The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection?

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

It seems like wolves just have so much to tell us, through their howls and their habits and the traces they leave through their berries. And in Wolfish, you supplement and compare stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” with stories about wolves and their food and other non-human elements of the world. What do you find valuable about this approach?

ERICA BERRY

And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I'm also fascinated by the role of the demonstrations of creativity in the animal world. Tell us about the creativity of wolves.

BERRY

It's felt very anxious to imagine going towards the next few decades. And I do get a real sense of solidarity and hope by how wolves are navigating these change landscapes and moving through them and raising new generations. In the face of it, a wolf pack will pass on territory potentially through multiple generations.

We have to rekindle the herd instinct. Cows right now are bred just for meat. They are bred to exist within capitalism. The cows have forgotten how to interact with each other and protect each other. They are stewards of the land and what can we learn from that?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

So in the writing of the book, what special qualities did you find in wolves? There's so many animals you could write about. And what did you learn about human relationships with wolves? Predators and prey and dispersers in the wild?

BERRY

And I think the ways that wolves converse with one another, there's also so much there that really conjures the way that we humans do. And I was trying to piece together: why did we feel so threatened by wolves? In part, I think because there's a sort of uncanny mirror that humans have seen in a wolf. And I'll give an example. Wolf packs will form a diversity of family structures very often. So they will have a nuclear family where you'll have two breeders, but they can also have an extended family where there's sort of aunts and uncles in the pack. Or (these are the biologist's names) they'll call it a step-family if a wolf pack welcomes an outside breeder. A foster family, if they welcome another outsider. And I think the way that a pack is its own ecosystem: if one wolf dies, there's one wolf in this pack that might be the one that teaches how to move through the territory. And if that one wolf dies, the whole pack has a much higher likelihood of disbanding. And so this idea that the interconnectivity between the packs and the individuality of the wolves is so critical. It is so beautiful, and you see that studying these different wolves, they have personalities.

Photo by Andrea Lonas

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Indigo Pinder Magaña with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Indigo Pinder Magaña.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).