The Ghosts of Evolution

We now inhabit the Anthropocene era -- one where man-made environments have displaced entire ecosystems and the plants and animals that inhabited them. Knowing that all species are interconnected -- including us bipedal chatterboxes -- how will vanishing flora and fauna affect evolution? Will humans be added to the list of ghosts haunting the evolutionary halls of Earth?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas,
and we are, as usual, podcasting to you from the
eleventh floor of a building here in Atlanta, Georgia. Big

(00:24):
concrete and glass structure shooting up into the sky, surrounded
by mazes of concrete. There's a giant highway just right
outside the window that's continually built with a stream of traffic.
There's noise, there's some greenery, but it's difficult to argue
that this is in any way, shape or form a

(00:45):
natural environment. And yet it inhabits a natural environment if
you think about it. I know we're way up on
the eleventh floor, but all around us there are ghosts,
ghosts of chemicals of years past, and we forget that
even though we're up here and these rarefied airs of
the Buckhead region of Atlanta, um, we are very much
tied to the earth below where. Of course we know this,

(01:09):
but we take it for granted. Many things existed before us.
There are ghosts of fauna and flora all around us. Yes,
ghosts in a metaphorical sense though, I would love to
see a giant sloth made out of ectoplasm on my
train ride to work some morning. But indeed you haven't
seen that on Marta, not yet. But it's just a

(01:30):
matter of time. Okay, all right, you just wait. But indeed,
I mean that when when you start looking at the
details and you start looking at the fossil record, you
see the shadows, You see these ghosts of the environment
that came before the natural environment that came before the
rise of man. Yeah. I think one of the best
examples of this is actually in Trafalgar Square. That's not

(01:54):
to say that you will find hippos and elephants roaming
around Trafalgar Square today, which is this incredibly compact area
of London. Right. Well, the only time I was there,
I couldn't see it because there was a Scissor Sisters
concert in Square, right, But any other day you would
see the hippos and elephants. But actually, excavation of various

(02:14):
sites in London, including Square, found remains from the last
ice age of these animals. We're talking about a hundred
and ten thousand, twelve thousand years ago. So again here's
a good example of this. You know, extremely densely populated
area which does have some classical elements of human history
woven throughout it, which makes it feel really historical. But

(02:36):
when you think about these mega fauna roaming around, you know,
a hundred ten thousand years before, you really begin to
get this sense that, um, everywhere we are we are
surrounded by this deep history. We forget how very rich
it is. Yes, and we're talking about about creatures of
all sizes, including mega fauna, the the the ultra large creatures,

(03:00):
the king sized creatures that have have subsequently vanished from
from much of the world. Yeah. In fact, there's more
evidence from remains that monkeys and rhinos were also native
to Britain during another period about six thousand years ago,
with a climate that's similar to the one we have today,
which has had some people say well, hey, why don't

(03:21):
we bring back monkeys to the UK. And we'll get
into that in a bit, but it does bring up
this idea of these these ghosts of the past and
what they mean to our current ecosystems. Yeah, and the
ecosystem is key here because, especially in our urban environment,
with our fancy towers and our highways, we we often

(03:43):
think of ourselves as detached from the ecosystem. We think
of here's the city, and beyond the city, well, that's
that's the nature. And if we have some some nature
here in the city, you know, and some pocket plants
and a little little garden here in a park here,
well that's all fine and good, but we don't think
of it in term. We don't think of ourselves in
terms of being a part of the of the ecology itself. Yeah,

(04:05):
and a lot of this is because more and more
of us are living in urban centers in a way
from farmlands, in a way from nature. And we've talked
about this before in several podcasts having to do with
um just inhabiting cities, which is vastly different even from
the eighteen hundreds. So what happens here is that you
get yourself a little bit divorced from the reality of

(04:27):
nature what's going on out there, and then you also
have this sort of storybook reality that was created for you.
And John mu Alum, who wrote The Wild Ones, talks
about this a lot that we are raised on all
these sort of parables that deal with animals and this
idea that there's this luxurious amount of animals out there

(04:47):
for us to just revel in, when in fact we
know that if we want to see an animal, a
wild one, particularly one that is exotic, you gotta get
to the zoo. Right. And so again this is just
kind of underscoring again how very far away we are
from from true nature, and it starts to get into

(05:08):
this idea of well, if we're that removed from our
own ecosystems, then perhaps we're that removed from understanding how
we affect them, and that we may even be entering
into a period of ecological collapse as a result. And
by that we're talking about the just the overall crippling

(05:30):
of an ecosystem and a drastic reduction in its ability
to support the organisms that are a part of it.
And and and force again we hear organisms that are supported
as a part of it. We don't exist outside of it,
we we exist within it. Uh. And ecological collapse is
often a permanent event um with with drastic consequences including

(05:51):
mass extinction. Yeah, if you think about it, there's a
certain carrying capacity to humans, right, And so we have
all this junk with us, we have all this need
for resource is we have limited amounts of land, we
have global warming going on, and we have a population
that is just bursting out of control. And we've talked
about this. By twenty fifty, there are some um stats

(06:11):
out there that say that we may get to ten
million people on Earth. Yeah, which is a bad thing.
I read an editorial not too long ago where an
individual was saying, well, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
We need to start stop thinking about it is a
bad thing, because then they were making a case for
for a very optimistic case for the education of people

(06:32):
and the changing of people, and which is all well
and good, but when you're looking at the facts, when
you're looking at the sheer numbers, it's very hard to
uh to see that as as any kind of a
positive outcome for the planet. Yeah, and I think we're
so good at kicking the cam further into the future
anyway and saying we'll deal with that when we get there, right,

(06:52):
and oh, technology that will save the day. But or
we're just getting better. You know, we're more enlightened. Enlightenment
will save us, even if they are even more of us.
But we know that's not necessarily true. When when the
road meets the rubber, rubber meets the road, not everybody
is acting in a way that would be helpful for
the impactor. Glad you mentioned the road again, because the

(07:13):
road ends up is a part of this. We have
this massive, continuous concrete asphalt thing that is basically like
a chain that we've we've used to wrap up the
natural environment, cutting across uh, you know, territories of existing animals,
carrying up the landscape, allowing humans to to to permeate

(07:35):
every every part of the environment. Paved paradise and they
put up a parking lot. Well yeah, um, but no,
I mean seriously, I mean you think about it in
that way, right, just the paving of land. And then
also people burn force for agriculture and grazing, and as
they replace native vegetation with monoculture crops, that discourages cloud formation,

(07:58):
and that alters the relationship to the surface in the atmosphere,
which initiates further drying and warming and further species loss.
And again here is this sort of invisible I stay
invisible because we don't see the chemicals, right, we don't
see them interacting all of this stuff going on behind
the scenes, And it's hard to get a beat on
it for us humans because we'd like to have concrete,

(08:21):
nice visual things to illustrate what's happening in our lives,
right And so I think that's some of where the
climate issues come into play. Because you have one camp
that says, dire need, big trouble right now if we
don't address this, and we have another camp that says,
I don't really see much going on here. Let's get
a little bit warmer. So we're going to try to

(08:42):
discuss a little bit more of this. And it does
all have to do with this ecological collapse. Now, so
many of these examples of ecological collapse and the forces
at work in the ecological collapse there, it's very much
like a spiral. You see one thing that sort of
kicks off the movement, and then it just keeps going
and going, and it gets more disastrous and more disastrous

(09:04):
until hopefully, uh, somebody checks the action and the listeners
maybe Remember we did an entire episode about this called
Black Blizzards of the dust Bowl. So the dust Bowl
occurred in the nineteen thirties here in the United States,
but its roots reached back into the late nineteenth century.
You had pioneers moving into a semi arid Midwestern Southern
Plains region. And what do they do. They wanted to

(09:26):
make a living, right, so they were farming. Then World
War One hits and farms needed up their production, so
they turned to the machines. They brought in plows and
other farming equipment. In between nineteen thirty more than five
million acres of previously unfarmed land was plowed. So he
had record crops in nineteen thirty one. But soon there's
too much wheat on the market and there's two little

(09:46):
money out there to spend on it, so prices is plummet. Okay,
So what they do They expanded their fields in an
effort to turn out a profit. They covered the prairie
with wheat in place of natural drought resistant grasses, and
they left the unused fields bear so and then in
the wake of all this plow based farming, the telling
of the soil. You have fertile top soil that literally

(10:08):
blows away in the wind, and without it, the ground
becomes less nurturing and more susceptible to drought. So we
see this example where where humans as always have remade
their environment, they've remade their world and and then what happens,
Drought comes like a vengeance. High temperature set in, it
bakes the parched earth, and when the winds blow through,

(10:28):
they summon up these great black dust storms. Yeah, and
those dust storms rereak havoc on people, right. I mean,
you all of a sudden are in this really inhospitable
terrain and you don't have the resources that you normally
would in terms of food. In fact, John Steinbeck explored
this in a fictional manner in the Grapes of Wrath,

(10:49):
and I think most people are familiar with it, or
with the dust bowl um in that sort of fictional account.
But this happens all over the world. I believe that
Australia has dealt with this right now in Arizona. There
has been a huge impact on farming practices and how
that has changed the land for the worst. So we
see this on and on and on again. And it's

(11:10):
a kind of extinction of vegetation of flora that is
changing the ecosystems and changing our access to resources. So
the other thing, you have our animals here as part
of this equation. And I wanted to bring up ancient
Egypt because there's a two thousand and fourteen study that's

(11:30):
published in the September eight Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science of p and A. S and it found
that about six thousand years ago there were thirty seven
species of large bodied mammals in Egypt, but today there
are only eight species. So some of the species that
were lost lions, wild dogs, elephants, or x hard a

(11:51):
beast in giraffes, so those were roaming around, right, and
mega fauna is really important for keeping other species in
check um for also spreading seeds and also interacting with
the vegetation. So what you're talking about here on the
Nile is that there were three major periods of really

(12:13):
dry climates that happened over that six thousand years. And
what happened is you also, at the same time had
human population just increasing quite a bit along the Nile.
You have a competition, a competition for space, and this
contributed to wiping out species. And of course, you know,
a lot of this is based on the fact that
we we saw the illustrations of these creatures in the

(12:36):
artifacts of the day. Yeah, that's right. They were able
to really go back and um and figure out what
sort of species existed and what time periods not counting
humans with the jackal heads of course no, and current
ones too, right. Um, so what we're talking about our
keystone species. These are creatures that interact really strongly with

(12:56):
the environment and they wield an outsized influence. So an
example would be even a beaver, Like you don't necessarily
think about them as this big giant um powerful uh,
you know, animals. But what they do is they alter
the course of streams, they open meadows within forests, they
create pollond ecosystems. And then here's another example. Elephants. They

(13:18):
graze and they browse, and they act like forest engineers,
and they push over trees and they keep vast grasslands
like the Serengetti open, and that makes them the keystone species.
So Caroline Fraser, who wrote the book Rewilding the World, says, quote,
the list of threatened plants and animals re rely on
is weird and varied, including amphibians, bears, gymnasperms, uh, cone snails, sharks,

(13:44):
and horseshoe crabs. She says, cone snails they have toxins
that they are prized in medical research, where they're used
in developing pain medication for cancer and AIDS patients. The
blood of horseshoe crabs that carries antimicrobial peptides that kill
bacteria being tested for treatments in HIV, leukemia, prostate cancer,
breast cancer, in rheumatoid arthritis, and these are all things

(14:09):
that we depend on, but we don't realize that our
actions as humans are decreasing the populations of Yeah, here's
a quote from Center for Biological Diversity. They say, quote,
although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs as a
natural at a natural background rate of about one to
five species per years. Scientists estimate we're now losing species
at one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate,

(14:31):
with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could could
be a scary future. Indeed, with as many as thirty
to of all species possible heading toward extinction by mid century,
and also adding of currently threatened species are at risk
from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of
exotic species, and global climate change, which leads to the

(14:53):
idea of global ecological collapse. And we'll talk about that
as well as the frozen zoo and the doomsday seed
vault when we get back. All right, we're back, and
you know, so many of horror episodes lately seemed to
be dwelling on this long term versus short term idea,

(15:15):
this idea that we we only live in the short term.
And I don't think anything could be more true than
this when you talk about UH ecological systems or the
future of our planet and the environments UH contained within.
So when you start to look at global ecological collapse
first glimpse, it does feel a little bit like the

(15:36):
sky is falling. The sky is falling. On the other hand,
if you take all of the data and you put
it together, you see that there is a direction that
we are going toward which seems to indicate a global
wide collapse of ecosystems if we can't get our stuff together. Indeed,
we may be approaching what is called a state shift
in Earth's biosphere, which is as scary as it sounds,

(15:59):
a planetary a scale, critical ecological transition as a result
of human influence. Yeah, there's a two thousand and twelve
study called Approaching State Shift and or spiosphere, and it
talks about how humans have already converted about of the
ice free land surface of the planet for raising crops
from livestock and building cities and nice buildings like the

(16:19):
when we're in right now. And studies on a smaller
scale have suggested that when more than fifty of a
natural landscape is lost, the ecological web can collapse. So
the idea is, let's step back and look at this
from a planetary perspective and see it going on all over.
And Dennis Meadows, who is a professor emeritus of systems

(16:40):
policy at the University of New Hampshire and he's written
extensively on the limits of growth, says collapse will not
be driven by a single identifiable cause simultaneously acting in
all countries. He says it will come through a self
reinforcing complex of issues, including climate change, resource constraints, and
socio economic equality. When economies slow down, fewer products are

(17:03):
created relative to demand, and when the rich can't get
more by producing real wealth, they start to use their
power to take from lower segments. Okay, well that's it's
definitely sound alarmist, but it does paint a picture of
a greater population of people and less resources to go
around for everyone. Yeah, and then we're also facing what

(17:25):
is called a youth bulge. Um. This is uh, this
is basically on one level, it's easy to dismiss this
because you you just look at the basic reality that
the old wild always distrust the youth. The youth are
always filled with all of this passion and this feeling
that they can change in the world. And uh, sometimes
they can't. Sometimes they have the scary ability to change
the world. And uh, and and how do we deal

(17:46):
with that? And then what do you do when due
to population explosions, you see this sudden swell in the
number of youths out there, youth that end up having
these very passionate ideas about what they need to do,
sometimes militant ideas about what they need to do to
change the world. Yeah. And according to Kenneth Wise, of
the l A Times, of the something two and a

(18:08):
half billion people who will be added to the planet
by twenty nine percent are expect to be to be
born in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now, these are
some of the poorest, most volatile countries, and we know
about eight percent of the world civil conflicts um since
the nineteen seventies have occurred in countries with young, fast
growing populations. And again, this is the the youth bulge

(18:30):
that we're talking about. So the stage is really set, uh,
for those who have control and influence to try to
maintain that control, influence and influence in that status quo,
and then for the poor to turn towards opportunities, whatever
opportunities they may have, whether or not that's that's joining
a militia, or whether or not that is doing something

(18:52):
that's more positive to affect change. And so that's when
you begin to look at the global collapse not just
as an environmental one, but also an economic one. Yeah. Yeah,
the the the economic and ecological ramifications of conflict. I mean,
we've discussed in the past. I feel like we did
an episode about about sunken dangerous. I think it was

(19:14):
when we talked in part about some of the lingering
ecological problem stemming from the Second World War, Uh, which
you know, again was a it was indeed a massive conflict,
was truly a world war. Anywhere you went on the planet, Uh,
somebody was wrapped up in this this termoil in one
way or another. UM. It just it makes me think

(19:34):
about some of our recent episodes about UM infectious disease,
because you know, we're looking at the complexity of of
the ecosystem, and you can easily tie that into into
guy a hypothesis, the idea that that all the life
on Earth is essentially one organism, that it's all interconnected,
because we we we do see that when we talk
look at ecological collapse, we see the dominoes falling over.

(19:57):
And when you hurt one thing, when you take one
thing out, when you pollute one corner of the earth,
there are shock waves and uh, and the results can
be catastrophic. And it's it's hard not to see human
culture as an illness uh in the organism, in the
metal organism of life on Earth. But it's a but
it's a nefarious organism. It's it's it's one that is

(20:20):
infecting more than just one area. You can't just you
can't just treat one tissue or one part of the
body because it is it is so ingrained in every
part of the creature. Not to keep bringing up the
matrix on every episode, but there is one part when
the when the alien guy can't remember his name, yes

(20:40):
Mr Smith, right, right, remember, and he talks about how
humans really have been the cancer on the Earth. And
that's the very dark view of it, is that we
are affecting all of these negative changes, and in doing
it somewhat willy nilly, although I will say it appears
that we are trying have a backup plan in place,

(21:02):
and I don't just mean people um putting together different plans,
which we'll talk about. One of them is real wild
ing um. But but taking a very like what would
happen tomorrow if there were the apocalypse approach, And what
I'm talking about is the doomsday seed vault. Yeah, now,
seed seed vaults, um seed refugees are you know, there's

(21:23):
nothing new. We've been h We've been doing those as
a human culture for quite some time, and there are
a number of different ones around the world, but the
most famous of these, located on the Norwegian Archipelago, is
uh Small bar the small Bard seed Vault out out
here in this largely barren Arctic Arctic frigid waste land
where polar bears roam uh and you know, and it's

(21:45):
not completely unoccupied there. It was a mining place for
for some time, but but still it's a very remote
setting and it's the perfect setting to have this uh,
this vault where they hope to in are in in
the process of storing the world eats so that we'll
have the seed heritage, not just the the massive seed
crops that we have and depend on, but other varieties.

(22:07):
Because it gets very, very complicated. It's it's like, you know,
when you have one variety of that you're depending on exclusively.
It's it's like having a you know, inbreeding that that
crop isn't susceptible to harm. And then likewise you have
you have types of plants that if they vanished, then
we we want the ecological heritage of being able to

(22:28):
to study it, to grow it and and heal the earth.
Even if you want to get to uh, you know,
almost religious about it, Well, that's the day after the apocalypse,
you would you would return to this compound here um
and then just started cultivating the seeds. I mean that
is a very simplistic view of it. But if you've
never seen this before, it's pretty amazing. It's basically like

(22:49):
a concrete wedge pounded into a mountain, and it contains
the world's crops one point five billion seeds, including everything
from California so flowers to ancient Chinese rice. So it's
kind of like a backup copy of nature, at least
in seed form, yes, well, a backup copy that you
would have to put some considerable work in um to

(23:13):
to to implement. It's a it's not a there's no
push push the button and repopulate the earth mechanism at
the small bard. But it is contains the algorithms it does.
It contains it contains the essentially the seed heritage of
the world, in which if you think about it, like
we have um crop extinction all the time, and this

(23:36):
happens usually because of the mono agriculture practices that we
have in place. So it's it's not weird that we
would lose some crops, but some of it has been exascerbated,
has been made worse because of our practices. So consider
that in the eighteen hundreds they were seventy one catalog
species of apples the United States. Today there are just

(23:59):
three hundred species seeds, so we lose them all the time.
But the seed vault, again, it's it's a place where
you could start from the beginning. It's the idea that
if we had a disease that was rampant that took
out a large amount of the population, if there was
something that that created that collapse, maybe it's global warming.
Maybe it's war that we would have something to return to,

(24:21):
you know. On the subject of of lost crops. If
anyone out there wants to watch a good cooking show,
a good food show, highly recommend The Mind of a Chef,
especially the second season as it pertains to this episode,
uh features a lot from Chef Sean Brock, who really
goes into lost seed heritage and and and reclaiming it

(24:44):
and especially is it concerned Southern cuisine because you see
the shift where people are getting away from the crops
that are actually grown and the plants that are part
of the natural ecology or stuff that we've we've lost
as we moved towards these big mono crops. Yeah, and
the flavors. I feel like the different species are kind
of like the Willy Wonkas of flavors in nature that

(25:06):
we don't always experience because of the mono agriculture. And
I believe Nolan producer, he turned me onto that show. Um,
it is really great mind of a chef, So check
it out. All right, so you have your seeds, but
what about your fauna? That's right, It's one thing to
have the plants, but again it's it's you know, getting
back into that idea of the ecology as the complex

(25:26):
system about life on Earth is one hole. You need
all the pieces. So what do you do about the
the animal pieces? Well, uh, there are currently several programs
going on of note to preserve the genes of endangered animals.
There's China's Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base. They keep
eggs and sperm and other tissue samples from panda is
another native species, and they keep it all in cold storage. There's, uh,

(25:49):
the UK's Frozen Art Project took on the mission to
create a network of similar gene banks around the world
devoted to endangered animals. And there is the f was
in Zoo which Oliver Writer at the San Diego Zoo
created founded um that is a cryod preservation of cells
and DNA from natured animals over a thousand species, and

(26:10):
Writer says, quote, it's a small amount of biodiversity for
the number of species that are potentially facing extinction. So
as you have, if we call back to some of
the statistics that you threw out earlier, the amount of
species that's those are good efforts to try to preserve
some of them, but we won't be able to do
all of them, particularly the ones that are going extinct. UM.

(26:33):
But I think it kind of this whole thing stepping
back and looking at seed preservation or DNA preservation of species.
The fact that we are sinking millions, if not billions
of dollars into these endeavors, I think will illustrate the
concept that perhaps something is going on, and then we

(26:53):
should take this seriously, the fact that that ecological collapse
could happen. And uh, you know, and I also want
to want a caution to don't take too much heart
in the and especially the frozen Zoo movements in the
sense that bear in mind that bringing an extinct animal
back just with its genetic information on that alone, just

(27:15):
with this blueprint, uh, is exceedingly difficult. So this is
not a situation where oh, we just have a backup again,
you just push the button and it's good to go. No,
it's there's some hope in it. But uh, but for
the most part, when a species is gone, it is gone. Well,
and if you're talking about a really a huge extinction here,
and we're talking about global uh ecological collapse on a

(27:40):
mass scale, we're talking about mass extinction, and let's keep
this in mind. Two hundred and fifty million years ago,
the most catastrophic, the Great Dying of the Permian Age,
wiped out over all species and the oceans and on land,
and it took tens of millions of years for life
to recover. So I don't know that we're going to

(28:00):
I mean, some will say we're going towards the sixth
extinction of humans and that you know, you can have
as many seeds and frozen DNA as you want of species,
but that's not going to counteract the amount of time
it takes to put systems back into place. Indeed, But yeah,
to your point, we've had actually for not round to
do it. But yeah, again to your point that we've

(28:23):
had five known mass extinction events in our history, and
it's it's crucial to know that two of them wiped
out at least half of all species. So that's that's
pretty stackering. So when we talk about a six extinction event, uh,
it is not a minor occurrence. No, And Caroline Fraser,
again the author of Rewilding, says bio biologists have begun
to understand that nature is a chain of dominoes. If

(28:46):
you pull one piece out the whole thing falls down,
lose the animals, lose the ecosystems, game over very well put.
And again, this is one of those things that is
so difficult for us to wrap our heads around because
there there's not this sort of concrete thing in front
of us that says, by the year X, all things

(29:06):
will die off. We can only look at what's happening
and predict what we think is going to happen, and
we can't say with certainty at what moment. And I
think that's what drives us nuts. And I think that's
what drives some people to in action indeed, And again
it just comes back again to our our inability to

(29:27):
deal with the long term consequences of our actions and
in our own life as well. But when you start
looking at at the model being the lives of our
children and their grandchildren or the generations to come, it
just it seems to cripple us even more. Yeah, there's
something called a shifting baseline syndrome, and it's a concept
that was coined in by fisheries scientists Daniel Polly, who

(29:51):
said that each subsequent generation of scientists uses wildlife populations
at the time they entered the field as the baseline
leveling the awareness of how much these populations may have
plummeted between that point and the baseline of the generation before,
which leads to this sort of environmental generational amnesia. Mhm, yeah,

(30:13):
I mean that that makes perfect. I mean the old
people will always tell you, you you know, when when when
I was your age, it was such and such. When
I was your age, it was such and such, and
we when we almost never listened to that, except maybe
as a just a curious, uh, you know, side tangent.
But but that's the reality we see here. It's it's
always what we're just taking our own experiences of when

(30:34):
we we enter into this world and using that as
as is almost the primordical setting as the base setting
that that everything else needs to be lined up to.
Forgetting that this base setting is somewhat downhill from where
I rolled from last time, and then from the time
before right deep time just isn't generally our thing, And

(30:54):
so yeah, we don't remember or even sometimes know that
there were elephants follower square right um, and that there
was a very different environment in place before us. It's
basically each generation, it's it's it's like if you came
into the doctor and this is and you've only had
this new doctor for two weeks. And the doctor says, hey,

(31:15):
you seem to be doing great. You're you know, only
one of your knees is painting you. And then you
have to remind the doctor but there was a time
when neither of my knees pained you. And then the
doctor said, well, I wasn't here for that, and then
he just starts to go in about how we're not
supposed to be up right anyway, exciting at desks. Alright,
So you know, this is a this is a bit

(31:36):
of a bit of a bummer episode in some respects.
It's kind of not a happy pants, not a happy
pants episode for sure. So I'm gonna I thought, maybe
I capt it off by reading just a quick little
paragraph from another bummer work, that being a cormat McCarthy's
The Road. Here's this uplifting quote. Bring it Yeah, Well,

(31:56):
I mean it's it's beautiful, but it it does deal
with ass extinction, with the loss of life on the planet,
the complexity of life on the planet. So here it goes.
Once there were brooked trout in the streams in the mountains.
You could see them standing in the amber current, where
the white edges of their fins wimpled softly, and the
flow they smelled of moss in your hand, polished and

(32:17):
muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that
were maps of the world, and it's becoming maps and
mazes of a thing which could not be put back,
not to be made right again. In the deep glens
where they lived, all things were older than man, and
they hummed up mystery. So there you have it. UH,
great book of course, and UH and I'm pretty sure

(32:39):
that one's available on audible for anyone who's thinking about
taking up that audible deal that we mentioned in the break. Indeed, alright,
make sure to check out the next episode, which is
about re wilding, which I guess you could say is
one of the ways in which we could approach this
in a very tactile way, a very concrete way, and
try to find a solution. Yeah. So if you want

(33:00):
something a little more upbeat to cat this, tune in
next time and we will U, We'll cheer you up
a little bit because rewilding is uh is a dash
of hope, uh to take on top of this this topic. Yeah,
and a Komodo dragon for everyone. Yeah who didn't want that? Yeah?
Check it out, saying In the meantime, be sure to
check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That

(33:21):
is our homepage, our mothership. You will find every podcast
episode we've ever done uh, and the podcast landing page
for this episode will include links to related content, stuff
we've mentioned here, et cetera. UH. That page also includes
links out to our various social media accounts, so you
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(33:42):
perspective on this topic, and you can send your thoughts
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