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