Hi everyone, it's Begna Chakrabardi, host of On Point, and I've got a special first person episode here for you.

On today's main show, we talked about the fact that the human population on planet Earth reached 8 billion people

late last year, and how we're headed for 2 billion more by the year 2100.

So we talked about what that means for all of us, and for the planet, and all the other living things on it.

And as part of the hour, we spoke with Elizabeth Hadley, she's a professor of biology at Stanford University,

and director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in California Santa Cruz Mountains.

For four decades, she's been an eyewitness to the astounding changes in the plant and animal kingdoms caused by human beings.

Remember all those insects you used to have on your windshield when you drove across the west?

Gosh, they're not there anymore. Why?

So I did a lot of working-elst on driving back and forth from either here or Berkeley, wherever I was living at the time,

and sometimes I would have to stop more frequently to clean my windshield than I did to fill up with gas.

And no more. I can drive across the country, which I just did, by the way, and not clean my windshield.

And that's horrifying to me.

So in my 40-some years of doing this, I have seen fewer large-game animals like rhinos, like grizzly bears, like big horn sheep, like whales.

I have seen fewer fish in the sea, and the fish that I have caught, I like to fly fish, the fish that I had personally handled in some of these amazing streams in the American West,

are smaller and harder to find.

Why do we have a loss of almost 70% of the wild animal populations in the world?

Why is this happening? And the bottom line is that there are so many people, and we are consuming so much of the biomass of the planet.

We're kind of harboring it for ourselves and for our domesticated animals.

I learned this from a farmer. If you look at a ranch where there's a lot of cow patties, you know they're drugging their animals big time.

And those cow patties are going to stay there for a long time, because they're basically sterilizing their soil.

If you look at another ranch where they're not applying so many of those pesticides, there's not as many cow patties. And it's because the dung beetles and the worms and everything that kind of helps decompose is working at it.

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