Eutrapelian LandMinds
Charles Siebert
Journalist Charles Siebert writes about dogs, whales and chimps. His latest book is The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals.
The Surprisingly Social Gray Whale
July 13, 200910:48 AM ET
Off the coast of Baja, California, scientists find gray whales are uncharacteristically social with humans, even allowing their faces, mouths and tongues to be massaged as they bump up beside boats.
Journalist Charles Siebert wrote about the phenomena in the July 8 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The article, "Watching Whales Watching Us," explains that relations between humans and the Pacific gray whale have been historically spotty. After being hunted nearly to extinction more than 150 years ago — and again in the 1900s — the gray whale has rebounded in population faster than any other whale species.
Behavioral and wildlife biologist Dr. Toni Frohoff also joins the show. She has studied marine mammal behavior for more than 20 years and is the director and co-founder of TerraMar Research and the Trans-Species Institute of Learning. Frohoff is co-author of the book Dolphin Mysteries: Unlocking the Secrets of Communication.
Siebert's new book, The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward A New Understanding of Animals, details his encounters with Roger a retired former circus chimp, who lived at the Center for Great Apes in Florida and preferred the company of humans to chimps.
Are Humans Causing Elephants to Go Crazy?
October 6, 2006 1:00 PM ET
Heard on Day to Day
Groups of young male elephants in Africa have gone wild, attacking whole villages and even packs of rhinos. Human beings might be indirectly responsible -- new studies point to an alarming disintegration of the social fabric of the species, and the noise and physical threat posed by people might be prompting elephants to lose control, both in Africa and Asia.
New York Times Magazine contributor Charles Siebert talks to Alex Chadwick about his article about the elephant rampages, to be published in this weekend's edition.
HARPER'S MAGAZINE
The Artifice of the Natural:
How TV's Nature Shows Make All the Earth a Stage
+ "Today, the natural world is for us a place of reticent and reticular wonders that command our active exposure and editing; a world made up of what we half create and what, even when we're there, we fully expect to see."
+ "The more facts we compile about the animals' days, the more human the tales we tell about them. We've come so far from actual nature,"
+ "The wilderness is wherever the city ends and whatever wild animals have been co-opted to stand for wilderness in the granite houses of zoos or in those deep dioramas at the natural history museum."
+ "But to sit here in front of a nature show is to have one's ego fed shamelessly via the distilled essence of that original place whose indifference and gradualness we can no longer abide. We need the time-lapsed and tightly woven tale called nature, and it is from here and not from that tale's source that we now collectively depart. We are, in a sense, a species being increasingly defined by the steady progress of our walk out of the woods."
+ "We've become, in a sense, a race of armchair naturalists even as more and more of us are now visiting the places and creatures whose stories we've watched on the TV. We go as nature tourists, fully equipped and expectant of seeing those characters, as though visiting the various sets of a Universal Studios theme park."