Art Heals All Wounds

We Loved It All: Lydia Millet on Loss, Connection and Telling Good Stories

Lydia Millet Season 7 Episode 2

In this episode of 'Art Heals All Wounds,' I have the pleasure of speaking with the author, Lydia Millet. Lydia’s latest book 'We Loved It All: A Memory of Life' explores themes of interconnectedness, extinction, and climate change. She shares insights into her writing process and the challenges of addressing such monumental issues through storytelling. The conversation also delves into the cultural narratives that have led to environmental degradation and the potential of new, inclusive stories that could inspire change. Lydia’s work is a reminder of the importance of love and protection for all beings as essential components in the fight against mass extinction and climate catastrophe.

 

00:00 Introduction to Art Heals All Wounds

00:44 The Extinction Crisis

02:16 Interview with Lydia Millet

05:15 Lydia Millet on Writing and Climate Change

11:56 The Role of Stories in Shaping Our World

30:01 The Importance of Love and Protection

35:02 Conclusion and Call to Action

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[00:00:00] Pam Uzzell: Do you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell.

(Birdsong)

[00:00:44] In 1987, David Boynton recorded the mating song of a male Kauai O'o bird. Even though the male sang, no female ever came. The kuaio'o bird was officially declared extinct in 2000. When my partner and I landscaped our yard four years ago, we chose plants that would be food for somebody. Figs and avocados for us, then loads and loads of flowering plants to feed pollinators and birds.

[00:01:17] When I sit outside, I watch to see who visits there. Loads and loads of honeybees. And most days, a single, solitary bumblebee. All of our cute bee costumes are modeled on the bumblebee's distinctive yellow and black furry bodies. Now bumblebees have disappeared from at least eight states and are on the brink of extinction in America. Reasons being, among other things, habitat destruction, pesticides, and climate change. It's weird to think that potentially the only bumblebees we'll see in the future are children and pets dressed up for Halloween. We're in a period of mass extinction, when animals of all kinds are quietly slipping away from the world stage.

[00:02:10] What animal will you miss the most when it's gone? 

[00:02:16] Today I'm talking with Lydia Millett. Lydia Millett's latest book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, talks a lot about these animals we're losing. In We Loved It All, you'll learn a fair amount about Lydia. But, it's not a memoir. We Loved It All encompasses so much more than that.

[00:02:39] I would say that it's, instead, a book about the interconnectedness of beings on Earth, including human and other animals and plant beings. The anecdotes from Lydia's life are pathways guiding us along the journey of the impact of human animals on the rest of the planet. Lydia didn't write a me me me story that is a memoir,

[00:03:03] not because there's anything wrong with memoir, But because we need to come up with other stories. Good stories that don't just center only a self or even humans. Telling stories is how we understand ourselves. I think of this book as a way to expand the idea of we, and to examine the outsized role human animals have

[00:03:29] have played in pushing the planet towards being unlivable for ourselves and all the other animals and plants we share it with. If we can begin to tell good stories that allow all beings, animals, human and otherwise, and plants as part of the narrative, how might this type of story affect how we see and treat all the beings who share this planet?

[00:03:57] Can this kind of story create space for us to remember how much we love these other beings? And will this love inspire us to protect them?

[00:04:13] You want to know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app. So easy, right? And if you really want to give the show a boost, leave me a five star rating or review.

[00:04:30] Hi Lydia, thank you so much for being on Art Heals All Wounds. Can you start by telling people who you are and what you do? 

[00:04:37] Lydia Millet: My name is Lydia Millet. I'm a writer. I have always been mostly a fiction writer, although I've done things like reviews and art writing and opinion writing as well. This is my first non fiction book, and I also work [00:05:00] and have worked for many years at an organization called the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a conservation group devoted to endangered species protection and climate change advocacy.

[00:05:15] Pam Uzzell: Your book, We Loved It All, is so amazing, but really briefly, I do want to just mention that I first read you as a fiction writer, reading A Children's Bible, which scared the crap out of me, um, in that I felt like a lot of, it might be, it might be considered dystopian, but I felt like, no, this is the new reality of now

[00:05:44] that's being written about, like, devastating climate events that really just crush civilization as we know it, even if it's for a short time. And I'm wondering about your decision. You've been writing many novels up until that point. I'm wondering about your decision to put climate change into a novel.

[00:06:03] Lydia Millet: You know, it had always been more difficult. I'm sure for others too, but it has always been difficult to write about because of the sheer magnitude of it and the many faceted quality of, of the existential quandary that it puts us in, the abstraction in certain ways, the politics, um, the science, all of it makes fictional renderings of climate change difficult to grapple with.

[00:06:36] More and more I see, of course, people making art about it, writing about it across media, creating stuff that has to do with climate change. I mean, it's sort of in the background of everything I think we do now. But just a few years ago, and I write about this in We Loved It All, it really was sort of uncool to bring up at parties.

[00:06:59] And, I've written about connected things for a long time. I've written about animals. I'm really an animal writer in a certain sense. And just, I'm consistently fascinated by the way we love animals and the way we use animals and the way our culture is made of animals. And so I've always written about matters of animals.

[00:07:24] And I, you know, I don't wish to exclude plants, by the way, this particular book of mine really does give short shrift to, to the green world. And I don't mean to do that because I love the more I live in the world, the more I, I recognize how infinite our debt is to those beings who don't, who don't move, you know, but who, who turn the sun into energy and into life for us.

[00:07:51] But anyway, it's harder to tell stories about plants than it is about animals. And I sort of fell into that trap in this, in this book. What I'm trying to say is that I've written about animals for a long time, and matters of extinction and climate change was harder, but finally simply had to be tackled because you can't write about any, any animals anymore, including human animals, without writing about the breakdown of the climate.

[00:08:20] Pam Uzzell: And just one thing I would say is that you do give time to non moving living beings in your new book. But I love the choice of word being because you really do bring out some aspects of trees and other things that are incredibly important for us to understand about sentience. I do want to ask you in the title of this book, 'We Loved It All'.

[00:08:46] What is it that you're describing? 

[00:08:50] Lydia Millet: Well, first of all, I always want titles to just be a cracked open door, you know, a sort of brief and it's sort of mysterious view into a room that you can't see all of. And so I never wish my titles to be self explanatory. Not that I resist your question, but just to say that I don't think that titles should be, you shouldn't be able to encapsulate a book in a title.

[00:09:16] You should only be able to hint at what the reader might encounter inside, which is why, you know, I really, like, resisted a subtitle that had, say, the word memoir in it, because I didn't really think this was exactly a memoir. And it's also not an anti memoir per se, because I've had questions about that.

[00:09:35] That is to say, it's not a rebellious act against memoirs, or the genre of memoir, but it is just a kind of personal, natural history, I think, I would say. It's kind of, it has to do with me, but I'm, but only in that I'm kind of wandering through the landscape of, of the book and the world and, uh, you know, you need someone to [00:10:00] push the button in the elevator or whatever.

[00:10:02] Uh, so the 'it' in the title, I am coming back to that. The it can be, I think, whatever you read into it in that moment of, of perceiving the title. Obviously, once you enter the, the sentences of the book and the language of the book, some 'its' are more likely than other its, right? But really, to me, the it is the whole of us and the rest.

[00:10:28] And I think that we are only ourselves because of the others that we have co evolved with, and that the whole of that it is what I'm, what I'm trying to evoke. 

[00:10:43] Pam Uzzell: If you're talking about what people would, might read into that 'it', I felt like it was definitely almost a taking for granted of the natural world.

[00:10:54] And that it was ours to live in as we pleased. And we've had this very long period of really, especially here in what we would call the West, living large with our fossil fuels while believing that nature would always be unchanging, both in enriching us, but also for us to use. And that we're kind of at a moment where we have to reckon with that.

[00:11:21] Lydia Millet: That's a beautiful way of putting it. Taking for granted, I think that's a beautiful formulation. 

[00:11:26] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, and you are writing in this moment where I think there's so much anxiety and grief and all kinds of things that humans are acting out that they may not even be aware of why they're acting it out around not only climate catastrophe, which we see weekly, if not daily, but in the disappearance of these other beings.

[00:11:56] You know, mass extinction has been a word that's been thrown around for a long time, but you really vividly bring this into storytelling. And I do want to ask you about the personal anecdotes, your decision to put them in because I did feel like they were this door for us to walk into this story as well.

[00:12:15] When did you have in mind kind of the shape of this book? That your, your life would be a part of it while not being the, a memoir per se. 

[00:12:28] Lydia Millet: You know, I think I figured that out to some degree as I, I went along. I did need help from other people with this book in a way I, I haven't in my fiction. That's not to say that other people haven't helped by reading my fiction and, and editing my fiction, but, um, It's a whole different, it's an order of magnitude, um, harder for me as someone who's never written, with an I that is, um, unfiltered, you know, like with an I, I mean, the letter I that is unfiltered, to sort of decide how to structure the book was, I don't think particularly, I don't think it's a particularly interesting subject, but it, it had to sort of be figured out as I went along.

[00:13:08] I first had almost twice the length of material and it had a lot more animals and plants actually in it. It was more sort of encyclopedic. And then I realized that was just, I mean, first of all, my agent told me it was overwhelming, but I realized there was just too much material. And another friend of mine, a dear friend of mine, um, read it and he told me it was like two books in one, but I still wanted to have that quality of two books.

[00:13:39] That is, I wanted it to be personal, and also sort of general and speculative and dreamy, you know, I wanted there to be these real physical encounters, because I think, I think we are losing so many of the ways we've perceived the world in the past, you know, we're sort of reducing the way we use our senses in the world because of being enthralled to our screens and to electronic media and to the boxes all kinds of boxes, which I discuss in the book the kind of boxes that we put ourselves in and that we see the world through I think we really are reducing our physical relationship to the world, to primarily vision and hearing, and all the other senses are sort of falling away, and I worry, worry about how that reduces us as creatures in the world, and so I did want to have these worldly, mundane in a sense of worldly, but worldly interactions that were concrete and narrative in the book, and the only way I could really do that, other than snippets of natural history. You know, which are secondhand, obviously, which I've gleaned from other sources, but the only other way was to just tell bits and pieces of my own, my own life so far.

[00:14:57] So it did end up being this kind of hybrid, which there's [00:15:00] precedent for certainly, you know, sort of natural naturalists and natural history writers who write quite differently from the way I write, have done this for, for a very long time, made themselves just sort of characters in this wandering through nature, right?

[00:15:15] And my version of that may be different, but it, I think there's still precedent for, in other words, I don't think I'm, you know, inventing a new form or anything. I think there's a lot of precedent for just people telling their stories as they make their way through the natural world. 

[00:15:35] Pam Uzzell: Right. And I think that going back to the feedback you said you got earlier, that it was overwhelming, I did find those personal snippets and stories as my way as I was going through so many times I thought, Oh, that reminds me of when this happened or when I did this.

[00:15:55] And then also just to be honest, some of them are really funny, you know, and I think had those not been there, the book is overwhelming, especially if you care about animals, even a smidgen. It's really overwhelming. And, um, I think being able to find a way in is really important. And I also think it's really important because ultimately you do question a lot of narratives and stories that we tell ourselves, that we tell about ourselves. And I thought that was really valuable. And I'm wondering if there are some stories that we've told ourselves that are particularly egregious in terms of where we find ourselves right now and with the natural world. 

[00:16:50] Lydia Millet: Yeah, I, I think the sort of dominant stories in, I guess, for lack of a better word, Western, as you said, culture, like industrialized culture or whatever that is.

[00:17:04] I think that the really mainstream, the really big stories are generally not stories that give us good models for anything except Capitalism, really, um, to be unsubtle about it, you know, we have this really powerful narrative of the triumph of the self of, um, mastery of rising above the rest, right? The, the, for what is it to be excellent?

[00:17:32] Well, to be excellent is to be better than others, you know, you know, we glorify excellence. Why? Why? Because it's better than good. It's, and it's better than mediocre. And it's, so everything for us is based on, in a certain way, in market, pre market capitalism, or so-called pre market capitalism and late capitalism.

[00:17:55] Everything is based on not the collective, but the self. And our stories have tended to promote that in numerous ways. But I think the stories need to change, because stories really are everything to us. Everything that's not material life, the actual stuff of survival, is a story, because it's famously the way that we cohere a chaotic universe.

[00:18:24] It's how our brains make sense of everything, and we have to tell better stories if we want, I think, to live in a way that prolongs our survival in a finite place, which this world is. It's not It's not a place that can sustain infinite growth. But we continue to insist otherwise, right? And so those kinds of stories are hurting us and everything else.

[00:18:54] Pam Uzzell: Yes. I don't want to put you on the spot, but what is a good story we could tell as opposed to the stories we have been telling? 

[00:19:04] Lydia Millet: I mean, I think a good story is a story not about being better than it's a story that's, and you know, it's tough. It's a tough one for sure. Cause I mean, for example, like. You know how the, there are, there are board games that are, what are they called, they're like collaborative games?

[00:19:24] Cooperative games? I honestly hate them. They are so boring, you know, just I mean So it is hard to write compelling stories that are not like a race, you know, and that are It is a more complicated thing to do. On the other hand, many of our art forms, you know, like music, for example, which in some ways I think is the most powerful form of human expression in the world.

[00:19:56] I mean, just, you know, music is I think ascendant in [00:20:00] so many ways, but we don't just love music because songs glorify us. You know, we, we love it on all these different visceral levels and all these, um, complex. I think neurological, emotional ways. The answer to what the next story is. I mean, that is the question, you know, that is the question.

[00:20:22] How do we tell stories that don't debase everyone who's not us? Stories that are about communion, but still respect the sort of infinite pleasures of having a private mind, right? None of us could stand to be without that. I don't think we can not be individuals. I don't, I think we just are. I don't think we have to fight so hard for it as Americans seem to believe.

[00:20:49] I mean, I think we just are, you know, like it's okay. Your being a self is really not threatened unless we make it so. There's just so much fear. The fear around individual liberties becomes obviously its own tyranny, right? That's what's happening now. Like, where liberty is defined, my liberty is actually your constraint.

[00:21:10] My liberty is, is you not being able to have liberty, right? It's kind of seeming to be the way we increasingly define, define freedom in America. And, you know, that form of individualism is, is not gonna, it's not gonna save anyone. 

[00:21:25] So I did not answer your question. Like, what is a good story? I can tell you what the bad stories are.

[00:21:34] Pam Uzzell: Right. 

[00:21:34] Lydia Millet: The good stories, that's for some genius to uncover, you know. 

[00:21:38] Pam Uzzell: Well, we'll debate whether you're a genius. I, I vote yes, but, um. 

[00:21:43] Lydia Millet: Yeah, I set you up for that one. A mark of genius, indeed. 

[00:21:51] Pam Uzzell: So, you do have this idea in the book, which I think is brilliant. Which is that we could actually publicly grieve, mourn, a way of life that's passing.

[00:22:07] You know, we, maybe we really, really did love that first car, which was, you know, an eight mile per gallon SUV, and we drove everywhere in it and really, we loved getting on jets every week and going somewhere. And we loved our big, enormous, juicy hamburgers. And we loved, you know, our leather clothing and all these things, which even that is not even really getting to what's happening in the world, but there's a way to acknowledge like, yeah, that was really fun.

[00:22:44] That was really great when we could do that. And we sort of, most of us blindly were doing it. There were obviously some very brilliant scientists who have recognized global warming for decades and decades, centuries, but most of us were blindly just living the good life. And it was great. But there's another, let's give a very good, you know, eulogy to that life, and then let's embrace a different life, which as you've used this word, it can be good.

[00:23:19] It doesn't have to be "It's the best!". It can be a good life for everyone, you know? 

[00:23:27] Lydia Millet: Yeah, I think, and it was someone else whose name I really should research, because I don't remember it right now, it was at some, I don't go to many conferences, but it was something like a conference that I happened to be at maybe 10 years ago, and some scholar was presenting on fossil fuels, and, she made a beautiful speech about, I mean, essentially about, although it was more academic than this, but it was essentially about, you know, our fetishism of fossils, but also like our genuine cultural rootedness in them.

[00:24:02] And, you know, almost like the beauty of, of many of the things that fossil fuels have brought us. And I get, I guess, I guess I don't think that we need to always have one tone around the things that we now are fighting. You know, this sort of tone of, we don't always, we can have a tone of, like, we're entitled to have whatever tone we need to have, of course, but I think that this sort of, you know, I work in environmentalism and I love and admire those I work with who really are on the front lines of things, and I just admire them so much, but I see why environmentalists have gotten a certain reputation, which is somewhat propagandistic and not entirely deserved, certainly, but for this sort of like, occasionally for this like shrillness or this know-it-all-ness about these matters, right, we've gotten [00:25:00] this, especially in the U. S., but in Europe, I would say also. This kind of reputation for being scolds, right, and It turns out we, sorry, but like we did tell you so, we were actually right about it all. But, notwithstanding, um, that, we still don't want to be those like annoying kind of gremlins on the, on the shoulder, or devils, or angels, or whatever, any hovering beast that's over your shoulder.

[00:25:26] We don't, we don't want to be that. I think that we have actually with fossil fuels as with some of the other things you mentioned that have marked our lives with forms of luxury over the past century Leather or whatever that ends up, you know in the Ganges like all the chemicals of which you know flow downstream you know anything any number of production processes and outputs that we have engaged with in this sort of prodigious way.

[00:25:55] I think we, we owe our past selves the respect, and even material culture, the respect of just saying plainly that we have loved it. We have loved all these things. I still love the Ziplocs that my partner uses so many of, you know, in their neat, with their neat labeling of everything. There are so many things still around me, so many plastics that my daily life depends on.

[00:26:25] And that all should go away. It's true. But let's not be scolds about it. Let us look back at really the forms of beauty that those things have brought us in many ways. And it's not to say that they haven't also done harm. We, we know they have, but those things aren't mutually exclusive, right? There, there never has been.

[00:26:44] There never has been beauty without sacrifice or, you know, death without life or any of those things always imply each other. So we should give ourselves the respect and we should also, and we should also move on. 

[00:26:59] Pam Uzzell: Listening to you, I feel that we're sort of stuck in this place where we can no longer be awed by certain types of progress.

[00:27:09] You know, when you think about the potential for renewable energy, it's actually amazing in every way in the benefits to the environment, but also to jobs and to the economy. And it's not a net zero thing, which fossil fuels sort of is. I feel like there's a race, like, let's get them all out and burn them up and then we'll burn up too.

[00:27:36] And I feel like our sense of awe over progress, like, oh my gosh, isn't it amazing? The sun, which is there all the time, could give us energy, or the wind can give us energy or...we're stuck, I feel like. 

[00:27:52] Lydia Millet: That's true. I mean, we used to, and I think this is something I, I briefly, I don't know, wrote a thing about in there.

[00:27:58] It was like, we used to worship scientists and engineers in this country, and now we vilify them. We used to see them as great Americans, you know, and now they're the enemy for so many of us, right? And education is the enemy. Anything that threatens the citadel that we, we already feel is embattled, we now resent and impugn.

[00:28:22] It's as though we're just dug in. So many of us are just dug in and, and I think that there is something, like there's something so correct in what you say about almost a failure to marvel anymore at ingenuity. Like, where is that marveling that we once felt, you know, when the Oroville brothers took off into the sky?

[00:28:44] Or the Apollo missions? Or where, where is, where is that gone? Like, why aren't you proud of what we're doing now? Why are you only proud of what we've done before? 

[00:28:57] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, it feels like we are in a dark age, desperately needing a renaissance, but with such greater stakes than what we now refer to the dark ages. 

[00:29:09] Lydia Millet: Yeah, and I wish that it weren't, I mean, if I had one wish, I think it would just be for everything to be slowed down, you know, for everything, the leaving of everything and the changing of everything for us just to have more time to understand

[00:29:28] what to do and how better to know ourselves and the rest of, for lack of a better word, creation. You know, we just need more time than we have, I think. And this is why things like this year's election are so terrifying because we just, we don't have four years to throw away. We just don't have the time.

[00:29:49] Other creatures don't have the time. Other people across the world don't have the time. We just don't. We don't have the time to waste. 

[00:29:57] Pam Uzzell: Yes, I [00:30:00] completely agree. I don't want to stop talking with you until we talk about this idea of love in your book. And I think that's the component that maybe we're missing.

[00:30:17] You know, we say we love our old way of life. We love our this and our that but there are other things we love, too, that. I feel like we're suppressing that you are reminding us of in this book and can you talk about that that what we love that we're forgetting about and also the importance of proclaiming that out loud 

[00:30:38] Lydia Millet: Well, one thing I believe that we love, we have a tremendous love that people naturally have, a tremendous love of otherness of all kinds, partly for its own beauty and fascination and charisma, but partly also because we need...we need things in the world that we don't yet know.

[00:30:58] We are creatures whose brains operate by novelty. You know, the, the pleasure hormones in our, in our brains really are triggered by novelty more than anything else. The encounter of newness in the field of our perception. Um, so, you know, oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin, all the neurotransmitters that make us happy.

[00:31:22] They require newness in, in all its different forms. And the others in the world are that newness. You know, we don't have stories to tell if we live in a world that is already entirely familiar to us. And I think we all love, infinitely love discovering new creatures, new things, new places, just for starters, just for starters, like that in and of itself should make us want to hold everything in the universe close to us and not let it go.

[00:31:57] Because all of us were made by deep time, and we can't be created easily again in human time. And I say we, meaning the complement of creatures and organisms that exist now in the world, that we've always had, for the most part, in the world with us. Since we've had consciousness, you know, and are about to be without in many cases, um, which will be, I think, a very harmful form of novelty for us.

[00:32:27] And then also, and this is just a very plain thing, but I think that the way we love our children, those of us who have children, and I wholeheartedly support those and thank those who don't have children, by the way. I talk in the book a little bit about how, you know, I think it's essentially a selfish act to have kids, certainly in my case, it was, and yet we, we like to paint it as selfless as a culture, really quite a reversal, but anyway, but those of us who do have kids or who even just like have people in our lives who, who seem more vulnerable than we are and, and who we have to protect.

[00:33:05] could also be elders, you know, um, but we know how fierce love can be and we know what we can do when we have to protect others, you know, when we have to protect, be it our children, be it our elderly parents, be it just anyone that can't protect themselves, right? Um, and I think we need to take that, the fierceness of that duty, which is like one of the only forms of duty we still really embrace as

[00:33:36] as civic people and project it over the rest of, of what is. You know, because it is so precarious, that biosphere, and we can't protect the young things and the small things and the frail things, you know, if we don't protect their life support. And it's, I mean, it's quite simple, really. 

[00:34:01] Pam Uzzell: Yes. Quite simple.

[00:34:03] And also 

[00:34:04] Lydia Millet: Easier easier said than done. 

[00:34:06] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. Yeah. Well, your book is beautiful and hard. I mean, I, I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you that, but the thing is right now, it, the real world is hard. And I feel like you're really holding up this really important mirror in reading this book. And so I thank you for the hard stories and also for the personal anecdotes.

[00:34:31] I did need to laugh every now and then, which some of your stories are so relatable. That I did laugh out loud. And then I also cried and felt like I had to put the book down a few times. So it's a beautiful book and it's so important. Thank you for writing it and for talking to me about it today. 

[00:34:53] Lydia Millet: Well, thank you for being such a, such a good reader of this book.

[00:34:57] I deeply appreciate that.[00:35:00] 

[00:35:02] Pam Uzzell: You're listening to art heals all wounds.

[00:35:28] Thank you to Lydia Millet for being on the show today. I'm a huge fan of her writing. And if you haven't read her novel, A Children's Bible, I can't recommend it enough. But I would say that this new book, We Loved It All, is an urgent read. I agree with Lydia that I wish we could slow down and have more time to figure all of this out.

[00:35:53] How do we thoughtfully, yet urgently, get to work? The problem of global warming isn't something that any one individual can change. But collectively, we know that we can affect policy to change how we create and use energy, and how we conserve habitats in a way that allows for humans to thrive and other animals to survive.

[00:36:19] For me, reading We Loved It All was a big help in sorting out my values and reminding me of all that I love on this earth. 

[00:36:29] If you have a story about how art and creativity play a role in your life, I'd love to hear from you. Whether it's your own creative practice or a creative work that's affected you in some way.

[00:36:42] Share it with me in a voicemail, and I'll share it on the show. Just go to my website. arthealsallwoundspodcast. com and click where it says leave Pam a voicemail. 

[00:36:54] Thank you to Alex and Julie for leaving me a donation. For anyone listening, if you feel able to, you can also leave me a small donation for the show.

[00:37:06] This show is completely independent, so anything you leave is greatly appreciated. 

[00:37:11] Thanks for listening. 

[00:37:14] The music you've heard in this podcast is by Ketsa and Lobo Loco. The mating song of the Kaua'i O'o bird that you heard in the intro was recorded by David Boynton. 

[00:37:26] This podcast was edited by Iva Hristova.