00:03:17.980and flying through across the east-west-oriented Chacabuco Valley,
00:03:22.680you'd be looking down on this little river,
00:03:25.060braided channel gravel bars of the Chacabuco River.
00:03:28.540It would look not dissimilar to similar-sized rivers
00:03:32.840that you would see in Alaska or Canada.
00:03:36.160And along the edges of the river, you'd see little patches of riparian forest.
00:03:41.840But the dominant ecosystem type there is this Patagonia steppe grassland full of bunch grasses and shrubby, prickly plants.
00:03:52.480And it would seem remarkably similar to parts of Montana or Idaho or Wyoming.
00:03:59.160In fact, the first time I got a chance to fly down there, I flew into the airport at Balmaceda and then had a six-hour drive along the gravel southern highway, the Carretera Austral, to get to the Chacabuco Valley.
00:04:13.660But when I got to the airport, I realized it smells like Wyoming, like it was like the same smell as Casper, Wyoming, you know, and because it's that same kind of Western bunch grass type habitat doesn't have sagebrush.
00:04:29.900It's a different suite of shrubby plants, but it really is remarkably similar to parts of the American West.
00:04:36.520But a few dissimilarities. Those big herds of grazing animals that you'd see throughout the Chacabuco Valley are not elk. They're not bison. It's winacos, the wild camel of South America.
00:04:53.120And the big birds you'd see soaring overhead are not golden eagles, but Andean condors soaring over the mountains.
00:05:03.240So it is a absolutely glorious and wild and wondrous country that has been the epicenter of a colonization story.
00:05:16.760It's not, again, dissimilar to what happened in the North American West, but just came later to the Americas.
00:05:25.560So does that give you kind of a bit of an idea of what this landscape is now?
00:05:31.960Yeah. Well, let me tell you what it was in 2004 when one of the philanthropies associated with Douglas and Christine Tompkins acquired the bulk of the Chacabuco Valley. It was one of the largest, if not the largest, private ranch or estancia in that region. It was called the Estancia Valle Chacabuco.
00:05:53.660It was close to 200,000 acres, and there were 50,000 sheep, and there were hundreds of miles of fencing, and there were very, very few Winacos, and every mountain lion that could be hunted, shot, poisoned, trapped, persecuted would be so.
00:06:12.120and the the land had been in effect sort of bound up colonized for agricultural production
00:06:21.220since the imposition of the frontier culture that got to that part of Chile really only only about
00:06:28.840100 years ago so it's a very recent era of colonization but the result of it was dramatic
00:06:36.580degradation of the grassland persecution of the wildlife
00:06:40.540soil loss through erosion and the imposition you know of this domestic
00:06:48.180agenda on an extraordinary and previously wild place so what happened
00:06:55.020in those intervening years from 2004 to now
00:06:59.120was this remarkable story of rebirth and rewilding
00:07:03.580as people tried to help nature heal in one particular place.
00:07:10.120Hundreds of people have been part of that story over that time period.
00:07:15.580And the result is this remarkable recovery of wildness.
00:07:22.020Hundreds of miles of ranch fencing torn out, the quick recovery of the grasslands, not total.
00:07:29.400I mean, it'll be a long period of time, but a faster recovery of the grasslands than was expected, and the recovery of wildlife populations, especially Winacos, and the conservation and protection of the apex predator region, of the region, the mountain lion or puma, instead of its persecution.
00:07:56.420I like to think of it, of that one little place is sort of like down payment, one down payment on the rewilding of the world.
00:08:04.340Thank you for sharing that with us and starting us off like that.
00:08:08.200And yeah, I've been learning more and more about large scale conservation projects.
00:08:14.660And what really stands out to me is that securing protection for vast swaths of land is no easy feat.
00:08:21.640You know, it's incredibly easy to criticize this process and recognize the shortcomings of capital C conservation and exclusionary conservation, as it has historically displaced many populations and distressed communities that have relied upon pasture and forest for their livelihood.
00:08:39.900Yet, as we find ourselves trying to protect some of the last vestiges of land, it's undeniable that large scale conservation is a tool that we have.
00:08:49.100So I wonder if you could share, how do you see the park system in Patagonia as an example of wildlands philanthropy that coalesces the powers of private ownership and government control to rewild precarious places?
00:09:03.620And how have you worked through some of these complexities and sought to balance the necessity of large-scale conservation while also acknowledging the social impacts?
00:09:14.220Well, wow, there's a whole lot there to chew on.
00:09:16.860So we could tease out pretty much each of those questions and spend an hour just on them.
00:09:22.800But I acknowledge, of course, you're precisely right that large-scale conservation is complicated.
00:09:35.720The particular tool that we're talking about here of conservation philanthropy, wildlands philanthropy, of private individuals or organizations acquiring private property for nature protection purposes, and in this case, repatriating it to the public as well as to the creatures that call that place home.
00:09:58.160That is how I define wildlands philanthropy.
00:10:01.120And that is a very important but limited tool in conservation history.
00:10:06.680In this place, it was applicable because this gigantic ranch that was being hammered was for sale.
00:10:16.120It was in the context of a society where there is kind of rule of law.
00:10:22.480private property ownership is possible and also relatively durable and enforceable.
00:10:29.840So it was a tool that was possible to use. And the people involved here, kind of the heroes of
00:10:38.380this story, Doug and Christine Tompkins, had the means, the private capital to do that. Now,
00:10:43.800this idea is not a new one. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Wildlands Philanthropy.
00:10:49.640And there are all kinds of stories in that book, from Grand Teton National Park to Acadia National Park to the Smokies, some of these most iconic public natural areas.
00:11:01.460Muir Woods, they're outside of San Francisco. Some of the most iconic public natural areas
00:11:07.600that we revere in the U.S. are the result of people using their wealth, their influence,
00:11:16.220and their energy, their passion to buy and save land. And in all those cases, to assure that it
00:11:23.020would remain in the public domain as opposed to keeping it as a private reserve. So in the context
00:11:30.700of Douglas and Christine Tompkins, for those people who don't know those names, they were
00:11:36.820very successful. Chris Tompkins was the former CEO of the Patagonia Clothing Company, one of
00:11:43.600the first employees under the owners of that company. And Doug Tompkins was a very successful
00:11:51.060American business person. He founded the North Face when it was just a little ski shop in San
00:11:56.980Francisco, sold that, and then was extremely successful with his first wife in growing the
00:12:03.100Esprit fashion company into a really a global powerhouse in the 1980s of fashion. And all the
00:12:12.360while was becoming more and more disgruntled with consumerism, and particularly with the fashion
00:12:17.900industry that he realized, as he later described it, that he was inculcating desire. At one point
00:12:23.680in the 1980s, you couldn't walk through an American town without seeing a teenager with
00:12:28.380a Esprit t-shirt on. He was creating a desire for something that really was unnecessary. He was
00:12:34.660helping to create consumerism. And when he had his ecological epiphany, he decided to essentially
00:12:42.680spend the last quarter of his life, the last 25 years of his life, as he used to say, paying his
00:12:48.200rent for living on the planet. And in a bit of capitalist jujitsu, after he'd sold his half of
00:12:54.800the Esprit company, he took his great wealth, endowed the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and then
00:13:00.900several other related family foundations and nonprofits, and began both granting to scrappy,
00:13:09.120biocentric, wilderness protection type NGOs, as well as started buying private land in the South,
00:13:15.900where he had mostly resettled within Chile and Argentina.
00:13:21.460And Doug, over the succeeding decades,
00:13:23.480Doug and Chris, through these philanthropies,
00:14:41.800Again, it's tricky. In the case of the landscapes where the Tompkins Conservation Projects have been located, and there have been many of them, but the three flagship parks are Pumaline Park in the Valvivian Coastal Temperate Rainforest Region of Chile,
00:15:02.560the Patagonia National Park in the Chacabuco Valley that we already discussed farther to the
00:15:09.020south and the Ibarra National Park in northern Argentina which is centered on one of South
00:15:16.800America's largest freshwater ecosystems the Ibarra Marshlands and there are many other
00:15:24.740parks that have been in that 13 successes. But those three flagships are ones that
00:15:33.560most closely embody the idea of this particular toolkit. Private wealth deployed into land
00:15:41.100acquisition, creation of related park infrastructure, so for public access, and then a
00:15:48.760donation to a national government, to a federal system of protected areas. In the case of
00:15:54.400Argentina, that's into the National Parks Administration, and into Chile, it's into a
00:15:59.540national park system, which is much, much weaker and much less funded. It's very much underfunded
00:16:05.940for a system of what are extraordinary ecological jewels. And of course, the hope is that over time,
00:16:15.300the public institutions, the institutional capacity to sustain and protect and conserve
00:16:21.880Those ecological jewels in Chile's national park system will will grow
00:17:21.880the downpour here in Washington has started and so I've listening to you as I'm watching the
00:17:41.580the rain pour outside thinking of these forests here on the Olympic Peninsula that have been
00:17:47.400so colonized and tortured over the past 100 150 years and to imagine
00:17:56.120what it would be like to rewild this place and so many places that have been so highly
00:18:04.040just i have a lot of words but uh destroyed and i want to talk a bit more about rewilding and
00:18:14.900you know, rewilding has been adopted in different ways according to different
00:18:18.780societal understandings. And to begin, I wonder if you'd share how you define rewilding
00:18:24.800and how and where you think this has been successfully done.
00:18:30.460I define rewilding very simply. At its most basic, rewilding is helping nature heal.
00:18:37.180It's an extremely simple concept to communicate, I think, if you lead with that.
00:18:46.320Arguably, the largest and most traumatic example of rewilding, if you think about rewilding as land that is growing more wild, the land community regaining wildness, the Adirondack Park of upstate New York, the northeastern temperate forest.
00:19:04.780If you looked at the last 150 years, if you could sort of watch over time and see how temperate forests have been shrinking all over the earth, where's the one place or one significant place where that story has been reversed?
00:19:18.780It's the northeastern U.S. temperate forest as it's been expanding, as that land was essentially colonized and then sort of abandoned for agricultural clearing as the soils played out.
00:19:33.340And then the idea of organized conservation in this part of the country really kind of accelerated in the late 1800s, the formation of the Adirondack Park, which is the largest protected area in the lower 48.
00:19:49.000The adoption of the forever wild clause in the New York state constitution, which protects those public forest lands within the Adirondack Forest Preserve as forever wild, with the strongest protection of any land use designation in the country, even stronger than federal wilderness area protection.
00:20:09.740So there's an example of the first component of an overarching rewilding approach, which I think is three-pronged.
00:20:20.800Rewilding can occur when, one, you protect particular places using the existing tools
00:20:29.980of protected areas designation, and protect those places for their wildness, not as places
00:20:38.380of sustainable timber production or forage production for livestock, talking essentially
00:20:48.500So protect places, that's the first part, and make sure that that protection, at least within the current kind of socio-political context, is as durable as possible.
00:20:58.900And there are a whole, you know, a lot of tools to do that.
00:21:01.460But public natural areas, including national parks, are arguably the most loved and most durable tool.
00:21:08.640And that's exactly why Doug and Chris Tompkins used that tool in the South with their projects.
00:21:14.580That's what they were shooting for, national parks.
00:21:16.580So the second part of rewilding is once you have that landscape, that stage for natural processes, it's helping natural processes recover, restoring wild processes and native species to the extent that is possible or to the extent that is necessary from active intervention.
00:21:38.600And then the third kind of wing of this triad of a rewilding approach to conservation is ourselves. It's rewilding hearts and minds.
00:21:47.780Because the only way that we ultimately will move toward this nature needs half or half earth vision for the planet, where we can imagine this future time when all the earth is wrapped in these beautiful blue and green ribbons of wildness when protected areas, protected incrementally, but knit up place by place and group by group and project by project into these ribbons of wildness around the earth.
00:22:16.880on land and the oceans the only way you get to that vision of at least half the earth
00:22:24.060protected for wild nature to flourish is if people's minds and hearts change
00:22:31.620and that's the rewilding ourselves component which is of course central to the work that you do
00:22:39.480through your podcast and other initiatives i'd like to discuss the differences between
00:22:46.140restoration and rewilding because restoration which has really gained a lot of traction in
00:22:51.720the united states has in my mind really been or what i've seen been co-opted by extractive industry
00:22:59.800and is now doing a great deal of damage for instance in the pacific northwest the united
00:23:05.640states i see a lot of greenwashing of restoration and a lot of times restoration projects are
00:23:13.120given a lot of grant money to basically just reopen roads for more logging or, you know,
00:23:19.380there's so many, I could really go on a monologue here about what I've seen, the damage that
00:23:24.220quote unquote restoration has done here. So I'm wondering, do you think rewilding is a better way
00:23:31.520to restore or have you seen these issues come up around restoration versus rewilding in your
00:23:37.980experience? First of all, I acknowledge and I share your fears and your general take on this
00:23:46.280because there is, I think your point is apt, these terms and methods can be co-opted for
00:23:55.480dangerous ends. The idea why I think rewilding is at least more powerful as an overarching meme
00:24:02.280now is because we're talking about not just sites, individual sites that have been trashed
00:24:09.040and need to be restored, which is noble, you know, if the ends are good, but to systems.
00:24:15.800We're talking about nature, natural processes being able to be reasserted across vast swaths
00:24:22.360of the landscape. So with some kind of restoration projects, you have a managerial mindset.
00:24:29.400It's just, you know, the tools or tactics may be different, but it's still putting people and manipulation in the driver's seat, as opposed to looking at an ecological wound and saying, how can we best serve the inherent intrinsic healing powers of nature here?
00:24:48.140So the natural metaphor here or analogy would be medicine.
00:24:54.740You know, when you go to the hospital and talk to your doctor and she gives you a treatment, a course of action, whether it's mild or highly interventionist, your doctor is counting on the body's intrinsic healing powers.
00:25:13.040And the medicine or the surgery or whatever it is, if it's more aggressive intervention, is there to serve that, but not to sort of require ongoing manipulation.
00:25:27.840At least one hopes. One hopes that one will get better and feel better and be vibrant and whole and healthy again.
00:25:34.480And so it is with biological systems. The goal of intervention should be to do the minimum, at least in my view, the minimum amount of intervention that is necessary for those systems, again, to be whole and healthy and intact and flourishing.
00:25:50.820And not to require ongoing intervention. And certainly not to sort of be a greenwashing for destructive activities because, oh, well, we're going to trash this place, but then we'll call in the restorationists and we'll fix it right up.
00:26:06.560That way gets you the ecologically depauperate, miserable places that are the blasted off mountaintops of Appalachia that have supposedly been reclaimed. And in fact, what is there is no, it will never be, and not for a thousand years be that beautiful intact diverse hardwood forest of Southern Appalachia again.
00:26:30.660this makes me think about shifting baselines of you know with restoration it's always trying to
00:26:37.840get back to something like a pre-colonial landscape where I feel like rewilding is a bit
00:26:44.960different than this trying to get back to something and then I think about of course
00:26:49.860climate change and conservation like everything else is also impacted by climate change and I
00:26:55.720would imagine rewilding as well, especially because it requires a, well, conservation
00:27:00.980requires a physical delineation of place and our understanding of place is becoming more
00:27:17.560Again, there's a whole lot to chew on there.
00:27:20.220And since I'm not trained as a scientist, I'm sure other people could give you a more astute and informed answer.
00:27:30.600But nonetheless, in my superficial way, I'll take a stab at it.
00:27:33.380And I'll do that by giving you two kind of contrasting examples of land conservation organizations trying to practice in their day-to-day tangible conservation work this idea of rewilding.
00:27:48.220Okay, so let's start with something at the small scale and then go back to Tompkins Conservation and working at a really large scale.
00:27:57.200Almost two decades ago, as a volunteer, I helped co-found a regional land trust in the Northeast.
00:28:03.340It's called the Northeast Wilderness Trust.
00:28:06.640And the current board president is the scientist Mark Anderson, who works at the Nature Conservancy and is a brilliant guy and a wonderful man.
00:28:16.220who is really the guru of climate resilience modeling related to land conservation targets.
00:28:24.220And this gets to the latter part of that question about the idea that no place is static in its assemblage of species.
00:28:33.920And with the acceleration of climate chaos, some places are going to fare better than other places to maintain wildness, to maintain ecological diversity, to be productive habitat for the creatures that call that place home, than other places will.
00:28:54.160And so if you're in the land conservation business, whether you're a local land trust or a regional group like Northeast Wilderness Trust or a huge international behemoth like the Nature Conservancy, as you decide which projects to work on, you better be incorporating as one criterion this idea of resilience.
00:29:16.800Is that landscape or seascape, is that area of the planet that you're likely to target your conservation efforts going to be more or less resilient in the face of climate chaos?
00:29:29.580So Northeast Wilderness Trust, even though it's a relatively small regional NGO, incorporates that, that modeling. And every time the team there is deciding on a particular, we want to work on this project in the Eastern Adirondacks or this project in Maine, it's being run through those models as one screen to help determine whether that is the best place to put organizational efforts.
00:29:56.520On the other scale with Tompkins Conservation, it's really interesting if you look at the 30-year history of Tompkins Conservation, this extraordinary track record of more than 14 million acres protected.
00:30:14.760There was initially almost no science brought to it.
00:30:20.520In terms of, you know, they didn't bring, Doug Tonkins didn't bring in teams of consulting biologists to look at the land around what became Pumaline Park.
00:30:31.560No, he flew over it in his little airplane, his little Husky or Cessna, and saw one of the great last intact wild temperate rainforests left on the planet.
00:30:42.220And he could buy it for 25 bucks an acre. And he had hundreds, you know, millions of dollars sitting in his bank account or in his foundation, you know, endowment. And he started doing that. He started buying large swaths of intact temperate Valdivian rainforest, ultimately assembled, you know, 700 plus thousand acres, that's Yosemite scale, and donated it in this parklands package, ultimately after he had died under the leadership of Chris Thompson.
00:31:12.220to become a national park other federal public lands were were incorporated and now it's basically
00:31:19.000a million acre wild sanctuary and one of the greatest reservoirs of intact carbon on the
00:31:27.220planet and it didn't it was it had nothing to do sort of with people going in and analyzing its
00:31:34.840ecological diversity and say well this is a good place to have a national park it was it was really
00:31:39.700based on conservation by opportunity and the huge vision that Doug had for what he might
00:31:47.040do for, you know, again, sort of using the private wealth that capitalism had brought
00:32:09.700The ecosystems are going to be shifting, but the more intact and the more heterogeneity that they have, you know, across elevational gradients, the more they're going to be resilient.
00:32:27.140And with Pumaline Park, you have a million acres there, protected forever, owned in common by the people, the nation of Chile, but open to everyone and protected for the creatures that, again, that call that place home.
00:32:41.440And it runs from the Pacific, from sea, you know, the sea, literally sea level, up to the crest of the Andes, across these elevational gradients.
00:32:51.080So it may be not only one of the great carbon reservoirs, it is likely to be one of the most ecologically resilient places of any protected area on Earth because of that ability for ecosystems to migrate uphill as temperatures warm.
00:39:03.000You know, right now, the Northeast Wilderness Trust has the opportunity to do all kinds of great conservation projects.
00:39:12.020You could right now, just on the cusp of starting a project to create the largest private wilderness area in the state of Vermont and continue a whole bunch of big projects in the state of Maine.
00:39:28.980The wild carbon that they store can only be sequestered if what happens? If that NGO raises several million dollars to complete the projects. Where does that money come from?
00:39:43.020That money will come from the current system that Doug Tompkins used to critique, the whole goal of which, the entire orientation of which is to commodify the natural world and take beauty and wildness and turn it into commodities for human use and profit.
00:40:01.380This is a tension. What is needed today that can help protect wildness is also coming from sources, those longer structural systems that privilege human beings and human and corporate profit over the interests of our cousins in the community of life, all the other wild creatures that live on the plane.
00:40:26.920oh thank you for speaking to these tensions it's something that i think a lot about in my own work
00:40:34.740with conservation and hearing the land really needing protection from development and commodification
00:40:43.260and also seeing that the business side of conservation is really complex and it um yeah
00:40:53.060it's it's it's not this purist fantasy you know it's like we're in this really
00:40:59.780uh there yeah there's exactly there's no purity you know there's which brings to mind the funny
00:41:07.320line you know the the one of the great land conservation leaders of american history in
00:41:14.560the last 50 years is patrick noonan pat noonan was a was the person leading the nature conservancy
00:41:47.920And he was happy enough to find dollars from whomever he could that then he deployed into land conservation projects.
00:41:57.300Now, I'm not saying that that is the right approach, but I'm saying it is one approach, and it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem.
00:42:10.300If you're in the moment trying to kind of fend off the worst excesses of this techno-industrial growth juggernaut, to get as much wildness and as much security as possible, as quickly as possible, you're going to use every tool and tactic that is available.
00:42:32.880And right now, our system in the U.S. is public natural areas and private natural areas, and on the latter requires private initiative and funding.
00:42:45.280And that means going to the people who have checkbooks that can help support that work.
00:42:51.340And now the one really kind of interesting and I think encouraging thing about this trajectory is if you go back and look at some of the stories that I profiled in my book, Wildlands Philanthropy, you see, okay, here's a Rockefeller involved in this project area, or here's a DuPont, or here's the heiress of the 3M fortune.
00:43:12.280So there's the robber baron class kind of involved in conservation. But over the successive decades, something remarkable happened. And that was the democratization of this. It's really crowdfunding is what the American land conservation movement is about.
00:43:33.080You have land trusts, small, local, and regional land trusts now all over the country, more than 1,000 of them, most of which don't even have professional staff or very small staffs, working to protect locally places of importance to a community.
00:43:53.660And that, to me, is remarkably hopeful.
00:43:57.540In fact, if you could say, if you could think of one area in our public life that is still bipartisan, it is that interest in protecting places, in protecting land that helps support the beauty, integrity, diversity of nature, and also supports human, cultural, and economic activity.
00:44:22.240So that's actually one little bit of hopeful that is kind of the expansion of the land trust community and the fact that, you know, you don't have to be a Rockefeller to support your local land trust.
00:44:31.680You don't have to be a DuPont. People with modest means and modest incomes have and are doing this.
00:44:39.360And some of the stories in that book, in Wildlands Philanthropy, the success stories were from people with very, very modest resources, but who had extraordinary creativity and energy and passion for the work and did amazing things.
00:44:54.020And the result is like the Ark of Appalachia, the system of natural areas in southeastern Ohio.
00:45:02.820It's a remarkable story founded by people who were not of means, but had extraordinary commitment to wild nature and to the particular landscape they loved.
00:45:15.340yeah yeah and when it comes to tainted money if we assume that all money comes from extraction
00:45:22.820of then it's all tainted and to me it's um what tainted money are you going to take
00:45:31.420and are there strings attached and that is another level to this question but again there's so much
00:45:39.880for us to talk about in this that i i'm going to move on and hopefully we'll have another
00:45:44.160conversation where i'm taking notes on um these pieces that i wish we had more time for but i
00:45:51.380wanted to come back to in keeping the wild against the domestication of earth the anthology that i
00:45:57.120had referenced in the last question that you um edited i wanted to read a quote conservation
00:46:03.340biologists are certain that providing enough shelter food water and smartphones for three
00:46:08.600to four billion more humans by the end of the century means wildness will survive only in
00:46:13.920highly secure parks, most of them already in industrialized nations. Assuming that commerce
00:46:19.820and growth carry on as usual, soon virtually all wild rivers will be dammed, tropical forest will
00:46:25.860be replaced by commercial plantations, marine fish stocks will continue to be depleted, oceans will
00:46:31.960be increasingly acidified, and deserts will be improved with desalinated seawater, wind farms,
00:46:39.080and solar collectors, end quote. And, you know, upon reading this passage, I thought about
00:46:46.060the many countries that possess the resources required to transition to green energy,
00:46:52.120places with abundant sources of copper and lithium and iron. And I do think this raises
00:46:57.780the question of what does conservation need to look like in the next several decades,
00:47:02.420and how might it actually oppose mass extraction in the name of green energy?
00:47:07.260I think it's going to be extremely difficult, but absolutely crucial to have the substantive conversations about this growth trajectory and how getting beyond whether you can power the world with renewables or power the world with fossil fuels,
00:47:29.000getting beyond the sort of superficial level of that conversation and get down to the more
00:47:34.540structural and systemic questions that undergird all this growth. But it's crucial, I think,
00:47:43.300as a social change movement that we hope for the long term is building the seeds, planting the
00:47:49.780seeds of a future ecocentric, a future ecological civilization that we'd be having these questions
00:47:57.160and the deep conversations now, including the deep systemic critique
00:48:02.280of people who say, in effect, well, the problem with climate change
00:48:07.040is we're just going to put wind turbines and solar panels
00:48:10.720and we'll all drive Priuses or we'll all drive EVs,
00:48:14.280but we'll not challenge the underlying logic of a techno-industrial
00:48:19.120growth civilization, which is designed to do one thing,
00:48:23.240grow and produce profit, and which we know is absolutely impossible to maintain on a finite
00:48:31.200planet. I often go back to that quip by the economist, the late economist Kenneth Boulding,
00:48:37.900and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, the only people who believe that perpetual economic growth
00:48:42.380is possible on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist. So that's what we have,
00:48:48.380is we have an economic order that is based on madness.
00:48:54.620And so conservation has a role to play in, again, saying always.
00:49:03.840Even in times when this may be difficult because we want the large donor
00:49:11.160at least some slice of the conservation movement,
00:49:13.660those leading edge, those vanguard groups,
00:49:15.460You need to constantly be going down to the deeper systemic analysis and saying why the current economic order has gotten us in, in large part, to the pickle we are in and the ways that a society has to change if we have any hope of stopping this twin crisis of escalating climate chaos and escalating biodiversity loss, the extinction spasm and climate change.
00:49:42.840And the answer to that, I mean, there's no silver bullet.
00:49:47.040You know, everybody wants to shoot, go out hunting their favorite ism.
00:49:51.220I was speaking earlier today about one ism with the absolutely brilliant, one of the world's leading wild river defenders, Juan Pablo Arego, the president of Ecosystemus, the NGO in Chile.
00:50:03.640And he's working on a paper, an expose of militarism's impacts on the earth, and particularly the way that Chile's economy produces vast amounts of raw materials for the war industry.
00:50:19.520So militarism, you know, people, it's a militarism or capitalism, or the problems of sexism and how we have to smash the patriarchy.
00:50:31.620But the ultimate one that we have to drill down to, again, is this question of anthropocentrism, of human centeredness, of human supremacy, and all the systems, political, economic, cultural, that privilege one species over all the other, perhaps 10 million others on the earth.
00:50:56.120And the ways we do this in the most unthinking and unexamined way, beginning with the language we use, which shapes the ideas that we think.
00:51:06.440Our cognitive frames are in large part shaped by the language we use.
00:51:10.800This is why I sort of get on this topic of language and my distress over when my fellow conservationists unthinkingly continue to use the language of dominion.
00:51:24.480The language of commodification, the language of industrialism, even as we pretend to be trying to heal the problems or the symptoms of the underlying system that we oppose.
00:51:39.420mm-hmm well for my last question i was reminded again that environmental conservation philanthropy
00:51:49.600makes up some like a minuscule portion of charitable donations in the united states
00:51:55.960i believe less than one percent of all philanthropic donations in the united states
00:52:00.620go to wilderness protection endangered species restoration and natural parks if you know
00:52:06.300differently, please correct me. And I think listeners will be surprised to learn of this
00:52:10.860as well, just this minuscule amount. But I'm wondering how much of our earth is protected
00:52:16.920through conservation and what sort of projects are valued within the conservation community
00:52:22.120when funding is somewhat limited? Quick answer about how much is protected is terrestrial. I
00:52:28.700think the current number is roughly 14% of the earth's land is in some form of protected area.
00:52:35.360That's not just sort of wilderness protection, but all categories of conservation.
00:52:42.100So 14%, and some of that, of course, would be in what you sort of alluded to earlier, this idea of paper parks, places that have protection in name only, but not, in fact, on the ground.
00:52:57.760Of course, the number of marine protected areas is a much, much lower percentage and sort of the subcategory of that. We talk about no take, no exploitation, no resource extraction, marine protected areas, whether you call them marine wilderness areas or no take zones or marine national parks. Well, that's even a tiny, tinier fraction.
00:53:18.540So to get from that level of protection of the earth to, let's say, just by, for sake of argument, at least 50% of the planet protected in durable institutions in an interconnected way, sustaining the most important and ecologically diverse habitats, that's a big leap.
00:53:46.080It's a big jump, and it's going to take time, which is, again, why we're in this for the long term.
00:53:51.500The social change movement that we think of now as conservation or the conservation and environmental movements, they're very recent.
00:53:58.780We're not talking about something that's been around for thousands of years.
00:54:04.620We first started this kind of organized thing that we think of as conservation.
00:54:09.740You know, it's only 150 years old. And the thing that people talk to, which is slightly different and has different historical antecedents that people refer to as the environmental movement, that's much more recent still.
00:54:22.400so it is a long game it's a marathon not a sprint for conservation and allied social change
00:54:35.060movements including peace movement women's movement human rights movement anti-racism
00:54:41.320movement all these kinds of allied movements that are again oriented toward expanding freedom and
00:54:49.960justice, we're going to be at it for a long time. But if I can, I'll just say,
00:54:57.540when we think about why it is so crucial to do this, I want to circle back to the idea of freedom
00:55:05.540and justice. Because the key social change movements, at least in American history,
00:55:11.700the right, the movement to get women to vote or to end explicit forms of racism during the
00:55:19.380civil rights movement. Even the more recent campaign, successful to achieve marriage equality
00:55:26.800for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, the change movements were about expanding
00:55:35.440the sphere of ethical concern from one category of, to these formerly marginalized categories
00:55:44.440of people. It was always sort of, you know, okay, those people are now worthy of our ethical
00:55:50.340concern. So the circle of ethical concern gets a little larger each time. But something really
00:55:57.500remarkable happened in America when the conservation movement emerged, and particularly
00:56:02.900that subset of the conservation movement that was oriented toward national parks and wilderness
00:56:08.360here is here you're expanding the sphere of ethical concern to wild places and creatures
00:56:15.340and at least implicitly saying these are the places that exist for their own sake we will not
00:56:22.520graze there we will not log there we will not mine there and moreover if there are grizzly bears
00:56:29.360or mountain lions there they can have the you know the persist the ability the right or the freedom
00:56:36.840to pursue lives of beauty and quality on their own,
00:56:41.060even if they're creatures that could potentially eat me.
00:56:45.280You're essentially moving from a purely human-centered framework of justice
00:56:52.100to a more ecocentric or life-centered and holistic framework for justice.
00:56:59.220That is what wilderness conservation is about.
00:57:02.420It's expanding freedom and justice to all the members of the land community, including if you're in a grizzly bear country, and to members of the land community that can eat you.
00:57:15.460And I think this is the most important area of evolution for at least the land conservation movement to understand.
00:57:26.080Not that the utilitarian reasons for protecting wild places aren't important.
00:57:30.140Of course, it's wonderful to go for a hike in a park. It's wonderful for our children's brain development to have access to nature. It's wonderful for natural climate solutions, for wild places to store and retain natural carbon and help regulate the climate.
00:57:46.540All of those things benefit us. But ultimately, the ultimate reason for protecting wild places
00:57:53.460and creatures is because they have intrinsic value. They don't require us to value them
00:57:58.260to be valuable. That, to me, is the ultimate argument for conservation. And it's why I'm in
00:58:04.460this movement and why I think ultimately, you know, we will get there toward that future
00:58:09.880ecological civilization that we all imagine well thank you for um ending on that note and
00:58:20.720yeah i really appreciated your thoughts and your time and i definitely have a lot to chew on and
00:58:27.660i'm gonna take these thoughts to the woods sit with the trees and ground myself in the complexity
00:58:36.580of conservation a bit more, although I know I think about it every day, and this just gave me
00:58:41.660a lot more to weave into the fabric of my understanding. It was such a pleasure to talk
00:58:49.600to you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast. The music
00:58:58.660you heard today was by Jeffrey Silverstein and Galen Hefferman. For the Wild is created by Ayanna
00:59:04.140Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.