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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is one of the world’s leading natural history filmmakers, Craig Foster. You may have heard of Craig Foster, the creator of the film My Octopus Teacher, for which he won an Academy Award for best documentary. What you may not know is that he’s created more than a hundred films and documentaries. In addition to his photography, Craig Foster is also the author of a new book. It’s called Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World.
Craig lives in South Africa and is one of the founders of the Sea Change Project. Let me tell you a little bit about the Sea Change Project. It’s a community of scientists, storytellers, journalists, and filmmakers who are dedicated to the wild and specifically the Great African Seaforest. Their mission: connect people to nature through science-based immersive storytelling, and you can learn more at seachangeproject.com. Craig, welcome.
Craig Foster: Wonderful to be here. Thanks so much, Tami.
TS: You’re joining us, now, from where?
CF: I’m right on the most southwest tip of Africa, about an hour south of Cape Town.
TS: Wonderful, and thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. As I immersed myself in your nature-based storytelling, I want to share my experience just a little bit and have you comment on it and make it real for our listeners, which is immediately what I felt is this sense of melting into all of nature, not as if I am living in nature, but that all of nature is living in me, if you will. And I want to hear a bit from you about that experience, and I’ll just say a little bit more. At one point in My Octopus Teacher, you say you have to start thinking like an octopus. And I thought to myself, what’s this like for Craig that different species, different manifestations in nature, start to live in his own interior experience? That’s what I really want to hear about.
CF: Wonderful question. Thanks, Tami. I think that for many years I was very frustrated, because I had this feeling of being outside of nature. And then mostly through this underwater tracking that I was inspired to learn through these amazing mentors that I met in the central Kalahari, San master trackers, I spent three years diving every day learning this tracking and trying to get inside this world that you spoke about so beautifully. And then I think probably on the fourth or fifth year of doing this every day, I started slowly feeling much closer to the wild. And then as the years went on, I had these moments of grace where I felt that there was no separation and this extraordinary feeling of being part of the great mother. And I talk about the great mother. I talk about, really, all the biodiversity, all the extraordinary animals and plants that have kept us alive since the beginning. But when you get to know these animals very well and you’re visiting them every day and you become very sensitized to them, you’re very cautious with upsetting them or getting in the way of their lives. You do have these moments where you feel that you are predicting what they’re going to do. You feel certainly getting to know part of their secret lives. And then there are these moments where you feel part of that Great African Seaforest, that underwater kelp forest. And there’s strange moments where you even feel that that ecosystem is watching you in a way. And I even called it a name—“forest mind”—that then there are these moments where you feel completely part of that. And of course, I mean, scientifically we know that we are totally part of nature. There’s—nature’s inside our bodies. If it wasn’t, we’d die very, very quickly. So we actually are nature; our minds, our bodies, everything is totally integrated. It’s just an illusion, a kind of illusion of this modern idea that we’re separate and nature’s over there.
TS: Craig, you mentioned this sensitizing process, and I’d love to hear more about that—what inner capacities you developed by going into the seaforest day after day that allowed you to attune in this way.
CF: Sure, absolutely. I mean, what happens is when you first go in—and remember, I’ve still been diving my whole life, so I’ve been diving since I was three years old, so I’m very used to the water. But when you really start to go every day and you start to observe and you start to really feel these creatures, you realize that your whole approach at first is very blunt and very quite disturbing, actually, for the animals. And then you slowly get to feel that they have these incredibly sensitive sensory systems so they can feel pressure waves in the water, for instance. Their smell is incredible. So two of the things you can do there immediately is quiet the whole movements of your bodies, no slapping of the hands, no hard pushing of the fins, very, very careful movements to bring those pressure waves right down and immediately see the animals react differently. You don’t want to be using a strong deodorant or any chemical like that on your body when you’re going to go in the water because there will be a very, very strong smell for them. Some of their eyesight is incredible, so you want to be moving very gently and slowly and smoothly so as not to disturb them. So you just get more and more attuned to what these animals are thinking and feeling, and then you try to move and mimic them in a way when you move through the forest and that changes the relationship because they can sense that very strongly. The sharks, for instance, can feel all the muscle tension in your body. They can measure that; they can measure your heartbeat. So you want to quieten all that down, relax the muscles, slow your heartbeat right down, and then they react accordingly.
TS: Craig, this is a question I have to ask at this point, which is when I hear you describe this experience, as I mentioned at the beginning, I can melt into it. I can fall into it and open to it and feel it. And it’s powerful, and my whole being kind of comes online. My heart swells. But then if I get up out of my chair, perhaps, and go outside into a wilderness environment where there are wolves, cougars, or if I were to go into the water where there are sharks, I’m really terrified and I feel very separate and I don’t have this sense of connectivity that I can access in my imagination when I’m actually in my individual body experience in these environments. I’m really afraid. And I think how these things coexist, it’s very strange. And I’m sure you’ve encountered a lot of people who are in situations similar to what I’m describing, and I wonder what you make of that.
CF: Yeah, very interesting observation. So what’s happening here, I think, Tami, is that all your wild memories—you’ve got, in a way, 3 million years of memories of living wild in the Homo genus, 300,000 years of living wild as a Homo sapien. So your entire memory, your design, is equipped to be quite comfortable in that completely wild situation, and that’s actually what your whole being is craving. But now your physical body has not had that training because you’re born into a world post hunting and gathering, in an industrial world. So your conscious mind and your body is not used to that. So that’s why you’ve got those two big differences and what I call this the sort of tame part of your existence and the wild part. And a lot of what I’m writing about in the book is how do we get this balance between the tame and the wild?
We obviously can’t go back to being fully wild, but the tame is too dominant in my mind. So all you have to do is just slowly, gently teach yourself what you already know. And I wouldn’t go straight into deep wilderness where there are a lot of big predators. Get to know areas that are, say surrounding your house, get to know the trees, get to know the smaller insects, mammals, birds, whatever you like. And then as you get to know them, as you get comfortable, you just go closer and closer to those more wild environments. Maybe at first go with someone who really knows what they’re doing, and you would be amazed how quickly all those old memories and the old language starts to come back. And then you will quite soon—I mean, I’m talking quite soon, maybe months or more—feel very comfortable in a place where you’d now feel afraid.
TS: Well, it’s interesting that you use the words “the tame and the wild.” If I were to accurately describe it, I would say “the terrified and the wild.”
CF: That’s a good thing. I mean, I think that you are only just terrified on the surface. So this is this idea I have of this—that’s why I call the book the Amphibious Soul, that we have this incredible design. I mean, we are designed, every single one of us, to live in a wild environment as a nomadic Homo sapien hunter-gatherer. That’s still our design. We haven’t adapted to this strange environment that we now find ourselves in. So it’s a funny thing you say “terrified,” but the wild being inside you is terrified living in this industrial-military complex or whatever ever you want to call it, and the tame part of your being, which is quite a small part, is terrified of living fully wild. So what I’m saying is if you just start to find that balance, what happens is you feel just much more comfortable. Because that wild being, which is making up a large part of your psyche, wants to feel like it belongs and wants to feel heard. So I feel it’s very powerful for mental health and for well-being is to start reconnecting even if it’s just with one animal in your backyard and really getting to know that animal. That animal will teach you so much about yourself and the world, and you’ll just feel far more comfortable, and all that feeling of fear will start dropping away.
TS: At that level of our deep psyche that is so connected with all of the species in the world, one of the things I was really moved by was the cave art of half-human, half-animal and that imagery. And I wonder if you can share a bit about how that lands in you. And as an amphibious soul, do you experience yourself as part human and part having a fin, or what’s your own mythological sense of yourself?
CF: It’s funny. So yeah, I’ve been fascinated by the San, or what people know as bushman, rock art for many, many years. I was very privileged to spend seven years with Dr. Janette Deacon, who’s one of our top rock art specialists, and we did a book together on the rock engravings of the Northern Cape of South Africa. So she was my mentor in teaching me about this incredible rock art. It’s the greatest rock art gallery in the world, stretching right across southern Africa. And you get these figures, what you’re talking about, called therianthropes, half-animal, half-human forms in the rock art, and they’re absolutely fascinating. So they might have a human head and an animal body, often an antelope or maybe a human head and a bird body. And then the really rare ones that I was really fascinated with this book were the half-human, half-fish creatures. I think they’re called ichyantropes, I’m not exactly sure, but fascinated me because I’ve had this 12-year now immersion in the ocean pretty much every day. And what we think these therianthropes are, these early people are trying to say with this art is that they’re experiencing during fairly deep stages of trance this merging with an animal so they will feel their body changing into an animal. And this is a common thing for hunter-gatherers and Indigenous people to feel all around the world. You’ll see these therianthropes in many, many Indigenous cultures. I think it says a lot about our deep understanding, connection, and ancestry related to wild animals. Even people living in a city, if they to a trance are going into a trance in whatever way, they will often feel themselves changing into an animal. And then we’ve got quite a lot of evidence for this. So it’s built in again into the primal psyche.
For myself, I have—you would think I would’ve felt the sort of from being in the water so much, maybe the fish-like feeling, but I have never had that feeling. But I once had a strange experience where I felt and saw part of my body changing into a baboon, and it was a very powerful experience, especially because I knew about this in a very, very old tradition of humans experiencing this. And I always remember, today still, I had a diving watch, an old diving watch that my dad had given me with those, they used to glow in the dark, and I’d looked down at my arm, which had become like a baboon arm at that point, very hairy black arm with nails, and the watch was on the arm glowing. It was a very strange image. I mean, this is a very long time ago, so it was a powerful and interesting experience. So it’s something quite normal actually and quite normal for a human being to experience during trance.
TS: Craig, one of the things I’m curious about, in your experience here you’ve had these tremendous nature communion experiences. Do you find yourself still at times feeling like a separate, alienated, suffering human being? And if you ever find yourself going in that direction, is it like, “Oh, OK, I got to go jump in the water.” Do you have a way back to your natural wild wholeness, and what is that way back?
CF: Yeah, that’s a very powerful question, and for sure, sometimes I feel very much in that very uncomfortable state. It may be caused by a lot of stress or who knows. So many things in life can do that to you. And if it’s a fairly mild feeling of uncomfortableness, certainly, and I just go straight to the ocean—hopefully it’s, and I find the coldest water I can—spend an hour in there. And it’s quite a radical transformation, because the whole brain chemistry shifts. And one can feel pretty terrible going in and absolutely fantastic coming out. Of course, if you have a more difficult experience, more deep seated or traumatic, that requires quite a lot more work. And that, for me, might require going into the ocean every day, maybe spending more time if I can, if I’ve got too much work. In a wild environment, perhaps doing quite a lot of breathing work, as well as the cold-water work. I might increase the cold-water work by working with very cold temperatures, say close to zero. That also has a profound effect on one. So there are all these techniques that help tremendously. Obviously exercising helps a lot, keeping fit, eating very healthily. So many of these factors affect us, but nobody, I think, is immune to being affected by things in life that can throw you. I mean, at the moment I feel really great. I’ve just come out the water now. It was a raining, freezing day, and just felt this incredible warmth in that icy water. I felt strong and healthy, but that can all change quite quickly. But it’s incredible tools to have, this ocean here. The seaforest and this environment is tremendously healing.
TS: Sounds True’s the publisher of The Wim Hof Method, and quite honestly I haven’t heard that many people talk about what Wim describes as the “noble force of the cold” and its health benefits quite in the way that you describe it in your book, Amphibious Soul. It seems like this has been a really important part of your own life journey.
CF: Yes, I mean, I’ve chatted to him a couple of times, and I think it’s amazing what he’s achieved, and I think he’s helped a lot of people. I think that—and the cold is certainly, it’s a powerful tool and it changes your brain chemistry, as I said, quite profoundly. But if you combine, for me, if you combine that cold and swimming and diving out a wetsuit with the underwater tracking with this what I call the oldest language on earth, which is reading the signs, the very subtle signs of animals with understanding the animal behavior with this connection to animals and this beautiful environment when you’re diving in a three-dimensional underwater forest with this incredible lighting, combine that with the animals and then a kind of study, a long-term study that you build up. So you build up this kind of library in your head of these animals’ lives and their behavior. The combination of that I found to be very powerful, and the cold is certainly quite an important component of that, as is warmth. It’s not like you’re just having this sort of very hardened difficult time and pushing through it. You actually start to enjoy the cold tremendously. But we also enjoy, say, the heat of the sun on a rock or even a sauna or build these little homemade saunas and enjoy that as well or fire. So it’s kind of a balance with all these primal things.
TS: Now, Craig, you mentioned that the other animals under the water, some of them could be sensitive to your heart rate so that if you felt afraid your heart rate would, of course, go up and that you could intentionally relax and lower it. And I’m curious, what do you actually do? How do you lower your heart rate when you need to on the spot?
CF: I mean, it sounds more complicated than it actually is. So I mean, one of the very obvious ways is just to relax tremendously. So you are hardly moving in the water. Soon as you start to do that, you’re not kicking to try and stay afloat. You’ve got all your buoyancy is right, you completely relax, you’re moving very slowly. That’s going to bring your heart rate down. You have done a lot of training before, so I do a lot of breathwork and holding my breath. So I’m very, very comfortable in the water, comfortable holding the breath and just to actually sort of visualize everything, just going so slowly and calming down. And then certainly those kind of simple things. You can also consciously say, OK, I’m going to just lower my heart rate a bit. I’m just going to let it go. And as you do that, you just feel yourself relaxing and then it goes slowly. And keeping fit as well—regular exercise helps that keep low and steady and relaxed.
TS: In Amphibious Soul, you write about your experience filming with crocodiles and great white sharks. Has there ever been a time where you were so afraid you couldn’t lower your heart rate and engage in those actions you just described? Like, “Not possible.”
CF: For sure. I mean, you know, I’ve never been too afraid with big animals, and it was frightening diving with the crocodiles, there’s no question. None of the crocodiles threatened me in any way, but it’s terrifying being in that environment, and I wouldn’t advocate that or I wouldn’t do it again either. It was quite a while ago. And certainly if a big shark is suddenly close to you, your heart rate goes up, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But I have had circumstances where I’ve been trapped underwater in caves, and you are breath hold. You’ve got one breath and you may be down 5, 10 meters and you actually got stuck, got stuck in a cave. It’s happened to me a few times. And then it is absolutely critical that you have to be absolutely calm, and you haven’t got a choice. If you panic or if you let your heart rate go up, you will not—you probably won’t make it. So in those, I’ve just forced myself to remain calm and relaxed and wait for the swell to pop me back out of being stuck. So that is, it’s funny enough, if you’re right on the edge of life and death, then often your being takes over and it just remains completely calm because it knows the alternative is not good.
TS: Craig, you talked about this notion that we could, whether it’s in a light trance state or in some imaginal space, feel our shared consciousness with another species, with an animal other than human. And I know that part of the work of the Sea Change Project is its commitment to the preservation of biodiversity and you actually have this project that you write about in Amphibious Soul, the 1,001 Species Project. And I’m curious what you think happens to us when a species goes extinct. I mean, it’s still in our collective memory. What are we losing as human beings and the complexity and richness of our consciousness, if you will, when a species goes extinct? Why is this so important to you?
CF: So my sense of biodiversity, which is that all the animals and plants and bacteria and all their interactions, it feels to me like that complexity is our mother of mothers. She is this incredible life support system that has literally allowed us to breathe and eat from the beginning of our species. If you take away biodiversity, many people don’t realize that we’d instantly die. And if biodiversity collapses, we will find it extremely difficult to survive as a species. So in a way, she is the most precious thing that we will ever know, because this is the substance that’s keeping us alive from moment to moment, these small creatures, big creatures, but it’s often the small creatures that actually are producing the oxygen and the plants for us to exist. So it’s like if there could be some manifestation of the divine or God, I would’ve imagined this would be the closest thing you could get to it, because it’s literally keeping us alive. And if you have an ex species, a species going extinct, that is like a part of that life support system, that mother of mothers, that is precious, precious stuff being snuffed out. Of course, as evolution unfolds, there’s a very natural process where animals do go extinct. The problem now is because of our human activities, we’ve increased that very, very slow extinction to a thousand times what it should be. So now when these animals are going extinct every single day, unfortunately as one gets connected to this wild system, you really feel that loss in a very powerful way. And it’s very difficult to deal with because these animals are—we come from them, they are ancestors, we are, we’re only here because of them, and they keep us alive. Now, I mean, what creature destroys its own life support system? It’s a strange thing that’s going on now, and it is very difficult to come to terms with.
TS: Can you share with me an example of a creature that you’ve bonded with that’s gone extinct and what that process was like for you?
CF: Gosh, I can’t actually think of a species that I specifically bonded with that’s gone extinct. What I can say is that we are fortunate enough to live here, very close to African penguin colony, and this animal is right on the edge of extinction. These are these incredible little flightless birds that I’ve seen hunting in the water I’ve swam with. They are—I’ve seen them sitting on the eggs, the chicks hatching, these magnificent little chicks being fed and the enormous interest, a lot of—millions of people come around from all over the world to see them here. It’s one of the main things to see. But they, at the present rate of decline, they will be functionally extinct by 2035. This is from the corner. So you can literally feel these animals slipping away. We see white shark, great white shark populations here also diminishing fast. We see many of the shark species diminishing. So I’m feeling that process unfolding with these animals I know, but actually going extinct, there are so many animals are going extinct, but we don’t even know. That’s the frightening thing. They haven’t even been looked at. And that’s why we are trying to study 1,001 animals in the kelp forest to try to actually get a grip on all who live here. I mean, there are obviously a lot more than that even, but it’s a lot of animals to look at.
TS: In your identification process on your way to 1,001 and more species of creatures in the kelp forest, have you discovered anything that previously was not documented or was barely documented that you could say, “Oh my God, look what we found! This is amazing.”
CF: Sure, sure. I mean, one of many examples is I found a mysid, which is a little type of shrimp that lives inside the octopus dens. And they have this—it’s a beautiful little shoulder, these animals, and the octopus tolerate them. It’s probably some kind of mutualistic relationship. But that was a new species to science. I found quite a few other shrimp species that are new to science, and we are continually finding behaviors that are previously unknown. So it’s amazing how much is not known. I mean, I can go on and on about all these animals that we found that are new to science.
TS: Well, and it does seem that by identifying them and bringing them into our conscious awareness, that changes us, that increases our enrichment, if you will, in some way. I wonder how you experienced that.
CF: So I think if you can imagine, Tami, what I like to do is imagine going back in time and thinking what every person before the agricultural revolution was feeling. And every person, including children, had relationships with hundreds if not thousands of animals and plants and knew them pretty well. As we got into agriculture and especially into the industrial revolution, we had these incredible relationships that were there for thousands and thousands of years severed. So suddenly you’ve got human beings just with a few relationships with other humans, and nowadays maybe with a computer, cell phone, and some other technology. Now think of that difference. You’ve got this vast relationship with all these different species, and they affect the way you think about the world. They affect your psyche in a surprisingly deep way, because that’s how we were designed to live and survive. So what’s very interesting is when you start to reestablish these bonds and these threads with these animals and repair them, you start to feel your own psyche changing and you start to feel safer and you start to feel very—an important feeling is you start to feel like you belong in your environment.
So the relationships with these wild animals allow you to feel like you belong and that you are actually another wild creature in this place. You’re not like a human being and then the wild animals are over there and separate. You’re just another wild creature in that space. And in fact, in this project of ours, 1,001, we’ve made Homo sapiens the 1,001st animal and the octopus is number one. So we’ve had this feeling of integration and this feeling of belonging, and that’s what we want to bring out in the project and in the stories, because we’d like to share these stories with the world and allow people, if they’d like, to reconnect to that part of themselves.
TS: Very beautifully said, Craig. I noticed that as you were just talking about belonging in nature, belonging in the wild as a wild creature, that was the language that I think was inside my breaking heart, in immersing myself in your work. That was what was inside. It’s like, oh, that—because I was asking myself, “What is it that’s breaking open? What’s the longing? What is that fullness that you’re seeking?” And I think it’s what you just named.
Now, one thing I really wanted to ask you about, because in My Octopus Teacher you did such a great job of helping us appreciate the intelligence, the remarkable, extraordinary intelligent capacities of the octopus. And sometimes people talk about, well, human beings, humans have this special kind of quality. I’ve even heard spiritual teachers talk about it. We can be aware of awareness in a certain kind of way, and this is something unique to us as human beings, our unique gift. And I often think to myself, God, you’re really making this sound like a lot more gloriously better than other animals. And I wonder if it’s true. And you write in Amphibious Soul, “Intelligence is not a hierarchy with humans at the top of the ladder.” And yet so often it’s described that way. And I wonder what your sense is of all these different intelligences.
CF: Yeah, I mean, all you have to do is understand some of these sensory systems of these animals that we spoke about earlier, and their ability to smell things or see things or find things, makes us look like bumbling idiots in many ways. They are also extremely—a lot of these animals extremely spend a lot of time in the present. So people who may be very advanced in meditation or this kind of thing would struggle to be in the present the whole time. But these animals are highly present, so it’s very difficult to say, well, one thing’s more intelligent than others. In many ways, we are this incredibly clever, stupid creature, because none of these other animals will destroy their own life support system. That is one of the most unintelligent things you could possibly do. Of course, our technology is extraordinary, and I think our understanding of the universe and how that formed, this origin story we have through science, is absolutely magnificent and beautiful. But so many of these animals have, and it’s hard to describe exactly, but they have remarkable intelligence and remarkable ability to survive in places that 99% of us would not be able to survive. And that survival know-how is extreme intelligence. You probably, you may or may not have seen these sort of survival programs on television where people are trying to survive for a hundred days or something, and these small animals are surviving their entire lives, and these people are using every bit of intelligence they have to survive. And a small creature can do so quite easily.
And there’s different types of intelligence. So the octopus has two-thirds of its intelligence outside of its brain, this external cognition. So the arms actually have enormous intelligence on themselves and can do things without the brain. So it’s very, very complex. But it’s almost like there’s one consciousness that’s running through all of us, and it’s being—we are expressing it—when I say “we,” the animals ourselves, the different species—are expressing it, just in a different way. But it’s very similar in some ways. It’s the same thing. It’s just being expressed in a different way.
TS: And how would you name the unique contribution of human intelligence?
CF: Gosh, I haven’t thought too much how to. When you say “name,” what do you mean?
TS: I mean, you mentioned that we have the capacity to study and know history, our history, that there’s some contribution. Because you’re talking about this huge creative universe of oneness that’s expressing through all of us. What’s our unique contribution?
CF: I think what comes to mind now—there’s probably many things—but what comes to mind is this sense and to large extent the science of knowing that this started 13.8 billion years ago and there were these enormous explosions and this incredible darkness for billions of years or a billion years. And then the cosmic dawn, and then out of this galactic dust, these creatures and eventually us formed. And we still in our bodies have the molecules that were formed in these giant explosions so long ago. I mean, that story is so powerful that we are actually born from the universe and the big bang and that we are, as we move our hands and our bodies, we are using the energy from that explosion all those billions of years ago. I mean, it’s incredible just that feeling, as we are sitting talking to each other. Knowing that fills one with awe and wander and hope and just sitting in this present moment when you feel that we are all part of that, we are all related, we are all children of this extraordinary universe. I mean, it’s very, very powerful contribution, that idea and that origin story.
TS: Alright, Craig, just two more things I want to lob your way. You write, “I don’t think I’ve ever gone on a dive without witnessing one animal killing another.” And this is part of what astonished me when I watched The Great Dance, and that is a hunting story in the Kalahari, and also in watching the death in My Octopus Teacher. And I wonder how witnessing animals killing each other every day of your dive, how that has affected you and your own view about death and dying.
CF: So first of all, I think what happens when I did the first few years of going in every day, it felt like a killing field in many ways. But then as you start to really understand the wild and understand nature, you actually see that this whole system of predator and prey and so on, parasites and everything, is incredibly supportive of life. So the predations are absolutely necessary part of this incredible biodiversity. And in a way, the predators are the architects of the prey, and they’re genius. So you have to have them in place. It’s a beautiful, powerful system that supports this massive array of life. So it does make me feel—I’m still afraid of death, like most people, but it gives quite a lot of release from that. And you see this death-rebirth process as so necessary and so elegant and beautiful.
TS: And it’s this death-rebirth process, ending on this notion of rebirth, that I want to conclude our conversation around, which is this notion of regeneration and the power of rebirth and regeneration at this time. Because we’ve talked about species that are on the brink of the potential of extinction. And this is such a time of transition for us here. And I’m wondering your sense of this possibility and power of regeneration. I know you mentioned to me right at the beginning of our call before we started recording, that you’re moving back now to a home that had been impacted tremendously by a fire. And of course, fire is such a force of destruction. And then there’s the power of rebirth and regeneration. So this is the note I want to end on, your own life view of rebirth and regeneration.
CF: I’ve been fortunate enough to see, especially in the ocean, this incredible capacity for nature to regenerate. A huge storm comes through. An entire reef is stripped and destroyed. It’s just a bare rock. And two months later, it’s completely regrown. And although the animals and plants may be not that big, but there’s just that life just comes back in this incredible, magical way. So nature has this incredible capacity to regenerate. The planet has gone through many mass extinctions and smaller extinctions and often come back with more biodiversity, more life. We are at a point now where we are facing very, very serious environmental poly-crisis. And it will be extremely difficult for us humans because we’ve created this very difficult position for ourselves. But I think that what we can draw from it is that these death and rebirth cycles have gone on through this planet for a very long time, and we will probably now be in one of those cycles, and let’s hope we have the ability to survive it as a species. I think we are very beautiful species in many ways, and we have tremendous capacity for empathy, care, and love. And who knows exactly how long this trajectory will be. But I think that we live in a world, in a universe of regeneration and that gives one a lot of hope.
TS: And Craig, tell people about seachangeproject.com and how they can support your work.
CF: Thank you. So Sea Change Project’s now been going for 12 years. I started with a small group of scientists and storytellers and filmmakers, people I knew well who wanted to come diving with me. And they put five years of their time in as volunteers for free, so passionate about it. And then we had to form it in a more formal way. And what we’re trying to do is really get to understand deep nature, understand these animals face-to-face, bring their stories, bring their science to life, and then use that knowledge and that power and that storytelling and filmmaking ability to create policy at government level and at business level to affect change, to try to protect the biodiversity of this planet, the most precious thing we will ever encounter and our life support system. So that’s fundamentally what we do. I mean, it’d be amazing if people can help and donate. The Sea Change Project has a beautiful website. The book Amphibious Soul, which you kindly mentioned, there’s a QR code in that book. I don’t know if you have looked at that at all, Tami, but you can put your phone or tablet on that QR code and it takes you to 27 short films that relate to stories in the book. So you can read and immerse. And there are many things on the Sea Change Project’s website where one can immerse into these stories and go much further in things that we’ve talked about.
TS: Craig, I’m going to have to say goodbye to you now, but as we say goodbye to all of our listeners, you mentioned you can just go outside, make a relationship with one animal, one creature that lives somewhere else out your door. And I’m wondering if people want to take this conversation and make it very real in their life. Right after listening to this, they’re going to walk outside. Give us just a few pointers to how we can open all of our senses to our own wildness right outside our door.
CF: Great idea, Tami. Thank you. So go outside. And it could be the simplest of creatures. It could be an ant, it could be a caterpillar, it could be a bird. And when I say “get to know it,” I say “really get curious.” Start to understand what that animal’s doing, who are its predators, who are its prey, who are its allies. And just through that one animal, if you really get to know it and try to study it, and you need maybe 10 minutes, half an hour a day, write down a few notes. Look it up. Use everything in your tool kit to understand that creature. Over a few years, that creature, I promise you, will become your greatest teacher, and your mind will change 100% as you get to know that animal deeper and deeper. And I mean, it’s just a simple case of you don’t have to be very clever; you just have to have persistence and curiosity. And then you will start to know the wild and know yourself.
TS: Academy Award–winning filmmaker Craig Foster. My Octopus Teacher and the book Amphibious Soul. Again, learn more at seachangeproject.com. Craig, thank you for making my heart and awareness much, much bigger. Thank you.
CF: Bless you, Tami. Wonderful talking to you. Thanks so much.
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