Speaker 1: I don't particularly enjoy reading the news these days. It's
Speaker 1: always something sensational, always something bad. But what saves me
Speaker 1: when I get the good sense to put down my
Speaker 1: phone and take a step outside is wildness. Henry David
Speaker 1: Thurrow wrote that in wildness is the preservation of the world,
Speaker 1: and I think he's right. But what exactly is wildness.
Speaker 1: It's a tricky thing to pin down. What I can
Speaker 1: tell you is that I've seen it in the eyes
Speaker 1: of a mountain lion, lying on a branch twenty feet
Speaker 1: above my head, its tail swishing back and forth, its
Speaker 1: iron gray eyes locked right on mine. And I felt it,
Speaker 1: for example, as a kid every morning during summer break,
Speaker 1: when I would set off into the neighborhood woods on
Speaker 1: the full day with nothing to do but look for
Speaker 1: snakes and turtles and frogs, and coming back at dark covered.
Speaker 2: In slime mud scratches.
Speaker 1: And I've heard it on nights laying on a tent
Speaker 1: on the top of a cold, dark mountain, when I've
Speaker 1: been woken up by the screaming of a bowl elk
Speaker 1: echoing from peak to peak. This, as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, is wildness, but it comes in so many
Speaker 1: other forms.
Speaker 2: And each is essential.
Speaker 1: By some accounts, today wildness is disappearing. Just take a
Speaker 1: look at the news.
Speaker 2: As I mentioned.
Speaker 1: In other ways, though, you might say that wildness is
Speaker 1: on the rise. Take that mountain line I saw, for example,
Speaker 1: and the many other two the carnivores that are starting
Speaker 1: to return to landscapes that they haven't commonly been seen
Speaker 1: in since the early twentieth century.
Speaker 2: The question is.
Speaker 1: Does any of this matter in a twenty first century
Speaker 1: world that's seemingly defined by social media and AI and power,
Speaker 1: fame and fortune. Is wildness still relevant? I believe it is.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think it's more important than ever in
Speaker 1: the face of so much today that's artificial. We need
Speaker 1: something real, and there's nothing that can shake you back
Speaker 1: to reality more urgently than the wild. Thankfully, I'm far
Speaker 1: from the only one who's asking questions today about wildness,
Speaker 1: and one of those thinkers who has spent more time
Speaker 1: than most defining and making a case for wildness today
Speaker 1: is David Kwaman. David is an outdoor enthusiast, a world
Speaker 1: renowned science writer, and the New York Times best selling
Speaker 1: author of numerous books, including several of my all time
Speaker 1: favorites on the topics of wildness and wildlife, such as
Speaker 1: the Song of the Dodo, Monster of God, and most recently,
Speaker 1: The Heartbeat of the Wild. I've invited David to join
Speaker 1: me here today to help us understand how wildness might
Speaker 1: be defined in our present day matters and what the
Speaker 1: future might hold for wildness on this planet. Thanks for
Speaker 1: being here, David Kwalman. Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3: You're very welcome. Mark glad to be with you me too.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, have really appreciated your work, and in
Speaker 1: reading and listening to your books over the years, I've
Speaker 1: come away from them with a lot of new thoughts,
Speaker 1: but also questions, and I'm hoping to dive into some
Speaker 1: of those here today. A lot of witches is wondering
Speaker 1: how your thoughts on many of these topics that you've
Speaker 1: written about over the last thirty or so years have
Speaker 1: possibly evolved over the subsequent decades. But I want to
Speaker 1: start with your most recent work, your most recently published book,
Speaker 1: The Heartbeal of wild You opened with this extended discussion
Speaker 1: of wildness and what that is, and I'm curious if
Speaker 1: you could help us understand what you mean by that.
Speaker 1: How would you define wildness. And then secondly, why why
Speaker 1: is wildness worth contemplating and possibly preserving?
Speaker 3: Right? Happy to do that, let me start with the
Speaker 3: second of those two questions. Why Why did I try
Speaker 3: to define wildness at the beginning of this book and
Speaker 3: the introduction of this book? And that's because I wanted
Speaker 3: to think about it more systematically than I ever had before.
Speaker 3: Because I knew I was going to be publishing this
Speaker 3: book of essays, reports narratives drawn from work that I
Speaker 3: did over twenty years for National Geographic and I knew
Speaker 3: I was going to title it the Heartbeat of the Wild.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to think, what is the heartbeat of
Speaker 3: the wild? What is the wild itself? And what is
Speaker 3: the very core, the very essence of it? So I
Speaker 3: started thinking about that systematically than I had before, and
Speaker 3: and what I came to was the simple statement that
Speaker 3: what we mean when we use the word wildness, what
Speaker 3: do you mean? And what I mean as opposed to
Speaker 3: what somebody means about you know times square on New
Speaker 3: Year's Eve, is we're talking about and thinking about nature,
Speaker 3: living nature, living nature on planet Earth at its most dynamic,
Speaker 3: its most diverse, its most unfettered and robust, Right Okay,
Speaker 3: a bunch of adjectives that I apply to this. And
Speaker 3: then I said to myself, well, so when you add
Speaker 3: those things together, what is it that What is it
Speaker 3: that's necessary to constitute a place, an ecosystem, a patch
Speaker 3: of landscape, a collection of animals and plants such that
Speaker 3: that wildness is throbbing with vitality, is is permanent, is capacious,
Speaker 3: is substantial enough? What is it that differs wildness as
Speaker 3: we think about it, from say, a tiger in a
Speaker 3: cage in a zoo, or a or a piranha in
Speaker 3: an aquarium, or a single great baobab tree in Africa,
Speaker 3: as I've seen great baobab trees in Africa that has
Speaker 3: become the centerpiece of a roundabout in a village, surrounded
Speaker 3: by dirt roads, surrounded by shops, surrounded by cars and motorcycles,
Speaker 3: a baobab. We don't think of those as wildness. So
Speaker 3: what is it that that comes together to constitute wildness?
Speaker 3: And what I came up with is four characteristics and
Speaker 3: I enumerate them in the introduction, and those are scale, connectivity, diversity,
Speaker 3: and ecological processes. You put those together and I'll define
Speaker 3: each of those briefly put those together and you have
Speaker 3: real wildness. As I think of it, so scale. It's
Speaker 3: got to be big. It's got to be big enough,
Speaker 3: big enough piece of landscape, big enough protected area, national park, whatever,
Speaker 3: big enough forest. It's got to be sufficiently big so
Speaker 3: that it will contain all of the creatures that were
Speaker 3: there originally. If you have a small piece of really
Speaker 3: beautiful forest but it's too small to support a population
Speaker 3: of the top predator, then everything is going to change
Speaker 3: and you're not going to have wildness in the same stent,
Speaker 3: because if you lose the top predator, then the middle
Speaker 3: sized predators will explode in population and they'll eat up
Speaker 3: all the ground nesting birds and you'll start losing diversity
Speaker 3: in sort of a chain reaction. So you've got to
Speaker 3: have scale. It's got to be big, and the bigness
Speaker 3: has got to have connectivity. It can't be just a
Speaker 3: cumulative gathering of small patches that are separated from one
Speaker 3: another by roads and by parking lots and by fences.
Speaker 3: It's got to be well scale with connectivity. And that
Speaker 3: realizing that went back to work I've done thirty years
Speaker 3: ago on island biogeography in the song of the Dodo.
Speaker 3: So scale connectivity diversity, Well, that's both the both the
Speaker 3: necessity and a result of this kind of wildness disassemblage
Speaker 3: of factors. You need full biological diversity. You need that
Speaker 3: top predator. You need that population of lions, or that
Speaker 3: population of grizzly bears, or that population of tigers to
Speaker 3: play their role, that population of saltwater crocodile to play
Speaker 3: their role in the ecosystem. And you need the things
Speaker 3: all the way through at the bottom, including the little
Speaker 3: things that run the world. Is the great ed Wilson
Speaker 3: Edward O. Wilson put it. You need the ants, Yes,
Speaker 3: you really need the ants. Ants are really important on
Speaker 3: this planet. You need all of the insects. You need
Speaker 3: the beetles, which are less obviously important but are incredibly biodiverse,
Speaker 3: so you need them. You need the bacteria. You need
Speaker 3: the archaeans, the microbes that are not bacteria but look
Speaker 3: like bacteria. I wrote a whole book about the discovery
Speaker 3: of the tangle tree. You need all of that. You
Speaker 3: need the diversity, and finally, if you have those three things,
Speaker 3: you probably will have the ecological processes. But if you don't,
Speaker 3: you need to know the reason why ecological processes dation,
Speaker 3: herbivy competition, photosynthesis, decomposition, parasitism, seed dispersal, pollination. What am
Speaker 3: I missing? Mark you that I thought, Okay, you need
Speaker 3: those things. You need those things to be happening. And
Speaker 3: when you have those things, then scale connectivity, diversity, and
Speaker 3: the ecological processes. Then you've got this thing where the
Speaker 3: heart of wildness is beating within it, the way it
Speaker 3: beats in the Congo forest, the way it beats in
Speaker 3: the best intact portions of the of the Amazon forest,
Speaker 3: the way it beats in the northern boreal forest, the
Speaker 3: way the way it beats at the heart of you know,
Speaker 3: the Bob Marshall wilderness. Then you have that wildness.
Speaker 1: So so you and I and likely many many of
Speaker 1: the people listening to this were so fortunate that we
Speaker 1: have a direct connection to places and animals and examples
Speaker 1: that you described there that exude that wildness. But there's
Speaker 1: so many people likely across the world who would hear
Speaker 1: what you just described and would think to themselves, that
Speaker 1: sounds like a lot. That doesn't sound all that necessary.
Speaker 1: When I look at the forest, I just see board
Speaker 1: feet of timber that could help fill my bank account,
Speaker 1: or they might say, you know, I really just want
Speaker 1: to see as many different birds as possible to fill
Speaker 1: out my list, and that's all that really matters to me.
Speaker 1: The rest of that seems like above and beyond, where
Speaker 1: there might be some people that say, well, I just
Speaker 1: want to catch as many fish as I can, or
Speaker 1: I just want to be able to sell this piece
Speaker 1: of real estate for as much as possible. There's all
Speaker 1: these different ways that people look at a landscape or
Speaker 1: the animals that are on that landscape that might be
Speaker 1: different than what you just described. And my question for
Speaker 1: you is what would you say to that person as
Speaker 1: to why your description of wildness is important? Why should
Speaker 1: that be preserved or fought for?
Speaker 3: You know, Mark, there's no question that I've thought more
Speaker 3: about and more often about over the last forty years
Speaker 3: than that, how do you convey this to other people?
Speaker 3: Because I feel it almost as as a religious belief.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not a conventionally religious person. I wouldn't
Speaker 3: even claim to be a spiritual person. I'm a black
Speaker 3: hole Darwinian materialist who happened to go through twelve years
Speaker 3: of Catholic education. But I feel this connection. What ed
Speaker 3: Wilson called biophilia an inherent love for life in all
Speaker 3: its forms. I feel that almost as a pre rational conviction,
Speaker 3: but not everybody does. And I want people to agree
Speaker 3: with the importance of preserving wildness. So it's incumbent on me,
Speaker 3: and it's incumbent on you. This is what you guys do.
Speaker 3: That's what I do all day, every day as we work,
Speaker 3: is try and figure out ways to make the case
Speaker 3: that this stuff is important for people who maybe didn't
Speaker 3: at the age of six encounter a snake for the
Speaker 3: first time and think, this is the most wonderful thing
Speaker 3: I've ever seen. What is this? Yeah, let me grab it.
Speaker 3: Let me take it home and put it in a
Speaker 3: box in my bedroom so I can look at it.
Speaker 3: Not everybody is built that way or has that luck
Speaker 3: that experience. I do, Jane Goodall did, Ed Wilson did.
Speaker 3: Not everybody so incumbent to explain it make the case
Speaker 3: for it. I think there are two ways. There are
Speaker 3: two channels, two categories of explanation of argument for that.
Speaker 3: One is the pragmatic, sort of anthropocentric answer, and one
Speaker 3: is a little bit more is less pragmatic and it's
Speaker 3: more esthetic. Maybe is the way to put it. The
Speaker 3: pragmatic answer is if you want to catch trout. I
Speaker 3: was a fishing guide for a number of years. When
Speaker 3: I was a starving young writer. I came to Montana
Speaker 3: with a fly rod, an electric typewriter, and Volkswagen bus
Speaker 3: filled with books in September of seventy three because I
Speaker 3: wanted two things. I wanted to be a writer and
Speaker 3: I wanted to fly fish.
Speaker 2: Yeah there's the dream right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And I don't fish anymore, but I know
Speaker 3: what it feels, so I know how incredibly thrilling it
Speaker 3: is to catch a trout on a fly. See a
Speaker 3: rainbow trout, you know, come flying out of the water,
Speaker 3: and a big jump when you come up snug with it,
Speaker 3: and you've laid out, you know, a number eighteen atoms
Speaker 3: in front of him, and you tied that number eighteen
Speaker 3: atoms yourself perfect. I know what that feels like. I
Speaker 3: know how thrilling that is. But if you want that feeling,
Speaker 3: then you need aquatic insects. You need mayflies, stone flies, catisflies,
Speaker 3: and let's see what's the fourth one.
Speaker 1: Of the may fly, stone flies, cats flies, terrestrials of
Speaker 1: different types would help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, clean water, and you need clean water and
Speaker 3: nutrients in that water, but not too many nutrients, not
Speaker 3: too much nutrients. And you you need a temperature regiment.
Speaker 3: You need for that water not to get too hot.
Speaker 3: You need dissolved oxygen in that way. You need all
Speaker 3: those things. And if you don't have them, if you
Speaker 3: don't have a real wild stream, wildness in your stream,
Speaker 3: wildness in your Madison River, wildness in your Odell Spring
Speaker 3: creek or whatever, then eventually those those trout are not
Speaker 3: going to be there. So that's pragmatic. If you're you know,
Speaker 3: if you're in the timber business, if you're like buddies
Speaker 3: of mine who have made their living in the timber
Speaker 3: fell in trees, then you're probably wise enough to realize
Speaker 3: that even for those trees to grow, you need a
Speaker 3: healthy ecosystem. You need to control climate change. You need
Speaker 3: for things to be happening so that your forest is
Speaker 3: not streaked through with rusty red needles because of a
Speaker 3: huge beetlekill that has swept through the forest and killed off,
Speaker 3: you know, twenty percent of the trees. Why did that
Speaker 3: beetle kill happen, Well, it happened because of things that
Speaker 3: people do happen probably because of climate change. Happened because
Speaker 3: our weeks of sub zero weather in the winter have
Speaker 3: decreased so that our beetle populations have exploded. Those things
Speaker 3: are connected. Even if you're in the timber business. But
Speaker 3: also if you're in the timber business, you're probably somebody
Speaker 3: who likes to be outdoors in the forest, like the
Speaker 3: buddies that I talked about, you know, with their johnsreads
Speaker 3: who were out there, you know, cutting logs, and then
Speaker 3: when they're done cutting logs, they go fly fishing, and
Speaker 3: when they're done fly fishing, they'd work on their novel
Speaker 3: I mean, not all loggers are working on novels and
Speaker 3: fly fishing, but there are people who like to be
Speaker 3: out there, sure, and so maybe maybe you find it
Speaker 3: more satisfying if you're going out into the timber to
Speaker 3: know that the grizzly is out there too, at pine
Speaker 3: marks are out there too, that maybe maybe there's this
Speaker 3: sparse population of wolverines or links out there you're cutting.
Speaker 3: You know, you're cutting logs in the winter. Maybe you
Speaker 3: want you want to see, you enjoy probably seeing some
Speaker 3: some cougar prints or some linx prints moving around occasionally
Speaker 3: occasionally seeing uh a uh a Martin or or whatever. Anyway.
Speaker 3: Uh So those that's all the pragmatic Well that's also
Speaker 3: somewhat aesthetic. But but for timber, you need healthy forests
Speaker 3: and and for it for there to be a sustainable
Speaker 3: timber industry, you need proportion h you need good timber science,
Speaker 3: good ecosystem science. You need cooperation with your fellow citizens.
Speaker 3: You need to to appreciate that over the long term.
Speaker 3: If you want to make a living from timber, you
Speaker 3: need to compromise with people about about limits and sustainability.
Speaker 3: You need you need spotted owls. You might need not
Speaker 3: need spotted owls for from your for yourself, but you're
Speaker 3: there are gonna be people who are going to be
Speaker 3: against you if you don't figure out a way to
Speaker 3: make it possible for there to be northern spotted owls too.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 3: Uh And then there's the aesthetic argument that I make
Speaker 3: in preference actually to that argument, that category of argument there.
Speaker 3: It's not all one or the other. But I think
Speaker 3: the the more esthetic and maybe you could call it
Speaker 3: spiritual argument is is the bottom line, if we don't
Speaker 3: have these things, if we don't have scale in our wildness,
Speaker 3: if we don't have connectivity, if we break everything up,
Speaker 3: we cut everything down, if we dig everything up, if
Speaker 3: we if we you know, if we if we hunt
Speaker 3: species to extinction rather than hunting them sustainably the way
Speaker 3: good hunters do. Uh, And then we're going to be
Speaker 3: living on a planet, and we're going to be passing
Speaker 3: along a planet to our children and our grandchildren. If
Speaker 3: we have children that is more boring, more lonely, and
Speaker 3: more ugly than the planet that we were born on.
Speaker 3: I don't have any children, but if I had children
Speaker 3: and grandchildren, and by now, you know, at least one
Speaker 3: of my high school buddies has a great grandchild. That's
Speaker 3: how old I am. If I had children and grandchildren,
Speaker 3: I would not want to look at them and realize
Speaker 3: that they're going to live on a planet where there
Speaker 3: is no polar bear, or at least no polar bear
Speaker 3: in the wild. They're going to live on a planet
Speaker 3: where there is no lowland gorilla. They're going to live
Speaker 3: on a planet where there is no tiger swallowtail. A
Speaker 3: planet that's more lonely, boring, and ugly than the amazing,
Speaker 3: green and blue, throbbing with life planet that we inherit
Speaker 3: and that we still live on right now. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 3: there's a famous statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin. He comes
Speaker 3: out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia seventeen eighty nine,
Speaker 3: and a woman says to him, mister Franklin, what sort
Speaker 3: of a government have you designed for us, you guys
Speaker 3: in there in the Constitutional Convention? And Franklin supposedly said,
Speaker 3: a republic, madam, if you can keep it. So. What
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about is we have wildness on this planet,
Speaker 3: amazing wildness, boys and girls. If you can keep it?
Speaker 1: That haunts me. A question haunts me that I imagine
Speaker 1: for my kids.
Speaker 2: I do have chill. I have a six year old
Speaker 2: and an eight year old boy.
Speaker 1: And what keeps me up at night more often than
Speaker 1: I cared to admit, is twenty years from now, thirty
Speaker 1: years from now, forty years from now, them living in
Speaker 1: that alternate world, and them asking me, why didn't you
Speaker 1: do anything, Why didn't you change this? Why didn't you
Speaker 1: keep that wild here for us? Why am I hearing
Speaker 1: these stories about how great it was when you were
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty and not able to actually experience it myself.
Speaker 1: That that's the scariest thing to imagine for me. So yes,
Speaker 1: I can relate to that. And so that brings to
Speaker 1: mind the next question, which is if wildness is worth
Speaker 1: preserving as we both believe, and wildness is illuminated or
Speaker 1: is manifested by these four different these four different I
Speaker 1: guess qualifiers, that being scale, connectivity, diverse, and those ecological processes.
Speaker 1: Standing here now in twenty twenty six, I'm curious, would
Speaker 1: you say that those four elements are gaining ground or
Speaker 1: losing ground? What's what's the trend for wildness currently?
Speaker 3: Well, the overall trend is losing ground. The overall trend
Speaker 3: is tragic, it is losing ground. We have eight point
Speaker 3: three billion humans on this planet. And when you when
Speaker 3: you multiply the human population times average human consumption, you
Speaker 3: get our footprint, or not just our carbon footprint, b
Speaker 3: our ecological footprint, our consumptive footprint. So you can say, well,
Speaker 3: it's human population, but it's not just human population, because
Speaker 3: if you say it's just human population, then the next step,
Speaker 3: the next conclusion that some people leap to is well,
Speaker 3: it's those those families in Africa that have six kids,
Speaker 3: or seven kids, or eight kids. They're the problem. And
Speaker 3: you know we have two kids or three kids. I
Speaker 3: don't have kids, but my parents have three kids. I
Speaker 3: have two sisters. But no, those those six or eight
Speaker 3: kids in that family in that village in Africa are
Speaker 3: not the problem because they're consuming less. We who live
Speaker 3: in affluent countries and belong to africa aff fluent socioeconomic
Speaker 3: groups categories, we account for more consumption than those six
Speaker 3: or eight kids in that average African village. So we
Speaker 3: need to think about our consumption. And this is not
Speaker 3: you know, if this is not to point fingers except
Speaker 3: into the mirror. If you're going to point figures fingers
Speaker 3: about what's happening, the first direction you point the finger
Speaker 3: is into the mirror. I do that. I know you
Speaker 3: do that. You just mentioned that we all need to
Speaker 3: do that. And then we point figure fingers also at
Speaker 3: our elected representatives. You know, there are two ways in
Speaker 3: which we ultimately deal with this. We deal with this
Speaker 3: as citizens of communities, voters, people who can march, who
Speaker 3: can write letters, who can who can donate to organizations,
Speaker 3: And we deal with it as individuals. What am I
Speaker 3: doing that is causing a lot of footprint that maybe
Speaker 3: I could reduce and the thing we talked about children,
Speaker 3: the number of children that you have, that's an important
Speaker 3: part of your footprint. The number of miles that you travel,
Speaker 3: particularly by airplane, the amount of meat you eat. And
Speaker 3: we're on meat eater, so it's important that I can
Speaker 3: immediately say what I'm really talking about is the amount
Speaker 3: of meat you buy. Yes, the amount of meat you
Speaker 3: buy especially, it's different, especially the amount of meat you
Speaker 3: buy from a supermarket chain. Yeah. Now, if you're you know,
Speaker 3: if you're a hunter who harvests his own meat or
Speaker 3: her own meat in a sustainable way, in a responsible way,
Speaker 3: then great. But the number of children you haven't, what
Speaker 3: they consume as well as you consume into the future,
Speaker 3: the amount of meat that you eat that's bought from
Speaker 3: industrial animal husbandry operations and through supermarkets, and the amount
Speaker 3: of carbon you burn in traveling around. And you know,
Speaker 3: I travel a lot. I burn a lot of airplane fuel.
Speaker 3: So when I look in the mirror and point the finger,
Speaker 3: that's one of the things I point at. Okay, you're
Speaker 3: invited to go such and such a place, or you
Speaker 3: want to go such and such a place. Is that
Speaker 3: worth it? Or should that be a zoom conversation and
Speaker 3: more and more. For me, it's zoom conversations. I mean
Speaker 3: not the last book that I published, the Heartbeat of
Speaker 3: the Wild, I did a lot of travel. All those
Speaker 3: travels came for National Geographic Magazine over that twenty year period,
Speaker 3: and then National Geographic Magazine actually wanted me to assemble
Speaker 3: them into a book.
Speaker 1: But to your point, we are all complicit in our
Speaker 1: own ways, in our own very many different variations of
Speaker 1: examples like that, we all make an impact. There's no
Speaker 1: changing that. And some people use that though as an
Speaker 1: excuse to say, well, either pointing a finger at somebody
Speaker 1: like you and saying, well, you're telling us we should
Speaker 1: care about these things and that we should do something
Speaker 1: about it. But you're a hypocrite because you're burning all
Speaker 1: this carbon and you don't really care about climate change,
Speaker 1: or you don't really care about these things because you
Speaker 1: you're making you know, you're making an impact to or
Speaker 1: on the other side, folks will say, geez, I recognize
Speaker 1: that I'm doing these things. I recognize I'm complicit. So
Speaker 1: who am I to try to do something about or
Speaker 1: who am I to tell people that we should care
Speaker 1: about these things? Because then I am a hypocrite. So
Speaker 1: there's there's these two different sides of that same coin.
Speaker 1: This sometimes will keep folks from trying to engage. It
Speaker 1: will keep folks from trying to even reckon with this,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to reckon with UH. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance when you have to look in the
Speaker 1: mirror and realize that all these things that I care about, UH,
Speaker 1: I am in some ways a part of their atrophy
Speaker 1: or decline. So I want I want to dive into
Speaker 1: that a little bit further through two examples that you reference.
Speaker 1: There two parts of wildness that I think are quite
Speaker 1: interconnected and in many ways seem to lead to the
Speaker 1: possibility of those second two being diversity and those processes
Speaker 1: so scale and connectivity. You've done a lot of great work,
Speaker 1: So I don't want to say maybe your most famous
Speaker 1: work or your foundational work, but the Song of the
Speaker 1: Dough Dough, this book, which is a heck of a doorstop.
Speaker 1: It's a big, intimidating book. It took me a while
Speaker 1: to finally get the nerve to dive into it, but
Speaker 1: when I did, I was very glad to do so.
Speaker 1: After it's sitting on the bookshelf for several years. I
Speaker 1: need to do that eventually. I need to read that eventually. Well,
Speaker 1: I finally did five years ago or whatever it was.
Speaker 3: I have books like that. I have big, intimidating books
Speaker 3: that have sat on my bookshelf for twenty years, and
Speaker 3: I finally say it's time to do that. It's time anyway,
Speaker 3: but I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1: So all that said, I want to spend some time
Speaker 1: exploring some of those topics. In another piece of yours,
Speaker 1: you wrote about Thomas Lovejoy, who you end up talking
Speaker 1: about in the Song of the Dodo you write about,
Speaker 1: but in an article you wrote about Lovejoy, you talked
Speaker 1: about this idea that he helped advance, and a quote
Speaker 1: of his that you mentioned there was that nature to
Speaker 1: be diverse and functional and steady must be large, must
Speaker 1: be large. And you reference that as well in your
Speaker 1: book and your explanation right there. We need scale, We
Speaker 1: need this size. Why is that?
Speaker 2: And what is.
Speaker 1: Happening across the world related to that? Do we have
Speaker 1: this scale we need? You mentioned in general wildness is
Speaker 1: in decline, but can you speak to the importance of scale,
Speaker 1: the importance of nature being large and where that is
Speaker 1: headed currently right now, and maybe we can explore this
Speaker 1: to the example of where you live in the Greater
Speaker 1: Yellowstone ecosystem in that region scale and connectivity. I'd love
Speaker 1: to just kind of peel back the layers of the
Speaker 1: onion a little bit there for people who haven't read
Speaker 1: the book, who aren't familiar with this.
Speaker 3: Why yeah, okay, let's start with Tom Lovejoy. Tom Lovejoy
Speaker 3: was a great man. He died about through two and
Speaker 3: a half years ago, and he became an important a
Speaker 3: great friend of mine, an important influence on me. He
Speaker 3: as I described in the Song of the Dodo. He
Speaker 3: was at one point he was vice president for Conversation
Speaker 3: for Conservation of the World Wildlife on then he worked
Speaker 3: for the Smithsonian Institution. He worked all of his life
Speaker 3: for the preservation of biological diversity. He got his PhD
Speaker 3: studying birds in the Amazon, and he went back to
Speaker 3: the Amazon years later and created a project that at
Speaker 3: first was called the the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project.
Speaker 3: There was a law that had been passed in Brazil
Speaker 3: that said if you own or have a least rights
Speaker 3: on a big area of Amazon forest, then you're allowed
Speaker 3: to log half of your holdings and you have to
Speaker 3: leave the other half standing as forests. So this was
Speaker 3: a fact that was going to happen. Large stretches of
Speaker 3: Amazon forests were going to be cut down in some
Speaker 3: way that left half of each holding. And Tom by
Speaker 3: that time was well versed in politics and business as
Speaker 3: well as ecology of Brazil. He was fluent in Portuguese,
Speaker 3: and he went down there and he started persuading people
Speaker 3: to do their cutting in a way that would leave
Speaker 3: islands of forest surrounded by a sea of clearcut islands
Speaker 3: of standardized size one hundred hectors hector is two point
Speaker 3: four acres, the metric unit of landscape area one hundred
Speaker 3: hectors one thousand hectors ten thousand. So he was creating
Speaker 3: an experiment to see what happens if a forest loses
Speaker 3: connectivity and loses scale and you have these little ecological
Speaker 3: islands of Amazon rainforest surrounded by just clearcut sun baked latterite,
Speaker 3: clay and slash. And he wrote about that, and that
Speaker 3: inspired me to write the Song of the Dodo. Song
Speaker 3: of the Dodo just had its thirtieth anniversary was published
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety six. But I was reading about his
Speaker 3: ideas and reading about there was a book called The
Speaker 3: Fragmented Forest. This was the mid late eighties, and people
Speaker 3: were starting to realize that habitat loss was not the
Speaker 3: only way you lost biological diversity. Habitat fragmentation also resulted
Speaker 3: in a loss of biological diversity, the cutting of your
Speaker 3: ecosystem into little pieces. And it was actually Ed Wilson,
Speaker 3: Edward O. Wilson and a colleague friend of his, Robert MacArthur,
Speaker 3: who had first systematized that insight in ecological terms with
Speaker 3: a little book called The Theory of Island Biogeography, published
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty seven, And I discovered that book in
Speaker 3: about nineteen eighty five, about the same time I discovered
Speaker 3: Tom Lovejoy's experiment to explore the implications of that book.
Speaker 3: And so what all this adds up to is that
Speaker 3: if you have a mainland ecosystem and it has a
Speaker 3: full complement, the full food chain of biological diversities, got
Speaker 3: big predators and meso predators and smaller predators, and birds
Speaker 3: of all sorts and insects of all sorts, microbes, sords,
Speaker 3: and you create an island of just a part of that,
Speaker 3: either with rising water or with clear cut land, so
Speaker 3: that suddenly there's only a limited area. You will start
Speaker 3: to lose biological diversity immediately. And Tom Lovejoy's phrase for that,
Speaker 3: I think he coined this phrase was ecosystem decay. Biological
Speaker 3: diversity would start to be lost, would decay from that
Speaker 3: island bit of ecosystem in a way parallel to radioactive decay. Now,
Speaker 3: an element loses loses protons, loses electrons, and it decays
Speaker 3: into another element. So that's ecosystem decay. Tom created this
Speaker 3: experiment to test it. There were also some natural experiments detested.
Speaker 3: There was an island in what became the Panama Canal.
Speaker 3: When the Panama Canal was built in Panama, they created
Speaker 3: dams to back up water. They created a great reservoir
Speaker 3: called Lake Gatun to feed the canal to make sure
Speaker 3: there would always be enough water in the canal. And
Speaker 3: when they built those dams, they created this reservoir, Lake Gatun,
Speaker 3: and there was a there was a mountain that called Barrow, Colorado,
Speaker 3: that instead of being a mountain, became an island. As
Speaker 3: the water rose, it became a small island of intact,
Speaker 3: primary nearly pristine Panama rainforest. And so they studied that
Speaker 3: island after the reservoir had filled and insularized it, and
Speaker 3: they saw this, they saw ecosystem decay. What happened first, Well,
Speaker 3: there population of puma mountain lion cougar which they had
Speaker 3: in Panama disappeared. Why the island wasn't big enough to
Speaker 3: support a viable population, an inter breeding population of puma.
Speaker 3: So the puma disappears, and they have an explosion of
Speaker 3: miso predators. I forget what they were, things like raccoons,
Speaker 3: Quadamundi's small predatory cats smaller than the puma, and those
Speaker 3: creatures no longer were being preyed on by the top predator.
Speaker 3: So their populations exploded, and suddenly they lost all their
Speaker 3: ground nesting birds because these birds are laying eggs on
Speaker 3: the ground and now they're you know, Koda Mundy's running around,
Speaker 3: and they were gone. So the ecosystem started losing, diversity
Speaker 3: started collapsing. Same thing was happening on Tom Lovejoy's islands
Speaker 3: in the Amazon forests, surrounded by a sea of clearcut.
Speaker 3: That's the lesson of scale and connectivity. So you bring
Speaker 3: that back to where we live Montana, Gallatin County. Boseman,
Speaker 3: the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is one
Speaker 3: of the greatest exemplars of this that you could have.
Speaker 3: Yellowstone National Park is what two point two million acres
Speaker 3: Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, including six national forests, two Indian reservations,
Speaker 3: some wildlife refuges, all contiguous with Yellowstone Park. Also Grand
Speaker 3: Teton National Park, of course, all contiguous Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
Speaker 3: It's more like twenty million acres with two million acres
Speaker 3: if you put an ocean around it, or if you
Speaker 3: put clearcut around it, pretty soon you're not going to
Speaker 3: have a grizzly bear population because it's not big enough,
Speaker 3: not even two million acres. But if you've got the
Speaker 3: Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, then you've got elk migrating in and
Speaker 3: out with the seasons. You know, elk leave Yellowstone Park
Speaker 3: in the autumn and migrate down across the Shoshone River
Speaker 3: onto winter range, including a lot of private ranches in
Speaker 3: the Shoshone Basin over there by Cody and and the
Speaker 3: grizzlies hibernate, and in the spring elk migrate back in
Speaker 3: and so uh and likewise the bison so grizzlies have
Speaker 3: enough to eat, and they have enough individuals to support
Speaker 3: a viable, genetically robust, reproducing population.
Speaker 2: So paint me a picture, David.
Speaker 1: If the current trends continue, and if the island of
Speaker 1: the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem becomes, if the seas around the
Speaker 1: island of the Greater yellow Stone Ecosystem continue to rise,
Speaker 1: We'll follow that analogy, and let's say that more and
Speaker 1: more of the valleys around Madison Valley and Paradise Valley
Speaker 1: and the areas around Cody and you know, stretching up
Speaker 1: out of Jackson and Teton Valley in Idaho, if they
Speaker 1: continue to be bought up and developed, more and more
Speaker 1: housing developments, more and more energy development in certain regions,
Speaker 1: more and more of the forested lands broken up, because
Speaker 1: let's say the roadless rule goes away, and now we
Speaker 1: open up more of this national forest system to roads.
Speaker 1: So we're getting more and more fragmentation, more roads, more development,
Speaker 1: more loss of habitat. All of this one big island
Speaker 1: becomes instead two hundred and sixteen smaller islands. To steal
Speaker 1: from your incredible analogy at the beginning of the Song
Speaker 1: of a Dodo, If that great big rug is cut
Speaker 1: into two hundred and sixteen pieces. Is it still a great,
Speaker 1: big rug or is it actually something very different?
Speaker 3: It's a pile. It's a pile of washcloths.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if we end up with a greater Yellowstone
Speaker 1: ecosystem that is still twenty million acres, but it's twenty
Speaker 1: million acres of washcloths.
Speaker 2: What does that mean for the wildlife there?
Speaker 1: Because you just mentioned that having this great big thing
Speaker 1: allows us to have a genetically viable grizzly bear population.
Speaker 1: It allows us to have those elk migrations, but in
Speaker 1: ecosystem to decay. When in describing that and examples of that,
Speaker 1: you also write about extinction vortices and how there' seem
Speaker 1: to be all these different feedback loops that occur once
Speaker 1: we start snipping things apart. Paint a picture for us
Speaker 1: of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem twenty years from now if
Speaker 1: it does get snipped away as we're describing here, What
Speaker 1: does that look like?
Speaker 2: How does it happen?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, you start with thinking about the grizzly bear,
Speaker 3: because that grizzly bear is the top press, the predator
Speaker 3: that needs the most wildness, and there's also the wolf.
Speaker 3: The wolf is very important. We're blessed to have the
Speaker 3: wolf back. The wolf is playing an important ecological role.
Speaker 3: But but wolves are they reproduce much more quickly and
Speaker 3: spread much more quickly, and are much more cagey in
Speaker 3: their relations with humans than grizzly bears are. They're resilient,
Speaker 3: that's right. Yeah, so so the most On the other hand,
Speaker 3: we hunt wolves. People hunt wolves, and that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's an issue, that's a question, especially along the boundary,
Speaker 3: along the northern boundary of Yellowstone. That's a different can
Speaker 3: of worms we can or cannot maybe talk about, but
Speaker 3: do so think about the grizzly bear. So when when
Speaker 3: the grizzly bear was listed as an endangered species back
Speaker 3: in I think nineteen seventy three, it was right after
Speaker 3: the dumps have been closed. This is the ancient history
Speaker 3: of Yellowstone. Grizzly bears in Yellowstone used to be carnival
Speaker 3: clowns that performed for the tourists, or they were they
Speaker 3: were They were treated like carnival clowns and they would
Speaker 3: get a lot of their nutrition from big dumps of
Speaker 3: food waste outside the hotels in Yellowstone Park. This is
Speaker 3: during the nineteen sixties, there were stands. There were you know,
Speaker 3: like what am I thinking of stadiums. Stadium stands, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that were set up so that people could go out
Speaker 3: after the dinner at Lake Lodge or Mammoth or whatever
Speaker 3: and sit and watch, you know, ten or twenty or
Speaker 3: twenty five bears come in and route through grapefruit rines
Speaker 3: and leftover you know, steak bones in that garbage of
Speaker 3: all sorts. And they could say, well, yeah, we saw
Speaker 3: grizzly bears. Yeah, they apparently love to eat garbage. And
Speaker 3: we saw twenty of them. And then we talked briefly
Speaker 3: you and I before we started about Aldo Leopold. It
Speaker 3: was one of Aldo Leopold's sons, which one Starker, Yeah,
Speaker 3: who helped help the Secretary of the Interior with the
Speaker 3: report about a better way to think about Yellowstone Park
Speaker 3: and our national parks in general, natural regulation, natural management,
Speaker 3: and that they said, well, let's get rid of the dumps.
Speaker 3: We got to get rid of the dumps. Okay, but
Speaker 3: if we get rid of the dumps, what are the
Speaker 3: bears going to eat? Well, the bears will figure it out.
Speaker 3: Is there going to be a lot more bear human conflict.
Speaker 3: Well maybe, but we can push through that. So this
Speaker 3: is all started happening in sixty seven or sixty eight
Speaker 3: and was happening straight through to seventy three. There was
Speaker 3: a lot more bear human contact. Bears were dying, population
Speaker 3: of grizzlies, and Yellowstone was estimated to be down around
Speaker 3: viracall correctly. One's seventy five. Don't hold me to that.
Speaker 3: It's just memory and I sounds haven't refreshed my memory.
Speaker 3: So one seventy five. So that's that's better than nothing,
Speaker 3: But that's not that's that's not a very sizable population
Speaker 3: if you consider that it includes juvenile males and post
Speaker 3: reproductive females and depends whether we're counting cubs of the
Speaker 3: year or not. The scientists who study island biogeography and
Speaker 3: the scientific branch of population biology and viable population theory
Speaker 3: have told us that seventy five in a population is
Speaker 3: not enough probably to retain genetic robustness and resistance to
Speaker 3: various kinds of disaster over the long term, and if
Speaker 3: you want a viable population, you need more than that.
Speaker 3: Neverre scientists writing PhD dissertations on this subject. It's a
Speaker 3: fellow named Matt Mark Schaeffer, who became an important conservationist.
Speaker 3: But he did his dissertation out of the University of
Speaker 3: Michigan School of Natural Resources. If I call correctly on
Speaker 3: the case history of what is a viable population of
Speaker 3: grizzly bears in Yellowstone? And he concluded that, well, you
Speaker 3: can't say X or y is the exact viable population,
Speaker 3: but you can say that at a certain level there
Speaker 3: will be a greater chance of extinction. And if you
Speaker 3: want a ninety nine percent likelihood that you grizzly population
Speaker 3: is going to persist for a thousand years, then you
Speaker 3: need this many maybe five hundred. Again, I'm I'm vaguely
Speaker 3: recollecting in this number. If you only have one hundred
Speaker 3: and seventy five, then the chance of your population persisting,
Speaker 3: surviving in their isolated state over one thousand years, that
Speaker 3: might be down to fifty percent. Chance. Is society satisfied
Speaker 3: with a fifty percent chance that grizzlies will persist in Yellowstone?
Speaker 3: One thousand years is a long time. It's hard to imagine.
Speaker 3: But you could also say, okay, what's the likelihood of
Speaker 3: going extinct in one hundred years? Well, at one hundred
Speaker 3: and seventy five individuals, The likelihood might be might be
Speaker 3: up to a fifty percent chance that the population would
Speaker 3: go extinct in one hundred years. Is society satisfied with
Speaker 3: that there's a fifty to fifty chance that the grizzly
Speaker 3: bear will go extinct in Yellowstone National Park in one
Speaker 3: hundred years. We don't do anything about this population size.
Speaker 3: A lot of people would say, no, that's not good enough,
Speaker 3: that's not good enough. So this whole debate went on. Now,
Speaker 3: if you've got a population that's smallish like that and
Speaker 3: it has a danger of going extinct. You mentioned that
Speaker 3: I wrote about the vortices of extinction. Michael Souley and
Speaker 3: Mike Gilpin were these two brilliant population biologists who worked
Speaker 3: out the theory of how species go extinct, and I
Speaker 3: wrote about the implications and how it was happening in
Speaker 3: the Song of the Dodo. Once your population gets small,
Speaker 3: you're going to start to have inbreeding. You're going to
Speaker 3: have you know, mothers breeding with their own sons, or
Speaker 3: you're going to have brothers breeding with sisters because there
Speaker 3: aren't enough options around. You're going to have a problem
Speaker 3: that Well, one year there there was a nice crop
Speaker 3: of cubs. There were there were eighteen cubs that survived
Speaker 3: in Yellowstone Park, but unfortunately, fourteen of those were male
Speaker 3: cubs and only four were female cubs. So we've got
Speaker 3: a dangerous shortage of females now. Plus things have happened
Speaker 3: to the food supply. We've got climate change that is
Speaker 3: killing off the white bark pines in Yellowstone and white
Speaker 3: bark pine nuts are one of the four staple food
Speaker 3: sources for the Yellowstone grizzly. We're losing them. We've had
Speaker 3: lake trout introduced to Yellowstone Lake and they're killing off
Speaker 3: the cutthroat trout. And cutthroat trout spawn in the feeder
Speaker 3: streams where grizzlies can eat them. Lake trout spawn at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the lake where grizzlies cannot eat them.
Speaker 3: So if you lose your cutthroat trout spawning, that's another
Speaker 3: loss of a food source for grizzlies. Your population is
Speaker 3: going to shrink down a little bit more. And then
Speaker 3: you have a fire of the sort that we had
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty eight. And maybe it's caused by climate change,
Speaker 3: maybe it's not. Maybe it's human cost maybe it's caused
Speaker 3: by lightning. Still, things happen, as the saying goes, shit happens.
Speaker 3: That's an important principle in ecology as well as life generally.
Speaker 3: And so you have a fire, and you lose a
Speaker 3: lot of your habitat, You lose a lot of your
Speaker 3: white bark pines. Perhaps you might lose habitat for at
Speaker 3: least for a year. So you might lose habitat for
Speaker 3: your big ungulates. You might have fewer elk, you might
Speaker 3: have fewer bison. If you have fewer elk and fewer bison,
Speaker 3: you lose another of the major food sources for grizzlies,
Speaker 3: which is which is ungulate meat, particularly of the young
Speaker 3: of winter killed and young. So all of these are
Speaker 3: happening there. These are cyclists that interact with one another
Speaker 3: what Gilpin and Soulet called the vortices of extinction. The
Speaker 3: inbreeding vortice can hurt your population, and then you've got
Speaker 3: the democratic demographic vortex. You know, too many males born
Speaker 3: and not enough females just by chance. And then maybe
Speaker 3: you've got a disease that comes in and kills off some,
Speaker 3: and then you've got loss of habitat or loss of
Speaker 3: food all of these things interacting, and the lower your
Speaker 3: population goes, the worse the inbreeding problem is going to be,
Speaker 3: and the greater the chance that just some sort of
Speaker 3: an accident, a really bad fire, or you know, a
Speaker 3: winter where there is not enough snow so there's not
Speaker 3: enough winter kill of big ungulates and the grizzlies come out.
Speaker 3: What are they going to eat? There are no winter
Speaker 3: kill bison carcasses, no winter kill elk carcasses. There, all
Speaker 3: of these things, And eventually you get to a point
Speaker 3: where you've got six grizzly bears left, and two of
Speaker 3: them are females and four are males, and one of
Speaker 3: the females is post reproductive, and then the other female
Speaker 3: gets hit by a car boom. Grizzly bear is extinct
Speaker 3: in Yellowstone Park if it's an island.
Speaker 1: And because that increasing water level all around it, increasing fragmentation,
Speaker 1: the opportunity to supplement that island population with new immigrants
Speaker 1: is not there, right, So right that fragregation keeps us
Speaker 1: from ever being able to bring it.
Speaker 2: Bring it you turn it around.
Speaker 3: Right, And so that's the scenario that gloomy scenario I
Speaker 3: and I describe a scenario just parallel to that in
Speaker 3: the Song of the Dodo, and it's about the possible
Speaker 3: scenario of extinction of the of the Dodo itself, this
Speaker 3: bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the
Speaker 3: Indian Ocean. The scenario I just described, that's the scenario
Speaker 3: with Yellowstone Park as an island. No greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Instead,
Speaker 3: you've got an ecosystem of parking lots and hotels and
Speaker 3: suburbs and golf courses and interstate highways. So that's why
Speaker 3: we need the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and we need it
Speaker 3: to be not just there but connected. And that means
Speaker 3: how many roads, how many suburbs, how many big private
Speaker 3: ranches over in the Shoshonee Valley south of Kody, how
Speaker 3: many of those big private ranches get sold for subdivision.
Speaker 3: All of those things are factors that can turn Yellowstone
Speaker 3: Park into an island.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and something very similar might be happening for mountain
Speaker 1: lions in the Everglades, And something similar could be happening
Speaker 1: with mountain goats in the Bridgers, or bears in the Smokies,
Speaker 1: or you know, pick your species and pick some other island.
Speaker 1: Metaphorical island. You know, this is happening all over the country.
Speaker 1: There are all sorts of different examples where we're surrounding
Speaker 1: these last fragments of wildlife habitat with development of one
Speaker 1: kind or another. And then these different animals are all
Speaker 1: experiencing some unique version of that spiraling extinction vortex that
Speaker 1: you just described for grizzlies, but so many other species. Right,
Speaker 1: So this is this is happening at different rates, to
Speaker 1: different degrees all over the place. That is a discouraging
Speaker 1: reality to consider. And you you kind of paint the
Speaker 1: picture of the problem within the Song of the Dodo
Speaker 1: in your latest book, Heartbeat of the Wild, you illustrate
Speaker 1: some encouraging examples of various kinds, some little rays of hope.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious if you can and speed us up
Speaker 1: to now in twenty twenty six, when you look at
Speaker 1: the the islandification of our nation in many ways, and
Speaker 1: of course it is happening across the world, but let's
Speaker 1: focus on America. When you see what's happening in America
Speaker 1: and all those discouraging trends we just described, can you
Speaker 1: share with me some examples of solutions or positive trends
Speaker 1: or tools that encourage you on this front.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, there are some. There is some good news,
Speaker 3: There are some encouraging things. There are cases where where
Speaker 3: species have been brought back from the brink that manage
Speaker 3: to transcend the problem of insularization. For not many, but
Speaker 3: the one that comes to mind immediately is the California condor.
Speaker 3: Here's a great scavenging bird, a magnetic animal. It was
Speaker 3: down to about I don't know, fifteen to twenty individuals,
Speaker 3: maybe less than that at its peak of endangerment thirty
Speaker 3: or thirty five years ago. When I started, I wrote
Speaker 3: about it. I think at least once, when I was
Speaker 3: doing the Natural Science column I did for Outside magazine
Speaker 3: California case of the California conder, and at the last
Speaker 3: minute they said, all right, let's bring those last Maybe
Speaker 3: they were down to six, six or eight. Let's let's
Speaker 3: bring them into captivity. They're being killed, They're dying for
Speaker 3: reasons that we can deal with. They were actually be dying.
Speaker 3: If I recall correctly, there was some concern about DDT
Speaker 3: DDT in the environment, which makes eggshells thinner and makes
Speaker 3: reproductive success less for birds. That's what happened to the
Speaker 3: peregrine falcon in the US. That's what happened to the
Speaker 3: bald eagle. But with the with the California conduct there
Speaker 3: was also the issue of lead ammunition. And they were
Speaker 3: scavenging carcasses of animals that had been killed by hunters
Speaker 3: and presumably by legitimate hunters, but using lead ammunition, and
Speaker 3: they adjusted enough lead that they were starting to die
Speaker 3: of lead poisoning. Now that was I never I never
Speaker 3: wrote a book about that, so I don't know the
Speaker 3: details as well as I know the details about some things.
Speaker 3: Maybe they discovered that, well, the lead ammunition was a
Speaker 3: marginal problem, and you know, there were other problems more severe,
Speaker 3: but that was one of the things that was discussed. Anyway,
Speaker 3: they brought him into captivity, they brought him carefully in captivity,
Speaker 3: and then they started releasing him to the wild. And
Speaker 3: they can soar over the Grand Canyon, They can soar
Speaker 3: out of California. They can soar from one piece of
Speaker 3: good habitat to another. They can soar over downtown Los
Speaker 3: Angeles if they need to. So they are not insularized
Speaker 3: in the way that most creatures, including grizzly bears, are insularized.
Speaker 3: You also hear about corridors. Corridors are important if you're
Speaker 3: going to design a nature reserve, or if you have
Speaker 3: a chance to protect two pieces of wild landscape and
Speaker 3: there's a chance of having a corridor between the two pieces,
Speaker 3: a corridor that's big enough that some dispersing individuals of
Speaker 3: different species will use it, then you have mitigated the
Speaker 3: problem of insularization. And that's being done in different parts
Speaker 3: of the world. There's a lot of work that's been
Speaker 3: done on the Cougar in California that has involved corridor work.
Speaker 3: Probably in the East to some extent too, but I'm
Speaker 3: not a knowledgeable that. Definitely in Florida with the Florida
Speaker 3: panther yea, yeah, yeah, because a lot of those animals
Speaker 3: were being killed by if I recall correctly, right, yes, right,
Speaker 3: So corridors can protect and allow animals, some kinds of
Speaker 3: animals to migrate from, you know, from one patch of landscape,
Speaker 3: one island of landscape to another. If there's a corridor,
Speaker 3: then it's not an island, it's it's it's a peninsula,
Speaker 3: and it potentially can migrate. And then the other thing
Speaker 3: that we haven't mentioned yet was if you're going to
Speaker 3: protect landscape, really wild landscape. Well, most wild landscape on
Speaker 3: this planet has some human presence. There are some people.
Speaker 3: This is in the Amazon, in the Congo. The wild
Speaker 3: is most of the wildest places I've ever gone, there
Speaker 3: is still some dimension, some wisp of human presence. I've
Speaker 3: been to some places in the Congo where there's there's
Speaker 3: no evidence of humans having been there for you know,
Speaker 3: for fifty or sixty years to any degree. But most
Speaker 3: places there's a human presence. There are people that are
Speaker 3: living either in the in the forest or adjacent to
Speaker 3: the forest. And usually if it's if it's in Africa
Speaker 3: or South America or in Borneo, those people are are
Speaker 3: disempowered people. They're they're uh, they're rural people. There are
Speaker 3: people living in villages, living by subsistence agriculture or by hunting.
Speaker 3: So what is their impact, what are their rights? And
Speaker 3: how do we deal with their rights even as we
Speaker 3: try and protect biological diversity. And I write about I
Speaker 3: write about that in the Heartbeat of the Wild. A
Speaker 3: couple of different cases, but the one that's I think
Speaker 3: most inspiring is gore and Gosa National Park in Mozambique,
Speaker 3: which is a big, beautiful national park that's filled with
Speaker 3: wildlife and is being brought back to life after a
Speaker 3: long civil war in Mozambique that resulted in and the
Speaker 3: slaughter of a lot of their wildlife, for instance, slaughter
Speaker 3: of their elephant population for ivory to buy ammunition. The
Speaker 3: rebel faction in that civil war made Gordon Gosa National
Speaker 3: Park their headquarters, and they and the government bombed them
Speaker 3: and bombed the park infrastructure, and the rebels killed animals
Speaker 3: to eat and also killed elephants for ivory to buy ammunition.
Speaker 3: So this place was devastated and then beginning about the
Speaker 3: year two thousand and two thousand and one, it was
Speaker 3: brought back to life by a combination of parties, including
Speaker 3: a very progressive president of Mozambique, an American multi multi
Speaker 3: millionaire named Greg Carr from Idaho, who said the president
Speaker 3: happened to meet him and said, how can I help
Speaker 3: to restore your national park. I got a bunch of
Speaker 3: money and I want to do something good with it.
Speaker 3: So they created a partnership. Nelson Mandela was involved across
Speaker 3: the border in South Africa in this brainstorming and they
Speaker 3: have created a park project that includes revived, rewilded Gordon
Speaker 3: Gosa National Park surrounded by a buffer zone that is
Speaker 3: filled with people and villages one hundred thousand people maybe
Speaker 3: I can't remember the exact number. And those people in
Speaker 3: those villages are not locked out of the park. They
Speaker 3: are considered, they are considered one of the purposes for
Speaker 3: the park to exist. The park, under the guidance of
Speaker 3: the Mozambican leaders and Greg Carr, wanted this park project
Speaker 3: to be the best thing that ever happened to the
Speaker 3: people in the buffer zone immediately surrounding ghosta national park.
Speaker 3: So there are agronomy projects, there are education projects, they're
Speaker 3: public health projects. Are girls clubs, clubs for young girls
Speaker 3: to get them educated and get them engaged in school
Speaker 3: so they don't get married off at the age of twelve.
Speaker 3: All of these things great social benefits and financial benefits
Speaker 3: and health benefits to the people in the areas surrounding
Speaker 3: because the leaders in Mozambique and their partner Greg Carr,
Speaker 3: realized that for the long term, you have to consider
Speaker 3: the needs and rights of the people on the on
Speaker 3: or at the fringes of the wild landscape, the people
Speaker 3: on the rural landscape. Because a lot of a lot
Speaker 3: of nature, a lot of populations of big animals exist
Speaker 3: outside of protected areas, so you have to deal with
Speaker 3: the human needs as well. And Gore and Gosa National
Speaker 3: Park is a great example of how that can succeed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's funny that you know that applies just
Speaker 1: as much to our Yellowstone example too, Right. I think
Speaker 1: tolerance or intolerance of animals can be just as much
Speaker 1: of a habitat fragmentator as a road.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If you have a stretch of human occupied landscape where
Speaker 1: they are intolerant of the presence of grizzly bears or elk,
Speaker 1: that can bifurcate a migration route or stop connectivity of
Speaker 1: habitat just as much as anything else.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So to your point, if we can find ways to
Speaker 1: increase tolerance for wildlife, we therefore then also increase the
Speaker 1: potential for our islands to.
Speaker 2: Be larger or there to be those corridors.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you talked about I think this is on
Speaker 1: another interview you did with somebody else. You talked about
Speaker 1: for there to be conservation of habitat or whileft to
Speaker 1: actually be lasting, you need to make for solution for
Speaker 1: the people just as much as the animals.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that reminds me of and I know we're
Speaker 3: probably running out of time, but there is an elk biologist,
Speaker 3: a wonderful guy named Arthur Middleton.
Speaker 1: You know Arthur Middleton, not personally, but I'm very well
Speaker 1: aware of his work.
Speaker 3: You should get him on this show, because there is
Speaker 3: nobody who's better than Arthur at both understanding the needs
Speaker 3: of elk, the importance of elk to the whole Yellowstone ecosystem,
Speaker 3: and the perspective of the private ranchers over in the
Speaker 3: Shoshonee Valley south of Cody, who have these big plots
Speaker 3: of winter range where hundreds and hundreds thousands of elk
Speaker 3: come and eat their grass and then migrate back into
Speaker 3: Yellowstone in the summer. And Arthur Middleton works with those people,
Speaker 3: those ranchers for mutual understanding, cooperation, appreciation of what their
Speaker 3: needs and their perspectives are, and the service that they
Speaker 3: provide by way of the elk and grass to the
Speaker 3: grizzly bear and to the American people. It's an interesting, yeah,
Speaker 3: political biological ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So many of our ecological challenges are just as tied
Speaker 1: to social science as they are to actual conservation biology
Speaker 1: or ecosystem science.
Speaker 2: That's certain.
Speaker 1: So, as you mentioned, we are coming up on time.
Speaker 1: I was maybe being overly optimistic that I could somehow
Speaker 1: manage a discussion with you in less than sixty minutes
Speaker 1: because there's so much talk about. But I have two
Speaker 1: final things i'd love to pick your brain about, selfishly,
Speaker 1: very selfishly. One is related to an overarching theme that
Speaker 1: I have always personally thought will be mission critical to
Speaker 1: ever actually solving these problems. We've been talking about this,
Speaker 1: trying to protect wildness and wildlife and wild places. And
Speaker 1: I read an essay of yours in which you had
Speaker 1: a friend who shared with you the same perspective that
Speaker 1: I have, and I'm curious about your thoughts on it now.
Speaker 1: So you wrote this essay in which you went on
Speaker 1: a mountain lion hunt with a friend of yours, Don Thomas,
Speaker 1: and you were kind of antagonistic towards the idea of
Speaker 1: mountain lion and hunting until you went on that trip
Speaker 1: with him and learned about how he does it and
Speaker 1: why he does it and all those things. But in
Speaker 1: this piece that you wrote, you shared a perspective that
Speaker 1: Don shared and what he said to you. I'm paraphrasing
Speaker 1: this quote a little bit, But he said one of
Speaker 1: the biggest impending tragedies and the struggle waged by conservation
Speaker 1: organizations is the polarization between the hunting and non hunting
Speaker 1: factions of those groups. This polarization divides resource, is it
Speaker 1: divides people. It wastes time and money. Until hunting and
Speaker 1: non hunting conservationists can find the pragmatic wisdom to accommodate
Speaker 1: each other within the larger fold, the developers and miners
Speaker 1: and the loggers are going to be laughing all the
Speaker 1: way to the bank. So my question to you is,
Speaker 1: number one, do you agree with Don? And number two,
Speaker 1: if you do, do you have any sense of what
Speaker 1: that pragmatic wisdom is that might help us accommodate each
Speaker 1: other and work together to solve these pressing conservation issues.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I absolutely agree with Don. I
Speaker 3: learned a lot from Don. He's a great guy. You
Speaker 3: should have him on the show. E Donald Thomas, Okay, Yes,
Speaker 3: he's a he's a writer. He's published a number of
Speaker 3: books about hunting and outdoor adventures of various different sorts.
Speaker 3: He's a great sportsman. He's also a medical doctor. And
Speaker 3: I wrote a piece long ago about about mountain lions,
Speaker 3: and the fact that you know, I've lived in Montana
Speaker 3: for fifty years and I've never seen one in the wild.
Speaker 3: I've seen one in Chile in the wild, but I've
Speaker 3: never seen one in Montana in the wild. And I
Speaker 3: thought they must be pretty rare, and maybe we shouldn't
Speaker 3: hunt them if they're that rare. And I published that
Speaker 3: piece and came to Don's attention, and he we joke
Speaker 3: about this. Now he emailed me essentially, I think email,
Speaker 3: maybe he sent me a letter, maybe it was before email,
Speaker 3: and he said, hey, you ignorant Bozeman yuppie, if you
Speaker 3: think mountain lions are rare, you should come up and
Speaker 3: go mountain lion hunting with me and my dogs, and
Speaker 3: I'll show you what a mountain lion looks like. And
Speaker 3: I wrote back and said when when can I come?
Speaker 3: So I went up there. Oh, And I also said,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe we shouldn't hunt them because you don't
Speaker 3: eat them. And I have no problem with hunting for food,
Speaker 3: but hunting for trophies falls in a different category. And
Speaker 3: he said, well, I eat my mountain lions, and I'll
Speaker 3: feed you a mountain lion dinner if you come up
Speaker 3: and he did that. I went out with him in
Speaker 3: the snow with his dogs. We did not see a
Speaker 3: mountain lion. We did not strike a trail that day.
Speaker 3: And then he fed me mountain lion and that was
Speaker 3: interesting and we became friends highly with a high degree
Speaker 3: of mutual respect. And that statement of his I absolutely
Speaker 3: agree with. How how do we do that? People have
Speaker 3: to keep talking to each other, They have to keep listening,
Speaker 3: have to realize that there are heartfelt values beyond their
Speaker 3: own heartfelt values. They have to use their imagination. Imagine
Speaker 3: the things that matter to the other person. Imagine the
Speaker 3: things that make the other person feel threatened, Imagine the
Speaker 3: things that make the other person feel disrespected or demeaned.
Speaker 3: Use your imagic pause, pause, and use your imagination about
Speaker 3: the other person. You know, I'm I, You know I was.
Speaker 3: I described my fishing background. My father was a fisherman,
Speaker 3: taught me to fish. I started fishing when I was
Speaker 3: a kid. My father didn't happen to be a hunter.
Speaker 3: I never hunted, but I eat meat, so I have
Speaker 3: no ethical grounds or inclination to disrespect you know, hunting
Speaker 3: for food. Trophy hunting is a different discussion. Don taught
Speaker 3: me that even that is a complicated discussion. And I
Speaker 3: learned these things because I was barely smart enough in
Speaker 3: response to that hey, you ignorant Bozeman yuppie letter to say,
Speaker 3: I'd love to go out in the snow with you
Speaker 3: when you hunt mountain lions and see and learn something.
Speaker 3: And that created the opportunity for a friendship that exists
Speaker 3: to this day. We don't see each other as often
Speaker 3: as we wish, but we have a strong bond of
Speaker 3: respect and mutual appreciation. And there are other people that
Speaker 3: I've had that kind of thing with, not as often
Speaker 3: as I wish, but it starts with saying, pause and
Speaker 3: try and imagine what it looks like, you know, walk
Speaker 3: a mile in the other guy's moccasins.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's amazing how such a simple act can be
Speaker 1: so transformative. And if we can do that, to Don's point,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: That we would have a.
Speaker 1: Larger, stronger, were diverse and capable army of people to
Speaker 1: stand up for and speak up for these wild places
Speaker 1: and wild creatures that we all care about, sometimes in
Speaker 1: different ways, and we have different ways of engaging with wildness,
Speaker 1: but it's no less.
Speaker 2: Valuable, that's for certain. So amen, one last question.
Speaker 1: That I have selfishly wanted to talk to you about
Speaker 1: when I very when I reached out to you several
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 2: For the first time, it was it was with this
Speaker 2: question of mind. And I've reached out.
Speaker 1: To a number of other people who have who are
Speaker 1: friends of yours, and other writers and other thinkers on this,
Speaker 1: and it comes back to we started a conversation off
Speaker 1: air with Leopold, right, and this is this is a
Speaker 1: famous line of Leopold's. He said something along the lines
Speaker 1: of in his book is Stan County Almanac. He said
Speaker 1: that the curse of an ecologic education is that you
Speaker 1: discover that you live in a world full of wounds. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's what we've been talking about here today, is
Speaker 1: how this amazing wild world that we live in and
Speaker 1: that we love, and that we have our own unique
Speaker 1: ways of participating, whether it's hunting or fishing, or wildlife
Speaker 1: watching or biking or hiking, whatever it is. When you
Speaker 1: start paying attention to our present day, you recognize that
Speaker 1: there are many ways that it's in decline, that it
Speaker 1: is threatened, and that the future is in the air.
Speaker 1: It's up in the air in many ways that can
Speaker 1: be depressing, that can be discouraging, that can it's a
Speaker 1: whole lot of negativity if you allow yourself to wallow
Speaker 1: in it. So quite simply, how do you find hope?
Speaker 1: What gives you hope for the future given all of
Speaker 1: this reality that we just discussed.
Speaker 3: It's a very interesting question. It's an important question. It's
Speaker 3: a question I think about a lot. And it's all
Speaker 3: the more so now because my current book project is
Speaker 3: to do a short, essaistic biography of Jane Goodall. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I saw, and that's a question that she answered a
Speaker 3: lot of times. She always talked about hope, and I,
Speaker 3: you know, Jane Goodall and Ed Wilson are two of
Speaker 3: the biggest heroes of mine that I had the privilege
Speaker 3: of meeting and becoming, you know, friends with during their lifetimes.
Speaker 3: And Jane, so I asked her that question. I was
Speaker 3: one of the many, many people who asked her that question.
Speaker 3: And because she her hope just seemed inextinguishable. She traveled
Speaker 3: three hundred a year, speaking to people, speaking to big
Speaker 3: audiences of adults, speaking at university, speaking to school kids,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, the answer
Speaker 3: has always been this, hope is not a mood. It's
Speaker 3: a duty because these things that we're talking about are
Speaker 3: so precious that even though the trends are mostly grim,
Speaker 3: there's nothing more important than to continue to fight, to
Speaker 3: continue to fight for the for the preservation of biological diversity,
Speaker 3: as much of it as we can preserve. There's just
Speaker 3: nothing more important. So even if the odds are against
Speaker 3: us and the trends are grim, you keep fighting. And
Speaker 3: that's because hope versus despair is different from optimism and pessimism.
Speaker 3: Optimism and pessimism tend to imply predictions of the future.
Speaker 3: A pessimist thinks that things will go badly, and an
Speaker 3: optimist expects that things will go well. But hope versus
Speaker 3: despair I view as more an act of the will,
Speaker 3: a duty. Despair is an indulgence that we can't afford,
Speaker 3: and hope is a duty that we've got to embrace
Speaker 3: because it empowers us. And Jane said the same thing.
Speaker 3: Her answer is a little bit more elaborate. She gives
Speaker 3: four reasons for hope. She's written a number of books
Speaker 3: that have hope. In the title, she talks about the
Speaker 3: resilience of nature and the inventiveness of humans and the
Speaker 3: energy of young people as reasons for hope, and she's
Speaker 3: got one more that I can't remember right now because
Speaker 3: we're doing this live and this is real. Yes, but
Speaker 3: so so. One of the reasons I have hope is
Speaker 3: that Jane Goodall taught us you don't have a right
Speaker 3: to despair. You got to keep fighting. But also there
Speaker 3: are reasons, there are reasons to be optimistic. The resilience
Speaker 3: of nature and the energy and and idealism of young
Speaker 3: people are high on the list.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, the passion of people like yourself who are willing
Speaker 1: to give themselves to that cause is certainly another one
Speaker 1: that gives me hope, because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people in one way or another that have dedicated themselves
Speaker 1: their lives, their work, their time, or maybe just their
Speaker 1: weekends or their evenings, whatever it is they have to
Speaker 1: spare to try to make sure we can continue enjoying
Speaker 1: wildness and wild places. Those all of those individual examples
Speaker 1: are are certainly encouraging as well. And I appreciate everything
Speaker 1: that you have done in that in that line, David,
Speaker 1: it's it's been thank you, Mark, appreciate it very much,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate our chat here today too.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Thank you