September 25, 2014 • 31 mins
The Anthropocene era has exacted quite a toll on Earth's ecosystem, but could rewilding reverse the damage and restore balance to Earth? Could it bring the human individual and human culture as a whole back in line with the natural order of things? Maybe we won't have to go off-Earth after all...
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
in our last episode we discussed what Ghosts of Evolution.
We gave you what was probably a very sobering episode
(00:24):
about the state of the world, the state of the
ecosystem and humanity's role in degrading it, and and the
forecast for the future which is not all that great. Yeah,
we talked about picking apart the web of life and
what happens and how it unravels and affects humans and
other species and other flora around the world. So we're
(00:48):
talking about trying to weave that web of life back
together in this episode, specifically with something called re wilding.
And the reason why it's so important is because we
have definitely squarely entered into something called the anthroposyne. Yes, UH,
this is of course the age of man UH and
(01:08):
this is when we did a whole episode on this UH,
which you can certainly go back to and find a
link to on the landing page for this podcast episode.
But this is the idea that in the past UH
vast changes in the world have been caused by uh,
you know, changes in the global climate, ecological changes. But
(01:30):
in this age of man, we see the world being
changed by humanity. Yeah, is the first time a species
has become a greater force than the elements of nature.
And just to call back to the episode real quick, um,
we're talking about the Holocene period previous to us ending
(01:52):
about two hundred years ago with the steam engine. And
this is according to Ken Caldera, who is a climate
scientists of the Carnegie Institute of Science and California. Data
retreat from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a
growth in the atmosphere, a concentrations of several greenhouse gases
in chickul our CEO two and h four, which coincide
(02:12):
with the invention of the steam engine in seventeen eighty four.
We can look at these ice cores and be like, oh, hey,
that's evidence right there that this is when it began.
And there's plenty of other evidence that there's all sorts
of man made strata out there, but this is a
good example of how humans are are shaping the course
(02:34):
of the earth. Yeah. I mean, agriculture is another huge area, right,
you go back twelve thousand years in history, you see
the rise of agriculture. We stopped being hunter gatherers. We
stopped you know, going out here to get our plants
and going over here to try and catch or hunt
an animal. We said, hey, we can grow the crops
right here. And to do that, we have to change
(02:54):
the environment. We have to to take what was once
a a field, what was once afar us, which was
once you know, a bunch of shrubs, and turn it
into a one crop environment that is that is tightly
control by the humans that have made it, and then
eventually just pave over that, yeah, right, and build something
on top of it. So the idea here is can
(03:15):
we reverse the course of our actions, and can we
do this through something called rewilding, which we'll get to
in a moment, but before we should talk about human rewilding.
You know, in looking at this topic, uh, and and
the previous one, I keep thinking back to Daniel quinn
book Ishmael, which I know a number of our listeners
(03:35):
have probably read. Uh. The basic cell on the book,
of course, is a man talks to a talking gorilla.
But it's a it's a deep ecological philosophical work about
where where we are and where we're going, and and
and indeed, if we can do anything to stop what
we've done. Just to read a quick quote from it,
um Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world,
(03:56):
and this is what he's done. Almost he hasn't quite
made it, and it looked as though this may be
his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the
world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of
all the mastery we've obtained, we don't have enough mastery
to stop devastating the world or to repair the devastation
we've already wrought. There's a part in the book where
Ishmael describes human culture and the rise of technology as
(04:20):
this this this pilot in an airplane. It's been pushed off,
you know, like that's sort of like the experimental aircraft
of old. You know, you've all seen the footage they
pushed it off the top of building, off the side
of a cliff, and it ultimately is just plummeting. But
inside the aircraft, the individual is, you know, pumping hard
of the controls, pedaling the petals as fast as they can,
even though it's falling. It's falling, and it's just falling,
(04:41):
you know, faster and faster, And but we keep doing
all the things that we're doing. We keep trying to
pilot this aircraft that simply is not going to fly.
It's not going to to prevent us from crashing into
the ground. So in this podcast, we're we're we're asking
that question, can we stuff the plane from crashing and
crashing the ground? What are some of the things we
(05:03):
can do to avoid devastation? First we have to get
out of the plane. Yes, Yeah, that's clear. They're right,
it's not working for us. And that's really what we're
talking about, like that that some of what we're doing, uh,
particularly from a technological angle, is not working for us.
And how do we get back to a solution that
does work for us? Well, rewilding in nature is certainly
(05:25):
a solution, and we'll talk about that in a moment,
But before we talk about re welding and nature, you've
got to talk about rewilding humans because that's where it begins. Yes,
and uh, as with a lot of things, rewilding, the
term already has various definitions, and it can already be
sort of taken to mean one thing or another um
(05:46):
in this In this sense human rewilding though is on
one level, it's about reconnecting with nature. Um, it's about integrating.
It's about combining time and nature with conscious living. It's
about it's not necessarily about just completely abandoning your life.
It's because it easily brings to mind, you know, the
idea of someone quitting their job, throwing their smartphone into
(06:08):
the ocean, and then trekking off into the woods to
eat you know, berries and field mice all day. But
but but it's about integration. It's about saying, all right,
what are some aspects of my life that I can
that I can bring back to nature. Uh, places in
my life where I can reconnect with nature and reconnect
with with the with the survival skills that that that
(06:30):
I originally had. I've also seen it described in terms
of of modern humans as being domesticated. You know, we're
the we're the were the house cats that have been
in the house so long that if we're suddenly outside
in the backyard, we're going to die within an hour
because we we we we we don't know how to
survive anymore. We've gotten away from our roots. Well, I
mean much of that is true because if you had
(06:52):
to go out and survive on your own in a forest,
it would be very difficult today, right unless someone had
passed down the skills to you or had paid to
get those skills, like through rewild Portland actually, which offers
a six month long rewilding immersion program you for the
for the low cost of five thousand dollars, you could
learn every sort of do it yourself thing, from metal
(07:15):
smith ing to hunting wild game and foraging skills. And
foraging skills I think are hugely important something that we
overlook because for for millennia, ancestors have been foraging for
food and that's how they largely subsisted. We tend to
think about, you know, this sort of paleo diet where
it's you know, a bunch of meat, punks of meat.
(07:35):
But the truth of the matter is that we subsisted
on vegetation. So we've talked about this before. We've talked
about foraging and even into mafagey eating bugs as ways
to subsist um in ways that actually would have less
of an impact on environments and ecosystems. So the whole
human rewilding thing is hearkening back to a simpler time
(08:00):
and less of a reliance on technology. Yeah, and it's
it's easy to get the to get caught up in
the language of it too, because you know, we're saying
things like reconnect with nature and your past, and just
the mere fact that it sounds like the pitch for
an ongoing skit in the next season in Portlandia. You know,
it's easy to sort of dismiss the missilliness of it,
but but it is at heart about reconnecting with what
(08:23):
it is to be human of sort of relearning how
to be a human organism. Um. And a lot of
this is stuff that we we do feel a craving towards,
like the hunter gatherer thing. Most of us don't do
any kind of hunting and gathering, but I wonder to
what extent we end up scratching that itch when we
say get coupon crazy and we're looking for deals like
we're sort of we're sort of trying to recapture the
(08:45):
hunter gather or certainly I mean I grew up in
a in rural Tennessee and there are plenty of hunters
in that area, and uh, you know, in a large
part I feel A lot of that comes from a
culture of you know, you're reconnecting with with your past.
You know, this part of your heritage hunting for meat,
and even though you're not depending upon that dear meat
to feed your family as much anymore, you're you feel
(09:08):
pulled to the past. You feel like this is a
part of what you are as a as a as
a being, as an organism, and therefore you engage in it,
you know. I was recently in Taos, New Mexico, and
I visited the Taus Pueblo Settlements, which is um one
of the oldest Native American settlements UM in the United States.
And one of the things that one of the TAUSE
(09:31):
members was talking about is growing up in that village
which still practices the same sort of rituals, um and
day to day operations as they did a thousand years ago.
And there's no running water electricity there. And so she
said that as a child, she would run around, she
would go and get the water, she would bring it home.
(09:52):
She would be taught by the other children how to
fish with her hands right um. And they also played
up in the mountains. She said that was her backyard,
and they respected nature and they understood how to communicate
with nature. So she said mountain lions weren't a problem.
They weren't getting eaten by mountain lions because they were
so much more in tuned and had the information passed
(10:14):
down on how to deal with you know, these species
around them, and how to cultivate the flora around them.
And I thought this was it was such an amazing
place to visit, to see that people were still I
suppose you would say human rewilding, although all they were
doing is just following their ancestors way of living. As
(10:38):
with a lot of human endeavors, it's it's one of
those areas where we we end up complicating things several
times over because you see the mix of of ecological
responsibility here the the idea that if we all behave
just a little more in tune with with the environment
than than our than our individual footprint is less and
(11:00):
their overall environmental footprint is less, and and it can
all roll down to positive change. But then on the
other hand, it's a lot of this is is caught
up in heritage and culture and and and wanting to
reconnect with our past. Yeah, And the interesting thing about
that is that the flower I believe was her name,
who led the tour, was saying that for seventy years,
(11:22):
tas Pueblow Settlement UH had an ongoing lawsuit with the
government to reclaim lands, including Blue Lake, which is nearby,
and they were saying that because the government had taken
over national park land and they were giving it to
commercial entities, that a lot of their drinking water began
(11:43):
to get tainted and as a result, they began to
see their environment change. And that's exactly what we're going
to talk about today, this impact, this this web of life.
UM that you just change one little thing and there's
a cascade of events that follow. So this, to me
was such a good example of here's this group in place,
and little do we know here in the United States,
(12:05):
but their affecting change for the Clean Water Act right
and the Clean Air Act in the nineteen seventies, UM,
A lot of that was the movement from Native American
tribes saying we need to respect the land and act
with it. YEA, Even even though re wilding is relatively
new term, it is it's already kind of a big tent.
But just bear in mind when thinking about it that
(12:25):
it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna go live off the
grid in the woods. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna,
you know, build a bunker and prepare for the apocalypse
and for you know, the hunt and gather amid the
shattered ruins of human civilization or anything like that. It
can be as simple as reminding yourself that nature exists,
(12:45):
taking the time too. And again, it's so easy to
fall in the traffic, making it just sound like hippie
feel good to read to some listeners, but just to
reconnect with nature and to realize that you are a
biological organism, and you are a part of the psychology,
and you do not stand outside of it, no matter
how unnatural the environments are that we've built for ourselves,
(13:06):
and the and and the structures that we depend on,
both the UH informational and physical UH. It can be
just as simple as as thinking about your choice is
a little more and in making those choices a little
more in step with the natural world. Yeah, definitely, it's
all about choices when you really think about it, and
perhaps even installing a Komodo dragon in your backyard. We'll
(13:28):
talk about that idea when we get back from mis
brading all right, we're back. We've been talking about rewild
ng in the human sense, uh and in the idea
of undomesticating ourselves, about reconnecting with nature, uh and and
making better choices in our lives, all the things that
(13:50):
kind of fall under the semi ambiguous term of human
rewild Yeah. And now we're going to talk about re
wilding nature, which is a huge topic. So we could
talk about all the various projects going on with real wilding,
but we chose to really focus on something that George
Mombiante talked about in his TED talk. And we're talking
(14:11):
about re wild ing with wolves. But before you can
talk about real wilding with wolves, you have to talk
about how there was a mass extermination effort of wolves
for a very long period of time, at least in
the United States. Yeah. And it's a it's a it's
rather involved and fascinating topic when you get into it,
because there's several different layers to it. I mean, there's
the basic human fear of wolves, which is generally unfounded.
(14:33):
This is not a species that praise on humans. I
feel like we've discussed this in the past. Uh. The
wolf is is it's easy to build a wolf up
in your mind as this thing that it is not,
and so part of it is the fear of the wolf.
Part of it it also has to do with uh,
with the ways that we were already changing the world
(14:53):
and altering the environment and therefore altering the behavior of
the wolves. You know, suddenly we're trying to keep a
whole bunch of gray animals out here unmolested from you know,
basically trying to set the sheep or whatever apart from
the rest of the natural world. And then you get
upset when the wolves come to eat the sheep. Right, So,
I mean the right. There's part of this is agriculture.
(15:13):
Part of this is folk tale um. In fact, we
even talked about I think it was in New Mexico
there was a bus stop that was a caged bus
stop for children because the ridiculous fear that the wolves
were just out there ready to eat American children. Yeah,
there was a group that installed these because they were
against um, the protection of these subspecies of the gray wolf.
(15:35):
I believe so if you look at the fact that
before Europeans settled in the United States, there were two
hundred and fifty thousand wolves roaming in the country. And
then you look at the fact that by the new
conceemnities only a few hundred wolves remained in the lower
forty States. You get that um that wolves had been
hunted and exterminated to to quite a degree. Yeah, I mean,
(15:56):
we're talking about putting up poison traps for them, putting
out of physical traps. Often they would put out two
physical traps so that they wouldn't just catch them with
one pot, catch them with two. Therefore, in trying to
ensure that this animal would be captured and killed rather
than just escaping injured. Now, the effected that can be
in something called the tropic cascade, which is an ecological
(16:19):
process which starts at the top of the food chain
and tumbles all the way down to the bottom. And
nothing illustrates this better than wolves, as told by George
Mombiat during his TED talk on rewilding, because he says
that after seventy years of wolves being absent in Yellowstone,
when they were reintroduced, there was a huge effect, Okay.
(16:45):
And the reason that they were reintroduced is that the
numbers of deer had just escalated and went crazy, and
because there was nothing to hunt them, Uh, they had
reduced the vegetation to mil They were just grazing all
over the place. So they thought, let's bring in a
couple of wolves, knocked down the population of deer, and
that'll that will help things, right, But really, it was
(17:06):
this whole wilderness that seemed to have sprung from the
reintroduction of these wolves. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty impressive,
because again, you you expected the wolves to kill the deer.
You it was just in a situation. Oh well, the
bath water is a little too hot. Let's add a
little cold water and that will balance it out. But
as we've as we've made clear in our previous episode,
(17:28):
nature is more complicated than that. They're they're far there's
far much more going on. It's not just hot water
and cold water. Uh so, uh, what else happened? We
You see the deer starting to avoid the valleys and
gorges where they could be easily killed by the wolves.
So suddenly these areas are deer free. And so since
the deer are no longer there to munch everything down
to the ground, stuff starts growing up again. And so
(17:50):
very quickly you see these uh what had previously been
you know, bear valleys are growing up into the forests again. Yeah,
Momba says that the high of trees quintippled in just
six years, and then you had forests of aspen and
willow and cottonwood. And then as soon as that happened,
all of a sudden, there was a whole neighborhood of
birds that moved in. And then the number of beavers
(18:14):
started to increase, because beavers like to eat trees, right,
and beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. We talked about
that in our last episode, about these keystone species affecting
oversized changed in their environment. Yes, so they're they're building
the rivers, they're providing habitats for otters and muskrats and
ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians, and they're moving it.
(18:36):
And then also you see that the wolves are not
only eating the deer, right, they're also preying on coyotes.
And then because of that, the number of rabbits and
mice they begin to rise because we're not being killed
off by coyotes, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes,
more badges, ravens, and bald eagles came down to feed
on the carrion that the wolves had left behind. Then bears,
(18:57):
they're like they got in on the game too, in
a large part because there's more shrubs growing, more berries.
I mean, they're they're, they're they want to hunt and gather,
and now there's more to hunt and gather from. But
now this is the thing that's not even the craziest
of changes, the fact that all these animals sprung up
once the wolf was reintroduced. The crazy thing is that
the behavior of the rivers, the actual landscape begins to change. Indeed,
(19:23):
because suddenly you're seeing it means changing the traffic alongside
the river. You know, what's walking around there is changing,
what's growing around the river, and is the vegetation changes.
It's it's affecting the stability of the waterways. Uh, there's
less erosion, less erosion, Yeah, it's it's actually changing the earth. Yeah,
(19:44):
and it's regenerating force which are stabilizing the banks that
the banks don't collapse as often as well, and then
they become more fixed, they meander less. And so really
what you have is this this more stabilized even kind
of moving in. Yeah. Now, of course it's worth noting
that there still is a golf course in Yellowstone Park.
(20:04):
I don't I don't want anyone to forget that when
when thinking about the nature reclaiming this, Uh, this is beautiful,
but and it is a beautiful park. I've been there
and it's it's fabulous, but there's still very much a
human footprint there. But but this really does uh, just
how the the the reintroduction of this one species. It's
like we we we we as humans have this tendency
(20:26):
we don't we don't realize the value of things until
they're gone, and this is kind of an example of that.
And by by putting something back, we begin to see
just how important it was to begin with. And I
love how this, like this should be a children's story
because it has that kind of role to it. You
put one thing back and then there this comes back,
and this comes back. It's it's kind of like a
more positive version of fig the big hearted nukes with
(20:48):
all of these, with the with the cascading effect. Well yeah,
I mean it's the reversal of the domino effect, and
it's amazing to see it unfold like this now. Mombott
also brings up an example of whales not necessarily rewilding them,
but understanding that whales provide an entire ecosystem unto themselves
as well and are a good example again of what
(21:10):
happens when you disrupt a species. And the Japanese government,
he says, had rationalized killing whales for a long time
because they thought, hey, the number of krill and fish
will rise if you remove the main predator, right, which
is again very hot water cold water understanding of how
nature works. It's far more complicated. It's far more complicated,
(21:32):
and it's really reliant poop. It turns out, specifically whale
poop in the oceans, because, as Mambiat says, they produce
what biologists politely call large fecal plumes when they come
to the surface. These are huge explosions of poop right
across the surface up in the photo zone where there's
(21:54):
enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place. And then
those big plumes of poop are basically fertilizing or stimulating
the growth of phytoplankton, and the plant plankton at the
bottom of the food chain is stimulating the growth of zooplankton,
which feeds the fish and the krill and all the
rest of it, which which ends up producing more and
(22:17):
more sea life for humans to eat. So without taking
them away, without reducing their numbers, you're already getting the
same results you're trying to achieve by their removal. Yeah,
if you remove them, you're actually reducing the amount of
fish and krill, which, to be fair, it does sound counterintuitive, right.
You would think you'd take the predator away, you'd have
more of a thing, But the predator poop is actually
(22:39):
the life force for the thing. Yeah, I mean it's
you can quote me on that. So that this this
raises the question, then is it Is it this simple?
Is there it? Could this be done in various environments
around the world. Could we just simply reintroduce a missing
keystone creature, a missing predator and therefore make the difference,
(22:59):
Like I can't help think of where my mom lives
out in the in rural Tennessee. Deer everywhere. It's just
just lousy with deer. You can hardly drive down the
road without almost hitting one. You just you look out
the window and they're like six out there looking through
at you because there's nothing to eat them. Even the
human hunters, who are you know, doing all they all
(23:21):
they can, they still can't kill enough to keep the
numbers down. Yeah, and in a national park setting, I
feel like this is a more straightforward proposition. But George
Mombiance says, hey, um, let's just go crazy with paleo ecology,
which is the study of past ecosystems. He says, why
not reintroduced introduce some of our lost megafauna, or at
(23:42):
least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere?
Why shouldn't all of us have a serengetti on our doorsteps?
And yeah, and this is where he gets into at
times controversial areas. That's certainly areas where they're playing people
who disagree with them, because on one level, you can say, yes,
let's reintroduce species that were lost to this particular area,
(24:03):
and in many cases you can. You can make those
efforts as well. Discuss there are there are some ongoing
rewilding efforts to do just that. Okay, so before we
get into some more of the wilder animals extinct animals,
let's talk about commodo dragons, because there are proponents of
rewilding the argue that commodo dragons may fill the gap
(24:24):
in Australia's ecosystem left by Megalania, which was a giant
lizard like species that disappeared thousands of years ago, and
this was a keystone species like the wolf. And so
their idea is that a bunch of roaming commodo dragons
could restore important ecological functions like controlling the population size
(24:46):
of native and introduced herbivores. So if you have a
bunch of herbivores that are just going to town on
the vegetation, you don't have enough vegetation there and that's
creating that trofic cascading effect and a negative of way.
Maybe you bring back the Commoto dragon, is the idea. Yeah,
it's kind of like in an office environment, you have
an employee that leaves and he suddenly realized, whoa, they
(25:08):
really played an important role here. We can't get them back,
but maybe we can get something else like them, such
as a Commoto dragon in the office place. Right. And
then there are some other ideas that I guess you
could say are a bit more along the wooly mammoth
uh bring back wagon, yeah, and really sort of going
more into the way back machine in terms of humanity's
(25:30):
impact on the environment and saying, uh, well, hey, we
used to have mega fauna everywhere. We used to have
not just elephants in Africa and in Asia, but we
had large pack of germs in Europe, UH, in the
in North America. So what the what can we do there?
Should should we bring We can't bring those creatures back.
(25:52):
As romantic as that idea is and it's fascinating as
the possible science of it is, it's it's not feasible
for the immediate future. So can we just take African
or Asian elephants and introduce them into modern day Europe,
into UH North America and and have them fill this
long lost role to revitalize the environment. Now, of course
(26:16):
this would require that we set aside land or even
reclaim land to do it, So that would certainly be
one of the things that comes up in terms of
logistics and criticism um and they're often also or critics
that say, this is this would be a monumental effort,
and you're better off focusing on restoring the existing environment
(26:37):
and helping to maintain that, you know, actual species that
live in the environment. And if you're worried about because
the other side of it is that this would also
help out African and Asian elephants. Uh, And the critics
would argue, well, helping out African and Asian elephants, if
you're gonna do that, those efforts are best restricted to
Africa and Asia where where they naturally live, right. So, yeah,
(26:59):
there's all sorts of religious stickle problems. You were talking
about transporting the animals, talking about exotic diseases, and then
as you had kind of already alluded to a poor
trek record of introducing or even keeping species that we
already have. So the idea is that you you start
rewilding and you take away, um the attention from from
(27:19):
the species that are already going extinct and need help,
and instead you're spending all your money in your attention
on these different parts in different species. Yeah, but it's
also worth pointing out that Mombat's ted talk is a
ted talk, and ted talks are are generally it's it's
you can think of in terms of of a lighted
beacon on the top of the hill, would be understanding
(27:41):
that humans are not actually going to follow that beacon
to the top of the hill. They're gonna maybe climb
it halfway. And if they climb it halfway, that's great.
Just by by seeing the beacon there, it gives us
a frame of reference. And yet we need that beacon,
right because we know that that is an example of
something that can be done in In fact, in her
book Rewilding the World, Caroline Fraser list twenty one rewilding
(28:05):
sites throughout the world in which habitats are intentionally being
rewild and species are reintroduced. And again let's think about
that wolf example again. You know that's the best case
scenario um in this sort of closed system already, but
you see a huge positive effects. So perhaps these projects
can bring about the same sort of change. See change
(28:29):
really And there are also a couple of other rewilding
projects of note, and you can definitely check these out
more if you want to find out more. Rewilding Europe
and Rewilding Siberia. Yeah, the Siberia one I found particularly
interesting because they're they're dealing in part with reintroducing wild horses,
which they can say could possibly save us from the
(28:51):
effects of global climate change. They say that in the winter,
the animals trample and flatten the snow that would otherwise
insulate the ground from cold air, and so that helps
prevent the frozen ground or permafrost from thawing and releasing
powerful greenhouse gases. So and again you see that cascading effect, right,
I mean, just to hammer the nail home again. I mean,
(29:11):
over millions and millions and millions of years, life on
Earth evolves into a system that works. Events occur and
it has to uh, the settings have to adjust, but
then it finds its level again. But then humans come
along and just start messing with all the settings, turning
all the dials around. So rewilding in a large sense
is about saying, hey, what were the what were the
(29:33):
factory settings before humans came along? And even though we
can't go back to all of those factory settings, there
are things we can do. There are things we can say, well,
as humans as a culture, we don't really need this.
Maybe we can stop doing this. We can take this away.
Or here's something that we took away without any reason
at all. Why do we take all the wolves away?
What if we what do we give them back? And
(29:54):
and everybody and everything can reap the positive benefits of
that reintroduction. Yeah, I mean I think in a way
it's reframing our role in the anthropos syne. If we
know this is the age of man, and we know
that we're now creating the strata of man made materials.
The nuts should be empowering enough to say that we
could do something as simple as this, which is to
(30:15):
turn back the clock a bit and to reclaim some
of these lands and see these trophic cascadings in effect.
And David Biello, writing for Scientific American I think, had
a really good thought about this. He said, quote in
the end, wilderness is a state of mind. The natural
world can only persist now as a deliberate act of
human will that will require firm human purpose, as a
(30:39):
gesture of humility, yes, but also a form of self protection.
In other words, we don't really have a choice in
the matter. Yeah, the airplane is plummeting, it's not flying.
At some point you have to realize we need to
stop peddling and figure out something else that works, and
and there's never a better time than now. Indeed, A right,
So there you have it. As always, be sure to
(30:59):
check out the land Ding page for this podcast episode.
You'll find that at stuff to Blow your Mind dot
com you don't include links out to some of the
stuff that we've talked about here, including that Ted Talk,
which you'll probably want to check out as well, and
the homepage includes all of our blog posts, all of
our podcast episodes, all of our videos, anything and everything
stuff to blow your mind you will find right there.
(31:21):
And what are your thoughts on this? Do you think
were Wilding could work? Do you think it's could work
in just certain areas of the world? Let us know
and you can send your thoughts to blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
in our last episode we discussed what Ghosts of Evolution.
We gave you what was probably a very sobering episode
(00:24):
about the state of the world, the state of the
ecosystem and humanity's role in degrading it, and and the
forecast for the future which is not all that great. Yeah,
we talked about picking apart the web of life and
what happens and how it unravels and affects humans and
other species and other flora around the world. So we're
(00:48):
talking about trying to weave that web of life back
together in this episode, specifically with something called re wilding.
And the reason why it's so important is because we
have definitely squarely entered into something called the anthroposyne. Yes, UH,
this is of course the age of man UH and
(01:08):
this is when we did a whole episode on this UH,
which you can certainly go back to and find a
link to on the landing page for this podcast episode.
But this is the idea that in the past UH
vast changes in the world have been caused by uh,
you know, changes in the global climate, ecological changes. But
(01:30):
in this age of man, we see the world being
changed by humanity. Yeah, is the first time a species
has become a greater force than the elements of nature.
And just to call back to the episode real quick, um,
we're talking about the Holocene period previous to us ending
(01:52):
about two hundred years ago with the steam engine. And
this is according to Ken Caldera, who is a climate
scientists of the Carnegie Institute of Science and California. Data
retreat from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a
growth in the atmosphere, a concentrations of several greenhouse gases
in chickul our CEO two and h four, which coincide
(02:12):
with the invention of the steam engine in seventeen eighty four.
We can look at these ice cores and be like, oh, hey,
that's evidence right there that this is when it began.
And there's plenty of other evidence that there's all sorts
of man made strata out there, but this is a
good example of how humans are are shaping the course
(02:34):
of the earth. Yeah. I mean, agriculture is another huge area, right,
you go back twelve thousand years in history, you see
the rise of agriculture. We stopped being hunter gatherers. We
stopped you know, going out here to get our plants
and going over here to try and catch or hunt
an animal. We said, hey, we can grow the crops
right here. And to do that, we have to change
(02:54):
the environment. We have to to take what was once
a a field, what was once afar us, which was
once you know, a bunch of shrubs, and turn it
into a one crop environment that is that is tightly
control by the humans that have made it, and then
eventually just pave over that, yeah, right, and build something
on top of it. So the idea here is can
(03:15):
we reverse the course of our actions, and can we
do this through something called rewilding, which we'll get to
in a moment, but before we should talk about human rewilding.
You know, in looking at this topic, uh, and and
the previous one, I keep thinking back to Daniel quinn
book Ishmael, which I know a number of our listeners
(03:35):
have probably read. Uh. The basic cell on the book,
of course, is a man talks to a talking gorilla.
But it's a it's a deep ecological philosophical work about
where where we are and where we're going, and and
and indeed, if we can do anything to stop what
we've done. Just to read a quick quote from it,
um Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world,
(03:56):
and this is what he's done. Almost he hasn't quite
made it, and it looked as though this may be
his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the
world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of
all the mastery we've obtained, we don't have enough mastery
to stop devastating the world or to repair the devastation
we've already wrought. There's a part in the book where
Ishmael describes human culture and the rise of technology as
(04:20):
this this this pilot in an airplane. It's been pushed off,
you know, like that's sort of like the experimental aircraft
of old. You know, you've all seen the footage they
pushed it off the top of building, off the side
of a cliff, and it ultimately is just plummeting. But
inside the aircraft, the individual is, you know, pumping hard
of the controls, pedaling the petals as fast as they can,
even though it's falling. It's falling, and it's just falling,
(04:41):
you know, faster and faster, And but we keep doing
all the things that we're doing. We keep trying to
pilot this aircraft that simply is not going to fly.
It's not going to to prevent us from crashing into
the ground. So in this podcast, we're we're we're asking
that question, can we stuff the plane from crashing and
crashing the ground? What are some of the things we
(05:03):
can do to avoid devastation? First we have to get
out of the plane. Yes, Yeah, that's clear. They're right,
it's not working for us. And that's really what we're
talking about, like that that some of what we're doing, uh,
particularly from a technological angle, is not working for us.
And how do we get back to a solution that
does work for us? Well, rewilding in nature is certainly
(05:25):
a solution, and we'll talk about that in a moment,
But before we talk about re welding and nature, you've
got to talk about rewilding humans because that's where it begins. Yes,
and uh, as with a lot of things, rewilding, the
term already has various definitions, and it can already be
sort of taken to mean one thing or another um
(05:46):
in this In this sense human rewilding though is on
one level, it's about reconnecting with nature. Um, it's about integrating.
It's about combining time and nature with conscious living. It's
about it's not necessarily about just completely abandoning your life.
It's because it easily brings to mind, you know, the
idea of someone quitting their job, throwing their smartphone into
(06:08):
the ocean, and then trekking off into the woods to
eat you know, berries and field mice all day. But
but but it's about integration. It's about saying, all right,
what are some aspects of my life that I can
that I can bring back to nature. Uh, places in
my life where I can reconnect with nature and reconnect
with with the with the survival skills that that that
(06:30):
I originally had. I've also seen it described in terms
of of modern humans as being domesticated. You know, we're
the we're the were the house cats that have been
in the house so long that if we're suddenly outside
in the backyard, we're going to die within an hour
because we we we we we don't know how to
survive anymore. We've gotten away from our roots. Well, I
mean much of that is true because if you had
(06:52):
to go out and survive on your own in a forest,
it would be very difficult today, right unless someone had
passed down the skills to you or had paid to
get those skills, like through rewild Portland actually, which offers
a six month long rewilding immersion program you for the
for the low cost of five thousand dollars, you could
learn every sort of do it yourself thing, from metal
(07:15):
smith ing to hunting wild game and foraging skills. And
foraging skills I think are hugely important something that we
overlook because for for millennia, ancestors have been foraging for
food and that's how they largely subsisted. We tend to
think about, you know, this sort of paleo diet where
it's you know, a bunch of meat, punks of meat.
(07:35):
But the truth of the matter is that we subsisted
on vegetation. So we've talked about this before. We've talked
about foraging and even into mafagey eating bugs as ways
to subsist um in ways that actually would have less
of an impact on environments and ecosystems. So the whole
human rewilding thing is hearkening back to a simpler time
(08:00):
and less of a reliance on technology. Yeah, and it's
it's easy to get the to get caught up in
the language of it too, because you know, we're saying
things like reconnect with nature and your past, and just
the mere fact that it sounds like the pitch for
an ongoing skit in the next season in Portlandia. You know,
it's easy to sort of dismiss the missilliness of it,
but but it is at heart about reconnecting with what
(08:23):
it is to be human of sort of relearning how
to be a human organism. Um. And a lot of
this is stuff that we we do feel a craving towards,
like the hunter gatherer thing. Most of us don't do
any kind of hunting and gathering, but I wonder to
what extent we end up scratching that itch when we
say get coupon crazy and we're looking for deals like
we're sort of we're sort of trying to recapture the
(08:45):
hunter gather or certainly I mean I grew up in
a in rural Tennessee and there are plenty of hunters
in that area, and uh, you know, in a large
part I feel A lot of that comes from a
culture of you know, you're reconnecting with with your past.
You know, this part of your heritage hunting for meat,
and even though you're not depending upon that dear meat
to feed your family as much anymore, you're you feel
(09:08):
pulled to the past. You feel like this is a
part of what you are as a as a as
a being, as an organism, and therefore you engage in it,
you know. I was recently in Taos, New Mexico, and
I visited the Taus Pueblo Settlements, which is um one
of the oldest Native American settlements UM in the United States.
And one of the things that one of the TAUSE
(09:31):
members was talking about is growing up in that village
which still practices the same sort of rituals, um and
day to day operations as they did a thousand years ago.
And there's no running water electricity there. And so she
said that as a child, she would run around, she
would go and get the water, she would bring it home.
(09:52):
She would be taught by the other children how to
fish with her hands right um. And they also played
up in the mountains. She said that was her backyard,
and they respected nature and they understood how to communicate
with nature. So she said mountain lions weren't a problem.
They weren't getting eaten by mountain lions because they were
so much more in tuned and had the information passed
(10:14):
down on how to deal with you know, these species
around them, and how to cultivate the flora around them.
And I thought this was it was such an amazing
place to visit, to see that people were still I
suppose you would say human rewilding, although all they were
doing is just following their ancestors way of living. As
(10:38):
with a lot of human endeavors, it's it's one of
those areas where we we end up complicating things several
times over because you see the mix of of ecological
responsibility here the the idea that if we all behave
just a little more in tune with with the environment
than than our than our individual footprint is less and
(11:00):
their overall environmental footprint is less, and and it can
all roll down to positive change. But then on the
other hand, it's a lot of this is is caught
up in heritage and culture and and and wanting to
reconnect with our past. Yeah, And the interesting thing about
that is that the flower I believe was her name,
who led the tour, was saying that for seventy years,
(11:22):
tas Pueblow Settlement UH had an ongoing lawsuit with the
government to reclaim lands, including Blue Lake, which is nearby,
and they were saying that because the government had taken
over national park land and they were giving it to
commercial entities, that a lot of their drinking water began
(11:43):
to get tainted and as a result, they began to
see their environment change. And that's exactly what we're going
to talk about today, this impact, this this web of life.
UM that you just change one little thing and there's
a cascade of events that follow. So this, to me
was such a good example of here's this group in place,
and little do we know here in the United States,
(12:05):
but their affecting change for the Clean Water Act right
and the Clean Air Act in the nineteen seventies, UM,
A lot of that was the movement from Native American
tribes saying we need to respect the land and act
with it. YEA, Even even though re wilding is relatively
new term, it is it's already kind of a big tent.
But just bear in mind when thinking about it that
(12:25):
it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna go live off the
grid in the woods. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna,
you know, build a bunker and prepare for the apocalypse
and for you know, the hunt and gather amid the
shattered ruins of human civilization or anything like that. It
can be as simple as reminding yourself that nature exists,
(12:45):
taking the time too. And again, it's so easy to
fall in the traffic, making it just sound like hippie
feel good to read to some listeners, but just to
reconnect with nature and to realize that you are a
biological organism, and you are a part of the psychology,
and you do not stand outside of it, no matter
how unnatural the environments are that we've built for ourselves,
(13:06):
and the and and the structures that we depend on,
both the UH informational and physical UH. It can be
just as simple as as thinking about your choice is
a little more and in making those choices a little
more in step with the natural world. Yeah, definitely, it's
all about choices when you really think about it, and
perhaps even installing a Komodo dragon in your backyard. We'll
(13:28):
talk about that idea when we get back from mis
brading all right, we're back. We've been talking about rewild
ng in the human sense, uh and in the idea
of undomesticating ourselves, about reconnecting with nature, uh and and
making better choices in our lives, all the things that
(13:50):
kind of fall under the semi ambiguous term of human
rewild Yeah. And now we're going to talk about re
wilding nature, which is a huge topic. So we could
talk about all the various projects going on with real wilding,
but we chose to really focus on something that George
Mombiante talked about in his TED talk. And we're talking
(14:11):
about re wild ing with wolves. But before you can
talk about real wilding with wolves, you have to talk
about how there was a mass extermination effort of wolves
for a very long period of time, at least in
the United States. Yeah. And it's a it's a it's
rather involved and fascinating topic when you get into it,
because there's several different layers to it. I mean, there's
the basic human fear of wolves, which is generally unfounded.
(14:33):
This is not a species that praise on humans. I
feel like we've discussed this in the past. Uh. The
wolf is is it's easy to build a wolf up
in your mind as this thing that it is not,
and so part of it is the fear of the wolf.
Part of it it also has to do with uh,
with the ways that we were already changing the world
(14:53):
and altering the environment and therefore altering the behavior of
the wolves. You know, suddenly we're trying to keep a
whole bunch of gray animals out here unmolested from you know,
basically trying to set the sheep or whatever apart from
the rest of the natural world. And then you get
upset when the wolves come to eat the sheep. Right, So,
I mean the right. There's part of this is agriculture.
(15:13):
Part of this is folk tale um. In fact, we
even talked about I think it was in New Mexico
there was a bus stop that was a caged bus
stop for children because the ridiculous fear that the wolves
were just out there ready to eat American children. Yeah,
there was a group that installed these because they were
against um, the protection of these subspecies of the gray wolf.
(15:35):
I believe so if you look at the fact that
before Europeans settled in the United States, there were two
hundred and fifty thousand wolves roaming in the country. And
then you look at the fact that by the new
conceemnities only a few hundred wolves remained in the lower
forty States. You get that um that wolves had been
hunted and exterminated to to quite a degree. Yeah, I mean,
(15:56):
we're talking about putting up poison traps for them, putting
out of physical traps. Often they would put out two
physical traps so that they wouldn't just catch them with
one pot, catch them with two. Therefore, in trying to
ensure that this animal would be captured and killed rather
than just escaping injured. Now, the effected that can be
in something called the tropic cascade, which is an ecological
(16:19):
process which starts at the top of the food chain
and tumbles all the way down to the bottom. And
nothing illustrates this better than wolves, as told by George
Mombiat during his TED talk on rewilding, because he says
that after seventy years of wolves being absent in Yellowstone,
when they were reintroduced, there was a huge effect, Okay.
(16:45):
And the reason that they were reintroduced is that the
numbers of deer had just escalated and went crazy, and
because there was nothing to hunt them, Uh, they had
reduced the vegetation to mil They were just grazing all
over the place. So they thought, let's bring in a
couple of wolves, knocked down the population of deer, and
that'll that will help things, right, But really, it was
(17:06):
this whole wilderness that seemed to have sprung from the
reintroduction of these wolves. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty impressive,
because again, you you expected the wolves to kill the deer.
You it was just in a situation. Oh well, the
bath water is a little too hot. Let's add a
little cold water and that will balance it out. But
as we've as we've made clear in our previous episode,
(17:28):
nature is more complicated than that. They're they're far there's
far much more going on. It's not just hot water
and cold water. Uh so, uh, what else happened? We
You see the deer starting to avoid the valleys and
gorges where they could be easily killed by the wolves.
So suddenly these areas are deer free. And so since
the deer are no longer there to munch everything down
to the ground, stuff starts growing up again. And so
(17:50):
very quickly you see these uh what had previously been
you know, bear valleys are growing up into the forests again. Yeah,
Momba says that the high of trees quintippled in just
six years, and then you had forests of aspen and
willow and cottonwood. And then as soon as that happened,
all of a sudden, there was a whole neighborhood of
birds that moved in. And then the number of beavers
(18:14):
started to increase, because beavers like to eat trees, right,
and beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. We talked about
that in our last episode, about these keystone species affecting
oversized changed in their environment. Yes, so they're they're building
the rivers, they're providing habitats for otters and muskrats and
ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians, and they're moving it.
(18:36):
And then also you see that the wolves are not
only eating the deer, right, they're also preying on coyotes.
And then because of that, the number of rabbits and
mice they begin to rise because we're not being killed
off by coyotes, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes,
more badges, ravens, and bald eagles came down to feed
on the carrion that the wolves had left behind. Then bears,
(18:57):
they're like they got in on the game too, in
a large part because there's more shrubs growing, more berries.
I mean, they're they're, they're they want to hunt and gather,
and now there's more to hunt and gather from. But
now this is the thing that's not even the craziest
of changes, the fact that all these animals sprung up
once the wolf was reintroduced. The crazy thing is that
the behavior of the rivers, the actual landscape begins to change. Indeed,
(19:23):
because suddenly you're seeing it means changing the traffic alongside
the river. You know, what's walking around there is changing,
what's growing around the river, and is the vegetation changes.
It's it's affecting the stability of the waterways. Uh, there's
less erosion, less erosion, Yeah, it's it's actually changing the earth. Yeah,
(19:44):
and it's regenerating force which are stabilizing the banks that
the banks don't collapse as often as well, and then
they become more fixed, they meander less. And so really
what you have is this this more stabilized even kind
of moving in. Yeah. Now, of course it's worth noting
that there still is a golf course in Yellowstone Park.
(20:04):
I don't I don't want anyone to forget that when
when thinking about the nature reclaiming this, Uh, this is beautiful,
but and it is a beautiful park. I've been there
and it's it's fabulous, but there's still very much a
human footprint there. But but this really does uh, just
how the the the reintroduction of this one species. It's
like we we we we as humans have this tendency
(20:26):
we don't we don't realize the value of things until
they're gone, and this is kind of an example of that.
And by by putting something back, we begin to see
just how important it was to begin with. And I
love how this, like this should be a children's story
because it has that kind of role to it. You
put one thing back and then there this comes back,
and this comes back. It's it's kind of like a
more positive version of fig the big hearted nukes with
(20:48):
all of these, with the with the cascading effect. Well yeah,
I mean it's the reversal of the domino effect, and
it's amazing to see it unfold like this now. Mombott
also brings up an example of whales not necessarily rewilding them,
but understanding that whales provide an entire ecosystem unto themselves
as well and are a good example again of what
(21:10):
happens when you disrupt a species. And the Japanese government,
he says, had rationalized killing whales for a long time
because they thought, hey, the number of krill and fish
will rise if you remove the main predator, right, which
is again very hot water cold water understanding of how
nature works. It's far more complicated. It's far more complicated,
(21:32):
and it's really reliant poop. It turns out, specifically whale
poop in the oceans, because, as Mambiat says, they produce
what biologists politely call large fecal plumes when they come
to the surface. These are huge explosions of poop right
across the surface up in the photo zone where there's
(21:54):
enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place. And then
those big plumes of poop are basically fertilizing or stimulating
the growth of phytoplankton, and the plant plankton at the
bottom of the food chain is stimulating the growth of zooplankton,
which feeds the fish and the krill and all the
rest of it, which which ends up producing more and
(22:17):
more sea life for humans to eat. So without taking
them away, without reducing their numbers, you're already getting the
same results you're trying to achieve by their removal. Yeah,
if you remove them, you're actually reducing the amount of
fish and krill, which, to be fair, it does sound counterintuitive, right.
You would think you'd take the predator away, you'd have
more of a thing, But the predator poop is actually
(22:39):
the life force for the thing. Yeah, I mean it's
you can quote me on that. So that this this
raises the question, then is it Is it this simple?
Is there it? Could this be done in various environments
around the world. Could we just simply reintroduce a missing
keystone creature, a missing predator and therefore make the difference,
(22:59):
Like I can't help think of where my mom lives
out in the in rural Tennessee. Deer everywhere. It's just
just lousy with deer. You can hardly drive down the
road without almost hitting one. You just you look out
the window and they're like six out there looking through
at you because there's nothing to eat them. Even the
human hunters, who are you know, doing all they all
(23:21):
they can, they still can't kill enough to keep the
numbers down. Yeah, and in a national park setting, I
feel like this is a more straightforward proposition. But George
Mombiance says, hey, um, let's just go crazy with paleo ecology,
which is the study of past ecosystems. He says, why
not reintroduced introduce some of our lost megafauna, or at
(23:42):
least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere?
Why shouldn't all of us have a serengetti on our doorsteps?
And yeah, and this is where he gets into at
times controversial areas. That's certainly areas where they're playing people
who disagree with them, because on one level, you can say, yes,
let's reintroduce species that were lost to this particular area,
(24:03):
and in many cases you can. You can make those
efforts as well. Discuss there are there are some ongoing
rewilding efforts to do just that. Okay, so before we
get into some more of the wilder animals extinct animals,
let's talk about commodo dragons, because there are proponents of
rewilding the argue that commodo dragons may fill the gap
(24:24):
in Australia's ecosystem left by Megalania, which was a giant
lizard like species that disappeared thousands of years ago, and
this was a keystone species like the wolf. And so
their idea is that a bunch of roaming commodo dragons
could restore important ecological functions like controlling the population size
(24:46):
of native and introduced herbivores. So if you have a
bunch of herbivores that are just going to town on
the vegetation, you don't have enough vegetation there and that's
creating that trofic cascading effect and a negative of way.
Maybe you bring back the Commoto dragon, is the idea. Yeah,
it's kind of like in an office environment, you have
an employee that leaves and he suddenly realized, whoa, they
(25:08):
really played an important role here. We can't get them back,
but maybe we can get something else like them, such
as a Commoto dragon in the office place. Right. And
then there are some other ideas that I guess you
could say are a bit more along the wooly mammoth
uh bring back wagon, yeah, and really sort of going
more into the way back machine in terms of humanity's
(25:30):
impact on the environment and saying, uh, well, hey, we
used to have mega fauna everywhere. We used to have
not just elephants in Africa and in Asia, but we
had large pack of germs in Europe, UH, in the
in North America. So what the what can we do there?
Should should we bring We can't bring those creatures back.
(25:52):
As romantic as that idea is and it's fascinating as
the possible science of it is, it's it's not feasible
for the immediate future. So can we just take African
or Asian elephants and introduce them into modern day Europe,
into UH North America and and have them fill this
long lost role to revitalize the environment. Now, of course
(26:16):
this would require that we set aside land or even
reclaim land to do it, So that would certainly be
one of the things that comes up in terms of
logistics and criticism um and they're often also or critics
that say, this is this would be a monumental effort,
and you're better off focusing on restoring the existing environment
(26:37):
and helping to maintain that, you know, actual species that
live in the environment. And if you're worried about because
the other side of it is that this would also
help out African and Asian elephants. Uh, And the critics
would argue, well, helping out African and Asian elephants, if
you're gonna do that, those efforts are best restricted to
Africa and Asia where where they naturally live, right. So, yeah,
(26:59):
there's all sorts of religious stickle problems. You were talking
about transporting the animals, talking about exotic diseases, and then
as you had kind of already alluded to a poor
trek record of introducing or even keeping species that we
already have. So the idea is that you you start
rewilding and you take away, um the attention from from
(27:19):
the species that are already going extinct and need help,
and instead you're spending all your money in your attention
on these different parts in different species. Yeah, but it's
also worth pointing out that Mombat's ted talk is a
ted talk, and ted talks are are generally it's it's
you can think of in terms of of a lighted
beacon on the top of the hill, would be understanding
(27:41):
that humans are not actually going to follow that beacon
to the top of the hill. They're gonna maybe climb
it halfway. And if they climb it halfway, that's great.
Just by by seeing the beacon there, it gives us
a frame of reference. And yet we need that beacon,
right because we know that that is an example of
something that can be done in In fact, in her
book Rewilding the World, Caroline Fraser list twenty one rewilding
(28:05):
sites throughout the world in which habitats are intentionally being
rewild and species are reintroduced. And again let's think about
that wolf example again. You know that's the best case
scenario um in this sort of closed system already, but
you see a huge positive effects. So perhaps these projects
can bring about the same sort of change. See change
(28:29):
really And there are also a couple of other rewilding
projects of note, and you can definitely check these out
more if you want to find out more. Rewilding Europe
and Rewilding Siberia. Yeah, the Siberia one I found particularly
interesting because they're they're dealing in part with reintroducing wild horses,
which they can say could possibly save us from the
(28:51):
effects of global climate change. They say that in the winter,
the animals trample and flatten the snow that would otherwise
insulate the ground from cold air, and so that helps
prevent the frozen ground or permafrost from thawing and releasing
powerful greenhouse gases. So and again you see that cascading effect, right,
I mean, just to hammer the nail home again. I mean,
(29:11):
over millions and millions and millions of years, life on
Earth evolves into a system that works. Events occur and
it has to uh, the settings have to adjust, but
then it finds its level again. But then humans come
along and just start messing with all the settings, turning
all the dials around. So rewilding in a large sense
is about saying, hey, what were the what were the
(29:33):
factory settings before humans came along? And even though we
can't go back to all of those factory settings, there
are things we can do. There are things we can say, well,
as humans as a culture, we don't really need this.
Maybe we can stop doing this. We can take this away.
Or here's something that we took away without any reason
at all. Why do we take all the wolves away?
What if we what do we give them back? And
(29:54):
and everybody and everything can reap the positive benefits of
that reintroduction. Yeah, I mean I think in a way
it's reframing our role in the anthropos syne. If we
know this is the age of man, and we know
that we're now creating the strata of man made materials.
The nuts should be empowering enough to say that we
could do something as simple as this, which is to
(30:15):
turn back the clock a bit and to reclaim some
of these lands and see these trophic cascadings in effect.
And David Biello, writing for Scientific American I think, had
a really good thought about this. He said, quote in
the end, wilderness is a state of mind. The natural
world can only persist now as a deliberate act of
human will that will require firm human purpose, as a
(30:39):
gesture of humility, yes, but also a form of self protection.
In other words, we don't really have a choice in
the matter. Yeah, the airplane is plummeting, it's not flying.
At some point you have to realize we need to
stop peddling and figure out something else that works, and
and there's never a better time than now. Indeed, A right,
So there you have it. As always, be sure to
(30:59):
check out the land Ding page for this podcast episode.
You'll find that at stuff to Blow your Mind dot
com you don't include links out to some of the
stuff that we've talked about here, including that Ted Talk,
which you'll probably want to check out as well, and
the homepage includes all of our blog posts, all of
our podcast episodes, all of our videos, anything and everything
stuff to blow your mind you will find right there.
(31:21):
And what are your thoughts on this? Do you think
were Wilding could work? Do you think it's could work
in just certain areas of the world? Let us know
and you can send your thoughts to blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
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