Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas,
Speaker 1: and we are, as usual, podcasting to you from the
Speaker 1: eleventh floor of a building here in Atlanta, Georgia. Big
Speaker 1: concrete and glass structure shooting up into the sky, surrounded
Speaker 1: by mazes of concrete. There's a giant highway just right
Speaker 1: outside the window that's continually built with a stream of traffic.
Speaker 1: There's noise, there's some greenery, but it's difficult to argue
Speaker 1: that this is in any way, shape or form a
Speaker 1: natural environment. And yet it inhabits a natural environment if
Speaker 1: you think about it. I know we're way up on
Speaker 1: the eleventh floor, but all around us there are ghosts,
Speaker 1: ghosts of chemicals of years past, and we forget that
Speaker 1: even though we're up here and these rarefied airs of
Speaker 1: the Buckhead region of Atlanta, um, we are very much
Speaker 1: tied to the earth below where. Of course we know this,
Speaker 1: but we take it for granted. Many things existed before us.
Speaker 1: There are ghosts of fauna and flora all around us. Yes,
Speaker 1: ghosts in a metaphorical sense though, I would love to
Speaker 1: see a giant sloth made out of ectoplasm on my
Speaker 1: train ride to work some morning. But indeed you haven't
Speaker 1: seen that on Marta, not yet. But it's just a
Speaker 1: matter of time. Okay, all right, you just wait. But indeed,
Speaker 1: I mean that when when you start looking at the
Speaker 1: details and you start looking at the fossil record, you
Speaker 1: see the shadows, You see these ghosts of the environment
Speaker 1: that came before the natural environment that came before the
Speaker 1: rise of man. Yeah. I think one of the best
Speaker 1: examples of this is actually in Trafalgar Square. That's not
Speaker 1: to say that you will find hippos and elephants roaming
Speaker 1: around Trafalgar Square today, which is this incredibly compact area
Speaker 1: of London. Right. Well, the only time I was there,
Speaker 1: I couldn't see it because there was a Scissor Sisters
Speaker 1: concert in Square, right, But any other day you would
Speaker 1: see the hippos and elephants. But actually, excavation of various
Speaker 1: sites in London, including Square, found remains from the last
Speaker 1: ice age of these animals. We're talking about a hundred
Speaker 1: and ten thousand, twelve thousand years ago. So again here's
Speaker 1: a good example of this. You know, extremely densely populated
Speaker 1: area which does have some classical elements of human history
Speaker 1: woven throughout it, which makes it feel really historical. But
Speaker 1: when you think about these mega fauna roaming around, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred ten thousand years before, you really begin to
Speaker 1: get this sense that, um, everywhere we are we are
Speaker 1: surrounded by this deep history. We forget how very rich
Speaker 1: it is. Yes, and we're talking about about creatures of
Speaker 1: all sizes, including mega fauna, the the the ultra large creatures,
Speaker 1: the king sized creatures that have have subsequently vanished from
Speaker 1: from much of the world. Yeah. In fact, there's more
Speaker 1: evidence from remains that monkeys and rhinos were also native
Speaker 1: to Britain during another period about six thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: with a climate that's similar to the one we have today,
Speaker 1: which has had some people say well, hey, why don't
Speaker 1: we bring back monkeys to the UK. And we'll get
Speaker 1: into that in a bit, but it does bring up
Speaker 1: this idea of these these ghosts of the past and
Speaker 1: what they mean to our current ecosystems. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: ecosystem is key here because, especially in our urban environment,
Speaker 1: with our fancy towers and our highways, we we often
Speaker 1: think of ourselves as detached from the ecosystem. We think
Speaker 1: of here's the city, and beyond the city, well, that's
Speaker 1: that's the nature. And if we have some some nature
Speaker 1: here in the city, you know, and some pocket plants
Speaker 1: and a little little garden here in a park here,
Speaker 1: well that's all fine and good, but we don't think
Speaker 1: of it in term. We don't think of ourselves in
Speaker 1: terms of being a part of the of the ecology itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of this is because more and more
Speaker 1: of us are living in urban centers in a way
Speaker 1: from farmlands, in a way from nature. And we've talked
Speaker 1: about this before in several podcasts having to do with
Speaker 1: um just inhabiting cities, which is vastly different even from
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds. So what happens here is that you
Speaker 1: get yourself a little bit divorced from the reality of
Speaker 1: nature what's going on out there, and then you also
Speaker 1: have this sort of storybook reality that was created for you.
Speaker 1: And John mu Alum, who wrote The Wild Ones, talks
Speaker 1: about this a lot that we are raised on all
Speaker 1: these sort of parables that deal with animals and this
Speaker 1: idea that there's this luxurious amount of animals out there
Speaker 1: for us to just revel in, when in fact we
Speaker 1: know that if we want to see an animal, a
Speaker 1: wild one, particularly one that is exotic, you gotta get
Speaker 1: to the zoo. Right. And so again this is just
Speaker 1: kind of underscoring again how very far away we are
Speaker 1: from from true nature, and it starts to get into
Speaker 1: this idea of well, if we're that removed from our
Speaker 1: own ecosystems, then perhaps we're that removed from understanding how
Speaker 1: we affect them, and that we may even be entering
Speaker 1: into a period of ecological collapse as a result. And
Speaker 1: by that we're talking about the just the overall crippling
Speaker 1: of an ecosystem and a drastic reduction in its ability
Speaker 1: to support the organisms that are a part of it.
Speaker 1: And and and force again we hear organisms that are supported
Speaker 1: as a part of it. We don't exist outside of it,
Speaker 1: we we exist within it. Uh. And ecological collapse is
Speaker 1: often a permanent event um with with drastic consequences including
Speaker 1: mass extinction. Yeah, if you think about it, there's a
Speaker 1: certain carrying capacity to humans, right, And so we have
Speaker 1: all this junk with us, we have all this need
Speaker 1: for resource is we have limited amounts of land, we
Speaker 1: have global warming going on, and we have a population
Speaker 1: that is just bursting out of control. And we've talked
Speaker 1: about this. By twenty fifty, there are some um stats
Speaker 1: out there that say that we may get to ten
Speaker 1: million people on Earth. Yeah, which is a bad thing.
Speaker 1: I read an editorial not too long ago where an
Speaker 1: individual was saying, well, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1: We need to start stop thinking about it is a
Speaker 1: bad thing, because then they were making a case for
Speaker 1: for a very optimistic case for the education of people
Speaker 1: and the changing of people, and which is all well
Speaker 1: and good, but when you're looking at the facts, when
Speaker 1: you're looking at the sheer numbers, it's very hard to
Speaker 1: uh to see that as as any kind of a
Speaker 1: positive outcome for the planet. Yeah, and I think we're
Speaker 1: so good at kicking the cam further into the future
Speaker 1: anyway and saying we'll deal with that when we get there, right,
Speaker 1: and oh, technology that will save the day. But or
Speaker 1: we're just getting better. You know, we're more enlightened. Enlightenment
Speaker 1: will save us, even if they are even more of us.
Speaker 1: But we know that's not necessarily true. When when the
Speaker 1: road meets the rubber, rubber meets the road, not everybody
Speaker 1: is acting in a way that would be helpful for
Speaker 1: the impactor. Glad you mentioned the road again, because the
Speaker 1: road ends up is a part of this. We have
Speaker 1: this massive, continuous concrete asphalt thing that is basically like
Speaker 1: a chain that we've we've used to wrap up the
Speaker 1: natural environment, cutting across uh, you know, territories of existing animals,
Speaker 1: carrying up the landscape, allowing humans to to to permeate
Speaker 1: every every part of the environment. Paved paradise and they
Speaker 1: put up a parking lot. Well yeah, um, but no,
Speaker 1: I mean seriously, I mean you think about it in
Speaker 1: that way, right, just the paving of land. And then
Speaker 1: also people burn force for agriculture and grazing, and as
Speaker 1: they replace native vegetation with monoculture crops, that discourages cloud formation,
Speaker 1: and that alters the relationship to the surface in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: which initiates further drying and warming and further species loss.
Speaker 1: And again here is this sort of invisible I stay
Speaker 1: invisible because we don't see the chemicals, right, we don't
Speaker 1: see them interacting all of this stuff going on behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, And it's hard to get a beat on
Speaker 1: it for us humans because we'd like to have concrete,
Speaker 1: nice visual things to illustrate what's happening in our lives,
Speaker 1: right And so I think that's some of where the
Speaker 1: climate issues come into play. Because you have one camp
Speaker 1: that says, dire need, big trouble right now if we
Speaker 1: don't address this, and we have another camp that says,
Speaker 1: I don't really see much going on here. Let's get
Speaker 1: a little bit warmer. So we're going to try to
Speaker 1: discuss a little bit more of this. And it does
Speaker 1: all have to do with this ecological collapse. Now, so
Speaker 1: many of these examples of ecological collapse and the forces
Speaker 1: at work in the ecological collapse there, it's very much
Speaker 1: like a spiral. You see one thing that sort of
Speaker 1: kicks off the movement, and then it just keeps going
Speaker 1: and going, and it gets more disastrous and more disastrous
Speaker 1: until hopefully, uh, somebody checks the action and the listeners
Speaker 1: maybe Remember we did an entire episode about this called
Speaker 1: Black Blizzards of the dust Bowl. So the dust Bowl
Speaker 1: occurred in the nineteen thirties here in the United States,
Speaker 1: but its roots reached back into the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: You had pioneers moving into a semi arid Midwestern Southern
Speaker 1: Plains region. And what do they do. They wanted to
Speaker 1: make a living, right, so they were farming. Then World
Speaker 1: War One hits and farms needed up their production, so
Speaker 1: they turned to the machines. They brought in plows and
Speaker 1: other farming equipment. In between nineteen thirty more than five
Speaker 1: million acres of previously unfarmed land was plowed. So he
Speaker 1: had record crops in nineteen thirty one. But soon there's
Speaker 1: too much wheat on the market and there's two little
Speaker 1: money out there to spend on it, so prices is plummet. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what they do They expanded their fields in an
Speaker 1: effort to turn out a profit. They covered the prairie
Speaker 1: with wheat in place of natural drought resistant grasses, and
Speaker 1: they left the unused fields bear so and then in
Speaker 1: the wake of all this plow based farming, the telling
Speaker 1: of the soil. You have fertile top soil that literally
Speaker 1: blows away in the wind, and without it, the ground
Speaker 1: becomes less nurturing and more susceptible to drought. So we
Speaker 1: see this example where where humans as always have remade
Speaker 1: their environment, they've remade their world and and then what happens,
Speaker 1: Drought comes like a vengeance. High temperature set in, it
Speaker 1: bakes the parched earth, and when the winds blow through,
Speaker 1: they summon up these great black dust storms. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: those dust storms rereak havoc on people, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you all of a sudden are in this really inhospitable
Speaker 1: terrain and you don't have the resources that you normally
Speaker 1: would in terms of food. In fact, John Steinbeck explored
Speaker 1: this in a fictional manner in the Grapes of Wrath,
Speaker 1: and I think most people are familiar with it, or
Speaker 1: with the dust bowl um in that sort of fictional account.
Speaker 1: But this happens all over the world. I believe that
Speaker 1: Australia has dealt with this right now in Arizona. There
Speaker 1: has been a huge impact on farming practices and how
Speaker 1: that has changed the land for the worst. So we
Speaker 1: see this on and on and on again. And it's
Speaker 1: a kind of extinction of vegetation of flora that is
Speaker 1: changing the ecosystems and changing our access to resources. So
Speaker 1: the other thing, you have our animals here as part
Speaker 1: of this equation. And I wanted to bring up ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt because there's a two thousand and fourteen study that's
Speaker 1: published in the September eight Proceedings of the National Academy
Speaker 1: of Science of p and A. S and it found
Speaker 1: that about six thousand years ago there were thirty seven
Speaker 1: species of large bodied mammals in Egypt, but today there
Speaker 1: are only eight species. So some of the species that
Speaker 1: were lost lions, wild dogs, elephants, or x hard a
Speaker 1: beast in giraffes, so those were roaming around, right, and
Speaker 1: mega fauna is really important for keeping other species in
Speaker 1: check um for also spreading seeds and also interacting with
Speaker 1: the vegetation. So what you're talking about here on the
Speaker 1: Nile is that there were three major periods of really
Speaker 1: dry climates that happened over that six thousand years. And
Speaker 1: what happened is you also, at the same time had
Speaker 1: human population just increasing quite a bit along the Nile.
Speaker 1: You have a competition, a competition for space, and this
Speaker 1: contributed to wiping out species. And of course, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of this is based on the fact that
Speaker 1: we we saw the illustrations of these creatures in the
Speaker 1: artifacts of the day. Yeah, that's right. They were able
Speaker 1: to really go back and um and figure out what
Speaker 1: sort of species existed and what time periods not counting
Speaker 1: humans with the jackal heads of course no, and current
Speaker 1: ones too, right. Um, so what we're talking about our
Speaker 1: keystone species. These are creatures that interact really strongly with
Speaker 1: the environment and they wield an outsized influence. So an
Speaker 1: example would be even a beaver, Like you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: think about them as this big giant um powerful uh,
Speaker 1: you know, animals. But what they do is they alter
Speaker 1: the course of streams, they open meadows within forests, they
Speaker 1: create pollond ecosystems. And then here's another example. Elephants. They
Speaker 1: graze and they browse, and they act like forest engineers,
Speaker 1: and they push over trees and they keep vast grasslands
Speaker 1: like the Serengetti open, and that makes them the keystone species.
Speaker 1: So Caroline Fraser, who wrote the book Rewilding the World, says, quote,
Speaker 1: the list of threatened plants and animals re rely on
Speaker 1: is weird and varied, including amphibians, bears, gymnasperms, uh, cone snails, sharks,
Speaker 1: and horseshoe crabs. She says, cone snails they have toxins
Speaker 1: that they are prized in medical research, where they're used
Speaker 1: in developing pain medication for cancer and AIDS patients. The
Speaker 1: blood of horseshoe crabs that carries antimicrobial peptides that kill
Speaker 1: bacteria being tested for treatments in HIV, leukemia, prostate cancer,
Speaker 1: breast cancer, in rheumatoid arthritis, and these are all things
Speaker 1: that we depend on, but we don't realize that our
Speaker 1: actions as humans are decreasing the populations of Yeah, here's
Speaker 1: a quote from Center for Biological Diversity. They say, quote,
Speaker 1: although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs as a
Speaker 1: natural at a natural background rate of about one to
Speaker 1: five species per years. Scientists estimate we're now losing species
Speaker 1: at one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate,
Speaker 1: with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could could
Speaker 1: be a scary future. Indeed, with as many as thirty
Speaker 1: to of all species possible heading toward extinction by mid century,
Speaker 1: and also adding of currently threatened species are at risk
Speaker 1: from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of
Speaker 1: exotic species, and global climate change, which leads to the
Speaker 1: idea of global ecological collapse. And we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: as well as the frozen zoo and the doomsday seed
Speaker 1: vault when we get back. All right, we're back, and
Speaker 1: you know, so many of horror episodes lately seemed to
Speaker 1: be dwelling on this long term versus short term idea,
Speaker 1: this idea that we we only live in the short term.
Speaker 1: And I don't think anything could be more true than
Speaker 1: this when you talk about UH ecological systems or the
Speaker 1: future of our planet and the environments UH contained within.
Speaker 1: So when you start to look at global ecological collapse
Speaker 1: first glimpse, it does feel a little bit like the
Speaker 1: sky is falling. The sky is falling. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: if you take all of the data and you put
Speaker 1: it together, you see that there is a direction that
Speaker 1: we are going toward which seems to indicate a global
Speaker 1: wide collapse of ecosystems if we can't get our stuff together. Indeed,
Speaker 1: we may be approaching what is called a state shift
Speaker 1: in Earth's biosphere, which is as scary as it sounds,
Speaker 1: a planetary a scale, critical ecological transition as a result
Speaker 1: of human influence. Yeah, there's a two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: study called Approaching State Shift and or spiosphere, and it
Speaker 1: talks about how humans have already converted about of the
Speaker 1: ice free land surface of the planet for raising crops
Speaker 1: from livestock and building cities and nice buildings like the
Speaker 1: when we're in right now. And studies on a smaller
Speaker 1: scale have suggested that when more than fifty of a
Speaker 1: natural landscape is lost, the ecological web can collapse. So
Speaker 1: the idea is, let's step back and look at this
Speaker 1: from a planetary perspective and see it going on all over.
Speaker 1: And Dennis Meadows, who is a professor emeritus of systems
Speaker 1: policy at the University of New Hampshire and he's written
Speaker 1: extensively on the limits of growth, says collapse will not
Speaker 1: be driven by a single identifiable cause simultaneously acting in
Speaker 1: all countries. He says it will come through a self
Speaker 1: reinforcing complex of issues, including climate change, resource constraints, and
Speaker 1: socio economic equality. When economies slow down, fewer products are
Speaker 1: created relative to demand, and when the rich can't get
Speaker 1: more by producing real wealth, they start to use their
Speaker 1: power to take from lower segments. Okay, well that's it's
Speaker 1: definitely sound alarmist, but it does paint a picture of
Speaker 1: a greater population of people and less resources to go
Speaker 1: around for everyone. Yeah, and then we're also facing what
Speaker 1: is called a youth bulge. Um. This is uh, this
Speaker 1: is basically on one level, it's easy to dismiss this
Speaker 1: because you you just look at the basic reality that
Speaker 1: the old wild always distrust the youth. The youth are
Speaker 1: always filled with all of this passion and this feeling
Speaker 1: that they can change in the world. And uh, sometimes
Speaker 1: they can't. Sometimes they have the scary ability to change
Speaker 1: the world. And uh, and and how do we deal
Speaker 1: with that? And then what do you do when due
Speaker 1: to population explosions, you see this sudden swell in the
Speaker 1: number of youths out there, youth that end up having
Speaker 1: these very passionate ideas about what they need to do,
Speaker 1: sometimes militant ideas about what they need to do to
Speaker 1: change the world. Yeah. And according to Kenneth Wise, of
Speaker 1: the l A Times, of the something two and a
Speaker 1: half billion people who will be added to the planet
Speaker 1: by twenty nine percent are expect to be to be
Speaker 1: born in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now, these are
Speaker 1: some of the poorest, most volatile countries, and we know
Speaker 1: about eight percent of the world civil conflicts um since
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies have occurred in countries with young, fast
Speaker 1: growing populations. And again, this is the the youth bulge
Speaker 1: that we're talking about. So the stage is really set, uh,
Speaker 1: for those who have control and influence to try to
Speaker 1: maintain that control, influence and influence in that status quo,
Speaker 1: and then for the poor to turn towards opportunities, whatever
Speaker 1: opportunities they may have, whether or not that's that's joining
Speaker 1: a militia, or whether or not that is doing something
Speaker 1: that's more positive to affect change. And so that's when
Speaker 1: you begin to look at the global collapse not just
Speaker 1: as an environmental one, but also an economic one. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the the economic and ecological ramifications of conflict. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've discussed in the past. I feel like we did
Speaker 1: an episode about about sunken dangerous. I think it was
Speaker 1: when we talked in part about some of the lingering
Speaker 1: ecological problem stemming from the Second World War, Uh, which
Speaker 1: you know, again was a it was indeed a massive conflict,
Speaker 1: was truly a world war. Anywhere you went on the planet, Uh,
Speaker 1: somebody was wrapped up in this this termoil in one
Speaker 1: way or another. UM. It just it makes me think
Speaker 1: about some of our recent episodes about UM infectious disease,
Speaker 1: because you know, we're looking at the complexity of of
Speaker 1: the ecosystem, and you can easily tie that into into
Speaker 1: guy a hypothesis, the idea that that all the life
Speaker 1: on Earth is essentially one organism, that it's all interconnected,
Speaker 1: because we we we do see that when we talk
Speaker 1: look at ecological collapse, we see the dominoes falling over.
Speaker 1: And when you hurt one thing, when you take one
Speaker 1: thing out, when you pollute one corner of the earth,
Speaker 1: there are shock waves and uh, and the results can
Speaker 1: be catastrophic. And it's it's hard not to see human
Speaker 1: culture as an illness uh in the organism, in the
Speaker 1: metal organism of life on Earth. But it's a but
Speaker 1: it's a nefarious organism. It's it's it's one that is
Speaker 1: infecting more than just one area. You can't just you
Speaker 1: can't just treat one tissue or one part of the
Speaker 1: body because it is it is so ingrained in every
Speaker 1: part of the creature. Not to keep bringing up the
Speaker 1: matrix on every episode, but there is one part when
Speaker 1: the when the alien guy can't remember his name, yes
Speaker 1: Mr Smith, right, right, remember, and he talks about how
Speaker 1: humans really have been the cancer on the Earth. And
Speaker 1: that's the very dark view of it, is that we
Speaker 1: are affecting all of these negative changes, and in doing
Speaker 1: it somewhat willy nilly, although I will say it appears
Speaker 1: that we are trying have a backup plan in place,
Speaker 1: and I don't just mean people um putting together different plans,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about. One of them is real wild
Speaker 1: ing um. But but taking a very like what would
Speaker 1: happen tomorrow if there were the apocalypse approach, And what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about is the doomsday seed vault. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: seed seed vaults, um seed refugees are you know, there's
Speaker 1: nothing new. We've been h We've been doing those as
Speaker 1: a human culture for quite some time, and there are
Speaker 1: a number of different ones around the world, but the
Speaker 1: most famous of these, located on the Norwegian Archipelago, is
Speaker 1: uh Small bar the small Bard seed Vault out out
Speaker 1: here in this largely barren Arctic Arctic frigid waste land
Speaker 1: where polar bears roam uh and you know, and it's
Speaker 1: not completely unoccupied there. It was a mining place for
Speaker 1: for some time, but but still it's a very remote
Speaker 1: setting and it's the perfect setting to have this uh,
Speaker 1: this vault where they hope to in are in in
Speaker 1: the process of storing the world eats so that we'll
Speaker 1: have the seed heritage, not just the the massive seed
Speaker 1: crops that we have and depend on, but other varieties.
Speaker 1: Because it gets very, very complicated. It's it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: when you have one variety of that you're depending on exclusively.
Speaker 1: It's it's like having a you know, inbreeding that that
Speaker 1: crop isn't susceptible to harm. And then likewise you have
Speaker 1: you have types of plants that if they vanished, then
Speaker 1: we we want the ecological heritage of being able to
Speaker 1: to study it, to grow it and and heal the earth.
Speaker 1: Even if you want to get to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: almost religious about it, Well, that's the day after the apocalypse,
Speaker 1: you would you would return to this compound here um
Speaker 1: and then just started cultivating the seeds. I mean that
Speaker 1: is a very simplistic view of it. But if you've
Speaker 1: never seen this before, it's pretty amazing. It's basically like
Speaker 1: a concrete wedge pounded into a mountain, and it contains
Speaker 1: the world's crops one point five billion seeds, including everything
Speaker 1: from California so flowers to ancient Chinese rice. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a backup copy of nature, at least
Speaker 1: in seed form, yes, well, a backup copy that you
Speaker 1: would have to put some considerable work in um to
Speaker 1: to to implement. It's a it's not a there's no
Speaker 1: push push the button and repopulate the earth mechanism at
Speaker 1: the small bard. But it is contains the algorithms it does.
Speaker 1: It contains it contains the essentially the seed heritage of
Speaker 1: the world, in which if you think about it, like
Speaker 1: we have um crop extinction all the time, and this
Speaker 1: happens usually because of the mono agriculture practices that we
Speaker 1: have in place. So it's it's not weird that we
Speaker 1: would lose some crops, but some of it has been exascerbated,
Speaker 1: has been made worse because of our practices. So consider
Speaker 1: that in the eighteen hundreds they were seventy one catalog
Speaker 1: species of apples the United States. Today there are just
Speaker 1: three hundred species seeds, so we lose them all the time.
Speaker 1: But the seed vault, again, it's it's a place where
Speaker 1: you could start from the beginning. It's the idea that
Speaker 1: if we had a disease that was rampant that took
Speaker 1: out a large amount of the population, if there was
Speaker 1: something that that created that collapse, maybe it's global warming.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's war that we would have something to return to,
Speaker 1: you know. On the subject of of lost crops. If
Speaker 1: anyone out there wants to watch a good cooking show,
Speaker 1: a good food show, highly recommend The Mind of a Chef,
Speaker 1: especially the second season as it pertains to this episode,
Speaker 1: uh features a lot from Chef Sean Brock, who really
Speaker 1: goes into lost seed heritage and and and reclaiming it
Speaker 1: and especially is it concerned Southern cuisine because you see
Speaker 1: the shift where people are getting away from the crops
Speaker 1: that are actually grown and the plants that are part
Speaker 1: of the natural ecology or stuff that we've we've lost
Speaker 1: as we moved towards these big mono crops. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the flavors. I feel like the different species are kind
Speaker 1: of like the Willy Wonkas of flavors in nature that
Speaker 1: we don't always experience because of the mono agriculture. And
Speaker 1: I believe Nolan producer, he turned me onto that show. Um,
Speaker 1: it is really great mind of a chef, So check
Speaker 1: it out. All right, so you have your seeds, but
Speaker 1: what about your fauna? That's right, It's one thing to
Speaker 1: have the plants, but again it's it's you know, getting
Speaker 1: back into that idea of the ecology as the complex
Speaker 1: system about life on Earth is one hole. You need
Speaker 1: all the pieces. So what do you do about the
Speaker 1: the animal pieces? Well, uh, there are currently several programs
Speaker 1: going on of note to preserve the genes of endangered animals.
Speaker 1: There's China's Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base. They keep
Speaker 1: eggs and sperm and other tissue samples from panda is
Speaker 1: another native species, and they keep it all in cold storage. There's, uh,
Speaker 1: the UK's Frozen Art Project took on the mission to
Speaker 1: create a network of similar gene banks around the world
Speaker 1: devoted to endangered animals. And there is the f was
Speaker 1: in Zoo which Oliver Writer at the San Diego Zoo
Speaker 1: created founded um that is a cryod preservation of cells
Speaker 1: and DNA from natured animals over a thousand species, and
Speaker 1: Writer says, quote, it's a small amount of biodiversity for
Speaker 1: the number of species that are potentially facing extinction. So
Speaker 1: as you have, if we call back to some of
Speaker 1: the statistics that you threw out earlier, the amount of
Speaker 1: species that's those are good efforts to try to preserve
Speaker 1: some of them, but we won't be able to do
Speaker 1: all of them, particularly the ones that are going extinct. UM.
Speaker 1: But I think it kind of this whole thing stepping
Speaker 1: back and looking at seed preservation or DNA preservation of species.
Speaker 1: The fact that we are sinking millions, if not billions
Speaker 1: of dollars into these endeavors, I think will illustrate the
Speaker 1: concept that perhaps something is going on, and then we
Speaker 1: should take this seriously, the fact that that ecological collapse
Speaker 1: could happen. And uh, you know, and I also want
Speaker 1: to want a caution to don't take too much heart
Speaker 1: in the and especially the frozen Zoo movements in the
Speaker 1: sense that bear in mind that bringing an extinct animal
Speaker 1: back just with its genetic information on that alone, just
Speaker 1: with this blueprint, uh, is exceedingly difficult. So this is
Speaker 1: not a situation where oh, we just have a backup again,
Speaker 1: you just push the button and it's good to go. No,
Speaker 1: it's there's some hope in it. But uh, but for
Speaker 1: the most part, when a species is gone, it is gone. Well,
Speaker 1: and if you're talking about a really a huge extinction here,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about global uh ecological collapse on a
Speaker 1: mass scale, we're talking about mass extinction, and let's keep
Speaker 1: this in mind. Two hundred and fifty million years ago,
Speaker 1: the most catastrophic, the Great Dying of the Permian Age,
Speaker 1: wiped out over all species and the oceans and on land,
Speaker 1: and it took tens of millions of years for life
Speaker 1: to recover. So I don't know that we're going to
Speaker 1: I mean, some will say we're going towards the sixth
Speaker 1: extinction of humans and that you know, you can have
Speaker 1: as many seeds and frozen DNA as you want of species,
Speaker 1: but that's not going to counteract the amount of time
Speaker 1: it takes to put systems back into place. Indeed, But yeah,
Speaker 1: to your point, we've had actually for not round to
Speaker 1: do it. But yeah, again to your point that we've
Speaker 1: had five known mass extinction events in our history, and
Speaker 1: it's it's crucial to know that two of them wiped
Speaker 1: out at least half of all species. So that's that's
Speaker 1: pretty stackering. So when we talk about a six extinction event, uh,
Speaker 1: it is not a minor occurrence. No, And Caroline Fraser,
Speaker 1: again the author of Rewilding, says bio biologists have begun
Speaker 1: to understand that nature is a chain of dominoes. If
Speaker 1: you pull one piece out the whole thing falls down,
Speaker 1: lose the animals, lose the ecosystems, game over very well put.
Speaker 1: And again, this is one of those things that is
Speaker 1: so difficult for us to wrap our heads around because
Speaker 1: there there's not this sort of concrete thing in front
Speaker 1: of us that says, by the year X, all things
Speaker 1: will die off. We can only look at what's happening
Speaker 1: and predict what we think is going to happen, and
Speaker 1: we can't say with certainty at what moment. And I
Speaker 1: think that's what drives us nuts. And I think that's
Speaker 1: what drives some people to in action indeed, And again
Speaker 1: it just comes back again to our our inability to
Speaker 1: deal with the long term consequences of our actions and
Speaker 1: in our own life as well. But when you start
Speaker 1: looking at at the model being the lives of our
Speaker 1: children and their grandchildren or the generations to come, it
Speaker 1: just it seems to cripple us even more. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: something called a shifting baseline syndrome, and it's a concept
Speaker 1: that was coined in by fisheries scientists Daniel Polly, who
Speaker 1: said that each subsequent generation of scientists uses wildlife populations
Speaker 1: at the time they entered the field as the baseline
Speaker 1: leveling the awareness of how much these populations may have
Speaker 1: plummeted between that point and the baseline of the generation before,
Speaker 1: which leads to this sort of environmental generational amnesia. Mhm, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that makes perfect. I mean the old
Speaker 1: people will always tell you, you you know, when when when
Speaker 1: I was your age, it was such and such. When
Speaker 1: I was your age, it was such and such, and
Speaker 1: we when we almost never listened to that, except maybe
Speaker 1: as a just a curious, uh, you know, side tangent.
Speaker 1: But but that's the reality we see here. It's it's
Speaker 1: always what we're just taking our own experiences of when
Speaker 1: we we enter into this world and using that as
Speaker 1: as is almost the primordical setting as the base setting
Speaker 1: that that everything else needs to be lined up to.
Speaker 1: Forgetting that this base setting is somewhat downhill from where
Speaker 1: I rolled from last time, and then from the time
Speaker 1: before right deep time just isn't generally our thing, And
Speaker 1: so yeah, we don't remember or even sometimes know that
Speaker 1: there were elephants follower square right um, and that there
Speaker 1: was a very different environment in place before us. It's
Speaker 1: basically each generation, it's it's it's like if you came
Speaker 1: into the doctor and this is and you've only had
Speaker 1: this new doctor for two weeks. And the doctor says, hey,
Speaker 1: you seem to be doing great. You're you know, only
Speaker 1: one of your knees is painting you. And then you
Speaker 1: have to remind the doctor but there was a time
Speaker 1: when neither of my knees pained you. And then the
Speaker 1: doctor said, well, I wasn't here for that, and then
Speaker 1: he just starts to go in about how we're not
Speaker 1: supposed to be up right anyway, exciting at desks. Alright,
Speaker 1: So you know, this is a this is a bit
Speaker 1: of a bit of a bummer episode in some respects.
Speaker 1: It's kind of not a happy pants, not a happy
Speaker 1: pants episode for sure. So I'm gonna I thought, maybe
Speaker 1: I capt it off by reading just a quick little
Speaker 1: paragraph from another bummer work, that being a cormat McCarthy's
Speaker 1: The Road. Here's this uplifting quote. Bring it Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's beautiful, but it it does deal
Speaker 1: with ass extinction, with the loss of life on the planet,
Speaker 1: the complexity of life on the planet. So here it goes.
Speaker 1: Once there were brooked trout in the streams in the mountains.
Speaker 1: You could see them standing in the amber current, where
Speaker 1: the white edges of their fins wimpled softly, and the
Speaker 1: flow they smelled of moss in your hand, polished and
Speaker 1: muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that
Speaker 1: were maps of the world, and it's becoming maps and
Speaker 1: mazes of a thing which could not be put back,
Speaker 1: not to be made right again. In the deep glens
Speaker 1: where they lived, all things were older than man, and
Speaker 1: they hummed up mystery. So there you have it. UH,
Speaker 1: great book of course, and UH and I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: that one's available on audible for anyone who's thinking about
Speaker 1: taking up that audible deal that we mentioned in the break. Indeed, alright,
Speaker 1: make sure to check out the next episode, which is
Speaker 1: about re wilding, which I guess you could say is
Speaker 1: one of the ways in which we could approach this
Speaker 1: in a very tactile way, a very concrete way, and
Speaker 1: try to find a solution. Yeah. So if you want
Speaker 1: something a little more upbeat to cat this, tune in
Speaker 1: next time and we will U, We'll cheer you up
Speaker 1: a little bit because rewilding is uh is a dash
Speaker 1: of hope, uh to take on top of this this topic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a Komodo dragon for everyone. Yeah who didn't want that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Check it out, saying In the meantime, be sure to
Speaker 1: check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
Speaker 1: is our homepage, our mothership. You will find every podcast
Speaker 1: episode we've ever done uh, and the podcast landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode will include links to related content, stuff
Speaker 1: we've mentioned here, et cetera. UH. That page also includes
Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts, so you
Speaker 1: can certainly follow us on Facebook and Twitter, Tumbler, or
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