Transcripts For CSPAN3 Adam 20240704

Wells here with us as our speaker. Adam wells is a naturalist, conservation consultant, writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the guardian, the Atlantic Yale environment, 360 time magazine, and numerous other publications. Hes a recipient of the middlebury fellowship in environmental journalism and to compliment his writing and reporting. Hes an avid naturalist and birder while he currently lives cape town, south africa, with his wife and their triplet daughters. Hes lived in cities and communities over the world where hes the opportunity to observe strikingly wildlife communities and, ecosystems as well as hollows environments have changed across time. In that vein, hes just written a new book, the end of eden wild nature in the age of climate breakdown, which is what hes here to talk tonight. Reviewers are the end of eden exquisitely and beautifully written. Both celebrates and heartbreaking. An elegy, an exhortation and a climate book for everyone. If youd like to get a copy of the end of eden, there is a link to purchase the book in the chat panel here on zoom and also on secret science clubs website. Now we are very pleased to welcome adam wells, the virtual stage here at secret science club. Please take it away, adam. Thank you very much, margaret, for that very generous introduction. I trust you can all hear me well before, i get going. Id like to say this book that ive just written thats thats just come out that margaret talked about is quite a sad book and its quite a sobering book. Its not a book that youre going to. Yeah, im so happy that this is all happening, you know . And i just like, set that up just from get go in the sense that i, i try inject a bit of life a little when were talking about it, but at the end of the day it is a very sad and sobering book. And the reason i wrote it, i think, which is a good place to start this discussion, is that when we hear about Climate Change, when people write Climate Change in the media its almost overwhelmingly from a human perspective. So we read about, you know, cities flooding communities burning down what, extended droughts and so on. Mean for humans and very seldom do we read about it or see the tv stories about the impact of Climate Change on the Natural World, on wild species and. Of course, these creatures outnumber us by a pretty long way and i thought it was important to try and do a book that, as i say, the impact Climate Change or climate breakdown, as i prefer to call it, on the Natural World and initially i had this idea of doing a book that would be kind of lets put it not sound too grandiose, but a little bit of a little bit complete something that sort of gave readers the whole, as it were, or relatively complete picture was a somewhat encyclopedic and its approach. And i very soon realized that that was not going to happen, that was a waste of time because theres so much going on. I mean the entire Natural World, all our natural ecosystems, you know, all our wild species and so on are being affected by climate breakdown in one way or another. Were seeing a literal sort of transformation of the Natural World due to phenomenon. And trying to be anything like encyclopedic was a complete waste of time because the book could take, you know, lifetimes to write and be 20,000 pages long. And nobody be around to read it. And so what i decided was to to, to, to focus on a few species and a few, because in select and species and ecosystems that illustrated particular of how climate breakdown affects the Natural World and and bring things down. So readers could away knowing understood how things were happening. Certain places to certain species and realized that, you know, if something is happening to a particular species in a particular place the same kind of thing is happening other species in other places. So that way approached the try and give an idea of the big picture of whats whats going on everywhere but through these individual stories of individual species and particular places and it was also very important to me emphasize that climate breakdown is not just affecting, say, you know, the iconic polar bears, the north pole with melting ice sheets and the polar bears are all starving in these kind of iconic images. Actually, this is happening everywhere all around you. So ive deliberately set the introduction of the book in a new york city park. I actually lived in new york for five or six years until my kids were born nine years ago and left went back to south africa, but so i wanted to show folks that also of subtle things that are happening everywhere, all around us, all kinds of subtle, what i call a breakup ecological breakups and breakdowns. And these little ecological breakups and breakdowns are often quite quiet, quite require quite some attention to to notice and to see collectively amounts to ecological and in some cases, ecological collapse so that these these Little Things, these little quiet things that are going on due to Climate Change are actually as significant as the big dramatic type of that. We typically see in the mainstream stream media, lets put it that way. So really thats thats the book is coming from as as an introduction and one of the things i thought id start was ill go ill go chapter by chapter through the book talking about maybe a couple of the stories that that i, i wrote and, and why i wrote about them and how i approached them. So i thought it important that my chapter, which is called energy, water and time, is just to get the sort basics down. And one of the basic aspects of life and one of the basic things that theyre living organisms have to do is manage temperature. So oftentimes people think of, say, an animal, if you picture a bird in the in the desert, lets imagine a bird in the desert, maybe its Biggest Challenges of getting through the day is staying alive or finding food and predators, for example. But actually, this this bird needs to be doing 24 seven is is manage its internal Energy Managing its internal temperature unless it keeps internal temperature within certain it does it too cold too hot it dies and one of the ways birds because birds dont have sweat glands birds in warm areas show their control their temperatures if it gets too warm is by sitting in the shade and panting they pass their across the inside the wet moist of their mouths in order to evaporate, really cool their bodies down. Now, one of the things i realized very early on is animals hot places that are that are getting hotter as many hot places are getting hotter, hotter. Now, what they have to do in in in in in order to do this. Dont they dont come close to the edge very quickly. They dont they dont fall out of the sky en masse in thousands. If we have a heatwave, dont see millions of birds just dropping out of the sky like hailstones. Birds for example, disappear from warm again in a more subtle. And i talk about this in terms of a bird called the yellow horned, which is a Southern African species that i know quite well. Its a its a midsized bird. Its very charismatic. It has a large yellow bell. Im going to try to show you a picture of one of them on the on the screen here. And im. One second here. Okay. So heres our yellow tornado. Thanks, folks. Your your patience. Its as i say, its a very charismatic characterful bird with very bright eyes and, this big bell. And they have very interesting breeding system to get away from predators during a very vulnerable phase in their lives. What happens is the female bird walls herself into they find natural hollow in a tree and the female walls herself into. This hollow creates a wall, literally, of of pieces of there and feces that dry, very sort of hard concrete like wall with a slit in the middle of it and the female goes is inside this hollow . And she lays her eggs and and incubates them at the same time as she loses pretty much all her feathers molds. If she was outside hollow, of course, losing all her feathers, shed be extremely vulnerable to predators. So she stays inside the hall, lays the eggs and what that means is that the male whos on the outside during that time has to work one heck of a lot harder in finding food, because he has to find food. The insects, the little lizards and so on, that these these birds eat. He has to find both for himself and her, and she tends to be walled up in inside this nest at the hottest time of the year. And what researchers have noticed was that a around ten years ago the yellow horned bulls within the kalahari, which is a large semidesert area in central southern south africa and gets very warm. Around ten years ago, the yellow hornbill populations in those areas breeding just fine. And now were in an era where within about ten years weve seen a near total collapse of breeding success. And this is simply because increased temperatures have wrecked these birds schedules. So the the essential i. E. The male bird now has to deal with increased periods of very high temperatures during the middle of the day where all he can do survive is sit in the shade and do nothing and pant and in, say, ten years ago, in the past, on very hot days would be a relatively short period of time where the air was so hot that he had to do that. Now its often many hours in the day and he simply does not have enough time to find enough food himself and for his his female in the hall and later on when the youngsters hatch certainly for the youngsters as well and so breeding success and basically youngsters end up starving because they dont get enough food. And so breeding success of this bird has absolutely collapsed. And were seeing similar patterns in other arid areas like the Mojave Desert in southern california. Recent work has found that around that the Breeding Bird species have disappeared. Any given patch of desert over the last hundred years and thermodynamic modeling indicates that its due to exactly same thing birds getting to warm they dont die outright of. The extreme heat. Its not this obvious dramatic thing but they over they they hit high temperatures that they cant handle and they run out of time during the day and then the Second Chapter of the book i deal with it. Ive called it plagues and diseases. And thats pretty grim. Thats exactly what the chapters about. I look at new diseases and and a new you know insect outbreaks and so on the plagues plagues if you like that are happening because rising temperatures in mostly in northeastern us which the focus of the of the chapter are allowing all. Of new critters to move into that are deep winter cold previously prevented them from into and the point of this chapter ready to show people that really tiny increases in in in minimum temperatures in other words winters getting quite as cold as they used to just by a few degrees allow certain insects in one case ticks to survive and to be active for much longer periods the year. And they can then have enormous effects the species that they traditionally go for and wipe them out and create like really rash ecological shifts, a very short space of time and one of the examples i talk about in this chapter is a thing called the southern pine, which is a small sort of beetle that drills into the bark of, a pitch pine trees and. This beetle was previously confined really the southeastern United States, sort of more temperate forests and where it wasnt really a very it was just one out of many insects that for trees and wasnt particularly noteworthy. Whats happened in recent years that winter minimum temperatures in the northeastern United States have got warmer and warmer and this beetle has been able to move north of before it is confined south of new jersey. This beetle is now being able move up through new jersey into, new york into massachusetts, a place like this. And then its recently been found in New Hampshire and maine. And and its absolutely hammering vice vast swaths of of pitch pine trees, which are the sort of ecological keystone species of, what we call the pine barrens, which is this very distinctive coastal type of habitat, a very coastal habitat in area. And is really hammering the pitch pine trees really define the habitat and is is transforming this within a space of just a few short years. You know, a single species of beetle is just overhauling this ecosystem for for everything that lives in it. Another be a story i tell in this chapter is about these the winter ticks and moose where we have a phenomenon now with extended warm seasons allowing a species of tick called the winter tick to have a much longer growing season and what they call a quest season, which is when the ticks the tiny young ticks go out on vegetation and feel around and wait for large animals, walk past them and brush off on, grab onto and. Because of the longer questing season and larger tick populations moose are getting absolutely hammered by ticks. We now have a like a recent study in vermont showed that the average moose in vermont has 47,000 and winter ticks on them and as a result of this moose, which are again being such large animals, are quite influential in the ecosystem, they are now either dying that are literally sanguine, arid theyre having all the blood out of them by these these these vast numbers of ticks or theyre being weakened by these the parasite load by the tickler to such an extent that they breed success anymore. They just dont have the nutritional resources, lets say, in their bodies. So thats another charming story about this but again, the point not to really emphasize the gruesomeness. All of this some of it is it is gruesome and disturbing, but just it takes just the tiniest shifts in in in minimal maximum temperatures in order to change the way that certain individual species operate in ecosystems. And those can have just radical sort of ramification and change things very very quickly indeed then. I have a chapter on extreme weather which focuses very much on uses as a as its example, all hurricanes in the caribbean. And one of the stories i tell this, which is for me, an incredible story because it brings together history. It brings together human influence and all of these other things that affect species with with climate breakdown. And that is the story of the puerto rican parrot on the on island of puerto rico. And the fascinating thing about this parrot, i tell its its long history, was that it was a very common bird on on the island of puerto rico prior to european colonization of the there were possibly estimates of being made of roughly a million a million of these parrots living on puerto rico. But as the colonists in they they chopped down more and more forests. And over the centuries the parrots were left the only place could breed was in a tiny little parrot patch of old growth rainforest, puerto rico, in heart of whats called the uk forest. Nowadays. And it was a fascinating story because again, parrots like these are like the yellow hornbill thats on the screen now. Actually let me let me pull up a picture of of of a of a puerto parrot. Why dont we hold on one second. Im six. This is all so much easier person, isnt it . Anyway heres some puerto rican parrots. There are attractive birds, as you can see, this is a large amazon parrots. As youll notice, these guys are a cage and they have little, Little Things around, their necks. These are actually parrots that are part of a captive Breeding Program endangered species captive Breeding Program. And each of them has these distinctive colors with a little necklace icon it so that the parrot keepers can tell different individuals each other. This is a photograph took when i visited this facility but what happened was that the puerto rican parrot was pushed into a tiny little patch rainforest, which is the only place on the island that still had big old trees in which it could. It could make its nest. Its a an obligate cavity. Nestor needs to nest inside natural hollows in, old trees. And there was only one part of the island that had the trees that were old enough to have these birds it nest them. But unfortunately, this area was in pretty much the wettest part of puerto and to the influence that that climate had has on species. Their breeding success was also cratering during the last century during the 1900s because so of their eggs were getting fungus and all kinds of diseases the young birds were getting all kinds of diseases. Their survival rates were absolutely and in fact, species was on the very, very brink of extinction when it became one of the very first species that was listed under endangered species act decades ago. And the government put a huge amount of money and lots of researchers went in and lots of conservationists in and did an incredible of work to save this the species from outright extinction. It really in dedicated work of over decades and one of the ways they saved the puerto rican from extinction was taking what they taking some of the eggs out of the last wild nests. And what this does is if you you effectively steal eggs of the nest you can take them an incubator and raise these birds. Then in but it also triggers the wild birds to then relay a second clutch of eggs to replace those which they can then try and raise in the wild that can increase the output of the birds by stealing their first clutch of eggs and, raising those in captivity and what happened though, was rather interesting is when they started this captive Breeding Program, they didnt have any adults, puerto rican parrots in captivity or very, very few of them. But what did have was a related called the hispanic island parrot from a nearby island. And they had hispanic island parrots that had been sort of confiscated, animal traders and things like this. And what they did was they took the use the hispanic island parrots as as foster parents for the puerto rican parrots the eggs that they in. But what happened was baby puerto rican parrots parrots a highly vocal they have very sophisticated culture they have very detailed language that people learning more and more about is that these captive raised puerto rican parrots learns a kind of a kind of a crude, simplified version of his Spanish Island parrot language in these cages which was very, very different and very much simpler and cruder than the language of the real wild puerto rican parrots. And over time, these conservationists moved and some of these captive bred parrots released them out into the out into the wild with these wild talking parrots that had had a continuous history, the wild, but essentially what happened, very sadly in 2017 was Hurricane Maria came along and hit this the part of the island where the lost, lets say, while talking parrots lived. And not to put too fine a point on it, basically killed them all. And so the puerto rican parrot today still exists. A species. Yeah, you know you can go and see them like these photos show you and there are some have been released into the wild and are even sort of breeding in the wild from these captive rays stuck. But the language which was a cornerstone of wild parrot culture of puerto rican parrot culture if you like that it evolved over hundreds of thousands years. The language is gone. So for me, in a funny of way, thats almost sadder than the species being gone. Its like part of the species is has been taken away and that was that was caused by just a single, very large hurricane that hit the right part of the island. And now this another bird i write about. I like birds lot, so im talking about them doing this talk. But is there is a species called the red put up a photo that quickly hang on one second. Right theres a red not this is a small shorebird. You know, one of these wading birds that feeds in mud, you know, on the seashore. And there are a few different races of red knots around the world. They all breed up in the high northern, up in the high arctic and migrate to points further south. But the story i tell in the book is about a particular subspecies of the red knots, the afro siberian red knot, and this type red knot breeds in the time peninsula, very far northern russia, northern siberia and then migrates across europe. And the vast majority of, the population spends their non breeding season on a large wetland on the coast, mauritania basically on the Sahara Desert coasts of west africa. And researchers have been looking at these knots in enormous since the 1980s. Theyve been studying them on their russian breeding grounds. Theyve been looking them in as pass through europe and theyve been counting them and surveying them in west africa. And theyve seen just an incredible collapse of this birds population from where we around a million birds nest wintering in west africa in the in the 1980s now down to around 200,000 birds and dropping all the time and at first they couldnt figure out why this bird was disappearing was was hurting this birds population. And then they realized double heating Global Warming is is is progressing more rapidly in the arctic on average than in than in the globe as whole. In other words, the arctic is warming certain parts of the arctic warming 3 to 4 times faster than the global average. And what means is that the spring snowmelt comes to the arctic. Now a lot earlier than it used to. Its been coming earlier and earlier, every year the temperature rises and the spring snowmelt, what triggers whats in a way brings the sort of northern tundra vegetation to life and triggers insects, emergencies in the far north, which is what baby red knots, tiny little fluffy balls that sort of hatch out of their eggs. What baby red knots depend on for for their protein and to grow. And whats been happening is insects because of the earlier and earlier snow melts. I mean, snow melts sort of advanced about a month since the 1980s, up in birds breeding grounds is kind of coming earlier by about a month than it did then. Whats happening is the nuts are not able to arrive from there migration as as early as they need to keep pace with the snowmelt advance and so the insects by merging on the tundra too early effectively when the baby not are still in their eggs or sometimes even late yet. And so when the baby red knots hatch they dont have nearly enough insects to get the kind of protein that they need in order to grow well. But once again, whats happening here is kind of subtle. They dont die en masse. Theres not just this crunch mass starvation on the northern tundra of tiny little nuts. What happens is they usually get enough insects to survive, but their their weight, their body weight has dropped and their size has dropped. Theyre effectively malnourished. Theyre stunted. And so when they fly from those in siberia all the way to west africa, they arrive in west africa, they need to feed in west africa. They feed on these clams that you can see this photograph, the little crabs with, the scientific name, genus name of floripas they they they they have a very special pressure sensing organ in the end of their bullet specific, clay evolved to get at these very nutrient rich clam bars in the mud that they need to really thrive through that wintering season. But what happens is when they get in into west africa and they land, theyve been malnourished up in siberia. Their bellies are just a few millimeters too short to get at these nutrient to get down into the mud deep enough to get these nutrient rich clams. And they actually starve during their their wintering season. The young theyre young not over a period of a few months literally fade away in west africa. And so its a fascinating story for me. Again, quite sad, but a fascinating story to me, showing that changing the timing of snow melts way up in the in the far, far north can actually cause a mass death of in west africa thousands of miles away and months and months later. And so you know climate breakdown is having all these very strange often not very obvious effects on species and ecosystems and think thats a fascinating way to talk about those and other fascinating. Story. A rather sad that i that i came across again was was in australia. I mean most of you probably remember those enormous bushfires at the end of 2019, early 20, just before covid shut everything down. And, you know, world were full of these stories, wooly koalas and all these animals that had been burned up in the bushfires. But i went to australia quite deliberately at the tail end of this, i wanted to see the aftermath of the bushfires, not the, you know, not the hysterical sort of giant flames themselves of what does this place look like afterwards. And i and i came across a very good story illustrated how these megafauna actually have ecological that go well beyond, you know, the animals and the trees that that have that have burned down. And ill pick up another picture here for you guys. Hold on one second. And this this photograph is from a small creek in. In eastern australia, in an area that been incredibly and what it shows is the creek which survived the fire. Absolutely fine and most of creatures within the creek survived, the fire absolutely fine. What it shows is that a few weeks after the fire when rain started in the ecosystem, according a lot of people was restored freeing itself in the sense that you when rain falls after these big fires some of the the the the fire adapted vegetation growing again you start seeing green shoots breaking out across the landscape. But a lot of people think, oh, you know, the ecosystem storms fixing itself, what happened at that point is that the rain washed just an incredible number amount of ash and and debris into the streams across the region and that is actually what killed off nearly all the fish in these areas as the fishes you know gills literally clogged up from this incredible amount of crud that came into the streams. And these these megafires are so big that theyre absolutely they transformed the entire ecosystem of these of these streams. This was a very clear, very deep stream before before the fire. Its now, this incredibly shallow muddy thing where a whole lot of the species that used to be able to live in it cant in it anymore. And this deluge of mud into the Aquatic Ecosystems is been so profound that that even the heavy rains that that have been experienced in australia since that time havent really been able to to wash it out and effectively these Aquatic Ecosystems been transformed for generations generations. Another quick mention of a story before we get into the questions in a few minutes is a story that i stumbled across across in my own backyard, as it were, in Southern Africa, where savannah colleges have been noting over the last few decades that our savanna ecosystems in Southern Africa have been changing, again, incredibly rapidly. Weve seen a real what folks are calling the wood ification of savannas, just incredible of trees are moving these ecosystems which are essentially part grassland and, part woodlands as savanna really, you know, one can conceptualize the savanna as a as a grassland combined with a woodland where grasses and trees are battling for space, basically. Yeah, this classic african savanna, as one might imagine, these pictures you might have seen from sort kenya or whatever, these sort of grassy areas with interspersed sort of beautiful flat top thorn and so on, you know, scattered between them. This is the result of an ongoing battle between grass and trees for space. And this this this battle mediated by fire and fire is a natural part of these ecosystem teams, has been for an incredibly long time, millions of years. And essentially what happens when a fire comes along is every tree that isnt a fireproof. And for most species, that means around four meters, maybe five meters in height. Every tree that isnt tall enough yet to escape the real sort of to escape its its crown being severely burned by the fire dies. So trees have to reach this particular height to escape what we might call the fire trap grass is dealing with fire any. Well, theyre theyre highly adapted to fire comes along in burns chop the grass off and then sprout and they regrow from from the base. So fire in a sense is grasses french aid in the battle for space that that that happens in savannas if fire doesnt come along often enough, more and more trees will grow to fireproof height and take over and eventually create kind of a closed canopy forest which shades out the grasses they dont get enough sun and that and they die out. But whats quite interesting, as i say is, is these trees have been taking out of the vast as were talking literally millions of of savannas in recent decades, even though the natural frequency of fire has actually remained the same. Fire is not coming less often than it used to, which one might expect would lead to more trees in the landscape. Whats actually happened, folks have realized, is that trees have actually started growing, are a heck of a lot faster. They used to because trees and grasses use different systems of photosynthesis essentially grasses are much less reactive or much less sensitive to the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. They can photosynthesize and produce carbohydrates and grow really well even at very low Carbon Dioxide levels, atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels, because they have special turbocharger cells, if you like, in their photosynthetic systems that supply the photosynth apparatus with very high quality co2, even when atmospheric co2 levels are low, trees cant do that. And during the last, you know, atmospheric co2 levels have actually been pretty low. If we especially if we go back to to the last place, a maximum of 20,000 years ago and so on. And and trees have effectively in recent time, last at least the last tens of thousands of if not hundreds of thousands of years being well below their potential. But now, as the climate breakdown sort of increases and were throwing and more co2 into the atmosphere here, trees are now able to grow a heck of a lot faster than they used to. Were talking. Like 200 , 300 faster than than preindustrial. Then just 250 years ago due to increased co2 in the atmosphere. And so theyre able to grow to fireproof heights much more quickly than they used to. And so even the fire frequency fires are coming at pretty much the same rate that they did. Trees are able to escape their effects much quicker. And were seeing this absolutely radical transformation of millions and millions acres of of savannas, not just in africa, but around the because of this. And i thought that was a fascinating thing that you know, when we often think about we talk about Climate Change, climate breakdown and the effects that we think about sort of changes in precipitation. You know, either rainfall getting blessed, droughts or these, you know, deluges leading to just incredible floods and we dont consider oil, you know, we consider the impacts of temperature and how those but we dont consider merely change in the the co2 content of the atmosphere to consider ocean of co2 in the atmosphere just making that one single change can also without even if it is possible to do that changing precipitation or temperature or any or any of these other things which is, you know, theoretically possible do that even this change in that one thing has profound effects across know enormous areas of the planet planet anyway. So theres a whole bunch of as i say that i write about in this, ive just given you a flavor of some the stories and why i found them interesting. But the last chapter of the book is very much a personal reflect on what it was like to write the book and its the its a chapter where i sort of talk about myself a little bit and how i feel and and honestly writing this book was, was, was extremely difficult. Im not im not a person that i mean, ive seen a lot of i grew up in apartheid south africa. Ive been an investigator a journalist. Ive seen a lot really gruesome things in the human realm. A lot of a lot of bad stuff, a lot of evil. A lot of these things are familiar to me, im not im not shocked by, a lot of stuff. But i was as truly stunned by the scale of some of the ecological changes and the rapidity with which theyre happening and that i that i saw and i learned about what while writing this. And i was it was incredibly difficult. I mean, there were times where it was very, very difficult to process it psychologically and, mentally, to really try and get a on on on the situation, whats going on and frankly, i was incredibly depressed and somebody asked me on an the other day, well, you know, how did you write this . Its super, super depressing. I said, well, yeah, tons of cheap anti, you know, and and and exercise and and and there were periods where honestly i couldnt write and it led to think a lot about what people calling in a climate anxiety and and and what to go along with that in a lot of people is a kind of doom ism a sense of that the game is up were lost were all going to hell in a handbasket because of climate breakdown and and i write about this and i think i think as with many things, its not its not that simple. I im not people sometimes ask me, you know, do you have hope can you give can you give us hope for climate situation . You know, and my you know, is there any hope . You know, i get variations those questions and my answer nowadays is, why are you asking me that question . Are you asking me that question . And to tell you, oh, theres hope. Were going to solve this whole thing were going to turn this all around and its all going to be great so that you, the questioner, can then go and sit in the corner and do nothing . Or are you asking me question so that i can be this harbinger of death if you and tell . You know, theres absolutely no hope, everythings screwed. Were going to go to hell in a handbasket and also then give you permission to sit in a corner and do nothing. I think neither of those are satisfactory my in my attitude is that that i think things are extremely difficult. I a lot of ecosystems are in very serious trouble. I think were going to see much and in ecosystems think were going to see a lot more change and a lot of that changes is not going to be good. I think were going to see a lot of species being pushed towards extinction at an ever increasing rate. But i also think that is actually quite a lot we can do about this. And my my next book that im already writing, if you like, is so much is that what what the hell can we do about this kind of book . Whereas this book is really laying out the problem and its intention is in languages as accessible as possible. I mean, ive really even this is the secret science club, these are folks are interested in science. I wrote this book, you know, for people that maybe have never done a study of science in their lives, have never thought about ecology once in their lives any reasonably smart person who picks up this book. I want them to be able to read it and come away with something. But i also know well more than something an understanding of of maybe how, you know, climate breakdown. But i also think there is in this book that even if you are sort of ecologist, even if you are Natural World type, even if you are a climate expert, youre going to read some stories in this book of things that you you might never known about or never have thought about before. And honestly, i think i think will leave it at that and open up for. Oh, thank you so much, adam, the wonderful presentation. And again, im going to remind people name of the book is the end of eden wild nature in the age of climate breakdown, which also some of your wonderful photos, other peoples wonderful photos of these creatures. There is curtis in various places. Yes, even underwater. Even underwater. So we are now open up for the questions. And i have been sending out instructions to people. But in case you didnt see, its very easy. You can either go down below there and look for that raise hand option and raise your hand and i will call on you and you can ask your question or you can send in a message to me at chat, dorian evans and you can send the message to directly and ill read it in. We have a couple of questions that have come in already, so im going to start off with charles who says i read the New York Times in the New York Times that you prefer a term such as global weirding to the term climate. What do you mean by that exactly . Yeah, i said i prefer the terms climate breakdown and weirding to climate. These are not my original terms. Theyve been used by a few people in the past. I think Climate Change is a is a difficult term psychologically for people because it puts two opposites against each other. If you read sort of some cognitive linguistics then and framing theory and things like this, you start thinking that this might actually be a real problem communicating it. It might explain some of the reactions people have to the term Climate Change. So climate, as weve always about it in school or climate is constant dry, it is predictable. Its like can say you make a Statement Like know the climate in rio de janeiro, blah blah blah. Theres a sort of description and this is something you can generally expect. And you know, understand climate is as is sort of repeating itself through the annual cycle and being pretty much the same year year. And so if you put this, this, this word which has within its intrinsic of meaning, if you the the idea of constancy, predictability, if you put that right against the term change that that creates what some cognitive linguistics of call sort of a deep frame clash it actually you two opposites together and honestly that could create quite a strong reaction in a lot of people of of denial of even aggression a sort of violent rejection and these kinds of i mean, its psychologically its have shown that these if create these deep frame clashes, these pairings of words and joining of words, you can create a very negative aversive in people to them. And almost wonder if that wasnt kind of deliberate. The part of people who who develop the term also changed to me feels kind of wishy washy like its changed. Well it could change it could warmer, but then it can change back. You know it could be a little cooler the next day, who knows, you know kind of thing whereas the term the word breakdown when you put it next to climate it sort of creates this term that kind of acknowledges fact that climate is a structure is something predictable, is something, you know, solid in those ways that we traditionally understand climate to be and were saying that its actually breaking down this this kind of structure is is breaking down this is not something that you can just put back together again or sort of change again. So i prefer the climate breakdown for that reason. But i also like the term global weirding because obviously it plays on the term Global Warming because the more go into this stuff and the more ecologists i speak to, the more climate i speak to. And quite frankly, the more i see myself, you know, being in world around me because im this Old Fashioned naturalist right on this very old school and fashionable who like walks around and wants to know the names of all these critters and wants to learn how to identify them and wants to know, you know, where they fit into things. You know, im not a dna lab. Im not analyzing satellite imagery and im not dealing with highfalutin mathematical models of ecosystems, for example, which a lot of my colleagues, you know, folks that studied with me at university on this Old Fashioned atlas and, im seeing some really strange things happening in the ecosystem that i know and, you know, scientists and, the rest of us, we can make some general predictions about how climate breakdown is going to affect the biosphere is the biosphere a of the changes were seeing are in line with theory and in line with models, in line with projections. But then the system so complex that, you know, the global ecosystem, if you like, is so that as it starts changing and as it starts fracturing at at an increasing rate, were seeing many more totally unexpected things happening, emerging out of the system. And and thats i like the term weirding. I mean going you know although i think some folks think even the Climate Change is bad at least we kind of know whats happening because theres all these smart people with all these big models. But, you know, and but you speak to smart people, all the big models, and they say, whoa, well, this thing just happening. And we had no idea that going to happen, you know, and so thats why i like the term, you know, global weirding. Sorry, a very long answer, but yeah. Where are were getting it. Well, its hard to deny that things have not gotten kind of weird or extended thats for sure. Thank you. Okay charles has a question. I read the New York Times that you preferred way. Im sorry. That was what we just said. Jessica, could you talk a bit more about your background . I heard your father was an investigative journalist in apartheid south africa. What got you into studying . Studying wildlife and watching birds . Yeah, i write a little bit about this in the in the the final chapter. The book is basically i grew up in apartheid south africa. My father was an investigative journalist who did a lot of very stories in that we were constantly monitored by the government telephone. His text, people outside our house watching, you know, who comes and who goes. There were lots of Death Threats and things like this. So i grew up in a pretty tense environment, lets put it that way. And one of my escapes from this kind of oppression and, also just the general white Apartheid Society that was around which i found not only racist, awful in many ways, but also unspeakably boring. Straitjacketed was was was. I mean, animals, birds in particular. But i was also fascinated snakes and frogs and all kinds of lizards and all sorts of other things that i went in court and kept. I was one of those kids, you know, with fish and snake tanks. And lord knows else did i in their bedrooms horrifying their mothers with all these creatures that i brought and it was it was an escape i honestly from the kind of bleak nest of a lot of the sort of political and social situation around me and and animals and and plants, for that matter, have always demonstrated beauty and interests. And, and and i had a story, for example, about how i was a young teenager. I volunteered myself to various at the local History Museum in the town pretoria i grew up in and and they loved me and my friends because we were free labor for the youth, for their scientific pursuits. And we, you know, writing about how one day we went, we did a lot bird banding, we did a lot of catching birds and sticking a little number of rings on their legs for, research. And one of the places where we did banding was this just truly astonishing, massive of european bond swallows. You know, bond swallows that breed in europe, but come to Southern Africa for the non breeding season and every night there was a, theres a large bed that hosted in our summer around a million birds. It was just truly astonishing thing to see and we would our mist nets around the edge of this thing and catch some of these swallows and and ban them and so on and one day this is now apartheid south. This is, i dont know, 1987 or somewhere thereabouts, 86. It the middle of you know, the worst time, the bleakest of apartheid south africa. There was a lot of violence happening in the country. This is preinternet era. So very little contact with outside world in that sense. And and and heavy, heavy Media Censorship and all of this and we caught two birds ill never forget this one of them had a had a had a ring from from estonia on its leg and the other had a ring from israel on its leg, you know, and it was this incredible sort of thing of it was like finding a living message in a bottle, you know, its like, holy smokes, somewhere out there right in some other part of the world, you know, in case on the other side of the iron curtain where the evil communists, we were taught, you know, fear live that. And in with this sort of conflict wracked middle east that wed also heard of they were people, you know, just like us who are interested in these birds and had taken the trouble to catch them, you know, and put little rings on their legs to figure out where they went, you know. And it was just this amazing sort of thing that ive always remembered in terms of, you know, opening yourself up, literally sort of tapping the web of life, if you like, the sort of the travels across the world. It was an incredible thing and, honestly, since then, since my youth, ive always been interested in nature, even if ive i havent really worked as a biologist. I studied biology. Ive worked a very short period as a actual biologist. Ive worked for few conservation nonprofits and so on but most of my life ive been a freelance person in the media. Ive been made, ive done photography, ive written investigative journalism, always is its something to do with the environment. But particularly around wildlife conservation. And wherever i go, you know, im fascinated by, by living right here in manhattan, i can watch peregrine falcons, you know, hunting of the Tall Buildings and, you know, this stuff everywhere. And and and again, a bit of a long winded answer. But, you know, honestly, thats where the interest came from came. Thank you. Okay gregor has asks how do you as a writer and naturalist, come across these intricate stories . Yeah, i, i just read a lot of random on the internet, know i know a lot of biologists, i know a lot of biologists. And i hang out with them and i talk to them. I like people. Im one of those irritating guys. Talks to the guy next to them on the plane you know and i talk to random people on the street corner, which is kind of why i like new york, because new yorkers dont think youre strange if you do that. And honestly, if you just if you just talk to people and you stay like really curious and you read a whole lot of stuff and you get out there and you actually look at nature, you know, a real advocate for being an Old Fashioned naturalist as you wherever you are you dont have to be in the most biodiverse rainforest in the world or anything like even if youre in the middle of a city, get out, get into the parks and learn that names of the insects you see, learn the names of the birds you see, learn the names of the plants in the park. Use that to start developing an understanding of the ecosystems in your area. And you know, i just do that and i bump into all kinds of great people who tell me all kinds great things. And you know one finds thats how you know, you find these stories and. I mean, the stories are great. You know, often what i find is, is, again, sadly, there are Just Brilliant stories being by scientists all the time right. But a lot of them, they get written up in this very dry fashion, an obscure journal and they just thats where they go to die. You know, often scientists are arent that good at realize how great the stories that they themselves on covering actually are and are telling them. And i really feel thats my job is is im not and again im not a genius scientist i dont the kind of mindset that allows me to generate you know diligently unpick a certain story over a period of ten years. You know im far to sort scattered but that i see myself as a bit of an inbetween and that i can usually understand what the scientists are telling me and then trying to translate that into languages of stories that hopefully people sort of nonscientists will relate to and understand and and why theyre important. You know, also, i grew up in a family with a lot of uncles who we spent a lot of time drinking wine, and and and and that helps to be around that. Im that sort of facetiously but not because you learn a heck of a lot about stories, structure and what is and isnt a good story. But by listening to storytellers, you know, for on that note. So maria asks in brief, what is the story in the York City Parks that you opened the book with . Yeah, well the very brief. You should read the book because i the book is about better i think sometimes a better writer that i am a speaker but the book is very much sort of opens in this new york city park and it invites the reader to imagine themselves walking through a generic new york city park. And in the case of this, i was imagining Prospect Park in brooklyn where i spent many years birding and, really got to know that place very well. But and the idea is if you through, you know, your average park in new york city, you might think that nothing much has about the scene that you see. You know, you look around, you see people jogging, see people walking their dogs. These trees as lawns, as bushes. Theres you know, aside from the fact that i say in the book, everybodys attached to a small computer in the form of either a cell phone or, tablet or whatever. Nothing fundamental has changed about this park maybe since the not in the 1970s or whatever it is, theres maybe less crime and crime and what have you. In the case of new york city. But this place is essentially the same to most people. But but the point im making, the introduction is actually this is not the set. And ecologically its changing really fast. Theres you know theres theres been a bird population collapse this maybe only, you know a third of the songbirds have disappeared out of north american skies. Since the 1970s, weve had insect population collapses. Were getting all kinds of new, strange diseases, plant diseases come into these parks, fungal diseases. Were getting new insects coming into these that are wiping out certain types of plants. And weve also had, which i lived through hurricanes irene and sandy, for example, which like knocked down a lot of the really big old trees in these parks. And changed the ecosystem there. But because of our sort of shifting baseline syndrome, we miss a lot of these changes and the opening chapter is really just just to say like, hey, folks, it might kind of look the same around you, but actually is all this stuff is changing and actually its really important and. Actually, we need to Pay Attention to and you can Pay Attention to it. The whole the whole point of this book, even though its sort of sad, it might sound a little grandiose. Im very inspired by Rachel Carson and silent spring, you know, she wrote that book, what, 60 years ago now. And that was a book that really sort of alerted world to sort of pesticides. It was thing that was going on around them, you know, in plain view as were. But it needed somebody to actually write them down, know and say to people, this is actually going on and sort of create the words and and thats kind of what im trying to do with this book is like, you know, again, as i said at the beginning, the media, the majority of the coverage is is about what Climate Change is doing to people and human societies and economies, agriculture and things like this. And im saying. Well, hold on. Theres these millions of wild species out there, and a lot of them are way more to these changes because theyre not adaptable. Big brains, naked apes that can, you know, actually, you know, survive at least the early stages of climate breakdowns. Worst effects in many cases, you know, we can adapt and, you know, to sit in a you know, we can turn on the a. C. , whereas the animals out there, they just have to deal with heat. And often theyre not dealing with it. And so you know climate breakdown is of course not the only thing harming wild species and changing natural ecosystems. Its a force multiplier as it is. This is yet another factor on top of things like pollution and habitat destruction, all of these things. But its really significant. And i want people to start paying attention to it around them and this is an attempt to do that. Thank you. Scissors asks how long will it take for this weather break take to correct and what the amount of damage what amount of damage will be done to the environment should correction happen . Im not sure i fully understand that question, to be honest. Whether. Maybe just to say that people often conceptualize Climate Change or climate breakdown is this kind of either or type thing. I mean, scientists generally do that that way. But like, lets say the average person out there, nonscientists often sort of sort of thinks, oh, well be fine. Its just a little change the weather. And fundamentally, well be fine. Or that sort of catastrophe that like in the sense that Climate Change is coming and everythings, everythings, its a mess everythings screwed up. And ultimately, you all going to die. All these major systems are going to fall apart. Obviously, thats not how it how it works. You know, the more, you know, thermal trapping gases we throw into the atmosphere, the more, you know, co2 the more methane we throw into the atmosphere, the more thermal energy builds up in the atmosphere. Obviously, the more the the the rise in global temperature and, the instability in the system gets, worse and worse and worse. And but these impacts the outcomes of this are nonlinear. Right. We have certain seem to be able to sit in species seem to be able to handle increase pretty well theyre quite resilient they they deal with it they dont change a whole lot others fall down very very quickly and fracture and fragment and so so its this process of of breakdown you know thats thats nonlinear and early semi predictable you know that were moving and even if we were miraculously to start chucking all this these fossil fuel emissions and what have you into that atmosphere tomorrow. You know weve already in motion certain shifts that are effectively irreversible. So its not like we can reverse our way out of this if we do stop throwing these gases up into the atmosphere, you know, were going to ameliorate lot of that. A lot of the the bad stuff thats coming down the road. But we wont reverse our way out of this this illness. There any interesting examples of organisms that are adapting . Well. Yeah, in the sense that there are, lets say and again ill ill answer this question somewhat tangentially. Its not that im dodging the question. Yes. Are there are species that that handle change that intrinsically handle change. Right. And usually as ecologists we call these generalists or, you know, adaptable species in bird world. Ill give you an example of these european starlings that are sort of an Invasive Species around world. Its a very smart, you know, midsized bird, incredibly culturally adaptable and able to nest and feed in all sorts of different environments, deals with humans really well in a as as the ice retreats northwards well probably see, you know, european starlings, you know, taking over a large, you know, increase habitats. Theres certain trees for example that are moving areas now that are warming there. There are there are genera as they tend to be species, that are already common not always. They tend to be species that already carbon that are already adapted to live in a wide range of environments. Sort of the generalists adaptable species. You know, quite a few of those are, lets say, winners, but i think its very important to, to, to to realize and when you think about this, people sort of say, oh, well, therell be some Climate Change when as the Climate Change losers, as if this all sort of balances in the end, theyre all its all going to be okay because someone in some lose but honestly if we so conceptual as the well lets say lets say there are 100 species in the world just for arguments sake. And 50 of those are winners. Then 50 of those are losers. Weve got to remember that those 50 of those 50 species that are the losers losing means extinct or extinct, you know, and what were left with is a world that is fundamental, much poorer, much more impoverished in the world. We have not what we left as a world with overall half, the species that we started off with and those winners, you know, well, good for them. You know, but but ultimately, we we were left with a vastly impoverished world and. Thats and thats where were heading right now, you know, and thats the sad and thats the thing that we cannot you pussyfoot ourselves, you know around that thats where were going right now. Okay. That comes up to two questions that im going to sort of consolidate from jessica and colleen. Thanks. Talking about how difficult writing this book was. I was thinking all this must break your heart. Im interested in more of your on what people can do about Climate Change and also how to deal with of over overwhelm pessimism, depression and or heartbreak and colleen says, tell us one hopeful thing we can do from your next book. Yeah. So im everyone has to deal with with the of the situation the difficulty the situation in their own way. Right. Im some psychological genius who can tell you how to do that. I think every you know and again in my case its doses of cheap antidepressants sure have helped. You know, theres theres no doubt about that. And, you know, getting regular exercise, all of that stuff that people tell you about dealing with depression. And, you know, the other thing is, is is i mean, you cant get around feeling it, you know, it is thats whats happening. And we deny it and try to tell ourselves, well, oh, we shouldnt be sad about it because we we should be hopeful. You know, this is a big thing in mainstream american society, always got to look for it. And the individual and the hopeful and, you know, forward to blah, blah, blah, you know, theres a lot of that kind of thing. And in particularly, you know, sarbanes and capitalist american society, then and honestly, maybe nothing wrong with being feeling bleak about this whole thing because its a pretty darn bleak situation, right. And maybe thats honest. But that mean you need to do yourself in, you know, become suicidal for ill and that also doesnt mean that you have to sit and do nothing and sort of collapse depression because there are things that people can do in a and i think one of the important things what i sort of get at this next book is that there are actually if you start to and what the next book lays out our sort of give it away now is the writing the thing at the moment. And i want people to read it once its but you know think one of the things you can do is really sort of concentrate on on saving species in your area you know and can be anywhere. And one of the things i do, for example, in my writing off the spec in cape town is i breed extinct in the wild species of african fish in my office. I literally im surrounded by fish tanks full of fish that are now extinct in the wild. Some of which are only held by a handful of people in the world. You know, and i cheap fish shacks. I go to the last place and i buy a few dollars worth of glass and i make my own fish tanks. I stick them together. And ive basically got 20 Species Survival projects happening in my writing office, you know, and an array of these fish, their habitats have been destroyed, rivers have been polluted or dried up due to drought or whatever. Theres all sorts of reasons that disappeared from the wild. But, you know, one day maybe we can release these back in some place theyll survive. And for the moment, im a custodian of species in my office for next to no money. I dont even have to have a yard in which to grow locally native plants. Which is another thing i do in town and i think another very important thing to do is build community. Dont do this on your own. You dont sit there and miserable on your own. Find some other people to do to something. You know, i think really what it is that you do dont just kneejerk into whatever the fashionable thing is you know a distant step together and do stuff with the idea of scaling of making bigger and ultimately you know get involved in politics political change is really really important you know and that needs is but again you can start that in all sorts of unconventional ways. You can start that by Building Local around Species Survival, local communities around, you know, transitioning to your neighborhood to solar panels or whatever it is, you know. But but but have you at a prize, i think a large scale political change. Often i find sort of not environmental types. I mean that in the best way. A lot of the sort of nature people that i know are really genuinely nice people. Theyre theyre people i really like hanging out there. Theyre very good people, but theyre theyre not very hard nosed when it comes to politics and power. And honestly and i say this in the book is like people like this have got to become a lot more comfortable with gaining and using political and economic power because because the folks are there in the fossil fuel companies that are driving all of this stuff. The folks that they have no qualms about that stuff, you know, they will buy all the politicians they can. They will go out and cause wars, even to maintain their you know, theyll sell own families down the river in order maintain their economic, you know, with respect to their financial interest in fossil fuels and so on. Those will stop at nothing. So the people who actually want to stop this disaster need to be very clear about that. You cant just be, oh, i love nature. And isnt it sad whats happening. You have be Strong Enough and powerful enough and yourself to access that political and that financial power or support people who prepared to do that otherwise not going to change. I like that Community Idea though. Maybe like book clubs, people could start clubs or. Yeah, absolutely. You know, all this thing from the grassroots. You dont have to ask permission. You can just do it. Yeah, thats what i was on the internet. You might as well use it for something good. Yeah, exactly. John has a question. He says Climate Change sounds really bad for grass and birds. Great for ticks and trees. I feel Invasive Species are also problematic aspect of it all that you touched on with the ticks i go for walks in the park and many times its an invasive crossing my path when i use google lens. Have you personally across some interesting Invasive Species problems in south africa . Oh hell. Many of them, yeah. I mean, and thats thats really great point. Know in the sense that youre, you know, well, its good for trees and its bad for grass as well. Climate breakdowns are really good for trees and places. Its really bad for trees and. Other places, you know, for example, there are other parts the world where where droughts are really weakening trees and hitting trees really hard. And you know, theres a lot of talk about, say, for example, the amazon basin, the rainforest in the amazon, possibly hit a Tipping Point in which theyre now kind of maybe possibly irreversible turning into savannahs. You due to drop off. So again, your mileage may vary depending on where you are but i think Invasive Species are really worth talking about a because theyre really and by invasive i mean species that have been overtly if not consciously but overtly transported from place to another by people and and and becoming much more common all and are invading if you like areas outside of their historic natural and yes we see we often that Invasive Species benefit from from from global Climate Change because species that become successful species are often these really adaptable generalist to start off with thats how theyre able be you know if you take them from one ecosystem and put them in another, theyre able to thrive. And, and theres a lot of evidence, for example, in north america that a lot of invasive siv introduced species, insects from asia, from europe and so on that have been brought in to, to, to to north america that attack trees here north america are becoming more widespread and the numbers are going up due to rising temperatures. So so, yes, i think talking about invasives is really important in Southern Africa. We have a lot of planted invasives around cape town where i live. We have a particularly australian species, species from australia in general, which a similar miniature come from a similar mediterranean type climate and, then the south western cape and. And these, these plants are definitely in some cases benefiting from changed precipitation patterns, changed rainfall patterns, seen a lot of change in rainfall patterns in south western africa. Theyre also benefiting from things like nitrogen pollution. You know, car exhausts, fear, contain a lot of nitrogen, which the literally on the soil especially erodes and makes the soil a lot more fertile. A lot of Invasive Species really benefit from that our local species in cape town are adapted usually to very, very poor soils and too nutrition actually kills them and and so yeah theres a heck of a lot going on there so much that its very, very, you know were at the early phases of this this this great chance, if you like. I thats important term were just at the beginning of of a lot of these human induced to the to the to the biosphere and we still have a heck of a lot learn the science of the cycle is in many ways still its infancy. I couldnt have written a book like this even ten years ago. Probably it just wasnt enough note and enough sort of really stories, you know, yet. So Invasive Species super important. There is a lot of evidence that in north america these and these treating insects are a from it there are a few papers there already looking at that stuff and yeah keep focusing on it. Its its really its really important you might say we have another arabella whos a young birder. Also has a comment about ecosystem in the hudson river valley. And theres she sees an Invasive Species having a profound effect on the ecosystem there and but theres a big disconnect the people and their willingness to take action and change behaviors so so yeah, people are how do you convince them its hard. Yes. And again, you know, often again, you need to you need to model the behavior yourself. I think its quite important. But but realize that youre making an individual change in your life is not where you need to stop it. Its important. Its only the beginning. Again, youve got to try to figure out ways of modeling behavior change, dealing with people. Its incredibly difficult. You know, as anybody whos ever tried change, anything in society, social you know, if you look at the civil rights movement, the us, for example, it took, you know, decades of really hard work of getting this stuff. But but the plus side that is that, you know, once certain critical points are reached and when things happen, change can happen incredibly quickly. You know, as well and and i use the example in the book as this its a silly and its a simple example, but im old enough to been around. I grew up, you know, without cell phones, they just didnt exist. And then when i was in it, in my early twenties, well, there was this thing, a cell phone and people these, you know, giant bricks of the things but very expensive. And a lot of people thought they were really stupid and who to be able to you know, have people them at any hour of the day not anyway know you wanted to be left alone and then there was this sort of phase. It was around the year 2000, 2000. What where suddenly it seemed that a year everyone had a cell phone. You know, it amazing how rapidly this Technology Just took over and changed everything. You know, about the way we interact about, you know, texting you know, kind of thing. I, i remember the World Without texts i couldnt have imagined the world with. Was we really going to walk around these ridiculous little computers, you know, talking to each other like, instead of actually talking to each other . But now here we are, you know, so in the same way know positive. I lived through the trans the from apartheid south africa to a postapartheid dispensation and im not saying today south africa is perfect certainly isnt it has enormous problems of corruption and institutional failure, things like this. But in the late eighties, especially in a sort of lets say more politically aware family that i came from a lot of there is there is people were like were headed for a civil war and theres no out of this you know the racial conflicts in this are too deep seeded. Theres too much its too much, too pressure building up in the pressure cooker. Were headed for a civil war or were headed for it. Just more extreme totalitarian apartheid state. You know, thats going to just clamp down and were going to live on that for the of our lives. You know that was the thinking the idea that apartheid you know formal apartheid could sort of collapse and a real democracy come into being within the space of a few years was completely to most people. I mean the idea that that could happen was people would laugh at you if. You said that in sort of serious society and, you know, here we are, you know we went from the depths of fundamental list apartheid to having Nelson Mandela as a president and all these racist laws banned within a period of three years, essentially the right once things get going, they happen. Yeah, yeah. Well, why dont we take one more . Its getting a little late now, and i have a from harris some people view Climate Change a physics problem. Why do you think its important to frame it as an ecosystems problem are people even environmentalists disconnect it from nature. Yeah, i think thats a good question. And ill answer it again somewhat indirectly. You know what ive noticed is that there are there sort of climate people. I climate activists or or climate scientist, climate physicists and again, they they do Climate Change as a sort of physics problem or a numbers problem. Right. These are the people that that are very sort of into like these targets, you know, 1. 5 degrees we go the world warming on average more than 1. 5 degrees or whatever it is. And theyre theyre very often considered a sort of policy and law and and this is going to sound than that it means sound, but they often view the world as a kind of abstraction. You know, that were where these numbers sort of play. And then you get the nature people and the nature people are sort of, lets say the Nature Conservation people, they sort of look at the world and they tend to see the complexities of ecosystems more and they sort of see all these different species and sort of how alive world is and all of this kind of stuff and theres actually, even though both these sets of people typically are termed or called environmentalists or, you know, or conservationists, theyre often now and increasingly actually in conflict with each other because the sort of climate types see things in terms of numbers, in terms of like whatever, okay, weve got to reduce the output of co2 by x number of gigatons year and weve got to, you know, transition from fossil fuels, having x percentage of whatever, you know, and all of this they just want to do that as fast as possible right. And these are the folks that are pushing for, say, for example, these colossal commercial solar farms, the american southwest, where they go along and bulldoze 5000 acres, 10,000 acres, 20,000 acres, you know, wildlands and put in these solar panels and these guys all saying this is a brilliant thing because, you know, were going to displace x of fossil fuel burning and get numbers, right . And then you get nature people on the other side going, holy , you guys you just bulldozed 10,000 acres of wild land. Youve just gone in, destroyed like an incredible swath of nature. You, in order to save it, you know, youre destroying nature in order to save. So these people are coming into more and more conflict and theyre not eye to eye. And its because i think often that sort of nature of people dont realize the impacts that Climate Change is happening on natural and about the ecosystems. A lot in nature, people that are made are still very much in denial and want to carry on doing natural as they always have, always done it for the last few decades and without realizing that everything actually changing. And unless we deal with with climate breakdown, a lot of National Parks and conservation areas are going to be lost just because theyre going to those ecosystems are going to get changed of all recognition and shattered and become the portraits. But in these climate, they dont see nature either. So as i theyre quite willing and think its a great thing to trash nature in order to save it. And i think need we need a much more dialog between these folks and im sort of greater because we roll up solar you at a large scale but we need to do it in the right way. You know, we can it out on rooftops, which is, you know, significantly more expensive in the, you know, the bulldozing of acres of, wild land that you might get for free from the government. But it also creates a heck of a lot more jobs, for example. So putting solar panels on roofs does not destroy natural habitat. It creates opportunities for people to to generate power in their own home. And it generated income themselves. But again, the big Utility Companies like it because it literally is taking power away from them. So if they go ahead and bulldoze 10,000 acres and fill that with solar panels, they can monopolize that that power supply and profit from it. And, and, and that, you know, and and still control the system. So with all of these things need to be talking political change and economic change. You know as well as just sort of technology change. And as i say, the nature of people and the climate people need to be acknowledging each others points of view in a much more robust way than. They have sort of a very idea. I didnt even realize that was going on, but it makes perfect sense. Yeah. Well, adam watts, thank so much for your time and your expertise and all youve done and, particularly for your book, the fabulous book, the of eden. Yeah, i have a copy of. Yeah. There we go. Lets all book. Fantastic because there is if people dont buy the book i cant write the next one and it has been years and you know already if you can please go into your local independent bookstore or ask the ask the you know, the staff for book, get it into their heads and if you buy it online, please leave a great review or whichever online you already have enough of those you have a lot of great but i guess never you can never have too many i mean we actually have a shameless shameless promoter of the book at this point. Yeah well its good youve got to be an evangelist for something positive, right. So yeah and we really appreciate all that. Youve talked about here because its a lot of a lot of new information. Yeah. And i really appreciate folks spending the time on this call. Honestly, i know people are very busy and on and its really heartening to know that there folks out there that want to talk about this stuff and interact about the stuff. Its its really great. Great to see all those names on the screen and theyre sending ideas. Youve composting and all kinds of things. So get involved with your