Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Rewilding

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Daniel and Kelly talk about the differences between conservation and rewilding, and discuss some of the successes, failures, and wild ideas that have come from the rewilding movement so far.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's admit it. Humanity hasn't been great for biodiversity and wildlife on planet Earth. Throughout our history, we've killed, for example, many large mammals, either because we wanted to eat them, or because we were worried that they would compete with us or try to eat us. So many ecosystems exist today without the large herbivores and large predators that once roamed within them.

Large animals like this aren't just charismatic. They also have oversized impacts on the ecosystem. No doubt many of you have heard the story about how Yellowstone National Park was transformed after the reintroduction of the wolves, and we're going to talk about that a bit today. The newish movement of rewilding is a new spin on the conservation movement, though I suspect that many self-proclaimed conservationists would be upset with me for explaining it that way. Anyway, rewilding focuses on trying to restore lost interactions between species, and the radiating impacts that they have on the ecosystems in which they're found.

But how far should you go to restore these interactions? If the big herbivore at the center of these interactions was a woolly mammoth, should you use genetic engineering to resurrect them from the dead? In addition to emphasizing restoring lost interactions, rewilding also tends to emphasize a hands-off approach, where animals are reintroduced to a system, and then you kind of sit back and see what will happen, being happy with the result, even if it doesn't pretty much,

even if it doesn't produce the exact same ecosystem that was there before. We're going to walk through a bunch of examples today and talk about how rewilding is a little different than the conservation of my youth, and we're going to discuss the pros and the cons of this approach. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Wild Universe. Daniel, I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens, and when I was a kid, I always wished they could bring saber-toothed tigers back from the dead. Oh, all right. Hi, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space.

And I wasn't necessarily thinking about de-extinction when I was a kid, but I was really into wolves. And so, like, for my birthday, I would have my parents, like, quote-unquote, adopt a wolf for me, which just meant, like, you know, make a donation to a conservation group. And so, like, wolves were my jam. Didn't you ever see critters on TV, like in cartoons or whatever, and think, whoa, that looks really cool. I wish we had those guys now? I mean, Jurassic Park was, by far and away, my favorite movie. There you go.

And so, yes, yes. I do still think it would be amazing to see like a brontosaurus or something like that. And I interviewed Dr. Beth Shapiro, who now works at Colossal. The dire wolf place. The dire wolf place. And I asked her, you know, could we ever have Jurassic Park? And she was pretty much like, no. We could try to pull together all of the genes that would make something that would look like a brontosaurus.

But the brontosaurus genome is like long since gone. There's nothing. We're not finding that. It's decayed. All right, a great start to our episode, throwing a wet blanket on lots of people's fantasies. But, you know, there was something else about that when I was a kid. It's just the awe of seeing something like that surviving in the wild. Yeah.

You know, not in a zoo, but like really making its life out there. I think about that sometimes the way I think about like small businesses. You ever drive by like a little jewelry store and you're like, how does that thing survive? Like, who's going in there and paying enough to cover the rent? Right. And when you see a creature sometimes, I'm like, how does this thing like making it out there? It gets cold at night. How is this thing surviving every night and finding food and raising its kids, you know?

So it's amazing to see these creatures in the wild. Zach used to joke that when we moved out to the farm, the biggest problem we'd have is that every winter I would try to get all the deer in the house on the coldest night of the year. Because I'd be like, guys, there's no way you can survive this. You've got to come inside. If you're cold, they're cold, right? That's right. That's right. Yes, that's right.

Except they're adapted to the cold and they're, you know, usually they do fine. Not always, but usually they do fine. But you are focusing on, you know, me being a wet blanket, which like, fair enough, right? That's a totally reasonable baseline. But today's story is meant to be a bit uplifting. One of the big, well, you know, like as much as I can. A bit uplifting. Moderate your expectations, folks.

Qualifier. But, you know, rewilding definitely has a more like positive vibe than conservation. And so let's try to start with. a like, you know, a positive vibe. Like, we can bring some of this stuff back. So that at the end, you can tell us how it's all hopeless? I mean, you know, I want it to be a roller coaster, right? It wouldn't be a Weiner Smith-led episode otherwise.

Right. So let's begin with the inspiration of it, right? Like, what is the idea? How does this work? But first, what's the inspiration for today's episode, Kelly? Why are we talking about rewilding today? The inspiration for today's episode is that one of our active discord members who always has fantastic questions, whose hand,

handle is, call me Moes? I love that you refer to the Discord members by their handles. I always forget to ask for first names ahead of time. But anyway, well, and also, you know, you want to be able to join our Discord channel and then communicate with this person. So now you know. But anyway, let's go ahead and hear the question that they had for us today. Hey, Kelly and Daniel.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the rewilding projects underway in the the U.S. and Europe and maybe elsewhere to let big chunks of land return to their natural unregulated ecosystems, including returning original predators and herbivores to the land, removing human dams, etc. I am most interested in the American Prairie Preserve in Montana because I grew up in what used to be the prairie in Iowa. But all of these efforts are really fascinating to me. Thank you. I just drove through Montana. What a beautiful state. I never heard about the American Prairie Preserve. What is that? Well, we're going to get to it. Okay, sorry. Sorry. No, that's okay. So I got excited about rewilding because, you know, I was really

learning about conservation when I was a kid. And then I went to grad school for ecology. And rewilding is a flavor of conservation that I was definitely less familiar with. And so I used this question as an excuse to dive into the literature and catch back up. It's been at least a decade since I was in grad school and thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I learned a lot. Today we're going to go through rewilding in general, but we're definitely going to talk about American Prairie. And it turns out this is a very important time to be talking about it because it turns

out they might be losing the rights to graze bison on their land. So stay tuned for that because that would be huge for that project. All right. And thank you, Call Me, Mose, for asking this question. I love when people ask questions, they give us an excuse to bump something up to the top of the stuff. I wish I had time to read about List. Yes.

Yeah. So I read like a whole book on rewilding. And then there's this great podcast called Rewildology. And so I listened to a bunch of interviews by experts who are running rewilding program. So I've got a sense of what it's like to run a bunch of these different programs. Wow. But first, let's go ahead and hear what our extraordinarily think. Because I was wondering, do most people know the difference between rewilding and conservation?

Or do they use those terms interchangeably? because I'm not quite sure I could have put my finger on the difference when I started this research project. So let's go ahead and see what the Extraordinaries had to say. I asked them, how is rewilding different than conservation? Conservation is preventative. Rewilding is restorative. Conservation is when you, like, preserve a certain thing. And then rewilding is probably, like, letting an area.

go back to the wild, conservation kind of means, I mean, it's more of, yeah, like keeping track with wildlife to preserve it, while rewilding would probably be letting it wildlife bend for itself in a way. So, yeah, I think that conservative is controlled, and rewelding is just let it go. Conservation is kind of like gardening. Rewilding is getting out of the way and letting nature take its course. I believe that conservation is different from rewilding. because in rewilding, there is human intervention, such as reintroducing species or something along that line. But in conservation, it's pretty much just sort of stop human interaction and human interference and letting nature do its thing.

I think that conservation is like taking intact ecosystems and keeping them from getting hurt. And rewilding is taking ecosystems that are already messed up and making them right again. I think conservation means to try to preserve an ecosystem in an existing. state, but rewilding is introducing a population to take it back to a previous state. To begin with, I've never heard of rewilding of momentum. I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that conservation protects endangered species of plants and animals, while rewilding encourages proliferation of species with protections from poaching.

So I'm actually going to say it's about whose interests you're serving. Are you serving the environment's best interest, the area, including? including the creatures in it, or are you serving just one or a few particular creature's interests? Conservation is kind of protecting what's still there, whereas rewilding, you're kind of trying to add more wild, I think? Free association. Conservation makes me think of swamps and protecting them. Rewilding makes me think about genetically engineered woolly mammoths. Huh. Well, I think that conservation means keeping things as is, while rewilding means bringing back some characteristics of the natural world.

I think conservation is to try to reduce the human footprint on an environment or a species, and rewilding is human manipulation through and through. All right, people have some definite opinions about this. How do you grade these scores, Kelly? I don't like to grade anyone's scores, really, because we're encouraging people to just give us their off-the-cuff answers. I feel like you grade something people were supposed to prepare for, But I would say that we had a really thoughtful range of answers,

thinking about their gut feeling for what conservation should mean versus what rewilding should mean. I think at the end of the day, most of these answers didn't quite get what I came away with by the end of my research. And so, you know, I hope we'll all learn something interesting along the way. But so first, let's start with what is rewilding? And before I jump into a definition,

I want to reiterate that I, I read a bunch of review papers, and, like, I did a bunch of research. And one of the themes was that the Rewilders were like, look, we can't agree on the definition. We... The movement itself can't even agree what it means. Well, like, different projects in different places, in different times, want to focus on different things. And so that leads them to come up with different definitions. But there have been some review papers where a bunch of scientists have come together and said,

okay, this is our best shot at a definition that sort of encompasses what all of us are doing. Okay. And so here's the definition that I got. What is it? Rewilding is the process of rebuilding following a major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes

in the complete or near-complete food web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem with biota that would have been present, that would have been present had this disturbance not occurred. This will involve a paradigm, shift in the relationship between humans and nature. And my plan is to break it down because your eyes glazed over. No, I was just laughing when you said biota were president. I was thinking,

that actually sounds cool. I wish we had like elephant presidents and stuff like that. Yeah. What would an elephant ask more? More water holes. We need more water holes without crocodiles in them. But the overall sense I got was, yeah, we're rebuilding an ecosystem that we destroyed. Yes. So for example, building Jurassic Park would not be rewilding because humans didn't destroy the dinosaur ecosystem. That was the asteroid. Yes, that's true. Let's go through the Yellowstone example. And then at the end of the example, I want to talk about how a conservationist might have pitched this project versus how a rewilder would have looked at this project. And by the end of this example, I feel like we'll have a good handle on the difference between conservation and rewilding.

All right. Are we going to talk about wolves? We're going to talk about wolves. I love the Yellowstone wolves. Oh man, me too. Okay. So as you probably know then, by the mid-1900s, the wolves were pretty much gone from Yellowstone. And the park ecologists that were out there, they were sort of watching what happened to the ecosystem after the wolves were gone. And they noticed that there were a lot more elk. And those elk were now eating a lot more vegetation because there was more of them. And in particular, some of the things that they were eating were young aspens. So you weren't getting like Aspen woodlands anymore because these trees were getting sort of consumed before they had a chance to get big.

They were also eating these trees called cottonwoods that grow along the banks of like rivers. And because those couldn't get big, you were losing beavers because those trees were both food for beavers and were important for beavers when they were making their dams. Without those trees, without the beavers,

that was changing the entire aquatic system as well. So one of the things, I know. So one of the things that beavers do is these dams, slow the water so the water rises and starts to spill over the banks of the river. When it does that, you end up with land areas that are kind of like wet and moist. And so they're producing these wetlands that are good for frog eggs and salamanders and certain kinds of insects.

So having the beavers is producing these extra ecosystems that give you a bunch of extra biodiversity. But without the beavers, the water starts flowing quickly down the river. And as it does that, it starts pulling away soil from the bottom of the river and from the size. And so instead of having these like rivers that have wetlands associated with it, you just have very deep, fast-moving rivers instead. Does that make sense? It does, but it just reinforces my sense that all of biology is a crazy Rube Goldberg machine. I mean, you're telling me, you don't have as many wolves, so now you have more deer which eat a bunch of trees, which the beavers needed. And without the beavers, you're not getting dam, so you're not getting

the wetlands, so you're getting faster rivers. This is crazy. It is crazy. It is crazy. It is crazy. And I feel like that complexity is lost from the story a bit. So I feel like when I heard the story about the reintroduction, I was like, oh, the wolves came back. And then there's fewer elks and the beaver comes back. And now everything goes back to the way it was before. But these things are so complicated that that's not necessarily what you should expect. And so there were some areas when you brought the wolves back. The elk started either dying because they were getting eaten by the wolves.

But they also changed their behavior. They no longer wanted to be right up against dense wood. where they could get ambushed by the wolves, and they also tended to not want to be in, like, big open areas. Wait, elk are smart like that? They can, like, learn cats? Yeah, of course they can. Yeah, yeah.

Really? Yes. They give me the whole sort of glazed-eyed robot, you know, leaf-munching vibe. I don't really get a whole lot of intelligence from the look of a deer, but clearly I'm wrong. They can learn. I mean, I think they can also hold I don't want to die in there,

along with the thought of more, more food. Okay. Sally died last week doing this, so maybe we shouldn't do this sort of a thing. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you see, like, your kid get eaten by a wolf because they jumped out of the woods and you're like, I'm not standing near the wolves anymore. Like, I'm not doing that next year. And so, so anyway, yeah, they learn. But I think the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction story is a little more complicated because in some areas you get the beavers back and the wetlands back. But there were other areas where it looks like they didn't get that stuff back.

And the reason they didn't get it back was because those ecosystems had like shifted to a different state. And I think what happened in this case in particular was that the river had gotten like so deep and so fast. And the banks were no longer like appropriate for those trees to grow on that you just couldn't get the beavers back. So that system had shifted to like a no turning back scenario. But there's lots of areas where you do. You get the beavers back. You get the wetlands back. It's good for the animals that need the wetlands.

The wolves also tend to eat coyotes. and the coyotes had been going nuts on the small rodents. And so now you can get like some small rodent populations back. And so the point is there's all of these interactions between species happening at Yellowstone. And when you throw the wolves in there, those interactions change dramatically. And it actually makes a lot of sense that the ecosystem is not some sort of like reversible process. Or if you undo what you did, you're going to go back to where you were. Right.

It's like if you have a ball at the top of a hill and you kick it, It's going to go to the bottom of the hill and giving it the same kick in the other direction doesn't necessarily push it back to the top of the hill because gravity is going the other direction. So there must be lots of asymmetric forces at work here that are not reversible. Yep, exactly. Biology is complicated. It is complicated. And I feel like when I was a kid, the vibe of the conservation movement would have been, we are bad. We killed the wolves.

We need to bring the wolves back and try to recreate what was lost. And in particular, we need to reach. X number of wolves and get them back in the system. And we should feel bad the whole time we're doing it because we are bad. And without us, this problem wouldn't have happened. And there's a couple of things going on there. There's like the self-flagellation, but also they're like defining an ecosystem by a narrow metric. Right?

And then saying once you've hit that metric, then now everything is back to where it was when obviously an ecosystem is very complicated and can't be captured by one number. Yeah, exactly. And so the rewilders, their attitude, like, Like, when I was listening to interviews and, you know, reading books and papers, the attitude was a lot more like, look, a lot of this bad stuff happened at a time when none of us who are alive today were around. None of us made these decisions. We don't need to, you know, be self-flagellating because this happened. And we can't necessarily expect to get back exactly what was lost.

But we can't have something better than what we have today. Yeah. And so let's try to get some wolves back. And our goal isn't to get like 75 wolves back, you know, for example, to pick an arbitrary number. The goal is to bring wolves back until we start to see these interactions returning. And we shouldn't expect to get the exact same thing, but we should just be happy with what we do get back and just kind of hope that the ecosystems are now more resilient and more diverse because the wolves are back. Well, let me ask a naive question then.

Like, are we measuring ecosystems by some quality metrics? like we're saying the ecosystem we destroyed is better than the one we have now, so we need to somehow improve it. That implies that you can, like, grade ecosystems. I know you're against giving grades. You know, that we can say this one's better, this one's worse. But we know that the flow of history says that everything is constantly in flux. Things are changing. Extinction is natural, right? And so who are we to say that, like, this human intervention is necessarily bad? By what metric is it bad? Yeah, so rewilders are much more likely to say, look, things change. We don't necessarily know what the best scenario would be, but we do know that we removed this animal from the ecosystem and that if they were back, a lot of different things would change.

And in particular, what would change would result in more biodiversity. And so I think they're more likely to embrace the fact that you're probably not going to get back exactly what you had. That's fine because ecosystems change over time. you just need to decide what is important to you to bring back and then try to focus on those things. But I don't understand why the new ecosystem that's the result of human intervention has less biodiversity. I understand that it's different, but ecosystems are changing all the time. The pre-human ecosystem was different from one that came before it a million years before. Was it less biodiverse? Is there a general trend towards less biodiversity?

Or is it like anytime humans are involved, biodiversity goes down for some reason? Well, I mean, I think probably, yes, anytime humans are involved, biodiversity does go down, unfortunately. But a thing that a lot of rewilders focus on is that when you bring back certain important players into a system, they create heterogeneity. And so, like, by that, I mean, you know, before the elk were going everywhere and they were grazing down everything. But when the wolves are there, the elk behavior changes. And now there's areas that they don't go to anymore. And because they're not in those areas anymore, that allows other organisms to sort of come in and live there. And so a common theme that I found was that you think about what was lost when we took this organism away or when this organism was killed by humans.

And what would we gain by bringing it back and is what we gain, you know, important or worth having? But I think that we should keep this question in our heads because it will be important as we go through multiple other examples. And let's return to this at the end because this was actually. an important point that I had at our like wrap up discussion. So let's return to it. Before we move on to our next example, I want to emphasize that I think a lot of conservation biologists

would say, you know, the rewilding community is focusing on all of these interactions that came back when you brought the wolf back. It's not like we thought that bringing the wolf back wouldn't change anything. I hear a lot of conservation biologists argue that like, look, if you want to get donations from people, for example, you pick a charismatic animal

that people like, like the wolf. I mean, this worked on like seven-year-old Kelly. I was like, mom and dad, send money for the wolves. And by conserving this charismatic organism, you benefit the entire ecosystem. And so I think a lot of conservation biologists say, we don't need this new term. This is all stuff we knew before.

But we were just sort of emphasizing something different. So anyway, there's a debate in the community about whether or not you need this term and what it should mean. Well, the wolves definitely worked on me. And in particular, I am a big fan. of the books by Rick McIntyre, Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone. I don't know if you know about this guy. No?

He gets up at, seriously? No, sorry. For like 40 years, he would get up at like 4 in the morning and just watch the wolves. And he tracked them and he got to know them. And then he wrote this incredible series of books about the wolves and their interaction. And he knows all of the wolves and their relationships. And it's about all the conflicts between the wolf packs and how wolves moved from one to the other. And their incredibly dramatic scenes were like a wolf that was.

raised by another wolf, leads a fight between two packs. It's like a soap opera. It's incredible. It's basically Game of Thrones for wolves, but it's real. I mean, the wolves have amazing, complicated social lives. It sounds fantastic. Yeah, check out the Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone by Rick McIntyre. All right, I will be doing that.

Okay, but now let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about another feature of rewilding, which is the hands-off nature of rewilding. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

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take your hands off. You don't want these systems to require a lot of human management. You want to just let them do their nature thing and see what happens. You don't want to have to inject wolves every year. You want it to be self-sustaining. Yes, right. And you don't want to be out there saying like, all right, we need to have exactly 75 wolves and 1,000 elk. And if we have too many elk, we're going to put out more food or we're going to shoot some of the elk. You want to just sort of let the system reach whatever equilibrium it's going to reach and not get too involved. Okay. Sometimes this works well. Other times, it works less well. So let's go ahead and talk about an example where things worked less well. So, oh, we're going to have fun with this pronunciation. Daniel, do you want to

try it first? Is it the Oost Vardisblassen? Yes, there you can be OVP. Hey, you know me. Nice. In the Netherlands. I'm down with the OVP. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. So this is a delta of the river Rhine, and it has been massively managed, and in 1973, this sort of unexpected experiment happened. One of the polders, which was like a section of this managed area near

the river, was supposed to be managed by this industry that sort of went under, and they no longer ended up using this area. And when they didn't use it, plants started to come back, and that attracted geese, and the geese started eating some plants, and when they ate the plants, they were producing these open water

corridors, and they were making this much more complex ecosystems where you had open water corridors and then areas where there were more plants and that was creating ecosystems for more animals. And this ecologist named Franz Vera saw this. And he thought to himself, you know, we could do something with this environment. It doesn't have to just be supermanaged. And he was really interested in this idea that actually across much of Europe and across much of the United States, when you say like think of an ecosystem, most of us picture a forest, or at least I do, it was actually the case that much, maybe even most of Europe and America was grassland. But the massive herbivores that used to,

you know, keep these things grassland by like eating and trampling trees that we're trying to grow, like those species have been gone. So now we don't have a lot of grasslands. Is that what keeps prairies, prairies? I've been wondering about that. Yeah. What keeps prairies, prairies, is that you've got herbivores that are going around and trampling and eating things. like trees that are trying to grow up. And so they're an important part of keeping those systems the way that they are. Okay, cool. So he thought to himself, okay, there used to be orocks here, and these are wild cows,

and there used to be tarpans, which were extinct horses. And so he thought, what if we could bring those back to maintain this as a grassland and make it more wild? And so in 1991, the OVP becomes this experiment where they bring in mega herbivore and release them to graze to try to keep these habitats from getting foresty. Wait, but this is the delta of a river. I'm imagining something pretty squishy. How are you putting, like, cows into the river?

Yeah, so, I mean, it's a mix of, like, squishy bits and harder bits. It's sort of like a patchwork. But as I mentioned, the tarpans are gone. And so they said, all right, we're going to get conic ponies. I think that's how you pronounce it. But from Poland, these are, like, hardy horses. Are those ponies that come as a section of a cone, like parabolas? hyperbolas.

Yes, probably. Probably that's what they meant. They also brought in deer, which might have naturally been there. And then because Orocks are no longer available, the like wild cattle, they brought in domestic cattle that were as close to primitive breeds as possible. So there's a breed of cattle called heck cattle that were created in the 1920s by cross-breeding other primitive breeds to try to get something that's like really robust and resilient that you can just throw out, you know, into an environment and be like, good luck, guys,

and they'll do well on their own. Okay. So we're missing the old big fauna. And so we take a sample of the ones we have that we think might approximate those and put them out there. Yes, exactly. Okay. Right. And so for a while, this was actually going pretty well. It was becoming sort of like a beautiful grassland. Tourists and locals wanted to come and see these beautiful animals grazing. So this became like a place where people would want to like kind of go for walks. And so in some ways, this experiment was working. You got the grasslands, the animals are surviving, people are happy with the new ecosystem. But there's this emphasis on a hands-off approach. And there used to be predators in this area, but you don't want to introduce predators into a heavily populated area

and for reasons. You don't want wolves and playgrounds? Why not? It's complicated. But, But so they didn't introduce predators, but they were really insistent on being hands off. And so in 2017, 2018, that winter that straddled those years was really bad and there wasn't enough food. So thousands of horses were dying. And people were allowed to go into this area. And so they were going on walks and they were seeing thousands of horses starving to death. Oh, my gosh. And this is something that, like, I think society is absolutely no longer comfortable with.

like this should not be happening under our watch. And so people were getting furious. And so like people who lived in the community were teaming up with farmers to take bales of hay and secretly bring them into the reserve and dump them to feed the horses because they didn't want these horses to starve. And so this ended up creating like a huge PR mess. And now there are rules where you can't just let thousands of animals starve to death. And so now this system is much more managed, which was not.

Not the initial plan, but like, I totally get why they're doing that. I see, well, where do you fall on that? Are you pro lots of beautiful horses suffering or anti-horse suffering? I'm anti, lots of beautiful horse suffering. I totally understand the inclination to want to create something and then just let it go, right? And in nature, there probably are harsh winters where lots of animals die and we don't go out and intervene. This is just part of the cycle of life. But on the other hand, you have tried to.

create an ecosystem that is missing important parts. It's missing the predators that would have made short work of these animals and would have kept the numbers from getting so high probably to begin with. And so I don't think it's unreasonable in these situations to intervene. And a lot of the other programs that I read about, and this is going to be controversial, but involved letting people come in and hunt when numbers were getting high. And by having people come in and hunt, you can get a lot more money for your conservation program, and this is a way to sort of sustain the whole thing. But what do you think?

Based on the way you asked me the question, I think I know your answer. Well, I'm never in favor of suffering, but also suffering is part of nature, right? And it's not our responsibility to remove all suffering from every critter in nature. But if we have constructed an ecosystem intentionally, then we are responsible for the critters who are living there. Right? We can't just say, like, look, we did what we could and walk away. So yeah, I think it is our responsibility. I'm pro-feeding suffering horses, yes. I think just to be a little bit of a, like, devil's advocate, you know, I think even if there had been predators there, every once in a while a really harsh winter comes through. And, you know,

even when predators are around, you will end up getting animals, you know, herbivore is dying of starvation because the predators probably can't keep up. You get these cycles over time. But I think a problem is you need to keep in mind that if you are having a very powerful, public-facing program. You need to keep in mind how the public is going to feel about that program. And I feel like this is a thread that sort of goes through conservation and through rewilding. You always need to think about the impacts on the people who are going to be in the area. And this is, to my mind, one of the hardest parts about conservation. It's not trying to breed the animals in a captive area before you release them, which that's very hard too. But it's figuring

out how the community is going to respond and managing that. Yeah, the people are part of the ecosystem in a way, right? I mean, that is an emphasis of rewilding, particularly that is a point that I saw emphasized in the American Prairie Preserve website. And so let's go ahead to that Montana example that we were initially asked to talk about now that we've had half an hour of Kelly rambling

about other things. And before we do, let me just say how much I love Montana. I just drove through it with my daughter, and we went to Yellowstone, and we went to Bozeman, and we went to Missoula, and wow, it's a beautiful place. You know, after reading about the American Prairie Project, I really want to go. I've never been to that part of the United States, and I am dying to see it now. Like, I was going through their photos, and I was like, oh, my gosh, you got to be kidding me.

I hadn't thought about grasslands as being a place I'd want to visit, but wow, they look beautiful. No, it's jaw-dropping vista after jaw-dropping vista. It's like, it looks fake almost. You're like, what? Come on. Yeah, yeah. Well, so, you know, now that we've been uplifting, let's do the Kelly depressing thing here. Let's go to the past real quick.

So there used to be like literally millions of bison on the Great Plains. What years are we talking about? Like pre-humans, like 25,000 years ago or more recently? Pre-white people, there were millions of bison. And they were living with the indigenous peoples who were, you know, killing them and eating them or whatnot. But nowhere near the numbers that would be slaughtered when we came through. And we came through and we ate them a little bit. partly we were also killing them as a way to sort of manipulate and control the indigenous peoples that

were in the area. And so by the late 1800s, we had nearly eradicated them. The arrival of Europeans also brought horses, which must have really changed the way the indigenous people hunted the bison. Yeah. Did that impact the bison population as well? Yeah, that's a good point. It probably did. And also, it's worth noting that, yes, we brought horses here, but there were also horses before we brought horses here and then they went extinct for a little while. So there was probably a while where there were horses and bison living together. But anyway, yes, probably horses did make it easier for the indigenous peoples to hunt the bison, but I did not see anywhere in my research that that was a contributing factor to the loss of millions of them. All right. So we have vast

planes filled with enormous herds of bison before the Europeans arrived. And then what happened? By the early 1900s, there were fewer than 1,000. A thousand bison? Yeah, a thousand. In the whole country? Yep. That's, wow. Yeah, and it is now hard to find bison that just have straight bison genomes because they interbred with cattle that we brought in.

And so you kind of have some cattle genes in there with the bison. Maybe that matters. Maybe that doesn't. But anyway, yes, so they went down to about 1,000 individuals. Well, you want to hear a nice physics biology overlap? Sure. Which is at Fermilab, the biggest. particle accelerator in the United States, most of the facilities underground and on top is prairie

and they have a herd of vison that roam the grounds of the accelerator. And every spring you can watch them calf, which is amazing. And Katrina and I were out there once and we saw one and we're like, is that a hoof sticking out the back? And then like two minutes later, there's a baby. And like two minutes after that, it's running around. It's an incredible moment. That is so cool.

I'm so jealous. Yeah, I mean, I was amazed when my goats gave birth, and like two minutes later they were walking around trying to, like, get a drink of milk or whatever. Her herbivores like that are amazing. But anyway, okay, you know, there's many reasons to care about the loss of the bison from an ecological perspective. One, they were grazing, so they were, you know, keeping out the trees and trampling the trees and stuff like that. Two, they do this behavior called wallowing where they kind of like, you know, roll on their back and roll around. And when they do that, they create sort of like indentations that sometimes fill with water. And so they create these little mini wetlands throughout the, you know, places where they roam.

And those get used by different animals than are using the rest of the area. The bison are literally shaping the ecosystem. They are. No, they absolutely are. And when they move together as a herd, they don't necessarily like, you know, get in a straight line. and graze from one side of the grassland to the other, they create some patches that have been grazed down a lot, and the grass is short, and other areas where the grasses are high. And, for example, there are some birds that prefer short grass,

and there are some birds that prefer the tall grass areas. And so by creating this difference in the kinds of habitats you find, because the bison have interacted with the land, you get a lot more biodiversity when the bison are around. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does make sense. Okay. Plus they're awesome.

Plus they're awesome. They're so awesome. Yes. So the American Prairie is this project where they're trying to expand on this national wildlife refuge that already exists and is 1.1 million acres. So it's a big starting place. And so what they're doing is they get donors and they collect as much money as they can so that when a piece of property goes up for sale and it is in any way attached to that wildlife refuge, they are buying it up. to essentially increase the area where you could have bison. And the goal is to eventually have 5,000 square miles of continuous area,

which is like roughly the size of Connecticut. And the goal is to have something like 5,000 bison on there. So we're not even talking about millions of bison. Like 5,000 would be nice to restore some of the interactions that used to be happening on this prairie. And the goal isn't to like keep humans out entirely. These lands are also, to some extent, owned by the public. And so when this program buys the land, you can still go out there and you can camp on the land. You can hike on the land.

You can get gourd by bison. I mean, yeah, you should be careful. You should be bison are at least easy to, you know, to see and avoid. And so you should be doing that when bison are out there. Are they easy to avoid? They're fast. Yeah, maybe they're not easy to avoid. These are not cows, right?

They are fast. They are fast, yes. I'm pretty sure bison can outrun horses. I'll believe you. I don't know. Wait, let me back, check that. I'll say you'll absolutely need to respect them and give them their space. Bison, despite weighing up to 2,000 pounds, can reach sprint speeds of 35 to 40 miles per hour, which is incredible.

Yeah, so give them a lot of space, a lot of space. Enjoy them through binoculars, ideally. But yeah, so what they do is, as they mention, is they buy up the land, and then they talk to the Bureau of Land Management, and they get what's called grazing rights. And essentially they say, usually this land used to be grazed by cattle. We are now bringing in bison. That's our livestock.

And this counts according to the prior rules that we have for how you can use land. And I'll note there are other programs that are saying, okay, instead of cattle, we're bringing in horses to do something similar to the rule that the bison do. And so this has been working. They've been growing the land.

They've been opening it up to people. They even every once in a while will have hunters who are allowed to come and shoot bison for a price to help the program keep going. But so while I was going through the website, like I wanted to see how they dealt with the question of hunting.

Yeah. And for 2026, they're not allowing any hunting to happen. And the reason they're not allowing any hunting to happen is because there's a ton of uncertainty about the future of their program. So for a really long time, the Bureau of Land Management has allowed organizations like this one

to say, hey, bison are my quote unquote livestock. that I am grazing on this land, but the Bureau of Land Management has recently decided to revoke some of their licenses saying that bison don't count as livestock because you're not planning on killing and eating them. And the whole premise is that

they're going to be able to buy land and have bison on it as livestock. And so if their licenses are revoked, does that mean a bunch of land that they've bought can no longer have bison on it? And so the American Prairie is fighting back, they're arguing that this is a brand new interpretation of laws that have been around for a really long time. Interesting.

It seems like some organizations at like the federal or the local government level have just decided that they don't want bison for whatever reason. This could be concerned from nearby ranchers about what the bison might do to their farms or what if bison attract, for example, cougars or wolves to the area, what those animals might subsequently do to the ranches. And so a public comment period just passed, they were asking for people to sort of weigh in. But we're waiting to see if the American Prairie program is going to be able to overturn this recent Bureau of Land Management decision. And otherwise, it's sort of unclear what the future of this program is going to be. Fascinating. No, it sucks. That's the wrong response.

This sucks. This was a really cool program. Yeah. Well, it makes me wonder, I have, for example, eaten a buffalo burger. And it makes me wonder, where did that? that come from? Was it from a herd like this or are there like commercial buffalo ranches somewhere that raise it for meat? Yes, there are commercial bison ranches that raise them for meat. I see. And so that's like a completely separate way that bison are being kept alive.

Yes. Yeah. But, you know, they're, they tend to be in like smaller patches of land. And so they're not necessarily having the same impact on the ecosystem. They're in more of like a, you know, fenced in, farmed managed situation. Right. And so I think to be able to count as livestock, the plan would have to be that, like, a significant portion of them are harvested every year and then sold after slaughter. And that's not the American Prairie's plan. Right.

And so, anyway, I am upset. I can see that. I really, like, sort of came to love this program while I was reading about it. When I found that website, I, like, anyway, I hope they figure out a way through. And if you're concerned, then you should. check out the American Frere website and see if they have any other calls to action, any other ways that you can contribute by contacting lawmakers or anything. All right.

Let's take a break and give Kelly a chance to cool off. And then we'll get to some more examples and discuss the difference between rewilding and conservation from a philosophical point of view. This doesn't piss you off. They're changing the rules, man. They've been following all the rules. That's not cool. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.

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I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile.

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And we are going to move on to talking about one of the more controversial rewilding projects. And I should say, so I picked the projects that we're talking about today because the book that I read focused on the projects we're talking about today. Plus, I added the American Prairie Project because our listener requested it. There's a lot of rewilding projects

that are less controversial than the ones that we've talked about today. But this one brings up some really interesting questions philosophically about how we should manage rewilding projects. So I wanted us to sort of end on this note. All right.

We're going to talk about a project run by Sergei Zimov in Russia. So he was a guy who was working with permafrost. And so this is like the ice that's supposed to be permanently frozen, but because of global climate change is no longer permanently frozen in a lot of cases. And not just ice, right? It's soil that's also frozen. Yes, yep, exactly. Thank you. And so he was working in this area where there were banks on either side of him. And he could see in the permafrost

a bunch of old bones. And the bones were from bison and horses and elks and mammoths. And they were from about 10,000 years ago. Wow. And when he was looking at all of these bones, he was thinking, these animals were all here and none of them are here now. What would it have been like if these animals were back? And by doing some research, he came to the conclusion that these animals helped to maintain what is now permafrost in more of a grassland state. And how did they do that? So if you have like a permafrost environment, a lot of the plants that are there are slow

growing plants like mosses. And so it takes them a really long time to grow, but As they grow, they sort of establish an area and they slowly sort of edge out the grasses. Okay. But if you've got herbivores there stomping on the mosses or eating the mosses, the mosses don't get a chance, and other plants like moses, don't get a chance to get those footholds. And that gives the grass a chance to grow and catch up. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I would have thought the herbivores eat the grass too.

They do eat the grass too, but because the grasses are more quick growing, they can recover more quickly, unsurprisingly. I see. So, yeah, they're able to out-compete the slower-growing things, and then you can get these grassland ecosystems. But without the herbivores to sort of keep the other stuff from out-competing the grasses, you lose the grasslands. But isn't there another big difference which contributes, which is just climate change? I mean, 10,000 years ago, weren't we in like a little ice age? Isn't that some of the reason why this ground is no longer frozen, that the Earth has warmed? Yeah, so I think what Sergey would say is that we are looking at really long time.

scales here, and you ended up with grasslands in this area in between glaciation periods. And so this was like a grassland state for a very long time. And yes, things have changed over times, but grasslands were like a pretty consistent feature of this area until humans came in and killed all of those large animals. Oh, I see. Yeah. So it's not that the animals died off because the climate changed. But I thought it was that the climate change helped bring the humans to this area.

So maybe that's the contribution. Yeah, could be. Could be. But the argument that this group is making is that humans killing these large herbivores was the main thing that tipped this ecosystem from one state to another. All right. So it's our fault. I get it.

Well, I mean, but, you know, the rewilding community would say this happened thousands of years ago. So you don't have to personally feel bad about it. But you can say, well, would it be good if we could restore the grasslands? And so the arguments that they're making is that, that when you have a grassland in an area instead of permafrost, that environment sequesters more carbon. And so if you are interested in trying to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, then a grassland is a better environment to have than this permafrost.

And the permafrost is, in a lot of cases, melting. And so a grassland might be a better replacement for what we've got. Because that's what plants and green stuff does, is it pulls carbon out of the atmosphere to build itself up and then sequesters it in the ground. Yes, but if you just are growing like a forest or something, if a forest fire comes through, a lot of that carbon is stored above ground. And when the fire burns, it releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. But they're arguing that these grasslands are sequestering a lot of carbon underground, which makes it like a better long-term solution.

But I should highlight that I listen to this really great interview from someone who was working on a rewilding bison project in Europe. And he was trying to quantify differences in carbon sequestration, like in environments with bison versus environments without bison. And while he did find that on average, it looks like having bison around does mean you get more carbon sort of sequestered in a way that would be good for the environment, he was pointing out that like it's really hard to make these measurements. There's a lot of uncertainty. You should definitely think of this as like an emerging field that we're working on. And so I think you should be hesitant whenever someone tells you like, oh, you know, loads and loads of carbon would be sequestered with this method. I think we're trying to get a handle on how much better it is to have grasslands relative to something like a tundra. Yeah.

Okay. Anyway, okay. So here's what he did. He managed to fence in a thousand hectares of tigua and tundra. And he brought in hardy horses, elk, musk, ox, bison, sheep, goats of. variety of different herbivores. And I was looking at the website and it looks like it's like 10 of this species, 15 of another. And so it does appear that this experiment at the moment is pretty small scale. Yeah. And so that's not why this experiment has become famous. Like, yes,

it was an exciting idea that like this area that we think of as permafrost was actually probably grassland. And we need to stop all being acclimated to the idea that this should just be a frozen wasteland. It could be a productive, amazing environment with lots of huge earth. herbivores living on it. But this program has gotten a lot of attention because it got the attention of George Church who started pushing this program where he said, well, maybe we can bring back the Willie Mammoth, which was the major herbivore in this system. George Church, the same guy who famously asked for volunteers for women who wanted to be surrogates

for a Neanderthal baby. Oh, my God. Are you serious? I'm serious. Oh, there's like so many levels of unethical things. I know, yeah. Okay, so he has spearheaded a lot of really innovative far-out projects, some of which I think are ethically questionable, if I'm going to be honest.

So anyway, so the argument here is that if you bring back the woolly mammoth, they are like the quintessential mega herbivore that lived in these systems, and they could do a really good job of speeding up the transition from like permafrost environment to grassland. So what do you think, Daniel? We killed them off. We could bring them back. and bring back this ecosystem that is no longer around because of us.

Do you think we should bring back the woolly mammoth? I would love to see a woolly mammoth in the flesh. Wow, that would be amazing. I mean, what are the arguments against it? I mean, it's permafrost right now, which is an ecosystem. There are some things living there, I imagine, which might get supplanted if you bring back the woolly mammoth. Sure.

Yeah, I don't know. Seems good to me. What's the bad news? Well, I mean, because I'm Kelly, I've thought of. some things that I'm concerned about, let's say. So, you know, you're not going to bring back the woolly mammoth. What you're going to be able to bring back is some elephant that has woolly mammoth genes inserted into it. And so you're going to try to essentially make hairy elephants that will need to be birthed by preexisting elephants.

And then you'll put them in this harsh environment and hope that you have figured it out so that they don't die a horrible death when they're up there. They'll also, I think from like a purist perspective, you know, they're not really mammoths. So like, you know, they're not going to have the mammoth microbiome. Elephants usually when they're born, they eat a little of like mom's poop to get their microbiome. So woolly mammoths, their mom's poop is just gone, man. Like, you can't bring it back. But, you know, they're not going to have like social behaviors that were learned from the rest of the herd. That kind of stuff is gone entirely.

There's sort of mammoths the way American cheese is cheese, which is like vaguely cheese flavored. Yeah, and like, you know, I'm okay with that if it does bring back these dynamic ecosystems that are helpful in sequestering carbon in some way. But I do find myself wondering, like, could we be spending money on better things? Do we need mammoths to do it if, like, a thousand musk oxen could do the trick instead, for example? And then, like, what obligation do we have to these mammoths if things get bad? Like, so one, you have to worry about the mammoths, like, crushing the house of anybody that's, you know, they can, like, reach because that's scary. But, like, two, you know, if it looks like the mammoths are starting to go extinct again,

do we now have an obligation to keep these proto-mammoths alive because we brought them into existence? You build it, you buy it, right? You build it, you buy it, yeah. So, I don't know, it seems like a lot of work that you could maybe replace with pre-existing species. I'm not opposed to it. It would be interesting to see a woolly mammoth. I'm just not sure if this is, like, our best use of time and money. But I guess, you know, they would argue that this is a company.

that's working on it. It's not taking any of your tax dollars. So stop whining. Yeah. I need a T-shirt that says that. Stop whining. Stop whining, comma, Kelly. All right. So then, you know, maybe this takes us back to the original question. Say they do this and they have a herd of woolly mammoth. How do you evaluate whether it's been successful? Is it the amount of carbon sequestered? Is it the number of species there? What's the metric? And how do we avoid just gaming that metric. Yeah, so that's a great question. So one, I think it's important to set metrics up ahead of time so that you're not sort

of measuring whatever seems to be going right at the time. But so, like, with conservation, I think they would argue that, you know, one of the nice things was that you could say, you know, our goal is 100 wolves. And you could measure, do I have 100 wolves or not? But if you're just trying to measure, we want to bring back some of the interactions, like, what does that look like? and that's harder to quantify. And so, for example, I was listening to one of the people who runs the American Prairie Project,

and they were talking about how they quantify success. And he was saying that one of the hard things about quantifying success for that program is that the animals that they're interested in seeing more of are pretty much all already there, but they're just in low numbers. And so how do you figure out, like, what are the target numbers that you want to see come back? And how do you figure out, like, how those animals should be distributed? And I think the honest answer is that nature is a Rube Goldberg machine that's hard to predict. And so I think to some extent the rewilding community is like, look, we don't necessarily know what we're going to get. We can have some goals ahead of time. And those goals could be like, probably it would be good to see more bison.

And it would be important to make sure that the ranchers are happy and that people are still enjoying this environment. But those are like, they can be hard things to quantify. And so I think that this is honestly a really difficult question for the field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think some projects have easier answers than others and more straightforward answers than others. But I think in a lot of cases, it's hard to say. Do you think that some of it is hard to pin down because the goal isn't always scientific?

It's partially emotional. It's a feeling like, look, we've done some damage. Can we just, you know, earn some points by fixing a few things, even if we're not like, actually scientifically accomplishing something, it feels like we've tried. Yes, and I don't necessarily think that's a problem. So you said that driving through Montana is beautiful. It is. If having bison out there makes the environment even more beautiful in some way,

because it creates more little microhabitats that bring more animals in, and you want to see black-footed ferrets peeking up out of their burrows and looking absolutely adorable. Like, I don't think it's a problem to say, look, we think there'd be. some better things if we introduce this animal. It will produce like cascading positive effects. And a lot of us will think that's beautiful and we'll feel good living in that environment. And we've undone some of the damage that we've done, even though it's hard to quantify exactly how much better we've made things.

Like, I don't personally think that's a problem. I know that's not very scientific of me to say. But I don't think making the world more beautiful in a way that supports more wild animals is a bad answer. Yeah, I agree. And since you raised the issue, let me ask you a philosophical question that Hazel asked me as we're driving through Montana, which totally stumped me. Oh. She said, do the bison think this is beautiful?

Oh. So what do you think? Do you think animals appreciate the beauty of nature? Gosh, I think animals probably don't appreciate when things change, you know? So, like, I think if you are a bison living in a grassland and then suddenly, there's no grass and it's all cattle, you probably look around and think, well, shoot, where am I going to get my food?

And I don't know if they're thinking this isn't beautiful, but they're probably, like, stressed out and have, like, higher stress hormone levels trying to figure out, like, well, how do I stay away from that person who, you know, I saw a shoot, Fran the other day?

Like, I know those humans have guns, but I can't get enough food. All right, but you're avoiding the question, you know, if a buffalo rounds a corner and sees an amazing vista with a sunset, do you think they ever go? Ooh, nice. I have no way to answer that.

Exactly. An unanswerable question. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. They could say, ooh, yummy grass. I'll tell Hazel that you're stumped also. But just to foreshadow to a future episode, we're going to have animal behavior extraordinaire Andy C. on the show. And he's going to be answering questions about, like, what do we know about what animals do feel?

Like, do they want to stay alive? Do they feel fear? All right. We'll ask him Hazel's Buffalo question then. Yeah, so hang on to Hazel's Buffalo question because Andy C is just a top-notch animal behaviorist. All right, Kelly, so you've walked us through a bunch of examples, some positive, some with mixed results. So bottom line it for us, what is your take on rewilding? Well-intentioned, a good idea.

What do you think? I think it is well-intentioned, and I think it's a good idea. I think all conservation is complicated. And I think it's always really important to think about how, you know, the people who are interacting with this wild area, how it's going to impact them. And I think the rewilding movement, a lot of people are thinking about that a lot more. And I think rewilding reflects the fact that over time we've learned more and more about how complicated these ecosystems are. And rewilding sort of focuses on the interactions between species that we've learned about in the last, you know, however many decades. And so I think like all conservation programs, it's not just straightforward doing the science.

You have to also manage humans and stuff like that. But I thought there was a lot of exciting stuff going on. Some of it is a little wild for my taste. I didn't necessarily feel like we need to bring back the woolly mammoth. So I'm not going to see a saber-tooth tiger. I mean, I can't. Maybe George Church is working on that. I don't know.

But no, in general, I thought it was exciting to see. see the conservation community coming up with new ideas, new ways to do things. I like that there's a little bit less of a doom and gloom and there's more of a like, look, let's do something. And it's not going to be perfect, but like at least we will have done something and we will have these beautiful creatures and these beautiful ecosystems to look at and enjoy. And we can feel good that we did something instead of just sitting around feeling bummed out. Awesome.

Well, thank you for ending on a positive note. I'm impressed. I can do it sometimes. Thanks, Kelly and Daniel. That was really thorough and super interesting, and I don't have any follow-up questions. I do have one quick follow-up comment, though. The world birth rate, even in developing countries, is falling off a cliff right now. The world's population is projected to begin declining around the turn of the century. And if world birth rates stabilize between 1.5 and 1.8 like they are in Europe and East Asia right now, there's going to be a lot less human beings alive in the year of 2400, a lot less. So maybe it's a pipe dream, but I hope much of the earth will be returned to nature as part of that depopulation process. Maybe a topic for another episode? Again, thank you so much. All right, thank you. And if you have a question you'd like to share, you can write us at

questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can go to our website, danielandkelly.org, and find a link to our Discord community and share your questions with us and the rest of the community there. very much, everybody. Stay wild. Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. Come engage with us.

You can email us at questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We really really. do want to hear from you. And you can find our website www. www. daniel and kelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. Did you think you were the only one? Like no matter what you did, it was never good enough for your mother. I'm Jennifer Arnese, and this is the Black Mother Woon podcast where we unpack and heal from the very first relationship that shaped us. We rush to accommodate other people when we have been hurt and our hurt has not been healed.

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