The Ghosts of Evolution

There's noise, there's some greenery, but it's difficult to argue that this is in any way, shape or form a natural environment. And yet it inhabits a natural environment if you think about it. I know we're way up on the eleventh floor, but all around us there are ghosts, ghosts of chemicals of years past, and we forget that even though we're up here and these rarefied airs of the Buckhead region of Atlanta, um, we are very much tied to the earth below where. Of course we know this,

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

matter of time. Okay, all right, you just wait. But indeed, I mean that when when you start looking at the details and you start looking at the fossil record, you see the shadows, You see these ghosts of the environment that came before the natural environment that came before the rise of man. Yeah. I think one of the best

examples of this is actually in Trafalgar Square. That's not to say that you will find hippos and elephants roaming around Trafalgar Square today, which is this incredibly compact area of London. Right. Well, the only time I was there, I couldn't see it because there was a Scissor Sisters concert in Square, right, But any other day you would see the hippos and elephants. But actually, excavation of various sites in London, including Square, found remains from the last

ice age of these animals. We're talking about a hundred and ten thousand, twelve thousand years ago. So again here's a good example of this. You know, extremely densely populated area which does have some classical elements of human history woven throughout it, which makes it feel really historical. But when you think about these mega fauna roaming around, you know, a hundred ten thousand years before, you really begin to get this sense that, um, everywhere we are we are

surrounded by this deep history. We forget how very rich it is. Yes, and we're talking about about creatures of all sizes, including mega fauna, the the the ultra large creatures, the king sized creatures that have have subsequently vanished from

from much of the world. Yeah. In fact, there's more evidence from remains that monkeys and rhinos were also native to Britain during another period about six thousand years ago, with a climate that's similar to the one we have today, which has had some people say well, hey, why don't we bring back monkeys to the UK. And we'll get into that in a bit, but it does bring up this idea of these these ghosts of the past and

what they mean to our current ecosystems. Yeah, and the ecosystem is key here because, especially in our urban environment, with our fancy towers and our highways, we we often think of ourselves as detached from the ecosystem. We think of here's the city, and beyond the city, well, that's that's the nature. And if we have some some nature here in the city, you know, and some pocket plants and a little little garden here in a park here, well that's all fine and good, but we don't think

of it in term. We don't think of ourselves in terms of being a part of the of the ecology itself. Yeah, and a lot of this is because more and more of us are living in urban centers in a way from farmlands, in a way from nature. And we've talked about this before in several podcasts having to do with um just inhabiting cities, which is vastly different even from

the eighteen hundreds. So what happens here is that you get yourself a little bit divorced from the reality of nature what's going on out there, and then you also have this sort of storybook reality that was created for you.

And John mu Alum, who wrote The Wild Ones, talks about this a lot that we are raised on all these sort of parables that deal with animals and this idea that there's this luxurious amount of animals out there for us to just revel in, when in fact we know that if we want to see an animal, a wild one, particularly one that is exotic, you gotta get

to the zoo. Right. And so again this is just kind of underscoring again how very far away we are from from true nature, and it starts to get into this idea of well, if we're that removed from our own ecosystems, then perhaps we're that removed from understanding how we affect them, and that we may even be entering

into a period of ecological collapse as a result. And by that we're talking about the just the overall crippling of an ecosystem and a drastic reduction in its ability to support the organisms that are a part of it. And and and force again we hear organisms that are supported as a part of it. We don't exist outside of it, we we exist within it. Uh. And ecological collapse is often a permanent event um with with drastic consequences including

mass extinction. Yeah, if you think about it, there's a certain carrying capacity to humans, right, And so we have all this junk with us, we have all this need for resource is we have limited amounts of land, we have global warming going on, and we have a population that is just bursting out of control. And we've talked about this. By twenty fifty, there are some um stats out there that say that we may get to ten million people on Earth. Yeah, which is a bad thing.

I read an editorial not too long ago where an individual was saying, well, it's not necessarily a bad thing. We need to start stop thinking about it is a bad thing, because then they were making a case for for a very optimistic case for the education of people and the changing of people, and which is all well and good, but when you're looking at the facts, when you're looking at the sheer numbers, it's very hard to uh to see that as as any kind of a

positive outcome for the planet. Yeah, and I think we're so good at kicking the cam further into the future anyway and saying we'll deal with that when we get there, right, and oh, technology that will save the day. But or we're just getting better. You know, we're more enlightened. Enlightenment will save us, even if they are even more of us.

But we know that's not necessarily true. When when the road meets the rubber, rubber meets the road, not everybody is acting in a way that would be helpful for the impactor. Glad you mentioned the road again, because the

road ends up is a part of this. We have this massive, continuous concrete asphalt thing that is basically like a chain that we've we've used to wrap up the natural environment, cutting across uh, you know, territories of existing animals, carrying up the landscape, allowing humans to to to permeate every every part of the environment. Paved paradise and they put up a parking lot. Well yeah, um, but no, I mean seriously, I mean you think about it in

that way, right, just the paving of land. And then also people burn force for agriculture and grazing, and as they replace native vegetation with monoculture crops, that discourages cloud formation, and that alters the relationship to the surface in the atmosphere, which initiates further drying and warming and further species loss.

And again here is this sort of invisible I stay invisible because we don't see the chemicals, right, we don't see them interacting all of this stuff going on behind the scenes, And it's hard to get a beat on it for us humans because we'd like to have concrete, nice visual things to illustrate what's happening in our lives, right And so I think that's some of where the

climate issues come into play. Because you have one camp that says, dire need, big trouble right now if we don't address this, and we have another camp that says, I don't really see much going on here. Let's get a little bit warmer. So we're going to try to discuss a little bit more of this. And it does all have to do with this ecological collapse. Now, so many of these examples of ecological collapse and the forces at work in the ecological collapse there, it's very much

like a spiral. You see one thing that sort of kicks off the movement, and then it just keeps going and going, and it gets more disastrous and more disastrous until hopefully, uh, somebody checks the action and the listeners maybe Remember we did an entire episode about this called Black Blizzards of the dust Bowl. So the dust Bowl occurred in the nineteen thirties here in the United States, but its roots reached back into the late nineteenth century.

You had pioneers moving into a semi arid Midwestern Southern Plains region. And what do they do. They wanted to make a living, right, so they were farming. Then World War One hits and farms needed up their production, so they turned to the machines. They brought in plows and other farming equipment. In between nineteen thirty more than five million acres of previously unfarmed land was plowed. So he

had record crops in nineteen thirty one. But soon there's too much wheat on the market and there's two little money out there to spend on it, so prices is plummet. Okay, So what they do They expanded their fields in an effort to turn out a profit. They covered the prairie with wheat in place of natural drought resistant grasses, and they left the unused fields bear so and then in the wake of all this plow based farming, the telling

of the soil. You have fertile top soil that literally blows away in the wind, and without it, the ground becomes less nurturing and more susceptible to drought. So we see this example where where humans as always have remade their environment, they've remade their world and and then what happens, Drought comes like a vengeance. High temperature set in, it bakes the parched earth, and when the winds blow through, they summon up these great black dust storms. Yeah, and

those dust storms rereak havoc on people, right. I mean, you all of a sudden are in this really inhospitable terrain and you don't have the resources that you normally would in terms of food. In fact, John Steinbeck explored this in a fictional manner in the Grapes of Wrath, and I think most people are familiar with it, or with the dust bowl um in that sort of fictional account. But this happens all over the world. I believe that

Australia has dealt with this right now in Arizona. There has been a huge impact on farming practices and how that has changed the land for the worst. So we see this on and on and on again. And it's a kind of extinction of vegetation of flora that is changing the ecosystems and changing our access to resources. So the other thing, you have our animals here as part

of this equation. And I wanted to bring up ancient Egypt because there's a two thousand and fourteen study that's published in the September eight Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of p and A. S and it found that about six thousand years ago there were thirty seven species of large bodied mammals in Egypt, but today there

are only eight species. So some of the species that were lost lions, wild dogs, elephants, or x hard a beast in giraffes, so those were roaming around, right, and mega fauna is really important for keeping other species in check um for also spreading seeds and also interacting with the vegetation. So what you're talking about here on the Nile is that there were three major periods of really

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

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

the environment and they wield an outsized influence. So an example would be even a beaver, Like you don't necessarily think about them as this big giant um powerful uh, you know, animals. But what they do is they alter the course of streams, they open meadows within forests, they

create pollond ecosystems. And then here's another example. Elephants. They graze and they browse, and they act like forest engineers, and they push over trees and they keep vast grasslands like the Serengetti open, and that makes them the keystone species. So Caroline Fraser, who wrote the book Rewilding the World, says, quote, the list of threatened plants and animals re rely on is weird and varied, including amphibians, bears, gymnasperms, uh, cone snails, sharks,

and horseshoe crabs. She says, cone snails they have toxins that they are prized in medical research, where they're used

in developing pain medication for cancer and AIDS patients. The blood of horseshoe crabs that carries antimicrobial peptides that kill bacteria being tested for treatments in HIV, leukemia, prostate cancer, breast cancer, in rheumatoid arthritis, and these are all things that we depend on, but we don't realize that our actions as humans are decreasing the populations of Yeah, here's

a quote from Center for Biological Diversity. They say, quote, although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs as a natural at a natural background rate of about one to five species per years. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could could

be a scary future. Indeed, with as many as thirty to of all species possible heading toward extinction by mid century, and also adding of currently threatened species are at risk from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of exotic species, and global climate change, which leads to the idea of global ecological collapse. And we'll talk about that as well as the frozen zoo and the doomsday seed

vault when we get back. All right, we're back, and you know, so many of horror episodes lately seemed to be dwelling on this long term versus short term idea, this idea that we we only live in the short term. And I don't think anything could be more true than this when you talk about UH ecological systems or the future of our planet and the environments UH contained within. So when you start to look at global ecological collapse first glimpse, it does feel a little bit like the

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

of human influence. Yeah, there's a two thousand and twelve study called Approaching State Shift and or spiosphere, and it talks about how humans have already converted about of the ice free land surface of the planet for raising crops from livestock and building cities and nice buildings like the when we're in right now. And studies on a smaller scale have suggested that when more than fifty of a

natural landscape is lost, the ecological web can collapse. So the idea is, let's step back and look at this from a planetary perspective and see it going on all over. And Dennis Meadows, who is a professor emeritus of systems policy at the University of New Hampshire and he's written extensively on the limits of growth, says collapse will not be driven by a single identifiable cause simultaneously acting in

all countries. He says it will come through a self reinforcing complex of issues, including climate change, resource constraints, and socio economic equality. When economies slow down, fewer products are created relative to demand, and when the rich can't get more by producing real wealth, they start to use their power to take from lower segments. Okay, well that's it's definitely sound alarmist, but it does paint a picture of a greater population of people and less resources to go

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

with that? And then what do you do when due to population explosions, you see this sudden swell in the number of youths out there, youth that end up having these very passionate ideas about what they need to do, sometimes militant ideas about what they need to do to change the world. Yeah. And according to Kenneth Wise, of the l A Times, of the something two and a half billion people who will be added to the planet by twenty nine percent are expect to be to be

born in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now, these are some of the poorest, most volatile countries, and we know about eight percent of the world civil conflicts um since the nineteen seventies have occurred in countries with young, fast growing populations. And again, this is the the youth bulge

that we're talking about. So the stage is really set, uh, for those who have control and influence to try to maintain that control, influence and influence in that status quo, and then for the poor to turn towards opportunities, whatever opportunities they may have, whether or not that's that's joining a militia, or whether or not that is doing something that's more positive to affect change. And so that's when you begin to look at the global collapse not just

as an environmental one, but also an economic one. Yeah. Yeah, the the the economic and ecological ramifications of conflict. I mean, we've discussed in the past. I feel like we did an episode about about sunken dangerous. I think it was when we talked in part about some of the lingering ecological problem stemming from the Second World War, Uh, which you know, again was a it was indeed a massive conflict,

was truly a world war. Anywhere you went on the planet, Uh, somebody was wrapped up in this this termoil in one

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

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

infecting more than just one area. You can't just you can't just treat one tissue or one part of the body because it is it is so ingrained in every part of the creature. Not to keep bringing up the matrix on every episode, but there is one part when the when the alien guy can't remember his name, yes Mr Smith, right, right, remember, and he talks about how

humans really have been the cancer on the Earth. And that's the very dark view of it, is that we are affecting all of these negative changes, and in doing it somewhat willy nilly, although I will say it appears that we are trying have a backup plan in place, and I don't just mean people um putting together different plans, which we'll talk about. One of them is real wild ing um. But but taking a very like what would happen tomorrow if there were the apocalypse approach, And what

I'm talking about is the doomsday seed vault. Yeah, now, seed seed vaults, um seed refugees are you know, there's nothing new. We've been h We've been doing those as a human culture for quite some time, and there are a number of different ones around the world, but the most famous of these, located on the Norwegian Archipelago, is uh Small bar the small Bard seed Vault out out here in this largely barren Arctic Arctic frigid waste land where polar bears roam uh and you know, and it's

not completely unoccupied there. It was a mining place for for some time, but but still it's a very remote setting and it's the perfect setting to have this uh, this vault where they hope to in are in in the process of storing the world eats so that we'll have the seed heritage, not just the the massive seed crops that we have and depend on, but other varieties. Because it gets very, very complicated. It's it's like, you know, when you have one variety of that you're depending on exclusively.

It's it's like having a you know, inbreeding that that crop isn't susceptible to harm. And then likewise you have you have types of plants that if they vanished, then we we want the ecological heritage of being able to to study it, to grow it and and heal the earth. Even if you want to get to uh, you know, almost religious about it, Well, that's the day after the apocalypse, you would you would return to this compound here um and then just started cultivating the seeds. I mean that

is a very simplistic view of it. But if you've never seen this before, it's pretty amazing. It's basically like a concrete wedge pounded into a mountain, and it contains the world's crops one point five billion seeds, including everything from California so flowers to ancient Chinese rice. So it's kind of like a backup copy of nature, at least in seed form, yes, well, a backup copy that you would have to put some considerable work in um to

to to implement. It's a it's not a there's no push push the button and repopulate the earth mechanism at the small bard. But it is contains the algorithms it does. It contains it contains the essentially the seed heritage of the world, in which if you think about it, like we have um crop extinction all the time, and this happens usually because of the mono agriculture practices that we have in place. So it's it's not weird that we would lose some crops, but some of it has been exascerbated,

has been made worse because of our practices. So consider that in the eighteen hundreds they were seventy one catalog species of apples the United States. Today there are just three hundred species seeds, so we lose them all the time. But the seed vault, again, it's it's a place where

you could start from the beginning. It's the idea that if we had a disease that was rampant that took out a large amount of the population, if there was something that that created that collapse, maybe it's global warming. Maybe it's war that we would have something to return to,

you know. On the subject of of lost crops. If anyone out there wants to watch a good cooking show, a good food show, highly recommend The Mind of a Chef, especially the second season as it pertains to this episode, uh features a lot from Chef Sean Brock, who really goes into lost seed heritage and and and reclaiming it and especially is it concerned Southern cuisine because you see the shift where people are getting away from the crops that are actually grown and the plants that are part

of the natural ecology or stuff that we've we've lost as we moved towards these big mono crops. Yeah, and the flavors. I feel like the different species are kind of like the Willy Wonkas of flavors in nature that we don't always experience because of the mono agriculture. And I believe Nolan producer, he turned me onto that show. Um, it is really great mind of a chef, So check it out. All right, so you have your seeds, but

what about your fauna? That's right, It's one thing to have the plants, but again it's it's you know, getting back into that idea of the ecology as the complex system about life on Earth is one hole. You need all the pieces. So what do you do about the the animal pieces? Well, uh, there are currently several programs going on of note to preserve the genes of endangered animals. There's China's Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base. They keep eggs and sperm and other tissue samples from panda is

another native species, and they keep it all in cold storage. There's, uh, the UK's Frozen Art Project took on the mission to create a network of similar gene banks around the world devoted to endangered animals. And there is the f was in Zoo which Oliver Writer at the San Diego Zoo created founded um that is a cryod preservation of cells and DNA from natured animals over a thousand species, and Writer says, quote, it's a small amount of biodiversity for

the number of species that are potentially facing extinction. So as you have, if we call back to some of the statistics that you threw out earlier, the amount of species that's those are good efforts to try to preserve some of them, but we won't be able to do all of them, particularly the ones that are going extinct. UM. But I think it kind of this whole thing stepping back and looking at seed preservation or DNA preservation of species.

The fact that we are sinking millions, if not billions of dollars into these endeavors, I think will illustrate the concept that perhaps something is going on, and then we should take this seriously, the fact that that ecological collapse

could happen. And uh, you know, and I also want to want a caution to don't take too much heart in the and especially the frozen Zoo movements in the sense that bear in mind that bringing an extinct animal back just with its genetic information on that alone, just with this blueprint, uh, is exceedingly difficult. So this is not a situation where oh, we just have a backup again, you just push the button and it's good to go. No, it's there's some hope in it. But uh, but for

the most part, when a species is gone, it is gone. Well, and if you're talking about a really a huge extinction here, and we're talking about global uh ecological collapse on a mass scale, we're talking about mass extinction, and let's keep this in mind. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, the most catastrophic, the Great Dying of the Permian Age, wiped out over all species and the oceans and on land, and it took tens of millions of years for life

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

do it. But yeah, again to your point that we've had five known mass extinction events in our history, and it's it's crucial to know that two of them wiped out at least half of all species. So that's that's pretty stackering. So when we talk about a six extinction event, uh, it is not a minor occurrence. No, And Caroline Fraser, again the author of Rewilding, says bio biologists have begun

to understand that nature is a chain of dominoes. If you pull one piece out the whole thing falls down, lose the animals, lose the ecosystems, game over very well put. And again, this is one of those things that is so difficult for us to wrap our heads around because there there's not this sort of concrete thing in front of us that says, by the year X, all things will die off. We can only look at what's happening and predict what we think is going to happen, and

we can't say with certainty at what moment. And I think that's what drives us nuts. And I think that's what drives some people to in action indeed, And again it just comes back again to our our inability to deal with the long term consequences of our actions and in our own life as well. But when you start looking at at the model being the lives of our children and their grandchildren or the generations to come, it

just it seems to cripple us even more. Yeah, there's something called a shifting baseline syndrome, and it's a concept that was coined in by fisheries scientists Daniel Polly, who said that each subsequent generation of scientists uses wildlife populations at the time they entered the field as the baseline leveling the awareness of how much these populations may have plummeted between that point and the baseline of the generation before,

which leads to this sort of environmental generational amnesia. Mhm, yeah, I mean that that makes perfect. I mean the old people will always tell you, you you know, when when when I was your age, it was such and such. When I was your age, it was such and such, and we when we almost never listened to that, except maybe as a just a curious, uh, you know, side tangent.

But but that's the reality we see here. It's it's always what we're just taking our own experiences of when we we enter into this world and using that as as is almost the primordical setting as the base setting that that everything else needs to be lined up to.

Forgetting that this base setting is somewhat downhill from where I rolled from last time, and then from the time before right deep time just isn't generally our thing, And so yeah, we don't remember or even sometimes know that there were elephants follower square right um, and that there was a very different environment in place before us. It's basically each generation, it's it's it's like if you came into the doctor and this is and you've only had

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

It's kind of not a happy pants, not a happy pants episode for sure. So I'm gonna I thought, maybe I capt it off by reading just a quick little paragraph from another bummer work, that being a cormat McCarthy's The Road. Here's this uplifting quote. Bring it Yeah, Well, I mean it's it's beautiful, but it it does deal with ass extinction, with the loss of life on the planet, the complexity of life on the planet. So here it goes. Once there were brooked trout in the streams in the mountains.

You could see them standing in the amber current, where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly, and the flow they smelled of moss in your hand, polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world, and it's becoming maps and mazes of a thing which could not be put back, not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man, and

they hummed up mystery. So there you have it. UH, great book of course, and UH and I'm pretty sure that one's available on audible for anyone who's thinking about taking up that audible deal that we mentioned in the break. Indeed, alright, make sure to check out the next episode, which is about re wilding, which I guess you could say is one of the ways in which we could approach this in a very tactile way, a very concrete way, and

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

is our homepage, our mothership. You will find every podcast episode we've ever done uh, and the podcast landing page for this episode will include links to related content, stuff we've mentioned here, et cetera. UH. That page also includes links out to our various social media accounts, so you can certainly follow us on Facebook and Twitter, Tumbler, or

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