Factually! with Adam Conover - Humans Are An Invasive Species with Elizabeth Kolbert

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Adam is thrilled to introduce one of his absolute favorite journalists and authors to the show: Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert. They discuss how humans have transformed the planet even more profoundly than we imagine; the dirty work of eliminating invasive species; how even getting to net zero emissions only stabilizes, rather than reverses, climate change, and how to carry the psychic weight of knowing we are destroying the things we love. Look for Elizabeth Kolbert's newest book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, wherever books are sold. 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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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And, you know, we've talked a lot about the environment on this podcast. If you listen to this podcast, you probably give a shit about the planet and you want to save it as best you can. I know I do. And, you know, just a few weeks ago, we had Saul Griffith on the show to discuss how we really can stave off the worst of climate change today if we can muster the political will to massively electrify our power grid. Today, if we can muster the political will to massively electrify our power grid.

Now, that's an incredibly optimistic, uplifting message, and I support it. I also don't want that to prevent us from having a clear-eyed view of how massively we have already altered the planet. The truth is that we can't just fix the Earth or reverse climate change. All we can do is prevent the worst effects that are to come because so many of the impacts have already happened. I mean, there are 7 billion humans alive today and every single thing we do alters the earth and its ecosystems. For instance, simply by doing something as basic as traveling around the world, we've spread the chytrid fungus, which has straight up murdered massive numbers of amphibians. This fungus, which travels with us on the soles of our feet, has been implicated in destroying

90 species of amphibian, 90. And it's driven the decline of another 124 species by 90%. Those amphibians are just gone. And even though we want to do everything we can to save them, I don't think it's likely that we're going to completely shut down all human travel around the globe anytime soon. Moving about the earth is just part of what it means to be a human, even though by doing so, we fundamentally change the earth. And look, it's not just frogs, okay? In the United States and Canada, we have lost 3 billion birds since 1970. That's billion with a B. Now, these deaths are due to pesticides and plastics. Yes, things that we are trying to reform, but they're also due to our windows and even our cats. That's right. The cats that we brought to North America that we love and support

and love to cuddle. Those cats are responsible for the deaths of countless birds. Are we going to stop loving cats anytime soon? I wouldn't place bets on it. Or take insects, which we talked about in our interview with Akito Kawahara. Land insects are decreasing by about 9% each decade, which might be good news for your windshield, but it's bad news for the prospects of a healthy, thriving Earth. And it's happening because of habitat destruction, farming, and all these other things that humans do. In fact, when you look at this all together, it starts to look like

changing the natural world is just what humans do. That's what it is to be a living human being on this planet, to change the world around you. But that is, let's just say, not a comforting revelation. I would even call it dismaying. I mean, we are changing the world in ways that we do not like, that are heartbreaking to us. And that creates a conflict at our core. If being human is to change and we don't want to make those changes, what do we do? Well, here's what I think. I think that it is vital to not view this as a source of pessimism, but instead a reason to be optimistic. Because if to be human is to cause change, well, we also have a choice in the kinds of changes that we are going to create. We can't undo the alterations and destruction that

humanity has caused to the planet so far, but we can decide what the planet of the future is going to look like. But critically, we can only do that if we accept our own role in fundamentally altering it with every breath that we take. We are living in a world defined by human intervention in a new geological age that scientists call the Anthropocene. And I feel that our most important job as sentient organisms on this planet is to look that reality right in the eyes and ask ourselves what it means. Well, there is no author on the planet who tells the story of humanity's impact on the planet better than Elizabeth Colbert. I am so thrilled to have her on this show. The entire monologue I just gave was based on revelations that I had when I first read her book, The Sixth

Extinction, and then the following six years of me thinking about these topics and developing my own beliefs about them. That book, by the way, won a Pulitzer, and she has a new book out now called Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future. I cannot say enough about how important and moving her work is, and this interview knocked my socks off. So I really hope you enjoy it. Let's get right to it. I couldn't be more excited to welcome Elizabeth Colbert. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks for having me. I have been a fan of your work for such a long time. I read The Sixth Extinction when it came out in 2014.

And I can't say there are many books that have been more of like a revelation to me that have made me see the world more differently than your book did. Popularized for many of us, certainly for me, the notion of the Anthropocene, the idea that we've now changed the Earth so much that we're in a new geological age in a way. And I mean, it just portrayed so vividly. You know, I grew up with this notion that we are supposed to save the planet, that we're trying to save wild spaces, that we can reverse the damage that we've done or the changes that we've made. And your book showed in so many vivid examples how much that change, that damage has already been done and how much we do it just by the act of living on Earth. And it sort of put me to an existential crisis. And I spent the next maybe two years. I spent the next couple of years of

my career working through it, doing multiple episodes of television about climate change and trying to understand it. And yeah, you have a new book out. I'm so excited to read it. I've not had a chance yet. How does it fit into that broader narrative that you were telling in that book and your work generally? Well, it, it, it's sort of, I mean, some people have described it as a sequel and I, I would say that it, it is, it is really a sequel. It, it looks at the question of, you know, having, having altered all of these natural systems and cycles, you know, what what what's our next move, basically? Yeah. I mean, well, before we get into what that next move is, you've described the book as as a dark comedy. It seems like it's it seems like it would just be dark, a dark drama. It's a very heavy subject.

I'm all about finding comedy in dark situations. What about it is a comedy for you? Well, you know, a lot of the comedy emerges fromist streak to it, but I like to think of it as sort of Dr. Strange-Levian component to it. How's that? Can you give me an example from the book? I know that you, similarly to the last book, go to different places and talk about the crises that certain species are facing or what scientists are working on in various places. What's the funniest one? The funniest one? Well, one of the ones that has, you know, it has a humorous element and, you know, I'm not a comedian, so I'm not sure that I can do justice to the comedy, I'm not sure that I can do justice to the comedy, is I go to Australia where one of the big problems or among the many, many invasive species in Australia. So Australia is, you know,

a part of the world that was isolated from the rest of the world for many millions of years, developed a unique fauna that people are familiar with in the form of koalas and kangaroos. But that's just a few of the extraordinary species that evolved on Australia and nowhere else. So they have a very unusual and very, very endangered native fauna. And one of the creatures that has endangered the native fauna is a toad called the cane toad, which is native to South America and Central America, an enormous toad. Sometimes these toads are mistaken for boulders. They're so big.'re they're highly toxic that's how they endanger the native wildlife they um australia doesn't have any toads of its own any native toads it's a part of the world just doesn't have toads

and it certainly has no toxic toads so you know things come in contact with these pain toads and they eat them and they die and And Australians have come up with, and here's sort of where the comedy comes in, all sorts of schemes for doing in cane toads. It's sort of a national pastime in a way. People take golf clubs and try to smash them. They purposely run them over. Uh, they freeze them. They stick them in the freezer. Um, so they organize, uh, they have what are called toad busting militias. They go out and try to, you know, bust some cane toads. So it's kind of a national, um, sport really even. And, uh, they run them over with their lawnmowers. Um, while I was in,

there's also a, I, I don't think I've told anyone this yet and it's not in the book, but there's also like a little mini industry. They've become kind of, as I say, they're, they have a comic element. They're, they're kind of ugly, you know, from a human perspective. say they have a comic element. They're kind of ugly, you know, from a human perspective. And there's a sort of a crafts industry that has sprung up of cane toad sort of paraphernalia. So I have I bought a little cane toad purse, you know, that sort of has a zipper where its mouth would be. People have cane toad, you know, purses. They have, you can buy, you know, like taxidermied cane toads holding beer cans. I mean, everything, you know, there's a whole wide range of handicrafts that you can purchase, cane toad handicrafts. So it's sort of just a, I mean, it's funny, but it's also, you know, sad because,

of course, these cane toads are having a really significant impact on native species. But this is, there is a perversity to it too, because there's this invasive species that was, I assume they got there, they were brought there by humans somehow in the, what, in a ship or an escaped pet or something along those lines. But this is not what we think conservation looks like. This is not, oh, we're living in harmony with the plants and animals. This is we're trying to run over amphibians in our cars and making more crap out of them. Right. And I should say the story begins, and this also does have a dark comic aspect in my mind. I suppose you have to have a perverse sense of humor, perhaps. But the story begins in the 1930s when 102 of these Canto's, we have very good records on that, were shipped from Hawaii. They were not native to Hawaii either, but they were already in Hawaii and are still in Hawaii to Sydney. And 101 of them survived this journey. And then they

were intentionally let loose in sugarcane country. I mean, they're called cane toads, so that really has no relationship to what they really are. But the idea was that they were going to eat these beetles and beetle grubs that were damaging the sugarcane crop, which is a big cash crop in northeastern Australia. But so the cane toads were not interested in the beetles at all or the beetle grubs. Yeah, but they did just fine. They have no, you know, they have no natural predators in a part of the world where nothing eats toads except things that eat toads and die. And they just multiplied like crazy and spread. They keep spreading.

And another interesting part of this story is that they're evolving. So people have watched them, scientists have watched them speed up as they make their way around Australia. They don't survive well in the central part of Australia, which is so dry, but wherever there's any water, they can survive. They're very, very good survivors. And so they're making their way around sort of the peripher part of Australia where they'd been released, and then some of the toads on what's called the invasion front. So, you know, where, you know, it's like a front in a battle, you know, on this side is toads and on this side are no toads. And they found that the toads on the invasion front had evolved significantly longer

legs. So we're watching evolution happen in real time. And these toads are getting faster and faster. And so conquering more and more territory every year. You keep raising in your work, these visions of our own flailing attempts to undo our own impact. Like I think there's and again, I just got this from a review, but there's an example where, you know, we'll we'll let loose some species in order to eat another invasive species. And then we've got to take then we have to deal with that species and then we have to deal with this. that species. And then we have to deal with this. There's like a cascade effect where we're constantly trying to, to put the, you know, put the tsunami back in the bottle in a way and only making it worse. Yeah. I mean, one of the reviews of the book cited, which I thought was very apt, you know, the old kid song, I know an old woman who swallowed a fly and, and that kind of response of, oh, well, that,

that was a, that was a boo-boo. Let's, let's swallow something else, you know, that you associate with, you know, dumb teenage boys or whatever. Yeah. That's kind of the way we're working our way through planet earth. Absolutely. I mean, do you, earth. Absolutely. I mean, do you, the, the, the, the, the crisis that your work presents me with a lot of times when I engage with, you know, normally maybe I'd save this big question for the end, but I feel like I need to steer into it head on is, you know, we just had Saul Griffith on the show a couple of weeks ago. He's, he's an engineer and he, yeah, I listened to him. I thought he was really good. Yeah. He's great. And he's got a very optimistic, uh, point of view, you know, we can do it if we do these

things, you know, you listen to that and makes you feel great. Um, makes you feel that, you know, humanity is up to the challenge or at least we hope we are. Um, but when I engage with your work, you know, one of the stories that stuck with me the most from the sixth extinction was the one about, I believe, frogs somewhere in South America. Do I have it right? Yeah. Yeah. In Central America. We were in Central America. We could have been in South America or we could have been in North America. I mean, this this fungal pathogen is is is everywhere now. Yeah. And that this fungal pathogen that's wiping out these frogs was brought by people on the soles of our boots that just from people traveling from one place to another and you write about how you know when we knit together

ecosystems by traveling just by the you know hey i'm going to europe for a vacation i come back home i'm going to you know miami to uh do a comedy show and i fly back home just by doing that uniting those ecosystems we necessarily are reducing biodiversity, causing extinctions. And I engage with that and I think, my God, I can't ask. I can say let's electrify the grid, but I can't tell people don't travel. I can't tell myself don't travel. Could I could I ever live that way? I can't go anywhere because I might mess up an ecosystem.

And that makes our effect on the planet seem inevitable, inexorable, that maybe we can mitigate it a little bit, but in the broad scope, we are ourselves an invasive species that is unable to stop ourselves. And that's what causes me to spin out a little bit. And I'm wondering what your emotional perspective towards these issues are because you've been swimming in them for the past few decades, reporting on them directly.

How do you feel about it? And how do you feel like your perspective differs from, you know, the average person who's thinking about climate change or the average pundit? Well, you know, I listened to Saul and I thought, you know, he makes a really compelling case, but you also had to follow him. You know, he it was like, if we do this and this and this and this and this and you follow him down and then then we will get to the point where we are no longer causing more damage. Right. So what he was talking about was ultimately getting to the point where our emissions are effectively zero. So what's being called net zero now. Right. Which is, you know, a big concept out there. Now, the sad fact I have to say, because this is always my job to be sort of a fly in the ointment,

is net zero just gets you to the place where things aren't getting worse. It doesn't solve the problem. You know, so California, as I'm sure you're well aware, you know, was in flames for a lot of the fall. That's only going to get worse as, you know, climate change advances. And it advances for two reasons right now. One of which is that we have not yet even experienced the full effects of the CO2 we've already put up into the atmosphere because there's a time lag in the system. There's a lot of inertia in the system. And the second is we keep putting out more CO2. So, you know, both of those factors are in play. So at the point that you reach net zero, which I do think is possible, the unfortunate fact is at that point, after maybe a decade or two,

then temperatures would level out, but they would level out at a higher level. You know, they're not, they're not, it's not like, oh, we've solved the problem. So, I think that, you know, I find some, you know, I'm a journalist, and I still hew to the sort of old fashioned, increasingly old fashioned, you know, dinosaurian notion that it's important to face up to the truth. And the truth of the situation is that we're in a really, we're in a bind that we've created for ourselves, not because we're evil, you know, not because we're greedy, though, you know, those don't help, I'm not going to lie to you um but because we are very good at changing the world and when you think about it you know and that was very much the point of the sixth extinction if you're another creature you have only one you know you you have certain adaptability you have a certain range range of temperatures you can tolerate, you have a

certain way of doing things, you have a certain what's called, you know, plasticity. So you're not like an automaton, you do have a certain amount of range. But when things go beyond your range, unless you evolve, you're done, right? Now humans, you know, they move into the Arctic. Well, a creature that evolved in the tropics shouldn't be able to really do too well in the Arctic, but we have clothes, we have tools, now we have heating. So we're just really, really good at taking over the territory and the ecological niche of other creatures because we don't wait to evolve. We just say, oh, let's invent something new. And there's a mismatch there between humanity and the rest of the world.

And unless we acknowledge that, we're just constantly sort of chasing our tails, like, oh, that's gonna solve this, that's gonna solve this. And that sad fact is, no, that's not gonna solve it. Yeah, I mean, what that makes me think is, and I've had this thought many times, we're the invasive species, we're the toad.

Yes, we're the ultimate weedy species. I mean, when I wrote The Sixth Extinction, one of the reasons I wrote it was because I read a paper. It was called Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? It was written by two herpetologists, so guys who studied frogs. And they were studying exactly the phenomenon that you alluded to, which is this fungal pathogen that's killing amphibians all around the world. And they refer to humanity as a weedy species. We are the ultimate meaty species. We can survive just about anywhere. We now survive on Antarctica. And that is, we are the ultimate invasive species. Absolutely.

And it's just, in a way, it's what we do. I mean, we're a species like any other. We're reproducing, we're consuming resources. But the difference between us and the toad is that we are the species that says, hold on a second, this is bad. We would like to stop. We're a fire that's burning through all the fuel in a forest. Meanwhile, going, oh no, the forest is going away.

Yes, that's a brilliant analogy. We are both the fire and the firefighters. And when you think about it, that's kind of a weird situation to be in. But I think it's kind of a brilliant analogy. happy that you feel it's true because it's also a very a very dire one because it puts us in this bind where we want to stop and protect these things but by being alive and by reap by doing the most basic actions of human existence we imperil them and you know i mean by by the other token if we all said you know what this is terrible let's all commit mass suicide every human on the planet will take a cyanide pill well then there'd be no one around to appreciate and to care about these species either. You know that. Yeah. So, so what?

Well, it's worse than that, Adam. I, I'm going to, I, I, yeah, you might, you haven't really even plumbed the depths of this one, but yeah. I mean, like, if you think about, um, what we've let loose in the world, you know. For example, you know, take the case of Australia, which is also in addition to being overrun by poisonous toads, toxic toads. I mean, we could just spend all of our hour talking about Australia. It's also overrun with feral cats. So, you know, the British settlers settlers brought cats they went crazy too they should not be there at all and they're the australian fauna really can't deal with cats which are very very good hunters yeah um so there's millions of of um feral cats and they consume it's been estimated you know know, calculated hundreds of millions of native mammals every year in Australia. And if you just read, so a lot of Australian mammals have already gone extinct.

And the ones that remain are often confined to these huge, what are called exclosures. remain are often confined to these huge what are called exclosures so they're huge fenced in areas where they you know have these cat proof fences um and if you if humans just um left the scene you know uh it's not like australia's fauna would recover it's like the cats would take over right many native mammals would be wiped out. And, you know, something new would evolve eventually. I don't want to, you know, it depends on your, and you're taking the very long view. Eventually, Australia would have new native species. But eventually is a pretty fucking long time.

Yeah. And, I mean, you know, when I start taking a view, that's that long, I start to think, well, you know, I mean, it won't be that bad if we wipe out all life on earth because the earth will keep spinning around and there's some life somewhere else in the universe. And, you know, there's no cosmic judge that's going to come send us to species jail. It'll just happen. But we happen to we happen to value these things. You know, we we perversely value cats. You know, there's people in the US and I'm sure in Australia who want to protect feral cats, even though they are absolutely deadly to I think in the US they kill something

like two billion birds a year. Right. And so we love and we value those feral cats. Those are your right. That's kitty kitty. Yeah.. Those are your, that's kitty, kitty. Yeah, your domestic cat who you let outside once a week or whatever. Exactly. But, you know, we love the cats, so we can't do anything about it. And, or it interferes our mitigation efforts,

but we also love the birds and we want to save the birds. You know, I've started bird watching this year. I'm enjoying it incredibly. And yet I'm aware that my presence on the planet is contributing to the fact that in the last 40 years, the population of birds in North America has dropped by a third. We have a third less birds than we did 40 years ago. So I'm heartbroken because my existence is imperiling the thing that I love. And that's hard to deal with psychically.

Do you how do you grapple with that? I mean, I I think, you know, honestly, you've gotten to the heart of the matter. And I think that that is very difficult to deal with. And, you know, maybe it gets back to, you know, original sin or something. I don't want to get too heavy duty here. And I'm certainly no, you know, theologian, but I think that living with this knowledge that, you know, humanity, or certainly humanity in its current, you know, incarnation of a modern, you know, in the U.S., and most of the world now, right, even in even very

parts of the world where they're doing a lot, you know, where they just consume a lot less. But, you know, people are still the dominant force everywhere. Yeah. And, and, but it's particularly true of us in the US that we all trail after us, you know, this invisible set of consequences, we are cut off from it in many ways, you know, this invisible set of consequences. We are cut off from it in many ways, you know, and maybe that's one of the problems we don't really see, you know, the way our economy is structured. It's like, not like you, Adam, you know, when you buy, go to the grocery store and buy that, you know, box of cookies that was made with palm oil that was grown in Indonesia, where they had to, you know, cut down the native rainforest, you know, you should have like a dead

bird in that box of cereal. And then maybe it would, you know, really bring it home to you. But instead, you just sort of cut off from your impacts. You're like, oh, I think I'm leading, I think I'm going about things pretty well. I, you know, I floss my teeth. I, you know, eat impossible burgers, whatever, whatever you're doing. You know, I drive a hybrid car, whatever, whatever you're doing to say, oh, I'm trying to reduce my impacts. But really, you just have this cloud of impacts that you're just, you know, surround you. And that's very, very painful. It's really hard for people to deal with. And it's why they always say, just, you know, just, just, I don't want to hear about it anymore. I just want the solutions. And, you know, my peculiar role,

role has been to say, well, I'm sorry, those just don't exist. Like the solutions, the solutions that will make all of this magically make exactly yeah exactly that's uh that is so yeah you know a lot of times that's heavy yeah a lot of times people will you know i look at what people say about the podcast on twitter and they say i listened to this episode and this made me feel so hopeful this episode okay Okay. Well, that's not what you're going to get for this. And I'm happy with that. I want, I don't want to be, I love to have a positive takeaway. I don't think it's a mandate.

No, I agree. And I want to say, I listened to, you know, I listened to Michael Mann. I listened to Saul Griffith, right. And I thought they were both great. And I thought they both did have a pretty, you know, a hopeful message. And I absolutely, you know, applaud that and think it's incredibly important. And, you know, I don't expect everyone to reason, um, that, as I say, I think it's, it's sort of being a journalist is like, okay, I really have to look at what the really, really, what is this saying? I'm not, I'm not advocating, you know, I'm not an advocate. I don't have a, um, a product that I'm selling you. And I don't have a agenda that I'm selling you and I don't have a agenda that I'm selling you. I only have bringing to these situations a kind of, I hope, I'd like to think sort of truth seeking mentality.

Yeah. And when you look at these things, I think as honestly as possible, there are definitely and I think you said this on some show and I absolutely agree with it. You know, there are bad outcomes and there are worse outcomes. And we need to focus on, you know i just i'm afraid that doesn't take into account the many many other species with whom we share this planet yeah i mean i you know what would eventually resolve my existential crisis that your book provoked and it was many year process was I spoke with the climate, I guess I call him a climate philosopher, Dale Jamison.

I don't know if you're familiar with them, but he, his message sort of at the end, this is just what he said to me perhaps was, look, you always have the choice today to make a better tomorrow, no matter how bad things are. There is no, it's too late. You always can do things today to make tomorrow better. And that's your responsibility and your opportunity to wake up and do that. And I do try to hold that and remember that. And I think that's a more healthy perspective than the all or nothing, than the we can save it. And then once you realize that we can't save 100 percent

of it, you're devastated and you're thrown into a spiral and you say, well, fuck it. I'm just going to drive a, you know, a gas guzzling old car and like eat plastic bags. But yes, but I agree with you. You need to have a clear eyed view of how possible this is and what our range of outcomes are. Yes. And I think that that is exactly, you know, I think that that is a problem actually that people, you know, once again, I don't want to be, I mean, I think that there's a certain resistance to having a clear eye view and you have, you have people always, you know, they're going to solve climate change or they're going to reverse climate change. They're going to fix climate change and, you know, no, they're not. change. And, you know, no, they're not. Well, you know what? I was like, how do I pivot to a break? You spent a good deal of the book talking about various plans to do this and breaking them down. If you want to reverse climate change, I do have a plan for you. But, you know, most people are not going to like it. Well, let's talk about it right after the break. We'll be right back with more Elizabeth Colbert. OK, we're back with Elizabeth Colbert. You said it was very tantalizing before the break. If we want to reverse climate change,

here's how we do it. We're not going to like it. What did you mean by that? Well, it's actually the final chapter, couple chapters of my new book, which is called Under White Sky. And that alludes to this idea of solar geoengineering, which I'm sure many of your listeners have heard of. And what solar geoengineering is, is it's a idea, we'll just call it an idea, proposal that we would counteract the effects of having, you know, dumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with another level of intervention where we would now pour something, some compound, either sulfur dioxide is one idea or calcium carbonate is another idea, into the stratosphere.

And what that would do is that would reflect, these tiny particles would be reflective particles, they would reflect sunlight back to space, there would be less direct sunlight hitting the earth, and that would have a cooling effect. And if you, you know, dumped enough of it in, into the stratosphere, and you'd have to keep replenishing it, I should add, this is what volcanoes do, they spew a lot of sulfur dioxide. That creates this kind of stratospheric haze. Um, and that temporarily lowers average global temperature. So that happened after Mount Pinatubo erupted, for example. Now, um,

there are all sorts of ways you, you, you could, once again, in theory, it's very theoretical at this point, do this. But, you know, in theory, once again, if you did enough of this, you reflected enough sunlight, you could even out. You could say, OK, we want to reach a point where the effect of our cooling was the effect of our warming. Right now, you know, tough to hit that exactly, but that is pretty much the only way that you could in a sort of human lifetime timescale, you know, fix, solve, reverse climate change. Now, most people who are consider themselves environmentalists, and I am one of them you know look at this idea

with a lot of horror now is this um so is this contradictory right you have all these people out there you know who are who you know care passionately about these issues um and I'm very glad about that and a lot of young people taking to the streets and I applaud them, but saying, you know, we need to fix the climate or as I say, you pick the verb that you like, but then when you have the, pretty much the only way that anyone's come up

with actually doing that, you know, people react with horror. So I think we have to be, once again, frank about what we're talking about. Why, I mean, think of me as, you know, people react with horror. So I think we have to be, once again, frank about what we're talking about. Why? I mean, think of me as, you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, like, like, you know, I'm the geoengineer. Elon Musk is probably hip with this. Yeah, I would imagine. It's the ultimate technocratic solution, right? Yes. And there's many folks out there who say we will solve climate change with technology. Someone's going to invent something on humanity. That's going to do what? That's going to do what?

That should be your next question. What is that thing going to do? Well, there's two options. Once again, I don't want to keep flogging my own book, but they're both in the book. You can try to suck CO2 out of the air. You can try to suck CO2 out of the air. And a lot of people are working on that. It's an extremely slow process. You know, it took us 200 years to put all the CO2 up there. And it's going to take a long time, even if we devoted ourselves to it very passionately.

It's going to take a long time to get it out. But Elon Musk, just to name our favorite, you know, loony billionaire, he recently put up a hundred million dollar prize. Just the other day announced it for the team that comes up with a way to remove a billion tons a year of CO2 from the atmosphere, prove that they could scale up to a billion tons a year. And I want to say a billion tons is only a small fraction of what we're putting up there, but it's significant. It's a lot. And will someone win that hundred million dollars? You know, we'll see. We'll see if someone will even win it. so that's one possibility then you would slowly sort of if you think of the climate as a sort of super tanker that's heading in one direction um pulling co2 out of the air

is a sort of putting a slow break on that right uh and then eventually you know potentially reversing the ship. If you want to do it quickly, if you want to say like, we want this super tanker, we want it to stop just right now, where it is right now, then the only idea that's on the table right now is stratospheric geoengineering. And what is so horrifying about that? I mean, I certainly am disinclined away from that sort of solution, but what about that would the average person not like? Well, I'll start with, you know, the I'll start with the maybe relatively trivial.

this book that I just published, Under White Sky, takes its title from the fact that one of the side effects of doing this on a massive scale would probably be to turn the sky to white in the sky. So the sky would look whiter. You just looked up at the sky. Nowadays, you know, probably I'm not sure it would make that much difference in L.A., you know, because there's a lot of other crap in there. This is literally what they do in The Matrix. Do you remember The Matrix where it says the robots, they blotted out the sun and like the sky goes away? Like it is. It's dystopian. The thought of that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But, you know, the list goes on, on and on. You know, I mean, you are trying to counteract one huge, what climate scientists would call a forcing. So we're forcing the climate in one direction. We're implying a force to it that's warming it up. And then you would sort of have a countervailing forcing in the other direction. But you don't know, you know, a lot of people are looking at this using climate models, but you really don't know how the system, which is a vast system comprising, you know, the earth and the oceans and the atmosphere, exactly how it will respond.

So, for example, one big concern is it will change, you know, regional weather patterns. So even if you could theoretically even these two things out, warming and cooling, you know, what's that going to do to the monsoons? What's that going to do to rainfall patterns? You know, these are questions that people are working on very, you know, in an abstract way. But, you know, the problem is or a problem. I mean, there's a lot of problems. The problem is you don't you could say you don't know it till you try it. Now, if I'm a scientist who says.

And, you know, I don't think there are any scientists out there who are actually advocating for geoengineering, but they are advocating for finding out whether it will work or not, trying to find out whether it will work or not, because you might decide you need it. to what I just said, and I really want to give everyone their due, and these are very smart people, they would say, well, you don't have to go right from zero to 100%. So you wouldn't have to go from trying to counteract all of the warming that we have created already and all of the warming that's still in the pipeline, you could start very small. You could start with your little pilot project, geoengineering, and see what happens. And that's reasonable. That is reasonable.

But you are, you know, I quote one guy, as I say in this new book, once again, very smart guy who says, you know, we, I can't remember the exact quote, but basically we are in a situation where, you know, dimming the fucking sun may be less dangerous than not doing it. And, you know, that's sort of the situation that we find ourselves in. How's that? I mean, it's really stark. It's really stark. I mean, you... It's funny because it sounds like you're unsettled a little bit on the prospects for this technology. You say you consider it with horror, yet at the same time...

Well, I'd like to say respectful horror. Respectful horror. I mean, I really appreciate where these guys are coming from. And as I say, they're very, very smart people. And I do believe that they think that we may need this in our toolbox and they may well be right. You know, I do think, though, that it's very difficult to look at, you know, dimming the fucking sun and say, you know, yay. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not solar panels and we'll all buy Teslas and everything's going to be fine. Exactly.

Well, tell me about some of the other, you know, places that you went and visited. You wrote about, and I was, I was reading a bit about it, the devil's hole pupfish. Can you just, just tell us a little bit about that story? Sure. So the devil's hole pupfish is a small sort of one inch long, very, very beautiful little fish, an iridescent blue fish.

It is said to be, and I don't think it has a lot of competition, the rarest fish in the world. It lives only, and as far as anyone knows, has only lived in one pool in the middle of the Mojave Desert. And this pool, yeah, this pool is, you know, in what's called Devil's Hole. So Devil's Hole is like a little canyon. And at the bottom of the canyon, and when you come up to it, it now has a big fence around it to prevent anyone from getting into it. But previously, if you'd come 100 years ago, you would have just almost fallen in. You don't really realize that it's there. It's just sort of an opening in the earth. And it, at the bottom of this canyon is a pool, a very beautiful, you know, blue water that connects up with this huge underground

aquifer that's under the Mojave and contains water that, you know, probably fell as rain during the last ice age. So it's a really interesting, you know, bit of geology there. Yeah. And no one knows how the fish got in there, you know, but they're there. This is the middle of the desert and fresh water? Very, very dry. Yes. It's fresh water. It's, it's the, you know, I don't want to say it's the driest place you can go, but it is, you know, it's not far from Death Valley. It is it is dry. OK, but yes. So so this, you know, and you have a fair number.

I mean, something I learned in the course of reporting the book is that actually there are a lot of desert fishes and they have this interesting property of, it's sort of like being on an island when you're in a pool of water in the middle of the desert, you know, it's not like there's no connectivity, there's no rivers, there's no, so if you're in some pool that, that exists for whatever reason, there's a spring or, you know, you're connected to this aquifer, you're isolated. And so there's a lot of unique species, sort of classic Darwinian isolation leading to speciation. And so the devil's hole pupfish, people recognized it quite a while ago as a very interesting creature. Also, I should point out the water in this pool, it's heated geothermally. So it's 93 degrees.

It's very warm and it's very low oxygen. And most fish under such conditions would drop dead very quickly. But the devil's hole pupfish is adapted to it. So it's a very interesting animal. And you'd think a very tough animal, but it actually can only live under these really tough conditions. So when people started to pump water out of this aquifer in the 60s, the water level in the pool fell. And even though the pool is very, very deep, the fish only live toward the top, you know, where there's some light and some food. And the fish started, the population started to dwindle. And people

realized this, once again, biologists realized this, and they tried all sorts of things in the 60s and 70s. They rigged up banks of lights in the canyon and they fed the fish and they created, you know, sort of fake features of the canyon to try to make up for the fact that the water was falling and the fish were ailing. And finally, it was decided about 15 years ago or so that the fish needed, they needed to have a backup population of the fish. The fish were really dwindling down into the, you know, dozens. And yeah. And so they built a fake canyon, an entire sort of fake canyon. It's not as deep as the real canyon, which is over 500 feet deep, but in all other respects, it's even down to the contours of the sides of this tank, it's supposed to replicate the real canyon as closely as possible.

The water is, you know, 93 degrees, et cetera. And so there are now two populations of these little fish and they have recovered somewhat from their very, very lowest number. But that is the situation of the Devil's Hole pupfish sort of restricted to these two tiny habitats. And I found the idea of the sort of fake Devil's Hole quite fantastic and marvelous and also sort of funny, I have to admit. And so I went out there. Is it like a duplicate of it?

Like geologic, like is the same shape? It's the same shape. They took these sort of laser 3D images of the real canyon. Wow. And they replicated it sort of with, you know, styrofoam and, you know, plastic basically.

So it's supposed to have the same sort of contours. Now it's, you know, it's doubtless, not exactly the same. And as I say, it's not as deep, but they tried to replicate it as closely as possible. that, I mean, first of all, what a unicorn of a species to basically only exist in a single puddle that we stumbled across in these incredibly small numbers. It makes you think of how many other unique species in different, you know, biomes around, you know, incredibly specific little biomes around the world have we eradicated without even realizing it. We tripped over it and wiped out a species that we never even noticed. But in this case, we have noticed it.

It serves no utility to anything other than we want it to continue existing, but it's in the most precarious possible situation. It's in this natural oasis that we are threatening just by, again, existing. And we're having to take these heroic efforts to keep this animal alive that will never i there's no like leaving it alone right and it'll it rebounding it's like we're gonna have to watch this until the end of time we're gonna have to keep that fence up in order to keep this

tiny population of fish alive um it's yes well what actually drew me to the story actually if you want the more comic element of it please um a couple years ago uh three guys doubtless drunk uh decided they'd wanted to go skinny dipping in devil's hole so they uh drove up in an atv it's it's quite as I said, it's fenced off quite effect, you know, you would, to you or me, it would be quite effective, but not to some drunk person. And they, so they, they got off their ATVs, they climbed over the fence, they shot out some of the security cameras, but they didn't realize that there was a underwater security camera. So they were sort of filmed from underwater and a, through a sort of, yeah, dogged, you know, detective work, they were tracked down. One, they, they, you know, they barfed in Devil's Hole,

they swam in it and they managed, there was a fish that, um, was floating on the water. So, you know, there, it was a, it was a murder mystery as it were. And, um, it was solved and they, it, the devil's hole is an endangered species. You know, it's a, it's a listed species listed under the endangered species act. And so all sorts of legal protections kick in and so these guys were arrested and you know one of them did time uh so it was taken quite seriously as well it should be because if you let any idiot uh into devil's hole you know and uh with impunity those fish will be gone very fast yeah but the the project itself of trying to keep them alive there's sometimes when i think about it i'm like well this is one of the most

important things that we can possibly do is to keep alive a unique you know piece of biodiversity that that will never exist again if we let it perish and then on the other hand it seems sort of futile in a way that we've just chosen, okay, these are the fish we're going to try to keep alive and we'll keep a watchful eye on them and spend millions on them forever just so that we can continue to look at them. I know there's scientific value in it as well, but I also don't think the reason is that utilitarian. I don't think we're hoping we're going to make some medicine out of them. We just want them to continue existing. And I don't know, it seems like both things at once to me. I don't know. How do you think about it?

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the proximate reason for why we do these things in the U.S., at least, is often the Endangered Species Act. And when the endangered species, when, if you're a species that gets listed under the Endangered Species Act. And when the endangered species, when, if you're a species that gets listed under the Endangered Species Act, which often, which tends to happen when you're in really dire straits, is you, then there has to be, there's a legally mandated recovery plan. So all these legal provisions kick in. Now, I think that anyone looking at the situation would say, what we should be doing is preventing this from happening, right? So we should not have ever let, you know, people pump water from this aquifer. Or as soon as we realized that pumping water from this aquifer was going to endanger the fish, you know, when the water level went down an inch, we should have been able to intervene.

What actually happened is, you know, there was huge court battles that went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the court finally did rule in favor of the fish. But that was a long time. And meanwhile, the water had dropped, you know, so low that the fish were in trouble. So if you extend that, you know, sort of metaphorically out, what we should really do is whenever we see and once again, we're not very good observers. So as you suggested, there's a lot of species that we're doubtless doing in without ever knowing they existed. But we should try to be managing and conserving on a landscape level. And, you know, Biden has this, there's this phrase 30% by 2030, we protect 30% of the US

by 2030. I certainly think that would be a good idea. But we should really be looking at things at a whole ecosystem level. But instead, we look at it at a species level. And so what happens is we let things crash. And then if they're lucky, this also usually involves a court case. Now, I don't think people realize this, but to get listed as an endangered species now almost always involves someone suing the federal government to list the species. Because the feds, there's such a backlog of species, the feds are not listing them basically until they're sued. So it's a bad system. It's just not a functional system. But, you know, to get to the politics of it all, if you were to reopen the Endangered Species Act, and I think a lot of people would say it should be reopened, it should be amended,

it should be, you know, yeah, so that, you know, some of these problems could be ameliorated. It would simply, you can't do that in the current political climate, because they would actually simply, they would just destroy the Endangered Species Act. So, you know, we can never reopen any of these environmental bills from the 70s to try to update them because, you know, they'll just be destroyed. Yeah, you don't want to subject that to I mean, the 70s, we had Nixon and various politicians on both sides of the aisle coming together to support these policies. And obviously the opposite is true because it's so polarized. And yeah, I would not want to subject those protections to the political system right now, which is an extremely sad state of affairs. I want to talk about the idea as I as we sort of come in slowly for a landing about the idea of naturalness, that a lot of the time it seems like saving these things that we care about ends up interacting with our idea of what's natural in an odd way.

Like you, I believe, right about the prospect of gene editing to, to save species, um, which is odd. Can you, an odd prospect? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, here's a, here's an example that I, that I mentioned in, in, in the book, um, and that I, uh, have written about more expensive, have written about more extensively in The New Yorker, scientists and researchers in Syracuse, New York, have developed a chestnut tree, an American chestnut tree. So the American chestnut tree was the dominant tree in the northeastern U..s until the early 1900s when a fungal pathogen was imported from probably japan i think on on asian chestnut trees that were you know imported to be because

they were you know pretty and it was actually first identified interestingly enough at what's now the Bronx Zoo. People noticed that the chestnut trees were dying and this just spread throughout the northeastern and parts of the southeast too where the chestnuts lived and killed literally every single chestnut tree, something like

4 billion trees. So now if you go into the forests of New England, you will not see a chestnut. Occasionally, there are some trees, chestnut trees can sprout from the roots. So sometimes there are these little, you know, spindly trees that grow up and then they don't get very old or large

or reach reproductive age before they also get done in by this blight. This is like one of the most massive changes we could possibly make to the ecosystem on the continent that like the dominant tree along the entire coast no longer exists. I mean, it doesn't get bigger than that. Yes, it had it had doubtless a lot of repercussions that, you know, we don't even know because people weren't really recording them. But yes, doubtless a lot of things depended on the American chestnut. Okay.

So, you know, fast forward 100 years and some researchers, a guy, very nice guy, I've met him, named William Powell, developed a transgenic chestnut tree. It borrows a really one gene, one key gene from wheat. And that allows it to be blight resistant. Okay. So as he said, as he says, it's like, you know, 99.99% American chestnut, but it does have this one non-chestnut gene. And okay, so the question is, and I will just put it to you, and it is a live question. Those trees exist. I've seen them. They are fenced in plots in Syracuse and in greenhouses. But should we be allowed to plant them out in the forest?

And that question is being put before federal agencies, you know, even as we speak, someone will have to make the call, say either, yes, we will allow that. It's transgenic, but that's, you know, that's how we're going to get American chestnuts. If you want them, this is how they're going to come. Or they're going to say, no, we cannot let that transgenic organism out into the world.

Now, what would you say? God, I don't have, okay, I guess I would say I don't have an inherent bias against a gene-edited organism. I think I'm too jaded to say that, you know, that's an illegitimate form of organism. I think that gene editing can be good. I mean, hey, I'm very happy about the coronavirus vaccine, which is not quite gene editing, but it's us using our knowledge of genetic pathways for positive change. But I am thinking reintroducing a slightly altered version of the same tree to a forest landscape that has been without it for 100 years. Is that returning something to its natural state or is that further meddling, I guess, is the question. And and it And it makes me question what my values are. What do I care about in the forest? Do I want the forest to be as it was? Do I want it to be nice for me today? Do I want it to be a non-human place? Well, it can't be because we've

already impacted it. So what am I serving? And I need to answer that question first. And I don't know what the answer is. Well, now, now you, now you're, now you've gotten to the place where, yes, I've been, uh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that was a very, very well put. Yeah. I answered too well. I should have just said, I think it will be bad. And then you can tell me. Right. Exactly. No. Yeah. But now you're But now you're getting the hang of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not. These are not easy decisions. And there's no right answer.

See, I love talking to someone who says there's no right answer because I think that's the truth about the world. And yet it's still so unsettling to have that be the answer because that's what we want. We want clear answers.'t they don't exist. I mean, is but this sort of approach, I mean, is this what we have to do in order to not fix the environment? I think that's the wrong word. But in order to care for the environment, I mean, are we sort of forced to do these things that, you know, we may be confront with, to use your own word, horror or confusion? Are these the only methods available to us? I feel like there's more stories in your book along the same lines. Yes, the book, absolutely. I, yeah, I mean, I think that increasingly,

Yeah, I mean, I think that increasingly the combination of, you know, what we're what we're doing to the world that that these, you know, problems, let's just call them problems are going to are becoming more and more common. So I'll give you another example. You know, I live in New England and we now have what's called the Emerald Asher. So ash is now one of the dominant trees in the forests of New England. After chestnut, and I honestly don't know what place ash played in the forest before chestnuts were done in, but I think they were very important trees always. They're being done in. All of our ash trees are dying because of an insect that was imported from Asia called the emerald ash borer, which just drills into the tree and eventually

kills it. So, you know, you could go down the block where I live and there's, you know, big red X's on a bunch of the trees that, you know, the electric company is going to come and cut down so they don't knock down all of our power lines because they're dead. And so we are going to lose ash trees now. So these problems are going to keep popping up. And then as we get better and better at gene editing, we're going to be confronted, I think, more and more with the question of, okay, are we just going to, you know, resort to gene editing? That's the only way to, once again, do something quickly. Now, that's also raising the possibility, is it possible? It's not necessarily always going to be possible. You know, I don't think anyone is even thinking about, I should say, an ash tree that could be gene edited to be resistant to this,

you know, to an insect. So one thing is a fungus, you know, another thing is an insect, you know, it's complicated. I'm not saying we're going to have the answers to these things, but I think more and more that border is going to be breached between what is natural and what is unnatural and who's gonna stand at that border and where are we gonna define that border? These are questions that are just gonna keep coming up. Yeah, and I mean, that's what your work does for me and what it sounds like your new work is gonna do for me just as much as erasing that border.

I mean, this is a border that I grew up with. I was raised by know, I was raised by, you know, my dad was a marine biologist. My mom was a botanist. You know, I was raised in an environmentalist household and to cherish the natural world and, you know, engaging with your work erases the boundary between the natural world and myself. And I, I can't end before I ask you this question. I think more than any other journalist that I can think of, your work raises for me what are almost spiritual questions about, you know, I read what's going on with a fish or a frog and it makes me ask, like, what is my place in creation, right? In the world, like, how do I feel about the fact that I change things and end things? And it raises for me, I'm not a religious person, but to me, those are spiritual questions, which are some of the hardest questions to answer. Does the work that you do raise questions like that for you?

And do you feel, it's not a question for you as a journalist like that for you? And do you feel, it's not a question for you as a journalist, but as a person, do you feel that you've been able to answer them for yourself or, or do you, you know, are those still question marks? How do you resolve them?

Well, I, I, I'm, I'm not going to answer that, but I am going to tell you a story. Fair enough. This is,

you know, also from the latest book under white sky, um, in the chapter on pup fish, um, there's a guy, a fisheries biologist, um, who is, you know, still around, but in the, in the, uh, very nice guy, um, who actually loaned me some great photos that I, that are in the book, um, who in the sixties and seventies was really instrumental in trying to save some of these, some of these desert, very rare desert fish. In one instance, he actually, um, the, the habitat for this fish for some reason or another was suddenly shrinking. And he literally, you know, like walked out, walked there with, you know, a couple of buckets, scooped up all the fish he possibly could. And those are the fish we have today. Only the ones that he, you know, captured

in those buckets. And he's a guy by the name of Phil Pister. And people would always ask him, because these fish are, tend to be very small. You know, they live in these very small habitats. They're, you know, just these tiny little fish. And people would always ask him because these fish are tend to be very small. You know, they live in these very small habitats. They're, you know, just these tiny little fish. And people would always ask him, uh, what good are pupfish? And his response was, what good are you? And I think that gets at something pretty profound. Yeah. Uh, I appreciate that answer to the question and, Yeah. I appreciate that answer to the question and I appreciate you allowing me to ask it. Is there anything that you hope people take away from your from your work after they read it? You know, do you feel that you are trying to spread any particular ethos or takeaway for the average person who cares about this stuff, but, you know, is not thinking about it with the sort of very specific consciousness that you have.

Yeah. Is there anything you want to leave people with? Well, I guess the one message I would want to leave people with is, you know, I do think people tend to divide into camps and be adamantly opposed to, you know, one possibility or another. You know, so, for example, there will be, you know, if it's permitted, if it's permitted that these, you know, chestnut trees are allowed into the world, there will be some people who will be, you know, very upset and who will, you know, maybe even go so far as to, you know, chop them down. I really don't know. But, you know, I think that people need to, I don't want to say embrace because that's not really the right word, but be alert. You know, there's no straight line through this system.

alert, you know, there's no straight line through this system. And there are a lot of people, I mean, a somewhat more hopeful message would be there are a lot of people there, they're trying, you know, doing their best to try to offer, you know, not solutions, but better than nothing moves here. And if we strict, if we divide up into these sort of armed camps, even on the, you know, among groups of people who do care about these issues, we haven't even talked about the people who, you know, want to just, you know, burn coal until the world, you know, melts into a puddle. I don't think we're going to get anywhere. So I think we need to be a little bit more generous to each other and think, okay, you know, why are we arguing here? What are we arguing about? We need to, I mean, we are erasing those borders ourselves and, you know, between human

and natural. And if we establish too much of an ideology around, around these things, it's a, it's a letting the perfect be the enemy of the good situation. Like we, there are imperfect solutions that we may still need to accept in order to save the things we value. It sounds like is what you're saying. Yes, exactly. And I don't want to say I know where that line is and I'm, you know, I'm very wary instinctively and emotionally, you know, I'm like you, I'm a kid who, you know, grew up hiking out in Colorado and imagining this was the wilderness, you know, and thinking this was the most fantastic thing. And I still, you know, you know, as Thoreau said, and, you know, in wildness lies the salvation of the world.

as Thoreau said, in wildness lies the salvation of the world. But, you know, wildness is now kind of a romantic fiction. And we have to somehow be able to grapple with that. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming here and helping me grapple with it yet again. And thank you for your work. And I can't wait to read the new book, which is called one last time. It is called Under a White Sky, Under the Nature of the Future. Pick it up wherever books are sold. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. I can't thank you enough. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you once again to Elizabeth Colbert for coming on the show. I hope you loved that interview as much as I did.

If you did, you know, hey, leave us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out a ton. I know every podcast host says that, but we all say it because it's true. OK, if you have any thoughts of things you'd like to see on future episodes of the show, you can shoot me an email at factually at adamconover.net. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can find me online at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media or at adamconover.net. We'll see you next week on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. that was a hate gun podcast