- Hi everybody, it's Ken Burns.

We're having another Unum conversation.

I am so thrilled to say that we have with us today, Margaret Renkl, who is a phenomenal columnist for the New York Times, who's just published this great book, "The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year", which is just a wonderful reflection on nature.

And I'm so pleased, Margaret, that you're able to join us.

You know, my second film made in the early eighties was about the Shakers.

And the Shakers found out that their poor neighbors were stealing their crops at night, so the shakers planted more crops.

They said, we plant some for the thieves and some for the crows, and some for the Shakers.

Thieves and crows have to eat, too.

And I just thought that part of their spirit, very Christian spirit of generosity, permeated the whole book that you have written in this wonderful sense of how we are obligated to relate to nature.

So it seems to me that it's shot through, and I get this, this sort of consideration of time, both cyclical and linear.

The seasons change from one to the next, but we also change in age.

And you're sort of with both of those processes at the same time.

I felt that the book was a meditation on time, and how nature is itself a statement of impermanence.

Your essay titled, The Grief of Lost Time.

begins driving due South, and spring is like speeding up time.

I once gave a commencement address where I just said I'd had the greatest privilege on earth, is that I had seen five springs, because I'd started in the south and worked by way north.

And I thought that in some ways time had opened up, which nature also does.

And I thought of my first experience of COVID in the spring of '20.

I live in a rural area, and it seemed like for the first time in my life, I was aware, not just day-to-day, but almost hour-to-hour of the progress of spring from the bareness of those first terrifying weeks to the beginning of the hope of spring throughout that, it was a marvelous gift.

So can you talk to me a little bit about the very act of watching something, nature, so closely and how it changes your experience of time?

Did time seem to move faster or slower for you in similar ways?

- Well, I should probably admit that this book, it wasn't a new experience for me.

I've worked, well, I grew up a feral child, and I've worked from a home office for 27 years.

So I'm a lifelong studier of nearby nature.

And it was only just that I decided to write about it for this book.

But I do think a lot of people had that experience that you have.

I remember, in the spring of 2020 how there was a shortage of bird seed, and it wasn't because of the famed interruption of distribution-- - Supply chain issues.

- Yeah.

It was really just that so many people who had been in offices, of course, not everybody had the luxury of working from home during that time, but the people who had been working in offices and who had come to think of screens as a respite from the responsibilities of the day.

They'd come home and turn on the television or come home and scroll through social media or that's what they would do in their breaks.

I think we got so sick of screens during that time and people began to stare out windows.

And of course in springtime there's so much more to see, or there was actually not more to see.

There's just more splendor to see.

And so it was like a national experience of a pause that was unwelcome in many ways, but very welcome in that one, because you can't sit on your back steps with a cup of coffee and make a lot of noise, and expect to see anything.

There has to be stillness, there has to be quiet, you have to be patient.

And those skills, we've lost in the 21st century, we long lost them.

So what the pandemic taught us, was to recover ourselves as operating in natural time.

We had to be still, we had to be quiet.

If we wanted to see the birds, if we wanted to see the squirrels, and the chipmunks, and the skunks, and the possums, and the raccoons, we had to be quiet.

And I think, for me, that's the gift.

You know, we shouldn't treasure our wild neighbors because of what they teach us, we should treasure them for what they are.

But what they teach us is that we're animals too, and that we feel happier and better when we let time slow like that.

- The privilege of isolation though, focused more intently the sense of wonder, and that sense of opening up, and the sense of quieting oneself to this process.

And I just found your book just a kind of perfect compliment to these meditations, in a way.

- Thank you.

I wanna be careful, I don't wanna sound like a scold.

I don't wanna say, you should do this because we should all be doing this, or otherwise we're gonna lose some precious things.

I wanna say, you should do this because you will feel better.

You will feel happier if you do this.

And that is something... During the pandemic lockdowns, we had a derecho, a weather pattern, come through Nashville.

It was very unusual for Middle Tennessee, and the power was out for days.

And everybody kept walking around going, oh my gosh, look at the stars.

You know, because we just live in a light polluted city, and it's easy to forget the stars.

- I think that this is it, and this is a perfect segue, I think, you've just made to... We made a film on the national parks and we explored the life and the writings of John Muir.

His complicated and wonderful biography, occupied the first two episodes of that multi-part series, and then his ghost, in essence, spoke to us through to the end.

Nature formula, as you know, really defined what it meant to be human.

It's exactly what you're saying.

Let's take a look at this clip.

I think it's relevant to what you're exploring, and perhaps in a kind of different way.

And now we'll just play this clip about John Muir from our National Parks film.

- John Muir once said, by going out into the natural world, I'm really going in.

He defined in that sentence what it is to be a human being, because I think we're born lost, and we remain lost until we remove the shell of who we think we are, all the preconceptions of who we think we are, and to expose ourselves to the great power of the natural world, and to let that power reshape us the way it's reshaped the rocks of Yosemite Valley.

- [Narrator] Muir now felt he had discovered something else, his own destiny.

The gaunt mountaineer with blazing blue eyes and long whiskers would devote himself to understanding the wilderness, and then teach others the lessons he had learned.

- I think that, by going out, you go in, is the most wonderful paradox that you just described of when something interrupts, a pandemic, or a power outage, or whatever, we're suddenly faced with a new reality, and we do look up, and we do experience things differently.

As Emily Dickinson called them the far theatricals of day, our sunrises and sunsets often awaken in us something, they just startle us.

They get us out of that self that's buried in the phone and, or consumed by the thoughts of the day, and take us someplace else.

He became an advocate for the land.

But I think destiny in this case was more interior, a religious experience.

Does that come from the deep observation of nature?

I mean, we were talking earlier about it, kind of opening-up moments, but it's also a mirror of who we are and very frank and honest.

And I think a lot of people can't take the country because it's an unforgiving portrait that it sometimes reflects back at us.

It tells us who we are, and I think people escape to their boxes, and their shopping in a city, because of this great gift of nature.

Not everybody, but many.

- Yeah, I think you're right.

I think, of course, Muir was a special person.

I mean, he was primed, it seemed, by genetics and by upbringing to be in search of holiness.

And there is a certain temperament that goes into a place like Yosemite or Yellowstone and sees holiness.

But for a lot of people, I think those landscapes are so forbidding, just what you're describing, that we feel safer in our boxes.

There's a sense that when you get out into big landscapes, there's a very real sense that we aren't at the top of the food chain, and that there are predators among us.

There are grizzly bears, there are rattlesnakes, there are dangerous creatures.

And it is a feeling... We don't like that feeling.

We find that feeling very unpleasant, to know that we aren't in charge.

And I don't really wish to be bitten by a rattlesnake, but I like the feeling of not being in charge, I find that very freeing.

And I do experience those grand vistas as a kind of conduit to holiness.

But I wonder if we've made a little bit of a mistake in thinking of that as the only nature there is.

You know, that nature is this thing we get in a car and drive to, we pack special gear to experience.

And of course, Muir was out there with nails in his shoes and not much else to help him - Sleeping on a glacier in order to get rid of what he called a lowland virus.

Right?

- Right.

- It's the opposite of what we do.

- It's very different from our experience.

And I think it might be good for us to recognize that nature is not a destination.

Like, last Saturday morning, the sandhill cranes were gathering in the sky above my house in Nashville.

I don't know what happened to 'em, but they were a little disorganized, and they were kind of coming together and talking to one another in that wonderful burbling cry they have.

These are giant birds.

These are almost six-foot tall birds, and they're right there.

They're right here.

They don't live in my backyard like the squirrels do or the chipmunks do, but they are right there if we're awake to them.

- Right, I think the key is awakening.

And I think Muir knew that the spectacular was probably the biggest-selling job, but it's actually the quotidian.

And that's where I think you fit in so beautifully.

We have Emerson, we have Thoreau, we have Muir.

In the 20th century, we have Wallace Stagner, we have Terry Tempest Williams, we have you.

And what I thought in my first COVID spring was that I was each day watching...

I finally understood how a leaf came out.

I was always missing some of the parts, but now I was present for all of them.

I love the way my woodpeckers, the pileated woodpeckers have their wings sort of set back in a way that's different from all the birds.

I love the sort of high pitch sound of the red-tailed hawks, which I think is my favorite bird.

I love the complaint not only of the coyotes, but of the unseen family, of bickering, wild turkeys that are constantly squabbling and all of these other tiny, tiny little gifts, you know.

Sometimes it's just a little orange baby salamander that is crossing the road, and you help it get to the other side.

Sometimes it's a big and threatening, gigantic snapping turtle, which you have to help with a stick, get over-- - You help that one from way far away.

- I'm trying to save you buddy or gal, but please don't bite me.

And they'll take a two inch stick and cut it in half.

I just love that part of it, the intimacy, the intimate parts of it, and not just as you say, the spectacular scenery.

- Well, you know, it's funny, the thing that is miraculous to me is how much, even when you're watching, even when you're studying, even when you're really awake, you miss, because you can't be at there every minute of every day.

And if I hadn't happened to be walking to the mailbox, I wouldn't have heard the cranes.

- You know, I'm so jealous, particularly of your southern latitudes, because up here, we really feel a dearth of things.

There's not as many amphibians as there used to be, there's not as many reptiles.

I haven't seen a box turtle up here in the 45 years that I've lived here, and I used to catch them in Delaware growing up and in Michigan all the time.

And insects too.

Not as many fireflies in the late June, when they usually come and just mesmerize you with their own constellations.

So I envy your box turtle, I must say.

- But you know what, Ken, it's the same here.

Box turtles, toads, lightning bugs, we call 'em here... - Yep.

- Your fireflies, they're all diminishing visibly right before our eyes, and the warmth doesn't help.

- No, no, it does not help.

You know, we just finished a film that aired in October on the American Buffalo, and part of the story is how for thousands of years, native people, 10, 12,000 years, lived with the buffalo.

Not as something removed from them, but as something related to them, as you were suggesting.

That there's something actually disturbing about assuming our top of the food chain, which we are, and then separating ourselves from nature.

And so that we've broken off this gift that native people keep reminding us that we've broken off.

We don't need to, these are our relatives.

I'd like to just show this clip from near the very end of the film as you begin to think about how native people saw things, and what part of the healing restoration process... We've saved the buffalo from extinction, but then there's other questions.

Do we just want it there as a zoo animal or do we wish something more for this relative of ours?

Let's watch the clip.

- [Narrator] The most important work of restoring bison to their homelands is being done in concert with the people whose lives have been intertwined with the buffalo for more than 10,000 years.

Back in 1991, representatives from 19 tribes gathered in the black hills to begin to form the InterTribal Buffalo Council, and organized attempts to bring some of the bison from Yellowstone and other federal preserves back to their reservations.

It was an act of healing that would reestablish a sacred connection with the buffalo that had been broken for more than a century.

An elderly Lakota woman took one of the founders aside.

It's best you ask the buffalo if they want to come back, she said.

So the group held a ceremony to do exactly that.

They said they wanted to come back, the man remembered.

But they said they didn't want to come back as cows.

They wanted to be buffalo, they wanted to be wild again.

Now, at least 80 tribes in 20 states control their own herds, grazing on nearly a million acres of tribal land.

And on the Flathead reservation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have taken over management of the National Bison Range.

- Bison are resilient, and they have taught us how to be resilient and adapt.

They've survived, we've survived.

They're here, we're here.

We both persisted.

- There's a lesson to be learned in that we cannot, as human beings afford to do that to our relatives, the animals.

Those are our relatives, they are part of us.

And when you look at a buffalo, you just don't see a big shaggy beast standing there.

You see life, you see existence, you see hope, you see prayer, and you see the future for your young, the future for those not yet born.

- You know, some people would say that looking at the buffalo roaming the great grasslands is different from watching crows on your back porch.

But I'd suggest, and I think you do that perhaps this is the real thesis of your book, that we can find nature on the back porch in all of its glory.

Is that true?

How is it that we think we can deny the existence of nature when it is so close to home?

I mean, we've been developing this theme.

Can you develop it even more?

- It's impossible to watch a herd of buffalo in your film going across a giant grasslands and not feel awe.

And awe, it almost has to come from a sense of separation, that we aren't that thing, that we are amazed and enraptured by that awesome thing.

And it's harder, I think, to see that magnificent animal, six feet at the shoulder, that magnificent animal as kin to us.

And that is what the native people were able to do and never lost, is that feeling of kinship.

And of course, it wasn't a fairer fight.

You know, they weren't going out when they needed a buffalo.

They were gonna use every bit of that buffalo for one thing.

But they also risk their own lives in taking a buffalo, which is very different from the scenario you described with the buffalo guns and the trains.

But I think that that feeling of kinship, which we struggle to feel, is harder with the megafauna.

We aren't gonna see ourselves in a grizzly bear probably.

But we can, if we're paying attention, see ourselves in the backyard squirrels, we can see ourselves in the little pink fingered opossums.

We can see ourselves, and when we can see ourselves in those creatures, it is a kind of brotherhood, a kind of sisterhood, a kind of kinship that I think we kind of need to foster and develop in ourselves somehow.

Whether that's through being reminded that our species hasn't always had that relationship of separation and superiority, that there are people among us who can teach us how to do that.

But also just being quiet and listening, 'cause when you, when you watch, you see that, the skinks on the front stoop, or the squirrels on the back deck, or the possums sleeping under the tool shed.

They have so many characteristics that we also have, and it's really obvious with crows.

- It's so wonderful, yes, with crows, I agree completely.

This guy back here, my-- - I'm watching him, yeah.

- My polar bear on my iceberg is Chester, and he, the other day, or a few, couple months ago, just caught a possum.

He ripped the leash out of my hand, and ran in my backyard, and caught a possum.

And I am screaming at him and chasing him, and I caught him.

And the second I got there, he had it, and the possum played dead.

It fell, and he was so shocked he let go, and the possum took off.

And I had always been told all my life, and reading all the books and granddaddy stories from Virginia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, all this stuff, playing possum, and here was the exact example of it.

And it was perfect.

And Chester never got his trophy, and I was so relieved.

But it's really true.

I think the thing... After the Wanton Slaughter of the buffalo in which we only want the hides to run the belts of the industrial revolution.

The native people have used, as you suggested, everything, not just for material sustenance, but for spiritual sustenance.

And to have that taken away, we understood somewhere deep in our consciousness, the poverty of that.

So that by 1913, we bring out an Indian Head nickel that has on the front a Native American, we know who he was modeled after, and a buffalo in the back, we know who it was modeled after, a buffalo from the Central Park menagerie that then went to the meat packing district and was slaughtered and parted out for steaks.

But the sculptor, a man named Fraser, said he wanted to design a coin that would be unmistakably the coin of our country.

And what does he take to symbolize, to romanticize, I would suggest even fetishize, the two things we have spent the last century trying to get rid of, native peoples and buffalo.

And it seems like there was a kind of stab at George Horse Capture Jr., a Native American in the film, after that just says, I just have to ask you, why do you kill the things you love?

And I think that what happens is that that superiority separates us, and we are not able to look on these people as family members.

- And we've done it.

If you look at pretty much every subdivision in America is named for whatever the builder eradicated to put houses there.

We have a mall here, Hundred Oaks Mall.

There's not an oak tree in the zip code.

And it's a question, and maybe there's something deep in our psyche that can't help.

But I think that there's something deep in our psyche, too, that recognizes connection and belonging.

- Yes.

- Even when it surprises us, I think we feel that connection when we feel awe.

And we don't know... We don't know that that's what we're feeling, all we can say is this is beautiful, this is magnificent.

But there has to be something in us, calling us to that and saying, this is who you are.

- I think it's a spark of conscience.

It may be guilt, it may be an attempt at reconciliation.

How come 90% of the high school mascots are Native Americans?

And territory, that people relentlessly, without a single thought, from the east coast to the west coast, just didn't blink an eye at obliterating.

And now they kind of get venerated in the same way that nickel did.

I think it somewhere as an expression of conscience.

And you have a quote in your book from the novelist, Richard Powers from The Overstory, "you cannot come back to something that is gone."

You write about the American chestnut, which numbered in the billions, but has now disappeared.

The story is of course very similar to the one we told in the buffalo, and also to the story of the beaver, and also to the story perhaps untold of the specific species of amphibians, and reptiles, and insects, and birds that seem to be ever-diminishing.

Can you talk about that?

- You know, the whole first episode of the American buffalo is very hard to watch because of that wholesale slaughter, and from so many different directions, and for so many different reasons.

You think about it, in one part of it, all they're taking are the hides.

And then in another later part, all they're taking are the heads.

And it's very disheartening to think that we are the species that does that.

That there is no other species that does that.

There's no other species that comes in and leaves nothing.

But you think about the passenger pigeons that were in flocks so large, they darkened the sky as far as the eye could see, and now there isn't even one.

Not even one.

And so it can be, thinking about history in that way, thinking about our own role in it, very demoralizing.

But then this is what I love about the American buffalo is that you describe all the constituents, sometimes seemingly at absolutely cross-purposes with one another who came together to save that species, and did.

And did.

I mean, that's the thing that I take so much heart from, is that we aren't only the destructive species, we're also the healing species.

We're also the cooperative species, we can do this.

- Yeah.

- And we can do this with the great extinction crisis that we're undergoing right now.

We can do it with the climate crisis.

I believe that we have proven again and again through history, that we can do this.

And all we have to do is look at the buffalo.

- Yeah, I think this is really true.

Part of the introduction to our second episode in which that Motley Assembly of human beings, some for reprehensible reasons of kind of-- - Right.

- Nationalism and white supremacy and eugenics are gonna help save the buffalo, and are happy to have earlier realized that the extinction of the buffalo helped them with the Indian problem.

We put in a quote by Wallace Stegner, in which he said, we are the most dangerous species on earth, and every other species, including the earth itself, should have reason to fear us.

But, as you were suggesting, we're the only species, when we set our mind to it, that can save something.

- I think people say all the time, well, what can I do?

What can one person do?

What can anybody do?

And then I think about George Bird Grinnell.

I think that there is... John Muir.

You think that there are individual people who galvanized-- - Rachel Carson.

- Yes, Rachel Carson's a perfect example, who galvanized us.

They weren't particular visionaries, really.

They were people who were in love, and wanted to save what they loved.

- Your book, I think, comes off as kind of poetry, and yet it's really a manifesto.

And it's in what you just said.

It's a call to action, but it has no kind of-- It has, I guess, an inferred political dynamic or dimension, but it's really about an individual conversion that then aggregates individual actions in relationship to nature.

And that's what I find so attractive about it.

Is that your intention?

Is it a manifesto in a way?

- It definitely-- I mean, I want it to be a gentle manifesto.

We don't have claws, we don't have fangs.

We have very useless fur.

We have achieved what we've achieved as a species by virtue of cooperation, and intelligence, and heart.

And I think that we are still that species, but it won't happen-- We can't just say, this is gonna happen because the scientists are gonna figure this out for us.

Or the market forces are gonna find a way to make it more profitable to do the right thing than to do the wrong thing.

I think all of those things will probably happen, must happen to save ourselves and to save the world we love.

But I also think it's very empowering to be one person who makes a tiny little difference.

Plants a pot of milkweed on a city balcony, or stops spraying poison on a yard, or digs up the grass on the medium between the sidewalk and the street, and puts in zinnias, just a little 69-cent pack of zinnia seeds from the grocery store.

And when you see those butterflies coming, when you see the bees, when you see the fireflies rising up from the fallen leaves that you let lie in your flower beds, and ideally even in your yard, you feel better.

You feel you are empowered to try harder, to do more.

And if we all did that as a collective, we could change the entire conversation, and stop letting it be so political.

It isn't political, just like that coalition of people who came together to save the buffalo.

This is not your side versus my side, this is our side.

- It's the human side.

You have these wonderful between-chapter, interstitials, don't know any other way to put it, that ask us to pause and think differently about some aspect, some moment in the world.

And as we're entering the summer section of your book, you have a praise song for the red fox screaming in the driveway.

Can you talk about that?

- Well, if you've never heard a red fox scream, you would feel absolutely certain that a woman was being murdered in the woods.

It is the most blood curdling sound you'll hear.

In this particular case, there's a little bit of woods behind a neighbor's house down at the end of my street.

And the fox was sitting in the drive...

There's a red fox den behind their house, it's been there for years and years.

And this is a sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet neighbor who keeps chickens in her backyard, but she doesn't try to evict the foxes, she just shores up the chicken house.

But the fox was really mad at a cat, and was sitting in the driveway screaming its head off because the cat was getting a little too near the den.

And, broad daylight, it's not something that you expect to see, but there it was right there among us.

- So nature is pretty unforgiving and you can see some stuff, my red-tailed hawk is sometimes catching a snake or sometimes carrying away a field mouse, or something like this, you see what we do to it.

When you see that, I mean, do you see the thrilling-ness of watching the predators or do you see it heartbreaking to know what we're doing?

Or do you feel sort of galvanized in an evangelical way to speak about it?

And then I'd like to go a little bit farther and ask you, you've talked about zinnias in the medium strip, you've talked about planting something in your balcony of your apartment building.

What else can people do?

I think people are looking for agency of some kind in relationship to this crisis, as you've described, and we feel powerless that we're just gonna let it see what science can do, see what politics can do, see what the marketplace can do.

But it's not going to entirely be that, it's going to be about individual action.

I remember everybody, everybody in the late sixties, my entire life, when you went out, say to a McDonald's, you threw things out the window.

- Out the window.

- Out the window, and literally from one moment to the next, when Earth Day happened, it just more or less stopped, at least among people that aren't knuckleheads, and it was an amazing and instantaneous transformation.

It happened in New York City when just walking in New York City was like trying to avoid stepping in dog poop.

And then they PESTLE, and everybody does it.

I mean, now you see it, and you go, oh my God, what kind of human being let that go?

You know... Just from one moment to the next.

It doesn't seem like... We always think this is some sort of Sisyphean task, but I think our experience, the turnaround with the buffalo, too, we woke up and said, oh no, there were 70 million, maybe, now there's 531 and most of them are in zoos or in private collections.

And we stop on a dime and completely change direction without too much whiplash, and so many other things we've done in our lives.

Can you talk about the furthering of this manifesto?

What is it that all of us can be doing to help make this home a better home?

- Well, beyond just recognizing that we do share this ecosystem with neighbors, wild neighbors, they are here among us, whether we see them or not, and work really hard at learning to think of them as neighbors and not as inconveniences or nuisances.

Shore up the chicken coop instead of evicting the foxes.

I think, first recognizing that they're here, that they're among us, that this is theirs too.

And trying to be a good neighbor to them in the same way that you would try to be a good neighbor to the people who live around you, and not be playing your music too loud, not be blocking their driveway with your car.

I mean, there are just certain things that you would never think about doing with another person that we have we have become accustomed to giving no thought to when it comes to the other creatures we share the planet with.

So I think a lot of... And I do wanna be careful to say that I don't...

I really do believe in the collective political will, and the engineering minds, and the market as a method for moving things very quickly.

We've already seen that it's cheaper to produce renewable energy now than it is to start another coal-fired power plant, we know that.

And it would be a mistake that the oil companies would love us to make, to believe that this is all on us.

That how we do manage our private lives, our personal carbon footprints is all it's gonna take, and that would be a mistake to believe.

But within the context of trying to be a good neighbor, there are a lot of things all through this book that I put in there, not as prescriptions, but just as little descriptions.

When you don't kill the moles in your yard, when you let the moles live underground, bothering nobody, and they're eating the grubs that eat the roots of your trees, but they're also pushing up loose soil that makes for a perfect landing spot for wildflower seeds when they come through on the wind, or when they come through in bird droppings, or on the coats of mammals.

And letting those early, early wildflowers just have your yard in spring.

That's food for the bees when they first emerge from their underground boroughs and start building their lives.

It's really just a matter of doing no harm as a first step.

And then, I think it's also a matter of trying as much as possible to change the fashion.

What's in style is not healthy for us.

The green carpet of grass is not healthy for us, it's not healthy for our wild neighbors.

The chemicals aren't healthy for us, the grass itself is feeding nobody.

There are things like that when we just retune our way of seeing, and we see the tangled wild flowers as beautiful, and not the grass.

- Let me go back to end on this idea of time, because I think as we began, we saw time as a moment being opened up in an appreciation of nature, a kind of stopping of it or a new way of seeing it, a new dimension.

Marcia Pablo, who is a Native American in our film at the very end said, native peoples plan seven generations out.

I learned that when we were working on our Roosevelt series, that FDR planted 1 billion trees.

And this means that somebody somewhere has a conception of time that isn't completely imprisoned by say, the marketplace, which says, judge me quarter-to-quarter.

What's the performance that I've delivered to my shareholders?

Even the most successful businesses don't do that way because that's how we lost the manufacturer of so many things in this country, because we were looking for just shareholder value.

So I think to me, that time has both a kind of atomic microscopic relationship to this story that you're telling, but it also has this magnificent macro-view.

Just as the architecture of the atom is very similar to the architecture of the solar system that we've got to sort of integrate both these kinds of long-form and also the intimate moment together if we're gonna save the planet, and of course ourselves.

And it begins, as you suggest, not by changing your environment, but by actually looking at it.

It's always right there, whether you live in the city and all of a sudden everybody's abuzz because there's a peregrine falcon that's nesting on fifth Avenue, and for months we're wondering where that is.

Or there's a coyote in Central Park, or whatever it might be, we've got a connection, and the connection can begin now.

We don't have to wait for certain circumstances to occur for this work to begin.

- I think that's really true and it's the quarter-to-quarter thing that is so dangerous and so damaging.

It's also individual ownership.

When you think of a tree as yours because it's growing on a piece of property that you say you own, because you're paying the bank for it, then you can cut that tree down without any kinda...

It's no different from moving your furniture around, but that isn't what it is.

So we have to, I think, fundamentally shift our understanding of the natural world to that stretch of time.

We don't own that tree, we borrowed that tree from the past, and we owe it to the future.

And if you...

The seven generations, that's a start.

That's a really good start, but as you know from your work, there are trees... We like to put it in perspective of human time.

We say, oh, that tree was a sapling when Jesus walked the earth.

And in fact, that's not an unimaginably long time ago when Jesus walked the earth.

It's a blink in geologic time.

I think if we start looking at time from that perspective, be it the time that came before us and the time that is coming after us, even if it is just seven generations.

I think we'll be doing... That's a magnificent start.

- Yes.

Margaret, we are so grateful that you gave us some time today.

Margaret's book is "The Comfort of Crows".

It's such a wonderful book in every single way.

We're so thrilled that you could spend, it's... Oh, a Backyard Year, I should have said.

And it's got wonderful illustrations in it and I just hardly recommend it.

I think it will repay your attention over and over again.

Thank you, Margaret, for spending time with us.

- Thank you for having me, Ken.

It's just been wonderful to talk with you.

- My pleasure.