00:04:21.880So I'd really love if you could begin this conversation by expanding on this a little more.
00:04:27.980How do big trees truly define the architecture of the forest they are found in?
00:04:34.260Yeah, well, in many ways, it's the giant trees that most distinguish a particularly unique forest type.
00:04:43.180Just for example, my wife at the moment is in Canary of Borneo, which is one of the last places on the entire island that has never been logged.
00:04:54.480And so what she's seeing there, and I've been there myself, are trees, massive so-called dipterocarp trees, that are 80 to 90 meters tall.
00:05:04.280So that's basically, you know, as tall as a football field is long.
00:05:09.080uh so and these trees are just everywhere and it's incredible and you don't see those in most
00:05:16.080places in southeast asia because they've been logged out or destroyed as the habitat's been
00:05:21.040destroyed cleared or whatever uh so when you see one of these ancient forests that still have
00:05:27.600these massive trees i think what you realize is how rare they've become and how in many ways
00:05:34.140the ecosystems that we see and even the forests that we see oftentimes are not really representatives
00:05:39.920of the grandeur that they once had. And these giants, as we're increasingly realizing, are
00:05:46.900very vulnerable for a whole range of reasons. The most simplest explanation simply being that
00:05:52.800they're adapted for ecosystems that are around for a long period of time and are very stable
00:05:58.820and give them the centuries to millennia that they need in order to attain this enormous stature and size.
00:06:08.160And so in this rapidly changing world we live in, they're a group of organisms like you mentioned the orcas
00:06:16.280and the large predators and elephants and other species.
00:06:21.020But they're ones that are not nearly talked about enough.
00:06:24.180I think we somehow forget that these stately giant trees are also just as imperiled as
00:06:31.920a lot of the big animal species that we tend to hear so much about.
00:08:46.840They're really the dominant, environmentally and ecologically dominant forces in the forest
00:08:52.680in terms of sort of dominating the nutrient cycles, dominating the water cycles.
00:08:57.780Again, storing the lion's share of the carbon.
00:09:00.640If you remove, you know, you can remove in a logging operation, if you remove just, you
00:09:05.840know the two two or three percent of the largest trees you can take out as much as half of the
00:09:10.400carbon storage that's uh in the forest but in the above ground carbon storage and then there's
00:09:16.840probably you know there's again there you know they provide these sort of structural foundations
00:09:20.900for so many other kinds of plants and organisms so all the epiphytes and the bromeliads and the
00:09:27.520vines and the lianas and everything else that sort of live on them and a lot of these life forms are
00:09:33.660specialized and only live on trees or on, you know, on other plant species. So, you know,
00:09:41.200you've got something that essentially is providing the foundation of the forest. And
00:09:45.780for an experienced, say an ecologist, that's one of the things that we would be looking at. One of
00:09:51.700the first things that we'd be looking for when we'd be walking through a forest is looking to
00:09:56.460see whether or not the big trees are there, because that would tell us immediately whether
00:10:02.220or not this was, you know, essentially an ancient, untouched area forest, or much more
00:10:08.360commonly, we would see that there would be an absence of these really giant trees, which
00:10:12.440means that there's been some kind of selective logging that's happened in the past.
00:10:15.620The other thing that we can do is, when you're just driving around, if you see these big
00:10:21.580trees out in pastures, we can take one look at those, and we can immediately say, look,
00:10:26.080That giant tree, either A, has been living there for centuries, and the forest around it has been destroyed, and the tree's still clinging to survival out there in the middle of this pasture.
00:10:39.080Or we can look at that same tree based on its growth form, and we can say, actually, that thing regenerated out there, and it's grown over a very long period of time, and it's grown secondarily.
00:10:49.620So you can actually just look at the structure of the tree, and it'll tell you that.
00:10:52.560So I guess what I'm saying is that the big trees are really indicators of pristine forest conditions.
00:11:00.200And they're one of the first things that a forest ecologist would look at and look for if they're trying to work out whether or not this is an ancient old growth forest or whether it's even it still might be quite an old forest.
00:11:13.520it might be you know a couple of centuries old but that's not going to be old enough to allow
00:11:18.120you to regain these really the real giants uh that would define the old growth forests yes i
00:11:25.800being amongst old growth forests is like nothing else and i've just stood amongst so many of them
00:11:34.600on different continents really just feeling um frozen in their magnificent and i mean frozen
00:11:41.760in the best way, just completely in awe of them. And I'm wondering, why is it that only a small
00:11:49.740number of tree species have the genetic capacity to grow really big? And then within that,
00:11:55.540what are the necessary conditions for trees that do have the capacity to achieve giant stature?
00:12:02.340Good questions. Well, why is it that only a relatively small fraction of the trees can
00:12:08.280turn into these giants. Um, it's getting really big and really tall turns out to be a pretty
00:12:16.020tough gig, uh, in ecological terms. Um, it's a very challenging lifestyle. Uh, one of the really
00:12:23.500key challenges is, is the hydraulics. You've got to be able to essentially get water from the
00:12:30.160ground. And if you're going to grow to say 60, 80, 60 or 80 meters in height, which is an enormous
00:12:36.040tree. If you're going to do that, it turns out to be a real serious ecological challenge in order
00:12:42.380to get water up to your leaves up in the canopy. And that's one of the things that we really found
00:12:48.380out is that these giant trees are extremely vulnerable to droughts and also to things like
00:12:53.680habitat fragmentation, which can dry out the forest. We'll talk more about that if you want
00:12:58.700in a bit but so the trees that are changing that are attaining these giant sizes are really living
00:13:06.860on the edge in ecological terms it's a dangerous life in order to try to get that big another thing
00:13:14.900about that big size as they as trees get bigger and taller they actually change their form and
00:13:21.500their structure and they tend to get thicker and less flexible and that also makes them more
00:13:26.000vulnerable to wind. So you can imagine a giant tree that's going to be, say, in a rainforest is
00:13:31.100going to be sticking up well above an emergent tree that would be well above the height of the
00:13:35.940rest of the forest canopy. Not only does that have to deal with this real stress that comes from
00:13:42.160dry seasons or droughts, but also if there's a big windstorm, that tree doesn't have a lot of
00:13:49.580capacity to bend and be flexible in the wind. It's really stiff, and so it can be knocked over.
00:13:56.000And it's kind of counterintuitive. It surprises a lot of people to realize that, well, how, you know, if these trees are so vulnerable, how do they get that big in the first place? And that's really kind of one of the interesting paradoxes is that they evidently are able to pull it off.
00:14:11.060But yet, on the other hand, we're seeing we're seeing that these key factors that really limit their survival when they get large.
00:14:18.660So, you know, why are why are not more species doing it?
00:14:21.920Well, it's just because it's it's it requires a capacity to the genetic capacity to get to attain those sizes to survive.
00:14:31.040And you have to have all the things that allow you to do that.
00:14:34.960It turns out, in fact, when you start looking at this more closely at details of their physiology, the trees have all kinds of things going on, complicated things with their internal plumbing.
00:14:45.820For instance, if they get under drought pressure, they tend to do things like block off some of their water vessels.
00:14:52.420And so this reduces – one of the things that really causes havoc with these big trees is when it gets too dry, they get water bubbles inside their water vessels.
00:15:02.240And when those bubbles form, essentially the water vessels stop working.
00:15:06.880So they can't, through siphoning action, they can't get capillary action.
00:15:11.180They can't get the water up to their tree crowns.
00:15:15.620So it turns out that trees have a whole variety of different strategies that they're doing to try to counteract the effects of very dry conditions and allow them to survive.
00:15:24.360But you need to have all the genetic architecture and physiology and the morphology, the capacity to grow and to form those structures in order to get to be those sizes.
00:15:34.940So it's a pretty specialized creature and it's not for everybody.
00:15:38.940So lots of other species are making their lives by being smaller, by growing in the understory, by being pioneer species that would colonize disturbed habitats, by being different growth forms like vines and epiphytes and lots of other things.
00:15:55.420So it's just one way of making a living in the forest, but it's one of the more high risk lifestyles.
00:16:01.260So so I think there's just a whole set of challenges that come with being a giant tree, which means there's only a limited number of species that can that can handle those challenges.
00:16:12.700And they're and they compete with each other and they compete with other trees.
00:16:15.780So there's there's a again, it's a life in the fast lane in some sense or a life in the in the in the risky world.
00:16:25.600And then sorry, Ayanna, could you repeat the second part of the question?
00:16:30.680Oh, yeah. So I was wondering, but you may have kind of answered this, but I was wondering, the second part of that was what are the necessary conditions for trees that do have the capacity to achieve giant stature?
00:16:43.580Yeah. Well, I mean, there's not it depends where you are. But the bottom the bottom line really is long periods of time and very oftentimes environmental stability that allows them to get to be the sizes and the ages that they need.
00:17:02.000And some of these things, of course, are once they get to be huge, they can become actually reproductively dominant.
00:17:09.560They can produce an enormous crops of fruits and flowers and seeds.
00:17:13.820And so they can become very, very successful once they finally get to be those to the giant sizes.
00:17:19.860But then there's but there's a very risky gauntlet that they have to do, that they have to run before they're able to get to be that size.
00:17:28.200But basically, time and stability. Those are the two things that I think one would say are most critical. And I guess, well, a third thing would be the right places, because it turns out, you know, big trees can't just grow everywhere. Oftentimes, there's special places in the environment that are suitable for them to have those growing conditions.
00:17:58.200Here we go, and I suppose you're never gonna know with likes of me.
00:18:13.800I can see right through the sides of ships that sail above the seas of green.
00:18:28.200But I'm considered unfit and I'm not to be believed
00:18:36.700Cause I for one have reached through suns
00:18:41.540And swam with all the colors bright and shiny hues
00:18:47.260That move in all directions, ins and outs and in-betweens
00:24:30.100And so what's happening is the forest actually is getting bigger.
00:24:33.600The undisturbed forests are getting bigger.
00:24:35.720And if you sort of extrapolate that out to the entire area of the undisturbed forest
00:24:40.620and the Amazon, what it suggests is that the Amazon could be sucking up about half a billion
00:24:48.140tons of extra carbon every year. And that's in a world today where we're spewing about 8 billion
00:24:54.860tons of carbon into the atmosphere. So that's a non-trivial amount that in some sense. So if that
00:25:01.720idea, if that hypothesis is correct, then what it means is that in some sense, the rainforest are
00:25:08.300kind of trying to save us from ourselves. They're, in some sense, slowing down or reducing up, you
00:25:14.220know, to a degree, the accumulation, the rapid accumulation, the escalating accumulation of
00:25:20.520carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, if that's right. Now, the other idea,
00:25:28.780which is that with warmer conditions, forests may be shrinking, makes a completely different
00:25:33.700prediction and what it says is because forests would be shrinking over time as they shrink
00:25:40.080because they're growing more slowly they would actually be emitting carbon dioxide not taking
00:25:45.820it in and storing it more of it over time and as they emit more of course that contributes more
00:25:51.580to global warming and with more global warming you get hotter conditions and with hotter conditions
00:25:56.280you get slower tree growth which then means more global warming and that turns into what we call
00:26:02.180a positive feedback, or it's like a snowball effect. One thing feeds on the other. And if
00:26:07.640that hypothesis is correct, it's actually very flat out scary because it implies whenever you
00:26:13.180hear positive feedback, you always think danger. Because again, that's like a snowball coming down
00:26:19.300a mountain and just getting bigger and bigger and turning into an avalanche. So we hope,
00:26:24.220We very much hope that the idea that this that the forest may be stunted by hot conditions is not as important as some people think.
00:26:37.220It's more optimistic to think that the forest may be getting some of the forest, the intact forest, if we can keep them intact, may actually be absorbing some of the CO2 that we're spewing into the atmosphere every year.
00:26:49.040some of that extra CO2. They won't be able to do it forever because nothing, no forest could ever
00:26:54.000keep growing in size forever. And that's another big question is, well, how long could this go on
00:26:58.400for? And no one's sure about that either. So look, there's lots of uncertainties, Ayana,
00:27:04.600when you start looking at the world and even some really basic questions that we
00:27:09.100need to understand about the global carbon cycle and how the forests and ecosystems are interacting
00:27:14.840to, to influence it, uh, that we just don't know yet. So there's still, there's still reasons why
00:27:21.200there's jobs for ecologists. We, we still have a lot of things to a lot of questions to try to
00:27:26.440uncover. Absolutely. The uncertainty is so, I want to say interesting, but it's not, it is
00:27:36.720interesting in a just a mental game way but to see all of the challenges and how in some parts
00:27:45.120of the world things will happen differently than in other parts of the world some areas are going
00:27:49.460to get wetter some are going to get drier some are going to get hotter there might be colder
00:27:53.240moments it's really like you were saying with the positive feedback loops we can somewhat predict
00:28:00.640what we can expect but at the same time there's so much that we just don't know how things are
00:28:09.140going to play out especially when they compound against one another and i was thinking about this
00:28:15.5802010 study published in forest ecology and management and it documented there was a
00:28:21.520significant tree mortality on every continent except antarctica and in the last 40 years well
00:28:27.840in the last 40 years. And then, for example, you know, trees in the Western US are dying twice as
00:28:32.520quickly as they did three decades ago. But this increase in mortality rates is generally, it is
00:28:39.100attributed, you know, generally to heat and drought, which we've been talking about. But then I know you
00:28:43.460and other members of the scientific community have also noticed this disturbing trend specifically
00:28:48.100amongst the global population of large old trees. So it's, you know, it's really this,
00:28:54.480strange time to be able to take in all this information. And I guess like there's a few
00:29:01.880questions that are coming up with that is, it seems challenging one to know exactly what is
00:29:07.760the driving force behind the disappearance of the old trees. And then of course, there's going to be
00:29:13.180these factors that are prohibiting new trees from growing potentially. And then, so there's kind of
00:29:20.820this question of, I don't even know if we could even say what is the driving force. But the other
00:29:25.920part of that question I'm thinking about is, are there any forest types that are immune to say
00:29:31.920drought and heat, heat induced mortality? Are there specific latitudes exempt from the loss
00:29:38.380of large trees? I don't know the answer to that question. I'm sort of taking this and thinking
00:29:46.140about it um i've got a feeling the answer to that's probably no in the sense that whenever we
00:29:52.560talk about particularly when we talk about things like heat waves and i know when you get up into
00:29:56.960higher latitude forests i mean i work mostly in the tropics myself so that's the system i'm going
00:30:01.400to be know the best but when you get up into the middle and higher latitudes and the boreal forests
00:30:07.720And, you know, the vast forests of places like northern Russia and Siberia and in Canada and northern Europe, heat waves definitely are playing a role in terms of increasing fire risk, for instance, in a lot of those forests, getting unusually dry conditions.
00:30:28.180And then on top of that, we're seeing increased fuel ignition sources because of more human access and more logging activity.
00:30:36.740so these things tend to interact so I don't I couldn't off the top of my head
00:30:41.340pick an ecosystem type I mean maybe you know I just don't yeah I've not heard of
00:30:46.880one but I I'm not sure anybody has it would have a firm answer to that but
00:30:52.060there's there's nothing would pop into my head in terms of a forest that would
00:30:56.180be essentially immune to unusual heat events or rising temperature and
00:31:02.680especially rising extremes. It's these, you know, these oftentimes, these intense heat waves that
00:31:07.800are actually becoming more intense that are really scary because one of the things that we know about
00:31:13.040living systems, about species, is that it's, there's very often thresholds. That's one of
00:31:19.900the things we're seeing right now where I'm, where I live in Cannes, Australia. Temperatures here
00:31:24.600have just hit, in our city here, have just hit 103 degrees, 105 degrees, which is very, very hot
00:31:34.880for here. And when it hits about that range of around 100, 102 degrees, what we see is the fruit
00:31:42.300bats, the flying foxes, just start dying. And at 98, they're okay. At 100, they're getting really,
00:31:49.400really stressed and then at about you know a little bit over a hundred they it's not like
00:31:54.560they start you start getting a gradual increase in mortality it's like they just suddenly all
00:31:59.260start dying and we've literally got hundreds and hundreds of them just falling out of the trees
00:32:03.580and dying or the animal carriers are over there now trying to save them and trying to you know
00:32:09.160rescue the animals and they're squirting water into their mouths and trying to rehydrate them
00:32:13.420and and do whatever they can to save some of them but the bottom line is there's a threshold and
00:32:18.600you hit that threshold and then suddenly mortality kicks in in a very big way and that's pretty much
00:32:24.780universally true for most of kinds of environmental factors things like heat and moisture it's not
00:32:32.080that you get a gradual increase in mortality as temperature goes up it's like you get these
00:32:38.340extreme conditions and then you you suddenly top a threshold and bang you get big increases in
00:32:44.180mortality. And then another thing that you mentioned, which I think is really important
00:32:48.360to underscore, is exactly that. And it ties right back into this idea of all the uncertainty.
00:32:53.980What we're living in is a world that is changing in lots of different ways all at once.
00:32:59.300And that's what we're really seeing. And the analogy I would use would be if humanity is in
00:33:04.320a boxing match with nature, nature is not just getting, you know, a punch here, you know, one
00:33:09.780punch one punch it's getting a whole flurry of blows that are arriving all at once so trees in
00:33:16.320some areas are being subjected to habitat fragmentation and to selective logging and
00:33:24.180into surface fires and into invasions of exotic species such as lantana and other things that
00:33:31.160can come in and completely clog up the forest understory and prevent tree regeneration there's
00:33:37.060exotic pathogens and diseases that are killing trees. Um, there's these climatic events that
00:33:42.480are happening and seem to be, you know, changes in terms of atmospheric chemistry and in weather
00:33:47.780conditions and, and, and climate trends and, uh, weather extremes. Um, and, you know, and there's
00:33:55.220the synergism, as you say, these sort of, you know, these, these combined effects, these are
00:33:59.760the things that really get complicated and it gets harder and harder to try to predict.
00:34:03.560i would say that you know if you talked if we talked about a specific forest type
00:34:09.040ecologists would often be able to say something like look we think in this habitat type these are
00:34:16.080the two or three or four factors that we're most worried about but then when you get into the
00:34:20.840details and you say like well exactly how is important say this factor versus that factor or
00:34:26.140etc etc that's a much harder question to ask and you know one thing i would when talking about
00:34:33.260things like uncertainties. Sometimes we quote Donald Rumsfeld, which is the former Secretary
00:34:39.940of Defense under President George W. Bush. And Rumsfeld was sort of given a hard time for this,
00:34:46.340but he was actually making, I think, a pretty good point because he was talking about things
00:34:50.920we know, things we don't know, and then things we don't know we don't know. And it's really that
00:34:58.400third category, which is the most scary. And he was quite right. People were sort of accused him
00:35:03.600of playing word games. But in fact, this is one of the things that probably frightens environmental
00:35:10.060scientists the most, is these things that come flying out of the blue and smack us in the back
00:35:15.280of the head. And we never saw coming at all. And we seem to be having more and more of those
00:35:21.300happening. And I don't actually think it's because we're learning how the world works better. I think
00:35:28.120that we actually are seeing more and more of these rare extreme or unusual events or combinations
00:35:35.180events that seem to be knocking ecosystems for a tizzy and you know give an example or two of that
00:35:41.160if you want but the bottom line is i think the world is just getting more stressed because there's
00:35:47.340so many different environmental drivers that are increasing over time and we're just seeing new
00:36:53.880the hills that divide as we wander their longitudes the clouds that depart
00:37:02.200do not fly at high altitudes they stretch out to multitudes and visions of open
00:37:11.080Where the souls that you seek aren't forever together up high.
00:37:31.880Yeah, and if projected temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100,
00:37:36.640You know, that warming alone could quite possibly cause most old trees to die sometime this century. And I was even reading that in California, Costa Rica, Spain, and some of these ancient trees are predicted in these places to disappear within 90 to 180 years.
00:37:56.420so there's yeah there's a lot to process and we can't even process all of it because we we just
00:38:05.480don't know all of it it's really yeah it's a it's a challenging time to be in especially for those of
00:38:11.600us who really not only emotionally love these places but also really understand the value
00:38:22.320of these forests in terms of biodiversity, habitat, oxygen. I mean, I think that there
00:38:30.900is honestly so much value in old growth forest and in the biodiversity that they hold that
00:38:34.900we really can't quantify. We really can't even understand how to quantify the value that is in
00:38:40.020these forests. And I know that up until, oh yeah, did you have something? Yeah. Well,
00:38:46.980I did want to say something, Ayana, because I think that and we can absolutely run around in
00:38:53.920circles and get and possibly with quite good reason and get very freaked out about all the
00:38:59.740uncertainties that we're facing. And we simply are. And I don't think that we're scientists,
00:39:05.820I think, sometimes get themselves into trouble is when we try to under to downplay the
00:39:12.220uncertainties because that's just simply not the case we are facing an awful lot of uncertainties
00:39:18.080in many different levels um it's not that there's to me in fact the uncertainties are probably more
00:39:23.960scary than the certain things that we do know are happening but but that's another question
00:39:27.900how comfortable you feel playing dice with the future of the planet but i would say this we know
00:39:33.620enough right now to one of the key things we want to we don't want to do is to say look we don't know
00:39:39.880what's happening and we're uncertain about this and uncertain about that so we're frozen and we're
00:39:45.740and and we we stop doing things and i think that that's exactly the opposite of what we want to do
00:39:51.580we know enough right now to say this the absolute most important thing that we can probably do
00:39:58.460to give ecosystems the absolute best chance of surviving and to give them the maximum resilience
00:40:04.840to future climatic changes and to almost every other kind of environmental changes
00:40:10.080is to conserve large and intact tracts of habitat. That is really important and it's really accurate.
00:40:19.060So what we want to do is to have the biggest parks and protected areas as we possibly can.
00:40:24.040We also want to have these protected areas spanning large gradients of environmental change.
00:40:31.340So, for instance, you might have a protected area that starts right at the coastline and then goes all the way up in the mid-elevations and right up to the tops of the mountains.
00:40:40.420That would be an ideal situation in which you would have a lot of topographic variation, a lot of diversity, a lot of different microclimates and microhabitats.
00:40:48.920And those microclimates and habitats will oftentimes provide really important refuges for some species to survive, say, for instance, when there is an extreme drought event or an extreme fire event or an extreme storm event.
00:41:03.240so we know enough right now to say this the best things that we can do and the other big advantage
00:41:10.040by the way of conserving intact habitats and conserving the most extensive areas of habitat
00:41:16.680that we possibly can is that those lock up a lot of carbon and we know that that right away
00:41:22.300is going to have a big benefit for reducing the carbon concentrations in the atmosphere
00:41:27.240and we also know that these intact tracks of forest are very important as we talked about
00:41:32.900earlier with things like the evapotranspiration, putting all that water vapor up into the
00:41:37.600atmosphere, which is important for, really important for maintaining clouds and especially,
00:41:44.520crucially, especially in the tropics during the dry season. And that's when the forests are most
00:41:50.040stressed and most vulnerable to fire. So the bottom line is this, even though, and we don't
00:41:57.240want to we absolutely don't want to say you know other efforts to combat climate change such as
00:42:03.880trying to reduce emissions from industry and from automobiles and from coal-fired plants and other
00:42:09.500kinds of things those aren't important of course course those are absolutely critical but on the
00:42:14.520other hand we also want to recognize that there's absolutely critical positive things that we can do
00:42:22.220that we know will increase the chances of ecosystems
00:42:26.680to give them the absolute best possibility of surviving.
00:42:30.420And that is to have large, intact, contiguous, connected tracks
00:43:41.400stop this oftentimes perverse and even in many cases economically and socially marginal and
00:43:51.280highly risky development that's happening in many parts of the world. So I think that
00:43:57.420absolutely a critical message for anyone listening to this, you know, to this podcast and this
00:44:04.000interview would be to say, we actually understand some critical things that we can do. We don't
00:44:11.360know everything. And there's lots of things that we, there's still going to be things that are
00:44:16.060going to come flying out of the blue and are going to hit us in the back of the head. And
00:44:19.860that's always going to happen. But we know enough right now to say the most critical things that we
00:44:25.900can focus on right at the moment. And so let's not let the uncertainty stop us from doing the
00:44:32.880things that we know will work i couldn't agree more about large conservation wildlife corridors
00:44:41.840you know i always think about we need to leave space for these ecosystems to evolve we need to
00:44:50.880create opportunity for evolution and when we you know pave paradise to put up a parking lot or when
00:44:59.020we go in and we mine or log or put up suburbs or whatever it is that we're doing for land use
00:45:05.980change, then there really is no, quote, hope. There's really no options for any type of survival
00:45:13.020if we take away the land that actually allows these species to survive. And I'm with you
00:45:22.840with all of the uncertainty and gosh the stress that it creates becoming frozen in this time or
00:45:29.740debilitated isn't going to support the forest or any of the creatures that are a part of that
00:45:35.960community so I really appreciate you saying that and I really couldn't agree more and
00:45:40.360this whittling away either by logging or some type of resource extraction or land use change
00:45:49.420it reminds me of this article from nature that you wrote in back in november 2018 titled
00:45:57.180if you can't build well then build nothing at all and it was this article on the comprehensive
00:46:03.340impacts of infrastructure on forest communities and in it you write quote by 2050 earth could
00:46:09.280accumulate another 25 million kilometers of paid road and that's enough to encircle the planet more
00:46:16.660than 600 times end quote so um you know we've talked about the impacts of infrastructure on
00:46:24.360biodiversity and and on these forest ecosystems and i'm thinking about like a second part of that
00:46:30.420i'm thinking about how in the same article you also led me to think about how the global community
00:46:35.280you know at some point should absolutely have the ability to intervene in the development of
00:46:40.080high risk projects especially given the government corruption and private interests are just so
00:46:46.520pervasive. You give two examples, the first being that the EIA for Brazil's 900 kilometer long BR 319
00:46:54.520highway, which cuts through the center of Amazonia, stated that the project would cause no net
00:47:01.480increase in deforestation. And the second being how China's Communist Party constitution legally
00:47:07.780protects and empowers China's Belt and Road Initiative by censoring and even preventing
00:47:14.480mandarin translations of any sort of critical response to its proposed infrastructure and
00:47:19.600extractive industry projects so my question out of all this is what sort of global guidelines do
00:47:26.980you ideally wish were in place when it comes to whether or not infrastructure projects should go
00:47:32.180forward and you know what is the role of environmental scientists botanists ecologists
00:47:37.500in overseeing infrastructure development yeah i really think that the infrastructure tsunami
00:47:43.080is one of the great understated environmental changes that we, I mean, a lot of people are
00:47:48.920talking about infrastructure now, but it's a much bigger peril than I think most people realize,
00:47:54.400because it really is what's responsible for devastating, you know, the last remnants of
00:48:00.560wild nature. And whether we're talking about an area of wilderness, or we're talking about
00:48:05.720ecosystems that have already been very severely degraded, in which case we're seeing, you know,
00:48:11.380disruption of some of the last remnants. But it's this incredible expansion of infrastructure and
00:48:18.600extractive industries, mining, oil and gas development, timber projects, and energy
00:48:27.080projects, all this together. It's a cyclone of development. I think that scientists need to be
00:48:34.260a lot more aware of it and need to get a lot more engaged because I think that the groups,
00:48:37.920They're mostly public interest groups, such as the environmental groups and sometimes the social, the indigenous rights groups that are raising concerns and protests about some of these issues.
00:48:51.960I think scientists as a group could become a lot more involved in this because these organizations, the public interest groups, really need more expertise.
00:49:00.240um but um i think that um we're in an incredibly challenging time and um i think the scale of
00:49:11.400what's happening well if if i could uh if i could do what what uh i would i would really like to do
00:49:19.380we of course was it was to be able to have essentially a um a global panel of experts
00:49:26.920that would look at every individual project and would say, you know, let's look at this in a
00:49:32.120transparent, open, publicly accessible way. And let's try to make some objective decisions about
00:49:37.720what's going on. That's not really what happens. You mentioned corruption. In many parts of the
00:49:44.020world, a lot of projects are being approved that should never get approved, not just for
00:49:49.320environmental reasons, but also for reasons of social risk and financial risk and economic risk,
00:49:55.460political risk, reputational risks. There's an incredible number of high-risk projects that are
00:50:03.220financially, and in many other ways, bad ideas and bad for the developing countries that are
00:50:09.300being subjected to these projects. And as you said, in the case of China,
00:50:15.100there's really essentially China ranks among the world's worst countries in terms of media openness.
00:50:20.140So with the Belt and Road Initiative, which is incredible, the biggest infrastructure
00:50:24.500venture that the world has ever seen, which China is driving. Within China, it's illegal.
00:50:32.980It's unlawful to publicly criticize that. So that has an enormous chilling effect
00:50:38.560on any kind of public discussion. There really isn't any kind of public debate. People inside
00:50:44.300China really just hear positive things about the Belt and Road, and they don't hear about
00:50:48.720these incredible risks. When we talk about, but here's the thing, and I've been doing this for
00:50:53.900almost 40 years working in developing countries in Latin America and in the Asia Pacific region
00:51:00.400and Africa and the Pacific. And one of the things that you find, Ayana, is just nations are
00:51:08.100absolutely so sensitive to the idea of their sovereignty and them essentially having the
00:51:15.500freedom and the sovereign right to develop in the way that they want and develop their natural
00:51:21.860resources in the way that they want. So I think whenever one has these discussions, one personally
00:51:27.460has to say, we've absolutely got to respect the rights of every nation to determine their own
00:51:33.500development trajectories. Now, that having been said, because so much of what's going on is
00:51:41.920happening in the shadows and is happening in dark places and is happening with corruption and is
00:51:47.180happening with highly uncertain and suspect circumstances. And say, for instance, you
00:51:54.500mentioned a couple of the environmental impact studies that have been done that are just
00:51:58.180laughable. And really, we see a lot of environmental studies, assessment analyses that are done
00:52:04.240that are just coming up with appallingly ridiculous conclusions. I could rattle off example after
00:52:11.280example, these things. So what we really argue is that the best thing we can possibly do is just
00:52:18.960for scientists and for people that are interested in the environment to try to do all we can to
00:52:25.940expose people in the countries where all this development is happening. And 90% of the
00:52:32.700infrastructure projects are happening in developing countries of the world. So most of it's happening
00:52:37.440in the developing nations, which, by the way, contain virtually all the world's tropical and
00:52:42.600subtropical forests, which are the biologically richest real estate on the planet. So anyway,
00:52:47.780the best thing that we think we can do is to shine a light and to try to have as much information and
00:52:54.420openness and public discussion and debate about these projects, because what we actually think
00:52:59.720is that the public can understand what the real realities are, then in many cases, a lot of these
00:53:06.220projects will die on their own. In fact, you know, we see this, that when once you start getting a
00:53:11.560public debate going, people start to see what's going on. And in many cases, these projects
00:53:17.620actually die their own death. And what you hope to happen is that that process occurs before the
00:53:23.880nation loses, you know, goes into great debt or squanders away a lot of their natural resources
00:53:29.540or strands a lot of their assets in some kind of project that ends up faltering. So what you'd
00:53:35.960really like to see is that smart decisions being made, better decisions being made early on in the
00:53:41.760development process. What land developers and what the people that are getting wealthy off these
00:53:47.340decisions and, you know, pushing these projects are doing is they're trying to railroad these
00:53:52.660things through as fast as possible. And they're trying to basically shove these things, projects
00:53:57.460through before there's time for public debate and before there's time for a lot of the realities
00:54:03.580to come to light. And so what we really say is like the best thing that we can do
00:54:09.400is absolutely not to challenge the rights of any individual nation to decide their own
00:54:15.800development priorities, but we can, there's nothing that's even faintly undemocratic
00:54:21.720or not right about helping countries and citizens to understand the real risks and realities
00:54:28.560involved. And when we do that, that definitely improves their capacity to make better and smarter
00:54:36.220decisions, not just financially and economically and socially, but also environmentally.
00:54:42.160Turns out those things oftentimes really go hand in hand. So there's a great opportunity right now
00:54:49.840for people that are interested in infrastructure in particular to try to help groups and nations
00:54:58.380to understand better the consequences of what's going to happen.
00:55:02.320Because in a lot of cases, in a lot of cases, you just get this very simple mantra.
00:55:08.520And the mantra is this, development is good.
00:55:11.520And people just accept this without any kind of thinking at all.
00:55:16.360Therefore, any kind of proposal must be good.
00:55:19.480And that is such a dangerous way of thinking.
00:55:22.580That is such a dangerous set of assumptions.
00:55:24.260And once you start looking in detail at a lot of these projects, you see how precarious many of them are and how disastrously they can fail and fail at many, many levels.
00:55:35.800So I think we certainly have our work cut out for us in that in that regard.
00:55:39.760And I'm really happy that you brought up this the issue of infrastructure again.
00:55:44.220And let me let me get on my soapbox again about it, because I I really do think that it's one of our great environmental challenges.
00:55:51.420I think it's right up there with global global climate change, because it's in terms of something happening over the next two or three decades.
00:56:15.860And we need good, smart infrastructure and better infrastructure.
00:56:21.200But boy, oh boy, we need to look at it much more critically than has been done.
00:56:26.020And we definitely can't assume that all development is good.
00:56:28.800And we can't assume that environmental impact studies are going to be revealing which studies are good.
00:56:33.280And we can't assume that good decisions are being made because the truth is a lot of this stuff is happening in the shadows and the darkness where a lot of money is changing hands.
00:56:42.160and where we know that projects are being approved
00:56:44.660that should never have been approved in the first place.
00:56:47.740I'm so happy this is one of your soapboxes.
00:56:49.860I really feel so aligned with this analysis of infrastructure.
00:56:57.680And so I really appreciate your passion and your feelings about that.