 There was a government inquiry after the bushfires which said that there was a possibility that koalas could go extinct in the world completely by 2050 in New South Wales. I mean, as koalas are only found in four or five states anyway, New South Wales is one of the most significant states where koalas are found. So that's really a very severe impact and it shows that we need to take strong conservation measures now. John Pickrell is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by Innovator's Magazine and 1.5 Media. John is an award-winning journalist, the author of Flying Dinosaurs and Weird Dinosaurs and the former editor of Australian Geographic Magazine. Currently, the Asian Pacific Bureau Chief for Nature has worked in London, Washington, D.C. and Sydney for publications including New Scientist, Science, Science News and Cosmos. His articles also appear in National Geographic, Scientific American, Focus, BBC Future, The Guardian and the ABC. John has been a finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka Prize, three times won an Earth Journalism Award and has featured repeatedly in the best Australian science writing anthology which he edited in 2018. He studied biology at Imperial College in the United Kingdom and has a Masters of Science in Taxonomy and Biodiversity from the Natural History Museum in London. John, welcome to the show. It's so great to see you. Hi, it's great to be here. I'm so glad that you can make it. You're in Australia. Sydney, is that correct? I'm in Sydney, yeah, you're right. Great, great. And I'm in Hamburg, Germany. It's so glad that you can make it and how was your Earth Day? Yesterday was Earth Day. Did you have a good Earth Day? The moment I'm working on a lot of stories about coronavirus actually, so I kind of have my head buried in COVID. I believe it. There's a lot to bury your head in the sand almost with that. Tons of articles. It's unbelievable. So the normal scientific papers that come out on pandemics and viruses and things are usually around five to 10,000 a year. We've already surpassed in one year's period with COVID, 20,000 peer-reviewed papers and the number just keeps going. It's amazing what humanity can do in times of pressure and need, how quickly the research and the studies and the peer reviews can be turned out. You have a long history. I could have probably read much longer biography on you and what you've done in your academic and journalist life and what you've been doing. But you've kind of been in this field of passion around dinosaurs. And so I mentioned it in your biography. You have two books prior to this, Flying Dinosaurs and Weird Dinosaurs. And you've tons of other things you've been working on. What moved you in that direction? And I personally know you're kind of dispelling a lot of myths that we used to have about dinosaurs. Yeah, I mean, I've always had a lot of interest in wildlife and nature and the environment and animals. I was very interested in animals and fossils and kind of getting out into the woods and the beaches and stuff as a kid. So I studied biology at university and I went on to do that master's course at the Natural History Museum in London. And within a year at the Natural History Museum, we kind of had free reigns behind the scenes. And of course, the Natural History Museum in London just has tens of millions of incredible specimens of animals and fossils. And so, you know, I'd always really had a great love of fossils and natural history and I became a science journalist. And for the first 10 years of my career, I was more of a generalist, science journalist, really. But once I had the opportunity to start writing some more dinosaur stuff, I kind of got stuck back into that again. And it was really this incredible series of feathered fossil discoveries from China that made me want to write a book about the whole connection between dinosaurs and birds and how birds, modern birds really are kind of living dinosaurs. So it was nice that I could kind of bring my science journalism career kind of full circle back to my education at the Natural History Museum in London. I mean, that really ties to evolution. So, you know, I've heard said that Tyrannosaurus rex and the many different type of p-rex type of both relatives had some form of feathers on them as well. And that they are closely tied to, you know, these flying dinosaurs. And you mentioned, you know, that 55 million years ago when asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula, it wasn't a full extinction. It was kind of, there was this evolution somehow that happened with transition into the flying birds that we have today that have a lot of similarities. How did that, was that something that you learned in your academic view, or is that something through these studies in the museum that just kind of came out? I think the first feather dinosaur fossil was discovered in about 1996, but a lot of paleontologists before that point realized that birds and dinosaurs were very closely related. But in the past 25 years, since that first feather dinosaur was found, I mean, there have been about 100 feather dinosaurs found and many, many have been in China, most of them in China, but dinosaurs with direct evidence of feathers have been found all over the world. And so, you know, I've been covering for years stories on some of these exciting dinosaurs discovery, and I covered a big feature kind of all about the new feather stuff, and that was what motivated me to write the book. But I mean, I think people realize now that modern birds actually are dinosaurs. And, you know, chickens are actually more closely related to a T-Rex than a T-Rex is to a stegosaurus or a triceratops. So birds absolutely are kind of nested within the carnivorous dinosaur family. And so prior to that, the asteroid hitting the Earth 66 million years ago, there would have been ecosystems were filled with dinosaurs and birds that was kind of living together in the same environments. And in fact, the majority of birds were sent extinct when the asteroid hit the Earth, but a small number of them survived and they flourished and became the 10,000 or so living species of birds that we have alive today. It was only a very small amount of bird diversity that existed that survived that mass extinction event. And interestingly, the research showing now that most of the birds that made it past that extinction event were the ground-dwelling birds, because when the asteroid hit the Earth, there were global wildfires, all of the forests and trees were gone. So in fact, most of the tree-living birds that were contemporaries of the dinosaurs didn't make it. And all of our living birds are kind of descendants of what were ground-living birds from the dinosaurs. I love that. I love that you express that. Do you? There's a lot of evolution that occurs with those birds that kind of were ground-dwelling birds already and then they maybe kind of even evolve more into what we know and see today? Or do you think that's just a very slow evolution that happened or not? Totally different. No, I think probably after the asteroid hit, there were a limited number of mammals and birds and other animals that made it through, but then there was a huge burst of evolution afterwards. Mammals, particularly a lot of them, were kind of more fairly uniform looking mammals at the time. Mammals as well burst into all of the different kind of, the whales, the anteaters, the monkeys, the deers and cows and horses. There really was a burst of evolution after that massive extinction event. And the same thing happened with birds and all of them. From a fairly small number of ground-dwelling birds, all of the birds that live in trees and spend a lot of time on the wing flying in every different kind of bird burst out of this group. So yeah, there was certainly some exciting evolution going on directly after that massive extinction event. The reason I kind of ask you on this, and I'm leading you down a journey that we'll have today in our discussions, that there's some strong ties to evolution. There's some strong ties to mass extinctions or extinctions. Obviously your new book that we're discussing today is Flames of Extinction. And it's around the brush dryers and Curt in Australia. And we'll get definitely more into that. I speak to a lot of authors and people who are evolutionary biologists and have to do with a lot with biology. One of them is Matthias Glaubrecht. He wrote this huge thick book that you see here. It's called The End of Evolution and he's only tickled the surface. I mean, I think it's a thousand pages, seven hundred of actual pages, well written. He even got a prize for it, but just tickling the surface of evolution. He also works a lot with natural history museums, museums, and not just London, but in Berlin and Hamburg and that. And a lot of that has to do with these old fossils, these old remains of dinosaurs, and other species that are around. And because of the title of Flames of Extinction, we have heard that we're in the Anthropocene, that we could be facing the sixth mass extinction. And the real kind of journey that you've been on, not only with your books prior and your academic world and then what you've seen in your journalism, especially with those brush fires, then the pandemic hits. Your book actually released April 15th, so not too long ago, a little bit prior to that in Australia or the rest of the world. And so congratulations during a hard time pandemic and after all this to be able to release a wonderful book during that time, which tells us a lot of things. But did any of that wisdom, any of that research provide you with some learning lessons or some more resilience of how what not only the future of humanity is, but how maybe then we can do some things differently or need to do things differently to weather hard times of brush fires, climate change, human extinctions, biodiversity loss on and on, that to be models that we need to be aware of or have on our radar for the future? Yeah, I mean, the fossil record and what we know about the biological and geological history of Australia certainly informs how well we understand about what happened in the 2019 to 2020 bushfire crisis really was very unusual and absolutely unprecedented in Australia because Australia is really unusual among the continents in the world. It's the driest inhabited continent of the Antarctic. And Australia actually at the time of the dinosaurs, it was attached to Antarctica and a number of other continents, the southern tip continent of Gondwana. And about 80 million years ago, the last two pieces of Gondwana, which were Antarctica and Australia separated from one another, and Australia began to drift northwards towards the equator. And we still have remnant forests from Gondwana right down the east rainforest from Gondwana right down the east coast of Australia. So there are many species that would have been trees that were around during the time of the dinosaurs and many of the trees that we have down the coast of Australia would have grown all over Antarctica as well. So they're called this kind of Antarctic relic rainforest that we have growing in Australia. And but what happened is Australia moved north. It moved into a climatic zone of the planet where it became increasingly drier. And as it became drier and hotter, bushfires, wildfires began to become much more common. And so animals and plants in Australia are very well adapted and they've evolved for a long time to live in an environment that has frequent fire in it. So it means that many of the trees in Australia eucalyptus, the gum trees, we have about 800 species of gum trees and they grow in all different environments all over Australia. And those and mellilookas or tea trees and a few other different Australian groups of plants all very well adapted to dry conditions and fires. They have they often have quite dry, leathery leaves that are very prevent desiccation. So they're quite water resistant. But it would also gum trees, the leaves are full of oil. And I mean, they're actually they've evolved to kind of burst into flames when when fire comes through. And at the same time as having trees, which over evolutionary time have become adapted to fire as many of the animals in Australia have also grown in have also evolved in environments that frequently have foreign have evolved responses to that. But for what happens here in the 2019 to 2020 bushfire crisis, the fires were so enormous in extent, both geographically and temporally, they, they, they, we just have fires to a degree that we've never had in so many different parts of Australia simultaneously, certainly in modern history, but the fossil record, the geological record would suggest not really in in, you know, potentially millions of years before this in Australia. And certainly the past has informed what was incredibly unusual about the geographic and spatial extent of the geographic spatial temporal extent of the bushfire crisis in 2019, 2020. And the fact that many plants and animals have evolved to live in an environment with fire, but the fires were so intense and so far reaching. But you know, for a number of reasons that many plants that are normally adapted to fire are not surviving with with the fires of the extent that we've seen it in particularly, there are many plants in Australia that can they survive well in an environment when a fire passes through every 20 or 30 years. And so there are the, you know, there are many different kinds of forest hives and ecotones in Australia and some have fire more frequently than others. And there's kind of a mosaic of different ecosystems that are adapted to the frequency of fire in a particular place, but there are many places in Australia that were burned in the bushfire crisis that might normally only have a fire once every 30 years, but they've had five fires past or in the last 20 years. So even plants and animals that are kind of exquisitely adapted to environments that experience fire are really struggling at the moment. And it's actually something that we're seeing in other parts of the world. I mean, in California, the ponderosa pine and the animals that live in those environments equally are adapted to a certain frequency of fire, but as fires become greater in extent and are passing through more frequently, these species are trying to survive. But in all of these places, what we know about the kind of biological and theological history of these environments is informing how we understand the degree of damage, but also to what degree and what is happening with these wildfires and bushfires is very unusual at the moment. Thank you for kind of going into that. Do you think that there are any learning lessons? So throughout your book, you take us kind of on this journey through different parts of Australia, and you talk about koalas and you talk about firehawks, you talk about night capital, you talk about the lemur platypus, you go on and I don't want to kind of give the cliff notes or give away too many nuggets of wisdom from your book and give it away because I want people to buy it. But were there some stark learning lessons of a better operating system that we can deal with this for more intense fires in the future, more climate change, some things that we need to change what we're doing in order to be better prepared or to minimize that in the future? Can you kind of give us that if there was any kind of real aha moments in there? Yeah, definitely. I would say that the bushfire crisis here, normally, we have bushfire crises fairly regularly in Australia, every maybe every four or five years up until now that there have been serious fires that have caused a lot of damage in a particular region of Australia. But like I was saying with the geographical spread, what was very unusual during a bushfire crisis was that normally a bushfire crisis in Australia is called Ash Wednesday or Black Friday. And the fires this time, they began in August, they began sort of up the coast of North South, or New South Wales is on the eastern coast in August, which is our winter like halfway up the eastern seaboard of Australia. And then really we had rolling bushfires right down the coast through New South Wales into Victoria and then Kangaroo Island as well in South Australia. And so the fires this time, they spanned more than six months and really so instead of being called Black Friday, it's actually come to be called Black Summer here in Australia because the fires went on for such a very long time. And it wasn't just the geographic extent, it was also the incredible severity of the fires. I mean, to come back to your question about lessons we learned, I just wanted to set a little bit of the background here. But the other thing that was allowing these fires to kind of spread out such an incredible extent this time was that we had a bad, bad drought in Australia for about three. We had at least three years of drought in the southeast Australia before the fires. And it meant that in many environments, the moisture had just been sucked out of those environments. And so many lush rainforest environments up there in northern New South Wales and some of the kind of wetest places in Australia were so dry that they were made available to burn in these fires. And I mean, there were marshes burning and many places that we would never expect to burn were available to burn because of how dry the environment was. And also because, I mean, this happens every year now in Australia, but climate records tumble almost every year. But it was also because of the extreme heat and the heat waves, that combination of a whole, you know, a number of heat waves, climate records, something like, and this terrible drought just meant that these environments were very dry and very hot and the fires could just spread much further than ever before. And I'd say that was a wake up call because people in Australia, you know, modern history in Australia, there is no record of fires that went for so long covered such an incredible extent of land and environments. And so really that was a wake up call for people and people were not, even though the government here had been warned, particularly by fire chiefs, kind of for six months or a year before that. And indeed, in, you know, climate reports that had been prepared for the government 10 years before that were predicting large fires in 2020, but certainly the wider public were not expecting fires at the extent that we saw in 2019, 2020. And, you know, I think many people were not expecting climate impacts like this to be happening for the next decade or two in Australia. So it caught many people really, really unaware and unprepared. And so I think one of the main lessons from the bushfire season is if we want to save important species and ecosystems in Australia, then we need to think very hard about how we're going to be prepared for next time this comes around. I mean, this summer in Australia, we flipped to a different climatic system called the La Nina weather system. And that brings a lot of rain across the Pacific Ocean to Australia. And so in fact, we've had almost no bushfires of no in southeastern Australia this summer. And it's been raining all very consistently across the summer. Everything looks very kind of green and lush at the moment. But we have to think about what's going to be happening in 10 years time because fires of the kind that we saw this year next time, you know, Australia has rolling periodic droughts. But what's happening with climate change now is the droughts are slowly getting worse and worse each time they happen. And when they do roll around again, the temperatures are getting higher and higher. And so there's almost no question that, you know, it might be five years, it might be 10, it might be 20. But mega fires of the kind that we saw over Black Summer are definitely coming back to Australia. And we need to think very hard now about some of the things we can do to save wildlife. So, you know, kind of carving fire breaks around important environments, thinking about ways that we can get into these environments and perhaps fire have firefighting efforts. There were some animals and plants. This bit in that fire season where national park staff firefighters were able to get into, you know, an environment where an important tree was called the wall of my pine and irrigate that environment and make it moist so that when the fire passed through it was only low intensity, or they were able to go out and kind of ahead of the fires, rescue some insurance populations of animals so that if their environments were completely destroyed, then there might be captive breeding populations. So we need to think very carefully now about all of the endangered and critically endangered species that are in places that are likely to be hit badly by fires in the future and think also about whether the legislations for changing Australia and its kind of firefighting efforts at the moment can, you know, at the moment firefighting in Australia is very much built around saving human lives and property, but in some of the states in Australia the laws have been changed and biodiversity assets and wildlife can now come under the directives when firefighting efforts happen. It means firefighting, government money and firefighting resources can be put towards rescuing animals or preventing fires from entering important environments. So it's kind of many of those things that need to be brought about now and also, I mean there are probably many parts of animals that need to have, need to be captive bred now, need to have insurance populations in case they're lost in the world when these kind of fires come around again in the future. Boy, there's so much to unpack there. I think the direction I want to go, so when you were talking about the Wallamy Pines that was in a different form of new conservation, extreme conservation that we're seeing, that was in your chapter seven of the book and just unbelievable the types of new extreme conservation methods that we're having to take to kind of mitigate and prepare for these new things that are happening. I must say I want to go on a more global level for a minute, kind of step back and take a cosmic or overview of perspective of things and have you give me some of your what you learned or what you saw the pandemic. Basically in Europe, in the United States, so little was heard about the brush fires. We saw some pictures of koalas, we saw some kangaroos and you know some devastating things for a blink of a moment it seemed like and then pandemic and other things just seemed to wash that away and I want to know that the pandemic or still did it hurt what happened to kind of spread the awareness of not only for Australia but for the rest of the world to kind of say hey we need to not only have mitigation but some more plans in place to be prepared for things like this in the future also to raise awareness of what can be done more conservation efforts and support for not just conservation but firefighters and others put some plans into place but on a global level the reason why I say this and I kind of also you believe that that biodiversity loss that those fires and the emissions coming from those fires that were spread just in Australia that they just remained in Australia or do you think that eventually those emissions and that biodiversity loss and all that affect or whether it's greenhouse gases or just the regular wind streams is affecting our whole planet in some respect for not if it's just not more warming but also other biodiversity and other forms of loss that we will experience in the long term. I guess the first part of your question was kind of about whether the pandemic had kind of overshadowed the bushfire crisis and yeah I guess I'd start by saying you know if some of your listeners are not really aware of how bad the bushfires were and so like the total area that was burnt was kind of bigger than Guatemala or Ireland so I mean there were very large fires in the boreal forest so in Siberia and Alaska but probably these were the largest ever fires in areas where there's much human habitation I mean the wildfires in the west of the US were very bad this year but I think the fires in Australia probably burnt sort of three or four times the total area that was burnt in the west of the US so we really had you know barely any pause to think in Australia the fires were only really extinguished in around February March and of course the pandemic was already kicking in and I think most people thought oh a year in Australia really couldn't get worse off the bushfire crisis but yeah of course the the pandemic ended up happening and I mean it had a direct effect on conservation and ecological survey and recovery work after the fires because we went into lockdown in mid-March and many many scientists and conservationists hadn't even been able to get out to places to survey animals because in a lot of the areas once trees have burnt it made it unsafe to go into these national parks you could only drive down a lot of roads once the kind of clearing crews have been through so the lockdown the pandemic really retarded a lot of that basic survey work just to go out and and try to find plants and animals and see how how bad the damage had been and then thankfully in in Australia um was not in all of Australia but in New South Wales the state where I live and and many Australian states um outbreaks were for under control and lockdowns most of the lockdowns lifted here and kind of made gene last year so men later in the year scientists were able to go out again and get into these environments but it wasn't unfortunate series of events that there's a very serious bushfire crisis was followed immediately by the pandemic and I would also say um yeah people have had a lot of other crap to deal with this year and they um the bushfire crisis has is certainly something that probably hasn't been on a lot of people's minds especially because we've had a much wetter summer this year and we haven't had a lot of bad bushfires of no so um yeah the pandemic has overshadowed and drawn people's attention away but many um you know many scientists conservationists national park staff um people in government environment departments haven't forgotten about what's happened this summer this past summer and um they've certainly been thinking about what what we need to do in the future to protect stuff you know to help stuff recover now and to protect stuff uh next time the issue comes around so and I think the second part of your question was kind of bulky can I say something before you answer the second part of the question so uh I'm almost certain that at least 85 percent of the population of the earth is kind of up in the dark of what occurred and so you have some wonderful data on the ground experience in your different chapters not only about the species in the trees and and the fires and things I want to touch upon that for a minute and just make it clear before you answer the next question um it's almost a new epoch of forest fires brush fires that that were experienced and to put it into perspective it's worse than an atomic bomb is between 650 million and one one point two billion tons of co2 that were emitted during that period of those brush fires um that's just a co2 okay co2 you can't see you can't smell it really in many respects so um but to put that into perspective but 530 million tons is the annual normal emission of co2 or greenhouse gas emissions from australian an entire year 530 million tons roughly and and uh so just during that shorter period of the brush fires and kind of blue blue right through that uh annual emissions and kind of uh more than doubled uh that that's one thing secondly just in in one month uh due to fires there was 19 million hectares were lost uh in one month one lightning strike in the blue mountains a world heritage site burnt 85 thousand hectares in one month um three billion three billion wild animal species were affected seven billion tree species how I didn't even know there was three um three billion individual animals individual animals yeah and seven billion tree species I didn't even know there were seven billion tree species unbelievable seven billion individual trees seven billion seven billion in individual uh uh uh trees and three billion individual animals you know that's unfathomable that's a huge number um and I I want I I want it to be said you know I want people to understand that's 300 times the size of the United Kingdom isn't it that that's a lot of size that's a lot of space that's a lot of uh species or not species but trees that's a lot of animals we need to really put that into perspective and so having said that I think there's a bigger impact globally yeah okay I don't even though Australia's continent and of itself I think those those effects on the ground but also those emissions play a bigger role in in our global ecosphere our biosphere our cryosphere our atmosphere and uh that that there are some some ripple effects that we see that no blame on Australia um there's no blame anywhere for a brush fire so to say I guess there are a lot of things that we could be doing differently around the world to do that but I guess now I'd want to now that we've kind of hit the point home either you say maybe a little bit more about that big impact but I would now like you to answer that you know the the next question of what you think for the rest of the globe well we know that um during those uh I mean that majority of that sort of five six hundred million tons of ca2 was I mean that was probably really just released over December and January when when the fires with most of that would have been released over that period when the fires were at their worst extent and in fact we know for a fact the plumes of smoke from the fires were so great and set in extent that the plumes of smoke um drift they swirled around the planet they swirled out to the east of Australia across the Pacific and the Tasman Sea down so they passed over New Zealand there was um you know ash from the bush wires was ash and soot from the bush was was falling in in rain and snow in in New Zealand and colouring glaciers and it passed across the Pacific ocean I mean there's massive satellite images of the smoke plumes passing from Australia across the New Zealand Pacific to Chile and South America and then you know within a number of weeks um you know the world records of the smoke basically passing all the way around the planet so you can see photos of the smoke plumes passing out across the Pacific I mean and it's not hard to see I mean they're they're um you know they're clear smoke plumes in in these satellite images that are passing right around the planet so it sort of showed um how how severe that impact was of the smoke and and of course here in Sydney with the fires in the Blue Mountains I mean for nearly all of December um if there was just a constant fixed smoke hanging in the air and people were really you know as time of the year when we'd normally be spending a lot of time at the beach but the sky was black and red it was unpleasant being outside people were wearing masks and but then of course it was similar to the scenes seen in sort of San Francisco and other cities in the west of the US when when the wildfires came were very bad and that came around last summer so I guess I think the bigger issue here is the climate change is causing increasing drought increasing heat waves all around the world and you know Australia was kind of the first example of these really terrible mega fires but there have been bad fires in many you know in the in the Amazon rainforest and in Indonesia in the in the Arctic and Alaska and Siberia and the west of the US and wildfires really is as a result of the warming and drying of the climate caused by climate change getting worse that's so true I do a lot with NASA and do a lot with digital ecosystem for the earth for the United Nations and satellite data and especially what was seen with Elon Musk and Blue Origin from Jeff Bezos and many others kind of shooting satellites and and new Starlink broadband into outer space to monitor our planet and give us new broadband we're getting this data we're able to see that the burning fires of brush fires of Australia are not just enclosed in the walls there that they're spreading around the world they're you know leaving some kind of resonance and we also know that there's there's a big tie to air pollution and issues not just in global warming and greenhouse gas emissions but in air pollution which comes from fires and other greenhouse gas emissions in our air that you know is just unhealthy for our planet in general I just think that there are some some kind of bigger learning lessons from this and I haven't heard enough people talking about it or concern about new conservation or mitigation efforts what do we do in the future we know they're going to come you say there's these rolling times and periods when the fires have come there's these rolling periods and times of natural occurring droughts or hot seasons that that occur naturally but they tend to get worse and so what are the true methods to put these astronomical numbers you know the billions we've talked about the millions into perspective so that we have a better operating system or a better plan to be prepared in the future now I've zoomed out I've given you this this big question from this global perspective but you were there boots on the ground you went to all these locations and the first of your book you have this map of Australian shows as you made your journey as much as possible around to see what was going on and I really want to get these learning lessons help us put that into perspective help us understand what to do with this information in some respects because I think it's so vital to know and how we can help what we can do with concern how can we apply it to where we live many other things so that's kind of a broad question but I want you to go with it because you were there on the ground I think you know I said earlier that the bushfire crisis early really was a wake-up call in Australia and I mean Australia already is a place that has extreme climates you know much of the inland of Australia you know so dry and hot during the summer months but it's uninhabitable and you know 80 percent of Australia's population actually live within 50 kilometers the close coastline so we you know most Australians live on this little tiny green fringe right around the outside of the continent and I think the bushfire crisis really kind of brought home for people that already were in a precarious position here here in Australia and it's not going to take very much for for it to become so hot and dry here that it's pushing the limits of where it's possible for you know people large numbers of people to live in people to live in cities and certainly many studies saying you know if we continue going away we're going and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions that you know climate change is not a mitigated greenhouse gas emissions don't come down then in you know 50 to 100 years large parts of Australia where people live at the moment are going to be largely uninhabitable I mean in in summer you you already in Sydney during our heat waves there there are perils to human human life now if people don't have air conditioning so you know are we there are people certainly wondering now if we're heading towards a point where places that are you know beautiful much cherished parts of Australia are going to be uninhabitable at some point in the future so it's definitely something people are worrying about and you know I would agree that unfortunately because of the terrible effects of the pandemic this year people have stopped caring so much about climate change and stopped worrying so much about it but I but I think a lot of the you know what has been called doomsday scenarios that climate sciences have been presenting for some time I mean what happened in Australia this summer told us that you know some of these nightmare scenarios really could come come true in the future and when you look at the number of people you know the proportion of the population in Australia that believed in climate change and also had the environment as one of their top concerns those numbers really increased from after you know sorry from before to after the bushfire crisis and you know we had a government in Australia that were you know with many of the members of the government might have been from a more climate denying position before the fires but it certainly it's certainly been an important factor in kind of removing some of that resistance to the idea of climate change and the problem climate change in Australia so you know I hope that once we're in a better position with the pandemic and people can really start to focus a lot more on the problem of climate change and I know you know when people ask me what what they can do here in Australia I would say one of the most important things is is voting for politicians to support strong action against them greenhouse gases and mitigating climate change that's really one of the best things we can be to secure our future and secure our environment here in Australia and indeed anyone can secure that their future and their environment wherever they are in the world. I used to have an uncle who lived in in Australia I've been there several times I have family in Auckland New Zealand and absolutely love it and love the environment but it's one that not many people are aware of of what Australia and New Zealand offer what's there besides this great biodiversity and you know great place to live and be and how farming is I've had several authors and farmers on the show from Australia and it's amazing that we don't know certain places of our earth what what it's like to be there I want you to maybe give me just an example and then I want to kind of touch on on some things that even if we're tourists and have visited Australia before that we might not know so it's very hot it's it's arid type of environment does that does that mean that there's it's a very dry air or is it when you're outside you're just sweating to death because there's a lot of humidity in the air yeah I mean there's a whole range of different climates and environments in Australia I mean the content of Australia is about the same size as the 50 contiguous states of the US so you know we don't have quite the cold climate extreme that the US has but we we certainly have a whole range of the amount in alpine environments there are rainforests all down because the the entire top off of Australia around the coastline the top off is tropical and nearer to the coastline the invo there are rainforest mangroves very green environments but a lot of the very centre of Australia is more of that environment that people might kind of typically conjure up when they think of Australia which is the you know very dry red soils fast scrubby vegetation kangaroos um but yeah it really varies place to place I mean a lot of the eastern coast and the Sydney where I live is subtropical so actually it's often very humid here but certainly in the you know once you get kind of a hundred or a hundred a couple of hundred kilometers or miles inland from the coast then things start to become very dry and the air becomes dry so the coastal fringe of Australia is is um often quite kind of moist in a lot of places and we do have a lot of rainforest pockets as well so I guess a lot of people might imagine Sydney to be kind of very dry and our have been impacted here the very filled with kind of um um prehistorical to kind of tropical looking trees and eucalypt and if you fly in Sydney from the area you know the first time I flew in Sydney I was really excited at how how unexpectedly green it looks from the end yeah and you went for the past few years there's been a lot of discussion about geo engineering and and what we could do to to uh kind of mitigate climate change and uh and in Jordan there's been some pretty big water projects uh how do we use an old Tesla Nikolai Tesla invention where we positively ionize the particles the dust the dirt get it up into the air and do some form of cloud seeding to kind of get that moisture to rain to to bring it back down to to the watershed and the cycle of life and change change our environments a little bit to uh to do crazy things um this coastal whole coastal thinking our way of living uh as we've seen worldwide globally those people who live in coastal areas are usually ones one of the first to be hit by climate change in one way or the other rising sea levels or hurricanes or or other issues uh Australia's probably positioned better not to fill it as much but just this last uh December we had the big um hurricane that hit Fiji and a bunch of issues there that I actually did a telethon for them Fiji Samoa Tonga they were kind of hit hard by climate change they're very obviously island coastal um so there's so much that we need to be thinking about and doing on a political government uh putting systems in place to kind of change things but I want to put a couple things into place so those who have gone to Australia or New Zealand for visit or tourism um I just want you know in 2014 in your book there was a study that um koala tourism just koala tourism for Australia was a 3.2 billion dollar annually uh business tourism business just to go see koalas and during these fires uh in 2016 they did an estimated that there's roughly 329,000 koalas in Australia um a lot of those were affected in the fires a lot of them as we said the species they're not a species the individual animals that perished because of the fires and in your book you you outline the chapters so nicely you kind of each chapter has kind of an animal attached to it as well you know koalas is how the book starts out the fire hawks in chapter two and then you go to the nightcap oak tree uh lemur rod ring tail possums you know then you go into the uh region honey eater and on and on platypus it's just a fabulous journey of of animals that I haven't really had the fortunate ability always to see or understand or know but with these fires with this climate change what we're seeing and you to talk about this in the book is some of these animals dwell in the trees or eat from the ground or have have these different ways of living now that there have a caspin destroyed or the fires is drying them down from the trees where they're more vulnerable by other species to be attacked to be eaten to not find enough food or water etc and there's some some interesting things that have emerged with that where I guess it's I don't know if you would call it evolution but it's a different form of cultural change that's kind of occurring quick where I can't remember if you said it was the hawk the fire hawk or or there was a couple others that really that's the areas they go to where there's a fire and it's drawing out the little the little animals and rodents that they can eat that some interesting things that have come can you tell us a little bit about the changes and the things that you're seeing when that occurs and how it changes the ecosystems well those I mean if the fire there's three different species of kite and hawk in northern Australia that have been seen um I mean already there was known to be something which has been called pyrrhic carnivoret carnivory by scientists in the US and so birds of prey for a long time have been known to wait around the edges of wildfires and bushfires because they've learned that um you know lizards uh small rodents insects will be fleeing from the fire and it's a great place to kind of easily look up your lunch if they're always uh yeah kind of um plethora of animals fleeing fleeing from the fire so but there are a number of species in Australia that seem to have learned to actually spread fire themselves so they'll fly in and pick up a burning sticks and quigs carry them somewhere else and drop them to create a new fire and flush animals out of those regions so I mean that's um I guess I had that in the book as an example of the way that many plants and animals are adapted to live in a world of fire in in Australia and so there wasn't so much in the regions that were hit kind of very badly by the bushfires this year and and it's only really but I Aboriginal people have known about birds doing this for probably for thousands or tens of thousands of years and there are many um Aboriginal dream time stories and tales that kind of um involve stories about birds and fire so it's probably been something that's been going on for quite a long time but it's only been kind of documented by western scientists in the last five years so I mean it's possible that it happens in other parts of the world but it's been recognised here but um I mean just to go to that other point you were talking about the impacts on koalas and um yeah you're right the population estimates for koalas you know the mid-range for that population estimate is about 330 and the the estimate for the number of koalas killed in the bushfires is kind of about 60 or 70 000 so that that's um that's a huge proportion of the species that and it gives you a flavour of the impact and terrible extent of the fires really you have to think that there were many plants and animals in Australia that were endangered or critically endangered that only exist kind of as a hundred or a couple of hundred individuals so that you know there were certainly um koalas have been incredibly badly impacted but there are certainly many other more endangered species that could have been um the may already have been pushed to extinction by by the fires and there've been um you know surveys are happening much more now and it was a survey a few months ago showing that about 230 species of invertebrates so insects, worms, snails, other creepy crawlies that's about 230 species probably need to be added to um endangered species so that you know there's certainly been very bad um impacts on wildlife with the koala that here in the state of New South Wales where Sydney is there was a government inquiry after the bushfires which said there was a possibility that koalas could go extinct in the world completely by 2050 in in um New South Wales I mean as um as koalas are only found in four or five states anyway and New South Wales is one of the most significant states where koalas are found so it that's really a very severe impact and it shows that we need to take um strong conservation measures now and the koalas like you said they're um they're very famous there are sort of charismatic flagship species that draws people's attention but there are many other plants and animals in in Australia you know hundreds and hundreds that could have also been very badly impacted by the fires but but don't draw any anywhere near as much um attention or funding but koalas are a good kind of flagship or keystone species if we can try to protect koalas and save some of the environments where koalas are found and were probably protecting and saving a lot of other species that are found in those environments alongside koalas as well. There are some interesting things that I learned about koalas from your book that um some I knew but others I didn't know um I do farming or I come from six generations of farmers here in Germany but I know with other um farm animals and some issues with especially from Europe and have been in Australia before that there's big issues around chlamydia and heat movements to the coast which causes problems for koalas and other animals and species that move into these more populated civilized areas um as well as just when they come down from the trees which is the gum trees where that which is their source of food that um they don't do very they don't fare very well on the ground against cars and dogs and other things um that that there's some really interesting learnings there when you talk to most people in in Europe or in the especially United States they're like chlamydia that's uh that's a sexually transmitted disease what does that have to do with with koalas and that I've heard that quite a bit that people don't even know that um and really if I'm right it occurred kind of from the European uh farmers or migrants coming to Australia kind of really that was caught with farm animals originally yeah with Europe I mean Europeans brought many diseases and problems to Australia but yeah I believe um committee was brought in with farm animals but it's endemic and so I mean some koala populations particularly in New South Wales and Queensland um so nearly every animal in the population has it and it and it will kill them so a lot of conservation work with koalas is kind of treat you know bringing them into care and treating them with anti-biotics and then sort of returning them to the world again but yeah I mean even before the bushfires there were big problems with um commedia um car strikes and dog attacks really that have been you know shrinking populations thriving the extinction of local populations of koalas in Queensland and New South Wales and um they were regarded the koalas in Queensland um the Australian capital the territory of Canberra our capital is and New South Wales Queensland and in Canberra had been regarded as vulnerable before the fires and but they're currently being considered to um the upgraded to endangered following the fires and I mean that's specifically as a result of the fires but they weren't doing very well before the fires came along anyway um I guess the the the last giveaway that I'll I guess uh for my listeners that I'll give on your book is you know they're um I'm big on farming and plants and gardening and things the the tallest flowering plant in the world on earth is in the mountain ash area and it's just beautiful there are some really some really beautiful biodiversity loss of plants and animals that we're just losing through things like the brush fires that is just so terribly sad to see occurring in our world and I see that throughout your book you you you bring up you kind of give us this nice connection the story about how it is what the what the on-ground look and feel is during this crazy time that that you experience and the the stories of like you have bear the dog who's in the book which is hopefully he's not bad against koalas he's more trained for for good reason James a firefighter and and these different koala rescue uh areas that are reaching are raising monies for kind of sanctuaries and help around koalas um I uh I honestly suggest that people get this book uh even though there's some eye-opening things you're like how can this be how can we have lived through this time and not know that that these uh things were going on because as as the book says it's flames of extinction and uh really I hope it doesn't become a mass extinction but we really need to realize what kind of things are being lost every minute of the day every month of our our year and where it is and realize what effects that has on on our world are there any things that I'm leaving out in the book that you would like to tease or let someone know about why they should read it and look at it and and and what will it well you know you've um obviously had a look through the book in some detail and yeah I'm glad that you kind of enjoyed the different species and animals that I sort of used as a way to kind of draw people into the different topic in a more friendly way the the other thing that I tried hard to do with the book was you know there's um a lot of very sort of depressing statistics and sad stories about what happened over the summer but I really wanted to try and find um people's more hopeful stories as well you know to bring a more positive and hopeful note and just show that it's it's not too late and there is stuff that we can do if we want to um you know prevent the worst excesses of climate change and save some of these really beautiful and important species and there are many people out there in in Australia wildlife carers and rescuers conservationists ecologists Aboriginal rangers park rangers who are just absolutely dedicated and you know out there every day of the week doing everything they can and and um yeah I just hope that I was able to bring a few more of these kind of positive and hopeful stories and you know they weren't my stories what I tried to do but was really tell other people's stories they were they were the ones who were telling the stories most of kind of their mouthpiece in the book and they they um have fantastic stories to tell about the important work that they were doing and I just wanted to bring that to a wider audience I definitely throughout the entire book got that message and read it I that's why I want others to to get out as well so that there are some amazing human beings caring about some amazing species plants and animals on this planet that are doing just fabulous fabulous work and uh we we need to support them we need to support Australia in any way possible to make sure that we um protect us for the entire world that we get into a different operating system um for not only conservation but that we will have um places to live in multiple generations that are inhabitable and and beautiful for for humanity as well as those other species and tree species and animal species I have the hardest question for you today it's really the burning question I ask all my guests this it's WTF the burning question it's not the swear word although maybe during this crazy time you you have said it a few times but it's what's the futures what's the plan out of all your academic and journeys and what you're reporting on you have a plan for the future or do you know if there are some plans what's the future where are we going where are we headed as humanity I I hope that um and and I believe as well in in the next five years there's going to be a real wake up call about the impacts of climate change and that we have to act now and that we're rapidly running out of time and I think especially you know among younger people today there is no doubt that climate change is happening that we have to work very hard to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions but more than that really just transition to a greener future as rapidly as possible and to find the economic benefits of making that transition as well so you know I'm I'm hopeful that we're going to start taking much harder and faster climate action and it's going to prevent a lot of the nightmare worst-case scenarios that people are talking about at the moment and that's never going to become a world that we have to live in this is a very similar question that's probably not as hard but what what do you think or what does a world that works for everyone look like for you um I mean I just go back to this issue about a greener future really it's a place where we're we're not getting by on um burning fossil fuels and coal and gas and you know it's um we all of the technologies already exist for us to um live a much cleaner much more harmonious lifestyle with it with the natural world to have um you know great green environments um you know running into our cities and and um you know that that's a much more pleasant world that we could all live in whether you know the air isn't choking with um car fumes and you know we're not still in in Australia taking huge amounts of coal out of the ground it's um a a re-wilded world a much greener and more re-wilded world where we can all enjoy the benefits of nature these last three questions are really for the listeners and they're if there was one message you could impart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that had the power to change our life what would it be your message um similar to what I was saying before you know if um if you're worried about the environment you're worried about the uh future of the world then vote with your feet and vote for politicians who are going to take strong action on climate change what should young journalists uh in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make real impact cover cover the important stories about climate change and kind of uh and the environment and and um you know like I tried to do with the book find find uh way to tell these stories in a you know bring important stories to like tell important stories about the work that people are being around the environment in a kind of deeper way and bring bring stories that people don't know anything about to be attention of the public what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start I guess the importance of um getting out onto the ground and into environments and experiencing things firsthand especially covering environmental stories you know with this book I spent a lot of time going out with scientists ecologists average and rangers you know traveling into the fight rounds and environments all over Australia and um it's that that kind of experience bringing environmental issues environmental stories to like um invaluable yeah it really helps you hell stories in a sort of more vivid and and vital way and um yeah it's just that kind of on the ground experience it's just really important in them getting kind of messages about the environment now I I have had a lot of evolutionary biologists and uh on the show and on the podcast and spoken to them and um evolution takes hundreds of millions billions of years but there's another form of evolution and you kind of touched upon it right there and your last answer and that's kind of the stories it's the community it's the culture that uh cultural evolution is one that probably still takes a long time but it's a little bit faster normal evolution where if we're reporting the right things if we're writing the right stories and flames of extinction to me is one that we can get some strong learning lessons out of some strong stories out there to build the new culture on thinking for greener futures and preparing for climate change that could set us on a much uh more expedient evolution to a different type of a world of a one one world without tons of loss and extinctions and john I really thank you for your time today and for letting us inside your ideas inside your books they're wonderful not just flames of extinction but I would recommend your other books to them as well to my listeners and I thank you for your time uh have a wonderful day thank you yeah I really enjoyed that conversation