EP. 94 — Humans Are An Invasive Species with Elizabeth Kolbert

Adam: [00:00:22] Hello, everyone, welcome to Factually!, I’m Adam Conover, and, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the environment on this podcast. If you listen to this podcast, you probably give a shit about the planet and you want to save it as best you can. I know I do. And, you know, just a few weeks ago, we had Saul Griffith on the show to discuss how we really can stave off the worst of climate change today if we can muster the political will to massively electrify our power grid. Now, that’s an incredibly optimistic, uplifting message, and I support it. I also don’t want that to prevent us from having a clear eyed view of how massively we have already altered the planet. The truth is that we can’t just fix the Earth or reverse climate change. All we can do is prevent the worst effects that are to come because so many of the impacts have already happened. I mean, there are seven billion humans alive today and every single thing we do alters the Earth and its ecosystems, for instance, simply by doing something as basic as traveling around the world. We’ve spread the chytrid fungus. We just straight up murdered massive numbers of amphibians. This fungus, which travels with us on the soles of our feet, has been implicated in destroying 90 species of amphibian 90. And it’s driven the decline of another hundred and twenty four species by 90 percent. Those amphibians are just gone. And even though we want to do everything we can to save them, I don’t think it’s likely that we’re going to completely shut down all human travel around the globe any time soon. Moving about the earth is just part of what it means to be a human, even though by doing so we fundamentally change the earth. And look, it’s not just frogs, OK? In the United States and Canada, we have lost three billion birds since 1970. That’s billion with a B.. Now, these deaths are due to pesticides and plastics. Yes. Things that we are trying to reform. But they’re also due to our windows and even our cats. That’s right. The cats that we brought to North America that we love and support and love to cuddle, those cats are responsible for the deaths of countless birds. Are we going to stop loving cats any time soon? I wouldn’t place bets on it or take insects, which we talked about in our interview with Akito Kawahara. Land insects are decreasing by about nine percent each decade, which might be good news for your windshield, but it’s bad news for the prospects of a healthy, thriving earth. And it’s happening because of habitat destruction, farming and all these other things that humans do. In fact, when you look at this all together, it starts to look like changing the natural world is just what humans do. That’s what it is to be a living human being on this planet, to change the world around you. But that is, let’s just say, not a comforting revelation. I would even call it dismaying. I mean, we are changing the world in ways that we do not like that are heartbreaking to us. And that creates a conflict at our core. If being human is to change and we don’t want to make those changes, what do we do? Well, here’s what I think. I think that it is vital to not view this as a source of pessimism, but instead a reason to be optimistic, because if to be human is to cause change. Well, we also have a choice in the kinds of changes that we are going to create. We can’t undo the alterations and destruction that humanity has caused to the planet so far. But we can decide what the planet of the future is going to look like. But critically, we can only do that if we accept our own role in fundamentally altering it with every breath that we take. We are living in a world defined by human intervention in a new geological age that scientists call the Anthropocene. And I feel that our most important job as sentient organisms on this planet is to look that reality right in the eyes and ask ourselves what it means. Well, there is no author on the planet who tells the story of humanity’s impact on the planet better than Elizabeth Kolbert. I am so thrilled to have her on this show. The entire monologue I just gave was based on revelations that I had when I first read her book, The Sixth Extinction, and then the following six years of me thinking about these topics and developing my own beliefs about them. That book, by the way, won a Pulitzer, and she has a new book out now called Under a White Sky The Nature of the Future. I cannot say enough about how important and moving her work is and this interview, knocked my socks off. So I really hope you enjoy it. Let’s get right to it. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elizabeth Kolbert. [00:05:07][285.1]

Adam: [00:05:09] Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. [00:05:11][1.7]

Elizabeth: [00:05:12] Thanks for having me. [00:05:13][0.7]

Adam: [00:05:14] I have been a fan of your work for such a long time. I read The Sixth Extinction when I came out in 2014. And I can’t say there are many books that have been more of a revelation to me that have made me see the world more differently than your book did, popularized for many of us certainly for me, the notion of the Anthropocene, the idea that we’ve now changed the Earth so much that we’re in a new geological age in a way. And I mean just it just portrayed so vividly. You know, I grew up with this notion that we are supposed to save the planet, that we’re trying to save wild spaces, that we can reverse the damage that we’ve done or the changes that we’ve made in your book showed in so many vivid examples how much that change, that damage has already been done and how much we do it just by the act of living on Earth. And it sort of put me to an existential crisis. And I spent the next maybe two years of my life. [00:06:10][56.8]

Elizabeth: [00:06:12] I’m sorry. [00:06:12][0.1]

Adam: [00:06:12] I spent the next couple of years of my career working through it, doing multiple episodes of television about climate change and trying to understand it. And yeah, you have a new book out. I’m so excited to read it. I’ve not had a chance yet. How does it fit into that broader narrative that you were telling in that book and your work generally? [00:06:28][16.4]

Elizabeth: [00:06:30] Well, it it it’s sort of I mean, some people have described it as a sequel, and I would say that it it is it is really a sequel. It looks at the question of having. Having altered all of these natural systems and cycles, you know what what what’s our next move basically? [00:06:51][20.8]

Adam: [00:06:51] Yeah, I mean, well, before we get into what that next move is, you’ve described the book as a dark comedy. It seems like it’s it seems like it would just be dark, a dark drama. It’s a very heavy subject. I’m all about finding comedy in dark situations. What about it is a comedy for you? [00:07:07][15.5]

Elizabeth: [00:07:09] Well, you know, a lot of the comedy emerges from the situations that the sort of individual stories that I explore, but each one of them has a somewhat I don’t want to say absurdist streak to it, but I like to think of it as sort of Dr. Strangelovian and component to it how’s that. [00:07:37][28.0]

Adam: [00:07:38] Can you give me give me an example from the book, I know that you similarly to the last book, go to go to different places and talk about the crises that certain species are facing or what scientists are working on in various places. What’s the funniest one? [00:07:51][12.5]

Elizabeth: [00:07:52] The funniest one? Well, one one of the ones that has it has it has a humorous element. And I’m not a comedian, so I’m I’m not sure that I can do justice to the to the comedy is I go to Australia, where one of the big problems or among the many, many invasive species in Australia. So Australia is part of the world that was isolated from the rest of the world for many millions of years, developed a unique fauna that people are familiar with in the form of koalas and kangaroos. But that’s just a few of the extraordinary species that evolved on Australia, nowhere else. So they have a very unusual and very, very endangered native fauna. And one of the creatures that has endangered the native fauna is a toad called the cane toad, which is native to South America and Central America, an enormous toad. Sometimes these toads are mistaken for boulders, they’re so big. And they’re they’re highly toxic. That’s how they endanger the native wildlife they Australia doesn’t have any toads of its own, any native toads. It’s a part of the world just doesn’t have toads and it certainly has no toxic toads. So things come in contact with these cane toads and they eat them and they die. And Australians have come up with and here’s sort of where the comedy comes in, all sorts of schemes for doing in cane toads. It’s a it’s sort of a natural national pastime in a way. People take golf clubs and try to smash them. They purposefully run them over, they freeze them, they stick them in the freezer. So they organize. They have what are called toad busting militias. They go out and try to bust some cane toads, so it’s kind of a national sport, really even and they run them over with their lawn mowers. While I was in there’s also a I don’t think I’ve told anyone this yet and it’s not in the book, but there’s also like a little mini industry. They’ve become kind of as I say, they have a comic element. They’re kind of ugly from a human perspective. And there’s a sort of a crass industry that has sprung up of cane toad sort of paraphernalia. So I have I bought a little cane toad purse that sort of has a zipper where its mouth would be. People have cane toad purses. They have you can buy you like taxidermy cane toads holding beer cans. I mean, everything. There’s a whole wide range of handicrafts that you can purchase cane toad handicrafts. So it’s sort of just I mean, it’s funny, but it’s it’s also sad because, of course, these cane toads are having a really significant impact on native species. [00:11:14][202.3]

Adam: [00:11:16] But this is there is a perversity to it, too, because there’s this invasive species that was I assume they got there. They were brought there by humans somehow. And what, in a ship or an escaped pet or something along those lines. But this is not what we think conservation looks like. This is not oh we’re living in harmony with the plants and animals. This is we’re trying to run over amphibians in their cars and making more crap out of them. [00:11:41][25.2]

Elizabeth: [00:11:42] Right. And I should say that the story begins. And this also does have a dark comic aspect in my mind. I suppose you have a perverse sense of humor, perhaps, but the story begins in the 1930s when one hundred and two of these cane toads, we have very good records on that were shipped from Hawaii. They were not native to Hawaii either, but they were already in Hawaii and are still in Hawaii to to Sydney. And one hundred and one of them survive this journey. And then they were intentionally let loose in a sugar cane country. I mean, they’re called cane toads that really has no relationship to what they really are. But the idea was that they were going to eat these beetles and beetle grubs that were damaging the sugarcane crop, which is a big cash crop in northeastern Australia, but so the cane toads were not interested in the beetles at all. The beetle grubs. Yeah, but they did just fine. They have no they have no natural predators in a part of the world where nothing eats toads except things that eat toads and die. And they just multiplied like crazy and spread. They keep spreading. And another interesting part of this story is that they’re evolving. So people have watched them. Scientists have watched them feed up as they make their way around Australia. They don’t survive well in the central part of Australia, which is so dry, but wherever there’s any water they can survive, they’re very, very good survivors. And so they’re making their way around of the periphery of Australia. And it was observed that as they were on the march, as it were, they were expanding their range faster and faster. And it seemed inexplicable until scientists went and collected some of the toads from the original part of Australia where they’d been released and then some of the toads on what’s called the invasion front. So where it’s like a front in the battle on this side is is toads and on this side are no toads and they found that the toads on the invasion front had evolved significantly longer legs. So we’re watching evolution happen in real time and these toads are getting faster and faster. And so covering more and more territory every year. [00:14:18][156.7]

Adam: [00:14:22] You keep raising in your work these visions of our own flailing attempts to undo our own impact. Like I think there’s and again, I just got this from a review, but there’s an example where, you know, we’ll we’ll let loose some species in order to eat another invasive species. And then we’ve got to take that and then we have to deal with that species and then we have to deal with there’s like a cascade effect where we’re constantly trying to to put the put the tsunami back in the bottle in a way and only making it worse. [00:14:52][30.2]

Elizabeth: [00:14:54] Yeah, I mean, one of the reviews of the book cited, which I thought was very apt in the old kids song, I know an old woman who swallowed a fly and and that kind of response of, oh well, that that was that was a boo boo. Let’s let’s swallow something else that you associate with dumb teenage boys or whatever. Yeah, that’s kind of the way we’re we’re working our way through planet Earth. Absolutely. [00:15:22][28.4]

Adam: [00:15:23] I mean, do you. Like the the the crisis that your work presents me with a lot of times when I engage with, you know, normally maybe I’d save this big question for the end, but I feel like I need to steer into it head on is you know, we just had Saul Griffith on the show a couple of weeks ago. He’s he’s an engineer. And he. [00:15:43][19.2]

Elizabeth: [00:15:43] Yeah, I listen to him. I thought he was really good. Really interesting. [00:15:45][2.7]

Adam: [00:15:46] Yeah, he’s great. And he’s got a very optimistic point of view. You know, we can do it if we do these things, you know, you listen to that makes you feel great, makes you feel that humanity is up to the challenge, or at least we hope we are. But when I engage with your work, you know, one of the stories that stuck with me the most from the Sixth Extinction was the one about, I believe, frogs somewhere in South America. Do I have it right? [00:16:09][23.1]

Elizabeth: [00:16:10] Yeah. Yeah. In Central America, we were in Central America. We could have been in South America. We could have been in North America. I mean, this fungal pathogen is is is everywhere now. [00:16:20][9.5]

Adam: [00:16:21] Yeah. And that this fungal pathogen that’s wiping out these frogs was brought by people on the soles of our boots that just from people traveling from one place to another. And you write about how when we knit together ecosystems by traveling, just by that, you know, hey, I’m going to Europe for vacation. I come back home. I’m going to Miami to do a comedy show, and I fly back home just by doing that, uniting those ecosystems, we necessarily are reducing biodiversity, causing extinctions. And I engage with that. And I think, my God, I can’t ask. I can say let’s electrify the grid, but I can’t tell people don’t travel. I can’t tell myself don’t travel. Could I could I ever live that way so I can’t go anywhere because I might mess up an ecosystem and that makes our affect on the planet seem inevitable, inexorable that maybe we can mitigate it a little bit. But, you know, in the broad scope, we are ourselves an invasive species that is unable to to stop ourselves. And that’s what causes me to spin out a little bit. And I’m wondering what your emotional perspective towards these issues are, because you’ve been swimming in them for the past few decades, reporting on them directly. How do you feel about it and how do you feel like your perspective differs from the average person who’s thinking about climate change or the average pundit? [00:17:33][72.2]

Elizabeth: [00:17:34] Well, you know, I was just Saul and I thought he makes a really compelling case. But you also had to follow him. You know, he it was like if we do this and this and this and this and this and you follow him down and then then we will get to the point where we are no longer causing more damage. So what he was talking about was ultimately getting to the point where our emissions are effectively zero. So what’s being called net zero now. Right. Which is a big concept out there. Now, the sad fact, I have to say, because this is always my job to be sort of the fly in the ointment is net zero just gets you to the place where things aren’t getting worse, doesn’t solve the problem. So California as I’m sure you’re well aware, was in flames for a lot of the fall. That’s only going to get worse as climate change advances and advances for two reasons. Right now, one of which is that we have not yet even experienced the full effects of the CO2 we’ve already put up into the atmosphere because there’s a time lag in the system. There’s a lot of inertia in the system. And the second is we keep putting out more CO2. So both of those factors are in play. So at the point that you reach net zero, which I do think is possible, the unfortunate fact is at that point, after maybe a decade or two then temperatures would level out, but they would level out at a higher level, they’re not they’re not it’s not like we’ve solved the problem. So I think that, you know, I find some. I’m a I’m a journalist and I still huge to the sort of old fashioned, increasingly old fashioned dinosaurian notion that it’s important to face up to the truth and the truth of the situation is that we’re in a a really, we’re in a bind that we’ve created for ourselves, not because we’re evil or not because we’re greedy, though those don’t help. I’m not going to lie to you, but because we are very good at changing the world. And when you think about it. And that was very much the point of the sixth extinction. If you’re another creature, you have only one you have certain adaptability. You have certain range of temperatures you can tolerate. You have a certain way of doing things. You have a certain what’s called plasticity. So you’re not like an automaton. You do have a certain amount of a range. But when things go beyond your range, unless you evolve, you’re you’re you’re done. Right now, humans, as they move into the Arctic, well, a creature that evolved in the tropics shouldn’t be able to really do too well in the Arctic. We have clothes, we have tools. Now we have heating. So we’re just really, really good at taking over the territory and the ecological niche of other creatures because we don’t wait to evolve. We just say, oh, let’s invent something new. And there’s a mismatch there between humanity and the rest of the world and unless we acknowledge that we’re just constantly sort of chasing our tails like, oh, that’s going to stop this that can solve this. And the sad fact is, no, that’s not going to solve it. [00:21:26][231.8]

Adam: [00:21:27] Yeah, I mean, what that makes me think is and I’ve had this thought many times, we’re the invasive species. We’re the toad. [00:21:34][7.3]

Elizabeth: [00:21:36] Yeah. We’re the ultimate weedy species. I mean, when I when I wrote The Sixth Extinction, one of the first one of the reasons I wrote it was because I read a paper was called Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction, as it was written by two herpetologists guys who studied frogs. And they were studying exactly the phenomenon that you alluded to, which is this fungal pathogen that’s killing amphibians all around the world. And they refer to humanity as a weedy species. We are the ultimate weedy species. We can survive just about anywhere. We now survive on Antarctica and that is, we are the ultimate invasive species. [00:22:16][40.8]

Adam: [00:22:17] And it’s just in a way, it’s what we do. I mean, it’s we’re a species like any other. We’re reproducing we’re consuming resources. But the difference between us and the toad is that we are the species that says, hold on a second, this is bad, we would like to stop. We’re a fire that’s burning through all the fuel in the forest. Meanwhile, going, oh, no, the forest is going away yet. [00:22:41][24.3]

Elizabeth: [00:22:43] Yes. Yes. That’s a brilliant analogy. We are. We are. We are. We are both the fire and the firefighters. And when you think about it, that’s kind of a weird situation to be in. But I think it’s kind of a brilliant analogy. [00:22:56][13.1]

Adam: [00:22:57] Well, thank you. I’m happy to have come up with it, but I’m not happy that you feel it’s true, because it’s also a very a very dire one, because it puts us in this bind where we want to stop and protect these things. But by being alive, by by doing the most basic actions of human existence, we imperil them. And, you know, I mean, by the other token, if we all said, you know what, this is terrible, let’s all commit mass suicide, every human on the planet will take a cyanide pill. Well, then there’s no one around to appreciate and to care about these species either. You know that. Yeah, so, so. [00:23:33][36.5]

Elizabeth: [00:23:34] Well, it’s worse than that. Adam, I’m going to I yeah, you might. You haven’t really even plumb the depths of this one, but let’s go. Yeah. I mean like if you think about what we’ve let loose in the world, you know. For example, take the case of Australia, which is also in addition to being overrun by poisonous toads, toxic toads. I mean, we could just spend all of our hour talking about Australia, it’s also overrun with feral cats. So the British settlers brought cats. They went crazy, too. They should not be there at all. And they’re the Australian fauna really can’t deal with cats, which are very, very good hunters. So there’s millions of of feral cats and they consume, it’s been estimated, calculated, hundreds of millions of native mammals every year in Australia. And if you just read so a lot of a lot of Australian mammals have already gone extinct and the ones that remain are often confined to these huge what are called exclosures. So there are huge fenced in areas where they have these cat proof fences. And if you if humans just left the scene, you know, it’s not like Australia’s fauna would recover, like the cats would take over, many native mammals would be wiped out and something new would evolve eventually. I don’t want to you know, it depends on your and you’re taking the very long view. Eventually, Australia would have new native species, but eventually is a pretty fucking long time. [00:25:23][108.4]

Adam: [00:25:25] Yeah. And I mean, you know, when I start taking a view that’s that long, I start to think, well, you know, I mean, it won’t be that bad if we wipe out all life on Earth because the earth will keep spinning around and there’s some life somewhere else in the universe. And, you know, there’s no cosmic judge that’s going to come send us to species jail. It’ll just happen. But we happen to we happen to value these things. You know, we we perversely value cats. You know, there’s people in the US and I’m sure in Australia who want to protect feral cats, even though they are absolutely deadly to I think in the US, they kill something like two billion birds a year. [00:25:59][34.6]

Elizabeth: [00:26:00] Right. [00:26:00][0.0]

Adam: [00:26:01] And so we love and we value those cats. [00:26:04][2.5]

Elizabeth: [00:26:04] That’s not just feral cats. Those are your. That’s kitty. Kitty. [00:26:06][2.0]

Adam: [00:26:07] Yeah. Your domestic cat who you lived outside once a week or whatever. But we love the cats, so we can’t do anything about it and or our it interferes our mitigation efforts. But we also love the birds and we want to save the birds. You know, I’ve started bird watching this year. I’m enjoying it incredibly. And yet I’m aware that my presence on the planet is contributing to the fact that in the last 40 years, the population of birds in North America has dropped by a third. We have a third less birds than we did 40 years ago. So I’m heartbroken because my existence is imperiling the thing that I love and that’s hard to deal with it psychically. Do you how do you grapple with that? [00:26:43][36.4]

Elizabeth: [00:26:44] I mean, I, I, I think, you know, honestly, I’ve gotten to the heart of the matter and I think that that is very difficult to deal with and maybe it gets back to original sin or something. I don’t want to get too heavy duty here and I’m certainly no theologian. But I think that living with this knowledge that humanity or certainly humanity in its in its current incarnation of of a modern in the US and most of the world now. Right. Even in even very parts of the world where they’re doing a lot, you know, they just consume a lot less. But people are still the dominant force everywhere. And and but it’s particularly true of us in the US that we all trail after us, you know, this invisible set of consequences. We are cut off from it in many ways. And maybe that’s one of the problems. We don’t really see the way our economy is structured. It’s like not like you, Adam, when you buy, go to the grocery store and buy that box of cookies that was made with palm oil that was grown in Indonesia where they had to cut down the native rainforest, you know, you should have like a dead bird in that box of cereal, and then maybe it would really bring them to you. But instead you just sort of cut off from your impacts. You’re like, oh, I think I’m reading. I think I’m going about things pretty well. I floss my teeth. I eat Impossible Burgers or whatever. Whatever you do, you know, I drive a hybrid car, whatever, whatever you’re doing to say, oh, I’m trying to reduce my impacts. But really you just have this cloud of impacts that you’re just surround you. And that’s very, very painful. It’s really hard for people to deal with. And it’s why they always say just, you know, just just I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I just want the solutions. And my peculiar role role has been to say, well, I’m sorry, those just don’t exist. [00:29:01][137.1]

Adam: [00:29:01] Like the solutions, the solutions that will make all of this go away. [00:29:07][5.8]

Elizabeth: [00:29:07] Exactly. Exactly. [00:29:08][1.0]

Adam: [00:29:10] That’s why that is so, you know, a lot of times that’s heavy [00:29:16][5.3]

Elizabeth: [00:29:16] That’s heavy yeah. [00:29:16][0.0]

Adam: [00:29:17] A lot of times people will I look at what people say about the podcast on Twitter and they say, I listen to this episode and this made me feel so hopeful, this episode. [00:29:25][8.2]

Elizabeth: [00:29:25] OK, well, that’s not where you’re going to get for this. [00:29:27][2.3]

Adam: [00:29:28] Yeah, and I’m happy with that. I want I don’t want to be I love to have a positive takeaway. I don’t think it’s a mandate. [00:29:35][7.2]

Elizabeth: [00:29:36] No, I agree. And I want to say I listen to I listened to Michael Mann. I listened to Saul Griffeth and I thought they were both great. And I thought they both did have pretty hopeful message. And I absolutely applaud that and think it’s incredibly important. And, you know, I don’t expect everyone to go around saying, oh, that’s a bunch of B.S. But, you know, I for whatever reason that, as I say, I think it’s sort of being a journalist is OK, I really have to look at what the really, really what is the saying I’m not I’m not advocating I’m not an advocate. I don’t have a product that I’m selling you and I don’t have an agenda that I’m selling you. I only have bringing to these situations a kind of. I hope I like to think sort of truth seeking mentality and when you look at these things, I think as honestly as possible, there are definitely and I think you said this on some show and I absolutely agree with it, there are bad outcomes and there are worse outcomes. And we need to focus on not reaching the worst outcomes. But the idea that we’re going to magically somehow all live the way we live now and everything’s going to be happy and fine if we just all put up solar panels. I just I’m afraid that doesn’t take into account the many, many other species with whom we share this planet. [00:31:18][101.7]

Adam: [00:31:18] Yeah, I mean, what eventually resolved my existential crisis that your book provoked. And it was many year process was I spoke with the climate, I guess I call my climate philosopher Dale Jamieson. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but he his message sort of at the end, this is just what he said to me, perhaps was, look, you always have the choice today to make a better tomorrow, no matter how bad things are. There is no it’s too late. You always can do things today to make tomorrow better. And that’s your responsibility and your opportunity to wake up and do that. And I do try to hold that and remember that. And I think that’s a more healthy perspective than the all or nothing. Then the we can save it. And then once you realize that we can’t save one hundred percent of it, you’re devastated and you’re thrown into a spiral and you say, well, fuck it, I’m just going to drive a gas guzzling old car and like, eat plastic bags. But I agree with you. You need to have a clear eyed view of how possible this is and what our range of outcomes are. [00:32:21][62.8]

Elizabeth: [00:32:23] Yes. And I think that that is exactly you know, I think that that is a problem, actually, that people you know, once again, I don’t want to be I mean, I think that there’s a certain resistance to having a clear eyed view. And you have you have people always, you know, they’re going to solve climate change or they’re going to reverse climate change. They’re going to fix climate change. And, you know, no, they’re not. [00:32:44][21.2]

Adam: [00:32:46] Well, you know what I I like how do I pivot to a break, you spent a good deal of the book talking about various plans to do this and breaking them down. [00:32:57][11.2]

Elizabeth: [00:32:58] If you want to reverse climate change, I do have a plan for you, but most people are not going to like it. [00:33:04][5.6]

Adam: [00:33:04] Well, let’s talk about it right after the break. We’ll be right back with more Elizabeth Kolbert. OK, we’re back with Elizabeth Kolbert. You said it was very tantalizing before the break, if we want to reverse climate change, here’s how we do it. We’re not going to like it. What did you mean by that? [00:33:29][25.1]

Elizabeth: [00:33:30] Well, it’s it’s actually. The final chapter, couple chapters of of my new book, which is called Under White Sky, and that alludes to this idea of solar geoengineering, which I’m sure many of your listeners have heard of. And what solar geoengineering is, is it’s a idea we’ll just call it an idea proposal that we would counteract the effects of having dumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by with another level of intervention where we would now pour something, some either sulfur dioxide as one idea or calcium carbonate is another idea into the stratosphere. And what that would do is that would reflect these tiny particles would be reflective particles, they reflect sunlight back to space. There would be less direct sunlight hitting the earth and that would have a cooling effect. And if you dumped enough of it in into the stratosphere, you’d have to keep replenishing it. I should add, this is what volcanoes do. They spew sulfur dioxide that creates this kind of stratospheric haze and that temporarily lowers average global temperature. So that happened after Mount Pinatubo erupted, for example. Now, there are all sorts of ways you could once again, in theory, it’s very theoretical at this point do this. But in theory, once again, if you did enough of this, you reflected enough sunlight, you could even out, you could say, OK, we want to reach a point where the effect of our cooling equals the effect of our warming right. Now, tough to hit that exactly. But that is pretty much the only way that you could in a sort of human lifetime time scale fix, solve, reverse climate change. Now. Most people who are consider themselves environmentalists, and I am one of them, look at this idea with a lot of horror. Now is this. So is this contradictory, right, you have all these people out there who are who care passionately about these issues and I’m very glad about that and a lot of young people taking to the streets and I applaud them but saying, you know, we need to fix the climate or as I say, you pick the verb that you like. But then when you have the pretty much the only way that anyone’s come up with with actually doing that, you know, people react with horror. So I think we have to be once again, frank, about what we’re talking about. [00:36:26][175.8]

Adam: [00:36:27] Why I mean, think of me as, you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezo like. [00:36:33][6.5]

Elizabeth: [00:36:34] Elon Musk is probably hip with this. He’d probably be fine with it. [00:36:37][2.6]

Adam: [00:36:37] I would imagine. It’s it’s the ultimate technocratic solution, right? And there’s many folks out there who say we will solve climate change with technology. Someone’s going to invent something that . [00:36:48][11.2]

Elizabeth: [00:36:48] That’s going to do what? That should be your next question, what is that thing going to do? So there’s two two options. Once again, I don’t want to keep flogging my own book, but they’re both in the book. You can try to suck CO2 out of the air. And a lot of people are working on that, it’s extremely slow process, you know, took us 200 years to put all the CO2 up there and it’s going to take a long time. Even if we devoted ourselves to it very passionately, it’s going to take a long time to get it out. But Elon Musk, just to name our favorite loony billionaire, he recently put up one hundred million dollar prize just the other day, announced it for the team that comes up with a way to remove a billion tons a year of CO2 from the atmosphere, prove that they could scale up to a billion tons a year. And I want to say a billion tons is only a small fraction of what we’re putting out there. But it’s significant. It’s a lot. And will someone within that hundred million dollars, we’ll see. We’ll see if someone will even win it. So that’s one possibility, then you would slowly sort of if you think of the climate as a sort of supertanker that’s heading in one direction. Pulling CO2 out of the air is a sort of putting a slow brake on that and then eventually potentially reversing ship. If you want to do it quickly, if you want to say you want the super tanker, we want it to stop just right now where it is right now, then the only idea that’s on the table right now is stratospheric geoengineering. [00:38:40][111.7]

Adam: [00:38:41] And what is so horrifying about that? I mean, I certainly am disinclined away from that sort of solution. But but what are the what about that would the average person not like? [00:38:50][9.0]

Elizabeth: [00:38:52] Well, I’ll start with the I’ll start with the maybe relatively trivial, I mean, the this this book that I just published Under White Sky takes its title from the fact that one of the side effects of doing this on a massive scale would probably be a turn sky to white in the sky so the sky would look whiter. Just looked up at the sky nowadays, probably. I’m not sure it would make that much difference in L.A. because there’s a lot of other crap in the air but. [00:39:28][36.2]

Adam: [00:39:29] I mean this is literally what they do in The Matrix. Do you remember The Matrix where it says the robots, they blotted out the sun and the sky goes away like it is dystopian, the thought of it. [00:39:39][9.9]

Elizabeth: [00:39:39] Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. But the list goes on and on and on. I mean, if you are trying to counteract one huge what climate scientists would call a forcing. So we’re forcing the climate in one direction. We’re implying a force to it that’s warming it up. And then you would sort of have a countervailing force in the other direction. But you don’t know. A lot of people are looking at this using climate models, but you really don’t know how the system, which is a vast system comprising the earth and the oceans and the atmosphere, exactly how it will respond. So, for example, one big concern is it will change regional weather patterns. So even if you could theoretically, even these two things out, warming and cooling, what’s that going to do to the monsoons? What’s that going to do to rainfall patterns? These are questions that people are working on very in an abstract way. But the problem is or a problem, I mean, there’s a lot of problems. The problem is you don’t really you don’t know what to try it. Now, if I’m a scientist who says and I don’t think there are any scientists out there who are actually advocating for geoengineering, but they are advocating for finding out whether it will work or not, trying to find out whether it works or not, because you might decide you need it and what they would say to what I just said, and I will I really want to give everyone their due. And these are very smart people. They would say, well, you don’t have to go right from zero to one hundred percent. So you wouldn’t have to go from trying to counteract all of the warming that we have created already and all of the warming that’s still in the of still in the pipeline, you could you could start very small, could start with like your little pilot project, geoengineering and see what happens. And that’s that’s reasonable. That is reasonable. But you are, I quote, one guy in in as I say, in this new book, once again, very smart guy says we I can’t remember the exact quote, but basically we are in a situation where jimmying the fucking sun may be less dangerous than not doing it. And that’s sort of the situation that we find ourselves in. How’s that. [00:42:19][160.2]

Adam: [00:42:21] I mean, it’s really stark. It’s really stark. I mean, you know, it’s funny because I it sounds like you’re unsettled a little bit on the prospects of this technology. Say you you you consider it with horror yet at the same time. [00:42:39][17.2]

Elizabeth: [00:42:40] Well I like to say its respectful horror respectful horror. I mean, I, I, I, I really appreciate where these guys are coming from. And as I say, they’re very, very smart people. And I do believe that they think that we may need this in our tool box and they may well be right. I do think, though, that it’s very difficult to look at dimming the fucking sun and say, you know, yay. [00:43:07][26.2]

Adam: [00:43:08] Yeah, yeah, it’s not it’s not solar panels and we’ll all buy Teslas and everything is going to be fine. [00:43:13][5.8]

Elizabeth: [00:43:14] Exactly. [00:43:14][0.0]

Adam: [00:43:16] Well, tell me about some of the other places that you went and visited, you wrote about and I was I was reading a bit about it, The Devils Holes pupfish. Can you just just tell us a little bit about that story? [00:43:28][11.9]

Elizabeth: [00:43:30] Sure. So the Devils Hole pupfish is a small sort of one inch long, very, very beautiful fish and iridescent blue fish, it is said to be and I don’t think it has a lot of competition, the rarest fish in the world, it lives only and as far as anyone knows, has only lived in one pool in the middle of the Mojave Desert. And this pool this pool is in what’s called Devils Hole, the Devils Hole is a little canyon and at the bottom of the canyon and when you when you come up to it now has a big fence around it to prevent anyone from getting into it. But previously, if you’d come one hundred years ago, you would have just almost fallen in. You don’t really realize that it’s there. It’s just sort of an opening in the earth. And it at the bottom of this canyon is a pool, very beautiful blue water that connects up with this huge underground aquifer that’s under the Mojave and contains water that probably fell as rain during the last ice age, so it’s a really interesting bit of geology there. And no one knows how the fish got in there. But there there. [00:44:55][84.3]

Adam: [00:44:55] And this is in the middle of the desert and fresh water? [00:44:57][2.2]

Elizabeth: [00:44:58] Yeah. Very, very dry. Yes, it’s freshwater. It’s it’s the you know, I don’t want to say is the driest place you can go, but it is it’s not far from Death Valley. It is it is dry. But yes. So so this you know, and you have a fair number. I mean, something I learned in the course of reporting the book is that actually there are a lot of desert fishes and they have this interesting property of it, sort of like being on an island when you’re in a pool of water in the middle of the desert. It’s not like there’s no connectivity, there’s no rivers. There’s no. So if you’re in some pool that that exists for whatever reason, there’s a spring or, you know, you’re connected to this aquifer, you’re isolated. And so there’s a lot of unique species, sort of classic Darwinian isolation leading to speciation. And so the Devils Hole pupfish people recognized it quite a while ago, as it is a very interesting creature. Also, I should I should point out the water in this pool, it’s heated geothermally, so it’s 93 degrees. It’s very warm and is very low oxygen. And most fish under this, under such conditions would drop dead very quickly. But the Devils Hole pupfish is adapted to it. So it’s a very interesting animal and you’d think a very tough animal, but it actually can only live under these really tough conditions so when people started to pump water out of this aquifer in the 60s, the water level in the pool fell. And even though the pool is very, very deep, the fish only live toward the top where there’s some light and some food. And the fish started, the population started to dwindle and people realized this. Once again, biologists realized this and then they tried all sorts of things in the 60s and 70s, they rigged up banks of lights in the canyon and they fed the fish and they created a sort of fake features of the canyon to try to make up for the fact that the water was falling and the fish were ailing. And finally it was decided about 15 years ago or so that the fish needed, they needed to have a back up population of the fish, the fish were really dwindling down into the dozens. And so they built a fake canyon, an entire sort of fake canyon. It’s not as deep as the real canyon, which is over 500 feet deep. But in all other respects, it’s even down to the contours of the sides of this tank. It’s supposed to replicate the real canyon as closely as possible. The water is ninety three degrees, etc. And so there are now two populations of these little fish and they have recovered somewhat from their very, very lowest number. But that is the situation of the Devils Hole pupfish sort of restricted to these two tiny habitats. And I found the idea of the sort of fake Devils Hole quite fantastic and marvelous and also sort of funny, I have to admit, and so I went out there. [00:48:20][202.2]

Adam: [00:48:20] Is it like a duplicate of it? Like geologically is the same shape? [00:48:25][4.3]

Elizabeth: [00:48:26] It’s the same shape. They took these sort of laser 3-D images of the real canyon and they replicated it sort of with Styrofoam and plastic, basically, so it’s supposed to have the same sort of contours now it’s now it’s not exactly the same. And as I say, it’s not as deep, but they tried to replicate it as closely as possible. [00:48:50][24.3]

Adam: [00:48:52] There’s something so incredibly tragic about that story, like in a in almost a beautiful way, like I can understand why you’d want to write about it that. I mean, first of all, what a unicorn of a species to basically only exist in a single puddle that we stumbled across in these incredibly small numbers. It makes you think of how many other unique species in different biomes around, you know, incredibly specific little biomes around the world have we eradicated without even realizing it? We tripped over it and wiped out a species that we never even noticed. But in this case, we have noticed it. It serves no utility to anything other than we want it to continue existing. But it’s the most precarious in the most precarious possible situation. It’s in this, like, natural oasis that we are threatening just by, again, existing and we’re having these heroic efforts to keep this animal alive that will never there’s no like leaving it alone. Right. And it’ll it rebounding. It’s like we’re going to have to watch this until the end of time. We’re going to keep that fence up in order to keep this tiny population of fish alive. It’s. [00:50:00][68.5]

Elizabeth: [00:50:01] Yes well, what actually drew me to this story, actually, if you want that more comic element of it a couple of years ago three guys drunk decided they wanted to go skinny dipping in Devils Hole. So they drove up in an ATV. It’s quite as I said, it’s fenced off quite you know to you to you or me it would be quite effective, but not to some drunk person. And they so they got off their ATVs, they climbed over the fence, they shot out some of the security cameras, but they didn’t realize that there was underwater security camera. So they were sort of filmed from underwater and a through a sort of dogged detective work, they were tracked down, one they they you know, they barfed in Devils Hole, they swam in it and they managed there was a fish that was floating on the water, so it was a murder mystery, as it were, and it was solved and they it the Devils Hole is an endangered species, you know, it’s a it’s a listed species listed under the Endangered Species Act. And so all sorts of legal protections kick in. And so these guys were arrested and one of them did time. So it was taken quite seriously as well it should be, because if you let any idiot into Devils Hole and with impunity, those fish will be gone very fast. [00:51:43][102.7]

Adam: [00:51:44] Yeah. But the project itself of trying to keep them alive, there’s sometimes when I think about it, I’m like, well, this is one of the most important things that we can possibly do is to keep alive a unique piece of biodiversity that will never exist again if we let it perish. And then, on the other hand, it seems sort of futile in a way that we’ve just chosen, OK, these are the fish we’re going to try to keep alive and we’ll we’ll keep a watchful eye on them and spend millions on them forever just so that we can continue to look at them. I know their scientific value in it as well, but I also don’t think the reason is that utilitarian. I don’t think we’re hoping they’re going to we’re going to take some medicine out of them. We just want them to continue existing. And I don’t know, it seems like both both things at once to me. It’s a I don’t know. How do you think about it? [00:52:32][48.2]

Elizabeth: [00:52:32] Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the proximate reason for why we do these things in the US at least, is often the Endangered Species Act. And when the endangered species when if you’re a species that gets listed under the Endangered Species Act, which often which tends to happen when you’re in really dire straits, is. You then there has to be there’s a legally mandated recovery plan, so all these legal provisions kick in. Now, I think that anyone looking at the situation would say what we should be doing is preventing this from happening. So we should not have ever let people pump water from this aquifer. Or as soon as we realized that pumping water from this aquifer was going to endanger the fish, when the water level went down an inch, we should have been able to intervene. What actually happened is there was huge court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and the court finally did rule in favor of the fish. But that was a long time. And meanwhile, the water had dropped so low that the fish were in trouble. So if you extend that sort of metaphorically out, what we should really do is whenever we see and once again, we’re not very good observers. So as you suggested, there’s a lot of species that were doubtless doing it without ever knowing they existed. But we should try to be managing and conserving on a landscape level. And Biden has this there’s this phrase 30 percent by 2030. We protect 30 percent of the US by 2030. I certainly think that would be a good idea. But we should really be looking at things as a whole ecosystem level. But instead we look at it at a species level. And so what happens is we let things crash and then if they’re lucky, this also usually involves a court case. Now, I don’t think people realize this, but to get listed as an endangered species now almost always involves someone suing the federal government to list the species. Because the feds, there’s such a backlog of species, the feds are not listing them basically until they’re sued. So it’s a bad system. It’s just not a functional system, but you know to get to the politics of it all, if you were to reopen the Endangered Species Act and I think a lot of people would say it should be reopened. It should be amended. It should be. Yeah, so that some of these problems could be ameliorated. It would you can’t do that in the current political climate because they would actually just destroy the Endangered Species Act. So we can never reopen any of these environmental bills from the 70s to try to update them because they’ll just be destroyed. [00:55:38][185.9]

Adam: [00:55:39] Yeah, you don’t want to subject that to I mean, the 70s we had Nixon and various politicians on both sides of the aisle coming together to support these policies. And obviously the opposite is true because it’s so polarized. And, yeah, I would not want to subject those protections to the political system right now, which is an extremely sad state of affairs. I want to talk about the idea as I as we sort of come in slowly for a landing about the idea of naturalness, that a lot of the time it seems like saving these things that we care about ends up interacting with our idea of what’s natural in an odd way. Like you, I believe wrote about the prospect of gene editing to to save species, which is odd. Can you- an odd prospect. [00:56:30][51.0]

Elizabeth: [00:56:31] Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, here’s here’s an example that I that I mentioned in the book and that I have written about more extensively in The New Yorker, scientists in researchers in Syracuse, New York, have developed a chestnut tree, American chestnut tree. So the American chestnut tree, right was the dominant tree, for in the northeastern US into the early 1900s when a fungal pathogen was imported from probably Japan, I think, on Asian chestnut trees that were important to be because they were pretty and it was actually first identified, interestingly enough, at what’s now the Bronx Zoo. People noticed that the chestnut trees were dying and this just spread throughout the northeastern and parts of the southeast too where you where the chestnuts lived and killed literally every single chestnut tree, something like four billion trees. So now you go into the forests of New England, you will not see a chestnut. Occasionally there are some trees. Chestnut trees can sprout from the roots so sometimes there are these little spindly trees that grow up and then they don’t get very old or large or reach reproductive age before they also get done by this blight. [00:58:06][95.7]

Adam: [00:58:07] This is like one of the most massive changes we could possibly make to the ecosystem on the continent that, like the dominant tree along the entire coast, no longer exists. I mean, it doesn’t get bigger than that. [00:58:20][13.1]

Elizabeth: [00:58:21] Yes, it had it had doubtless a lot of repercussions that we don’t even know because people weren’t really recording them. But, yes, doubtless a lot of things depended on the American chestnut. OK, so fast forward one hundred years and some researchers, a guy, very nice guy named William Powell developed a transgenic chestnut tree, it borrows a really, one gene, one one key gene from wheat. And that allows it to be blight resistant. OK, so he said this, he says it’s like nine nine nine point nine 99.99% American chestnut. But it does have this one not chestnut gene and- OK, so the question is, and I will just put it to you, and it is a live question, those trees exist. I’ve seen them. They are in fenced in plots in Syracuse. And in greenhouses, but should they be allowed should we be allowed to plant them out in the forest? And that question is being put before federal agencies even as we speak. Someone will have to make the call, say either, yes, we will allow that. It’s transgenic, but that’s that’s how we’re going to get American chestnut. You want them, this is how they’re going to come or they’re going to say, no, we can not let that transgenic organism out into the world. Now, what would you say? [00:59:56][95.5]

Adam: [00:59:58] God, I don’t have. OK, I guess I would say I don’t have an inherent bias against a gene edited organism, I think I’m too jaded to say that, you know, that’s an illegitimate form of organism. I think that gene editing can be I mean, hey, I’m very happy about the coronavirus vaccine, which is not quite gene editing, but it’s us using our knowledge of genetic pathways for positive change. But I am thinking in reintroducing a slightly altered version of the same tree to a forest landscape that has been without it for one hundred years. Is that returning something to its natural state or is that further meddling? I guess is the question. And and it’s it makes me question what my values are when it comes. What do I care about in the forest? Do I want the forest to be as it was? Do I want it to be nice for me today? Do I want it to be a non-human place? Well, it can’t be because we’ve already impacted it. So what am I serving? And I need to answer that question first, and I don’t know what the answer is. [01:01:06][67.5]

Elizabeth: [01:01:07] Well, now, now, now you’re now you’ve gone to the place where. Yes, I’ve been. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that is very, very well put. Yeah. Well, there’s no. [01:01:17][10.2]

Adam: [01:01:19] I answered too well, I should have just said I think it will be bad and then you can tell me how you think about it. [01:01:23][4.6]

Elizabeth: [01:01:23] Exactly no yeah. But now you’re now you’re getting the hang of it. Yeah. It’s, it’s not, it’s, it’s, these are not easy decisions and there’s no right answer. [01:01:33][9.5]

Adam: [01:01:36] See I love talking to someone who says there’s no right answer, because I think that’s the truth about the world, and yet it’s still so unsettling to have that be the answer, because that’s what we want. We want clear answers and they don’t they don’t exist. I mean, is but this sort of approach I mean, is this what we have to do in order to not fix the environment I think that’s the wrong word. But in order to care for the environment, I mean, are we sort of forced to do these things that, you know, we may be confronted with, to use your own word, horror or confusion? Are these the only methods available to us? I feel like there’s more stories in your book along the same lines. [01:02:15][39.5]

Elizabeth: [01:02:17] Yes, the book, absolutely. I yeah I mean, I think that increasingly the combination of what we’re what we’re doing to the world that that these, you know problems, let’s just call them, problems are going to are becoming more and more common. So I’ll give you another example, I live in New England and we now have what’s called the emerald ash borer. So, OK, ash is now one of the dominant trees in the forests of New England after chestnut. And I honestly don’t know what ash played in the forest before chestnuts were done in, but I think they were very important trees. Oh, always. Or they’re being done in all of our trees are dying because of an insect that was imported from Asia called the emerald ash borer, which just drills into the tree and eventually kills it. So you can go down the block where I live and there’s big red Xs on a bunch of trees that the electric company is going to come and cut down so they don’t knock down all of our power lines because they’re dead. And so we are going to lose ash trees now. So these problems are going to keep popping up and then as we get better and better at gene editing, we’re going to be confronted, I think, more and more with the question of, OK, are we just going to resort to gene editing? That’s the only way to once again do something quickly. Now, that’s also raising the possibility. Is it possible it’s not necessarily always going to be possible you know, I don’t think anyone is even thinking about, I should say, an ash tree that could be gene edited to be resistant to this to an insect. So one thing is a fungus. Another thing is an insect. It’s complicated. I’m not I’m not saying we’re going to have the answers to these things, but I think more and more that border is going to be breached between what is natural and what is unnatural and who is going to stand at that border and where are we going to define that border? These are questions that are just going to keep coming up. [01:04:35][138.0]

Adam: [01:04:35] Yeah, and I mean, that’s what your work does for me and what it sounds like your new work is going to do for me just as much as it is erasing that border. I mean, this is a border that I that I grew up with. You know, I was raised by you my dad was a marine biologist. My mom was a botanist. You know, I was raised in an environmentalist household and to cherish the natural world and, you know, engaging with your work erases the boundary between the natural world and myself. And I I can’t end before I ask you this question, I think more than any other journalist that I can think of, your work raises for me what are almost spiritual questions about, you know you know, I read what’s going on with a with a fish or a frog. And it makes me ask, like, what is my place in creation right in the world? Like, how do I feel about the fact that I change things and end things? And it raises for me, I’m not a religious person, but to me those are spiritual questions, which are some of the hardest questions to answer. Does the work that you do raise questions like that for you? And do you feel it’s not a question for you as a journalist, but as a person? Do you feel that you’ve been able to answer them for yourself or do you, you know, are those still question marks? How do you resolve them? [01:05:57][82.0]

Elizabeth: [01:05:58] Well, I I’m I’m not going to answer that, but I am going to tell you a story. And this is also from the latest book Under White Sky, in a chapter on pupfish, there’s a guy, a fisheries biologist, who is still around, but in a very nice guy who actually loaned me some great photos that I that are in the book. Who in the 60s and 70s was really instrumental in trying to save some of these some of these desert, very rare desert fish, in one instance, he actually the the habitat for this fish, for some reason or another, was suddenly shrinking. And if you literally walked out, walked there with a couple of buckets, scooped up all the fish you possibly could, and those are the fish we have today, only the ones that he captured in those buckets. And he’s a guy by the name of Phil Pister. And people would always ask him, because these fish are tend to be very small. You know, they live in these very small habitats. They’re just these tiny little fish. And people would always ask him, what good are pupfish? And his response was, what good are you? And I think that gets at something pretty profound. [01:07:20][81.9]

Adam: [01:07:21] Yeah. I appreciate that answer to the question and I appreciate you allowing me to ask it. Is there anything that you hope people take away from your from your work after they read it? You know, do you feel that you are trying to spread any particular ethos or takeaway for the average person who cares about this stuff but is not thinking about it with this or a very specific consciousness that you have? Yeah. Is there anything you want to leave people with? [01:07:54][32.8]

Elizabeth: [01:07:55] Well, I guess the one message I would want to leave people with is, you know, I do think people tend to divide into camps and be adamantly opposed to know one possibility or another. So, for example, there will be, you know, if if it’s permitted, if these if it’s permitted that these chestnut trees are allowed into the world, there will be some people who will be very upset and who will maybe even go so far as to chop them down. I really don’t know. But, you know, I think that people need to I don’t want to say embrace, because that’s not really the right word, but be alert. There’s no straight line through the system and there are a lot of people I mean, a somewhat more hopeful message would be there are a lot of people they’re they’re trying doing their best to try to offer not solutions, but better than nothing moves here. And if we strip if we divide up into these sort of armed camps, even on the among groups of people who do care about these issues, we haven’t even talked about the people who want to just burn coal until the world melts into a puddle. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. So I think we need to be a little bit more generous to each other and think, OK, why are we why are we arguing here? What are we arguing about? [01:09:35][100.3]

Adam: [01:09:36] We need to I mean, we are erasing those borders ourselves and between human and natural. And if we establish too much of an ideology around around these things, it’s a it’s a letting the perfect be the enemy of the good situation. Like we there are imperfect solutions that we may still need to accept in order to save the things we value, it sounds like is what you’re saying. [01:09:58][22.8]

Elizabeth: [01:09:59] Yes, exactly. And I don’t want to say I know where that line is. And I’m I’m very wary, instinctively and emotionally. I’m like you. I’m a kid who grew up hiking out in Colorado and imagining this was the wilderness, you know, and thinking this was the most fantastic thing. And I still, you know, as Thoreau said, and in wildness lies the salvation of the world. But wildness is now kind of a romantic fiction. And we have to we have to somehow be able to grapple with that. [01:10:36][37.2]

Adam: [01:10:37] Well, I can’t thank you enough for coming here and and helping me grapple with it yet again. And thank you for your work. And I can’t wait to read the new book, which is called one last time it is called? [01:10:49][11.2]

Elizabeth: [01:10:49] Under a White Sky, Nature of the Future. [01:10:53][3.9]

Adam: [01:10:53] Pick it up wherever books are sold. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. I can’t thank you enough. [01:10:57][3.8]

Elizabeth: [01:10:58] Thanks for having me. [01:10:59][0.6]

Adam: [01:11:04] Well, thank you once again to Elizabeth Kolbert for coming on the show, I hope you love that interview as much as I did. If you did, you know, hey, leave us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out a ton. I know every podcast host says that, but we all say it because it’s true. OK, if you have any thoughts of things you’d like to see on future episodes of the show, you can shoot me an email at Factually@adamconover.net. I want to thank our producers Kimmie Lucas and Sam Rubin or engineer Andrew Carson, Andrew W.K. for our theme song. You can find me online @AdamConover wherever you get your social media or at AdamConover.net. We’ll see you next week on Factually!. Thank you so much for listening. [01:11:04][0.0]

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