00:10:43.500Blow Gabriel, blow that trumpet, come and easy, tell everybody, my God say, that they got to meet, oh blow Gabriel, oh blow that trumpet, loud and louder,
00:23:00.920I love the vision of an ecologist going, whoa, this was not what I expected.
00:23:26.400This was not what was in the textbooks.
00:23:29.060And honestly, I think that gives me the most hope when thinking about restoring ecosystems is that we don't know and we're not in control of how nature replenishes.
00:23:43.660in a way of course I see that the earth was doing quite fine without us before we came on the scene
00:23:53.340and that so many humans have created such incredible disruptions to these systems
00:23:59.640and then on the other hand the book Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson really describes how humans
00:24:07.920were able to interact with the landscape and actually create more biodiversity by tending
00:24:12.140the wild so there's these two different views on that and then fast forward to now and we're
00:24:19.840dealing with massive pollution and clear cuts and just devastation and I'm launching this one
00:24:27.660million redwoods project where I'm not so interested in restoration ecology per se I'm
00:24:33.960interested in renewal ecology or the idea of how to promote as much biodiversity by replanting
00:24:40.680as possible in these places that are so devastated that the soil has been stripped of its nutrients
00:24:48.820and the canopy is gone and you know how to replace as much biodiversity as possible for a changing
00:24:54.140climate but also knowing that where is that point where you go and nurture and then you step back
00:25:00.800I guess this is kind of a two-part question of looking in the past and seeing when humans actually
00:25:06.940were ecosystem engineers in a positive way? And then how do we learn from that in today's world
00:25:14.040when we are dealing with the Anthropocene in just so much degraded land? The first thing to say is
00:25:20.540that it's not strictly true in my reading of it that the human interaction with nature enhanced
00:25:28.640diversity. What it tended to enhance was abundance, that there were certain species that we wanted to
00:25:35.260favor in our hunter-gatherer past because they were of use to us and so we tended to manage to
00:25:43.480tend to garden the the living world in order to enhance the preponderance of those species
00:25:50.900and in certain cases for instance with the Mebangokri and the Amazon they moved in trees
00:25:57.540which weren't growing in an area and did a sort of very very extensive forest gardening sort of
00:26:03.420putting in islands of trees they called apete in the savannah areas which gradually fused into
00:26:10.180rainforest but you're not necessarily enhancing diversity there as changing the the composition
00:26:17.040of species but you're certainly enhancing the abundance of certain species so I'm just a bit
00:26:22.520concerned that I feel the issue's been somewhat overplayed that we sort of have this vision of
00:26:28.440people actually making the planet more diverse well you know that's that's difficult for us to
00:26:34.040do because we don't operate at evolutionary time spans and in fact I think we were doing something
00:26:39.120slightly different and the truth is you know and it's an uncomfortable truth and a truth I find0.52
00:26:46.140very difficult because I've worked for many years of my life with indigenous people and0.97
00:26:51.040indigenous people have helped me to form my world view that our engagement with nature has1.00
00:26:59.800seldom been a harmonious one and in fact you can map the arrival of homo sapiens
00:27:06.540in different parts of the world by the sudden collapse of large animal populations in fact
00:27:13.260it's a far more accurate way of mapping than finding the presence of humans because when we
00:27:18.340first turn up for instance in turtle island we have very low numbers leave very few artifacts
00:27:25.380behind you know you might if you're extremely lucky find early clovis flints in a few locations
00:27:32.120and you think okay this is the earliest sign of human beings here so this shows us when human
00:27:37.700beings arrive but actually human beings might have been there for several hundred years before
00:27:42.100you see any evidence of their presence because what they leave behind is so thinly scattered
00:27:47.660but what you see in the paleontological record rather than the archaeological record
00:27:53.660gives you a much clearer view of when people turn up because you'll see these
00:27:57.820tremendous numbers of very large animals the megafauna is the default state of all ecosystems
00:28:05.140all over the world ecosystems were dominated by huge animals so for instance in your continent
00:28:11.840there were short-faced bears twice the size of grizzly bears with enormous teeth and fangs who
00:28:19.700were specialized seemed to be specialists in driving giant American lions and saber-tooths
00:28:26.220giant saber-tooths off their prey there was a bird with a 26 foot wingspan there were nine
00:28:32.360foot pacific salmon with fangs there were giant bison there were the giant ground sloths there
00:28:38.840were loads of different species of elephant and mastodon and gomphothere and mammoth there was
00:28:45.940just an extraordinary range of mind-blowing creatures a beaver six foot long i mean it just
00:28:53.080goes on and on armadillos the size of small cars and you just see this remarkably rapid
00:29:00.060disappearance of those species and it's the same elsewhere it's the same in madagascar it's the
00:29:05.540same on all the oceanic islands it's same in europe for that matter where where the sort of
00:29:11.360modern humans turn up displacing the previous human populations and all the megafauna goes as
00:29:18.280well and that sort of sudden break in the fossil record and in the animal remains shows us when
00:29:26.360people turned up so you know we were not good news anywhere now of course it is the case that
00:29:32.100after a while after the initial phase of massive destruction people settled down people began to
00:29:38.760recognize environmental limits the limits became clearer because there wasn't this tremendous
00:29:44.500abundance of huge naive prey that people could just walk up to and stick a spear into and people
00:29:52.120realized that they had to live much more lightly and so there were a lot of social codes developed
00:29:56.980by people but you know just as we have a hazy view and often a distorted view of ecosystems
00:30:04.880because of what we saw when as Europeans we first turned up somewhere we have a very similar
00:30:11.480hazy and distorted view in terms of what we saw as Europeans when we turned up in other people's
00:30:18.220lands so a classic example of this Francisco Ariana the first European to go down the Amazon
00:30:24.900and he described these massive cities beside the amazon with 100 000 people or more vast earth
00:30:32.220ramparts with the land cleared all around and people farming highly sophisticated farming
00:30:38.420systems highly stratified societies with a big division of labor and then he completed his
00:30:45.780journey came back wrote it all up 40 years later the next lot of european explorers went down the
00:30:52.660amazon and they said this guy was a liar there's nothing nothing here it's just it's just forest
00:30:57.780there's no people there's no cities he's just making it all up he was just trying to big himself
00:31:02.500up by describing these fake civilizations that he claims to have found well it wasn't until the 1980s
00:31:08.620that archaeological evidence reveals that he was actually correct these cities were there but what
00:31:14.780had happened between his arrival and the arrival of the next europeans 40 years later was that
00:31:21.240diseases had passed down the trade routes from the caribbean european diseases things like common
00:31:27.580cold smallpox measles were absolutely lethal to the native peoples of south america and had
00:31:35.600completely wiped out those civilizations and that the hunter-gatherer peoples who by the time you
00:31:42.580know 40 years on were living in the vazia flood plains of the amazon amongst the giant trees which
00:31:49.060had then grown turn out in many cases to have been the remnant populations that had previously
00:31:55.720been in great civilizations and that the only people who survived were those who fled into the
00:32:02.200wild and lived as hunter-gatherers where they couldn't be infected through the transmission
00:32:07.560caused by close contact within cities and so the hunter-gatherers who we see in I mean some parts
00:32:15.220of the Amazon have always had hunter-gatherers, others, those hunter-gatherers are actually
00:32:20.000the post-apocalyptic remnant population of what had once been a great civilisation.
00:33:34.180to detail out what it looks like to be in relationship to land at this point
00:33:57.580of modern humanity in the Anthropocene because of course we can look back at these histories that
00:34:03.960are honestly just horrifying and now we're at a place where we can choose to rewild we can choose
00:34:11.660to renew these lands so how do you see this relationship for modern humans of being able to
00:34:20.280involve ourselves engage with the land but also when do we step back well there are opportunities
00:34:29.540here you know in any crisis there's there's horror and fear but and threat but there's also opportunity
00:34:37.500and what we've seen happening in many parts of the world including in the americas and in europe
00:34:47.300is large areas being vacated by farmers and this is the result of globalization now you know we
00:34:54.360might like or not like the globalization of the food supply and there's many real problems with
00:35:00.920it but one thing it has done is to make places which are marginal for agricultural production
00:35:07.200no longer economically viable to farming and in particular these are places with where livestock
00:35:15.520has been produced at a fairly low level and places where actually there's a very high proportion of
00:35:21.860destruction to production. I mean grazed livestock are turns out to be a phenomenally inefficient way
00:35:27.620of using the land. So we consume on average 81 grams of protein per day and one gram of that
00:35:36.020comes from grazed livestock but livestock grazing occupies twice the area worldwide that crops
00:35:43.280occupy. So you can see what a fantastically inefficient land use this is and in many places
00:35:49.660it just can't be sustained except with farm subsidies and when the subsidies go the farming
00:35:55.040goes and and that's a tragedy for the farming communities but it means that suddenly a whole
00:36:01.660load of land becomes available for nature and rather than allowing say the forestry industry
00:36:07.880to move in there or the mining industry or some other form of extractive and destructive industry
00:36:14.120that's the time where we should say wait a minute this is time to give something back
00:36:19.220to this planet we have ravaged and destroyed to such an extent here now is a time where we say
00:36:27.880let's mend let's renew let's bring life back to the barren wastes and allow it to re-establish
00:36:36.040itself and so there is a tremendous opportunity very large areas of land potentially becoming
00:36:42.620available and and this opportunity where it's grasped does amazing things and the classic
00:36:47.300example is in Patagonia where people like Doug and Chris Tompkins started partly buying up land
00:36:55.180started partly by negotiating with governments and with other landowners and have just created
00:37:01.380a fantastic network of national parks in which life has come bounding back and all sorts of
00:37:08.720species have been reintroduced re-established and this is now in both Chile and Argentina a great
00:37:15.840source of national pride that you know this is one of the few parts of the world where nature is
00:37:21.380actually doing better than it was before and suddenly people have realized actually we can
00:37:26.280do better as a result of this in terms of employment in terms of income we can actually
00:37:30.680make a lot more we can employ a lot more people with a nature-based economy than we were doing
00:37:36.760with our traditional extractive economies of sort of sheep ranching which is basically what was there
00:37:41.680before and this is a message that we can take to many parts of the world and say look you know we
00:37:47.160want to see rural communities thriving we want to see people continuing to make a living we don't
00:37:52.520want to see people collapsing communities being hammered by opioid addiction and suicide and all
00:37:59.660the terrible things afflictions that we're seeing taking place around the world so let's let's create
00:38:05.140a new economy but an economy that can be sustained indefinitely not an economy which is just taking
00:38:10.860what it can now and then the whole thing falls apart because there's nothing left to take
00:38:15.180which is basically the way in which rural areas worldwide have been treated we'll just exhaust
00:38:21.120the soil we'll exhaust the minerals we'll cut down the trees and then capital moves on leaving
00:38:27.100a wasteland behind a social wasteland as well as an ecological wasteland and then we can say to
00:38:34.820people look here's a better future a future that can be sustained indefinitely for you and for the
00:38:42.120living world that what is environmentally sustainable can also be economically sustainable
00:38:47.260this reminds me of one of the main themes in your new book out of the wreckage but essential to this
00:38:54.200vision is the reclamations of the commons and when I think about Chris and Doug Tompkins being able to
00:39:01.020purchase and support these large areas, these national parks, which in a way are the commons,
00:39:07.240it makes me think about the challenges of being able to re-inhabit the commons and, you know,
00:39:15.340whether that's land privatization or, you know, the state and the market in this broad economic
00:39:20.360sense. So I'm wondering if you could speak about how the restoration of the commons
00:39:24.800is really crucial as we navigate this path of collective remembering and rewilding.
00:39:29.840the first thing to do is to recognize and understand the commons and and it's amazing
00:39:35.920how little we know of them when we talk about the economy we talk about it as if it's only got two
00:39:43.080corners the the state and the market and broadly speaking if you're on the left you say you want
00:39:49.540more state and less market and if you're on the right you say you want more market and less state
00:39:53.780but in having these discussions we completely forget that actually the economy has four corners
00:39:58.820there's the state there's the market there's the household crucial part of the economy nothing else
00:40:04.620no other part of the economy could function without the household and because we don't0.95
00:40:08.500recognize it we devalue the role of women and the crucial economic work that they do which keeps0.99
00:40:13.780everybody else going and then there's the commons and people don't even know what the commons is
00:40:19.960you know everyone thinks they know what the state or the market is but but the commons once upon a
00:40:24.820time almost everything was a commons all our land was held in common our water our crucial
00:40:30.020resources our fish our forests a whole lot of it was in common but gradually those common resources
00:40:36.160were grabbed enclosed primarily by the market but also by the state with devastating consequences
00:40:43.100for people what a commons is is a particular resource which is managed and controlled by a
00:40:50.620particular community and managed in perpetuity that resource is inalienable it can't be sold
00:40:57.220it can't be given away and the aim of the community is to keep it going forever and then
00:41:03.060to share the product from that resource on an equal basis and as a result the rules and
00:41:08.940negotiations which the community creates are absolutely crucial they're an important part
00:41:15.180of the definition of a commons and what the commons is is is not capitalism and it's not
00:41:21.400communism it's something else entirely it's community management and community benefit on
00:41:27.480a shared and equal basis so the land was once held in common almost everywhere the concept of private
00:41:35.680land ownership was completely alien to people worldwide until the 15th century in Britain
00:41:42.300It was in England that it was invented and then it was spread through colonial conquest all over the world and then copied by other colonial powers and it became the dominant model.
00:41:53.760And now we can hardly conceive of being without it, but it's a very recent thing and a very alien thing to the whole of the rest of human history.
00:42:01.800And it's a highly destructive thing because when a commons is enclosed, not only is a community scattered and destroyed with devastating consequences.
00:42:11.700I mean, I've seen with my own eyes what's happened to indigenous people when they lose their land.