︎ESSAY & INTERVIEW HIGHL

Rewilding Our Senses

Essay for RSPCA 200-year anniversary book

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Some 500 years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci observed that “an average person looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without odour or fragrance”. We remain guilty of underestimating the ways in which we sense the world. Most of us still labour under a misapprehension dating back to Aristotle that we have only five senses, but some neuroscientists count as many as 33…

Conference of Animals

Essay for FT Weekend

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In the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference, our screens have been replaying familiar imagery. Aerial shots reveal cities without end, industrial chimneys belching tar-black fumes and traffic-snarled junctions - all juxtaposed with views of pristine icescapes, rainforests exhaling mists and seas silver-swirled with fish. The message is clear: the world we humans have built is at odds with the natural one… What if the animals had a voice?

Worlds Unseen & Unimagined

Essay for Lithub

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In “Possible Worlds,” J.B.S. Haldane declared, “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.” These words are often quoted with a glance to the stars, but recently I was reminded of their earthbound interpretation…

A Year Without Touch

Essay for Telegraph

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I was watching my children skitter around the frozen school playground, faces beaming, breath fogging the air, when I heard the first reports of a deadly virus emerging from China. I recall my overwhelming sense of foreboding and déjà-vu. Seventeen years previously, working on the BBC series Horizon, I had visited the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva to interview the team charged with saving the world from Sars…

Our Green & Prehistoric Land

Review of The Lost Rainforests for The Times

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Our green and pleasant land is exotic in places; our shores enclose rainforests. Not the sort that flash with neon tree frogs or reverberate with the howls of monkeys; in short, not tropical rainforest, but temperate. Guy Shrubsole has searched out and uncovered these hidden habitats. His book portrays them as places worthy of reverence…

The Professor Who Believes Plants Can Feel Pain

Review of Planta Sapiens for Telegraph

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At Oxford Scientific Films, we specialised in techniques that played with time: expanding or condensing it with high-speed or time-lapse photography. Many of our documentaries for the BBC or National Geographic focused on plants. Behind the production office, labyrinthine corridors led to musty, cramped spaces where we coaxed tendrils to unfurl and flowers to bloom, all the while watched by cameras…

The World Needs More Darkness

Review of The Darkness Manifesto for Telegraph

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The Darkness Manifesto opens like a Gothic novel. A graveyard in the dead of night. Shadows shifting in the sweep of a torch. Strange sounds from beyond its beam. Yet this is no flight of fancy. Jokan Eklof is a biologist and conservationist who studies bats. His research is revealing that these creatures are under threat. Their enemy is light…

What Is It Like To Be a Bat?

Review of An Immense World for Telegraph

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There is a word that deserves our attention: Umwelt. Conceived in 1909 by the Baltic-German aristocrat Jakob von Uexkull, it describes the part of the environment that an organism senses. To contemplate our Umwelt is to realise that our experience cannot be the same thing as reality. More profound, however, is to contemplate the Umwelten of all the species with whom we share the planet…

Interview with Gretchen Rubin

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Gretchen: What’s a simple activity or habit that consistently makes you happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?

Jackie: Getting out the front door for a walk, rain or shine, with or without my whippet. The filmmaker Werner Herzog said that ‘the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.’ He was talking about Bruce-Chatwin-like pilgrimages, but I don’t think you have to travel far -, a quick turn round the block will do. There is something about moving through the world that enlivens the senses. Simply looking or listening, feeling or even smelling what's around me is so immersive that I forget myself - allowing my senses to soak up the outer world stills that inner chatter.

Interview with Psychology Today

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Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Sentient?

Jackie: Some 25 years ago, I started at Oxford Scientific Films, a company now regarded as a pioneer in natural history camerawork. My first day in the office was far from typical; it entailed inflicting pain on my new boss. We were reconstructing a killer-bee attack for a National Geographic documentary and needed a close-up of a bee implanting its barbed sting. My boss rolled up his sleeve, showed me how to hold the bee and where on his skin the macro lens was focused. That day, I learned how the bee released a scent - undetectable to my human nose - designed to summon other bees.

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