REBROADCAST: ‘Wild Souls’ questions assumptions about animals, nature, and conservation

The fossil fuel economy and other factors driving climate change created dramatic impacts on the natural environment and the wildlife that call those places home. Countless species have disappeared and others are threatened or endangered. In her latest book, “Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World,” Emma Marris says human activity has touched so much of the planet that it raises the question of whether any part of the Earth can truly be considered “wild.”

The efforts to save ecosystems and species and preserve biodiversity may seem to be harmonious endeavors. But, Marris says the decisions to save one species may well damage another, and she wonders if striving for “pure” or “natural” states is actually the most effective strategy for the well-being of non-human animals. Research suggests many animals possess what has long been thought of as a primarily human domain: self-awareness and sentience. We talk with Marris about the effect of human activity on non-human life and how she’s thinking about the underlying values and assumptions that often shape conservation and preservation strategies.

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Note: The following transcript was generated by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Emma Marris is an award winning journalist based in Klamath Falls who writes about science and the environment. Marris has written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Outside Magazine and High Country News. Her first book was called Rambunctious Garden. Her new book, which just came out is called Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing In the Non-Human World. The book is propelled by one big question - what obligations do we have to wild animals?

What do we owe them given that we are already impacting every corner of the world in one way or another. This is not a theoretical quandary. It is a whole cascade of real world dilemmas:

-Should captive breeding programs be used to prevent species from going extinct;

-Should we feed animals that are starving because of climate change;

-Should animals be kept in zoos;

-When is it okay to kill one animal to give another, a better chance at survival?

Emma Marris joins us to talk about all of this and more. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Emma Marris: It’s always a pleasure.

Miller: This is a book full of very real, very practical questions about things that people are doing but it’s also a book of philosophy. Some of the early chapters are focused on the minds and the selves of individual animals. There’s been a lot of research in recent years into the lives of animals. There’s also your own experiences with the non-human world. What has made the biggest impact on you in terms of how you think about the rights of animals?

Marris: I know a lot of people come to an understanding of the selfhood of animals through interacting with their own companion animals, their cats and dogs. I travel a lot, so I never had pets. For me the individual animal that really made a difference was a wild wolf here in Oregon that I wrote about and we talked about some years back, named OR4. I’m a conservation reporter, an environmental reporter and I’ve been doing that for 15 years. At one point I decided it would be interesting to try to talk about wolf reintroduction through the lens of a single wolf that had been at the center of a lot of controversy. And so I started doing all this research about one individual wolf, OR4.

I can trace it back to an exact moment. I remember it was the summer. My kids are playing in the sprinkler. I got a phone call and it was somebody telling me that OR4 was dead. Up until that moment, I had just been thinking of this animal as a sort of a narrative device that would allow me to draw readers into the story of wolf reintroduction. But the minute I heard that he had died, I felt really bad. I felt really sad and this profound sense of grief. It suddenly hit me that I cared about this individual animal, not just as a wolf but as himself.

Miller: You actually write at one point, ‘if most wolves outside of national parks die young because of human actions, I think it’s legitimate to ask whether having wolves in the West is worth the cost to individual wolves’. That gets to a tension that you explore over and over in the book, which is what we owe to individual animals as opposed to a species. We’re going to, as a government, do our best to bring wolves back as a species. But what about the individual [wolf] beings?

Marris: I think that [often] people’s feelings about wolf reintroduction divide along pro and con lines. But they all tend to look at [the] species or population level. And the more time I spent with the wildlife managers at the state and federal agencies who were putting collars on them, tracking them, getting samples of their DNA, figuring out how to manage them and how to scare them away from livestock, the more I realized that we were asking them [the wolves] to go through a lot to be present in our state and in our region. We’ve taken their ancestors who lived a relatively less humanized life and we brought them down here and said, ‘okay, now you have to learn how to live with us and it’s going to be really complicated’.

Miller: What does a numbering system say about the ambivalence we have in terms of whether these are individuals or just members of a species - whether it’s OR4 or OR7 or giving them the name Sam or Journey or whatever? They seem very different.

Marris: Yeah, they do. When these managers interact with these wolves, they are attempting to maintain a certain amount of professional distance by using this numbering system. But ultimately as I explored in a piece I wrote for Outside, it’s impossible for them not to individualize them if they spend a lot of time out in the field with them. So even though this wolf was called OR4, I know that some of the biologists who managed him had a personal relationship with him. They didn’t need to name him Sam in order to feel like he was an individual to them.

Miller: One of the words that you use a lot in your book is ‘flourishing’. This is one of the highest values you say we should be seeking. What does it mean for an animal, especially a wild one, to flourish?

Marris: For most of my career writing about conservation, I’ve been focused on these animal populations and the goal has always been to keep them from going extinct. That’s the conservation framework. And the individual lives of the individual animals that are living and dying in the wild are less important as long as they’re reproducing at a good rate, they’re genetically well mixed and they have these other characteristics [allowing them to] persist into the future.

So it was a real game changer for me to start thinking about what their actual lives were like and whether they were having a good time. Flourishing comes from Aristotle’s idea that the good life typically goes beyond just having enough to eat or not being in pain. For humans it includes being intellectually satisfied and having a job that you like and having good relationships with people and being virtuous and all these other things. But [that same] question of what it means for animals is, I think, an unanswered one. We’re still learning what it means for different animal species to truly ‘flourish’.

Miller: But part of it is that you, as the animal, have the freedom to live a life as close to your nature as possible. So for a wolf, that would mean for example, having the freedom to patrol a wide area. Each animal is going to have a different version of flourishing.

Marris: I talk a little about the science of animal personality in the book and how some [individual]wolves might go further than others famously do. OR7 went quite a bit further than most wolves do and that was probably because his personality was a little bit different. [So] what does it mean to have a good life for a wolf? One of the things is that you’ve been hanging out with mom and dad and then all of a sudden you get this overwhelming urge to leave home and strike out on your own and find a mate and establish your own territory. The narrative arc of life is this process of growing up and moving out and starting [one’s] own territory and so on. So if you’re, for example, in a zoo, you can’t do any of that stuff. And even if you have enough to eat and the vet checks on you every week, you’re not flourishing if you can’t do that stuff.

There’s good research to show that a lot of animals like wolves or big cats, bears, apes, elephants, don’t do well in captivity even if all their physical needs are being met. I think part of the reason is because they don’t have any choices. They can’t decide what to eat, they can’t decide where to go, they can’t decide with whom to meet. All of that is decided for them. Even though they’re not humans, that lack of freedom is an issue that stops them from fully being happy. They might not see it that way. I don’t know if they’re thinking in their heads, I am not happy because I am not free, but they aren’t as happy as their wild counterparts, when you look at stress hormone levels or behavioral stuff.

Miller: That reminds me of a kind of working definition of wildness [in your book] ‘A wild animal wakes up in the morning and it decides what to have for breakfast’. One of the case studies that you dig into is California condors. Can you describe these animals?

Marris: Condors are so awesome. They are a huge bird, the last remainder of a whole group of very large scavenging birds, many of which went extinct during the Pleistocene in North America. But California condors were able to hang on in part because they were able to scavenge marine mammal carcasses which were abundant for a long time on our coast. They have a huge wingspan so they soar beautifully in the sky, they have naked heads like scavenging birds do and then they have this feather boa-like collar around their necks [made of] glossy iridescent feathers.

Miller: What happened to condor populations by the 1970′s?

Marris: Condor populations were extremely low at that time. Biologists didn’t know all of the details why. The working hypothesis was that [they were] being shot and [they were] losing habitat. We now know that a major contributor to their declining numbers was lead in the shot people were using that is incredibly poisonous to these birds.

Miller: Can you describe the interventions that conservationists and wildlife biologists came up with to prevent condors from going fully extinct?

Marris: So the reason I chose this story is because it was a test case for the concept of captive breeding. When condor numbers were down below 30 [with fewer than] a couple of dozen of these left in the wild, the conservation community said, ‘we’re going to have to take them all in to captivity and protect them from whatever is going on out there and breed them up and then we can re-release them and they can be wild again’.

But this proposal was controversial at the time for a couple of reasons. Some people thought that we just didn’t know enough and that we might just kill them all and they would do better on their own. But more philosophically, some people felt that if the condor couldn’t be free then it should just be allowed to die with dignity. Taking them all into cages, this majestic enormous bird, was just too sad and too pathetic.

Miller: You write, “it’s an exercise in total domination, undertaken as part of a larger cultural project of stopping extinction. It is arguably an attempt to reverse or reduce human domination over the earth. It’s the least humble way to increase humanity’s overall humility. But sometimes it works.” How do you measure the success of condor captive breeding programs?

Marris: The condor story is not done because we are still extremely involved in their lives. There are still lots of cases of lead poisoning. So wild birds are taken back in and treated often for lead poisoning on a regular basis. Nests are checked on, there’s a huge amount of monitoring and there’re still captive populations being bred today. So it’s ongoing. However, I think in the end it will have been a success [because success is when] you’re no longer involved. You’ve restored them some autonomy. We may be running the lives of more than one generation, but ultimately they get to run their own lives again.

Miller: I wonder if you could read us a section of the book where you talk about the implications of this particular effort to save this particular species.

Marris: “It’s noteworthy that the condor, which we have worked so hard to say it’s a scavenger, a handmaiden of and symbol for death, the condor is part of a guild of animals who helped the dead contribute to the cycle of life, who transferred the energy of the dead back into the living. It was, in fact, this role that nearly killed them off. When humans wanted ‘vermin’ dead, they poisoned them. And then the condors died after eating their strychnine-laced carcasses. When humans wanted ‘game’ dead, they shot them and the lead shot went on to kill condors that ate the gut files. In other words, humans were so extremely good at killing, the death we meted out, killed two nodes of the food web and maybe more. Who knows what beetles or flies perished after dining on the carcass of a poison condor.

Alongside captive breeding, condor recovery today focuses on reeling that killing back in such that farmers kill just one node on the food web. If you died in certain parts of the American West today, out in exposed country, you might even be lucky enough to be eaten by the largest bird in North America - to have the energy in your body used to propel those magnificently long black wings through the cloudless desert sky. By capturing the birds and dragging their species back from the brink of extinction, we have preserved that possibility - what ecologists dryly called the species function. And by preventing the extinction of Gymnogyps californianus we have preserved biodiversity - another dry word for something natural.”

Miller: What do you think it will take for condors to be able to thrive without human intervention?

Marris: We’ve got to get rid of the lead. I interviewed people who are continuing to care for these birds on a hands-on daily basis for this book. And they said if we’d been able to get the lead out of ammunition and out of the back country decades ago, this project would have been over by now. It’s ultimately that continued threat. We see that pattern and a lot of captive breeding situations where if we could get rid of the threats to the species and make sure that there is enough room and habitat for them to thrive, then we could potentially get them back out onto the landscape or the seascape quite quickly. It’s oftentimes making space for them that slows things down.

Miller: The condors that are in the “wild” now were raised in these programs and then released. One of the arguments made by conservationists [and people of] good faith, in the seventies and eighties opposed to the captive breeding programs about to take place, was that this was going to change the whole idea of what a condor was. Do you think it did?

Marris: This gets [to]a central concern of the book, which is about how to define the word ‘wild’ in the phrase ‘wild animal’. Does it mean that the animals are untouched by humanity? Or does it mean that they decide what to have for breakfast? I ultimately come down, in the book, on the latter definition. So the entire world has been influenced by humanity to an extreme degree, a degree that sometimes we don’t even notice because we’re all living through it. Climate change is only the most prominent example of all of these global transformations.

So if you’re going to define ‘wild’ as untouched by humanity, then there simply aren’t any wild animals left. But if you define ‘wild’ as an individual [animal] that has [property] and is autonomous in terms of what it does all day, then there are plenty of wild animals. And any condor that’s out of the flight cage could be considered to be a wild condor, even if it has one of those big numbers pinned to its wings so that the the managers can identify it at a distance. If it’s deciding, ‘what do I want for breakfast’ then I say it’s a wild bird.

Miller: We [will have heard] more about efforts to do exactly what you’re talking about in Oregon. (on the July 8, 2021 Think Out Loud episode). Speaking of zoos, how do they fit into your own thinking about what we owe to wild animals?

Mattis: The big difference between a captive breeding program and a zoo is that in a [legitimate] captive breeding program, the humans involved are hustling to try to get those animals back [out] onto the landscape as quickly as possible. The longer they stay in captivity, the more [likely]they might be to adapt to that care and have trouble when they go back out into the wild. So [the programs] are desperate to get these animals out from inside the cage. Whereas a zoo, apart from a small number of breeding programs that are being run, most of their animals are being bred for a lifetime of captivity and display with no chance of ever being set free.

The justification for multigenerational captivity is just so we can look at them so we can learn from them. Maybe they’ll make us better people, or maybe it’ll just be a fun thing to do with the kids. The research I did for the book convinced me that wasn’t good enough justification for that amount of captivity, especially with what I’ve learned about how unhappy captivity can make many species.

Miller: You actually focus a fair amount on the unhappiness of elephants. What stands out to you most about what you learned about elephants in captivity?

Marris: I chose elephants because in some ways I think they’re the orcas of the zoo. After the documentary Blackfish a few years back, public sentiment about keeping whales in captivity changed. Elephants, obviously the largest animal that you’ll see in the zoo, are very emotionally complex. We’ve learned a lot about their inner and their social lives. They’re complicated individuals. I was interested in the particular story of the elephant program at the Woodland Park Zoo because I grew up in Seattle, walking distance from the Woodland Park Zoo.

They don’t have elephants anymore and that was partly due to public concern about their welfare. There’s just not enough room in a municipal zoo for an elephant to be happy. They just need more space. And often zoo elephants just don’t have enough social interaction with other elephants or they’re thrown in with other elephants, even of other species, that aren’t their family. They are expected to all get along [even] if they can have a lot of interpersonal dynamics that are really stressful. So they’re physically unhealthy. They have a shorter lifespan than elephants in the wild and they’re almost all mentally unwell. There’s a lot of repetitive rocking and swaying behaviors that show that they’re not feeling good.

Miller: Your preference is that zoos would wind down their current version of their existence in the animal display business and you’d want them to first turn into the animal habitat business. What exactly do you envision?

Marris: I don’t think we should be breeding any animals that we don’t think we can let out someday. So the AZA and and the EAZA, the two accrediting institutions in the Americas and in Europe, manage the genetics of their captive animals very carefully for maximum genetic diversity, as if they were going to let them all out. But there’s no realistic prospect that they’re going to let these tigers or these gorillas out. Any conservationist who works on any of these species would tell you it would be much simpler and more effective to protect existing wild populations, give them more room and reduce threats to them.

So all of those breeding programs, I think, should be ended. And then those individuals that are still alive should just be treated extremely well and possibly even taken to sanctuaries where they can have more room and more socialization. But zoos could shift into a model that’s a mix between legitimate conservation captive breeding programs and more of a sanctuary-like model where they’re not breeding, but are becoming like a home for animals that can’t be reintroduced into the wild. Also more botanical gardens increase the focus on plants, a huge part of biodiversity, and something that they could do as they shift away from breeding animals.

Miller: One of many vexing scenarios that you present is what we should do for and about polar bears. Before we get to the dilemma, can you give us a sense for estimates of their population trends in the coming decades?

Marris: Polar bears have had a pretty stable population for a while, but certain of their populations are under a lot of stress because their hunting ground, the sea ice, is essentially melting away or is not present for longer and longer stretches of the year. For those polar bear populations, the outlook looks pretty grim. I think the overall population reduction is 30% in the coming decades? People are expecting a reduction because of the sea ice not being present during the hunting season.

Miller: The reduction is serious enough that people are talking about what to do and whether or not [polar bears] should be fed. So what’s the case for helping out these particular polar bears that are most likely to be hungry in the coming decades?

Marris: This is a vexing case study and there’s lots of variables here. But the overall arching argument for feeding them is that these individual bears are starving because humans have warmed the climate and that now they can’t hunt seals. So we humans have collective responsibility for their suffering and untimely deaths. Therefore we should help them out. We should feed them or supplement their diets during the worst summers and keep them going. That’s the argument.

Miller: It’s the collective responsibility issue here. It’s more obvious than what I owe a deer I injured if I hit it with my car than what I, as an individual, owe a particular polar bear who has less ice for hunting seals. How do you deal with this issue of collective responsibility and individual polar bears in need?

Marris: It’s a tricky one. There are very different schools of thought on this within the environmental ethics community. Some think that collective responsibility is a very intuitive and straightforward concept. We humans owe other species or other ecosystems that we’ve harmed. Another school says ‘My’ individual contribution to climate change is minuscule. So therefore ‘my’ individual responsibility for the suffering of these polar bears is also minuscule. And therefore I don’t really have a responsibility, individually, to do anything about it.

A third possibility of exploring responsibility is that maybe instead of looking at who caused the harm, we look at who continues to benefit. So anyone who benefits from fossil fuel and the fossil fuel capitalistic economy and takes flights to Hawaii to have fun and gets around in a car bears some part of responsibility because we benefit. I like that framing in some ways because those who are not benefiting from climate change, those who are mostly victims of climate change, don’t have to feel like they have to do something about the polar bears because they’re not really benefiting overall from the harm. The example I give in the book is a rice farmer in Bangladesh who has flooded fields.

Miller: This is the kind of climate justice argument or framework being applied not just in terms of humans, but to the nonhuman world as well.

Marris: It’s so fascinating. There are different ways you can think about what we owe animals and one of them is just that we ought to be nice to them because we’re compassionate people and they feel pain and suffering. That is a more old fashioned ‘let’s be humane’ kind of argument. But the argument where it gets into justice is this notion that these animals have rights of their own.

So it isn’t just that we should be nice to them because we’re nice people. [The justice argument] is that these polar bears have a right not to have their food snatched away from them and we have infringed on that right. I think that’s a really interesting idea.

Miller: So let’s follow the ethical arguments forward. What should I, as a person [who drives], do for the polar bear?

Marris: I do think that your personal responsibility, Dave, is somewhat diffuse. So I don’t think you need to pack your puffy jacket and head north and immediately start handing out seal meat. This is something that I imagine us doing as a society. Obviously, these kinds of decisions wouldn’t be made unilaterally by the government of Canada or the Inuit people who hunt polar bears and have this really deep relationship with them you know. [But they] might have some pro or con ideas that should probably supersede my ‘pro-Oregon’ ideas about this. So we need to really pay attention to who’s making these decisions and make sure that the stakeholders who really matter are making these decisions.

Miller: How might a feeding regimen work as a kind of stop gap to their continuation as a species? How do you envision it working?

Marris: This is where it gets a little sci-fi. And I actually have a lot of fun imagining. If this was something that we have to do indefinitely for the rest of time, I think it would be something I would pause more about but you did say ‘stop gap’. I’m very optimistic that not only will our global society tackle climate change, I’m optimistic that we can actually roll it back to a certain extent now. I’m not saying tomorrow, but I’m saying over a generation or two we could get that sea ice back. That would be the true justice for those polar bears.

So the idea of the feeding would be just to get them through that hottest bottleneck period before we could restore the seal hunting opportunities. What makes it tricky is, let’s say, we are going to feed them well. Are we feeding them seals? And in that case, we’re going to go out and bonk seals on the head for them. But that opens up some serious new ethical questions. The interesting thing about philosophy is that you can get very hypothetical in order to test out your ethical ideas. So you could hypothetically imagine designing a polar bear supplemental food that was vegan - kind of like impossible burgers for polar bears - impossible seal.

Then we could have some sort of feeding stations that were appropriately located so they wouldn’t cause conflicts between polar bears and human communities. And we could become part of their lives for a century or so, then be able to back off once we had addressed the original harm of climate change.

Miller: You point out that there are already many wild species that only exist right now because of ongoing conservation efforts. We talked earlier about the California condor, but there are many more. Termed conservation reliant species, what are some of these?

Marris: Michael Scott, a conservationist in Idaho, came up with this term [conservation reliant species]. Some birds have habitats that must be burned over forests. So conservationists are going in and burning forests for them. There are many species that require guards from poachers. That counts as a conservation reliant species along with any species where there is an ongoing budget item to keep this species alive.

We are physically moving rhinos and some other large species around, to make sure that the gene flow is good. The bison at Yellowstone are rounded up annually and vaccinated and sorted by a specific age class and sex ratio. So there’s a lot of really active management on species. And we are taking care of a lot of species in a hands-on way.

Miller: What does that tell you about countries all around the world who fall prey to the idea that humans are this kind of rapacious cancer on the world. That sort of old language is, in fact, how a lot of people think about what humans do. But here you are talking about very concerted efforts that people are doing day in day out, spending a lot of people hours, a lot of their own money and resources and time, specifically to keep a lot of different species alive. What does it tell us about human values?

Marris: There’s a real common thread between my first book and my second book at this point. I don’t think the way you do right by the non-human world is to withdraw from it in shame, which I think has been our dominant Western approach for the last 50 years. We were so horrified by what we had done to a lot of ecosystems and species that it makes sense that we felt our best course of action was to make a park and keep people out or let nature take its course and not intervene, getting the human touch out of there to undo everything that humans did.

But I actually don’t think that withdrawal is going to work. Because of all of the changes that we’ve made to the entire planet, what we need to seek instead are good relationships. Instead of bad relationships, good relationships are going to get us a lot further than no relationships.

Miller: So with polar bears, the big question is should we feed them if they might starve otherwise. With other animals, especially defenseless ones that evolved on islands where there were no predators for them. The question is, should we kill the non-native predators that are now common in some of these places? New Zealand has answered that question in recent years loudly and clearly saying yes, we should kill cats and foxes and many other small furry creatures that eat other smaller furry creatures. So can you describe the Predator-Free 2050 Campaign?

Marris: Predator-Free 2050 is a national initiative to eradicate rats, stoats, which are short- tailed weasels and Australian possums [completely] from New Zealand in order to save their beautiful and iconic native species, including many birds that are completely flightless, nest on the ground and are utterly vulnerable to these predators.

Miller: How much is this embedded in kiwi culture? When you go around the country, what signs do you see and hear?

Marris: What I became really fascinated with is that New Zealanders see themselves as the public image. In fact, their tourist logo motto is ‘New Zealand 100% Pure’. They have this image of themselves as a very nature loving, very animal loving people. And this is all true. But in order to save their native species they decided to eradicate these invasive species. And they have gone all in. So trapping rats and stoats and possums is not just something that governments just do. It’s a national hobby with families and clubs and iwi, which is their tribal structure, all pitching in. It is something done on the weekend with friends.

There are contests over who can get the most dead rats. And I’ve been told by numerous people that it is considered the very correct thing to run over a possum if it’s seen on the road. When I went to a nature reserve in Wellington called Zealandia they have a very intense fence to keep these non-native predators out so they can preserve their biodiversity. You can even buy a throw pillow with a picture of a stoat and a rat with big x’s through them. So it’s become almost like a culture of killing these non-native predators.

Miller: Is there an endpoint that serious scientists or mathematicians talk about here, or is this essentially a forever war?

Marris: There is a moral difference between an eradication and constant killing. We humans have successfully eradicated some of these non-native predators from smaller islands. The bar keeps getting raised every few years when there’s a new record broken for the size of an island where they have completely eradicated rats, for example. So I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that New Zealand could do it now.

Miller: Even with container ships and trans global travel? Now we live in a tiny world where everything is connected.

Marris: That’s a great point. So let’s say they manage to get rid of all these species in the whole country. They’re going to have this biosecurity issue forever. That is going to be the forever war. It’s already the case. I brought a tent into New Zealand because I was going to be in the field doing some reporting. They completely took my tent apart and searched it, my hiking boots and everything, very thoroughly. They are already pretty serious about trying to keep out non-native organisms. But they’re going to have to stay serious forever. And when I say forever, I don’t just mean until 2100. I mean for millennia. These are big time scales we’re talking about here.

Miller: The combination of predator killing and technology led to some surprising interventions. I think one was in Australia. Can you describe what became known as the death row dingoes?

Marris: I do feel a bit sorry for the conservation biologists who dreamed this one up because it was a relatively small project. But the details do capture the imagination. Dingoes are not native to Australia. They came there maybe 5000 years ago, possibly brought by humans. And they are pretty efficient predators. So they wanted to get the goats off of this island too because the non-native goats were eating all the rare vegetation. They decided to use dingoes to kill the goats, but they didn’t want the dingoes there eventually. So their plan was to let the dingoes kill the goats and then kill the dingoes. But they were worried they wouldn’t be able to catch the dingoes because the island is very steep with difficult terrain. So they implanted poison capsules under the skin of the dingoes that would eventually break down and kill the dingoes.

Miller: It struck me as an incredible detail that seemed made up, but it also illustrates something of the complexity behind this and the awareness of the potential pitfalls of intervention when it’s this convoluted. I can understand why somebody would say maybe the best intervention is no intervention because there are so many unintended consequences. How can we know this is smart? I can see why somebody would look at everything and say ‘take a step back humans and just let Nature take its course’.

Marris: We are nature. All of the dingoes, the goats and the plants that the goats were eating are all living in this humanist world, where not only are they dealing with each other, but also with higher temperatures and other introduced species and the extinction of other guys that used to be there. So this whole ‘let-nature-take-its-course’ is not an option anymore.

Miller: We can’t take ourselves out of the question [because] the implicit idea is that we’re saying we are not a part of it. You are saying we are always and forever now, in this together?

Marris: That’s right.

Miller: You also spent time in Australia looking into another attempt to save highly threatened native species without killing non-native predators. Can you give us a sense for what seems like, at least, a 100-year long evolution open air experiment?

Marris: Australia is, ecologically speaking, the biggest island because it has island problems. By that I mean that one of the biggest threats to its native fauna is introduced predators, specifically cats and foxes. And they have a ton of these really unique and fascinating and different mammal species that are all being completely decimated by cats and foxes. They just don’t have the behavioral response. The scientists call it “prey naivete”. So they’re sitting there eating some little bush and a cat shows up and they just blink at it and then the cat eats them. It must be extremely frustrating for those who work in this field because they are busting their butts trying to save these creatures, but the creatures aren’t doing a whole lot to save themselves.

So to address this, Arid Recovery, a gorgeous outback reserve in South Australia, is basically trying to use a small number of cats as an evolutionary filter. So they’ve got these bilbies and bettongs, which are two of these little cute mammals, in this very large fenced enclosure. They throw in a couple of neutered cats, to kill some of them, but not all of them. The ones that survive are the ones that are best able to coexist with cats. They let those reproduce for a while and then they bring the cats back in and they do another round. Ultimately the plan is to breed native mammals that know how to run away from cats.

Miller: So that uses essentially the tools of artificial selection to speed up the transformation of a species. But you write about another much newer tool that humans are developing right now, CRISPR and various kinds of gene editing that could be much more powerful and far reaching. What might conservation biologists do with these new tools?

Marris: Genetic engineering was always so expensive that conservation didn’t even really think about it, because conservationists are always working on a shoestring. But CRISPR has made it much more affordable. Gene drives are a very special kind of tool that have not been used yet. But in theory, they could be used to let a gene loose in a wild population, such that over time it would be guaranteed to become the dominant or eventually the only version of that gene in the population. So every time anybody that had this gene reproduced , all of their offspring would get this gene. So you could use that, in the case of mice or rats or possums, to spread infertility genes. Which means that you could, in theory, eradicate all of these animals without having to kill them with traps or poisons. They just wouldn’t have any more babies. So in theory, it could be a much more humane way to remove a predator that’s threatening a rare native species.

Miller: What do you think about the possibility of this tool?

Marris: I am not opposed to genetic engineering, on principle, as a tool. I think you have to judge this on a case by case basis. It’s really early for this. They haven’t even been able to necessarily make it work in mice. They’re working on it in the lab. So we have time to discuss this all together. The important caveat is that we make sure the people who have the closest and longest standing relationships with the various species in question have a seat at the table and that their voices are being respected.

What I think is less important than what some of the local stakeholders like the Maori groups in New Zealand and the indigenous peoples of Australia think about these approaches. In Hawai’i, for example, there are a lot of birds going extinct because of avian malaria spread by mosquitoes. This technique could get rid of all of the mosquitoes in Hawai’i and save those birds. Would we want to do that or not? I think it’s an intriguing possibility.

Miller: At the end of the book, you give us two lists that, together, are intended to help clarify the kinds of complex questions we’ve been talking about or future ones that arise - things that are valuable and things that are not. Let’s go through these two brief lists, starting with what’s not helpful. Could you read it for us?

Mattis: Here are five things that just aren’t valuable:

-naturalness is not valuable;

-wildness is not valuable if you define wildness as lack of human influence;

-I don’t think ecological integrity is necessarily valuable;

-or genetic integrity;

-purity in general because that’s just not how ecosystems work. Keeping them pure is not the right approach.

Miller: A lot of these alleged values are actually related, and you argue in the book that when it comes to landscapes, the notion of purity has often been connected to colonialism. What do you mean by that?

Mattis: In the Western tradition of conservation, what has often happened is that white guys show up, they take a look around and say, “Aha, virgin untouched wilderness”. They completely ignore the way that indigenous people have been managing and altering the landscape [prior to their arrival]. Then they spend the next 200 years trying to manage back to that little snapshot in time, as the pre-human condition. We’re much more aware of this now, in the last 15 years or so, and maybe people are starting to realize this isn’t the most fruitful approach. But I still think that a lot of laws and a lot of policies are built around this idea of managing back to the day the first white guy stepped off the boat.

Miller: Can you read us your list or tell us the things that are valuable in your mind?

I do this one in order from the ones that I’m most sure to least sure of. You’ll have to read the book to find out why I’m more sure about some than others:

• The flourishing of at least sentient creatures, including their autonomy, their happiness and the freedom of individual animals matters;
• Human compassion;

3. Human humility;

4. The flow of matter and energy between living things;

5. The diversity of living things.

A quick thing [about] those last two things, the flow of energy and the diversity. You can have those without it looking like it did in 1850. [It] doesn’t imply some kind of stasis.

Miller: We’ve talked a lot about non-human flourishing. But did working on this book and thinking about that framework affect the way you think about human flourishing?

Marris: I wrote so much of this book during the pandemic. So sometimes I think we need to sort ourselves out before we figure out how to. But I realized that our flourishing is so intimately connected to the flourishing of other species that I don’t think that we can flourish ourselves unless we start to get into a better relationship with the other species that surround us.

Miller: That reminds me of the epigraph for the book, which is, “All flourishing is mutual”.

Marris: That’s from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants which I’m sure many of your listeners have heard of. It is a great book.

Miller: Emma Marris, it was a pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks very much and congratulations on this new book.

Marris: Thank you so much.