Today, Explained - A plan to protect the planet

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Or at least 30 percent of it. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Dragon Space X Go for launch.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. In a world with many problems, one problem reigns supreme. The climate emergency.

The stakes have never been higher. The odds of bipartisan agreement on this issue have possibly never been lower. But there's a new president in town, and he's hot for science. We've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer. It's Earth Week at Today Explained. We're going to talk about what's in store for this planet, the future of our future. Welcome to Earth. Week on Today Explained. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firman. Here we are at the end of

our Earth Week. We are wrapping up our coverage with a reminder of what's worth protecting and with a real-life plan to protect it. Or at least a plan to protect like 30% of it. The plan is called 30 by 30. It's kind of a big global push. Katrin Einhorn covers biodiversity for The New York Times. There's broad scientific consensus that we are experiencing a global biodiversity collapse. A million plant and animal species are threatened by extinction. I mean, it threatens entire ecosystems. This biodiversity loss is not just a tragedy. It's the single biggest problem we face. A less wild world is less able to provide for our needs, less able to maintain dependable weather and seasons,

less able to absorb our impact. And so what to do about it? And there's broad consensus that we need to save the nature that still exists. These big intact swaths of, you know, tropical rainforest and these other important ecosystems need to be preserved. And so, you know, a bunch of conservation organizations have joined with governments led by, you know, Britain and France and Costa Rica to really try and get the world to commit to set aside 30% of its land and water by 2030. And it's going to be hammered out at the UN biodiversity meeting in Kunming, China this fall. And why 30? Why is that the number? You know, scientists would say that really, given the scale of the crisis, we need more. Actually, it should be more like 50%. But I think 30% was what was agreed upon just in terms of sort of political viability.

And because it maybe has a ring to it, 30 by 30? You know, they seem to love the ring because the last UN sort of push on this front was 20 by 20. It was like 20 targets to hit by 2020. 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity. This is our chance to inject a new resolve into safeguarding and repairing our life support system. Countries of the world did not do a good job hitting those targets. None of the 20 objectives set a decade ago by some 150 countries have been fully met,

and only six were partially achieved. If anything, I think that there is, both with the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, it seems like the world is really coming to realize the real problem that we're in. And so there does seem to be a lot of interest in trying to make this happen. You mentioned that really scientists would prefer 50% of the planet to be conserved. But if by some miracle, this 30 target is hit, will there be relief in the conservation movement? Will people feel like we're good? It will certainly be a victory. I mean, look, it's not going to be easy, in part because every country is different, right? So not every country is the same when it comes to

biodiversity wealth. Here in Tambopata, Peru, E.O. Wilson once found more species of ant in a single tree than there are in all of the British Isles. And scientists have seen this pattern all over the world. More species exist near the tropics. And so, you know, what does it look like for countries that have already cut down a lot of their old growth forests are now going to tell tropical countries, you can't cut down yours, right? It's a really tricky, thorny thing. Conservationists really

hope that the world can kind of come together for a common good and figure out a way to make this fair. And that's what they will try to do in Kunming, China in the fall. I imagine part of the question here is about what preservation really looks like. Tell me what that means. Is it just you put up a barbed wire fence and no one can touch this land? Or is it more nuanced? Yeah, not at all.

There's actually a growing consensus that that is the wrong way to do conservation. That is a traditional way that it's been done in the West, right? There's this idea of sort of pure wilderness. John Muir changed the way a country viewed its wilderness. Not a resource to be harvested, he argued, but a treasure to be preserved. In fact, like what a whole body of research is showing us is that lands that are

managed by indigenous people are really biodiverse. In fact, they showed that they are at least or more biodiverse than like national and state parks. National parks or these, you know, let's say parks that are that are set aside only for nature, a lot of them actually don't have a lot of biodiversity, right? So they're called paper parks. They exist on paper. But in fact, because of poaching, because local communities aren't bought into this idea, or because they're not being actually managed appropriately, they're kind of nature wastelands. And so even like the sort of really like legacy conservation groups have come around and said, look, like indigenous rights need to be respected. These lands need to be managed sustainably.

It's not about kicking people off the land. Tell me a bit more about what we know about how biodiversity functions in lands that are managed by indigenous communities. It's not like there's one way that Indigenous peoples manage the land, right? On the contrary, there's a vast array of Indigenous cultures, all with their own relationships, their own worldviews, their own cultures, right? But there is a uniting theme of making a living off the land sustainably because you live there and you want to preserve it for future generations. You want your children to be able to eat the fish from the same waters that you eat the fish from. And that's not the case when you think about our global economy and corporations. You know, there's a desire to extract as much profit as

possible and, you know, you can move on if necessary. So that's a big difference. It's about local communities making a living from nature without taking too much. And do we know how much land worldwide at present is managed by indigenous communities? Yeah, this number is somewhat contested, but everyone can agree that it's more than a quarter. More than a quarter? Yeah. One example that comes to mind for me, because of what we've done on the show before, is the Amazon and the sort of ongoing fight between, for example, the Brazilian government and indigenous communities in the Amazon over land control. Since the 1970s, the Amazon has been steadily deforested.

Nearly 20 percent has already been wiped out. Is there something sort of in that particular instance that can teach us how this might work across different countries and cultures? You know, there's many indigenous groups that live in the Amazon region, and they're such a great example of this. I mean, they are a really striking and unfortunately tragic example of this, right? In that they are often putting their bodies on the line to protect their land. A Wawa are a tiny band of just 120 indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest.

They're patrolling what's meant to be a protected reserve. But more and more, they're discovering incursions. This track was carved through the trees to steal timber or create new farms. I'm scared sometimes, he says, but we are fighting. Six weeks later, Paolo Paulino Guajajara is now dead. I spoke with one coalition of indigenous groups from Amazonian countries. They believe that 30% is nowhere near enough.

So they want 30 by 30 to be at least 50%. They think that indigenous people managing the land is really the way to sort of staunch this crisis that we're in. Okay, so I'm not really sure how the management structure of this 30 by 30 movement works, but do indigenous people have prominent seats at the table? Not when it comes to this UN agreement. It's a structural problem because countries are the ones that have the votes. It's hard enough to get these countries to agree on anything. And there's so many different indigenous groups that would be party to this. I mean, I don't even know how that would work. But I do think that people understand that indigenous people have been better stewards of nature.

They are going to be directly affected by this. They are both directly affected by the loss of nature, as well as whatever agreement is reached in China. And so certainly people are paying lip service to the rights of indigenous people and the importance of listening to their voices. The question is, will that really matter in the actual negotiations? The United States seems like it'd be well-suited to promote the voices of indigenous communities in this effort, considering the historic appointment of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland as,

you know, the first ever Native American to lead a cabinet agency. So as a Pueblo woman, I was raised to feel connected to the earth and to carry on the legacy of environmental stewardship of countless generations who came before me, who took seriously their obligations to pass our natural treasures on to future generations. What's the U.S. involvement here? President Biden ordered his team to, you know, look into how we would set aside 30% of the U.S. by 2030. But it's a little tricky because we are not party to this U.N. biodiversity agreement. I mean, if you think of it a little bit like the Paris Agreement for climate, there's also this biodiversity agreement. They're not exactly the same, but we can kind of think of them as sort of one for climate, there's also this biodiversity agreement. They're

not exactly the same, but we can kind of think of them as sort of one for climate and one for biodiversity. And the U.S. hasn't signed on to that. So the U.S. will go to China, will sort of weigh in, will actually be very active in the talks, but it doesn't have a vote. Like it has never signed on to the treaty. It's actually the only country in the world other than the Vatican. So even without the Pope and the United States signed on, it does sound like there's enough momentum here to give this 30 by 30 push some legitimacy. And it also sounds like it's just a more realistic idea of what conservation could be, you know, a way to use land while protecting it instead of walling it off and putting up a sign that says, stay out? I think it's definitely a step forward. It's a better understanding

of how humans and nature interact. We in the United States, in the West, we make a distinction between humans and nature. We've used that distinction throughout this conversation. But, you know, I was speaking with First Nations leader in Canada, Stephen Nita. I'm part of the denomination of First Nations people in northern Canada, relatives to my southern brothers and sisters down in Apache and Navajo country. And I kept talking about, you know, Indigenous folks protecting nature. And he kept saying, we're not protecting nature. We're part of nature.

My people, in a way, refer to Earth as an island. And our creator, as Nuh Tzineh. Nuh is the term we use for an island. We say an island on an ocean or an island on a big lake. Earth to us is an island within the sea of the universe. And in any island, there's a finite resource to support the life that exists on that island. If you overextend the use of that resource, that island becomes uninhabitable. And we are nearing that point.

It is frustrating that Indigenous people don't have a vote at the United Nations level. Science has proven that Indigenous people know what they're doing. Therefore, they should be given a better and a bigger platform so that they can share their knowledge. We have an opportunity today to bring forward Indigenous knowledge systems and value systems as how we relate to Mother Earth. You know, historically, yes, we created protected areas

and parks for animals and excluded people. But we haven't been systematic to protect enough and the right type of lands to secure a healthy environment. That's the challenge and that's the opportunity. Thank you. The report for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, you've heard about the plan to protect 30% of the planet.

Now it's time to celebrate the biodiversity that remains on this rock. Some of it we're still just only now discovering. So we are going out today with some fresh facts about the Earth. My name is Brian Anderson, and I am the editor of Down to Earth, Vox's new reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis. My favorite Earth fact discovered over the past year is just how much turning the volume down on ocean noise pollution helps out marine life. Sound is the primary medium through which most any marine mammal uses to communicate and find food and find potential mates. So we know that whales vocalize to talk to one another within their pod.

Dolphins, similarly to whales, they use click-based vocalizations to talk with one another. Over the past couple of decades, with a increase in shipping traffic primarily, the oceans have been getting louder and louder. And for all these marine creatures, this is really detrimental. But then all of a sudden, the oceans got eerily quiet when the pandemic came crashing down last spring. We can assume that this brief three-month period of really do know from history, there's a very famous example. After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a similar drop in shipping traffic, maritime traffic in general, resulted in less stress hormones in whales. This makes me really hopeful because the thing about noise

is that it's really easy to turn it down. You can silence it at its source and that's going to have an immediate impact, especially in the oceans. Hi, my name is Benji Jones, and I am a reporter at Vox focused on explaining the biodiversity crisis. My favorite thing that scientists discovered about the Earth in the last year is how wombats poop cubes. So wombats, for those of you who don't know them,

are these adorable, fluffy marsupials in Australia. A wombat is closely related to a koala. These are the ones on the ground. The koala's in the tree. They're extremely chunky. I love them. Wasn't me. And a big mystery is why the poop that they leave behind is in cube form.

So literally they have piles of poop that is made up of cubes. So the secret is in their intestines. And what scientists have found is that wombats have various sections of the intestine of various thickness and elasticity, and they can vary the rates at which those sections compact the poop. And that's what leads to these cube-like structures. So it really is just about these unique intestine that the animals have. The question that is still kind of puzzling is why they're doing this at all, why they're leaving square poop behind, and some researchers think that it's to prevent the poop from rolling away because it is really how they mark their territory and

communicate with other wombats. So wombats scramble around on rocks and logs that are slippery and round poop might slide away, so the cube structure actually prevents any rolling from happening. Clever stuff. This makes me hopeful, partly because I spent a lot of my time focusing on the depressing facts of biodiversity loss. And this is a little break from that. And I just love that we're still learning secrets of nature today. Even though we know so much, like there's still so much left to learn. And if nothing else, that's another reason to prevent further loss from happening. Hi, I'm Bird Pinkerton.

I am a reporter producer for Unexplainable, Vox's science podcast. My favorite thing scientists discovered about the Earth in the last year is that there are 100 million year old bacteria living at the bottom of the ocean. One of the things that I loved about this was I was talking to like a microbiologist who studies this stuff and he was kind of like, we may have to redefine our definition of what it is to be alive. So there's this part of the ocean known as the South Pacific Gyre. And it has very few nutrients because currents kind of swirl around it, but not really in it. So it's known as a marine desert. And if you go down through 6,000 feet of water to the bottom, there are even fewer nutrients down there.

But scientists have pulled up bacteria from these bottom sediments. They used a research ship with a giant drill on the back to take samples of clay that had been deposited on the seafloor 101.5 million years ago and have been buried ever since. And they kind of fed these bacteria. And despite the fact that they are over a million years old, some of them, they came right back to life and just started multiplying. So they'd survived essentially in like the the harshest possible conditions for for millions of years and we're just like ready to go this makes me hopeful because even if we like wipe ourselves off the planet or wipe like a huge number of the species on the planet off the planet through climate change like it's an indication to me that life is unbelievably hardy and, like, some form of life will find a way to hold on.

Hello, I'm Eliza Barkley. I'm the science, health, and climate editor at Vox. Ocean acidification is like a huge kind of evil twin of climate change. Some of the CO2 that we're emitting on Earth is actually getting trapped in the ocean, where it's really problematic. It's affecting marine organisms like shellfish and coral. And so we need to find ways to basically mitigate this. And it turns out that seagrass does this naturally, which is really awesome. What the scientists found, they wrote a paper that was published in March in the journal Global Change Biology, is that as seagrass performs photosynthesis, it's actually removing carbon dioxide from the water.

And that is counteracting the acidifying effect of CO2 in the ocean. This is a relatively easy solution compared to a lot of others for dealing with ocean acidification and also for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Unlike a lot of other climate solutions that require brand new technology that's not even proven that needs to be scaled up, protecting and promoting restoring seagrass is a lot easier than a lot of other things. So just knowing that there is one more benefit to protecting and restoring seagrass, I think it's very helpful for making the case that this should be a top priority ecosystem

as we think about what we need to protect going forward. Hey, I'm Brian Resnick. I'm a science reporter at Vox. My favorite thing that scientists have discovered over the last year are just new species, new types of life documented for the first time in the scientific literature. We still don't know what most of the life on Earth is. Estimates range from 86% to as high as 99% of all life on Earth is still undocumented. And even though we're living in this time of great biodiversity loss, there's just so much more to discover. Just one institution, California Academy of Sciences, described 213 new species. I can go through the list, but it's like 101 ants and 22 crickets and 15 fishes and 11 geckos. They discovered this really pretty sea slug. It's named after roses because on the underside of the sea slug, there's these pretty

kind of rose petal polka dots. And it's just a very little pretty creature. I actually talked to the researcher who discovered this sea slug. And he first saw it 20 years ago and then couldn't find it again for a decade or more. And so the amount of work it does to like just prove that what you found is a new species, like it can take decades to just spot something and then spot it again and then spot it again and do the work to make sure like this isn't anything like any of the other sea slugs that we've seen before. It makes me want to go out into the world, or it makes me excited for other people to go out in the world and discover the extent of the beauty and the ingenuity and the precise biology of everything that exists on Earth. this invention wrought by evolution. And yes, we also know we're living in this time of biodiversity loss. But in order to protect things, we need to know that they exist, and we need to know why they're special, and we need to know how they live and where they live and document all these things

in scientific literature so we can protect them. So it gives me hope that we discover new species because you have to know it exists to be able to help it. That's it for Earth Week on Today Explained. Thank you so much for listening. Earth Week was brought to you by Miles Bryan, Muj Zaydi, Will Reed, Halima Shah, Cecilia Lay, Victoria Chamberlain, and Amina Alsadi, who's our supervising producer. We had edits from Jillian Weinberger, facts checked by Laura Bullard, engineering by Christian Ayala, but mostly Afim Shapiro, who dreamed up our theme, additional music from Breakmaster Cylinder, a touch of saxophone from MC Mike Chamberlain. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's VP of audio.

Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And now that we're done with Earth Week, we're going to turn our attention to the gangbusters state of the housing market in the United States. And we need your help. If you are trying to buy a place right now, we want to hear about it. If you bought a place during the pandemic and are now second guessing your purchase, we definitely want to hear about it. And if you're nowhere near either of those two, but have some thoughts on the general boom and bust of the housing market in this country, tell us about that too. We've got this phone line where you can call and leave a message. The number is 202-688-5944. Or you can send us an email todayexplainedatvox.com.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We might use them on the show. Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Outro Music you