The Atlantic Magazine : July / August 2022 : How Animals Understand The World

The Atlantic’s July/August Cover Story: “Our Blinding, Blaring World” Ed Yong explores how human-made light and sound are confounding animal senses—with potentially catastrophic results. “Our Blinding, Blaring World,” The Atlantic’s July/August 2022 cover story, is exclusively adapted from Yong’s forthcoming book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Random House). In his cover story, Yong invokes the concept of Umwelt, which comes from the German word for “environment” but specifically describes “the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience––its perceptual world. Our Umwelt is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know,” Yong writes. “This is an illusion that every creature shares. Humans, however, possess the unique capacity to appreciate the Umwelten of other species, and through centuries of effort, we have learned much about those sensory worlds.” Yong explains the damage human activity has had on other species’ Umwelten. “Because of the way we have upended the worlds of other animals, senses that have served their owners well for millions of years are now liabilities.”