From Orbit to Intimacy: Beyond the Overview Effect
(The original version of this was recorded and shared on Lifeworlds podcast: listen here)
What if the next shift in planetary consciousness didn’t come from looking back at Earth from space, but from listening deeply to the voices already here? In this thought piece I propose the “lifeworlding effect” as the overview effect of our time: one where developments in science, technology, law, and many other disciplines are revealing our entangled presence within a multispecies world.
A blue green marbled orb, suspended in pitch darkness. An image that defined a generation. We had become star travellers, cosmonauts. Hairless apes breaking free of a planet’s event horizon, launching into the abyss, only to look back at where we came from as if seeing it for the first time. Against the backdrop of a vast cosmos this was our only habitable home, revealed in a single frame, liberated from borders and tribal identities.
Pictures of Earth taken during the Apollo missions of the 1960s led to author Frank White coining the term “the overview effect”, referring to the phenomenon whereby astronauts reported experiencing significant cognitive shifts upon their return from space, such as self-transcendence, expanded identities and profound awe. The overview effect helped catalyze a new planetary awareness for countless earth citizens. It awakened a visceral sense of belonging to a wider whole and contextualized the preciousness of life, rippling into the first waves of the environmental movement.
What would be today’s equivalent of the overview effect? What image or sensation of the Earth could we experience that would change us forever?
I ask this question because I believe that it’s only through a fresh revelatory experience, a newfound summoning of the ‘mystique of the Earth’ as Thomas Berry would say, that our human collective wills can be summoned into a healing movement on behalf of the Earth.
I know what the overview effect is not: long lists of GHG emissions; net-zero targets; endless dashboards of carbon accounting; gamified climate apps; nor technocratic climate summits held in five-star hotels. It is not the disembodied language of metrics, markets, or guilt.
In this piece I’ll propose something we could playfully begin calling the ‘lifeworlding effect’ — as an evolution of the concept of the overview. Let me trace a story for you, beginning with whale songs.
In the 1970s bio-acoustician Roger Payne plunged a hydrophone under the ocean’s surface and for the first time in history recorded the resonant, haunting songs of humpback whales. The resulting records were printed and distributed via National Geographic in the millions, spreading the voices of our cetacean kin far and wide. By raising global consciousness around the culture of whales, the album helped spawn a worldwide Save The Whales movement and contributed to widespread whaling moratoriums. Their voices of the deep brought us what I would call another kind of overview effect: more aquatic, otherworldly, slinky, and undeniably transcendent.
Half a century later what began as eavesdropping has become a conversation. Whale voices are not only being recorded but translated. Through the application of neural networks, lightweight and self-organizing sensors, large language models fine-tuned on animal communication, computer vision, live data streams, and edge computing, we are beginning to create a new Rosetta Stone. In doing so we infer what they might be saying to each other: ancestral songs, individual names, tribal codas, intergenerational guidance, rituals of courtship, the location of whaling boats. Suddenly the whales are not only singing, they are speaking, and we can listen, understand… and even possibly, speak back.
The translation of animal languages such as whale song is just one piece of a rich tapestry I have seen emerging across many fields, their practitioners are intermingling, disciplines combining like DNA to create pathways none could have ventured alone. From bioacoustics to plant neurobiology, ecocentric law, remote sensing and earth observation, speculative design, nature-connection mentorship, rites of passage, digital twinning of ecosystems, rewilding, indigenous science, grief rituals, interspecies music and multispecies citizen assemblies, regenerative farming, the internet of animals… All around the world, people are placing themselves in the claws, hooves and wings of other beings, seeing through their lifeworlds (a lifeworld is the situated/felt/meaning-rich experience of the world by another being), revealing the pervasiveness of minds and personalities so unique and complex, so nuanced and intelligent, that often we are left stunned with what we find.
We’re highlighting what seemed previously invisible, and satiating the deep longing we all share to re-enter conversation with a landscape that has always remained dynamic, sentient and in dialogue with us. The united front here is an enduring relational shift in how humans come to understand, translate, embody, and ultimately serve the interests of earth’s diverse intelligences — through their perspectives, not just ours.
The guests that have come on this show are some of the most gifted translators of these lifeworlds. You can hear it in Carl Safina’s stories of elephants keeping vigil over their dead, dolphins sharing cultural rituals across pods, and how beauty and aesthetics are guiding forces in evolution. In the late Karen Bakker’s work decoding the sonar languages of bats and coral reefs, we glimpse how sound itself is a medium of mother’s tongue and baby larvae finding their way home. In Paco Calvo’s plant neurobiology lab, bean plants seem to “choose” which pole to climb. ahlay blakey reminds us that grief rituals and community choirs are a form of interspecies activism. Giuliana Furci shares a mycelium mapping of Earth as a planetary neural network in its own right.
As Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute and ICARUS has suggested, we could soon imagine mobile protected areas that follow the shifting migration patterns of animals under climate stress, whales that turn around shipping tankers, or goats that alert us to impeding eruptions. He envisions livestream telecasts of known individuals in the animal kingdom broadcasting the life of a stork or a snow leopard like we might follow a human story arc.
All the new aforementioned technologies add to what indigenous wisdom has tracked for millennia, as Tyson Yunkporta reminded us, scientific disciplines now braiding in ‘two-eyed seeing’. These advances in translation pave the way for humans to advocate for other species’ interests, objectively and legally, in courtrooms and city councils around the world.
Collaboratives such as MOTH at NYU Law are examining the philosophical conundrums of teasing out these interiorities. What are ethical guardrails and consent practices around speaking back to whales, as Project CETI is exploring? Who builds these AI systems, and what epistemologies guide their design, let alone the potential for behavioural manipulation? Will they help us hear the animals or will they commoditise them in another venture endeavour, interspecies communication branded as wellness tech (imagine an app with your dog ‘speaking to you’, or biofeedback rhythms from mycelial signals)? How might a digital twin of a forest built using AI respect the rhythms and biocomplexities of the forest itself? These are thrilling and worthy questions.
I chose the name Lifeworlds for this podcast without fully knowing why. Over time, the impulse is becoming clearer. Initially I knew I wanted to bridge the gap between human society and the lived experience of other Earth citizens, because of the sincere empathy, awe and belonging that peering into and through the perspectives of other lives can impart, breaking down dualities and othering.
Now, I am realising that lifeworld-ing, or what I like to call empathetic inhabitation, might become this decade’s equivalent of an overview effect — a swelling phase shift revealing fundamental truths about our human place within the web of life.
Only this time the overview effect is not humans in space staring back at the magnificence of our planetary home. It is us, firmly entangled in soil and salt water and reindeer moss, staring in and speaking out as the multiple lifeworlds of the earth… Eyes observing horizontally, fractally. Our gaze, and ourselves, reflected back in what we used to call “the other.”
This extends beyond empathy. It really is re-inhabitation. We become endogenous again to our wildly imaginative home planet. We begin to see so much of ourselves reflected in another, as if there were no divide or separation… Because there isn’t.
This is how we return to Earth. It’s the softening of our superiority. The giving not just of voice but of our bodies as we practice disciplines of interspecies connection. There are so many gifts that reveal when we sense the living world around us through a combination of body, intellect, and heart. It’s the healing of the divides that underlie many chronic mental illnesses and addictive consumerism. It’s about spirituality, but a spirituality married with science and technology; a bridging of the left and right hemispheres. Brain meeting body. It’s an intellectual act, and, it’s fundamentally somatic.
And where to go from there? Such relational worldviews propel us to redesign legal, political and economic systems aligned with what is now felt as undeniable. Militarism and polarisation arise from fear, disconnection, us-vs-them dynamics, and extractivist mindsets held by those in power who treat land, bodies and animals as resources. I hope that in reframing identities beyond a nation or tribe, and proving our interdependencies, a greater common planetary loyalty may arise. Newly cultivated skills of empathy and attending with ‘nature’ has been shown to translate in how we treat our human kin, and processes such as land based regeneration repair deteriorated cultural fabrics. In healing the earth, we heal ourselves.
In closing, I’ll offer one more evocation.
What if we flipped the perspective entirely, and rather than us having an overview effect on the Earth… What if we were the Earth extending its sensing systems — the Earth watching itself through human culture as a sensing organ? The soil moisture sensors, the echo-locating clicks of whales, the chips tracking migrations of animals, the infrared gaze of satellites, all the neural networks decoding the speech of other species… This is Gaia becoming reflexive. Blue green orbed, folding perception inward, evolving the capacity to know itself. Of course, maybe she always has been this, and we’re just tuning back in. Or maybe there is something truly singular happening, a new reflexivity, a new sense of distributed mind, that is unique to our time. Either way, the question lies in whether we will be ready change ourselves as a result, and act as Earth, regenerating itself.
(Written with some help from a GPT and a JK on ideating structure and cleaning up flow, but none of my sentences came from a machine)
