Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: in our last episode we discussed what Ghosts of Evolution.
Speaker 1: We gave you what was probably a very sobering episode
Speaker 1: about the state of the world, the state of the
Speaker 1: ecosystem and humanity's role in degrading it, and and the
Speaker 1: forecast for the future which is not all that great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we talked about picking apart the web of life and
Speaker 1: what happens and how it unravels and affects humans and
Speaker 1: other species and other flora around the world. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about trying to weave that web of life back
Speaker 1: together in this episode, specifically with something called re wilding.
Speaker 1: And the reason why it's so important is because we
Speaker 1: have definitely squarely entered into something called the anthroposyne. Yes, UH,
Speaker 1: this is of course the age of man UH and
Speaker 1: this is when we did a whole episode on this UH,
Speaker 1: which you can certainly go back to and find a
Speaker 1: link to on the landing page for this podcast episode.
Speaker 1: But this is the idea that in the past UH
Speaker 1: vast changes in the world have been caused by uh,
Speaker 1: you know, changes in the global climate, ecological changes. But
Speaker 1: in this age of man, we see the world being
Speaker 1: changed by humanity. Yeah, is the first time a species
Speaker 1: has become a greater force than the elements of nature.
Speaker 1: And just to call back to the episode real quick, um,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the Holocene period previous to us ending
Speaker 1: about two hundred years ago with the steam engine. And
Speaker 1: this is according to Ken Caldera, who is a climate
Speaker 1: scientists of the Carnegie Institute of Science and California. Data
Speaker 1: retreat from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a
Speaker 1: growth in the atmosphere, a concentrations of several greenhouse gases
Speaker 1: in chickul our CEO two and h four, which coincide
Speaker 1: with the invention of the steam engine in seventeen eighty four.
Speaker 1: We can look at these ice cores and be like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: that's evidence right there that this is when it began.
Speaker 1: And there's plenty of other evidence that there's all sorts
Speaker 1: of man made strata out there, but this is a
Speaker 1: good example of how humans are are shaping the course
Speaker 1: of the earth. Yeah. I mean, agriculture is another huge area, right,
Speaker 1: you go back twelve thousand years in history, you see
Speaker 1: the rise of agriculture. We stopped being hunter gatherers. We
Speaker 1: stopped you know, going out here to get our plants
Speaker 1: and going over here to try and catch or hunt
Speaker 1: an animal. We said, hey, we can grow the crops
Speaker 1: right here. And to do that, we have to change
Speaker 1: the environment. We have to to take what was once
Speaker 1: a a field, what was once afar us, which was
Speaker 1: once you know, a bunch of shrubs, and turn it
Speaker 1: into a one crop environment that is that is tightly
Speaker 1: control by the humans that have made it, and then
Speaker 1: eventually just pave over that, yeah, right, and build something
Speaker 1: on top of it. So the idea here is can
Speaker 1: we reverse the course of our actions, and can we
Speaker 1: do this through something called rewilding, which we'll get to
Speaker 1: in a moment, but before we should talk about human rewilding.
Speaker 1: You know, in looking at this topic, uh, and and
Speaker 1: the previous one, I keep thinking back to Daniel quinn
Speaker 1: book Ishmael, which I know a number of our listeners
Speaker 1: have probably read. Uh. The basic cell on the book,
Speaker 1: of course, is a man talks to a talking gorilla.
Speaker 1: But it's a it's a deep ecological philosophical work about
Speaker 1: where where we are and where we're going, and and
Speaker 1: and indeed, if we can do anything to stop what
Speaker 1: we've done. Just to read a quick quote from it,
Speaker 1: um Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world,
Speaker 1: and this is what he's done. Almost he hasn't quite
Speaker 1: made it, and it looked as though this may be
Speaker 1: his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the
Speaker 1: world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of
Speaker 1: all the mastery we've obtained, we don't have enough mastery
Speaker 1: to stop devastating the world or to repair the devastation
Speaker 1: we've already wrought. There's a part in the book where
Speaker 1: Ishmael describes human culture and the rise of technology as
Speaker 1: this this this pilot in an airplane. It's been pushed off,
Speaker 1: you know, like that's sort of like the experimental aircraft
Speaker 1: of old. You know, you've all seen the footage they
Speaker 1: pushed it off the top of building, off the side
Speaker 1: of a cliff, and it ultimately is just plummeting. But
Speaker 1: inside the aircraft, the individual is, you know, pumping hard
Speaker 1: of the controls, pedaling the petals as fast as they can,
Speaker 1: even though it's falling. It's falling, and it's just falling,
Speaker 1: you know, faster and faster, And but we keep doing
Speaker 1: all the things that we're doing. We keep trying to
Speaker 1: pilot this aircraft that simply is not going to fly.
Speaker 1: It's not going to to prevent us from crashing into
Speaker 1: the ground. So in this podcast, we're we're we're asking
Speaker 1: that question, can we stuff the plane from crashing and
Speaker 1: crashing the ground? What are some of the things we
Speaker 1: can do to avoid devastation? First we have to get
Speaker 1: out of the plane. Yes, Yeah, that's clear. They're right,
Speaker 1: it's not working for us. And that's really what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, like that that some of what we're doing, uh,
Speaker 1: particularly from a technological angle, is not working for us.
Speaker 1: And how do we get back to a solution that
Speaker 1: does work for us? Well, rewilding in nature is certainly
Speaker 1: a solution, and we'll talk about that in a moment,
Speaker 1: But before we talk about re welding and nature, you've
Speaker 1: got to talk about rewilding humans because that's where it begins. Yes,
Speaker 1: and uh, as with a lot of things, rewilding, the
Speaker 1: term already has various definitions, and it can already be
Speaker 1: sort of taken to mean one thing or another um
Speaker 1: in this In this sense human rewilding though is on
Speaker 1: one level, it's about reconnecting with nature. Um, it's about integrating.
Speaker 1: It's about combining time and nature with conscious living. It's
Speaker 1: about it's not necessarily about just completely abandoning your life.
Speaker 1: It's because it easily brings to mind, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea of someone quitting their job, throwing their smartphone into
Speaker 1: the ocean, and then trekking off into the woods to
Speaker 1: eat you know, berries and field mice all day. But
Speaker 1: but but it's about integration. It's about saying, all right,
Speaker 1: what are some aspects of my life that I can
Speaker 1: that I can bring back to nature. Uh, places in
Speaker 1: my life where I can reconnect with nature and reconnect
Speaker 1: with with the with the survival skills that that that
Speaker 1: I originally had. I've also seen it described in terms
Speaker 1: of of modern humans as being domesticated. You know, we're
Speaker 1: the we're the were the house cats that have been
Speaker 1: in the house so long that if we're suddenly outside
Speaker 1: in the backyard, we're going to die within an hour
Speaker 1: because we we we we we don't know how to
Speaker 1: survive anymore. We've gotten away from our roots. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean much of that is true because if you had
Speaker 1: to go out and survive on your own in a forest,
Speaker 1: it would be very difficult today, right unless someone had
Speaker 1: passed down the skills to you or had paid to
Speaker 1: get those skills, like through rewild Portland actually, which offers
Speaker 1: a six month long rewilding immersion program you for the
Speaker 1: for the low cost of five thousand dollars, you could
Speaker 1: learn every sort of do it yourself thing, from metal
Speaker 1: smith ing to hunting wild game and foraging skills. And
Speaker 1: foraging skills I think are hugely important something that we
Speaker 1: overlook because for for millennia, ancestors have been foraging for
Speaker 1: food and that's how they largely subsisted. We tend to
Speaker 1: think about, you know, this sort of paleo diet where
Speaker 1: it's you know, a bunch of meat, punks of meat.
Speaker 1: But the truth of the matter is that we subsisted
Speaker 1: on vegetation. So we've talked about this before. We've talked
Speaker 1: about foraging and even into mafagey eating bugs as ways
Speaker 1: to subsist um in ways that actually would have less
Speaker 1: of an impact on environments and ecosystems. So the whole
Speaker 1: human rewilding thing is hearkening back to a simpler time
Speaker 1: and less of a reliance on technology. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's easy to get the to get caught up in
Speaker 1: the language of it too, because you know, we're saying
Speaker 1: things like reconnect with nature and your past, and just
Speaker 1: the mere fact that it sounds like the pitch for
Speaker 1: an ongoing skit in the next season in Portlandia. You know,
Speaker 1: it's easy to sort of dismiss the missilliness of it,
Speaker 1: but but it is at heart about reconnecting with what
Speaker 1: it is to be human of sort of relearning how
Speaker 1: to be a human organism. Um. And a lot of
Speaker 1: this is stuff that we we do feel a craving towards,
Speaker 1: like the hunter gatherer thing. Most of us don't do
Speaker 1: any kind of hunting and gathering, but I wonder to
Speaker 1: what extent we end up scratching that itch when we
Speaker 1: say get coupon crazy and we're looking for deals like
Speaker 1: we're sort of we're sort of trying to recapture the
Speaker 1: hunter gather or certainly I mean I grew up in
Speaker 1: a in rural Tennessee and there are plenty of hunters
Speaker 1: in that area, and uh, you know, in a large
Speaker 1: part I feel A lot of that comes from a
Speaker 1: culture of you know, you're reconnecting with with your past.
Speaker 1: You know, this part of your heritage hunting for meat,
Speaker 1: and even though you're not depending upon that dear meat
Speaker 1: to feed your family as much anymore, you're you feel
Speaker 1: pulled to the past. You feel like this is a
Speaker 1: part of what you are as a as a as
Speaker 1: a being, as an organism, and therefore you engage in it,
Speaker 1: you know. I was recently in Taos, New Mexico, and
Speaker 1: I visited the Taus Pueblo Settlements, which is um one
Speaker 1: of the oldest Native American settlements UM in the United States.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that one of the TAUSE
Speaker 1: members was talking about is growing up in that village
Speaker 1: which still practices the same sort of rituals, um and
Speaker 1: day to day operations as they did a thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: And there's no running water electricity there. And so she
Speaker 1: said that as a child, she would run around, she
Speaker 1: would go and get the water, she would bring it home.
Speaker 1: She would be taught by the other children how to
Speaker 1: fish with her hands right um. And they also played
Speaker 1: up in the mountains. She said that was her backyard,
Speaker 1: and they respected nature and they understood how to communicate
Speaker 1: with nature. So she said mountain lions weren't a problem.
Speaker 1: They weren't getting eaten by mountain lions because they were
Speaker 1: so much more in tuned and had the information passed
Speaker 1: down on how to deal with you know, these species
Speaker 1: around them, and how to cultivate the flora around them.
Speaker 1: And I thought this was it was such an amazing
Speaker 1: place to visit, to see that people were still I
Speaker 1: suppose you would say human rewilding, although all they were
Speaker 1: doing is just following their ancestors way of living. As
Speaker 1: with a lot of human endeavors, it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those areas where we we end up complicating things several
Speaker 1: times over because you see the mix of of ecological
Speaker 1: responsibility here the the idea that if we all behave
Speaker 1: just a little more in tune with with the environment
Speaker 1: than than our than our individual footprint is less and
Speaker 1: their overall environmental footprint is less, and and it can
Speaker 1: all roll down to positive change. But then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's a lot of this is is caught
Speaker 1: up in heritage and culture and and and wanting to
Speaker 1: reconnect with our past. Yeah, And the interesting thing about
Speaker 1: that is that the flower I believe was her name,
Speaker 1: who led the tour, was saying that for seventy years,
Speaker 1: tas Pueblow Settlement UH had an ongoing lawsuit with the
Speaker 1: government to reclaim lands, including Blue Lake, which is nearby,
Speaker 1: and they were saying that because the government had taken
Speaker 1: over national park land and they were giving it to
Speaker 1: commercial entities, that a lot of their drinking water began
Speaker 1: to get tainted and as a result, they began to
Speaker 1: see their environment change. And that's exactly what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about today, this impact, this this web of life.
Speaker 1: UM that you just change one little thing and there's
Speaker 1: a cascade of events that follow. So this, to me
Speaker 1: was such a good example of here's this group in place,
Speaker 1: and little do we know here in the United States,
Speaker 1: but their affecting change for the Clean Water Act right
Speaker 1: and the Clean Air Act in the nineteen seventies, UM,
Speaker 1: A lot of that was the movement from Native American
Speaker 1: tribes saying we need to respect the land and act
Speaker 1: with it. YEA, Even even though re wilding is relatively
Speaker 1: new term, it is it's already kind of a big tent.
Speaker 1: But just bear in mind when thinking about it that
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna go live off the
Speaker 1: grid in the woods. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, build a bunker and prepare for the apocalypse
Speaker 1: and for you know, the hunt and gather amid the
Speaker 1: shattered ruins of human civilization or anything like that. It
Speaker 1: can be as simple as reminding yourself that nature exists,
Speaker 1: taking the time too. And again, it's so easy to
Speaker 1: fall in the traffic, making it just sound like hippie
Speaker 1: feel good to read to some listeners, but just to
Speaker 1: reconnect with nature and to realize that you are a
Speaker 1: biological organism, and you are a part of the psychology,
Speaker 1: and you do not stand outside of it, no matter
Speaker 1: how unnatural the environments are that we've built for ourselves,
Speaker 1: and the and and the structures that we depend on,
Speaker 1: both the UH informational and physical UH. It can be
Speaker 1: just as simple as as thinking about your choice is
Speaker 1: a little more and in making those choices a little
Speaker 1: more in step with the natural world. Yeah, definitely, it's
Speaker 1: all about choices when you really think about it, and
Speaker 1: perhaps even installing a Komodo dragon in your backyard. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that idea when we get back from mis
Speaker 1: brading all right, we're back. We've been talking about rewild
Speaker 1: ng in the human sense, uh and in the idea
Speaker 1: of undomesticating ourselves, about reconnecting with nature, uh and and
Speaker 1: making better choices in our lives, all the things that
Speaker 1: kind of fall under the semi ambiguous term of human
Speaker 1: rewild Yeah. And now we're going to talk about re
Speaker 1: wilding nature, which is a huge topic. So we could
Speaker 1: talk about all the various projects going on with real wilding,
Speaker 1: but we chose to really focus on something that George
Speaker 1: Mombiante talked about in his TED talk. And we're talking
Speaker 1: about re wild ing with wolves. But before you can
Speaker 1: talk about real wilding with wolves, you have to talk
Speaker 1: about how there was a mass extermination effort of wolves
Speaker 1: for a very long period of time, at least in
Speaker 1: the United States. Yeah. And it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: rather involved and fascinating topic when you get into it,
Speaker 1: because there's several different layers to it. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: the basic human fear of wolves, which is generally unfounded.
Speaker 1: This is not a species that praise on humans. I
Speaker 1: feel like we've discussed this in the past. Uh. The
Speaker 1: wolf is is it's easy to build a wolf up
Speaker 1: in your mind as this thing that it is not,
Speaker 1: and so part of it is the fear of the wolf.
Speaker 1: Part of it it also has to do with uh,
Speaker 1: with the ways that we were already changing the world
Speaker 1: and altering the environment and therefore altering the behavior of
Speaker 1: the wolves. You know, suddenly we're trying to keep a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of gray animals out here unmolested from you know,
Speaker 1: basically trying to set the sheep or whatever apart from
Speaker 1: the rest of the natural world. And then you get
Speaker 1: upset when the wolves come to eat the sheep. Right, So,
Speaker 1: I mean the right. There's part of this is agriculture.
Speaker 1: Part of this is folk tale um. In fact, we
Speaker 1: even talked about I think it was in New Mexico
Speaker 1: there was a bus stop that was a caged bus
Speaker 1: stop for children because the ridiculous fear that the wolves
Speaker 1: were just out there ready to eat American children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a group that installed these because they were
Speaker 1: against um, the protection of these subspecies of the gray wolf.
Speaker 1: I believe so if you look at the fact that
Speaker 1: before Europeans settled in the United States, there were two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand wolves roaming in the country. And
Speaker 1: then you look at the fact that by the new
Speaker 1: conceemnities only a few hundred wolves remained in the lower
Speaker 1: forty States. You get that um that wolves had been
Speaker 1: hunted and exterminated to to quite a degree. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're talking about putting up poison traps for them, putting
Speaker 1: out of physical traps. Often they would put out two
Speaker 1: physical traps so that they wouldn't just catch them with
Speaker 1: one pot, catch them with two. Therefore, in trying to
Speaker 1: ensure that this animal would be captured and killed rather
Speaker 1: than just escaping injured. Now, the effected that can be
Speaker 1: in something called the tropic cascade, which is an ecological
Speaker 1: process which starts at the top of the food chain
Speaker 1: and tumbles all the way down to the bottom. And
Speaker 1: nothing illustrates this better than wolves, as told by George
Speaker 1: Mombiat during his TED talk on rewilding, because he says
Speaker 1: that after seventy years of wolves being absent in Yellowstone,
Speaker 1: when they were reintroduced, there was a huge effect, Okay.
Speaker 1: And the reason that they were reintroduced is that the
Speaker 1: numbers of deer had just escalated and went crazy, and
Speaker 1: because there was nothing to hunt them, Uh, they had
Speaker 1: reduced the vegetation to mil They were just grazing all
Speaker 1: over the place. So they thought, let's bring in a
Speaker 1: couple of wolves, knocked down the population of deer, and
Speaker 1: that'll that will help things, right, But really, it was
Speaker 1: this whole wilderness that seemed to have sprung from the
Speaker 1: reintroduction of these wolves. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty impressive,
Speaker 1: because again, you you expected the wolves to kill the deer.
Speaker 1: You it was just in a situation. Oh well, the
Speaker 1: bath water is a little too hot. Let's add a
Speaker 1: little cold water and that will balance it out. But
Speaker 1: as we've as we've made clear in our previous episode,
Speaker 1: nature is more complicated than that. They're they're far there's
Speaker 1: far much more going on. It's not just hot water
Speaker 1: and cold water. Uh so, uh, what else happened? We
Speaker 1: You see the deer starting to avoid the valleys and
Speaker 1: gorges where they could be easily killed by the wolves.
Speaker 1: So suddenly these areas are deer free. And so since
Speaker 1: the deer are no longer there to munch everything down
Speaker 1: to the ground, stuff starts growing up again. And so
Speaker 1: very quickly you see these uh what had previously been
Speaker 1: you know, bear valleys are growing up into the forests again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Momba says that the high of trees quintippled in just
Speaker 1: six years, and then you had forests of aspen and
Speaker 1: willow and cottonwood. And then as soon as that happened,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there was a whole neighborhood of
Speaker 1: birds that moved in. And then the number of beavers
Speaker 1: started to increase, because beavers like to eat trees, right,
Speaker 1: and beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. We talked about
Speaker 1: that in our last episode, about these keystone species affecting
Speaker 1: oversized changed in their environment. Yes, so they're they're building
Speaker 1: the rivers, they're providing habitats for otters and muskrats and
Speaker 1: ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians, and they're moving it.
Speaker 1: And then also you see that the wolves are not
Speaker 1: only eating the deer, right, they're also preying on coyotes.
Speaker 1: And then because of that, the number of rabbits and
Speaker 1: mice they begin to rise because we're not being killed
Speaker 1: off by coyotes, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes,
Speaker 1: more badges, ravens, and bald eagles came down to feed
Speaker 1: on the carrion that the wolves had left behind. Then bears,
Speaker 1: they're like they got in on the game too, in
Speaker 1: a large part because there's more shrubs growing, more berries.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're they're, they're they want to hunt and gather,
Speaker 1: and now there's more to hunt and gather from. But
Speaker 1: now this is the thing that's not even the craziest
Speaker 1: of changes, the fact that all these animals sprung up
Speaker 1: once the wolf was reintroduced. The crazy thing is that
Speaker 1: the behavior of the rivers, the actual landscape begins to change. Indeed,
Speaker 1: because suddenly you're seeing it means changing the traffic alongside
Speaker 1: the river. You know, what's walking around there is changing,
Speaker 1: what's growing around the river, and is the vegetation changes.
Speaker 1: It's it's affecting the stability of the waterways. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: less erosion, less erosion, Yeah, it's it's actually changing the earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's regenerating force which are stabilizing the banks that
Speaker 1: the banks don't collapse as often as well, and then
Speaker 1: they become more fixed, they meander less. And so really
Speaker 1: what you have is this this more stabilized even kind
Speaker 1: of moving in. Yeah. Now, of course it's worth noting
Speaker 1: that there still is a golf course in Yellowstone Park.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't want anyone to forget that when
Speaker 1: when thinking about the nature reclaiming this, Uh, this is beautiful,
Speaker 1: but and it is a beautiful park. I've been there
Speaker 1: and it's it's fabulous, but there's still very much a
Speaker 1: human footprint there. But but this really does uh, just
Speaker 1: how the the the reintroduction of this one species. It's
Speaker 1: like we we we we as humans have this tendency
Speaker 1: we don't we don't realize the value of things until
Speaker 1: they're gone, and this is kind of an example of that.
Speaker 1: And by by putting something back, we begin to see
Speaker 1: just how important it was to begin with. And I
Speaker 1: love how this, like this should be a children's story
Speaker 1: because it has that kind of role to it. You
Speaker 1: put one thing back and then there this comes back,
Speaker 1: and this comes back. It's it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: more positive version of fig the big hearted nukes with
Speaker 1: all of these, with the with the cascading effect. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's the reversal of the domino effect, and
Speaker 1: it's amazing to see it unfold like this now. Mombott
Speaker 1: also brings up an example of whales not necessarily rewilding them,
Speaker 1: but understanding that whales provide an entire ecosystem unto themselves
Speaker 1: as well and are a good example again of what
Speaker 1: happens when you disrupt a species. And the Japanese government,
Speaker 1: he says, had rationalized killing whales for a long time
Speaker 1: because they thought, hey, the number of krill and fish
Speaker 1: will rise if you remove the main predator, right, which
Speaker 1: is again very hot water cold water understanding of how
Speaker 1: nature works. It's far more complicated. It's far more complicated,
Speaker 1: and it's really reliant poop. It turns out, specifically whale
Speaker 1: poop in the oceans, because, as Mambiat says, they produce
Speaker 1: what biologists politely call large fecal plumes when they come
Speaker 1: to the surface. These are huge explosions of poop right
Speaker 1: across the surface up in the photo zone where there's
Speaker 1: enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place. And then
Speaker 1: those big plumes of poop are basically fertilizing or stimulating
Speaker 1: the growth of phytoplankton, and the plant plankton at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the food chain is stimulating the growth of zooplankton,
Speaker 1: which feeds the fish and the krill and all the
Speaker 1: rest of it, which which ends up producing more and
Speaker 1: more sea life for humans to eat. So without taking
Speaker 1: them away, without reducing their numbers, you're already getting the
Speaker 1: same results you're trying to achieve by their removal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you remove them, you're actually reducing the amount of
Speaker 1: fish and krill, which, to be fair, it does sound counterintuitive, right.
Speaker 1: You would think you'd take the predator away, you'd have
Speaker 1: more of a thing, But the predator poop is actually
Speaker 1: the life force for the thing. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: you can quote me on that. So that this this
Speaker 1: raises the question, then is it Is it this simple?
Speaker 1: Is there it? Could this be done in various environments
Speaker 1: around the world. Could we just simply reintroduce a missing
Speaker 1: keystone creature, a missing predator and therefore make the difference,
Speaker 1: Like I can't help think of where my mom lives
Speaker 1: out in the in rural Tennessee. Deer everywhere. It's just
Speaker 1: just lousy with deer. You can hardly drive down the
Speaker 1: road without almost hitting one. You just you look out
Speaker 1: the window and they're like six out there looking through
Speaker 1: at you because there's nothing to eat them. Even the
Speaker 1: human hunters, who are you know, doing all they all
Speaker 1: they can, they still can't kill enough to keep the
Speaker 1: numbers down. Yeah, and in a national park setting, I
Speaker 1: feel like this is a more straightforward proposition. But George
Speaker 1: Mombiance says, hey, um, let's just go crazy with paleo ecology,
Speaker 1: which is the study of past ecosystems. He says, why
Speaker 1: not reintroduced introduce some of our lost megafauna, or at
Speaker 1: least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere?
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't all of us have a serengetti on our doorsteps?
Speaker 1: And yeah, and this is where he gets into at
Speaker 1: times controversial areas. That's certainly areas where they're playing people
Speaker 1: who disagree with them, because on one level, you can say, yes,
Speaker 1: let's reintroduce species that were lost to this particular area,
Speaker 1: and in many cases you can. You can make those
Speaker 1: efforts as well. Discuss there are there are some ongoing
Speaker 1: rewilding efforts to do just that. Okay, so before we
Speaker 1: get into some more of the wilder animals extinct animals,
Speaker 1: let's talk about commodo dragons, because there are proponents of
Speaker 1: rewilding the argue that commodo dragons may fill the gap
Speaker 1: in Australia's ecosystem left by Megalania, which was a giant
Speaker 1: lizard like species that disappeared thousands of years ago, and
Speaker 1: this was a keystone species like the wolf. And so
Speaker 1: their idea is that a bunch of roaming commodo dragons
Speaker 1: could restore important ecological functions like controlling the population size
Speaker 1: of native and introduced herbivores. So if you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of herbivores that are just going to town on
Speaker 1: the vegetation, you don't have enough vegetation there and that's
Speaker 1: creating that trofic cascading effect and a negative of way.
Speaker 1: Maybe you bring back the Commoto dragon, is the idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like in an office environment, you have
Speaker 1: an employee that leaves and he suddenly realized, whoa, they
Speaker 1: really played an important role here. We can't get them back,
Speaker 1: but maybe we can get something else like them, such
Speaker 1: as a Commoto dragon in the office place. Right. And
Speaker 1: then there are some other ideas that I guess you
Speaker 1: could say are a bit more along the wooly mammoth
Speaker 1: uh bring back wagon, yeah, and really sort of going
Speaker 1: more into the way back machine in terms of humanity's
Speaker 1: impact on the environment and saying, uh, well, hey, we
Speaker 1: used to have mega fauna everywhere. We used to have
Speaker 1: not just elephants in Africa and in Asia, but we
Speaker 1: had large pack of germs in Europe, UH, in the
Speaker 1: in North America. So what the what can we do there?
Speaker 1: Should should we bring We can't bring those creatures back.
Speaker 1: As romantic as that idea is and it's fascinating as
Speaker 1: the possible science of it is, it's it's not feasible
Speaker 1: for the immediate future. So can we just take African
Speaker 1: or Asian elephants and introduce them into modern day Europe,
Speaker 1: into UH North America and and have them fill this
Speaker 1: long lost role to revitalize the environment. Now, of course
Speaker 1: this would require that we set aside land or even
Speaker 1: reclaim land to do it, So that would certainly be
Speaker 1: one of the things that comes up in terms of
Speaker 1: logistics and criticism um and they're often also or critics
Speaker 1: that say, this is this would be a monumental effort,
Speaker 1: and you're better off focusing on restoring the existing environment
Speaker 1: and helping to maintain that, you know, actual species that
Speaker 1: live in the environment. And if you're worried about because
Speaker 1: the other side of it is that this would also
Speaker 1: help out African and Asian elephants. Uh, And the critics
Speaker 1: would argue, well, helping out African and Asian elephants, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna do that, those efforts are best restricted to
Speaker 1: Africa and Asia where where they naturally live, right. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of religious stickle problems. You were talking
Speaker 1: about transporting the animals, talking about exotic diseases, and then
Speaker 1: as you had kind of already alluded to a poor
Speaker 1: trek record of introducing or even keeping species that we
Speaker 1: already have. So the idea is that you you start
Speaker 1: rewilding and you take away, um the attention from from
Speaker 1: the species that are already going extinct and need help,
Speaker 1: and instead you're spending all your money in your attention
Speaker 1: on these different parts in different species. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: also worth pointing out that Mombat's ted talk is a
Speaker 1: ted talk, and ted talks are are generally it's it's
Speaker 1: you can think of in terms of of a lighted
Speaker 1: beacon on the top of the hill, would be understanding
Speaker 1: that humans are not actually going to follow that beacon
Speaker 1: to the top of the hill. They're gonna maybe climb
Speaker 1: it halfway. And if they climb it halfway, that's great.
Speaker 1: Just by by seeing the beacon there, it gives us
Speaker 1: a frame of reference. And yet we need that beacon,
Speaker 1: right because we know that that is an example of
Speaker 1: something that can be done in In fact, in her
Speaker 1: book Rewilding the World, Caroline Fraser list twenty one rewilding
Speaker 1: sites throughout the world in which habitats are intentionally being
Speaker 1: rewild and species are reintroduced. And again let's think about
Speaker 1: that wolf example again. You know that's the best case
Speaker 1: scenario um in this sort of closed system already, but
Speaker 1: you see a huge positive effects. So perhaps these projects
Speaker 1: can bring about the same sort of change. See change
Speaker 1: really And there are also a couple of other rewilding
Speaker 1: projects of note, and you can definitely check these out
Speaker 1: more if you want to find out more. Rewilding Europe
Speaker 1: and Rewilding Siberia. Yeah, the Siberia one I found particularly
Speaker 1: interesting because they're they're dealing in part with reintroducing wild horses,
Speaker 1: which they can say could possibly save us from the
Speaker 1: effects of global climate change. They say that in the winter,
Speaker 1: the animals trample and flatten the snow that would otherwise
Speaker 1: insulate the ground from cold air, and so that helps
Speaker 1: prevent the frozen ground or permafrost from thawing and releasing
Speaker 1: powerful greenhouse gases. So and again you see that cascading effect, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, just to hammer the nail home again. I mean,
Speaker 1: over millions and millions and millions of years, life on
Speaker 1: Earth evolves into a system that works. Events occur and
Speaker 1: it has to uh, the settings have to adjust, but
Speaker 1: then it finds its level again. But then humans come
Speaker 1: along and just start messing with all the settings, turning
Speaker 1: all the dials around. So rewilding in a large sense
Speaker 1: is about saying, hey, what were the what were the
Speaker 1: factory settings before humans came along? And even though we
Speaker 1: can't go back to all of those factory settings, there
Speaker 1: are things we can do. There are things we can say, well,
Speaker 1: as humans as a culture, we don't really need this.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can stop doing this. We can take this away.
Speaker 1: Or here's something that we took away without any reason
Speaker 1: at all. Why do we take all the wolves away?
Speaker 1: What if we what do we give them back? And
Speaker 1: and everybody and everything can reap the positive benefits of
Speaker 1: that reintroduction. Yeah, I mean I think in a way
Speaker 1: it's reframing our role in the anthropos syne. If we
Speaker 1: know this is the age of man, and we know
Speaker 1: that we're now creating the strata of man made materials.
Speaker 1: The nuts should be empowering enough to say that we
Speaker 1: could do something as simple as this, which is to
Speaker 1: turn back the clock a bit and to reclaim some
Speaker 1: of these lands and see these trophic cascadings in effect.
Speaker 1: And David Biello, writing for Scientific American I think, had
Speaker 1: a really good thought about this. He said, quote in
Speaker 1: the end, wilderness is a state of mind. The natural
Speaker 1: world can only persist now as a deliberate act of
Speaker 1: human will that will require firm human purpose, as a
Speaker 1: gesture of humility, yes, but also a form of self protection.
Speaker 1: In other words, we don't really have a choice in
Speaker 1: the matter. Yeah, the airplane is plummeting, it's not flying.
Speaker 1: At some point you have to realize we need to
Speaker 1: stop peddling and figure out something else that works, and
Speaker 1: and there's never a better time than now. Indeed, A right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. As always, be sure to
Speaker 1: check out the land Ding page for this podcast episode.
Speaker 1: You'll find that at stuff to Blow your Mind dot
Speaker 1: com you don't include links out to some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that we've talked about here, including that Ted Talk,
Speaker 1: which you'll probably want to check out as well, and
Speaker 1: the homepage includes all of our blog posts, all of
Speaker 1: our podcast episodes, all of our videos, anything and everything
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind you will find right there.
Speaker 1: And what are your thoughts on this? Do you think
Speaker 1: were Wilding could work? Do you think it's could work
Speaker 1: in just certain areas of the world? Let us know
Speaker 1: and you can send your thoughts to blow the mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com.