The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to an expert about climate and biodiversity collapse

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Professor Yvonne Buckley is the Professor of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin. She is Co-Chair of the All Island Climate and Biodiversity Research.We sat down for Science week 2023 to chat about biodiversity. Check out sfi.ie for info about science week 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crash face first into the tiffin, you chinless fintans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Thank you everybody in Ireland for the wonderful feedback for my book, which came out in Ireland last week. It was lovely to share the stories with you, to share something with you that I've been working on for so long, that I put so much time and care into. So genuinely, from the bottom of my heart,

thank you for going out and getting that book. And for the people of England, Scotland and Wales, for the good old cracking tans, it's available in yearbook shops tomorrow. Topographia Hibernica, my new collection of short stories. And you can get it as audiobook, everybody, because I really put,

I put a lot of care into the audiobook too, to make it not just an audiobook. I composed a soundtrack to it and performed the stories in a certain way so that you're getting a different experience if you read it in your hands. So this week's episode is actually pre-recorded. I'm speaking to you from the past of last week because right now I'm on tour from the bottom of England up to Scotland across to the north of Ireland down to Dublin eight or nine dates which is basically that's just traveling and gigging and traveling and gigging and then any available time off I'm spent doing interviews with the press

sitting down with papers magazines radios all that shit all the shit you have to do when you put out a book or put out an album or put out whatever. You have to do your press obligations. What I am looking forward to is those fully tumescent English breakfast sausages that you get in hotels. In Ireland, our sausages are kind of soft. But in England, their sausages are very firm. And they have a little snap to them. Now, I do prefer Irish sausages.

But it's a nice little treat in England to have those tumescent British sausages. All the hotels look the same now. Everything's fucking generic. So when I sit down at the hotel buffet. When I'm on tour. I have my headphones in all the time. So I can't hear when people are talking. So I really don't know what country I'm in.

Until I eat the sausages in the morning. And you know that you're in England or Scotland or Wales when you're down at the breakfast buffet and you bite into your sausage. To quote the food critic A.A. Gill, it feels like biting down on an occupied condom. So I'm not going to have time to record a podcast. I'll be gigging, travelling, doing fucking press interviews

and eating fully tumescent English sausages in the breakfast buffets of generic hotels with a lot of businessmen last time not the last time but about three years ago I was in some English hotel at a breakfast buffet I took my earphones out my eavesdropped on a table of business people and they were Christian business people they were a mixture of American people and English people and they were Christian business people. They were a mixture of American people and English people and they were hardcore Christians but they were Christians

and also like financiers or bankers or something and they were talking about a business meeting but then also praying and asking for Jesus to come with them to the business meeting like dead fucking serious like holding hands

and saying to each other later today in the acquisition between Barst Legacy Holdings and Blackheart International we ask for the presence of the Lord at the board meeting so that he may streamline operational efficiencies and and allow us to acquire competitive advantage in the market and they were there talking like this and bringing fucking poor old Christ into it and I'm listening away eating my English dick sausage and giving myself diarrhea from the fucking endless orange juice that you get at the buffets no, do you know what I'm going to do?

I'm not having sausages every morning I'm not doing it I'm going to I've got like 8 days in a hotel I'm not having sausages every morning, I'm not doing it, I'm gonna, I've got like eight days in a hotel, I'll go for sausages, two days, a treat, and then the rest of the time, croissants, which I call them croissants, over in England, do you know what they call them over in England, croissant, I know it's the French pronunciation, but come on. They're croissants. You silly billy. So I'm going to do croissants, muesli, natural yoghurt, a lot of fresh fruit, and coffee.

And maybe just for two of the days, English Mickey sausages. William the Conqueror's dick. The Right Honourable Gregory Chichester the Third. I don't know who the fuck he is, but he was dying on his savoury penis using that weird blunt English hotel cutlery that they have so you don't think of doing a terrorist attack. Not as blunt

as airplane cutlery, but not as sharp. I'm talking about butter knives here. Not as sharp as what you have at home. Just a butter knife that's dull enough that it'll prevent you from doing a terror. And that's what I'm probably doing right now. Eating a bit of a continental breakfast. Having climbed out of my continental quilt. Wondering why the two of them are related. I can understand

why you have a continental breakfast. There's cheese and bits of ham and croissants. So that's continental. The fuck is continental about my quilt? What's so Spanish or French about my quilt? Are they saying that the hotel bed is so big that I'm effectively pulling a continent over myself? I am the bare earth and this quilt is the continent that I pull over myself. Is this a tectonic analogy? So I'm now talking to you from the past.

Wondering about what I'm doing now. And that's the most exciting shit I can think of. That's fucking autism for you now. I'm hanging out with Johnny Marr on Monday night. That's the bit I'm supposed to get excited about. Not the predictability of the breakfasts. So I pre-recorded this week's podcast because there's simply no way I'd have time to do it this week. But as I mentioned

last week, it is currently Science Week. The 12th to 19th November is Science Week in Ireland. And Science Week, it's about democratising science. It's a week where anybody, anybody of any age gets to interact with scientists and go to loads of class events and find out about what's happening right now in science. So between the 12th and 19th of November, there's going to be loads of events all over the country where you can go and learn about science. And the best way to find out exactly what's going on, go to

sfi.ie, Science Foundation Ireland's website, take a look at the website and go to their events and find out if there's anything happening close to you and what I'm doing this week is I'm chatting to Professor Yvonne Buckley and she's a Professor of Zoology at Trinity College

up in Dublin and she's also the co-chair of the All Ireland Climate and Biodiversity Research Network. So I'm chatting to an expert, a scientist, a professor about biodiversity, climate collapse, biodiversity collapse, which is an incredibly serious issue that we all need to be very informed about. But you know, with this podcast, when I speak to people about biodiversity or when I speak about biodiversity myself, I like to lean into it in a way that's, that inspires proactivity and a bit of hope.

To be very real about the situation, to not gloss over anything, but to inspire action, to inspire action and to inspire hope. And that's the chat I had with Professor Yvonne Buckley, who was unbelievably sound and loads of crack and we had a fantastic chat where i got to i got to explore my curiosity around science zoology biodiversity with someone who's an expert so please enjoy this yvonne buckley thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and agreeing to have a chat. That's great to be on here. I'm delighted. So the first thing I'd like to ask, right,

so you're a professor of zoology in Trinity College. Yeah, that's right. And you started your academic training in like 2002, is that correct? I guess, well, I went to the UK to do my undergraduate first. I mean, I grew up in North Cork, so not too far away from you, I think. And I went to Oxford to do my undergraduate, and then I stayed in the UK for about 10 years doing a PhD and a postdoc. And then I went off to Australia for 10 years to do my first academic positions and it was only after that I came back to Ireland again about 10 years ago. It's like zoology is the study of animals it's the study of animals and wildlife yeah and when you began this journey and this is something I hear from a lot of scientists a lot of scientists say I'm supposed to be studying this thing and now all i'm doing is fixing trying to fix a problem

like when you started did you know that you're going to get into something here where you're effectively fixing a problem did you know that in the early 2000s i did i was very i guess aware of the problems early on and i'm a problem sol. Like that's what I love to do. That's where I find my academic challenges is, you know, figuring out what the problem is and then trying to find a solution to it. So that's always what draws me to an area. So I was a kid in the nineties and I do remember seeing my parents' car if we went out the countryside and all the insects that were on the front of the car the windshield and the lights the lights being so full of insects that you'd have to wipe it off and it was

uncomfortable that doesn't happen anymore like I did a gig at the weekend up in Manahan so that's a drive from Limerick to Manahan no insects anywhere like that's a lot of insects that aren't around anymore in such a short space of time in 30 years. Yeah, this is a really tricky one because a lot of people, you know, have found this anecdotally. What's the story there? Yeah, so insect declines are a real thing. We have some really good evidence from, you know, long-term scientific monitoring that insect populations have declined. long-term scientific monitoring that insect populations have declined. But the thing about insects is they are so variable and so patchy that you need that long-term scientific monitoring to

be able to say anything really conclusive. So the kind of, you know, the car windshield is a great story. It makes it real to people and it's, you know, it's something we observe, but it's very difficult to then say, you know, what is it that's gone wrong? I mean, there's, well, we know in our landscapes that over the last 40 years, populations of all kinds of things from, you know, vertebrates to insects have all declined because of the way that we use the land and the way that we use the sea now. So much more intensive. But the scientific monitoring goes alongside those kind of observations,

you know, the stuff that we see in real life to give, you know, the strong evidence base that we need to say exactly what's going wrong, whether it's the pesticides in our environment, whether it's the intensive land use, the cutting down of hedgerows, and the tidying up of the countryside, you know. And nature thrives on untidiness. So that's another thing, because I was a kid, so it's hard to remember, but are you suggesting there that maybe the countryside was just a little bit more mad, a little bit more wild? I think it was, yeah. Less cars on the road too. We had fewer cars, we had narrower roads, there was fewer chemicals being put into the system because it's quite expensive to use those.

And unless you're getting big profits, which is what, you know, some, some of our agricultural industries now are quite profitable. So you can afford those, you know, chemical inputs that maybe you couldn't afford back in the eighties and nineties. There's been, you know, just in my lifetime in the last 40 years, you know, we've seen such huge, huge changes in how we farm the landscape and in our urban development. And even just like how we, how we, you know, organize our front gardens and our back gardens and you know paving over our front gardens for car park spaces you know that's a new thing that wasn't around 40 years ago um yeah so i think i think things things we forget because of this whole kind of shifting baselines thing that you know as as the world changes we get used to the new normal we get used to the new normal we forget how it was

you know and um it used to be more untidy but another thing too because my mother my mother's 80 you know so when i speak to my mother about this stuff some of the things she says to me sometimes i feel like how my mother described how she grew up is where our society needs to go by which i mean she came to a market in limerick with me recently and in this market farmer's market they were selling all this locally produced organic products potatoes carrots whatever and they were real expensive and they were effectively presented as a luxury item this was a fetishized luxury item to be able to buy carrots and potatoes and the farmer to say these are from limerick these are and i'm going wow really because my my carrots are from spain yeah and my ma laughed at it and said we didn't have

organic stuff growing up everything was organic and everything was locally produced this is how it was yeah and she used to tell me stories about like her granddad had once seen an orange you know what i mean her granddad had seen he'd been abroad somewhere and he'd seen an orange and he used to come home and he had a gold um pocket watch and he used to tell her and her in like the 40s, he'd say to her and her sisters, oh, this is an orange, this gold pocket watch. This is what an orange is. And they believed him. And they'd climb up on him when he was asleep and try and eat his pocket watch. But for me, it was like there was something beautiful in the fact that here's a person who has seen an orange because you couldn't get an orange in Ireland because everything was local and organic. And what you'd lose there is choice.

But what you gain is that's so much better for the environment than biodiversity. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, you know, we can't romanticize the past either, you know, in that there were things, you know, like a choice, that diversity of food. I mean mean the diversity of food now we can get down in our local tesco is fantastic um but part of me is like yes that would be fantastic if everybody could eat locally grown and you know more more in tune food that's produced more in tune with nature so using kind of the nature-based solutions that we know work, like having more wildflowers around your fields and more hedgerows and, you know, making space for the insects that eat the pests on your food. You know, all of that is really good stuff.

But what's happened in the last kind of 20, 30 years is that the price of food has just, you know, become very, very cheap as well, you know, because we're able to produce food much more cheaply now with modern agricultural techniques than we could in the past. So we have this conflict right between trying to make sure that food is available, healthy food is available to everyone. And, and making sure that people have, you know, I'm making sure that our countryside is not, you know, that we're not horrendously polluting and destroying our countryside in the process of making that cheap food available so it's probably a middle road somewhere you know where we can import some of the ideas from organic agriculture into conventional agriculture and say look you know let's go a middle way here let's find ways of bringing more life back into our farms um you know without going the whole hog it's a tough one because like when i think of beef, something I often say to people is like, you know, I can go, I can buy 500 grams of mince for like four euro in the shop. And I like to say to people, I think that that's really wrong. It's kind of really, I shouldn't, when you think of the size of that cow, when you think of the amount of water that cow had to drink, when you think of the amount of wheat or corn that had to be grown or grass to feed that cow, I kind of shouldn't be able to do that. It's what I'm looking at is yummy, yummy. I've got 500 grams of beef.

But what this is here is unsustainable and it's kind of wrong. And I don't know, should I be able to do this? Well, and the farmers would probably agree with you. You know, they're not getting enough money. They're not getting enough money for their beef either. You know what I mean? Like they're not being paid sufficiently to cover their input costs. You know, beef farming is not very economically viable in Ireland.

It only really is. I'd love to know about that, Yvonne. Why? Because I've heard farmers say that so much. Like, why is that? Why in Ireland, this wonderful place, like cattle? Jesus, you read our mythology

and they're talking about cattle 2,000 years ago. We're the land of cattle and wonderful grass and rain. Why can't beef farmers earn money from beef in Ireland? They earn most of their money through the Common Ag Cultural Policy.

So without those taxpayer subsidies from Europe, beef farming would not be economically viable in much of this country. So we're paying farmers to actually produce beef in a lot of cases, which blows my mind. And similar for sheep farming. That doesn't make sense. Yeah, so it's a really strange one.

But people are used to buying cheap beef down in the supermarket so yeah you can't you can't charge more for your beef because people will buy it or and people will buy beef from another country for example brazil which you know the carbon emissions from the beef in brazil are much much worse because they cut down tropical rainforests to grow soy to feed to their cows you know ours are grass-fed at least and our beef is fetishized around the world as well. Our beef and our products are fetishized because we're grass-fed. Yeah. But we don't, we don't build in the environmental costs into the costs of that food. So it's based, you know, what you buy in the supermarket, those costs are based on the inputs that the farmer makes, maybe a bit of fertilizer, you know, a bit of extra food for the cows, you know, buying the cows, the veterinary bills, you know, there's lots of, lots of different input costs. We don't factor in the, you know, the, the, the slurry that runs

into our fresh waters that pollutes our fresh water. You know, that's a cost that's borne by society in general, rather than paid for by the people eating the products. Why is that dangerous, Yvonne? Why is it so bad for slurry to go into rivers? Lots of nutrients in slurry. So it goes into rivers and then that encourages the you know some kinds of animals and plants to grow and they suck up all the oxygen out of the river and they change the environment for other kinds of animals and plants and you end up with a really um polluted low diversity uh ecosystem so if you know Loch Nye has been in the news a lot over the last month or two with that toxic algal bloom yeah what's going on there like Like that is so freaky.

Yeah, it's really worrying, but it's kind of like the end point of, you know, the monitoring of water quality on this island has shown that we've seen big declines in water quality, you know, north and south over the past 40 years and the pollution you know this this state of loch ney now is just kind of the end point of of um that pollution um you know so it's it's it's basically uh you know if we needed more wake-up calls there it is but but we see it we see the same thing in lots of our rivers and lakes all over the country you know it's it's getting towards that it's not we're not at that point yet but we're seeing all the warning signs so do you see so loch may has got a bloom of algae which makes it fluorescent green and basically it's a

dead lake not not a lot can live in there because that algae is taken over is that correct so yeah it's it's a it's a funny little creature called a cyanobacteria it it it photosynthesizes so that's why it has that kind of bright fluorescent green color but it's a it's kind of a bacteria so that's chlorophyll then that we're seeing that's yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah um here's a mad one right but like could that happen to the river shannon like could that happen to an interesting one like because i'm looking at it going okay here's a lake that's not pleasant but yeah what if all the water turns into that yeah so lakes are very susceptible to those kinds of toxic blooms because

the water is kind of stationary and it doesn't mix as much as in a river i believe so there's not as much oxygen getting in there through the the movement of the water and they also and the the temperature can be quite warm in a lake as well especially in the shallow parts so i'm not a i'm not a freshwater biologist now so um yeah i don't know exactly what what's going on but we tend to see those those cyanobacterial blooms in um in lakes rather than rivers but you get other kinds of problems in rivers you know there's a lot of little creatures that you wouldn't know are in rivers until you go kicking around the stones and putting a net out and collecting them. We take our students down to do this kind of river sampling quite often.

And you see all kinds of weird and wonderful beasts like mayflies and stoneflies. And the larvae of loads of our insects actually live as little freshwater invertebrates in lakes and rivers and streams. And that's those little weird things you see floating around when you really look at it. Yeah, or they'll be under the rocks. The really cool stuff is under the rocks. Wow. So turn the rocks over and see what you find. And they're like little, just little kind of shrimpy things.

Yes. You know, they're really cute. But, I mean, this could be another reason for our insect declines is the fact that we're now polluting the habitat of a lot of, you know, the dragonfly larvae can't survive. They're nurseries. Yeah yeah wow um so yeah it's kind of it's kind of invisible like when you get into zoology and get into biodiversity you find you see all this stuff that other people don't see and i think it's a bit of a superpower you see the world in a completely different way

we think about bees and we think about flies and we have an awareness of wasps and that's about as far as that's about as far as i used to take it until i started to learn what biodiversity was and started to think about everything in terms of a system and then i started to care about everything i mean just a quick one on on lochney like let's just say the government or whatever because there's the problem as well as it being up north. Let's just say that the aristocrat who owns it gives it over to an organization who are interested in fixing it.

Is it the type of thing you can go, I can see how someone could try and fix that or is it just done? And it's a big question, I know, but like... Yeah, no, I think that it's not beyond the point no return i don't think i think that it could be fixed i think it would require a big all of landscape approach and it would require a social and ecological solution you know it's not just about a lake yeah it's not just about a lake it's about how we use the land how we treat our own

sewage waste how we treat you know um runoff's about how we use the land, how we treat our own sewage waste, how we treat, you know, runoff from farms, how we farm the land surrounding us. I mean, Loch Ness is a huge body of water and it's fed by, you know, a number of different rivers up in the north. So you'd have to really look at the whole of the landscape that's feeding into Loch Ness and think about how we can change what we do on the land to prevent it you know to prevent those nutrients from getting in and and you know they're they're restoration science is is coming on in leaps and bounds and we have you know we're figuring out lots of different ways of restoring ecosystems we need to do more of that i mean obviously the you know the first line of defense is don't let it get into that state but if it is you know's a lot of there's a lot of things that we can do to improve the situation.

At every point of this conversation, right? Like everything comes up against capitalism. Everything comes up again. Like. The lake is that because someone was making money somewhere else. lake is that way because someone was making money somewhere else you know I mean I know that the owner for years was selling the sand there was sand present in the lake so that was being sold and extracted for building then you have farmers who are just doing their thing and farming and their fertilizer goes into the lake but at all points there you have people just earning a living that's capitalism and yeah the most uncomfortable thing around the world

about biodiversity collapse climate collapse is is scientists like yourselves have to go to the powers that be and go the problem here is is is the literal system of how the world is working right now the problem is capitalism like that's a tough conversation how are you finding that that is a tough conversation um so i guess i would approach it from uh the point of view as we need a balancing force right we need We need something to kind of counteract the simple optimization that pure capitalism leads to. It's the cost efficiency of everything without the real costs being built in. So we either need to build in those real costs, the costs to us, to our health, to our clean clean water our ability to keep ourselves well and happy

in our you know functioning environments there's this cost to every single one of us that just aren't built in to the um to the cost that we pay for goods and that farmers earn and you know everything else like that and so that's one side of it and the other side of it you know building in those real costs would be a great step and the other side of it is just regulation then make stuff so expensive that people can't afford it well yeah maybe yeah um but but but then we then we choose what to subsidize don't we you know as a as a country we subsidize fossil fuel use currently to a large degree we're subsidizing you know the and certain kinds of farming and things like that and that you know maybe those subsidies would be better used planting trees along, you know, rivers to stop the runoff from going into the rivers or

putting in place sediment traps or, you know, there's lots of things we could be subsidizing that we're not. And instead we're subsidizing some of the wrong things. We're subsidizing the pollution and not the solution. Yes, absolutely. Sometimes again, what I like to say to myself, and it's after I speak to my mother was it really that bad in the 50s like I mean what I mean there is describing a world

where things are just a little bit more scarce like to say for me to say to myself no you can't have a banana why can't you have a banana because they're over there in Costa Rica and it's really expensive to get it to Ireland. So a banana, like, you know, they used to rent out pineapples.

Did you ever hear of that? Yeah, yeah. Pineapples are like the height of luxury, weren't they? You just used to show them off at your dinner table. You didn't need them. People would rent them. And then the poorer you are, you got the third rent of the pineapple. Oh, we'd be manky by then.

It's like, even when you you if you were to walk around dublin and you look at some of the railings from the georgian era you look at the tops of those railings if you look closely you'll see in some of the designs you'll see pineapples because pineapples were so luxurious it's like no you can't have a pineapple certainly not because you can't really grow them here and and just it's scarcity you know is what i'm talking about there like my my ma as well tells me about um you know we were talking about beef and the idea to my mother in the 50s we'll say or the 40s you're gonna have spaghetti bolognese every day of the week if you want that was mad like no you're not you're gonna have beef once a month if you're lucky yeah and she spoke about like in limerick and i actually quite like

the sound of this like limerick's known as pig town is it yeah yeah and because we we had a pork industry for years but what people in limerick used to do and i'm talking about people who lived in the the inner city people would have a pig out their back garden right and this pig would eat all the household waste and the pig would eat the waste and then the pig's dung they're using for fertilizer for stuff that they're growing and then they take that pig when it's fattened on the household waste and they bring it into town and the pig is slaughtered and butchered and the person leaves with a wheelbarrow full of bacon and blood and sausages. And that's their meat for the year. And people lived like that. But isn't that doesn't that sound so sustainable?

I mean, I know you're still killing an animal there, but. Yeah, that's so it's just, you know, it's, but it's not the way we live now, right? No. We live in such dense urban, you know, cities and that's actually, it's actually quite sustainable to have people living very, very densely. If we wanted everyone to have their own pig, we'd be using this land much more intensively. we'd be using this land much more intensively. So if you think back even just to the famine, everybody had their acre of potatoes. There was 8 million people living in the country. It was very densely populated, but to feed that population, everyone needed to be growing their potatoes. So the countryside was actually used very, very intensively back then. And you

see old potato furrows in places that are now national parks, like in the Burren National Park, for example. One of the sites I work in, there's old potato furrows, you know, so they would have farmed, you know, that thin layer of soil for potatoes on top of the limestone pavement. Like every inch of the country was probably farmed to produce that. But they might have made a barracks of the land as well, though, did they? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns back then either, you know. The Burren is another great example. That used to be forest, you know, back before humans, you know, came to Ireland. It would have been, you know, there would have been some areas of open grassland on the very thin soils and the very rocky areas. But there would have been a lot more hazel woodland and oak woodland and things like that.

And then that was cleared. And then a lot of the soil eroded. So that's what produced that landscape of the burrow and it wouldn't have looked like that you know nine eight thousand years ago no and it would have had a lot more soil on it would have had more trees on it we were rainforest i mean yeah yeah there was temperate rainforest yeah i think that ireland was once a rainforest and that's kind of what we're supposed to be but we're not. Exactly right. It's mad. Let's take a little break now for an ocarina pause.

I don't have an ocarina today, but I'm in my studio. So I have a variety of instruments and I think, let's do something strange. I've got an instrument here called a flexitone. It's a Latin percussion instrument that makes a very odd noise. So I'm going to play the flexitone, and then you're going to hear an advert for something. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever?

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You would have heard an advert for something. That instrument's used quite a lot in 90s West Coast rap music, in G-Funk in particular. I need to know how that started or how it happened. It's a niche instrument, but if you know that sound, you know it from like Dr. Dre or Tupac or, it's in the it's in the opening credit music for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

A queer little instrument. So support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. If this podcast is bringing you joy mirth merriment distraction whatever it is that has you coming listening to this podcast please consider paying me for the work that i'm doing because this is my full-time job it's how

i earn a living so i rent out my office it's how i pay all my bills this is my job it's my career bills this is my job it's my career and only because of the support of my patrons am i able to do it so if you can support via patreon please do i'm talking about the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it if you listen to my podcast would you like buy me a coffee in real life or buy me a pint because you like listening to it well you can via the patreon but if that's too expensive for you if you're not at work at the moment whatever don't worry about it you can listen for free you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gets a podcast and i earn a living and it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. My book Topografia Hibernica, it's available now. Please buy a copy if that's what you're into,

if you like short stories. So I'm recording this on the past but you're listening to this on the 15th which means that tomorrow night, 16th, I'm in Coventry and there are a few tickets left for Coventry it's almost sold out and then Edinburgh's sold out Friday, Saturday in Belfast Belfast and the waterfront is actually sold out but they had held back a bunch of tickets in case I needed them for guest list

and I don't so there's probably like possibly 10 tickets left for Belfast if you want them and then this Sunday the 19th Dublin, my homecoming gig There's probably like possibly 10 tickets left for Belfast. If you want them. And then this Sunday the 19th. Dublin. My homecoming gig.

I'll have a belly full of English sausages. I have a wonderful guest. There's very few tickets left for that. But Vicar Street on Sunday the 19th. Come along to that. Because that's going to be loads of crack. And I just love my Vicar Street gigs. Sunday night and I just love my Vicar Street gigs Sunday night I always do my Vicar Street gigs

on like a Sunday or a Tuesday or a Monday and the nights that other acts like don't want Vicar Street because it's hard to sell on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday I take those nights because you can come to my gig you don't have to drink. It's a lovely relaxed night.

It's closer to theatre or the cinema. And you can be home in bed. Up for work the next day with a clear head on you. And then once Vicar Street is done. I'm going to chill it a bit for the gigs. I'm going to try and relax for December. I've spent two years writing a book. I just want to take a break.

For December. And all I want to do is write this podcast each week. Because I love doing this podcast. But just to have a bit of space. Where that's the only thing I'm doing. And then my next gigs after that are. In February. Where I'm going to be.

Two nights in Berlin. One of them is sold out. And then Oslo. In February. I can't wait to gig in Oslo. I can't wait to go to fucking Oslo. I've never been there. I'm going to go to Viking museums. I'm going to do some Viking shit.

I'm going to experience extreme cold that I've never known before in February up in Oslo. But I'm also doing a live podcast there on the 6th of February. So if you're in Oslo come along okay back to my chat with the wonderful Professor Yvonne Buckley

for Science Week check out sfi.ie to see some Science Week events I have a theory I'm going to say this you know this is a crazy theory but I just want you to hear it and you can take off your academics hat when you're listening to it okay

so I reckon that mythology but I just want you to hear it and you can take off your academics hat when you're listening to it. Okay. So I reckon that mythology, right, mythological beliefs and folklore exist in the human animal to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity, right? Because we're animals, humans are animals and we're animals with language and i just i find that with so much mythology like up until the 1600s in ireland it was illegal to kill a white butterfly because people truly believed that white butterflies contained the souls of dead children wow and also people didn't fuck with bees because if you look at irish mythology and bees bees belong to the goddess bridget and bridget lived in the other world and her bees in the other world which was like the irish pagan heaven but it's not a heaven it's a parallel universe

bridget was over there and people believed that she had an orchard and she tended bees in this orchard and then the bees would travel through mist in the morning into our dimension. And that's how they would fertilize flowers. But you didn't fuck with bees because bees belong to Bridget. And then you go all around the world. Like, you know, of course, the story about when they reintroduced the wolf in Yellowstone National Park and how it improved biodiversity. So I looked at that story. Yellowstone National Park and how it improved biodiversity. So I looked at that story,

but I also then looked at the mythology of the Crow Nation Native Americans who are indigenous to Yellowstone. If you look at their mythology, which is a couple of thousand years old, their creator God is a wolf or a coyote. So if you look at their mythology going years back, the most important animal to them is the wolf. And then you find that science proves that. And it's just a crazy theory that I have that I think, I think mythology is there in the human animal to stop us doing what we've done.

Because if you look at what, you look at colonialism and the whole thing with colonialism is you eradicate the language and beliefs of a culture so that you can extract wealth from the land. Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't think it's crazy at all. I just wanted to get your take on it. Yeah, no. So I'm going to take my academic hat off, as you suggested, and I'm going to tell you my opinion.

my academic hat off as you suggested, and I'm going to tell you my opinion. I think that, that, you know, a lot of those myths and even, you know, the basis of many practices and religions are based on a sustainable way of living.

Because if you think about it back in the day, all you had was what you could get from your bit of land for you and your family. So you, you know, you, you had to manage things so that you had food next year next month you couldn't write things down too you couldn't write anything down so you have to have

oral culture and storytelling you couldn't write exactly yeah or exactly stories and the stories had to be memorable so you know you'd have kind of encode these rules of living into your stories and the stories the the best stories, the ones that survived were the ones that were much more transmissible, you know, that were more fun to hear, easier to remember, easier to recount. So you get these kind of encoded rules of living in the myths and legends. And it's just fascinating to try and kind of then exhume what those rules of living would have been from those myths and legends. And then see if science agrees with it. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, more and more now, putting my academic hat back on again,

more and more now ecologists are recognizing the value of traditional ecological knowledge and saying, look, you know, there's a lot of really useful information that's being encoded in traditional ecological practices and stories and myths and legends. And we're increasingly using those when we're looking for the solutions that we need for the climate crisis, for example, for the biodiversity crisis. You know, there's nuggets of information in there that are just invaluable. And there's ways of managing ecosystems that traditional peoples have been doing for centuries or millennia that we can learn from and say, okay, this is what we need, you know, to manage fisheries sustainably, for example, or,

you know, to, to manage, you know, forests for products that we can get out of them, um, you know, maintain ourselves on forest products while still, you know, maintaining the forest there as a closed canopy system, for example, you know, so, um, I think there's a lot in what you're saying what i'm poking around with there as well yvonne is is like what you've described there about scientists now listening to indigenous knowledge right like you you're in trinity college like you're a scientist you're a professor but if you the scientific method i see it as a very enlightenment thing. It's something that we get from the enlightenment. But then you look at when that came about, it was also at the same time that colonization was happening.

And like in psychology at the moment, the serious psychologists are having to look at the use of magic mushrooms. You know, I spoke to a a dude he was a professor of psychology in australia and his work is basically looking at psychedelics you know looking at psychedelics to improve people's mental health and the issue that the biggest issue is you're speaking about holistic kind of indigenous knowledge and then trying to bring this in line with the modern scientific method and is there something similar going on in your area with what we were speaking about there going I'm a scientist but also there might be some value here in mythology or folklore absolutely you know how do you get those two things to work beside each

other because without someone thinking oh should ask just a silly old stories i just want pure evidence yeah yeah that's interesting i work a lot on plants um for a zoologist yeah but i work on plants as well and uh you know even just the names of plants give you clues as to their ecology and what they were used for and their chemical composition even no way so yeah so an example well my favorite plant the one i do most i have a global project on a ribwort plantain which is a really common plant around the world and we're trying to figure out you know um what kinds of environmental conditions cause it to to grow you know why does it occur from the subarctic to the subtropics why are you so fascinated with it like

this this one plant because it can grow everywhere from from finland all the way through to um like subtropical australia and it's the same plant same plant yeah we've done the genetics same species everywhere um but in ireland it's called slonlus which means health plant so it's it's it's it's you know it's it's common name in irish indicates what it was used for and it's it's brilliant for nettle stings so you could rub it on your nettle stings and it's the original dock actually you know people say oh you should rub docks on nettle stings yeah that's rubbish so the reason why they say rub docks and nettle stings is because docks and nettles often grow together yeah yeah so they just go oh the docks are convenient we'll rub that on but the docks

have got nothing chemically that helps um with nettle stings but this this plant ribber plantain does so would i know what if i saw it um it's kind of one of those invisible plants it's everywhere and you wouldn't recognize it you know so it's got long narrow leaves and it's got kind of these funny flowers which don't really look like flowers they're kind of like black heads with a little ring of a little tutu like a ballerina's tutu of stamens around it so it's it's quite once you have it pointed out to you you'll see it everywhere um but yeah those and so it has all these uses and in eastern europe it's used as a cough medicine and a cough syrup and now coming around to the the ecology end of this it the reason why it's got all

of these medicinal uses is because of the chemicals in the plant that are used to deter herbivores. So caterpillars and the larvae of weevils and things like that, that eat the plant, the plant is defending itself using these chemicals. So, so it gives you a clue as to, you know, what, what's the chemical composition of this plant, you know, and that we secondarily come across, you know, through trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years, people figured out what uses they could put this plant to. They could drink it as a tea to cure their coughs. They can rub it on, you know through trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years people figured out what uses they could put this plant to they could drink it as a tea to cure their coughs they can rub it on you know minor injuries and things like that and it's the chemicals that the plant has been using to fight fight against things that eat it that we are then making use of so i find that fascinating and just a little question about the research around this plant, right?

Like, so you have this plant and it's the same one and it grows everywhere. Yep. Like, the first thing that came to my head there when you mentioned that is I was thinking, there are certain crops that are dying. And like I saw recently, they just figured out about a month ago how to grow baked beans in England yeah it's a type of haricot bean it's a haricot bean and it used to come from France and now they're like oh brilliant we can grow it in England now and I was like isn't that fantastic think of all the transport that doesn't have to happen yeah are you thinking of if this plant can survive everywhere in the world what

does that have that makes it unique and if some other plant is going extinct because of climate change we can i don't know engineer the seed to have some of this stuff yeah well that's that's certainly one of the uses that the research can be put to and you know we found that so humans have actually transported it to australia and to amer America and to Africa. It wouldn't have naturally occurred there. And in North America, it's called white man's footsteps because it grows where, you know, where the first Europeans would have gone. Oh, Jesus, isn't that amazing? They took it with them. You know, it's basically the seeds would be mixed up in hay for the horses, for example.

Wow. So really fascinating social kind of history to this plant as well. That's beautiful, isn't it? It's beautiful. It is beautiful. Scary and beautiful. It's terrifying because I imagine the indigenous American people, they're not a fan of white men's footsteps at all because that means death and eradication.

So for them, it was quite frightening. Exactly. That's a warning. And fascinating that they would have seen know seen this plant and you know seeing their environment change you know even down to individual plants that never occurred before white men europeans came to north america and now suddenly their environment has changed and you know that's noted and that goes into the the name of the plant that they find you know it's just fascinating so i was thinking of something a little bit off topic when i was going to say i'm going to tangent myself there for a second and then and then circle back again you go on go on your tangent

go on go on your time well interestingly now that plant is now in in north america and a really rare native endangered butterfly species in north america the caterpillars eat that plant wow so it's now become kind of integrated into the ecology of the system in north america in an interesting way in a non-destructive way yeah it's not a hugely destructive plant species it's one of those kind of non-native plant species it just kind of hangs around not doing very much harm um but i've heard that about hedgehogs in ireland i've heard hedgehogs here and if they were brought over by the normans and then they kind of chilled out and said we can work with this we're okay I mean would you agree with that or hedgehogs don't seem to do a hell of a lot of harm no I wouldn't I wouldn't be um trying to get

rid of the hedgehogs no I think they can stay okay cool it's but it's weird isn't it that we're having this conversation about what are the good animals and the good plants and what are the bad animals and the bad plants what is trying to see what what what ends up working with an ecosystem what ends up trying it because you don't hear about the ones that work yeah you hear about the ones that are invasive like japanese knotweed and stuff exactly they're destroying things yeah and i was going to go on because i just like uh this is a mad tangent but have you ever heard of um oh god i think it's called long distance nuclear warnings no but what it is is it's fascinating because when you spoke there about the this plant being called white men's footsteps so organizations that are burying nuclear waste right and i'm talking

so they have to bury this nuclear waste and they bury it far far far underground but this stuff never is never ever safe so the people who are burying it have to figure out if society collapses how do you warn people in like 10 000 years oh yes yeah did you hear about the glow cats no i didn't didn't. So one serious solution to this, and I love it because it's insane, is someone suggested the best way in 10,000 years to warn people about nuclear waste

if someone was to come across it. Because if someone came across it, like a civilization that's like ours, it'd be like finding the pyramids. You're just going to go, your curiosity is gonna take you down there so they have these warnings and the warnings are beautiful because they sound like uh foundational literature it's like nothing good is beyond this point beyond this point is death

and destruction only i'm trying to figure out how you can say this to someone in 10 000 years but one solution that was presented was you genetically engineer cats right they reckon cats will survive no matter what happens right so you genetically engineer cats so that they glow in the dark when they're near nuclear waste and then create mythology and religion and songs that might survive in 10 000 years time so whatever happens in 10 000 years people will know glowing cats are bad and stay the fuck away but we're not really sure why that is gloriously mad i love isn't it so you reckon my plantago could be could be one of those survivors cockroaches plantago cats yeah we should we should make them all glow in the dark and um create a whole religious

religious um thing around them yeah but that's what they're saying because brilliant i mean jesus we still have greek myths we still have yeah yeah yeah we still speak about uh like irish mythology and bridget that could be four or five thousand years old i spoke to a dude uh mancon magen who's a folklorist yeah he was with uh indigenous aboriginal people and they have stories that are could be 25 000 years old they have mythology that's so old it reflects literal changes in the art oh that's incredible which is astounding you know because that's the power of oral mythology um I'm gonna I'm gonna add one more weird weird thing to your to your um

cultural transmission there's a species of bird in australia called albert's lyrebird that's a great mimic so in in its natural environment it would be mimicking other birds so it creates this beautiful song you know to try and attract a female and warn off other males that's composed of the songs of loads of other bird species yeah and and they're culturally these songs are not just what the bird hears in its own lifetime it's culturally transmitted from one generation to another so you might you know as a lyrebird you might learn from your father who learned from his grandfather who learned from his great-grandfather you know so you get these cultural transmission and so you can get sounds preserved from way back in the past from Aboriginal people with their clapping sticks that are preserved by the lyrebirds because they'll mimic human noises as well.

So they mimic the clapstick songs of Aboriginal people. And more recently, lyrebirds have been incorporating the sounds of chainsaws into their songs. chainsaws jesus christ into their songs as you know it's it's just it's incredibly well i find it very affecting very sad that now they've moved on to mimicking chainsaws because that's one of the dominant noises that they hear in their environment but they also preserve this long history the other thing as well yvonne is is like that's unbelievably sad but the thing is too like when we spoke about we'll say say mythology, the best stories survive. Yeah, that right there is such a good story that every single person is going to hear it. Every single person who hears there is a bird in Australia who sounds like chainsaws because it represents the destruction of their environment.

Every single person who hears that is going to remember it. And everyone who hears that, then they've connected with a part of themselves that makes them care about this stuff a little bit more. I hope so. That would be a really nice outcome. Yeah, that's very sad, you know, and that's the power of storytelling there. You know, that's very sad. Just an aside, because I've never spoken to a zoologist before,

and I just want to know if you know anything about this. Do you know migratory birds? Like the ones that end up down in Africa and they come to Ireland swallows I think yeah yeah I've heard that there's certain migratory birds and they literally have quantum computers in their heads like the way that they navigate the world is they use a quantum split experiment do you know anything about that is the truth in that or is it yeah no i had i had a chat to a quantum scientist um a few months ago actually about exactly this topic because i was fascinated and they're using they're using this ability of um you know this

this quantum ability of some uh some birds to design quantum sensors and for other purposes as well so this is kind of like bio-inspired design so there is so much and don't ask me how it works i have no idea how it works except that it is it is a real thing and quantum scientists are using it so it must be true um but it's it's it just leads you know there's just so much in the natural world that we don't yet understand yet and this is another one of the fascinating things that you get as a zoologist or a wildlife biologist or an ecologist or anyone who studies the natural world. There's so much that we don't know still about animals and plants and fungi and bacteria. And it's, you know, a lot of it's invisible, you don't see it.

But once you get into it, it's just full of weird and wonderful surprises and lots of them have you know really useful um outcomes as well for people yeah so yeah it's fascinating another thing and i know all my questions have been about plants and you're a zoologist but it's oh no i do plants too it's fine i need to know about um the mushroom internet because again this is another one of these things like how much of it is bullshit and how much of it is true because it sounds astounding the idea that you've got these fungus underneath the earth and it allows plants to communicate with each other and share resources yeah like as a as an expert what's the crack with that how much is is real

yeah so the jury's out actually scientifically on how much of it is rubbish and how much of it is is true um so it was such a brilliant idea you know this idea of the wood wide web this kind of network of fungi you know that lives under the soil and connects trees and instead of like having a forest with fungi attached you have fungi that are farming a forest you know it kind of flips the idea of how the world works on its head, you know, and that we love that kind of thing, you know, that's just fascinating. Yeah, there's lots of evidence that fungi move nutrients around between trees, but whether they're actually farming the forest, you know, and whether it's the fungi driving the system, or whether it's the trees, you know, kind of, it's probably a bit of both, you know,

it's probably not as radical as the wood wide web you know some of the rhetoric around that but there's there's elements of that definitely working in in forests and grasslands and everywhere else and fungi can transmit messages electrically across their entire bodies you know and they can they're they're you know the filaments of the fungus can go for kilometers so this idea that a fungus could be communicating from one end of its body to another over over kilometers and potentially even communicating with plants that are that far apart as well, you know, that's fascinating. Like I heard that like, if a tree is sick, or if a tree is being attacked by a disease, that tree can use the fungal network to warn other trees. Yes. So I've been lecturing on this this week actually there is there is some evidence

that um when plants are attacked by a herbivore something that's eating them they can transmit messages you know warning other plants of this attack and they can transmit these messages in a bunch of different ways what is through connected fungi for example another way is they release chemicals that go into the atmosphere that could be sensed by other trees so they're actually have these chemical communication mechanisms like a scent you know you can think about it like a scent and when other trees detect this they mount their own defenses so they can you know up regulate their chemical defenses in response to detecting the fact that you know their neighbor is being eaten even if that neighbor is a different species so plants are you know communicating with each other above ground below ground um you know they're they're doing stuff they might not

look like they're doing stuff but they're almost as fascinating as animals i reckon but that's ancient knowledge but only recently is science going oh this is actually true okay and yeah like i see that as right there is is an example of how indigenous knowledge and now science are coming together quite comfortably the mushroom internally well the the this this this concept that everything is connected you know is is that's ecology you know that that's that's we will fully acknowledge that that's the basis of our scientific discipline is that animals, plants, soil, the atmosphere, they're all connected. So ecology and that concept of everything being connected are perfectly compatible. I guess where we differ from the kind of traditional ecological knowledge is that we start we start to get very specific about what is connected to what and how and why and how much and how much can you perturb it before it

breaks and you know how many species can you lose before you lose a particular ecosystem service so we get very very specific about those connections um but the broad general concepts are very compatible i see what you're saying and And even recently, Mankon Magan, who I mentioned earlier, he works with an organization called Home Tree. So they plant forests. And what Mankon said that part of his job when he does this is he's like, I just can't, I can't just plant a forest. I can't just get oak seeds and decide I'm doing an oak forest. What he does is he walks the landscape for hours hoping to find an old oak tree, not just for that tree, but for the mycelium in the soil. Yeah. That it's not just about planting a tree.

It's about, hold on a second, this soil here and the fungus here this could be quite old and that's very important if i want this entire forest to grow yeah absolutely and and science would back that up that that it's you know the the soil that um that the things that go into the soil in an old forest are quite different to the soil you know where, where you're trying to, if you're trying to restore a forest, for example, you know, getting hold of soil from ancient woodland, the close by would be fantastic. Or, you know, being able to grow out or, you know, collect and grow some of those really critical fungi and introduce them with the seed so that you're creating a little kind of fungal nest for the seed to grow up with. You know you're creating you're putting that connection um you know in place right at the start could really help with the restoration of that forest and another thing and this is something carly ennis said to me like

what i love about biodiversity and nature and what gives me a great feeling of hope is this sense of build it and they will come yeah like i had a six foot patch up my back garden and i planted native like proper native irish wildflower about three years ago and within two years i was seeing insects i'd never seen in my life grasshoppers big grasshoppers and it felt amazing because it gave me hope yeah I didn't ask any grasshoppers in I'd never seen a grasshopper before I just grew the right plants yeah and the plants like how did that happen how did I plant native Irish wildflower and then two years later I'm seeing insects that I've never seen before how How did they find out? Like I'm in a city. How did they know?

Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, so insects get dispersed around the place through their own power of flight, but they can also kind of get moved around by the wind, you know, so there's insects being moved around everywhere kind of randomly as well as under their own steam. And I guess it's a case of you know if you throw enough things at a patch you know something will stick if the conditions are right so there was probably baby grasshoppers coming into your garden you know every single year but they were just they were just never sticking you know they were dying or they were deciding to go somewhere else or

you know they just didn't stick so now that you have the right conditions for them and if anything does happen to come along um it can it can actually uh thrive there now and another another great example of this is that uh the lawns at trinity at the front of college and yes so there's uh the front there where where um plants have been planted as a wild flower an ornamental wildflower meadow but just just inside the gates, that's really pretty and it's grand. But just inside the gates, we have these two old grass quadrangles, the traditional kind of college lawns. And both of them have a birch tree on, and they were not mown this summer. So if you come into Trinity and you have a look, there's all this kind of scraggy looking lawn grass just inside the entrance. And it's been absolutely fascinating to see what's come up just and you have a look, there's all this kind of scraggy looking long grass just inside the entrance. And it's been absolutely fascinating

to see what's come up just when you stop mowing, just for the summer. We've had orchid species coming up and orchids take, they could take, you know, years to decades to grow and flower. So I find it fascinating. Are orchids the parasitic ones today? Well, these ones are not parasitic.

These ones make their own, make their own food. But they, the fascinating thing for me is that they've just been sitting there getting mown every year for, you know, tens, hundreds of years, getting mown, getting mown, getting mown.

Never had the chance to flower. And then this is their year, you know, suddenly there's no mowing for the first time in, you know, recorded history of Trinity. And up they pop, they've got their chance and they flowered and they're the first time in you know recorded history of trinity and um up

they pop they've got their chance and they flowered and they're setting seed and you know there'll be more orchids next year so i it's it's just fascinating what can come up when you when you actually just step back a bit manage it for biodiversity and and see what happens and then i like just as a wider ecosystem question right so you you're seeing this this wildflower meadow in trinity and you're looking at the insects is anything happening with larger animals are you seeing any different birds or anything now on trinity now that the wildflower meadow has been allowed to do its thing ah so then we come to the question of scale and this is something that concerns ecologists a lot we're always talking about scale so um you know what size of intervention will make a difference

to different kinds of animals like a small wildflower meadow like that you know will have positive effects on bees and butterflies and grasshoppers and small things but if you actually want to make a difference to you know um resources for for large birds which fly around and use lots of different areas you need to do something at the scale of like the whole city or a whole landscape and that's where things start to get really interesting because you know what if we had you know networks of these you know long grass um meadowy places um you know in every single suburb in the in the um um in the city you know then you're starting to get things at a scale at which animals like birds and mammals can actually use them. And I think the last few years with the all Ireland, the all

Ireland pollinator plan, we're starting to get that element of scale now because every tidy, every tidy towns organization in the country is signed up to the all Ireland pollinator plan. All the local authorities, you know, are now leaving areas uncut for several weeks to months during the summer so we're starting to see and I've never seen so many cow slips so many orchids on just on the sides of the roads as I have in the last few years completely unscientific anecdotal um observation but yeah see some people hate it some people hate it. Some people hate that. Some people think, oh, it's ugly. That roundabout is awful. That's ugly.

Because we're so conditioned by the lawn mentality, which, again, for me, that's pure colonialism. You look at the great lawns of the 1700s and Capability Brown and all these people designing lawns. I mean, I take that back to the Enlightenment. It's when Western man said we've got science now we're brilliant let's control nature yeah and the lawn for me is an is is is an arrogant human thing to show that you can control and design nature so when we see wonderful wildflower

meadows or a wild roundabout it's hard for my brain to go that's not messy that's beautiful that's how yeah yeah yeah exactly we're conditioned yeah and then and you know but there's all kinds of complications as well because you know do you go for the you know you said you had a lovely native wildflower meadow with native species yeah you know that's that's really good and and you know local seed um or you just stop mowing and see what comes up in your patch you know you don't have to dig it all up and replant it necessarily. And sometimes you do, but, you know, a lot of the times you can just stop mowing for a bit. You don't have to completely stop mowing.

You can mow around the edges to make it look tidy. You can, you know, mow it down in the winter and remove the cuttings. And that actually, you know, reduces the nutrients and encourages a more diverse suite of species. But we also need to adjust our aesthetic expectations here. You know, it's not all, you know, meadows from, you know, French Impressionist paintings of poppies and, you know, cornflowers. And that kind of romantic idea of a wildflower meadow is probably not the best.

Well, I know it's definitely not the best thing for biodiversity. Our best biodiversity meadows are, you know, kind of grassy looking, you know, more green than red poppy, you know, subtle colors, you know, quite subtle beauty. And we need to understand what that, you know, what the subtleties of that beauty are and adjust our aesthetic expectations away from the fireworks of, you know, poppies and cornflowers and more into the gentle greens and purples and yellows and the dandelions and the daisies and, you know poppies and cornflowers and more into the the gentle greens and purples and yellows and the dandelions and the daisies and you know all these things that are part of our childhoods and part of you know should be part of our identity but have kind of been knocked out

of us well what i find fascinating about that is is sometimes i get the sense of like i i don't think we know what ireland's supposed to look like no we don't you know unless you uh like I know Eoghan Dalton down there in the Bear Peninsula he's really having a crack at doing a proper yeah indigenous native Irish uh rainforest yeah I'm not even sure I know what that looks like yeah you know because I've been to forests but most of the forests I've been to I have seen some old wood forests but like only up until five years ago I thought that a pine forest was a forest and it's like it's not a forest that's industrial agriculture right there that's not a forest you know um what I would whenever I speak

about this stuff I always like to try and leave people with a sense of hope, you know, me doing my little six foot wildflower garden, you know, which is a tiny thing in your opinion, does that really contribute to change? Yes, I think it does. And I can give you a few, a few reasons why I think that, I mean, I think first of all, we, so I, you know, I work in this field. I see the kind of, you know, the negative side of it all the time. And, you know, people often ask me, how do you how do you cope? You know, what do you do to keep hope going? And it's like it's things like that. It's, you know, having your own patch, seeing it develop, being connected to nature, growing your own food, you know, seeing biodiversity. There's no there's no substitute for being out there and experiencing it yourself. It's good for your brain's good for your mind your mental health it's really good for your physical health as well for me it gave me a feeling of agency and control over the uncertainty of climate anxiety absolutely you're doing something exactly yeah the best antidote to climate anxiety or biodiversity anxiety is doing something about it and you know you mentioned home tree there yeahTree there. Yeah. You know, loads of admiration for them.

They're doing a great job. And Birdwatch Ireland, you know, we've got loads of fantastic NGOs, you know. So if you have your own patch and you're doing something on your own patch, that's brilliant. What about, you know, going into your Tidy Towns group and doing something at a larger scale there and having a little bit of influence there? What about joining one of our brilliant NGOs or, you know, working for one of these amazing organizations that are volunteering for one of these amazing organizations that's doing such great work or influencing your employer?

You know, you can be a banker, you could work in insurance and you can have a big influence on what your employer does because, you know, employers listen to their staff, you know, because they have a hard time finding staff these days. So if you say, why don't we have a wildfire meadow at work? Or why don't we have, you know, stop cutting our grass so often? You know, why don't we plant some trees? Why don't we, you know, so there's a lot we can do to influence these bigger organizations, you know, that can actually do things at scale and write your TD and bang on the door and say, what are you doing about biodiversity? You know, on the door and say what are you doing about biodiversity you know talk to your counselors what are you doing about biodiversity in my area all those things

are you know mean that you have agency you're doing something about it you're you know you're you're potentially being part of the solution here you are being part of the solution i'd love to get your opinion on something here which is um so like carbon credits right so let's just say someone decides to i'm i'm an organization and i'm going to build a giant native forest in ireland and this is native and it's i'm doing it in line with nothing other than biodiversity or i'm rewilding a bog and it's huge and then corporations then can come in and buy credits. They can offset their carbon emissions by buying credits in these forests. Like, what do you think of that as an overall concept?

Do you think it's workable or is it a little bit, is it greenwashing? Well, first and foremost, we need to be making sure that we're reducing fossil fuels. There's no substitute for getting out of the fossil fuel game. So anyone who's using offsets to avoid getting rid of, you know, reducing their fossil fuels there's no substitute for getting out of the fossil fuel game so anyone who's using offsets to avoid um getting rid of you know reducing their fossil fuels that's that's not appropriate um and if you think about i don't want a ryanair forest do you know what i mean well

it's it's just not going to work right if you think about the amount of land that we have and you know how much land you'd have to plant under forest to soak up all of the fossil fuel emissions that we're currently emitting and that we would continue to emit in the future if we didn't reduce, there just isn't enough land. So it's not a substitute. In no way is it a substitute for reducing fossil fuels.

So I think we need to be careful about carbon credits. There is a role for carbon credits. There will be some fossil fuel emissions that we potentially can't avoid and we should be saving you know our land-based solutions for those real unavoidable um um fossil fuel emissions you know the credits for those so you know i think land is going to become highly highly contested because of the many the many needs that we're going to have going forward. You know, we're going to still need food from our land. We're going to need home for wildlife.

You know, we need to keep nature in our landscapes. We need forests to suck carbon out of the air. We're going to need some Sitka spruce for that, for sure. We're also going to need native forests and woodlands. Are Sitka spruce for that for sure we're also going to need native forests and woodlands good for carbon today they they're very fast growing and you can they they are very efficient at pulling carbon out of the air but once you cut the Sitka spruce down um if that wood is not used in you know furniture or houses or some kind of permanent way then the carbon is just released back out to the atmosphere again like if it's used as paper or if it's used as you know chipboard or pallets or something kind of cheap that decays fast

and then it just you know you suck all that carbon out and then you release it all again but if you keep planting Sitka spruce and use the wood in houses and furniture and long life products then you can potentially build that up as a carbon storing it yeah exactly they're a nordic there's a nordic country at the moment i don't know which one but i believe they're building a wooden city yeah wow yeah and i imagine it's because of that crack you're talking about there yeah yeah i didn't know that i thought cithcospruce was just simply the root of all evil i thought this was has its uses no it has its uses um but what you don't want i guess is you know 100% your forest being

Sitka spruce we need to think about diversifying rivers doesn't it destroys rivers and it acidifies the soil and all that type of stuff uh with certain kinds of management yep if it's planted in the wrong place and if it's and if it's managed in the wrong way you know then it can cause that erosion um and and pollution of rivers and things like that so look i think there we have to work with Sitka spruce you know it is a species, but we really need to think about end of life use. And we need to think about how we are working with it as a forest species. You know, are there ways of managing like closed canopy forestry where you don't do clear cutting, you don't do, you know, felling large numbers of trees at the same time, you're felling in small groups and things like

that, which is much less damaging. So, you know, we need to find ways of working with it i think and to get the most benefit from it but alongside that commercial you know intensive forestry we also need the the restoration of native woodlands and we need native woodland plantations and we need to manage those in sensible ways as well and plant them in places where they're not going to cause more damage here's i'm going to ask you one last question, because this is something I find fascinating. So like, so whenever I bring on academics, it can be a difficult thing because like you're a professor. So academics are like, I need to be careful that I stay within my remit here and that I don't speak out of place. And your thing is zoology, but you've spoken about so much you're speaking about trees

you're speaking you know you're going outside of this and what i find interesting there is how do you as an academic stay in your lane when there's not really such a thing as a lane because you're everything you do is ecosystem related how can you say i only talk about animals and then i don't talk about the animals that these plants live around it seems to me like you're comfortable speaking about everything because you're it's ecosystem stuff you're talking about yeah and i'm just really interested in human interactions with nature as well so that that brings me into the human and social side of things quite often but i'll tell you how i stay in my lane often people

will tell me if i get out of my lane i get told all the time i'm out of my lane but um that's fine as long as we have evidence to back up what we're saying you know and i'd be comfortable you know kind of digging up the evidence for for most of the things that i've talked about today and saying look you know there is evidence for this um you know um and i learn a lot from my colleagues you know we we stand on the shoulders of giants you know we i talk to colleagues across loads of different disciplines all the time. I'm co-supervising PhD students with a professor of French literature, with a professor of electronic engineering, you know, with professors in botany and zoology and geography. You know, so I'm naturally interdisciplinary, I suppose.

And you just have to know kind of, you know, you do have to respect other disciplines as well, because they have their own norms and their own ways of scholarship and things like that, you know, that it's really important to respect that and not to think that your discipline is, you know, over, you know, so much more important than anyone else's discipline. That's just not the case. We need everyone pulling together to come up with the solutions that we need for the future. So I think it's so important to be able to talk to, to, you know, talk about subjects, bringing your unique perspective to a subject like, um, you know, like, uh, mythology or whatever, you know, we can all contribute. Is there any emerging technology or emerging field that's giving you a feeling of hope regarding the

climate or biodiversity there's lots actually i'm gonna have a hard time picking now and i think it's a one area that i'm finding fascinating at the moment is blue carbon this idea that the the oceans and the organisms in the oceans can um um lock carbon away so if you think about seaweeds or algae that grow in the oceans and oceans are huge most of our planet is oceans right so and oceans are three-dimensional so you can get you know seaweeds and algae living um you know you can get a lot of a lot of matter in there and so if we can figure out a way well we need to figure out where the carbon in the ocean goes we don't even know that yet wow so you know where is there a big carbon store at the bottom of the Mariana Trench or, you know,

in these ocean sediments? What controls the release of carbon from ocean sediments and what controls the sequestration of carbon into those sediments? There's something called, you know, there's the carbon ocean pump, you know, that we, you know, so there's so much about ocean carbon that we don't understand. And the more we understand it, the better we'll be able to then kind of, you know, figure out how to manage it and how to figure out how to get our oceans, you know, doing even more for us than they currently do. Because they've currently soaked up a lot of the temperature rise that we would have felt otherwise. And all of that's gone into our big ocean. And ocean's like a massive storage heater. So all that rise and has gone into the

oceans and it's changing how the oceans function so we really do need to understand that carbon sink so i think there's there's areas there which are really fascinating things like mangroves hold more carbon these are like coastal forests and they hold more carbon the tropical rainforests and even our salt marshes here in ireland amounts of carbon in them. Wow. So I think that, you know, we've got great potential here. We are an ocean country, you know, to exploit what we have and, you know, find solutions. And there's the wind as well, yeah. Yeah, find solutions to the problems that we have. So I think that's one big one that I'm excited about.

Something that got me feeling quite optimistic. I spoke to two scientists a couple of years back and what they're doing is studying how Ireland can take waste from our cheese and dairy industry to capture the emissions of decomposing waste of the dairy industry, which is huge, and then use that for fuel and biodiesel that can really run the country. We need to get more efficient at everything we do. So this idea of, you know, having a circular economy, so taking waste streams from one area of the economy and turning it into a resource that you can exploit or displace fossil fuels, you know, that has to be done. And that's the whole, I guess, the foundation of the bioeconomy, you know, turning these,

instead of using fossil fuels, we use wastes from food and, you know, animal waste and things like that and turn that into useful products like plastics and, you know, all the kinds of chemicals that we can't seem to live without these days. You know, we need to find those somewhere else if we're not going to use fossil fuels for those. So, you know, I think there's great potential there for, I guess, making more efficient use of the things that we have and not throwing away stuff. efficient use of the things that we have and not throwing away stuff so you know when you're going back to i guess where we started thinking about you know the 1950s or the 1980s we didn't throw away stuff you know we reuse stuff all the time biscuit tin full of needles you know what i mean exactly if you got a biscuit like but that's one little small thing that pisses me off when you go to the to duns or aldi or wherever at Christmas, right? Yeah. And you see the Quality Street.

Yeah. And I look at Quality Street and I go, I shouldn't be able to buy two Quality Streets for a tenner. That shouldn't exist. Because when I grew up, Quality Street came in a tin container and it never left the house. Exactly right. It was a valuable thing. They're not valuable anymore. They're just big plastic tubs and you buy three for a tenner

and now Quality Street has no meaning anymore. Yeah. And I know it's silly because it's Quality Street, but it's turning into beef. I need my Quality Street to be sustainable.

I want to keep that tin. I want that tin to be important. Boil it all down to we buy too much stuff. But milk used to be delivered in glass bottles and then you get the glass bottles to the milkman

the next day and they were refilled we we had there's a lot of stuff where we already had this shit sorted we had this stuff sorted and we've managed now we look at it it's like when we're speaking about meadows there we have an idea of what beauty is and this beauty that in meadows is that's a construct that was made in the 17th century and we need to look at wildflower which we see as ugly and untidy as being the new beauty yeah and i think too we need to look back as your milk comes in a glass bottle and you replace it or you hang on to that that tin you know what i mean and instead of seeing it as that's backwards that's in the past that's? And instead of seeing it as that's backwards, that's in the past, that's what my grandparents did. You go, no, that's actually progress.

Maybe not everything gets better all the time. Maybe there was a point in time where we had certain shit figured out and that was the right thing and we've gone past it. And once it becomes unsustainable, no, that's actually the bad thing we're doing now. And we need to go back to a bit of scarcity again. I totally get it. Yeah. It's it's a tough one it is and then when people do live like that it tends to be really really expensive like i started buying i started getting annoyed at myself for how much cling film i was using you know yeah so i bought the reusable beeswax um yeah but it was i could only buy that because i could afford it yeah i bought that because i had the income to afford beeswax cloth the person who doesn't have that money they're buying 99p

cling film in the pound shop you know so how do we make this stuff available for everybody and currently for it not to be a luxury item sustainable products are now luxury items that people use in a capitalistic way to show off how middle class they are yeah yeah i agree yeah yeah totally but i mean there's loads you can do with you know and actually make life cheaper for yourself you know everybody has takeaway occasionally keep the takeaway containers throw them away you know they're very handy there's simple things like that and you know eating eating less meat is good for your pocket good for your health good for the environment it's i don't believe in being extreme you know and saying you know every you know you're not allowed to eat beef anymore you know i don't

i don't think that's a helpful argument yeah um but saying you know cut down on what you eat you know just just have it as a treat have it you know once a month once a week um i'm gonna leave you go so ivan thank you so much that was such a month, once a week. I'm going to leave you go so, Ivan. Thank you so much. That was such a wonderful chat. It was so much crack. Thank you to Professor Ivan Buckley for that wonderful chat. I hope he took something from that. I hope it inspired

some hope. I hope it inspired the type of hope that creates action. I'll catch you next week, most likely with a hot take of some description. I'll catch you next week, most likely with a hot take of some description. I'll be back from my tour. And in the meantime,

I'm going to roll around in my continental quilt and eat muesli and chumescent sausages. Dog bless. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City

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