Science Friday - “All That Breathes’ Film, Repatriating Native American Remains, Benjamin Banneker. Feb 24, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

‘All That Breathes:’ A Story Of Two Brothers Saving New Delhi’s Raptors The Oscars are right around the corner, and one of the nominees in the documentary category is called “All That Breathes.” It tells the story of two brothers—Nadeem and Saud—who dedicate their lives to rescuing black kites, a type of raptor that dominates the skies of New Delhi. Since they were children, the brothers have rescued more than 25,000 of these birds, who are quite literally falling out of the thick, polluted, hazy sky. Their conservation efforts have triumphed over limited resources and periods of religious violence in New Delhi. Guest host John Dankosky speaks with Shaunak Sen, director of “All That Breathes,” about the making of the film, and how it’s a story of urban ecology, politics, and hope.     Why Won’t Museums Return Native American Human Remains? In 1990, the United States passed a groundbreaking human rights policy called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act—known as NAGPRA. It was designed to spur museums, universities, and federal agencies to return Native American human remains and cultural items back to the tribes they were stolen from. NAGPRA held a lot of promise, but now—33 years later—more than 110,000 Native American, Hawaiian, and Alaskan human remains are held up in research institutions. So why, decades later, have so many institutions failed to return remains? That’s the focus of a new report from ProPublica. ProPublica reporter Mary Hudetz joins guest host John Dankosky to discuss why NAGPRA fell short, and where to go from here.   Appreciating The Brilliance Of Benjamin Banneker Benjamin Banneker was a free Black man born in 1731, over a century before slavery was abolished in his home state of Maryland. Today, Banneker is perhaps best known for his role in drawing the original borders of Washington, DC. But he was also an accomplished naturalist and polymath. He was among the first to document the cicada’s 17-year life cycle. Banneker also taught himself astronomy and math, and published one of the country’s first almanacs. Guest host Regina Barber talks with Dr. Janet Barber, an independent researcher, writer, and social scientist (with no relation to Regina), and Dr. Asamoah Nkwanta department chair and professor of mathematics at Morgan State University, based in Baltimore, Maryland, about Benjamin Banneker’s life and scientific legacy.   The Supernatural Side Of Astronomical Events Throughout history, there have been events in the sky that have made people uneasy: Think supernovas, comets, and eclipses. It’s easy to understand why. Even when astronomical knowledge was limited, the skies were readily observable. So when things changed, it sometimes led people to see these events as omens. In ancient China, eclipses were thought to occur when a celestial dragon attacked and ate the sun. And in Incan culture, eclipses were seen as the sun god expressing displeasure, which sometimes led to human sacrifice. And in 1456, Halley’s Comet was excommunicated by the pope for being an instrument of the devil. There are scientific explanations for these events, of course. Co-host Regina Barber speaks with Dr. Samaiyah Farid, solar physicist and project scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, about what’s behind these astrological omens.     Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm John Dankosky. In 1990, the U.S. passed a groundbreaking human rights policy. It was designed to spur museums, universities, and federal agencies to return Native American human remains and cultural items back to the tribes they were stolen from. It's called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as Nagpra. And Nagra held a lot of promise, but now some 33 years. years later, more than 110,000 Native American Hawaiian and Alaskan human remains are still held up in research institutions. So why, decades later, have so many places failed to return them? That's the focus of a new story by ProPublica. ProPublica reporter Mary Heweds worked on this.

She's based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She's also a member of the Crow tribe in Montana and the former president of the Native American Journalists Association. Mary, thanks so much for this reporting and welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. So let's start at the beginning here. How exactly did thousands of human remains end up in museums in the first place? The answer goes into history, into this country's history in the 1800s museums in the United States began to collect in large amounts. There weren't a lot of museums back then, but the earliest ones, you know, American Museum of Natural History, P-Body Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology began sort of campaigns to collect an excavate from indigenous burial sites.

Over time, I think many other institutions followed suit. Our data shows that there are actually 600 institutions that reported holding human remains across the U.S. So just to be clear, when you're talking about tracking human remains, you're also looking at cultural items that have been looted as well, and some items they were used in funerals, right? So we're talking about human remains, but also other items that are important to Native American tribes. Correct. Nagra, as it's called now, really refers to human remains taken from Native American gravesites,

as well as items that people may have buried with the deceased. In addition, Nagra also applies to many sacred objects and items of cultural patrimony. these would be items that a tribe believes belongs to its entire people. It's public property, and therefore no one person could have sold it or allowed for it to be taken. But certainly, NACRA, the law, is the clearest about reporting human remains and funerary items. And so that's where a lot of our reporting lies because the data was a lot more detailed. Walk me through how repatriation of these items exactly works. Do the tribes have to make a claim?

Typically, yes. In 1990, Congress passed this law, and it set out a pretty clear and simple mandate for institutions across the U.S. to review their holdings. I gave most institutions five years. Some of the biggest institutions got 10 years. And so they went through their collections, determined what came from Native American gravesites, which ancestral remains they were holding for those of Native Americans. and then require those institutions to report them. By reporting them, then it allowed for tribes to review what institutions had and to make claims.

Institutions also had to tell tribes what they had, for instance, if they had remains from, you know, the plains of the United States, they would tell tribes in that region what had come from there. The law also required consultation with tribes. And so for Native American tribes that are making claims, I can only imagine there's an enormous differential in power and their ability to go ahead and do this. If you're talking about a Harvard or a Yale, they have almost unlimited money to spend. And most of the tribes that are making these claims don't. Yeah.

So we've seen a lot in NAGRO work, tribes that are very active in this space and tribes that may not have the resources or the capacity to be as proactive. in making claims. But yeah, tribes have talked about generally across all institutions, the amount of effort that it requires to repatriate. The cost is immense. You know, if the tribe is in New Mexico, where I am, they may have to make multiple trips across country to review collections, to have meetings.

And then it gets harder if they feel that an institution is resistant to their claims or even rejects their claims. So Nagfer was designed to get, these institutions to return these stolen human remains. It was supposed to be done in about 10 years, and that would have been the year 2000, right? That's a while ago. It's now 2023. What exactly went wrong? Yeah, so the Congressional Budget Office guessed it would be about a decade or even less. There's been some criticism that Congress, the federal government has not dedicated enough money to this process. They did not fully understand. just how much it would begin to cost institutions as well as tribes. But also I think that

there was a resistance to NAGRA that's been documented. A lot of institutions didn't want it to be passed. And then within the law, which originally had been presented as sort of like a compromise between institutions and tribes, at least among native people, there's a feeling that maybe the law started to, at least initially from the outset, favored institutions a bit more, gave them the final say and whether they could repatriate. And then there was also what has now been called a loophole in the law that institutions took advantage of, which is called the culturally unidentifiable loophole. And what that means is that institution, when an institution declares that remains cannot be affiliated with a tribe or therefore culturally

unidentifiable, that means that they cannot decide which tribe to repatriate to or that the human remains and the objects cannot be affiliated to any modern day tribe. That can be a little offensive, at least to some tribes, because I think a lot of tribes will argue that they know where they came from, they know their history, especially if they've made a claim. They feel that that's almost a rejection of their ties to the land that they believe their ancestors come from and their kind of claims to who they are. So the loophole, in essence, allows universities or museums to just kick the can down the road and say, well, we don't know to whom we should return these, and so they'll stay with us. Correct. And today, the vast majority of the human remains

that exist in collections have been declared culturally unidentifiable by institutions. There's another problem with this, too, and I think this often happens when the federal government changes a law and says, we're going to enforce something and make sure that it sticks. Nagbra didn't have any real teeth behind it because there wasn't any enforcement mechanism at all. But yeah, the enforcement mechanism was extremely limited. Just as I think there's criticism that Congress did not fully fund the law, you know, and allowing for grants to fund repatriation work. There's also a lot of criticism that there has not been enough money devoted to civil enforcement,

which there's clear language in the law that calls for fining institutions that may not be in compliance, but there's been very little that that's happened. I think data we've seen places the figure around just more than $50,000 in fines against institutions over the years. Only last year, the Interior Department appointed a full-time investigator. I think they said that it was the first time they had a person at position full-time. So there wasn't even an investigator assigned to this? Correct. Until last year.

To look into complaints filed against institutions that may not be in compliance with the law. A big part of this project that you and ProPublica have worked on does indeed let us know across the country that some of our most famous institutions, loved institutions, places where we've spent quite a bit of our time, like the Smithsonian or the Field Museum, that they are part of this, that they continue to hold on to human remains, what exactly do you think needs to happen to get NAGPRA to be enforced? I think so much of this, we hear a lot across the museum world and then among Native people, we hear the word institutional will quite often. So the law is, as we speak, the Interior Department is reviewing new regulations that might tighten the law. But, you know, I think beyond that,

It's public understanding of the histories of the institutions and some public pressure for things to change. We're also in a moment, I think, there's a new generation of museum workers. And so a lot of people have put a lot of faith in the fact that perhaps, you know, with the changing times, with a new generation, there'll be more proactive work happening in institutions on repatriation. When you reached out to some of these institutions for comment or, to have them explain why they haven't complied. What did you hear? We hear often that time, resources, and money are major factors, even for institutions that have quite a bit of money or significant endowments. And then even among institutions that may have sort of been founded with collections that were taken from grave sites. I would say we also hear that NAGRA is complicated.

And I think certainly through one lens, it can be others might argue that it's as simple, as I said earlier, like listing what you have and working towards returning it. But we've also heard that, yeah, NACRO is complicated and museums feel they don't know who to return to, which I think makes sense, at least with the smaller institutions, with fewer resources. but we still, I think, our continuing our reporting to understand that exploitation a little better with larger institutions. Before I let you go, what exactly do you want people to take away from this reporting project, Mary? There's a couple things. Most of all, it's what I spoke to a little bit earlier about the need for a basic and broad public understanding of the issue. And so to that end, my colleagues on our team at ProPublica developed a tool for the public to look up their institution, to look up their county or their state just to see what is held from or what was taken from the land where they now live. And then the other piece, I think, and I think about this throughout the past years we worked on the story and we'll continue to is just really the history of it all and understanding that so much of what was taken,

And especially early on, it happened at a really difficult time for Native people. And they didn't have a say over the treatment of their ancestors, you know, in the 1800s as sort of major U.S. expansion was happening and forcing them off their land. And so I think it's understanding that history and then understanding how that history kind of continues today with or has sort of a lasting effect. Mary Hudetz is a reporter for ProPublica. She's based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. To read the full ProPublica report, you can head to our website. They also have a tool that lets you search for any institution to see how they're doing when it comes to repatriation. We're going to link to that too, and what's in there might surprise you.

Mary, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. After the break, co-host Regina Barber learns about the life and legacy of Benjamin Banacher, a black scientist born in 1731. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And I'm Regina Barber. In honor of Black History Month, we wanted to bring you the story of a pioneering black scientist whose work you might not be familiar with. Benjamin Bannaker. He was a free black man born in 1731, over a century before slavery was abolished in his home state of Maryland.

Bannaker is perhaps best known for his role in drawing the original borders of Washington, D.C. But he was also an accomplished naturalist and polymath. And among the first, first to document the Cicada's 17-year life cycle. He taught himself astronomy and math and published one of the country's first almanacs. Joining me today to talk more about Benjamin Bannaker's life and scientific legacy are my guests. Dr. Janet Barber, independent researcher, writer, and social scientist, and despite sharing the last name, we are not related, and Dr. Osimo Quanta, department chair and professor of mathematics at Morgan State University based in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Barber and Dr. Quanta, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you and welcome to you as well. Thank you ever so much. We're excited. All right, let's start with Benjamin Bannocker's early life

and education. So Dr. Barber, as I mentioned at the top, he had no formal scientific training. Can you tell me a bit about his role, his mother played in encouraging him to observe and document the natural world? He had an astute mother who was in naturalist. And so I'm so glad you brought that up. She most certainly was a naturalist, grew herbs, edible flowers, and she would sell at the market in Ellicott City. And his mother was very instrumental, and so was his grandmother, very instrumental in his education. And he learned to read from his grandmother. He was very observant of his surroundings. His father left him property when he was only six years old, his name was on the deed.

And so he did have land. He did have a business. And he always held on to the lessons of his mom and the lessons of his grandmother and also certainly the lessons of his father. Because he learned about the dogon from his father, which is like an African tradition and knowledge from particular families. And I'm thinking that's how he might have been interested in. surveying and astronomy, mathematics, and everything. Because every day at his house was like a lesson, it was like a general school lesson. But he also was able at some point in his life to go to school. And that helped, I'm sure, somewhat as well. However, as I say in many of my lectures, we can

imagine, though, how he might have felt being born free, but only somewhat free, because I'm sure, on an everyday basis, he was forever walking around in his neighborhood and the community where he lived and looking at enslaved people. And so to do what he has done in his lifetime and in his life is truly, truly fascinating and amazing. So Dr. Quanta, you have been working on getting Bannikers like work, his research work on cicadas out there. You recently published a paper about his pioneering work on cicadas. What were his contributions to our understanding of cicadas? Bannaker at a very young age, first observed these insects and not knowing the nature or characteristic of this particular insect, he actually became curious and interested in the aspects of this

particular insect. And so they emerged in the first year. And then he noticed that 17 years, later, they emerged again. And then there was another 17 years. And then he had observed the emergence of these cicadas for four 17-year cycles. So if you go back and study the actual history of the emergence of the cicadas, Bannocker's observations are nowhere to be seen. What is so fascinating and interesting is that the cicatis emerge every 17 years, which is a prime number. And for those who don't know what a prime number, it's a number that's divisible by that particular number and one. So the math conundrum is how do these particular fascinating insects know to emerge every 17 years? And so the mathematical models that are related to trying to better understand why these particular insects emerge is still an ongoing research problem today.

Various models have been developed over the years to try to get a better understanding. So Dr. Kanta, despite him likely being the first to document Cicada's 17-year life site, He's largely uncredited, like you say, in the academic literature until recently, and you probably helped with that. Why were his contributions overlooked for so long? I have a guess, but you go ahead. You know, he was self-taught astronomer, self-taught mathematician. So as we in STEM and in the sciences, know when you're not part of the actual academy, sometimes you're not recognized. And of course, race may have placed. And of course, race may have played a part in that.

So it's a good chance that people just weren't aware of his observations that, you know, that turned up in his almanet. Dr. Barber, now just a few months after Bannaker was born in 1731, the 17-year cicadas emerged. And you wrote a poem imagining this moment in time. Could you read it for us, this poem? Okay, so the title is Baby Benjamin Bannaker and the Magi Cicata. Years from adulthood, down deep in old Maryland woods, a feather bed as his crib, little baby Benjamin heard magic for real. His brain already bright for a 17-year flight.

The Dogan star smiled down, duly anorting his head and vision alike. Baby Ben saw the magic, wings twirling around in the May night, the 1730-year cicada singing loudly with delight. And that was penned while I was writing a children's book about Benjamin Bannaker. It is beautiful. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. I loved it. Now, I must mention here that you two are husband and wife. Dr. Barbara, you are a social scientist, and Dr. Quanta, you are a mathematician. What made you decide to work together on this project documenting Benjamin Bannaker's

cicada research? That's funny. That is. That's quite funny, isn't it? Well, as I said earlier, Dr. Quanta, you know, is interested in the nature, and I am, too. however, I had not planned to write about a play with the bugs at all. And he was just fascinated by the fact that he thought that he had heard something about the fact that Benjamin Bannaker had something to do with it. And we're living very close to Ellicott City.

And we had collaborated in some writing and thinking about writing things together. And so he enlisted me as a partner in doing this. And I veered off into becoming very interested in Benjamin Bannaker's life. which I'd already been, but this even made it more so. The fact that I was visiting his home, and we did visit his home in 2004, and it was just really amazing just to listen to the songs of the cicada. While Dr. Quanta was very interested in learning about the mathematics of the 17 years, I was looking at and listening to the love songs of the cicadas,

since I had learned that they are pretty romantic insects. And that is how it really came about with his thing. and let's do this. I'm interested in the cicada, and I became interested as well, especially when I heard the words like magic and magic cicadas, and, you know, what's so historical about them, what's so important about them.

All right, I do want to talk about one of Benjamin Bannockers other important contributions, his almanac. His was among one of the first published in the United States, and he also made some important astronomical predictions, which I'm interested in. Can you tell me more about that? In 1789, he made a prediction about the solar eclipse. And it came into fruition April the 14th, 1789, that it actually did occur.

And so he made this prediction. And so it just so happens that the moon began to path between the Earth and the sun. And he had already made that prediction. And it actually did happen. It was very unusual. that a lot of people were not able to do that. So that was mentioned in some papers and everything in the community. And his almanac was really popular among black and white farmers.

It was. Many, many farmers and naturalists used that almanet religiously. And his scientific contributions and his contemporaries would incorrectly predict these solar eclipses and things, whereas he usually did not. And so I like to say this with his scientific brilliance at analyzing things very mathematically, I'm thinking that that dogone ancestry that his grandfather and father taught him was into play at that time. Well, let's talk about another really good story about Benjamin Panicker. Another thing he's known for is building the first wooden clock in the U.S.

While that matter of him being the first is a little contestant. the story is pretty remarkable. Can you tell me about it? Well, Benjamin Bannaker, some do say that he made the first clock. It is understood that he actually made the first wooden clock. And the reason we have to say that is because he did indeed get a wristwatch type clock. And he was able to just look at and calculate and do the thinking, analysis, and mathematics from that. and actually made a wooden clock that lasted 40 to 50 years and had people from really and truly around, not just the United States, from around the world, actually, and certainly his neighborhood and people in his community,

looking and visiting Benjamin Banerica's homestead, looking at that clock out of fascination for that many years. Yeah, and before he built that wooden clock, he had never seen a clock before ever, which shows how remarkable he is. He had not ever seen a clock before. He was fascinated with that visitors watch, and they allowed him to hold on to it. Benjamin Bannaker was a free black man when most other African Americans were still enslaved, and that understandably affected him deeply, and it motivated him to write to Thomas Jefferson. What did his letter say? What he did was challenge Thomas Jefferson, and I said in all sincerity,

in claiming equality in human rights for all, while you are duly holding African Americans in bondage captivity, its insensitivity, inservitude. And he said that it reflected and detained and looked fraudulent for him to do and say the things he says when so much violence was going on against enslaved people. He said to Thomas Jefferson in the latter, we are race of beings who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world. We have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt. However, diversified in situation or color, we are all the same. We are all the same family. We are all human. And that's essentially what he said in the letter. And he also asked that slavery be abolished. Of course, we know that it was not. And so even when Thomas Jefferson became president, it still was not. And it was

way years later, 1806, October the 9th, when Benjamin Bannaker passed away. And still, I'm sure he sadly passed away knowing that his friends, family, all in his community and across the world were still enslaved. And you said that he also attached his almanac to this letter. And Jefferson actually wrote back. And what did Bannaker do with Thomas Jefferson's response? What Thomas Jefferson said about, I finally met a black man who has some intelligence. He is the son of an African prince and a white grandmother, he said, and he was impressed. And then he turned around years later and said something pretty derogatory to a friend that he wrote to in France. He said something to the effect that African Americans or Africans were still not human.

I read that Bannaker actually published Jefferson's response. Is that true? In the Ammanette. Can I just add about the almanac, besides the science contributions, there's also the human rights contribution in terms of his letter to Jefferson. And also there was a plan about a peaceful plan in the document that we still haven't addressed today in terms of during war, we have plans for, war, but we also need the United States needs a plan for peace. And that particular almanac has this contribution in terms of science is also a contribution in terms of human rights. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So during Bannaker's funeral, his cabin went up in flames. And we don't know exactly how or why it happened, but in those flames, it's most likely

that even more of Benjamin Bannaker's contributions were lost to history, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Many of his important documents and pages that he had written, research that he had done went up in flames. They were able to save some of them, and they were saved our friends, but his sisters also saved some of them from his homestead. And we did see, Dr. Quentin, I did see at the Historical Museum in Maryland many of his documents. We did see many of his documents. However, we know that there's so many more that he had. So Dr. Kondra, I'm going to give you the last question then.

You've made it your mission to share the scientific legacy of Benjamin Bannaker. Why is it so important to make sure his work is remembered? Here is a self-taught individual who had very little resources and what resources he did have. he made the best of them. And so there's no excuse for a young person or a researcher today who knows the life and legacy of Benjamin Bannaker to use an excuse of lack of resources in terms of turning out good science and good research. What he contributed is an example that we all can learn from and we all can follow. Recently, I was I was in a class with some freshman students and many of them from the Baltimore, D.C. area. And I asked them if they had ever

heard of Benjamin Bannaker. And to my surprise, no one in the room knew of Benjamin Bannocker. So we still have a lot of work to do. And that's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Janet Barber, independent researcher, writer and social scientist, and Dr. Osimo Kwanta, department chair and professor of mathematics at Morgan State University based in Baltimore, Maryland. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. After the break, John Dan Koski talks with the director of All That Breathe's,

an Oscar-nominated film about the beautiful birds falling from New Delhi skies. Once they would find injured black kites and would sort of bring them up to their house and start healing and repairing them on their own. And that's how it began. It started with picking one bird up and then 10 and then 100 and then thousands and now scores of thousands. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Regina Barber.

And I'm John Dankowski. The Oscars are right around the corner, and I don't know about you, but I'm trying to power through as many nominated films as I can. And what I recently watched is a documentary called All That Breathes. It tells the story of two brothers, Nadim and Saoud, who dedicate their lives to rescuing black kites, their beautiful birds, raptors that dominate the New Delhi skies. The brothers have managed to rescue more than 25,000 of these birds who are quite literally falling out of the thick hazy sky,

and they're managing to do this despite very few resources and during periods of religious violence. Here to tell us more about this film is Shaanak Sen. He's director of All That Breathe's joining us from Los Angeles. Shaanek, congratulations and welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Really pleased to be here. How did you first find? this story? Well, the thing is that when you live in Delhi, the air itself is just such a,

has a kind of creepy sentience and it's constantly grey and heavy and, you know, everybody's always preoccupied with it. And in it are these tiny, lazy, gliding black dots, which are the birds. And the bird that you see most commonly is this bird of prey or this raptor called the black kite. And this one time, I was sitting, I remember looking up and feeling distinctly this sort of impression of watching one of these black dots hurtling down, like falling from the sky. And essentially I started researching where birds go when they fall off the sky. And the singular work of these two brothers, these two Muslim men, Nadim and Saoud, they work in this very tiny, grubby basement full of industrial

D-K and machines. And in it, they treat these magisterial birds. And, you know, in the last 15-odd years, they've saved over 25,000 black kites. And that's how we started on this an affirmative venture to make something poetic and philosophical and cinematic about ecology, politics, and the emotional life of the brothers. For these brothers, saving kites has become a type of mission. How did they start doing this and how did they learn to take care of these birds that were falling from the sky? I think they sort of stumbled into it in the most slapdash of manners. Their story goes that they used to be amateur bodybuilders as teenagers and they were interested in matters of flesh and tendons and, you know, like the ways in which muscles work.

And once they would find injured black kites and would sort of bring them up to their house and start healing and repairing them on their own. And that's how it began. It started with picking one bird up and then 10 and then 100 and then thousands and now scores of thousands really. And it's remarkable because these are not cute songbirds. They're often ferocious raptors and these are big magisterial birds. So their story is really one of absolutely radical kindness. They're like three Don Quixote's, you know, who peddle micro-miracles every day. And even though they have, as you can see, a kind of front-row seats to the apocalypse,

as you've seen, the film doesn't sentimentalize or romanticize anything. What's interesting is the stuff of soldiering on. To my mind, it's a very interesting philosophical disposition towards climate change. and to planetary damage. You started our conversation by talking about what drew you to this story in the first place was the sky above Delhi, which you described quite beautifully. And I can imagine this gray haze hanging over the city. Explain a bit more about what draws these birds from the sky.

What makes them fall from the sky that is so polluting that it might, must be harming the humans who live there too. Well, of course it's harming the humans who live there too. I mean, lung disease and other kinds of respiratory ailments have really skyrocketed. Like, they've really gone through the roof in recent years. It's, of course, it affects all non-human life as well. With the black kite, it's a complicated kind of a scenario. There's a bunch of reasons why they fall down.

One, for instance, is a cultural reason. You know, the cultural practice of flying paper kites, and they have those sharp strings or the trails, you know, the paper, the kite trails that are used to fly them. Often birds get entangled in them. Other than that, the ecological reasons are very many. For instance, the main sort of the apex predator in terms of the avian ecosystem, for the longest time used to be the vulture in Delhi. But with what's often called now as the Diclofenac event, that has changed. because essentially the excessive use of this chemical called Diclofenac meant that it would end up in the kidneys of livestock. And once those livestock would die, the vultures would eat the carcasses and then they would have renal failures.

And there was a kind of mass death event, which meant that the kite suddenly became the top raptor. Secondly, the amount of food available given the size of the landfill, landfills in Delhi, means that there's constant supply of food. Delhi in recent years has become, has the highest density of black kites. And of course, apart from that is the pollution itself. And I don't think there's a study yet that exactly pinpoints which precise toxins cause what kind of damage. But of course, the sheer opacity in the air, et cetera, doesn't help. Throughout the movie, you have all these beautiful close-ups of the birds as they roost.

How did you capture these scenes that really allow you to see the faces of the kites? Well, we spent about three years shooting it. When we began, we were very clear of one thing. We were more sure of what we did not want to do. We did not want to make wildlife talk, I mean in the conventional sense. And as you've seen in the film, it's not just the birds, but there's a whole panoply of non-human life like rats and pigs and snails and horses and so on and so forth. And what we decided is that we'll use these long, slow pans.

and tilts and these really languid, languorous shots. And the main idea that we had to communicate was a kind of simultaneously of life, a kind of entanglement or kinship or neighborliness of life. And I think those are best communicated in these kinds of single takes where you've showed these two kinds of life and temporality and so on, sort of stapled together in that one shot. You know, if you look around wherever you guys are right now, there's definitely different kinds of non-human life within a few hundred meters of you, right?

And we're constantly simultaneously inhabiting, especially urban ecology, like in cities. So we had to figure out this kind of a grammar of this slow, contemplative, meditative style of slow, long takes. It's interesting how you describe your desire to not want to make a traditional nature film. I think one hallmark of the nature film that we all grew up with, is that scientists and photographers go out into nature, whatever we call nature, the African Savannah say, and take pictures of animals in their own habitat. But what your film does is it's showing these animals living right next to people, next to all these people, and it shows a very different type of ecology. And I think you really succeed in making us understand that we're part of

nature, that nature is not out there, that it's right here with us in the city of Delhi. The main problem in terms of thought is how we draw kind of mutually exclusive binary between these things, right, where nature is apparently something that occurs in beaches and forests and underwater and not in the cities. But we know that that's a staggeringly silly thought, so much of inhabited land in the world is actually urban and it's exponentially growing. So of course it's not like non-human life is only consigning itself to non-urban space

and which is why urban ecology is so interesting. Like in the film the brothers talk about how in the cities in Delhi they've noticed that certain songbirds sing over the sound of traffic to hear its mate. The city is a very, dominant and aggressive driving factor for a non-human life as well. And we have to understand that.

And the film really was interested in urban ecology. The brothers are phenomenally skilled in terms of what they do and have incredible knowledge. But it's a kind of knowledge that is also taken from a kind of lived experience. It's also as inflected by the spiritual or by the other kinds of belief systems. So they're kind of organic intellectuals. And I think that those kinds of voices are also very obviously equally important. I'm glad that you mentioned the spiritual aspect of this. I think one of the striking things about the film is the way that you show the brothers

during a period of violence and unrest in their neighborhood, Muslims being targeted because of their religion. And it seemed as though these kites were more than just birds that they could rescue. But it really was a symbol of hope. Every time they let one of these birds free, it seemed to symbolize something very powerful for them emotionally and spiritually. That is precisely why the brothers are singular to my mind. Because you see, it's as much a story of redemption and hope. And it's not a simple-minded optimism.

It's a hard-fought, radical, and a very kind, empathetic kind of hope. And that's what really sets them apart, really, because essentially they see a really staggering amount of devastation, ecological devastation every day, right? But for them to still soldier and do the kind of work that they're doing is incredible because, you know, they're not, they don't speak in the language of martyrdom or heroes. There's a kind of, well, you know, a kind of matter-of-fact rhinus to them. There's also levity and joy and laughter and joking and fooling around.

And I think that kind of attitude is incredibly enriching to witness. Sean Exxan is the director of the documentary All That Breates. It's available to stream on HBO Max right now. And it's also been nominated for an Oscar. Shaanak, thank you so much for joining us. And best of luck with this film at the Oscars. Thank you so much. Lovely talking.

Sean Excentny is the director of the documentary All That Breathes. It's available to stream on HBO Max. And next week, we're going to be rounding up all the sciencey films that were nominated for the Oscars, from Best Picture nominees to documentaries. Please join us. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Throughout history, there have been things that have happened in the sky that have made people uneasy. Think comets and eclipses, or when a new star appears in the sky. The skies were always there.

And so when things changed, it confused people and sometimes led people to see these events as omens. Of course, there are scientific explanations behind these astronomical phenomena. So joining me today to explain is my guest, Dr. Samaya Friede, solar physicist, and project scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right.

So we're going to start talking omens. Let's start with an event that is actually super fascinating to me, the supernova of 1054. So Chinese astronomers documented sightings of this, and Native Americans may have seen it, too, based on rock paintings that have been found in Arizona and New Mexico. But first, before we jump into the science, can you explain what that would have looked like in the sky? Yeah, so imagine if you were an astronomer in 1054. These guys were not just, you know, casual observers of the sky. They made very detailed maps of the star locations across different seasons.

So all of a sudden, you know, there's one location that we see a star that wasn't there the previous night. And then it stays over some period of time over two years that this supernova was observed. So from Earth, they probably observed a bright region that looked like a star, just a bright light coming from this one location in the sky that was dark before. Yeah, it was brighter than. Venus, right, at one point? Yeah. And it was actually, you could see it in the daytime for almost a month. Okay, so can you go through the process of what that actually was? It was a supernova. It was an explosion of a star. So what happens to that star before it explodes? Yeah. It was formed from an eruption of a pulsar, which is a really rapidly spinning star. And once that star reached the end of his

life exploded and caused the supernova to be observed from Earth. And that explosion created the crab nebula, right? Can you explain what that is? Right, exactly. So when we see the crab nebula now, it's a really amazing area of dust and gas that kind of looks sparse and fibrous. So what happens is that the star that exploded, this is all the gas and debris from that star. and the effect of heating the local gas also nearby.

Let's move on to an astronomical phenomenon that some people may have witnessed with their own eyes, an eclipse, right? So throughout history, there have been lots of reactions to eclipses. In ancient China, there was a myth associated with eclipses. A celestial dragon attacked and ate the sun. In the Incan culture, eclipses were associated with the sun god expressing his displeasure. what is actually happening during an eclipse? It depends. So when you're talking about a solar eclipse, the alignment happens when the moon moves in between the sun and the earth.

It casts a shadow on the earth. And so we observe it as a solar eclipse. On the other side, when the lunar eclipse, which can be observed more often than solar eclips, happen when the moon moves into the earth's shadow. So then the moon is on the other side of the earth and it moves into the earth's shadow. And so when we're viewed from Earth, it looks like the moon itself is being eclips or darkened. Right.

So that's the type of eclipse that's like extra fascinating for me. It's called the blood moon sometimes. It's kind of when it has that darkening that you talk about, it's kind of reddish, it's kind of creepy. there are actually four blood moons between 2014 and 2015, and this led to something called the blood moon prophecies from two American Christian preachers thinking it was like the end of times. So like you were saying, what makes this blood moon different from the other types of eclipses?

When we're looking at the moon in general from the earth, the light that you see illuminating the moon's surface is from the sun. But when the moon is in the earth's shadow, then a lot of the light that is from the sun is being blocked. So some of the sun like still reaches the surface of the moon indirectly. So it's being scattered off of the Earth's atmosphere. And so because it's being scattered, it's like similar to a sunset when you see the sun's going down, the colors that you see there,

the oranges and reds. And so the same effect is happening. Let's move to another phenomenon that people may have been lucky enough to see even recently, comets. So in 1456, Haley's comet was excommunicated by the Pope for being an instrument of the devil. And in the Incan and Aztec empires, they were seen as divine wrath against Spanish colonists. So Samaya, what exactly is a comet? Its comet is a large object. It's made of dust, ice, and rock that orbits the sun, just like the planets do. A lot of these rocks and dust are left over from the formation of.

of the solar system. That's all the time we have for now. And I want to thank my guest, Dr. Samia Farid, solar physicist and project scientists at the University Cooperation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. If you missed any part of this program or like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriad.com. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm John Dankoski. Thanks so much for listening.