Air Date: August 1, 2025

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Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels


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Eels play an important ecological role in many rivers and streams, but they’re so eel-usive that even eel scientists have been challenged to observe them mating in the wild. Ellen Ruppel Shell is author of the 2024 book Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels, and she sheds light on the eel’s murky ecology and path through the seafood industry. (14:25)

Uprooted By Climate / Abraham Lustgarten


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The relentless heating of the Earth is prompting people to move after climate-related catastrophes and amid more gradual changes. Journalist Abrahm Lustgarten is the author of On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, and he talks with Host Steve Curwood about the northward migration he anticipates as Americans seek to escape punishing heat, fire, and drought. (15:08)

Starborn: How the Stars Made Us


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Stargazing has profoundly shaped who we are as human beings, and gave rise to science, religion, and origin stories from diverse traditions. Roberto Trotta, a cosmologist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, explores this legacy in his book Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (And Who We Would Be Without Them). He joins Host Jenni Doering to discuss how studying the night sky shaped science and more and why satellites now threaten our connection to the stars. (16:57)

Show Credits and Funders

Show Transcript

250725 Transcript

HOSTS: Jenni Doering, Paloma Beltran

GUESTS: Ellen Ruppel Shell, Roberto Trotta

REPORTERS: Abrahm Lustgarten

[THEME]

DOERING: From PRX this is Living on Earth.

[THEME]

I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. Why eels are giving some Mainers cold feet about fishing.

SHELL: He said, no, no, I’m not talking about eels big enough to bite me. I’m talking about those baby eels. Ever since the price on those things went through the roof, it’s gotten dangerous down by the river. This year, this season, they’re going for about $2500 a pound.

DOERING: Also, how stargazing led to huge leaps for humankind.

TROTTA: Astronomy had this very long tradition of data observation, interest for the sky, out of which quantitative science and physics sprang. Without astronomy, Newton wouldn't have written down the laws of gravitation, and physics would not exist as we know it. And without physics, none of the other sciences.

That and more, this week on Living on Earth. Stick around!

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[NEWSBREAK MUSIC: Boards of Canada “Zoetrope” from “In A Beautiful Place Out In
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[THEME]

Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

DOERING: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this is an encore edition of Living on Earth. I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. We’ve interviewed many authors over the years here at Living on Earth and today our show features a few of those favorite interviews from recent months. And we’re starting off with the wonderfully titled book, Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels. Eels are mysterious creatures, you could even say eel-usive.
Even eel scientists have been challenged to observe eels mating in the wild. It was only in 2022 that scientists were finally able to track mature eels to the Sargasso Sea, which includes the Bermuda Triangle, to prove that they spawned there. These eel enigmas and more, intrigued Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Slippery Beast. She joins us now – welcome to Living on Earth, Ellen!

SHELL: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

BELTRAN: So, tell us, what got you interested in writing about eels in the first place? Do you fish, by any chance?

SHELL: Actually, I'm one of the few people who has written about eels who does not fish. The short answer to your excellent question is that I did not find eels. Eels found me. And the story behind that, if you'd like to hear it, involves the guy that I call Sam in the book. It's not his real name, but he is a real person. And Sam was a handyman who I'd hired to help me fix up my house on the coast of Maine. And one day, Sam came into my kitchen to share with me that he was hoping to put together enough money to buy a boat on which he was going to teach his grandson to fish. And I said, "Sam, why don't you mix business with pleasure and get yourself a commercial fishing license to go with that boat?" And Sam said, "Well, I would do that. In fact, I used to do that, but not anymore, because of the eels." Now that kind of stopped me. I said, "What do you mean? Are you afraid the eels are going to bite you?" And he said, "No, no, I'm not talking about eels big enough to bite me. I'm talking about those baby eels. Ever since the price on those things went through the roof, it's gotten dangerous down by the river." And I said, "What do you mean? The price went through the roof?" And he said, "Well, this year, this season, they're going for about $2,500 a pound, and with money like that around, you know, people have gotten greedy, and some have gotten mean, and they have guns, and they've been cutting nets, and it's just too dangerous to fish for eels or to fish at all." And after hearing it, obviously, I couldn't resist looking into the eel and to the you know, both as a product, as a commodity, but also as this incredible fish that have attracted the attention of people, what they call eel people, since Aristotle's time. It was really an incredible story.

BELTRAN: It really is. And you said, Sam says that a pound of eels is going up for $2,500 a pound. That's a lot of dough. That's a lot of money. Tell me a little bit about how eating eel became so popular in the United States.

SHELL: Oh, well, eel has quite a history in the United States. It begins with Native Americans who relied on eels, those in the maritime states, New England, for example, also in Canada. Native Americans relied on eel to get them through the winters, because you could smoke it, you could preserve it and salt it, and it's also very high in calories and because it's a very fatty fish. But as the centuries passed, post-colonial times, eel declined in popularity, although even at the turn of the last century, say, around 1900 it was still considered a delicacy preferable to things like lobster. But then it kind of died out in popularity in the United States, until the introduction of the Japanese cuisine and sushi, which was actually introduced to United States into, you know, around early 1900s but then kind of exploded in the 1960s and 70s. So, some consider eel, which is cooked, as kind of a gateway drug to sushi. Many Americans were afraid of eating raw fish, which is sushi, but they… They would eat eel, which is always serve cooked. And since that time, with the, you know, growth and interest in Japanese cuisine and sushi in particular, eel has become more and more popular in the United States.

BELTRAN: So, the full title of your book is “Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History with Eels”. This is because there's a massive eel poaching industry. How does the supply chain actually work?

SHELL: Well, you're right. It is massive. In fact, the poaching, the illicit trade in eel, freshwater eel, in particular, is the world's largest wildlife crime in terms of dollars. It's about $4 billion a year illegal industry. In the United States, we harvest these eels mostly in Maine, okay, because that's the largest fishery for baby eels in the United States, and really the only significant fishery for baby eels. But we don't grow them up in the United States. We send them to China to be grown to market sized, and then there they're usually processed. They're killed and cut into filets and sometimes coated in sauce and then shipped back to United States. So, it's a crazy supply chain. We also don't know too much about those eel ponds in China. They don't know what goes in them, whether it's healthy or not. We're really not sure. I's not very well regulated.

BELTRAN: So, the current eel fishing industry is complicated. Is anyone trying to build a shortcut around it?

SHELL: Yes. One of them is Sara Rademaker, who has recently opened the first eel farm in the United States on the coast of Maine, and she is hoping to kind of short circuit the crazy supply chain and have the eels that are fished in Maine, caught in Maine, stay in Maine, and grown up on a farm. And she has done that, and so far, so good. She's managed to grow her first two years of eels, and her goal is to farm about 6% of the eels that are consumed the United States. And she's well on her way to doing that.

BELTRAN: I was shocked to find out that at some point in history, there was a competition to find an eel that would show to be pregnant or have some sort of eggs, just to try to figure out how eels reproduce. Can you tell us more about that?

SHELL: Okay, so eel people stretch all the way back to Aristotle through history. I mean, Aristotle was obsessed with eels because no one knew how they reproduced, okay? Eels were ubiquitous. They were everywhere. In some waterways, they were the most abundant fish. Until relatively recently, they've made up about as much as 50% of biomass in many, many waterways, right? So, there were all these eels, they were very, very plentiful, and yet no one had ever seen them reproduce, and no one had ever seen an eel egg. Okay, so this mystery just really obsessed people throughout history, scholars throughout history, beginning with Aristotle, who assumed that they were created through spontaneous generation, right, that they just kind of appeared out of the mud, okay? And they were pretty good argument for spontaneous generation because no one had ever seen them reproducing, or, as I said, seen an egg, or even seen a sexually mature eel in the wild. So, through centuries, scholars have puzzled what they consider to be one of the greatest mysteries of biology, that is, how do eels, again, so common a fish, how do they reproduce? And as a consequence of this, in the 1800s into the 1900s a fisherman that could find an eel that was pregnant would get a certain amount of money, and they would fake it. They would take an eel and put other species eggs in the eels and hoping that they could pass this off as an eel, a pregnant eel. Of course, it never worked, but the hopes were high for this. There was essentially a bounty on finding pregnant eels.

BELTRAN: Your book goes through all of these crazy hypotheses that scientists came up with, what were some key moments through that timeline? What were some of your favorite hypotheses?

SHELL: Ah, yes. So, the German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, okay, so we're talking about 1100 A.D., sometime around that time. And so, she was a noted philosopher and a composer, and she was also a medical practitioner, if you can believe it. And so, she could not get her head around the idea of, maybe, because she was a Benedictine nun, the idea that there was an immaculate conception of the eel, right? Which, if you're talking about spontaneous generation, it is essentially an immaculate conception, right? So, Hildegard's idea was that each winter, the female eel choose an appropriate stone and spits seeds onto it, and then the male spits something like milk over the seeds. And after some struggle, the male and the female together lie on top of the seeds, the male protecting them with his tail and the female blowing, quote, vital air into them until they come alive. And so, I kind of think of this as a primitive version of in vitro fertilization. And that, given that, you know, this involves eels of both genders and not spontaneous generation, it's probably one of the more romantic tellings of the eel procreation story.

BELTRAN: There's romance booming in the ocean.

SHELL: Romance is a stretch, but I'll go with it.

BELTRAN: I think a huge question people would have listening to you right now is, why don't we just breed eels? Why don't we just try to breed eels ourselves? Why have to poach them?

SHELL: We can't. We can't breed the American eel in captivity. There was one scientist who spent a long time trying to do this. He was able to coax an American eel to breed, but all the larva died. Okay? It's a very, very difficult problem, and scientists in Japan have been working for decades trying to artificially breed Japanese eel in captivity. But the American eel, we haven't come close. We just simply cannot breed eels the way we can breed things like oysters or other animals. They simply refuse to breed in captivity, which is another part of their incredible mystery, right? Why not? No one knows for sure.

BELTRAN: So, Ellen, you wrote that the scary reality of the American eel is that it is "simultaneously abundant and doomed to extinction." How is that possible?

SHELL: Well, in this I make a comparison to the passenger pigeon, which was highly, highly abundant, as we all know, some thought it to be the most common feathered creature on Earth, certainly the most common bird on Earth at one point. And everybody thought it was so common. Scientists even thought it was so common that it would never go extinct, but it was a target of hunters in the United States, right? Very popular target because it didn't move a lot, and it was very tasty, and so hunters took it on. And as the population of the passenger pigeon diminished, it became extinct, because just like the eel, there need to be a lot of passenger pigeons, for any single passenger pigeon to survive, right? Passenger pigeons are very gregarious animals. They breed in flocks, and they cannot, you know, there can't be an isolated pigeon here and there for them to survive. It's... you need quite a few. The same is true of the freshwater eel and what we saw in Japan, where they declined by something like 95% very, very quickly, could also happen in the United States. Okay, we need a lot of them to survive for any of them to survive. And that's why, even though they seem plentiful, they're still at great risk.

BELTRAN: And why is protecting the eels so important? What role do they play in our ecosystem?

SHELL: Yeah, that's a great question. Eels are what we call an indicator species, so their health oftentimes reflects the health of the water that they're in. Okay? So, what we know is that if you rid waterways that have eels, freshwater eels, of the eel, there are consequences, and those consequences vary with the waterway we're talking about. An example that I give in the book is the Susquehanna River. Okay, it's a, you know, we all know the Susquehanna. It's great American River. When eels were depleted, heavily depleted in the Susquehanna, there became a great decline in the freshwater mussel and the reason for that is because eels were kind of a transportation system for the freshwater mussel larva. It helped scatter the freshwater mussel larva along the bottom of the river and kept it going. So, when the eels died off, the mussels died off, and mussels are filter feeders that keep waterways clean. So, without the mussels, the waterways became polluted. When you take that eel out, you screw everything up.

BELTRAN: Ellen, I have to ask you, after all this research and talking to all kinds of different eel people. How do you feel about eels? Do you eat them?

SHELL: Yes, I do eat eels. I wasn't smitten by the eel, as so many people in the book were. I'm not enraptured to the eel, but I'm enraptured to the people who are enraptured to the eel. Okay, the people are what brought me to this story and hold me to this story.

DOERING: Ellen Ruppel Shell is the author of Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels. She spoke with Living on Earth’s Paloma Beltran.

Related links:
- Purchase Slippery Beast and support both local bookstores and Living on Earth.
- Learn more about the American Eel.
- Purchase American raised eel.

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[MUSIC: Joe Pass, “Chloe” on Intercontinental, Edel Germany GmbH]

DOERING: Coming up, climate disasters both fast and slow are making people migrate. That’s just ahead on Living on Earth. Stay with us!

ANNOUNCER: Support for Living on Earth comes from the Waverley Street Foundation, working to cultivate a healing planet with community-led programs for better food, healthy farmlands, and smarter building, energy and businesses.

[MUSIC: Joe Pass, “Chloe” on Intercontinental, Edel Germany GmbH]

Uprooted By Climate

BELTRAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Paloma Beltran.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering. People can be uprooted in the wake of disasters such as wildfires, floods, storms and crop loss linked to climate disruption. But the relentless heating of the Earth is prompting some people to move even if they have not been caught in the crosshairs of a climate-related catastrophe. Journalist Abrahm Lustgarten has written a book about how life as we know it in the United States will forever change as temperatures rise, which he says will accelerate an internal migration trend that has already begun. His book is called On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, and he spoke from his home in the Bay Area of California with Living on Earth Executive Producer and Host Steve Curwood.

CURWOOD: Why write this book?

LUSTGARTEN: Well, the book arose out of a series of articles that I wrote in 2020 for ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine that looked at how climate change was going to displace people and how it would lead to a new era of what I think will be mass migration in the future in general. And you can slice that a million different ways, many of which are important. But one thing that came up through that reporting was the fact that climate change was going to displace Americans as well, and it was going to displace potentially myself. And in the course of reporting, I was I live in California, and I was really confronted by a disastrous set of wildfire seasons, and it really got me thinking. At the same time that I was doing this reporting and writing these articles about how climate change was going to affect my life, how it might affect Americans' lives, and why we're relatively privileged and sheltered from climate impacts compared to so many other parts of the world. Change is coming nonetheless, and I became really intently focused and curious on what that change was going to look like for the United States.

CURWOOD: In your very thorough style, Abrahm, you have drilled into many, many aspects of what the increasing displacement due to climate disruption, that impact that it's going to have on us. But let me ask you another kind of broad question, and not a simple one. Who is a climate migrant?

LUSTGARTEN: Yeah, you know, everybody's got a different definition for this, and I tend to take the broadest and most flexible definition. So, to me, a climate migrant is somebody whose decision to move or whose displacement has in some tangential way, been influenced by the change in our environment and by the pressures of climate change. And, you know, people have always moved, migrated for reasons around conflict, persecution, economic opportunity. I think those are kind of the standard explanations for the factors that drive migration. And I've been really interested in how environmental change plays into that. And moving away from this cliche idea that a climate migrant is only somebody who's been displaced by environmental change alone. And so, I'd like to look at a set of more complex and nuanced factors, the way that environmental change might put somebody in a situation where conflict then displaces them. So, I think very broadly about it, and if environmental change has any role in moving a person out of their homeland and into a new location, I consider them a climate migrant.

CURWOOD: That's right. I mean, people move, as you say, for a number of reasons, economics, opportunity, conflict. So, to what extent do you think that climate becomes that proverbial straw on the camel's back for many people?

LUSTGARTEN: Yeah. I mean, I think it absolutely is, and I think that that makes it hard to identify or to single out for many people as well. I, for example, spoke with, spent some time with a woman in San Salvador who was victim of gang violence there and was looking to move to the United States. And so, she would be typically described as a person persecuted under difficult gang situations, but she would prefer to move back to her hometown. But her hometown, this small village in the mountains in El Salvador, was suffering from a coffee fungus that was driven by climate change. So, I describe her as an environmental migrant, as a climate migrant, and the same way that somebody in California might move because their homeowner's insurance becomes too expensive because of the wildfires. They don't necessarily connect that idea with their fleeing wildfires, but they are ultimately driven to move because of that environmental change. And in those ways that environmental change, it can have an enormous effect, and it can literally displace people, like flooding in Houston, or it can have a very, very subtle, almost immeasurable effect that you know that proverbial straw on the camel's back that is almost unidentifiable, but does tip the scales in driving somebody to change their circumstances or change their location.

CURWOOD: So, talk to me about the most climate risky places these days in the United States.

LUSTGARTEN: It's probably no great surprise, but the riskiest parts of the country are along the south, throughout the south, from the southwest all the way to the southeastern coast and the west coast. I based my reporting off of collection of empirical data modeled by the Rhodium Group. And we modeled very specific risks, risks like threat of wildfire, threat of drought, decline in crop yields, rising temperatures, economic harm, rising sea levels and those things. And if you map all of those, which I did, you see that many of them overlap. And what they essentially tell you is that the southern third of the country is significantly more at risk than the northern two thirds of the United States. To grossly overgeneralize, but that is kind of the trend. And so, the projected or assumed. You know, reaction to that is that as people begin to move, to migrate because of these changes, that they will migrate from those regions northward.

The complex, contradictory and heartbreaking process of American climate migration is underway “At first, after the storm, it’s volunteers pulling out trash... Then, it’s not destruction, but the aftermath of destruction.” An excerpt from On The Move. https://t.co/lpP72TsTeZ

— Abrahm Lustgarten (@AbrahmL) April 11, 2024

CURWOOD: Abrahm, to what extent did you find that government policies in the US have deceived us about the risks of climate disruption?

LUSTGARTEN: You know, it's very hard to link cause and effect with certainty, but I looked closely at a number of disincentives that have arisen through American policy of one sort or another that have tended to encourage people to live in the path of great risk, and one of those that I focus on in the book is the role of homeowners insurance and property insurance, and we're having such a great conversation now nationally about insurance in the face of climate change, because it's becoming more expensive and is becoming harder to get. But for many, many years, insurance was used as a tool to make it seem safe to live in the path of disaster, and it was subsidized by states across the country to reverse or protect against the actual risk of out migration, of declining population. So, in the book, I explore, for example, how after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in Florida devastated parts of that state. And Florida was in an economic recession at the time, and its population began to move. And so, the state, in an effort to keep people there created its own state run, state subsidized insurance plan. Called it a fair plan, called it Florida citizens eventually, and that plan promised that insurance would be available to everybody at a cheaper cost than they were already paying, no matter their circumstances. And that kind of system has now been replicated across 30 odd states. It's being used in California now to provide insurance to people who are at risk of wildfires, for example. And it has an effect of blunting the effects of climate change, because it blinds homeowners to the risks to their assets. It makes it seem safer; makes it seem easier to protect the value of their homes when they're in the path of risk than it actually is. And so that's one kind of mechanism that has disincentivized a logical response to environmental change.

CURWOOD: So, in the United States, what does wealth have to do with climate risk?

LUSTGARTEN: Well, probably no surprise, but the wealth equals capacity to be resilient in the face of impact, and so it affects climate driven migration in a whole bunch of ways. But it also affects just our individual ability to protect ourselves or to rebuild in the face of disaster. So, from a migration standpoint, the experts I talk to and the models kind of pinpoint a middle class as the most likely to move in response to climate change, because you need to have some degree of wealth to be mobile. But those with extraordinary wealth are also more likely to kind of have backup plans, maybe multiple homes, keep a farm in Vermont while living in Phoenix, Arizona, or something like that. So, you know, the wealthy have greater flexibility to make dramatic changes at the last moment, and don't have to plan for them as much. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have the impoverished, but also just unwealthy parts of the country, and that's a whole other part of the story. I mean, we will have communities in the United States, as we will around the world, who are trapped by the circumstances of their changing climate and cannot migrate for a number of reasons, one of them being economic. And that's going to be a growing part of the climate change story, of the social story around climate change, and it's already been a part of the inequities of how climate change has affected American communities and affected communities across the country, where lower income communities and many minority communities have already borne a very disproportionate brunt of the environmental changes we've seen so far. We can expect that to happen in the future, and then we can expect those same segments of our population to be less mobile and a little less resilient to the opportunities to to migrate in response to it in the future.

CURWOOD: Little hard to move when you're on a fixed income, say, from Social Security or something and everything's balanced out where you live today to think about moving to someplace else tomorrow.

LUSTGARTEN: That's exactly right.

CURWOOD: Not to mention giving up your friends and community.

LUSTGARTEN: So, friends and community are, you know, a real intangible part of this conversation and a real draw factor to keep people from moving as is age. So, when we start to think about trapped communities, it's that intersection of poverty, perhaps of age, of deep communities, of small communities, that makes it both painful and less and less practical to be able to respond by changing your location.

CURWOOD: Now what about relative wealth internationally, what does that have to do with climate risk? United States is fairly affluent. A lot of the rest of the world is not.

LUSTGARTEN: Yeah, I mean, I started the conversation by just kind of offering that caveat, that we are relatively privileged and relatively sheltered, though not immune from impact and change. And so globally, almost everybody is worse off than we are. Is the simplest way to see it. We have the most vulnerable nations in the world also are largely to generalize, you know, the most populated and they are also the most impoverished. And so, from both a climate change perspective and a climate migration perspective, the hot spots of enormous risk are the equatorial regions around North Africa, South Asia, Central America. Many countries in which are among the poorest in the world and among the most populous. And it means that they have the least flexibility and the least amount of depth of resilience to adapt to these changes, and that they're also, you know, the most likely to have their populations migrate in search of better circumstances, and so the relative wealth of nations around the world means that the most populous parts of the world are going to be the hardest hit and the most likely to move but it also suggests that there's a great responsibility on the part of the wealthy parts of the world to stabilize the communities around them, maybe to make up for the damages that they're seeing and experiencing and will experience, and it gets really quickly into the loss and damage conversation about who's responsible for emissions that have caused climate change and who's responsible for mitigating the long term effects. And the climate migration conversation just really underscores the importance of that larger conversation about equity and debt, and what we as a wealthy nation owe to those other parts of the world that are going to be even harder hit.

CURWOOD: And now, what about Abram Lustgarten, who lives in the Bay area of California, you write in the book there were days just choking with the wildfire smoke. Doing the work that you've done these years, knowing that this is no joke: Climate disruption is for real. What's your decision?

LUSTGARTEN: My decision hasn't been made yet. Through the course of my experience in my reporting, it's given me a great appreciation for the complexity of migration and the complexity of making a decision about whether to move. It's forced me to reflect on why I live where I live, and how I make that choice, so it's not a naive or a blind choice, and it's affected by so many other factors. I began writing and began considering being forced to move myself. It seemed like we were on a linear trajectory towards an apocalypse, basically. And that's one context in which to make a decision, you know, about my own life. But the calmness that followed those for a couple years, which I know empirically and objectively, is temporary. I mean, I see the data, I know what the climate risks are for the part of Northern California that I live in, and the long-term story is not a positive one.

CURWOOD: So, Abrahm, you're a reporter who's looked at climate disruption, but it's also moving you into being a philosopher about the way civilizations and societies function with this tsunami of climate disruption coming at us. From your view, how are we set to deal with this as a society, both here in America and around the world?

LUSTGARTEN: Brittleness is a word that comes up a lot, both among the experts that I talk to, and I think it reflects my current feeling. There are bright spots in Americans' ability, I think, to adapt to the changes that are coming. There are organizations and communities and groups of political movements that are well poised to greet the change in a proactive way, prepare for it in ways that will lessen the blow, if you will. But I'm sorry to say that I'm a little more cynical about the larger average impact, and I think we see incredible political divisions in this country, and political divisions that are kind of replicated in countries around the world at this moment. I don't see those political divisions as being altogether separate from climate influences. I think that the way that these issues interact isn't totally clear yet, but the pressures of a changing climate, the pressures that it puts on migration and on border, policies of our country and on other countries, I think, is an unrecognized pressure. The cost of climate change, I think is a pressure on our fiscal health and on all the policies that result from it. And I don't think that I see, you know, a level of cooperation or preparedness or willingness to invest financially, or willingness to invest socially, quickly enough and at a scale enough that will really prepare us nationally for the changes that are coming. And so, you know, I think it's going to be a difficult era of successes surrounded by larger challenges.

DOERING: That’s journalist Abrahm Lustgarten, speaking with Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood about his book On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.

Related links:
- Get your copy of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America" (Affiliate link supports both Living on Earth and local booksellers)
- Learn more about Lustgarten’s other works

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[MUSIC: Lee Ritenour, Dave Grusin, “Water to Drink (Agua De Beber)” on The Very Best of Lee Ritenour, The Verve Music Group.]

BELTRAN: If you enjoy the stories you hear on Living on Earth, please consider signing up for our newsletter. You’ll never miss a show, and you’ll have special access to show highlights, notes from our staff, and advanced information about upcoming events. The Living on Earth newsletter is sent to your inbox weekly. Don't miss out! Subscribe at the Living on Earth website, loe.org, that's loe.org. After the break, how stargazing gave us science as we know it. That’s just ahead on Living on Earth.

ANNOUNCER: Support for Living on Earth comes from the estate of Rosamund Stone Zander - celebrated painter, environmentalist, and author of The Art of Possibility – who inspired others to see the profound interconnectedness of all living things, and to act with courage and creativity on behalf of our planet. Support also comes from Sailors for the Sea and Oceana. Helping boaters race clean, sail green, and protect the seas they love. More information @sailorsforthesea.org.

[MUSIC: Herbie Hancock, “Watermelon Man – Remastered 2007” on Takin’ Off (Expanded Edition), Blue Note Records.]

Starborn: How the Stars Made Us

BELTRAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Paloma Beltran.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering. If you went to summer camp as a kid, perhaps you slept out under the night sky, the Milky Way spread out like a bright blanket and threaded now and then with shooting stars. Stargazing is one of the simple pleasures of life, but it’s also profoundly shaped who we are as human beings. Science, religion, and origin stories from diverse traditions have all been deeply connected to the human tendency to gaze up at the night sky.
Roberto Trotta is a cosmologist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and he has often wondered what our species might have been like if we had never been able to see the stars. Some planets, like Venus, are eternally shrouded in clouds, so even if intelligent beings had evolved to survive its extreme climate, they would never see the universe beyond. And if our view of the heavens was obscured, Roberto Trotta says it’s possible advanced civilizations capable of traveling out into space would have never developed. His book is called Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (And Who We Would Be Without Them), and Professor Trotta joins us now. Welcome back to Living on Earth!

TROTTA: Thank you, I'm thrilled to be back.

DOERING: So, I think we really take for granted the stars that we see at night if we're, you know, lucky enough to have dark enough skies to see those stars. And as you write astronomy was the midwife to all the sciences. Why is that?

TROTTA: Because astronomy was the first of what then become sciences to actually have access to a plethora of quantitative data. That was, of course, in the 16th century when astronomers started working out, our place in the universe, started working out that the earth was not at the center of the solar system, but the sun was, which was, you know, the Copernican Revolution was an absolute paradigm shift of our conception of the universe we live in. But even before then, of course, for millennia, the stars have drawn the attention of humanity, starting from history, as I argue in the book, but also in historical times, we had all these priests and these high sacred people who will look up at the sky, try to divine the future, try to understand what the position and the movement of the planets, and the stars would mean for humanity for the king, for example, for the pyre and so on. The practice of astrology, which is very much disparaged today was very, very important in our past, because it is through astrology, that for thousands of years, humankind kept up their interest for the stars. And we often forget that when the 16th century came around, and a scientific revolution came around, many of the central characters of the scientific revolution, Copernicus, Galileo, the Tycho Brahe, Kepler, they were all astrologers as well as astronomers because the kings and other high place people who paid the salaries, paid the salaries just as much for their observations as for their divination. And so, you know, astrology was very important, and that led to astronomy and astronomy at that point, had this very long tradition of data observation, interests for the sky, after which quantitative science and physics sprang. Without astronomy, Newton wouldn't have written down the laws of gravitation, and physics will not exist as we know it and without physics, none of the other sciences.

DOERING: It's so interesting to hear you talk about how something that was so unscientific, you know, especially considering it today, what we know you know, astrology actually did end up leading to careful observation and science itself.

TROTTA: Exactly. And all these patrons who really helped astrology along unwittingly, they also ushered in the scientific revolution eventually.

DOERING: How has our knowledge of time been shaped by the planets and cosmos?

TROTTA: Time is intimately related to the cycles in the sky, let alone the day night alternation that we mentioned, that's, of course, the most basic unit of time. But to go beyond that, to go beyond the simple observing that there is a period of light and a period of darkness that repeats every 24 hours, really, the moon was central the phases of the moon and the lunar cycle of 29.5 days was absolutely crucial in enabling the understanding that we can measure time spans that are longer than a day. And before that was one of the central planks, not just from a point of view, for example of the hunt, we can imagine prehistoric hunters gatherers, trying to time their hands with the full moon, because that's something that we have largely forgotten we never pay any attention to this. But if you are a hunter gatherer in a place in a world that's entirely dark, except for the cosmic luminaries above us, then you absolutely know that when the sun sets on the full moon night, that's when the moon rises. And that means that if you're still hunting prey out at dusk, out at sunset, the moon will follow up and illuminate the hunt and will stay on for the whole night if needs be, and you can hunt down that prey that has perhaps escaped you. So probably the full moon was enabled not just the most fruitful hunts in prehistory but also was giving rise to rituals for perhaps certain key rituals to celebrate that successful hunt. So timekeeping, as marked by the period of the Moon was absolutely central. And of course, even today, when we glance at the 12 subdivisions of a normal clock, we are without realizing it, we are looking at a series of stars that the Egyptians called the decans that followed series about 10 degrees apart in the sky, which is the reason why we subdivide the night and then the day also in 12 hours. And so, whenever we glanced at our watch, we are glancing deep into the past and deep into the stary origin of our timekeeping that has always been with us.

DOERING: So, we have to talk about Galileo Galilei, a very important astronomer. How did Galileo's observation of the stars through his telescope shape astronomy?

TROTTA: Galileo in 1610 did something absolutely extraordinary. The significance of which slightly escapes us today because we're so used to it now. But when he heard that something that we now call a telescope, had been invented in the Netherlands, it immediately set his genius in motion to try to build his own. And in fact, after 24 hours, he had built his own telescope with no instructions, no blueprint, nothing grinding the lens himself, and so on. And when he had this telescope fashioned for himself, he did a revolutionary thing. He took it, and he pointed it to the sky. And it's a simple act of almost incredible daring, the fact that he wanted to see what matters were hidden in the sky, by the means of a device that could now give him a more powerful acuity and vision. And when he did that, all sorts of incredible sights opened up to his understanding and his ability to draw them actually. And he saw the moons of Jupiter; he discovered the fact that there were other moons revolving around another planet. He saw the phases of Venus, the fact that Venus changes its shape, just like the moon does, which is incontrovertible evidence for the fact that Venus actually orbits the Sun and not the earth. He studied the sun's sunspots, which had been already discovered, but he was the first to characterize them. He looked at the moon and he realized it's got craters and valleys and crevices and it's not that perfect object that Aristotle had said. And so, the sky and the earth were made of the same substance and that was shattering in terms of changing our view of what the cosmos was made of. It's all of this together, really, any of these discoveries, and all of them together completely changed our view, not only of the universe around us, but also of our place in the universe, and our relationship with it.

DOERING: What a revolution. So, Roberto, your book takes us all the way from ancient history through our relationship with the stars today. And I was fascinated, and frankly, quite alarmed to read in your book that our view of the stars is threatened today, not only by light pollution, of course, which I think a lot of us experience anyone who lives near a city, but also by artificial satellites. What's the impact of having thousands of satellites orbiting Earth?

TROTTA: Through my view, this is a dramatic ecological crisis that's unfolding silently and above our heads, without people really realizing it, and without much fuss about it. But it's as concerning there's other ecological crisis that unfortunately, we're witnessing in our time. And it's brought about by the fact that in the last few years, private companies, private space companies have launched thousands of internet satellites in low earth orbit that's 250 kilometers up, so they're relatively nearby. And space is fast becoming congested. So, there is now about 10,000 satellites in near orbit. And according to some estimates that by 2030, there's going to be 100,000 satellites. And those satellites are mostly used for the purpose of providing internet service, fast internet service everywhere, at all times. But the downside, well there's many downsides, but a very concerning one is that being so low, they actually reflected the sun's light, especially at dusk through the solar panels, and also depending on the location and the season, throughout the night. And they show up as little moving dots across the firmament, which means that if you look up on a dark night, if you're lucky enough to leave under dark skies, which is increasingly difficult, of course because of light pollution, which means that you will see plenty of these little dot carving little lines across the sky. And by some estimates, unfortunately, I'm sad to report that by 2030, it's possible that we will see more artificial satellites in the sky than real stars, at which point, we will have lost the sky for good. We will never nowhere on earth have the opportunity to actually experience the sky, like our ancestors always had done and so will last forever, that connection with the beauty and inspiration of the eternal sublime, as Emerson put it. And that's happening, you know, launch after launch, it's happening fast and if it's not regulated or stopped soon, it will be too late to get it back.

DOERING: And that's nothing like going to a dark sky sanctuary can resolve. I mean, if they're up there, you're going to see them.

TROTTA: Exactly. And that's dramatic, right? Because it's already difficult enough to find the dark sky sanctuary these days. But those satellites will be everywhere, they're running around all the globe, and so you won't be able to escape them. There is no mountain that's tall enough, there is no ocean that's offshore far enough for you to escape them because they're everywhere all the time. So that's a real loss, a tragic loss of perhaps what I think of as the last global common and actually the only truly global common that humanity has shared you know across cultures, across times. Since time immemorial, the sky has been you know, everybody's but space no longer is.

DOERING: It does seem like we'd have an impoverished experience of the sky at night. And what's the impact to science, if any?

TROTTA: Yes, there was a cultural impact which I just described but also there is a scientific impact because as the satellites pass in front of astronomers telescopes, both on Earth and in space, the live trains on the pictures that astronomers take of the deep sky. And that means that up to 50%, up to half of the data of the greatest sonic observatories are rendered unusable for research. So, this has got a real cost in terms of essentially nullifying half of the billion-dollar efforts that astronomers are putting into studying the sky, and making important programs more difficult. For example, asteroid tracking becomes more difficult because of these tracks left by the satellites and that's really important program. For example, in order to raise alarm in case asteroids are deflected, of course, or will be threatening to life on earth. All the satellites render this so much harder and it's a real scientific problem.

DOERING: How do you think studying the stars and looking up the sky can inspire us to take better care of our planet?

TROTTA: I think it does, and I think it does, because it affords us the opportunity for ones to see ourselves from a different cosmic perspective. Let me just backtrack for a second and talk for a minute about what is called the "Overview Effect", which is this mystical, if you want to call it that experience that many astronauts report when they get to see our fragile, beautiful blue and white planet from space. Right when they behold, this little globe floating in the darkness of space in the velvet of the universe and they realize that we're so fragile, we're so little, and all the squabbles, all the wars, all the terrible things that are happening to our planet really should not be happening because we need to see ourselves as being global citizens of one spaceship, spaceship earth. Which is our own only protection against the hostility of space. So that's the overview effect that many astronauts have reported feeling something move inside their heart or inside their soul, when they perceive Earth from that. And that's not available to everybody, of course, but we earthbound beings if we look up, we won't see ourselves from up there but we can still see what's out there and transport ourselves into this cosmic perspective and understand, in looking at the void between the glowing stars and looking at the majesty of the night sky, and realizing the smallness and the fragility of our life compared to that. I think that's a very important and very needed antidote to the hubris, the technologically driven hubris that's wreaking havoc to our planet. You know, think about loss of biodiversity, climate change, the terrible wars that we're witnessing every day, all of this needs to be put in a different perspective, in perspective of the stars. And if we start measuring our actions and the impact of our actions on the cosmic perspective, I think that the politics and the economics and the kinds of societies that we want to build on a planet will change radically. It could inspire us to build a better world.

DOERING: It is really special, this perspective that we're given by being able to look up at the stars send up instruments and people up there to look back at Earth.

TROTTA: Absolutely, and it's something that's been only afforded to us by the technology that was actually born out of the science that was ultimately given to us by the contemplation of the stars. So, in a way, our understanding of the stars is something that we owe the stars themselves.

DOERING: So, Roberto, the stars have been hugely important for humans for how our societies have developed. How important have they been in your life?

TROTTA: Well, I realized that stars really shaped my life profoundly. And perhaps that's not so surprising for somebody who is a cosmologist by profession, and therefore very professional wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the stars. But perhaps I hadn't realized fully how the stars had really changed the course of my personal history as much as my professional history. And that's also how I chose to actually open the book. And when I tell a story that I think prior to actually writing it in the book, I probably never told anybody. And it's a story of how many, many years ago on a dark night in my native Switzerland, which is a landlocked country, which at that time, still enjoyed some quite dark skies, I had a date and my date and I were out for an evening at the theater and we were walking back home. And then we both happened to look up at the sky at a very special moment where something really special and quite magical happened. It was a meteor passing by a shooting star, if you like.

DOERING: Wow.

TROTTA: Which appeared to be the perfect, romantic moment that sparked well, something that was in the air but hadn't quite catalyzed yet. And many years later, when I actually came to reflect about my personal trajectory and history, I found myself looking into my wife's eyes and I saw the very same falling star reflected in there still, because that date that night later on 25 years plus later, that girl had become my wife. And I don't know whether that would have been quite the same story if that shooting star had not happened to fall precisely that night at that moment, in that circumstance that really, somehow brought some magic to the entire, to the entire thing and definitely changed the course of my life.

DOERING: Roberto Trotta is a cosmologist and astrophysicist and author of the book Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would be Without Them). Thank you for joining us.

TROTTA: Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Related links:
- Learn more about professor of Astrophysics and Data Science Roberto Trotta
- Purchase Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (And Who We Would be Without Them) from Bookshop.org to support both Living on Earth and local independent bookstores

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BELTRAN: Living on Earth is produced by the World Media Foundation. Our crew includes Naomi Arenberg, Daniela Faria, Swayam Gagneja, Mark Kausch, Mark Seth Lender, Don Lyman, Ashanti Mclean, Nana Mohammed, Aynsley O’Neill, Sophia Pandelidis, Jake Rego, Andrew Skerritt, Bella Smith, Melba Torres, and El Wilson.

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BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. Thanks for listening!

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