Eat, Poop, Die: Animals as the Arteries of the Biosphere with Joe Roman
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2024
⏱️ 93 minutes
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Summary
(Conversation recorded on June 14th, 2024)
Show Summary:
If plants are considered the lungs of the Earth, cycling CO2 into oxygen for animals to breathe, then animals act as the heart and arteries, spreading nutrients across the Earth to where it's needed most.
This is the metaphor that today's guest, conservation biologist Joe Roman, uses when describing his work studying how animals such as whales, otters, salmon, and midges provide vital ecosystem services, and how destruction of their populations – caused by modern industrial systems – affects the livability of the entire planet.
How has human activity drastically altered the balance and mass of species, and subsequently their ability to spread nutrients across the biosphere? What consequences must we face when biodiversity is diminished and nutrients are no longer dispersed as equally, leaving ecosystems with either extreme concentrations or scarcity of essential minerals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus? If we could "re-wild" diminishing species into their native habitats and aim for zero human-caused extinctions, how would this support a more resilient Earth for future generations of humans and animals alike?
About Joe Roman:
Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and "editor 'n' chef" of eattheinvaders.org. Winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act, Roman has written for The New York Times, Science, Slate, and other publications. Coverage of his research has appeared in the New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, and many other outlets. He is a fellow and writer in residence at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont. His latest book is Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sea otters were almost completely extinguished due to hunting and by the 19th and early 20th century. |
| 0:06.8 | They were only found in one or two remote islands in the Aleutians. |
| 0:12.2 | And one of those was going to be used for the largest underground nuclear tests that the |
| 0:17.3 | U.S. ever conducted. |
| 0:19.2 | This is the early 70s and a local biologist tells them, you guys are going to have a problem. |
| 0:24.6 | You're going to do this underground explosion. |
| 0:27.6 | You have thousands of otters here, and the pressure waves are going to kill them. |
| 0:31.6 | I've got a solution. |
| 0:32.6 | We'll take your otters, and we'll bring them back to the historical areas where they had been found for thousands of years and had been extirpated. |
| 0:41.5 | It's a term we call trophic rewilding. |
| 0:44.9 | Almost within a few years of bringing those sea otters back, the kelp forest came back and fish nurseries for fish came back. |
| 0:53.9 | Eagles started hunting differently. |
| 0:56.0 | You know, so the whole system changed. |
| 0:58.4 | That's, to me, the inspiration of how animals can transform ecosystems if we restore them. |
| 1:07.6 | You're listening to the Great Simplification. |
| 1:10.7 | I'm Nate Hagen's. |
| 1:11.9 | On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. |
| 1:20.7 | By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. |
| 1:34.7 | An essential component of any healthy ecosystem is adequate nutrient availability of vital minerals such as nitrogen and phosphorus. |
| 1:44.8 | Joining me today to unpack how animals uniquely disperse such nutrients across the |
| 1:50.9 | biosphere, as well as the threats to their ongoing ability to do so, is conservation |
| 1:56.4 | biologist Joe Roman. |
... |
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