In this episode of Air Time, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author Ed Yong joins UCSB Arts & Lectures for a wide-ranging conversation that begins with animal perception and expands into a deeper inquiry about how humans understand the world. Drawing on his book An Immense World and his forthcoming Life Beyond Measure, Yong explores the concept of the — the idea that every species experiences its own sensory reality — and reflects on how much of existence lies beyond human perception.
The conversation moves from the hidden richness of everyday environments, where frogs, bats, and birds inhabit unseen sensory worlds, to the limits of human attention and awareness. Yong also reflects on his pandemic reporting, introducing the concept of “moral injury” to describe the psychological toll of witnessing systemic failure. Across these themes, a throughline emerges: Whether in biology, journalism, or environmental crisis, the most important truths are often the hardest to perceive.
A probing and accessible exchange, this episode invites listeners to reconsider what it means to notice, to understand, and to live within a world far more complex than our senses alone can reveal.
Charles Donelan
Welcome to the UCSB Arts & Lectures podcast, Air Time. This week we have Ed Yong. He will be in Santa Barbara on Wednesday, May 6, at 7:30 p.m. at UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall to give a talk called The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses. Ed is the author of two wonderful books, I contain multitudes and then an immense world. And he is, as I understand it, working on a third book called life beyond measure. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for his reporting on covid, and he has done much else besides welcome Ed Young, thank you for taking the time.
Ed Yong
Hi, thanks for having me.
Charles Donelan
We are looking forward to a talk that is largely based on the work you did for An Immense World, and yet you understand your project as continuous with your previous interests, such as microbiology in I Contain Multitudes, and even the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism about the COVID-19 pandemic that you performed. Maybe you can remind us why you felt compelled to do that? As I understand it, you put down the work on animal sensory development, or animal senses, to come back into the field and do the work you did on COVID. Why did you feel compelled to make that change?
Ed Yong
Yeah, so I was about halfway through a 10-month book leave, during which I was meant to be writing An Immense World, and I got halfway through that before all hell broke loose. And I have written about a number of different topics throughout my career, and pandemics was one of them. In 2018, I wrote a long feature for The Atlantic called “The Next Plague Is Coming, Is America Ready?” It was about the imminent and substantial threat of a new pandemic, and it was about what preparedness for such an event might look like, and why a nation like America, despite its many advantages, like a thriving biomedical industry, huge amounts of money and resources would almost certainly fall short when faced with such a challenge. So at the point when that prediction was coming to pass, and we were, in fact, falling short. It just seemed like a very natural and necessary thing to do, to bring all the knowledge and expertise that I had already gathered in the course of doing some pandemic reporting pre-pandemic to making sense of the crisis for our readers.
Charles Donelan
Well, thank you, because the reporting that you did was extraordinarily useful, and also, as I understand it, quite demanding on every level, intellectually, physically, emotionally, and like a lot of people that you reported on, the frontline workers, various different people who played a role in coping with the pandemic, you eventually felt burned out after the intensity of following and reporting on it. You have an interesting way of explaining the nature of that exhaustion. Maybe you could get into that a little bit?
Ed Yong
Sure. You know, I remember talking to people who work in public health, who explained that they were feeling immensely burned out and thinking I relate very much to everything you are telling me. Now that was in June of 2020, merely a few months into this. And you know — as we all know — things continued in that vein for some time. And, you know, there’s much to be said about why it was demanding. I mean, from my perspective, writing about the pandemic means thinking about basically nothing else. You know, I think, as a journalist, especially faced with a topic so complex and multifaceted, you have to do a lot of work, and you have to let that work stew and simmer in your head.
You know many, many people, even friends and colleagues, have told me that their experience of early 2020 was being astonishingly bored. I would have given my left leg to have been even slightly bored! I was talking to people about COVID. I was staring in the face of the worst sides of it, the deaths, the disability of it all, and thinking about basically nothing else for about two or three years, and it is difficult to do that. It is difficult when your entire week consists of wall-to-wall interviews with people recounting the worst days of their lives to you, and then having to sit with that and think about basically nothing else in order to try and extract some meaning and some value out of it.
Many of the healthcare workers I talked to made it very clear that for them, often “burnout” didn’t feel like a particularly accurate description. If you tell someone that a person is experiencing burnout, I think the impression you’re left with is that person was faced with difficult challenges and couldn’t hack it. That’s not at all what these healthcare workers were experiencing. They instead framed it in terms of moral injury, that they knew what their job was and what they should be doing, but for various reasons — the tide of patients, you know, institutional betrayal, a dwindling workforce, rampant misinformation — they just couldn’t provide the care that they knew that they needed to and wanted to, and it was this gulf between what they wanted to do, the care that they wanted to provide, and what they were actually able to do that left many of them hollowed out and broken and wanting to leave, and I sympathize with that very much. That is also how I felt. You know, I feel like reporting of the pandemic was spending three to four years watching people, and institutions in particular, make the same mistakes again and again and again, despite one’s every effort to talk about a better way forward, and that becomes very hard to take after a while.
Charles Donelan
Wonderful answer. I want to just hold for a moment and stay with this concept of you’re calling it “moral injury,” and I’m going to see if I can restate this, and you can tell me whether I’m getting this right, but you’re saying it wasn’t that health care workers were unable to do what they knew how to do. It was that they were constrained by various different forces that were beyond their control from realizing the full impact or having the return on the investment of their time and energy and expertise that they were looking for. Is that correct?
Ed Yong
Yes, that is it. Let me put it simply: “burnout” is “I can’t handle my job,” and “moral injury” is “I can’t handle being unable to do my job.”
Charles Donelan
This is fascinating, because I think this resonates in multiple directions. I was a classroom teacher at the time, working in a secondary school, and it was also, you know, “not boring.” And the period, especially in that fateful spring [2020] of just having to kind of sort through, not only how to keep moving forward with the educational project, but also how to do so in a chaotic administrative environment. It was challenging.
Ed Yong
Yes, I can see many parallels between educators and front-line workers, you know, because there you are. It does not surprise me that there’s resonance for you there
Charles Donelan
In An Immense World, you introduced the reader to an idea of the Umwelt; that each species inhabits its own sensory world. How has that concept continued to shape the way that you think and write as you continue your project?
Ed Yong
So the Umwelt idea is reasonably straightforward. The idea is that every organism or every individual has its own particular cocktail of sights and smells and textures and sounds that it can sense and that might be different slightly or radically from another individual or another species around it. So you know, I’m sitting here in my garden, and I can see bees buzzing around the flowers in the garden, I can see hummingbirds flitting around, and my dog is prowling around somewhere. All of these creatures are sharing the same physical space as me, but we are each having a radically different experience of that space. And that sensory bubble is what biologists call an Umwelt. It’s the part of the world that you have access to.
And I love this idea because, you know, I am sitting here completely immersed in the very powerful illusion that I am perceiving all there is to perceive. There are no holes in my vision. I am not sitting here thinking about the things that I cannot hear, the things that I cannot smell. It feels like my perception of the world is complete, and that is completely wrong, but that is an illusion that we share with all living things. And I find this idea to be incredibly humbling, but also incredibly wondrous at the same time, because it tells me that even in this space that I’m currently sitting in, which I sit in every day and know very well, it tells me that I am still only privy to a small fraction of all there is to perceive, that I’m only getting a partial picture of the world, and that that picture is very different than what my dog, for example, who I know very well, experiences. And I think once you start thinking about that, it’s really hard to not think about that. You know there’s this sense of wonder and of discoveries to be made around in every place and around every corner.
Charles Donelan
So I wholeheartedly agree, and your book has had an impact on me that I’m going to try to explore a little bit with you, to maybe have some fun with this. I live here in Santa Barbara, in Mission Canyon, and at night, the loudest presences, apart from maybe the occasional motorcycle that you know comes roaring down the canyon, is not human. Instead, what I hear at night at my house is a chorus of frogs who call every night in my courtyard, and then also in sort of the larger surround I hear owls and mourning doves, and they are very active at night. All of these creatures – I’ve learned a little bit about them, mostly inspired by your example – but maybe you could address them. I guess my question would be, is it not the same canyon, or is it for a frog or an owl instead of a person?
Ed Yong
No, it’s not. You know, there’s many ways we could think about that. So, you know, if you went out at night, at the time when you heard owls and frogs, what would you see? Pretty much, nothing, right, the night is black to us because our eyes, though they are very sharp, are very poor at dealing with small amounts of light. That isn’t true for large parts of the animal kingdom that have much more sensitive eyes. In the book I write about a beautiful hawk moth that has eyes that are so sensitive that it can see color perfectly well in nights that would be so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. So even something as basic about that nighttime scene as the blackness of it, the fact that the darkness, the nighttime, is devoid of color, is actually not true, or at least it’s only true for us. It’s true depending on the kind of sense organs you have. For many animals, the night just abounds with all the usual colors of the day.
Then you have the sounds that you can hear. Owls are actually a great example of this, because bird hearing is not that different to human hearing in terms of frequency. So there are like, there’s not a lot of pitch in an owl toot that you are not picking up on, but there are plenty of calls in the night that you cannot hear; you know that the night sky around you, aside from being full of frogs and owls, is also just heaving with bats. Hopefully, you know, if things are right with the world, there should be tons of bats flying around. Now you aren’t hearing those noises, and why not? It’s because the bats are producing ultrasonic calls. It calls at frequencies too high for the human ear to detect, and the bats are using those calls to find their way around. They are timing. They are paying attention to how long each call takes to make the outward journey away from the bat and then the return journey to its ear. That time correlates with distance, and so allows the bat to work out how far away it is from a flying moth or a large obstacle in its surroundings. This skill is called echolocation. Some blind humans have it, dolphins have it, but bats are really just masters of it, and the night is full of their ultrasonic calls. Their main sensory stimulus that they’re listening out for, are the echoes of their own high pitched calls. Those are just two examples. And I think they show that you know, even in assessing what you’re describing of your home at night, there’s so much that you aren’t perceiving and that other animals are.
Charles Donelan
That’s absolutely true. Let me just fill in a little bit, because this is making me think of a lot of very specific things. First of all, the frogs are the loudest. I still have never seen one, right? Which seems uncanny, because they make so much noise. And I do see the fence post lizards who make no noise, or at least none that I can hear, which I’m now beginning to pick up on that possibility. And I see them every day, a day doesn’t go by where I don’t run into one of those. But here’s something else that I want to thank you for, because, you know, we’re very proud of Santa Barbara. We love our microclimate, and we boast about it constantly. But I’m adding a new item to the list, because from now on, I’m going to tell people, not only do we have the best beaches, but also our canyons are “heaving with bats.” That’s a big tourist attraction.
Ed Yong
I mean, well, you know, I don’t mean Santa Barbara particularly, but I mean, like any kind of forest canyon, right? Like, if I go out walking in our local canyons, I will occasionally see bats. But if my ears were tuned to frequencies a few thousand kilohertz above their current threshold, I’d hear them all the time. Yes, but I think that there’s a couple of things to unpack here. There are things that we just don’t perceive because we don’t have the biology for it. Like no matter how hard I try, I am not going to hear bat echolocation because I literally cannot do that with my ears.
Then there are things that we don’t perceive because it’s very hard to. So, like a frog. Those frogs are not only calling at night, but also just very well hidden. So if you try and find them, even if you are trying to track the source of sound, it’s really hard to, and then I think there’s this sort of final tantalizing category of things that we don’t perceive, not because we can’t, but because we’re just not looking, we’re not really trusting our attention to the world around us. And I think about this a lot, because when I moved to California in the spring of 2023, I started birding, and that is now probably my main pastime. It’s what I spend a significant proportion of my daylight hours doing, and it is astonishing what it has revealed to me in parts of the world that I would otherwise overlook. You know, just places that are all around me all the time, my neighborhood, this garden. You know, there is so much life around us that I think we overlook, and there are probably a lot of people living exactly where you are living, who aren’t hearing owls at night, even though they are there and even though you’re picking them up. You know, I think that when you’re not looking, when you’re not listening, when you’re not like casting your care and attention and respect into the natural world, it is astonishing how much you do not get, and how much you miss.
Charles Donelan
So you’re saying that our attention is likely to be more selective than we are aware..
Ed Yong
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And by some kind of a factor. I went out for a walk this morning at one of my favorite birding destinations, and I saw a couple of things, but I heard maybe 30 or 40 species around me, because I know what they sound like, and I am listening out for them. Time was about three or four years ago, I could have walked down that exact same trail and thought to myself, “there’s nothing here.” So, you know, I think when you start to learn about the natural world at large, whether it’s birds or flowers or butterflies or frog calls, you really start understanding how surrounded we are by life at all times, and how much there is to pay attention to.
Charles Donelan
I’m going to take us in what I hope will be another fruitful direction by bringing up an event that took place in Montecito in 2018. We had a debris flow incident here, with 22 fatalities in one night. It felt to us, this mudslide, like a sudden, singular disaster, but it was really the convergence of longer processes. It involved fire, it involved rain, it involved the pitch of the slope on which this took place. How do we make sense of events that feel instantaneous to us, but belong to much larger scales of time?
Ed Yong
Great question. I think, with immense difficulty. I think we aren’t really wired to see all of the complex chains of cause and effect that lead to an event like that. We want simple causality, and I think simple answers are very comforting, but the complex ones are the ones we actually need to grasp, and grapple with, because all of the big challenges of our time are like this. And in fact, you know, the debris flow that you’ve talked about has many qualities that make it much easier to appreciate than some of those big challenges. You know, there is an event. You can see it. You can see the aftermath and the consequences of it with your own eyes. It’s obvious.
If you compare that to something like the pandemic, that too is the result of many, many, long-standing, complicated problems. You know that the way it played out had to do with our global supply chains. It had to do with the encroachment of human settlements into wild places. It had to do with the problems in our healthcare system. I spent hours talking about all the things that contributed to the pandemic, first happening, and then being as bad as it was. But the thing is, you didn’t see what happened. None of us saw what happened, right? This is the work of a microscopic virus. No one sees it. You see the symptoms, but even those are often very invisible. The aftermath is invisible. You don’t see the people who died. You don’t see the hospitals being inundated unless you happen to be in one yourself for most of the pandemic. If I looked out the window, the world looked completely normal. It was not like a hurricane, it was not like a fire. The skies didn’t turn orange, the streets weren’t flooded. The world looked completely normal. And when you have a disaster that operates like that, where you cannot perceive the carnage, where it happens so quickly that hospitals could be inundated, and yet still so slowly that you don’t perceive that tick-tock of disaster. It’s not like the landslide, where you can just literally watch the disaster happening in front of your eyes. We deal terribly with that.
There’s a wonderful scholar named Rob Nixon at Princeton who’s written a great book called Slow Violence. He describes this concept of slow violence as you know, being violence that occurs too slowly for us to perceive both the chains of cause and effect and the consequences of it. So environmental degradation is an example of slow violence. Climate change is an example. The pandemic is a great example, right? With many sub-examples and many of the greatest crises, the big existential problems of our time are exactly like this. And you know they exist at scales of time and space that are different to the ones that we normally pay attention to and that really hampers our ability to even understand that there’s a problem, let alone to cope with them.
Charles Donelan
So this is such a good answer because it confirms what my intuition was, which is that there’s a convergence here between this work that you’ve done about things that we can’t perceive because of the way our senses are organized, and then things that we can’t know because we have certain habits that have to do with duration with time.
Ed Yong
Yes, great question, and actually this gives me a fantastic chance to talk about the third book that I’ve just finished writing. Very good. Honestly, I couldn’t have planted the question better myself. Let me back up a bit. At the start of this chat, you talked about how I see a continuity in my work, and that is true. It might seem at the surface that the sensory world of animals and the COVID-19 pandemic are completely different topics with no thematic tissue connecting them. And I think that’s not the case. I think my writing in both of these areas is about the idea that there are hidden sides to the world that we do not appreciate and that we absolutely need to.
With the animal senses, it’s obvious. But with the pandemic stuff, most of my writing was about societal vulnerabilities and fault lines that were deeply exposed and exploited by the new virus. It’s about entire sectors of society whose plight and whose problems were ignored, both before the pandemic and during it. And this is what I am interested in. This is what gets me going. I think that the world is a complex and rich place, far richer and far more complex than we know. And I think that we need to grapple with the ways in which we miss out on that complexity, to really understand the nature of the world and our place in it.
The third book, Life Beyond Measure, takes that theme and runs with it in every possible direction. The book is about life at different scales: size, time, space, movement, age. It’s about the many, many different ways of existing that occur across the Tree of Life, across the living world. In An Immense World, I started investigating this idea in terms of the senses, in terms of what stimuli in the world we don’t perceive, but there’s so much of the world that we don’t perceive because we are stuck at the size and the lifespan and the timescales that we are. You know, life is very different if you are the size of a blue whale, or if you are the size of a bacterium. Life is very different if you move at the speed of the plants I can see in my garden, or at the speed of the hummingbirds that are flying around those plants. It’s different if you’re rooted in place your whole life, or if you travel halfway across the world twice a year, if you live for a few months, like some of the insects I can see, or if you live for millennia, like the Bristlecone pines that live a short drive away from me.
All of these different ways of existing, I think give us clues about what the world is really like. And I think that helps stretch our imaginations, our curiosity, our sense of empathy and and I think it’s paramount for us to think about how life is, what life is like for most of the living. The final chapter of the book is very much about the kinds of things we just talked about, everything that your question about the mudslide unlocked about this discordance between the way we perceive the world and the timescales and the other scales that natural phenomena play out in and play over. There’s a lot of that in the final chapter. And you know that that gulf, that mismatch, that discrepancy is, is threaded throughout the entire book. It’s both a celebration of the wondrous diversity of life on Earth, and also a call for all of us to stretch our understanding to the greatest part of the world.
Charles Donelan
Wow, I can’t think of a better way to end our conversation, although I would love to continue it. There’s so much more.
Ed Yong
Well, maybe we can pick it up again
Charles Donelan
I look forward to the next time I get to learn from you and to discuss with you, and we will have an opportunity soon to do just that. Ed Yong will be in Santa Barbara on Wednesday, May 6, at 7:30 for UCSB Arts & Lectures. He’ll be at Campbell Hall on the UC Santa Barbara campus, and the talk is called The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses, but as we just heard, there is so much more at stake and in play than that. Thank you so much, Ed. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Ed Yong
Yes, I had a lot of fun, too. Thank you so much for the great questions, and I will see you next month.
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