Factually! with Adam Conover - Solving the Climate Crisis, Preserving Biodiversity and the 6th Extinction with Emma Marris

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

Environmental journalist and thinker, Emma Marris, joins Adam this week to discuss how drastic our impact is on the natural environment, being a "reducetarian", the issues with purism in conservation, and herons! This episode is brought to you by Away (www.awaytravel.com/factually code: FACTUALLY), Blinkist (www.blinkist.com/FACTUALLY), and The Great Courses Plus (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/factually). 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 and welcome to Factually. I am your host, Adam Conover. And look, everyone loves national parks. We love them so much that Ken Burns made a documentary miniseries about them called The National Parks, America's Best Idea. And everyone agreed. I mean, going to the moon, blue jeans, representative democracy, those were just good ideas. Leaving some trees and rocks alone, that's our best idea. And look, if you've ever been to one, you know how amazing and inspiring they can be.

But strangely, the way that we think about these places is completely off base. Our conception of national parks is that those are parts of the country we've somehow preserved in their natural state, untouched by humanity. But actually, that's not true at all. untouched by humanity. But actually, that's not true at all. Take Yellowstone, one of the jewels of America's national park system, the home of the great geyser Old Faithful, pristine waterfalls, bison, elk, and gray wolves, a place where you can step back to a time before people and explore the wonders of untrammeled wilderness all on the back of a bitchin' snowmobile, right? Well, actually, that notion is kinda completely false. The natural landscape you see in Yellowstone is, in fact, entirely shaped by humans.

First of all, humans have been living in and around Yellowstone for at least 12,000 years, from the prehistoric Clovis culture to the Nez Perce, Crow, and Shoshone tribes of the 19th century. We're talking 12 millennia. That's nearly 50 times as long as the U.S. has even been around. And over those many, many years, the native people didn't just stand around marveling at the land, they transformed it. They hunted mastodon and other

huge mammals to extinction, they set controlled fires which replenished the land's nutrients, and they drove game into areas where they'd be easier to hunt. The humans who lived in Yellowstone for thousands and thousands of years weren't mystic caretakers of a static, ever-replenishing nature. They were the goddamn apex predator. They affected the place, fundamentally. And that's why European explorers who came to Yellowstone in the 19th century reported that it was something of a managed landscape with few large animals and open forests. But once Europeans colonized the area, everything changed again. Over the 19th century, native peoples were pushed out through disease, dislocation, and murder, with the result that Yellowstone's ecology was once again transformed. With Native Americans

gone, the forest became increasingly dense and large animals that were once rare returned. But when tourists came to Yellowstone, they didn't know that. They saw this dense forest with an abundance of large animals that was just a few decades old, but they declared it eternal, unchanging, and natural, even though it was a complete historical anomaly. But that unnatural landscape became the vision of Yellowstone that we have today. Or take the Amazon. Not the website, that's a different episode. I mean the rainforest, which, if you were to ask someone for an example of an untouched wilderness,

they might name as being one of the last wild places on Earth. But in reality, people have been living in the Amazon for thousands of years, and they've had a continuous impact on it through hunting, farming, and using material to build their homes. So, taken all together, it's hard to know what the word wilderness even means today, given that scientists believe that we now live in a new era called the Anthropocene that is defined by human impact on natural systems. In such a developed, human-impacted world, the idea of nature and the wilderness represents a chance to escape to us, to experience an idealized pre-human landscape. That's why nature is so important to us.

But the truth is, there is no more untrammeled wilderness. There simply is not a single place on earth untouched by human impact. And this is a profoundly upsetting revelation. It makes us feel somehow like the game is already lost. It's fuel for the darkest pessimism. But does it have to be? Is it possible that we're just thinking about nature the wrong way? And that by adjusting our conception, we can enhance our ability to be? Is it possible that we're just thinking about nature the wrong way? And that by adjusting our conception, we can enhance our ability to protect and cultivate it?

Well, to help answer this question is our guest today. Her name is Emma Maris. She previously appeared on the episode of Adam Ruins Everything entitled Adam Ruins Nature. She is a wonderful environmental journalist and thinker. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the New York Times, and in her 2013 book, Rambunctious Garden, Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. And I am so excited to have her on the show because more than anyone talking to her has helped me come to terms with what it means to love nature in a world that is so radically shaped by humans. Please welcome Emma Maris. Emma, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know we have an interesting recording set up because you live in the woods,

which is very fitting, or way out in the wilderness, I believe, right? Well, I live in a town called Klamath Falls, so I live in town, but the town itself is kind of nestled in the mountains and not close to anything or any radio stations. So we have a little bit of a jerry-rigged recording setup, but I find that very fitting for your line of work. I want to start by talking about, as we're recording this, just this morning when I was preparing my notes for this interview, and this episode won't air for a little bit, so if you're hearing this now, I'm speaking about the past, but as we're recording this, a new report just came out from the United Nations about how drastic our impact on the natural world is. The New York Times reported it that the average abundance of

native plant and animal life has fallen by 20% or more over the past century. And with the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing, and mining are altering the world at a rate unprecedented in human history. And they go on to say that we, you know, scientists go on to say that we can't stop this from happening. All we can hope to do is slow it. I think when we read stories like this, our first reaction is that it's profoundly depressing because the environmental ethos that we were brought up with, at least that I was brought up with, the sort of captain planet mindset from the 80s and 90s was that we should be trying to protect and preserve the natural world in its natural state, that affecting it is bad

and that we need to avoid it. And we are now hearing over and over again that we are doing it on a massive scale and we're doing it just by the activities of living, just by farming food and clearing land for places for humans to live. It seems very disheartening. And I woke up a little disheartened having read about it. I just want to know what your reaction is. Yeah. I mean, I too am disheartened by these kinds of reports and I do this for a living. You'd think I would be numb to this by now, but I am not.

And in the past year or two, we've had a series of startling findings and reports on climate change, on species abundance declines, on the rate of extinction. And they can be such a bummer that some people just get overwhelmed and think, we've messed this up. It's too late. There's no point in even engaging in this anymore. I'm just going to worry about other things. I'm not going to try to fix this because it's just too late and too bad. And I think that that's something that I really worry about because all of these issues can be made less bad if we act now and act appropriately and really put our shoulders to the wheel on this. Right. This is something that I learned

in the episode of Adam Ruins, everything we did called Adam Ruins Going Green a couple of years ago from the climate philosopher, Dale Jamison, who really helped me think about this differently, that it's always a mistake to say, well, we've got one chance left to save the planet. And if we don't take it, all is lost

and we might as well give up. The choice is always, we have the choice today to at least take some steps to make a better tomorrow, that an improvement is always possible. And that the sort of nihilistic giving up is never the correct choice. Yeah, that's right. And I think that it's really tempting for people who are trying to draw attention to these issues to use the kind of words that bring to mind thresholds or cliffs or, you know, ultimatums. Most recently, pretty recently, people have been talking about we have 12 years to solve climate change. But when you talk like that, well, what if we don't solve it in 12 years? Do we all just go down some sort of nihilistic Mad Max road? What if we don't solve it in 12 years? Do we all just go down some sort of nihilistic Mad Max road? No. It can almost be every day is a point of inflection. There's no real threshold. Every day we can choose to make things better or worse going forward.

Right. That 12-year number, I've heard that a lot, can be effective as a goad when you say to your elected representatives, hey, we have 12 years left. What is your plan? Present us with your plan now. We want to hear something that's going to turn this around in 12 years. That's a great way to spur action. But when you don't want later, six years from now, going like, uh-oh, we're not going to make those 12 years. It's going to be 13 years instead. You don't want to have people give up as a result of that. And also, 12 years is kind of a long time for an elected representative. It should be really like, years instead, you don't want to have people give up as a result of that. And also 12 years is kind of a long time for an elected representative. It should be really like,

we need to fix this in two years or four years, the length of the average term. What are you going to do while you're in office? Exactly. And if we waited 11 years to do anything, things would be a lot worse than if we started fixing things today. So earlier is always better always earlier is always better than later and more is always better than less. And it's, it's kind of a big linear option space. You know, it's not, these thresholds are mostly rhetorical. Well, let's move from talking about climate change, which I'm sure is going to come up repeatedly throughout this conversation and move to our understanding of nature in general. The big revelation for me over the last few years, as I've read about this in various books, and as we crafted our episode about Adam Ruin's nature,

is really that the idea of nature, as I had conceived of it my whole life, is somewhat false. That humans are affecting nature on a global scale everywhere on earth. There's really no such thing as a pristine natural wilderness anymore. Even when you go for a hike in the woods, you create a corridor of impact on either side of the hike where, you know, there's less animals and plants, you know, stretching off, you know, into the area that you're in. So even just by going out and looking at nature and experiencing it, we affect it. And since I was brought up to revere and to want to protect nature, that's extremely depressing. It makes it seem like there's nothing left to save. And when I encountered your work, it really helped me reconfigure my notion of nature

into a way that I felt was a little bit more positive and more productive. So I'd like you to talk about how we can go about doing that. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's so you talk about, about affecting the nature on either side of the trail. I could see how that makes you nervous, or it makes you sad. But on another, another way to look at that is that that nature that you're walking through on the trail is itself the product of thousands of years of human influence. All of North America has been influenced by human activity for thousands of years, ever since the first people came here 15,000 years ago. Right. Right. So, you know, when European settlers got here, they tended to take a look around and whatever they saw, they classified as sort of pristine, untouched nature.

Generally speaking, what they were seeing was some sort of very consciously managed system, you know, where plants had been moved around and where burning was taking place and where hunting was taking place and with certain rules attached and so on. So they were already looking at sort of like a managed humanized landscape. Um, and then conservation kind of became this, uh, strange creature where we were trying desperately to save what, um, we perceived as wilderness, but what was actually a human creation. If you really want to find pristine nature, you're going to have to go back like 20,000 years and there'll be a glacier on top of most of North America. Right, but the idea of conservation that I certainly grew up with that dates back to John Muir and figures like that is that, hey, we want to find the areas that humans haven't interacted with at all.

We want to cordon them off and let them grow all by themselves. And, and, you know, it'll really be a, a preserve, like we'll put it in a little bubble sort of. And, and, uh, you know, this is what it looked like when the dinosaurs were around up until the present day. And it hasn't been, you know, it hasn't been touched by human hands. It's like almost like the surface of the moon or something. And that ends up being such a false way of looking at the natural world that it can really be harmful to our efforts to preserve it. Yeah. And also harmful to the people who lived there before. I mean, a lot of natural national parks have the same kind of hidden history of kicking out indigenous people to make it into a park. And then sometimes, like, for example,

with you mentioned John Muir and one of his favorite places in the world was Yosemite, out indigenous people to make it into a park. And then sometimes, like, for example, with, you mentioned John Muir, and one of his favorite places in the world was Yosemite, which he saw as a sort of a completely untouched, you know, he felt that the people who were living there were just sort of just living on top of the landscape. They weren't really affecting it. But then once they kicked those guys out to make it into a park, a lot of the beautiful flower meadows he really loved started getting, turning into forests because nobody was burning them off, right? The very people who'd created the landscapes he loved had been forcibly removed, and so they weren't there to maintain them. And he didn't realize that? He didn't have an awareness that that's what he had

done, that he had actually changed the landscape that he loved so much? I don't think so. I mean, he really saw, as many people, many white people of his time saw, he saw Native Americans as sort of ineffectual on the landscape. And I think part of the reason that that, I mean, part of it is just straight up racism. But part of it is because oftentimes when European settlers got to a place, diseases had gotten there first. And so what they often walked into was a much reduced population that was coping with this huge trauma of having smallpox or whatever having come through. Like up in the Seattle area, when Captain Vancouver first got off his boats, he actually noticed that there were a bunch of abandoned villages with trees growing up through them because everybody had already died of smallpox before the boats even got there.

Right. I read about this in the incredible book 1491 by Charles Mann that talks about how the population of North America was actually much huger than those original European settlers thought because what happened is the first few exploration parties that came went and saw, Oh my God, the shores are teeming with people. There's like entire cities here, but then they would bring disease with them and they'd leave. The disease would spread like wildfire throughout those communities and kill literally what? A 90% huge, huge numbers of those people. But then it wasn't another until what? A few more decades later that, all right. Or in some cases, like more than a hundred years later. Really?

That Europeans would send their settling parties, their colonists. And when the colonists got there, they were like, oh, that's weird. I don't understand what that explorer was saying about shore steaming with people because it looks like there's only a couple of Native Americans who are sort of, you know, oh, living in harmony with nature or whatever. They don't live in villages. They're just sort of hanging out because almost all of them had been killed by these diseases. Right, oh, living in harmony with nature or whatever. They don't live in villages. They're just sort of hanging out because almost all of them had been killed by these diseases.

Right, right, exactly. I was just in San Diego, so giving a talk. And so to research that, I was looking up what the Kumeyaay people, how they used to manage the area down there in San Diego. And not only were they planting fields of grain and burning and moving desert plants to the coast, they were even doing hydrological manipulations. They were creating these huge rock structures to retain water so they could have, you know, I mean, big stuff.

So I think that it's been only in the last couple of decades that conservation has even really started to wrestle with the legacy of all of this. And in a lot of places, they still are kind of trying to conserve the way it looked when the first settlers got there. Well, so where did we get this idea of nature, you know, real nature being something that's pristine and untouched by humans? Is that an American idea? Did that begin with John Muir, or is it different in other places? Yeah, that whole nature-human dualism thing is very much a Western concept. In most non-Western societies, humans see themselves as one animal among many

with a role to play in the ecosystem. And there's been a lot of scholarship about where exactly this originally comes from. There was a really influential paper that suggested that Christianity was responsible for this kind of, you know, division between humans and nature. I think that that's, it's a complicated question. But certainly it's a very, it's a very Western idea. This idea that if you touch nature or influence it, you degrade it automatically by your very touch. nature or influence it, you degrade it automatically by your very touch. And one thing that I try to do in my work is get Western people, people with Western mindsets to think about ways in which humans could change nature in ways that would be good, which sounds like heresy to a lot of people

at first, but I think it's, you know, a lot of cultures have positive relationships with other species. Could we possibly have relationships with other species where we're not just killing them? Yeah. And, you know, when you've been brought up with a worldview, like I was brought up with that humans are bad in our interactions with nature at first, that seems almost cynical and negative that like, okay, we can't save anything. So we're just going to geoengineer, you know, the world, uh, in order to, in order to fix our own mistakes. Uh, but then once you realize that, you know, we're going to affect nature, no matter what we do. And that instead of trying to avoid having an impact, we can have, we can try to have a positive impact that does seem like a more

optimistic and less, you know, fundamentally misanthropic view of the problem, uh, that does seem like a more optimistic and less, you know, fundamentally misanthropic view of the problem that we're no longer saying, we're no longer hating ourselves. We're trying to say, how can we have a positive effect? Yeah. And I think, you know, just to add a little bit of caveat to that too, I do think that it is important to have places where we don't fiddle around with nature, where we just sit back and watch. Because I think we can learn so much from that. And also that'll just give us a kind of hedge our bets in case the fiddling that we're doing in other places is not successful. But to be

clear, those areas that we don't actively manage are not going to look like they did when the first settlers showed up. They're going to change a lot because the climate is changing and species are moving around. And so they're going to be very unfamiliar very quickly. But I do think it is important that we have some areas that we just really do let kind of go wild. But then in other places, you know, I think we almost have an obligation. Take something like whitebark pine, which is this beautiful, high-altitude tree that grows in the West that's in incredible danger because of introduced diseases and beetle outbreaks. And a lot of the tree grows in wilderness areas. So there's been this huge debate about whether you should try to plant rust-resistant whitebark pines in these wilderness areas or whether that would not

be okay because we're humans. And if we plant a tree, it no longer is wilderness. And I sort of think, I think we just can't afford to be too precious about wilderness if we're at the, if, you know, we risk losing an entire species of tree. I think we, we, we go out and we plant the rust resistant trees and we cross our fingers. Right. I mean, there's the example. I'm actually, you know, I'm reaching back into my memory about this, so maybe you'll correct me on the details, but I know, for instance, the American chestnut, which is a long beloved tree that was almost wiped out by blight that was brought as an invasive species, I believe. The blight was brought over from overseas. And for the last couple of decades, there's been like this effort to create a blight resistant version of the tree through breeding and I suppose genetic engineering perhaps in order to repopulate it. Which that sounds like a very clear example where, yes, that's what we should do because otherwise this species is going to go extinct.

And this was a part of America's natural history for so long. That seems like a case where, yes, we should definitely do that. Although there are definitely groups that oppose that. I, you know, there are people, especially because a lot of these, uh, there are people who oppose specifically using genetic engineering to create a blight resistant chestnut, um, becausenut, just because they feel that somehow genetic engineering is always bad. And I have to admit, I do feel a little frustrated with that attitude because the alternatives are either no chestnuts or you could crossbreed them with Chinese chestnuts, but then like half of the genes would be non-native. Whereas if you do the genetic engineering, you're just talking like one gene out of millions. And, you know, it would be 99.9% Native American chestnut, but they would prefer to go 50% non-native.

You know, it just doesn't seem logically consistent to me. But I think that's because they see a real difference in that tool as opposed to conventional breeding. And I don't see a big philosophical difference between conventional breeding and genetic modification. Yeah, no, neither would I. I mean, at this point, we're talking about humans manipulating the genotypes of a species through one means or another. And we're the ones doing it. And whether we're doing it through crossbreeding or through – I mean, you know, and modern horticulture is like extremely artificial with grafts and, you know, all these different high-tech ways of breeding these plants. It's just, it seems

like one tool among many. And that's the point at which when you're trying to divide, I think this is a good example of how when we try to divide humans from nature, we end up having to split hairs in these ways that ultimately end up being arbitrary and get in the way of us actually protecting or cultivating the things that we care about. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if there's a grand theme through all of my work, it's that beware of purism, right? Like when you're too purist about what your nature is going to look like, sometimes you risk losing it. There's a famous case of the dusky seaside sparrow in Florida, where they had so few of these little birds left that the only option to keep their sort of gene pool alive was to hybridize them with a related species. And Fish and Wildlife was like, no, that would create something artificial, something new

that wouldn't be natural. So they just let it go extinct. It's gone now. Let's talk about what this sort of differing perspective can do for our lives on a day-to-day basis. One of the things that really struck me about spending time with you, you know, you came to our set in Los Angeles. We shot for two days, we shot in Griffith Park, which is the large urban park here in Los Angeles. And in many ways, it's an urban park, very different from like Central Park, which is, you know, extremely cultivated. Griffith Park a lot of times just feels like, oh, here's a hillside that LA County just decided not to build anything on and just sort of like left alone. Like large parts of it are just like, all right, here's some

like scrubby hill with whatever happening on it. And then we also went to Echo Park, which is Echo Park Lake, which is a very cultivated city park right in the middle of Eastside Los Angeles. And the whole time that we were on set together, you were pointing out species left and right. You were like, oh, look, here's a, here's this tree, here's a hawk, here's a, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that wasn't something that had ever occurred to me to do, right? Like I've never thought of, you know, these sort of hybrid urban nature spaces as being anything other than rec areas or being particular natural spaces. But one of the things that your work really does, and I love the way you talked about this in your TED Talk, which I recommend our audience goes and watches.

You talk about how much nature there is to be found right under our noses. Even in an empty lot, we can find nature right in front of us. Right. Yeah. And to be clear, you know, we don't have to, you know, embracing the nature in the empty lot or in the scruffy urban park does not mean that we don't want to preserve and protect the sort of, fancy national parks or that we don't want to go visit them on vacation. I'm all for that. I drag my kids to, I've dragged my kids to like every national park in the West. But I think that we can add to that this really exciting thing, which is that we're surrounded by nature all the time, every day.

surrounded by nature all the time every day but because we've been sort of trained to only look for nature in this sort of high value fancy nature parks we often just kind of want it's like just becomes part of background blur yeah and we don't really have a relationship that we could have with it so i'm sitting in my house right now and like i said even though the town is in the mountains i'm in a town and i'm looking out the window at my crab apple tree and there's all these robins hopping around in it. And, you know, a robin is a really common bird that you see a lot in cities, but it's like a remarkable, beautiful, overgrown thrush with this like amazing brick colored breast and this huge migration. And you can learn all about how many eggs they have and try to figure out how try to find their nests and but we just forget to do that and that really affects how we manage our own local spaces you know if if we're not it struck me that if we're not seeing

you know the the trees right outside our windows you know say this the street trees in our city as an example of nature, then we're not going to be as vociferous about protecting them when, you know, someone's trying to tear them down to build a parking lot or whatever that, you know, we often neglect to protect the nature that's right in our own backyards, which is the nature that we get to interact with the most often. And especially for folks who say live in the city and don't have the wherewithal to make their way out to Yosemite once a year, there's a lot more that we can do to cultivate nature right here at home so that all those folks can access it.

Yeah, I think that equity point is really important, right? So there's a certain sort of demographic that makes it out to the parks and that has the gear and has an R.E.I. number. And then there's a lot of people in this country that that don't. And so and a lot of times they think, well, that nature isn't it's just not for them then. You know, there's often the, for example, these really well-meaning programs to take sort of urban youth and take them out to these national parks so they can experience nature. But then when that program is over, the buses drop them back off in their neighborhoods, and the message that they're getting is like, well, that was your dose of nature for the next 12 months. I much would prefer to see a program where, and these programs do exist,

where kids in the city are shown what are the species that are growing in my neighborhood? What are these birds that are flying around my neighborhood? If I go down to the creek or the cul-de-sac or out behind the cul-de-sac or out behind the big box store, what are these flowers? What is this bird out here? Because then they can have that relationship and that interaction every day. Right. And in a lot of ways, those are often the natural spaces that I find the most bewitching anyway. One of the first places, I'm a reluctant transplant to Los Angeles, but I've been trying to find the things I love about it. And one of the first places in Los Angeles that really captivated me was the LA River because the LA River, for those who don't know, was a sort of formerly, you know, as LA was being settled, this very,

very variable and crazy river that was always, you know, leaping over its banks and flooding places. And so the, I believe the Army Corps of Engineers turned it into a channel, like just this concrete channel on both sides. And you almost never see it. You drive over and it's on the side of the freeway. It sort of looks like this in a lot of places, this sort of gross ditch and people make fun of it. Oh, the LA river, you know, that's, that's look, that's the river we have in LA. We don't have a nice one. We've got this weird crappy thing. But I went down there at first after I came to LA, cause I was looking for a place to go on a long run and there was a little path by it. And I realized that in down in the middle of it, there was this incredible weird ecosystem where, you know, it's, it's just a couple dozen feet across, but like, I guess,

uh, dirt had like collected in the middle and trees had started growing and, you know, just weird random plants in the middle of this, uh, sort of concrete channel. And I saw the first time I went down there, I saw like waterfowl, I saw heron. I don you know, just weird random plants in the middle of this sort of concrete channel. And I saw the first time I went down there, I saw like waterfowl, I saw a heron. I don't know, I don't know which heron is which, but I saw, I'm reasonably sure it was a goddamn heron, like, you know, take off and like fly, fly over my head. I was like transfixed by this. And then in the years since there's been a big effort just to get people involved in that space. There's now, you know, there's a group that got it, uh, certified as a river that, you know, they can lead kayaking tours down. And I took a kayak once down the LA river. And when I told people that

they were like, you did, is that possible? Like, yeah. And it was really pretty. There were parts where you even forgot you were in Los Angeles for a second. And then of course there were parts where you're like, oh, there's, there's some like, you know, some refuse floating around or whatever, but there's also, there's also honest to God wildlife there. And you know, that's a place that thankfully LA is trying to cultivate and trying to turn into more of a place where we can go and interact with nature to some extent. And it feels like that's the kind of pattern that could have so much power if we were to use that throughout our communities. Yeah, totally. And I think that in the past, conservation organizations often just pretty

much ignored cities. And it makes sense. They don't have a lot of money. So they were really sort of trying to figure out how can we use our money to save biggest possible areas with the most species in them. So they were not going to want to mess around with urban real estate prices or anything like that. But I think in recent decades, there's been a shift and a lot of these big conservation organizations are realizing that if they want people to continue to care about nature in the future and to donate to their organizations and to go and vote for their proposals, they need to have some kind of personal relationship with nature. And so they're investing in biodiversity in the city is a really good long-term play, not only for these conservation organizations, but for everybody's happiness and joy. And so,

yeah, the LA River is a great example of that. And a lot of other really big cities have similar stuff going on. You can, I forget what kind of, if it's a canoe or a kayak, but you can get on the water in the Gowanus in New York. You can get in a kayak on the Duwamish River in Seattle. I've done that, which is a super fun site, but it also has herons and salmon. So, you know, wherever you live, there's probably somebody who's kind of really getting into this in your city and a little bit of digging, you should be able to find this, this kind of energy where you live. And that's, I think, really exciting. Yeah. I mean, I'm struck by, you know, even in New York City, which is obviously one of the most developed landscapes in the country that, you know, urban birdwatching is like I know to be a big hobby in New York.

I've never done it. I now regret that I didn't while I lived there, but that that's the sort of thing that we can go participate in in order to sort of reconfigure this relationship. I saw some kind of really cool woodpecker last time I was in Battery Park. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely an alive place. And you know, New York is also the home of the High Line, which is a complicated beast. But at its heart was, you know, the kind of the genesis of it really sprang from a bunch of people. Can you refresh us on what it is for those who don't know? Yeah. Oh yeah. So the High Line was originally an abandoned elevated train track that was sort of off limits to the general public and accumulated some soil and accumulated some

what people call spontaneous vegetation, which is one of my favorite phrases. Just a really interesting mix of weeds that were just growing up there in the sky. And so it became- Let me break in and say, when I first moved to New York City in 2005 or 2006, that was before they had developed it. And people were, it was still an urban exploration destination. And me and my friend, one of the first things we did in New York was break into it or hop the fence or whatever it was we had to do and walk it. And it was really incredible because it was this, it's one of my favorite things I ever did in the city.

It was this abandoned freight rail system that was used to bring, you know, goods to and from different factories. But yeah, just accumulated this soil and these, this strange collection of like weeds. And it was a, well, I don't want to say weeds because, you know, in this context, they were just plants, but it was a really magical place because it was, it felt like a truly wild place in the middle of the most developed city on earth because no one was managing it. And as a result, it was like attracting all of this nature to it. Right. And that sense of magic is really what got the constituency around it to kind of push for it to be turned into a park. And then sort of paradoxically, in order to make it a park that everyone could access,

they had to pull out a lot of that spontaneous vegetation and then landscape the heck out of it with this, you know, unarguably beautiful landscape design that is kind of informed by or inspired by, uh, those that spontaneous vegetation, but in most, for most of the length of Pine Line is now completely managed. So it's this kind of, it's an interesting beast, but I think that, that, um, that acknowledgement, that feeling that you had with your buddies climbing in there, that is a powerful force. And that's, it's not that different from, from the sense that you had with your buddies climbing in there, that is a powerful force. And that's, it's not that different from, from the sense that you got when you were a kid, if you found an empty lot or, and you started to build a cabin there with, you know, like a clubhouse with your friends,

or if you just dug a tunnel through the blackberry bushes, um, that kind of wild energy in the city has inspired so many people to go on to careers in conservation. And maybe they end up, you know, protecting Yellowstone or something like that. But a lot of times they're, you know, they kind of fell in love with nature, you know, some kind of weed patch. Does that describe you? Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Seattle, so I thought that nature only was the old growth forests that I could, that I kind of occasionally visited with my family car camping. And, um, we used to, my dad used to like heat up, um, canned corned beef hash on the engine block.

And we would eat that. Um, but for most of, most of the time when we weren't on these special camping trips, it was running around in city parks and empty lots and picking, trying to make perfumes out of the weedy flowers that I saw growing around. And it wasn't actually until I was well into my 20s that I kind of connected these two things together as one, that they weren't separate. together as one, that they weren't separate, that the beautiful Olympic Peninsula rainforest was nature, but so were these weedy patches that I was playing in as a child, that they were all part of the same interconnected whole. And that, you know, you manage them differently and you interact with them differently, but they're all part of the same thing. Well, let's take a quick break and continue on that thought right after we're back. Well, I'm back with Emma Maris. Thank you again for being here. So we were just talking about how our personal relationship with the natural world can become so much richer when we sort of abandon this human nature dichotomy and stop thinking of ourselves as separate and start seeing, oh, my gosh, there's nature all around us that we can be protecting and cultivating right in our own backyards.

And that's a wonderful message, but I want to get back to talking about how that can change our sort of species level relationship with the planet that, you know, seems to be in such dire circumstances. I mean, again, we're hearing there's horrible new reports coming out from, you know, the highest levels of science and government every single week about the enormous impacts that we're having. The issue of climate change is thankfully coming more and more to the forefront. But it's very frightening. It often seems like the job of protecting nature is too vast to handle. And so I want to talk about ways that, again, reconfiguring our mental relationship with the natural world can result in better planetary and climate stewardship on our parts. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the big question, right? How do we, in our tiny little lives, our ant-like lives, how do we even begin to be part of

the solution? And how do we not get completely overwhelmed by the bad news? So one kind of minor thing is that having this relationship, daily relationship with nearby nature is a way where you can kind of refresh yourself and kind of get energy back. If you spend the whole time fighting climate change in the abstract, you've got to keep going back to the source and remember why you're in the fight in the first place.

And if you could go and do a five-week backpacking trip to reconnect to that, that's great. But for most of us, that's probably not possible. So being able to do that by knowing the species of street tree that you pass every day on your way to work is also a way to kind of re-energize yourself. But then getting to sort of like how we tackle the big problems, you know, so you can kind of break it down, I would say, into climate change and the sort of species and abundance problems. one thing I think is really important when you see these reports about species and plants and animals declining is to make sure that when you're reading the report that it's clear in your mind

whether they're talking about extinctions of species or reduction in abundance. So they're both problems, but they are a little bit distinct. So fairly recently, there was a bunch of news about insect declines. This was terrifying. Yeahines. Most of those papers are- This was terrifying. Yeah. And most of those papers are about pure numbers. Like, if you drive through a field in Germany, you have fewer insects hitting your windshield than you did a generation ago. I hope you're not driving through a field.

Well, driving alongside a field, right? Like, you drive through an agricultural area. Yes. Um, but, um, and that, that can mean that there are extinctions going on, but it can also just mean that, you know, that you're seeing these big decreases in abundance within species that are still existing. And of course, if, as long as something isn't extinct, that means we can increase its abundance, right? So this is part of the all is not lost message here. You know, if species numbers are going down, then you can usually figure out through science what is causing that and you reverse that and then those numbers can go back up. So these abundance

declines are reversible. And often what's causing them to decline, it's not the same everywhere, and islands, for example, are a very special case, but often what's causing them to decline, it's not the same everywhere. And, and islands, for example, are a very special case, but often what's causing them to go down is just simply that humans are taking up all the room. Yeah. Um, that we are using a lot of the habitat for our own purposes, um, often to grow food or to, uh, raise animals to eat, um, and partly also to have cities and places to live. But really, our agricultural footprint is a lot bigger than our living presidential footprint. So it turns out that a lot of sort of addressing abundance and declines and the extinction

problem, it has to do with like reforming agriculture. So I care about species and I care about abundance of species. and so i spend a ton of time reading scientific papers about fake meat uh because beef production for example is one of the biggest land hogs and water hogs out there um and so if we could replace a lot of the beef that we eat with sort of either protein plant protein protein that tastes beefy, like the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Beef Burger. Give them both. Don't pick a favorite of the two of them. They're locked in a death blow competition for America's stomachs.

Well, I wish there'd be more companies too getting in the mix because what we really need is like a really, you know, we need these. I mean, I think they're awesome products, but this, and I'm really excited at how quickly this sector is taking off. Um, I mean, they're in Burger King now. That's, that's, that's an accomplishment. Just a few years ago, I would get into lots of debates with people about, will people ever eat this stuff? And I was always like, people will eat it.

I mean, people eat chicken McNuggets. They'll eat this stuff. And it's not a small thing for those products to be in fast food because, you know, McDonald's and Burger King's buying decisions affect the entire supply chain. I think there was a, I forget exactly what the details were, but McDonald's was mulling or did decide to make a change in what sort of eggs it would buy. And that affects, you know, how eggs are produced and how those chickens live and, you know, what impact they have on the environment on a massive scale, because they're buying so many of them. So if, you know, Burger King is buying, you know, a huge number of impossible burgers, that's going to affect agriculture on a wide scale. Yeah, totally. And so these kinds of shifts are, are the exact

kind of thing that we need, you know, I mean, that's just one example. But also just other sort of, in some ways, this is about using technology to shrink our footprint. So there's just more room on the planet for other species. Right. I mean, speaking of how much of a resource hog beef is, our terrestrial animals, like our biomass, plus the biomass of all of the animals we raise as food, I believe outweigh all other mammals combined. So it's like we're using,

our food supply is using up a ton of ecological space, like we're using, frankly, most of it. Yeah, I mean, not just ecological space, it's also just, you can actually do the calculations on how much energy hits the earth from the sun and how much of it ends up going into plants that we eat or that go to plants that are eaten by animals that we eat versus or or go into plants that we burn for biofuel or that we cut down to build our houses and that's called the

the human appropriation of primary production very wonky title there but it's in some ways it's actually kind of like the the the bottom line number of how much we are being hogs on the planet. And so, you know, the big sort of underlying solution for the biodiversity crisis is to reduce our pull on the sun and let there be more sunlight for all other species and all other ecosystems. More sunlight for all other species and all other ecosystems. Yeah. And I want to just say here, too, that when we talk about things like these cool beef replacements, I certainly have been eating a lot more of them and a lot less beef over the years. And I consider myself at this point a reducitarian, which is a cool kind of you don't have to go full vegan, but you can reduce the heck out of your meat consumption. Right. I try to do the same. reduce the heck out of your meat consumption. Right. I try to do the same. I'm not a full vegetarian, but I try to eat vegan two meals a day if I can, unless I'm traveling, which makes

it hard. But that's my general way to, I probably eat about a quarter of the meat I did 10 years ago. Yeah. So you're a reducetarian too. And that's great. And I totally encourage everybody to do that stuff. But I also really want to make the point that we cannot solve either the biodiversity crisis or the climate crisis by just consuming properly, by just being good capitalist consumers. Right. We, you know, I see this real tendency to want to kind of perfect the self. Like, well, I bring my own bags to this grocery store and I don't eat meat and I don't do this or I do do this. And so I'm helping. And yeah, but frankly, if you did forget your grocery bags a couple of times a month and

you actually go down to the voting booth and you vote the right people in, or you go down to the city council meeting and you push the city council to like put in a new bike lane, if you try to push the system, it's going to be a much more effective use of your energy than just perfecting yourself. And ultimately, that's how we're going to get out of these crises is by systemic change, not by 6 billion, 7 billion, 10 billion people being personally virtuous. Yeah, exactly. That individual, oh, if we all just convert each other to be right thinking, then we'll all make the best choice and that's how we'll change the system.

That isn't even, well, part of it is that also the consumer choices that we have are limited by what's provided to us. You can only buy what's in your grocery store. And even if, okay, say you're an affluent person and you can order something that's better than what's in your grocery store. Well, most people can't do that. And you can't point a finger at those other people and say, well, you need to buy what I buy because they may not be actually able to.

You know, when I was – I always think about how – you know, now I buy the fancy chicken when I do buy it. the fancy chicken when I do buy it. But when I was in, when I was 21, I was getting the 99 cent a pound bag of chicken thighs because that was the cheapest source of protein that was available to me. And that's the amount of money that I had. And you know, that's, that's the reality of it. So all of these problems are systemic problems and they all demand systemic solutions. Yeah, that's right. And, and, and also think, you know, including in just not just the price of these kind of greener options, but also the time and labor to research, you know? Right. Like if you, I mean, at one point years ago, I needed a new handbag. And I think I kind of calculated that over the course of many weeks, I spent something like 30 hours trying to research

a perfectly sustainable handbag. I've done this too. If I had spent those 30 hours at my congressman's office trying to get him to vote properly on some bill, it would have been much better spent. And not everybody has 30 hours to spend researching a handbag purchase. That's absolutely a luxury to have the luxury of researching and being able to go on sustainable fashion blogs. Right. So we need to make it so that when you have no time and no money and you need to buy clothes for your kids and food for your kids, that the only options available to you are the best possible ecological options. the best possible ecological options. Yeah, I sometimes think about it in comparison to, for instance, saying, okay, we can solve climate change if we all just make better choices,

is sort of like saying, oh, we can solve the transportation problem if we all make better choices. Well, no, that's not really possible because we are all stuck with the roads and the buses and the underground train lines that exist. If you live in a spot in Brooklyn that does not have train access, you cannot make a better choice to have a train appear. That is a collective problem. The people of the city and state need to come together and dig some tunnels. No one can do that by themselves, right?

We so often leave out of our conversation that there are some problems that can only be solved collectively and need to be addressed in that way. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, sometimes that's tough. We're in a society that really focuses on individual choices and individualization, and we're in a kind of cultural moment that's even more hyper-individualized. But this is a really, these are collective action problems. And we have to, so if you really, really want to work on these,

you need to look around to find the group of people that you can hook up with that is pushing to make these systemic changes and then become an effective and part of that group. And I think that's really the best way that individual people can help. But by all means, you know,

ride your bike and eat your fake meat. And because frankly, a lot of the things that make you a greener consumer also kind of just improve your quality of life. If you can fit them in. Right. Right. I mean, I recently over the last year quit driving and I take the bus around Los Angeles now as often as I can. I took it here today and, and it's made me happier in my life. That's now that's me. I don't expect to make everybody happier. I understand why a lot of people don't feel comfortable taking public transportation, especially in a city like Los Angeles. But when you can find those choices that actually make your life better, that's a win-win all around. I do-

Yeah, I would say take the choices that make you happier, but do not feel wallowing guilt about the things that you're doing that aren't ideal. Just take all that guilt energy and put it into something productive, collective action. I think that is wonderful advice. However, I want to move to I want to postulate for you how I think about this in my darkest thoughts. And I want to hear what your response is, because over the last few years, I've read a lot about this in my darkest thoughts. And I want to hear what your response is. Because over the last few years, I've read a lot about this subject. I've confronted a lot of sources that have sort of painted a deeper picture of it for me. One of them was the book, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Colbert, which is a wonderful piece of environmental journalism, I think. And it really was one of those, that and other books really gave me a

180 degree change in the way that I viewed this issue, because the picture they painted was of, say, you know, there are these incredible declines in amphibian populations and extinctions. I believe, you know, frogs in South America, things like that, that are caused by, you know, an invasive fungus that comes in. Uh, and that fungus is just brought on the soles of people's shoes. Nobody knows how it was brought there. Um, it, it's just, you know, Hey, we, we, we connected the continents in ways that weren't connected before by traveling from place to place, by creating trade routes, by flying from place to place. And actually her book describes it

as almost a mathematical equation that the less little islands of biodiversity you have, the less unconnected places you have, the less biodiversity you're going to get as a result. That when we connect these landmasses through just basic human activity, we are necessarily reducing biodiversity. Or when I look at the degree to which, when I've really come to absorb how much air travel has an impact on the planet.

And we've got maybe some hopes and dreams for ways that we're going to reduce the carbon impact of air travel, but it seems like it's always going to be pretty intense. And I also can't look at a world and say, well, we need to stop people from traveling on a systemic basis because God, it's just one of the fundamental activities of human life. Right. And so when I look at, you know, I can't ask anyone else to stop flying from place to place. It has a gigantic carbon impact, the fact that I can now fly to my grandmother's funeral and so can everybody else. And I don't think we're going to live in a world where we're not flying to grandma's funeral, right? And that's going to have a huge impact as well. look at all those issues combined, sometimes I think, man, humans, just by being alive and doing

what we do, we reduce biodiversity on a massive scale. We influence the planet on a massive scale in ways that we don't like. And is there a degree to which we just have to accept that? Even as we try to reduce it as best we can, sometimes I feel that we still need to start living with the knowledge that this is just what humans do, that we have this impact. And that's a depressing thing to confront. How do you feel about that? Well, I think the word impact is sort of tellingly vague here. So I think you just really need to distinguish changes from, you know, negative, really bad, tragic changes. And I think that that's part of what I try to do in my work is to get people to comb those apart. Because I think we've been sort of trained because of this human nature dichotomy to see any change to nature as necessarily bad.

because of this human nature dichotomy, to see any change to nature as necessarily bad. And if we start from that premise that any change to nature is bad, then we very quickly get overwhelmed by the scope and speed of the changes. And it's really hard to keep any kind of hope and to keep engaged. But I would argue that not all of the changes are necessarily bad. So, for example, you talked about species moving around, and species are moving around in a crazy way compared to the rate at which species moved around before humans learned how to crisscross the earth so quickly. But not all of those movements are necessarily going to be tragedies. Some of them are. And we actually, you know, we kind of know which ones are more likely to be problematic than others. So if you move a new predator onto a small island

with a bunch of animals that evolved without any predators around, that's going to be a problem very quickly. And that's going to be something that you're going to want to put your resources into trying to work with, work on. But if you just move some shrub or flower from one continent to another, and it starts growing there, and it's not actually driving anything else extinct or causing any other major disruption, is that necessarily bad? Or is that just change? Because the environment is always changing and always has changed, and change itself isn't necessarily bad. So just by splitting those two up, we at least can reduce the number of things that we're freaking out about.

But isn't it the case that I completely agree with that, and, well, actually, I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about whether or not an invasive or a foreign species coming in, if it's not harming anything, if that's still something we want to avoid or not. And if invasive species that aren't harmful are things that we should still be welcoming. I'm sure there are conservationists who would disagree with that. But I could also see myself working my way around to that point of like, well, hey, you know, nature is nature and we've changed it, but it's not worse in this case. You could at least probably go so far as to say,

given all the stuff that's on our table right now to deal with, it should be a lower priority. Right, right. And, you know, hey, there are so many invasive species or quote invasive species that we love and that we value. You know, the Jacaranda tree is like a beautiful, there's like the most beautiful tree in Los Angeles. Everybody loves these trees. They're not native to Los Angeles. That doesn't mean we should uproot them because they seem, you know, assuming they're not, they're not killing anything else.

I actually have no idea if they are. It was just off the top of my head. But you know, the palm tree is a crappy tree that Los Angeles could do without. And, you know, that's also not native, in my opinion. So I understand how we can make that distinction. But is it not the case, though, that just by moving those species around, by jumbling them around, that we are necessarily reducing biodiversity through that activity? I understand there's good examples of that happening or not harmful examples. that activity. I understand there's good examples of that happening or not harmful examples, but when we look at the aggregate, you know, uh, impact, uh, sorry, well, let's, let's not use that word when we, uh, when, when we look at the aggregate effects, is that better than impact? I don't know if it is. Uh, isn't it, isn't biodiversity being reduced? Well, I mean,

paradoxically, a lot of places it's being increased on a local scale because all these new species are coming in. So that's something that some interesting ecological work has pointed out, that in a lot of places, biodiversity is actually increased on the local scale. Is it decreasing on the global scale? Yes. Is every species movement contributing to that decrease? No. Some species are just moving. Some species are just moving. Some species are moving and then going on to cause ecological cascades of events that then will ultimately reduce biodiversity.

But some of them are not. So I do think that I'm very much in the school of ask questions first and shoot later when it comes to species that are out of place or perceived to be in the wrong place. Well, so let's talk about – you've written some interesting pieces about that. For instance, there's a big article just now in the New York Times Magazine about how in Australia, they are sort of mass killing cats because feral cats, which is actually a topic we've covered on our show about how the feral cat populations that humans have created by adopting these animals as pets and then sort of letting them breed outside, creates these massive cat populations. And those kill native creatures on a massive scale here in the United States. They're, you know, they're killing untold numbers of birds. And in Australia, wait, it is Australia, not New Zealand, right? Okay, good. Well, they have, I mean, they have a lot of problems with non-native predators in New Zealand as well.

Yes. Because they're islands, right? So they're kind of the biggest examples of this island effect. But in Australia, they are just trying to wipe out feral cats as much as they can. And you've written somewhat critically about this idea of conservation, meaning killing something that we don't like. Yeah. So, I mean, the cat, I think, you know, it's a good example to talk about because I think the ethics of this are trickier than they first appear. I, after spending many years kind of devoting myself to the environment and environmental issues through my writing, it seemed really obvious to me that if you have to kill a few animals in order to save a species, that's totally worth it.

that's totally worth it. And by and large, I'm still kind of, I guess I'm still in favor of projects that involve killing when you can demonstrate that you can get all of them off the island and then that will immediately have a positive effect on an endangered species. And there are plenty of places that are like that. Little tiny islands with seabirds nesting on them that are just being just ravaged by rodents or cats or some kind of non-native predator. And if you just get those predators off that island, those seabird populations can really bounce back. You know, I do think that there is – you do have to weigh the killing against the benefit, but there I think the benefit probably makes it worth it. In Australia, they want to kill 2 million cats. And as far as I can tell, the government just kind probably makes it worth it. Um, in Australia, they want to kill 2 million cats. And as far as I can tell, the government just kind of made that number up. Um, and frankly, killing 2 million cats won't make a bit of difference if there are 4 million

cats out there because they'll just breed and then you'll have 4 million cats again. Um, and so I, I do object to, uh, uh, projects that just cull animals, just reduce their numbers, and don't have any kind of endgame sketched out. Because basically what we're signing up for is infinite deaths forever. Right. And that seems pretty intense, ethically, to kill cats forever and ever and ever without ever actually achieving the goal. Yeah, and look, I – a criticism I have heard of our feral cat segment that we did about how bad this problem is is that we didn't offer a solution. That, hey, why didn't you offer a solution to this problem? There's trap, neuter, release, which some people advocate.

Unfortunately, trap, neuter, release has not really – the effectiveness has not really been proven. It sort of sounds better than it is. It, like, feels good. Hey, let's just neuter the cats. It's, you know, expensive and it doesn't – hasn't really been shown to reduce their populations. And the cats are then still free to kill, you know, whatever animals they would kill. So that doesn't really seem to work. But also going and killing all the cats cats not only is it a logistical

nightmare it's also nobody wants to do that like we don't we don't like that either culturally um and so to some degree it seems like all right do we then simply need to accept that well humans are part of nature we affect nature one of the the ways in which we affect nature is that we have released cats everywhere. And so does our new conception of the natural world in Australia or in America now simply need to be there's feral cats everywhere and a lot less birds? Like, how do we think about this emotionally is what I want to know. Well, I think that there are some routes. There are some possible approaches that you haven't covered there. So one of them is you can use genetic engineering CRISPR gene drives to try to spread infertility genes throughout a population.

This is something that we wouldn't be able to do next week or even a few years from now, but it could eventually be possible to essentially just genetically modify the wild cats such that they don't have any more kittens. And then you wouldn't have to kill them. They just wouldn't reproduce. And they would just sort of disappear slowly from the landscape. And they've proven that this works with mosquitoes, I believe, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's much further along with mosquitoes. I wrote a piece for Wired magazine about research to do this with rodents, with rats and mice that are a big issue on a lot of islands. I actually think rodents are probably responsible for more extinctions than any other group. Oh, wow. So it's definitely a possibility that could be on the table. And if you're not a person who thinks that all genetic modification is just off the table because that somehow the technology itself is wrong, then I think it's definitely worth considering,

even though it's in some ways off and there's a lot to unpack with it. And then there's other options, too, that actually are a little more like what you discussed about sort of welcoming cats into the ecosystem. There are some experiments in Australia where they're actually trying to sort of breed the native animals to become more resistant to cat predation so that potentially someday they could coexist on the landscape and you could have you wouldn't the cats wouldn't actually drive these native species these little bilbies and batons and all these adorable marsupials and numb bats and that they wouldn't actually drive them extinct that they could actually just kind of become part of a functioning ecosystem with them. So there are other roads into the future besides just a wasteland of cats or continent-wide unending slaughter.

Those aren't the only two options. ending slaughter. Like those aren't the only two options. Yeah. What I like about your work is it makes me confront how much this is a question of values and how rarely we actually examine those values and see what they are. Like, are we concerned about biodiversity for its own sake? Are we concerned about animals being unjustly killed, right, in individual numbers? Are we concerned about how well, you know, humans are able to live and flourish on the planet? And these are all related issues, but sometimes it seems that we're implicitly trying to maximize one rather than the other. And that's when the question starts to get really complex to me. Like when I do a thought experiment in my head, right?

And say, okay, what happens if humans, you know, accidentally eradicate all life on earth, including our own, right? Who is that bad for if humans no humans no longer exist well nobody right the the rest of the universe keeps on spinning maybe there's some life elsewhere that's happening right um when i think about that i'm like all right this is this is a human value at the end of the day that we want to preserve nature and preserve biodiversity uh to some extent and when i think about hey what here's a different thought of experiment. What if humans just disappeared from the face of the earth? What if, you know, Thanos from the, uh, Avengers movie snaps his fingers and, and, you know, uh, destroys humanity where

we stand. Well, then there'll be cats in Australia and stuff like that. But after, uh, you know, biodiversity will be down, but after a couple of 10,000 years, you know, uh, evolution will work its magic and, uh, you know, there will be a new status quo for nature. We haven't destroyed natural systems so much that those things have been wiped out. So that makes me wonder like what are my values and why am I concerned about this exactly? And what is the exact outcome that I want to see? And I don't have answers to those questions, but it seems to be extraordinarily important to think about them. Yeah. I mean, I think you're asking the right questions, right? I think certainly I and many people that I know kind of just kind of went on autopilot for most

of our lives thinking like, well, of course it's wrong to cut down old growth trees. And of course it's wrong to shoot endangered species. Um, and that still seems pretty obvious, but what about some of these more tricky, ethically thornier questions? Um, you know, how many, how many cute kittens are you willing to kill to save that species? You know? Um, and I think that as, uh, climate continues to change and as the world continues to, I think that as climate continues to change and as the world continues to kind of the human impact unfolds, these thorny questions are just going to get more and more thorny. I think, you know, figuring out what our values are is really important. And having said that, I'm still working through it myself. I'm still working through the sort of ultimate process of why is biodiversity so important to me? Is it that it's intrinsically valuable, even if there's no humans on the planet?

Is it because humans value it just for what it is? Or is it because it's actually sort of materially good for us? All of which sort of seem sort of simultaneously true. So I don't have answers for you, but I think you're asking the right questions. And I do think that, you know, to me, the big mind shift was going away from this mental model where it was like nature was correct in the past and then we screwed it up and now we just need to unwind all the changes we've made and go back to correct point A. That was essentially the mental model that I had. Like go backwards and fix it and make it back like the way it used to be. And that's what we were brought up with.

That was every piece of environmental media. That was everything. Right. But that's not happening. A, it doesn't make any sense because the magical time A, when everything was correct, didn't exist. Because nature has been changing the whole time. And humans have been influencing it for thousands of years. And B, that's not happening because we are not able to go back.

We are not able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. That's not going to happen. So we have to reframe the whole quest, the whole project, and sort of say, what kind of futures do we want? Do we want everything to be in the right place or do we just want to make sure that things don't go extinct, even if they're in different places? Do we want to try to have extremely, extremely efficient farms that are tiny? So there's more room for nature, or do we want to have big sprawling organic farms with lots of nature on them? You know, we need to map out futures that we can agree on as, as a sort of a global society

and on the more local level as well. But those futures are not necessarily going to look like the past. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny because, uh, so much of what you say has a depressing angle to it. Um, uh, because you have a very clear-eyed view of what's happening, but you also seem like you have a very optimistic view. And so I'm curious for, again, I'm always trying to speak to the emotional truth that people have around this issue, and that is that people are frightened and they're depressed. And so I want to know, what is it when you wake up and you see that New York Times headline about the U.N. report that gives you optimism moving forward? And what do you say to those people?

What should they be going and doing on a day-to-day basis? When I see those reports, like, first of all, like everybody else in the world, they tend to take the wind out of my sails for a minute. I'm not some sort of Pollyanna. going to take the wind out of my sails for a minute. I'm not some sort of Pollyanna, you know, I don't have a hundred percent always optimism in the face of some of these extremely real and extremely serious challenges. Um, but what I do have some hope for is the fact that this does bum people out. I mean, the day that people see that headline and it doesn't even bum them out, that's the day when you really need to start worrying. Because we still care. And as our sort of understanding of the natural world and as our sort of technological abilities increase,

like we're starting to have options on the table for trying to deal with some of these problems that we didn't even have 20 years ago. 20 years ago, nobody was talking about using gene drives to make rats infertile on islands to save seabirds. That wasn't even a possibility. So there are some new tools that we can work with. There are some new futures we can imagine. I'm made optimistic by the fact that young people continue to be super into nature, and even though they've grown up in a world where ever since they were children, they've been told that things are going to hell in the handbasket. So that's good.

I kind of have been terrified for a long time that that's just going to make people check out. But, I mean, the main thing to me is that if you define nature as a place that is unchanged from the past, you can never make more. You can only protect what you've got left. And that amount is going to get nibbled away and nibbled away and nibbled away. And they, yeah, that's depressing. And you know what? I think it's totally okay to have a little moment of mourning for that idea of the pristine, perfect, unchanging, timeless, balanced nature that we grew up with, that kind of Disney nature idea. Because that was a beautiful, wonderful idea. And I think it's okay to mourn it as it, you know, mourn its passing and to realize that the sort of truth going forward is going to be a little

bit more hybridized, a little bit more open-ended, a little bit less romantic perhaps. Although I find a lot of romance and a lot of kind of surprising magic in these kinds of new kind of mongrel ecosystems that are springing up all over the world. So if you open up your definition of nature, you put yourself back in nature, then you have a concept that you can start making more of. We can imagine a world in which our grandchildren have more nature than we do. Ah, I love that. And how do we bring that world into being? Vote for the right people is a very good start. And then, you know, don't just vote for the right people. Go knock on doors for the right people.

Find a group, some sort of, you know, NGO. Locally as well, not just on a national or state level, like locally. Locally, absolutely. I mean, I am personally involved, very involved in local politics in my tiny little town. I volunteered for a campaign for like a state senator last go around because the candidate that I was supporting was against a natural gas pipeline they want to put through our county. So sometimes my kids get frozen pizza for dinner. I'm not making them some sort of zero emissions meal because I'm down at the campaign office trying to make this. If I can affect whether or not this pipeline goes through, that's going to be the single biggest influence on climate change I'll have in my

entire life. Yes. Well, that is a wonderful way to look at it. And I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us about it. Thanks for having me. I'm just such a big dork for these ideas that I never get sick of talking about them. Well, we'll have to have you come back and talk about them again sometime. Absolutely. When the world is more natural and we've got sort of monkeys falling out of our trees outside and the world is just completely lush and overgrown, we can get back together and talk about how great it was. Tell you what, let's talk again when we're both when we're both 105 because, you know, just given the advancements in medical technology, it'll hopefully happen. And let's give ourselves a report card and see how we did. That's a great idea. Thank you so much, Emma. Thank you once again to Emma Maris for coming on the show. I

hope you got as much out of that conversation as I did. And that is it this week for us on Factually. Please leave us a rating or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us out quite a lot. Thank you to our producer,

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