 Okay, good evening everybody. Welcome to the first program in our week long observance of Earth Week slash Earth Day. My name is Dan, I am the director of development and programming for the bed for Playhouse. We're very, very happy to have such a distinguished guest presenting for us tonight. Before I introduce him and welcome him in. Just a couple of quick things. I just wanted to point out for those of you who are at this point still not familiar with zoom. Feel free to ask a question at any point during the program there is a Q&A button, which you will find at the bottom of your screen. If you are on a laptop or PC. It's at the top of your screen if you are on a phone or iPad. So I am obligated to mention that Bedford Playhouse is a 501C3 nonprofit. We rely greatly on the generosity of the community to help us with our programming and operations. So if you enjoy tonight's program, and you'd like us to continue doing more of these we do a monthly environmental theme series. We have our website which is bedfordplayhouse.org and making a contribution any amount is appreciated and helpful. I'm now going to introduce our speaker and I'm going to read his bio because he deserves all the credit that is entailed within. Since 2014, Dr. Eric Dinterstein has served as director of the Biodiversity and Wildlife Solutions Program at Resolve and CEO of the Wildtech at Resolve Social Impact Enterprise. Wildtech is producing innovative technologies by integrating AI into cryptic low power camera based near real time alert systems to stop poaching, reduce illegal logging and prevent human wildlife conflict. He was passed 25 years before that he was chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. Beginning in 1975 he conducted field studies of tigers and their prey and led conservation programs for large mammals such as the greater one horned rhinoceros and Asianic elephant. Eric has helped create the conservation plans for many iconic places including the Galapagos, the Chihuahuan Desert, the Himalayas, the Panda Mountains of China, and the northern Great Plains of Montana. He has conservation experience in many countries and is published widely on large mammal conservation. More recently he led two publications calling for a global deal for nature aimed at saving life on earth and stabilizing the climate and another paper to operationalize it called the Global Safety Met, both published in Science Advances. He is currently a co-author on a new paper to provide the scientific basis for a pragmatic approach to rewilding large mammal species to restore intact vertebrate assemblages globally. He is the author of several popular science books, including Tigerland and Other Intended Destinations, The Kingdom of Rarities, The Return of the Unicorns, The Natural History and Conservation of the Greater One Horned Rhinoceros, and two middle grade novels, What Elephants Know and A Circle of Elephants. Both of those are published by Disney Hyperion and I'm very, very happy to welcome Dr. Eric Dinerstein to the forum. Hi Eric. Hi, thank you. Thank you so much. Laura is yours. Great. Can you see my screen? Yes. Great. Well, hello everyone, and it's really a delight to be invited to the Bedford Playhouse on an auspicious day of the start of Earth Week. What I'm going to try to do is to give you an overview in about 30 minutes of the most pressing environmental problems facing the future of life on Earth, and a way to find a solution so that we can maintain a livable biosphere. Repetitiously, I'm going to offer you essentially in 30 minutes a condensed version of an entire graduate program in conservation biology. So if you can manage to get through this 30 minutes, you'll come out knowing much more than many graduates, many students right now in such programs, because a lot of what I'm about to present is not even in the textbooks yet. I'll try to summarize and make this as clear as possible. I'll give you headlines of the major findings that we've made over a course of the last few years of studying how to protect life on Earth. Let's begin now, though, with what I call the four great existential crises that we face to preserve life on Earth. The first is the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet and in the upper left you see a Game Guard trying to soothe a dying northern white rhinoceros which is the last of its kind of the subspecies and the subspecies disappeared last year. To the upper right is the problem of climate change and how we're symbolized here by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how we run the risk of cooking our planet. To the right, though, sorry, the lower left is something that we've become terribly familiar with, which is a photograph of a wet market in China, which is presumed to be the place where the pen the current pandemic first arose and spread into human population. And so the idea that pandemics are a major threat to humanity. Since the year 2000 we've had 14 what we call zoonotic spillovers diseases that have jumped from animals to humans. So we can predict pretty safely there's going to be more of those in the future. What can we do to prevent prevent those. And finally, one that doesn't get enough attention is ecosystem collapse and here you see the bleaching of coral reefs, which happens in part because of climate change when sea surface temperatures get too high. And the symbiotic relationship in the coral reef systems, no longer is able to function in such warm waters, and the reefs bleach and die and life disappears. Well, that's a pretty tragic way to start out, but that's the road we're headed on. And what can we do to reverse that so that's going to be the subject of this talk. Okay. My titles a global safety net for biodiversity and climate and we think of safety nets, you think of like in the circus, how trapeze artists would have a net below them to catch them. And in a way that's what we're going to talk about tonight is the kind of net that we can create to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks that were protected and future generations are as well. So we're going to save the diversity and abundance of life on earth. The scientific basis for what I'm going to talk about our two main papers. One that came out in 2019 called the global deal for nature guiding principles milestones and targets and essentially, this can be seen as the companion piece to the global of the Paris climate accord. The global deal that's been created for addressing climate change. We need to, we need to have a similar one for protecting nature and so that's what this one is. But that was mostly about the principles and milestones and targets it wasn't really what that deal should look like on a map and so the second paper a global safety net actually maps out what a stable climate. What an abundant life, life would look like on earth for biodiversity. And so we're going to go through those and we're going to actually, I'm going to share with you the recipe for how we build the safety net. Really what we're talking about is how can we live in much greater harmony with life on earth so that there's enough room for elephants and young giraffes and all the other species that have evolved over 3.8 billion years of life since life began on earth that were about to lose very quickly if we don't act rapidly. This is what the safety net looks like. It's these different colors represent different parcels of land that need to be protected for different reasons, and I'm going to go through these and explain each one how we build this you can think of this like a giant jigsaw puzzle that we're going to put together using the best available science so don't be daunted by this it'll become very clear in a few minutes. Okay, if I was in the Bedford Playhouse now and there was an audience in front of me this would be the slide that gets half of you up out of your seats and and to the exits. The only really challenging slide in my whole talk. It's also in my view, the most important graph I've ever seen, or at least certainly in the last 30 years that explains the possible trajectory of life on earth and what we have to do to maintain a living biosphere. It's called the one earth climate model. And the basic idea is very simple is, we need to stay below a 1.5 degree centigrade global rise in temperature in order to maintain a living biosphere. And let's see how we can get there. So right now, if we look at where we are in 2021 in in society today in industry in countries around the world. All the emissions from fossil fuels and cement production and from land use change, about half of all those emissions are absorbed either in land by forests and mangroves or in the ocean. And so these are natural sinks that we have to maintain that other 50% escapes into the atmosphere and that's a big part of the problem. But it's these two pieces here that give us hope of how we can address this crisis. So what we need to look at this graph is how we have to, we, it's, it's not only got an upper limit that we have to stay below. There's also a timeline here so it's time bound. We don't a short way of saying this is we don't have a lot of time to waste by 2030 will be hitting some tipping points that could make these changes irreversible, much more difficult to deal with. So let's just go over some of these key milestones along the way. Last year, we should have hit peak anthropogenic emissions, meaning that from all the activities of humans on earth, we should have hit our peak. Perhaps the the COVID epidemic influence that we'll see over the next two years, but we're still climbing quite rapidly. By 2030, we think that we have to have a moratorium on converting habitat from natural vegetation to other means, and all the greenhouse gases that are emitted. By 2050, we have to move to 100% renewables. If we do these three things, and if we protect 50% of the land, which is basically about what we have here. That's the difference of staying below 1.5. There's one more piece to this puzzle is even as we move along in years here from 2021 to 2030. We're not going to be able to stop emissions from happening. And so we have to draw down about another 400 gigatons of carbon, and we do that through restoration. This this yellow area here that pulls down the carbon so that we don't have emissions or balances the emissions that are occurring. This little green fringe here is the emissions that come from possibly melting of permafrost, which we hope does not happen. But this gives us a strategy of staying below 1.5 and that's critical. It's handy because climate scientists have a single number that they can advocate for stable a 1.5 rise. But what do we have for biodiversity. That's been a big question. And what I'd like to propose is that scientists have come around to our own single number, which is to protect 50% of the of the planet of the terrestrial and marine realms for conservation and let's try to build the safety net to get there. Okay, so I'm going to give you a series of headlines from our papers and the first one is that solutions for biodiversity, reversing biodiversity loss and stabilizing the climate are interdependent. And let me give you two examples of that one from coral reefs and one from the Amazon. So here is a coral reef system. These are the rainforests of the sea, by far the most number of species combined of hard coral soft corals coral reef fish. They also produce enough food to feed about 1.5 billion people on earth who rely on the fish of the reef systems and the near shore mangroves to get their protein every day. If we have the, and they also draw down lots and lots of carbon. If the sea temperatures rising above 1.5 degrees to two degrees, most of the world's coral reefs will bleach out and die. And that will, they will no longer have their function of being a sink for carbon. Similarly, in the Amazon rainforest, the richest forests on earth. The reason why these forests are so rich in carbon as a carbon storage place is because the species that are packed in here are figured out through competition and coexistence to live together and to draw down all this carbon into their tissues and into their roots and into the soil. When we get rising temperatures and drying of the rainforest, it goes from rainforest to savannahs and goes from being a sink for carbon to a source emitting carbon, and that would be disastrous, but it's this biodiversity that helps this function to incorporate to be the carbon drawdown that we need. So the big headline is, if you want to save biodiversity, you have to address climate, and if you want to address climate change you have to save biodiversity. Now let's start building the safety net. The first layer that we use is one that you'll all be familiar with is the national parks and protected areas of the world. The Yellowstone National Park, the first national park as an example, and these parks become our anchor. So let's see what that looks like on our map that we start building this jigsaw puzzle you see the green polygons here the green figures. This represents about 15% of the earth's surface. What a number of people are advocating a number of scientists and policymakers are advocating for is to try to get to 30% by 2030. We're going to argue that we actually have to get 50% protected under some form by 2030 to stay below 1.5 but we'll we'll get to that in a second. So what we do to build the safety net and to build this arc so to speak is to identify all the species that have that are most at risk of extinction that are most rare. Here's a fundamental point of biology that most people don't know is that most species on earth are rare. It's just that, and relatively few are common. That paradox runs through depending whatever whatever group of organisms you look at birds reptiles amphibians mammals plants. We see this over and over this pattern. What we know a lot about are the common species but they're, they're widespread but they're not very numerous. But we have, particularly on islands in remote areas we have species that are found nowhere else. So the first six layers that we use in our jigsaw puzzle to put together are mapping all of the world's rare species, where they're protected and where they're not are shown for example in this inset map of the northern Andes region of Columbia Ecuador and Peru. In these magenta colors here. These are areas that contain very rare species like these tree frogs and like this this parrot here that occur nowhere else. It's the only place you can possibly conserve them. They're out of the protected area system and we need to protect them. If we do this, and we map this across the globe, we find something truly remarkable that we could head off the worst of the extinctions by only adding another 2.3% to the current map of protected areas that contain the world's rare species. So that's a very achievable goal. It's something that should make us really optimistic about what we're doing. Just to give a little bit of a shameless plug I know that Don Whedon is in the audience and with him. We co founded what we call the quick response fund for nature. This fund directly addresses those species that are extremely rare that only live in one or a few places on earth and trying to protect their habitat. Whether it's that parrot that you saw in the previous one that the little scene Amazon found in Ecuador, one of the species of pangolins found in Uganda, or this this bird that looks very much like our, our bald eagle, or a bald eagle with a with a bad hair day. This is actually the Philippine eagle, which is in the same genus of our bald eagle and it's one of the rarest raptors on earth, protected in one of the places that we help fund through this quick response fund for nature. Now here's something that looks like perhaps is color in the trees color by number. And in a way that's that's basically what it is. These are two of the most remarkable photographs you'll ever see taken from an airplane, but representing what we would see if we could somehow color in every tree in the rainforest whether it's the Amazon on the left, or northern Borneo on the right, by either or the species it belongs to. And this is a phenomenon that is prevalent in rainforest we have very high diversity of tree species that drives diversity around the world in rainforest. And what we want to do is capture all those places where we have high turnover of species where the basically where the colors change dramatically from one place to another. In this area here for example, this bright blue. It's a monoculture it's oil palm plantations but as soon as you leave that and get into this winding river in Borneo, you can see all the various colors. As soon as you move away from the river where the vegetation is more uniform. There are all the different species here, the taller the trees the more carbon they contain and each one by a different color scheme is a different species. So we can map those. So if we add that into our jigsaw puzzle we get another 6% to add to that 2.3% for rare species and the 15% for protected areas and we're building our safety net. So the species that occur in very narrow ranges are ones that need very big areas, such as rhinos, which are territorial or mountain lions which are heading towards Westchester or wolves which might get there a little bit after or tigers or or caribou or tapers. And so we want to make sure that our safety net includes enough area for those species that don't have narrow ranges like those on islands or those that live on mountain tops but those that range widely. And so what we added was what we call intact large mammal assemblages like here's one in the region the region called the Pantanal that has rare species in it, but the full complement of species that had 500 years ago. These are unique places that still have the same roster of species that we saw when major development started to occur around the world about 1500 AD. The largest mag species is the main wolf, which is not really a wolf but looks more like a fox on stilts. And of course the jaguar the largest predator of the region. Another aspect that we can focus on is reintroduction of course, like these jaguars that were reintroduced into Argentina after 70 years. So what we found out were the places where ecoregions that have mostly intact species assemblages but that only need to add one or two or three species, and we bring back the entire roster of species that used to be their 1500 AD. So we want to grab this map, put it into our bigger map. And now we have the large mammal areas that add another 6.3%. Okay, so now we're assembling this this safety net. We need to add a few more pieces. The next one are areas that are intact wilderness and a good example for that would be the boreal forests that are far north of Westchester, but through Canada and Alaska and across into Russia and Scandinavia. So the boreal forests, unlike the tropical rainforest are not very rich in species, although we can think of them as the, the factories that produce our songbirds, many of our warblers and other songbirds breed in the boreal forests. They pass through where I live in Maryland and Westchester on their way up there, because there's lots of insects in the summer. It's also the home of large intact mammal assemblages, where you can find brown bear grizzly bear, bears, mountain lions, caribou, wolverines, etc., at sometimes at their normal rate of variation. But what the boreal forests really represent in terms of our climate balance is they're the Fort Knox of carbon. A lot of it stored below ground as peat underneath the rather monotonous black spruce and white spruce that stretch all the way across from Canada into Alaska and to Russia. So we have to conserve this as well. And by focusing on these intact wildernesses like you can see this kind of tannish color, yellowish color, those are some of the boreal forests, and in Russia as well. We add another 16% because there's phenomena that occur in wilderness that you won't find anywhere else. But earlier on in that difficult graph, I said that we have to draw down about 400 gigatons of carbon to stay in balance, to balance the emissions that are going to occur from land clearing that will happen for the next 10 or 15 years. One of the best places to do this is to restore mangroves. For their size or for by say square acre. They have the highest concentrations of carbon of any habitat on earth, both above ground and particularly below ground in the root systems. And so they're a vital piece of the ecosystems of the world, not only for the carbon content and the carbon drawdown effect, but as nurseries for many fish that are then caught later further out from the shore. So, focusing on mangrove conservation is a great way to help accelerate that drawdown. To add these in, we can then ask the question, okay, here's our safety net viewed from a slightly different way, not just the biodiversity value, but how much carbon is protected in conserved in the protected areas in the places where we find rare species. We have large mammals in the places where we have intact habitats. And we get this picture to add up a carbon budget, and we find remarkably that if we could conserve this map, if we could put this into practice, we would be able to stay below that vital number of 1.5 degrees rise, and we would have a sustainable biosphere. And the last piece of the safety net, because it's the net part of it. This was the first study that ever asked the question globally, what would it take to connect all the world's intact areas and protected areas or parks by corridors 2.5 kilometers and what this looks like here for the western US as you can see here is like I call it the angel hair pasta that connects these various colors. This is what it would take to connect all the intact habitats and national parks and reserves of the United States or the Midwest to the west. And part of that is just making corridors for like this, this black bear coming through or over highway overpasses. But this is the headline from this part of the study is we found that if we implemented the other parts of the safety net. We only need about 2.7% of the earth's surface to reconnect all the habitats on earth. If we're going to build back better or for it to have a green climate core or a green new deal. This has to be a centerpiece of it is we have to reconnect to the areas, because with climate change, some species may need to move from one area to another, and without that corridor there they won't be able to do so. So this gives us the net, it completes the global safety net. And this is what it would look like depending on what hemisphere you live in. But we think it's a, it's a doable plan but it's also an essential one. So let's go into a few more features about it. This is how it look if you lived in California, what we have to do California is at about 2628% protected to get to 50%, which is what is needed. It's shown on this map. I tried to get one together for New York State, but didn't have time to finish it for today, but that will be available soon. Here's perhaps the most important headline of our study, which is that if we look at the safety net and ask let's go back quickly to this map here, and to say all those areas in color that we need to put into greater conservation. 35% of those areas are either occupied by, claimed by, or have, or have title to indigenous peoples. And so what it means is that the single most important thing that we can do to guarantee a livable biosphere is to empower and finance the efforts of indigenous peoples to have sovereignty over their lands, because in fact they do a much better job of protecting biodiversity and keeping the forests and the habitats intact for avoiding emissions than any other kind of management that we have today. Here's an example of that kind of planning going on in the Pacific Northwest, but we're arguing for an indigenous led agenda for the next big biodiversity conference because if we simply empowered indigenous groups to be able to manage their lands better, that we could go a long way to achieving our safety net. I didn't really touch much on the pandemics or preventing ecosystem collapse, but just a word or two about each. This is an ape that's died of Ebola. But as I said, we've had 14 different zoonotic spillovers since the year 2000. And we're guaranteed to have more. It's just simply the greater contact between human populations and wildlife and the interior of tropical forests. The world is full of viruses. There are more that are ready to jump. If we do achieve the safety net, they would be many of the tropical areas would be pandemic prevention areas. And it's predicted that the next great pandemic may come from the area in the Amazon, and we need to be able to keep those areas more intact, and be able to prevent pandemics, or the zoonotic spillovers from occurring. Similarly, with coral reef bleaching or any other kind of ecosystem that's on the verge of collapse. If we implemented the safety net quickly, we would prevent these these collapses from occurring. And it costs. One of the studies that's done has been done recently and published that I was a co-author on of just protecting 30% of the planet, not 50% puts puts the estimate at around a trillion dollars. We've actually put this a bit lower and we think that for about 100 billion to 150 billion dollars a year, we could implement the safety net over the next 10 years. So think about how much we're spending on pandemic relief alone and the vaccine programs. This is a way of vaccinating us from the perils of climate change and biodiversity loss that would have all of these other spillover benefits. I think the best way to sum this up is that humanity is headed off a cliff. We have to make an environmental U turn and we have to do it in the next 10 years. And so the global safety net gives us that very specific map of what we have to do where to avoid going off that cliff. What I'd like to do is shift very briefly for the last few minutes to some other targets that what I've talked about a lot here are essentially area based targets or percentages we need to conserve X% of the land and X% of the oceans. But even if we did that we'd miss a large part of biodiversity because it's not so much the habitat that needs to be protected but the species as well. The greatest examples of course is African elephants in the time that I've been talking to African elephants have been poached over over the same time period. We're losing about 35,000 elephants a year. And it may end up that within 10 years elephants at least in the forest elephant in the cargo basin will go extinct and that's unthinkable. Another example is the black rhinoceros in around 1900 they're over a million black rhinos in Africa. Today they're no more than 6000. The problem is is not having enough black rhino habitat it's enough black rhinos. How can we protect them get them through this bottleneck and rebuild their populations when they're persecuted for their body parts and slaughtered by poachers. One emerging solution and also backed by the Weedon Foundation is one that I spend a lot of my time working on, which is how to address this short term crisis of poaching by using in a clever way artificial intelligence to detect humans to detect elephants to detect rhinos and transmit those images in near all time through different means to alert Rangers to be prepared to stop poachers before they kill. And so very quickly how our system works, which we have out now in about seven parks in Africa and will try to scale to 100 or so parks by the end of next year is intruders are detected by a tiny camera the size of your index finger, which transmits images to a cell tower the near cell tower using a radio link or satellite modem that goes to the server in the cloud here in the United States from Africa, and then sent back to the park headquarters to appear on a computer screen in less than 50 seconds. So what we've done is something that no one has done before which is to miniaturize our camera so we can avoid theft, which happens a lot. We add AI to do all the sorting in the camera itself on a tiny chip the size of your pinky fingernail. We connect using different ways of doing so depending on the park and the habitat, and we extend battery life. So that hopefully with the next version we're building you never have to recharge or swap the batteries out because they're recharged by a solar powered charger. And they typically last about three years anyway, by greatly reducing the cost and efficiency we can make this available to everybody. This is the view of our new camera. It's only three inches long is kind of I think James Bond would be jealous. This is a very small camera that is using the same hardware and all we do is pull out the SD card like you would on a camera, put in a new SD card with a different program on it, and we can use the same hardware to detect all sorts of objects that we want to use to improve conservation whether it's to avoid human wildlife conflict by detecting the lions before they kill livestock by detecting boats coming up rivers or detecting illegal logging up to 90% of the logging that occurs in some tropical countries is illegal countries to lose massive revenue. We have models that detect logging trucks, empty and full that can send alerts in near real time to the police to arrest the loggers. We can detect endangered species, and so on. So one example going back to those rare species on islands. The biggest threat is not loss of habitat. It's introduced predators and herbivores. It's the use of cats, rats, mice, iguanas, non native iguanas and goats that destroy the ecology these islands and wipe out these species, we can use our cameras to run models that detect cats or rodents or mice or goats, so that biosecurity officers can come and remove them and protect the native fauna. I mentioned how vital Indigenous reserves are to conservation and the people who live there who are the who are great stewards but their big problem is being invaded by others who want to mine gold in these areas or cut down the valuable trees or drill for oil and gas. It's the means to be able to detect people coming in before they do any damage. That's what River Guard is meant to do by detecting boats that come up rivers and Indigenous territories and alerting communities by using a satellite connection. One of the ways we can do it is probably everybody in the audience is interested in eating fish that's from certified sources, but we don't really know how well those fishing fleets are performing because there's no transparency on these boats or very little. And so by using AI again to create models that would detect species that are illegal bycatch like the sharks and the rays and sea turtles and porpoises and marine mammals that are caught that are not supposed to be. We can improve performance and be able to serve as auditors for for seafood operations that want to earn the certification badge. So that's a quick overview of how we can use technological innovations to protect not only the biodiversity we have, but also to protect their habitats using these new technologies to create this global safety net. And make sure that we avoid the sixth grade extinction, and we stabilize our climate and we live future generations with a wild kingdom. Thank you very much for your attention and I'll be happy to answer any questions at this point. Okay. Eric, we do have a couple of questions. Okay. Let's see, let's start with one this one was submitted via email. 1.5 degree change doesn't sound like very much does that deceive people into downplaying the urgency. Well that's a good point it's actually because it's that's in centigrade. And if we converted that to Fahrenheit the number would be larger but but scientists use centigrade. It doesn't sound like much it actually another way of looking at and that's a very astute question is just, you know, probably only about 10 years ago, we were saying that the threshold is two degrees centigrade. And now we know that just that difference from 1.5 degrees to two degrees spells life or death or coral reefs below 1.5 degrees, they flourish above two degrees centigrade rise. They bleach out and die. And so it's, it's much of the life in the seas and the near shore environment are very sensitive. They've been very stable for a long periods of time. The same sort of thing in tropical forests. Many trees are at their physiological limit for photosynthesis. If it gets to be hotter and drier for longer periods. They simply can't photosynthesize efficiently anymore and they start to die in masses. So we have to avoid that as well so slight changes in temperature can have a huge difference. Okay. Another question that we have. Can you please suggest some ideas for philanthropy and ways or places that will have meaningful impact. Sure. Well, I can jump right to the quick response fund for nature that Don and I have set up that this is this is the, we can think of the global safety net like this is the spearhead for like where the places that we can do the most good in the shortest period of time. And that's, we've already mapped out where the rarest species are that only live in one place on earth and are threatened. If we can raise the funds to buy the land in those areas, then we can save those species in perpetuity and that that's what we're trying to do so anybody who knows Don, who's in the in the audience, he can tell you a lot more about that but we have a website of the quick response fund.org where you can find out more, but really lots of groups are doing great work trying in their own areas to better protect wildlife. In New York, I would say one of the things I would focus on is, how do we get this might shock some people but how do we get mountain lions back to the Adirondacks, and maybe even down to the cat skills. A serious problem of too many deer, which leads to lots of collisions, which lead to the spread of Lyme disease. If we had mountain lions back in the eastern US, we would see a drastic reduction in Lyme disease. Many fewer collisions of deer with cars and much healthier ecosystems. And I just want to remind everybody keep those questions coming to the Q&A forum as we go along. Here's another one that was submitted via email. Is it true that in the early months of the pandemic that there was an observable drop in atmosphere of carbon because no one was leaving their house? Yes, that is true that we did see a drop in carbon. Really the greatest pollutants, our greatest sources of pollution are automobiles and other vehicles, and oil and gas plants, factories, and we saw, you know, factories shutting down because workers couldn't work inside and people stopped driving. And so we did have that dip, but overall there's been a net increase still in CO2 emissions. So, you know, we really have to rein that in and we have to be hopeful that as we move much more rapidly to renewables, this will be possible, and electric cars and other things to address that. Okay. Another question is, this is something of a sensitive topic and you touched on it briefly, what are your thoughts about overpopulation with regard to species, human interaction and the creation of the safety net? It's a very sensitive topic, but I think we have to have to discuss it that and when we had large intact habitats, the world's population was probably still in the hundreds of millions, not at 7.8 billion. If we're to go to, as is predicted, close to 10 billion, we're headed into very dangerous territory. And, you know, there's some hope in the sense that populations are stabilizing in many countries, but they're still increasing in others. Another important aspect is where people will live in the future, where the greatest gains in population are, and most of the growth is going to occur, is occurring in Africa, and a lot of that will be in African cities. So one of the important things to think about too, and something that could have, so clearly population growth is still a major issue, and the more that we can do to do things like education of young girls, family planning, and improve water supplies to reduce mortality, people will have fewer and people have fewer children per family, and then we can get to a more stable population. I think one of the biggest things that we can do too though, I hope is the rapid advances in lab grown meat and dairy and fish, because we're going to have to feed 10 billion people. And I think the shift to moving away from agriculture, the way that it is to growing meat in factories, and it can be not just beef and pork and chicken, but it could be impala or ostrich or game meat that people like to eat. It could really take off. This would be huge. If you think about it, about 23% of the earth's surface is devoted to agriculture, but 75% of that 23% is to grow grain crops or feed crops for that livestock. It's incredibly inefficient system. Our agricultural system is broken. If we can change that by going to lab grown proteins, then it frees up vast areas to allow us to basically have farmers instead of raising livestock is to raising natural vegetation that draws down the carbon and pay them, you know, the subsidy for cattle ranching, for example, pay them to be carbon farmers. You're just shifting the commodity and saving the earth as well. So that's my great hope, combining population and that yeah. You sort of just touched on this but one other question that someone asked is, how should we be thinking about our eating habits with regard to like meat, fish, vegetables, and that sort of sort of consumption so do you have any additional thoughts to that. Certainly, greatly reducing beef consumption. But I think that it's astonishing to me how fast like impossible burgers and beyond meat and beyond chicken has taken off. And I think we're going to see the major food producing companies see this that this is the future. You know, we have to find ways of bringing very cheap desirable proteins to large numbers of people living in cities. We don't have to have that that food being raised far far away from where people live we can move it really close. And we can do it I think in in ways that are sustainable. And that would, that could be the single most dramatic thing that helps propel us to a livable biosphere. Are there any specific programs that are making a difference right now that this audience may not have heard of. Well, I think the efforts that that are going on now to empower indigenous peoples is one that it's it's hard because typically a lot of indigenous groups are reluctant to to become engaged with some of the typical entities like the university convention or the climate convention or they feel excluded. And so I would look to nonprofits that have a great track record in supporting indigenous peoples for their legal rights to help them cope with like the great crisis, because it's really going to be, I think make or break for us will be determined by how will we bring indigenous peoples into the conservation picture and allow them to lead a big part of it. Next question. These are all this next group is sort of somewhat related so I'll, I'll ask a couple of them because they're on somewhat of the same topic. So what are what are the one or two things that everybody could do every day that could make a difference. The second part to that is, is the idea still viable that you have to give up something today to make tomorrow, equally viable. A lot of people could do in Westchester is those who live in a place where they have a piece of land attached to their house, like I'm looking out from my computer into my backyard garden, which used to just have a lawn until I got tired of mowing at 15 years ago. So I, I think I'm going to plant some native trees and she said okay plant some dogwoods and those are native, but I didn't just plant a single dogwood, the flowering dog but I planted all the other five species that are here, and becoming a little obsessive about it one thing led to another and I ended up with 500 species in my backyard of about there's about 1800 species in our native flora here in Maryland, a little bit less in New York, but one of the great things people could do to help sustain our population of pollinators which are at risk is, is think about when you're planting your gardens plant native species, because those are the ones that are evolved there, not ornamentals not exotics, where the species that we typically think of that insects local insects can't eat those. You know everybody likes to have birds in their backyard. If you think about this birds are made of bugs. And if you want more birds in your backyard plant native plants that the bugs can eat and then you'll have a lot more songbirds and that will be much more pleasant so that's something everybody can do. What is what are the most difficult things you're asked to talk about and why are they difficult. I think your audience already hit on a population. It is in many circles and many academic gatherings and absolute no no to even bring it up. It's particularly if you're coming from the perspective of an older white person advocating for family planning. It's viewed as that's not appropriate and that's a shame because it's, it's, it's the elephant in the room, you know, it's why we have such economic problems, while we have migration of people. And it's also, you know, exacerbates problem is problems is that when you have high population densities, and you have like failures of crops due to climate change of the drawing like for example the the large migration of Honduras into the United States was largely driven by climate change of the corn crops the maze crops in Honduras failing year after year. And the farmers had no place to go but also because they were living at higher population densities. Some parts of the world can sustain very high densities like El Salvador, the reason it can do that or the island of Java and Indonesia, or Kenya, because they're on volcanic soils that are really rich or Rwanda, but other parts of the tropics are on poor soils and as populations increase. It's even harder to grow crops, which is why we have to figure out better ways to support those societies and keep people in those countries but but it's, it's not just it's, it's not a question of, do we want to have migration or not we do of course that's what made our country so strong. But I think we also have to reinvigorate our efforts to improve the quality of life in many of the countries south of us, so that people who want to stay in those countries but don't have a good economic reason to do so have that opportunity again. Those are difficult topics to bring up. Sounds like it. Can you talk about corridors and what that means. Around 1500, when most habitats were still intact, we didn't have to think about, if we knew enough about it. We wouldn't think about connectivity, but that changed once we cleared lots and lots of land across the United States and other continents and fragmented the remaining habitats. The reason that corridors are so important. I'll give you an example. I spent much of my young life in the country of Nepal in the base of the Himalayas in a newly created tiger reserve, and I spent much of my career studying tigers and trying to figure out how to continue to grow the tiger population about, let's see we're in 2021 now 11 years ago, the total wild population of tigers was about 3500 individuals. That means there are more tigers alive in private hands in Texas than in the wild. Crazy to think of but true. The problem is that in the, the 13 countries that have wild tiger populations in all the protected areas in those 13 countries, not a single one was large enough to have what we call a viable population of tigers, enough breeding tigers to continue to sustain that population without them becoming inbred over time. But the way to avoid that is to connect those tiger reserves through corridors and tigers are relatively poor dispersers but if you have corridors that are a couple of kilometers wide, tigers will use them particularly the sub adult males that have to disperse from their, their natal area. And as those tigers move, they reinvigorate that population and so what you're doing, the function of corridors is to use this piece of jargon that will complete the graduate course of the of tonight called a meta population, which means a population that is linked by dispersal. So you can have like we have in Nepal and northern India, 12 tiger reserves, not a single one is large enough to support a viable population but all linked by forest corridors, such that they're managed as one and they become a viable population. So that's a good example of why we need corridors for these large mammals that that now don't have enough habitat in a given new link together. Alright, so we have two more questions right now which are. I'm going to ask them both together and I think this probably would put a cap on the conversation so the first part is. Why does Earth Day slash Earth Week still matter with regard to society today and what we're trying to achieve through it. And the second part is, are you hopeful that we as a society can come together and save the biodiversity and save the environment. Sure. Well first. If this were 1950, we wouldn't have to worry. I wish it were in some ways, because there's so much more wildlife back then so much more habitat but it's not what we're in 2021. And the real crisis is as Greta Thunberg has pointed out as many scientists have pointed out we're about nine years away from major tipping points that will become thresholds that we cross where the changes become essentially irreversible. So we still have time to make those changes and that's what gives me great hope, we do have to make this environmental U turn as I showed but if you think about just from the last year, how people have changed their behavior to address something that we couldn't have even conceived of two years before that. It's going to be much worse, the effects of it then then depend the coronavirus pandemic. And, but now we have the mechanisms in place to deal with it we know that Congress and and the, the, the parliaments of other countries can appropriate large sums of money to address critical problems very quickly. I think that we can do this for another kind of crisis. Now we have to apply what we've learned from the pandemic to addressing climate change and biodiversity. And the great thing is, it costs a whole lot less. It just requires a lot more political will, but in terms of cost. It's much more advantageous for us to invest in conservation and climate stabilization, and as a byproduct, reduce the chances of more pandemics. That's a bargain for us. So why I'm really hopeful is that if this would cost a couple of trillion a year. I would say pretty doubtful, but at the level of about 150 billion a year. That's, you know, that's well within our reach. So I hope that's all that's great. I think we could all use a little hope right now. Eric, thank you very much for your time and for your participation. This was a great way to kick off our Earth Week programming. I should just mention to everybody who's tuned in that we did record tonight. So we will send the link to this recording. If you care to revisit sections of it and recap or perhaps share it with someone that you think might do well to to view it. That'll be available to you in the next couple of days. We hope we'll see you again later this week we have some other great programs coming up. Thank you so much for joining us on our website, which is bedfordplayhouse.org. Eric, thank you again. We really really really appreciate it. And it's, it's thanks to the generosity of people like you that we can do these programs. Have a great night everybody and hope we see you again soon. Bye bye. Take it easy.