Redrawing Our Relationship With Spiders

For many people, the feelings they have about spiders form a tangled web of repulsion, fear, and hate, but animator Joshua Slice has set out to shape a new perspective on these eight-legged wonders.

Using a jumping spider as his model, Slice created Lucas the spider, an animated Internet sensation. The adorable Lucas, voiced by Slices's five-year-old nephew, challenges arachnophobia by striking an engaging tone, which is exactly what the animator intended. To see Lucas and learn more about Slice's approach to creating him, watch the video below:



Lucas represents a smart blend of strategies from animation and environmental communication. First, Slice animated the spider so that it closely resembles a real jumping spider. It also moves like a real spider. The differences between art and life appear subtly. Although he has four large eyes like his counterpart in nature (real jumping spiders have a total of eight eyes but four large ones), Lucas possesses a more doe-eyed look. This gives him a less intimidating presence as does his young voice.

The changes Slice makes from real jumping spiders anthropomorphize Lucas only slightly, allowing people to connect with this eight-legged ambassador without making him so cartoonish that people can't associate him with actual spiders. As environmental communication scholar Julia Corbett argues, although anthropomorphizing contains drawbacks, when used strategically and minimally, it can help people better relate to animals and our environment. Early audience reactions suggest that Slice achieved that balance in an effective way.

With animation like Lucas, perhaps we'll untangled ourselves from our phobia of spiders and start to weave a better relationship with them.

A Picture of Regret

The picture that's worth a thousand words assumes a heavier price when not taken.

For the last two and a half years, a picture I did not take in August 2015 has bothered me. The regret stems not from some beautiful missed sunset or mountain scene but rather from the awful image of dead seabirds washed up on the coast of Washington state. In the past, I have blogged about the disturbing experiences I had with global warming during the summer of 2015, and I have even mentioned that I saw the seabird carcasses, but this will be my first post dedicated specifically to those birds.

I saw the dead birds at Roosevelt Beach, their bodies half-buried in the sand and mixed with ocean debris at the high-water mark. The effects of the summer's unusual weather had already disoriented and disconcerted me. The heat, drought, and fires presented me with a Pacific Northwest I hardly recognized but for which I grieved deeply. Going to the beach seemed like a good way to escape the oppressive conditions, and although the ocean breeze made things cooler, seeing the dead birds added to my alarm. At the time, I didn't know what kind of birds they were, and I didn't realize the connection between the heat and their deaths. As it turned out, they were common murres, and the warming of the Pacific Ocean depleted their food sources, starving them into a mass die-off up and down North America's west coast.

A common murre swims in the surf off
Roosevelt Beach in August 2015.

A thought of taking a picture to capture the sad image crossed my mind, but I hesitated and ultimately decided not to snap it. I can't pinpoint the exact reason I didn't take it, but I remember feeling sad and confused about the sight before me. The birds' unceremonious demise made me question whether I wanted to or even should keep a photographic memory of it. I felt powerless and ashamed too. So I walked past without giving them the recognition they warranted. All I ended up with was a shot of a live common murre swimming in the surf just beyond the dead bodies of its kin. It's a haunting image in its own way--dark, lacking detail, and showing the bird looking into a vast ocean of uncertainty.

Regardless of why I didn't photograph the carcasses, I know I wish I had taken that picture of them. I should have recorded the moment. Because of what those birds went through, they deserved having their fate documented in the hopes that it would inspire people to prevent more die-offs from happening in the future. Additionally, the photo would have added another piece to the larger picture of what global warming, fueled by human activity, does to this planet.

The picture of those dead murres never made it to my camera, but the memory of seeing them on the beach has stayed with me in vivid regret and led me to write these words in an attempt to make up for the omission. I suspect it isn't enough.

The Best of Us

The best of who we are emerges through our collective efforts to achieve shared dreams.

At Snoqualmie Pass on Interstate 90 in Washington state's Cascade Mountains, we can see the great things that happen when people come together in a public decision-making process and exercise their combined power to solve problems. Fittingly, that collaboration has produced work that both symbolizes and realizes the potential of connection.

Seeking to solve multiple problems, including avalanche danger, car collisions with wildlife, and ecosystem disruption, a far-reaching coalition of environmental groups, government agencies, lawmakers, and engaged citizens, planned out an extraordinary project. Through a series of road-widening strategies and plans for wildlife overpasses and underpasses, the coalition set in motion an intelligent and inspiring approach to transportation and habitat connectivity. The long and impressive work to bring that vision to life continues, but the fruits of the labor have already started appearing, and they are nothing short of awesome. To learn more about the entire project, check out Cascade Crossroads, the new documentary by Conservation Northwest:



Fragile as it is, confidence in ourselves and our public institutions deserves the best chance to flourish. When it is allowed to, it yields amazing results.

Projects like the I-90 wildlife overpasses and underpasses demonstrate the great things within our collective capacity when we offer our individual strengths to the work of a common dream.