00:01:56.020So I'd like to start off with a foundational question.
00:02:00.140What does the old way of conservation look like, and why is it not working?
00:02:05.540For example, Yellowstone National Park.
00:02:09.020Well, you know, this is really, really on my mind quite a bit these days.
00:02:13.300So going to the spine of the continent to one of the major, of course, messages of the spine of the continent is that when we established protected areas like Yellowstone National Park 100 years ago, we thought we would put our arms around a protected area, limit human impacts within that protected area, and then we would be protecting the nature within that area.
00:02:36.640And what conservation biology figured out is that that doesn't work for nature.
00:02:40.860Nature needs to be connected in order to thrive.
00:02:44.300So I look at the connections of nature in two ways, horizontal and vertical.
00:02:49.760And this is kind of a false construct, but I think it sort of helps.
00:02:53.440And horizontal, to me, describes species movement across the landscape.
00:02:58.560So in Yellowstone, you have wolves and grizzly bears that they stake territorial ranges that
00:03:04.260are much larger than those parks can possibly contain.
00:03:08.980And in the case of the grizzly bear, we have about 660 grizzlies in Yellowstone.
00:03:13.460If those grizzly bears don't breed with others of their own kind in other populations that are farther north and up into Canada,
00:03:23.700then the grizzly bears in Yellowstone will have genetic inbreeding and they will go extinct.
00:03:29.020And wolves similarly need to come and go in the park and interbreed with other wolf populations to keep their genetic viability.
00:03:37.160and wolves especially those top carnivores typically mountain lions are
00:03:44.040like this and jaguars are like this they need very large territories because they
00:03:48.540need to go out and stake new grounds away from their natal home so that's
00:03:56.100horizontal across the landscape and that's very difficult right because we0.86
00:04:00.160have all these roadways we have human habitations we interrupt the ordinary
00:04:04.820the thousands of millions of years that these animals had this place to themselves.
00:04:10.640But we've also interrupted the vertical interconnections between species.
00:04:16.180So going back to Yellowstone, you know, there's this really fantastic case study of species
00:04:22.600interactions between the wolf and the aspen, the cottonwood and willows, the vegetation
00:04:29.900of Yellowstone and then everything in between especially the ungulates or the browsers and
00:04:36.940that's the elk the deer and the cattle and when you have paradoxically it might seem when you have
00:04:42.620wolves on the landscape you actually are protecting the greenery more because the the browsers don't
00:04:49.660eat it all the way down to the ground they look over their shoulders every two minutes to see if
00:04:54.580wolf is coming and they keep moving. And this movement allows the greenery to grow sufficiently
00:05:01.440that then beaver, for example, can use it to create their lodges and their dams. And when
00:05:08.120beavers do that, they slow the flow of water through the waterways and many more native fish
00:05:15.300can thrive there. Many more species of bird come in, reptiles, amphibians, bugs. The impact goes
00:05:22.340all the way down into the soil. So when you have wolves on the landscape, you actually are
00:05:27.560sequestering more carbon in the soil. And this is where the biological carbon cycle, where you're
00:05:35.180having animals eating animals, eating plants, intersects with the atmospheric and geological
00:05:41.500carbon cycles. So the atmospheric carbon cycle, of course, being where we're experiencing climate
00:05:46.860change and then the geological carbon cycle where we have our very long processes like
00:05:53.440uplifting of mountains but you know we are taking stuff out we're taking this fossil fuels out of
00:06:00.100the geological carbon cycle and putting it up into the atmospheric carbon cycle which is disturbing
00:06:05.800the biological carbon cycle and there you have your unholy mess that we find ourselves in now
00:06:11.980so this is also you know brings up this point there's been a lot of talk around here recently
00:06:18.640the last couple of weeks about jonathan franzen's article in the new yorker recently in which he
00:06:24.420sort of decried the focus on climate change as distracting people from from more immediate
00:06:31.660conservation goals and um i think he has a point you know we do focus so much on on climate change
00:06:38.900that it's almost as if that's our only problem it's not our only problem in fact EO Wilson just
00:06:45.360two weeks ago at Berkeley he was at a conference for the national parks and he said he basically
00:06:52.540addressed this issue and he said you know if we only change the atmospheric carbon cycle
00:06:59.160disturbance of carbon of of climate change we still will have an ecological meltdown
00:07:07.520because we're experiencing a sixth mass extinction of plants and animals and this biological meltdown
00:07:16.300he points out is is fast accelerating and if we lose the species we lose the whole system
00:07:24.060so if you just fix climate change you don't fix the problem of extinction because we're really
00:07:30.460mostly losing plants and animals to habitat loss but then this is all complicated because climate
00:07:36.080change actually changes habitat. And this is something you see in the ocean. So the ocean is
00:07:42.720becoming inhospitable to some species that have lived there. We have this massive sea star die
00:07:48.480off going on here, right off the coast of the entire west coast. It's partly due to climate
00:07:55.380change. There's no doubt about it. It's too much CO2 in the water. And so this is where we can't
00:08:01.500really uncouple climate change from habitat loss it's all happening but we do have to approach
00:08:06.900both things at the same time but the spite of the continent is really about how we understand
00:08:13.320species extinctions and what to do about them and what to do about them is to connect and keep
00:08:20.140restore connections that have been lost between habitats and on a horizontal level so that can
00:08:27.160sometimes mean making a highway overpass so that large carnivores can get from one place to the
00:08:31.860other. And it also means healing those connections in a vertical sense between species. So that means
00:08:38.720in some cases, and there's no one size fits all in nature, but in some cases, as in Yellowstone,
00:08:44.940it meant bring back the wolf to bring back the health of the river. I mean, it's just kind of
00:08:51.320wild, how nature is so deeply interconnected. Wow, that was beautifully said. Thank you for
00:08:59.360speaking on behalf of the necessity of biodiversity. And now I'd like to move on to
00:09:06.040another foundational question. What is the spine? And can you take us through some key points of
00:09:12.540its history regarding the Homo sapien migration and the geographic territorial understanding of
00:09:20.080this area? Well, I'm so delighted to, because it's just really this epic, you know, landscape story.
00:09:27.480So the spine of the continent refers basically to the whole Rocky Mountain Cordillera, which is this
00:09:33.000huge mountain range that extends from Canada and up in the Yukon all the way down into Mexico.
00:09:39.800And it really defines the entire continent of North America. And actually, then if you go down
00:09:45.580into South America you've got the Andes that do a similar thing in defining South America and
00:09:52.100there's really kind of a whole connectivity between North and South America along these
00:09:56.160mountain ranges. So about approximately and this is always paleontologists and archaeologists are
00:10:02.600always moving this this marker around but approximately say 13 to 14,000 years ago
00:10:09.980the first humans came over to North America from across the Bering Strait.
00:10:16.940There seems to have also been some humans who came on boats around South America,
00:10:22.880the Panama Canal in those days, and started to inhabit North America.
00:10:29.040And there were several pulses of people, and some came and went.
00:10:34.060i think that you know we have the the oldest human settlements are in in arizona to the zuni
00:10:44.980people and then there were subsequent waves of people that came over and inhabited the whole
00:10:53.540continent with what we call you know native americans now so the thing about the spine of
00:11:00.000the continent that makes it very important for conservation biology is that first of all mountain
00:11:05.720ranges are very important for conservation you know if you go from here in california up to
00:11:12.380alaska you'll find a big range right a big range shift of the kind of vegetation you find
00:11:17.960if you go up a mountain range from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain you will
00:11:24.120find a similar elevational gradient of different kinds of biomes and so mountains have all sorts
00:11:32.500of different what what scientists call heterogeneous or different kinds of habitat built into them
00:11:38.460and especially with climate change as species are seeking to remain in a comfortable temperature and
00:11:44.320precipitation envelope for themselves mountains provide refugia they provide places where you
00:11:51.280can find microclimates if you're a species that needs one also the the continental divide there's
00:11:57.820sort of the heart it's called the crown of the continent is up in canada where there's a confluence
00:12:03.880of river riverways that go to the east and the west and the north and the south and then the
00:12:11.060continental divide this waterway comes down it's really kind of it's the central nervous system of
00:12:16.860the continent. And here along the spine of the continent in the United States and in Canada and
00:12:23.240Mexico, because it is so rich in biodiversity, you still have these iconic species in many places
00:12:29.920that have been removed or extirpated in other parts of the country. So you still have wolves
00:12:36.340and grizzly bears and wolverine and all sorts of creatures in the spine of the continent,
00:12:42.720especially toward the northern part that you don't have anywhere else um so when you know in my book
00:12:50.560i profiled michael sulle who is considered the father or grandfather of conservation biology
00:12:57.440and he was one of a team of people really of big name names including eo wilson paul earlick
00:13:04.260jared diamond uh reed nos is lesser known and he deserves a lot more credit than he gets
00:13:09.980For these guys figured out that what nature needed to do was to be connected in order to be protected.
00:13:18.560And then Michael was really impatient to actually save nature and not just talk about how to do it.
00:13:25.980So he founded Wildlands Network, what's now called Wildlands Network, with Dave Foreman.
00:13:30.700And Dave Foreman, and with Reed Noss, Dave Foreman was kind of a notorious eco-warrior who, he was a disciple, basically, of Edward Abbey's, who you might know from some of his wonderful books, including, what's the name of his desert one?
00:13:53.980So they said, we've got to connect up landscapes.
00:13:57.660And so Wildlands Network, which is this teeny tiny NGO, non-profit, still tries to make connections and support the idea of connectivity along the spine of the continent.
00:14:09.700And they also train their attention on so-called other mega linkages on the continental United States.
00:14:16.660So if you were to look at a map of the United States, and if you go online, Wildlands Network, you can see on their website where some of these other mega linkages are.
00:14:25.800There's one along the Appalachian Mountains on the East Coast.
00:14:30.340There's one that goes horizontally kind of across the top of our United States and the bottom of Canada.
00:14:38.340And then another one, I don't think is on their map, another one here in California.
00:14:43.600We really have a Pacific Wild Way here along the Pacific Coast Trail.
00:14:49.140So these are places where plants and animals have gravitated to because there's shelter, there's a lot to eat, there's water.
00:14:58.880And so those are the things that plants and animals need, and that's where they have been protected the longest.
00:15:05.460Humans have built in the valley bottoms, and we've disturbed habitat in many more places,
00:15:11.780but we can't build the same way in mountains, but we can in valley bottoms.
00:15:15.560So there's more left of the mountains to protect.
00:15:20.540So that's sort of the blueprint is the spine of the continent.
00:15:25.040And in terms of the United States and the reason why I chose to focus the book on the spine of the continent
00:15:32.300is that really we have more hope of actually connecting the spine of the continent
00:15:37.880than we do some of these other megalinkages because it's a bigger landscape.
00:19:59.500They have more influence than they should because of the way the political situation is in the Western states.
00:20:06.700But I think if you took the idea of the healthy landscape, needing a top predator on it, and told that story, or as I tell it in The Spine of the Continent,
00:20:19.720You took all of the people in Denver, Colorado, who have PhDs, who are super educated and aware and environmentally sympathetic, and you told them what was at stake here.
00:20:35.740When you take the top predator away, degrade the ecosystem, it becomes very susceptible to climate change, to flooding, to fires.
00:20:46.780it does not sequester carbon well you lose biodiversity when you lose that top predator
00:20:53.360if you got all the people who are really capable of understanding this
00:20:57.900to even get have that concept i think you'd see a political shift instead of trying to argue with
00:21:04.320the ranchers which is a lot of what some conservation organizations do um let's try to
00:21:12.260educate the broader populace in places like Denver, which have a big number of a highly
00:21:19.960educated population. This is something where I see citizen science as also really helping to
00:21:28.160give a big revision to how conservation nonprofits approach their work. Because citizen science can
00:21:36.720start in the schools you can have kids tracking wildlife and understanding then as part of their
00:21:44.000lesson plans why they need to learn how to track wildlife so we can understand where the wildlife
00:21:48.820is moving so we can help continue connectivity when you teach kids this stuff then they bring
00:21:56.320it home i mean it's really not the kids that need the lesson it's the parents so there's ways in
00:22:02.180which to not keep having the same discussion over and over again in the West in particular,
00:22:07.700but anywhere about how to approach these conservation issues.
00:22:13.260I'd like to hear your thoughts about how cattle grazing is affecting the West.
00:22:17.800Some believe that there's no problem with cattle on public lands and that grazing cattle
00:22:22.180can even sequester carbon, while others are fervently against cattle because they believe
00:22:27.540them to be detrimental to the landscapes, creating soil erosion and desertification
00:22:32.820while releasing methane. In one of my previous interviews, I spoke with Courtney White from
00:22:38.500the Kivira Coalition, who works with cattle ranchers in the southwest to conserve land and
00:22:44.920sequester carbon through specific grazing management. So what are your feelings on the
00:22:51.000whole cattle debate? I'd love for you to take us through the history of how cattle replaced bison
00:22:57.180and became the major industry in the West that it is today.
00:23:01.220You know, this is another subject where I feel like more people need to have more information
00:23:06.820about how our public lands are being used.
00:23:10.700I actually am a huge fan of Courtney White, and I mention him in The Spine of the Continent.
00:23:16.940And I also talk just briefly about something called the Marin Carbon Project,
00:23:21.380which is here in California in Point Reyes.
00:23:24.760And this is a project that's really monitoring how to increase carbon sequestration by using cattle.
00:23:33.900The thing is, is that what Courtney White is in favor of is a kind of cattle grazing called mob grazing, or what else do they call it?
00:23:45.880Mob grazing, or just you basically move your cows around.
00:24:18.620We needed people to stay put and have homesteads and create communities.
00:24:23.080But we needed to give them a way to make a living.
00:24:25.700So that was this huge influx of cattle so that people could become cattle grazers.
00:24:31.200This is partly what started our whole obsession with eating beef.
00:24:37.960And then that happened all over the West, even in places like the desert Southwest,
00:24:43.840where probably there were no big grazers on the landscape historically,
00:24:49.320and the landscape is simply not evolved to have cows on it.
00:24:55.000So Mary O'Brien, who is a wonderful scientist with the Grand Canyon Trust,
00:25:01.120she says, okay, there's just some places where we shouldn't have cattle.
00:25:05.380Other places you can have cattle, but we also need to graze them properly.
00:25:10.360And this is where they are not grazed properly.
00:25:13.440The negative way is that these sort of absentee ranchers who put cattle out on their landscapes and don't move them and let them eat, eat, eat down, they degrade waterways, they degrade the landscape, they eat all the way down to the ground so there's no forage for other animals, there's nothing for beaver to use to create dams, and they have their methane and they destroy waterways.
00:25:38.960That is something that could be, it really could be reformed through grazing regulations, forest service regulations, Bureau of Land Management regulations about how to graze on public lands.
00:25:55.560This is where I feel like if more educated people understood what was happening on our public lands, there would be a pressure on these agencies to reform the grazing practices.
00:26:08.240Now, it's just worth noting that when you read in the newspaper that the biggest single contributor to climate change is the livestock industry, that's really a different kind of cattle problem.
00:27:11.060And on the edges of ranches and within ranches, you'll have habitat.
00:27:17.080You'll have ungrazed patches of forest or meadows where lots of species can live.
00:27:26.340And if you were to put a ski resort on that ranch, that would all be wiped out.
00:27:31.560So we do want to try to keep ranchers ranching, but we also want to reform the way that they ranch.
00:27:39.200I really appreciate you elucidating the many sides of this complex issue.
00:27:44.240And to dive into the holistic grazing management a bit deeper, what are your thoughts on Alan Savory and his idea that grazing cattle can not only sequester carbon, but also stop desertification?
00:27:56.680I mean, one of my critiques of Alan is his lack of sensitivity to desert landscapes that never historically had big grazers to begin with.
00:31:56.240And when they learned how to hunt beaver, a trade, a fur trade started for those pilgrims.
00:32:03.140Now, there had actually been fur trading going on before the pilgrims came over.
00:32:09.020So the Dutch had been coming and harvesting beaver fur, and I think the French, there
00:32:18.720was a beaver trade that had started, and if you can remember, you know, 1600s, 1400s,
00:32:26.0401500s, 1600s, there was no central heating for anybody in those days, and it was cold
00:32:31.520in Europe, and the beaver has this incredible fur.
00:32:34.600So the beaver is one of these amazing animals that's kind of a bridge between a terrestrial or an earthbound animal and an aquatic or water animal.
00:32:45.020And it's partly because of this amazing fur that they have.
00:32:48.580They can swim and stay warm and they have these amazing adaptations.
00:32:55.680They have these like goggles that come down over their eyes so they can see underwater.
00:33:00.220you know back in the day it was customary for Catholics not to eat meat on Fridays as part of
00:33:07.360kind of a Lenten ritual but the Pope allowed you to eat beaver because it was felt that beaver were
00:33:15.320a fish because they swim so they weren't even considered a mammal which they are
00:33:21.780if you think about this I had never thought about this but if you're gonna if you're gonna
00:33:26.500to colonize a continent, right? You are going to need to have an economy to do that with.
00:33:34.880And we grow up, I think, learning about the tobacco growing in Jamestown and sugarcane
00:33:41.240and then cotton. And that's all really very important to the development of the United
00:33:45.560States. But really, much, much more fundamental was the fur trade. And over the centuries,
00:33:52.580the native americans the french the british the dutch and then eventually what we call the americans
00:33:58.300all interacted over this fur trade and at different times i mean for really long periods of time that
00:34:05.380trade was dominated by different people including native americans dominated the trade over and over
00:34:11.940again because they were the ones who really knew how to they knew where the beaver were and they
00:34:15.860really were good at killing them. It also, yeah, I think, enlightens us a little bit of not to
00:34:22.920romanticize Native Americans in such a way that, oh, they would never deplete natural resources
00:34:29.800the way we do. Well, they did, too. They depleted their beaver also. And what nobody was understanding0.96
00:34:36.260is that beaver on the waterways change everything. So nobody understood you take the beavers off the
00:34:43.820waterway you change the way the water works you change the hydrological carbon cycle when you
00:34:50.700take beaver off because beaver are doing this thing they're actually changing the flow of the
00:34:57.780water and that changes the temperature of the water it changes uh what can grow in it near it
00:35:05.460and it changes you know the species interactions on the waterway so by the time you can actually
00:35:13.200track the the fur industry moving west because what what they did is they extirpated or took out
00:35:19.500every single last beaver off of every waterway and then they the the trade moved west and by the
00:35:26.180time it got all the way out to california there was not going to be any more beaver left anyway
00:35:31.660they took them all off but you know miraculously kind of it was figured out like we're not going
00:35:39.500to have this to base our settlement our colonies on anymore we need something else we need another
00:35:47.060economy that's when the cattle came in so the cattle came in after the after the beaver but
00:35:53.120especially in the in the west here where we're really dealing with this horrifying drought
00:35:57.900bringing beaver back to the waterways could just make an enormous difference i mean it's not so
00:36:04.940easy to just do that because you know we have these dams and reservoirs and we have these
00:36:11.300delivery mechanisms of water to communities and we can't just stop those i mean we need to keep
00:36:16.780getting water to people to keep them alive but in many many places where there aren't where we're
00:36:22.600not purchasing water for humans like in utah you could put beaver back on waterways in utah
00:36:29.220all over the place and you would you would instantly basically it happens amazingly fast
00:36:35.720you would restore these degraded landscapes and as we are hit by climate change we need the more
00:36:44.940most resilient landscape possible that means landscapes that are have growing on them more
00:36:51.960native species more dense interactions between species you want more native vegetation which
00:37:00.220has been adapted to to climate shifts over millions of years in a way that you know invasive species
00:37:08.380probably haven't been you want invasive species come in when the the landscape is degraded so a
00:37:15.740landscape say that's degraded by over cattle grazing might be invaded by kentucky bluegrass
00:37:21.200so that outcompetes the native plants because the native plants can't grow up because they're
00:37:26.760constantly eaten down by the cattle so the kentucky bluegrass comes in and if there's a
00:37:32.920large weather event which we're having more and more of like with flooding the whole all the
00:37:37.700kentucky bluegrass is is rhizomous it's like a wall-to-wall carpeting of grass the whole thing
00:37:43.660just rips up in a flood and all of that that dirt underneath it all that wonderful soil is washed
00:37:50.320away. Whereas if that soil was planted, had native plants growing in it, they have much
00:37:57.460deeper root systems that hold the soil in place in a flood. Similarly with fire, invasive species
00:38:04.940are often, you know, kind of like adding gasoline to fire. They burn so quickly. The native grasses
00:38:12.840and vegetation, some of them are adapted to come back in a fire cycle. Others, you know,
00:38:19.320sometimes it's a little bit longer than we want to wait to see them again but even in
00:38:25.580Yellowstone where you can see the effects of the huge fires that happened a number of years ago
00:38:32.320there there's a succession that there's native plants come back it just it takes like 20 years
00:38:37.760to start seeing that and we don't like to see burnt landscapes but sometimes they're necessary
00:38:43.260so putting beaver back on the landscape would really really help the west in terms of
00:38:49.600holding on to water having the water that comes down from snow melt percolate more slowly through
00:38:56.400the landscape and sink into the landscape as it kind of comes down in rivers and creeks when you
00:39:02.900have degraded rivers and creeks the water hurtles down quickly and just gets to the ocean or gets
00:39:09.500dispersed way fast or it evaporates. And it's not as useful to the surroundings. So you want
00:39:17.100those beaver on the landscape to slow the water flow down and to have the water percolate through
00:39:22.680the whole system in a slower way to nourish the ground and everything that's on it. And the thing
00:39:28.740is, you know, beaver, they are a hardy species. They're a rodent. They have survived mass
00:39:36.060extinctions. They come back very easily. You can reintroduce them to places, and they do really
00:39:43.760well. So it's really a really good tool in the climate change toolkit to be pro-beaver.
00:39:52.700Why do you think beaver has not been reintroduced in places like Utah more fervently?
00:44:36.320The future is water. You are an orphan no more. You are the river's daughter.
00:44:53.100Now back to the spine. What is the current status of the project as a whole,
00:44:58.160and where are the efforts most concentrated?
00:45:00.840Well, right now, Wildlands Network, which is this little tiny nonprofit that really works to promote, and what Wildlands Network does is it convenes lots of other nonprofits along the spine of the continent who are all interested in connectivity.
00:45:18.760and they all try to coordinate their efforts
00:45:21.720and look out for places on the landscape that might need protection
00:45:26.260and nobody's quite paying attention to them at the moment
00:45:28.940and they try to hold hands across the landscape.
00:45:32.180A lot of the effort that I see is going into trying to change forest service rules
00:45:38.300kind of on an administrative level is really where the focus is at the moment.
00:45:43.140part of this is because of you know funding and non-profits they sort of have to go with
00:45:51.120where their their opportunities are and shift with that when i was researching the spine of
00:45:58.200the continent i i frankly i don't hide this i don't think that these non-profits can possibly
00:46:04.280save nature in the kind of time frame and on the kind of scale that is needed at the moment
00:46:10.320and when I was on the spine of the continent I was thinking what could possibly scale to address
00:46:18.180this loss of biodiversity at the level at which it is going on and that's where I came to citizen
00:46:24.840science and I participated in some citizen science projects on the spine of the continent and I saw
00:46:30.780that people of all walks of life were coming together
00:46:36.340to learn something about nature and to do something about it
00:47:45.680So what's happening is large carnivores, jaguars and ocelots are moving north from Mexico back and they're reclaiming some of their historic range.
00:47:58.600So jaguar used to be found as high as Monterey, California, not that long ago.
00:48:05.200so what the sky island alliance is doing is trying to see where are these animals moving
00:48:10.520and how can we protect those passages those corridors and with the data that citizen
00:48:18.060scientists have gathered about where animals are moving the sky island alliance has succeeded in
00:48:24.720getting plans underway for highway overpasses and underpasses and i see that's conservation
00:48:30.980happening. They actually have outcomes. That's a conservation outcome. I find that a lot of the
00:48:36.940administrative stuff going on with changing forest service rules is not really having a conservation
00:48:42.160outcome. We need to protect landscapes and species. We need to do that right now. And
00:48:49.400rulemaking is very important, but there's more urgent things to attend to, I think.
00:48:55.520but the thing about citizen science is that today with your smartphone you can take an observation
00:49:03.460like say of a mountain lion paw print and you can geolocate it date time latitude and longitude you
00:49:12.460can make a precise observation of where that exists and you can show that to somebody and
00:49:19.560that can be verified so it puts the power of darwin in your hands darwin went around you know
00:49:26.680to the south america to the galapagos and he noticed what species lived where and in what
00:49:34.560amounts and in what relationship to each other this is the question we are still asking we don't
00:49:39.800have that perfect information yet and this is what we need to know so that we can protect where they
00:49:45.800are and where they're going with climate change. So citizen science is a way for people to get
00:49:50.520involved. Wherever you live, you can look at citizensci.org. There's tons of programs. Right
00:49:59.300now, you can join something called inaturalist.org. You can get an account and you can start making
00:50:05.660species observations wherever you live. And you can take a look on inaturalist for projects
00:50:11.640because there's all kinds of different projects you could participate in on iNaturalist just with
00:50:16.820your smartphone or your iPad or with a camera and a computer that you would upload the photographs
00:50:23.020to later. I love how citizen science empowers us to take back the knowledge and ultimately
00:50:29.820the control of our homes and bioregions. It's so easy to feel debilitated with all of the
00:50:36.600destruction happening. But to have this tool, every person can be an integral part of conservation.
00:50:44.180It's just so exciting to imagine. You mentioned your new book is about citizen science.
00:50:50.640Could you give us a sneak peek? My new book about citizen science is focused a lot on California
00:50:57.420and the Bay Area because part of being an eco-citizen is the power of place. Where do you
00:51:05.100live? Who else lives there with you? What are the processes going on where you live? And you know
00:51:12.240what, we all live in places rich in species and rich in biodiversity and rich in historic
00:51:20.680species interactions that may not be here now, but may be possible to reintroduce. So I mean,
00:51:28.240And my new book is also just a journey for myself through kind of the hero's journey
00:51:35.000as Joseph Campbell framed it to try to understand how people can live, you know, profit both
00:51:44.600biodiversity and humanity at the same time.
00:51:47.240I have some despair at going through what E.L. Wilson calls this bottleneck that we're
00:51:52.680in right now of overpopulation and environmental degradation.
00:51:56.300But I do see that this bottleneck is also what Joseph Campbell would call the threshold, that the hero crosses over, and that we can change ourselves and how we orient ourselves to the world, to the earth, by becoming citizen scientists.
00:52:13.020I will say that I spent some time, I had an opportunity to really devise how citizen science could be used as a tool to achieve the spine of the continent.
00:52:23.320and here's my concept the spine of the continent is all about connectivity so what i would envision
00:52:30.620for the spine of the continent to kind of circumvent all of these political quagmires
00:52:35.100that people get into and trying to to change grazing practices or to try to do this or that
00:52:40.660is have some hubs in denver and tucson somewhere in canada where you had sort of citizen science
00:52:48.460central locations and people could come like let's say you did this in tucson and people could learn
00:52:54.120how to track wildlife but they could also learn how to watch for birds they could learn um how to
00:53:00.660use something called nature's notebook this is nature's notebook tracks phenology or the coming
00:53:06.220of spring and animals going in and out of hibernation and pollination all the interactions
00:53:12.140between nature this wonderful program called nature's notebook you can also just join that
00:53:17.760right today online allows you to do that. And then what I would like to see is have these hubs
00:53:25.480have visualizations on a website. So let's say it was Tucson and you could go onto your website and
00:53:31.180say, where are the ocelots today? Where are the jaguar? Where are the hummingbirds? And what's
00:53:37.820coming into bloom? Where are the invasive species? Is it the time of year that it's the most
00:53:43.780productive to try to mow that down right now. And then I think people would start to see patterns
00:53:50.260in nature themselves. They would connect the dots that, you know, sometimes scientists don't
00:53:56.100connect the dots between what's happening in one place and another, or between what's happening
00:54:00.620with one species and another. And we could keep tabs on that in real time. And then ultimately,
00:54:07.140what if you had a website where you could look at what's happening in Tucson, you could also look
00:54:11.660what's happening in Colorado what's happening in Montana and and start to make really bigger
00:54:17.260regional and continental scale observations so to give you an example of what that might reveal
00:54:23.100in Colorado we have a big problem for them because of climate change is causing snow melt
00:54:30.700to melt faster on the tops of the mountains so what that is doing is it's making spring come
00:54:37.620earlier because the flowers are cued to bloom when they get that water starting to melt so the
00:54:46.740trouble with that is that nobody gave the hummingbirds or the migrating birds the memo to
00:54:52.540come at a different time so they come when they used to come but now they're coming and they're
00:54:57.620sometimes missing their food source then there's a hard frost that happens in colorado and that's
00:55:04.240killing the buds that have come out because they thought it was spring already.
00:55:09.300And then, to add to this sort of devilish thing of climate change doing this,
00:55:16.100in years past, there's been this dust problem.
00:55:20.780So this is a problem originating in Arizona,
00:55:23.360where you have ATV activity and development breaking up the desert floor.
00:55:30.140the desert floor is covered with this this very delicate but very strong crust that holds the
00:55:36.660dust in place but when these atvs go over it it breaks it right they have these gigantic dust0.91
00:55:43.180storms in phoenix but that dust goes up into the atmosphere and it goes and lands on the
00:55:50.140mountaintops in colorado because it's dark it changes what they call the albedo or the
00:55:56.300reflectiveness of the snow. And just like, you know, when you're really hot outside, you want
00:56:00.440to take off your black shirt and have a white shirt on. The blackness actually makes the snow0.99
00:56:06.520melt faster. And that's when we start to have a global, a regional, continental, local, regional,
00:56:12.940continental conversations about how what we do in our local places have regional impacts
00:56:18.860and have continental impacts. And then that's how we start making the best decisions
00:56:24.020about how to manage our human activities