Christopher Preston: Tenacious Beasts

Bill 0:14 Welcome to the wild idea podcast, where, as you know, we are exploring the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature here today to have a great conversation with Christopher Preston from the University of Montana. Can't wait to bring Christopher into this conversation, but Anders, you and I are getting to record in person, once again, what a treat. You know, we've had an amazing weekend together here in Montana, doing exploring a couple of two of your favorite things, right, public lands and public pit toilets. Anders 0:46 Oh, Bill, that is slanderous. You're 50% right. Anyone that knows me as you do knows that I love two things, public lands and not pit toilets, but libraries. Oh, that's what it is, yeah, easy to get confused, but you have done I'm really grateful to you this week, because you've done a great job introducing me to some some great public lands and an incredible library. We are here right now with our guest at the Missoula Public Library, which, in addition to being named the Montana library of the year a couple of times, has been internationally recognized. So recently, the International Federation of library associations and institutions named the Missoula Public Library, the Public Library of the year, it was also given the title of world's best library by the world Library and Information Congress. And it's incredible. I'm sure our guest can probably enlighten us more, but it's the architecture, it's the collection, it's the services they offer. It's an incredible space. I'm like, so happy to be here, and it's a great day. But yesterday may have been even better, because yesterday was Public Lands Day, and we spent it together doing a lot. Bill 1:57 Yeah, we got to go explore a little bit of the beaver head, deer lodge National Forest, some of the salmon chalice National Forest. We literally straddled the line. You and I got to spend a chunk of the afternoon on the Continental Divide Trail between those two amazing national forests. Was a spectacular day. I felt guilty for not doing something to give back, but I think this effort is a little bit part of that giving back. But yeah, it was a gorgeous day. We love the High Divide country in southwest Montana. It was great to be back there again. This is something we do kind of annually, but yeah, it was such a such a special landscape to get to spend a few days and hopefully we don't smell too bad for our guests today. But who knows? Well, with no further ado, let's bring in our guests for the conversation today. Christopher Preston is a professor in the department of philosophy, and really interesting to us is he's written an amazing book called tenacious beast, which Anders and I both spent a lot of time devouring and re devouring and talking about over the weekend, he's talked a lot about ethics and Public Lands Management with some of our friends that were with us over the weekend, introducing ethics to The RAD framework, which we'll talk about a little bit what RAD is and what those things are. But Christopher, people are going to hear from your accent. Maybe you weren't born in Montana. Could you tell us a little bit about what brought you to the University of Montana and your role here? Christopher Preston 3:13 It is true that I was not born in Montana. I came over to the US for graduate school, and that was in Colorado. As soon as I got to Colorado, I started going up to Alaska in the summer. I said, what do people do? Said, what do people do in the summer? And they said, they go to Alaska and they fish. So I went up to Alaska. After that, I was in Oregon, so I had this introduction to these western landscapes. And by the time I was ready to get a job, Montana looked like a good place to be, and it's proved to be that way. How long have you been in Montana? Been here 20 years now? Well, well, it is Bill 3:40 a special place, for sure. We're glad to get to get to share it with you Anders this week. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. So we got, I got connected to the book. I just it leapt off the shelves that, I think it was at the book exchange here in Missoula, and I grabbed my copy, I don't know, six or seven months ago, and then got connected to you through, through a friend here in Missoula who had had a conversation with you in reading the book. What was so I don't know, kind of crazy to me. Your book has all of these connections and things that have happened. There's genetic connections over generations in the species that the book is about. And again, the book is called tenacious beasts. But there was all like there were so many names in the book who I've had the good fortune of working with here in Montana, conversations that we have coming up with like American prairie, it feels like a so much of it is about connections, like connections to the land, connections among species, obviously, the connections between species and the lands and the landscapes. Could you kind of maybe give us a little bit about what brought about the book? Christopher Preston 4:39 Yeah, for sure. So I wrote a book before this one that was really kind of a grim, bad news book. It was called the synthetic age, and it was basically reflecting on how technology is replacing the natural world. We're losing it through genetic engineering and climate engineering and stuff like that. So for a while it was feeling like it was all bad news. And then I started hearing these good news stories just kind of creeping in. Kind of over the airwaves. I thought it's clearly not all bad news. There's clearly something in the biological world that is still functioning and still letting some of these species come back. And so I thought it's time to write a good news book and to string together these stories and put it into a package where people can have some hope. People can have a vision about what's possible if we make the right moves. I mean, it's still tenuous. You know, the good news is not everywhere. There's still plenty of bad news, but it's a vision of what's Bill 5:27 possible, and it's not just one story of what's possible. I mean, you tell an arc of stories across two different continents. You have a personal history across those two continents, but like you stitch together a lot of different species who have shown resilience and recovery and again, this good news that you're talking about? Christopher Preston 5:46 Yeah, I mean, in a way, this was not a book that was written on the back of a huge National Geographic grant or something like that. It was a book that just reflected the places I'd been, the people I'd met, things I'd kind of come across through my work and through my time in Montana, and also through my time in Europe, where I go back and visit family. So the species name, they sort of arose organically out of my experience, and hence out of a lot of the connections that I have to both of these landscapes and both of these continents. Anders 6:15 So I definitely caught the emphasis on Joy in your book, which, again, is called tenacious beast. But the subtitle is wildlife recoveries that change how we think about animals. And the book really is full of all sorts of wonderful interventions and surprises, purposeful reintroductions that involve actions like dam removal, but also more passive recoveries, where, like the animals, have had some some agency themselves and becoming more fruitful. You mentioned these good news stories coming to you over the airwaves, slowly over time. I'm curious. You know, after listening to those stories and delving more deeply into them in your book, I'm curious if you've decided you know how much manipulation of a species or a landscape is acceptable. Have you come up with like a golden rule, or is there a single principle that you'd sort of offer as advice to land or wildlife managers? Christopher Preston 7:13 Yeah, so people need to know that I'm a philosopher in my background, I teach philosophy at the University of Montana, and philosophers like to come up with single principles. They like to unify their worldview under some kind of rule. But when you look at half a dozen species that have come back, there simply is no single rule. I mean, you have to be pragmatic, you have to improvise, you have to figure out what's going to work for a particular situation. But having said that, I think there's a there's a couple of rules that you can put out there, and I think the first one is stop killing them. Sounds kind of basic, right? But it's actually true, if you stop killing many wildlife species, they do, in fact, come back. So stop killing them is perhaps rule number one, and let them roam. I think is rule number two, if you can have connected landscapes that permit wildlife to move as they need to, and they might continue to need to move through climate change. So if you can connect these landscapes and try and avoid animals being killed, that's a good start. That's not going to save every species, but that's a good start to allowing species to come back. Anders 8:13 So I want to dig into that first rule, stop killing them. And I specifically want to talk about your chapter on the spotted owl and the barred owl, which very much focuses on killing one of those species in order to save the other. So maybe it's not quite clear that you just have to stop killing them, because in this case, it felt like the argument was the spotted owl needs a little help from its human friends in order to not be overcome by the invasive barred owl. Christopher Preston 8:39 Yeah, so anus, you're making my life difficult. Yeah, totally so rude. There are species where if you just stop killing them, they come back. So humpback whale, Wolf, bison, Beaver. These are examples where they just they know how to breed. They know how to reproduce. There are other cases where you have to really make a concerted effort for this to happen. And the spotted owl barred owl controversy is one where, you know, the spotted owl is far enough gone, and it's being hammered so much by the barred owls that just stopping killing spotted owls is not going to be enough. And so there is this balance. And for a philosopher, that's a very difficult question to answer, like, what on the spectrum of intervening versus non intervening. Where is the right place to draw the line, and it's really it's kind of a case by case basis. And as you know, with the spotted owl, barred owl gets real controversial real quick. If you're going out there and actively killing one species to save another, let's Anders 9:36 move away from human intervention in that case and talk more about specific agency for species. I felt like when I was reading the book, an argument I was seeing between the lines was that you believe there's been a shift in ecosystem planning that places a greater emphasis on allowing species to advocate for themselves. Was I onto something there? Or have I maybe Misunderstood? Christopher Preston 10:00 No, that's totally right. In the last 10 years, there has been this acknowledgement that rewiling is a thing, and this movement has come from Europe, which for me, has been fascinating. Remember, I moved west and went pretty far west up to Alaska, because I thought those were the landscapes you had to go on to see wild processes and see wild animals when I go back to Europe now, people are saying, let's have some wildness back. And we have it back by just letting things go and letting them rewild themselves. And so to see that coming out of Europe, emerging out of Europe, has been fantastically exciting for me. And the emphasis here is the animal knows what to do. The system knows how to rebalance itself, and so you let that system rip, and if you like your word was agency, you just acknowledge that this system will do something on its own. We don't have to control it. We could just kind of carefully watch and see what it produces and see if we like it. Anders 10:58 I hate asking three questions in a row, because I know people want to hear from Bill too, but real quickly, I want to ask, like a political question about this. As you were talking it came to me, I sometimes wonder, not just with issues involving plants and animals, but is something like ecosystem planning or better wildlife management? Is it easier for European nations to wrap their heads around that, because they're so close to other countries who are doing things and seeing positive results. I often feel like in America, we are sort of out of detriment because we've got an ocean on either side of us right. Like it's easy to hold other countries at arm length and say, well, that's working over there. We don't care what they're doing over there. We're doing our own thing where I think, like, if something's working in Germany, the Netherlands notices, right? It's just next door. How could it not also work? Here? Is there some of that built into this thinking? Christopher Preston 11:50 So there's definitely differences across the Atlantic. And I mean, in Europe, one, one fundamental difference is in Europe, you just have to get used to being around people a lot more, and have to get used to having neighbors. And so this gives a certain mindset in Europe, which you know, sometimes is good, sometimes is bad, at the very least, it it makes you be tolerant of the fact that you have neighbors who you have to accommodate their their needs and interests. But where I think it shows up in this context of wildlife recovery is Europeans saying we've had heavily managed landscapes for centuries? Is there something else we can do? Is there another version of this where we just let the landscape go and see what happens? We thought we knew what a landscape should look like, and it turns out that sometimes a landscape is more interesting and more inspiring if you just let it go, if you let wildlife come back. And I think that's a that's an advantage the Europeans had, is they've fallen so far from having self determining landscapes that it became a real option and a real exciting option that they're exploring right now. You know one Bill 12:56 thing that that jumped out to me, because it's right off the jump in the first part of the book, is one other difference between maybe here in America and in Europe, as the wolf was making its way from Germany into the Netherlands, like the Netherlands had, you know, they had a chance to get, you know, open to and accepting of the idea that it's on its way. What are we going to do? And you bring up in your book one difference here in America from your experiences here in America, experiences here in America is humans exercise their agency to say, No, we're going to reintroduce the wolf, which kind of set up a political dynamic, right? All of a sudden, instead of thinking about just what's best for how are we going to live with the species, some people were immediately put on their back heels with the idea, right? And is, am I right? That's one of the biggest differences in that, particularly in that first section about wolves, that it became so polarizing here because it wasn't natural, just organic, that it happened there was an intentionality humans use their agency to decide to introduce them. Christopher Preston 13:57 Yeah. So there's an interesting fact about wolves in Europe. Wolves are now back in every country in Europe except the United Kingdom, because they'd have to cross the water to get there. But they're back in every country in Europe, and they were not reintroduced to any of them, which is kind of incredible, considering how densely populated Europe is, you know, has twice the people on half the land area. So but then in the United States, it sort of depends. And Montana is an interesting case in point. And Diane Boyd has written about this in her work on wolves. At the same time as wolves were brought back to Yellowstone, and they were making their own way back through glacier. And so you had these, these two populations, which for a while were about the same size, the wolves naturally recolonizing from the north, and the wolves that were brought in to Yellowstone National Park. And certainly the politics that surrounded bringing the wolves back into Yellowstone National Park kind of tainted the whole wolf debate, and perhaps we've never recovered from that. So yeah, certainly it makes a difference if animals are brought back rather than making their own way. Bill 14:58 Yeah, one thing on the ethical front. Sticking, maybe sticking with a with a charismatic species, like the wolf. For those who don't live, you know, listening to this, that don't live in the West, they are incredibly polarizing. You tend to stand on one side or the other of a very stark divide. And one thing that feeds the narrative on one side of that divide is we've, we've anthropomorphized some of these critters, whether they're wolves or the bears in Yellowstone, that they've gone from having numbers to having names and people sort of creating a personal connection, and then the other side doesn't even recognize and understand that because they're faced with the loss of livestock or the fear of safety of their children, for example, from from bears or wolves or whatever it may be. And I'm just wondering, you know, how we think about that from an ethical standpoint, this idea of people over humanizing them and another side totally demonizing them, and it's hard to imagine spanning that gulf that Christopher Preston 16:00 there's plenty of space with a lot of these charismatic animals to romanticize in a ridiculous fashion and to demonize in an absurd fashion as well. And unfortunately, that's where the debate tends to go. It kind of veers to those extremes. The likely truth is that the animal itself is somewhere in the middle. It occupies some kind of space in the middle. And perhaps we should, you know, resist ourselves from moving too far to one side or to the other side. One thing I would say though about this whole idea of anthropomorphizing, which, you know, that's, that's a long technical word in philosophy, we talk about it as projecting human characteristics on something. One thing I would say about that is, when you try to imagine what an animal's life is like, you have no choice but to imagine, okay, I would think of this like this, as a human. And so anthropomorphizing often has a bad name, but it is a vehicle to imagine what the experience of an animal is like, like the experience, for example, of a grizzly bear trying to cross i 90. We can sort of imagine that, you know, the noise and the confusion and the sense of danger. And so I think animals are subjects. Animals are beings that have an individual conscious experience. And I don't think it is always harmful to try to imagine what that experience is and to gain something from that act of imagination. Bill 17:27 Yeah, you're right. In this very library, I sat and listened to Ben Goldfarb talk about bears getting across I named it 90. We've had, we've had, you know, bear biologists and bear managers on the podcast before. And we've seen, we've seen, you know, collar data, and it's easy to picture yourself. We watched the bear that came all the way down to 90, walked I 90, all the way into Idaho and all the way back, clearly looking for a way over this barrier. So you immediately project, like you said, I can see what that barrier was, even though, as a human, we know it's very easy to get across. I 90, no, find an overpass, and off you go. But yeah, it's just interesting to think about the pros and cons to over anthropomorphizing animals in that kind of way, like there's, there's a there's a way in which it brings empathy and also maybe an understanding that agent, that animals have their own agency, and we tend to not think about, or at least we haven't historically thought about it that way. Christopher Preston 18:18 Yeah, I do think that's important, and I know in science, it's important to objectify and to give an animal a number and not a name, but animals are clearly agents. They clearly make decisions. They clearly have a certain life experience. And to deny that, I think, is to deny something that's very real. Anders 18:35 Bill, and I kept seeing a lone pronghorn this weekend that appeared to be calling out, looking for other pronghorn like it. And I was definitely in that moment thinking, Oh, this poor guy, he's lonely, like, can't find his friends. And because I'd read your book, I knew that the animal he was most genetically similar to was a giraffe. I couldn't stop thinking about that. So he was looking for giraffe. So they decided, yeah, that Bill 19:01 might have been what was going on. It was interesting. He would walk this ridge line by the by the place where we were camped for the week. And you know, you'd seen, you see groups of pronghorn everywhere. But this poor guy was by himself and calling constantly, walking up and down this long ridge line. Anders 19:15 Right? Your book asked us to rethink how we live with wildlife, and you use indigenous knowledge as a framework that we may be able to use there. Do you want to see more explicit ethical deliberation in those frameworks? And if so, what would that look Christopher Preston 19:35 like? So you're right that there in the book, in several chapters, at some point in the chapter, there's a mention of an indigenous worldview or an indigenous attitude. But I think one of the interesting features of the stories, as I learned about them, is often I was coming to a certain attitude towards an animal, and then once I'd got there, I said to myself, Well, wait, isn't this an attitude that. Present in indigenous cultures. And let me illustrate that a little bit. I went out on the Lolo National Forest and looked at some people building Beaver Dam analogs, and they were studying these analogs to just see what it was that a beaver was doing when they blocked up the flow of the creek, and how did it change the hydrology. And they were trying to work out, you know, what can we learn from beavers and from beaver dams? And so if that's what is going on, those folks were looking at beavers as teachers about stream restoration. You know, they were learning from beavers. Beavers know how to restore streams. And so I was settling into this idea that, well, maybe we should be thinking of beavers as teachers, not just kind of pesky rodents that are just a pain in our neck and something we don't want on the landscape. And the moment you start admitting that a beaver has something to teach you, you're resonating with some indigenous worldviews. And so you've come to that point through just looking at the science of hydrology and stream restoration. And so it was an interesting experience as a writer, because I wasn't really trying to lead with one thing or another. I was just sort of working my way through the science and through the facts, and then with a background in environmental philosophy, yes, I started to realize, hey, there's some real resonance here with some of these indigenous worldviews. And that happened several times in the book, and that surprised me. If you'd have said, when I started writing the book, is indigenous thinking going to be a major feature of this book, I would have said, I doubt it. I'm not deliberately heading in that direction, but it did end up being that way. Bill 21:40 Yeah, we had an interesting conversation on an earlier episode with Christina Eisenberg, where she talked about trophic cascades, and she talked about, she lives in the swan here in Montana and and the reintroduction of of large carnivores changed the behavior of ungulates, which changed like what her meadow looked like. Within years. It changed the meadow and but all of that for her, as an indigenous person, was a natural way of thinking about how the world functions. One thing, when this episode comes out, it's going to be a week after we've had a conversation about creation and about religious perspectives as somebody who is in the world of philosophy and philosophy as it comes to creation, if we'll call our natural world creation, how much does religion tend to cover in color? How we think about wildlife and our relationship to wildlife? Christopher Preston 22:33 That's a really deep and kind of fruitful question, actually. So environmental philosophy as a discipline didn't really begin as a modern discipline until the 1970s and the first couple of people who ventured into it. So these were philosophers who started writing about the environment. The first couple of people said, Well, wait, maybe this is just a religious topic. It's not a philosophical topic at all, because religion generally deals with your surroundings and your place in the world, and your relationship to something bigger than you. So the first few efforts at doing environmental philosophy were really ways of doing religious philosophy, but people quickly started to realize, Hey, you don't have to have some belief in the Divine, or you don't have to be immersed in some theological worldview to think that the natural environment matters, that the natural environment counts for something, that there's some value there, and that how we interact with the natural environment is a moral issue. And so after the first few years of environmental philosophy, it started to secularize. So people were writing about the value of nature without any mention of a god or any mention of a religious belief. And that's where I've always been in this field, is as a secular environmental philosopher investigating questions about the meaning of our surroundings. Bill 23:53 Yeah, it's really, it's it's interesting to me, because, you know, so many more tend to characterize those who think about the environment too much is that we've made a religion out of the environment, right? Like, you know, I don't want to get into that, you know, but it's just sort of interesting that, you know, we talked earlier about watching the pronghorn walk up and down the ridge line. I not only sort of felt empathy, but I also just was in awe of another being trying to figure it was clearly trying to figure something out. It was or it was just following a standard course, I don't know, but it touched me somewhere inside. We can call it my soul. We can call it whatever. It triggered emotions. It triggered something, endorphins in my brain to watch this creature, you know, go about, probably trying to find connection. And in a sense, that is religion, right? It's about trying to find connection. So for Christopher Preston 24:44 sure, but I would add that one doesn't have to be religious to care about another human being. I mean, we care about another human being because we do that's what you do, right? And so when you extend that caring to the non human world, maybe it doesn't have to be religious either. Anders 24:58 I think that's why I was asking you about using ethical deliberation in our decision making around managing wildlife or rewilding different places. How do we even know what ethical framework to use? You know, like as I was reading your book, I was thinking about, like, where these sorts of decisions might take us in the future. And I found myself thinking of of, like decision making and even evolution is like something that stops right? But it doesn't. It continues on. Things aren't going to evolve until the year 2025, and then just stop evolving. Things are going to keep evolving. So how can you ever decide, like, we're going to make a decision based on the management of the species as it exists now? Like, can you cast that decision making forward into the future? What if ethics look different? Then do you see what I'm saying? It gets kind of confusing, really quick in my head, but I'm sure you've thought about it a lot more and probably more clearly. Christopher Preston 26:03 Well, it's tricky. I can't guarantee I've thought about it more clearly, but I think it's not the case where you settle on one ethical theory and you say this ethical theory will govern all our Lands Management and wildlife management from here on into the future. I don't think you do that. What I think perhaps we could be thinking of instead is extending compassion, extending care. I think that's a good thing to do in a human world, gradually extend one's compassion and care to include more and more humans in the different ways that our actions affect more and more humans. And I don't think it's a huge stretch to say we should do the same with the animal world and with the natural world, is extend our compassion and care to other beings, and then, you know, see where that takes us. I think we are morally improving ourselves when we extend that care. Bill 26:52 Yeah, it seems to me that just by accepting that they have agency, particularly in the in the Wildlife World, is one way of extending that compassion and care, right, instead of just seeing them as and there has been that sort of fundamental you touch it on the book, one of the big dividing lines over human thought on wildlife was that they didn't have reason. Humans were the only species that had reason, and therefore were somehow separate from but soon as you realize that those that you have compassion for those critters because they have their own agency to try to live a life, to pass on genetics, whatever it might be. It seems like that's when we start to recognize that we could think about it differently than we have in the past, Christopher Preston 27:33 and we're living in a wonderful time to do just that. I mean, if you think about all of the advances in acoustics and video videography for tracking animals and watching them and observing them in their own habitats. You know, cameras that are going on whales now when they descend into the ocean, so you can kind of see what they're doing down there. I mean, it's impossible not to recognize them more and more as subjects with whom we can empathize and for whom we can have compassion. And so it's kind of an exciting time to be in this field. Things are changing. I think, yeah, I know one thing Bill 28:06 you've been thinking about outside of the book has been as we think about, you know, ecosystem management, like we're managing these places and their function. The people who are charged with doing that, many of whom are dear friends of ours and think deeply about it, tend to say, Well, if we do X, we'll get this outcome. And and they think about pathways of either specifically a way of thinking called rad, which is, resist, accept or direct, which is if a ecosystem is shifting, maybe to the detriment of certain species, whether it be flora or fauna. They can either resist that change, make management decisions to resist it. They can just accept the change and say that's an evolving, changing world that is evolution at play, or they can maybe direct it in a way that serves certain species or certain collection of species. How do we think about ethics as an overlay to that rad framework? I wonder if you've thought about that. Christopher Preston 29:06 Yeah, I have thought about that. I mean, if one is deciding how to proceed on land management, you're deciding on the basis of what matters most, what counts most, what do we value most as a society, as a nation, as an individual, and that, quite simply, that is an ethical matter. The question What matters to us is an ethical question. And so if you're deciding to resist a change, you're deciding that the thing that is there right now, whether it's the species or the particular ecosystem, that matters, and so you want to invest money and time and effort into keeping that if you are trying to direct a system, you're trying to direct it in favor, let's say, of a particular species that's having a hard time as the system changes. Again, what you're saying is that species matters. We don't do anything without having an ethical commitment. I mean, this is sort of really. Surprisingly basic, but true. When we make a choice about something we're saying, this matters to me. I value this future, and so I'm going to aim for that future. So really, ethics is everywhere. It's in every land management decision. Bill 30:13 Well, here in Montana, you've chosen to live here, you clearly have a connection and a passion for this place, here in Missoula, we are surrounded by wild places, some of which are federally designated Wilderness. I'm curious, if you've given much thought about the ethics behind the Wilderness Act itself. In some cases, it can be said that it sort of ignored indigenous history on the land. It may also feed into this idea that man is separate from nature, so therefore we're we're not a part of it, as opposed to when we do choose to manage it and intervene, we are. But I'm curious, if you've thought about the Wilderness Act itself and the idea of designated wilderness, and the ethics of that law from 1964 Christopher Preston 30:54 Oh, for sure, in an environmental ethics class, you go through that first page or two of the Wilderness Act, and you can just enumerate the ethical values in there, some things of recreational value, historical value, scientific value, this primeval character and influence valuing that, wanting to keep a certain space open for a certain type of recreational experience, that's a value, right there. So, yeah, you don't have a law without that law expressing certain kinds of values. I think the Wilderness Act is a good example of a case where the values are really complex, and especially complex in a world that is changing. And so we have to think about what those words mean, what they were meant to mean in 1964 and what they mean today. And we've got to really be smart about it. The law itself doesn't always give you all the answers. You have to kind of read in between the lines. Bill 31:47 Well, we've had that discussion on the podcast with like Greg Apple it came on wrestling with the word natural. What do they mean by natural conditions? Did they mean you have to, it goes back to the RAD framework. No, you have to try to keep it like it looked the day it was designated. Or are you just meant to keep it as a functioning ecosystem that serves what pieces and what parts of that function? And that opens up all sorts of ethical questions, right? Christopher Preston 32:10 It is enormously complicated, and it's a mistake to think that the answer is manifest in the text itself. I mean, the text requires interpretation, and you know, conditions on the ground are constantly changing. It's very, very complicated. Bill 32:25 Well, Christopher, it's been just a pleasure having you join us. We look forward to continuing our conversations. Folks, you've been listening to Christopher Preston. He is a professor at the University of Montana and philosophy ethics, obviously connected, he has written an incredible book called tenacious beast wildlife recoveries that change how we think about animals. I highly recommend you pick up the book and just thank you so much Christopher for joining us and being a part of the podcast. Christopher Preston 32:50 Yep, this has been fun. I appreciate it. Anders 32:52 This book is wonderful, Christopher, I enjoyed reading it so much. There's a little blurb on the front that says, What a joy this book is, and I couldn't agree more, it is full of so much joy, and like you brought up earlier, so much compassion and care. I appreciate you writing it, and I appreciate you joining us today, and I appreciate you reminding us that every choice we make is a vote for the world in which we wish to live. So thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Speaker 4 33:20 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. Production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky at daypack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ringleader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com Bren. Transcribed by https://otter.ai