 you've used the word actionable and that's a favorite word of mine, but it's a favorite word in my research group. I love doing science, I'm fascinated by science, I've been fascinated by science since I was five years old, but I think scientists have an ethical responsibility to make sure that their science makes a difference in the world and that's nowhere is that more true than environmental science. Dr. Stuart Pym is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Stuart is a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University, is one of the world's most highly cited and influential environmental scientists. He's an internationally recognized global leader in the study of biodiversity, especially present day extinctions and what the world can do to prevent them. The media turns to him when they want to know what's happening in our planet and on our planet. He is adept at explaining a complex issue in a reliable and relatable way. His message that we can all make a difference in our planet survival inspires a wide range of audiences. Pym was awarded the 2019 International Cosmos Prize, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious honors presented in the environmental field. We will touch upon that in our discussion as well today. The honor recognizes Stuart's groundbreaking research on endangered species as well as his work through his non-profit organization, Saving Nature, to promote practical approaches to help slow or reverse species declines by protecting and restoring their shrinking habitats. Past recipients of the cosmos prize include Jane Goodall, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Sir David Attenborough, a fine list of other environmentalists and activists, scientists around the world, among other luminaries in his field of conservation science and natural history. His international honors also include the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2010 and Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Pym's commitment to the interface between science and policy has led to his regular testimony to both the House and Senate committees of the U.S. Congress. He frequently visits Washington, D.C. to engage policymakers on environmental issues. He is also asked to advise international governments on biodiversity issues and the management of national parks. Stewart has served on National Geographics Committee for Research and Exploration and currently works with our Big Cats initiative in effort to reduce human wildlife conflict in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. He's a lecturer on National Geographic Expeditions. In addition to his conservation efforts in Africa, Pym has worked in the wet forests of Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil for decades, and this is a long-term, and he is the long-term collaborator on the forest fermentation project in the Brazilian Amazon. In the last decade, he has been active in training Chinese conservation professionals and spends a month each year in China. Stewart directs Saving Nature, savingnature.com, a 501c3 nonprofit that uses donations for carbon emission offsets to fund conservation groups in countries to restore their degraded lands and areas of exceptional tropical biodiversity. Their science board is composed of some of the world's most eminent and accomplished conservation biologists. Now, I could go on and on, but I want you to know that not only is he active in science and biology, and he is written well over 300 scientific papers, five books, including the highly acclaimed assessment of the human impact of the planet, the world according to Pym, a scientific audit, audits the earth. His students have gone on to important positions into top universities worldwide, others directing science at International Union for Conservation of Nature, the World Bank and Monterey Bay Aquariums, U.S. governmental agencies and international NGOs. So as you know, as you can see, I welcome my guest, Stewart Pym. Thank you so much, Professor Pym. And I hope you don't mind me calling you Stewart. We're both up there in years and we have done a lot of accomplishments. You a thousand times more than me and have been around the block and seen our world in many different ways, but I'm sure there's many things that I've left out in your list of accomplishments. It is truly unbelievable. We came together and first got to this point because of a paper study, ecology and economics for pandemic prevention investments to prevent tropical deforestation to limit wildlife trade. And I want to talk about that as well as other things today on the show. But first of all, welcome and thank you so much for taking your valuable time to be here. Well, thank you so much for having me on the program. Yes, please call me Stewart. It's a great pleasure to be here. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk to you. And I greatly appreciate you giving me that chance. Thank you. I mean, it's exciting. So your list of accomplishments is just innumerable. And the thing that really touches me the most is it's really actionable science that you do. Not only you have a deep passion and very learned wisdom through your experience, but you want to see not let's not just report about it. Let's not just talk about it. Let's get out there and do some actionable items that will make it different and change the situation that we're in. And that's really what has drawn me in all your works to this discussion I want to let my listeners and viewers know about what some of these things are. So now we've went through a second. You've used the word actionable. And that's a favorite word of mine, but it's a favorite word in my research group. I love doing science. I'm fascinated by science. I've been fascinated by science since I was five years old. But I think scientists have an ethical responsibility to make sure that their science makes a difference in the world. And that's no, nowhere is that more true than environmental science. And I had a sort of a conversion when I was in my late 20s. My science was being widely recognized. I was working in Hawaii. I was working on species that were going extinct. And I thought, what would the world think of me 40 years later if all I'd done was great science, but I haven't made a difference? So actionable science is absolutely what my group and I are committed to doing. That's fabulous. And thank you for that insight. I, all the scientists, all the researchers and those who are involved in conservation and environmentalists, the ones that I see as my mentors are heroes. And you've definitely fallen to that category. Seem to also take that approach. This very actionable, how can it be applied in your biography? I mentioned Jane Goodall is also a recipient of the same price that you have. And she's a very active participant in all that she does. Still to today, she is very active, 200 plus events a year and very outspoken at what she does among others. I've had the great privilege to do a couple of congressional briefings in the United States with Dame Jane Goodall. She is an amazingly tough act to follow, but the last time we had dinner together, I sort of said, you know, how, Jane, you know, how much time you spend at home. And, you know, she's this very slight lady. She's older than I am, but she has such an amazing spark. And, you know, she said something like two weeks. That's, you know, the rest of the time she's out there trying to make the world a better place. She is a huge inspiration. I've had the first time I was at a congressional hearing with her. I got to the hearing, oh, probably about an hour before it was due. And there was about a thousand young women and their mums that, you know, trying to get in to see her. And I almost had to, you know, fight my way through this crowd of young women who wanted to see her. It's a great privilege to have shared the same price that she has. Yes, it is. And I believe you also have many traits that are similar. So she makes time for people on a one-on-one basis. She wants to hear their stories. She wants to shake their hands. And yes, today we're in this age of selfies. But she wants to not only hear their message, but to depart her messages to them. And I see that in your work as well. There's a little bit of a gap, also for those of my listeners that haven't heard of you before. I was hoping you could kind of fill us in. So you have been doing this work for a long time, which I, and I don't want to make an assumption, but for me, it would say that you have, not only by doing the work, you know how to turn it into actionable things that will help species in our environment to be more resilient. But that also requires a certain amount of resilience for you and the way you think, kind of thinking resiliently, critically thinking, thinking, and complexity sciences and the things that you do. Has that at all helped prepare you for this pandemic time? So you've probably lived long enough to see other pandemics or other great things or bad things that have happened in our world. But has any of that helped you to weather this pandemic a little bit better and give you insights of what we're doing right or wrong to get through this time? And maybe that's where we touch on the paper that we're going to talk about soon. What not only preparedness, but preventative measures can we take to make sure that the next one's pandemics aren't as worse or we make them through them a lot better? You've asked two questions. One about the pandemic, which I'll answer second. The first about sort of background and origins. I like to say that like Lord Elrond in Lord of the Rings, I was there at the beginning. And I literally was there one Thursday afternoon at the University of Michigan, about 35 years, 40 years ago, when a group of us voted into existence, the professional society, the Society for Conservation Biology. And the reality is that the science of conserving biodiversity is a very, very new one. And I've been rewarded very kindly, as you mentioned earlier, because I brought science into the business of conservation. So yes, some of the stuff that I do is technical science. Actually, quite a lot of it is technical science. But I think the important thing is that it's science that makes a difference. And I firmly believe that what science does is to give us an edge. It gives us insights into what we can do to be more efficient, what we can do to prevent species from going extinct. And that explanation segues very nicely into the question about the current pandemic. Because what we know from science is that a couple of viruses a year spill over from animal hosts into the human population. This is an epidemic that we anticipated. There are scientific papers predicting that this sort of thing would happen. There were papers that anticipated what would be needed to prevent it. So I mean, within my teaching career, I've seen a couple of influencers that have killed a million people or more that have come into us via pigs or chickens, domestic animals. But I've also seen more than 10 million people around the world die of HIV, of AIDS. And that came into the human population because people who were clearing forests in Western Central Africa were killing chimpanzees for bush meat. They were butchering those animals and they became infected with their blood. And what we're seeing now is just one of a string of pandemics that broadly we've got because of a couple of things. We're moving into tropical forests, rainforests, if you like. And we're coming into close quarters with species that harbor diseases there. And we're trading in animals. We're eating animals, wild animals. COVID-19 came from bats. It may have come via pangolins. But whatever, we are bringing wild animals into close contact with others. And in doing so, we have caused tens of trillions of dollars of damages and pushing a million casualties. So I think there's a lot of science out there and it's incumbent upon us as scientists, as as ecologists, to look at what those causes are and to address them. And with Andy Dobson, a close friend from Princeton University, we assembled a stellar team of men and women scientists from around the world, from China, from South America, economists, environmentalists, epidemiologists. To answer the question of what could we do and how much will it cost? And the bottom line of that message is it's going to cost a lot less to prevent the next pandemic than it will cost if we don't. I will have Andy on another podcast, hopefully, here in a couple of weeks. So we'll also get into depth. I wanted to, really, because you're so knowledgeable. You've been doing this for a long time. It would have been nice to have you both. But I think it would have been unfair to have a show with both of you on it, because you each have so much that we could go down tons of rabbit holes. There are so many things with environmentalism, conservation, and this that you each offer. So I've decided to split it up into two different shows. You're a tropical conservation biologist, I guess, if I'm correct, as really the specialist. And you mentioned you've dealt with this over many years in different factors, you know, HIV and these things have any of those experiences helped you personally, whether the pandemic better, but also say, wow, we actually had preventative measures or things in place or that we discussed about to avoid this happening years ago. And this is just this very similar to SARS, MERS, HIV, or other facts. We're still not listening. And every time there's a new pandemic, it's like we're recreating the wheel or we're not using any of the learnings from the past, implementing them immediately to be more preventative, to make sure that when this occurs in the future, not only humanity has more resilience, but that we get through, I mean, there will be some, but that we get through it a much different way, less cost, but also less human suffering, less environmental suffering to get through it on. So I'd like to know a little bit more of your thoughts or feelings on how that's helped you, but also, you know, what are you seeing? And did that lead to writing this paper or kind of I want to kind of get into your brain, what the process was in that? See if we can get any learnings for our listeners out there that give us more insight. One of the lessons that's immediate for me is that I'm teaching students at Duke University who are in various stages of lockdown. The university is still open, so we have some students on campus. And as I've been telling them, I have the experience of teaching students at the University of Pretoria in South Africa where I've had, I have the wonderful title of Extraordinary Professor there. And I first went to South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president, I boycotted South Africa during the apartheid years. And so over the last 25 years or so, I've taught classes where I know that a fraction of the students that I teach were going to die from AIDS within five years. When I started teaching in South Africa, young adults between the ages of 20 and 30 were dying to faster rate them than people above 60 or 70 years old. And what we learned from that is that it's not just the average behavior of young people that was at issue. It was the behavior of a very, very highly risk taking individuals. In the case of HIV, people are having lots and lots of unprotected sexual contacts. And the issue that many of us are facing now, many universities are facing now, many countries are facing now, both in, certainly in Britain and for what I understand in Europe too, but definitely in the United States, is that while many people are prudent and sensible in what they do, there's a fraction of people who are taking very, very risky actions. And we have to take care of these extreme behaviors if we're going to get the pandemic under control. So for me, that's an immediate lesson that comes from having looked at a previous epidemic. But let me sort of wind it back right to the very beginning. And that is that a lot of these diseases come from the tropical moist forests of the world, certainly the tropical forests of the world. And they come from these places because these were, these are the last places where we humans have spread. That as our world population has grown, we're moving into areas that previously we left unoccupied. You know, when the Spanish flu epidemic 100 years ago spread through the world, there was only one billion people, now there's close to seven. And with that increasing human population, we are moving into to rainforests, into dry areas, and we're pushing the boundaries of nature back. And we're coming into into contact with with diseases that we didn't encounter before. I mean, the story of HIV coming from people killing chimpanzees in western central Africa is a very obvious example of that. And that raises the question of do we need to do that? And the sort of the tragic answer is no. It's not that we need to destroy the world's rainforests to feed people. The interesting case of Brazil, which has the world's biggest rainforest, the Amazon, is when under a previous administration, they decided to cut back deforestation and cut it back to about 10% of what it had been historically. Their yields of soybean, which is the principal crop, went up. And it went up because they decided to invest some money on better farming practices, rather than just sort of really nearly clearing clearing the forests. If we look at Africa, Africa's population is growing faster than anywhere else. And a lot of that is causing people from from the south to move north into the dry forests that fringe the Sahara. People are moving from the north into into these areas too. There is a collision of two peoples of Muslims from the north, Christians from the south. And so there is a zone of conflict that stretches 6000 kilometers east to west, sea to shining sea, you know, Dhaka to Mother Dishu, that comes from desperately poor people moving into lands that are really unsuitable. You know, I could go on, but we're moving into into places that do not make us rich, do not feed us. And the costs of stopping that are quite modest. The second part of the story is that there is a huge wildlife trade. Some of it is wildlife for meat. Some of it is wildlife for exotic pets. When it comes to meat, that those wildlife markets in China, my Chinese colleagues tell us, are worth about $20 billion a year. And I have lots of Chinese friends and colleagues, and there's no question that the Chinese realize that that $20 billion is a market that needs to go. It's cost China many, many times more than that in losses of life and economic activity. Now, it's not always as simple as that. There are cultures around the world that depend on meat. You know, across 60 million square kilometers of the planet, people can't grow crops, they graze animals. But nonetheless, there are clearly some low-hanging fruit. There are clearly some activities which nations could either close down or find alternatives. Or the simple and prudent alternative is to make sure they have more vets who can go in and check that animals in captivity, being bred in captivity, are healthy. So, you know, prevention is a lot cheaper, an option than cure. We don't yet have a cure for COVID. We know that hundreds of thousands of people more are going to die until we do. Bill Gates just came out and said as well that COVID is going to run its course by 2021. I've heard other specialists, scientists, and doctors say that it's going to be around for about two years, and then it's going to run its course, and then something else will come in. Whether we get the vaccine or not, which is looking fairly positive, that just like MERS, SARS, and others, the big majority will run its course. Then there'll be the next thing on the radar, hopefully not, but I wanted to see what your views are on that as well. Is it kind of a seasonal thing? Is it only something that lasts that long, or do we still not know enough about it? I think the best answer is we don't know enough about it yet. If you look at diseases, a disease doesn't want to kill you. A disease wants to reproduce and infect more people, and if it kills you, it's not going to infect as many people as it could. Unfortunately, that simple evolutionary scenario is complicated by the fact that to be able to spread, COVID needs to make you cough and sneeze and all the rest of it, and it's precisely by clogging up your lungs full of a gunk that it infects other individuals. It's not clear what the evolutionary pathway of COVID is going to be. There's no really compelling evidence yet that it is becoming more benign. Some diseases do become more benign, but not all of them. That's an open question. Rather easier to answer is that you can calculate what fraction of the population need to be immune, either because they have caught the disease and recovered, or that they're being given a vaccination. That has to do with this number that we're all hearing about called the R-value. It's a reproductive rate. In other words, if you are infected, how many other people are you going to infect? The World Health Organization thinks for COVID, that's about 2.5. That means that we would have to make sure that 80% of the population had either caught COVID and recovered or had been given a vaccination. I think when we look at the United States, it's not clear that enough people would become immunized even if a vaccine were available because of the general hostility to science, vaccination, all the rest of it. It varies from country to country. I saw a report on the Netherlands, and as you might expect, everybody in the Netherlands got the memo, and essentially everybody in the Netherlands would become vaccinated, but the Netherlands is not the United States. I think the worry is that even in countries where people could afford to have the immunization, it's not clear that that's going to take place. If that happens, then indeed this disease is going to hang around, and there are going to be periodic outbreaks just as happened in New Zealand, which went 100 days without an outbreak, and then there was an outbreak. I'm afraid it's going to be with us for a long time. It's going to alter our social behavior in much the same way that HIV altered people's social behavior. I can't imagine that anybody is going to want to go to very dense concentrations of people indoors, but once again, if we look at what's happening on university campuses and indeed elsewhere, there's always some young men and women who feel that they are immortal, and so they can spend the evening with 100 of their closest friends in very close proximity. I think there's a lot of things like that that are still going to be very difficult to assess, but I think it's going to be around for a while. I'm looking forward to a vaccine as soon as possible so I can get on with my life, but I think it's going to be a while. We don't want to get on with life as business as usual. I believe we should get a big, the great reset that we should definitely think of more preventative and prevention methods for the future that let us live more resilient. There are some things that you said earlier that I wanted to just touch upon. First of all, you're a professor at Duke, you've got also the great title for the South Africa University as well, but you are an educator of all people. So all students, whether that's businesses, governments or whoever, so we're very fortunate that you think well beyond those universities that you're affiliated with that you're educating us all. So that's humbling. You mentioned that you were there in the beginning of that conservation. Can you tell us the date, 1970s sometime or what one was it? Early 1980s. Was that 1983 or 1985? 1983 or five. So that was actually almost 10 years or eight or nine years after the real big environmental movement, Environmental Protection Act, Clean Air Act, but then finally this conservation so started moving. I wanted to know that because it's important you know after the space race and we got to the moon and then we got the first and second catalog image of our earth and we saw the world in a different light. That was also really the beginning of a lot of environmental movements and awareness on our planet. That wasn't the beginning of the environmental movement, I'm for certain. There were many, many influential people who were talking about the environment well before that. I think it does provide a very convenient marker for the beginning of conservation science and we were hugely fortunate is the man who instigated that effort who died a few weeks ago, Michael Soleil. Michael realized that it needed to be of a big tent. He realized that it needed to bring a lot of people together. So he had philosophers, he had theologians, he had social scientists, he had economists, he had ecologists, he had geneticists. I think that reflects in the paper that my colleagues and I have just published and that is to tackle this problem we need a lot of different insights. We knew we needed epidemiologists and ecologists, we knew we needed economists, we know we needed social scientists and we needed people from a lot of different backgrounds. I mean the fundamental problem is that we are not looking after nature well. As we've grown from in this century, the last hundred years, from a billion people to seven billion people, we have been abusing mother nature and we've been saying for a long time that mother nature is not a lady with whom we want to mess and she's bitten back. Now that means that we need to be more thoughtful about what we're going to do but those sort of actions are complicated, they're multifaceted. There are surprising differences between people across quite short distances. I'm always impressed when I'm on the up in northeast India in the flood plain of the Brahmaputra river in winter. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks and cranes in the people's fields and the people are wandering through these cranes and the animals don't care because they know the people will leave them alone. 300 kilometers away in southwest China people are shooting every bird bigger than a sparrow even though it's illegal to do so because it's a different religion, it's a different culture. Not to say all the Chinese like that far from it but different cultures have very different different perspectives even within the same religion. A few years ago the pope came out with a remarkable document called the Dato Si, just a very very powerful chapter on biodiversity and talks about what human actions are doing to that. It's cyclical, yes, it's fanatical. I'm not qualified to talk about its theology but I'm qualified to talk about its sciences. Science is very very good and yet there are varieties of Christians, subspecies of Christians if you will, within the United States who feel that global warming is a mere species extinction is invented that we have quite literally a god given right to to go and destroy the environment. So you know I've gone on at length about that but clearly there are these kind of ethical and religious discussions which are very important and require dialogue, require investigation and require talk. So going back to Michael Soleil and being there at the beginning, Michael understood that so he understood that we had to bring in we had to bring in a lot of people to talk about these issues. That's so important and I'm gonna I know we could get down some rabbit holes we're not even to the first real question yet but I really want to get into it and pull some things out because there's so many connections that can be made here. So the Cosmos Prize was that tied at all to Carl Sagan Cosmos or is that a different totally different organization the way the prize was structured and named? The Cosmos Prize takes its name from the flower there's a Cosmos flower okay and I'm not sure but I think it was the prize was established before Carl Sagan's very famous very wonderful Cosmos program on television. I could be wrong on that but it certainly it wasn't it was Carl Sagan and then then it was a Cosmos flower so it was a Cosmos flower from which they took the inspiration. I just wanted to make that sure because I didn't know and I wanted to let know a little bit more about that because if it was there's some interesting ties there as well and the reason I wanted to find that out first is because my real question is about your your science your thoughts and your feelings around biome earth biome destruction and our human health biome and how that interplays with viruses and diseases that we're seeing we have a lot of ties to the earth birth you know we're really basically started with bacteria primordial soup type of things to present day as well as all the bacteria microbes and viruses and things that live in our body and then the biome the earth biome and how that microorganism world and works as well as there are some some ties with your work and explanations that you can give us that also correlate or relate with that in any way. I can't talk much about that because it's outside my area of expertise okay the extent that I understand that it does appear that people who you know spend time in nature and you know are sensible about their diets often have a much more diverse gut biome than people who you know who don't get exposed to nature and live off processed foods and there are developing studies that show that you know that you know a healthy gut flora a healthy gut you know microbiota lead to more health generally but that's outside my view. The cosmos prize I was hugely honored to get that it's about the harmonious coexistence of nature and humankind now I didn't invent that they invented it when the prize was established um close to 50 years ago 40 years ago um and I think that's a fantastic vision um because it says you know we need to live in in harmony with nature and there's a sort of or else uh and you know COVID comes along and says what the or else is um so I think this is a recognition that you know as we begin to become a more even more populous planet than we are now we simply cannot take nature for granted we do have to live we have to find practical ways of living in harmony with nature. One of my big uh she's passed away now but she was a a big mentor and uh someone that I really admire her works and I wanted to see how much you knew about her as well but there's some ties here to to not only our earth and this the the cosmos and and their vision of this uh I would call it a symbiotic earth or symbiosis of nature and humans and species and you know connected to nature um Lynn Margolis you know she came up with a symbiotic earth symbiosis she is uh really rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution she was also a uh American evolutionary biologist as well I don't know how much you know about her but she was also Carl Sagan's first wife uh her second his second wife was Andurian I just interviewed uh his daughter Carl Sagan's daughter Sasha Sagan but um really the evolution of cells um a lot of work with James Lovelock also from the United Kingdom and um she received the National Medal of Science but she and many other since have really kind of said we need to live in in harmony with nature you know kind of have this uh uh symbiosis of our world on how we interact and and see our connection with the planet um the the other thing that's really unique is there's another Professor Chin who I saw last year in Songdo Korea uh spoke at a UN conference where a lot of indigenous people were there it's called the National Adaptation Expo in Songdo Korea that was a host every year and he said humans need to evolve homo sapiens really need to evolve into some form of homo symbios you know and and it's a new twist that's unique it's far out there but it's more along this line cosmos this connection with nature and how uh we're all tied together I want to know I I read out of your work and or out of what you've done that is also a very similar message um Lynn Margolis was not only the the evolution of cells but it was this micro rizia and uh uh mitocondria and many other things that were there and she actually totally went against uh docens and and other scientists as the single female at the time that says you know uh neo darwinism and neoliberalism that is absolute bullshit uh there is no natural selection survival of the fittest only the strong survive it's about collaboration and cooperation and more the symbiotic her so I would love to hear your thoughts and feelings on how that ties to your work and if you're in alignment anyway or or what we can how we can understand that if if you don't mind well um it's beginning to stray from for what I can talk about I I never met a James Lovelock my wife and I visited him and his wife um you know he's a fellow great she's a fellow american like my wife um and and that was a wonderful experience I love spending a couple of days with Jim he's an amazing intellect um and and you know he got into a he got into a dispute with Richard Dawkins and I didn't think that did um uh did either of them any good but I do admire a lot of what Jim said um in many ways I'm a much more I'm a much more sort of mud on boots practical person I think those ideas are important I think they speak to the general topic of the fact that we do have to live um harmoniously with nature um but I we have to figure out exactly what that means in a practical way and those practical ways which are at the heart of the the paper that we just published are you know not destroying habitats willy nilly um not destroying species willy nilly not trading you know animals for their parts because we think that they may have some you know magical properties um and most of my efforts are devoted through my non-profit saving nature to the very practical side of of restoring nature of healing nature um not only have we destroyed so much of the planet um what we have left behind is in tatters and pieces and fragments so we have lots of little isolated patches of of nature you know and if you have a forest fragment over here and it has two tigers and their males and the forest fragment over here and they have two tigers and females you do not need a phd in biology to know you're not getting any baby tigers so what we do at saving nature is to work with local groups of groups that work with local communities benefit local communities um are run by people in the local communities to to restore nature I mean so to the extent that we have a metaphor it's CPR for earth connect protect restore um and I think we can we can make practical um actions so um yes um you know I I think Jim Jim Lovelock is a wonderful guy yes of course I read Lin's work but you but you know when it comes down to it um so much of it comes down in the final analysis to planting a tree I think the thing that gives me the greatest fun you know is you know is is is digging a hole and putting a tree in it um now I don't do that very often but the partners that we work with are planting hundreds of thousands of trees I think the important message is that there are so many things we can do we can do as individuals we can do as citizens through the ballot box and through engaging our politicians and there are so many things that we can do to make the world a better place and I think if there's a single lesson from from COVID-19 is that we have to do that you know that we can't just assume that we can forget nature and continue to exploit it we we have to get down and start doing some very practical things so the the article the the paper the report how however you say it there's many contributors science mag came out with it and it's the policy form ecology and economics for pandemic prevention COVID-19 investments to prevent tropical deforestation to limit wildlife trade and predict against future zoonosis outbreaks now that is a mouthful and the paper is very complex very thorough for the information at hand for all the the data that you had to go through available at the time and you mentioned that in the paper after reading it several times and I want you to not give me the synopsis a lot better than I could but really what I see it's a it's showing economists and politicians that there is a preventative way that is much more cost effective than the reactionary way to do it let's wait for the next one and just react if we put some monies in that we will putting in any way and preventative measures the outcome is much better the return and the ease of of of problems is much better now I know I'm not a scientist so I'm making it very easy and simple but I'm sure you can tell us much more how it's about yeah well the first thing is often when scientific papers appear in journals unless you subscribe to that journal you can't read it this this piece is in the public domain so anybody can go to science and read it if they do they'll find it's two and a half thousand words and when you only have two and a half thousand words you have to make sure that every single one of them counts so there were times when you know I sat there and argued every which way with my colleagues to say two words in a sentence however there is there are a lot of good write-ups and if I may plug my favorite newspaper The Guardian it's been my newspaper since I was 12 years old when it was called The Manchester Guardian there's a really excellent piece in The Guardian and The Guardian does brilliant graphics so if anybody wants to have a much easier version go go to The Guardian and look it up the message is that yeah there are some very very practical things that we can do and they're cheap they're they're staggeringly cheap compared to to to what the nations of the world spend on military preparedness and after all this is a national security issue this has hurt our nations as much as a small war might it's killed a huge number of people we ought to be thinking of this in terms of its security implications for our societies but they are very straightforward we should stop chopping down fires we should suppress wildlife trade wherever possible there are exceptions we ought to put much more money into prevention now I don't want to in any way criticize the World Health Organization it's an organization I greatly admire and it does a superb job but it focuses on what its name suggests which is you know the health piece of this you know you get sick and WHO you know starts thinking about what they can do about it we need to be we need to be looking at the stages before that we need to look at what you know bats and monkeys and rats and mice what are they carrying what's out there what are the dangers we need to be looking at the early stages when you get spill over from from those species into domestic livestock or into humans I mean if we'd have been on them you know if we'd have been paying attention when when HIV first spread into people in western central Africa you know we could have saved trillions of dollars and 10 million lives we need to be out there at the beginning we need to shape this agenda to be more you know environmental ecologically oriented unless on the you know taking care of the health issues after the fact and I think that simple message even if the paper is is is hardgoing is one that's easy to easy to get I like it very much and we'll definitely put a couple links into the show notes when we post and and publish it so that people will know how to find it and also putting saving nature and Duke on their Nicholas Duke on there as well I leaving now are already almost an hour into it I want to give you my first question and we'll move into some some questions that you might not be able to ask but you might might have opinions on it as well grew up in Britain wives American how do you feel about being a global citizen or the term and what if a future without walls borders nations divisions of humanity which is really kind of how nature and other species work and operate how food works and operates as we've seen through this pandemic what are your thoughts and feelings on that um I have to tell you that I was enormously disappointed when Britain left left the European Union I was definitely a remainer I think it behooves us to to develop close and practical ties with our neighbors and I most certainly do not you know support Boris Johnson and his efforts to take Britain out of Europe but that's actually not really particularly relevant to these issues the the issues are that whatever national boundaries this disease crossed those boundaries like that in a you know second um that it very very quickly spread around the world and so whether we whether we recognize our national boundaries or not um we have to recognize that we do not live in an isolated world um diseases spread the the carbon dioxide pollution that we we create by burning fossil fuels in our cars in our homes by burning tropical forests those are consequences that have global significance so whatever our views on on national cooperation or whatever our political views are um we have to address you know we have to address the the the essential one one world view that we have I mean earlier you talked about that that iconic photograph of the of the earth rising from the moon yes yes I think that um inspired you know billions of people it said look we have this little lonely blue marble you know we we better we better get our act together and that that's more I didn't really want to push any political at all um although as you as you mentioned with uh uh brexit there are a lot of consequences not only with food and um other things that have a ripple effect on that globally but there are there are some nations with uh where that where they see themselves as as like an old their own national planet to some respects that are making decisions tropical forest burning or whatever the the the cause is the the big one right before the pandemic was um one that that Australia was burning right before the pandemic and it released 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide which is uh double that of what they emit in a single year for all of Australia just through industry and that and you know there's not a lot of conversation about that but that the bigger wave is obviously climate change environmental destruction and um um you know when I when I ask the question of global citizenry the air we breathe the food we eat the waters we drink um uh and those don't have boundaries they are global citizens the pandemic it is a global citizen and so if if uh some nations or some places are making decisions for us all and affecting us all whether it's uh you know with pollution or whatever that that's kind of the reason I asked that question so it's a little bit leading but I want to you answer it very eloquently it's a good question I mean the US has um you know contributes a huge amount to global heating um because of its emissions um and to some extent it's coming back and biting us on the arse yeah because we're having these massive fires in the west there are droughts in the midwest um Australia which has had politicians that have simply denied you know global heating is taking place has now had some massive fires one of the you know one of the important feedbacks one of the things that Jim Lovelock has written yes um is that as temperatures warm things become more flammable forests dry out they become more flammable they burn they put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that makes it even worse um and and so there are a lot of consequences and those consequences are global um you know as we warm the planet um the Arctic is melting faster than ever before that's rising sea levels that's causing damage along coastlines uh North Carolina has a very very low flooded coastline and flooding's um uh flooding's going to get a lot worse I mean you can't you can't simply put a wall around your country yeah President Trump trying to build a wall along the Mexican border um was was farcical in all sorts of ways not least of they had a storm that blew pieces of it down um but the reality is that we can't isolate ourselves from um from COVID from global heating from all these other things we have to recognize that you know we have to we we have to you know not only play nicely with each other we have to play smartly we have to come to to global agreements on on climate change on deforestation on on the spread of spread of diseases that leads me to nicely um to the first burning question WTF and it's not the swear word I promise it's what's the future and not and you you can answer it for you you don't need to answer it for all of us well what's what's the future um you know when Al Gore in an inconvenient truth talks about species going extinct a thousand times faster than they should he's quoting the work that I do I did well still do yeah um and so the question I get from most journalists is you know you know Professor Pym how do you get up in the morning uh you know how do you get up in the morning where you're the go-to guy for telling us we're losing earth's biodiversity and the simple answer I get up in the morning because there's so much I can do I I'm very very optimistic that we're smart enough to come up with solutions it's why I founded saving nature it's why my group is is very energetically helping wonderful local conservation groups around the world plant native trees it reforests the areas it reconnects areas helps with global heating um my feeling is that there's a lot of smart things that we can do we need to be doing more of it and we need to do it with a greater sense of urgency but what's the future I think we can get through this um I don't um you know I I I don't go to bed crying in my beer um I usually go to bed absolutely exhausted because I've worked a long day and I get up ready to do you know new things um you know my day-to-day will be you know very much um looking at how uh how I can support a reforestation project in Ecuador we want to be able to help uh help people um on the on the eastern Andes so you know we can do this we can change our lives we can make a lot of smart smart decisions and in the way we do things we can consume energy we can be we can tread more gently on on the landscape a whole long list of of personal decisions decisions we can make as groups to to engage with other others I hope people will engage with saving nature we can we can hold our politicians feet to the fire and we can tell them that environmental issues matter and so you're saying by those actions that we can take now actually we're creating that that future that resilient desirable future where we that we all can enjoy and live in and as this this almost this symbiotic earth more um conservation and protection one with nature um I really I really like that and and um I see that throughout all your work and that's also what I read in the paper as well there's so many people that can take actionable items into their own life and it's specific for each individual and how and the way they apply it but there are so many numerous things that can be done it's uh it is doable and and I'm also very optimistic um I I don't know if you knew this but I was one of the first 50 people trained by Al Gore and this ranch in Carson's Tennessee I'm in both the movies and convenient truth and the sequel as well and used to be the Germany and Austria country manager but uh it's a really really uh great man he's done a lot of things today he's trained about 27 000 climate leaders and you know done the movies and written the books there are some fabulous youth activists youth leaders out there that are doing a lot of things you might be aware of Felix Finkbeiner he um has a foundation called plant for the planet he uh he tells politicians stop talking and start planning he is planted well over 500 million trees to date he's sold a fair trade chocolate bar that protects uh far indigenous farmers farmers and for every chocolate bar that's sold and usually at international conventions or conferences there is one tree planted and in that process not only is he planted a lot of trees but he's also trained about 87 000 climate leaders to give his presentation and think about planting trees and he's from he's from Germany started when he was nine years old spoke at the General Assembly with that movement and now I think he's 22 23 something like that but uh there are fabulous people not giving up continuing to take action and and follow you know the words and wisdom that you're doing and also setting great examples it's uh I feel I feel very lucky to be uh you know to be a teacher I have fantastic students at Duke I have fantastic students in in South Africa but you know I I engage students around the world um and and their their enthusiasm and their and their dedication you know is is hugely encouraging you realize that you know they can do this the world is um their world is at risk um I think we all understand that if we don't get this right in this century it's going to be catastrophic um and and so you know there is an ever greater sense of urgency but I think there's also a greater sense of of understanding and competence um when I started trying to look at what was happening to the planet 20 years ago um we didn't have we didn't have Google Earth um I got the opportunity to um uh with a small group of colleagues to ask the administrator of NASA to make two global coverages of earth available because back in 20 years ago that wasn't the case and now we think nothing of oh you can get a Google Earth you can see where forests are happening uh where forests are recovering where they're where they're being destroyed you know we've got a we've got a we've got our intelligence you know a company now that's trying to cut a an illegal logging road into a protected area in the Ecuadorian Amazon you know we see them and we can get that message you know sometimes on the front page of the New York Times uh you know before the before the CEO was even woken up in the morning I mean there's a lot of we have a much better grasp of what's going on and we can use that intelligence to to to effect um appropriate actions I belong to a group with the United Nations it's called the digital ecosystem for the earth it's a geospatial data sources numerous close to 1300 different sources that everything from Google Earth to NASA to European Space Agency and many many others uh planet home things like that that provide these important vital data it is uh real time up to the date accurate lifeblood pulse heartbeat of our planet so to say precipitation data soil moisture etc on and on that is so vital to know for conservation but also for agriculture and just how we can act and use that data for good to make sure that we restore conserve and heal our planet in a way so I love that you all that's also mentioned in the paper as well but also in some of your other other works on how how we can use the tools at hand you know to to keep up to speed with our exponentially growing world and use that function in a positive way to to react um this the second our last hardest question I have for you is kind of similar to the burning question but a little bit different of a twist um it's what does a world that works for everyone look like for you um I think um we are going to have to address some fundamental issues in in in how we are how we are abusing the earth um I mean a lot of people say well why don't you spend all your time talking about human population growth there is no doubt that human population growth is is is is is a major driver um but it's just one of two but the other is um our ever insatiable demand for more stuff ever increasing aspirations to live more expensive lives um and so when we in developed nations you know tend to point fingers at poorer nations and say you know you're having too many children it's right for them to point back and say that you're consuming more now you know I like to live well I'm not trying to tell you I live a poor life I don't but I do think that we have to think you know carefully about about consuming a lot less the energy efficient be increasingly developing renewable energies suppliers are not constantly destroying the world's forests not constantly destroying the world's fisheries you know one of the most obvious ways in which we encounter uh impact on the environment is to look at what's on the fish munger slab you know I grew up in the north of england where hadakin chips was comfort food codden chips you know now you go to uh the fish mungers I did this morning I do my shopping early on the Sunday morning um you know and and the most of the fish was tilapia which is farm raised and I hate tilapia um you know we need to be looking after our resources better and that's um has to be part and parcel of of rich people consuming less but consuming smartly and recognizing that there can't be these extraordinary inequities in inequalities um in in people's lives you know the the the the person who is you know eating bats is is trying to make a living um and it's cost the world tens of trillions of dollars the person who is smuggling pangolin scales um I don't have a lot of sympathy for them and we need to stop that but you know in a way it's a reflection of people's desperation you know should should we discourage people from from killing rhinos for their horns yes but at the same time we we need to be thinking of how how we can use our resources to you know to help people who are living in in poor areas of Africa these are all solvable problems um and it's clear that we have to have a a more even uh society socially if we're going to effect the kinds of environmental changes that I've been talking about yes so I mean part of it is really Einstein's problem theory and we can't solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them we have to think think about them a little bit differently apply them different what you just said there's many rabbit holes that we could go down and dive deeper into one being population and the the divisions and thoughts behind that one but more generally it all really ties into uniquely what occurred yesterday yesterday was earth overshoot day august 22nd last year it was july 29th was earth overshoot day through this pause in this pandemic we've gained 24 more days um I don't I don't think it's nice to hear it's nice to hear that a forced lockdown and and pandemic we can gain some days but I I think there's also some things that we're not realizing the permafrost and the methane that's occurring the the like I mentioned uh Australia burning before that and how much more and emissions just through that um that that it's not enough to rebalance and get us back into the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries that whole principle of earth overshoot day as we are consuming and using more resources than we have in the day whether that that thinking and that model evolved from from one of the great books the the limits to growth from the club of Rome and the Volkswagen Foundation and other fabulous people you know it's just amazing that we to to have a replicable life to live within the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries today we we would do that with 1.6 global hectares that is replicable that means that if we had those resources and that that that global hectare we could have enough food drinking of food water shelter security resources to live a ripe old good long age uh with good stewardship but per person and we we've heard i'm sure many of our listeners have heard this before that if we all lived like americans we'd need five planets worth of resources like germans or the french three planets worth of resources and on and on um we really can thrive and and have that abundance that that we all need and live a good life if we do it one not only that sustainable but we're moving out of that sustainable arena where we're beyond the limits to growth as the books mentions as well that we need to build in some resilience there so uh doesn't matter how sustainable you are a community or city is if the very next day hurricane Maria Maria or Katrina or whatever comes along and wipes out all your infrastructure food and resources that takes time to grow back and so we need to have some resilient systems and infrastructures in place which does include sustainability within it to survive and and it is a different global model that kind of transitions or leads me into my second the last question for you and that is uh you you may know i i don't know if you do know i'm an advocate for the united nations sustainable development goals and i would like to know your thoughts and feelings on them but also as maybe as a global plan to get us to december 2030 keep us below 1.5 degrees of warming um if if those principles those goals targets and indicators are probably something that really could help us in conservation and action and and something to keep us within that planetary boundaries yeah i mean i i i think the um the uh the development goals are are very sensible and very prudent and and i think they do provide a a roadmap as the politicians like to say um for for getting there i they are clearly a consensus statement on the part of um of a large number of people um in my particular space we have the convention on biological diversity um it has aspirations for slowing the rates of species extinction of protecting more of the planet um and you know we can quibble about the fine details of those but you know i think they're they're broadly very very sensible and they they they they are things to which we must as a global society we must move in those directions we need to address those issues um and the lesson from you know the lesson from covid is that if we don't it's going to it's going to harm an awful lot more people than than if we uh uh uh if we want them my last question for you is more of uh a request for you to give my listeners a sustainable takeaway something a tool a tip a trick of empowerment that would help them to either be more conservationist or apply something in their life that will leave them better for hearing the podcast but also something that they could apply in their lives maybe to create a better future for for all involved yeah just you know we hear so much about how much how much carbon dioxide we're putting in the atmosphere okay um you know a billion tons a year comes from burning tropical forests and so i often ask people how much do you think it would cost you to become carbon neutral to live a lifestyle where you soak up more carbon than you put out um and i can promise you that i spend more money on coffee than it takes to to become carbon neutral we can make you carbon neutral for about a hundred dollars a year at saving nature somewhat less than that if you're in european countries and if you're an american um and and yes i spend more than a hundred dollars on coffee every year um and i think there are actions like that um the fish that i eat and make sure it's sustainable there's a nice little app that comes from in a monterey bay aquarium that tells you which fish fish stocks are being harvested sustainably um there are a lot of choices like that day-to-day choices simple um and yet and yet effective and then the final thing is you know when was the last time you talked to a politician and the answer is you know if it's longer than a month ago you know shame you know we elect our public officials let's make sure that they hear from us let's show that we meet with them when they are visiting their districts let's make sure they they hear from us when when they're in parliament or congress or whatever the body is called um uh we need to hold their feet to the fire and make sure they're doing the right things towards towards the environment thank you so much steward it's been a sheer pleasure and i hope that we can have a discussion maybe next year again or when you have your next updates that you can catch us all up to speed but it's been an absolute pleasure we could speak for hours i know that we have tons tons to discuss um thank you very much for your time it's my pleasure thank you so much for having me on the program most welcome