Rewilding

Daniel and Kelly talk about the differences between conservation and rewilding, and discuss some of the successes, failures, and wild ideas that have come from the rewilding movement so far. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 4:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's admit it. Humanity hasn't been great for biodiversity and wildlife on planet Earth. Throughout our history, we've killed, for example, many large mammals, either because we wanted to eat them, or because we were worried that they would compete with us or try to eat us. So many ecosystems exist today without the large herbivores and large predators that once roamed within them. Large animals like this aren't just charismatic, they also have oversized impacts on the ecosystem. No doubt, many of you have heard the story about how Yellowstone National Park was transformed

• 5:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  after the reintroduction of the wolves, and we're going to talk about that a bit today. The newish movement of rewilding is a new spin on the conservation movement, though I suspect that many self-proclaimed conservationists would be upset with me for explaining it that way. Anyway, rewilding focuses on trying to restore lost interactions between species and the radiating impacts that they have on the ecosystems in which they're found. But how far should you go to restore these interactions? If the big herbivore at the center of these interactions was a woolly mammoth, should you use genetic engineering to resurrect them from the dead? In addition to emphasizing restoring lost interactions, rewilding also tends to emphasize a hands-off approach, where animals are reintroduced to a system, and then you kind of sit back

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  and see what will happen, being happy with the result, even if it doesn't produce the exact same ecosystem that was there before. We're going to walk through a bunch of examples today and talk about how rewilding is a little different than the conservation of my youth, and we're going to discuss the pros and the cons of this approach. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Wild Universe.

• 6:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens, and when I was a kid, I always wished they could bring saber-toothed tigers back from the dead.

• 6:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. Hi, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space. And I wasn't necessarily thinking about de-extinction when I was a kid, but I was really into wolves. And so, like, for my birthday, I would have my parents, like, quote-unquote, "adopt a wolf for me," which just meant, like, you know, make a donation to a conservation group. And so, like, wolves were my jam.

• 7:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Didn't you ever see critters on TV, like, in cartoons or whatever, and think, whoa, that looks really cool. I wish we had those guys now.

• 7:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, Jurassic Park was by far and away my favorite movie.

• 7:25Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go.

• 7:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, yes, yes, I do still think it would be amazing to see, like, a brontosaurus or something like that. And I interviewed Dr. Beth Shapiro, who now works at Colossal.

• 7:36Daniel Whiteson?

  The Dire Wolf Place?

• 7:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  The Dire Wolf Place. And I asked her, you know, could we ever have Jurassic Park? And she was pretty much like, no. We could try to pull together all of the genes that would make something that would look like a brontosaurus, but the brontosaurus genome is, like, long since gone. There's nothing. We're not finding that. It's decayed.

• 7:57Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, a great start to our episode, throwing a wet blanket on lots of people's fantasies. But, you know, there was something else about that when I was a kid, is just the awe of seeing something like that surviving in the wild.

• 8:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, not in a zoo, but like, really making its life out there. I think about that sometimes the way I think about, like, small businesses. You ever drive by, like, a little jewelry store, and you're like, how does that thing survive? Like, who's going in there and paying enough to cover the rent?

• 8:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 8:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And when you see a creature sometimes, I'm like, how does this thing, like, making it out there? It gets cold at night. How is this thing surviving every night and finding food and raising its kids, you know? So it's amazing to see these creatures in the wild.

• 8:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Zach used to joke that when we moved out to the farm, the biggest problem we'd have is that every winter, I would try to get all the deer in the house on the coldest night of the year. Because I'd be like, guys, there's no way you can survive this. You gotta come inside.

• 8:51Daniel Whiteson?

  If you're cold, they're cold, right?

• 8:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Yes, that's right. Except, they're adapted to the cold, and they're, you know, usually they do fine. Not always, but usually they do fine. But you were focusing on, you know, me being a wet blanket, which, like, fair enough, right? That's a totally reasonable baseline. But today's story is meant to be a bit uplifting, one of the big...

• 9:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, is it?

• 9:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, like, as much as I could...

• 9:15Daniel Whiteson?

  A bit uplifting.

• 9:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  A bit.

• 9:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Moderate your expectations, folks.

• 9:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Qualifier. But, you know, rewilding definitely has a more, like, positive vibe than conservation. And so, let's try to start with a, like, you know, positive vibe, like, we can bring some of this stuff back.

• 9:30Daniel Whiteson?

  So that, at the end, you can tell us how it's all hopeless?

• 9:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you know, I want it to be a roller coaster ride. It wouldn't be a Wiener Smith LED episode otherwise.

• 9:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. So let's begin with the inspiration of it, right? Like, what is the idea? How does this work? But first, what's the inspiration for today's episode, Kelly? Why are we talking about rewilding today?

• 9:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  The inspiration for today's episode is that one of our active Discord members, who always has fantastic questions, whose handle is @callmemose.

• 9:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I love that you refer to the Discord members by their handles.

• 10:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I always forget to ask for first names ahead of time, but anyway. Well, and also, you know, you want to be able to join our Discord channel and then communicate with this person. So now you know, but anyway, uh, let's go ahead and hear the question that they had for us today.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  Hey, Kelly and Daniel. I would love to hear your thoughts on the rewilding projects underway in the US and Europe and maybe elsewhere. To let big chunks of land return to their natural unregulated ecosystems, including returning original predators and herbivores to the land, removing human dams, et cetera. I am most interested in the American Prairie Preserve in Montana, because I grew up in what used to be the prairie in Iowa. But all of these efforts are really fascinating to me. Thank you.

• 10:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I just drove through Montana. What a beautiful state. I never heard about the American Prairie Preserve. What is that?

• 10:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, but we're gonna get to it. It is.

• 11:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, sorry, sorry.

• 11:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, that's okay. So I got excited about rewilding because, you know, I was really into learning about conservation when I was a kid. And then I went to grad school for ecology and rewilding is a flavor of conservation that I was definitely less familiar with. And so I used this question as an excuse to dive into the literature and catch back up. It's been at least a decade since I was in grad school and thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I learned a lot and today we're going to go through rewilding in general, but we're definitely going to talk about American Prairie. And it turns out this is a very important time to be talking about it because it turns out they might be losing the rights to graze bison on their land. So stay tuned for that because that would be, that would be huge for that project.

• 11:44Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And thank you, Call Me Mose, for asking this question. I love when people ask questions that give us an excuse to bump something up to the top of the stuff I wish I had time to read about list.

• 11:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah, I know. And so I, I read like a whole book on rewilding and then there's this great podcast called Rewildology. And so I listened to a bunch of interviews by experts who are running rewilding programs. So I've got a sense of what it's like to run a bunch of these different programs. But first, let's go ahead and hear what our extraordinaries think, because I was wondering, do most people know the difference between rewilding and conservation? Or do they use those terms interchangeably? Because I'm not quite sure I could have put my finger on the difference when I started this research project. So let's go ahead and see what the extraordinaries had to say. I asked them, how is rewilding different than conservation?

• 12:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Conservation is preventative. Rewilding is restorative. Conservation is when you like preserve a certain thing. And then rewilding is probably like letting an area go back to the wild. Conservation kind of means, I mean, it's more of, um, yeah, like keeping track of wildlife to preserve it. While rewilding would probably be letting it wildlife for itself in a way.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  So yeah, I think like conservative is controlled and rewilding is just let it go. Conservation is kind of like gardening. Rewilding is getting out of the way and letting nature take its course. I believe that conservation is different from rewilding because in rewilding, there is human intervention, such as reintroducing species or something along that line. But in conservation, it's pretty much just sort of stop human interaction and human interference and letting nature do its thing. I think that conservation is like taking intact ecosystems and keeping them from getting hurt. And rewilding is taking ecosystems that are already messed up and making them right again. I think conservation means to try to preserve an ecosystem in an existing state.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  But rewilding is introducing a population to take it back to a previous state.

• 14:00Daniel Whiteson?

  To begin with, I've never heard of rewilding of momentum. I'm not sure, but I think the difference is that conservation protects endangered species of plants and animals, while rewilding encourages proliferation of species with protections from poaching. So I'm actually going to say it's about whose interests you're serving. Are you serving the environment's best interests, the, the area, including the creatures in it? Or are you serving just one or a few particular creatures' interests? Conservation is kind of protecting what's still there, whereas rewilding, you're kind of trying to add more wilds, I think.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Free association. Conservation makes me think of swamps and protecting them. Rewilding makes me think about genetically engineered woolly mammoths. Huh. Well, I think that conservation means keeping things as is. While rewilding means bringing back some characteristics of the natural world.

• 14:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I think conservation is to try to reduce the human footprint on an environment or a species. And rewilding is human manipulation through and through. All right. People had some definite opinions about this.

• 15:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Daniel Whiteson?

  How do you grade these scores, Kelly?

• 15:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you know, I don't like to grade anyone's scores really, because we're encouraging people to just give us their like off the cuff answers. I feel like you grade something people were supposed to prepare for, but, but I would say that we had a really thoughtful range of answers. Thinking about, you know, like their gut feeling for what conservation should mean versus what rewilding should mean. I think at the end of the day, most of these answers didn't quite get what I came away with by the end of my research. And so I, you know, I, I hope we'll all learn something interesting along the way. But so first, let's start with what is rewilding? And before I jump into a definition, I want to reiterate that I read a bunch of review papers and like I did a bunch of research.

• 15:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And one of the themes was that the rewilders were like, look, we can't agree on a definition.

• 16:04Daniel Whiteson?

  The movement itself can't even agree what it means.

• 16:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, they, that like different projects in different places in different times want to focus on different things. And so that leads them to come up with different definitions. But there have been some review papers where a bunch of scientists have come together and said, okay, this is our best shot at a definition that sort of encompasses what all of us are doing.

• 16:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 16:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so here's the definition that I got.

• 16:30Daniel Whiteson?

  What is it?

• 16:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Rewilding is the process of rebuilding following a major human disturbance. A natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes in the complete or near complete food web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem with biota that would have been president, that would have been present had this disturbance not occurred. This will involve a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. And my plan is to break it down because your eyes glazed over.

• 16:58Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I was just laughing when you said biota were president. I was thinking, that actually sounds cool. I wish we had like elephant presidents and stuff like that.

• 17:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. What would an elephant ask for? More water holes. We need more water holes without crocodiles in them.

• 17:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But the overall sense I got was, yeah, we're rebuilding an ecosystem that we destroyed.

• 17:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 17:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So for example, building Jurassic Park would not be rewilding because humans didn't destroy the dinosaur ecosystem. That was the asteroid.

• 17:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, that's true. Let's go through the Yellowstone example. And then at the end of the example, I want to talk about how a conservationist might have pitched this project versus how a re wilder would have looked at this project. And by the end of this example, I feel like we'll have a good handle on the difference between conservation and rewilding.

• 17:45Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Are we going to talk about wolves?

• 17:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're gonna talk about wolves.

• 17:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I love the Yellowstone wolves.

• 17:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, me too. Okay. So as you probably know, then by the mid 1900s, the wolves were pretty much gone from Yellowstone. And the park ecologists that were out there, they were sort of watching what happened to the ecosystem after the wolves were gone. And they noticed that there were a lot more elk and those elk were now eating a lot more vegetation because there was more of them. And in particular, some of the things that they were eating were young aspens. So you weren't getting like aspen woodlands anymore because these trees were getting sort of consumed before they had a chance to get big. They were also eating these trees called cottonwoods that grow along the banks of like rivers. And because those couldn't get big, you were losing beavers because those trees were both food for beavers

• 18:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  and were important for beavers when they were making their dams. Without those trees, without the beavers, that was changing the entire aquatic system as well. So one of the things, I know. So what, one of the things that beavers do is these dams slow the water. So the water rises and starts to spill over the banks of the river. When it does that, you end up with land areas that are kind of like wet and moist. And so they're producing these wetlands that are good for frog eggs and salamanders and certain kinds of insects. So having the beavers is producing these extra ecosystems that give you a bunch of extra biodiversity. But without the beavers, the water starts flowing quickly down the river. And as it does that, it starts pulling away soil from the bottom of the river and from the sides.

• 19:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so instead of having these like rivers that have wetlands associated with it, you just have very deep, fast-moving rivers instead. Does that make sense?

• 19:26Daniel Whiteson?

  It does, but it just reinforces my sense that all of biology is a crazy Rube Goldberg machine.

• 19:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you're telling me you don't have as many wolves, now you have more deer, which eat a bunch of trees, which the beavers needed, and without the beavers, you're not getting dams, you're not getting the wetlands, so you're getting faster rivers. This is crazy.

• 19:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is crazy, and I feel like that complexity is lost from the story a bit. So I feel like when I heard the story about the reintroduction, I was like, oh, the wolves came back, and then there's fewer elks, and the beaver comes back, and now everything goes back to the way it was before. But these things are so complicated that that's not necessarily what you should expect. And so there were some areas, when you brought the wolves back, the elk started either dying because they were getting eaten by the wolves, but they also changed their behavior. They no longer wanted to be right up against dense woods, where they could get ambushed by the wolves, and they also tended to not want to be in like, big, open areas.

• 20:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, elk are smart like that? They can like learn things?

• 20:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, of course they can. Yeah, yeah.

• 20:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Really?

• 20:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 20:27Daniel Whiteson?

  They give me the whole sort of glazed eye, robot, you know, leaf munching vibe. I don't really get a lot of intelligence from the look of a deer, but clearly I'm wrong. They can learn.

• 20:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I think they can also hold "I don't want to die" in there, along with the thought of more, more food.

• 20:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Sally died last week doing this, and maybe we shouldn't do this, sort of a thing.

• 20:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I think you see, like, your kid get eaten by a wolf because they jumped out of the woods, and you're like, I'm not standing near the wolves anymore. Like, I'm not doing that next year. And so, so anyway, yeah, they learn. But I think the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction story is a little more complicated, because in some areas, you get the beavers back and the wetlands back. But there were other areas where it looks like they didn't get that stuff back. And the reason they didn't get it back was because those ecosystems had, like, shifted to a different state. And I think what happened in this case in particular was that the river had gotten, like, so deep and so fast, and the banks were no longer, like, appropriate for those trees to grow on, that you just couldn't get the beavers back. So that system had shifted to, like, a no-turning-back scenario.

• 21:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  But there's lots of areas where you do, you get the beavers back, you get the wetlands back, it's good for the animals that need the wetlands. The wolves also tend to eat coyotes, and the coyotes had been going nuts on the small rodents, and so now you can get, like, some small rodent populations back. And so the point is, there's all of these interactions between species happening at Yellowstone. And when you throw the wolves in there, those interactions change dramatically.

• 22:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And it actually makes a lot of sense that the ecosystem is not some sort of, like, reversible process, where if you undo what you did, you're gonna go back to where you were.

• 22:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 22:11Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like if you have a ball at the top of a hill, and you kick it, it's gonna go to the bottom of the hill, and giving it the same kick in the other direction doesn't necessarily push it back to the top of the hill, because gravity's going the other direction. So there must be lots of asymmetric forces at work here that are not reversible.

• 22:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, exactly.

• 22:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Biology is complicated.

• 22:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is complicated. And I feel like when I was a kid, the vibe of the conservation movement would have been, "We are bad, we killed the wolves, we need to bring the wolves back and try to recreate what was lost." And in particular, "We need to reach X number of wolves and get them back in the system, and we should feel bad the whole time we're doing it, because we are bad, and without us, this problem wouldn't have happened."

• 22:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's a couple of things going on there. There's like, the self-flagellation, but also the, like, defining an ecosystem by a narrow metric, right? And then saying, "Once you've hit that metric, then now everything is back to where it was." When obviously, an ecosystem is very complicated and can't be captured by one number.

• 23:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, exactly. And so the rewilders, their attitude, like, when I was listening to interviews and, you know, reading books and papers, the attitude was a lot more like, "Look, a lot of this bad stuff happened at a time when none of us who are alive today were around. None of us made these decisions, we don't need to, you know, be self-flagellating because this happened, and we can't necessarily expect to get back exactly what was lost. But we can have something better than what we have today. And so, let's try to get some wolves back, and our real, our goal isn't to get, like, 75 wolves back, you know, for example, to pick an arbitrary number. The goal is to bring wolves back until we start to see these interactions returning.

• 23:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we shouldn't expect to get the exact same thing, but we should just be happy with what we do get back, and just kind of hope that the ecosystems are now more resilient and more diverse, because the wolves are back."

• 24:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, let me ask a naive question, then. Like, are we measuring ecosystems by some quality metric? Like, we're saying, "The ecosystem we destroyed is better than the one we have now, so we need to somehow improve it." That implies that you can, like, grade ecosystems. I know you're against giving grades.

• 24:26Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, that we can say, "This one's better, this one's worse." But we know that the flow of history says that everything is constantly in flux, things are changing, extinction is natural, right? And so who are we to say that, like, this human intervention is necessarily bad? By what metric is it bad?

• 24:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so rewilders are much more likely to say, "Look, things change. We don't necessarily know what the best scenario would be, but we do know that we removed this animal from the ecosystem, and that if they were back, a lot of different things would change, and in particular, what would change would result in more biodiversity." And so I think they're more likely to embrace the fact that you're probably not gonna get back exactly what you had, that's fine, because ecosystems change over time, you just need to decide what is important to you to bring back, and then try to focus on those things.

• 25:15Daniel Whiteson?

  But I don't understand why the new ecosystem that's the result of human intervention has less biodiversity. I understand that it's different, but ecosystems are changing all the time. The pre-human ecosystem was different from one that came before it, a million years before. Was it less biodiverse? Is there a general trend towards less biodiversity? Or is it like, anytime humans are involved, biodiversity goes down for some reason?

• 25:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, I think probably yes, anytime humans are involved, biodiversity does go down, unfortunately. But, but a thing that a lot of rewilders focus on is that when you bring back certain important players into a system, they create heterogeneity. And so like, by that, I mean, you know, before the elk were going everywhere, and they were grazing down everything. But when the wolves are there, the elk behavior changes, and now there's areas that they don't go to anymore. And because they're not in those areas anymore, that allows other organisms to sort of come in and live there. And so a common theme that I found was that you think about what was lost when we took this organism away, or when this organism was killed by humans, and what would we gain by bringing it back?

• 26:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is what we gain, you know, important or worth having? But 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 an important point that I had at our, like, wrap-up discussion. So let's, let's return to it.

• 26:41Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 26:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  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." I 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."

• 27:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So anyway, there's a debate in the community about whether or not you need this term and what it should mean.

• 27:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, 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 you know about this guy?

• 27:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 27:41Daniel Whiteson?

  He like, gets up at, oh, you, seriously?

• 27:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, sorry.

• 27:44Daniel Whiteson?

  For like, 40 years, he would get up at like, 4:00 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 their incredibly dramatic scenes, where like, a wolf that was raised by another wolf leads a fight between two packs. It's like a soap opera. It's incredible. It's basically Game of Thrones for wolves, but it's real.

• 28:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, the wolves have amazing, complicated social lives. Yeah, it sounds fantastic.

• 28:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, check out The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone by Rick McIntyre.

• 28:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?

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• 33:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  All 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.

• 33:36Daniel Whiteson?

  You don't want to have to inject wolves every year. You want it to be self-sustaining.

• 33:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And 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.

• 33:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 33:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 34:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Is it the Oostvaardesplassen?

• 34:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, there you go, the OVP. Hey, you know me.

• 34:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice.

• 34:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  In the Netherlands.

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm down with the OVP. Let's do it.

• 34:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And

• 35:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  that was creating ecosystems for more animals. And this ecologist named Franz Vera saw this. And he thought to himself, you know, we could do something with this environment. It doesn't have to just be super managed. 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, you know, keep these things grassland by, like, eating and trampling trees that were trying to grow, like, those species have been gone. So now we don't have a lot of grasslands.

• 35:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that what keeps prairies prairies? I've been wondering about that.

• 35:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 35:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, cool.

• 35:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  So he thought to himself, okay, there used to be oryx here, and these are wild cows. And there used to be tar pans, 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? And 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.

• 36:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, but this is the delta of a river. I'm imagining something pretty squishy. How are you putting, like, cows into the river?

• 36:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  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 tar pans are gone. And so they said, all right, we're going to get Koenig ponies. I think that's how you pronounce it. But from Poland, these are like hardy horses.

• 36:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Are those ponies that come as a section of a cone, like parabolas, hyperbulas?

• 36:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, probably. Probably that's what they meant. They also brought in deer, which might have naturally been there. And then because oryx are no longer available, the, 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.

• 37:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. 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.

• 37:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly.

• 37:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 37:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And there used to be predators in this area, but you don't want to introduce predators into a heavily populated area. And for, for reasons.

• 38:14Daniel Whiteson?

  You don't want wolves in playgrounds? Why not?

• 38:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, it's complicated. It's got, but, but so that, 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.

• 38:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 38:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this is something that like, I think society is absolutely no longer comfortable with. Like this should not be happening under our watch. And so people were getting furious. And so like 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. Cause they, they didn't want these horses to starve. And so this ended up creating like 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 like, I totally get why they're doing that.

• 39:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. Well, where do you fall on that? Are you pro lots of beautiful horses suffering or anti horse suffering?

• 39:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm anti lots of beautiful horse suffering. Like I, 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. And 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.

• 40:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  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, what do you think? Based on the way you asked me the question, I think I know your answer.

• 40:29Daniel Whiteson?

  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? We 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.

• 40:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think just to be a little bit of a like devil's advocate, uh, you know, I think even if there had been predators there, every once in a while, a really harsh winter comes through.

• 41:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you know, even when predators are around, you will end up getting animals. You know, herbivores dying of starvation, uh, cause 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. And 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.

• 41:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, the people are part of the ecosystem in a way, right?

• 41:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, that is a, an emphasis of rewilding, particularly that is a point that I saw emphasized in the American Prairie Preserve website. And 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.

• 42:06Daniel Whiteson?

  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 when we went to Missoula and wow, it's a beautiful place.

• 42:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  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 gotta be kidding me. I hadn't thought about grasslands as being a place I'd want to visit, but wow, they look beautiful.

• 42:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. No, it's jaw dropping vista after jaw dropping vista. It's like, it looks fake almost. You're like, what? Come on.

• 42:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 42:54Daniel Whiteson?

  What years are we talking about? Like pre humans, like 25,000 years ago or more recently?

• 43:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, pre white people, there were millions of bison and they were living with the indigenous peoples who, who were, you know, killing them and eating them or whatnot, but, but nowhere near the numbers that would be slaughtered when we came through. And 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.

• 43:28Daniel Whiteson?

  The arrival of Europeans also brought horses, which must've really changed the way the indigenous people hunted the bison.

• 43:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Did that impact the bison population as well?

• 43:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, 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. So there was probably a while where there were horses and bison living together.

• 43:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 43:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  But anyway, yes, probably horses did make it easier for the indigenous peoples to hunt, uh, the bison. But I did not see anywhere in my research that that was a contributing factor to the loss of millions of them.

• 44:07Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we have vast plains filled with enormous herds of bison before the Europeans arrived. And then what happened?

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  By the early 1900s, there were fewer than a thousand.

• 44:17Daniel Whiteson?

  A thousand bison?

• 44:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, a thousand.

• 44:20Daniel Whiteson?

  In the whole country?

• 44:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 44:21Daniel Whiteson?

  That's wow.

• 44:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And, and it is now hard to find bison that just have straight bison genomes because they interbred with cattle that we brought in. And 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.

• 44:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you want to hear a nice physics biology overlap?

• 44:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure.

• 44:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is at Fermilab, the biggest particle accelerator in the United States. Most of the facility is 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? And then like, two minutes later, there's a baby and like two minutes after that it's running around. It's an incredible moment.

• 45:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that is so cool. I'm so jealous. Yeah. I mean, I was, 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. And herbivores like that are amazing, but um, anyway, okay. The, you know, there's many reasons to care about the loss of the bison from an ecological perspective. Uh, one, they were grazing, so they were, you know, keeping out the trees and trampling the trees and stuff like that. Two, they do this behavior called wallowing where they kind of like, you know, roll on their back and roll around. And 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, uh, you know, places where they roam.

• 45:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And those get used by different animals than are using like the rest of the area.

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  The bison are literally shaping the ecosystem.

• 46:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  They are. No, they, they absolutely are. And when they move together as a herd, they don't necessarily like, you know, 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. And 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, uh, you get a lot more biodiversity when the bison are around. Does that make sense?

• 46:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that does make sense.

• 46:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So.

• 46:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Plus they're awesome.

• 46:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Plus they're awesome. They're so awesome. Yes. Uh, 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. And so what they're doing is they, 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.

• 47:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And 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.

• 47:45Daniel Whiteson?

  You can get gored by a bison.

• 47:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. 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.

• 47:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Are they easy to avoid? They're fast.

• 47:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, maybe they're not easy to avoid.

• 47:59Daniel Whiteson?

  These are not cows, right? They are fast.

• 48:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  They are fast. Yes.

• 48:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm pretty sure bison can outrun horses.

• 48:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, I'll believe you. I don't know.

• 48:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, let me just fact check that.

• 48:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'll say you absolutely need to respect them and give them their space.

• 48:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Bison, despite weighing up to 2,000 pounds, can reach sprint speeds of 35 to 40 miles per hour.

• 48:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 48:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is incredible.

• 48:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so give them a lot of space, a lot of space. Enjoy them through binoculars, ideally. But yeah, so, so what they do is, 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. That's our livestock. And this counts according to the like 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

• 49:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 49:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And so if their licenses are revoked, does that mean a bunch of land that they've bought can no longer have bison on it?

• 50:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 50:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting.

• 50:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And 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.

• 50:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating.

• 50:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, it sucks. That's the wrong response. This sucks. This is really, this was a really cool program.

• 50:56Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 51:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, there are commercial bison ranches that raise them for meat.

• 51:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. And so that's like a completely separate way that bison are being kept alive.

• 51:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. But you know, they're, 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.

• 51:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 51:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 51:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 51:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, um, anyway, I am upset.

• 51:47Daniel Whiteson?

  I can see that.

• 51:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 52:08Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 52:18Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 52:53Speaker 06

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• 54:06Speaker 03

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• 54:32Speaker 07

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• 56:15Daniel Whiteson?

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• 56:50Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and Kelly is mad.

• 56:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm really mad, but I'm going to try to contain that.

• 56:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. So I wanted us to sort of end on this note.

• 57:26Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 57:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're going to talk about a project run by Sergey 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.

• 57:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And not just ice, right? It's soil that's also frozen.

• 57:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. And they were from about 10,000 years ago.

• 58:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 58:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And when he was looking at all of these bones, he was thinking, These animals were all here.

• 58:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And none of them are here now.

• 58:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  What would it have been like if these animals were back?

• 58:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 58:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 58:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 58:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 58:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 58:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but I would have thought that herbivores eat the grass too.

• 58:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  They do eat the grass too, but because the grasses are more quick growing, they can recover more.

• 59:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 59:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Quickly. Unsurprisingly.

• 59:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 59:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 59:18Daniel Whiteson?

  But 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?

• 59:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so I think what Sergey would say is that we are looking at really long time scales 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.

• 59:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see.

• 59:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:00:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, could be, could be. But the argument that this group is making is that humans killing these large herbivores was the main thing that tipped this ecosystem from one state to another.

• 1:00:17Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so it's our fault. I get it.

• 1:00:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, but, but you know, the rewilding community would say this happened thousands of years ago.

• 1:00:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:00:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  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? And 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.

• 1:00:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:00:58Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:01:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:01:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And 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.

• 1:01:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 1:01:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:01:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  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. He 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.

• 1:02:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:02:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Anyway, okay. So here's what, what he did. He managed to fence in 1,000 hectares of taiga and tundra.

• 1:02:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he brought in hardy horses, elk, musk ox, bison, uh, sheep, goats, a variety of different herbivores. And 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.

• 1:02:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:02:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool.

• 1:02:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:03:14Daniel Whiteson?

  George Church, the same guy who famously asked for volunteers for women who wanted to be surrogates for a Neanderthal baby.

• 1:03:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my God, are you serious?

• 1:03:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm serious.

• 1:03:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that, 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, uh, if I'm gonna 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. So 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?

• 1:04:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I would love to see a woolly mammoth in 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.

• 1:04:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure.

• 1:04:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Um, yeah, I don't know. It seems good to me. What's the bad news?

• 1:04:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I, I, I mean, because I'm Kelly, I've thought of some things that, that I'm concerned about, let's say. So, 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 preexisting 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. Though also, I think from like a purist perspective, you know, they're not, they're not really mammoths. So like, you know, they're not going to have the mammoth microbiome. Elephants usually, when they're born, they eat a little of like mom's poop to get their microbiome.

• 1:05:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:05:23Daniel Whiteson?

  They're sort of mammoths the way American cheese is cheese, which is like vaguely cheese flavored.

• 1:05:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And, 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? Do 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. Cause 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? Cause we brought them into existence.

• 1:06:09Daniel Whiteson?

  You build it, you buy it, right?

• 1:06:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  You build it, you buy it. Yeah. So I don't know. It seems like a lot of work that you could maybe replace with preexisting species. I'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 that, 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, uh, stop whining.

• 1:06:35Daniel Whiteson?

  I need a T-shirt that says that. Stop whining.

• 1:06:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Stop whining, comma Kelly.

• 1:06:40Daniel Whiteson?

  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? Is it the number of species there? What's the metric? And how do we avoid just gaming that metric?

• 1:06:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that, 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 100 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? And 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

• 1:07:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  there, but they're just in low numbers. And so, how do you figure out, like, what are the target numbers that you want to 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. And 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.

• 1:08:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 1:08:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, I think some projects have easier answers than others and more straightforward answers than others, but I think in a lot of cases, it's hard to say.

• 1:08:33Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 1:08:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, and I don't necessarily think that's a problem. Like, so you said that driving through Montana is beautiful.

• 1:09:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It is.

• 1:09:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  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, like, 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 will 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

• 1:09:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  more beautiful in a way that supports more wild animals is a bad answer.

• 1:09:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I agree. And 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?

• 1:10:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 1:10:04Daniel Whiteson?

  So what do you think? Do you think animals appreciate the beauty of nature?

• 1:10:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  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? Like, I know those humans have guns, but I can't get enough food.

• 1:10:42Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 1:10:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have no way to answer that.

• 1:10:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. They could say, ooh, yummy grass.

• 1:11:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll tell Hazel that you're stumped also.

• 1:11:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  But just to foreshadow to a future episode, we're going to have animal behavior extraordinaire Andy C. on the show.

• 1:11:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 1:11:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he's going to be answering questions about like, what do we know about what animals do feel? Like, do they want to stay alive? Do they feel fear?

• 1:11:20Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. We'll ask him Hazel's buffalo question then.

• 1:11:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so hang on to Hazel's buffalo question, because Andy C. is just a top-notch animal behaviorist.

• 1:11:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Kelly, so you've walked us through a bunch of examples, some positive, some with mixed results. So bottom line it for us, what is your take on rewilding? Well-intentioned, a good idea? What do you think?

• 1:11:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Um, I think it is well-intentioned, and I think it's a good idea. I think all conservation is complicated.

• 1:11:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think it's always really important to think about how, you know, the people who are interacting with this wild area, how it's going to impact them. And 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, you know, however many decades. And so, I think, like all conservation programs, it's not just straightforward doing the science. You have to also, you know, 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. I didn't necessarily feel like we need to bring back the woolly mammoth.

• 1:12:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So I'm not going to see a saber-toothed tiger?

• 1:12:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I can't. Maybe George Church is working on that. I don't, I don't know. But no, in general, I thought it was, it was exciting to see the conservation community coming up with new ideas, new ways to do things. I like that they were, that there's a little bit less of a doom and gloom, and there's more of a like, look, let's do something.

• 1:12:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that, 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, and we can feel good that we did something, instead of just sitting around feeling bummed out.

• 1:13:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Awesome. Well, thank you for ending on a positive note. I'm impressed.

• 1:13:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can do it sometimes.

• 1:13:17Speaker 06

  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 of 2400, a 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?

• 1:14:01Speaker 06

  Again, thank you so much.

• 1:14:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, thank you. And if you have a question you'd like to share, you can write us at [email protected], 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.

• 1:14:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks very much, everybody. Stay wild.

• 1:14:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, 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.

• 1:14:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:14:37Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:14:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:14:53Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:15:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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