Here you do have forests, where pigs could be raised by letting

Host: The forest edge lay bathed in a thin veil of mist — the kind that made the trees seem half-real, like they were being whispered into existence. It was early morning, and the light was still soft, diffused through branches heavy with dew. The air smelled of wet earth, moss, and the faint, unmistakable musk of animals that lived close to the soil.

Jack leaned against the fence, his boots muddy, his hands tucked into his coat. A few yards away, a group of pigs snuffled through the underbrush — content, deliberate, ancient. Jeeny stood beside him, notebook in hand, a small smile playing at her lips as she watched them root through the fallen leaves.

Jeeny: reading softly “Marvin Harris once wrote, ‘Here you do have forests, where pigs could be raised by letting them root about in the forests for a good part of the year. Therefore, you have a different attitude toward them compared with what continues to exist in the Middle East.’” She closed the notebook, her eyes on the animals. “You ever think about how geography shapes morality, Jack?”

Jack: grinning faintly “I think about how geography shapes bacon. Morality comes later.”

Host: The pigs grunted softly, their pink hides glistening in the dawn light. One of them — smaller, curious — wandered toward the fence and snorted near Jack’s boot. He bent slightly, watching it, then looked up at Jeeny with a half-smile.

Jack: “Harris had a point though. A pig in this forest is a resource. A pig in the desert is a liability. What we call taboo is usually just the body remembering what’s practical.”

Jeeny: nodding slowly “So you’re saying ethics are ecological.”

Jack: “Mostly. You can dress them up with scripture and symbolism, but at the bottom, it’s still survival in a fancy hat.”

Jeeny: smiling “That’s a very Jack way to put it.”

Jack: “Well, tell me I’m wrong. Religion didn’t descend from heaven. It sprouted from hunger, weather, and terrain. What you can eat, what you can’t — those were the first laws.”

Host: The wind shifted, carrying the scent of pine and damp straw. Jeeny leaned on the fence beside him, her eyes thoughtful.

Jeeny: “So when the desert said pigs were unclean, it wasn’t judgment — it was adaptation.”

Jack: “Exactly. No forests. No shade. No mud. Pigs overheat. They spoil fast. They eat what you can’t afford to waste. It wasn’t moral disgust — it was ecological logic.”

Jeeny: quietly “And yet centuries later, people still fight over those rules, as if they were handed down from eternity.”

Jack: “Because we like to forget our wisdom had dirt under its fingernails. We want morality to feel divine, not environmental.”

Host: A raven cawed from a nearby branch, the sound slicing clean through the morning quiet. The pigs flinched briefly, then returned to their foraging.

Jeeny: “Do you think that’s all culture is — adapting to the landscape until we mistake necessity for virtue?”

Jack: “Pretty much. Civilization’s just geography moralized.”

Jeeny: “That’s cynical.”

Jack: shrugging “It’s honest. The people who could raise pigs called it prosperity. The ones who couldn’t called it sin. Different climates, same logic.”

Host: She turned her face toward the forest — the light now brightening through the trees, the fog dissolving like memory.

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s why humans struggle to understand each other. We worship the by-products of our environments instead of seeing the environments themselves.”

Jack: “Exactly. We fight over gods that were really just reflections of weather reports.”

Jeeny: with a small smile “That’s a little harsh.”

Jack: “It’s anthropology.”

Host: A long silence stretched between them. The forest hummed with life — distant birdsong, rustling leaves, the low rhythm of hooves in soft mud. Jeeny’s gaze drifted to the smallest piglet — half-buried in the leaves, snuffling curiously at the base of an oak.

Jeeny: “It’s strange, isn’t it? How something as simple as climate can determine the soul of a civilization.”

Jack: quietly “The soul is just the climate of the mind.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe healing our divisions means remembering that.”

Jack: smirking “What — that some of us just evolved with better weather?”

Jeeny: “No. That no belief, no taboo, no morality exists in a vacuum. Every one of them was born from someone’s geography, someone’s hunger, someone’s fear.”

Host: The sun broke fully through now, staining the wet grass gold. The pigs’ shadows stretched across the earth like lines on an old map.

Jack: “You know what I love about this?” He gestured to the forest. “No judgment. Just coexistence. Trees, mud, beasts — all doing their part, no sermons needed.”

Jeeny: softly “Nature’s the only system that doesn’t need belief to work.”

Jack: nodding “Exactly. It just is. Maybe that’s what Harris meant — that morality becomes distorted when we forget where it came from. When we stop listening to the earth.”

Jeeny: “And start listening only to ourselves.”

Host: She smiled faintly, brushing a bit of clay from her sleeve — the remnants of some earlier work. The morning was alive now, full of sound and motion. The world — imperfect, interdependent — breathed around them.

Jeeny: “So what do we do, then? How do we remember?”

Jack: “Start small. Eat consciously. Live locally. Ask where your food, your beliefs, your fears come from. The answers will always lead you back to the soil.”

Jeeny: softly “And to humility.”

Jack: nodding “Exactly. The only morality that survives climate change is empathy.”

Host: The camera drifted upward — over the fence, over the trees, over the animals rooting peacefully beneath the canopy. From above, the scene looked like a moving mosaic: human and animal, nature and nurture, belief and biology — all one unbroken fabric.

And as the sunlight filtered through the branches, Marvin Harris’s insight seemed to shimmer between the leaves, ancient and unflinching:

Culture is the child of landscape.
Morality is geography translated into myth.
And every taboo, every belief, every sacred rule —
began as the earth teaching us how to survive.