← Rewilding Earth Podcast
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- [00:11]
Alan Weissman
Just by being born on this planet, we've redefined the concept of original sin. We all exhale carbon dioxide. We all are addicted to food. We all are addicted to energy. And yet we have to use these things to fuel us, to try to bring the Earth into balance with our own species. But the bottom line is that if we fail to do that, we'll go extinct. Every species eventually does, just like everybody eventually dies. It's just that I don't think either you or I or anybody listening to this is quite ready for our species to go extinct anytime soon. As I've done in other books, I also portray some really valiant and imaginative and stubborn artists in this book who are doing their best to create art that will inspire us to live much better and to establish the kind of cooperation and exhilarated fascination and reverence for this planet that we are privileged to live on, to hold onto it a little longer.
- [01:48]
Jack
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. With books like the best selling the World Without Us, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Countdown, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, environmental journalist Alan Wiseman has established himself as one of the most prophetic voices on humanity's relationship to the Earth. For his latest, Hope Dies Last, he returns with a book 10 years in the making, a study of what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet's existential crisis. Weissman traveled the globe witnessing climate upheaval and other devastations from the flooding Marshall Islands to revived wetlands in Iraq, to the Netherlands, to Mexico, Bangladesh and the Korean dmz to cities and coastlines in the Americas and beyond. He's encountered the best of humanity, battling heat, hunger, rising tides, and imperiled wildlife. Alan, thank you so much. It's a great honor to have you here on the Rewilding Earth podcast.
- [03:00]
Alan Weissman
It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
- [03:04]
Jack
It's 2025 and you've been writing about this for quite some time now. And for you to come out with a book called Hope Dies Last, I want to just check in with you. How are you feeling about hope these days? Did you know in 2025 that you would still be writing about some of these things?
- [03:22]
Alan Weissman
Overall, I have realized for a long time that the battle between the natural environment and our species, I'll put this diplomatically too successful presence on this planet, which has tipped the balance. This was going to take some time to readjust. One way or another, it's going to be readjusted eventually. Either we will learn to manage it gracefully or nature's just going to do it to us. And right now we're seeing a combination of both things happening. All that said, do I have any hope or. I take pains in this book to define what hope means. And for one, when I set out to do this book, it came about as the culmination of about a year's discussion with my editor, who was the editor of my last two books, the World Without Us and Countdown, about what my next book should be. How should we frame it? We certainly knew what the big issues were, the big global issues were that concerned me and that I couldn't really get away from. At the end of our discussions, usually my editor would say to me, man, do you think there's any hope left? And finally we realized that was probably the frame. Given all that we know that's going on, what are the realistic hopes that we have to move forward and to get the human race through this, what's appearing to be a bottleneck century, and come out the other side with a viable future? What I learned from the people who I portray in this book, I went to about a dozen countries, including many trips in our own. People from all walks of life, just this great variety from indigenous elders through the military, with plasma physicists in between, and just a real interesting assortment of human beings who I encountered. But what I learned from them is that realistic hope is not just sitting around and wishing and hoping that something will happen, something good, but it's a verb. You go out there and you make things happen. Several of the people who I describe in this book did things that others were convinced were just impossible. And I found the word impossible to be missing from their vocabularies. They actually went out to make things happen. And some of the things that they've made happen are miraculous. But again, it's not waiting around for miracles, it's making them happen yourself. So that, to me, is the definition of hope. And I found a lot of it out there because I found people who. They were really surprising. Their creativity, their imagination, and their stubborn relentlessness was just constantly impressive. And they did some things that I really wouldn't have expected and yet were better off for the fact that they have done them.
- [07:11]
Jack
There seemed to be a thread among many of your stories of people thinking so far out of the box. The inventiveness that people, the stories that you told, it's getting. They're getting bolder, they're getting more creative, as humanity seems to not be turning the ship as fast as any of us would like. The people that you're talking to are doing some pretty bold things. Does it strike you that people are moving in directions that you wouldn't really expect?
- [07:42]
Alan Weissman
I think that people are rising to the occasion. We have right now a very serious situation on the planet. I define it as four different existential crises that are all occurring at the same time. One is that we've got climate that has been unleashed from where it might have been had we not industrialized and dug up a lot of energy that was inside of carbon molecules that nature didn't need to run her cycle, so she just buried them. We dug them up and burned them all and or close to all of them in 200 years. And it's jet propelled our society. We do all these wonderful things. Here you and I are talking to each other across a few thousand miles through some fascinating electronics. The fuel for this has been, when you burn it, it creates exhaust. And that exhaust has been invisibly collecting overhead. And the metaphor of greenhouse is so apt because it's not letting heat escape and it's causing positive feedback loops. The heat bounces back into the soil, that activates soil microbes, which then release things like nitrous oxide, which causes more greenhouse gas, et cetera, et cetera. So we've got that problem. We've got the problem that rewilding is taken on head on the fact that we are perpetrating a mass extinction event right now. Again, through our own successes, we've managed to become really adept at lowering infant mortality and extending our lifespans through modern medicine, of which I am a beneficiary. So I'm not complaining about that because modern medicine and the fact that many more babies survive now, to me, are good things. But they are not the principal cause of why our population has grown so fast. And I'll get to that in a moment. But the fact that we are 8 billion people right now means that we are pushing other species off the edge of the planet, so to speak. Nearly half the terrestrial unfrozen Earth now is dedicated to feeding ourselves or our livestock, which then feed ourselves. And so much so that the total of mammalian mass on this planet, 4% of it is wildlife, the rest of it is us or our livestock. And that's ultimately to my mind, an untenable situation. The third and the fourth existential crises, I describe them in the book as being so intertwined they're almost indistinguishable. And I've already alluded to it, we have become so numerous not Just through modern medicine, but the fact that we learned how to basically artificially stimulate plants that we have selected to eat, stimulate them by, instead of depending on the amount of nitrogen nutrients that naturally exist in soils, we've learned how to pull them out of the atmosphere and chemically slather them on the ground. And since there's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere, nearly three quarters of the atmosphere is nitrogen. And it's an inert gas that we don't depend on for breathing. There's an unlimited amount of it. The problem is though, is that pulling it out of the atmosphere, turning it into nitrogen, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, accounts for a tremendous amount of fuel expended. It's natural gas is the feedstock. And we burn a lot of it and give off a lot of carbon to produce the fertilizer. Then when we apply it, because a lot of it ends up running off downstream, we over apply it and then more of it runs off downstream. And it creates real messes at the mouths of our big rivers, creating huge dead spots at the mouth of the Mississippi or the mouth of the Nile or the mouth of the Congo or the mouth of the Amazon. It also evaporates into the air. It's now calculated that more greenhouse gases float away from our fields that are treated with nitrogen fertilizer in the form of greenhouse gases. Then it's caused by all commercial aircraft. We've force fed our food supply with chemistry. That's how we stay alive. And we're caught in a conundrum because if we pulled out completely right now, I'm not sure that naturally we'd be able to support the number of human beings that we have. If we all farmed organically, that would be very difficult. Now it is pointed out that if we stopped eating meat and we fed all those grains to ourself instead of 75% of them in the United States alone to animals that we then eat, maybe we could survive. That would be wonderful if we did that. But as Michael Pollan pointed out in just the title of his book, the Omnivore's Dilemma, it's probably not going to happen. We are omnivorous creatures. And even though many of us, myself included, stopped eating meat a long time ago, there's still the fact is that the more people make enough money to afford meat, the more they're going to eat it. So we've got all those problems facing us. That said, I was able to find in research in this book so many people who are standing up to those existential problems. And refusing to quit finding us a way to get through them. I know I've just spoken for a bit here, but since you mentioned Molly, John, I just want to refer to example for your listeners benefits. Molly is someone who, whether you know her name or not, you're probably already familiar with her because you either have eaten the fruits of her labor as a preeminent plant breeder or you're growing them yourself in your garden. Hannah's choice cantaloupe is one of her inventions. And bush delicata squash, we raise that right here in our own garden. And yet Molly finally decided that even though she could have rested on her laurels as a plant breeder, that the world had reached its limits of how far we can go by plowing more forests into farmlands or using chemistry to grow enough food for all of us. And she started looking at a way of, as she terms it, not farming macrobes, but microbes. And she found that darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the Department of the Defense, is really the most forward looking part of the US Government, ironically. And yet it makes sense. Their mission is to be thinking about what security concerns are going to be for The United States 50 years out in the future and to plan accordingly. And they've got this wonderful philosophy and a budget to match to fund big projects with a high degree of probability of failure in hopes that some things are going to work out famously, and some of them certainly have. From Teflon to the Internet to GPS to Siri, they have really had a lot of life changing successes. So what she is trying to do is come up with a way of using microbes, those fermentable little things that suddenly can do much bigger things like grow a loaf of bread in your oven. Or potentially what DARPA asked her to do is how do you feed a platoon of robust soldiers in the middle of nowhere? Give them a way to eat, produce food wherever they are, not depending on supply lines. So the microbes that she's contracted several universities and institutions and private companies to try to produce would combine with atmospheric nitrogen, hydrogen, and that excess CO2 that we have loaded into the atmosphere to turn it into something nutritious. And this is also part of the contract that darpens this on delicious as well. So the first step would be saving that platoon, giving them 300 or 3,600 calories apiece per day by pulling it out of thin air. The second would be do that for or at least survival level for 100 refugees that they would Discover. But in Mali's vision, this is a way that we could produce food wherever we are. We're not dependent on distant fields. The phrase that she coined for it is not agriculture, but ubiquiculture. Now, that is thinking bold and that is thinking out of the box. And if it takes the Department of Defense fence to do it, so be it. Let's put some of those DOD tax dollars to good use.
- [18:33]
Jack
And I like that they even considered the idea after we invented MREs, that these meals be delicious, just a little extra nice, really.
- [18:44]
Alan Weissman
You know, soldiers just detest those meals, those ready meals that they carry into the field.
- [18:51]
Jack
I just saw, and I don't know if it's through the research for this interview or somewhere else, but I just saw a photo of a guy holding an mre and the caption was, there's more energy in the packaging holding the mre, the food inside, than there is in the food.
- [19:07]
Alan Weissman
Yeah, you actually read it in my book. Okay.
- [19:10]
Jack
It's striking to me. I could see a slightly science fictiony type title of a book called Carbon Eaters, the idea that we would turn around and help solve one big problem, actually by solving two big problems. And yeah, I also am really struck by. We had a program at the Rewilding Institute that we were partnering with Project Coyote and Half Earth called Heartland Rewilding. And in the Midwest, you speak a lot about what we've done with the land and how much agriculture has affected pretty much everything to a bigger degree than other people would assume, like jets, jet flight, other things. And when you fly, they call this flyover country for a reason. You can see that there's just. It's just all crops everywhere. And the heart of our Heartland program was Iowa, because you couldn't really get more hopeful or daring or defiant than thinking that you could tackle rewilding and wildlands recovery in a state that's almost wall to wall agriculture and also Indiana and other states. But Iowa is really the poster child for that and learning how we can reconnect things, the Mississippi watershed, how animals who are still there still find ways to move and are telling us that they want to connect from one core to another. And so I get really excited when I hear about alternative forms of the ways we might feed ourselves. Super big paradigm change, but nonetheless the moment calls for it because I get greedy. And I think, what kind of agricultural land, especially like on steep slopes or in floodplains, at least we could start there, can we take out of production? Because of some of these advancements and the Work that Molly and others are doing. That's where I found a lot of hope in that story. I got very. I just looked forward and thought, ooh, what if? What if we can pull that off?
- [21:06]
Alan Weissman
There's another chapter of my book in which I look at farming the sea. There are something like 12,500 species of seaweed out there that are all edible. And a lot of them have just terrific quantities of like omega 3s and things like that. Partly these are defenses that they have built up because seaweed is floating out there all by itself. And in order to not get completely consumed by predators, it's had to learn how to con to protect itself. And those are things that have great nutritional value for ourselves. Can this be done in such a way to sustainably harvest the seas? Can we domesticate seaweed and grow even more of it without causing some other kind of imbalance the way that we have done on the land? Can we develop enough taste that it pushes to the center of our plate rather than be a garnish the way that seaweed is right now in a sushi bar? Don't know the answers to all of these things, but there are people who are out there trying. And in the meantime, the seaweed people are finding out that seaweed is a terrific biostimulant on the land. So it's a fertilizer replacement that is having a great deal of success. That still means that we're going to be growing food on land, but probably we'll always grow some food on the land. What we're going to need is a whole different series of solutions, a real mosaic of things to be able to make it into the future. And it was heartening to find people doing so many things. I followed another company that is just simply trying to eliminate nitrogen fertilizer again by using microbes. Coming up with a microbial coating for grain crops where, say you plant kernel of corn that's been coated in this microbial brew that as it sprouts, these microbes will colonize the roots and they will basically act very much the the way that nitrogen fixing bacteria that are naturally hosted on the roots of legumes or beans, they would turn grain crops into something that would be imitating that. And so far they've had some great success in eliminating at least 40% of the needed nitrogen in fields. So I think because nitrogen fertilizer is such an enormous pollutant, we have to keep aiming for full replacement. But it's also. Here's the reality check here. When we talk about how fossil fuels rule the world's economy. Fertilizer is one of the biggest parts of that. It's a huge crop. And by the way, the biggest producer of fertilizer in the world is Russia. So these are some complex and formidable problems. And yet, once again, I just met all these people who are taking on portions of these problems and trying to find us away. It was a pretty uplifting experience.
- [24:35]
Jack
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Did you know we also publish in insightful and inspirational content from leading Rewilding scholars, poets, artists and organizers from around the world? You can visit rewilding.org and sign up for our weekly digest to receive brilliant, fresh insights on everything Rewilding. You'll find over a decade of articles and news from the front lines of Wildlands protection and all kinds of restoration efforts. Check us out@rewilding.org and don't forget to share it with friends. There's a dialogue that you wrote about the scientists at the Hawksbill Turtle Nest and I really loved it. I made a note about it because I wanted to ask you about it. It's just a conversation between the scientists at the conference and it feels like a movie. It really feels like a movie. You're writing about real life challenges and tragedies and they're being witnessed firsthand by people doing their best to keep going despite it all. I was just like, man, the way this reads and the conversations they're having in these rooms as they're doing exercises to get them thinking really hard about out of the box solutions. And then I remember another scene where Katie Arkema came in with the Natural Capital Project and a lot of those same scientists were in the room really seriously struggling with doubt and resignation as they were getting going and going over all the stats. And I have a feeling that people go away and come back together and ask each other what you found in your particular study that you do. And the stats are always worse. And then Katie coming in and breathing some guarded hope into the room and lifting people's spirits a bit. And it's just they're working at the front lines. I wonder what it's like being in the room watching all these ups and downs on all this discovery and at the end of the day they all come to play. They never quit, despite the doubt and the things they whisper to each other about, are we going to make it?
- [26:30]
Alan Weissman
You just restated the most important message of this book. These people just don't quit. That's the message you keep going. If you see that there's no hope. You go out there until you create some. The scene that you were describing. Actually, it's set in two different countries. I followed a team of scientists from the World Wildlife foundation from the Natural Capital Project, which was formed at Stanford University. It's a project that's been going now for over a decade about basically how to convince the powers that be they political or economic, that it is in their vested interest to preserve nature because of all the benefits that nature gives them, that they would deeply miss or probably fatally miss if nature were to disappear on them. And the setting for all this was the Mesoamerican Reef, which, after the great Australian Barrier Reef, is the second longest reef on Earth. It starts on the top of the Yucatan Peninsula, and then it's a Z shape. It dips down on the other side of that peninsula, past Belize, through Belize, and Guatemala's got a small portion of coastline, and then it becomes horizontal again across the northern coast of Honduras. And I was with these scientists and many different local reserve managers, coastal managers, coral reef experts, government officials, all kinds of people who are trying to preserve coastal ecology and to deal with warming and rising seas. How are they going to preserve the wildlife? How are they going to preserve the natural protections like the reefs, the sand dunes, the mangroves, anything that protects the coastline? And oftentimes, besides global warming, we have the perennial assault by commercialization, the selling of the coastline for recreational purposes or for private little beach houses. It's a really difficult mix. And it was great to see these people come together and workshop ideas of how they might be able to make their communities more resilient by pinpointing things that are absolutely essential and preserving them and then helping them spread. For example, helping the amount of sand spread along coastlines and beaches rather than all be eroded away, which is what happens when you put up breakwaters. One of the interesting moments in my research down there was that two of the coastal managers in Mexico. The meetings in Mexico were in the city of Merida. But we took a drive to the coastline, and at one point it was almost imperceptible. But they pointed out to me that we went over very gentle ridge line and then descended to the coast. That ridge line, if you were to look at it from above, from a satellite, you would see it's part of a big semicircle, and we were descending into the crater that the Chicxulub asteroid hit the Earth, or where it hit the earth 67 million years ago and created the last major extinction event, the one that oft the dinosaurs. In fact, at one point we grabbed lunch in the village of Chicxulub and there's a little monument there. It's basically in the shape of a dinosaur bone. And this asteroid crashed here, ending the age of reptiles, but giving an opportunity for a rather minor character in those 160 million years of reptilian rule to now have this big, wide open, empty niche to fill. And those were mammals at the time. They were just these little shrew like creatures, but they evolved into you and me. It definitely gave me pause to think about the immense symbolism of the place where I was, where these all these scientists and coastal wildlife refuge people, like the women who ran that turtle sanctuary that you mentioned before, where all of them were trying to hold on to enough nature to keep this enterprise, including the human enterprise, going. It was really moving, but it was also a reminder that no matter how bad things get, and things were horrific after that asteroid hit, the Earth was a firestorm for a long time and then it just died down into an ashen wilderness where 75% of all living things were gone. But the ones that came back slowly gave us the world that we know and love and we're trying to hold on to. So ultimately, yeah, that chapter ends with uncertainty. We're standing in a place on the Honduran Guatemalan border where a village is being washed away by rising seas and intensifying storms. And people are basically huddled around a building on stilts that they call Noah's Ark. You can't get more symbolic than that. And yet still they are doing their best to preserve the turtle and the jaguar habitat that is at the mouth of the river that we're standing alongside.
- [33:00]
Jack
You described very clearly the difference between letting nature handle storm surge as opposed to what we think is best is putting up huge concrete barriers. But how do you get through to people? We could be answering the same question, the same way about mangroves and the way they've built on Florida's coastline. In each successive hurricane, more and more houses are destroyed. But ludicrously, more and more developers come right back in to build houses. Right where the ones that got washed away. Is anyone breaking through on that front? All the disasters are pointing to the fact that those things don't work and we should do something else. But is the developed world dug in so deeply that they're just not listening?
- [33:44]
Alan Weissman
2 replies to that. One of them very quick and the other one, I want to go into a little bit more detail. The quick one is that Insurance companies are responding. One of the reasons I cite this in something else that I wrote, one of the reasons that things get rebuilt where they've already been demolished or flooded is that either insurance policies are written in such a way that you have to replace a house that you lost. I saw this in Paradise, California, one place I went while I was researching this book. They had to rebuild right there in the forest because the insurance policy wouldn't let them build a new house somewhere else safer. Another example, and this is in a town, I can't think of the name of it. It's between Houston and Galveston. That was under 16ft of water. The rooftops were. And yet everyone was rebuilding right alongside the river that overflowed there. And insurance companies wouldn't touch that anymore. But the town began insuring these self insuring, basically insuring these homeowners themselves. Why? Because if everybody left, the town's tax base would leave with them. So they're basically taking a wild bet against the future, where the odds are way stacked against them just to cling to their population a little while longer. So some of that stuff is pretty entrenched. But major insurance companies are getting to the point where they're just not going to insure things. It's already happening in Florida that are so endangered. But in the book, I have two chapters that when I started doing this book, I didn't realize I was going to be going to either of these countries. One of them is set in the Netherlands and one of them is set in Bangladesh, and the two are actually very closely related. I went to the Netherlands because this is a country that has managed not to drown and disappear completely over the past thousand years by learning how to manage its water. If you've never been to the Netherlands, it's one of the most perfect countries you will ever see. Everything works in it beautifully. They're prosperous, et cetera. And a quarter of it is under sea level, and two thirds of it is really endangered by either rivers or encroaching seas because it's the drain of Europe. It's where Europe's biggest rivers, the Meuse and the Rhine, both meet in a big delta, with another river coming up through Belgium and southern Netherlands called the Scheldt. If they hadn't learned how to manage their water, it's fascinating. In the Netherlands, they've got two parallel governments there. There's the Royal Dutch Government, but there's also one run by what in every village is known as the dikemaster. And the Dikemaster really determines what are the water needs, water preservation needs for each village. They can levy taxes. Nobody ever refuses to pay taxes to the water boards because they're absolutely essential to the survival of this country. So what the Netherlands has done two things. One is that they have designed some rather remarkable technical defenses. These are some of the technological wonders of the world. They're basically storm surge gates that will close off and protect places like Rotterdam in the event of a major storm surge out in the Atlantic. But the other which speaks to your question is how they've learned to deal with the rivers. They found that creating big walls along them, like New Orleans has done, ultimately will fail. So they've learned to live with the rivers. They have wide floodplain areas devoted to them. Now, people can still, for example, farm in those areas, but with the caveat that from time to time, the river is going to need more space. If a whole lot of water falls in the Alps or in Germany or in France and all rolls down into the Netherlands, that river is going to need room to move. The country is, fortunately, prosperous enough that it can indemnify people against those losses. For when they started their Room for the Rivers program, some houses had to be moved. Some of them were moved straight up. They actually built hills underneath them for people who did not want to leave the area. Others just were allowed to go elsewhere and to build a bigger house or a better house. And they were indemnified for all of that. Now, part of the way that the Netherlands is prosperous is that next to the United States, they're the biggest agricultural exporter in the world. For this small country, they are incredibly efficient in the way they produce crops and dairy. In fact, their people are the tallest people on Earth because of the amount of dairy products that they consume. At least according to some medical reports, they're definitely, per capita, the tallest people on Earth. But the other way that I point out, ironically, is that the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam together amount for nearly triple the amount of export import income for every other product in the country by importing or exporting oil, gas, and coal. So ironically, the very substance that is causing the North Sea to rise or those rivers to flood is the one that they're making money on. Now, that's not a sustainable situation. And I've got a wonderful story in the book about a couple people who have stood up to that and have had incredible success against the odds in forcing their government to start getting it right. But in the meantime, the Dutch's prowess with all this water technology, starting with New Orleans After Katrina and expanding to dozens of countries throughout the world that I list. And the big everyone is trying to get the Dutch to show them how to survive. And that's why I went to Bangladesh, which is a country about three and a half times the size of the Netherlands. It's also got about two thirds of the country is a river delta. But the rivers we're talking about, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, these enormous rivers that pound down from the Himalayas from glacial melt and carrying Everest sized loads of sediment. And it's many times the situation of the Netherlands. And I show how Bangladesh has enlisted the Netherlands in a project that will last till at least for now, until 2100, to basically rejigger its coastlines and its rivers in such a way that it's going to be able to survive. Ironically, again, I also show in the book the way that they decided they needed to jumpstart their economy to be able to afford all of this to become their goal, to become an upper middle class country by the year 2030. And the way they're doing that is by building coal fired plants. I went to one of them, the second biggest coal fired plant plant in the world. And I went there both with people who were protesting it and later when I took a river expedition that took me past it and went down into the Sundarbans, which is the world's biggest mangrove forest and biggest tiger preserve at the mouth of several distributaries of the Ganges. It's an incredible ecosystem and one that may drown unless the Netherlands can take control of this situation. And again, the way they're trying to take control of it is heartening in some ways and messy in other ways. But that's the world that we live in right now.
- [42:50]
Jack
The irony of using one of the tools that got us into this mess to get us out of this mess is not lost though.
- [42:58]
Alan Weissman
Yeah, it's a recurrent theme and yet I just continue to be inspired by people who are very clear eyed. They know what they're up against, they know the odds, but they refuse to quit. And I was just amazed by some of the creative approaches that they were coming up with.
- [43:24]
Jack
I'm really struck by your macro seeking self. Like you really obviously gravitate with this and your previous books to the macro vision of what's going on in a world of specialists where people work in their local area, in their region, in their country, but almost always on specific issues. And when you talk to them about what's going on in the world they start to feel faint, they start to get overwhelmed, and you do not. And I wonder how could you describe what makes you tick? Why do you gravitate toward. I need to know everything that's going on and I need to know who's working on it and how it all fits together. It's such a big thing.
- [44:10]
Alan Weissman
Not saying that I don't feel faint from this sometimes, but I learned how to be a journalist much more from ecologists than from anything I learned in journalism school or during my English major when I was struggling to learn how to write. Ecologists very early in my career and I was being a local journalist taught me basically, it's the prime guiding rule of ecology. Everything is connected. So I started following those connections. One thing led to another and suddenly I was looking at how all the Earth's ecosystems are connected. They're connected in several ways. They're connected through ocean currents, they are connected through the atmosphere that envelops us all. They are connected through the migration of species. They are connected through the invasion of species. All of this stuff. To really understand how it all works, I had. I stood away. But I do want to emphasize anybody who is there working on the specifics of these issues is making an incredibly valuable contribution to our understanding. And when you see my book, I hope you're not daunted by how thick it is because there's a half to three quarters inch fine print bibliography in it. And that bibliography is all filled with stories by people like you. Those specific stories that I was able to read and then help piece together. My understanding of what to see is as I stood back to look at the big picture. Now, looking at the big picture is. It's complicated. You can't possibly see it all. I've worked in over 60 countries, but there are about 200 of them. You have to depend on other people's visions. But what I have always tried to do, certainly with my last three books, is, is go to enough countries so I can get the pulse of the planet. Some people might wonder if I'm violating my own principles by taking all the airplane flights to go to these places. It's a legitimate question. I think it's one that people like Bill McKibben have to deal with sometime. Sometimes for me, the answer is someone needs to be a witness, not just to the pieces, but to how all the pieces fit together. And I'm not saying that I'm the only one out there. I know some other journalists and Bill is a good example, even though he has become an Activist for the climate. He was a great journalist and continues to be as a columnist for places like the New Yorker. And he always applies the rules of journalism, which is to witness, to interview, and then to corroborate and to verify, not just to take one source as the truth. There's a role for what I'm doing, and I'm speaking to you by the benefit of electrons provided by my solar panels managed to rejigger my house over the past year. So it's all running on heat pumps right now. The cars that we drive are. We plug them in. So trying to mitigate my own footprint as much as possible. But look, just by being born on this planet, we've redefined the concept of original sin. We all exhale carbon dioxide. We all are addicted to food, we all are addicted to energy. And yet we have to use these things to fuel us, to try to bring the Earth into balance with our own species. But the bottom line is that if we fail to do that, we'll go extinct. Every species eventually does, just like everybody eventually dies. It's just that I don't think either you or I or anybody listening to this quite ready for our species to go extinct anytime soon. As I've done in other books, I also portray some really valiant and imaginative and stubborn artists in this book who are doing their best to create art that will inspire us to live much better and to establish the kind of cooperation and exhilarated fascination and reverence for this planet that we are privileged to live on, to hold onto it a little longer.
- [49:26]
Jack
Alan, thank you so much for stopping by and taking the time to talk with us. And I would add to your carbon thing by saying that the inspiration that people are going to get from this book, Hope Dies Last, it's probably impossible to track how much good is going to be put into the world from the work that you've done and compiled here and your great storytelling that is engaging, as always. One of the things I really love about your books, how approachable everything is, that's going to account for something. It's going to count for a lot. I just really appreciate you taking the time. I really love the book. Depending on when people are listening to this, the book is out and shippable on April 22, 2025.
- [50:11]
Alan Weissman
That's Earth Day. Yeah.
- [50:12]
Jack
Yes, absolutely.
- [50:14]
Alan Weissman
Well, thank you very much, Jack. And we didn't even have time to go into some of the really exciting stories I have in this book about preservation of nature. There's one chapter that's built around one of my favorite set of villains out there, the center for Biological Diversity, who drive many other environmental groups nuts by constantly using the Endangered Species act as a bludgeon to push their way into uncomfortable situations. And they've done a lot of good in saving species everywhere, from little slugs all the way up to the polar bear.
- [50:52]
Jack
Yeah, I love that chapter. I proudly pointed out to my son that I know everyone in that chapter. I've worked with some of them know of the rest of them. We've worked together as organizations in the past and and it really hit home. You brought up some seriously fond memories of working in the 90s, especially in the sky island region of Arizona. I was the executive director of the Sky island alliance in the 90s.
- [51:17]
Alan Weissman
There's a shout out in my book to the current director of Sky Island.
- [51:22]
Jack
Yeah, I got really excited. I love it when I can. I know exactly what the place smells like that you're talking about and looks and feels like at any season. So that was really cool. You're absolutely right. Boy, we could have talked about 100 other things, too. It was great.
- [51:37]
Alan Weissman
But I just want to emphasize how grateful I am to people like you and to Louise Mistahl, who currently runs Skyle, and to all those folks at the center for Biological Diversity and the other environmental groups that are holding on to nature for us. Thank you.
- [51:58]
Jack
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