Factually! with Adam Conover - 12,000 Years of Humans Altering Earth with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

As nature lovers, we prize the idea of places untouched by human influence. But new research shows that such places were few and far between as long as 12,000 years ago. This week paleo-ecologist Dr. Jacquelyn Gill is on the show to talk about the surprisingly strong effect humans have had on nature for thousands and thousands of years, and how knowing this changes our relationship with the natural world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You know, it's so wonderful to have you listen to the show once again. We thank you for being here. This week, let's talk about nature. You know, if you're a nature lover like I am, but I'm guessing you are. I think all humans have deep down the love of nature in their hearts. out to the national park, into the wilderness on your camping trip, on your birdwatching expedition? What is the perfect experience of the natural world for you? Well, for me, I think what I'm looking for is the wildest possible space, you know, someplace untouched by the hairy monkey hand of humanity. As nature lovers, we want to see the most remote mountain, the deepest ocean. We want to be like John Muir, stepping into an untouched wilderness that hasn't been touched by human hands for tens of thousands of years. That's what we're looking for in our hearts, right? Well, that makes it tough to be a nature lover because we're well aware that that kind of nature, that untouched wilderness is disappearing. I mean, climate change is happening right now and it ain't stopping. That's changing temperatures across

the globe. Plus the icebergs are melting and the Marianas Trench at the bottom of the ocean, well, it is littered with microplastics. We have touched the planet the world over. And in fact, if you have listened to this show before, you know that that story of John Muir is a myth. When John Muir stepped foot in Yosemite, why, he was looking at a landscape that had been managed actively by Native Americans for centuries, and then he went and managed it even more himself and kicked them all out and messed with the landscape in his own way. So when you go to Yosemite, you're not seeing an untouched wilderness that's been preserved in amber by the National Parks Department. No, you are seeing a space that humans have altered for millennia and continue to alter day by day.

Okay, but say we're to go, Adam, I'm a nature lover. You know what? I'm going to invent a time machine and I'm going to go back in time to find that untouched wilderness I love so much. Well, I hate to break it to you, but a mind-blowing study shows that humans have actually been doing this. We have been altering the earth in this way on a far more massive scale and far further back in history than we ever imagined. According to this study, three quarters of the earth's ecology has been shaped by human society for at least 12,000 years. That's right. For 12 millennia, we have shaped 75% of the Earth's entire surface. The ecological record

shows the impact of people all over the planet, planting crops, domesticating herds, and using fire to control the landscape. We can see the impact of early farmers, hunter-gatherers, and pastoralists sharing landscapes over most of the planet for 10,000 years before the Common Era. So if you're that nature lover, you want to find that untouched nature, you got to go way, way far back. I mean, we literally do not have written records

of a time in which pure, untouched nature existed on Earth on a large scale. So what do we, as nature lovers, do with this information? Should we just sit around moping? Should we feel deeply sad that we've so massively altered the natural world that we love? Or is there a deeper perspective that we can draw from this that might reshape how we think about what we consider natural and that might reshape our relationship with the world as it is,

rather than the world that we wish still existed. Well, to help us answer these questions, our guest today is one of the authors of that study I just mentioned. She has the incredibly cool job of being a paleoecologist, which she's going to tell us all about. And she is also the host of the Climate Change Podcast, Warm Regards. I am so thrilled to have her on the show. Please welcome Dr. Jacqueline Gill. Jacqueline, thank you so much for coming to the show. It's really good to be here. So you are, among other things, a paleoecologist. Tell me what that means. Yeah. So people are probably familiar with the idea of ecology, right? Understanding

where things live on the planet, why, what they do, different plant animal species. So I do that, but over long periods of time. So, you know, hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of years or longer. So as opposed, I mean, I think, I think a lot of people are familiar with just like a paleontologist with the Jurassic Park version to, you know, looking at the fossil record to understand a particular species, but you're looking at ecologies via that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So, um, I'm really interested in, uh in I'm less interested in individual species per se. Let's just say I'm really interested in what they do to each other, how they interact. The I do a lot of work on herbivores. So how big animals like woolly mammoths affected ecosystems. And so what we lose from an ecosystem when we lose an animal like a woolly mammoth, what are the consequences of those? When we lose an animal like a woolly mammoth, what are the consequences of those? And so I actually like to think of myself as a little bit of a forensic scientist because we have to climate change or people showing up in a place for the first time or the addition or removal of different plant animals. And you said so that we understand what happens with the woolly man, let's say, when when, you know, a creature like that is removed from the environment, that makes it sound like you're talking about today. Like it's part of the point to understand what happens in ecosystems today, not just in the past. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the reasons is that the biodiversity and climate crises just feel huge. They feel enormous. They feel just like we've never this has never happened before.

We don't know what we're doing. We don't know what the future is going to be like. And for me, the fossil record is really comforting in this odd way because it's like, okay, you know, we actually have had species extinctions relatively recently. We have gone through periods of climate change. And to me, that information means that we're not headed into the future, totally blindfolded. We have these, what we call natural experiments from the past, the very recent past. And, you know, like when it comes to like woolly mammoths, you know, you can think about the modern analog of elephants

because mammoths were an elephant. They were a species of elephant. And, you know, we know why elephants are going extinct today. We know why they're threatened. What interests me is, all right, what can we do to prevent that? And also if elephants were to go extinct, what would be the consequences? And we haven't asked those kinds of questions enough, right? And partly because we haven't had that

luxury. You know, we're so urgently worried about protecting elephants that thinking about what happens next is hopefully a road we never go down anyway. But we can, for me, we can just look to the past and say, okay, woolly mammoths and mastodons and Colombian mammoths and other big elephants that used to trundle around the landscape, they were pretty important too. And when they died, that had consequences that in a lot of ways are still playing out thousands of years later. And hopefully that information can help us just increase that sense of urgency that we need to do something now to protect elephants, because it's too late for the mammoths, right? But maybe this information can save other species. I was going to ask you, because when you said,

okay, it's comforting to know that the climate has always changed. Well, sometimes you hear that argument from climate deniers or people who are advocating that we don't take action to stop climate change. They say, oh, well, the climate has always changed. Oh, everything's always shifting around and we're still here. So no big deal. But you're saying, well, no, hold on a second. What we want to learn from that is it was those changes can be bad. Like we can look at the fossil record and say,

wait, this was actually a bad thing and that's why we would want to prevent it. Yeah, exactly. Like if, if you are okay with your lifestyle being completely disrupted, losing your favorite foods and beverages, um, you know, dying earlier than you normally would have. Yeah, sure. Fine. That's good. That's comforting to you, I guess. That you normally would have. Um, yeah, sure. I'm fine. That's, if that's comforting to you, I guess that's, that's your call, but, um, you know, but to be, to be serious about it, um, I, there's sort of two lessons that I take from that. One is we often focus a lot on these catastrophic examples. Um, and I do that too. I work on extinction. Um, but there's also a lot of resilience in the natural world more than I think we appreciate. And to me, what that does is it gives me hope for the future that I, or if not hope, at least it makes the problem feel a little bit more approachable.

If you're if you're standing from the perspective of, you know, needing to save all of the things, all of the species, protecting all the species, that problem is so outside the scope of human ability. Yeah. A million species would be outside the scope of human ability. Right. But if you were instead able to say, OK, you know, we have this record of change in the past. And from that, we can say these kinds of ecosystems are probably going to be okay or okay for longer, whereas these others are going to be way more at risk. Then that allows us to focus our attention. It's like doing a kind of medical triage, right? It doesn't mean that everything is going to be okay. We actually do talk in climate change advocacy about climate winners and losers, right? And what we want to do is reduce the number of losers as much winners and losers. Right. And we, what we want to do is reduce the number of losers as much as we can.

And so for me, you know, the fossil record tells us not only who's likely to be a loser, but how we can reduce that, that likelihood. Yeah. You should come up with a better name than loser though, because it does sound like who's likely to be a loser. Like all these species are losers. Like it's a little, it's a little derogatory.

Something is being done to them, Jackie, or to those, or, or to those, uh, those ecosystems. Um, I'm just curious, since you were talking about woolly mammoths, what, what did happen when woolly mammoths, when, like, like what was the effect of that? happen when woolly mammoths, when like what was the effect of that? So that is something that we are, I think, really at the frontier of figuring out. But there's growing evidence that suggests that there were big changes in the ecosystem, in some cases, like places like the Arctic, that there may have been long-term consequences such that the Arctic today may actually be more vulnerable to climate change in the absence of big animals like mammoths, because those mammoths are thought to, you know, they, we talk about, you know, ecosystem services,

right? Which I don't like, it sounds really corporate, but, you know, it basically reminds us that these animals play roles. They're not just, you know, pretty window dressing on the landscape. Right. So if you think about everything that a woolly mammoth does, it eats, it poops, it brushes the snow away in the wintertime to get to plants. All of those activities are beneficial for certain kinds of plants and animals and may be detrimental to others. But in the case of, say, the Arctic, there's growing evidence that suggests that if you have big herbivores like a woolly mammoth or a musk ox walking around accessing the snow or the plants under the snow, it helps keep the ground colder. And that helps the permafrost, that layer of frozen ground, stay cold longer, which means that in the warm summers, it's less

likely to thaw as much. And if that permafrost doesn't thaw, it's not releasing carbon into the atmosphere, which then accelerates and amplifies warming, right? Oh, wow. That's just one example of some hypotheses that are actively being researched, both using fossils and in places like you might've heard of Pleistocene Park, right? It's like the Ice Age version of Jurassic Park. People are trying to experimentally demonstrate that this is true. There have been other examples where if you put up a fence and you keep large herbivores out and then you warm the ecosystem, if you have herbivores eating plants, then the plants actually respond less to that warming. And if you keep the herbivores out, the plants respond more. There's more of a negative impact

of that warming. And so we're not entirely sure why, but these big animals seem to be playing an important role in like dampening the effect of climate change. Yeah. So so woolly mammoths going extinct or leaving the sort of permafrost area actually caused some amount of carbon to be released into the atmosphere at that time? That's what you're or contributed to warming to some degree. I mean, that that is one of the million dollar questions in my field right now. And there's good evidence to support that. But we're still we're still chasing chasing down that idea. Well, what's interesting to me about that is correct me if I'm wrong. Humans played a role in the extinction of the woolly mammoth, correct? Yeah. So that's super debated at the moment, but, um, but, but I, I am very, you know, to reveal my own biases, I'm very much in,

in the school of thought that, um, that if, uh, that, that, that you can't explain the extinction of these huge animals without without people. Yeah. I mean, I believe I read Elizabeth Colbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, years and years ago. But she the version of it that I remember is that there is a at least a very strong correlation between humans arriving in an area and the megafauna in that area disappearing. Oh yeah. It's, it's very tight and it doesn't have, cause that's one of the first things that we, if you look at the global picture, people arrive, animals go extinct, people arrive, animals go extinct. And that's one of the big patterns that you have to be able to explain. If you want to explain these extinctions, which were global, you have to explain the, the, the kind of the, the fact that they don't happen everywhere at the same time, which you would expect if it was a climate driven extinction.

And they seem to happen relatively, you know, soon after people show up. And so that's that's one one of the big patterns. The other pattern is why just really big animals and why just mostly mammals, right? And why not fishes and birds and plants? And so, you know, this, this emphasis on this emphasis on these really big animals going extinct, you know, tells us that there's, there's something unique and special here. It's, it's geologically superlative, here. It's geologically superlative, right? It's not, you know, usually extinction risk is not just based on how big you are and being a mammal, right? Yeah. But it might be dependent on, hey, there's a new animal roaming around that's especially good at killing large calorie stores and eating them and turning them into clothing and et cetera.

Yeah. And, and people have tried to model this mathematically and they've shown that you don't have to run around and kill everyone. You actually don't have to kill very many, um, that, uh, animals that are long lived and don't have a lot of offspring and put a lot of attention into their offspring. You know, people fall into that category generally, usually, you know, you don't actually have to reduce their populations very much to contribute to an extinction. And especially when you factor in that there was some climate changing during this period, and which we know is going to stress populations. And one thing that people should remember, and one thing that frustrates me about these debates, and they've gotten nasty at times,

is like climate versus humans versus climate versus humans. Extinction is rarely a simple story. It's usually a one-two punch, right? Usually you knock down populations from, you know, with some kind of environmental stress and then something else comes along. It's bad luck,'s a it's bad luck, really, in a lot of ways. Well, it's both things. It's many factors at once. And there's a great term that came up in the I was reading about the 2016 election that I learned this term is that overdetermined, that there's like many, many inputs happening at once. And it's often hard to pick out exactly which one it is. Like, why did Trump win the 2016 election? Was it, you know, was it this?

Was it that? Was it, well, it's all those things at once. You can't really blame one thing. And you also can't say, well, it's very hard to piece out which ones were sufficient, which were necessary. You're like, all these things happen together. When it strikes me,

extinction kind of works the same way, but at the very least, we're humanity as part of the story. Most people don't like stories like that. Right. We want clean, simple, tidy answers. But the natural world is rarely tidy. Right. It's really simple. Maybe every now and then we get something like a big asteroid that is like, OK, well, that's a pretty clear cause. Right. But most of the time it's going to be these messy, complex interactions. You know, we can as scientists and as ecologists, we can have physics envy, but our systems will never be that straightforward or simple. What strikes me about what you said is that, OK, if humans contributed to woolly mammoths and these other species going extinct and the disappearance of those species is affecting, as you say, like the warming of the permafrost, that's like a macro effect that we're having on the climate in a very, at a very early period. And so what I'm working my way towards here is that you were an author

on a study in April that said that humans have been shaping nature for the last 12,000 years, which is very contrary to what a lot of our narrative is. You know, a lot of times you say, oh, the Industrial Revolution is when we started to really affect the planet. And before that, especially in certain parts of the globe, humans lived in cooperation with nature and didn't affect things that much. And this paper seems to upend that. And I wondered if you could tell us about it. Yeah. So I, one of the things that I find really interesting about this is, is how some people get really upset about this idea and other people feel very validated

because it, you know, it reinforces their, you know, their own lived experiences, particularly, you know, indigenous peoples, right? Who you might think like, well, are we saying that, that people have caused widespread environmental degradation? It's like, no, that's not actually what we're saying. What we're saying is that it's not the presence or absence of people. That's the problem. It's what we do, what we choose to do. It's this, it was actually the rise of things like colonialism and capitalism and those extractive policies that are more strongly associated with environmental degradation and extinction risk than the presence of people per se. And there are some notable exceptions,

right? These global extinctions of woolly mammoths. And I should also put in a plug for like, you know, giant beavers the size of black bear and woolly rhinos and lots of other cool animals too. All of those animals go extinct. Anything in North America larger than, or half of the species larger than an adult German shepherd go extinct, right? Like that's not an insignificant event. right? Like that's, that's not an insignificant event. But, you know, with that aside, for the most part, if you look at the pattern of biodiversity on the planet, 80% of the world's biodiversity today is being managed on indigenous lands. So these are places where people have been for thousands of years. This is not an accident. And in a lot of cases, people have enhanced biodiversity. These indigenous land use practices have helped shape biodiversity. And so we're not

saying that people have been a scourge on the planet since we first evolved tool use and spread across the globe. We're not a virus, right? And we're also not saying, oh, people have lived in total harmony with nature all over the planet. And it's only until recently that, you know, we've seen everything totally collapse. Like so many things I've been saying, the real picture is really, it's messier than that. And I think a lot of people today still have this idea that humans are inherently bad. If you care about the planet, if you're an environmentalist, if you care about biodiversity, you might think what we need to do is remove people.

But what our study shows is that there are life ways, there are ways of living with nature that can be in harmony or even enhance biodiversity. It's not an inherently negative relationship. And the reason that that's important is not only because, you know, if you actually genuinely care about saving biodiversity, you know, it's important for us to understand our relationship as people with the rest of nature because we're part of nature, but it's also important from the perspective of just enforcing indigenous agency. There are efforts, so many conservation efforts have tried to take nature away from the people who have lived with

it for thousands of years. As though, you know, from Washington, D.C., we might know better than people in Ghana or people in, you know, the Brazilian rainforest, how better to manage their ecosystems. And those efforts so often fail. So just from a conservation perspective, I think what we need is a, you know, we've known for a long time that we need to read, to adjust our approach to how we live with the natural world and also how Western societies engage with indigenous cultures. What we're just doing with this study is saying, yeah, here's 12,000 years of data that supports that. Wow. That is a lot to dig into.

Tell me, first of all, just what is in the study? Like, what did you how did you go about it and what did you turn up? It's the first study that really took a global picture or global snapshot of, of, um, the human relationship with nature going back for this long, 12,000 years. And it uses a couple of different data sets that are themselves just compilations of, of many, many, many studies across the globe. Um, and then models that try to, um, basically simulate like a video game, what those relationships, the impacts of those relationships might be. So it's using everything from computer simulations

to actual archeological data. So real information on the ground from the archeological and paleoecological records. And what they, so one of them is just human population. How many people were there and where were people? You know, we've been on every continent except Antarctica for 12,000 years at least. So how long have we been in different places and how many of us were

there? And then what was our land use like? What were we doing? Were we practicing agriculture, burning? You know, were we having more of a sort of transient relationship, just moving through ecosystems, but never staying in one place for very long? And it puts all that information together and then looks at the human environment relationship going back 12,000 years all the way to the present. And what we find is that even very early on, you can start to pick up the fingerprints of our actions as people on nature. And those actions aren't always bad. We often think human impacts are inherently negative. And there's a reason that I'm trying to avoid that term. But if you imagine when people show up in a place for the first time and they might change how often fires happen and the changing frequency of fires is going to promote some kinds

of plants versus others. And those changes in plants are going to bring different kinds of animals to that place. And so you could imagine that even in small populations, people can have a noticeable impact. And again, that impact isn't always negative. It just might change the way environments look. It might change what species live in a place or how many species there are. We move species around. We're really good at that. So, and I, and that's basically what the study does. It just looks at our, it puts together a big, you know, planet earth scale picture of what we've been up to as a human race for 12,000 years. And we find that by 12,000 years ago, up to 70% of the planet was already starting to show,

yeah, you can see the impacts of our actions in these places. And again, they're not always negative, but they do leave a fingerprint in the fossil in the archaeological record. 70 percent. Wow. That's a that's a huge amount of land. And yeah, so, you know, I've talked about on my television show on this podcast before, like examples of this. The myth is that either there were no people here before European the colonizers showed up or that the people who were here sort of were just hanging out in the woods without really touching anything and just like leaving everything as it was. When, in fact, we now know that this is the example I've used a couple of times that, you know, indigenous folks throughout North America were doing controlled burns that would were, you know, sort of maintaining the the forest, you know, burning away deadwood, that sort of thing, and also altering it. And that this was a form of land management. And that has always been one of the most stunning things that I've learned in my years of doing this. And you're saying is that sort of land management that was

really happening globally. That's not just an anecdote. That is, humans were doing that all over the world. Those debates out of North America and in places like Australia and elsewhere, Those debates out of North America and in places like Australia and elsewhere, they are directly influencing the study that we did. You know, we are, with that work, trying to hopefully, you know, put the pin in that myth and just say, okay, we're done. This idea of the pristine myth or that, you know, the sort of ecological Indian that was like a ghost on the landscape, you know, that was a myth. And that was a myth by colonizers who used that myth actively to to take over the land because it wasn't being developed by native peoples. And if native peoples weren't in, quote unquote, improving the land, then Europeans had to take over. And and so there's a lot of, you know, this myth kind of pops up over and over again. It kind of pops back up in the 70s with the rise of the environmental movement and it's, it's understandable where it comes from.

But in the end, it's, it's been damaging for both our management of ecosystems because we can't, we can't, we can't manage an ecosystem if we don't know its history. Right. And people like me who study that prehistory, we study the past. If we are pretending that people weren't there doing things, then we're going to have a really messed up picture of what that landscape should look like. And a lot of people here in North America, we go back to this, you know, pre-contact, pre-European contact baseline. Like that's how we should restore ecosystems. But then we completely ignore that the ecosystems Europeans encountered were shaped by humans. And so, yeah. So hopefully this, you know, this myth can, can finally be put to rest. It's, it's, I think it's based on some of the responses to the paper. I think, I think we still have a lot of work to do, but you know, I think we're

moving in the right direction. Well, it's such a, it's such a complicated issue. It's a deep sort of prejudice in our minds to believe that humankind and nature are separate worlds and that the only important version of nature is the kind that is by itself, that is pristine, that is untouched by humanity. And so the idea that 12,000 years ago, 70% of land was already managed to some degree or altered to some degree by human impact is like deeply unsettling to

people. I can imagine why you, some of the responses that you got, because people don't want to believe it. And as you say, part of the myth of, oh, indigenous folks lived in harmony and didn't actually touch anything is like, part of that is a positive myth, or at least it's, it's trying to, some of the people who promulgated are trying to say no no there's a way to not touch anything and restore things back to the way they naturally were but yes it's a false dichotomy because if we're if we actually want to protect the natural world we need to understand that like there is no there are no two worlds. It's one world, right? That we, we are, we fundamentally do alter the, the earth by being on it, by managing it. And so it's a question of how do we manage it?

What do we do rather than trying to go back to some pristine pre-human like epoch? Yeah, I would agree. And it's, it's funny because, you know, I, you know, I thought that I was a paleoecologist, but I think at the end of the day, like what I really am, if I had to just distill my ultimate life's work down, it would be to just like, I'm like a binary destroyer, right? Like I just don't, I just want us to stop thinking in terms of these black and white perspectives that if we could just remove every binary and replace it with a continuum in society, I think we would just be in a much better place. Because like you said,

it's not that it's either humans, no humans, right? And we know now, we have data to show that what we have thought of as our wildest and most remote places have been human landscapes to some extent, right? So this binary is false, but that doesn't mean we have been human landscapes to some extent, right? So this binary is false. Um, but that doesn't mean we have to let go of some idea that we have about, um, the places, the wild places that we love, right? Um, rather it's just thinking about the kinds of

things that we do, the, the intensity of, of our activities, um, you know, how are they extractive or are we facilitating nature, right? So it's, it's this continuum of, of, you know, how are they extractive or are we facilitating nature? Right. So it's this continuum of of, you know, beneficial to detrimental. That's going to vary based on where we are, based on what the climate's doing, based on lots of other factors. Yeah, it seems to me a lot of the time that we need to come up with new a new set of values about how we talk about nature and what we're trying to save rather than we need to, you know, the human world, bad, the natural world, good. And we want to go towards the natural world. Well, we need to come up with, with richer ways of thinking about what it actually is that we're trying to support. Yeah, I agree. And I want to just take a moment really quickly to say like when we say we we should be really clear about who the we is are the we are who we're talking about when we say we

um because when I talk to like my native colleagues they're like yeah no shit like we've known this for a really long time um and so yeah and so I think you know it's it's funny because like on some levels this idea of like we need to listen to indigenous peoples has been threaded through all along. It's just during a lot of those periods where we thought of, you know, natives walking lightly on the landscape and almost like you like they weren't even really there, you know, that we were we were telling this version of them or twisting this, this, this reality, um, that removed indigenous agency. And so, um, yeah, and, and indigenous sovereignty and all of those things that we now know are super important for conservation efforts. And so, um, and also just, you know, civil rights. Um, and so, yeah, so I think, I think we do still have a lot, a lot to learn. Um know, we as settlers and, and, you know, descendants of colonizers in these places that we live. But yeah. And so I think, you know,

we should, I think you're absolutely right. It's just, it's a lot of these, these centuries of colonial and extractive practices. And that can be really hard to grapple with because, you know, it forces us to rethink not only our relationship with nature, but our relationship with, you know, the long histories of the people who live in these places. Yeah, man. Okay. I have a lot more questions for you, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Dr. Jacqueline Gill. OK, we're back with Jacqueline Gill. I want to challenge something that you said a little bit because it's something that I think about a lot. You said that despite the fact that this paper says that, you know, humans have been affecting the natural world for 12,000 years. Well, that's not always a bad thing. There are sort of good

and bad ways to do it. And I agree with that. And I do believe that, you know, the dichotomy between human and natural is wrong. and we need to come up with better, with like more granular values to like understand what, what it is that we want to save. But my understanding is also that there are certain ways that by being on the planet, humans affect the natural world in ways that maybe we don't like in ways that are hard to stomach. Like the one that always stuck with me the most is that you said earlier, by traveling, we bring species from one place to another.

Now, my understanding is that by so doing, we like necessarily reduce biodiversity. That if you're transporting species across the globe, you're bringing invasive species in and out, you're sort of combining ecosystems, right? And to the extent that biodiversity is something that we want to save, to me, I do sometimes,

something I wrestle with, and I would like to tell you, I would like you to tell me why I'm wrong, but something I wrestle with is like, are humans just fundamentally sort of biodiversity reducing organisms? You know, to some extent, even when we have our best practices, right?

Is that, you know, a fundamental truth that, you know, when humans came to North America, Hey, yeah, we wiped out a lot of megafauna. And it, it seems like it's hard for us to not do that. Oh, okay. There's so, there's, there's so many things there I want to respond to. I know. I'm so sorry. No, no, no, not at all. It's more just like, how much time do we have? We have as much time as we need. Like you're getting the Jacqueline Gill view of the world.

So one really funny thing about that is that, and I'm going to get so many people mad. So one of my colleagues here at UMaine, Brian McGill, was on a paper that looked at global biodiversity trends. And what they found is that if you look place by place, so not at the whole earth, but place by place, biodiversity numbers are actually pretty stable. And that's because species extinctions or extirpation. So like when you take a species out of a place, but it's still alive somewhere else,

you know, like we don't have caribou here in Maine right now, but they've been here in the past, but they're not extinct globally. So that would be an extirpation. Um, if you look at those numbers, the balance is, uh, is pretty even. And that's because, you know, for every species we take are, is actually not doing a very good job of capturing the full global picture of our impacts on the planet. So we are very good at eliminating some species with our actions. We move things around, but not all things that we move around are inherently bad. And so not all non-native species are invasive, for example. And some native species can become invasive under certain conditions, right? Like think about like a cattail on the side of a road that's getting lots of disturbance and fertilizer by the highway can become invasive,

even though it evolved here in North America. I always imagine invasive meant purely from somewhere else, but you mean invasive in terms of like dominating other species, pushing other species out or being like sort of detrimental to the ecosystem. Yeah. And so people are starting to like parse these terms a little bit differently to capture some of these nuances. Right. And so like when I take my students out into the forest, you know, there will be some species that are non-native and aren't having any detrimental effects. Right. And then there will be other species that are technically native, but are not even technically they are native, but they're having hugely

detrimental effects because of something else that we're doing that's sort of tweaking that balance or that relationship. And so, you know, but one of the things that you said that I really appreciated was you said something about changing, impacting biodiversity in ways we don't like. And what you did there is you admitted that this is a lot of our conservation goals and targets are based on values. And I think that that's not a bad thing, right? As long as we're open about that, as long as we're honest about that. Because I deeply believe that biodiversity has fundamental value. I, and not just the value

that we confer upon it, but I also believe that we like as humans, we like certain kinds of ecosystems. We don't like others. We like certain species. We're not, you know, we're not super jazzed about others. And being honest about that, I think is, is sort of our first step towards having some more clarity about our relationship with nature and what our impacts are. So I guess what I would say is, yes, you know, What I would say is, yes, you know, we have, humans have had both positive and negative influences on biodiversity, which is this like nebulous term, right? If we're, you know, when we say, are we talking about individual species that we care about? Are we talking about just how many there are? Because if you just look at how many there are, that number hasn't actually changed.

If you go place by place, like where I live, where you live. Globally, yes, the number is going down and that is a bad, bad thing. What we need to challenge ourselves to do is to think about what kinds of actions we're having on the planet and whether those actions are having, you know, positive or negative impacts, right? Based on a whole bunch of different metrics. And the answers are very, the answers are very rarely going to be easy or simple, right? They're probably going to be messy and muddy. And you and I talking about a place that we both love might have completely different ideas about what it should look like. This is all really vague. So I'm going to try to bring it down to a concrete example. Yeah. So, okay. Acadia National Park is right down the road for me.

It's one of my favorite places in the whole world and I'm very lucky to live nearby it. And in the 1940s, there was a fire that burned half of the island. And if you've ever been to Acadia, you might have in your mind, you know, the rugged coast, but if you go inland a little bit, they're these beautiful birches. And those birches are an artifact of that fire. And those birches are now dying because birches don't live very long. They're a pioneer species. They come in right after a disturbance. They flourish and then they get replaced by some secondary tree, like a conifer tree in this part of the world. But a lot of people are really upset that those birch trees are not being managed or cared for by the park, that they're not being protected, that the park that they're visiting now doesn't look like the park of their childhood.

But the only way to do that would be to set half of the island on fire. And that's not necessarily something that people want, right? And then you turn around and you ask the same people, okay, well, we're trying to eradicate invasive species from Acadia because a lot of those non-native invasive species are having damaging effects on some of the rare plants that we love. We do know some of the rare plants have been declining in Acadia over the last decades. And people say, cool, cool, cool. We like it. We're on board. And then we say, yeah, so we're going to take the lupins away. And I don't know if you're familiar with like how important lupins are in this part of the world, but there was this child, children's book, Miss Rumpheus. It's all about this white hair, snowy white haired lady riding around on her bicycle who wants to do something beautiful in the world.

And so she decides she's going to broadcast lupin seeds everywhere. And these beautiful lupins grow up. What are lupins? Oh, gosh. If you don't know, Google L-U-P-I-N-E. You're probably like, are you she's talking about werewolves? Like, what the hell is going on? like, are you, she's talking about werewolves? Like what the hell is going on? Um, they're these beautiful spiky flowers, um, that, uh, are like a purpley blue. Um, and they'll just cover

the hillside. They're really beautiful. Um, they're from, they're actually from your, are you on the, you're on the West coast, right? Yes. I'm from Los Angeles or Los Angeles. Sorry. Yeah. There is a, there is a native lupine, but the ones that are being spread around are actually from the West coast and they will choke out the local one and they will choke out a whole bunch of other plants too. And, but people love them and they have this strong association with this children's book. And, and when you tell them, okay, we're going to get rid of all the non-native species from the park, including the lupine. People are like, no, you can't do that. Like, this is important to me. It doesn't matter what the impacts are. And so to me, I think that just reminds, it's a powerful reminder that our

preferences and our cultures are deeply bound up. Our experiences are deeply bound up in our ideas of nature. And so it's easy to say, we're going to make these decisions because that's what's right for the natural world and to sort of take ourselves out of it. But those biases, those preferences, those cultural choices have always been there and they will always be a part of those decisions. And we just need to be open and honest about that. And in some cases it might be okay. In other cases, we might have to make trade-offs. Like maybe we do burn half of the island of, you know, Madras Island. Maybe we don't. Maybe we let the lupins go. Maybe we don't. Right. So what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that these are messy conversations. They're deeply personal. They're very place-based, right? They're going to,

they're going to vary depending on where you live. But our, our perceptions of what is natural are, are shaped by, you know, by our experiences, by history, by our cultures. And, and, and that makes answering questions like your question really hard in a one hour podcast. Right. Is that, is that a fair answer? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, these are the questions that I wrestle with all the time and that's, you know, and this is a topic that we've done on the show multiple times and we'll continue to do it because it's one that I keep looping around to. Like there are times when I feel like I understand it and all comes together to me where I'm like,

no, we exist. We are part of the natural world. We are in fact an animal species ourselves and we manage the landscape. And, you know, that means that, you know, our real goal should be to, you know, decide what our values are in a way that allows us to live

and help the natural world flourish in a way that allows us to live and help the natural world flourish in a way that isn't so stressed out all the time about it, you know, in a way that's, that's healthier and we can, we can work our way towards that. And then there's other times when I feel like, and this is how I put it when we had Elizabeth Colbert on the show,

where I feel like I'm part of a fire, right? That's like burning through a forest. Like, like humanity consumes natural resources. We alter the world that we're moving through. And I'm, and we're just part of a fire that says burning through a forest. Humanity consumes natural resources. We alter the world that we're moving through. And we're just part of a fire that says, oh my God, what are we doing? But we're somehow unable to stop. And I vacillate between those two ways of looking at myself and my relationship with the world. And the former is the one that I think is correct and I hope is correct. But then the latter is the one where

when I look at, you know, a study like yours that says we've been affecting the world for 12, you know, for 12,000 years, when I think about the fact that, hey, wherever humans go, woolly mammoths and other megafauna just disappear no matter what, right? I'm like, Right. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like we are you know, we we are doing we seem to have this effect that also causes us pain. Right. And the fact that it's human values and it's not like an objective natural truth about the world is an important one. But at the same time, I'm like, I care about biodiversity. Right. And it's the biodiversity doesn't care. It's me caring. Great. Maybe I could affect what I care about. Okay. I'll do my best. But at the same time, I'm also looking around going, the thing that I care about seems to not be doing well. And it's

because of me. And no matter what I do, I'm not going to be able to fix it entirely. And it's, it's, you know, and that causes me pain and that's what I wrestle with. And it's it's you know, and that causes me pain. And that's what I wrestle with. I and I want I want you to know that I am right there with you and that like I am deeply wounded by how close we came to still having woolly mammoths running around now. Right. This, the fact that it was such a near miss to me is something that I find deeply upsetting and unsettling. And the fact that we are at risk of, you know, being a generation away from people who can't see a living elephant or a living rhinoceros, right? Like that to me would be such a compounded tragedy because

we have that, that lesson of the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhino, um, that tell us like, Hey, let's not do this. Let's not, you know, we have some agency here. We can, we can turn the tide and then choosing not to do that. Um, and so I'm not, I don't want to say that it's, that it's easy, but rather, you know, to go back to your, your fire metaphor, I think that's a really, a really powerful one because I think fire in and of itself. And I know that, you know, being where you are, like your relationship with fire is going to be really different than mine, right? Like it's probably too soon to bring this up, but, you know, like where I live, we could do with a little bit of ground fires that manage the understory and kill some invasive species and lower our tick populations, which are giving everyone Lyme disease, right? Like a little bit of well-managed, thoughtful application of fire would be really beneficial.

Fire is a powerful tool. A lot of species, a lot of plants need it to reproduce, right? And yet it can also rage out of control if used poorly. It can devastate ecosystems and habitat. It can, you know, cause people to lose their homes or their their livelihoods or their lives um and so so i think you know to sort of break down that you know are we good or bad binary into something more like fire like there's like a continuum right a little bit in certain in certain applications and natural fire regimes can be really valuable too much fire suppression um or climate change can interact to, to turn fire into a huge, a massively destructive conflagration that is, you know, accelerating climate change in Siberia, right? Like there's,

there's a whole range of ways in which, you know, fires impact on, on, on our communities and our ecosystems play out, right? And, and that to me, I think might be, to me, I find comfort in that. That sounds like it's not comfort in like, yes, we can, we can be this destructive force, but more like, okay, we know what the full range of possibilities are. Right. We know that there are examples. This, this is why I turn back to the prehistoric record over and over and over again, because I see not only extinction and destruction and loss and, you know, you know, collapse, but also resilience and choice and agency and survival and persistence and adaptation. There are all of those options out there in front of us. And we have still, our story, our biodiversity story is not yet written. We still have the agency to decide,

you know, are we going to be the conflagration or are we going to be, you know, something that, you know, is part of the natural world and enhances ecosystems and creates space for lots of species to coexist and thrive together? Yeah, I agree. I agree with all of that. and come back to the point that you just brought me to, which is that we do have choice and agency and that we don't just need to like weep over, you know, what's lost or like give up, you know, and say, well, we can't do anything. Like we have the ability to, you know, make a better natural human world tomorrow

than exists today. And, you know, I think the binary is very deep in me as much as I try to fight it. And what I express to you is like, you know, it is hard to get away from. And I still end up having those binary values in me. And what's important about the work that you do is it helps us escape it to say, you know, well, let's look at what actually happened and what actually worked. Like even, you know, I see a lot of people, for instance, solely blame capitalism and the industrial revolution for like, you know, for negative changes and say, you know, hey, indigenous folks or other folks. Right. The non colonizers did a better job and we can just do that. And it's like, well, it's still more complex than that because like capitalism didn't kill the woolly mammoth, you know? So we, we have to look a lot more closely at like what our effects are.

I'm always super suspicious of simplistic narratives. And I think there's a few reasons that in this particular moment, you know, you were talking about, oh, I can't remember the really great phrase you used, but multiple interacting causal mechanisms. Oh, the overdetermined thing. Yeah. Overdeterminism. Yeah. Just this. There's a lot of reasons why I think that we're we're falling into this trap of of trying to look for simple solutions. One is it helps galvanize movements. And I get that. And there's lots of, you know, conditions are super shitty for lots of people. And so there's there's really good reasons why why it's it's easy to just focus on these big structural elements. But at the same time, I worry that people are forgetting that, you know, corporations produce products that people buy. Right. And so there's there's there is a consumer. It's not just it's not just that Exxon, you know, puts money, you know, creates its own money and then shoves it into a CO2 machine, right? Like there are products that are being produced and people are purchasing those products. And, you know, the biggest emitters, if you look in the world, some of the top are actually state-run energy

companies. They're not corporations, right? And so that, which isn't to say that it's not all, all of these things don't operate in, you know, a capitalist system, but, you know, overall, you know, it's easy to, it's easy to fall into the trap of, okay, individual actions don't matter because we have these large structural problems, but then we sort of forget that, you know, collectives can be really powerful in addressing them. And so there's, you know, we can't give away our agency either. Right. And I worry that part of the rise that we see in, you know, climate anxiety or eco grief is because a lot of these problems just seem so big and they're intractable.

But because we focus so much on large scale forces that are really difficult to change, you know, as individuals or as communities. One of the other things I wanted to circle back to is just thinking about what you said about feeling like you're going through this cycle over and over. And it made me really think of like the cycles of grief and how grief is really nonlinear. I think it's okay. And you shouldn't beat yourself up if I can just be your like biodiversity therapist for a second. Please. You know, it's, it's, it's okay if you're, you know, if you go through these cycles of, of feeling like, you know, because we're, we're not just mourning, we're not just mourning this like event that happened in the past. It's something that's continual and ongoing. Right. And every

time you turn around, it feels like there's some new crisis or some new, new loss. But I would say, you know, there, there are stories of survival and resilience out there too. And we can, more importantly, we can help write those stories. And if the work that I do and putting the dead to work, putting the past to work to save the future, if that has any value, I would hope it's that, it helps people to understand

that there are other ways forward and that we are not committed to, you know, total, like, I'm not going to mourn a planet whose obituary has not yet been written. Right. And, you know, the, it's not even flatlined. Right. And so, you know, just as if I were to, if I were to go into the doctor with acute appendicitis, that doctor, what I would hope would tell me, okay, if you don't, if we don't get your appendix out, you're going to die. But we have the tools at our disposal. Fortunately, we know how to remove appendices and we're going to do it. And I would say, cool, awesome. You know, I wouldn't expect to go to the

doctor and have him say, oh, sorry, you're doomed. Like that's it. We can't do anything for you. Right. Because we know that's not true. Right. And we know that's not true about my appendix, which I don't actually have, but that's another story. We also know that it's not true about the planet. Right. And so, you know, I just, I worry that, I worry that if we, if we drift too far into despair, then, then we up. And there's, you know, there's really good reasons not to do that. And one of them being like, this is kind of a cool place to live. This is where we were in. So, yeah. Oh, that's all very, very nice and very helpful. You know, I think what I'm taking away from it is that, you know, anything that reduces our agency is not a great perspective on it you know like i i want people

to not get me wrong i'm a critic of capitalism right but when we say if we say well hold on second capitalism is the whole problem we have to destroy capital i agree we have to destroy capitalism but if we wait around to destroy capitalism before we focus on the natural world it's gonna it's gonna take a little while know, and we should be considering, well, we have the ability to be better stewards at the same time, you know, as as we are doing that. It's we don't need to entirely take ourselves out of it. And I wrestle all the time with, you know, the structural, you know, the need to go fight structural climate change, structural causes of climate change and my individual role, you know, in it and my own individual responsibility. How much how much time am I putting in trying to like, you know, obsessively reduce my own emissions versus what am I doing to, you know, change the change the

world? The old the old question of is it worth it to fly somewhere if your flight is to a climate conference or whatever is like this like bizarre loop I get caught in. Yeah. And maybe I will never get out of that loop. Maybe I'll always go back and forth. But it's it's a bad idea to reduce my own agency and to say like, well, I'm not going to, you know, let's let's just start grieving already. Yeah.

Or let's let's put off doing anything because we need to solve some other problem first or anything along those lines. And I don't know, hopefully there's a way, like I do think that my perspective is enriched by understanding that humans fundamentally change the natural world as a, you know, that's what human civilization does. That's what your paper shows.

world as a, you know, that's what human civilization does. That's what your paper shows. But that shouldn't drive me to grief and paralysis. It should hopefully push me to understanding that means I can affect it in positive ways. That gives me agency. It doesn't take it away. You know how we say like depression is a liar, right? Like depression tells us like you're useless. You'll never enjoy things. Nobody likes you, right? Like depression tells us like, you're useless. You'll never enjoy things. Nobody likes you. Right. Like that's true for planet earth too. Right. It's not just true for us. Like, um, and so, you know, it's okay. It's okay to grieve. It's a, you know, when, when a place that's important to you is destroyed by a wildfire, like that is okay to do. It is okay to be concerned and worried. All of those are normal, healthy emotions. But if you become immobilized, right, like by your grief or your depression or your anxiety,

like just as you would do for yourself, like you should get help because we need you, right? Like we, like planet earth needs you too, right? And so, I don't know. I mean, we're getting a little bit more metaphysical, I guess, than I expected, but, you know, so I hope it's okay to say that, but I mean, I think it's, yeah, I mean, I guess I think it's important though, because, you know, I never want to tell someone not to feel what they're feeling because it's, I think that's, that's not an appropriate thing to do. And I wouldn't say you shouldn't feel grief. You should feel hope, or you shouldn't feel, you know, we're all motivated by different things. I have close friends who are motivated by anger, others who are motivated by, you know, worry. But there is some good, there is some good research on this that collectively, if you just, if you only, if people are only afraid or, or they're only sad, then they can shut down as a, you know, on, on average, um, not everybody, but most people broadly, um, you have to give them a sort of, um, uh, uh, a sense of agency, right? Like, so,

uh, kind of a hopeful worry, right? I guess if you want to use that phrase, um, that, you know, our actions matter, um, it will always be worth it to fight for the things that we care about. And everyone can pitch in from wherever you're at. Right. And so I think that those are the messages that I hope that people will take from this kind of work. And also that, you know, it can feel very much like we're just stumbling in the dark or going into the future with a blindfold on that we don't know our way. I take great comfort in the fact that the fossil record is like a blueprint, right? It's literally showing us, you know, it's like planet Earth left us a whole series of clues about what to do to get us out of this. What works, what doesn't work, right? We have that. Those are tools we have at our disposal. And to me, that is incredibly empowering. And one of the,

you know, whether you're motivated by stubbornness like I am, or, you know, whatever it is that you need to get you off of the couch of your climate grief or whatever, you know, do that thing. And, you know, don't don't if you feel like it's too late or it's time to give up, it's that's, you know, the science shows that's not true. Right. And and we need you. Oh, that is a wonderful note to end out. Thank you so much, Jacqueline, for that for that stirring call to action for helping me once again process my climate grief, my biodiversity grief. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. And where can folks find you and find out more about your work?

You can find me on Twitter at Jacqueline Gill. And I also host a podcast called Warm Regards. So if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, you know, you can find us there as well. Thank you so much. Listen to your podcast. Isn't that what we say?

That's what we all have to say. That's the podcaster's curse is to say that goddamn phrase. Thank you. We all know that. Like, why do we say anyway, whatever people ask, people still say,

well, where can I hear your podcast? And I'm like, I don't know. What app do you use? This is not this is. OK. OK. Thank you so much for being on the show, Jacqueline. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah. And I'll send you a bill for the therapy. Well, thank you once again to Jacqueline Gill for coming on the show and thank you for listening. If you want to support the show, hey, buy one of our incredible guests books

at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you will be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore through our bookshop.org shop. Once again, that URL is factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song, our incredible engineer, Andrew Carson, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I recorded this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover,

wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.