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This science writer has seen Earth’s most amazing places. Here’s what she’s learned.
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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today the Pulitzer Prize winning science writer reflects on what she's learned about our changing planet. Elizabeth Kolbert knows that in order to tell the story of our changing planet and the scientists who study it, you need to experience it firsthand.
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B
I've gotten to see some of the most ecologically, you know, spectacular places on our planet. The Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, the cloud forest in the Andes. Just amazing places.
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A
She's been doing this very hands on kind of science writing for the New Yorker for more than 25 years and she manages to capture both this awestruck attitude toward the world and the unsettling truth about what humans are doing to it.
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B
Our science is so marvelous and miraculous and we can really see into cells and we can see into DNA, we can see beyond cells, you know, to molecules and atoms. And at the same time we are just sort of willy nilly wrecking a lot of the planet.
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A
Elizabeth explores that tension in her new book, Life on A Little Known Dispatches from a Changing World. It's a collection of some of her essays that she's written over the years where she introduces us to intrepid researchers expl exploring pressing questions like could AI help us communicate with sperm whales? And do bodies of water have legal rights? We started by talking about one of the first essays in her book which looks at the so called insect apocalypse and an entomologist who's racing to document as many caterpillar species as possible before they disappear.
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B
So the entomologist is named David Wagner and He teaches at UConn and, and he is certainly the foremost expert on caterpillars in the US and probably one of the experts of caterpillars in the world. And a caterpillar is just the sort of larval state of a moth or a butterfly. That's the definition of a caterpillar. And there are lots and lots and lots of them in the world and it's very hard to catalog them all. But David is intent on trying to catalog all of them in the US and he sort of is racing around the country to try to do that because a lot of them, he's very worried that some of them will, you know, wink out before they're even have been documented. And I spent a very memorable, I guess about 10 days with him on the road in the mountains of southern Texas and we would just race around and whenever David saw an interesting plant, because caterpillars can be very specialized, you may only find them on One plant, he would get out there with something called a beading sheet, which is just this sort of nylon. It looks like a kite. And you kind of whack the bush and whatever's in it falls into it, which includes the caterpillars. And then you have to sort of pick through them. And whenever he found something interesting, he would stick it in what looked like a little pill bottle. Until we were sort of traveling around Texas with this little menagerie that could fit into a shoebox, basically, but had, you know, dozens of species in it, some of which turned out to be completely new to science. And that was really quite a wonderful experience.
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A
Wow. I mean, the way that he describes it, too, is like, yeah, I found new species in my backyard. So of course I can buy this idea that there are so many yet to be discover, yet to be named, yet to be cataloged. Species in every corner, it seems like, of the world.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I think if you want to discover a new species, you should look for an insect, because insects are by far the most numerous creatures on the planet. And insects in general are just phenomenally important. They decompose, they pollinate, they spread seeds. I mean, without them, ecosystems would just crash. And caterpillars are really crucial. Many birds rely on caterpillars as a big source of nutrition for their chicks. So a lot of bird species can't really fledge chicks without a lot of caterpillars around. And caterpillars do a lot to sort of transform plants basically into protein. You know, they're sort of like the cows for the rest of the species on Earth. So insects are really crucial. They're at the bottom of a lot of food chains, and we really, really need to be paying a lot more attention to what's happening to insects. And a lot of the news that's coming out of the insect world, and that's one of the reasons Dave is really racing, is not good.
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A
This kind of work can feel so like drop in a bucket in a way. Right. Like, this is. This is a person, this David, this entomologist, is contributing something to the scientific record that captures just this brief blink in time and is trust that that contribution will lead to this wider body of work that will ultimately help us all understand our planet better. I don't know, It's. There's something very beautiful about that and very noble about that kind of work.
- [05:15]
B
Well, I'll tell you one little anecdote. You know, he photographs all these caterpillars, so he collects them, and if he Thinks they're interesting and potentially, you know, new. And he hasn't photographed them before. He very elaborately photographs them, and they're so tiny that it looks like he's photographing nothing, you know, when you. When you're watching him. But he said to me, I was watching him photograph some, you know, quite beautiful caterpillar when it' looked at under magnification. And he said to me, I want to capture them. I want people to make eye contact. So when he puts a picture of the caterpillar in a book, one of these huge catalogs of all the caterpillars in North America, I want people to be able to make eye contact with them, which is quite wonderful when you think about, you know, eye contact with a caterpillar. And the other sort of wonderful irony here is that caterpillars don't see very well, so they're not really seeing you. But he thought that it would be really important that people have that sort of emotional connection with the caterpillar.
- [06:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's go from very tiny, tiny creatures to huge, huge ones. Another essay early in the book is about sperm whales and really interesting efforts underway that have been underway now for a couple of years to try to decode sperm whale communication using AI. It sounds like you got out on the boat with these researchers and talked to them a lot about their work. Tell us a little bit about what they're working on, what your understanding is of it. It sounds fascinating.
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B
Yeah, sure. So that is a project. It's called Project seti. And the allusion to, you know, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is purposeful. But what they're looking for is cetacean intelligence. And we know that whales are super intelligent. Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet, way, way bigger than ours. They're very big creatures, of course, sort of the size of a school bus. And they communicate with these clicks. They give out these sort of streams of clicks. And the clicks are organized. They have a structure to them. They're sort of a little bit like Morse code, and they seem to exchange them like a conversation. And the question is, what are they saying? And the idea here is that, you know, just as a large language model, you know, chatgpt, quote unquote, learned English by absorbing huge amounts of text, basically the whole web. If you fed a large language model, a lot of these clicks, you could get it to, quote, unquote, understand whale. You know, I sort of joke that it's click GPT. And, you know, it raises a Lot of super interesting questions because as one of the computer scientists who was involved in the project told me, you know, it is possible that you could come up with one of these models that could anticipate what the whales are going to say, that could, in a sense, communicate with the whales, but you as a human wouldn't know what was going on, what exactly you're communicating. Yes, right, exactly. So one of the big challenges of the project is to try to link certain sequences of clicks to actions like, did that mean, let's go? So that's a big challenge because you've got to then also not just tape the whale, but then you have to also capture their movements and what they're doing, and that becomes more complicated. But one thing I will also just mention that I should have mentioned earlier was just by chance, I was out on the boat, you know, where we were tracking these sperm whales off the island of Dominica, and we saw a whale being born, a whale calf being born, which was just the most amazing sight. There was suddenly this streak of red, huge sort of puddle, unfurling puddle of red in the water, and no one knew what was going on, were they being attacked? And then it became clear that a whale calf had just been born, which was just astonishing. It's not really clear that anyone had ever seen that before.
- [09:02]
A
It's incredible. And the way you describe the scene in the essays, the scientists around you, it's really fun to hear their reaction, actually. Right. Because they're so exc. They're so amazed. What does this project, which is still ongoing and like you said, still has so much to be worked out. What does it reveal to you about the limits of human understanding, really, of the natural world, or about the way even that technology is shaping or has the potential to shape that understanding, you.
- [09:32]
B
Know, the limits of human understanding and how we regard other species? I think one of the. The goals of the project really is to show. Demonstrate that other species are extremely sophisticated. There's been this sort of tendency, I talk about that in the piece as well, to sort of restrict language. Language is something only people have, and that's really unclear. It's very, very clear that many species have very sophisticated communication systems. And our attempts to sort of reserve language for ourselves show this sort of very human centric view of the world. We live on a planet with creatures that quite possibly have just as sophisticated communication systems as we do. We just don't have access to them. And using AI is interesting because, of course, you're using a machine, you know, to mediate that relationship. But I think that the. The founder of the project, who's another David, David Gruber, would say that this is an effort to show that we can use technology in a thoughtful, humane way. But they're going to face a lot of interesting questions if they do decode anything, of how much to intrude into these whales communications. And those are all questions for the future, but they're also very, very interesting questions.
- [10:58]
A
Let's talk about another essay. This is from 2022. It is the essay about whether rivers, forests and ecosystems should have legal rights. This is such a fascinating argument. You have been writing about this in the New Yorker for some time now, and whenever you have written a piece about this, I've always clicked. I find it really, really interesting myself. What intrigues you about this movement to advocate for the legal rights of bodies of water and forests and things like this, and what kinds of questions does it raise for you?
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B
That was a really fun story to do, too. It was a law that was passed in Florida, of all places, that gave rights to bodies of water. And it was very, very quickly squelched was passed in a county in Florida, very quickly squelched by the Florida state legislature. But in the meantime, in that brief window, some bodies of water that I visited actually filed suit for their. What they claimed was, you know, an existential threat from a big development. And I think that the question that this whole rights of nature, and we're not really talking about animal rights here now, we're talking about sort of inanimate, or it could be animate, it could be a forest, but it could also be a lake or a river is to what entities do we grant not just rights, but the respect of their continued existence? And I think that it strikes people as radical when you first mention it, but then when they start to think about it, they're like, yeah, that makes sense. And when you think about the extension of rights over the course of human history to different groups and now increasingly to animals, sentient animals, do we sort of have the capacity to extend that to inanimate nature? And I should say that it is an idea that was first proposed quite a while ago by a law professor named Christopher Stone, who wrote a wonderful law review article called Do Trees have Standing? And all of these sort of efforts can be traced back to this one law review article. But it has been picked up in many places. So in New Zealand, there are rivers that are considered to have rights. And in, in Ecuador, the Constitution, they wrote a new constitution and that included a Provision of the rights of nature. Now, how much that has actually been respected is a big, open question right now. But I think that, as that original law review paper pointed out, you know, unless you have some standing, some regard for the natural entity as it is, then everything gets litigated through a human perspective. How did it harm humans? And there's no redress for the natural world. And that, you could argue, is sort of why we're in the mess that we're in, because we're always fighting over our own interests and we're not really taking into account this world upon which we depend and of which we are only one part.
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A
Well, several of these essays touch on the question of whether it is possible for us to innovate our way out of the climate crisis. Right. The use of technology is making me think of the rise in how people are thinking about solutions. One of the essays that you wrote specifically looks at carbon dioxide removal. This feels like an urgent conversation. I know that many experts in this field have skepticism toward carbon removal as a realistic solution. What are your thoughts on it? How does it. How does it fit to you in the conversation about solutions?
- [14:46]
B
You know, carbon dioxide removal is a. Is a somewhat complicated issue. I don't want to go honestly too far down the, you know, tech chemistry rabbit hole here or whatever, but, you know, it's definitely doable. You can suck carbon out of the air. The problem is it takes a lot of energy. So I think that just about anyone these days would say, well, if you're using fossil fuel energy to do it, it makes no sense because you're releasing a lot of carbon to suck out carbon, and the kinetics there don't work. So you have to imagine that you're going to have a lot of excess clean energy that you could then use to remove some of the carbon that we've put up there. And I think that what this all shows is, first of all, you need a really coherent set of goals and policies if you're going to get from A to B. I think one of the themes that does come out in the book in terms of people looking at solutions or ways to mitigate climate change is you need consistency. And we have not had that. And in terms of carbon capture, I think if we had, you know, coherent policies that encouraged that, then we would find out what makes sense, what is economically and energetically viable. And there are a lot of things that we do as humans that are very hard to decarbonize. And I think that people would say at some point in the day. Even if you drive emissions down very far, you probably need some form of carbon removal to offset, for example, concrete. It's really, really hard to get the carbon out of concrete production. That's just one example. But we are not really driving down emissions. Emissions are continuing to grow. So the question of carbon dioxide removal in that context is somewhat different. But the other point that people would make is this is a long term effort. This problem is not going away. That's one point I would like to make to people. It is not going away. So all of these things that require a 10, 20 year research effort, we should be pouring resources into right now.
- [16:51]
A
You write one of your essays in the book is on the Paris Agreement. That was the agreement that committed countries at the time to limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We have already surpassed that. How do you make sense of things that have happened in the decades since the Paris Agreement was first formulated and agreed upon?
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B
Well, I think that was, you know, on this roller coaster ride of the last, let's say, two decades, that was a high point where something was salvaged. Things were the sort of international framework seemed to be sagging, I guess you'd say. And something was salvaged out of that by saying, you know, it's very hard to get countries to commit to something that they don't think is in their own self interest. So the idea behind the Paris Agreement of 2015 was bring to the table what you think you can do, what is in your national interest. And I think that that salvaged a bad situation. Now 10 years on, countries are supposed to be increasing their ambition as the cost of a lot of these clean energy technologies plummets as we learn more about the dangers of climate change. And that part really hasn't happened. In fact, in the us, we have removed ourselves from the Paris Agreement, really the only country to do that in the world.
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A
So, you know, under President Trump.
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B
Under President Trump, yes, exactly. And that is a huge thumbing your nose at the global community. And I don't think it's going to wear well when we look back at this moment.
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A
Say a little bit more about that. You know, I think we're in an interesting time politically in this country where there's disagreement about what the US's role should be on the global stage in so many different ways, but certainly in the climate conversation. Right. And as we've seen, this current administration has pulled back the US role a lot. Where do you think we are in this conversation as a country as a whole right now?
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B
Well, I think that we saw a big surge of interest and activity and concern that sort of culminated in 2022 in an actual piece of legislation, the first piece of legislation that really was aimed addressing climate change in the US which was given the name the Inflation Reduction act, but which was really aimed at spurring clean energy development and deployment. And that is being now completely dismantled. Has been completely dismantled. And I think that the response from a lot of quarters, unfortunately, has been to just say, well, sort of throw up your hands. What are we going to do? So I think that there's this sort of sense of tremendous disappointment among those people who really fought for that bill and fought for action. And I don't know how you recover from that. You know, I think you can have very legitimate disagreements about what policies should be, what the responsibilities of the US Are, et cetera, but you cannot have disagreements about whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That's something that, you know, has been understood for, we're getting on almost two centuries now. It's just a fundamental geophysical fact. It is why we're all here. If we didn't have greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this planet would basically be frozen. So it's not worth debating. We are also seeing exactly what climate scientists predicted literally 50 years ago. We're seeing exactly that play out right now. And the forecasts, if we continue on our merry way, are quite dire. We have a lot of cities in the US that are based basically at sea level and sea level rise is going to be a huge issue no matter what we do from now on. Sea levels are going to keep rising for hundreds of years. But if you start really rapidly melting the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, you're going to literally drown cities like Miami, Tampa, even New York, low lying coastal cities and they're already experiencing a lot of flooding. So the idea that we are still having this, you know, I'm going to go out, no, not very far on a limb and say, insane argument over whether climate change is real. That's just troglodytic.
- [21:14]
A
Yeah, I think people, people want there to be some nice neat, tied with a bow thing at the end a lot of the time. I'm sure you are probably really sick of being asked the question of like, so what's the solution? Right. How do we solve this? How do we get out of all. So I'm going to ask you that exact question, but maybe in a different way.
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B
Okay, good.
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A
Which is what is the way to get to the solution? Like what actions do you want to see that you think would just move us closer toward finding solutions.
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B
Well, I think that everyone who has looked at this problem would kind of agree. You need to incentivize the kinds of actions and research that will decarbonize the economy. Now, that's a huge task and it's not going to be one thing. There's no one solution to climate change. But the incentives now are really wrong. We don't charge you anything to just dump CO2 into the air. And so why wouldn't you? If you're a power plant or if you're an oil refinery, why wouldn't you? And until we sort of align the incentives with the public good, I don't think we are going to get where we need to go. But if we were to align those incentives, I think that there could be tremendous progress because people are very smart and they are very clever. And if you incentivize them to find solutions, then I don't want to guarantee that they would. But we would certainly make progress in that direction.
- [22:53]
A
As we enter this new year, what do you want people to be thinking about in their relationship with the planet? What it means to live responsibly right now in these times?
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B
Well, I do want them to be thinking and I do urge everyone, you know, go out, take a walk, look around, you know, wherever you are.
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A
Discover a new caterpillar space.
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B
Exactly. There is something beautiful and wonderful and fascinating. You know, even if it's just in, honestly, an overgrown lot nearby, there's probably some really interesting urban wildlife there. And pay attention and you will be rewarded for that.
- [23:34]
A
Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time. It was really nice to talk with you.
- [23:37]
B
Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you.
- [23:43]
A
You can find Life on a Little Known Planet by Elizabeth Colbert on Apple Books. We'll link to it on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.