00:00:00 Speaker 1: I don't particularly enjoy reading the news these days. It's always something sensational, always something bad. But what saves me when I get the good sense to put down my phone and take a step outside is wildness. Henry David Thurrow wrote that in wildness is the preservation of the world, and I think he's right. But what exactly is wildness. It's a tricky thing to pin down. What I can tell you is that I've seen it in the eyes of a mountain lion, lying on a branch twenty feet above my head, its tail swishing back and forth, its iron gray eyes locked right on mine. And I felt it, for example, as a kid every morning during summer break, when I would set off into the neighborhood woods on the full day with nothing to do but look for snakes and turtles and frogs, and coming back at dark covered. 00:00:56 Speaker 2: In slime mud scratches. 00:01:00 Speaker 1: And I've heard it on nights laying on a tent on the top of a cold, dark mountain, when I've been woken up by the screaming of a bowl elk echoing from peak to peak. This, as far as I can tell, is wildness, but it comes in so many other forms. 00:01:20 Speaker 2: And each is essential. 00:01:22 Speaker 1: By some accounts, today wildness is disappearing. Just take a look at the news. 00:01:28 Speaker 2: As I mentioned. 00:01:29 Speaker 1: In other ways, though, you might say that wildness is on the rise. Take that mountain line I saw, for example, and the many other two the carnivores that are starting to return to landscapes that they haven't commonly been seen in since the early twentieth century. 00:01:45 Speaker 2: The question is. 00:01:46 Speaker 1: Does any of this matter in a twenty first century world that's seemingly defined by social media and AI and power, fame and fortune. Is wildness still relevant? I believe it is. In fact, I think it's more important than ever in the face of so much today that's artificial. We need something real, and there's nothing that can shake you back to reality more urgently than the wild. Thankfully, I'm far from the only one who's asking questions today about wildness, and one of those thinkers who has spent more time than most defining and making a case for wildness today is David Kwaman. David is an outdoor enthusiast, a world renowned science writer, and the New York Times best selling author of numerous books, including several of my all time favorites on the topics of wildness and wildlife, such as the Song of the Dodo, Monster of God, and most recently, The Heartbeat of the Wild. I've invited David to join me here today to help us understand how wildness might be defined in our present day matters and what the future might hold for wildness on this planet. Thanks for being here, David Kwalman. Thank you so much for joining me. 00:03:15 Speaker 3: You're very welcome. Mark glad to be with you me too. 00:03:19 Speaker 1: As I mentioned, have really appreciated your work, and in reading and listening to your books over the years, I've come away from them with a lot of new thoughts, but also questions, and I'm hoping to dive into some of those here today. A lot of witches is wondering how your thoughts on many of these topics that you've written about over the last thirty or so years have possibly evolved over the subsequent decades. But I want to start with your most recent work, your most recently published book, The Heartbeal of wild You opened with this extended discussion of wildness and what that is, and I'm curious if you could help us understand what you mean by that. How would you define wildness. And then secondly, why why is wildness worth contemplating and possibly preserving? 00:04:13 Speaker 3: Right? Happy to do that, let me start with the second of those two questions. Why Why did I try to define wildness at the beginning of this book and the introduction of this book? And that's because I wanted to think about it more systematically than I ever had before. Because I knew I was going to be publishing this book of essays, reports narratives drawn from work that I did over twenty years for National Geographic and I knew I was going to title it the Heartbeat of the Wild. So I wanted to think, what is the heartbeat of the wild? What is the wild itself? And what is the very core, the very essence of it? So I started thinking about that systematically than I had before, and and what I came to was the simple statement that what we mean when we use the word wildness, what do you mean? And what I mean as opposed to what somebody means about you know times square on New Year's Eve, is we're talking about and thinking about nature, living nature, living nature on planet Earth at its most dynamic, its most diverse, its most unfettered and robust, Right Okay, a bunch of adjectives that I apply to this. And then I said to myself, well, so when you add those things together, what is it that What is it that's necessary to constitute a place, an ecosystem, a patch of landscape, a collection of animals and plants such that that wildness is throbbing with vitality, is is permanent, is capacious, is substantial enough? What is it that differs wildness as we think about it, from say, a tiger in a cage in a zoo, or a or a piranha in an aquarium, or a single great baobab tree in Africa, as I've seen great baobab trees in Africa that has become the centerpiece of a roundabout in a village, surrounded by dirt roads, surrounded by shops, surrounded by cars and motorcycles, a baobab. We don't think of those as wildness. So what is it that that comes together to constitute wildness? And what I came up with is four characteristics and I enumerate them in the introduction, and those are scale, connectivity, diversity, and ecological processes. You put those together and I'll define each of those briefly put those together and you have real wildness. As I think of it, so scale. It's got to be big. It's got to be big enough, big enough piece of landscape, big enough protected area, national park, whatever, big enough forest. It's got to be sufficiently big so that it will contain all of the creatures that were there originally. If you have a small piece of really beautiful forest but it's too small to support a population of the top predator, then everything is going to change and you're not going to have wildness in the same stent, because if you lose the top predator, then the middle sized predators will explode in population and they'll eat up all the ground nesting birds and you'll start losing diversity in sort of a chain reaction. So you've got to have scale. It's got to be big, and the bigness has got to have connectivity. It can't be just a cumulative gathering of small patches that are separated from one another by roads and by parking lots and by fences. It's got to be well scale with connectivity. And that realizing that went back to work I've done thirty years ago on island biogeography in the song of the Dodo. So scale connectivity diversity, Well, that's both the both the necessity and a result of this kind of wildness disassemblage of factors. You need full biological diversity. You need that top predator. You need that population of lions, or that population of grizzly bears, or that population of tigers to play their role, that population of saltwater crocodile to play their role in the ecosystem. And you need the things all the way through at the bottom, including the little things that run the world. Is the great ed Wilson Edward O. Wilson put it. You need the ants, Yes, you really need the ants. Ants are really important on this planet. You need all of the insects. You need the beetles, which are less obviously important but are incredibly biodiverse, so you need them. You need the bacteria. You need the archaeans, the microbes that are not bacteria but look like bacteria. I wrote a whole book about the discovery of the tangle tree. You need all of that. You need the diversity, and finally, if you have those three things, you probably will have the ecological processes. But if you don't, you need to know the reason why ecological processes dation, herbivy competition, photosynthesis, decomposition, parasitism, seed dispersal, pollination. What am I missing? Mark you that I thought, Okay, you need those things. You need those things to be happening. And when you have those things, then scale connectivity, diversity, and the ecological processes. Then you've got this thing where the heart of wildness is beating within it, the way it beats in the Congo forest, the way it beats in the best intact portions of the of the Amazon forest, the way it beats in the northern boreal forest, the way the way it beats at the heart of you know, the Bob Marshall wilderness. Then you have that wildness. 00:10:59 Speaker 1: So so you and I and likely many many of the people listening to this were so fortunate that we have a direct connection to places and animals and examples that you described there that exude that wildness. But there's so many people likely across the world who would hear what you just described and would think to themselves, that sounds like a lot. That doesn't sound all that necessary. When I look at the forest, I just see board feet of timber that could help fill my bank account, or they might say, you know, I really just want to see as many different birds as possible to fill out my list, and that's all that really matters to me. The rest of that seems like above and beyond, where there might be some people that say, well, I just want to catch as many fish as I can, or I just want to be able to sell this piece of real estate for as much as possible. There's all these different ways that people look at a landscape or the animals that are on that landscape that might be different than what you just described. And my question for you is what would you say to that person as to why your description of wildness is important? Why should that be preserved or fought for? 00:12:18 Speaker 3: You know, Mark, there's no question that I've thought more about and more often about over the last forty years than that, how do you convey this to other people? Because I feel it almost as as a religious belief. You know, I'm not a conventionally religious person. I wouldn't even claim to be a spiritual person. I'm a black hole Darwinian materialist who happened to go through twelve years of Catholic education. But I feel this connection. What ed Wilson called biophilia an inherent love for life in all its forms. I feel that almost as a pre rational conviction, but not everybody does. And I want people to agree with the importance of preserving wildness. So it's incumbent on me, and it's incumbent on you. This is what you guys do. That's what I do all day, every day as we work, is try and figure out ways to make the case that this stuff is important for people who maybe didn't at the age of six encounter a snake for the first time and think, this is the most wonderful thing I've ever seen. What is this? Yeah, let me grab it. Let me take it home and put it in a box in my bedroom so I can look at it. Not everybody is built that way or has that luck that experience. I do, Jane Goodall did, Ed Wilson did. Not everybody so incumbent to explain it make the case for it. I think there are two ways. There are two channels, two categories of explanation of argument for that. One is the pragmatic, sort of anthropocentric answer, and one is a little bit more is less pragmatic and it's more esthetic. Maybe is the way to put it. The pragmatic answer is if you want to catch trout. I was a fishing guide for a number of years. When I was a starving young writer. I came to Montana with a fly rod, an electric typewriter, and Volkswagen bus filled with books in September of seventy three because I wanted two things. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to fly fish. 00:14:53 Speaker 2: Yeah there's the dream right there. 00:14:55 Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And I don't fish anymore, but I know what it feels, so I know how incredibly thrilling it is to catch a trout on a fly. See a rainbow trout, you know, come flying out of the water, and a big jump when you come up snug with it, and you've laid out, you know, a number eighteen atoms in front of him, and you tied that number eighteen atoms yourself perfect. I know what that feels like. I know how thrilling that is. But if you want that feeling, then you need aquatic insects. You need mayflies, stone flies, catisflies, and let's see what's the fourth one. 00:15:37 Speaker 1: Of the may fly, stone flies, cats flies, terrestrials of different types would help. 00:15:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, clean water, and you need clean water and nutrients in that water, but not too many nutrients, not too much nutrients. And you you need a temperature regiment. You need for that water not to get too hot. You need dissolved oxygen in that way. You need all those things. And if you don't have them, if you don't have a real wild stream, wildness in your stream, wildness in your Madison River, wildness in your Odell Spring creek or whatever, then eventually those those trout are not going to be there. So that's pragmatic. If you're you know, if you're in the timber business, if you're like buddies of mine who have made their living in the timber fell in trees, then you're probably wise enough to realize that even for those trees to grow, you need a healthy ecosystem. You need to control climate change. You need for things to be happening so that your forest is not streaked through with rusty red needles because of a huge beetlekill that has swept through the forest and killed off, you know, twenty percent of the trees. Why did that beetle kill happen, Well, it happened because of things that people do happen probably because of climate change. Happened because our weeks of sub zero weather in the winter have decreased so that our beetle populations have exploded. Those things are connected. Even if you're in the timber business. But also if you're in the timber business, you're probably somebody who likes to be outdoors in the forest, like the buddies that I talked about, you know, with their johnsreads who were out there, you know, cutting logs, and then when they're done cutting logs, they go fly fishing, and when they're done fly fishing, they'd work on their novel I mean, not all loggers are working on novels and fly fishing, but there are people who like to be out there, sure, and so maybe maybe you find it more satisfying if you're going out into the timber to know that the grizzly is out there too, at pine marks are out there too, that maybe maybe there's this sparse population of wolverines or links out there you're cutting. You know, you're cutting logs in the winter. Maybe you want you want to see, you enjoy probably seeing some some cougar prints or some linx prints moving around occasionally occasionally seeing uh a uh a Martin or or whatever. Anyway. Uh So those that's all the pragmatic Well that's also somewhat aesthetic. But but for timber, you need healthy forests and and for it for there to be a sustainable timber industry, you need proportion h you need good timber science, good ecosystem science. You need cooperation with your fellow citizens. You need to to appreciate that over the long term. If you want to make a living from timber, you need to compromise with people about about limits and sustainability. You need you need spotted owls. You might need not need spotted owls for from your for yourself, but you're there are gonna be people who are going to be against you if you don't figure out a way to make it possible for there to be northern spotted owls too. 00:19:20 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:19:21 Speaker 3: Uh And then there's the aesthetic argument that I make in preference actually to that argument, that category of argument there. It's not all one or the other. But I think the the more esthetic and maybe you could call it spiritual argument is is the bottom line, if we don't have these things, if we don't have scale in our wildness, if we don't have connectivity, if we break everything up, we cut everything down, if we dig everything up, if we if we you know, if we if we hunt species to extinction rather than hunting them sustainably the way good hunters do. Uh, And then we're going to be living on a planet, and we're going to be passing along a planet to our children and our grandchildren. If we have children that is more boring, more lonely, and more ugly than the planet that we were born on. I don't have any children, but if I had children and grandchildren, and by now, you know, at least one of my high school buddies has a great grandchild. That's how old I am. If I had children and grandchildren, I would not want to look at them and realize that they're going to live on a planet where there is no polar bear, or at least no polar bear in the wild. They're going to live on a planet where there is no lowland gorilla. They're going to live on a planet where there is no tiger swallowtail. A planet that's more lonely, boring, and ugly than the amazing, green and blue, throbbing with life planet that we inherit and that we still live on right now. Yeah. You know, there's a famous statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin. He comes out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia seventeen eighty nine, and a woman says to him, mister Franklin, what sort of a government have you designed for us, you guys in there in the Constitutional Convention? And Franklin supposedly said, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. So. What I'm thinking about is we have wildness on this planet, amazing wildness, boys and girls. If you can keep it? 00:21:51 Speaker 1: That haunts me. A question haunts me that I imagine for my kids. 00:21:59 Speaker 2: I do have chill. I have a six year old and an eight year old boy. 00:22:02 Speaker 1: And what keeps me up at night more often than I cared to admit, is twenty years from now, thirty years from now, forty years from now, them living in that alternate world, and them asking me, why didn't you do anything, Why didn't you change this? Why didn't you keep that wild here for us? Why am I hearing these stories about how great it was when you were twenty or thirty and not able to actually experience it myself. That that's the scariest thing to imagine for me. So yes, I can relate to that. And so that brings to mind the next question, which is if wildness is worth preserving as we both believe, and wildness is illuminated or is manifested by these four different these four different I guess qualifiers, that being scale, connectivity, diverse, and those ecological processes. Standing here now in twenty twenty six, I'm curious, would you say that those four elements are gaining ground or losing ground? What's what's the trend for wildness currently? 00:23:16 Speaker 3: Well, the overall trend is losing ground. The overall trend is tragic, it is losing ground. We have eight point three billion humans on this planet. And when you when you multiply the human population times average human consumption, you get our footprint, or not just our carbon footprint, b our ecological footprint, our consumptive footprint. So you can say, well, it's human population, but it's not just human population, because if you say it's just human population, then the next step, the next conclusion that some people leap to is well, it's those those families in Africa that have six kids, or seven kids, or eight kids. They're the problem. And you know we have two kids or three kids. I don't have kids, but my parents have three kids. I have two sisters. But no, those those six or eight kids in that family in that village in Africa are not the problem because they're consuming less. We who live in affluent countries and belong to africa aff fluent socioeconomic groups categories, we account for more consumption than those six or eight kids in that average African village. So we need to think about our consumption. And this is not you know, if this is not to point fingers except into the mirror. If you're going to point figures fingers about what's happening, the first direction you point the finger is into the mirror. I do that. I know you do that. You just mentioned that we all need to do that. And then we point figure fingers also at our elected representatives. You know, there are two ways in which we ultimately deal with this. We deal with this as citizens of communities, voters, people who can march, who can write letters, who can who can donate to organizations, And we deal with it as individuals. What am I doing that is causing a lot of footprint that maybe I could reduce and the thing we talked about children, the number of children that you have, that's an important part of your footprint. The number of miles that you travel, particularly by airplane, the amount of meat you eat. And we're on meat eater, so it's important that I can immediately say what I'm really talking about is the amount of meat you buy. Yes, the amount of meat you buy especially, it's different, especially the amount of meat you buy from a supermarket chain. Yeah. Now, if you're you know, if you're a hunter who harvests his own meat or her own meat in a sustainable way, in a responsible way, then great. But the number of children you haven't, what they consume as well as you consume into the future, the amount of meat that you eat that's bought from industrial animal husbandry operations and through supermarkets, and the amount of carbon you burn in traveling around. And you know, I travel a lot. I burn a lot of airplane fuel. So when I look in the mirror and point the finger, that's one of the things I point at. Okay, you're invited to go such and such a place, or you want to go such and such a place. Is that worth it? Or should that be a zoom conversation and more and more. For me, it's zoom conversations. I mean not the last book that I published, the Heartbeat of the Wild, I did a lot of travel. All those travels came for National Geographic Magazine over that twenty year period, and then National Geographic Magazine actually wanted me to assemble them into a book. 00:27:38 Speaker 1: But to your point, we are all complicit in our own ways, in our own very many different variations of examples like that, we all make an impact. There's no changing that. And some people use that though as an excuse to say, well, either pointing a finger at somebody like you and saying, well, you're telling us we should care about these things and that we should do something about it. But you're a hypocrite because you're burning all this carbon and you don't really care about climate change, or you don't really care about these things because you you're making you know, you're making an impact to or on the other side, folks will say, geez, I recognize that I'm doing these things. I recognize I'm complicit. So who am I to try to do something about or who am I to tell people that we should care about these things? Because then I am a hypocrite. So there's there's these two different sides of that same coin. This sometimes will keep folks from trying to engage. It will keep folks from trying to even reckon with this, because it's hard to reckon with UH. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance when you have to look in the mirror and realize that all these things that I care about, UH, I am in some ways a part of their atrophy or decline. So I want I want to dive into that a little bit further through two examples that you reference. There two parts of wildness that I think are quite interconnected and in many ways seem to lead to the possibility of those second two being diversity and those processes so scale and connectivity. You've done a lot of great work, So I don't want to say maybe your most famous work or your foundational work, but the Song of the Dough Dough, this book, which is a heck of a doorstop. It's a big, intimidating book. It took me a while to finally get the nerve to dive into it, but when I did, I was very glad to do so. After it's sitting on the bookshelf for several years. I need to do that eventually. I need to read that eventually. Well, I finally did five years ago or whatever it was. 00:29:40 Speaker 3: I have books like that. I have big, intimidating books that have sat on my bookshelf for twenty years, and I finally say it's time to do that. It's time anyway, but I appreciate that. 00:29:49 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And. 00:29:50 Speaker 1: So all that said, I want to spend some time exploring some of those topics. In another piece of yours, you wrote about Thomas Lovejoy, who you end up talking about in the Song of the Dodo you write about, but in an article you wrote about Lovejoy, you talked about this idea that he helped advance, and a quote of his that you mentioned there was that nature to be diverse and functional and steady must be large, must be large. And you reference that as well in your book and your explanation right there. We need scale, We need this size. Why is that? 00:30:26 Speaker 2: And what is. 00:30:27 Speaker 1: Happening across the world related to that? Do we have this scale we need? You mentioned in general wildness is in decline, but can you speak to the importance of scale, the importance of nature being large and where that is headed currently right now, and maybe we can explore this to the example of where you live in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in that region scale and connectivity. I'd love to just kind of peel back the layers of the onion a little bit there for people who haven't read the book, who aren't familiar with this. 00:30:57 Speaker 3: Why yeah, okay, let's start with Tom Lovejoy. Tom Lovejoy was a great man. He died about through two and a half years ago, and he became an important a great friend of mine, an important influence on me. He as I described in the Song of the Dodo. He was at one point he was vice president for Conversation for Conservation of the World Wildlife on then he worked for the Smithsonian Institution. He worked all of his life for the preservation of biological diversity. He got his PhD studying birds in the Amazon, and he went back to the Amazon years later and created a project that at first was called the the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project. There was a law that had been passed in Brazil that said if you own or have a least rights on a big area of Amazon forest, then you're allowed to log half of your holdings and you have to leave the other half standing as forests. So this was a fact that was going to happen. Large stretches of Amazon forests were going to be cut down in some way that left half of each holding. And Tom by that time was well versed in politics and business as well as ecology of Brazil. He was fluent in Portuguese, and he went down there and he started persuading people to do their cutting in a way that would leave islands of forest surrounded by a sea of clearcut islands of standardized size one hundred hectors hector is two point four acres, the metric unit of landscape area one hundred hectors one thousand hectors ten thousand. So he was creating an experiment to see what happens if a forest loses connectivity and loses scale and you have these little ecological islands of Amazon rainforest surrounded by just clearcut sun baked latterite, clay and slash. And he wrote about that, and that inspired me to write the Song of the Dodo. Song of the Dodo just had its thirtieth anniversary was published in nineteen ninety six. But I was reading about his ideas and reading about there was a book called The Fragmented Forest. This was the mid late eighties, and people were starting to realize that habitat loss was not the only way you lost biological diversity. Habitat fragmentation also resulted in a loss of biological diversity, the cutting of your ecosystem into little pieces. And it was actually Ed Wilson, Edward O. Wilson and a colleague friend of his, Robert MacArthur, who had first systematized that insight in ecological terms with a little book called The Theory of Island Biogeography, published in nineteen sixty seven, And I discovered that book in about nineteen eighty five, about the same time I discovered Tom Lovejoy's experiment to explore the implications of that book. And so what all this adds up to is that if you have a mainland ecosystem and it has a full complement, the full food chain of biological diversities, got big predators and meso predators and smaller predators, and birds of all sorts and insects of all sorts, microbes, sords, and you create an island of just a part of that, either with rising water or with clear cut land, so that suddenly there's only a limited area. You will start to lose biological diversity immediately. And Tom Lovejoy's phrase for that, I think he coined this phrase was ecosystem decay. Biological diversity would start to be lost, would decay from that island bit of ecosystem in a way parallel to radioactive decay. Now, an element loses loses protons, loses electrons, and it decays into another element. So that's ecosystem decay. Tom created this experiment to test it. There were also some natural experiments detested. There was an island in what became the Panama Canal. When the Panama Canal was built in Panama, they created dams to back up water. They created a great reservoir called Lake Gatun to feed the canal to make sure there would always be enough water in the canal. And when they built those dams, they created this reservoir, Lake Gatun, and there was a there was a mountain that called Barrow, Colorado, that instead of being a mountain, became an island. As the water rose, it became a small island of intact, primary nearly pristine Panama rainforest. And so they studied that island after the reservoir had filled and insularized it, and they saw this, they saw ecosystem decay. What happened first, Well, there population of puma mountain lion cougar which they had in Panama disappeared. Why the island wasn't big enough to support a viable population, an inter breeding population of puma. So the puma disappears, and they have an explosion of miso predators. I forget what they were, things like raccoons, Quadamundi's small predatory cats smaller than the puma, and those creatures no longer were being preyed on by the top predator. So their populations exploded, and suddenly they lost all their ground nesting birds because these birds are laying eggs on the ground and now they're you know, Koda Mundy's running around, and they were gone. So the ecosystem started losing, diversity started collapsing. Same thing was happening on Tom Lovejoy's islands in the Amazon forests, surrounded by a sea of clearcut. That's the lesson of scale and connectivity. So you bring that back to where we live Montana, Gallatin County. Boseman, the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is one of the greatest exemplars of this that you could have. Yellowstone National Park is what two point two million acres Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, including six national forests, two Indian reservations, some wildlife refuges, all contiguous with Yellowstone Park. Also Grand Teton National Park, of course, all contiguous Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. It's more like twenty million acres with two million acres if you put an ocean around it, or if you put clearcut around it, pretty soon you're not going to have a grizzly bear population because it's not big enough, not even two million acres. But if you've got the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, then you've got elk migrating in and out with the seasons. You know, elk leave Yellowstone Park in the autumn and migrate down across the Shoshone River onto winter range, including a lot of private ranches in the Shoshone Basin over there by Cody and and the grizzlies hibernate, and in the spring elk migrate back in and so uh and likewise the bison so grizzlies have enough to eat, and they have enough individuals to support a viable, genetically robust, reproducing population. 00:39:46 Speaker 2: So paint me a picture, David. 00:39:49 Speaker 1: If the current trends continue, and if the island of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem becomes, if the seas around the island of the Greater yellow Stone Ecosystem continue to rise, We'll follow that analogy, and let's say that more and more of the valleys around Madison Valley and Paradise Valley and the areas around Cody and you know, stretching up out of Jackson and Teton Valley in Idaho, if they continue to be bought up and developed, more and more housing developments, more and more energy development in certain regions, more and more of the forested lands broken up, because let's say the roadless rule goes away, and now we open up more of this national forest system to roads. So we're getting more and more fragmentation, more roads, more development, more loss of habitat. All of this one big island becomes instead two hundred and sixteen smaller islands. To steal from your incredible analogy at the beginning of the Song of a Dodo, If that great big rug is cut into two hundred and sixteen pieces. Is it still a great, big rug or is it actually something very different? 00:40:53 Speaker 3: It's a pile. It's a pile of washcloths. 00:40:56 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:40:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, So if we end up with a greater Yellowstone ecosystem that is still twenty million acres, but it's twenty million acres of washcloths. 00:41:08 Speaker 2: What does that mean for the wildlife there? 00:41:13 Speaker 1: Because you just mentioned that having this great big thing allows us to have a genetically viable grizzly bear population. It allows us to have those elk migrations, but in ecosystem to decay. When in describing that and examples of that, you also write about extinction vortices and how there' seem to be all these different feedback loops that occur once we start snipping things apart. Paint a picture for us of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem twenty years from now if it does get snipped away as we're describing here, What does that look like? 00:41:48 Speaker 2: How does it happen? 00:41:49 Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, you start with thinking about the grizzly bear, because that grizzly bear is the top press, the predator that needs the most wildness, and there's also the wolf. The wolf is very important. We're blessed to have the wolf back. The wolf is playing an important ecological role. But but wolves are they reproduce much more quickly and spread much more quickly, and are much more cagey in their relations with humans than grizzly bears are. They're resilient, that's right. Yeah, so so the most On the other hand, we hunt wolves. People hunt wolves, and that's you know, that's an issue, that's a question, especially along the boundary, along the northern boundary of Yellowstone. That's a different can of worms we can or cannot maybe talk about, but do so think about the grizzly bear. So when when the grizzly bear was listed as an endangered species back in I think nineteen seventy three, it was right after the dumps have been closed. This is the ancient history of Yellowstone. Grizzly bears in Yellowstone used to be carnival clowns that performed for the tourists, or they were they were They were treated like carnival clowns and they would get a lot of their nutrition from big dumps of food waste outside the hotels in Yellowstone Park. This is during the nineteen sixties, there were stands. There were you know, like what am I thinking of stadiums. Stadium stands, Yeah, that were set up so that people could go out after the dinner at Lake Lodge or Mammoth or whatever and sit and watch, you know, ten or twenty or twenty five bears come in and route through grapefruit rines and leftover you know, steak bones in that garbage of all sorts. And they could say, well, yeah, we saw grizzly bears. Yeah, they apparently love to eat garbage. And we saw twenty of them. And then we talked briefly you and I before we started about Aldo Leopold. It was one of Aldo Leopold's sons, which one Starker, Yeah, who helped help the Secretary of the Interior with the report about a better way to think about Yellowstone Park and our national parks in general, natural regulation, natural management, and that they said, well, let's get rid of the dumps. We got to get rid of the dumps. Okay, but if we get rid of the dumps, what are the bears going to eat? Well, the bears will figure it out. Is there going to be a lot more bear human conflict. Well maybe, but we can push through that. So this is all started happening in sixty seven or sixty eight and was happening straight through to seventy three. There was a lot more bear human contact. Bears were dying, population of grizzlies, and Yellowstone was estimated to be down around viracall correctly. One's seventy five. Don't hold me to that. It's just memory and I sounds haven't refreshed my memory. So one seventy five. So that's that's better than nothing, But that's not that's that's not a very sizable population if you consider that it includes juvenile males and post reproductive females and depends whether we're counting cubs of the year or not. The scientists who study island biogeography and the scientific branch of population biology and viable population theory have told us that seventy five in a population is not enough probably to retain genetic robustness and resistance to various kinds of disaster over the long term, and if you want a viable population, you need more than that. Neverre scientists writing PhD dissertations on this subject. It's a fellow named Matt Mark Schaeffer, who became an important conservationist. But he did his dissertation out of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources. If I call correctly on the case history of what is a viable population of grizzly bears in Yellowstone? And he concluded that, well, you can't say X or y is the exact viable population, but you can say that at a certain level there will be a greater chance of extinction. And if you want a ninety nine percent likelihood that you grizzly population is going to persist for a thousand years, then you need this many maybe five hundred. Again, I'm I'm vaguely recollecting in this number. If you only have one hundred and seventy five, then the chance of your population persisting, surviving in their isolated state over one thousand years, that might be down to fifty percent. Chance. Is society satisfied with a fifty percent chance that grizzlies will persist in Yellowstone? One thousand years is a long time. It's hard to imagine. But you could also say, okay, what's the likelihood of going extinct in one hundred years? Well, at one hundred and seventy five individuals, The likelihood might be might be up to a fifty percent chance that the population would go extinct in one hundred years. Is society satisfied with that there's a fifty to fifty chance that the grizzly bear will go extinct in Yellowstone National Park in one hundred years. We don't do anything about this population size. A lot of people would say, no, that's not good enough, that's not good enough. So this whole debate went on. Now, if you've got a population that's smallish like that and it has a danger of going extinct. You mentioned that I wrote about the vortices of extinction. Michael Souley and Mike Gilpin were these two brilliant population biologists who worked out the theory of how species go extinct, and I wrote about the implications and how it was happening in the Song of the Dodo. Once your population gets small, you're going to start to have inbreeding. You're going to have you know, mothers breeding with their own sons, or you're going to have brothers breeding with sisters because there aren't enough options around. You're going to have a problem that Well, one year there there was a nice crop of cubs. There were there were eighteen cubs that survived in Yellowstone Park, but unfortunately, fourteen of those were male cubs and only four were female cubs. So we've got a dangerous shortage of females now. Plus things have happened to the food supply. We've got climate change that is killing off the white bark pines in Yellowstone and white bark pine nuts are one of the four staple food sources for the Yellowstone grizzly. We're losing them. We've had lake trout introduced to Yellowstone Lake and they're killing off the cutthroat trout. And cutthroat trout spawn in the feeder streams where grizzlies can eat them. Lake trout spawn at the bottom of the lake where grizzlies cannot eat them. So if you lose your cutthroat trout spawning, that's another loss of a food source for grizzlies. Your population is going to shrink down a little bit more. And then you have a fire of the sort that we had in nineteen eighty eight. And maybe it's caused by climate change, maybe it's not. Maybe it's human cost maybe it's caused by lightning. Still, things happen, as the saying goes, shit happens. That's an important principle in ecology as well as life generally. And so you have a fire, and you lose a lot of your habitat, You lose a lot of your white bark pines. Perhaps you might lose habitat for at least for a year. So you might lose habitat for your big ungulates. You might have fewer elk, you might have fewer bison. If you have fewer elk and fewer bison, you lose another of the major food sources for grizzlies, which is which is ungulate meat, particularly of the young of winter killed and young. So all of these are happening there. These are cyclists that interact with one another what Gilpin and Soulet called the vortices of extinction. The inbreeding vortice can hurt your population, and then you've got the democratic demographic vortex. You know, too many males born and not enough females just by chance. And then maybe you've got a disease that comes in and kills off some, and then you've got loss of habitat or loss of food all of these things interacting, and the lower your population goes, the worse the inbreeding problem is going to be, and the greater the chance that just some sort of an accident, a really bad fire, or you know, a winter where there is not enough snow so there's not enough winter kill of big ungulates and the grizzlies come out. What are they going to eat? There are no winter kill bison carcasses, no winter kill elk carcasses. There, all of these things, And eventually you get to a point where you've got six grizzly bears left, and two of them are females and four are males, and one of the females is post reproductive, and then the other female gets hit by a car boom. Grizzly bear is extinct in Yellowstone Park if it's an island. 00:52:20 Speaker 1: And because that increasing water level all around it, increasing fragmentation, the opportunity to supplement that island population with new immigrants is not there, right, So right that fragregation keeps us from ever being able to bring it. 00:52:38 Speaker 2: Bring it you turn it around. 00:52:40 Speaker 3: Right, And so that's the scenario that gloomy scenario I and I describe a scenario just parallel to that in the Song of the Dodo, and it's about the possible scenario of extinction of the of the Dodo itself, this bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The scenario I just described, that's the scenario with Yellowstone Park as an island. No greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Instead, you've got an ecosystem of parking lots and hotels and suburbs and golf courses and interstate highways. So that's why we need the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and we need it to be not just there but connected. And that means how many roads, how many suburbs, how many big private ranches over in the Shoshonee Valley south of Kody, how many of those big private ranches get sold for subdivision. All of those things are factors that can turn Yellowstone Park into an island. 00:53:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, and something very similar might be happening for mountain lions in the Everglades, And something similar could be happening with mountain goats in the Bridgers, or bears in the Smokies, or you know, pick your species and pick some other island. Metaphorical island. You know, this is happening all over the country. There are all sorts of different examples where we're surrounding these last fragments of wildlife habitat with development of one kind or another. And then these different animals are all experiencing some unique version of that spiraling extinction vortex that you just described for grizzlies, but so many other species. Right, So this is this is happening at different rates, to different degrees all over the place. That is a discouraging reality to consider. And you you kind of paint the picture of the problem within the Song of the Dodo in your latest book, Heartbeat of the Wild, you illustrate some encouraging examples of various kinds, some little rays of hope. And I'm curious if you can and speed us up to now in twenty twenty six, when you look at the the islandification of our nation in many ways, and of course it is happening across the world, but let's focus on America. When you see what's happening in America and all those discouraging trends we just described, can you share with me some examples of solutions or positive trends or tools that encourage you on this front. 00:55:30 Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, there are some. There is some good news, There are some encouraging things. There are cases where where species have been brought back from the brink that manage to transcend the problem of insularization. For not many, but the one that comes to mind immediately is the California condor. Here's a great scavenging bird, a magnetic animal. It was down to about I don't know, fifteen to twenty individuals, maybe less than that at its peak of endangerment thirty or thirty five years ago. When I started, I wrote about it. I think at least once, when I was doing the Natural Science column I did for Outside magazine California case of the California conder, and at the last minute they said, all right, let's bring those last Maybe they were down to six, six or eight. Let's let's bring them into captivity. They're being killed, They're dying for reasons that we can deal with. They were actually be dying. If I recall correctly, there was some concern about DDT DDT in the environment, which makes eggshells thinner and makes reproductive success less for birds. That's what happened to the peregrine falcon in the US. That's what happened to the bald eagle. But with the with the California conduct there was also the issue of lead ammunition. And they were scavenging carcasses of animals that had been killed by hunters and presumably by legitimate hunters, but using lead ammunition, and they adjusted enough lead that they were starting to die of lead poisoning. Now that was I never I never wrote a book about that, so I don't know the details as well as I know the details about some things. Maybe they discovered that, well, the lead ammunition was a marginal problem, and you know, there were other problems more severe, but that was one of the things that was discussed. Anyway, they brought him into captivity, they brought him carefully in captivity, and then they started releasing him to the wild. And they can soar over the Grand Canyon, They can soar out of California. They can soar from one piece of good habitat to another. They can soar over downtown Los Angeles if they need to. So they are not insularized in the way that most creatures, including grizzly bears, are insularized. You also hear about corridors. Corridors are important if you're going to design a nature reserve, or if you have a chance to protect two pieces of wild landscape and there's a chance of having a corridor between the two pieces, a corridor that's big enough that some dispersing individuals of different species will use it, then you have mitigated the problem of insularization. And that's being done in different parts of the world. There's a lot of work that's been done on the Cougar in California that has involved corridor work. Probably in the East to some extent too, but I'm not a knowledgeable that. Definitely in Florida with the Florida panther yea, yeah, yeah, because a lot of those animals were being killed by if I recall correctly, right, yes, right, So corridors can protect and allow animals, some kinds of animals to migrate from, you know, from one patch of landscape, one island of landscape to another. If there's a corridor, then it's not an island, it's it's it's a peninsula, and it potentially can migrate. And then the other thing that we haven't mentioned yet was if you're going to protect landscape, really wild landscape. Well, most wild landscape on this planet has some human presence. There are some people. This is in the Amazon, in the Congo. The wild is most of the wildest places I've ever gone, there is still some dimension, some wisp of human presence. I've been to some places in the Congo where there's there's no evidence of humans having been there for you know, for fifty or sixty years to any degree. But most places there's a human presence. There are people that are living either in the in the forest or adjacent to the forest. And usually if it's if it's in Africa or South America or in Borneo, those people are are disempowered people. They're they're uh, they're rural people. There are people living in villages, living by subsistence agriculture or by hunting. So what is their impact, what are their rights? And how do we deal with their rights even as we try and protect biological diversity. And I write about I write about that in the Heartbeat of the Wild. A couple of different cases, but the one that's I think most inspiring is gore and Gosa National Park in Mozambique, which is a big, beautiful national park that's filled with wildlife and is being brought back to life after a long civil war in Mozambique that resulted in and the slaughter of a lot of their wildlife, for instance, slaughter of their elephant population for ivory to buy ammunition. The rebel faction in that civil war made Gordon Gosa National Park their headquarters, and they and the government bombed them and bombed the park infrastructure, and the rebels killed animals to eat and also killed elephants for ivory to buy ammunition. So this place was devastated and then beginning about the year two thousand and two thousand and one, it was brought back to life by a combination of parties, including a very progressive president of Mozambique, an American multi multi millionaire named Greg Carr from Idaho, who said the president happened to meet him and said, how can I help to restore your national park. I got a bunch of money and I want to do something good with it. So they created a partnership. Nelson Mandela was involved across the border in South Africa in this brainstorming and they have created a park project that includes revived, rewilded Gordon Gosa National Park surrounded by a buffer zone that is filled with people and villages one hundred thousand people maybe I can't remember the exact number. And those people in those villages are not locked out of the park. They are considered, they are considered one of the purposes for the park to exist. The park, under the guidance of the Mozambican leaders and Greg Carr, wanted this park project to be the best thing that ever happened to the people in the buffer zone immediately surrounding ghosta national park. So there are agronomy projects, there are education projects, they're public health projects. Are girls clubs, clubs for young girls to get them educated and get them engaged in school so they don't get married off at the age of twelve. All of these things great social benefits and financial benefits and health benefits to the people in the areas surrounding because the leaders in Mozambique and their partner Greg Carr, realized that for the long term, you have to consider the needs and rights of the people on the on or at the fringes of the wild landscape, the people on the rural landscape. Because a lot of a lot of nature, a lot of populations of big animals exist outside of protected areas, so you have to deal with the human needs as well. And Gore and Gosa National Park is a great example of how that can succeed. 01:04:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's funny that you know that applies just as much to our Yellowstone example too, Right. I think tolerance or intolerance of animals can be just as much of a habitat fragmentator as a road. 01:04:19 Speaker 2: Right. 01:04:19 Speaker 1: If you have a stretch of human occupied landscape where they are intolerant of the presence of grizzly bears or elk, that can bifurcate a migration route or stop connectivity of habitat just as much as anything else. 01:04:33 Speaker 2: Right. 01:04:33 Speaker 1: So to your point, if we can find ways to increase tolerance for wildlife, we therefore then also increase the potential for our islands to. 01:04:43 Speaker 2: Be larger or there to be those corridors. 01:04:46 Speaker 1: Yes, and you talked about I think this is on another interview you did with somebody else. You talked about for there to be conservation of habitat or whileft to actually be lasting, you need to make for solution for the people just as much as the animals. 01:05:02 Speaker 3: Yes, and that reminds me of and I know we're probably running out of time, but there is an elk biologist, a wonderful guy named Arthur Middleton. 01:05:12 Speaker 1: You know Arthur Middleton, not personally, but I'm very well aware of his work. 01:05:16 Speaker 3: You should get him on this show, because there is nobody who's better than Arthur at both understanding the needs of elk, the importance of elk to the whole Yellowstone ecosystem, and the perspective of the private ranchers over in the Shoshonee Valley south of Cody, who have these big plots of winter range where hundreds and hundreds thousands of elk come and eat their grass and then migrate back into Yellowstone in the summer. And Arthur Middleton works with those people, those ranchers for mutual understanding, cooperation, appreciation of what their needs and their perspectives are, and the service that they provide by way of the elk and grass to the grizzly bear and to the American people. It's an interesting, yeah, political biological ecosystem. 01:06:21 Speaker 1: So many of our ecological challenges are just as tied to social science as they are to actual conservation biology or ecosystem science. 01:06:31 Speaker 2: That's certain. 01:06:34 Speaker 1: So, as you mentioned, we are coming up on time. I was maybe being overly optimistic that I could somehow manage a discussion with you in less than sixty minutes because there's so much talk about. But I have two final things i'd love to pick your brain about, selfishly, very selfishly. One is related to an overarching theme that I have always personally thought will be mission critical to ever actually solving these problems. We've been talking about this, trying to protect wildness and wildlife and wild places. And I read an essay of yours in which you had a friend who shared with you the same perspective that I have, and I'm curious about your thoughts on it now. So you wrote this essay in which you went on a mountain lion hunt with a friend of yours, Don Thomas, and you were kind of antagonistic towards the idea of mountain lion and hunting until you went on that trip with him and learned about how he does it and why he does it and all those things. But in this piece that you wrote, you shared a perspective that Don shared and what he said to you. I'm paraphrasing this quote a little bit, But he said one of the biggest impending tragedies and the struggle waged by conservation organizations is the polarization between the hunting and non hunting factions of those groups. This polarization divides resource, is it divides people. It wastes time and money. Until hunting and non hunting conservationists can find the pragmatic wisdom to accommodate each other within the larger fold, the developers and miners and the loggers are going to be laughing all the way to the bank. So my question to you is, number one, do you agree with Don? And number two, if you do, do you have any sense of what that pragmatic wisdom is that might help us accommodate each other and work together to solve these pressing conservation issues. 01:08:38 Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I absolutely agree with Don. I learned a lot from Don. He's a great guy. You should have him on the show. E Donald Thomas, Okay, Yes, he's a he's a writer. He's published a number of books about hunting and outdoor adventures of various different sorts. He's a great sportsman. He's also a medical doctor. And I wrote a piece long ago about about mountain lions, and the fact that you know, I've lived in Montana for fifty years and I've never seen one in the wild. I've seen one in Chile in the wild, but I've never seen one in Montana in the wild. And I thought they must be pretty rare, and maybe we shouldn't hunt them if they're that rare. And I published that piece and came to Don's attention, and he we joke about this. Now he emailed me essentially, I think email, maybe he sent me a letter, maybe it was before email, and he said, hey, you ignorant Bozeman yuppie, if you think mountain lions are rare, you should come up and go mountain lion hunting with me and my dogs, and I'll show you what a mountain lion looks like. And I wrote back and said when when can I come? So I went up there. Oh, And I also said, you know, maybe we shouldn't hunt them because you don't eat them. And I have no problem with hunting for food, but hunting for trophies falls in a different category. And he said, well, I eat my mountain lions, and I'll feed you a mountain lion dinner if you come up and he did that. I went out with him in the snow with his dogs. We did not see a mountain lion. We did not strike a trail that day. And then he fed me mountain lion and that was interesting and we became friends highly with a high degree of mutual respect. And that statement of his I absolutely agree with. How how do we do that? People have to keep talking to each other, They have to keep listening, have to realize that there are heartfelt values beyond their own heartfelt values. They have to use their imagination. Imagine the things that matter to the other person. Imagine the things that make the other person feel threatened, Imagine the things that make the other person feel disrespected or demeaned. Use your imagic pause, pause, and use your imagination about the other person. You know, I'm I, You know I was. I described my fishing background. My father was a fisherman, taught me to fish. I started fishing when I was a kid. My father didn't happen to be a hunter. I never hunted, but I eat meat, so I have no ethical grounds or inclination to disrespect you know, hunting for food. Trophy hunting is a different discussion. Don taught me that even that is a complicated discussion. And I learned these things because I was barely smart enough in response to that hey, you ignorant Bozeman yuppie letter to say, I'd love to go out in the snow with you when you hunt mountain lions and see and learn something. And that created the opportunity for a friendship that exists to this day. We don't see each other as often as we wish, but we have a strong bond of respect and mutual appreciation. And there are other people that I've had that kind of thing with, not as often as I wish, but it starts with saying, pause and try and imagine what it looks like, you know, walk a mile in the other guy's moccasins. 01:12:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:12:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, It's amazing how such a simple act can be so transformative. And if we can do that, to Don's point, I think. 01:12:55 Speaker 2: That we would have a. 01:12:57 Speaker 1: Larger, stronger, were diverse and capable army of people to stand up for and speak up for these wild places and wild creatures that we all care about, sometimes in different ways, and we have different ways of engaging with wildness, but it's no less. 01:13:18 Speaker 2: Valuable, that's for certain. So amen, one last question. 01:13:26 Speaker 1: That I have selfishly wanted to talk to you about when I very when I reached out to you several years ago. 01:13:34 Speaker 2: For the first time, it was it was with this question of mind. And I've reached out. 01:13:37 Speaker 1: To a number of other people who have who are friends of yours, and other writers and other thinkers on this, and it comes back to we started a conversation off air with Leopold, right, and this is this is a famous line of Leopold's. He said something along the lines of in his book is Stan County Almanac. He said that the curse of an ecologic education is that you discover that you live in a world full of wounds. Right, And that's what we've been talking about here today, is how this amazing wild world that we live in and that we love, and that we have our own unique ways of participating, whether it's hunting or fishing, or wildlife watching or biking or hiking, whatever it is. When you start paying attention to our present day, you recognize that there are many ways that it's in decline, that it is threatened, and that the future is in the air. It's up in the air in many ways that can be depressing, that can be discouraging, that can it's a whole lot of negativity if you allow yourself to wallow in it. So quite simply, how do you find hope? What gives you hope for the future given all of this reality that we just discussed. 01:15:01 Speaker 3: It's a very interesting question. It's an important question. It's a question I think about a lot. And it's all the more so now because my current book project is to do a short, essaistic biography of Jane Goodall. Yeah, I saw, and that's a question that she answered a lot of times. She always talked about hope, and I, you know, Jane Goodall and Ed Wilson are two of the biggest heroes of mine that I had the privilege of meeting and becoming, you know, friends with during their lifetimes. And Jane, so I asked her that question. I was one of the many, many people who asked her that question. And because she her hope just seemed inextinguishable. She traveled three hundred a year, speaking to people, speaking to big audiences of adults, speaking at university, speaking to school kids, et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, the answer has always been this, hope is not a mood. It's a duty because these things that we're talking about are so precious that even though the trends are mostly grim, there's nothing more important than to continue to fight, to continue to fight for the for the preservation of biological diversity, as much of it as we can preserve. There's just nothing more important. So even if the odds are against us and the trends are grim, you keep fighting. And that's because hope versus despair is different from optimism and pessimism. Optimism and pessimism tend to imply predictions of the future. A pessimist thinks that things will go badly, and an optimist expects that things will go well. But hope versus despair I view as more an act of the will, a duty. Despair is an indulgence that we can't afford, and hope is a duty that we've got to embrace because it empowers us. And Jane said the same thing. Her answer is a little bit more elaborate. She gives four reasons for hope. She's written a number of books that have hope. In the title, she talks about the resilience of nature and the inventiveness of humans and the energy of young people as reasons for hope, and she's got one more that I can't remember right now because we're doing this live and this is real. Yes, but so so. One of the reasons I have hope is that Jane Goodall taught us you don't have a right to despair. You got to keep fighting. But also there are reasons, there are reasons to be optimistic. The resilience of nature and the energy and and idealism of young people are high on the list. 01:18:39 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:18:40 Speaker 1: Well, the passion of people like yourself who are willing to give themselves to that cause is certainly another one that gives me hope, because there are a lot of people in one way or another that have dedicated themselves their lives, their work, their time, or maybe just their weekends or their evenings, whatever it is they have to spare to try to make sure we can continue enjoying wildness and wild places. Those all of those individual examples are are certainly encouraging as well. And I appreciate everything that you have done in that in that line, David, it's it's been thank you, Mark, appreciate it very much, and I appreciate our chat here today too. 01:19:24 Speaker 3: I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for having me on. 01:19:27 Speaker 2: Thank you