00:00:54.440Hello, I'm Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical
00:01:07.280ideas relating to earth renewal. In the race to name this new bizarre geologic era,
00:01:14.240Anthropocene seems to have stuck the most. Some people are cautious to embrace a name meaning
00:01:19.420the age of humans, as it can be latched onto by industry and used as a justification for the
00:01:26.200murder of the planet. More descriptive, cautionary names have been suggested too.
00:01:32.660Michael Soule suggested the Catastrophozoic Era. Other contenders include Homogeocene,
00:01:39.520Age of Homogeneity, Myxocene, Age of Slime, and the most resonant to me, coined by E.O. Wilson,
00:01:47.320Eremocene, the age of loneliness. With the human population and explosive expansion,
00:01:55.160it's easy to forget the earth is going through the most rapid and possibly the most massive
00:02:01.180extinction crisis the world has ever seen. Joining us today to help us digest the great
00:02:07.560amount of information being amassed around the globe about this major juncture in earth's history
00:02:12.320is Elizabeth Colbert. Elizabeth is a staff writer for The New Yorker, author of Field Notes from a
00:02:19.360Catastrophe, Man, Nature, and Climate Change, and most recently, The Sixth Extinction,
00:02:25.760An Unnatural History, which has just won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
00:02:31.040Hello, Elizabeth. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you.
00:02:36.880There is a smattering in the public media about this sixth great extinction we are in the early
00:02:41.880days of. But considering the magnitude of this catastrophe, it should be ringing in the ears of
00:02:47.920every world leader, corporate chair, professor, parent, and child, so we can take the reins of
00:02:53.940this runaway civilization and attempt to ground it as gracefully as possible. I have heard numbers
00:03:00.140such as 200 species a day are going extinct, but it's difficult to pin a number on it for many
00:03:05.600reasons. What are the numbers you have seen in your research? Or what data do you use to back
00:03:11.840up the fact that we are entering and essentially unleashing a mass extinction event? Well,
00:03:18.300it's a good question. And I guess the first thing that I should say is people throw that number
00:03:24.240around of how many extinctions we're experiencing per day. And I think that that is considered
00:03:31.000pretty suspect right now. It's based on using something called the species area relationship
00:03:41.580and then looking at how much habitat is being lost. And it was sort of a projection based on
00:03:47.000rates of deforestation. And it's hard to know. There's a bunch of potential problems with it.
00:03:55.200So even though it does get bandied around in the popular press a lot, I don't think it gets used in the scientific literature very much at this point.
00:04:04.000And I don't use it except to point out that we can't document this.
00:04:10.560If it is happening, we can't document it.
00:04:13.340Now, one of the reasons that potentially we can't document it there, as I said, there are several potential reasons.
00:04:19.440it's either you know not happening or most of the species that would go extinct in any extinction
00:04:27.200event mass extinction event would be invertebrates because they're the vast majority of species on
00:04:33.140the planet and we have very poor records of them so there are all sorts of you know possible
00:04:37.280complexities to that number now how do we know so that's the negative okay about that number now
00:04:43.180the positive or I shouldn't call it positive but the thing that we can say is so how would we look
00:04:50.160at extinction rates today that would be a useful way to look at them and I think people have thought
00:04:56.420a lot about this because it is important to quantify try to have some quantitative sense
00:05:03.160of what's going on and one of the difficulties we have looking at extinction rates is we don't
00:05:09.540even know how many species there are on the planet. Not even, some people would argue,
00:05:15.380within an order of magnitude. So what people have done to try to constrain this problem is look at
00:05:25.460groups of animals or organisms, I guess I should say, that we do know pretty well. So mammals are
00:05:32.600a very good example. We have a pretty good idea how many species of mammals there are on the
00:05:38.400planet right now. And we also, they're very carefully monitored. So we have a pretty good
00:05:45.140idea of, you know, which ones are endangered, which ones are critically endangered, etc. And
00:05:51.100if you look, people have looked, taken a look at how fast mammals are moving through various stages
00:05:58.520of endangerment and becoming extinct. And when they look at those, and there's just a pretty
00:06:04.000big study on this published pretty recently, they find that extinction rates are very, very high.
00:06:10.560They are the kinds of rates that you would expect to see during a mass extinction event. So those
00:06:17.340are the types of data that people point to when they say to say that we are now either in a mass
00:06:25.160extinction or on the verge of a mass extinction event are looking at well-studied groups and
00:06:30.260looking at extinction rates among those groups. E.O. Wilson published an article where he estimates
00:06:37.520the current extinction rate for certain areas is 10,000 times the normal background rate,
00:06:43.740and that biodiversity is heading to the lowest level since the end-Cretaceous extinction event
00:06:49.220that snuffed out the dinosaurs and all land animals over 50 pounds. Here we have one of the
00:06:55.160world's most respected scientist, delivering another chilling statistic. Can you break that
00:07:00.580down for us? Well, scientists try to calculate this idea of background extinction. So there's
00:07:07.840this idea that, well, extinctions are happening all the time, which is true. Species seem to have
00:07:13.760a certain sort of average lifespan, if you will, just like, you know, individuals have an average
00:07:20.480lifespan and but that seems to you know vary from group to group and so what paleontologists have
00:07:28.960done is gone back and it's a very very painstaking process and they go through the fossil record and
00:07:36.240sort of look at you know when you see the first you if you look at you know some organisms are
00:07:41.600are easily fossilized and some are not and so you get a lot of biases in the record too that way
00:07:49.160potentially but if you try to look at when you start seeing an organism an easily fossilized
00:07:55.120organism which tends to be like an animal with a shell for example those are much more likely to
00:07:59.660be fossilized than something that's just you know very squishy like say like a worm or something
00:08:05.300um and you see when it appeared and you see when it disappears from the record and you do that over
00:08:10.940you know multiple multiple species in a big group you get kind of an average lifespan for a species
00:08:17.340in a group and you know very very roughly speaking people have looked at the record and
00:08:23.960arrived at lifespans for species in different groups um and you know very roughly speaking
00:08:30.280the average species may last let's say a million years and so that would be the background
00:08:36.240extinction rate if the species lasts a million years and you know how many species there are
00:08:40.420in that group you know you should be able to calculate okay roughly how often should we be
00:08:45.080seeing a species go extinct. Now, when you compare that, that's exactly what people are doing, you
00:08:51.500know, when they go out and say, okay, how many? So with mammals, a figure that I quote in my book,
00:08:56.700which was done, arrived at by a paleontologist through a lot of painstaking work, was you would
00:09:02.020expect a mammalian species to go extinct, let's say, once every 750 years or so. And if you compare
00:09:08.860that to the rate that we actually are seeing mammals go extinct, you find that extinction
00:09:13.680rates. I don't know if they quite reach 10,000 times, but they're very, very high. And then
00:09:19.800among some groups of animals, they probably are. They're certainly 100 times faster. For some
00:09:25.840groups, they're probably 1,000 times faster. And for some groups, they may already have hit 10,000
00:09:32.600times faster. Now, one of the complexities that you get into is there are a lot of
00:09:37.000species around right now that are not technically extinct, but they are already functionally
00:09:43.040extinct. So, you know, there's a lot of squishiness here, but that's the basic idea.
00:09:49.060You wrote about the biological dynamics of forest fragments project, BDFFP, which is a study area
00:09:56.380down in the Amazon in Brazil, where farmers were subsidized to go out and deforest the rainforest
00:10:02.080to graze cattle. But they were also required to leave a portion intact. And for 30 years,
00:10:08.500this patchwork of degraded and pristine forest have been studied.
00:10:12.480So what has been discovered through this about fragmentation?
00:10:16.340And is it contributing much to the extinction event?
00:10:19.780Now the BFFD is not really looking at extinction per se.
00:10:27.120It was looking at, as the title suggests, looking at the dynamics of fragmentation.
00:10:32.060what happens, what you lose from a particular forest when you fragment it. So how big is the
00:10:40.020fragment? That turns out to be significant. But when you cut off a piece of forest, even if that
00:10:44.940piece of forest remains intact, it turns out you lose a lot of species. You know, theory suggests
00:10:49.840that, practice suggests that. And in fact, when you do the work, you find that same thing. But
00:10:56.260those species that are lost from that particular fragment are not extinct, right? You can sort of
00:11:01.580extrapolate from that maybe to extinction rates, but we're not actually looking at extinction
00:11:05.680because they may well exist somewhere else in the forest still.
00:11:10.440Well, the tropical rainforests hold an incredible amount of biodiversity,
00:11:15.340probably in the millions of species. And I'm wondering if there had ever been such species
00:11:20.800richness prior to the other extinction events, or is our current age the most biodiverse?
00:11:26.940one sort of very rough figure you know we often have the problem that we're we're looking at the
00:11:33.500present we have even the present we don't have very neat access because we have pretty dim
00:11:40.760understanding of the invertebrate life on the planet right now we can't be in all places at
00:11:45.940once sometimes an animal is thought to be extinct and a tiny little population has survived and it
00:11:51.120you know, pops up again. So even now, even with the best, you know, technology available and
00:11:57.400lots and lots of people looking for things, we still only have a very patchy picture of what's
00:12:02.640going on in the world. And in the case of previous extinction events, you're talking about going back
00:12:09.920tens and in several cases, hundreds of millions of years. So we have a very, very sketchy,
00:12:15.780you know, idea. But one rough figure that's thrown around is that in a major mass extinction,
00:12:22.200of which there have been five over the last half billion years, which is why my book is called The
00:12:28.200Sixth Extinction, 75% of the species have disappeared. So that's sort of used as the
00:12:35.060threshold for a major mass extinction. Now, obviously, we have not yet gotten rid of 75%
00:12:42.000of the species on earth and I personally certainly hope that we won't but the point is to go back to
00:12:49.340the point I made earlier that if you look at the rate that things are going extinct for example
00:12:54.660look the rate mammals are going extinct now you say well we could be reaching that 75 percent of
00:12:59.920all mammals within the next several centuries and that is very very short span of time on the
00:13:06.600geological time span. And we would have expected the mass extinction events of the past probably
00:13:13.180took several hundreds, several thousands, many thousands of years. So we are losing species at
00:13:18.980that rate. And that is what is extremely alarming. Now, what biodiversity looked like in each of those
00:13:24.820mass extinctions, the world looked very, very different at different times. And the major mass
00:13:30.900extinctions are turning points in the history of life. That's very, very clear. And one of the
00:13:37.500major mass extinctions, which was a very, very serious extinction, the end Permian extinction
00:13:42.620about 250 million years ago, that was what brought to an end the Paleozoic, what's called the
00:13:49.180Paleozoic. And a whole fauna went out. I mean, it just, the world changed very dramatically. So
00:13:57.680everything you know that went on uh and and had descendants formed what we call the mesozoic fauna
00:14:05.560and then uh at the end of the cretaceous period about 66 million years ago um there was another
00:14:13.600major mass extinction and the mesozoic came to an end and we now live in what's called the
00:14:18.680cenozoic so there's been this these very very dramatic shifts and we wouldn't even recognize
00:14:25.160a lot of the creatures that populated the world, you know, they were the dinosaurs,
00:14:29.560but they were, you know, not dinosaurs.
00:14:31.160There were many, many creatures that didn't go on to have descendants.
00:14:34.460And so to us, they seem very odd looking, but they were often very dominant groups of organisms
00:20:54.880But I think if you talk to amphibian specialists, they would not say amphibians are canaries, the canary in the coal mine.
00:21:01.240The canary was brought in into this weird man-made environment to signal the coal miners about to croak.
00:21:08.640Amphibians have been around a lot, lot longer than people have, you know.0.94
00:21:13.660And they're not necessarily particularly delicate creatures.
00:21:16.940Their life history on Earth over hundreds of millions of years suggests that they're actually very robust creatures, and so that we shouldn't look at them as delicate creatures that are giving us a sign of something bad.
00:21:33.160We should, in some sense, be even more worried, because they're actually very, very tough creatures.
00:21:40.760So that's just to frame the question somewhat differently.
00:21:44.240Now, BD is a fungus, and it appeared in many different parts of the world, you know, more or less simultaneously, as best that people can ascertain, and its origins remain somewhat mysterious.
00:22:01.080What people have done is they take samples of this fungus from the frogs around the world and they've analyzed them genetically.
00:22:09.620And there's a very sophisticated genetic analysis that can be done now that can oftentimes, if you're fortunate and if things line up, you can trace things back to their origin.
00:22:20.440You see where the genetic diversity was the greatest and then you see it sort of different strains of it that got carried around to different parts of the world.
00:22:30.380So you should be able to sort of build this family tree of this fungus and then trace it back to the matriarch or patriarch, however you want to put that, and figure out where it came from.
00:22:40.060But in the case of BD, that has actually turned out to be very frustratingly difficult, and people have not been able to trace it to a clear source.
00:22:49.080So one theory, which I think is not that popular now because the genetics haven't worked out, was that it was imported around the world on these frogs called African clawed frogs, which were exported from Africa in the 30s and 40s and 50s for pregnancy tests, for use in early pregnancy tests.
00:23:13.620and then um another theory is that it might have come even from american bullfrogs actually who
00:23:20.540were been exported around the world just for just for food they're grown for you know they're sort
00:23:25.540of raised it's like you know little little cattle or whatever around the world so that's another
00:23:30.760possibility and no one um no one knows and because the genetics are a little bit obscure it's not
00:23:38.340entirely clear that anyone ever will know, but I think that the thing that convinces people that
00:23:44.580it was something that was moved around the world is, as I said, that it appeared pretty much
00:23:50.860simultaneously in a lot of different parts of the world, and it's very hard for a fungus
00:23:54.640to get around that quickly without human assistance. Certain fungi and diseases have
00:24:01.300spread around the world with disastrous consequences to species that have no resistance to them,
00:24:07.420But also, there are these invasive plant and animal species.
00:24:11.640Now, on a local level, biodiversity would go up in the short term as new species arrive.
00:24:16.840But the ecological balance can be thrown off, and native species inevitably lose their place at the table.
00:24:24.120So could you tell us about your findings about how invasive species are contributing to the extinction event?
00:24:31.600Yeah, I mean, there's different kinds of diversity, right?
00:24:34.000I mean, there's local diversity, and then there's global diversity. And, you know, we've moved a lot, a lot of stuff around the world, we are still continuing to move stuff all the time. I know a lot of the times we do it on purpose. And a lot of the times we don't do it on purpose. But the bottom line, and I think it's sort of not at all debatable, is at least in a kind of human timeframe, there are parts of the world where diversity has increased in a local sense.
00:25:03.460Your backyard, for example. But because invasives and introduced species have tended to have a really devastating effect on islands, for example, in particular, where you have a lot of really fascinating creatures who have evolved in the absence of certain kinds of predators, let's say, in the absence of whole groups and whole classes of other animals.
00:25:30.240So, for example, I was in New Zealand about a year ago, and, you know, New Zealand is a pretty big place, but it had no terrestrial mammals until humans arrived.
00:25:44.860It's just a weird corp of evolutionary history, and it was isolated for a very, very long time, and then people showed up, and so they had a lot of ground-nesting birds.
00:25:54.840Some of the most famous are the kiwi, who are really wonderful, very, very sweet creatures and very defenseless against mammalian predators and very smelly, too.
00:26:07.300That's another interesting fact is that a lot of these ground nesting birds on New Zealand are kind of stinky.
00:26:14.380And that is because they didn't have mammalian predators and mammals hunt by smell.
00:26:19.080So as soon as mammals showed up and they showed up in the form of rats and cats and once again things that people brought purposefully and things that they brought accidentally, these birds were just devastated and so many of them no longer exist.
00:26:33.900So New Zealand in itself would be a good case study because in some level there may be more species than there used to be, right?
00:26:42.740I mean, rats are another species, they're a form of biodiversity, but the species that only existed on New Zealand are gone.
00:26:51.260So we've lost species in a global sense, even though in a very local sense, in some parts of New Zealand they actually have more species now than they used to.
00:27:00.820while we're in that part of the world i'd like to talk about what's threatening the very existence
00:27:07.800of the great barrier reef and all the world's coral reef and that's ocean acidification
00:27:13.220which has been implicated in mass extinctions of the past some scientists have warned that
00:27:19.440the oceans could become all but uninhabitable by 2100 that's two-thirds of the globe emptied of
00:27:26.660life. Can anything be done to counteract this acidification process? And in your view,
00:27:33.480how likely are these outcomes? Well, acidification refers to this process by which, you know,
00:27:40.920when we put carbon dioxide into the air, and you're putting a lot of carbon dioxide into the
00:27:45.620air by burning fossil fuels. So a lot of it, it goes into the air, right? You know, it comes out
00:27:53.660your tailpipe or it comes out of a smokestack and then a lot of it about a third of it gets
00:27:59.880uh dissolved very quickly in the surface waters of the ocean and that's just because
00:28:04.800there has to be an equilibrium between the air and the water and and to achieve this equilibrium
00:28:10.660um when you you know stuff a lot of co2 into the air you are in effect also stuffing it into the
00:28:17.480ocean that's not very scientific but it's the best i can do right now and what happens when
00:28:23.180co2 dissolves in water is it forms an acid carbonic acid and it's a weak acid if you had a
00:28:31.320carbonated beverage you drink it but it is an acid and so it changes the chemistry of the oceans
00:28:37.580and the oceans are naturally kind of alkaline for people who remember their high school chemistry
00:28:44.280they should have a ph of around 8.2 the surface waters of the ocean so we've already reduced that
00:28:50.520to around 8.1 and it's just going to continue to be driven down as we dissolve more and more
00:28:57.160CO2 in the water so as the water becomes more acidified it's not becoming acidic but it's
00:29:03.340becoming acidified and when you think about it changing the chemistry of the ocean if you're a
00:29:10.000marine creature is a really big deal because marine creatures only interact with the rest of
00:29:16.660the world through their contact with the water so it's akin to changing the composition of the air
00:29:23.000for us and you can imagine that that could have some pretty serious consequences and in terms of
00:29:28.720what we could do about it there's really only one thing that we can do because there's nothing you
00:29:36.100can do to prevent the oceans from taking up co2 once we put it into the air that's just a really
00:29:42.240fundamental geophysical process. So the only thing that we can do to prevent the oceans from
00:29:48.100taking up more and more CO2 is stop putting it into the air. I don't think anyone has come up
00:29:54.780with, even in theory, a different solution. And do you think that this mass extinction
00:30:02.500and all the human meddling with the Earth that has brought it about could have such profound
00:30:08.020effects that earth no longer will be able to host such a diverse array of complex life forms
00:30:13.540or would we just expect a new and different cast of characters well i mean i think that
00:30:20.760all we have to go on when we look at mass extinction is the fossil record and that is
00:30:27.720as i said that's a kind of a scratchy mirror because it the record is in many cases old in
00:30:34.520many cases sort of patchy and then you know obviously involves as you know we were talking
00:30:39.560about before a whole different groups of organisms that simply don't exist anymore so you know we
00:30:45.900don't necessarily have a good analog and in fact one of the phrases that you see more and more in
00:30:52.360scientific literature is this idea of a no analog future so we are going into a future in which
00:30:59.000in certain sort of geochemical sense, I guess, almost, there's no analog, there's just nothing
00:31:06.340you can find in the fossil record that is a very good parallel to what the planet's going to be
00:31:12.560like. But if you look at the mass extinctions of the past, one thing that's clear is that it takes
00:31:20.280a long time for biodiversity to rebound just because you're speeding up. Extinction doesn't
00:31:25.940really mean that you're speeding up evolution you're opening up a lot of ecological you know
00:31:31.420what are sometimes called ecological niches um but the process of evolution which is a
00:31:36.260random process of you know genetic mutation does i mean some people might argue i suppose in some
00:31:43.060ways that it does get speeded up in the sense that you do have all this empty space out there
00:31:48.240for organisms to fill but you know the process of mutation probably doesn't get sped up so
00:31:53.520So, you know, and in some sense, evolution remains, you know, fairly constant.
00:31:57.680And so what we see when we look at that is it takes really millions of years for biodiversity to rebound.
00:32:04.500And if you actually succeeded in an extinction that rises to the level of a major mass extinction, then yes, absolutely, you'd expect a new cast of characters many millions of years from now.
00:32:16.860It wouldn't be something that humans, our own species, which presumably has its own lifetime of roughly a million years, we wouldn't be around to see it, but that's at least what you would expect to see in the eventual fossil record.
00:32:46.860Story let me live, the stars are known and fixed for all children.
00:33:02.300Story a report, rush right past the world to the single world.
00:34:49.940We're here with Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Colbert.
00:35:03.600You were involved in research in Peru, tracking the ability of trees to respond to warmer temperatures
00:35:09.180and extend their range uphill into the cooler altitude of the Andes.
00:35:13.900What did that research turn up? Are the trees able to migrate, in a sense?
00:35:19.940Well, I was just tagged along with a bunch of scientists who have been going to the same area and have laid out a very intricate series of plots that they've been looking at now for several years to try to, as you say, figure out how are tree communities responding to climate change.
00:35:41.080And what they have found is that different trees, different groups of trees respond differently.
00:35:49.240So some trees are very responsive to climate change, and they have moved upslope. So obviously trees can't move, but they can put out seeds, right, which are then going to sprout and survive at higher and higher elevations. That's sort of what you would expect if you're just doing a really back of the envelope sort of ecological calculation.
00:36:14.980So some trees have moved almost as fast as temperatures are rising,
00:36:21.040and they're rising very, very quickly in the Andes.
00:46:28.500Where do you think our efforts will be best directed for conservation?
00:46:35.060Well, I think our efforts would be, you know, and I, once again, I really try to preface it whenever I offer an opinion like this by saying, you know, this is not really my opinion. It's an opinion I've heard from experts in the field.
00:46:52.900I don't want to say it's universally shared by experts in the field, but I think it's a very commonly voiced opinion, and I find it pretty compelling.
00:47:02.300And that is this idea that we should really try to be preserving to whatever extent we have intact tracts of forest.
00:47:14.520And also, same thing would go for the marine realm, same thing would go for savanna, whatever ecosystem we're talking about.
00:47:22.900To the extent that you have large, intact ecosystems or semi-intact, because that may be the best we can do these days, to try to preserve them.
00:47:36.620I mean, I think that the idea that we're going to overcome one kind of vast manipulation of the planet with these little insulency, you know, let's move this plant here or this animal there and see how it goes, are really kind of ridiculous, to be honest.
00:47:54.020Because one thing that we really shouldn't have learned about the natural world is it's pretty unpredictable and it's hard for us just looking at one variable or even a hundred variables, you know, to know what will actually happen because the natural world is arrived at by this interesting process of trial and error that is evolution.
00:48:14.740So I think that, and this has been voiced by many people, having as many large, intact forests as possible that have some form of connectivity, that's a big buzzword these days, in conservation.
00:48:29.360so because everything's on the move as we discussed in terms of either upslope or to
00:48:35.160higher latitudes they need to be able to get to where they would go that also gets to this
00:48:41.980question of well some species will follow the temperature what's known as the isotherm some
00:48:46.680will follow rainfall so we need to sort of let them go as it were where they want to go and the
00:48:54.780other point is obviously to try to preserve as many lineages as possible and some people
00:49:01.840EO Wilson talks about this moment that we're in right now as a kind of a as a bottleneck where
00:49:08.420we possibly have the maximum number of people on earth certainly that there have ever been and
00:49:15.040maybe that there ever will be so we take up a lot of resources as people and if you can get as much
00:49:22.500of the world's biodiversity through this moment and eventually perhaps and this is the most hopeful
00:49:27.660thing that you could think of you know there'll be a time when the human population starts to
00:49:32.720decline you know just for natural reasons that we stop having as many kids we go through this
00:49:37.720bulge sort of and our impacts also decline and maybe there will be more space just you know
00:49:43.600sort of sheer physical and ecological space for some of the species and if we've managed to get
00:49:48.780and through what is right now a very bad time
00:49:51.900and what will probably be in coming decades a very, very bad time,
00:49:56.080then maybe you will have done the best you can in really bad times.
00:52:31.980That sort of gets back to the point we were talking at the very beginning, which is we don't know what's happening to a lot of the species on Earth because we're not really keeping track of them.
00:52:41.820But yeah, industrial agriculture is really a huge water use, as you point out.
00:52:49.040But also, I think even maybe more significantly, it's conversion of very big tracts of land to monocultures.
00:52:56.600obviously when you're converting a big tract of habitat whatever it was into one thing corn soy
00:53:04.740whatever it is uh and you're a creature that can't live off that well then you're you know
00:53:10.200you're just out of luck so you just have to either have some other place to go or you're going to die
00:53:16.880out and now another thing that we do with monoculture agriculture and agriculture in
00:53:21.600general that I think is proving really damaging and destructive. People are talking about this
00:53:28.160second coming of Silent Spring as we have developed a whole new generation of pesticides.
00:53:34.780We may really regret having spread all over the U.S. and Europe and seeing really significant
00:53:41.020impacts on insect populations. And when you start to see your insects going, it's probably a pretty
00:53:47.780bad sign. Yeah, and I'm wondering, there is still debate about climate change and the Anthropocene
00:53:55.740extinction, and somehow people are denying our implication the whole thing. Now, your books have
00:54:02.700had a huge reach already and have earned you a Pulitzer in nonfiction, and they can be had as
00:54:08.380audiobooks as well. So how have your books been received by the press and the public with your
00:54:13.880unequivocal stance on climate and human-driven extinction. Have they brought about any hostilities
00:54:19.820or debunking efforts? Well, you know, as we speak right now, Obama is in Alaska talking about
00:54:29.140climate change in the Arctic. And I think that simple climate change denial is becoming
00:54:37.520harder and harder to sustain. It's simply irrefutable that the climate is changing.
00:54:43.880It's changing in exactly the ways that were predicted. So you really, really have to go to
00:54:49.500fantastic lengths to explain what's going on without referring to, you know, what are just
00:54:55.880basically the facts. But, you know, there's levels and levels of denial as to where there's
00:55:02.260just people sticking their fingers in their ears. So even if, you know, what they believe is
00:55:06.580important but what they do is also important so even if you say well i think climate change is
00:55:12.020the problem or maybe it isn't whatever your attitude is if we're not voting for some really
00:55:17.380pretty drastic policy changes then you know it doesn't really matter whether people quote unquote
00:55:24.420climate change i don't like to use that um phrase because it's sort of like you know do you believe
00:55:29.680in the Loch Ness Monster and that's really not the phenomenon that we're talking about
00:55:33.540And we're just talking about basic geophysics here.
00:55:38.580But once again, all that being said, I got a surprisingly positive reaction to both of the books.
00:55:44.440I did not get a lot of pushback from people.
00:55:48.060You know, there always were the people sort of trolls on the Internet or whatever,
00:55:52.060but I got an overwhelmingly positive response to both books.
00:55:56.580I'm also wondering, where can people go to find more of your writing?
00:56:00.220Well, I write mainly for The New Yorker.
00:56:03.020So if people want to find some of the articles that, you know, went into the book or a piece I did out of New Zealand,
00:56:11.740which we talked about, the invasive species of New Zealand, if they go to the New Yorker website, they can probably find those.
00:56:19.660Well, I'm so grateful for the immense amounts of information you have sifted through to put these books together
00:56:25.840and the many laps around the globe you have made
00:56:28.500to get the first-hand narratives you've brought us.
00:56:31.200So thank you so much for all your work,