Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We are filling the darkness with light.
We are filling the quiet with noise.
And all of these extra stimuli that we've added to the world...
I don't think we naturally think of them as pollutants, but they are.
They are things that we have put in the world at times and places where they don't belong and that are harmful to the other creatures that we share the planet with.
I think probably for us directly, one of the most insidious consequences of pollution is that it severs our relationship with the natural world.
So light at night stops us from seeing the stars and the darkness.
Noise pollution stops us from hearing the calls of birds and other animals around us.
And it makes the natural world seem more impoverished, smaller, and just more distant from our everyday lives.
You know, I wrote large chunks of this book concurrently with reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic.
And it really helped my mental health to be spending a lot of my time thinking about how
all of these wondrous things that other animals are doing and experiencing all around us.
Thinking about the umwelt of another creature is a lot like going on and is a lot like an act of travel, going to an alien world, traveling to a parallel dimension, all from the comfort of your own home.
And it really has been that for me.
I would almost call it escapism, but it's not.
It's actually the opposite of that.
It's an immersion in the true and full reality that we're always in and that we miss.
I did get hit by a mantis shrimp, which has the most powerful punch in nature.
This was a very, very small mantis shrimp.
And it still hurt.
Showing 301–320 of 354 · page 16 of 18
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