Owls and Awe

A Conversation with Carl Safina

In this episode of BYUradio’s Constant Wonder, host Marcus Smith talks with Carl Safina, a passionate conservationist who rescued a foundling newborn owl on the brink of death. After a couple years, this owl—christened as “Alfie”—was released to the wild, where's she's lived a healthy life, even raising two broods of chicks. Alfie still pays regular visits to her rescuer right in his own back yard.

Carl: There are a lot of people who consider certain buildings and certain books to be sacred and consider no living things to be sacred. This is backwards. Maybe the only thing that really deserves reverence is the process of life and the continuity of life on this [Earth, the] only thing we know of in the entire universe that has this miracle going on it. There are people who have devoted their entire careers to looking for life outside of this planet and outside of this solar system; they haven't found any. There are [essential elements of life] that exist everywhere in the universe. There's light, there's gravity—all the different atoms, subatomic particles that make those atoms, molecules, some of the compounds, they're everywhere. You look for life and you'd see none. At the very least, life is a very rare thing and it's here and we are part of it. I can't think of anything else that really deserves a sense of reverence, except this miracle that we're part of, that we are often taught not to respect. . . .

Let’s put [the word “religious”] in context, because it means a lot of different things to different people. And the religious feeling is that you're connected to something that is bigger in space and time. And we are literally connected to life on this planet, which is much bigger than us in space and time. So, a religious feeling about life and the living world is entirely appropriate. If you don't have that feeling, it's probably because no one ever opened that door for you, like being in an apartment with a closed door and then you open it and there's a beautiful garden outside and you never knew that was there.

And I think that that is the way many people are raised that that door is never opened for them. The other thing is that a miracle is something that defies the laws of physics. It's something that should never happen because matter doesn't work that way. The second law says that the universe tends toward disorder, and if you talk to physicists, they will insist that this is the basic thing about the universe. Well, what if you broke that law? What if you had something that tended toward order? And what if that order created more order and proliferated into many, many ordered forms?

That could make more and more of themselves, until an entire planet was thoroughly covered and infused with all this order that evolves over time get more and more complex . . . that's a miracle. It breaks that law. Biologists know this, but most of them are too intimidated by physics because they can't do the math, and physicists don't really know a lot about living things. And honestly, I mean, that sounds funny, but honestly that's a real dynamic in Science.

Marcus: So, I followed your argument all the way through, and I'm with you. When you were with Alfie. Do you see a little bit of order? A miracle in the moment?

Carl: It’s a religious feeling, it's a feeling that I have about living things, is that you're always in relation and you're always in the miracle. You start to feel a relationship with the living world that is—here's a word that's been ruined by overuse—but it is awe-some. It imbues you with a sense of awe and wonder. I'm trained as a scientist, so I've been given a few tools in my branch of science, which is ecology, to do something about that sense of awe and wonder . . . to observe well, and maybe systematically so that you see things that you might miss otherwise . . . Alfie was constantly surprising me by doing things that I was sure screech owls never do, or was different from her usual pattern.

This conversation excerpt has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full interview below.

Marcus Smith is the host of Constant Wonder, produced by BYUradio.