Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Rewilding

Transcript

Rewilding · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Let's admit it. Humanity hasn't been great for biodiversity and
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: wildlife on planet Earth. Throughout our history, we've killed, for example,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: many large mammals, either because we wanted to eat them
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: or because we were worried that they would compete with
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: us or try to eat us. So many ecosystems exist
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: today without the large herbivores and large predators that once
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: roamed within them. Large animals like this aren't just charismatic.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: They also have oversized impacts on the ecosystems. No doubt
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: many of you have heard the story about how Yellowstone
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: National Park was transformed after the reintroduction of the wolves,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about that a bit today.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: The newish movement of rewilding is a new spin on
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: the conservation movement, though I suspect that many self-proclaimed conservationists
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: would be upset with me for explaining it that way. Anyway,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: rewilding focuses on trying to restore lost interactions between species
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: and the radiating impacts that they have on the ecosystems
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: in which they're found. But how far should you go
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: to restore these interactions? If the big herbivore at the
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: center of these interactions was a woolly mammoth, should you
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: use genetic engineering to resurrect them from the dead? In
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: addition to emphasizing restoring lost interactions, rewilding also tends to
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: emphasize a hands-off approach, where animals are reintroduced to a
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: system and then you kind of sit back and see
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: what will happen, being happy with the result, even if
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: it doesn't produce the exact same ecosystem that was there before.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: We're gonna walk through a bunch of examples today and
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: talk about how rewilding is a little different than the
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: conservation of my youth. And we're gonna discuss the pros
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: and the cons of this approach. Welcome to Daniel and
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Kelly's Wild Universe.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: think about aliens. And when I was a kid, I
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: always wished they could bring saber-toothed tigers back from the dead.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: Ooh, all right.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space. And I
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily thinking about de-extinction when I was a kid,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: but I was really into wolves. And so, like, for
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: my birthday, I would have my parents, like, quote-unquote, adopt
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: a wolf for me, which just meant, like, you know,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: make a donation to a conservation group. And so, like,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: wolves were my jam.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Didn't you ever see critters on TV, like in cartoons
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: or whatever, and think, whoa, that looks really cool. I
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: wish we had those guys now.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, Jurassic Park was by far and away my
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: favorite movie.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: There you go.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: And so, yes, yes. I do still think it would
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: be amazing to see like a brontosaurus or something like that.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: And I interviewed Dr. Beth Shapiro, who now works at Colossal.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: The dire wolf place.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: The dire wolf place. And I asked her, you know,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: could we ever... Have Jurassic Park. And she was pretty
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: much like, no. We could try to pull together all
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: of the genes that would make something that would look
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: like a brontosaurus. But the brontosaurus genome is like long
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: since gone. There's nothing. We're not finding that. It's decayed.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: All right. A great start to our episode. Throwing a
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: wet blanket on lots of people's fantasies. But, you know,
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: there was something else about that when I was a
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: kid is just the awe of seeing something like that
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: surviving in the wild.
• 3:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: You know, not in a zoo, but like really making
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: its life out there. I think about that sometimes the
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: way I think about like small businesses. You ever drive
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: by like a little jewelry store and you're like, how
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: does that thing survive? Like who's going in there and
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: paying enough to cover the rent?
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: And when you see a creature sometimes, I'm like, how
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: does this thing like making it out there? It gets
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: cold at night. How is this thing surviving every night
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: and finding food and raising its kids, you know? So
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: it's amazing to see these creatures in the wild.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Zach used to joke that when we moved out to
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: the farm, the biggest problem we'd have is that every
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: winter I would try to get all the deer in
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: the house on the coldest night of the year. Because
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: I'd be like, guys, there's no way you can survive this.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: You got to come inside.
• 4:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: If you're cold, they're cold, right?
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. Except they're adapted to the cold and they're,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: you know, usually they do fine. Not always, but usually
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: they do fine. But you were focusing on, you know,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: me being a wet blanket, which like, fair enough, right?
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: That's a totally reasonable baseline. But today's story is meant
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: to be a bit uplifting. One of the big- Oh,
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: is it? Well, you know, like as much as I can-
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: A bit uplifting. A bit, that's right.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: Moderate your expectations, folks. Qualifier.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: But you know, rewilding definitely has a more like positive
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: vibe than conservation. And so let's try to start with
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: a like, you know, positive vibe. Like we can bring some.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: Of this stuff back.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: So that at the end, you can tell us how
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: it's all hopeless?
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I want it to be a
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: roller coaster ride. It wouldn't be a Wienersmith-led episode otherwise.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: So let's begin with the inspiration of it, right? Like,
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: what is the idea? How does this work? But first,
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: what's the inspiration for today's episode, Kelly? Why are we
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: talking about rewilding today?
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: The inspiration for today's episode is that one of our
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: active Discord members, who always has fantastic questions, whose handle
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: is callmemose.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: I love that you refer to the Discord members by
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: their handles.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: I always forget to ask for first names ahead of time.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: But anyway, well, and also, you know, you want to
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: be able to join our Discord channel and then communicate
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: with this person. So now you know. But anyway, let's
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: go ahead and hear the question that they had for
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: us today.
• 5:33
  Speaker 5: Hey, Kelly and Daniel. I would love to hear your
• 5:36
  Speaker 5: thoughts on the rewilding projects underway in the U.S. and
• 5:41
  Speaker 5: Europe and maybe elsewhere. to let big chunks of land
• 5:44
  Speaker 5: return to their natural, unregulated ecosystems, including returning original predators
• 5:50
  Speaker 5: and herbivores to the land, removing human dams, etc. I
• 5:55
  Speaker 5: am most interested in the American Prairie Preserve in Montana
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: because I grew up in what used to be the
• 6:01
  Speaker 5: prairie in Iowa, but all of these efforts are really
• 6:05
  Speaker 5: fascinating to me.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Thank you. I just drove through Montana. What a beautiful state.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: I never heard about the American Prairie Preserve. What is that?
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Well, we're going to get to it.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: Okay, sorry. No, that's okay.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: So I got excited about rewilding because, you know, I
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: was really into learning about conservation when I was a kid.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: And then I went to grad school for ecology. And
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: rewilding is a flavor of conservation that I was definitely
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: less familiar with. And so I used this question as
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: an excuse to dive into the literature and catch back up.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: It's been at least a decade since I was in
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: grad school and thinking about this kind of stuff. And so...
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: I learned a lot. Today we're going to go through
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: rewilding in general, but we're definitely going to talk about
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: American prairie. And it turns out this is a very
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: important time to be talking about it because it turns
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: out they might be losing the rights to graze bison
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: on their land. So stay tuned for that because that
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: would be huge for that project.
• 6:59
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: And thank you, Call Me Mose, for asking this question.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: I love when people ask questions that give us an
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: excuse to bump something up to the top of the
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: stuff I wish I had time to read about list.
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: Yes!
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: So I read like a whole book on rewilding and
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: then there's this great podcast called Rewildology. And so I
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: listened to a bunch of interviews by experts who are
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: running rewilding programs. So I've got a sense of what
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: it's like to run a bunch of these different programs.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Let's go ahead and hear what our extraordinaries think, because
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: I was wondering, do most people know the difference between
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: rewilding and conservation, or do they use those terms interchangeably?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Because I'm not quite sure I could have put my
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: finger on the difference when I started this research project.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: So let's go ahead and see what the extraordinaries had
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: to say. I asked them, how is rewilding different than conservation?
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: Conservation is preventative. Rewilding is.
• 7:57
  Speaker 7: Conservation is when you like preserve a certain thing and
• 8:03
  Speaker 7: then rewilding is probably like letting an area go back to.
• 8:09
  Speaker 8: The wild conservation kind of means i mean it's more
• 8:14
  Speaker 8: of um yeah like keeping track of the wildlife to
• 8:16
  Speaker 8: preserve it while rewilding would probably be letting it wildlife vendor.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: For itself in a way So yeah, I think the
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: conservative is controlled and rewilding is just let it go.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Conservation is kind of like gardening. Rewilding is getting out
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: of the way and letting nature take its course.
• 8:35
  Speaker 9: I believe that conservation is different from rewilding because in
• 8:38
  Speaker 9: rewilding there is human intervention, such as reintroducing species or
• 8:43
  Speaker 9: something along that line. But in conservation, it's pretty much
• 8:46
  Speaker 9: just sort of stop human interaction and human interference and
• 8:50
  Speaker 9: letting nature do its thing.
• 8:51
  Speaker 6: I think that conservation is like taking intact ecosystems and
• 8:55
  Speaker 6: keeping them from getting hurt, and rewilding is taking ecosystems
• 8:58
  Speaker 6: that are already messed up and making them right again.
• 9:01
  Speaker 10: I think conservation means to try to preserve an ecosystem
• 9:07
  Speaker 10: in an existing state, but rewilding is introducing a population
• 9:12
  Speaker 10: to take it back to a previous state.
• 9:15
  Speaker 5: To begin with, I've never heard of rewilding of momentum.
• 9:19
  Speaker 8: I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that
• 9:20
  Speaker 8: conservation protects endangered species of plants and animals, while rewilding
• 9:25
  Speaker 8: encourages proliferation of species with protections from poaching.
• 9:29
  Speaker 6: So I'm actually going to say it's about whose interests
• 9:32
  Speaker 6: you're serving. Are you serving the environment's best interests, the
• 9:37
  Speaker 6: area including the creatures in it, or are you serving
• 9:40
  Speaker 6: just one or a few particular.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: Creatures' interests?
• 9:44
  Speaker 6: Conservation is kind of protecting what's still there, whereas rewilding,
• 9:49
  Speaker 6: you're kind of trying to add more wild.
• 9:54
  Speaker 9: I think?
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Free association.
• 9:56
  Speaker 7: Conservation makes me think of swamps and protecting them, rewilding.
• 10:00
  Speaker 7: makes me think about genetically engineered woolly mammoths.
• 10:04
  Speaker 10: Well, I think that conservation means keeping things as is,
• 10:08
  Speaker 10: while rewilding means bringing back some characteristics of the natural world.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: I think conservation is to try to reduce the human
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: footprint on an environment or a species, and rewilding is
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: human manipulation through and through. All right, people have some
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: definite opinions about this. How do you grade these scores, Kelly?
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: I don't like to grade anyone's scores, really, because we're
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: encouraging people to just give us their off-the-cuff answers. I
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: feel like you grade something people were supposed to prepare for.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: But I would say that we had a really thoughtful
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: range of answers, thinking about their gut feeling for what
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: conservation should mean versus what rewilding means. should mean. I
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: think at the end of the day, most of these
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: answers didn't quite get what I came away with by
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the end of my research. And so I hope we'll
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: all learn something interesting along the way. But so first
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: let's start with what is rewilding? And before I jump
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: into a definition, I want to reiterate that I read
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: a bunch of review papers and I did a bunch
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: of research. And one of the themes was that the
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: rewilders were like, look, we can't agree on a definition.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: The movement itself can't even agree what it means.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Well, like different projects in different places in different times
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: want to focus on different things. And so that... leads
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: them to come up with different definitions. But there have
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: been some review papers where a bunch of scientists have
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: come together and said, okay, this is our best shot
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: at a definition that sort of encompasses what all of
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: us are doing.
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: And so here's the definition that I got.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: What is it?
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Rewilding is the process of rebuilding following a major human disturbance.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Hmm.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: A natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes in the complete
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: or near-complete food web at all trophic levels as a
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem with biota that would have been
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: present had this disturbance not occurred. This will involve a
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. And
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: my plan is to break it down because your eyes
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: glazed over.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: No, I was just laughing when you said biota were president.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: I was thinking that actually sounds cool. I wish we
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: had like elephant presidents and stuff like that.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: What would an elephant ask for? More water holes. We
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: need more water holes without crocodiles in them.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: But the overall sense I got was, yeah, we're rebuilding
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: an ecosystem that we destroyed.
• 12:34
  Speaker 4: Yes. Yes.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: So, for example, building Jurassic Park would not be rewilding
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: because humans didn't destroy the dinosaur ecosystem that was the asteroid.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's true. Let's go through the Yellowstone example. And
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: then at the end of the example, I want to
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: talk about how a conservationist might have pitched this project
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: versus how a rewilder would have looked at this project.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And by the end of this example, I feel like
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: we'll have a good handle on the difference between conservation
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: and rewilding.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: All right, are we going to talk about wolves?
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about wolves.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: I love the Yellowstone wolves.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, man, me too. Okay, so as you probably know then,
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: by the mid-1900s, the wolves were pretty much gone from Yellowstone.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: And the park ecologists that were out there, they were
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: sort of watching what happened to the ecosystem after the
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: wolves were gone. And they noticed that there were a
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: lot more elk there. And those elk were now eating
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: a lot more vegetation because there was more of them.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: And in particular, some of the things that they were
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: eating were young aspens. So you weren't getting like aspen
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: woodlands anymore because these trees were getting sort of consumed
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: before they had a chance to get big. They were
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: also eating these trees called cottonwoods that grow along the
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: banks of like rivers. And because those couldn't get big,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: you were losing beavers because those trees were both food
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: for beavers and were important for beavers when they were
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: making their dams. Without those trees, without the beavers, that
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: was changing the entire aquatic system as well. So one
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: of the things.
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: I know.
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: So one.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: One of the things that beavers do is these dams
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: slow the water so the water rises and starts to
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: spill over the banks of the river. When it does that,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: you end up with land areas that are kind of
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: like wet and moist. And so they're producing these wetlands
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: that are good for frog eggs and salamanders and certain
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: kinds of insects. So having the beavers is producing these
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: extra ecosystems that give you a bunch of extra biodiversity.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: But without the beavers, the water starts flowing quickly down
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: the river. And as it does that, it starts pulling
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: away soil from the bottom of the river and from
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: the sides. And so instead of having these like rivers
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: that have wetlands associated with it, you just have very deep,
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: fast moving rivers instead. Does that make sense?
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: It does, but it just reinforces my sense that all
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: of biology is a crazy Rube Goldberg machine. I mean,
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: you're telling me you don't have as many wolves, so
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: now you have more deer, which eat a bunch of trees,
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: which the beavers needed, and without the beavers, you're not
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: getting dams, you're not getting the wetlands, so you're getting
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: faster rivers. This is crazy.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: It is crazy.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And I feel like that complexity is lost from the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: story a bit. So I feel like when I heard
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: the story about the reintroduction, I was like, oh, the
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: wolves came back. And then there's fewer elks and the
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: beaver comes back. And now everything goes back to the
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: way it was before. But these things are so complicated
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: that that's not necessarily what you should expect. And so
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: there were some areas when you brought the wolves back
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: that The elk started either dying because they were getting
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: eaten by the wolves, but they also changed their behavior.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: They no longer wanted to be right up against dense
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: woods where they could get ambushed by the wolves. And
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: they also tended to not want to be in like
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: big open areas.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Wait, elk are smart like that? Yeah, of course they can.
• 15:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 15:42
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 15:42
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: They give me the whole sort of glazed-eyed robot, you know,
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: leaf-munching vibe. I don't really get a lot of intelligence
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: from the look of a deer, but clearly I'm wrong.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: They can learn.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think they can also hold I don't
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: want to die in there, along with the thought of
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: more food.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: Sally died last week doing this, so maybe we shouldn't
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: do this sort of a thing.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean, I think you see like your
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: kid get eaten by a wolf because they jumped out
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: of the woods and you're like, I'm not standing near
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: the wolves anymore. Like I'm not doing that next year.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And so, so anyway, yeah, they learn. But I think
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction story is a little more complicated
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: because in some areas you get the beavers back and
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: the wetlands back. But there were other areas where it
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: looks like they didn't get that stuff back. And the
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: reason they didn't get it back was because those ecosystems
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: had like shifted to a different state. And I think
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: what happened in this case in particular was that the
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: river had gotten like so deep and so fast and
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: the banks were no longer like appropriate for those trees
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: to grow on that you just couldn't get the beavers back.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: So that system had shifted to like a no turning
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: back scenario.
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: But there's lots of areas where you do, you get
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: the beavers back, you get the wetlands back. It's good
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: for the animals that need the wetlands. The wolves also
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: tend to eat coyotes and the coyotes have been going
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: nuts on the small rodents. And so now you can
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: get like some small rodent populations back. And so the
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: point is there's all of these interactions between species happening
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: at Yellowstone.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: And when you.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Throw the wolves in there, those interactions change dramatically.
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: And it actually makes a lot of sense that the
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: ecosystem is not some sort of like reversible process where
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: if you undo what you did, you're going to go
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: back to where you were.
• 17:25
  Speaker 8: Right.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: It's like if you have a ball at the top
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: of a hill and you kick it, it's going to
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: go to the bottom of the hill and giving it
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: the same kick in the other direction doesn't necessarily work.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: push it back to the top of the hill because
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: gravity is going the other direction. So there must be
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: lots of asymmetric forces at work here that are not reversible.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Yep, exactly.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: Biology is complicated.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: It is complicated. And I feel like when I was
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: a kid, the vibe of the conservation movement would have been,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: we are bad. We killed the wolves. We need to
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: bring the wolves back and try to recreate... what was
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: lost and in particular, we need to reach X number
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: of wolves and get them back in the system and
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: we should feel bad the whole time we're doing it
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: because we are bad and without us, this problem wouldn't
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: have happened.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: And there's a couple of things going on there. There's
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: like the self-flagellation, but also the like defining an ecosystem
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: by a narrow metric, right? And then saying, once you've
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: hit that metric, then now everything is back to where
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: it was when obviously an ecosystem is very complicated and
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: can't be captured by one number.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And so the rewilders, their attitude, like when
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: I was listening to interviews and, you know, reading books
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: and papers, the attitude was a lot more like, look,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: a lot of this bad stuff happened at a time
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: when none of us who are alive today were around.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: None of us made these decisions. We don't need to
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: be self-flagellating because this happened. And we can't necessarily expect
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: to get back exactly what was lost. But we can
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: have something better than what we have today. And so
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: let's try to get some wolves back. And our goal
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: isn't to get like 75 wolves back, for example, to
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: pick an arbitrary number. The goal is to bring wolves
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: back until we start to see these interactions returning. And
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: we shouldn't expect to get the exact same thing. But
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: we should just be happy with what we do get
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: back and just kind of hope that the ecosystems are
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: now more resilient and more diverse because the wolves are back.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Well, let me ask a naive question then. Like, are
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: we measuring ecosystems by some quality metric? Like we're saying
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: the ecosystem we destroyed is better than the one we
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: have now. So we need to somehow improve it. That
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: implies that you can like grade ecosystems. I know you're
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: against giving grades. That we can say this one's better,
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: this one's worse. But we know that the flow of
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: history says that everything is constantly in flux. Things are changing.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: Extinction is natural. right? And so who are we to
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: say that this human intervention is necessarily bad? By what
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: metric is it bad?
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so rewilders are much more likely to say, look,
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: things change. We don't necessarily know what the best scenario
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: would be, but we do know that we removed this
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: animal from the ecosystem and that if they were back,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: a lot of different things would change. And in particular,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: what would change would result in more biodiversity. And so
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: I think they're more likely to embrace the fact that
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: you're probably not going to get back exactly what you had.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: That's fine because ecosystems change over time. You just need
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: to decide what is important to you to bring back
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: and then try to focus on those things.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: But I don't understand why the new ecosystem that's the
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: result of human intervention has less biodiversity. I understand that
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: it's different. But ecosystems are changing all the time. The
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: pre-human ecosystem was different from one that came before it
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: a million years before. Was it less biodiverse? Is there
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: a general trend towards less biodiversity? Or is it like
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: anytime humans are involved, biodiversity goes down for some reason?
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think probably yes, anytime humans are involved,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: biodiversity does go down, unfortunately. But a thing that a
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: lot of rewilders focus on is that when you bring
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: back certain important players into a system... Mm-hmm. They create heterogeneity.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: And so like by that, I mean, you know, before
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the elk were going everywhere and they were grazing down everything.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: But when the wolves are there, the elk behavior changes.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: And now there's areas that they don't go to anymore.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: And because they're not in those areas anymore, that allows
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: other organisms to sort of come in and live there.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: And so a common theme that I found was that
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: you think about what was lost when we took this
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: organism away or when this organism was killed by humans.
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: And what would we gain by bringing it back? And
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: is what we gain important or worth having? But I
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: think that we should keep this question in our heads
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: because it will be important as we go through multiple
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: other examples. And let's return to this at the end
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: because this was actually an important point that I had
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: at our wrap-up discussion. So let's return to it.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Before we move on to our next example, I want
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: to emphasize that I think a lot of conservation biologists
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: would say– You know, the rewilding community is focusing on
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: all of these interactions that came back when you brought
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: the wolf back. It's not like we thought that bringing
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: the wolf back wouldn't change anything. I hear a lot
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: of conservation biologists argue that, like, look, if you want
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: to get donations from people, for example, you pick a
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: charismatic animal that people like, like the wolf. I mean,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: this worked on, like, seven-year-old Kelly. I was like, mom
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: and dad, send money for the wolves. And by conserving
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: this charismatic organism, you benefit the entire ecosystem. And so
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of conservation biologists say we don't
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: need this new term. This is all stuff we knew before,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: but we were just sort of emphasizing something different. So anyway,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: there's a debate in the community about whether or not
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: you need this term and what it should mean.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Well, the wolves definitely worked on me. And in particular,
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of the books by Rick McIntyre,
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone. I don't know if you know
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: about this guy. No. Seriously?
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: No, sorry.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: For like 40 years, he would get up at like
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: four in the morning and just watch the wolves. And
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: he tracked them and he got to know them. And
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: then he wrote this incredible series of books about the
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: wolves and their interaction. And he knows all of the
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: wolves and their relationships. And it's about all the conflicts
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: between the wolf packs and how wolves move from one
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: to the other. And they're incredibly dramatic scenes where like
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: a wolf that was raised by another wolf leads a
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: fight between two packs. It's like a soap opera.
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: It's incredible.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: It's basically Game of Thrones for wolves, but it's real.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, the wolves have amazing, complicated social lives. Yeah,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: it sounds fantastic.
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: Check out The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone by Rick McIntyre.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: All right, I will be doing that. Okay, but now
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: talk about another feature of rewilding, which is the hands-off
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: nature of rewilding.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: So All right. And we're back.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: So we've been talking about differences between conservation and rewilding.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: And one of the big things that the rewilding community
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: emphasizes is that what you want is to restore, for example,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: wolves to the ecosystem and then be able to completely
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: take your hands off. You don't want these systems to
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: require a lot of human management. You want to just
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: let them do their nature thing and see what happens.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: You don't want to have to inject wolves every year.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: You want it to be self-sustaining.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: Yes, right.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: And you don't want to be out there saying like,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: all right, we need to have exactly 75 wolves and
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: 1,000 elk. And if we have too many elk, we're
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: going to put out more food or we're going to
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: shoot some of the elk. You want to just sort
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: of let the system reach whatever equilibrium it's going to
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: reach and not get too involved.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: Sometimes this works well. Other times it works less well.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: So let's go ahead and talk about an example where
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: things worked less well. So, oh, we're going to have
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: fun with this pronunciation. Daniel, do you want to try
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: it first?
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Is it the Oostvaardersplassen?
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: Yes, they're going to be OVP. Hey, you know me.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Nice.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: In the Netherlands.
• 25:13
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: I'm down with the OVP. Let's do it.
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: So this is a delta of the River Rhine, and
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: it has been massively managed. And in 1973, this sort
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: of unexpected experiment happened. One of the polders, which was
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: like a section of this managed area near the river,
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: was supposed to be managed by this industry that sort
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: of went under, and they no longer ended up using
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: this area. And when they didn't use it, plants started
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: to come back, and that attracted geese and And the
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: geese started eating some plants. And when they ate the plants,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: they were producing these open water corridors. And they were
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: making this much more complex ecosystems where you had open
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: water corridors and then areas where there were more plants.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: And that was creating ecosystems for more animals. And this
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: ecologist named Franz Vera saw this. And he thought to himself,
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: you know, we could do something with this environment. It
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: doesn't have to just be super managed. And he was
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: really interested in this idea that actually across much of
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Europe and across much of the United States, when you say, like,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: think of an ecosystem, most of us picture a forest,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: or at least I do. It was actually the case
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: that much, maybe even most of Europe and America was
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: grassland land. But the massive herbivores that used to, you know,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: keep these things grassland by like eating and trampling trees
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: that we're trying to grow, like those species have been gone.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: So now we don't have a lot of grasslands.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: Is that what keeps prairies prairies? I've been wondering about that.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: What keeps prairies prairies is that you've got herbivores that
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: are going around and trampling and eating things like trees
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: that are trying to grow up. And so they're an
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: important part of keeping those systems the way that they are.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: Okay, cool.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: So he thought to himself, okay, there used to be
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: aurochs here, and these are wild cows. And there used
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: to be tarpans, which were extinct horses. And so he thought,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: what if we could bring those back to maintain this
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: as a grassland and make it more wild? And so
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: in 1991, the OVP becomes this experiment where they bring
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: in mega herbivores and release them to graze to try
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: to keep these habitats from getting foresty.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: Wait, but this is the delta of a river. I'm
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: imagining something pretty squishy. How are you putting like cows
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: into the river?
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, it's a mix of like squishy bits
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: and harder bits. It's sort of like a patchwork. But
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: as I mentioned, the tarpans are gone. And so they said,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: all right, we're going to get conic ponies. I think
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: that's how you pronounce it. But from Poland, these are
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: like hardy horses.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: Are those ponies that come as a section of a cone,
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: like parabolas, hyperbolas?
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: Yes, probably. Probably that's what they meant. They also brought
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: in deer, which might have naturally been there. And then
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: because aurochs are no longer available, the like wild cattle,
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: they brought in domestic cattle that were as close to
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: primitive breeds as possible. So there's a breed of cattle
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: called heck cattle.
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: That were created in the 1920s by crossbreeding other primitive
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: breeds to try to get something that's really robust and
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: resilient that you can just throw out into an environment
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: and be like, good luck, guys, and they'll do well
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: on their own.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Okay. So we're missing the old big fauna. And so
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: we take a sample of the ones we have that
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: we think might approximate those and put them out there.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: And so for a while, this was actually going pretty well.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: It was becoming sort of like a beautiful grassland. Tourists
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: and locals wanted to come and see these beautiful animals grazing.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: So this became like a place where people would want
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: to like kind of go for walks and And so
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: in some ways, this experiment was working. You got the grasslands,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the animals are surviving, people are happy with the new ecosystem.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: But there's this emphasis on a hands-off approach. And there
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: used to be predators in this area, but you don't
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: want to introduce predators into a heavily populated area for reasons.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: Right. You don't want wolves in playgrounds? Why not?
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: It's complicated. So they didn't introduce predators, but they were
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: really insistent on being hands off. And so in 2017, 2018,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: that winter that straddled those years was really bad and
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: there wasn't enough food. So thousands of horses were dying
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: and people were allowed to go into this area. And
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: so they were going on walks and they were seeing
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: thousands of horses starving to death.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: And this is something that like I think society is
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: absolutely no longer comfortable with. Like this should not be
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: happening under our watch. And so people were getting furious.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: And so like people who lived in the community were
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: teaming up with farmers to take bales of hay and
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: secretly bring them into the reserve and dump them to
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: feed the horses because they didn't want these horses to starve.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: And so this ended up creating, like, a huge PR mess.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: And now there are rules where you can't just let
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: thousands of animals starve to death. And so now this
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: system is much more managed, which was not the initial plan, but, like,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: I totally... get why they're doing that.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: I see. Well, where do you fall on that? Are
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: you pro lots of beautiful horses suffering or anti horse suffering?
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: I'm anti lots of beautiful horse suffering. Like I totally
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: understand the inclination to want to create something and then
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: just let it go.
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: And in nature, there probably are harsh winters where lots
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: of animals die and we don't go out and intervene.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: This is just part of the cycle of life. But
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: on the other hand, you have tried to recreate an
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: ecosystem that is missing important parts. It's missing the predators
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: that would have like made short work of these animals
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: and would have kept the numbers from getting so high
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: probably to begin with. And so I don't think it's
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: unreasonable in these situations to intervene. And a lot of
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: the other programs that I read about, and this is
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: going to be controversial, but involved letting people come in
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: and hunt when numbers were getting high. And by having
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: people come in and hunt, you can get a lot
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: more money for your conservation program. And this is a
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: way to sort of sustain the whole thing. But what
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: do you think? Based on the way you asked me
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: the question, I think I know your answer.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I'm never in favor of suffering, but also
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: suffering is part of nature, right? And it's not our
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: responsibility to remove all suffering from every critter in nature.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: But if we have constructed an ecosystem intentionally, then we
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: are responsible for the critters who are living there, right?
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: We can't just say like, look, we did what we
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: could and walk away. So, yeah, I think it is
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: our responsibility. I'm pro feeding suffering horses. Yes.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: I think just to be a little bit of a
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: devil's advocate, I think even if there had been predators there.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Every once in a while, a really harsh winter comes through. And,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: you know, even when predators are around, you will end
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: up getting animals, you know, herbivores dying of starvation because
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: the predators probably can't keep up. You get these cycles
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: over time. But I think a problem is you need
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: to keep in mind that if you are having a
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: very public facing situation, program, you need to keep in
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: mind how the public is going to feel about that program.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: And I feel like this is a thread that sort
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: of goes through conservation and through rewilding. You always need
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: to think about the impacts on the people who are
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: going to be in the area. And this is, to
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: my mind, one of the hardest parts about conservation. It's
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: not trying to breed the animals in a captive area
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: before you release them, which that's very hard too, but
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: it's figuring out how the community is going to respond
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: and managing that.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the people are part of the ecosystem in a.
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: Way, right?
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: I mean, that is an emphasis of rewilding. Particularly, that
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: is a point that I saw emphasized in the American
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Prairie Preserve website. And so let's go ahead to that
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: Montana example that we were initially asked to talk about
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: now that we've had half an hour of Kelly rambling
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: about other things.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: And before we do, let me just say how much
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: I love Montana. I just drove through it with my
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: daughter and we went to Yellowstone and we went to
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: Bozeman and we went to Missoula. And wow, it's a
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: beautiful place.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: You know, after reading about the American Prairie Project, I
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: really want to go. I've never been to that part
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: of the United States, and I am dying to see
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: it now. Like, I was going through their photos, and
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: I was like, oh, my gosh, you've got to be
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: kidding me. I hadn't thought about grasslands as being a
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: place I'd want to visit, but wow, they look beautiful.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: No, it's jaw-dropping vista after jaw-dropping vista. It's like, it
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: looks fake almost. You're like, what?
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: Come on.
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: Well, so now that we've been uplifting, let's do the
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: Kelly depressing thing here. Let's go to the past real quick.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: So there used to be like literally millions of bison
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: on the Great Plains.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: What years are we talking about? Like pre-humans, like 25,000
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: years ago or more recently?
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: Pre-white people, there were millions of bison and they were
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: living with the indigenous peoples who were, you know, killing
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: them and eating them or whatnot, but nowhere near the
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: numbers that would be slaughtered when we came through. And
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: we came through and we ate them a little bit,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: but partly we were also killing them as a way
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: to sort of manipulate and control the indigenous peoples that
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: were in the area. And so by the late 1800s,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: we had nearly eradicated them.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: The arrival of Europeans also brought horses, which must have
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: really changed the way the indigenous people hunted horses. the bison,
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: did that impact the bison population as well?
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. It probably did. And also
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: it's worth noting that, yes, we brought horses here, but
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: there were also horses before we brought horses here. And
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: then they went extinct for a little while. So there
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: was probably a while where there were horses and bison
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: living together. But anyway, yes, probably horses did make it
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: easier for the indigenous peoples to hunt the bison. But
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: I don't Did not see anywhere in my research that
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: that was a contributing factor to the loss of millions
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: of them.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: All right. So we have vast plains filled with enormous
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: herds of bison before the Europeans arrived. And then what happened?
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: By the early 1900s, there were fewer than a thousand.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: A thousand bison?
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a thousand.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: In the whole country?
• 35:13
  Speaker 7: Yep.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: That's, wow.
• 35:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: And it is now hard to find bison that just
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: have straight bison genomes because they interbred with cattle that
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: we brought in. And so you kind of have some
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: cattle genes in there with the bison. Maybe that matters.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: Maybe that doesn't. But anyway, yes. So they went down
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: to about a thousand individuals.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Well, you want to hear a nice physics biology overlap?
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Which is at Fermilab, the biggest particle accelerator in the
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: United States, most of the facilities underground and on top
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: is prairie. And they have a herd of bison that
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: roam the grounds of the accelerator. And every spring you
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: can watch them calf, which is amazing. Oh, that's so cool.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: And Katrina and I were out there once and we
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: saw one and we're like, Is that a hoof sticking
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: out the back? And then like two minutes later, there's
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: a baby. And like two minutes after that, it's running around.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: It's an incredible moment. Oh my gosh.
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: That is so cool.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: I'm so jealous.
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, I was amazed when my goats gave birth
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: and like two minutes later, they were walking around trying
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: to like get a drink of milk or whatever. Herbivores
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: like that are amazing. But anyway, okay. You know, there's
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: many reasons to care about the loss of the bison
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: from an ecological perspective. One, they were grazing, so they were,
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: you know, keeping out the trees and trampling the trees
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Two, they do this behavior called wallowing,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: where they kind of like, you know, roll on their
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: back and roll around. And when they do that, they
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: create sort of like indentations that sometimes fill with water.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: And so they create these wallowings. little mini wetlands throughout
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: the places where they roam. And those get used by
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: different animals than are using the rest of the area.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: The bison are literally shaping the ecosystem.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: They are. No, they absolutely are. And when they move
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: together as a herd, they don't necessarily like, you know,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: get in a straight line and graze from one side
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: of the grassland to the other. They create some patches
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: that have been grazed down a lot, and the grass
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: is short, and other areas where the grasses are high. And,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: for example, there are some birds that prefer short grass,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: and there are some birds that prefer the tall grass areas.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: And so by creating this difference in the kinds of
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: habitats you find, because the bison have interacted with the land,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: you get a lot more biodiversity when the bison are around.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: Does that make sense?
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that does make sense.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Okay, so.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: Plus, they're awesome.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: Plus, they're awesome. They're so awesome.
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: So the American Prairie is this project where they're trying
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: to expand on this national wildlife refuge that already exists
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: and is 1.1 million acres. So it's a big starting place.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: And so what they're doing is they get donors and
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: they collect as much money as they can so that
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: when a piece of property goes up for sale and
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: it is in any way attached to that wildlife refuge,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: they are buying it up to essentially increase the area
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: where you could have bison. And the goal is to
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: eventually have 5,000 square miles of continuous area, which is
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: like roughly the size of Connecticut. And the goal is
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: to have something like 5,000 bison on there. So we're
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: not even talking about millions of bison. Like 5,000 would
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: be nice to restore some of the interactions that used
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: to be happening on this prairie. And the goal isn't
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: to like keep humans out entirely. These lands are also
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: to some extent owned by the public. And so when
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: this program buys the land, you can still go out
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: there and you can like camp on the land. You
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: can hike on the land.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: You can get gored by bison.
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you should be careful. Bison are at least easy
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: to see and avoid. And so you should be doing
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: that when bison are out there.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: Are they easy to avoid? They're fast.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe they're not easy to avoid.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: These are not cows, right? They are fast.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: They are fast, yes.
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure bison can outrun horses.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: I'll believe you. I don't know.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: Wait, let me fact check that.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: I'll say you absolutely need to respect them and give
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: them their space.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: Bison, despite weighing up to 2,000 pounds, can reach sprint
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: speeds of 35 to 40 miles per hour, which is incredible.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so give them a lot of space, a lot
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: of space. Enjoy them through binoculars, ideally. But yeah, so
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: what they do, as I mentioned, is they buy up
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: the land, and then they talk to the Bureau of
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: Land Management, and they get what's called grants.
• 39:30
  Speaker 4: Rights.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: And essentially they say, usually this land used to be
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: grazed by cattle. We are now bringing in bison. That's
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: our livestock. And this counts according to the prior rules
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: that we have for how you can use land. And
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: I'll note there are other programs that are saying, okay,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: instead of cattle, we're bringing in horses to do something
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: similar to the rule that the bison do. And so
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: this has been working. They've been growing the land. They've
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: been opening it up to people. They even every once
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: in a while will have Hunters who are allowed to
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: come and shoot bison for a price to help the
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: program keep going. But so while I was going through
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: the website, like I wanted to see how they dealt
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: with the question of hunting.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: And for 2026, they're not allowing any hunting to happen.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: And the reason they're not allowing any hunting to happen
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: is because there's. A ton of uncertainty about the future
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: of their program. So for a really long time, the
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Bureau of Land Management has allowed organizations like this one
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: to say, hey, bison are my quote unquote livestock that
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: I am grazing on this land. But the Bureau of
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: Land Management has recently decided to revoke some of their licenses,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: saying that bison don't count as livestock because you're not
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: planning on killing and eating them.
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: Hmm.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: And the whole premise is that they're going to be
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: able to buy land and have bison on it as livestock.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: And so if their licenses are revoked, does that mean
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: a bunch of land that they've bought can no longer
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: have bison on it? And so the American prairie is
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: fighting back. They're arguing that this is a brand new
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: interpretation of laws that have been around for a really
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: long time.
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: Interesting.
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: It seems like some organizations at like the federal or
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: the local government level have just decided that they don't
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: want bison for whatever reason. This could be concern from
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: nearby ranchers about what the bison might do to their
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: farms or what if bison attract, for example, cougars or
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: wolves to the area, what those animals might subsequently do
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: to the ranches. And so a public comment period just passed.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: They were asking for people to sort of weigh in.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: But we're waiting to see if the American Prairie Program
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: is going to be able to overturn this recent Bureau
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: of Land Management decision. And otherwise, it's sort of unclear
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: what the future of this program is going to be.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: Fascinating.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: No, it sucks. That's the wrong response. This sucks. This
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: was a really cool program.
• 41:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: Well, it makes me wonder. I have, for example, eaten
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: a buffalo burger and it makes me wonder where did
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: that come from? Was it from a herd like this
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: or are there like commercial buffalo ranches somewhere that raise
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: it for meat?
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, there are commercial bison ranches that raise them for meat.
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: I see. I see. And so that's like a completely
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: separate way that bison are being kept alive.
• 42:12
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But, you know, they tend to be in like
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: smaller patches of land. And so they're not necessarily having
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: the same impact on the ecosystem. They're in more of
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: like a, you know, fenced in, farmed, managed situation.
• 42:25
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: And so I think to be able to count as livestock,
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: the plan would have to be that like a significant
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: portion of them are harvested every year and then sold
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: after slaughter. And that's not the American Prairie's plan.
• 42:36
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: And so anyway, I am upset. I really like sort
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: of came to love this program while I was reading
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: about it. When I found that website, I like anyway,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: I hope they figure out a way through. And if
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: you're concerned, then you should check out the American Furry
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: website and see if they have any other calls to action,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: any other ways that you can contribute by contacting lawmakers
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: or anything.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: All right, let's take a break and give Kelly a
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: chance to cool off. And then we'll get to some
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: more examples and discuss the difference between rewilding and conservation
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: from a philosophical point of view.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: This doesn't piss you off.
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: They're changing the rules, man.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: They've been following all the rules.
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: That's not cool.
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: All right, we're back, and Kelly is mad.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: I'm really mad, but I'm going to try to contain
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: that for now. And we are going to move on
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: to talking about one of the more controversial rewilding projects.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: Hmm.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: And I should say, so I picked the projects that
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: we're talking about today because the book that I read
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: focused on the projects we're talking about today. Plus, I
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: added the American Prairie project because our listener requested it.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of rewilding projects that are less controversial
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: than the ones that we've talked about today. But this
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: one brings up some really interesting questions philosophically about how
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: we should manage rewilding projects. So I wanted us to
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: sort of end on this note.
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about a project run by Sergey
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: Zimov in Russia. So he was a guy who was
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: working with permafrost. And so this is like the ice
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: that's supposed to be permanently frozen. But because of global
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: climate change, it is no longer permanently frozen in a
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: lot of cases.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: And not just ice, right? It's soil that's also frozen.
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, yep, exactly. Thank you. And so he was working
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: in this area where there were, like, banks on either
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: side of him, and he could see in the permafrost
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: a bunch of old bones, and the bones were from
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: bison and horses and elks and mammoths, and they were
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: from about 10,000 years ago.
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: And when he was looking at all of these bones,
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: he was thinking... These animals were all here and none
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: of them are here now. What would it have been
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: like if these animals were back? And by doing some research,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: he came to the conclusion that these animals helped to
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: maintain what is now permafrost in more of a grassland state.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: And how did they do that? So if you have
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: like a permafrost environment, a lot of the plants that
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: are there are slow growing plants like mosses. And so
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: it takes them a really long time to grow. But
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: as they grow, they sort of establish an area and
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: they slowly sort of edge out the grasses.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: But if you've got herbivores there stomping on the mosses
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: or eating the mosses, the mosses don't get a chance
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: and other plants like mosses don't get a chance to
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: get those footholds. And that gives the grass a chance
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: to grow and catch up. Does that make sense?
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I would have thought the herbivores eat the
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: grass too.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: They do eat the grass too, but because the grasses
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: are more quick-growing, they can recover more quickly, unsurprisingly.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: I see.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: So yeah, they're able to out-compete the slower-growing things, and
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: then you can get these grassland ecosystems. But without the
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: herbivores to sort of keep the other stuff from out-competing
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: the grasses, you lose the grasslands.
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: But isn't there another big difference which contributes, which is
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: just climate change? I mean, 10,000 years ago, Weren't we
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: in like a little ice age? Isn't that some of
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: the reason why this ground is no longer frozen? That
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: the earth has warmed?
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think what Sergei would say is that
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: we are looking at really long timescales here and you
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: ended up with grasslands in this area in between glaciation periods.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: And so this was like a grassland state for a
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: very long time. And yes, things have changed over times,
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: but grasslands were like a pretty consistent feature of this
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: area until humans came in And killed all of those
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: large animals.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, I see.
• 46:44
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: So it's not that the animals died off because the
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: climate changed. But I thought it was that the climate
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: change helped bring the humans to this area. So maybe
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: that's the contribution.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, could be. Could be. But the argument that this
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: group is making is that humans killing these large herbivores
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: was the main thing that tipped this ecosystem from one
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: state to another.
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: All right, so it's our fault. I get it.
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, but, you know, the rewilding community would
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: say this happened thousands of years ago. So you don't
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: have to personally feel bad about it. But you can say, well,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: would it be good if we could restore the grasslands?
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: And so the arguments that they're making is that when
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: you have a grassland in an area instead of permafrost...
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: That environment sequesters more carbon. And so if you are
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: interested in trying to like pull carbon out of the atmosphere,
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: then a grassland is a better environment to have than
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: this permafrost. And the permafrost is in a lot of
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: cases melting. And so a grassland might be a better
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: replacement for what we've got.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: Because that's what plants and green stuff does. It pulls
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: carbon out of the atmosphere to build itself up and
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: then sequesters it in the ground.
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Yes, but if you just are growing like a forest
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: or something, if a forest fire comes through, a lot
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: of that carbon is stored above ground. And when the
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: fire burns, it releases that carbon back into the atmosphere.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: But they're arguing that these grasslands are sequestering a lot
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: of carbon underground, which makes it like a better long-term solution.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: But I should highlight that I listened to this really
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: great interview from someone who was working on a rewilding
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: bison project in Europe. And he was trying to quantify-
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: differences in carbon sequestration, like in environments with bison versus
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: environments without bison. And while he did find that on average,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: it looks like having bison around does mean you get
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: more carbon sort of sequestered in a way that would
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: be good for the environment. he was pointing out that
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: it's really hard to make these measurements. There's a lot
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: of uncertainty. You should definitely think of this as an
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: emerging field that we're working on. And so I think
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: you should be hesitant whenever someone tells you like, oh,
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: loads and loads of carbon would be sequestered with this method.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: I think we're trying to get a handle on how
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: much better it is to have grasslands relative to something
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: like a tundra.
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: Anyway, okay, so... Here's what he did. He managed to
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: fence in a thousand hectares of taiga and tundra. And
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: he brought in hardy horses, elk, musk ox, bison, sheep, goats,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: a variety of different herbivores. And I was looking at
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: the website. and it looks like it's like 10 of
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: this species, 15 of another. And so it does appear
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: that this experiment at the moment is pretty small scale.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: And so that's not why this experiment has become famous. Like, yes,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: it was an exciting idea that like this area that
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: we think of as permafrost was actually probably grassland. And
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: we need to stop all being acclimated to the idea
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: that this should just be a frozen wasteland. It could
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: be a productive, amazing environment with lots of huge herbivores
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: living on it. But this program has gotten a lot
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: of attention because it got the attention of George Church,
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: who started pushing this program where he said, well, maybe
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: we can bring back the woolly mammoth, which was the
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: major herbivore in this system.
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: George Church, the same guy who famously asked for volunteers
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: for women who wanted to be surrogates for a Neanderthal baby.
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Are you serious?
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: I'm serious.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: Oh, there's like so many levels of unethical there. Okay,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: so he has spearheaded a lot of really innovative, far-out projects.
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: Some of which I think are ethically questionable if I'm
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: gonna be honest. So anyway, so the argument here is
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: that if you bring back the woolly mammoth, they are
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: like the quintessential mega herbivore that lived in these systems
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: and they could do a really good job of speeding
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: up the transition from like permafrost environments to grassland. So
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: what do you think, Daniel? We killed them off. We
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: could bring them back and bring back this ecosystem that
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: is no longer around because of us. Do you think
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: we should bring back the woolly mammoth?
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: I would love to see a woolly mammoth in the flesh. Wow,
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: that would be amazing. I mean, what are the arguments
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: against it? I mean, it's permafrost right now, which is
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: an ecosystem. There are some things living there, I imagine,
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: which might get supplanted if you bring back the woolly mammoth. Sure. Yeah,
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: I don't know. It seems good to me. What's the
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: bad news?
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: I mean– Because I'm Kelly, I've thought of some things
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: that I'm concerned about, let's say. So, you know, you're
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: not going to bring back the woolly mammoth. What you're
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: going to be able to bring back is some elephant
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: that has woolly mammoth genes inserted into it. And so
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: you're going to try to essentially make hairy elephants... That
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: will need to be birthed by pre-existing elephants. And then
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: you'll put them in this harsh environment and hope that
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: you have figured it out so that they don't die
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: a horrible death when they're up there. Though also, I
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: think from a purist perspective, they're not really mammoths. So
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: they're not going to have the mammoth microbiome. Elephants, usually
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: when they're born, they eat a little of mom's poop
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: to get their microbiome. So woolly mammoths... Their mom's poop
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: is just gone, man. You can't bring it back. But
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: they're not going to have social behaviors that were learned
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: from the rest of the herd. That kind of stuff
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: is gone entirely.
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: They're sort of mammoths the way American cheese is cheese,
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: which is like vaguely cheese flavored.
• 52:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: And I'm okay with that if it does bring back
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: these dynamic ecosystems that are helpful in sequestering carbon in
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: some way. But I do find myself wondering like, Could
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: we be spending money on better things? Do we need
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: mammoths to do it if like a thousand musk oxen
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: could do the trick instead, for example? And then like
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: what obligation do we have to these mammoths if things
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: get bad? So one, you have to worry about the
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: mammoths crushing the house of anybody that they can reach
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: because that's scary. But two, if it looks like the
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: mammoths are starting to go extinct again, do we now
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: have an obligation to keep these proto-mammoths alive because we
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: brought them into existence?
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: You build it, you buy it, right?
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: You build it, you buy it, yeah. So I don't know.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: It seems like a lot of work that you could
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: maybe replace with pre-existing species. I'm not opposed to it.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: It would be interesting to see a woolly mammoth. I'm
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: just not sure if this is like our... best use
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: of time and money. But I guess, you know, they
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: would argue that this is a company that's working on it.
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: It's not taking any of your tax dollars. So stop whining.
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: I need a T-shirt that says that. Stop whining.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: Stop whining, comma, Kelly.
• 53:28
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: So then, you know, maybe this takes us back to
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: the original question. Say they do this and they have
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: a herd of woolly mammoth. How do you evaluate whether
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: it's been successful? Is it the amount of carbon sequestered?
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: Is it the number of species there? What's the metric?
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: And how do we avoid just gaming that metric?
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a great question. So one, I think
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: it's important to set metrics up ahead of time so
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: that you're not sort of measuring whatever seems to be
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: going right at the time. But so like with conservation,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: I think they would argue that, you know, one of
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: the nice things was that you could say, you know,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: our goal is a hundred wolves and you could measure,
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: do I have a hundred wolves or not? But if
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: you're just trying to measure, we want to bring back
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: some of the interactions that Like, what does that look like?
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: And that's harder to quantify. And so, you know, for example,
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: I was listening to one of the people who runs
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: the American Prairie Project and they were talking about how
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: they quantify success. And he was saying that one of
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: the hard things about quantifying success for that program is
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: that the animals that they're interested in seeing more of
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: are pretty much all already there, but they're just in
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: low numbers. And so how do you figure out what
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: are the target numbers that you want to see come back?
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: And how do you figure out how those animals should
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: be distributed? And I think the honest answer is that
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: Nature is a Rube Goldberg machine that's hard to predict.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: And so I think to some extent the rewilding community
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: is like, look, we don't necessarily know what we're going
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: to get. We can have some goals ahead of time.
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: And those goals could be like, probably it would be
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: good to see more bison. And it would be important
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: to make sure that the ranchers are happy and that
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: people are still enjoying this environment. But those are like,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: they can be hard things to quantify. And so I
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: think that this is honestly a really difficult question for
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: the field.
• 55:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think some projects have easier answers
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: than others and more straightforward answers than others. But I
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: think in a lot of cases, it's hard to say.
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: Do you think that some of it is hard to
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: pin down because the goal isn't always scientific? It's partially emotional.
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: It's a feeling like, look, we've done some damage. Can
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: we just, you know, earn some points by fixing a
• 55:36
  Speaker 2: few things? Even if we're not like actually scientifically accomplishing something,
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: it feels like we've tried.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: Yes, and I don't necessarily think that's a problem. So
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: you said that driving through Montana is beautiful.
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: It is.
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: If having bison out there makes the environment even more
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: beautiful in some way because it creates more little microhabitats
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: that bring more animals in and you want to see
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: black-footed ferrets peeking up out of their burrows and looking
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: absolutely adorable, I don't think it's a problem to say... look,
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: we think there'd be some better things if we introduce
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: this animal, it will produce like cascading positive effects. And
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: a lot of us will think that's beautiful and we'll
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: feel good living in that environment. And we've undone some
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: of the damage that we've done, even though it's hard
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: to quantify exactly how much better we've made things. Like,
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: I don't personally think that's a problem. I know that's
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: not very scientific of me to say, but I don't
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: think making the world more beautiful in a way that
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: supports more wild animals is a bad answer.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. And since you raised the issue, let
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: me ask you a philosophical question that Hazel asked me
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: as we were driving through Montana, which totally stumped me.
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: She said, do the bison think this is beautiful?
• 56:51
  Speaker 6: Oh.
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: So what do you think? Do you think animals appreciate
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: the beauty of nature?
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: Gosh, I think animals probably... don't appreciate when things change,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: you know? So like, you know, I think if you
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: are a bison living in a grassland and then suddenly
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: there's no grass and it's all cattle, you probably look
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: around and think, well, shoot, where am I going to
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: get my food? And I don't know if they're thinking
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: this isn't beautiful, but they're probably like stressed out and
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: have like higher stress hormone levels trying to figure out like, well,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: how do I stay away from that person who You know,
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: I saw a shoot Fran the other day. Like, I
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: know those humans have guns, but I can't get enough food.
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: But you're avoiding the question. You know, if a buffalo
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: rounds a corner and sees an amazing vista with a sunset,
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: do you think they ever go, ooh, nice?
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: I have no way to answer that.
• 57:42
  Speaker 2: Exactly. An unanswerable question. Yeah, I don't know.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know. They could say, ooh, yummy grass.
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: I'll tell Hazel that you're stumped also.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: But just to foreshadow to a future episode, we're going
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: to have animal behavior extraordinaire Andy C on the show.
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: And he's going to be answering questions about like, what
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: do we know about what animals do feel? Like, do
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: they want to stay alive? Do they feel fear?
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: All right. We'll ask him Hazel's buffalo question then.
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: So hang on to Hazel's buffalo question because Andy C
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: is just a top notch animal behaviorist.
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: All right, Kelly. So you've walked us through a bunch
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: of examples, some positive, some with mixed results. So bottom
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: line for us, what is your take on rewilding? Well-intentioned,
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: a good idea. What do you think?
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: I think it is well-intentioned and I think it's a
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: good idea. I think all conservation is complicated. And I
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: think it's always really important to think about how the
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: people who are interacting with this wild area, how it's
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: going to impact them. And I think the rewilding movement,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: a lot of people are thinking about that a lot more.
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: And I think rewilding reflects the fact that Over time,
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: we've learned more and more about how complicated these ecosystems
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: are and rewilding sort of focuses on the interactions between
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: species that we've learned about in the last, you know,
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: however many decades. And so I i think like all
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: conservation programs it's not just straightforward doing the science you
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: have to also you know manage humans and stuff like
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: that but i don't know i i thought there was
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: a lot of exciting stuff going on some of it
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: is a little wild for my taste i didn't necessarily
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: feel like we need to bring back the woolly mammoth.
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: So i'm not going to see a saber-toothed tiger I.
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: Mean, I can't. Maybe George Church is working on that.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: I don't know. But no, in general, I thought it
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: was exciting to see the conservation community coming up with
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: new ideas, new ways to do things. I like that
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: there's a little bit less of a doom and gloom
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: and there's more of a like, look, let's do something.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: And it's not going to be perfect, but at least
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: we will have done something and we will have these
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: beautiful creatures and these beautiful ecosystems to look at and enjoy.
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: And we can feel good that we did something instead
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: of just sitting around feeling bummed out.
• 59:57
  Speaker 5: Awesome.
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for ending on a positive note. I'm impressed.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: I can do it sometimes.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 4: Thanks, Kelly and Daniel. That was really thorough and super interesting.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 4: And I don't have any follow-up questions. I do have
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 4: one quick follow-up comment, though. The world birth rate, even
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 4: in developing countries, is falling off a cliff right now.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 4: The world's population is projected to begin declining around the
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 4: turn of the century. And if world birth rates stabilize
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 4: between 1.5 and 1.8 like they are in Europe and
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 4: East Asia right now, there's going to be a lot
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 4: less human beings alive in the year 2400.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 5: A lot less.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 4: So maybe it's a pipe dream, but I hope much
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 4: of the earth will be returned to nature as part
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 4: of that depopulation process.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 5: Maybe a topic for another episode? Again, thank you so much.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: All right, thank you. And if you have a question
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: you'd like to share, you can write us at questions
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: at danielandkelly.org or you can go to our website, danielandkelly.org
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: and find a link to our Discord community and share
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: your questions with us and the rest of the community there.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: Thanks very much, everybody. Stay wild. Thanks, everybody, for listening.
• 1:01:14
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• 1:01:20
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• 1:01:24
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• 1:01:25
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• 1:01:41
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• 1:01:46
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