Whales and the Myth of Progress
I’ve been in love with whales since my childhood, and in this episode I get to share some of their magic–particularly as it relates to our cultural myth of progress.
In this episode, I talk about my definition of what progress really is, whales’ surprising evolutionary history, and why progress so often requires the letting go of adaptations that are no longer helpful.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide.I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Welcome friend. I'm so glad that you're here. So honored to spend this time with you. Uh, the sun enters Scorpio today. So the sun is moving from the sign of Libra in the early fall and into Scorpio, which is a water sign and takes us into the heart of the autumn season.
And so, I don't know if you can hear, I think you can hear the crow, uh, serenading us this morning, heralding the arrival into the middle of the autumn season. It's a time when there's going to be more water, more rain. It's going to get wet. There's going to be increased decomposition of the matter that fell has fallen onto.
The ground in these last few weeks, it will begin getting darker and darker. It's a really different time. It feels different than the early fall season. And one of my teachers, old school Nate, says that this is really the time when the earth is feasting. She's getting all of her vitamins, all of her nutrients, a big boost, and the rain is going to help them take those nutrients down deep into her where they are needed. So it's a really rich time and I hope you're taking good care and enjoying as much of it as you can, even if you feel some resistance to the changing of the seasons and the daylight. With this increase in rain and darkness, I felt drawn to talking about whales today.
And I have wanted to talk about whales for a while on the podcast, and it didn't feel like the right time until now. I have loved whales since I was a little girl. I remember having magazines and books about them, just being completely transfixed by them, going to see Keiko, the whale who played Free Willy, In the Newport Aquarium here on the Oregon coast, and being both Again, just awestruck by this orca in, in the aquarium and also feeling in my little child body that there was something really wrong, you know, that this creature should not be in this tiny tank having to swim around in such a small space.
So I've always felt a ton of respect for these creatures. And today I want to talk about their unique history and what they can teach us about. many things, but especially about the myth of progress, how they can teach us about what's actually useful and essential right now, and what wisdom really lies in our watery origins, which can be so easy to forget in this day and age.
Just a few quick announcements before we start. The first is that my journal, Living the Seasons, a journal for surviving capitalism and bringing the medicine of autumn into your life, is still available. I know we're coming into the center of autumn and that some of the week's reflections won't be Maybe quite as relevant, but it's all useful material and the journal takes you week by week through the autumn season and helps you turn your gaze outward onto the land and in the natural landscapes around you to help you see where paring down or redefining or sharpening is most helpful to you in your personal life this autumn. It's a really sweet companion and I think it's, I tried to keep it very simple to really get to the heart of the matter. And in the autumn season. So if you haven't already ordered a copy, you can still get one at a wild new work.com slash shop.
For those of you in the Portland area, I'm facilitating three gatherings this fall. It's a learning from the land series where again, I'm keeping it simple this season. That seems to be the message I will be offering a few. Simple but very potent techniques to help you attune to what the earth might want to communicate to you right now about your own life, about what's going on for the land, about your gifts, your medicine, and how they might be useful to your village or community.
So in these times, I'll offer some teaching. You'll have some solo time on the land to listen and practice, and then we'll come back together to really deepen our learning. So I'd love to see you there. If that resonates, you can learn more about that at awildnewwork. com slash events.
And finally, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone supporting the show financially by pitching in either once or monthly. That means so much to me and is so helpful and so big, big thank you. And if you would like to support the show, you can do that at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman.
Okay, with that I'm going to read us our opening invocation and take us into some whale wisdom. So wherever you are, you might just notice how your body is doing today, feeling the weight of gravity kind of nudging you toward the earth. And if you haven't taken a deep breath today or let out a loud sigh, you can do that now too. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Okay, so I want to start today by talking about the myth of progress, because we're going to be talking about the whale's evolutionary story today. And we have this idea, or at least I do, that evolution is progress. Things are always just getting better and better, but that's not really what evolution is. Evolution is just adaptations to a particular context over time. So, An organism's adaptations in a particular context can mean greater chances of survival.
There's not like a good or bad about that, it's just survival. And if the context changes, then those adaptations may no longer be useful or no longer helpful in terms of survival. So evolution is just change. And so, you know, for us on a smaller scale, the evolutionary timeline is so vast. It's like, I can't even really comprehend it.
But for us on a smaller scale, we can see the ways that We are adapting to change and life inside of this culture and that doesn't mean that it's all positive progress or Helpful progress. It just means that we're adapting to the context that we're living in and that's really important to remember Because there has been a ton of investment over the last centuries, hundreds of years, a ton of investment in the idea that we are progressing, that agriculture was progress, that civilization was progress, that capitalism was progress.
And we have bought into the belief that what takes us out of intimate relationship with the land, which each of these things does, agriculture requires domination over the land. It requires us to manage and shape the land. Civilization takes us further from our natural origins by putting us inside of walled cities and in echo chambers of human culture.
Okay. Capitalism certainly takes us out of intimate relationship with the land by even depriving us of the time we could use to be out, you know, on the land or in intimate relationship with the beings that sustain us. And so there have been many people throughout time since the advent of agriculture and civilization and capitalism who have told us over and over and over again, this is progressive, this is better.
You know, thank goodness we don't have to live like our prehistoric ancestors who suffered and toiled all day, which is just not true. There's not evidence of that. The toil is in working a field, you know, eight hours a day. The toil is in having to work at a job you despise for money that you can use to survive.
So if you just look at where this has left us, this myth of progress, we can see all around us. This quote unquote progress has led to declines in health, widespread illness, genocide, war, living in overwhelm, feeling lonely, precarious food supply chains. So if the autumn season is about letting go or paring down or redefining things like we talked about in the last episode with Old School Nate, then one of the big things that I'm noticing right now is the need to really redefine what progress is.
Is a new data center really progress if it uses a ton of water to keep it cool and turns the local landscape toxic? Is that new medical science wing at the university really progress if no one's talking about the root causes of illness in our society or GMOs or challenging big pharma? Even personally, is, you know, gaining or losing weight really progress if we're filled with hateful thoughts about our bodies?
Is that new job really progress if it takes us further away from our innate talents and gifts? Everywhere we look, there's this myth that we are progressing, things are getting better, when so much of it is just new layers trying to cover up the rot underneath, taking up more and more land and space that could be used for a greater restoration of naturalness.
Progress as I'm defining it this season is that which brings us back into more naturalness, back into our true nature. So for a lot of us, progress is going to look like decline or destruction or death because we have built up so much around us that takes us out of our naturalness. And that's ready to be undone so that we can actually make progress and learn how to live well right now.
So, I don't know what that will be for each of us personally, or how that could look collectively, but it could certainly mean declining new projects, or jobs, or things that use our time, in favor of choosing instead to spend time with our natural gifts. It could mean allowing relationships to end, so that we can come back into our naturalness, our natural ease, and well being and stability.
And it might mean allowing this culture to decay even more in favor of spending our time creating bonds and ways of living that are more natural, more true, that bring us closer into relationship with the naturalness that the earth holds all around us.
So this summer I learned a story about progress that really reshaped my definition of it.
And I want to talk a little bit about the evolution of whales. And this will be in broad strokes, obviously, because I'm not a paleontologist, and it gets quite complicated, but I tried to do my due diligence and And everything I'm going to say is what I believe to be true based on what I've read and I'll put the articles in the show notes for you to look yourself if you'd like to.
But I want to tell you this story. So what I thought was that life originated in the oceans, which is true. And I thought that some of the creatures in the ocean came on to land and stayed and evolved into mammals and other animals. And I thought that other creatures in the ocean just stayed in the ocean and evolved You know, into the creatures that we know live in the sea now, like the seals and dolphins and the fish and sharks.
And this summer at a science museum, I found out that whales and all other marine mammals, actually, But that whales actually evolved on land and then re adapted to aquatic environments. Okay, so their story is that they actually came onto the land for millions of years and then re adapted to the ocean.
And this kind of blew my mind. I had never thought about it before, but it makes a lot of sense once you know it. There were life forms developing in the ocean, and some of those life forms eventually became like the fish that we know today. And some of those fish, because of the way their fins were shaped, began to develop things that looked like limbs that were more supportive of the bodily structure and eventually became more sturdy.
And so some of these beings started to come on to land as amphibians. So they were able to breathe oxygen eventually, but were also well suited to aquatic life. And over millions of years, some of those beings evolved into fish. terrestrial land based mammals. These were mammals that lived entirely on land, who, just like mammals today, gave birth to live young, were warm blooded, they had hair or fur, they nursed their offspring, etc.
But around 50 million years ago, There begins to be a fossil record, mostly found around modern Pakistan and India, showing a gradual shift for some mammals to begin to adopt to a fully aquatic lifestyle. So the ancestor of whales is actually a mammal that lived on land. Some articles said it was kind of like a goat or a deer.
Um, I also saw that it was more like a wolf with a long tail. But this creature lived completely on land and they lived near rivers and lakes. They lived near water. Um, and they're called Pachysetus. And again, this creature had four legs. Um, they were fully mammalian, but within 10 million years, that mammal and some others.
It wasn't just one line, but some like it. These mammals were completely adapted to life in the water. And 10 million years is like still crazy long for us to comprehend, but in the evolutionary record, apparently it's actually quite fast. So within 10 million years, we go from a creature just meandering around like a deer or a wolf to a creature that looks more like, you know, uh, an early dolphin or a small whale.
So animal life was drawn out of the sea onto land, and then some of those beings were drawn back into the waters and became the incredible creatures that we know today as whales. And these beings are still mammals. But much of what they needed on land is no longer needed in an oceanic context. So a lot of their mammalian selves were kept, you know, by these creatures, but some of who they were had to fall away.
You know, if you move from the land to the sea, you don't need saliva anymore. You've got water everywhere already. You don't need fur. That's not going to help you swim. Some marine mammals like walruses, you know, do have like an outer layer, but cetaceans, which are whales and dolphins and porpoises, um, cetaceans don't have fur.
Although you can find, like on a dolphin fetus, that they still have whiskers, which is really cute. Um, certain genes in these creatures that would control blood clotting turned off because of how it would impact the whales on deeper dives. The embryos of cetaceans still possess a hind limb like back legs that would grow but they stop growing as the embryo develops.
So a lot had to be shed in order for these animals to live in the water. And then new developments were added as well like the capacity to use echolocation or sonar since senses like smell or taste aren't as useful in the water. But tracking sound is incredibly useful. And whales today, you know, this, they're absolutely majestic creatures.
And I just love this story. Whales are, you know, they're important and so valuable just for who they are and their presence on there on this earth. They don't need to give anything to us or do anything for us, but they really show us that progress can look like decline.
You might imagine their terrestrial ancestors, Pakicetus, starting to venture into the water, and all of Pakicetus's friends are yelling, What are you doing? You know, we already came from there. We stay on the land. You're not suited for that life, right? But adaptations were made slowly over time, and today we get to share a planet with whale beings who can dive deeper than imaginable, who have one more lobe in their brains than we do, that's related to processing emotion. So it's not unlikely that they have more complex thoughts and emotions than we do. These are old beings who have done life on Earth. Who came back into the waters, who breathe air like us and have to come to the surface, but who can also go down deeper than our own anatomy could withstand.
Some of them, like the orca, have complex social structures. These whales have unique songs and languages like the humpbacks do, and they are absolutely aware of us and impacted by us. So we may not have the long story like whales do. We're talking about a much tinier, shorter scale in our own time. little individual lives.
But there is so much that whales can teach us in this season of redefining progress and what, and choosing what feels most natural and true. You know, we might consider what we are adapting to right now. We're adapting to faster technology, more isolation. We're learning how to adapt to Traveling more quickly to doing more with less, to greater globalization, to greater concentrations of power.
We have centuries of adapting to living out of alignment with nature. And we certainly can adapt to this. You know, humans could evolve in this way and get better at dealing with this kind of life or this way of living. But do we want to? So much of this is called progress, you know, but is it really? You know, we celebrate someone like buying a bigger house, or a newer car, or getting a higher paying job, or going to a more elite school.
These are the things that are sort of venerated in our culture. But are any of those really progress, the progress we need right now? No. We don't need more bigger homes. or more newer cars. We don't need all of these extra things that are taking us even further away from our naturalness. And of course, I'm talking in generalities here, but it's not all black or white.
Nothing is all or nothing, but we are way past do redefining what progress is. Because we can see, when we really look, we can see what we lose when we adapt to this way of living, when we evolve further away from our origins. The busier we are, and the less we sleep, the more dream time that we lose. The faster we go and the more, you know, hikes that are just quick and through the forest, the less animal or plant or fungi communication we can experience.
The more we're forced to work in jobs that aren't about our gifts at all, the less we know about what our gifts are and how to offer them to the village. We lose the village itself in our way of living. We lose rituals. We lose the ability to shapeshift and understand what life is like for other beings.
We lose the stories that really connect us to all that is. Okay, so we've lost a lot. And I think there is always an opportunity to turn around and look at the water behind us, look at our origins, and step back into them. What would it look like to swim back into the depths of where we came from and our true human nature?
What progress is possible if we shed some of our terrestrial layers and chose what feels most natural and fluid right now? If we chose to sleep more instead and access the dream time? If we used less electrical lighting or unplugged our Wi Fi? Or just accepted that we're gonna do less or make less this season or see fewer people or just grasp and hold on to things less?
Let the water take it instead. You know, all of this is related and emphasized by the changing colors of the leaves around us. Again, leaves change color because the chlorophyll in them, which keeps them green, it fades at this time of year. And so new colors can emerge. And so there are gifts lying just under the surface of your life.
There are new versions of your aliveness waiting for you. But they are so often obstructed by the adaptations that we have either been forced to make in this collective culture or adaptations that we choose to make based on our current situation or history or patterns, et cetera. And I encourage you to listen to the last episode, episode 132, that speaks to this in my conversation with old school, Nate, there are ways we can very intentionally decide that how we have been thinking about something, how we've been living, how we've been adapting can change and it can change quickly.
It doesn't take years and years, but there are ways that we can work with the natural cycles, like the cycle of autumn. And With the elements, with all of the beings who show us how to adapt, you know, how we can drop the old stories that aren't working, you know, and choose the ones that are actually here and true right now.
We don't see deer staying in the same meadow because there used to be blueberries there five years ago. No, they're choosing to go where there's, you know, salal or blackberry now that can feed them. And so we can do that too. We can decide what progress actually means to us, what it looks like, except the fact that it may look like decline or destruction or endings, and we can move forward in a much freer, more adaptive, more beneficial way. So I hope that you've enjoyed learning about whales today and progress. I think it's incredible how just the changing of a story, how just some new information can really shift things. You know, I thought that evolution was one way, right? That we came out of the oceans, Some of us, and some of us stayed, and then those of us who came on to the land just always sort of stayed here. But that's not true. There's another way, and I can really appreciate that complexity and the fact that progress doesn't flow in any one direction all the time. Progress changes for us. And when we look at the land around us and the earth around us, we can see that true progress would be the restoration of what's natural.
And so I hope that this has helped you in some way, and I hope that it has honored the whales, and that you can honor whales in some way this week, just learning about them, or spending time watching them, watching videos, or listening to their songs, or just sending them some love. It's a huge honor. To share a planet with them, to live alongside them.
They are kind of like ocean consciousness in a way. They're so intrinsic to that place. So of it now, and we have so much more to learn from them. So I hope you're well and that you're taking good care and I wish you such richness and depth in the middle of the autumn season as we go deeper into this time.
If you find value from this show and are open to supporting this work, you can do that at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. Thank you again for being here. I'll see you in a couple of weeks with a new episode. Take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.