto the idea that that needs is not some separate thing that needs to be pristine to involve wonder.
I love to see like. sparrow's dust bathing at the end of my neighbor's driveway. That's like a bunch of broken concrete that's really beautiful to me. Um, And maybe that sounds like trite or like woo woo or something, which like, you know, I more power to you if that's your thing.
But like, I don't know. I think,I think it's really important to not take those small daily interactions for granted because
they are actually so hugely important and. So often don't get enough attention.
Macie Bridge: It's so easy in this current moment to become completely overwhelmed by a concept like the age of loneliness. Oh my gosh. We're gonna, we're gonna be alone here. Um, Or we might not be here at all. And that can cripple your day to day or completely limit your day to day attention and interaction with the world.
Laura Marris: Yeah, it's such a good point. And I think community science work is something that is Very doable. And you know, it,it could even mean like you just put up a bird feeder and you watch from your window what comes there sitting in your favorite, armchair.
Like, you know, It could mean that you're up in waiters, like waiting in a river up to your shoulders, but it doesn't have to mean that. So I think like things like that, that are very local and have like really manageable. Way to enter and start to do the work are just something that feels really hopeful right now.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. I Wanna touch on just a little bit further, the idea that you never pose time with nature as necessarily a cure to loneliness. What do you think about that concept? Because I think that might be an easy takeaway for people to think that's what they should
come away from
Laura Marris: I guess like cure is an interesting word.
I worry about like Cure has a kind of finality to it, like a fix. I think cure could be something that's ongoing. That is a process that is an actual change. It's your life. I mean, I can speak from personal experience.
I think for me a big part of this book and like thinking about, so, you know, the book one of the beginnings was finding my dad's bird list in the back of a folder after he had died. And, And just looking at them and realizing over time that some of the birds that he was seeing pretty regularly were a lot harder for me to find.
And um, kind of just.Being uncomfortable with that loss because I almost hadn't noticed. it, it's, It's really hard to notice an absence sometimes. So I do think there's something curative about noticing absences that have been around that may be weigh on you, but are not acknowledged.
And I think especially in the sense of biodiversity laws, it's really important to keep track of absences. But yeah, the idea of being in nature as cure for loneliness, I think for me, I now go back every year and redo the bird count in the woods where I grew up, which is the same route that my dad used to do.
And so it's become this kind of tradition for me where the bird count is almost this long paused conversation that I'm having with my father. Um, and it's like a way to remember him. And so, there are ways that that is like kind of.aAL for me,
but, More than that, it's something that feelsecologically present and useful, even if it's just gathering a little bit of data.
So I think that kind of sense of a cure, yes. Probably will feel a lot better,
but that doesn't mean like you do it once and then you stop,
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm.
Laura Marris: you know? Um,
I think that these ways of being, paying more attention having more kind of sense of ground truth of the place that you live, these are lifelong projects.
Macie Bridge: That's wonderful. I am going to ask you a question that I'm hoping to end each of these interviews with which is for the listener who is grappling with their own experience of solitude right now, what is one piece of wisdom from your research that you would hope they carry forward with them?
Laura Marris: That's such a good question. I think for me the idea that. Loneliness really does stem from these kind of like unacknowledged absences that if you. Especially in ecological sense, take the time to, to notice what it is you're lonely for and to start to push that loneliness toward longing for how to create the world that would feel less lonely to you, that would feel more hospitable to other species.
Um, I think that's a really powerful impulse that. We could use a lot more of right now.
Macie Bridge: Yes.
Laura Marris: and, and you know, hopefully if people do start to have a different relationship to longing and valuing other living beings, that is the cultural shift. That might change how we accord rights to more than human ecosystems.
So I think that's kind of where the, the wisdom of the future lies.
Macie Bridge: Laura, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today on the podcast. It's been a joy.
Laura Marris: Thank you so much, Macy. It's a pleasure.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Laura Marris, interviewed by Macie Bridge, production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun.
I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu and lifeworthliving.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, videos, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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