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Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today's Monday, July thirteenth,

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twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of the show,

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Doctor Kara Santa Maria, And as always, before we dive

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into this week's episode, I want to thank those of

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you who make Talk Nerdy possible. Remember, since the beginning,

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this show is and has been, yes, has been, is

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and will always be one hundred percent free to download,

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even today on episode six hundred and nine, twelve years in.

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Speaker 2: Can't believe it.

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Speaker 1: The way I keep this thing going and I pay

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the people who need to be paid, is by relying

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on the support of individuals just like you. I use

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the Patreon platform and I use an episodic model, So

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if you are interested in pledging your support any amount

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talk Nerdy to learn more. This week's top patrons include

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Chuck Blell, David J. E. Smith, Daniel Lang, Will Defrayin,

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David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabo, Jay Ulrica Hagman, Pasquale, Jilati,

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Rika Maharaj, and Joe Wilkinson. Thank you all. So so

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very much. All right, quick intro for this one. This week,

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today I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Zoe Nissa.

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She is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University

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and she has a brand new book out called Rarities

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Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences. So, without

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any further ado, here she is doctor Zoe Nissa. Well, Zoe,

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thank you so much for joining me today.

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Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So I'm excited to talk about your new book, Rarities

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Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences. And of

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course there are many many times of unintended consequences throughout

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the history of conservation science. But before we even dig

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into that, I would love to just to know a

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little bit more about you and your work and kind

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of how you got to the place of putting so

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much effort and you know, gosh, I I was gonna say,

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I know how much work it is to write a book,

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but I still haven't done it. It's like I'm wanting

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to do it, but I don't have the bandwidth to

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do the work. Because I speak with authors and especially

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scientists who are authors every single day about just gosh

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about how much it takes from them. So let's get

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into maybe your work before the book first.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'll maybe start. I'll start actually in the present,

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which was and then I'll work backwards. But when I

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finished the book and my tenure case had gone through

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like that first, you know, I don't know what. It

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was a Thursday or Friday night when the announcement came

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out and I showed up in the living room. My

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family's watching TV and I sit down and they suddenly

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look at me and they're like, what are you? What

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are you doing here? I'm like, I'm watching TV. Like

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what you're doing?

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Speaker 2: What are you?

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Speaker 3: Ill?

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Speaker 2: Like, what's the matter with you?

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Speaker 3: And I was like, you know, this room is nice.

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I should sit in this room more. I should do

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this more. So. I don't think I had sat in

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my own living room in front of the television in

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many years. Many years. Oh man, Yeah, that's a warning

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depending on how how involved your book gets. But yeah,

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I had kind of a strange and winding road, and

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I think you'll appreciate this probably in your own biography.

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I started actually an astrophysics and that was my first

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degree at the University of Toronto, and it was it

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was kind of like the Canadian system is a little different.

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They've got kind of like almost this like extra duty major,

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you know, like that's even more more intense than a

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regular double major or something like that would be. And so,

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you know, I say it was kind of like a

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math a math degree really mostly. And the reason I

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did that was that space and science were really kind

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of my happy place. It was like, you know, when

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people say, imagine a beach, you know, feel relaxed, like

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at a yoga class or something. I was like, I'm

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not there, not on the beach. I'm looking up at

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the stars. I want to I want to see the infinite,

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you know. But the as I was in that program,

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I kind of had all of these questions that I

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couldn't really answer, and I was I was finding myself

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at the library a lot, you know, looking at like

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the origins of how the Greek figured out the number system, right,

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or the invention of the zero, which was a big

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point in mathematics, and just how did people put things

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that happen into numbers, you know, and then what's the

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fallout of that? You know, because that allows us. That's

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really powerful. It allows us to describe certain things in

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a certain way, and it also takes away things. And

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so I had that kind of worry as a young person.

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And you know, I had some professors who were like,

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you know, you're okay at this writing thing. You seem

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pretty good at this writing thing. Can you write this

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technical manual for us? Can you join this project? Can

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you do these things? I started doing some kind of

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science writing for the student magazines and things like that,

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and they're like, you know, you're actually asking these kind

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of really interesting questions, and I think physics may not

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be the.

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Speaker 2: Path for you to.

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Speaker 3: Answer those kinds of questions. And the final kind of

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breaking point was actually I'm dating myself here, but the

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Hubble Space Telescope team came and this was at the

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time there was a lot of debate around whether the

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universe was gonna and you know, it started in this

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big bang, Was it going to end in a big crunch,

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Was it going to all kind of collapse back together

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or not, or keep expanding forever into this kind of cold,

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slow death. And they were using this telescope to do that,

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and these very very smart and lots of very very smart,

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very prestigious people in the room, and I'm like in

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my early twenties, and they were making this very strong

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argument about the fate of the entire universe based on

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this graph and the error bars so exceeded like where

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the measurements were. And I was like, I'm like twenty,

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you know, two, and this makes no sense to me.

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These people are sort of taking it seriously. Like if

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I did this as an undergrad try to make this

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kind of argument, no, I would, you know, my professor

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would fail me because I don't have enough data, right,

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And I didn't understand yet because I hadn't taken a

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lot of philosophy or anything like that, that the fact

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that our data is really our arguments are really underdetermined

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by the data. It was not a concept that I

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had yet in my repertoire. But but that was what

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I was kind of confronting, and I went, you know what.

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I looked around the room at all these people, and

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I thought that I need to understand this. I need

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to understand what the heck is going on here and

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why why this is happening. So I got my start there,

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but I started to move to the social sciences and

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starting to try to understand science itself as a system

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and as a social practice and as a community and

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the people that are involved with science and that have

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a stake in science. So I ended up going to

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graduate school for for that. Maybe the other part of

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my background that would be important to the way that

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the book looked is that I'm the first of my

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family to go to college. And when I was applot,

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my my dad actually he was here for Father's Day,

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so I saw him recently and he was like, yeah,

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I remember that talk that I gave you.

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Speaker 1: Uh.

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Speaker 3: He just sat me down and he said, you know,

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people like us don't go to school. You're done school.

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You went to university. Like you're done. You've already got

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one degree that's more than any anyone else has ever gotten.

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People like us go to work. You're you're smart enough.

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Apparently you're making poor life choices, but you're smart enough.

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Speaker 2: He choices to cost money to make money.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, it's time to go make some money. It's

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time to get a job. And he was convinced that

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by applying to graduate school in the United States. I

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think he thought I was going to be kind of

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like trafficked or something like He was like, they're going

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to take your passport away, like you work or something.

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You just had no idea. And I said, I think

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they're going to pay for me to go to school, dad,

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And he was like, no, no one pays something to

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go to school. You're you're you know, like you're even

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dumber than I thought you were. So those two perspectives

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of having having not had that in my background to

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you know, university as a as a thing to do,

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and then coming from a very different kind of scientific

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tradition initially, where you know, you are supposed to be

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extremely quantitative and extremely objective, objective, and the objects of

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study are are literally light years away, you know, really

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shaped how I then started to encounter conservation, which was

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not actually what I started was initially going to study.

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But I got this uh fellowship at the University of Minnesota,

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which has a really amazing, amazing group of faculty there,

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and it was with a zoo, and I was like,

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I don't know anything about zoos. I mean, they're cool, right,

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but I was like, what what am I going to do?

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I never even took any biology, Honestly, I escaped all

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biology in high school. I never took any of it

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in college and my first time behind the scenes at

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the zoo watching these scientists, these conservation biologists and veterinarians

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and all kinds of folks and how they thought about

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their work and how much they really, really really cared

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for their for their for their animals, their animal population,

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and we're so invested in in what their science was

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doing and why it was doing it, you know, what

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it was for that It just it astounded me. It

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was really really cool to see. So that was kind

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of the kickoff many years ago to what what became rarities.

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Speaker 1: I love that and thinking about it's funny thinking about

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me kind of sitting across across the internet from you actually,

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but sitting across from you and having this conversation, you know,

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it feels.

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Speaker 2: Timely. In a lot of the episode that will have aired.

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Speaker 1: It's so weird when we podcast because we have to

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time travel a little bit. But the episode that will

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have aired the week right before this was an interview

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with Jessica Riskin, who is a historian of science, talking

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about Lamarque and evolution and sort of the zeitgeist of

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the time.

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Speaker 2: And I just finished just like very kind of.

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Speaker 1: Serendipitously a book by Lydia Pine, who I've also had

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on the show before, who's a historian and anthropologist but

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specifically usually focusing on science called Endlings, which is all

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about the last of specific species and how we tell

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stories about conservation and how we tell stories about species loss.

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And so it's I feel like I'm in this really

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interesting position where, even though this is not something I'm

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usually talking about and thinking about, it's sort of been

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on the tip of my mind lately, which which makes

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me excited for our conversation. So, so tell me a

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little bit about you know, we got to sort of

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how you, I guess, chose your degree path and and

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I mean very in a very meandering way, this specific story,

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like this book rarities, and the idea of talking about

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conservation science but situating it really in the sociologic or

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anthropologic kind of landscape.

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Speaker 2: What brought you to that storytelling?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a great question. Also, I'm so excited

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with the other conversations you're having.

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Speaker 2: Because that's that's just great.

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Speaker 3: I mean, back when I started this, uh, conservation was

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kind of booming as a field, but the perception of

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it I write, I read about this a bit in

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the book was that it was kind of vacuous, right,

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like it was just a bunch of people on a

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mission to save the world. And who appointed them, you know,

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pointed you in charge kind of thing. And in interview

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some of the some of the very early participants in

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the very early meetings in the seventies and eighties, they

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would say, we knew we were here to save the world,

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like it was on our shoulders to save the planet

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because no one else was. So they they definitely came

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in with this sense of mission. And these were primarily

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you know, middle class white American male biologists with all

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of the all of the you know, social perspectives that

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come along with that kind of positionality. And by the

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time I came to the field, you know, to study

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the field, it was it was well established, but still

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had this perception that it was kind of what was

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it really doing? That, wasn't it because biology was the

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study of life, So what exactly was conservation doing? And

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initially I thought I approached it like any good physicist.

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I was like, right, I need my initial conditions. I

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need to clear the ground here, I need to understand

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the entire field first, and then I'll figure out what

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case studies I want to look at, right, because I

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was thinking I was going to do kind of a

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lab ethnography is they're kind of called an anthropology. So

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take the methods of anthropology, but rather than apply them

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to a small scale society or a village, you know,

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you would go to a laboratory and just hang out

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for a year or two with those folks and understand

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them and their culture. So initially I thought that's what

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I was going to do. And as I started to

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kind of move around the field and talk to different

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people and visit these different sites, you know, over and over,

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I was getting these you know, I sort of saying

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the book, my weird file kept growing, these sort of

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strange stories people were telling me of stuff that didn't

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work out the way they wanted it, to a tremendous

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amount of like personal and professional hardship, you know, people

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getting shut out of the field, people getting hacked, backlash,

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like just all kinds of things sort of happening to people,

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projects getting sabotaged by local communities, lots of backlash, Like

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just all these things that were happening that kind of

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got in the way of what seemed like it should

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be a fairly straightforward thing, and in some ways a

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fairly uncontroversial thing, right, which is just like, let's protect

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the environment upon which we all literally depend, right, Like,

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let's just not trash it completely, because it's where our

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water and our food come from. So yeah, So I

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started initially thinking that, let me just understand who's in

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this field, what they're doing, what's going on. But then

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very quickly it became this thing of like, whoa, there

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are these things going on, and how widespread are they? Right? Like,

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is this what is going on here? If the whole

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thing is kind of not always happening the way it

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was expected to, what does that tell us about science

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more generally? Right? And so by the end of it,

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I kind of was saying I was sort of writing,

280
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I mean, and it's in a weird way kind of

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I think of it as almost like a love story,

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Like what happens when the thing you love, you know

283
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that you love the most of anything, that you've sacrificed

284
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everything to love it and to understand it and to

285
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know it, and it's not working out the way you

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wanted it to.

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Speaker 1: Gosh, yeah, wow, there's something very kind of existential and

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almost like eschatological about that I can't help, but you know,

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my psychologist's brain over here is like comparing that to

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this concept in mental health about like gripping things so

291
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tightly that they actually fall through your fingers. Is like

292
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really difficult balance that we have of holding things softly

293
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and of being nimble in an effort to change course

294
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when things aren't working.

295
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Speaker 2: I think.

296
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Speaker 1: There's so many things I want to get into with you, obviously,

297
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so many examples and stories of as you mentioned, like

298
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times when there's an intentionality and almost the opposite happens,

299
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or there's just things that feel very controllable, all these

300
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other unintended kind of runaway outcomes. When I think about

301
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this entire I don't even want to call it a

302
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field because it's so many different fields. But this entire

303
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area of even like inquiry and practice of how do

304
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we protect and save our planet from ourselves in a

305
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way knowing that we are the arbiters and the actors,

306
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and that there are geopolitical forces and that there are

307
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you know, now climate change is like its own organizing force,

308
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and all of these different things I can't help but

309
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go back to. For listeners who have been listening to

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the show for a long time. You may remember that,

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like several years ago, I traveled to Namibia to give

312
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a talk about science communication, and you know, we all

313
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have these memories of these times where our eyes were

314
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really opened right where like we we shifted our perspective

315
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in a major way. And one of the things that

316
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I learned there, working with the people who have their

317
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boo's on the ground, the people who live there, who

318
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are from there, and especially in these like large sort

319
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of nature reserves where a lot of indigenous folks would

320
00:18:08,799 --> 00:18:15,680
live with wildlife, was the power of something like and

321
00:18:15,680 --> 00:18:18,359
I hate to say it, but trophy hunting, like this

322
00:18:18,480 --> 00:18:20,559
thing that I think historically, as a white person living

323
00:18:20,599 --> 00:18:23,640
in the West thought was just all bad. And I

324
00:18:23,759 --> 00:18:26,680
very quickly learned that trophy hunting was how they fueled

325
00:18:26,720 --> 00:18:31,079
their anti poaching patrols. And you know, trophy hunting was

326
00:18:31,119 --> 00:18:33,039
a tool that they used. They had a bull elephant

327
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that was knocking over a bunch of people's water. It

328
00:18:35,680 --> 00:18:38,759
was a burdensome animal, it was old, it wasn't breeding anymore.

329
00:18:38,799 --> 00:18:41,240
The people just wanted to kill it. Well, sell the

330
00:18:41,279 --> 00:18:43,319
tag to some rich white person from the West and

331
00:18:43,359 --> 00:18:46,240
make two hundred thousand dollars or however much they go

332
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for now and use that money to fund anti poaching,

333
00:18:49,839 --> 00:18:52,079
like I think in my mind poaching and trophy hunting

334
00:18:52,079 --> 00:18:55,400
were the same thing. And being there and learning that

335
00:18:55,480 --> 00:18:58,559
this complicated thing that feels bad was actually a source

336
00:18:58,599 --> 00:19:00,240
for very good And a lot of these animals have

337
00:19:00,279 --> 00:19:03,319
to be cold anyway, and conservation is not as simple

338
00:19:03,359 --> 00:19:06,200
as these animals are endangered, therefore we have to protect

339
00:19:06,200 --> 00:19:08,440
them at all costs. Because look what happened in Botswana.

340
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It just really opened my eyes to how complicated this

341
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:11,400
all is.

342
00:19:12,119 --> 00:19:15,599
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely well, and that care piece is so big, right,

343
00:19:15,640 --> 00:19:19,839
what drives someone you know, who presumably wealthy enough to

344
00:19:19,960 --> 00:19:22,519
have a lot of choices with their leisure time and

345
00:19:22,559 --> 00:19:25,279
how they spend their recreation money. But they're going to fly,

346
00:19:25,680 --> 00:19:29,640
you know, a continent away and shoot something, you know,

347
00:19:30,240 --> 00:19:32,160
and we don't tend to think of that as an

348
00:19:32,160 --> 00:19:34,839
expression of care. And one of the things I sort

349
00:19:34,839 --> 00:19:36,839
of argue for in the book is actually we need

350
00:19:36,880 --> 00:19:40,519
to think about those things as when you view it

351
00:19:40,559 --> 00:19:42,240
from a care lens, When you view it from a

352
00:19:42,319 --> 00:19:46,960
lens of this has real value, not just like intellectual

353
00:19:47,079 --> 00:19:51,200
or monetary value, but it has value value for people

354
00:19:51,519 --> 00:19:54,559
in this deep kind of emotional way, this connect you know,

355
00:19:54,640 --> 00:19:58,119
kind of connected way that changes the equation, That changes

356
00:19:58,160 --> 00:20:01,880
a lot of our sort of pilosophical ideas about ethics

357
00:20:02,200 --> 00:20:04,880
or how we think the economy runs, or what is

358
00:20:04,920 --> 00:20:07,839
in our rational best interests as consumers. Right, Like, once

359
00:20:07,880 --> 00:20:11,920
you add that piece, it really opens up a way

360
00:20:11,960 --> 00:20:15,480
of understanding why people do the things they do.

361
00:20:16,599 --> 00:20:20,079
Speaker 1: Would you say that that is one of the kind

362
00:20:20,160 --> 00:20:26,839
of underlying themes the takeaways that you were interested in

363
00:20:26,839 --> 00:20:29,440
communicating in this book. I mean you did ultimately name

364
00:20:29,480 --> 00:20:36,119
it rarities, this concept of once something is scarce, once

365
00:20:36,200 --> 00:20:43,920
something no longer has ubiquity, it actually, in many respects

366
00:20:44,119 --> 00:20:51,680
goes up in value, which becomes simultaneously detrimental to its

367
00:20:51,799 --> 00:20:57,079
remaining population and also incredibly critical for the work to

368
00:20:57,720 --> 00:21:01,480
I guess not see it go extinct at the rate

369
00:21:01,519 --> 00:21:04,119
at least, like so many things are going extinct so quickly,

370
00:21:04,680 --> 00:21:06,720
Like this idea of what what does it mean for

371
00:21:06,759 --> 00:21:07,720
something to be rare?

372
00:21:08,759 --> 00:21:11,440
Speaker 3: Right? Yeah, okay, so this is yeah, that is absolutely

373
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the part of the thing for sure, the heart of

374
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the book. So economists will often and I have this

375
00:21:17,279 --> 00:21:19,119
when I give you know, talks. You know, there's always

376
00:21:19,119 --> 00:21:22,519
an economist or often an economic student who will come

377
00:21:22,599 --> 00:21:25,200
up to me and say, yeah, well, as you know,

378
00:21:25,519 --> 00:21:30,640
as supply goes down, so this thing becomes less common,

379
00:21:31,279 --> 00:21:33,599
more rare, whatever you want to say. Of course, the

380
00:21:33,640 --> 00:21:37,400
price goes up, right, because there's fewer of them, and

381
00:21:37,680 --> 00:21:41,480
non economists and even some economists will confuse like that

382
00:21:41,599 --> 00:21:45,960
standard supply and demand curve, which is which is the

383
00:21:46,079 --> 00:21:49,279
total supply and the total demand in a market? Right,

384
00:21:49,319 --> 00:21:53,759
it's not about an individual's intensity of longing. Right. So

385
00:21:54,359 --> 00:21:56,920
we know this with a lot of consumer goods, right

386
00:21:56,920 --> 00:21:59,839
where we do these limited product drops and it's this,

387
00:22:00,039 --> 00:22:02,319
it's here now just for a little bit. There's it's

388
00:22:02,359 --> 00:22:06,119
a limited run, it's you know, it's whatever it is, sneakers,

389
00:22:06,920 --> 00:22:10,079
Pokemon cards, you know, you name it. We've we've we've

390
00:22:10,119 --> 00:22:14,400
created artificial scarcity, and marketers have figured out very well

391
00:22:14,400 --> 00:22:17,599
how to create artificial scarcity in a way to drive

392
00:22:17,680 --> 00:22:20,400
up demand for it. Right. So the intensity of someone's

393
00:22:20,440 --> 00:22:25,400
emotional attachment to something can increase with the with its rarity. Right.

394
00:22:25,519 --> 00:22:29,480
But but for economists there should there should be a

395
00:22:29,519 --> 00:22:31,920
point when you think about sort of larger market dynamic

396
00:22:32,000 --> 00:22:34,599
dynamics where you go, right, this thing has become too

397
00:22:34,640 --> 00:22:37,319
expensive for most people to afford. Right, it's like the

398
00:22:37,440 --> 00:22:39,680
it's like the thing you want to pot or shoot. Right,

399
00:22:39,680 --> 00:22:41,640
it's the I'm going to fly across, you know, to

400
00:22:41,839 --> 00:22:45,759
Namibia and shoot this bull elephant. Not most people can't

401
00:22:45,799 --> 00:22:48,480
do that. They don't have the resources, and so total

402
00:22:48,519 --> 00:22:52,680
demand across the market decreases, and what I.

403
00:22:52,720 --> 00:22:53,440
Speaker 2: End up interesting.

404
00:22:53,799 --> 00:22:55,319
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what I end up talking about in the

405
00:22:55,359 --> 00:22:58,839
book is that what happens and this this was sparked

406
00:22:58,839 --> 00:23:01,599
by some talk that I went to. So these were

407
00:23:01,599 --> 00:23:05,759
biologists who were starting to identify that these things were happening.

408
00:23:07,359 --> 00:23:12,279
When something becomes valued just because it is perceived is rare.

409
00:23:12,759 --> 00:23:15,279
So I use the case of caviar. Right, the study

410
00:23:15,279 --> 00:23:17,920
that was done with caviar. If people have a choice

411
00:23:17,960 --> 00:23:21,720
between a rare brand of caviar and a common brand,

412
00:23:21,799 --> 00:23:23,880
they did these taste tests. People will always pick the

413
00:23:23,960 --> 00:23:28,640
rare one because they want to seem like they're you know, experts, right,

414
00:23:28,759 --> 00:23:32,000
expert consumers, and they enjoy luxury and they can appreciate

415
00:23:32,279 --> 00:23:34,119
all these sorts of things. So all of these other

416
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:39,759
meanings get attached to rarity, and if what the market

417
00:23:39,799 --> 00:23:43,279
is demanding, is just rarity for itself, not it doesn't

418
00:23:43,319 --> 00:23:45,720
matter which good it is anymore, it doesn't matter which

419
00:23:45,720 --> 00:23:48,799
species it is. Then this becomes a real problem for

420
00:23:48,880 --> 00:23:54,359
conservation policy, and I argue for other areas of applied

421
00:23:54,400 --> 00:23:58,559
science as well, because people are now have this arbitrary

422
00:23:58,599 --> 00:24:02,160
demand for just this thing that seems special. And what

423
00:24:02,319 --> 00:24:05,440
is conservation doing except making things seem special. The whole

424
00:24:05,440 --> 00:24:07,839
point of the field was to make people care about stuff,

425
00:24:08,440 --> 00:24:09,079
and they did.

426
00:24:10,160 --> 00:24:13,240
Speaker 1: Yeah, without without I guess the foresight or you know,

427
00:24:13,359 --> 00:24:17,759
just the the insight. Really that in some respects You're right.

428
00:24:17,920 --> 00:24:21,599
Once something feels special, we feel it an extra emotional

429
00:24:21,759 --> 00:24:24,559
kind of drive to protect it. But we also feel

430
00:24:24,559 --> 00:24:27,200
an extra emotional drive to make sure that we we

431
00:24:27,319 --> 00:24:31,480
have it, you know, that it somehow is possessed, like oh,

432
00:24:31,519 --> 00:24:33,400
put it in the zoo, put it in the you know,

433
00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:36,720
for and yes, four conservation purposes, but like mount it,

434
00:24:36,799 --> 00:24:40,839
you know. And I think obviously there is that colonial

435
00:24:40,880 --> 00:24:43,400
perspective does persist. I don't think it's as bad as

436
00:24:43,400 --> 00:24:47,839
it was back when when we had like European sailors

437
00:24:47,839 --> 00:24:49,440
going around the word ooh, that's a cool thing. I

438
00:24:49,480 --> 00:24:51,559
should kill it, so I can show everybody what it

439
00:24:51,599 --> 00:24:54,960
looks like. But it's funny thinking about like let's say

440
00:24:54,960 --> 00:24:58,359
a beautiful bird, for example, and the very reason it

441
00:24:58,440 --> 00:25:00,759
might have become rare would becau hus we killed it

442
00:25:00,799 --> 00:25:03,400
when it was ubiquitous to make pretty hats. And then

443
00:25:03,440 --> 00:25:07,720
you have other species who just they're just sensitive to

444
00:25:07,759 --> 00:25:11,319
these you know, climate changes. They just don't have the resiliency.

445
00:25:11,680 --> 00:25:14,079
And it's not because anybody went, I really really want

446
00:25:14,119 --> 00:25:18,240
that frog for myself. It's because that frog cannot adapt

447
00:25:18,759 --> 00:25:21,119
to a rapidly changing climate and it's just dying.

448
00:25:21,960 --> 00:25:26,400
Speaker 3: Right. But often, like even those you know, they used

449
00:25:26,440 --> 00:25:28,279
to we used to sort of divide things into like

450
00:25:29,680 --> 00:25:31,920
you know, back before riz was a word, right, it

451
00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:35,759
was like charismatic species, so like the high charisma species

452
00:25:35,799 --> 00:25:37,519
and the low. So the elephants of the world are

453
00:25:37,559 --> 00:25:40,400
kind of high charisma, and the frog is typically considered

454
00:25:40,400 --> 00:25:43,000
low charisma. But now you can kind of find fan

455
00:25:43,839 --> 00:25:50,960
fandoms for almost everything, right, and even you know, a plant, right,

456
00:25:51,000 --> 00:25:53,640
there are plant collectors out there who want whatever the

457
00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:56,200
thing is, and because of the Internet, they can get it.

458
00:25:56,839 --> 00:25:59,640
In the In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it

459
00:25:59,680 --> 00:26:02,200
was dying clubs. I wanted to eat the zebra. I

460
00:26:02,240 --> 00:26:04,559
wanted to you know, that was these gentlemen's clubs. They

461
00:26:04,599 --> 00:26:08,880
would serve like zebra meat or whatever. It isn't always

462
00:26:08,880 --> 00:26:11,839
even species based. So one of the chapters in the book,

463
00:26:11,839 --> 00:26:16,319
I look at housing development in Texas that is adjacent

464
00:26:16,359 --> 00:26:21,880
to a preserved area, and everyone that lives there describes

465
00:26:21,920 --> 00:26:25,440
themselves as a nature lover. Right. They all really really

466
00:26:25,480 --> 00:26:28,799
really love the outdoors. They really love and see themselves

467
00:26:28,839 --> 00:26:31,839
as stewards of the land in different ways, and they

468
00:26:31,839 --> 00:26:37,000
hold different you know, social positions and political commitments, but

469
00:26:37,039 --> 00:26:38,960
they all had that in common. Right. They moved to

470
00:26:39,039 --> 00:26:43,119
this place because they because they they loved the outdoors.

471
00:26:43,119 --> 00:26:45,079
They wanted to be around nature, even if they weren't

472
00:26:45,079 --> 00:26:46,640
going to go hiking in it or whatever. They wanted

473
00:26:46,680 --> 00:26:49,079
to be able to see it outside their window. And

474
00:26:49,119 --> 00:26:53,240
that also can be a problem. Right, So when we

475
00:26:53,480 --> 00:26:57,119
protect an area, if we're then incentivizing people to develop

476
00:26:57,200 --> 00:26:59,519
all along the margins. And there's been a lot of

477
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:03,440
really interesting research that has found this happening globally, so

478
00:27:03,559 --> 00:27:07,279
not just in the United States, that once you protect

479
00:27:07,319 --> 00:27:10,920
an area, you're basically saying to everyone else, this is

480
00:27:11,079 --> 00:27:14,319
now preserved from development. We're never going to build a

481
00:27:14,440 --> 00:27:18,799
highway or a you know, housing development or mall or

482
00:27:18,839 --> 00:27:22,400
nothing's going to come chip plant, chip manufacturing plant like

483
00:27:22,440 --> 00:27:28,079
we have here locally, and so if you now build

484
00:27:28,160 --> 00:27:31,559
adjacent to it, you've got a guaranteed access to this

485
00:27:32,319 --> 00:27:38,400
undeveloped space. Yeah, and so it incentivizes a different kind

486
00:27:38,400 --> 00:27:41,359
of consumption. It's not a consumption of like cavia or something,

487
00:27:41,839 --> 00:27:46,759
but it's it's by sort of having that land become privatized,

488
00:27:46,799 --> 00:27:49,240
You've you've converted it into a kind of a private

489
00:27:50,000 --> 00:27:55,160
private consumption dynamic all along the perimeter of that protected area.

490
00:27:56,079 --> 00:27:59,960
Speaker 1: And that's probably I mean, would you say that that ultimate.

491
00:28:00,640 --> 00:28:02,680
I mean, it's hard to kind of know somebody's intention,

492
00:28:02,799 --> 00:28:05,440
but that is a sort of perfect example of these

493
00:28:05,640 --> 00:28:11,240
unintended consequences where the idea is you know, noble, it

494
00:28:11,839 --> 00:28:15,039
seems like it's guided in the right direction, and yet

495
00:28:15,279 --> 00:28:19,799
you know, this was probably always destined to happen, right.

496
00:28:19,839 --> 00:28:23,920
Speaker 3: And the big kind of shocker in doing the research

497
00:28:23,920 --> 00:28:28,039
for the book was that scientists knew this so earlier.

498
00:28:28,119 --> 00:28:30,319
You know, ecology was kind of founded as a discipline

499
00:28:30,359 --> 00:28:32,839
in the late nineteenth century. It sort of came to

500
00:28:32,880 --> 00:28:36,480
the United States and organized itself in the early twentieth century,

501
00:28:36,559 --> 00:28:39,920
and all the way back then, so over a century ago,

502
00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:43,599
they knew that this could happen. They knew that this

503
00:28:43,640 --> 00:28:47,000
could happen, right, so they were already worried about setting

504
00:28:47,039 --> 00:28:50,799
up the first national parks, the first protected areas, you know,

505
00:28:52,039 --> 00:28:56,839
notwithstanding the massive displacement and land theft from indigenous landholders,

506
00:28:56,880 --> 00:29:02,119
but the idea that we could create an amenity out

507
00:29:02,160 --> 00:29:05,559
of protecting things, protecting things could could make it enter.

508
00:29:05,640 --> 00:29:08,200
Sort of these consumption dynamics as well, was something that

509
00:29:08,200 --> 00:29:10,759
people knew about a century ago and we're worried about.

510
00:29:12,039 --> 00:29:13,559
But they didn't have good solutions for it.

511
00:29:13,680 --> 00:29:13,839
Speaker 1: You know.

512
00:29:13,839 --> 00:29:16,160
Speaker 3: The solutions were things like let's keep this secret, let's

513
00:29:16,200 --> 00:29:18,839
keep it just among the scientists, or let's not right

514
00:29:19,359 --> 00:29:22,559
publicize it or whatever. And one of the arguments I

515
00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:24,680
make in the book is that that never works, right.

516
00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:28,359
The secrets always get out. And when people complain now

517
00:29:28,400 --> 00:29:31,799
about how crowded the national parks are, how crowded their

518
00:29:31,839 --> 00:29:34,119
favorite spot is, or don't put this on the internet

519
00:29:34,200 --> 00:29:37,000
because someone's going to my favorite spot's now going to

520
00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:39,559
get too crowded. That's the same sort of thing at work.

521
00:29:40,480 --> 00:29:42,880
Speaker 1: It's interesting it goes right back to this concept of

522
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:46,880
rarity as well. Yeah, And the other thing that I

523
00:29:46,880 --> 00:29:49,880
think I picked up in some of my travels, in

524
00:29:49,880 --> 00:29:55,079
some of my sort of like education, was this concept

525
00:29:55,400 --> 00:29:58,200
of I think a lot of people in the West

526
00:29:58,400 --> 00:30:01,680
who think of like when you mentioned charismatic species, and

527
00:30:01,720 --> 00:30:05,160
we mention or we think about the concept of wilderness

528
00:30:05,319 --> 00:30:07,759
or of something being wild. One of the things that

529
00:30:07,759 --> 00:30:10,960
I very quickly learned when I was in Southern Africa,

530
00:30:11,039 --> 00:30:13,920
in a country that's like the second least population dense

531
00:30:13,960 --> 00:30:18,000
country in the world, that has all of the charismatic megafauna.

532
00:30:18,039 --> 00:30:19,759
The people that they've got the Big Five, they've got

533
00:30:19,799 --> 00:30:22,240
all of these like phenomenal animals that a lot of

534
00:30:22,559 --> 00:30:25,960
Westerners grow up only seeing in like children's books and

535
00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:28,440
like in the form of stuffed animals. I think the

536
00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:35,160
thing that I very quickly learned was wild is an

537
00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:40,200
operational definition, Like, yes, these are wild animals, but none

538
00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:43,960
of this land is not managed. Like all of these

539
00:30:44,079 --> 00:30:48,000
areas have fences, and most of these large animals are

540
00:30:48,079 --> 00:30:52,480
tracked and have they're either collared or tagged. We know

541
00:30:52,559 --> 00:30:57,680
their names we're watching their movements. Like people are tasked,

542
00:30:57,680 --> 00:30:59,799
whether they own the land, or whether they're on a land,

543
00:31:00,440 --> 00:31:03,920
or whether they're working for governmental or NGOs, they're tasked

544
00:31:03,920 --> 00:31:06,799
with ensuring that, Okay, there aren't too many giraffes in

545
00:31:06,799 --> 00:31:09,240
this area, we need to cull some of the drafts

546
00:31:09,240 --> 00:31:12,000
so the balance is correct. And I think that was

547
00:31:12,119 --> 00:31:15,279
really eye opening for me that even the concept of

548
00:31:15,359 --> 00:31:19,519
like just let it go to you know, Faulow, let

549
00:31:19,559 --> 00:31:22,160
it go wild, let it go like to to to

550
00:31:22,400 --> 00:31:25,160
the wilderness, What does that even mean anymore?

551
00:31:25,920 --> 00:31:28,599
Speaker 3: Right exactly? And I think that that that's sort of

552
00:31:28,640 --> 00:31:31,680
the concept of the anthropisty, right, like that we're living

553
00:31:31,720 --> 00:31:35,160
on a planet that is so shaped by human choices

554
00:31:35,279 --> 00:31:39,400
and human activity that it's hard to it's hard to

555
00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:45,319
even find places or find naturally what we used to

556
00:31:45,319 --> 00:31:47,240
think of as natural processes that are not in some

557
00:31:47,279 --> 00:31:51,160
way touched by humanity. And I think that a lot

558
00:31:51,160 --> 00:31:52,759
of people are grappling with that. I mean, that's where

559
00:31:52,759 --> 00:31:56,000
a lot of a lot of grief for a lot

560
00:31:56,039 --> 00:31:57,880
of people comes from, you know, is that they want

561
00:31:58,000 --> 00:31:59,880
they want that idea of the wilder and especially in

562
00:31:59,880 --> 00:32:02,079
the United States, right we're sort of based on this

563
00:32:02,160 --> 00:32:05,279
idea of the frontier and now it's now maybe it's

564
00:32:05,319 --> 00:32:09,240
space or you know, you're so colonization or something.

565
00:32:09,680 --> 00:32:11,720
Speaker 1: But it's always been a lie, right, Like, yes, it

566
00:32:11,720 --> 00:32:14,920
was quote unquote wild, but there were people there, Like,

567
00:32:15,079 --> 00:32:18,079
there were people there who did affect the landscape, maybe

568
00:32:18,160 --> 00:32:20,240
not clearly, not to the extent that we do.

569
00:32:20,799 --> 00:32:22,359
Speaker 2: Maybe they were able.

570
00:32:22,119 --> 00:32:25,160
Speaker 1: To figure out a way to be less destructive and

571
00:32:25,200 --> 00:32:28,200
it became a part of their ideology and their religion

572
00:32:28,279 --> 00:32:31,920
over thousands of years. But regardless, there was not a place.

573
00:32:31,960 --> 00:32:34,319
I mean, there were a couple places. Iceland weirdly was

574
00:32:34,319 --> 00:32:37,359
a place where there just were no people, but there's

575
00:32:37,480 --> 00:32:42,440
there's very few places where there were no people. Indigenous

576
00:32:42,480 --> 00:32:46,440
people kind of figuring that out for themselves before we

577
00:32:46,519 --> 00:32:52,039
just kind of we Jesus Christ, the Royal we the West,

578
00:32:52,079 --> 00:32:54,799
like you said, manifest destiny, sort of like moving west

579
00:32:54,839 --> 00:32:57,359
for gold mining and for opportunity and for space and

580
00:32:57,400 --> 00:33:00,839
for land, and saying, oh, we're going out to the wilds.

581
00:33:01,000 --> 00:33:04,920
Speaker 2: It's like no, no, no, Right, it's more wild than what

582
00:33:04,960 --> 00:33:05,480
you're used to.

583
00:33:05,880 --> 00:33:09,359
Speaker 3: But and a lot of what we took to be wilderness, right,

584
00:33:09,400 --> 00:33:12,599
there's a lot of archaeological and other work that's pointing

585
00:33:12,680 --> 00:33:18,240
to you know, these these closed cannon be forests and

586
00:33:18,279 --> 00:33:23,599
things like that are actually a symptom of the of

587
00:33:23,599 --> 00:33:27,599
indigenous genocide. Right, So once we lost those original caretakers,

588
00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:32,720
the land changed, and then when people colonize the Americas,

589
00:33:32,759 --> 00:33:36,160
they go, oh, this is what this was our baseline. Right.

590
00:33:36,240 --> 00:33:39,359
So these scientists, these ecologists in the in the early

591
00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:42,519
twentieth century looking backwards, they themselves are going and things

592
00:33:42,519 --> 00:33:44,759
have changed so much, and they're very they're very anxious

593
00:33:44,759 --> 00:33:48,200
about it. Right, it's the guilded age, it's industrial revolution,

594
00:33:48,480 --> 00:33:50,319
you know, as all this sort of stuff has been happening,

595
00:33:50,319 --> 00:33:53,440
and they go, man, the landscape has changed so much.

596
00:33:53,519 --> 00:33:56,839
What did it originally look like? And they point back

597
00:33:56,920 --> 00:33:59,160
to that time period. But that time period is actually

598
00:33:59,160 --> 00:34:06,400
the output. It's the product of a prior extinction of

599
00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:08,280
indigenous peoples and species.

600
00:34:08,519 --> 00:34:10,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing that I think that it is

601
00:34:11,039 --> 00:34:14,280
a sort of tendency. And I mean there's probably like

602
00:34:14,320 --> 00:34:19,480
some just fundamental like anthropologic cognitive biases at play, but

603
00:34:19,559 --> 00:34:23,360
this tendency to say, what, like, how how far back

604
00:34:23,440 --> 00:34:26,800
do we go? As a purity test, right, at what

605
00:34:26,880 --> 00:34:29,920
point was everything untouched? And pure, and it's like you

606
00:34:30,039 --> 00:34:32,480
kind of have to go back to before there were people.

607
00:34:32,960 --> 00:34:35,000
But if you go back to before there were people,

608
00:34:35,840 --> 00:34:39,000
the landscape was wildly different. Anyway, we were in a

609
00:34:39,079 --> 00:34:43,320
different geologic era, you know, like everything was different. And

610
00:34:43,320 --> 00:34:46,639
then once people are on the scene, Okay, you may

611
00:34:46,679 --> 00:34:49,039
be able to argue, I suppose that there was a

612
00:34:49,119 --> 00:34:54,760
long period of more harmonious relationships with nature, But again,

613
00:34:54,800 --> 00:34:56,679
these are all constructs, aren't they.

614
00:34:57,599 --> 00:35:00,840
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, And you know a lot of when I

615
00:35:00,920 --> 00:35:03,320
ended up grappling with in the book was that, Okay,

616
00:35:03,880 --> 00:35:07,079
these scientists had a concept of modernity, right, So this

617
00:35:07,199 --> 00:35:10,880
modern era, you know again think guild, Gilded Age, early

618
00:35:10,960 --> 00:35:14,360
you know, twentieth century jazz. All these things are sort

619
00:35:14,400 --> 00:35:18,039
of happening boom times, lots of lots of hardship for

620
00:35:19,039 --> 00:35:24,400
economic underclasses and uh and racial minorities and and and

621
00:35:24,480 --> 00:35:28,239
for women and recent immigrants. But also like this incredible

622
00:35:28,760 --> 00:35:34,360
wealth generation that's coming out of industrial activity, and scientists

623
00:35:34,400 --> 00:35:37,119
are starting to go, what is that. Okay, if I'm

624
00:35:37,119 --> 00:35:39,480
an if I'm an ecologist in this new this new

625
00:35:39,519 --> 00:35:41,559
science were calling ecology, which is going to be the

626
00:35:41,599 --> 00:35:45,159
science of So if biology is the science of life.

627
00:35:45,639 --> 00:35:48,239
We're going to be the science of how life develops

628
00:35:48,239 --> 00:35:51,960
in its places. So it's the science of biology in

629
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:54,679
its environment. We're going to look at the organism and

630
00:35:54,719 --> 00:35:58,280
its environment in terms of its relationship. And other early

631
00:35:58,320 --> 00:36:02,599
scientists said, you people are insane. That's nonsense. You can't

632
00:36:02,639 --> 00:36:04,960
possibly do it. It's too complicated, right, they don't have

633
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:07,320
computers yet. Even now we have all these computers and

634
00:36:07,320 --> 00:36:09,239
we still can't do it very well. Yeah, but they

635
00:36:09,239 --> 00:36:11,559
were like, there's no way you can possibly do that.

636
00:36:11,559 --> 00:36:13,960
That's a terrible field. And some of them actually warned

637
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:16,039
their students not to take ecology. They were like, it's

638
00:36:16,039 --> 00:36:19,599
going to ruin your mind because it's not based in science.

639
00:36:19,639 --> 00:36:22,119
It's too complicated to ask these questions. We need to

640
00:36:22,159 --> 00:36:26,159
ask much more narrow questions, like you know, can I

641
00:36:26,199 --> 00:36:29,840
dissect this heart of this frog or whatever and leave

642
00:36:29,880 --> 00:36:32,679
all these other pieces out of it. But these early

643
00:36:32,679 --> 00:36:35,599
ecologists were sort of looking both at what was happening

644
00:36:35,639 --> 00:36:39,639
socially and politically and combining that with a lot of

645
00:36:39,679 --> 00:36:43,679
the early discoveries they were making and going, man, modernity

646
00:36:43,760 --> 00:36:46,760
is sort of built on our concept of what's modern,

647
00:36:46,880 --> 00:36:51,960
what's you know scientifically and socially sort of progressive and

648
00:36:52,079 --> 00:36:56,400
new and contemporary is built on this separation, separating ourselves

649
00:36:56,400 --> 00:36:59,679
from nature. That's the whole idea of a city, right.

650
00:36:59,719 --> 00:37:03,079
A city is like the ultimate arrogance, It's the ultimate

651
00:37:03,239 --> 00:37:06,920
human hubris. And these cities are expanding all over in.

652
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:09,719
Chicago was one of those places that I talk about

653
00:37:09,719 --> 00:37:11,599
in the book because it was a real birthplace for

654
00:37:11,960 --> 00:37:15,000
things like sociology, so those Chicago School sociology, but also

655
00:37:15,440 --> 00:37:20,079
for ecology as well. And Chicago is a city was

656
00:37:20,119 --> 00:37:23,719
this sort of laboratory for urban landscape and urban design

657
00:37:23,800 --> 00:37:25,960
and in a lot of interesting ways. So lots of

658
00:37:25,960 --> 00:37:27,840
people were coming to that area to sort of ask

659
00:37:27,880 --> 00:37:30,000
those questions of what does it mean to be a

660
00:37:30,039 --> 00:37:33,360
modern human? How far can we separate ourselves from nature

661
00:37:34,119 --> 00:37:37,840
and kind of get away with it? Basically? Right? And

662
00:37:38,159 --> 00:37:42,440
if I'm modern, what makes you not modern? Because you're

663
00:37:42,480 --> 00:37:47,440
too close to nature, you're too rural. Maybe your livelihood

664
00:37:47,480 --> 00:37:49,559
is based on the land, right, you don't live in

665
00:37:49,599 --> 00:37:52,760
a city. Maybe your skin is a different color than mine,

666
00:37:52,840 --> 00:37:54,639
or you speak a different you know, language, you live

667
00:37:54,639 --> 00:37:58,840
in a different place, So you're not modern. But I'm modern, right, Right?

668
00:37:58,880 --> 00:38:03,119
And science a cologist were in a tough spot because

669
00:38:03,119 --> 00:38:06,599
they needed to be they needed to be a modern

670
00:38:06,639 --> 00:38:09,440
science in order to get going and get funding and

671
00:38:09,599 --> 00:38:12,639
get established in universities. And yet they also saw the

672
00:38:12,639 --> 00:38:15,280
contradiction there, right, because they went, the more we become

673
00:38:15,880 --> 00:38:20,719
this modern contemporary science, more objective, more quantitative, the further

674
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:27,079
we sort of buy into this false premise, right that

675
00:38:27,119 --> 00:38:30,159
we can separate ourselves from nature.

676
00:38:31,199 --> 00:38:33,360
Speaker 1: So I can't help but think about I don't know

677
00:38:33,400 --> 00:38:36,400
if you've ever seen this cartoon by there's an author

678
00:38:36,480 --> 00:38:41,079
named Daniel Quinn who was I don't know if it

679
00:38:41,119 --> 00:38:45,760
was like quite sci fi but sort of a lot

680
00:38:45,760 --> 00:38:53,559
of environmental criticism and interesting I don't know, whatever, tribalistic stuff,

681
00:38:53,559 --> 00:38:56,119
but like a cultural critic. And he did this cartoon

682
00:38:56,159 --> 00:38:58,840
that has always really resonated for me. And it's called

683
00:38:59,079 --> 00:39:02,159
The Fence, and it's just four cells and in the

684
00:39:02,159 --> 00:39:04,239
first cell it says eight thousand BC and it's like

685
00:39:04,239 --> 00:39:06,920
a lush world with a tiny little fence on the corner,

686
00:39:06,960 --> 00:39:07,320
says we.

687
00:39:07,239 --> 00:39:08,000
Speaker 2: Call it a fence.

688
00:39:08,360 --> 00:39:10,719
Speaker 1: It keeps out the giraffes and the lions and the elephants,

689
00:39:10,800 --> 00:39:13,039
and then a D fifteen hundred and then it's like

690
00:39:13,079 --> 00:39:14,960
the fence is halfway across the world and it's like

691
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:16,920
barren on one side and lush on the other. Pray

692
00:39:16,960 --> 00:39:20,599
for rain children. And then like eighteen hundred, you know,

693
00:39:20,679 --> 00:39:22,920
it's like more of the world is barren and there's

694
00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:25,000
more green inside the fence. And then it ends with

695
00:39:25,400 --> 00:39:27,639
now the world is all brown. There's a tiny fence

696
00:39:27,639 --> 00:39:29,360
with a little green and it says, we call it

697
00:39:29,400 --> 00:39:32,199
a wildlife preserve. It keeps in the giraffes and the

698
00:39:32,199 --> 00:39:33,400
lions and the elephants.

699
00:39:34,599 --> 00:39:36,719
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, I have not seen that cartoon, and I

700
00:39:36,719 --> 00:39:37,400
definitely need to.

701
00:39:38,039 --> 00:39:41,639
Speaker 1: It's phenomenal, Like right, it just taps and when you

702
00:39:41,679 --> 00:39:45,599
see it and you it just okay, it lays it bare.

703
00:39:45,880 --> 00:39:48,320
But that is the world we're living in now, and

704
00:39:48,360 --> 00:39:53,599
it's because of this series of choices. Right were these choices?

705
00:39:54,960 --> 00:39:57,039
I mean I often struggle with this, I mean, who

706
00:39:57,079 --> 00:40:00,559
cares because it's an unanswerable question about like inevitable or

707
00:40:00,960 --> 00:40:04,280
choice or whatever. But the very core concepts of like

708
00:40:04,360 --> 00:40:08,719
capitalism and how quote unquote progress is defined were at

709
00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:12,760
a time anathema to this concept of conservation. I guess

710
00:40:12,760 --> 00:40:14,960
they did. Clearly they didn't have to be. But the

711
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:19,039
people with the power and the purse rings, they just

712
00:40:19,719 --> 00:40:21,639
didn't have the insight or they didn't.

713
00:40:21,440 --> 00:40:25,440
Speaker 3: Care they So in some cases I think the insight

714
00:40:25,599 --> 00:40:28,280
was there, but it couldn't be couldn't be acted on.

715
00:40:28,519 --> 00:40:31,000
And this was sort of part of the I guess

716
00:40:31,079 --> 00:40:32,920
counter history or some of the stuff I tried to

717
00:40:32,920 --> 00:40:36,360
recover a little bit from the archives, you know, from

718
00:40:36,400 --> 00:40:38,440
the archival work and put into the book that there

719
00:40:38,440 --> 00:40:42,800
were these voices all along saying, you know, maybe we

720
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:46,440
shouldn't do it this way. You know, maybe we shouldn't

721
00:40:46,960 --> 00:40:50,880
cast our cast our fortunes in this particular way and

722
00:40:51,119 --> 00:40:53,360
fence fence everything up, would try to protect it in

723
00:40:53,400 --> 00:40:57,639
this way, and you know, maybe maybe we need to

724
00:40:57,760 --> 00:41:02,559
consider how human care and are in inter relationship with

725
00:41:02,599 --> 00:41:06,119
their environments and have been, have been, you know, forever, right,

726
00:41:07,800 --> 00:41:12,159
And those those people were explicitly kind of pushed out

727
00:41:12,480 --> 00:41:15,039
or told no at multiple points. So I sort of

728
00:41:15,079 --> 00:41:17,559
document that in the book, like okay, here's another time,

729
00:41:17,639 --> 00:41:20,440
here's another time where people said someone tried a few

730
00:41:20,440 --> 00:41:23,639
people tried even to say we need to have a

731
00:41:23,719 --> 00:41:27,559
much more as complicated as ecology is for thinking about

732
00:41:27,639 --> 00:41:31,639
life in its relationship to place, it'll be even more

733
00:41:31,679 --> 00:41:34,800
complex once we start thinking about place as a human

734
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:38,039
geography as a social geography as well. But if we

735
00:41:38,079 --> 00:41:42,199
don't do that right, we're kind of doomed. And you know,

736
00:41:42,239 --> 00:41:44,800
these folks would sort of say, no, ecology is only

737
00:41:44,800 --> 00:41:48,039
going to be about non human species, right, We're only

738
00:41:48,039 --> 00:41:50,440
going to conservation is only going to be about non

739
00:41:51,079 --> 00:41:54,639
the non human world. And what we're going to do

740
00:41:54,679 --> 00:41:56,480
once we figure out what is happening in the non

741
00:41:56,519 --> 00:41:58,119
human world is we're going to tell the humans how

742
00:41:58,159 --> 00:42:01,880
they should behave right, because that always works, That works,

743
00:42:02,119 --> 00:42:04,760
that works so well.

744
00:42:04,880 --> 00:42:07,360
Speaker 1: It I can't help but just feel like it's it's

745
00:42:07,360 --> 00:42:12,159
a recapitulation of this ongoing theme of other ring, this

746
00:42:12,280 --> 00:42:15,599
ongoing theme of us versus then, which you know has

747
00:42:15,920 --> 00:42:20,639
always landed us in the most cooperative of situations. Like

748
00:42:20,800 --> 00:42:23,360
it reminds me quite a bit. I remember having a

749
00:42:23,400 --> 00:42:25,280
conversation with my mother once. This is going to feel

750
00:42:25,280 --> 00:42:28,039
like it's very off, out of left field, but hopefully

751
00:42:29,039 --> 00:42:30,639
your brain works similar.

752
00:42:30,280 --> 00:42:32,280
Speaker 2: To mine and you see the correlation.

753
00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:35,159
Speaker 1: I remember having a conversation with my mother once and

754
00:42:35,159 --> 00:42:38,920
she was talking about a friend of hers who has

755
00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:42,280
a daughter who's trans and she was saying like, Oh,

756
00:42:42,280 --> 00:42:44,480
I'm just really proud of my friend because she's, you know,

757
00:42:44,559 --> 00:42:49,039
she's she's really coming around lately, and she's been inviting

758
00:42:49,039 --> 00:42:51,039
her to more things and she's been using her pronouns.

759
00:42:51,079 --> 00:42:54,039
And I was like, oh, yeah, let's be so proud

760
00:42:54,559 --> 00:42:58,320
of this mother for accepting their child as they are finally,

761
00:42:58,679 --> 00:42:58,880
you know.

762
00:42:58,920 --> 00:43:00,440
Speaker 2: And my mom was like a little taken away.

763
00:43:00,440 --> 00:43:02,079
Speaker 1: She was like, well, you know, it takes time for

764
00:43:02,159 --> 00:43:04,159
some people, and you know, we really grew up in

765
00:43:04,199 --> 00:43:07,400
a different era. And I'm like, while I appreciate that

766
00:43:07,480 --> 00:43:10,159
we can look back, let's say, at scientists or at

767
00:43:10,199 --> 00:43:13,840
individuals and situate them in their time. And while I

768
00:43:13,880 --> 00:43:17,840
appreciate that there is normativity of things like racism and

769
00:43:17,920 --> 00:43:20,280
gendered violence and things like that, it doesn't mean it

770
00:43:20,360 --> 00:43:24,880
was okay even then. M and I always struggle with

771
00:43:24,920 --> 00:43:29,000
that concept, like it was still immoral. Just because more

772
00:43:29,119 --> 00:43:32,440
people did it out loud doesn't and there were always

773
00:43:32,559 --> 00:43:36,639
people throughout all of human history saying this is not okay.

774
00:43:37,480 --> 00:43:40,480
It's just their voices weren't the loudest voices at that time.

775
00:43:40,639 --> 00:43:43,880
That does not excuse bad behavior in the past, because

776
00:43:43,880 --> 00:43:47,559
there were always people who recognized bad behavior, called it

777
00:43:47,559 --> 00:43:49,239
out and said we can be better.

778
00:43:49,880 --> 00:43:52,320
Speaker 3: For sure, for sure, And in some ways the early

779
00:43:52,320 --> 00:43:56,280
twentieth century was actually, at least for science, was a

780
00:43:56,320 --> 00:43:58,440
lot better of a place to be than it was

781
00:43:58,519 --> 00:44:01,719
decades later. Right, there was this real sort of closure

782
00:44:01,760 --> 00:44:04,440
of things that happened, you know, post World War Two

783
00:44:04,559 --> 00:44:07,760
and sort of in the middle part of the twentieth century,

784
00:44:08,159 --> 00:44:11,639
where things it became very very difficult to be a

785
00:44:11,639 --> 00:44:14,840
woman in science, It became very difficult to do certain

786
00:44:14,880 --> 00:44:19,960
kinds of work within science. And it's really kind of

787
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:21,920
for me, it was quite fascinating to go back to

788
00:44:21,920 --> 00:44:24,800
the early twentieth century. Go, man, these folks were so radical,

789
00:44:25,159 --> 00:44:29,039
you know, like in ways that I wasn't expecting, and

790
00:44:29,079 --> 00:44:31,719
that certainly I can't say that my you know, home,

791
00:44:31,760 --> 00:44:34,719
my original discipline of physics was certainly not like that

792
00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:38,480
in the early twentieth century. But ecology was. It was

793
00:44:38,519 --> 00:44:42,039
this very experimental, very open field that welcomed a lot

794
00:44:42,039 --> 00:44:45,320
of a lot of people into it in ways that

795
00:44:45,440 --> 00:44:48,159
changed actually once it became kind of more attached to

796
00:44:48,280 --> 00:44:51,840
universities and became kind of an academic field. By the

797
00:44:51,840 --> 00:44:54,760
mid twentieth century, you know.

798
00:44:54,840 --> 00:44:59,679
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine how like, I'm curious about your process.

799
00:45:00,480 --> 00:45:03,440
I don't know how many people listening have the same

800
00:45:03,519 --> 00:45:06,000
type of curiosity that I have. I know, sometimes we

801
00:45:06,039 --> 00:45:08,639
go to podcasts to hear stories, and while I do

802
00:45:08,719 --> 00:45:10,840
want to hear some of the stories, I also am

803
00:45:10,960 --> 00:45:12,840
kind of like, yeah, read the book. They're in there,

804
00:45:12,920 --> 00:45:15,039
you know, Like that's the whole point, right, Like, read

805
00:45:15,079 --> 00:45:17,480
the book to get the stories. But I'm really curious,

806
00:45:17,719 --> 00:45:20,239
how does one sit down and say I'm going to

807
00:45:20,280 --> 00:45:22,719
write a book about this thing that could be literally

808
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:26,079
thousands of pages and still never be finished. Like, how

809
00:45:26,079 --> 00:45:29,159
do you even choose? It's such a big concept, you know.

810
00:45:29,480 --> 00:45:35,320
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had many, many, many people say to me, advisors, mentors,

811
00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:38,280
many people tell me, don't do this book. Don't do

812
00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:43,280
this book actually because it's too much. And especially as

813
00:45:43,280 --> 00:45:45,880
a PhD student, they were like, you're not allowed, we

814
00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:50,400
won't allow you to do this. It's too it's too big.

815
00:45:52,559 --> 00:45:56,400
And I sort of mentioned this at the end of

816
00:45:56,400 --> 00:45:59,239
the book, but that my very very end of field

817
00:45:59,239 --> 00:46:02,679
work was in a really bad accident. I was on

818
00:46:02,719 --> 00:46:05,440
a I was actually on a bicycle, a borrowed bicycle

819
00:46:05,480 --> 00:46:08,639
from the folks I was renting the house from and

820
00:46:08,880 --> 00:46:10,519
I was on my way to a field site and

821
00:46:10,559 --> 00:46:13,280
I was hit at a high speed by a truck

822
00:46:13,519 --> 00:46:17,639
that came up behind me. Wow, and uh. As I

823
00:46:17,840 --> 00:46:21,280
was riding in the ambulance, actually, as I was laying

824
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:25,039
on the pavement, even I was like, man, I don't

825
00:46:25,079 --> 00:46:28,280
know if I'm gonna make it through today, and what

826
00:46:28,400 --> 00:46:32,079
a shame that I didn't do the work that I

827
00:46:32,119 --> 00:46:33,519
know I could do, You know what I mean? Like

828
00:46:33,559 --> 00:46:35,760
that this is actually the story that needs to be told,

829
00:46:36,599 --> 00:46:38,840
and if I can't tell that, someone else is going

830
00:46:38,920 --> 00:46:40,800
to have to. You know, just this, this needs to

831
00:46:40,800 --> 00:46:44,280
be out there. And so that kind of shifted things

832
00:46:44,280 --> 00:46:47,760
for me to kind of go, you know, you never

833
00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:49,639
you never know when you're time's up. You never know

834
00:46:49,639 --> 00:46:51,400
how much time you have, and so you ought to

835
00:46:51,440 --> 00:46:54,320
do the thing that you you know, you feel that

836
00:46:54,360 --> 00:46:56,119
you can do and that you and that you want

837
00:46:56,159 --> 00:47:00,320
to do. Rather than that help was telling me, Yeah

838
00:47:00,320 --> 00:47:01,280
it did once you have.

839
00:47:01,400 --> 00:47:04,400
Speaker 1: That perspective, yeah it's still but it's still daunting, right,

840
00:47:04,440 --> 00:47:06,159
But did it give you a little bit of just

841
00:47:06,239 --> 00:47:08,199
like almost I don't know if you could put your

842
00:47:08,199 --> 00:47:11,840
finger on it, but internal filtering that said like this

843
00:47:11,960 --> 00:47:13,920
over here, but not that over there. I need to

844
00:47:13,920 --> 00:47:16,239
focus like on this component right now.

845
00:47:17,039 --> 00:47:23,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it helped me. It helped me, hone

846
00:47:23,880 --> 00:47:26,199
in on you know, if you've if you've only got

847
00:47:26,440 --> 00:47:29,280
we all have finite time, right, We've all none of

848
00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:30,360
us know how long we have.

849
00:47:30,480 --> 00:47:31,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're all gonna dieye.

850
00:47:31,400 --> 00:47:33,599
Speaker 1: Alost is something I grapple with in my day job

851
00:47:33,880 --> 00:47:34,480
all the yeah.

852
00:47:35,239 --> 00:47:39,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what do you really really really have to say?

853
00:47:40,079 --> 00:47:41,639
What do you really have to say? And who do

854
00:47:41,679 --> 00:47:44,400
you have have to say it to? What was harder

855
00:47:44,559 --> 00:47:47,960
was the figuring out the structure of it. So the

856
00:47:47,960 --> 00:47:51,360
book is written as I retell the same span of

857
00:47:51,400 --> 00:47:54,039
that century from the early twentieth century, so roughly the

858
00:47:54,039 --> 00:47:57,599
present in every chapter, right, I go over it from

859
00:47:57,599 --> 00:47:59,519
a from a different perspective. And once I kind of

860
00:47:59,599 --> 00:48:03,880
landed on that as the kind of the right the

861
00:48:03,880 --> 00:48:06,079
way to approach the writing, things got a lot easier

862
00:48:06,119 --> 00:48:07,440
because then I was like, Okay, I don't have to

863
00:48:07,440 --> 00:48:09,280
talk about everything. I had kind of the same problem

864
00:48:09,320 --> 00:48:11,960
the cologists have, which is everything is connected to everything else,

865
00:48:12,079 --> 00:48:14,519
So how can I possibly write this in your way?

866
00:48:15,280 --> 00:48:19,800
And I'm talking about unintended consequences and unintended consequences as

867
00:48:19,800 --> 00:48:23,480
a framework only makes sense if you think in a

868
00:48:23,559 --> 00:48:25,960
linear kind of way, if you think holistically. One of

869
00:48:25,960 --> 00:48:27,400
the things I argue is that none of these are

870
00:48:27,400 --> 00:48:30,480
actually unintended and none of them are consequences, so they're

871
00:48:30,480 --> 00:48:34,559
neither actually. But how do you make that argument in

872
00:48:34,599 --> 00:48:37,280
a book where every word has to follow every word

873
00:48:37,400 --> 00:48:39,039
and so it still has to be linear?

874
00:48:39,920 --> 00:48:40,280
Speaker 2: Right?

875
00:48:41,800 --> 00:48:44,440
Speaker 3: So that part took that part of the puzzle did

876
00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:46,960
take along a long time to figure out.

877
00:48:47,760 --> 00:48:50,719
Speaker 1: Did you work from sort of a bottom up perspective

878
00:48:50,719 --> 00:48:53,440
of like, here's all this really interesting information and I

879
00:48:53,480 --> 00:48:56,840
need to piece it together to tell a story, or

880
00:48:56,880 --> 00:48:59,119
did you work more top down and say like, these

881
00:48:59,119 --> 00:49:01,000
are the themes that I really want the readers to

882
00:49:01,039 --> 00:49:04,119
walk away with, and kind of approach everything through that lens.

883
00:49:05,400 --> 00:49:08,599
Speaker 3: I would say, I'm like a very optimistic outliner. So

884
00:49:08,639 --> 00:49:10,880
I definitely had outlines for what the book was going

885
00:49:10,960 --> 00:49:13,599
to be and plans, and then as I would write,

886
00:49:13,639 --> 00:49:18,039
it never never kind of went totally as expected, So

887
00:49:18,119 --> 00:49:21,800
that's there's that. I did definitely try to confirm the

888
00:49:23,039 --> 00:49:25,880
case studies that I had accumulated through a large kind

889
00:49:25,920 --> 00:49:28,599
of meta analysis of the literature that had been published

890
00:49:28,599 --> 00:49:31,079
today because I really wanted to understand, like, how widespread

891
00:49:31,159 --> 00:49:34,039
is this phenomena of unintended consequences? How often do scientists

892
00:49:34,039 --> 00:49:36,599
talk in this way like am I just picking? Am

893
00:49:36,599 --> 00:49:38,519
I being mean and picking out the worst of the

894
00:49:38,599 --> 00:49:41,440
worst here? Or how kind of pervasive is this? So

895
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:44,400
I did definitely do that kind of work to make

896
00:49:44,400 --> 00:49:47,599
sure that I felt okay about saying, actually, these are

897
00:49:48,039 --> 00:49:51,320
widespread and it is. It is systemic, and it's inherent

898
00:49:51,400 --> 00:49:55,760
how the science has been set up and funded and organized,

899
00:49:56,679 --> 00:49:58,599
and that means the good news is we could do

900
00:49:58,639 --> 00:50:00,639
it differently, right, So I kind of the book with

901
00:50:01,079 --> 00:50:03,840
we could you know, we could organize science a bit

902
00:50:03,840 --> 00:50:06,880
differently here, and we need to, right we're in a

903
00:50:06,880 --> 00:50:09,880
moment of real reckoning around what's the role of science

904
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:14,360
is in society. So it's.

905
00:50:16,360 --> 00:50:18,920
Speaker 1: You know, we talked a little bit at the very beginning,

906
00:50:19,159 --> 00:50:23,000
and maybe this is a good sort of bookend here,

907
00:50:23,199 --> 00:50:27,519
but this this concept of what it means for something

908
00:50:27,559 --> 00:50:31,679
to be rare or to have become rare, and how

909
00:50:31,719 --> 00:50:34,199
it affects human behavior and how there is a real

910
00:50:34,280 --> 00:50:38,519
chicken an egg question that sort of exacerbates itself or

911
00:50:38,559 --> 00:50:42,719
like kind of runs away in a feedback loop. I'm

912
00:50:42,880 --> 00:50:45,480
curious what some of those as you were sitting down

913
00:50:45,519 --> 00:50:47,599
to make those outlines. Sure, a lot of that work

914
00:50:47,679 --> 00:50:49,519
is logistical work, and how do I fit this in?

915
00:50:49,559 --> 00:50:50,360
Speaker 2: How do I fit that in?

916
00:50:50,760 --> 00:50:53,119
Speaker 1: But as you were thinking thematically, and you were thinking

917
00:50:53,119 --> 00:50:54,920
more top down, and you were thinking more like, what

918
00:50:55,079 --> 00:50:57,480
is the purpose and point? What do I hope that

919
00:50:57,519 --> 00:51:00,960
a reader can walk away with a deeper insight into?

920
00:51:01,480 --> 00:51:04,480
I'm curious, are there any themes that we haven't even

921
00:51:04,519 --> 00:51:08,599
touched on so far in our talk? Yeah?

922
00:51:08,679 --> 00:51:11,400
Speaker 3: I mean so, I don't know if this answers your

923
00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:14,320
question exactly, But each chapter I sort of approach it

924
00:51:14,360 --> 00:51:17,159
the way an anthropologists would approach anything. Right, what do

925
00:51:17,880 --> 00:51:21,039
human What do groups of humans have to do together?

926
00:51:21,440 --> 00:51:24,840
They have to find ways to be safe, They have

927
00:51:24,880 --> 00:51:26,880
to find ways to not kill each other. They have

928
00:51:26,920 --> 00:51:29,079
to get along somehow, so that means they have to

929
00:51:29,199 --> 00:51:32,719
organize themselves and have norms, patterns of behavior that are

930
00:51:32,760 --> 00:51:39,000
acceptable and unacceptable. They have to find a way to

931
00:51:39,079 --> 00:51:42,920
raise their young, educate and raise their young. And they

932
00:51:42,960 --> 00:51:48,599
have to find a way to produce or shape their environment.

933
00:51:50,440 --> 00:51:53,760
And all of those are things that all human societies

934
00:51:53,800 --> 00:51:55,760
have to do. But they're also things that science has

935
00:51:55,800 --> 00:51:58,079
to do. Scientific disciplines have to do. They have to

936
00:51:58,079 --> 00:52:00,719
find a way to train their young tom what's right

937
00:52:00,760 --> 00:52:04,920
and wrong, acquire resources, whether that's funding or something else,

938
00:52:05,119 --> 00:52:09,000
defend their space against incursions, right, whether that's their methods

939
00:52:09,119 --> 00:52:14,039
or their way of working, and and leave things a

940
00:52:14,039 --> 00:52:17,079
little bit better for the next next generation. So when

941
00:52:17,119 --> 00:52:20,599
you approach disciplines that way, they start somethings start to

942
00:52:20,599 --> 00:52:22,800
make a lot more sense. Also, right, like that, these

943
00:52:22,880 --> 00:52:27,559
scientists had to invent field sites, had to invent this idea,

944
00:52:27,639 --> 00:52:30,079
produce their field sites, so they weren't just like discovered

945
00:52:30,119 --> 00:52:32,079
out there like you were saying about wilderness. It's not

946
00:52:32,119 --> 00:52:34,639
just sort of out there. These ecologists had to solve

947
00:52:34,679 --> 00:52:38,000
a primary problem, which is what is my field site?

948
00:52:38,199 --> 00:52:41,519
And if with all this environmental destruction happening, which was

949
00:52:41,519 --> 00:52:44,039
happening even in the early twentieth century, is changing my

950
00:52:44,079 --> 00:52:45,840
field site. So they knew that things like air and

951
00:52:45,880 --> 00:52:49,199
water pollution were changing their field sites. How can I

952
00:52:49,239 --> 00:52:53,239
study something scientifically because nothing's helped constant. Everything that I'm

953
00:52:53,280 --> 00:52:55,880
doing is in flux. So a lot of this was

954
00:52:55,920 --> 00:52:58,960
motivated by I have to create if I'm going to

955
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:02,760
create this field of everything of life in relationship to

956
00:53:03,280 --> 00:53:07,320
absolutely everything else out there, including other organisms and the environment.

957
00:53:07,920 --> 00:53:10,840
Then I have to have a way of protecting these

958
00:53:10,840 --> 00:53:13,760
field sites in order to do this work. And so

959
00:53:13,840 --> 00:53:17,360
that that initial kind of that was the initial impetus, right,

960
00:53:17,639 --> 00:53:20,559
That was that care motive, if you will. They really

961
00:53:20,559 --> 00:53:24,719
cared for their field sites, and they invested tremendously, a

962
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:28,119
tremendous amount of labor and thought into the creation of

963
00:53:28,159 --> 00:53:31,840
these of these field sites and their maintenance. And one

964
00:53:31,880 --> 00:53:34,679
of the one of the concerns right now is that

965
00:53:34,679 --> 00:53:37,320
a lot of those field sites are under increasing pressure again, right,

966
00:53:37,400 --> 00:53:40,440
funding pressure and development and all kinds of things.

967
00:53:40,679 --> 00:53:44,360
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean it, you know, I sort of

968
00:53:44,400 --> 00:53:46,880
just like as a as a second to last note.

969
00:53:47,679 --> 00:53:50,239
It makes me think about you know, when when we

970
00:53:50,239 --> 00:53:56,079
think about perspective shift and paradigm shift within different scientific

971
00:53:57,079 --> 00:54:01,320
areas of inquiry, there are so many variables at play

972
00:54:01,440 --> 00:54:04,280
that often fade into the background. And that's why I

973
00:54:04,320 --> 00:54:09,519
think that, you know, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology,

974
00:54:09,559 --> 00:54:12,440
all of these fields are so fundamentally important to telling

975
00:54:12,519 --> 00:54:15,960
these stories because nothing happens in a vacuum.

976
00:54:16,239 --> 00:54:17,440
Speaker 2: You just describe such.

977
00:54:17,239 --> 00:54:22,519
Speaker 1: A beautiful example of the zeitgeist or the shifting zeitgeist

978
00:54:22,599 --> 00:54:25,679
throughout this type of work. And it's things like, you know,

979
00:54:25,760 --> 00:54:28,360
what tools had been invented, and do we need to

980
00:54:28,400 --> 00:54:30,119
take the time now to invent a new tool to

981
00:54:30,119 --> 00:54:33,480
be able to answer this question. Was there geopolitical conflict

982
00:54:33,679 --> 00:54:37,760
at the time, what was the economy? Like what you know,

983
00:54:37,840 --> 00:54:40,960
were we in favor with whoever the prevailing you know,

984
00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:44,880
governmental structure was. And it's so interesting that we often

985
00:54:45,639 --> 00:54:48,679
just look at an outcome instead of looking at all

986
00:54:48,719 --> 00:54:52,760
of the different pressures that collectively tell a story. And

987
00:54:52,840 --> 00:54:55,239
of course I think anybody living today can see that

988
00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:59,719
today is also history, right, And whether you define it

989
00:54:59,760 --> 00:55:03,079
as like a more trying time or not, we are

990
00:55:03,199 --> 00:55:07,719
living in a time of our own pressures on these

991
00:55:09,079 --> 00:55:11,320
on these areas of inquiry and on this very noble

992
00:55:11,400 --> 00:55:18,079
work to try to say how do we protect, maintain, conserve,

993
00:55:19,039 --> 00:55:22,639
improve however you want to define the goal.

994
00:55:23,679 --> 00:55:25,840
Speaker 2: It's not just happening in a vacuum.

995
00:55:25,880 --> 00:55:29,639
Speaker 1: It's happening against a background of all of these different pressures.

996
00:55:29,719 --> 00:55:33,159
Speaker 3: Right right, it absolutely is. And people are responding with

997
00:55:33,480 --> 00:55:36,599
memory of what they did before, what happened before. Right,

998
00:55:36,639 --> 00:55:39,480
It's not like people are a blank slate. So the

999
00:55:39,519 --> 00:55:42,159
first people move to that community in Texas because of

1000
00:55:42,199 --> 00:55:44,840
the views, the next group moves in because of the

1001
00:55:44,840 --> 00:55:48,239
swimming pools there. The next group is in the grocery store.

1002
00:55:48,360 --> 00:55:51,400
Now there's a grocery store, right, And so these things

1003
00:55:51,480 --> 00:55:54,280
keep happening on top of the things that have already happened,

1004
00:55:54,559 --> 00:55:58,920
and science is very not set up to handle that

1005
00:55:59,000 --> 00:56:02,440
kind of long term work. You know, someone trained in

1006
00:56:02,480 --> 00:56:05,079
the sciences and someone who studies the sciences and consults

1007
00:56:05,119 --> 00:56:09,159
a lot now for different science organizations, it's just not

1008
00:56:09,480 --> 00:56:11,840
very it's very We have a very inadequate tool set

1009
00:56:12,159 --> 00:56:15,199
to do that kind of long term thinking about how

1010
00:56:15,480 --> 00:56:19,239
consequences unfold on top of consequences unfold on top of consequences.

1011
00:56:19,320 --> 00:56:20,760
We don't have a good language for that.

1012
00:56:21,519 --> 00:56:25,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree, and I think and even so

1013
00:56:25,639 --> 00:56:29,159
I think science still probably does it better than politics

1014
00:56:29,199 --> 00:56:31,920
does because of our just because of the nature of

1015
00:56:31,920 --> 00:56:35,960
election cycles, it's very hard to think about long term

1016
00:56:36,000 --> 00:56:39,639
future When the people who are in power are thinking

1017
00:56:39,679 --> 00:56:43,280
about getting re elected or they're thinking about what they

1018
00:56:43,280 --> 00:56:49,320
can do within four years. That that really changes the calculus.

1019
00:56:49,800 --> 00:56:51,920
So I have to ask last question because I know

1020
00:56:51,960 --> 00:56:54,760
you have meetings to go to, but I'm super curious

1021
00:56:55,199 --> 00:56:57,159
that before and the after. I know that this has

1022
00:56:57,320 --> 00:57:00,320
really been a large part of your life's work, but

1023
00:57:00,639 --> 00:57:03,480
before you sat down to really, uh, I guess, in

1024
00:57:03,519 --> 00:57:07,440
a meaningful way write this book versus after, how have

1025
00:57:07,599 --> 00:57:10,920
you been changed by your own scholarship, like by the

1026
00:57:10,920 --> 00:57:15,159
things that you discovered in doing research and in doing

1027
00:57:15,239 --> 00:57:18,360
interviews in order to write this book.

1028
00:57:19,159 --> 00:57:20,559
Speaker 3: Wow, that is a great question.

1029
00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:24,480
Speaker 2: So I can't imagine you went into it with all

1030
00:57:24,559 --> 00:57:26,079
the same perspectives.

1031
00:57:25,559 --> 00:57:26,199
Speaker 1: That you came out.

1032
00:57:26,760 --> 00:57:29,559
Speaker 3: My goodness, Now, now I did not, for sure. I

1033
00:57:29,559 --> 00:57:32,159
mean I teach. I teach a lot of these same

1034
00:57:32,320 --> 00:57:35,800
methods now to our to our wonderful sets of students here,

1035
00:57:35,800 --> 00:57:38,280
and I do do consults and work with a number

1036
00:57:38,320 --> 00:57:40,519
of organizations around this. And you know, one of the

1037
00:57:40,559 --> 00:57:42,000
things I sort of tell them is that it feels

1038
00:57:42,039 --> 00:57:44,239
really hard, because this work is really hard. You know,

1039
00:57:44,280 --> 00:57:47,559
it's very very hard to hold all of these things

1040
00:57:48,559 --> 00:57:51,039
in a state of play at the same time. And

1041
00:57:51,119 --> 00:57:54,880
so some of that work that I've that I do

1042
00:57:54,960 --> 00:58:00,519
now and that I definitely prioritize more in in the

1043
00:58:00,559 --> 00:58:02,159
work that I do and that I also try to

1044
00:58:02,199 --> 00:58:06,679
sort of teach and share is that take that deep breath, right, Like,

1045
00:58:07,360 --> 00:58:10,239
this work is very hard, and if we come in

1046
00:58:10,280 --> 00:58:12,599
with the boxes, you know, we come in already with

1047
00:58:12,719 --> 00:58:15,039
everything set up, and we think we know what we're

1048
00:58:15,039 --> 00:58:19,119
going to be doing. We're going to be really wrong, right,

1049
00:58:19,199 --> 00:58:22,599
We're really we're really foreclosing ourselves to a lot of

1050
00:58:22,639 --> 00:58:25,039
potential insight. And so I actually start the book with

1051
00:58:25,079 --> 00:58:27,280
this mom and as a grad student where I'm completely

1052
00:58:27,280 --> 00:58:29,920
wrong about something, I go and see this talk about

1053
00:58:29,920 --> 00:58:33,159
the caviat and how rarity is creating more demand for

1054
00:58:33,239 --> 00:58:35,639
Raverty and I'm like, oh, there's a simple solution here.

1055
00:58:35,639 --> 00:58:38,320
We just need to fix the policy. You know, it says,

1056
00:58:39,239 --> 00:58:43,119
you know, Zoe is a grad student. I was completely wrong, right, Like,

1057
00:58:43,159 --> 00:58:47,159
that was totally not going to work. But it wasn't

1058
00:58:47,239 --> 00:58:52,280
until I kind of stopped and allowed all these other

1059
00:58:52,320 --> 00:58:55,440
things to kind of speak and and and not rush

1060
00:58:55,559 --> 00:58:59,840
in for the answer that other those other things started

1061
00:58:59,840 --> 00:59:03,760
to emerge. So I tend to work very sort of

1062
00:59:04,280 --> 00:59:07,480
slowly and a little bit sideways, you know, like allowing

1063
00:59:07,519 --> 00:59:10,199
things to kind of allowing a lot of serendipity to happen,

1064
00:59:11,360 --> 00:59:14,719
which is very frustrating for students, right because they which

1065
00:59:14,800 --> 00:59:17,039
makes sense because they're like, I want to just what's

1066
00:59:17,079 --> 00:59:18,840
my research question? How do I do this? Let's get

1067
00:59:18,840 --> 00:59:21,519
out of here. And in the graduate class, we've got

1068
00:59:22,199 --> 00:59:24,760
a formal agreement with local government here, so we do projects,

1069
00:59:25,239 --> 00:59:27,800
you know, every year, based on what the community needs,

1070
00:59:27,840 --> 00:59:29,280
and so that they walk in the first day and

1071
00:59:29,280 --> 00:59:30,960
they're like, what's our project? I said, I don't know,

1072
00:59:30,960 --> 00:59:32,840
we're going to build it? Like, how do we know?

1073
00:59:33,119 --> 00:59:35,280
If you knew what people needed, why would they need

1074
00:59:35,360 --> 00:59:38,519
us to be there to help them. We're there to

1075
00:59:38,559 --> 00:59:41,400
figure out what people, help them figure out what they need.

1076
00:59:42,079 --> 00:59:44,039
If we knew what they needed, then we're part of

1077
00:59:44,039 --> 00:59:46,400
the problem because now you're coming in as an outsider

1078
00:59:46,440 --> 00:59:48,960
telling them what they need. So you know, we're actually

1079
00:59:49,000 --> 00:59:51,199
going to spend half the semester figuring out what the

1080
00:59:51,239 --> 00:59:55,000
project is. And then it's always very distressing way, but

1081
00:59:55,119 --> 00:59:56,480
that's so important.

1082
00:59:56,960 --> 00:59:58,960
Speaker 1: So if we knew what they needed, they wouldn't need

1083
00:59:59,000 --> 01:00:02,760
because we would have already and solving the problem. Clearly,

1084
01:00:02,840 --> 01:00:05,440
that's not how science works, but it is I think

1085
01:00:05,480 --> 01:00:11,920
the hubris that has historically plagued many many endeavors and

1086
01:00:11,960 --> 01:00:16,599
So what a beautiful and humble and incredibly frustrating and

1087
01:00:16,639 --> 01:00:22,840
probably very probably directly attacking your self efficacy at times,

1088
01:00:22,920 --> 01:00:28,719
but necessary process for yourself and your students. And I

1089
01:00:28,719 --> 01:00:30,880
think we can all That's why I like to talk

1090
01:00:30,920 --> 01:00:33,239
about process. I think we can all learn from that.

1091
01:00:33,760 --> 01:00:35,760
We can all sit in the unknown a little bit

1092
01:00:35,840 --> 01:00:41,320
more and work on our neuropsychological humility a little bit more,

1093
01:00:42,280 --> 01:00:47,119
and stop assuming we already know and seeking out data

1094
01:00:47,119 --> 01:00:51,199
that reinforce our you know, previously held beliefs like be

1095
01:00:51,239 --> 01:00:55,199
aware the confirmation of bias exists, and allow ourselves to

1096
01:00:55,280 --> 01:00:58,400
sort of be more open as best as we can.

1097
01:00:59,000 --> 01:01:03,119
I think why wiser words have not been said. I

1098
01:01:03,480 --> 01:01:08,639
can't thank you enough for being here everybody. The book

1099
01:01:08,760 --> 01:01:14,639
is Rarities Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences

1100
01:01:15,159 --> 01:01:17,440
by doctor Zoe Nissa Zoe.

1101
01:01:17,559 --> 01:01:18,639
Speaker 2: Thank you so so much.

1102
01:01:19,320 --> 01:01:21,840
Speaker 3: Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really

1103
01:01:21,840 --> 01:01:22,880
really appreciate it.

1104
01:01:23,159 --> 01:01:26,360
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and everybody listening, thank you for coming back week

1105
01:01:26,480 --> 01:01:29,239
after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time

1106
01:01:29,239 --> 01:01:31,360
we all get together to talk. Merity