Stuff You Should Know - How Rewilding Works

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

A big new push toward nature conservation (and saving the planet) is based on a simple premise: remove humans from the equation and let nature take its own course.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kirk. There's Chuck Bryant. Whoa. And this is Stuff You Should Drrrrrrr. You've been working on your Chewbacca friend? No, no, it did sound like Chewbacca,

especially that last bit. No, I haven't been working on it all. It's all natural talent. Never had a lesson, as Ferris Bueller said. Do you remember Ferris Bueller? You know that show that came out 50, 60 years ago, back when we were cool? I was supposed to do that on a movie crush and then my guests couldn't make it. And so I have like this great document of notes prepared all about Ferris Bueller just sitting there going to waste. Oh, you should just read them, read through them on one of our episodes. Yeah. Ferris Bueller, sociopath or cool teenager? What'd you come up with? Well, Hodgman always has this sort of rant that Ferris is a sociopath upon looking back. And I'm just like, come on, man. There used to be a whole blog for a little

while about that. They would analyze famous films like Top Gun. They basically pointed out how Maverick was this terrible person who got his friend killed and felt like no responsibility for it and everything. Yeah. People that we idolize. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty eye-opening. It's paradigm shifting, I guess you could say. And I think that's appropriate that we're talking about paradigm shifting blogs because there's a lot of paradigm shift involved in today's topic. And there's a lot of blogs too, it turns out. About rewilding? Yeah. It's all over the place. It is. And we need to thank our old pal Julia Leighton makes an appearance here for the first time in a while. Yeah, welcome back Leighton. Helping us with this one. And I thought it was interesting

because I think you and I both, I'm going to go ahead and speak for you. I think we both agree that rewilding, the concept of rewilding is pretty awesome. Pretty awesome. Yes. But as evidence from even some of the stuff that Julia sent us, like there are some negative examples of rewilding that didn't go well. But I would argue, like that's not even rewilding and calling it that is just hurts the cause. And then you sent me a thing that where a guy said, hey, calling things that that aren't rewilding hurts the cause. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I need to backchuck up today. I know he's thinking about something. I'm going to send him something that backs it up and I did. But rewilding, I guess we should just define

so people are not angry at us for rolling that out 20 minutes in. Sure. But it is a term. When was it coined here? 1998. I've seen all over the place. Somebody claims 85. Another dude claims that he coined it in 92. But I think the first time it appeared in the scientific literature was 98. Some old hippie said that she coined it in 67. Yeah. The same hippie that claimed to have coined will turn it up, man. But here's the deal and we can get into the particulars, which we will, but generally rewilding is in a simplest form, kind of returning nature, turning it back over to nature to take care of itself. Because as Julia points out very aptly, nature didn't need humans to

come in and all the things that you see humans do for nature, it's because we had messed something up with nature. It's not because nature was like, oh, we need you to step in. If humans had never been around, nature would be just fine. Yeah. So the point of rewilding is to designate huge swaths of earth all over the earth. Huge tracts of land. Yeah, to basically remove ourselves from and just let nature do its thing. Because we screw everything up. Even when we try not to, we screw everything up. We can over manage, we can under manage, we can mismanage. There are very few things that we properly manage. And that's kind of what's given the idea, the concept of rewilding, such a great cache in the ecological community, both the scientific part of it and

also the popular part of it. It's saying, well, then let's just get humans out of the management business and let nature do its thing. I think it's a wonderful idea. It is. And it can encompass plant growth and just kind of simple things like that, like where things were once mowed down and mulched and quote unquote cared for by humans, letting that kind of run wild again, all the way to the most extreme examples, which is something we touched on in the National Park episode that Julia brought up here is like reintroducing a carnivore to the scene that had long been gone, like the wolves of Yellowstone and letting them do their thing. And that's actually kind of a big part of one part of rewilding. Yeah. So you bring up something that you kind of referenced what I

sent you earlier about misusing the term. Yeah. Like it does encompass all of those things, but the only reason rewilding encompasses all of those things is because the scientific community is still trying to figure out exactly what rewilding is. They're trying to figure out the definition. They're trying to figure out what is not rewilding. They're trying to figure out like what the best practices and best steps forward are for rewilding. And because they're still figuring it out and because it's such a buzzword, anybody who's doing anything that has to do with restoration, whether it's like reintroducing some voles into a place where there's already voles, or yeah, like you were saying, like adding some kind of grass or raising

the mower height in a park to let more of the ground cover flower to help rewild. Or stop mowing. Like currently that's technically rewilding, but really that's if you give it five more years, probably those things will not be considered rewilding. We'll have a much more coherent definition of it and hopefully a lot more data to back up the claims that rewilding makes because the big problem with it is it's a really great idea that we just need to know more about. We're jumping in feet first and that can be, it could be dangerous as we'll see, but I think more often than not, it could just be a failure and it could lose popular support. It'll make people think it just doesn't work if we do it the wrong way a bunch of times to start.

Right. And there are some really bad examples of rewilding. Well, again, I don't even like calling it rewilding because like one example that, well, maybe you might as well talk a little bit about a bad example is South Georgia, not Georgia that we live in, but Georgia in Europe. There's no reindeer in South Georgia. Where there were whalers on this, I think it was on an island and they're like, well, you know, we love to eat reindeer. And so we're just going to put a bunch of reindeer on this kind of smallish island so we can hunt them as whalers and have something to eat. And it went terribly. And, you know, years later, I think they had to just go in and like slaughter 5,000 reindeer.

That's not rewilding. That's just, that's a dumb idea, which is like bringing in an invasive species and plunking it down there. That's not rewilding at all, but it gets thrown in there as like, this is a bad example of rewilding. It's like, it's not rewilding. Right. And it wasn't ever intended to be rewilding. It took place at the turn of the century. And I think South Georgia Island is down by the Falklands, if I remember correctly, like below South America. So they brought it in as like a, like a food source because like these, these Swedes or Norwegians were like, there's nothing down here that we've ever eaten before. We need some reindeer in this place. And they managed it just fine. Like they hunted the reindeer and the, the reindeer apparently were,

were well checked or well managed, but then when they stopped hunting the reindeer and let nature take over basically what we would do with rewilding, the reindeer ran wild and things just went out of hand really, really quickly. So it was not an example of rewilding by anyone's definition, but it still serves as a cautionary tale about what can happen when you do something like just back out of the picture, that we do need to know more about what our role is to set up an ecosystem before we take our hands off of it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And also Julia points out, again, very aptly that like when something like this hits the news, then you're going to have animal activists and environmentalists when they hear the word rewilding project say,

we can't do that. That led to the death, the slaughter of 5,000 reindeer. So it just gives it all a bad name. So hopefully we'll try and give it a better name. Yeah, because again, I think it's a really great idea. We just need to know more about it. We need more science, everybody. Should we talk about biodiversity? Yeah, I think we should because that's pretty much the basis of this whole thing. The whole idea behind rewilding, the whole reason it has so much support is because it's become painfully clear that the damage that we've done to the earth is altering ecosystems in pretty much 100% unfavorable ways. I don't think there's any way that we've damaged an ecosystem where we're like, oh, that actually worked out for the better.

Well, maybe for humans and conveniences, but yeah. But even still, now we've reached, yeah, maybe that was true like 30, 40 years ago. Now we've reached the time where it's time to pay the piper. And now even for us, we're suffering the consequences of damaging and altering ecosystems so dramatically that they can no longer function. And the point behind rewilding is to reestablish biodiversity in large parts so that humans and other animals can survive on planet earth in the next 100 years. Right. And then when you look into the more, I guess, level-headed descriptors of what rewilding can be and sort of the tenets of them, which we can get to later in full. It's not, hey, let's dump a bunch of mountain lions into Central Park. It has to work with humans as well.

But as we'll see, there's a lot of places where there are not humans. And this is mainly what they're talking about. Yeah, yeah. And then those places where there are some humans or whatever, it's like, we'll get them out all the way 100%. Yeah, but it has to work together. Like, unfortunately, like it or not, humans are part of the ecosystem now. And it has to work for everyone. But right now, humans are just making it work for them in many cases. Yeah. And then so even beyond also, you raise a good point, even beyond also the fact that it's got to work for us, that we can't just coexist with mountain lions in Central Park, it has to work for us in the sense that a lot of the places that are being pointed to is prime

areas to be rewilded. If you look over to the right a little bit, there's some sheepherder there saying, this is my lion that I use my sheep to graze on. And sheepherds grazing is pretty much the antithesis of rewilding. So what are we going to do with that guy? So there's also one of the things that they're figuring out with rewilding is how to involve from a, at least to like an equally involved the community or the people who are going to be most affected by this. If not from a bottom up, everyone's saying do not do top down. Don't figure this out in the city and then come and tell the sheep farmers what to do. Like that's not going to work. I think I saw somebody say, especially in Scotland, that is not going to work. And I was like, yeah, I've been

to Scotland. I know that's true. Yeah. Oh boy. I had like this long string of Scottish obscenities. I was about ready to belt out in my worst accent. Earned brew. So as far as biodiversity goes, Julia put it away that I think really kind of hits it on the nose. It's not just the quantity and variety of species and individuals. It's really the interactions within that ecosystem and how they all work together. That's what biodiversity is. And ecosystems and biodiversity, they're meant to fluctuate. Like things happen in nature naturally and species may dwindle here and there when resources are a little more scarce. And sometimes they're not thriving like they should, but they're still built for that. What they're not built for is human triggered biodiversity

loss. And this is what we've seen humans do over and over and time and time again. And that just makes ecosystems kind of crumble under pressure to live and do their thing. Yeah. And it's unequivocal that we are facing terrible loss of biodiversity all over Earth. The living plant index said that between 1970 and 2012, 58% of the world's fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all disappeared. Like just gone. Goodbye. All of those species had gone. It's scary. Yeah. So when that happens, you're saying the way that ecosystems have evolved over time is that they function as a net, as a web, as a bunch of interconnected parts that create something greater as a whole. And then that whole works together with other similar

holes to create something greater. And it keeps going on to this macro scale until you reach like planet level. So you're going from like door mouse to planet level all following basically the same path. And when you lose biodiversity, you're bound to lose species that are performing really important, really valuable functions that affect and support a bunch of other different kinds of species. So you lose those other species, but then you also lose what are called the services that that ecosystem provides. Everything from preventing floods and erosion to preventing forest fires, wildfires, speeding up the carbon sequestration, speeding up oxygen production. Like all these things that the planet needs to live, we evolved on planet Earth, so we need those

too. And we've also, whether we realize it or not, built our economy, taking those things for granted. And so fortunately, the Office of Economic Development put together a paper that cited 125 to 140 trillion dollars worth of these services are produced by nature per year. Right. They put a number on it. Which on its face, it sounds like a lot of money, right? It is. It is. The global gross domestic product, all of the money produced by all the goods and services produced on planet Earth in 2020 only equaled 85 trillion. So on the high end, nature produces

services that are worth nearly twice of global GDP in a whole year. And so now you're starting to bring in the conservatives. They're like, oh, okay, I hadn't considered that. Let's talk about that too. So there's basically no one who wouldn't benefit from a healthier, more biodiverse planet. And I feel like we've reached the point for a break. What do you think? Right after I say one quick soapboxy thing. Sure. It sort of echoes back to what I would point it out in the Yellowstone episode is this wonderful macro long view of the world that you embrace and I embrace. That's the problem. Because

in the short term, people are like, sure, but what about this one thing I can do now? Right. What about all of this crypto I can mine today? Right. Not to get into all that, good Lord. But people need to take a longer view of things. And I think humans are just unfortunately want to look at the five bucks right in front of their face that they can make. Chuck, it feels a lot like we're waking up. You and me?

Yes. But I think that's a big point. I think you and I are very mainstream people. And I think we're waking up even more than we had before. And I think that that's usually reflective of people in general. I think that people are starting to wake up more as a group, as a collective. Mm-hmm. And you just see so much less like greenwashing and PRBS. People don't buy it anymore. I think people are starting to understand on the whole how important this is. I really feel that way. Yeah. I think younger generations continually do that through time and it's happening. So that's a good thing.

Shout out Gen Z. We should take that break. Go Gen Z and whatever follows you. I don't even know what my daughter is. I don't either. I'm not sure if they've named that generation yet. Because right now it's generation very selfish. No. But they're very young. They're very young. Six years old. Yeah. Six years old, sorry.

Generation temper tantrum. No, she's not much of a tantrumer, but anyway. Oh, that's good. Let's take that break and we'll be right back. Okay. Thanks, Bass. And my favorite boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, Oh, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that. Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Mangeshatikar and to be honest I don't believe in astrology but from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get second-hand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the

universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams cancelled marriages k-pop but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crashing down situation doesn't look good there is risk to father and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are gonna change too listen to

skyline drive in the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts hey before we get going can I say one quick thing and this is I am always very sad when I see that like jogger in California Southern California is attacked and mauled by mountain lion like that is a tragedy for that family but my favorite thing is when those stories end with and that's what happened and that's too bad and that's a mountain lion doing what a mountain lion does and not and they hunted it down and killed it yeah yeah you know yeah

speaking of releasing mountain lions in the Central Park which I doubt if they were over there anyway well I think that's that's one of the big tenets of rewilding is it's like there there's a push that of converting so I was talking about those sheep herders in Scotland and what are they gonna do you well some people say well you can actually there's stuff called nature-based economies and you can change what you do to make money if you are getting into rewilding your land you could start basically holding safaris and that's that illustrates two things one there's a lot of money to be made I've seen I've seen that some

farmers have reported making as much if not more than they did farming that they do now that they're doing like ecotourism on their old on their land that's been rewilded it's interesting sure but but then also it also shows you the role of humans in this like we are meant to be like guided on a tour in a very like arranged visit to these areas it's not like this area is wild just do whatever you want in it right it's extremely well managed but what you're managing in this case is the humans not the wildlife not the flora the fauna you're keeping people out no hunting no farming no grazing your livestock no

just like going camping there I'm not sure about that last part but I get the impression that humans are meant to just be kept out of it rather than the animal populations are managed it's the humans that are yeah I think I don't know how rewilders feel about it but as a camper I think if you do it right then you shouldn't be harming the ecosystems that you're in but yeah someone might argue that like hey man just setting a tent up like on the ground harms the ground yeah I mean I guess if you zoom in far enough with a microscope you can probably back that up yeah like I crushed a worm with my big body so then I

slept in a hammock right and we're gonna give that worms family now a small sum of money or maybe some dirt they would probably prefer dirt especially if it was really good dirt soil or soil from my body yep just take off your clothes and roll on the ground and say I'm sorry worm and then they said well and you just killed two more of us let's get off humans have to remove themselves from the wilderness let's move on please we should talk about the three C's because this was sort of an early descriptor on rewilding which is cores corridors and carnivores and the idea is that and this has a lot to do

with like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone carnivores having an apex predator in an area is awesome and super healthy for that area they control and they regulate that food chain like a champ and they need a lot of room though and so it's called a core reserve like their area if they're gonna thrive a lot and when that core reserve shrinks then all of a sudden they're isolated that's gonna harm them and then that's gonna have that trickle down effect that we talk a lot about here on planet earth now there are a lot of cores that are too small so the idea is all right why don't we connect these cores with

corridors to allow them to keep moving and this can look anything like I sent you that one thing I know that we talked about these before it's the coolest thing when they make like a a land bridge for animals to cross a highway without getting killed or go under like an overpass or an underpass like that could be a corridor at its most sort of fundamental or like literally sort of rejoining land yeah that was not joined before because of human interaction yeah there's a big there's a big push for that because yeah there's plenty of cores around but if they're disconnected then there's not gonna be

enough to support like a healthy ecosystem and those like apex predators are gonna get stressed and it's gonna stress out the whole ecosystem they don't have anywhere to go but if you connect two small ones through a corridor all of a sudden they can kind of go back and forth and you know the the one this one small place regenerates in their absence and then they go to the other one and then they go back to the first one and the second one regenerates while they're gone like that's a really great idea because it also kind of shows that spirit of like not giving up it's like oh the cores are so small what are

we gonna do I guess nothing it's like no you connect the cores and then you can also look at it on an even bigger scale like a good example of a core the ideal version of a core or close to it is a an American National Park mm-hmm like you can't do anything in the National Park but basically go and camp and visit and that's about it right the other National Parks I was reading about ones in England at least like you can hunt they're managed for like grouse hunting and deer hunting and like they're not like American National Parks so the American version is a really great example of kind of what we're talking

about the rewilding then imagine if you connected Yellowstone to Yosemite with the wildlife corridor wow right is that even possible well yeah they're on the same continent so effectively it's possible yeah you're gonna have to move some some powerful landowners like Ted Turner he's probably not gonna give up his land willingly although I don't know maybe he will there has to be like a shift in how people view the importance of wilderness and nature and that's kind of part and parcel with the the concept of rewilding too yeah and a lot of this research that we looked at comes from the UK and we'll talk about that more

later but it comes down to like a very smack I'm sorry a micro effort of going in convincing one landowner at a time almost to do stuff like this and they're having some successes in the uplands of the UK where that you know kind of one at a time some landowners are agreeing like all right this is what I could I'll agree to do and for the good of everybody yeah it's kind of cool but it is a you know it's a pretty slow process like you're not gonna see rewilding on on the evening news every night it's a pretty I don't know about small movement but it's it's not mainstream I don't think in the in the consciousness no but in the

ecological community it's like basically being touted as the future of ecology so hot so the the three C's especially with the carnivores featured that's that's basically descriptive of one of the two general umbrella categories for rewilding yeah and that would be trophic rewilding which we'll talk a little more about but let's talk about passive rewilding kind of the other end of the spectrum yeah I mean this is kind of taking a good look at where where you should do this like where to start like what what's a good area to even try this and where you can kind of go unchecked and where it will benefit people as well

as the the ecosystems around there but the two main goals of the passive rewilding are to and this is something humans do a lot like there's a lot of wildlife protection going on so the first part of passive rewilding is kind of that is letting wildlife rebound and kind of get back you know get its its land legs back under itself and that means like no hunting and stuff like that or hunting restrictions and then letting that land grow back together like you talked about so animals can you know go where they once could go like just increasing their territories and just saying here nature do what you will with

yourself and it's super dirty we try we won't look we're walking away if we had no idea nature would do that right oh god so with passive rewilding there's there's they're trying to figure out what the initial steps are because in a lot of these areas we've done a lot that's just kind of invisible the city slickers like you and me to alter the ecosystem the landscape so you know we would have to go in and like remove dams that we've built there we would have to fill in canals just anything any way that we've altered or put a human touch on the landscape we would need to basically undo before we left or else it would still

be an altered ecosystem that could be really problematic so if we just basically kind of restore it then and then we walk away that the idea is that it will take care of itself faster but like you're saying this is not it's not a fast process like some of these projects are being proposed to have timelines of a couple hundred years before they they reach where they're supposed to be that's a hard sell to people you know it is it is but again I think it's getting easier and easier I agree I agree and part of the passive rewilding is what I was talking about in the uplands of England that's where

they're kind of going one farmer at a time and saying hey you know 70% of England's drinking water comes from these uplands and you know I think when you start describing without maybe I think you can go too far and scare people in the other direction with the doom and gloom but if you very just sort of calmly lay out some facts and figures I think that can wake people up sometimes yes and the UK super into this in no small part because of an ecologist Harry Megan named George Mombiat I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly he wrote a book in 2013 called feral that basically called for

rewilding and he really popularized it over there and since then it's really started to kind of take off and they have really lofty goals they have a goal of rewilding 5% of England's land I believe it's like 20 30 which is coming up quick and 5% that's a lot it's about a million acres and they put in perspective there like there's a quarter of that is in like football fields in England so really is that that much like if you're daunted by that idea and but I that's still in eight years converting it to to a rewilded state or starting to is pretty ambitious yeah I think you sent me that one thing that

was really cool where they sort of analyze and this is from a UK site I think where they analyze like someone who might poop who this is well do we even have the space to do this kind of thing like you know we can't turn our cities over again to the to the mountain lions and just let everything grow wild and that's not what they're talking about but that one website I can't remember which one it was but talking about if you could traverse the entire UK in one day yeah England Scotland Wales in Northern Ireland that 86% of the land that you would find you would not see many people or buildings you would only

spend about an hour and 45 minutes of that 24 hours traversing all of you the UK moving through urban spaces and some of those urban spaces even have green spaces obviously not rewilded but green space nonetheless right and 83% of the population of the UK lives on 6% of the land mass so in other words there is a lot of land out there to be rewilded that doesn't mean you know throwing wild animals in the middle of the city right it's the opposite it's throwing the humans out of the wild the wilderness exactly you go over there right built your city life where you don't breathe fresh air and you don't go outside and

things like that well some of the more radical proposals for rewilding is like giving over you know like nine-tenths of the United States to wilderness and basically just pointing out like how many more people you can pack into the urban centers of like the East Coast and the West Coast and just like leave the middle alone as wilderness I haven't seen that supported by many people I think probably the guy who keeps promoting that keeps getting told to be quiet by the other ecologists because you're gonna scare off the normals you know American suburbs are very big and important right but it does it does

really point out to like you know there's there's people out there and we have there we have to take their interests into consideration and one of the things that I kept seeing pointed out in the UK is apparently after Brexit the farm subsidies for farms that that could not support themselves a hundred percent through their own production like like it is in the US and I'm sure Australia too they were heavily subsidized by the government to make up that that gap and then after Brexit apparently those things are beginning slash left and right and so people have been saying okay well if we're not

gonna be giving them farm subsidies what if we change the purpose of the subsidies from you know farming to rewilding land instead if these farms aren't producing that well anyway and we can still produce enough food that's a very important point sure without these farms and in fact some of these farms would actually be way more valuable as untouched wilderness then maybe it would make sense to take that money and convert it into that instead and then you also have you've also taken care of the person problem because they're still being supported like they need to be but at the same time they also don't have

to move they just can't graze their sheep anymore right don't graze sheep anymore and you're gonna make the same amount of money and you can take tourists on wilderness safaris as a side gig right and I just pictured groundskeeper Willie staring us down from across the room yeah yeah and then getting on this tractor that pulls us along to point out the red deer just hopping all over the place on his rewilded land or he could just give us the one of the great groundskeeper Willie lines of all time from one of the Halloween episodes when he was Freddy Krueger do you remember that one yeah

of course when I'm done with you they're gonna need a compass to murder them so great that was good one one of my favorite lines so a lot of stuff we were just talking about falls under the past of rewilding we've hit on trofer rewilding but within that there are like it kind of depends on how hardcore of a environmentalist you're talking to there's something called Pleistocene rewilding yeah where they're like hey human disturbance started at the last ice age and that should be our goal is to kind of like introduce if not Willie mammoths like maybe a descendant of the Willie mammoth because they're not around

anymore and so you get some sort of other people I mean I don't know about how heated the arguments get but other people like Pleistocene is really too we should really kind of move from that like forward from there and think more along the lines of the Wolves of Yellowstone than these huge megafauna right so some people say no the megafauna are important yeah and the people who are proponents of Pleistocene rewilding say that it's the reason that they've chosen that point is because they're suggesting that like if we go that far back we could probably defend ourselves in the planet against climate

change that much more quickly right or more robustly I guess is a better way say it's not like they're just doing it out of sentimentality like sure there's an intellectual bent to it like and that is that we basically need to go that far back to counteract the damage we've done in the last like 200 years in a mentality you know so there's a problem with Pleistocene rewilding though Chuck and that is a lot of those animals are extinct yeah like the Willie mammoth yeah okay so what are you gonna do if you want to recreate the Pleistocene on the American Midwest let's say every state in the Midwest agrees to move

eastward or westward and they're giving up all of their land over to rewilding and we've all agreed it was Pleistocene rewilding what are we gonna rewild it with if there's no such thing as a Willie mammoth elephants maybe but elephants have evolved in the last 10 12,000 years to to live around equatorial Africa if I'm not mistaken so are they gonna do well in Kansas and then the same thing for the saber-tooth tiger or actually I don't think they call them anymore I think it's a saber-tooth cat maybe all of their families totally extinct there's no descendants of the saber-tooth cats that

are alive today so what are we gonna do put mountain lions out there we're gonna put actual tigers out there or regular like African lions and we're gonna move them over to Kansas and then the larger problem Chuck the larger problem is this those animals as big and scary and ferocious as they are are kind of puny compared to the actual Pleistocene megafauna like a saber-tooth cat and it's not clear that they would be up to the task of managing enormous ecosystems like that just because of their smaller size yeah so there's a lot of problems with Pleistocene rewilding it's back to Megalodon for

the oceans yeah no there are a lot of problems with that and you were sort of talking about you mentioned the top-down control and that is that theory that these you know if you bring in an apex predator it can really it can be a really good thing that the cascade of interactions that it can trigger is can be vast but you know that's that's trophic rewilding it worked out pretty well for the wolves and Yellowstone and the beavers that followed and the birds and the fish that followed because of the beavers so it's a it's always a sternling example that people bring up yeah so just to button that up you've

got passive rewilding which is basically like just trying to get rid of your dams and bridges and stuff and then leave and then the trophic rewilding is where you're selectively putting back animals that used to play a role in that ecosystem or are related to ones that used to play a role right and then with a focus on those apex predators because they have so much control over the ecosystems that they live in and that that one is way more involved and needs way more thought before we start doing that yeah should we take a break yeah all right we're gonna will gonna we're gonna take our final break and we'll

talk about some of the issues with rewilding and some of the examples in some of the tenants how about that sounds great hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass the hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road okay I see what you're doing do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this I promise you oh god seriously I swear and you won't have to send an

SOS because I'll be there for you oh man and so my husband Michael um hey that's me yep we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy Bander each week to guide you through life step by step not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Mangesha Ticular and to be honest I don't

believe in astrology but from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crash down situation

doesn't look good there is risk to father and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too listen to skyline drive and the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts so earlier on we talked about one bad example of what I don't even think is rewilding with those reindeer yeah in South Georgia there are other examples there was one because you know people will point to stats people to say this isn't a good idea we'll say that hey the failure rate for introductions and

reintroduction introductions in nature is higher than 70% and we don't even really have a lot of data if this works out anyway and 70% is pretty high and look at the look about what look at what happened in Argentina in the 1940s when they brought these Canadian beavers in and they ran wild and destroyed the forest people who know what they're talking about will say that's an invasive species and when the beaver and Yellowstone eat the willow tree the willow tree grows back when they eat these beech trees here in Argentina they don't grow back so you just have a wasteland it's not dropping invasive

species down into another place where they were never supposed to be to begin with yeah it's supposed to be a little more thought out than that that like like I was saying before the break like these are carefully selected and carefully thought out or they're meant to be animals that are that fill specific niches in the ecosystem that you're trying to restore that's right not dropping beavers in South America of Canadian beavers no less yeah one thing that really spoke to me was in that additional material that you sent over I think it was the four tenants a rewilding Britain I think was the

website and therefore tenants are pretty self-explanatory but one part of part two really spoke to me the first one is support people in nature together the second one is let nature lead and the line that really got me was it is not geared to reach any human-defined optimal point or in-state it goes where nature takes it and then that ties in with number four number three is crazy create resilient local economies that's a big part of it but number four is work at nature scale like I think humans are so obsessed with scale and business and they're basically saying you got to do what nature let nature do it nature does

at its own pace yeah and at its own scale that's nature scale and just let it do it don't put don't put your hang-ups on nature man on what you want it to be and that's kind of true though yeah no absolutely I think I think though that that kind of reveals like that the lack of consensus in the field of rewilding because what you said I was rewilding Britain's four points yeah there were actually five the fifth one was secure benefits for the long term okay yeah five and then I saw the Union of the conservation of nature I think that's it I think that was it yeah they they have ten ten points yeah so you got five you

got ten depending on who you ask but they all generally agree that before we really start doing the stuff in earnest like we need more data like most of the people who are like yeah we just you know release some voles into the into the woods there's some rewilding project right there like these are the people who aren't necessarily even thinking it through yeah if you're a conservation ecologist if you're a biologist if you're a botanist if you're a scientist who's like actually looking at rewilding you pretty much everyone agrees like we need way more data than we have right now that is a great idea we just need way

more data if the science just isn't even there yeah but you know one of the tenants that they both it seems like everyone is talking about is talk to the local people they call them stakeholders yeah talk to the local stakeholders because you can't just come in there with your you know with your science under your arm and your folder and just say this is how it's gonna go like right it's got to work for the people and you have to get them involved and on boarders just not gonna work yeah don't even try that in Scotland everybody man don't mess with their sheep you got anything else I got nothing

else well maybe this last little bit from that stuff you sent 77% in increasing of the human population lives in urban areas and they spend 90% of their time indoors 77% of humans spend 90% of their time indoors and just the health effects and the role the trickle-down effects from that we've talked about a lot but people need to be out in nature mental and physical illness depression heart disease anxiety fatigue obesity ADHD like you name it like a lot can be not wholly attributed to this but certainly has an impact on people that and I'm a city guy you are too like I love my urban areas but people

need to get out doors more and this is a good way to do it I think yeah but that's a fine line you got to walk because we're giving this stuff over to nature so we have to ask ourselves what what role what place do we have in these wildernesses that we're creating yeah and I think that's one of the things that that rewilding ecologists are excited about is it that would cause us to rethink that that would be like wait a minute I want to be indoors all time well wait a minute I'm already indoors all the time I need to get out there and now there's a place for them to go so yeah I think that's another big

question mark that we'd have to figure out to you that's right well that's it for rewilding for now given another five years maybe we'll come back to it everybody and since I said that it's time for listener mail I'm gonna call this of what the author called it lesbians in the military okay hi guys really enjoyed your podcast about the term friend of Dorothy and wanted to add something to your discussion about gay men in the military and this is probably on us for just sort of saying gay men in the military but there were many lesbians in the military during World War two as well as people who would we

would now describe as bisexual women transmasculine people and others the military was a safe place for queer women and AFAB assigned female at birth people since it was somewhat of an escape for mainstream society the expected women to dress and present femininely and marry men never considered this it's not pretty great this article is a great summary of the history thought you might find it interesting and the name of the article I just click the link is called this from out history org lesbians comma not colon World War two and beyond and this is from Rebecca a friend of Dorothy

nice thanks a lot Rebecca we're a friend of Rebecca who's a friend of Dorothy that's right it's hard to keep track but let's just all be friends that's pretty great thank you for that email Rebecca and if you want to be like us and point out something we hadn't considered before we love that kind of stuff you can wrap it up and send it in an email to stuff podcasts at iheartradio.com stuff you should know is a production of i heart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the i heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new i heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the i heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Munga Shtigler and it turns out astrology is way more

widespread than any of us want to believe you can find in major league baseball international banks k-pop groups even the white house but just when I thought I had a handle on this subject something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too listen to skyline drive on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts