Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today's Monday, July thirteenth,
twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of the show,
Doctor Kara Santa Maria, And as always, before we dive
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very much. All right, quick intro for this one. This week,
today I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Zoe Nissa.
She is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University
and she has a brand new book out called Rarities
Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences. So, without
any further ado, here she is doctor Zoe Nissa. Well, Zoe,
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm excited to talk about your new book, Rarities
Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences. And of
course there are many many times of unintended consequences throughout
the history of conservation science. But before we even dig
into that, I would love to just to know a
little bit more about you and your work and kind
of how you got to the place of putting so
much effort and you know, gosh, I I was gonna say,
I know how much work it is to write a book,
but I still haven't done it. It's like I'm wanting
to do it, but I don't have the bandwidth to
do the work. Because I speak with authors and especially
scientists who are authors every single day about just gosh
about how much it takes from them. So let's get
into maybe your work before the book first.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'll maybe start. I'll start actually in the present,
which was and then I'll work backwards. But when I
finished the book and my tenure case had gone through
like that first, you know, I don't know what. It
was a Thursday or Friday night when the announcement came
out and I showed up in the living room. My
family's watching TV and I sit down and they suddenly
look at me and they're like, what are you? What
are you doing here? I'm like, I'm watching TV. Like
what you're doing?
Speaker 2: What are you?
Speaker 3: Ill?
Speaker 2: Like, what's the matter with you?
Speaker 3: And I was like, you know, this room is nice.
I should sit in this room more. I should do
this more. So. I don't think I had sat in
my own living room in front of the television in
many years. Many years. Oh man, Yeah, that's a warning
depending on how how involved your book gets. But yeah,
I had kind of a strange and winding road, and
I think you'll appreciate this probably in your own biography.
I started actually an astrophysics and that was my first
degree at the University of Toronto, and it was it
was kind of like the Canadian system is a little different.
They've got kind of like almost this like extra duty major,
you know, like that's even more more intense than a
regular double major or something like that would be. And so,
you know, I say it was kind of like a
math a math degree really mostly. And the reason I
did that was that space and science were really kind
of my happy place. It was like, you know, when
people say, imagine a beach, you know, feel relaxed, like
at a yoga class or something. I was like, I'm
not there, not on the beach. I'm looking up at
the stars. I want to I want to see the infinite,
you know. But the as I was in that program,
I kind of had all of these questions that I
couldn't really answer, and I was I was finding myself
at the library a lot, you know, looking at like
the origins of how the Greek figured out the number system, right,
or the invention of the zero, which was a big
point in mathematics, and just how did people put things
that happen into numbers, you know, and then what's the
fallout of that? You know, because that allows us. That's
really powerful. It allows us to describe certain things in
a certain way, and it also takes away things. And
so I had that kind of worry as a young person.
And you know, I had some professors who were like,
you know, you're okay at this writing thing. You seem
pretty good at this writing thing. Can you write this
technical manual for us? Can you join this project? Can
you do these things? I started doing some kind of
science writing for the student magazines and things like that,
and they're like, you know, you're actually asking these kind
of really interesting questions, and I think physics may not
be the.
Speaker 2: Path for you to.
Speaker 3: Answer those kinds of questions. And the final kind of
breaking point was actually I'm dating myself here, but the
Hubble Space Telescope team came and this was at the
time there was a lot of debate around whether the
universe was gonna and you know, it started in this
big bang, Was it going to end in a big crunch,
Was it going to all kind of collapse back together
or not, or keep expanding forever into this kind of cold,
slow death. And they were using this telescope to do that,
and these very very smart and lots of very very smart,
very prestigious people in the room, and I'm like in
my early twenties, and they were making this very strong
argument about the fate of the entire universe based on
this graph and the error bars so exceeded like where
the measurements were. And I was like, I'm like twenty,
you know, two, and this makes no sense to me.
These people are sort of taking it seriously. Like if
I did this as an undergrad try to make this
kind of argument, no, I would, you know, my professor
would fail me because I don't have enough data, right,
And I didn't understand yet because I hadn't taken a
lot of philosophy or anything like that, that the fact
that our data is really our arguments are really underdetermined
by the data. It was not a concept that I
had yet in my repertoire. But but that was what
I was kind of confronting, and I went, you know what.
I looked around the room at all these people, and
I thought that I need to understand this. I need
to understand what the heck is going on here and
why why this is happening. So I got my start there,
but I started to move to the social sciences and
starting to try to understand science itself as a system
and as a social practice and as a community and
the people that are involved with science and that have
a stake in science. So I ended up going to
graduate school for for that. Maybe the other part of
my background that would be important to the way that
the book looked is that I'm the first of my
family to go to college. And when I was applot,
my my dad actually he was here for Father's Day,
so I saw him recently and he was like, yeah,
I remember that talk that I gave you.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: He just sat me down and he said, you know,
people like us don't go to school. You're done school.
You went to university. Like you're done. You've already got
one degree that's more than any anyone else has ever gotten.
People like us go to work. You're you're smart enough.
Apparently you're making poor life choices, but you're smart enough.
Speaker 2: He choices to cost money to make money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, it's time to go make some money. It's
time to get a job. And he was convinced that
by applying to graduate school in the United States. I
think he thought I was going to be kind of
like trafficked or something like He was like, they're going
to take your passport away, like you work or something.
You just had no idea. And I said, I think
they're going to pay for me to go to school, dad,
And he was like, no, no one pays something to
go to school. You're you're you know, like you're even
dumber than I thought you were. So those two perspectives
of having having not had that in my background to
you know, university as a as a thing to do,
and then coming from a very different kind of scientific
tradition initially, where you know, you are supposed to be
extremely quantitative and extremely objective, objective, and the objects of
study are are literally light years away, you know, really
shaped how I then started to encounter conservation, which was
not actually what I started was initially going to study.
But I got this uh fellowship at the University of Minnesota,
which has a really amazing, amazing group of faculty there,
and it was with a zoo, and I was like,
I don't know anything about zoos. I mean, they're cool, right,
but I was like, what what am I going to do?
I never even took any biology, Honestly, I escaped all
biology in high school. I never took any of it
in college and my first time behind the scenes at
the zoo watching these scientists, these conservation biologists and veterinarians
and all kinds of folks and how they thought about
their work and how much they really, really really cared
for their for their for their animals, their animal population,
and we're so invested in in what their science was
doing and why it was doing it, you know, what
it was for that It just it astounded me. It
was really really cool to see. So that was kind
of the kickoff many years ago to what what became rarities.
Speaker 1: I love that and thinking about it's funny thinking about
me kind of sitting across across the internet from you actually,
but sitting across from you and having this conversation, you know,
it feels.
Speaker 2: Timely. In a lot of the episode that will have aired.
Speaker 1: It's so weird when we podcast because we have to
time travel a little bit. But the episode that will
have aired the week right before this was an interview
with Jessica Riskin, who is a historian of science, talking
about Lamarque and evolution and sort of the zeitgeist of
the time.
Speaker 2: And I just finished just like very kind of.
Speaker 1: Serendipitously a book by Lydia Pine, who I've also had
on the show before, who's a historian and anthropologist but
specifically usually focusing on science called Endlings, which is all
about the last of specific species and how we tell
stories about conservation and how we tell stories about species loss.
And so it's I feel like I'm in this really
interesting position where, even though this is not something I'm
usually talking about and thinking about, it's sort of been
on the tip of my mind lately, which which makes
me excited for our conversation. So, so tell me a
little bit about you know, we got to sort of
how you, I guess, chose your degree path and and
I mean very in a very meandering way, this specific story,
like this book rarities, and the idea of talking about
conservation science but situating it really in the sociologic or
anthropologic kind of landscape.
Speaker 2: What brought you to that storytelling?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a great question. Also, I'm so excited
with the other conversations you're having.
Speaker 2: Because that's that's just great.
Speaker 3: I mean, back when I started this, uh, conservation was
kind of booming as a field, but the perception of
it I write, I read about this a bit in
the book was that it was kind of vacuous, right,
like it was just a bunch of people on a
mission to save the world. And who appointed them, you know,
pointed you in charge kind of thing. And in interview
some of the some of the very early participants in
the very early meetings in the seventies and eighties, they
would say, we knew we were here to save the world,
like it was on our shoulders to save the planet
because no one else was. So they they definitely came
in with this sense of mission. And these were primarily
you know, middle class white American male biologists with all
of the all of the you know, social perspectives that
come along with that kind of positionality. And by the
time I came to the field, you know, to study
the field, it was it was well established, but still
had this perception that it was kind of what was
it really doing? That, wasn't it because biology was the
study of life, So what exactly was conservation doing? And
initially I thought I approached it like any good physicist.
I was like, right, I need my initial conditions. I
need to clear the ground here, I need to understand
the entire field first, and then I'll figure out what
case studies I want to look at, right, because I
was thinking I was going to do kind of a
lab ethnography is they're kind of called an anthropology. So
take the methods of anthropology, but rather than apply them
to a small scale society or a village, you know,
you would go to a laboratory and just hang out
for a year or two with those folks and understand
them and their culture. So initially I thought that's what
I was going to do. And as I started to
kind of move around the field and talk to different
people and visit these different sites, you know, over and over,
I was getting these you know, I sort of saying
the book, my weird file kept growing, these sort of
strange stories people were telling me of stuff that didn't
work out the way they wanted it, to a tremendous
amount of like personal and professional hardship, you know, people
getting shut out of the field, people getting hacked, backlash,
like just all kinds of things sort of happening to people,
projects getting sabotaged by local communities, lots of backlash, Like
just all these things that were happening that kind of
got in the way of what seemed like it should
be a fairly straightforward thing, and in some ways a
fairly uncontroversial thing, right, which is just like, let's protect
the environment upon which we all literally depend, right, Like,
let's just not trash it completely, because it's where our
water and our food come from. So yeah, So I
started initially thinking that, let me just understand who's in
this field, what they're doing, what's going on. But then
very quickly it became this thing of like, whoa, there
are these things going on, and how widespread are they? Right? Like,
is this what is going on here? If the whole
thing is kind of not always happening the way it
was expected to, what does that tell us about science
more generally? Right? And so by the end of it,
I kind of was saying I was sort of writing,
I mean, and it's in a weird way kind of
I think of it as almost like a love story,
Like what happens when the thing you love, you know
that you love the most of anything, that you've sacrificed
everything to love it and to understand it and to
know it, and it's not working out the way you
wanted it to.
Speaker 1: Gosh, yeah, wow, there's something very kind of existential and
almost like eschatological about that I can't help, but you know,
my psychologist's brain over here is like comparing that to
this concept in mental health about like gripping things so
tightly that they actually fall through your fingers. Is like
really difficult balance that we have of holding things softly
and of being nimble in an effort to change course
when things aren't working.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: There's so many things I want to get into with you, obviously,
so many examples and stories of as you mentioned, like
times when there's an intentionality and almost the opposite happens,
or there's just things that feel very controllable, all these
other unintended kind of runaway outcomes. When I think about
this entire I don't even want to call it a
field because it's so many different fields. But this entire
area of even like inquiry and practice of how do
we protect and save our planet from ourselves in a
way knowing that we are the arbiters and the actors,
and that there are geopolitical forces and that there are
you know, now climate change is like its own organizing force,
and all of these different things I can't help but
go back to. For listeners who have been listening to
the show for a long time. You may remember that,
like several years ago, I traveled to Namibia to give
a talk about science communication, and you know, we all
have these memories of these times where our eyes were
really opened right where like we we shifted our perspective
in a major way. And one of the things that
I learned there, working with the people who have their
boo's on the ground, the people who live there, who
are from there, and especially in these like large sort
of nature reserves where a lot of indigenous folks would
live with wildlife, was the power of something like and
I hate to say it, but trophy hunting, like this
thing that I think historically, as a white person living
in the West thought was just all bad. And I
very quickly learned that trophy hunting was how they fueled
their anti poaching patrols. And you know, trophy hunting was
a tool that they used. They had a bull elephant
that was knocking over a bunch of people's water. It
was a burdensome animal, it was old, it wasn't breeding anymore.
The people just wanted to kill it. Well, sell the
tag to some rich white person from the West and
make two hundred thousand dollars or however much they go
for now and use that money to fund anti poaching,
like I think in my mind poaching and trophy hunting
were the same thing. And being there and learning that
this complicated thing that feels bad was actually a source
for very good And a lot of these animals have
to be cold anyway, and conservation is not as simple
as these animals are endangered, therefore we have to protect
them at all costs. Because look what happened in Botswana.
It just really opened my eyes to how complicated this
all is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely well, and that care piece is so big, right,
what drives someone you know, who presumably wealthy enough to
have a lot of choices with their leisure time and
how they spend their recreation money. But they're going to fly,
you know, a continent away and shoot something, you know,
and we don't tend to think of that as an
expression of care. And one of the things I sort
of argue for in the book is actually we need
to think about those things as when you view it
from a care lens, When you view it from a
lens of this has real value, not just like intellectual
or monetary value, but it has value value for people
in this deep kind of emotional way, this connect you know,
kind of connected way that changes the equation, That changes
a lot of our sort of pilosophical ideas about ethics
or how we think the economy runs, or what is
in our rational best interests as consumers. Right, Like, once
you add that piece, it really opens up a way
of understanding why people do the things they do.
Speaker 1: Would you say that that is one of the kind
of underlying themes the takeaways that you were interested in
communicating in this book. I mean you did ultimately name
it rarities, this concept of once something is scarce, once
something no longer has ubiquity, it actually, in many respects
goes up in value, which becomes simultaneously detrimental to its
remaining population and also incredibly critical for the work to
I guess not see it go extinct at the rate
at least, like so many things are going extinct so quickly,
Like this idea of what what does it mean for
something to be rare?
Speaker 3: Right? Yeah, okay, so this is yeah, that is absolutely
the part of the thing for sure, the heart of
the book. So economists will often and I have this
when I give you know, talks. You know, there's always
an economist or often an economic student who will come
up to me and say, yeah, well, as you know,
as supply goes down, so this thing becomes less common,
more rare, whatever you want to say. Of course, the
price goes up, right, because there's fewer of them, and
non economists and even some economists will confuse like that
standard supply and demand curve, which is which is the
total supply and the total demand in a market? Right,
it's not about an individual's intensity of longing. Right. So
we know this with a lot of consumer goods, right
where we do these limited product drops and it's this,
it's here now just for a little bit. There's it's
a limited run, it's you know, it's whatever it is, sneakers,
Pokemon cards, you know, you name it. We've we've we've
created artificial scarcity, and marketers have figured out very well
how to create artificial scarcity in a way to drive
up demand for it. Right. So the intensity of someone's
emotional attachment to something can increase with the with its rarity. Right.
But but for economists there should there should be a
point when you think about sort of larger market dynamic
dynamics where you go, right, this thing has become too
expensive for most people to afford. Right, it's like the
it's like the thing you want to pot or shoot. Right,
it's the I'm going to fly across, you know, to
Namibia and shoot this bull elephant. Not most people can't
do that. They don't have the resources, and so total
demand across the market decreases, and what I.
Speaker 2: End up interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what I end up talking about in the
book is that what happens and this this was sparked
by some talk that I went to. So these were
biologists who were starting to identify that these things were happening.
When something becomes valued just because it is perceived is rare.
So I use the case of caviar. Right, the study
that was done with caviar. If people have a choice
between a rare brand of caviar and a common brand,
they did these taste tests. People will always pick the
rare one because they want to seem like they're you know, experts, right,
expert consumers, and they enjoy luxury and they can appreciate
all these sorts of things. So all of these other
meanings get attached to rarity, and if what the market
is demanding, is just rarity for itself, not it doesn't
matter which good it is anymore, it doesn't matter which
species it is. Then this becomes a real problem for
conservation policy, and I argue for other areas of applied
science as well, because people are now have this arbitrary
demand for just this thing that seems special. And what
is conservation doing except making things seem special. The whole
point of the field was to make people care about stuff,
and they did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, without without I guess the foresight or you know,
just the the insight. Really that in some respects You're right.
Once something feels special, we feel it an extra emotional
kind of drive to protect it. But we also feel
an extra emotional drive to make sure that we we
have it, you know, that it somehow is possessed, like oh,
put it in the zoo, put it in the you know,
for and yes, four conservation purposes, but like mount it,
you know. And I think obviously there is that colonial
perspective does persist. I don't think it's as bad as
it was back when when we had like European sailors
going around the word ooh, that's a cool thing. I
should kill it, so I can show everybody what it
looks like. But it's funny thinking about like let's say
a beautiful bird, for example, and the very reason it
might have become rare would becau hus we killed it
when it was ubiquitous to make pretty hats. And then
you have other species who just they're just sensitive to
these you know, climate changes. They just don't have the resiliency.
And it's not because anybody went, I really really want
that frog for myself. It's because that frog cannot adapt
to a rapidly changing climate and it's just dying.
Speaker 3: Right. But often, like even those you know, they used
to we used to sort of divide things into like
you know, back before riz was a word, right, it
was like charismatic species, so like the high charisma species
and the low. So the elephants of the world are
kind of high charisma, and the frog is typically considered
low charisma. But now you can kind of find fan
fandoms for almost everything, right, and even you know, a plant, right,
there are plant collectors out there who want whatever the
thing is, and because of the Internet, they can get it.
In the In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it
was dying clubs. I wanted to eat the zebra. I
wanted to you know, that was these gentlemen's clubs. They
would serve like zebra meat or whatever. It isn't always
even species based. So one of the chapters in the book,
I look at housing development in Texas that is adjacent
to a preserved area, and everyone that lives there describes
themselves as a nature lover. Right. They all really really
really love the outdoors. They really love and see themselves
as stewards of the land in different ways, and they
hold different you know, social positions and political commitments, but
they all had that in common. Right. They moved to
this place because they because they they loved the outdoors.
They wanted to be around nature, even if they weren't
going to go hiking in it or whatever. They wanted
to be able to see it outside their window. And
that also can be a problem. Right, So when we
protect an area, if we're then incentivizing people to develop
all along the margins. And there's been a lot of
really interesting research that has found this happening globally, so
not just in the United States, that once you protect
an area, you're basically saying to everyone else, this is
now preserved from development. We're never going to build a
highway or a you know, housing development or mall or
nothing's going to come chip plant, chip manufacturing plant like
we have here locally, and so if you now build
adjacent to it, you've got a guaranteed access to this
undeveloped space. Yeah, and so it incentivizes a different kind
of consumption. It's not a consumption of like cavia or something,
but it's it's by sort of having that land become privatized,
You've you've converted it into a kind of a private
private consumption dynamic all along the perimeter of that protected area.
Speaker 1: And that's probably I mean, would you say that that ultimate.
I mean, it's hard to kind of know somebody's intention,
but that is a sort of perfect example of these
unintended consequences where the idea is you know, noble, it
seems like it's guided in the right direction, and yet
you know, this was probably always destined to happen, right.
Speaker 3: And the big kind of shocker in doing the research
for the book was that scientists knew this so earlier.
You know, ecology was kind of founded as a discipline
in the late nineteenth century. It sort of came to
the United States and organized itself in the early twentieth century,
and all the way back then, so over a century ago,
they knew that this could happen. They knew that this
could happen, right, so they were already worried about setting
up the first national parks, the first protected areas, you know,
notwithstanding the massive displacement and land theft from indigenous landholders,
but the idea that we could create an amenity out
of protecting things, protecting things could could make it enter.
Sort of these consumption dynamics as well, was something that
people knew about a century ago and we're worried about.
But they didn't have good solutions for it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: The solutions were things like let's keep this secret, let's
keep it just among the scientists, or let's not right
publicize it or whatever. And one of the arguments I
make in the book is that that never works, right.
The secrets always get out. And when people complain now
about how crowded the national parks are, how crowded their
favorite spot is, or don't put this on the internet
because someone's going to my favorite spot's now going to
get too crowded. That's the same sort of thing at work.
Speaker 1: It's interesting it goes right back to this concept of
rarity as well. Yeah, And the other thing that I
think I picked up in some of my travels, in
some of my sort of like education, was this concept
of I think a lot of people in the West
who think of like when you mentioned charismatic species, and
we mention or we think about the concept of wilderness
or of something being wild. One of the things that
I very quickly learned when I was in Southern Africa,
in a country that's like the second least population dense
country in the world, that has all of the charismatic megafauna.
The people that they've got the Big Five, they've got
all of these like phenomenal animals that a lot of
Westerners grow up only seeing in like children's books and
like in the form of stuffed animals. I think the
thing that I very quickly learned was wild is an
operational definition, Like, yes, these are wild animals, but none
of this land is not managed. Like all of these
areas have fences, and most of these large animals are
tracked and have they're either collared or tagged. We know
their names we're watching their movements. Like people are tasked,
whether they own the land, or whether they're on a land,
or whether they're working for governmental or NGOs, they're tasked
with ensuring that, Okay, there aren't too many giraffes in
this area, we need to cull some of the drafts
so the balance is correct. And I think that was
really eye opening for me that even the concept of
like just let it go to you know, Faulow, let
it go wild, let it go like to to to
the wilderness, What does that even mean anymore?
Speaker 3: Right exactly? And I think that that that's sort of
the concept of the anthropisty, right, like that we're living
on a planet that is so shaped by human choices
and human activity that it's hard to it's hard to
even find places or find naturally what we used to
think of as natural processes that are not in some
way touched by humanity. And I think that a lot
of people are grappling with that. I mean, that's where
a lot of a lot of grief for a lot
of people comes from, you know, is that they want
they want that idea of the wilder and especially in
the United States, right we're sort of based on this
idea of the frontier and now it's now maybe it's
space or you know, you're so colonization or something.
Speaker 1: But it's always been a lie, right, Like, yes, it
was quote unquote wild, but there were people there, Like,
there were people there who did affect the landscape, maybe
not clearly, not to the extent that we do.
Speaker 2: Maybe they were able.
Speaker 1: To figure out a way to be less destructive and
it became a part of their ideology and their religion
over thousands of years. But regardless, there was not a place.
I mean, there were a couple places. Iceland weirdly was
a place where there just were no people, but there's
there's very few places where there were no people. Indigenous
people kind of figuring that out for themselves before we
just kind of we Jesus Christ, the Royal we the West,
like you said, manifest destiny, sort of like moving west
for gold mining and for opportunity and for space and
for land, and saying, oh, we're going out to the wilds.
Speaker 2: It's like no, no, no, Right, it's more wild than what
you're used to.
Speaker 3: But and a lot of what we took to be wilderness, right,
there's a lot of archaeological and other work that's pointing
to you know, these these closed cannon be forests and
things like that are actually a symptom of the of
indigenous genocide. Right, So once we lost those original caretakers,
the land changed, and then when people colonize the Americas,
they go, oh, this is what this was our baseline. Right.
So these scientists, these ecologists in the in the early
twentieth century looking backwards, they themselves are going and things
have changed so much, and they're very they're very anxious
about it. Right, it's the guilded age, it's industrial revolution,
you know, as all this sort of stuff has been happening,
and they go, man, the landscape has changed so much.
What did it originally look like? And they point back
to that time period. But that time period is actually
the output. It's the product of a prior extinction of
indigenous peoples and species.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing that I think that it is
a sort of tendency. And I mean there's probably like
some just fundamental like anthropologic cognitive biases at play, but
this tendency to say, what, like, how how far back
do we go? As a purity test, right, at what
point was everything untouched? And pure, and it's like you
kind of have to go back to before there were people.
But if you go back to before there were people,
the landscape was wildly different. Anyway, we were in a
different geologic era, you know, like everything was different. And
then once people are on the scene, Okay, you may
be able to argue, I suppose that there was a
long period of more harmonious relationships with nature, But again,
these are all constructs, aren't they.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, And you know a lot of when I
ended up grappling with in the book was that, Okay,
these scientists had a concept of modernity, right, So this
modern era, you know again think guild, Gilded Age, early
you know, twentieth century jazz. All these things are sort
of happening boom times, lots of lots of hardship for
economic underclasses and uh and racial minorities and and and
for women and recent immigrants. But also like this incredible
wealth generation that's coming out of industrial activity, and scientists
are starting to go, what is that. Okay, if I'm
an if I'm an ecologist in this new this new
science were calling ecology, which is going to be the
science of So if biology is the science of life.
We're going to be the science of how life develops
in its places. So it's the science of biology in
its environment. We're going to look at the organism and
its environment in terms of its relationship. And other early
scientists said, you people are insane. That's nonsense. You can't
possibly do it. It's too complicated, right, they don't have
computers yet. Even now we have all these computers and
we still can't do it very well. Yeah, but they
were like, there's no way you can possibly do that.
That's a terrible field. And some of them actually warned
their students not to take ecology. They were like, it's
going to ruin your mind because it's not based in science.
It's too complicated to ask these questions. We need to
ask much more narrow questions, like you know, can I
dissect this heart of this frog or whatever and leave
all these other pieces out of it. But these early
ecologists were sort of looking both at what was happening
socially and politically and combining that with a lot of
the early discoveries they were making and going, man, modernity
is sort of built on our concept of what's modern,
what's you know scientifically and socially sort of progressive and
new and contemporary is built on this separation, separating ourselves
from nature. That's the whole idea of a city, right.
A city is like the ultimate arrogance, It's the ultimate
human hubris. And these cities are expanding all over in.
Chicago was one of those places that I talk about
in the book because it was a real birthplace for
things like sociology, so those Chicago School sociology, but also
for ecology as well. And Chicago is a city was
this sort of laboratory for urban landscape and urban design
and in a lot of interesting ways. So lots of
people were coming to that area to sort of ask
those questions of what does it mean to be a
modern human? How far can we separate ourselves from nature
and kind of get away with it? Basically? Right? And
if I'm modern, what makes you not modern? Because you're
too close to nature, you're too rural. Maybe your livelihood
is based on the land, right, you don't live in
a city. Maybe your skin is a different color than mine,
or you speak a different you know, language, you live
in a different place, So you're not modern. But I'm modern, right, Right?
And science a cologist were in a tough spot because
they needed to be they needed to be a modern
science in order to get going and get funding and
get established in universities. And yet they also saw the
contradiction there, right, because they went, the more we become
this modern contemporary science, more objective, more quantitative, the further
we sort of buy into this false premise, right that
we can separate ourselves from nature.
Speaker 1: So I can't help but think about I don't know
if you've ever seen this cartoon by there's an author
named Daniel Quinn who was I don't know if it
was like quite sci fi but sort of a lot
of environmental criticism and interesting I don't know, whatever, tribalistic stuff,
but like a cultural critic. And he did this cartoon
that has always really resonated for me. And it's called
The Fence, and it's just four cells and in the
first cell it says eight thousand BC and it's like
a lush world with a tiny little fence on the corner,
says we.
Speaker 2: Call it a fence.
Speaker 1: It keeps out the giraffes and the lions and the elephants,
and then a D fifteen hundred and then it's like
the fence is halfway across the world and it's like
barren on one side and lush on the other. Pray
for rain children. And then like eighteen hundred, you know,
it's like more of the world is barren and there's
more green inside the fence. And then it ends with
now the world is all brown. There's a tiny fence
with a little green and it says, we call it
a wildlife preserve. It keeps in the giraffes and the
lions and the elephants.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, I have not seen that cartoon, and I
definitely need to.
Speaker 1: It's phenomenal, Like right, it just taps and when you
see it and you it just okay, it lays it bare.
But that is the world we're living in now, and
it's because of this series of choices. Right were these choices?
I mean I often struggle with this, I mean, who
cares because it's an unanswerable question about like inevitable or
choice or whatever. But the very core concepts of like
capitalism and how quote unquote progress is defined were at
a time anathema to this concept of conservation. I guess
they did. Clearly they didn't have to be. But the
people with the power and the purse rings, they just
didn't have the insight or they didn't.
Speaker 3: Care they So in some cases I think the insight
was there, but it couldn't be couldn't be acted on.
And this was sort of part of the I guess
counter history or some of the stuff I tried to
recover a little bit from the archives, you know, from
the archival work and put into the book that there
were these voices all along saying, you know, maybe we
shouldn't do it this way. You know, maybe we shouldn't
cast our cast our fortunes in this particular way and
fence fence everything up, would try to protect it in
this way, and you know, maybe maybe we need to
consider how human care and are in inter relationship with
their environments and have been, have been, you know, forever, right,
And those those people were explicitly kind of pushed out
or told no at multiple points. So I sort of
document that in the book, like okay, here's another time,
here's another time where people said someone tried a few
people tried even to say we need to have a
much more as complicated as ecology is for thinking about
life in its relationship to place, it'll be even more
complex once we start thinking about place as a human
geography as a social geography as well. But if we
don't do that right, we're kind of doomed. And you know,
these folks would sort of say, no, ecology is only
going to be about non human species, right, We're only
going to conservation is only going to be about non
the non human world. And what we're going to do
once we figure out what is happening in the non
human world is we're going to tell the humans how
they should behave right, because that always works, That works,
that works so well.
Speaker 1: It I can't help but just feel like it's it's
a recapitulation of this ongoing theme of other ring, this
ongoing theme of us versus then, which you know has
always landed us in the most cooperative of situations. Like
it reminds me quite a bit. I remember having a
conversation with my mother once. This is going to feel
like it's very off, out of left field, but hopefully
your brain works similar.
Speaker 2: To mine and you see the correlation.
Speaker 1: I remember having a conversation with my mother once and
she was talking about a friend of hers who has
a daughter who's trans and she was saying like, Oh,
I'm just really proud of my friend because she's, you know,
she's she's really coming around lately, and she's been inviting
her to more things and she's been using her pronouns.
And I was like, oh, yeah, let's be so proud
of this mother for accepting their child as they are finally,
you know.
Speaker 2: And my mom was like a little taken away.
Speaker 1: She was like, well, you know, it takes time for
some people, and you know, we really grew up in
a different era. And I'm like, while I appreciate that
we can look back, let's say, at scientists or at
individuals and situate them in their time. And while I
appreciate that there is normativity of things like racism and
gendered violence and things like that, it doesn't mean it
was okay even then. M and I always struggle with
that concept, like it was still immoral. Just because more
people did it out loud doesn't and there were always
people throughout all of human history saying this is not okay.
It's just their voices weren't the loudest voices at that time.
That does not excuse bad behavior in the past, because
there were always people who recognized bad behavior, called it
out and said we can be better.
Speaker 3: For sure, for sure, And in some ways the early
twentieth century was actually, at least for science, was a
lot better of a place to be than it was
decades later. Right, there was this real sort of closure
of things that happened, you know, post World War Two
and sort of in the middle part of the twentieth century,
where things it became very very difficult to be a
woman in science, It became very difficult to do certain
kinds of work within science. And it's really kind of
for me, it was quite fascinating to go back to
the early twentieth century. Go, man, these folks were so radical,
you know, like in ways that I wasn't expecting, and
that certainly I can't say that my you know, home,
my original discipline of physics was certainly not like that
in the early twentieth century. But ecology was. It was
this very experimental, very open field that welcomed a lot
of a lot of people into it in ways that
changed actually once it became kind of more attached to
universities and became kind of an academic field. By the
mid twentieth century, you know.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine how like, I'm curious about your process.
I don't know how many people listening have the same
type of curiosity that I have. I know, sometimes we
go to podcasts to hear stories, and while I do
want to hear some of the stories, I also am
kind of like, yeah, read the book. They're in there,
you know, Like that's the whole point, right, Like, read
the book to get the stories. But I'm really curious,
how does one sit down and say I'm going to
write a book about this thing that could be literally
thousands of pages and still never be finished. Like, how
do you even choose? It's such a big concept, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had many, many, many people say to me, advisors, mentors,
many people tell me, don't do this book. Don't do
this book actually because it's too much. And especially as
a PhD student, they were like, you're not allowed, we
won't allow you to do this. It's too it's too big.
And I sort of mentioned this at the end of
the book, but that my very very end of field
work was in a really bad accident. I was on
a I was actually on a bicycle, a borrowed bicycle
from the folks I was renting the house from and
I was on my way to a field site and
I was hit at a high speed by a truck
that came up behind me. Wow, and uh. As I
was riding in the ambulance, actually, as I was laying
on the pavement, even I was like, man, I don't
know if I'm gonna make it through today, and what
a shame that I didn't do the work that I
know I could do, You know what I mean? Like
that this is actually the story that needs to be told,
and if I can't tell that, someone else is going
to have to. You know, just this, this needs to
be out there. And so that kind of shifted things
for me to kind of go, you know, you never
you never know when you're time's up. You never know
how much time you have, and so you ought to
do the thing that you you know, you feel that
you can do and that you and that you want
to do. Rather than that help was telling me, Yeah
it did once you have.
Speaker 1: That perspective, yeah it's still but it's still daunting, right,
But did it give you a little bit of just
like almost I don't know if you could put your
finger on it, but internal filtering that said like this
over here, but not that over there. I need to
focus like on this component right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it helped me. It helped me, hone
in on you know, if you've if you've only got
we all have finite time, right, We've all none of
us know how long we have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're all gonna dieye.
Speaker 1: Alost is something I grapple with in my day job
all the yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what do you really really really have to say?
What do you really have to say? And who do
you have have to say it to? What was harder
was the figuring out the structure of it. So the
book is written as I retell the same span of
that century from the early twentieth century, so roughly the
present in every chapter, right, I go over it from
a from a different perspective. And once I kind of
landed on that as the kind of the right the
way to approach the writing, things got a lot easier
because then I was like, Okay, I don't have to
talk about everything. I had kind of the same problem
the cologists have, which is everything is connected to everything else,
So how can I possibly write this in your way?
And I'm talking about unintended consequences and unintended consequences as
a framework only makes sense if you think in a
linear kind of way, if you think holistically. One of
the things I argue is that none of these are
actually unintended and none of them are consequences, so they're
neither actually. But how do you make that argument in
a book where every word has to follow every word
and so it still has to be linear?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So that part took that part of the puzzle did
take along a long time to figure out.
Speaker 1: Did you work from sort of a bottom up perspective
of like, here's all this really interesting information and I
need to piece it together to tell a story, or
did you work more top down and say like, these
are the themes that I really want the readers to
walk away with, and kind of approach everything through that lens.
Speaker 3: I would say, I'm like a very optimistic outliner. So
I definitely had outlines for what the book was going
to be and plans, and then as I would write,
it never never kind of went totally as expected, So
that's there's that. I did definitely try to confirm the
case studies that I had accumulated through a large kind
of meta analysis of the literature that had been published
today because I really wanted to understand, like, how widespread
is this phenomena of unintended consequences? How often do scientists
talk in this way like am I just picking? Am
I being mean and picking out the worst of the
worst here? Or how kind of pervasive is this? So
I did definitely do that kind of work to make
sure that I felt okay about saying, actually, these are
widespread and it is. It is systemic, and it's inherent
how the science has been set up and funded and organized,
and that means the good news is we could do
it differently, right, So I kind of the book with
we could you know, we could organize science a bit
differently here, and we need to, right we're in a
moment of real reckoning around what's the role of science
is in society. So it's.
Speaker 1: You know, we talked a little bit at the very beginning,
and maybe this is a good sort of bookend here,
but this this concept of what it means for something
to be rare or to have become rare, and how
it affects human behavior and how there is a real
chicken an egg question that sort of exacerbates itself or
like kind of runs away in a feedback loop. I'm
curious what some of those as you were sitting down
to make those outlines. Sure, a lot of that work
is logistical work, and how do I fit this in?
Speaker 2: How do I fit that in?
Speaker 1: But as you were thinking thematically, and you were thinking
more top down, and you were thinking more like, what
is the purpose and point? What do I hope that
a reader can walk away with a deeper insight into?
I'm curious, are there any themes that we haven't even
touched on so far in our talk? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean so, I don't know if this answers your
question exactly, But each chapter I sort of approach it
the way an anthropologists would approach anything. Right, what do
human What do groups of humans have to do together?
They have to find ways to be safe, They have
to find ways to not kill each other. They have
to get along somehow, so that means they have to
organize themselves and have norms, patterns of behavior that are
acceptable and unacceptable. They have to find a way to
raise their young, educate and raise their young. And they
have to find a way to produce or shape their environment.
And all of those are things that all human societies
have to do. But they're also things that science has
to do. Scientific disciplines have to do. They have to
find a way to train their young tom what's right
and wrong, acquire resources, whether that's funding or something else,
defend their space against incursions, right, whether that's their methods
or their way of working, and and leave things a
little bit better for the next next generation. So when
you approach disciplines that way, they start somethings start to
make a lot more sense. Also, right, like that, these
scientists had to invent field sites, had to invent this idea,
produce their field sites, so they weren't just like discovered
out there like you were saying about wilderness. It's not
just sort of out there. These ecologists had to solve
a primary problem, which is what is my field site?
And if with all this environmental destruction happening, which was
happening even in the early twentieth century, is changing my
field site. So they knew that things like air and
water pollution were changing their field sites. How can I
study something scientifically because nothing's helped constant. Everything that I'm
doing is in flux. So a lot of this was
motivated by I have to create if I'm going to
create this field of everything of life in relationship to
absolutely everything else out there, including other organisms and the environment.
Then I have to have a way of protecting these
field sites in order to do this work. And so
that that initial kind of that was the initial impetus, right,
That was that care motive, if you will. They really
cared for their field sites, and they invested tremendously, a
tremendous amount of labor and thought into the creation of
these of these field sites and their maintenance. And one
of the one of the concerns right now is that
a lot of those field sites are under increasing pressure again, right,
funding pressure and development and all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean it, you know, I sort of
just like as a as a second to last note.
It makes me think about you know, when when we
think about perspective shift and paradigm shift within different scientific
areas of inquiry, there are so many variables at play
that often fade into the background. And that's why I
think that, you know, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology,
all of these fields are so fundamentally important to telling
these stories because nothing happens in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: You just describe such.
Speaker 1: A beautiful example of the zeitgeist or the shifting zeitgeist
throughout this type of work. And it's things like, you know,
what tools had been invented, and do we need to
take the time now to invent a new tool to
be able to answer this question. Was there geopolitical conflict
at the time, what was the economy? Like what you know,
were we in favor with whoever the prevailing you know,
governmental structure was. And it's so interesting that we often
just look at an outcome instead of looking at all
of the different pressures that collectively tell a story. And
of course I think anybody living today can see that
today is also history, right, And whether you define it
as like a more trying time or not, we are
living in a time of our own pressures on these
on these areas of inquiry and on this very noble
work to try to say how do we protect, maintain, conserve,
improve however you want to define the goal.
Speaker 2: It's not just happening in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: It's happening against a background of all of these different pressures.
Speaker 3: Right right, it absolutely is. And people are responding with
memory of what they did before, what happened before. Right,
It's not like people are a blank slate. So the
first people move to that community in Texas because of
the views, the next group moves in because of the
swimming pools there. The next group is in the grocery store.
Now there's a grocery store, right, And so these things
keep happening on top of the things that have already happened,
and science is very not set up to handle that
kind of long term work. You know, someone trained in
the sciences and someone who studies the sciences and consults
a lot now for different science organizations, it's just not
very it's very We have a very inadequate tool set
to do that kind of long term thinking about how
consequences unfold on top of consequences unfold on top of consequences.
We don't have a good language for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree, and I think and even so
I think science still probably does it better than politics
does because of our just because of the nature of
election cycles, it's very hard to think about long term
future When the people who are in power are thinking
about getting re elected or they're thinking about what they
can do within four years. That that really changes the calculus.
So I have to ask last question because I know
you have meetings to go to, but I'm super curious
that before and the after. I know that this has
really been a large part of your life's work, but
before you sat down to really, uh, I guess, in
a meaningful way write this book versus after, how have
you been changed by your own scholarship, like by the
things that you discovered in doing research and in doing
interviews in order to write this book.
Speaker 3: Wow, that is a great question.
Speaker 2: So I can't imagine you went into it with all
the same perspectives.
Speaker 1: That you came out.
Speaker 3: My goodness, Now, now I did not, for sure. I
mean I teach. I teach a lot of these same
methods now to our to our wonderful sets of students here,
and I do do consults and work with a number
of organizations around this. And you know, one of the
things I sort of tell them is that it feels
really hard, because this work is really hard. You know,
it's very very hard to hold all of these things
in a state of play at the same time. And
so some of that work that I've that I do
now and that I definitely prioritize more in in the
work that I do and that I also try to
sort of teach and share is that take that deep breath, right, Like,
this work is very hard, and if we come in
with the boxes, you know, we come in already with
everything set up, and we think we know what we're
going to be doing. We're going to be really wrong, right,
We're really we're really foreclosing ourselves to a lot of
potential insight. And so I actually start the book with
this mom and as a grad student where I'm completely
wrong about something, I go and see this talk about
the caviat and how rarity is creating more demand for
Raverty and I'm like, oh, there's a simple solution here.
We just need to fix the policy. You know, it says,
you know, Zoe is a grad student. I was completely wrong, right, Like,
that was totally not going to work. But it wasn't
until I kind of stopped and allowed all these other
things to kind of speak and and and not rush
in for the answer that other those other things started
to emerge. So I tend to work very sort of
slowly and a little bit sideways, you know, like allowing
things to kind of allowing a lot of serendipity to happen,
which is very frustrating for students, right because they which
makes sense because they're like, I want to just what's
my research question? How do I do this? Let's get
out of here. And in the graduate class, we've got
a formal agreement with local government here, so we do projects,
you know, every year, based on what the community needs,
and so that they walk in the first day and
they're like, what's our project? I said, I don't know,
we're going to build it? Like, how do we know?
If you knew what people needed, why would they need
us to be there to help them. We're there to
figure out what people, help them figure out what they need.
If we knew what they needed, then we're part of
the problem because now you're coming in as an outsider
telling them what they need. So you know, we're actually
going to spend half the semester figuring out what the
project is. And then it's always very distressing way, but
that's so important.
Speaker 1: So if we knew what they needed, they wouldn't need
because we would have already and solving the problem. Clearly,
that's not how science works, but it is I think
the hubris that has historically plagued many many endeavors and
So what a beautiful and humble and incredibly frustrating and
probably very probably directly attacking your self efficacy at times,
but necessary process for yourself and your students. And I
think we can all That's why I like to talk
about process. I think we can all learn from that.
We can all sit in the unknown a little bit
more and work on our neuropsychological humility a little bit more,
and stop assuming we already know and seeking out data
that reinforce our you know, previously held beliefs like be
aware the confirmation of bias exists, and allow ourselves to
sort of be more open as best as we can.
I think why wiser words have not been said. I
can't thank you enough for being here everybody. The book
is Rarities Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences
by doctor Zoe Nissa Zoe.
Speaker 2: Thank you so so much.
Speaker 3: Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really
really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and everybody listening, thank you for coming back week
after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time
we all get together to talk. Merity