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 became star travelers, 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, liberated from borders and tribal identities and revealed in a single frame.
Such pictures of Earth taken during the Apollo missions of the 1960s led author Frank White to coin the phrase “the overview effect.” This refers to the significant cognitive shifts and experiences of self-transcendence, expanded identities, and profound awe reported by astronauts upon their return from space. 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, shaping a perspective that rippled into the first waves of the environmental movement.
What is today’s equivalent of the overview effect? What image or sensation of the Earth has the power to change us forever?
I ask this question because I believe that only a fresh revelatory experience — a newfound summoning of the “mystique of the Earth,” as Thomas Berry would say — can summon our collective will into a healing movement on behalf of the Earth.
I know what today’s overview effect is not: long lists of greenhouse gas emissions, net-zero targets, endless dashboards of carbon accounting, gamified climate apps, or technocratic climate summits held in five-star hotels. It is not the disembodied language of metrics, markets, or guilt.
In this essay I’ll propose something we could playfully begin calling the “lifeworlding effect” (here, a “lifeworld” refers to another being’s situated/felt/meaning-rich experience of the world). 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 created the first recordings of the resonant, haunting songs of humpback whales. National Geographic printed and distributed the resulting records 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 the worldwide Save The Whales movement and contributed to widespread whaling moratoriums. The voices of the deep brought us another kind of overview effect, more aquatic but just as otherworldly and undeniably transcendent.
Half a century later what began as eavesdropping has now become a conversation. Scientists are not only recording but also translating whale voices. 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. We can now infer what whales might be saying to one another: 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 also 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 emerging across many fields. Disciplines and their practitioners are intermingling and combining like DNA to create pathways none could have forged 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, multispecies citizen assemblies, regenerative farming, and 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 and experiencing the pervasiveness of stunningly unique, complex, nuanced, and intelligent minds and personalities.
We’re highlighting what seemed previously invisible and satiating a deep longing to reenter 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.You can see the lifeworlding effect at work in Carl Safina’s stories of elephants keeping vigil over their dead, dolphins sharing cultural rituals across pods, and his account of how beauty and aesthetics function as guiding forces in evolution. In the late Karen Bakker’s work decoding sonar languages, we glimpse how beings as various as bats, settlement-stage coral, and mother turtles singing their children into the sea after they hatch use sound itself as a navigation tool. 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 forms 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 of Animal Behavior and the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) has suggested, we could soon imagine mobile protected areas that follow the shifting migration patterns of animals under climate stress — imagine whales that turn around shipping tankers or goats that alert us to impending eruptions. He envisions livestreams of known individuals in the animal kingdom, enabling us to trace the life of a stork or a snow leopard like we might follow a human’s story arc.
The new technologies that support these efforts add to what indigenous wisdom has tracked for millennia. As Tyson Yunkporta reminds us, scientific disciplines now braid themselves together with much older ways of knowing in a kind of “two-eyed seeing.” The resulting 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 the MOTH Program at NYU Law are examining the philosophical conundrums that emerge from the work of lifeworlding. For example, Project CETI asks: what ethical guardrails and consent practices do we need to build around speaking back to whales? Who builds these AI systems, and what epistemologies guide their design and potential for behavioural manipulation? Will they help us hear the animals or will they commoditize them, with interspecies communication branded as wellness tech (imagine a subscription app that allows your dog to “speak to you” or biofeedback rhythms from mycelial signals)? How can 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 the podcast I host without fully knowing why. Over time, the significance of 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 peering into and through the perspectives of other lives has the power to impart sincere empathy, awe, and a sense of belonging, breaking down dualities and othering.
Now, I am realizing that lifeworld-ing, or what I like to call empathetic inhabitation, might become this decade’s equivalent of an overview effect: a phase shift revealing fundamental truths about the place of humans within the web of life.
This time, however, 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; eyes observing horizontally, fractally; staring in and speaking out as the multiple lifeworlds of the Earth. Our gaze, and ourselves, reflected 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. Giving not just voice but also our bodies as we practice disciplines of interspecies connection. So many gifts are revealed 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 now feels undeniable. Militarism and polarization arise from fear, disconnection, us-versus-them dynamics, and extractivist mindsets held by those in power who treat land, bodies, and animals as resources. I hope that by 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” have been shown to shape how we treat our human kin, and processes such as land-based regeneration can 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 what if, rather than experiencing an overview effect at a remove from the Earth, we were the Earth extending its sensing systems — the Earth watching itself through human culture as a sensing organ? The soil moisture sensors, the echolocating 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. A blue-green orb, 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 is whether we will be ready to change ourselves 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)
