Rewilding

24:34But I think that we should keep this question in our heads because it will be important as we go through multiple other examples. And let's return to this at the end, because this was actually a important point that I had at our like wrap up discussion. So let's let's return to it. All right. Before we move on to our next example, I want to emphasize that I think a lot of conservation biologists would say, you know, the rewilding community is focusing on all of these interactions that came back when you brought the wolf back. It's not like we thought that bringing the wolf back wouldn't change anything.

25:04I hear a lot of conservation biologists argue that like, look, if you want to get donations from people, for example, you pick a charismatic animal that people like, like the wolf. I mean, this worked on like seven-year-old Kelly. I was like, mom and dad, send money for the wolves. And by conserving this charismatic organism, you benefit the entire ecosystem. And so I think a lot of conservation biologists say, we don't need this new term. This is all stuff we knew before, but we were just sort of emphasizing something different. So anyway, there's a debate in the community about whether or not you need this term and what it should mean.

25:37Well, the wolves definitely worked on me. And in particular, I'm a big fan of the books by Rick McIntyre, Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone. I don't know if know about this guy. He like gets up at, seriously? No, sorry. For like 40 years, he would get up at like four in the morning and just watch the wolves. And he tracked them and he got to know them. And then he wrote this incredible series of books about the wolves and their interaction. And he knows all of the wolves and their relationships. And it's about all the conflicts between the wolf packs and how wolves move from one to the other. And they're incredibly dramatic scenes where like a wolf that was raised by another wolf leads a fight between two packs.

26:14It's like a soap opera. It's incredible. It's basically Game of Thrones for wolves, but it's real. I mean, the wolves have amazing, complicated social lives. Yeah, it sounds fantastic. Yeah, check out The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone by Rick McIntyre. All right, I will be doing that. Okay, but now let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about another feature of rewilding, which is the hands-off nature of rewilding.

26:45I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko, where we have real conversations just like this. Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-chew spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. Is that weird? This week is Human Connection Week. We're taking a peek into the lives of various strangers who found my phone number online. We'll hear their funny moments, their difficult ones, and their unexpectedly profound ones.

27:28These are real conversations with real people figuring out life one call at a time. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That call was really pivotal for me. Hey, it's Emily Tisch-Sussman, and this season on She Pivots, the podcast where women share bold career moves and personal turning points that changed everything. I sit down with culture-shifting women who share their pivots, like Paralympian Allie Truitt. I was like, I'm a month out from a shark attack.

28:05There's no way in 11 months I'm making the Paralympics. Advocate Elizabeth Smart. I still feel that drive that I can still make a difference. So I'm going to keep going. Celebrity chef Carla Hall. Was that scary to walk away from such a stable career after just two years? No, I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke in a dead end job that I didn't enjoy. And feminist legend Gloria Steinem. All of us were trying to express women's real lives. We need a meeting place of our own. And if I can contribute to that, I'd like to maintain that and leave this house for that purpose. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:47On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educated. I can talk all week on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance better for some reason.

29:28I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts.

29:41Hi, I'm Michael Imperioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. I'm on the plane, honey. Something's wrong. It's about what happened in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. While the world was mourning, five powerful New York families saw an opportunity. The debris is supposed to go to the city-owned salvage yard, and some of it will. They would go on to make millions of dollars. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, silver ingots. It could be worth half a billion.

30:14And they would have made more if it hadn't been for one courageous cop. No, Dad, don't. You're going to need all of us. I'll call you when I can. Frank, be careful. Underground Zero, starring Steve Schirippa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioli. Would you be willing to see your family go to pieces? Some ways it already has. Listen to Underground Zero on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By age 11 or so, at least 70 % have a phone. Middle school is a different world than the one we grew up in. I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two Black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now.

31:01So it's literally physiological and neurological and psychological chaos happening all at the same time. We got into group chats and gaming, friendships and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. There's belonging. You could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted. And then there's fitting in. Spitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapist Keir Gaines on Black fatherhood and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage.

31:37You don't have on shorts, so you can't do flips. You have on the dress, so you have to cross your legs. That's the range of this run, from screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. You have to get off our device. But the reality is there's a lot of life out there that we don't want you as your adult and your life to miss out on. This has been our Surviving Middle School Run, brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

32:18All right, and we're back. So we've been talking about differences between conservation and rewilding. And one of the big things that the rewilding community emphasizes is that what you want is to restore, for example, wolves to the ecosystem and then be able to completely take your hands off. You don't want these systems to require a lot of human management. You want to just let them do their nature thing and see what happens. You don't want to have to inject wolves every year. You want it to be self-sustaining. Yes, right. And you don't want to be out there saying like, all right, we need to have exactly 75 wolves and 1 ,000 elk.

32:52And if we have too many elk, we're going to put out more food or we're going to shoot some of the elk. You want to just sort of let the system reach whatever equilibrium it's going to reach and not get too involved. Okay. Sometimes this works well. Other times it works less well. So let's go ahead and talk about an example where things worked less well. So, oh, we're going to have fun with this pronunciation. Daniel, do you want to try it first? Is it the Oostvordisblassen? Yes, there you go, the O-V-P. Hey, you know me.

33:25Nice. In the Netherlands. I'm down with the O-V-P. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. So this is a delta of the River Rhine, and it has been massively managed. And in 1973, this sort of unexpected experiment happened. One of the polders, which was like a section of this managed area near the river, was supposed to be managed by this industry that sort of went under and they no longer ended up using this area. And when they didn't use it, plants started to come back and that attracted geese. And the geese started eating some plants. And when they ate the plants, they were producing these open water corridors and they were making this much more complex ecosystems where you had open water corridors and then areas where there were more plants.

34:07And that was creating ecosystems for more animals. And this ecologist named Franz Vera saw this and he thought to himself, you know, we we could do something with this environment. It doesn't have to just be supermanaged. And he was really interested in this idea that actually across much of Europe and across much of the United States, when you say like think of an ecosystem, most of us picture a forest, or at least I do. It was actually the case that much, maybe even most of Europe and America was grassland. But the massive herbivores that used to keep these things grassland by like eating and trampling trees that were trying to grow, like those species have been gone.

34:48So now we don't have a lot of grasslands. Is that what keeps prairies prairies? I've been wondering about that. Yeah, what keeps prairies prairies is that you've got herbivores that are going around and trampling and eating things like trees that are trying to grow up. And so they're an important part of keeping those systems the way that they are. Okay, cool. So he thought to himself, okay, there used to be aurochs here, and these are wild cows. And there used to be tarpans, which were extinct horses. And so he thought, what if we could bring those back to maintain this as a grassland and make it more wild?

35:23And so in 1991, the OVP becomes this experiment where they bring in mega herbivores and release them to graze to try to keep these habitats from getting foresty. Wait, but this is the delta of a river. I'm imagining something pretty squishy. How are you putting like cows into the river? Yeah, so I mean, it's a mix of like squishy bits and harder bits. It's sort of like a patchwork. But as I mentioned, the tarpans are gone. And so they said, all right, we're going to get conic ponies. I think that's how you pronounce it. But from Poland, these are like hardy horses. Are those ponies that come as a section of a cone?

35:59Like parabolas, hyperbolas? Yes, probably. Probably that's what they meant. They also brought in deer, which might have naturally been there. And then because aurochs are no longer available, they're like wild cattle. They brought in domestic cattle that were as close to primitive breeds as possible. So there's a breed of cattle called Heck Cattle that were created in the 1920s by crossbreeding other primitive breeds to try to get something that's like really robust and resilient that you can just throw out, you know, into an environment and be like, good luck, guys. And they'll do well on their own.

36:36Okay. So we're missing the old big fauna. And so we take a sample of the ones we have that we think might approximate those and put them out there. Yes, exactly. Okay. Right. And so for a while, this was actually going pretty well. It was becoming sort of like a beautiful grassland. Tourists and locals wanted to come and see these beautiful animals grazing. So this became like a place where people would want to like kind of go for walks. And so in some ways, this experiment was working. You got the grasslands, the animals are surviving, people are happy with the new ecosystem. But there's this emphasis on a hands-off approach.

37:11And there used to be predators in this area, but you don't want to introduce predators into a heavily populated area for reasons. You don't want wolves in playgrounds? Why not? It's complicated. So they didn't introduce predators, but they were really insistent on being hands off. And so in 2017, 2018, that winter that straddled those years was really bad and there wasn't enough food. So thousands of horses were dying and people were allowed to go into this area. And so they were going on walks and they were seeing thousands of horses starving to death. Oh, my gosh. And this is something that like I think society is absolutely no longer comfortable with.

37:55Like this should not be happening under our watch. And so people were getting furious. And so people who lived in the community were teaming up with farmers to take bales of hay and secretly bring them into the reserve and dump them to feed the horses because they didn't want these horses to starve. And so this ended up creating a huge PR mess. And now there are rules where you can't just let thousands of animals starve to death. And so now this system is much more managed, which was not the initial plan, but I totally get why they're doing that. I see. Well, where do you fall on that? Are you pro lots of beautiful horses suffering or anti horse suffering?

38:36I'm anti lots of beautiful horse suffering. Like I totally understand the inclination to want to create something and then just let it go. Right. And in nature, there probably are harsh winters where lots of animals die and we don't go out and intervene. This is just part of the cycle of life. But on the other hand, you have tried to recreate an ecosystem that is missing important parts. It's missing the predators that would have, like, made short work of these animals and would have kept the numbers from getting so high probably to begin with. And so I don't think it's unreasonable in these situations to intervene.

39:11And a lot of the other programs that I read about, and this is going to be controversial, but involved letting people come in and hunt when numbers were getting high. And by having people come in and hunt, you can get a lot more money for your conservation program. And this is a way to sort of sustain the whole thing. But what do you think? Based on the way you asked me the question, I think I know your answer. Well, I'm never in favor of suffering, but also suffering is part of nature, right? And it's not our responsibility to remove all suffering from every critter in nature. But if we have constructed an ecosystem intentionally, then we are responsible for the critters who are living there, right?

39:52We can't just say like, look, we did what we could and walk away. So yeah, I think it is our responsibility. I'm pro feeding suffering horses. Yes. I think just to be a little bit of a devil's advocate, I think even if there had been predators there, every once in a while a really harsh winter comes through. And even when predators are around, you will end up getting animals, herbivores dying of starvation because the predators probably can't keep up. You get these cycles over time. But I think a problem is you need to keep in mind that if you are having a very public facing program, you need to keep in mind how the public is going to feel about that program.

40:31And I feel like this is a thread that sort of goes through conservation and through rewilding. You always need to think about the impacts on the people who are going to be in the area. And this is, to my mind, one of the hardest parts about conservation. It's not trying to breed the animals in a captive area before you release them, which that's very hard, too. But it's figuring out how the community is going to respond and managing that. Yeah, the people are part of the ecosystem in a way, right? I mean, that is an emphasis of rewilding. Particularly, that is a point that I saw emphasized in the American Prairie Preserve website.

41:06And so let's go ahead to that Montana example that we were initially asked to talk about now that we've had half an hour of Kelly rambling about other things. And before we do, let me just say how much I love Montana. I just drove through it with my daughter and we went to Yellowstone and we went to Bozeman and we went to Missoula. And wow, it's a beautiful place. You know, after reading about the American Prairie Project, I really want to go. I've never been to that part of the United States and I am dying to see it now. Like I was going through their photos and I was like, oh, my gosh, you got to be kidding me.

41:35I hadn't thought about grasslands as being a place I'd want to visit. But wow, they look beautiful. No, it's jaw dropping vista after jaw dropping vista. it's like, it looks fake almost. You're like, what? Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so to, you know, now that we've been uplifting, let's do the Kelly depressing thing here. Let's go to the past real quick. So there used to be like literally millions of bison on the great plains. What years are we talking about? Like pre-humans, like 25 ,000 years ago or more recently? Pre-white people, there were millions of bison and they were living with the indigenous peoples who were, you know, killing them and eating them or whatnot, but nowhere near the numbers that would be slaughtered when we came through.

42:20And we came through and we ate them a little bit, but partly we were also killing them as a way to sort of manipulate and control the indigenous peoples that were in the area. And so by the late 1800s, we had nearly eradicated them. The arrival of Europeans also brought horses, which must have really changed the way the indigenous people hunted the bison. Yeah. Did that impact the bison population as well? That's a good point. It probably did. And also it's worth noting that, yes, we brought horses here, but there were also horses before we brought horses here. And then they went extinct for a little while.

42:56So there was probably a while where there were horses and bison living together. But anyway, yes, probably horses did make it easier for the indigenous peoples to hunt. the bison, but I did not see anywhere in my research that that was a contributing factor to the loss of millions of them. All right. So we have vast plains filled with enormous herds of bison before the Europeans arrived. And then what happened? By the early 1900s, there were fewer than a thousand. A thousand bison? Yeah, a thousand. In the whole country? Yep. That's, wow. Yeah. And it is now hard to find bison that just have straight bison genomes because they interbred with cattle that we brought in.

43:37And so you kind of have some cattle genes in there with the bison. Maybe that matters. Maybe that doesn't. But anyway, yes. So they went down to about a thousand individuals. Well, you want to hear a nice physics biology overlap? Sure. Which is at Fermilab, the biggest particle accelerator in the United States, most of the facilities underground and on top is prairie. And they have a herd of bison that roam the grounds of the accelerator. And every spring you can watch them calf, which is amazing. And Katrina and I were out there once and we saw one and we're like, is that a hoof sticking out the back?

44:11And then like two minutes later, there's a baby. And like two minutes after that, it's running around. It's an incredible moment. Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I'm so jealous. I mean, I was amazed when my goats gave birth and like two minutes later, they were walking around trying to like get a drink of milk or whatever. Herbivores like that are amazing. But anyway, okay. There's many reasons to care about the loss of the bison. From an ecological perspective, one, they were grazing. So they were keeping out the trees and trampling the trees and stuff like that. Two, they do this behavior called wallowing, where they kind of like roll on their back and roll around.

44:50And when they do that, they create sort of like indentations that sometimes fill with water. And so they create these little mini wetlands throughout the places where they roam. And those get used by different animals than are using the rest of the area. The bison are literally shaping the ecosystem. They are. No, they absolutely are. And when they move together as a herd, they don't necessarily get in a straight line and graze from one side of the grassland to the other. They create some patches that have been grazed down a lot and the grass is short and other areas where the grasses are high.

45:23And for example, there are some birds that prefer short grass and there are some birds that prefer the tall grass areas. And so by creating this difference in the kinds of habitats you find because the bison have interacted with the land, you get a lot more biodiversity when the bison are around. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does make sense. Okay, so. Plus they're awesome. Plus they're awesome. They're so awesome. Yes. So the American Prairie is this project where they're trying to expand on this national wildlife refuge that already exists and is 1.1 million acres. So it's a big starting place.

46:01And so what they're doing is they get donors and they collect as much money as they can so that when a piece of property goes up for sale and it is in any way attached to that wildlife refuge, they are buying it up to essentially increase the area where you could have bison. And the goal is to eventually have 5 ,000 square miles of continuous area, which is like roughly the size of Connecticut. And the goal is to have something like 5 ,000 bison on there. So we're not even talking about millions of bison. Like 5 ,000 would be nice to restore some of the interactions that used to be happening on this prairie.

46:36And the goal isn't to like keep humans out entirely. These lands are also to some extent owned by the public. And so when this program buys the land, you can still go out there and you can like camp on the land. You can hike on the land. You can get gored by bison. I mean, yeah, you should be careful. You should be bison are at least easy to, you know, to see and avoid. And so you should be doing that when bison are out there. Are they easy to avoid? They're fast. Yeah, maybe they're not easy to avoid. These are not cows, right? They are fast. They are fast. Yes. I'm pretty sure bison can outrun horses.

47:12I'll believe you. I don't know. Wait, let me fact check that. I'll say you absolutely need to respect them and give them their space. Bison, despite weighing up to 2 ,000 pounds, can reach sprint speeds of 35 to 40 miles per hour. Which is incredible. Yeah, so give them a lot of space. A lot of space. Enjoy them through binoculars, ideally. But yeah, so what they do, as I mentioned, is they buy up the land, And then they talk to the Bureau of Land Management and they get what's called grazing rights. And essentially they say, usually this land used to be grazed by cattle. We are now bringing in bison.

47:51That's our livestock. And this counts according to the prior rules that we have for how you can use land. And I'll note there are other programs that are saying, okay, instead of cattle, we're bringing in horses to do something similar to the rule that the bison do. And so this has been working. They've been growing the land. They've been opening it up to people. They even every once in a while will have hunters who are allowed to come and shoot bison for a price to help the program keep going. But so while I was going through the website, like I wanted to see how they dealt with the question of hunting.

48:22Yeah. And for 2026, they're not allowing any hunting to happen. And the reason they're not allowing any hunting to happen is because there's a ton of uncertainty about the future of their program. So for a really long time, the Bureau of Land Management has allowed organizations like this one to say, hey, bison are my quote unquote livestock that I am grazing on this land. But the Bureau of Land Management has recently decided to revoke some of their licenses saying that bison don't count as livestock because you're not planning on killing and eating them. And the whole premise is that they're going to be able to buy land and have bison on it as livestock.

49:01And so if their licenses are revoked, does that mean a bunch of land that they've bought can no longer have bison on it? And so the American Prairie is fighting back. They're arguing that this is a brand new interpretation of laws that have been around for a really long time. It seems like some organizations at like the federal or the local government level have just decided that they don't want bison for whatever reason. This could be concern from nearby ranchers about what the bison might do to their farms or what if bison attract, for example, cougars or wolves to the area, what those animals might subsequently do to the ranches.

49:39And so a public comment period just passed. They were asking for people to sort of weigh in. But we're waiting to see if the American Prairie Program is going to be able to overturn this recent Bureau of Land Management decision. and otherwise it's sort of unclear what the future of this program is going to be. Fascinating. No, it sucks. That's the wrong response. This sucks. This was a really cool program. Yeah. Well, it makes me wonder, I have, for example, eaten a buffalo burger and it makes me wonder where did that come from? Was it from a herd like this or are there like commercial buffalo ranches somewhere that raise it for meat?

50:16Yes, there are commercial bison ranches that raise them for meat. I see. And so that's like a completely separate way that bison are being kept alive. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, they tend to be in like smaller patches of land. And so they're not necessarily having the same impact on the ecosystem. They're in more of like a, you know, fenced in, farmed, managed situation. Right. And so I think to be able to count as livestock, the plan would have to be that like a significant portion of them are harvested every year and then sold after slaughter. And that's not the American Prairie's plan. Right.

50:51And so anyway, I am upset. I can see that. I really like sort of came to love this program while I was reading about it. When I found that website, I like anyway, I hope they figure out a way through. And if you're concerned, then you should check out the American Prairie website and see if they have any other calls to action, any other ways that you can contribute by contacting lawmakers or anything. All right, let's take a break and give Kelly a chance to cool off. And then we'll get to some more examples and discuss the difference between rewilding and conservation from a philosophical point of view.

51:25This doesn't piss you off. They're changing the rules, man. They've been following all the rules. That's not cool.

51:40I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko, where we have real conversations just like this. Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-chew spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. Is that weird? This week is Human Connection Week. We're taking a peek into the lives of various strangers who found my phone number online. We'll hear their funny moments, their difficult ones, and their unexpectedly profound ones.

52:23These are real conversations with real people figuring out life one call at a time. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educated. I can talk all week on millions of subjects.

53:04And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance better for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. That call was really pivotal for me. Hey, it's Emily Tisch-Sussman. And this season on She Pivots, the podcast where women share bold career moves and personal turning points that changed everything.

53:47I sit down with culture-shifting women who share their pivots, like Paralympian Allie Truitt. I was like, I'm a month out from a shark attack. There's no way in 11 months I'm making the Paralympics. Advocate Elizabeth Smart. I still feel that drive that I can still make a difference. So I'm going to keep going. Celebrity chef Carla Hall. Was that scary to walk away from such a stable career after just two years? No, I was more afraid of being unhappy than I was broke in a dead end job that I didn't enjoy. And feminist legend Gloria Steinem. All of us were trying to express women's real lives. We need a meeting place of our own.

54:25And if I can contribute to that, I'd like to maintain that and leave this house for that purpose. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Michael Imperioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. I'm on the plane, honey. Something's wrong. It's about what happened in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. While the world was mourning, five powerful New York families saw an opportunity. The debris is supposed to go to the city-owned salvage yard, and some of it will.

55:02They would go on to make millions of dollars. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, silver ingots. It could be worth half a billion. And they would have made more if it hadn't been for one courageous cop. No, Dad, don't. You're going to need all of us. I'll call you when I can. Frank, be careful. Underground Zero, starring Steve Schirippa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioli. Would you be willing to see your family go to pieces? Some ways it already has. Listen to Underground Zero on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. self-care September is here which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means yes self-care can be a long walk it can be an everything shower it can be putting your phone on do not disturb but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff and understanding your patterns your boundaries finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again I'm Gemma Spegg the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are.

56:12Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and growth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this Self-Care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

56:47All right, we're back and Kelly is mad. I'm really mad, but I'm going to try to contain that for now. And we are going to move on to talking about one of the more controversial rewilding projects. And I should say, so I picked the projects that we're talking about today because the book that I read focused on the projects we're talking about today. Plus, I added the American Prairie Project because our listener requested it. There's a lot of rewilding projects that are less controversial than the ones that we've talked about today. But this one brings up some really interesting questions philosophically about how we should manage rewilding projects.

57:21So I wanted us to sort of end on this note. All right. We're going to talk about a project run by Sergei Zimov in Russia. So he was a guy who was working with permafrost. And so this is like the ice that's supposed to be permanently frozen. But because of global climate change is no longer permanently frozen in a lot of cases. And not just ice, right? It's soil that's also frozen. Yes. Yep, exactly. Thank you. And so he was working in this area where there were like banks on either side of him. And he could see in the permafrost a bunch of old bones. And the bones were from bison and horses and elks and mammoths.

57:58And they were from about 10 ,000 years ago. And when he was looking at all of these bones, he was thinking, these animals were all here. Yeah. And none of them are here now. What would it have been like if these animals were back? And by doing some research, he came to the conclusion that these animals helped to maintain what is now permafrost in more of a grassland state. And how did they do that? So if you have like a permafrost environment, a lot of the plants that are there are slow growing plants like mosses. And so it takes them a really long time to grow. But as they grow, they sort of establish an area and they slowly sort of edge out the grasses.

58:39Okay. But if you've got herbivores there stomping on the mosses or eating the mosses, the mosses don't get a chance and other plants like mosses don't get a chance to get those footholds. And that gives the grass a chance to grow and catch up. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I would have thought the herbivores eat the grass too. They do eat the grass too, but because the grasses are more quick growing, they can recover more quickly, unsurprisingly. I see. So yeah, they're able to out-compete the slower growing things, and then you can get these grassland ecosystems. But without the herbivores to sort of keep the other stuff from out-competing the grasses, you lose the grasslands.

59:15But isn't there another big difference which contributes, which is just climate change? I mean, 10 ,000 years ago, weren't we in like a little ice age? Isn't that some of the reason why this ground is no longer frozen, that the Earth has warmed? Yeah, so I think what Sergei would say is that we are looking at really long timescales here, and you ended up with grasslands in this area in between glaciation periods. And so this was like a grassland state for a very long time. And yes, things have changed over times, but grasslands were like a pretty consistent feature of this area until humans came in and killed all of those large animals.

59:54Oh, I see. Yeah. So it's not that the animals died off because the climate changed, but I thought that it was that the climate change helped bring the humans to this area. So maybe that's the contribution. Yeah, could be. But the argument that this group is making is that humans killing these large herbivores was the main thing that tips this ecosystem from one state to another. All right. So it's our fault. I get it. Well, I mean, but the rewilding community would say this happened thousands of years ago. So you don't have to personally feel bad about it. But you can say, well, would it be good if we could restore the grasslands?

1:00:31And so the arguments that they're making is that when you have a grassland in an area instead of permafrost, that environment sequesters more carbon. And so if you are interested in trying to like pull carbon out of the atmosphere, then a grassland is a better environment to have than this permafrost. And the permafrost is in a lot of cases melting. And so a grassland might be a better replacement for what we've got. Because that's what plants and green stuff does. It pulls carbon out of the atmosphere to build itself up and then sequesters it in the ground. Yes. But if you just are growing like a forest or something, if a forest fire comes through, a lot of that carbon is stored above ground.

1:01:10And when the fire burns, it releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. But they're arguing that these grasslands are sequestering a lot of carbon underground, which makes it like a better long term solution. But I should highlight that I listened to this really great interview from someone who was working on a rewilding bison project in Europe. And he was trying to quantify differences in carbon sequestration, like in environments with bison versus environments without bison. And while he did find that on average, it looks like having bison around does mean you get more carbon sort of sequestered in a way that would be good for the environment.

1:01:47He was pointing out that like there's it's really hard to make these measurements. There's a lot of uncertainty. You should definitely think of this as like an emerging field that we're working on. And so I think you should be hesitant whenever someone tells you like, oh, you know, loads and loads of carbon would be sequestered with this method. I think we're trying to get a handle on how much better it is to have grasslands relative to something like a tundra. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Okay. So here's what he did. He managed to fence in a thousand hectares of taiga and tundra. And he brought in hardy horses, elk, muskox, bison, sheep, goats, a variety of different herbivores.

1:02:28And I was looking at the website and it looks like it's like 10 of this species, 15 of another. And so it does appear that this experiment at the moment is pretty small scale. And so that's not why this experiment has become famous. Like, yes, it was an exciting idea that like this area that we think of as permafrost was actually probably grassland. And we need to stop all being acclimated to the idea that this should just be a frozen wasteland. It could be a productive, amazing environment with lots of huge herbivores living on it. But this program has gotten a lot of attention because it got the attention of George Church, who started pushing this program where he said, well, maybe we can bring back the woolly mammoth, which was the major herbivore in this system.

1:03:12George Church, the same guy who famously asked for volunteers for women who wanted to be surrogates for a Neanderthal baby. Oh, my God. Are you serious? I'm serious. Oh, there's like so many levels of unethical there. I know. Yeah. Okay. So he has spearheaded a lot of really innovative far out projects, some of which I think are ethically questionable if I'm going to be honest. So anyway, so the argument here is that if you bring back the woolly mammoth, they are like the quintessential mega herbivore that lived in these systems. And they could do a really good job of speeding up the transition from like permafrost environments to grassland.

1:03:52So what do you think, Daniel? We killed them off. We could bring them back and bring back this ecosystem that is no longer around because of us. Do you think we should bring back the woolly mammoth? I would love to see a woolly mammoth in the flesh. Wow, that would be amazing. I mean, what are the arguments against it? I mean, it's permafrost right now, which is an ecosystem. There are some things living there, I imagine, which might get supplanted if you bring back the woolly mammoth. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. It seems good to me. What's the bad news? Well, I mean, because I'm Kelly, I've thought of some things that I'm concerned about, let's say.

1:04:29So, you know, you're not going to bring back the woolly mammoth. What you're going to be able to bring back is some elephant that has woolly mammoth genes inserted into it. And so you're going to try to essentially make hairy elephants that will need to be birthed by pre-existing elephants. and then you'll put them in this harsh environment and hope that you have figured it out so that they don't die a horrible death when they're up there. They'll also, I think from like a purist perspective, you know, they're not really mammoths. So like, you know, they're not going to have the mammoth microbiome.

1:05:04Elephants usually when they're born, they eat a little of like mom's poop to get their microbiome. So woolly mammoths, their mom's poop is just gone, man. Like you can't bring it back. But you know, they're not going to have like social behaviors that were learned from the rest of the herd. That kind of stuff is gone entirely. They're sort of mammoths the way American cheese is cheese, which is like vaguely cheese flavored. Yeah. And like, you know, I'm okay with that if it does bring back these dynamic ecosystems that are helpful in sequestering carbon in some way. But I do find myself wondering like, could we be spending money on better things?

1:05:39Do we need mammoths to do it? If like a thousand musk oxen could do the trick instead, for example and then like what obligation do we have to these mammoths if things get bad like so one you have to worry about the mammoths like crushing the house of anybody that they can like reach because that's scary but like two you know if it looks like the mammoths are starting to go extinct again do we now have an obligation to keep these proto mammoths alive because we brought them into existence you build it you buy it right you build it you buy it yeah uh so i don't know it It seems like a lot of work that you could maybe replace with pre-existing species.

1:06:15I'm not opposed to it. It would be interesting to see a woolly mammoth. I'm just not sure if this is like our best use of time and money. But I guess, you know, they would argue that this is a company that's working on it. It's not taking any of your tax dollars. So stop whining. Yeah, stop whining. I need a T-shirt that says that. Stop whining. Stop whining, comma, Kelly. All right. So then, you know, maybe this takes us back to the original question. say they do this and they have a herd of woolly mammoth, how do you evaluate whether it's been successful? Is it the amount of carbon sequestered?

1:06:48Is it the number of species there? What's the metric and how do we avoid just gaming that metric? Yeah, so that's a great question. So one, I think it's important to set metrics up ahead of time so that you're not sort of measuring whatever seems to be going right at the time. But so like with conservation, I think they would argue that, you know, one of the nice things was that you could say, you know, our goal is a hundred wolves And you could measure, do I have 100 wolves or not? But if you're just trying to measure, we want to bring back some of the interactions. Like, what does that look like?

1:07:20And that's harder to quantify. And so, you know, for example, I was listening to one of the people who runs the American Prairie Project, and they were talking about how they quantify success. and he was saying that one of the hard things about quantifying success for that program is that the animals that they're interested in seeing more of are pretty much all already there, but they're just in low numbers. And so how do you figure out like, what are the target numbers that you wanna see come back? And how do you figure out like, how those animals should be distributed? And I think the honest answer is that nature is a Rube Goldberg machine that's hard to predict.

1:07:57and so I think to some extent the rewilding community is like look we don't necessarily know what we're going to get we can have some goals ahead of time yeah and those goals could be like probably it would be good to see more bison and it would be important to make sure that the ranchers are happy and that people are still enjoying this environment but those are like they can be hard things to quantify and so I think that this is honestly a really difficult question for the field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think some projects have easier answers than others and more straightforward answers than others.

1:08:28But I think in a lot of cases, it's hard to say. Do you think that some of it is hard to pin down because the goal isn't always scientific? It's partially emotional. It's a feeling like, look, we've done some damage. Can we just, you know, earn some points by fixing a few things? Even if we're not like actually scientifically accomplishing something, it feels like we've tried. Yes, and I don't necessarily think that's a problem. So you said that driving through Montana is beautiful. It is. If having bison out there makes the environment even more beautiful in some way because it creates more little microhabitats that bring more animals in and you want to see black-footed ferrets peeking up out of their burrows and looking absolutely adorable.

1:09:14Like, I don't think it's a problem to say, look, we think there'd be some better things if we introduce this animal. It will produce like cascading positive effects. And a lot of us will think that's beautiful and we'll feel good living in that environment. And we've undone some of the damage that we've done, even though it's hard to quantify exactly how much better we've made things. Like, I don't personally think that's a problem. I know that's not very scientific of me to say, but I don't think making the world more beautiful in a way that supports more wild animals is a bad answer. Yeah, I agree.

1:09:47And since you raised the issue, let me ask you a philosophical question that Hazel asked me as we were driving through Montana, which totally stumped me. She said, do the bison think this is beautiful? Oh. So what do you think? Do you think animals appreciate the beauty of nature? Gosh, I think animals probably don't appreciate when things change. You know, so like, you know, I think if you are a bison living in a grassland and then suddenly there's no grass and it's all cattle, you probably look around and think, well, shoot, where am I going to get my food? And I don't know if they're thinking this isn't beautiful, but they're probably like stressed out and have like higher stress hormone levels trying to figure out like, well, how do I stay away from that person who, you know, I saw shoot Fran the other day?

1:10:36Like, I know those humans have guns, but I can't get enough food. All right, but you're avoiding the question, you know. If a buffalo rounds a corner and sees an amazing vista with a sunset, do you think they ever go, ooh, nice? I have no way to answer that. Exactly. An unanswerable question. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. They could say, ooh, yummy grass. I'll tell Hazel that you're stumped also. But just to foreshadow to a future episode, we're going to have animal behavior extraordinaire Andy C on the show. Okay. And he's going to be answering questions about like, what do we know about what animals do feel?

1:11:14Like, do they want to stay alive? Do they feel fear? Oh my gosh. All right. We'll ask him Hazel's buffalo question then. Yeah. So hang on to Hazel's buffalo question because Andy C is just a top notch animal behaviorist. All right, Kelly. So you've walked us through a bunch of examples, some positive, some with mixed results. So bottom line for us, what is your take on rewilding? Well-intentioned, a good idea. What do you think? I think it is well-intentioned, and I think it's a good idea. I think all conservation is complicated, and I think it's always really important to think about how the people who are interacting with this wild area, how it's going to impact them.

1:11:55And I think the rewilding movement, a lot of people are thinking about that a lot more. And I think rewilding reflects the fact that over time we've learned more and more about how complicated these ecosystems are. And rewilding sort of focuses on the interactions between species that we've learned about in the last however many decades. And so I think like all conservation programs, it's not just straightforward doing the science. You have to also manage humans and stuff like that. But I don't know. I thought there was a lot of exciting stuff going on. Some of it is a little wild for my taste.

1:12:29I didn't necessarily feel like we need to bring back the woolly mammoth. So I'm not going to see a saber-toothed tiger? I mean, I can't. Maybe George Church is working on that. I don't know. But no, in general, I thought it was exciting to see the conservation community coming up with new ideas, new ways to do things. I like that there's a little bit less of a doom and gloom, and there's more of a like, look, let's do something. And, you know, it's not going to be perfect, but like at least we will have done something and we will have these beautiful creatures and these beautiful ecosystems to look at and enjoy.

1:13:02And we can feel good that we did something instead of just sitting around feeling bummed out. Awesome. Well, thank you for ending on a positive note. I'm impressed. I can do it sometimes. Thanks, Kelly and Daniel. That was really thorough and super interesting. And I don't have any follow up questions. I do have one quick follow-up comment, though. The world birth rate, even in developing countries, is falling off a cliff right now. The world's population is projected to begin declining around the turn of the century. And if world birth rates stabilize between 1.5 and 1.8 like they are in Europe and East Asia right now, there's going to be a lot less human beings alive in the year 2400.

1:13:47A lot less. So maybe it's a pipe dream, but I hope much of the Earth will be returned to nature as part of that depopulation process. Maybe a topic for another episode? Again, thank you so much. All right, thank you. And if you have a question you'd like to share, you can write us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can go to our website, danielandkelly.org, and find a link to our Discord community and share your questions with us and the rest of the community there. Thanks very much, everybody. Stay wild.

1:14:22Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

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