Interspecies Communication & Bears

I've never sat in a circle with a bear it's very cool I want to pet him so bad I really want to B him Parker you really want to cuddle that bear don't you earlier this year I interviewed environmentalist author Derek Jensen when I was at his house he told me he was working on a new project building a friendship and interspecies communication with bears the concept sounds absolutely insane at a first glance but he offered not only to let me meet said Bears when they awoke from their hibernation but to tell me exactly what interspecies communication is if I return to Northern California in the summer and given the breakdown of so much communication and peace between humans I figured perhaps there's something we can learn from the non-human world so that's exactly what I did so this is really the question that is integral to this entire piece um what is interes communication I think well inter species communication can happen on a bunch of levels and on its most basic level so I used to I used to grow marijuana and I got a really bad apid infestation and I didn't know what to do so I took the plants outside and within 24 hours there were uh wasps all over it eating the Honeydew from the aphids and then within another 24 hours there were all these tiny little black dots and I looked at them under a micro under under a magnify glass and they were itty bitty wasps and they were coming to lay eggs inside the the aphids and the way they got there is the plant sends out phermones that are then received that are then smelled by these Predators so basically the plants were sending out a 911 call and the various uh Predators were the First Responders and the same thing happened decades ago when I lived in Spokane I had this tree that got a really bad aphan infestation and within oh three or 4 days it was covered with ladybug larvae and they just ate like crazy and the the point is that those sorts of communications are happening all the time there's this guy Stefano manuso who uh has actually created a bit of a dictionary of plant terms and what that means is plants don't use vocal cords they send out pheromones and they can send out pheromones to other plants saying hey caterpillars are here you need to change the composition of your leaves or aphrs are here can somebody send over some ladybugs there's a bear oh oh Big Bear's here well we can get up and we can continue these questions we can go say hi to Big Bear and maybe get some shots oh here he is look who's come out to say hi so I've known him for probably seven or eight years he just showed up I've seen him out in the forest too not just here but one of my favorite memories of him is I was just walking through the forest and uh saw him just sitting contemplating the day uh out somewhere sitting just like that staring off into the distance I want to pet him so bad I really want to pet him Parker you really want to cuddle that bear don't you yeah please let me out let me add him about 25 years ago 24 years ago uh a mother bear dropped her yearling off here and don't know why and my mom had always heard that you're not supposed to feed bears and you're not it's illegal and I don't feed bears but my mom did well she didn't at first At first she would go out and yell at the bear who was left who was left off here and the bear would just look at her and so then she would like raise up a broom and say get out of here and the bear somehow out stubborn my mom which I didn't think was possible but the bear did and eventually mom's like okay you can have an apple and then okay you can have a couple apples then hey Derek you want to buy some dog food and and then we ended up with this deal where there was a a uh Dale Bakery in another town and whenever I would drive to that town I would pick up big uh shopping carts full of bread and so that uh my mom and mama was so what we eventually named that that bear developed this relationship and my mom could go on the porch and she would yell and Mama would show up and um and it was it was more than that it wasn't just I mean there was there was food but you know food is just sort of the central Act of courtship or the central Act of relationship among humans you know want to go get something to eat it's I mean that's that's how we get to know each other so that was sort of the entree but then mama every year she would bring her babies when they were the size of cocker spaniels and then also and this is no exaggeration um there was one summer where when I would walk from my house to my mom's house uh the bear would walk next to me in the forest and I'm not making that up I never videoed it because I just I don't happen to do that very often but anyway so that was one of the most extraordinary things in my life this happened she was would wait for me outside the house until I usually come up maybe 4 or 5 and she would just wait outside and then she'd walk up with me and I have rarely in my life been so honored so anyway then then Mama disappears and um she's gone for years and this is another thing about this is that these bears are all wild and I might see one and then I'll never see it again and I don't know did it die did it move away did it so we had no idea what happened to Mama and my mom and I presumed she had died but then my mom got pancreatic cancer and uh again this is no exaggeration uh she's dying of pancreatic cancer and she's sitting on this couch over here and um one day a week before she enters terminal delirium she looks out on the porch and she says that's that's Mama she's back and uh so that bear sat on the porch for every day all day for the my mom's final week before she had a terminal delirium and then after that as soon as my mom entered terminal delirium she left and I've never seen her since so that's how it started with the family with well my mom and I with with seeing bears and then since my mom died like I said I I don't feed them but there are there was five and a half years ago so there was almost 20 years of my mom feeding bears and generation after generation of bears who knew this as home and ever since then they still they still come back and say hi and they still come back and hang out and they know that this is a safe place that they're not going to get shot um they're not going to get yelled at very often um only if they like bang on the windows or destroy the porch too much I mean they're not scary at all they're not dangerous but they are extremely dangerous to porches and Amazon packages I hear as well oh I don't have anything delivered to my home because uh anything that comes here gets carried into the woods like there was a a box of books got delivered and I put in a claim because it never arrived and then like three months later I'm walking in the forest and I see an entire box of books what I'm really hoping that emerges from this interview and from the book that I'm going to write about in a couple next year is that people can have these relationships with large with what large or small animals wherever you live it doesn't matter you could live in a city I know someone who uh spends most of her disposable income on peanuts and bird seed and then she sits in Central Park all day she's retired she sits in Central Park all day and feeds the squirrels feeds the C feeds the pigeons feeds everybody we can have and they don't have to involve food like I said I don't feed them I just have a safe space for them and you can have it doesn't matter if it's if it's garter snakes if it's spiders if it's bats I mean there's just this whole world out there and it's not as scary as we've been taught to think you know not every snake in the world wants to bite you on the ankle and you know these Bears they just live their lives and and we can have this is one of the things that our separation costs us is there's there's a line that I just love there's this this astronomer back 15 years ago somebody asked him why we need to explore outer space he said to answer that most important question of all which is are we all alone and the answer is we're not all alone we have all these neighbors and you know this all we have to do is open up and I'm actually really surprised given how horribly we collectively treat non-humans I'm surprised that they'll have anything to do with this but they will they you know this all started because that one that one Bear Mama would be sitting out there when she was a yearling and my mom would yell at her and she would just she would just sit like big bear was sitting she would just you can yell but I'm staying I'm stay this is my backyard too my backyard too and um eventually they had just a delightful long-term relationship and I don't know how to explain why Mama came back when my mom was dying I don't know that I need to explain it it just and if I hadn't been here taking care of my mom as she died I don't know that I'd believe it you know if you told me that story I'd be like yeah and again she walked next to me in the forest she came up to me and it's just I wouldn't have come up to her I wouldn't go up to a bear and stand next to her and walk but she decided to do it to me and I mean I at the at the time I was carrying pepper spray you know I I carried pepper spray and I like don't get too close but she never did anything it's funny I follow all of these lately as I've been speaking to friends like yourself and other people I know I've started following all these Pages cuz I'm by the ocean uh orcas and sharks and seeing people swim with them and learning about them more and even learning that if you swim away from sharks they view you as prey whereas if you swim towards them and just hold their nose and turn it away they'll swim right on by it seems like just a a lack of knowledge and I think you were even telling me earlier the guy who made Jaws regrets making it Peter benley the guy who wrote the novel later profoundly apologized for what he did to sharks CU he said they're not like that and I think think so much of this is just what we're used to this is this is so scary for a lot of people people will say gosh aren't you scared to walk through the forest when there bears it's like that's never scared me at all but honestly there are times I've been in big cities where I have been scared walking down the street and you know I I have known people who grew up in big cities who weren't so scared you always that's always just what what Miss Stevie Miss Stevie like we might sort of smell oh somewhere in the room there's chocolate and the dog is like there's a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup right there like how we would see it that's how they smell things like a very discreet little package and they know exactly what it is and where it is which is why they can just go to your napsack and pull out your cheese and crackers or whatever you've got in there they can can smell it and they know exactly what it is yes I know look at you the people who believe that this is possible to all the cultures around the world which is all of us until very recently who understood that the entire universe was alive that it was pulsing that we were all made of the same stuff that communication was possible because we all have something similar everything rocks rain planets people Rivers there's a way to communicate with every being um they're not the ones who wrecked the world they left the world in very good shape one by one as they died the people who haven't believed that are the ones who have BL brought us to the the edge of total Destruction so it doesn't make for a good it's not a good basis for a culture to say that it's all just dead matter for us to use like our God complexes of made us want to transcend the very things that make life worth living something yeah yeah you think this is why we have such a big Mental Health crisis today is because we are like veering off from just the Simplicity of what makes the body in mind happy yes I think that there's a number of factors one is extremely horrible nutrition like we are eating absolute junk for our bodies so we're not eating good quality animal fats anymore nobody's getting enough protein except the bodybuilders um and even when you do eat things you know that you should be eating like milk and eggs and beef uh they are most of it's factory farmed so they're being fed the wrong food which means that their products don't have the correct ratio of amino acids or essential fatty acids so all of this means that your brain is never going to function properly so it's a big chunk of it right there then you add into that um the what everybody is eating is essentially one form or another of sugar or cheap carbohydrate so you've got what the blood sugar spikes due to your emotional health which is terrible um but you also have the inflammation from the high Omega sixes and that's because it's all grained and plants don't really make Omega-3s they don't need them what they do make is Omega sixes but we don't really need Omega six is hardly any what we need is Omega-3s and in fact if you eat a grass bed ruminant what do you know it's the perfect ratio of Omega 6 is Omega-3s which is way more evidence for what we already knew was true we evolved on the Savannah of Africa hunting down the huge those enormous herds of grass-fed ruminants that's what we ate to become human so you Veer too much off of that and yeah your brain's not going to function correctly I know I was a vegan for 20 years and I lost two decades of my life to that horrible depression and anxiety and I didn't know that's what it was nobody told me this was supposed to be the best thing ever and I wrecked my life and then I think the other part of it is um yeah what this way of life what that does to us as we are super social animals like we're not just social so we're not just dogs and we're not just horses um the the level of so sociality that we need that we evolve to have is like just a whole another level of above other social mammals and it's because our young are vulnerable for so long that we really do need that family that kin structure that tribe um and it it's something that some they will tell PE psychiatrists will tell people to do this especially if they live alone turn on the television you don't even have to put the sound on but just seeing human faces smiling can really really help and it's like how did we need to be told not to live alone in Little Boxes like it's so sad that that's where we are now um and I know the social media is not helping I mean look at the just the level of depression and anxiety now in the teenagers is completely heartbreaking to me and it's because they don't see each other they're all on those little screens all day long on multiple screens too I mean it's terrifying it's not even just one they'll have three or four going at once I keep seeing it over and over again where I'm like driving and I'll see a car beside me parked and they headphones in playing a game on the phone an iPad with a live stream on it's blowing my mind we seem to be the only creatures that have gotten what our bodies and Minds need despite the ones that think the most it's yeah definitely strange we collectively have too much hatred and disrespect for Predators especially for large mammals um but especially predators and um they're just other beings and they're not killing machines who are going to try to hurt you every chance they get and again I there's a big big difference between respect and and fear and I'm not afraid of him but I'm also not going to go scratch his ears and I'm not going to if we were not near the house I probably wouldn't be sitting this comfortably either but but they're tremendously misunderstood uh they I mean they're just again they're just other beings who have their own lives we're not a pra species this is this is something that there's this idea that if you see a bear it's going to immediately attack you and you know if I went up and punched him in the nose he he would certainly but he's just another being living his life and I think that we can have these same relationships with elk Buffalo deer wolves um if you be friendly to them I know that's going to sound hopelessly naive to people but I mean this is just true I mean this is this is I think they're very curious you asked what he thought of me I think he's very curious just like I'm curious about him except there's a lot more human so we're a lot less uh we're a lot less uh uh unusual to see to see in your day um but prior to Conquest prior to California getting conquered uh if you were near a body of water you would probably see a grizzly bear about every 15 minutes so they were a part of every everyday life it's just seeing a grizzly bear would be like seeing a mosquito I've never sat in a circle with a bear um wow it's very cool yeah well we'll go on in I think I think big bear has made his point oh sorry oh didn't mean to scare you bud so in the 19th century there was this horse who became very famous who was named clever Hans and Hans was extremely clever he could add subtract multiply divide he could tell you how many states there were in the United States he could do any of that and and he would do it by by pawing on the ground they eventually found out that the people who were with Hans were not cheating but they did find how it was happening and all the stories that you read about clever Hans usually end up well Hans wasn't really so clever because what they found is that Hans could not in fact figure out what 3 * 3 * 3 is didn't know how many states there were in the United States but instead uh the person who was asking the question would relax very slightly when uh Hans got to the right answer and was they weren't cheating it's just you know it's like if it's 27 he gets to 24 25 26 27 you got it you know so you just relax even if you're not meaning to so the way they the way they figured out that this was happening is they would ask Hans questions for which the questioner did not know the answer so I would give you you know the the the question you would ask it but you wouldn't know what the answer was anyway so all the stories end up while CL Hans wasn't so clever was he but I take a different lesson from that story which was that Hans may not have been able to count but he could read the slightest movement of your musculature and emotions and honestly which would rather having a friend somebody who can figure out what 3 * 3 * 3 is or somebody who can read the slightest movement of your musculature and emotions I mean everybody is communicating through gesture there's it's very simple like um how do you know that a dog is friendly or that it's not friendly if it's got its hackles raised I that's a form of communication those are just very simple simple levels and just extend it past there I'm not saying that a dog is going to start spouting wienstein at you um but I would frankly prefer that my human friends not spout wienstein at me either um but my point is that that opens the door to us recognizing that there is communication going on um you know the the dogs can certainly not let me know when they're hungry and they'll lie to me too um you know they'll you're not really hungry you're just wanting some more food all this kind of sounds like when you discuss a language older than words you know when it comes to expression and versus verbal explicit communication we kind of prioritize or Chinese or Swedish just things that are explicit but is non-verbal communication equally if not more important we certainly experience those all the time quite often on an unconscious level I mean you can see someone and you know the we've all seen this in movies where the the two Cowboys are standing in the the bar and then one looks at one another way and the other one looks back and then before you know it they're drawing guns you know and they didn't necessarily have to say anything and we know this in you know you're you're on a subway and you meet eyes with somebody and then you look away and you look back and then you look away and you look back and there's there are is communication going on there too or um we've all done this on airplanes where they don't have assigned seating um you go in and you sit there and you do not make eye contact with the people coming down the road because you're hoping that they're not going to sit next to you and so I don't know maybe I'm the only jerk in the world but if if I sit down early and I've got myself a a row with two you know two empty seats I'm definitely crossing my arms getting a little bit of a scowl looking like I'm somebody you it might be unpleasant to sit next to um and then of course when they sit down then I SM once it's done it's then I smile and become a nicer person but until then it's like stay away um so we all and and I mentioned yesterday that uh in basketball or in football in sports you'll see you'll see people make threat displays you know they they make they puff themselves up um they beat on their chests and that's just straight great eight behavior is that anticipatory Bears or real bears okay Tony Tony Tony the dogs get very excited if bears are about to show up and sometimes they get anticipations where it's like I think they're going to show up but they're wrong and sometimes it's real bears so that's what is going on there I I think another reason I think a big reason that we that we ignore this language older than words is that it reminds us that we are animals and that we that we have bodies and not only that we have bodies but we are our bodies and if we like to pretend that we're just sort of a brain and a sack of skin and that's but that's not true we are all of it and we don't really have to go here but um the body is mortal and you know this language is this language reminds us that you know the body falls apart I broke this finger stopping a dog fight last year and so it's going to be like that for the rest of my life and you know it's nice to think or you know I used to be a high jumper and I was I was an athlete and can't do that anymore and that's that's part of life and our bodies Were Meant [Music] to develop and to bring us great joy and eventually to fall apart and it's kind of nice to and I think it's I think it's comforting for a lot of people to forget that um but I don't mean to make it all Melancholy because this is you know what a wonderful gift we've been given with these bodies and and the thing is I mean there's literally true they that they bring us pain they of course they bring us joy too um oh oh you can see the other one peeking behind the tree there they all have names once Derek gets here Lear could I ask you a few questions about them Big Bear comes back every year um he's just starting to put on weight for winter um I think it's triggered by the Light honestly because it's you know we're about what six weeks out from the um summer solstice and all of a sudden their caloric needs just explode because it's just less light and they don't actually hibernate they do what's called torper which is similar enough but it's not exactly hibernation but to survive it they need to put on this insane number of calories so he's probably eating I think it's like 20,000 calories a day at this point and their hunger just it's like bottomless it's like teenage boys plus um and they eat so much that they get diabetic and then they destroy their kidneys but unlike humans when they're in torpor they will regenerate their kidneys so when they wake up in the spring they have perfectly fine brand new kidneys and they start the whole process over again and this little guy is hiding why is he hiding he's afraid of Big Bear a lot of the Bears are um they're fairly um friendly to each other like they don't they don't the female bears are the ones that keep the territory the mays so the the male bears are not particularly territorial um so you will see them hanging out like this and they don't travel in packs they're not particularly um they're not like really bonded to each other but they don't mind each other either and so they will play out here you will see some social behavior are humans the most intelligent creature on Earth part of the problem is that more or less all of the test that we have for intelligence that we've created for intelligence are set up to determine intelligence by what we can answer by by how we do on the test so I could make a test of intelligence I think that the greatest sign of intelligence somebody can have is to have written more than 25 books and what a coincidence I actually meet that metric um but it doesn't it they can't be horror NOS because then Stephen King would be smarter than I am so I I got to make sure there are specific types of books and I mean you get that I'm making a joke with this I hope um we all want to be the most intelligent creature that ever existed what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and Define intelligence in a way that we can that we can pass and that just doesn't really make it seems it seems intuitive that it seems obvious to me that if you if you design a test based on what you can do that you're going to come out the most intelligent but if we're the most depressed species on the planet are we really that intelligent are we really achieving what we want to achieve the the question I always like is is when people say are humans the best species and the way I answer that one is best at what and I mean if you want and this is true for myself too it's like there are some forms of intelligence that I have and that I've got pretty well and there are some other forms of intelligence I just don't have a joke with my mom was that um I am spatially inept so for example I would pack a suitcase to go on tour and then I would bring it up here on my way out my mom would look at the suitcase and laugh and then repack it and there's you can fit in twice as much stuff I'm I've always been spatially inept and so again there are different what are you good at I thought about this with Athletics too because am I a good athlete I mean I I was a good athlete but my when I was in track I was a high jumper I was very good and my roommate for the for the away trips was a shop Putter and we used to laugh sometimes because he couldn't jump six inches off the ground and meanwhile this is non- exaggeration I couldn't pick up the the shot with one hand I had used both hands to pick it up so I had no upper body strength whatsoever and it's the same with intelligence we have some forms I mean you can have people who are it it was really interesting it's way off topic but I remember the guy who was voted class brain in high school was a guy who was really good at math and terrible at English and history and now I'm not bitter or anything at this 50 years later um no it's it's it's just I thought it was really interesting even at 17 I thought it was really interesting that that was considered intelligent and and the other forms I mean how I was never an acting so I don't have a dog in this fight but you know doesn't it take a certain form of of intelligence to to Really perform as an actor doesn't it take a certain form of intelligence I could never have been a painter and I don't think I could have been a musician either I don't have it um and so anyway the same thing applies even on a bigger scale with non-humans that they have if you tested intelligence by uh how well you can detect different scents and um and follow a scent Trail that's we're not going to do so well refusing to perceive the natural world as being full of living beings who have something to say is not adaptive and because it's harming it and it allows you to harm it it leads to you harming it and so whatever is physically true in the universe we also know that this way of life is not that this P how we perceive the world affects how we behave in the world and if you perceive the world is consisting of objects to be exploited you're going to that's how you'll act and if you perceive the world as consisting of other beings to enter into relationship with that's how you'll act it doesn't mean that nobody ever hurts anybody at all but it just means that the others are are beings and that this way of life is not is maladaptive in that it is harming our capacity to live into the future forget what it's doing to everybody else um it's also not going to last so I've made it back from my trip to California and I've had a lot of thoughts about my chats with Derek and meeting the bears but when I got back uh Derek sent out an email to a few friends of his about our interview and you know for all the thoughts I could give to summarize this video none of them would be quite as good as this email I got from Derek so I think I'm just going to read it to you guys to finish this all off hey y' one thing I love about writing books is that I get to do numerous drafts as opposed to life where if you mess up you just have to go on we really only get one long draft in life all of which is to say that in every interview I do I always forget to say something important in a book in a book you can just add the sentences in in your next draft and that was true with the interview with Lauren Southern about bears I forgot something really important I kept saying that we have interspecies communication with domesticated animals all the time and to just extend that same courtesy and affection and attention to wild animals but I left off a big reason we don't do that and I really regret that I didn't also say a big reason we don't extend that courtesy and affection and attention to wild animals is precisely because they are wild they won't Bend to our control they come and they go on their own will they don't come when we call them or take kindly to leashes and for that we hate them especially if they large we cannot stand that they are fully willful beings who refuse to submit and so we manage them we put cers on them we shoot them if they cross us we torment them we trap them we destroy them because they will not submit because they continue to be their own beings we perpetuate the longest war this world has ever seen several thousand years now a war that will be a fight to the Finish probably theirs and certainly ours because attempting to control wild nature kills it as we see I think that there's something really beautiful in that that we can learn um even if you're not like a hardcore environmentalist like Derek Jensen look at someone like redyard Kipling in his poem the god of the copy book headings which is essentially a warning to mankind that you are not above nature you are not above God and if you try to Forever Bend everything to your own will will your huus will kill not just you but the nature around you but even in the end nature always wins the actual reality physical reality no matter what kind of form of transhumanism or utopian ideas we come up with physical reality and the laws of nature will always win and there's something beautiful about that too because as Derek says the tormenting and trapping and destroying of beings that cannot be caged and do not thrive in submission is not something that's healthy for them or us and it destroys I don't know something beautiful that we can all have and all interact with in a healthy way and yeah I don't care what your politics are I know my channel is usually for more right-wing minded people I think that this is a message that should transcend politics thank you guys for watching I hope this has given you some interesting things to think about and I will see you next time