Ep 116: Rewilding Biology (with Harry Greene)
How do biologists strike a productive balance between descriptive natural history and manipulative experiments in the lab or field? Should we bring back species to areas where they’ve gone extinct and what values do we use to make these decisions? What is wildness and how do we cultivate it?
On this episode, we talk with Harry Greene, a herpetologist and adjunct professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, whose distinguished career has spanned decades. Harry is an E.O. Wilson Award recipient and also received the PEN Literary award for his book, Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature. In the episode, we talk with Harry about the importance of natural history to biology. We also tackle the topic of rewilding, a type of biological restoration that involves translocating species where they still occur to regions where they no longer are found, in order to restore ecosystem function. Harry talks about how his views on rewilding have changed over time, including how rewilding ourselves could improve our health and happiness
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
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Marty Martin 0:00
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Cameron Ghalambor 0:08
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Cameron Ghalambor 1:11
Now, onto the show.
Marty Martin 1:20
If you were paying attention to biology news this past week, you might have heard the controversial announcement: Duke University plans on closing its herbarium in the near future, because it claims the herbarium is too expensive to maintain.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:34
The Duke University herbarium is the second largest private university plant collection in the United States. The collection has over 825,000 specimens, highlighting the high biodiversity of the southeastern United States.
Marty Martin 1:48
For those of you unfamiliar with an herbarium, think of it like a museum, or maybe more like a library, but instead of books plant specimens are dried, mounted on paper, then stored in cases like you would store folders in a filing cabinet.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:01
Just like books in libraries, herbarium collections don't sit around and collect dust. Plants in these collections play a critical role in helping researchers get to know the species in a given area.
Marty Martin 2:12
They also provide all sorts of research opportunities, including studies on diversity changes over time, invasive species, and even identification of rare plants that might not be found in a field guide.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:24
In recent years herbarium specimens have also been a useful source of seeds for rare species. And of course for plant DNA which are used for taxonomy and systematics.
Marty Martin 2:33
So why would Duke University, one of the wealthiest schools in the world with an endowment of over $13 billion, say its herbarium is too expensive to maintain?
Cameron Ghalambor 2:44
Ultimately, it comes down to priorities. When interviewed by Science Magazine, Susan Alberts, the Dean of Natural Sciences at Duke, said that at least $25 million was needed to provide new facilities and endow curators and staff for the herbarium, which is more than Duke is willing to spend.
Marty Martin 3:03
And yet, Duke University recently opened a new engineering building that cost $115 million dollars. So why doesn't the herbarium get the same kind of love?
Cameron Ghalambor 3:13
It's probably not just the cost of the herbarium. It's also the cost relative to how much money herbaria in other museum collections can generate through external grants.
Marty Martin 3:22
Yes, it's a sad truth that natural history collections, which have served as the backbone of the natural sciences, are increasingly at risk. Today, universities are often much more concerned about remaining financially viable, than they are with providing a service to students or scholars. Disciplines and buildings apt to bring in the most revenue are the ones most likely to get built and be sustained.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:44
Over 20 years ago, Robert Gropp wrote an article in the Journal BioScience titled, "Are University Natural Science Collections Going Extinct?" Gropp predicted that in the face of reduced funding from state legislatures, university administrators would increasingly give preference for biomedical research, which brings in the biggest research grant dollars.
Marty Martin 4:04
If these things upset you, but you're not seeking a bad news episode of Big biology today. Fear not, our focus isn't lamenting the loss of university natural history collections. It's a broader conversation on the value of natural history and biodiversity studies to the life sciences.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:20
And who better to talk to about such things than Harry Greene, who has long advocated for studying organisms in their natural environments.
Marty Martin 4:28
Harry is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Texas, but he spent decades as a professor and curator first at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at Cornell.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:36
We talk with Harry about his path to becoming a biologist and how his love for snakes and lizards informed his appreciation for the importance of natural history and biology.
Marty Martin 4:46
We also talk about how his views on conservation and restoration have evolved over time, including the pros and cons of rewilding North America by reintroducing elephants, cheetahs and even jaguars.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:57
Oh my!
Marty Martin 4:58
I'm Marty Martin.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:59
And I'm Cameron Ghalambor
Marty Martin 5:00
And you're listening to Big Biology
Cameron Ghalambor 5:14
Harry Greene, thanks so much for joining us today on Big Biology. I'm really looking forward to talking to you today about your research and your perspectives on organisms, Natural History, and the prospects of rewilding. One question that we often ask our guests is about their path to becoming a biologist, and I'm wondering if you could share a little bit of your sort of background and history. I know you grew up in Texas, and I've heard parts of your story and how you sort of came to be a biologist, but I was wondering if you could kind of tell your origin story, I guess, of how you came to be where you are today.
Harry Greene 5:52
Yeah, well, good morning, guys. It's great to be with you. My origin story starts out on my grandpa's tiny East Texas farm in the early 1950s, where my mom had grown up and I never lived there continuously, especially because my dad was in the Air Force, and we moved all over the world. But we went back to grandpa and grandma's farm every year, sometimes several times a year and sometimes for long periods of time. So it was in East Texas that I first saw box turtles and Texas Horned Lizards, tried to learn how to milk a cow, watched a pig being butchered, learned firearm safety at what today would be seen as an astonishingly young age, from my grandpa. And my parents, although neither of them were naturalists, they really liked books. And as soon as they realized I was interested in reptiles, they bought me a reptile book when I was seven years old. So I started reading about reptiles, as a little kid.
Harry Greene 6:49
For the next half dozen years or so. I probably thought I was going to be a cowboy when I grew up or a fireman or, you know, whatever little boys in the early 50s were idolizing. I had no idea there was a career out there for somebody who'd like to look for snakes and lizards and turtles and stuff. My dad was stationed in Norman, Oklahoma for one year. And he was taking classes at OU. And one day he came home he said "I heard this talk today by a man named Charles Carpenter. And he he studies lizard behavior." But turns out Chuck Carpenter is kind of the granddaddy of lizard ethology. And my dad said "He said he'd like to talk to you." So the next day I hopped on my little three speed and I rode down to the OU campus and went into the zoology building and found a door that said Dr. Charles C. Carpenter, and knocked on it. It was transformative- this guy, his office was filled with pickled snakes and live lizards. There was a live opossum. And he just had this air about him that was brand new to me. And he recommended that I buy a brand new book that was just out called the Houghton Mifflin Field Guide to Eastern Amphibians and Reptiles. This was 1958. So first edition of Cohen's Field Guide, first edition of any Peterson Field Guide for herps. So I went home and I told my mom, dad at night over dinner, "I'm going to be a college professor. That's what I'm going to be when I grew up because they get to keep lizards." And they bought me that book for my birthday. And it turns out, as y'all know, it's a lot more than keeping lizards, but that's when I decided what I wanted to be.
Harry Greene 8:24
The next thing was we got stationed in a tiny little town in western Missouri, graduating class of Warrensburg was about 100 students. And my science teacher came to me one day and said, you know, Harry, you seem really interested in science. And there's this thing at the University of Kansas called the summer science and math camp for kids from small Midwestern schools. And he said, I think you ought to apply for it. And so I did, I got in. There were 100 students at KU, living in a dorm for two weeks and we had classes literally from A to Z astronomy to zoology. And by then, I already knew there was a man named Henry Fitch at KU, who was sort of the grandpa or snake ecology, and I arranged to meet Henry. Then they had this thing you could come back the next summer and spend the whole summer working for a particular professor. They chose 20 students, so I applied for that and got it and I spent the summer after I graduated from high school at KU, working for Henry Fitch, published some papers out of it.
Marty Martin 9:23
Was he the one that instilled your passion for snakes? Or did you have that before you started with him?
Harry Greene 9:28
You know, I was really more into lizards for a long time, Marty, and the snake part came later, the snake part came later. So I was doing a project on lizard reproductive cycles with Fitch. The next thing that happened is I went off to college. And it turned out I'd been such a nerd, as an undergrad. I mean, imagine I published my first paper art when I was 16. And so I'd been such a nerd, I never noticed girls, and I never had much of a social life. And I went off to this little Methodist school just north of Austin, called Southwestern University. And three years later, I had a 1.89 GPA, a cumulative GPA. You know what that is? That's a D minus.
Marty Martin 10:09
That's not good.
Harry Greene 10:11
My hope for grad school were fading. But anyway, to make a long story short, I managed to finish. I got drafted. I spent three years in the Army. I got out, I squeaked into the University of Texas at Arlington, which was a tiny fledgling graduate program at the time, on probation. But that allowed me to erase my awful undergraduate accomplishment. And by then I was getting into snakes. I did a master's thesis on the feeding biology of venomous coral snakes. And I knew that Gordon Burghardt at University of Tennessee was probably the only person at that time that would let me do a PhD on snakes. And so I applied to UT Knoxville, got in, got my PhD with Gordon, soon was at Berkeley, spent 20 years at Berkeley, and then 20 years at Cornell. And now I'm an adjunct professor, retired from Cornell, and I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. I hope I did that quick enough.
Cameron Ghalambor 11:04
Yeah, no, that's great. I think or I hope anyways that for all those undergraduates out there that might be struggling, they find inspiration in your story that, you know, you can overcome those grades and have a extremely successful career as a biologist. I also fall into that category, by the way.
Marty Martin 11:05
Yeah, well, same here. I mean, hearing that, and then reading one of your papers in preparation for this, it was remarkable how similar your experience and your inspiration to become a biologist was to mine-- spending time on a farm in eastern Tennessee, running around in the woods learning to fish at an early age. My grandfather, he rarely used guns to hunt, he was a trapper, so he did a bunch of that. And now I didn't know about the one point would you say 1.89 1.98 GPA? I was a terrible undergraduate too, it was a two point something. Never thought I was going to be able to go to graduate school. So yeah, I mean, hopefully, that's inspiration to listeners, that the passion could sometimes outdo the rest. So you know, Harry, I think what's really cool about what you do, is that you continue to emphasize natural history. And you know, over your time as a biologist, I would imagine, you know, and you've written about the fact that the emphasis on natural history has profoundly changed. So how do you think about natural history? Now? What role do you think that natural history has in modern biology?
Harry Greene 12:31
Yeah, and I want to be clear that I'm not anti theory. Actually, I learned a long time ago that I think in general, we do better natural history when it's driven by theory. There are those rare individuals like Henry Fitch, who was, when Henry was just out of his PhD at Berkeley in the 1940s, and starting his studies of snake ecology in California, he was doing things like weighing prey items and weighing the snakes that ate them. He was gathering data on relative prey mass, and there was no foraging theory, you know, not only no optimal foraging theory, there was just no foraging theory. And I knew Henry very well. And I interviewed him several times for a book I wrote, and I tried to get him to tell me, how did you know what to measure? He was a very taciturn guy, and I never got a good answer out of him. He had a rare brilliance, such that he was recording most of the variables, you'd want to know, if you were doing life history theory, foraging theory, and so forth. Most of us aren't like that. I think theory actually guides us to be better natural historians.
Harry Greene 13:36
That said, we wouldn't have a need for theory, if there wasn't natural history. I mean, natural history is what provides the questions. Those questions are what we want to answer with theory. And so my regret, my sadness is that yes, there has been a ever growing lack of emphasis on organisms themselves and on documenting the sort of the details of natural history. And I started writing about that, in the 80s. I identified what I thought were several problems, some of those problems turned out to not be problems anymore, like I thought it was a problem that there was no place to publish natural history, really. And, to my astonishment, frankly, journals, like Ecology and American naturalist added venues for publishing, essentially, you know, not, not anecdotes in the strict sense, but very narrowly constrained sets of observations that were unusually revealing and provocative for theory. So that turned out, I was wrong about that problem. What I see is more of a problem now is that it's sort of two things.
Harry Greene 14:41
One is that we have these tremendous analytic capacities now, which I have to be honest and say I largely don't understand. And that means we can work with enormous datasets and ask very complicated questions. And this seems to have driven a sort of desire to get a lot of data fast, and as an example, I'll use morphology and morphometrics, it's now possible to claim that one is looking at, from a phylogenetic global perspective, diversification in the head and morphology of let's say, some major group of vertebrates. And then you go to the paper. And in fact, it's entirely based on external measurements. So all that fantastic morphology that's inside that head, you know, the ethmoid, this and the sphenoid that, and those such and such process on the piroxicam. That's all gone and meaningless. It's all reduced to, you know, a bunch of landmarks that you can digitize and then put it into an analysis that makes it into, you see where I'm going, and that will get you a paper in a very fancy journal. And we're all under, well I'm not, younger folks are under tremendous pressure to do that, you know, to get their work out in impressive places. I honestly don't quite know what to do about it. I sort of throw it back at you two. How could we teach our students to pay attention to the little nitty gritties of natural history and yet, get them out there, as you know, as competent professionals that can find jobs and satisfying lives?
Cameron Ghalambor 16:19
Well, I don't have really clear answers on this. But I mean, I can only speak from my personal experience. So unlike you guys, I was a city boy. I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, fairly isolated from the natural world. And it wasn't until I was an undergraduate, that I got in with a group of guys that start, we started going camping and backpacking. And I really gained this appreciation for the outer world. But it was fairly late in my life that I started birdwatching. And I got really into birds. And it was largely because of an undergraduate Professor Martin Cody, who was very inspirational for me. And when I got to graduate school, my PhD advisor actually kind of told me pretty bluntly, at the beginning of my graduate training that, you know, I wasn't there to be a birdwatcher, I was there, really to learn theory. And that's what I needed to emphasize, and he kind of, in some ways, I beat the sort of natural history side of things out of me. But it was sort of ironic, because he himself was a fantastic naturalist, and was really good in the field. And I was fortunate that my research allowed me to spend several months out of the year just living out of a tent, watching birds. And so I sort of learned, I think, you know, just just by doing.
Cameron Ghalambor 17:49
And it makes me wonder, though, because when I look around today, at the way we train graduate students, you know, I kind of see two groups of students, those, I think that kind of have your background, from a early age, they were into some animal group, and they've always had this sort of love of nature. And then there's other students that I would say, are maybe more book smart, and they're, you know, brilliant in their own right. But I feel like we've lost the ability to train students in natural history. The kind of field course that you did in high school, or that I did as an undergraduate, those kinds of courses where we teach how to observe nature seems to be less common, but I'm not sure if that's universally true. And I know what your guys' experience is with that, but I don't even know if it's something that can be easily taught in a course, because you can learn how to run a gel in a pretty short amount of time. But, you know, to distinguish between different sceloporus lizards, maybe that takes a little bit longer. I don't know.
Harry Greene 19:02
Certainly one thing would be the keep encouraging ology courses for undergraduates. And I feel really, really fortunate that my entire career has encompassed really excellent universities that, for whatever reason, have never stopped teaching those classes. So I was hired at Berkeley to teach natural history of invertebrates and herpetology. I mean, I had no idea how lucky I was, until I moved to Cornell and had to teach undergraduate introductory biology to 350 non majors. At Berkeley, being a good teacher and natural student herpetology consisted I think of basically loving to get outdoors and show people snakes, lizards, newts, and so forth, convince them to wade into a muddy pond and stuff like that. And when you walk into a big auditorium on an Ivy League campus and look at 350 freshmen, 60% of whom are business majors, and are one-third your age, just the feeling I had was there unanimously good daring me to bore them. My challenge is to figure out how to get beyond that which I think I did, but Cornell still teaches us herpetology after my wife, Kelly Zamudio and I left Cornell recently, they probably hired herpetology person. UT Austin, where I am now, still teaches herpetology, still has field courses. So that's one thing is that, to whatever extent we have any power or influence and so forth in our institutions, we push for keeping that in the undergraduate group, I think that encourages natural history.
Marty Martin 20:34
Yeah. So Harry, I wonder about, you know, the criticism that the non natural history is not people that are, you know, doggedly against it and design their research careers, not to be outdoor biologists, But still, lots of people invoke the natural history of stamp collecting. And I thought it was really it was really interesting that you, you know, you started this conversation from the perspective of theory is valuable, and I guess to some sense, guided the research that you do, and maybe even guides how you enjoy nature when you're, you're doing natural history, but you're not planning on publishing anything. It's literally just taking, taking a walk and looking for lizards and those kinds of things. How do you respond to natural history being stamp collecting, sort of tacitly thinking, or not maybe not tacitly because you said it. But if you know, that theory also has value? How do we sort of merge these worlds? Is it something about theory and natural history, that is this path forward to getting the undergrads excited and figuring out how to wake up those 60 percent of intro bio students?
Harry Greene 21:40
Yeah, well, maybe it's as simple as we just need to make a point to link the two in those undergraduate classes. And something you said really, I'm almost going to go run and write this down, Marty, afterwards.
Marty Martin 21:52
Oh, boy. All right. I want half the royalties on whatever you write down.
Harry Greene 21:57
Absolutely, man, and I sort of alluded to this in conversation with Cam, before we got started. When I'm out here walking around my ranch, my looking at nature is inspired by theory, when I see these crevice spiny lizards out, basking on a sunny day, in January, when two days ago, it was it was windchill five here, the first thing I go to is really theory, you know, I'm stunned. This doesn't match my notion of what reality is like. And, you know, my notion of what reality is like, is essentially a theory, it's a set of concepts that are tied together by relationships that have been tested, seem to be true. And all of a sudden, I'm looking at this going, wow. And the first thing I do actually is get back to my laptop and email my old friend, Ray Huey, who's a major player in reptile physiology, physiological ecology. And I go "Ray what is going on here?" and we end up having a really interesting conversation about that. So maybe we just need to be careful when we're teaching these ology classes to do both, you know, to, to honor both theory and natural history. I think, you know, picking on theory, or picking on natural history with sort of cliches is really unfair, it's sort of sad to see it.
Cameron Ghalambor 23:11
Well and in my experience is that, you know, the best scientists that I know that study ecology, evolution, behavior, are also excellent naturalists, and, you know, obviously, you can be strictly a theoretician and be quite good, but it seems that a lot of the inspiration for those really cutting edge questions that move the field, from the observations that people make in the wild. Just like you were saying, you know, wait, why is this lizard doing this? This shouldn't be this shouldn't be what their normal behavior is, do I have to re-think my conceptual framework for how how things actually work
Harry Greene 23:53
Onward with natural history. Theory too.
Marty Martin 23:54
Okay, so, you know, a powerful approach in modern biology is the use of the model organism. What's your take on the concept of the model organism? I mean, being a very strong, natural historian, and I guess I'm somewhat of a natural historian, but I guess that it isn't like a sort of primal, the number one thing that my lab's research focuses on. I mean, I've always had hang ups with model organisms. And I think, you know, whereas in one sense, it's totally understandable that we would want to control the environment and get at, you know, the sort of genetic contributions to phenotypic variation, the big reason the most model organisms were ever developed. I think we've sort of convinced ourselves in some facets of biology that you know, living systems are vastly more simple than reality. And case in point, immunology studies animals that develop their entire lives with really no or minimal challenges to their immune system, which is nothing like the natural condition for the mouse or the natural condition for the humans that they're supposed to model. So how do you think about model organisms being, you know, such an advocate of Natural History?
Harry Greene 25:09
Another great question. And I haven't thought about this before, quite like you're posing it. It strikes me that models are just like theory and natural history, in that they have very important roles to play. And yet, we have a richer science of biology if we use all three. And I'm just thinking about, let's take optimal foraging theory, optimal foraging theory would not have arisen out of studies of rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes eat about six meals a year in the wild, maybe, maybe ten or twelve, something like that. Their meals can vary from, say, 1% of their body mass to 150% of their body mass. And they continue to eat objects. They continue to take prey of both sizes, by the way, which is really interesting. Why don't they pass up the 1%? But the worst reason, the biggest reason they wouldn't have resulted in the development of foraging theory by people like Krebs and Davies, and Shaner. How would you study that in a rattlesnake? So I think we need model organisms to kind of crack these problems. Now here's the punchline, Rulon Clark, who was a postdoc with me at Cornell and is now a professor at San Diego State University is using three dimensional accelerometers on rattlesnakes, continuously recording to develop behavioral profiles, behavioral signatures from accelerometer data. So to put this otherwise, Rulon, and he has a video camera so he ground truths these signatures with continuous video, so he's got the sidewinders out there with delimiters on them, and they're transmitting continuously in three dimensions, the position of their head and neck, and he's got a video going, that shows what they're actually doing. He put all this together and I was amazed that turnout, there are distinguishable accelerometer signatures for things like yawning, resting, striking, crawling, doing all these things that have to do with foraging. Rulon can delimiter
Marty Martin 27:05
Wow
Harry Greene 27:05
the continuous foraging ecology of a sidewinder rattlesnake. Now Rulon actually can apply optimal foraging models now to the more complex aspects of that we have can now be applied to snakes. That was impossible when Shaner wrote his 71 or 72, annual review of ecology and systematics paper. So, to me, this is models theory, natural history all coming together with technological innovations that allow us to crack certain problems.
Cameron Ghalambor 27:34
What I'd like to do now is transition to talking about some other ideas that you've been involved with, which is this very sort of bold view of conservation under the umbrella term of rewilding. This is a concept that has generated a lot of controversy and a lot of disagreements not just among biologists, but also policymakers and the general public. And so I guess to begin, could you just give us a general overview of how you see the concept of rewilding as a conservation strategy?
Harry Greene 28:23
Wow, that's a very complicated problem can because, you know, it means different things to different people. The initial contribution I and some other people made was in terms of what we call Pleistocene rewilding. This qA in some papers in 2005 and 2006, based on a meeting we had in a bunkhouse on one at Ted Turner's ranches in New Mexico in 2004. And we were basically riffing off an idea of a man named Paul Martin, who was a Pleistocene paleoecology guy at University of Arizona. And Paul had even actually published an essay, in which he said maybe we could bring back some of this megafauna, either as the same species, or something closely related as a proxy. And we could start to restore some of the missing ecological function in North America that we lost about 10,000/12,000 years ago. As far as I know, that essay was never even cited by anyone. It had zero impact. And I had a PhD student at the time, Josh Donlan, who like me, was friends with Paul Martin, coincidentally. And we were working in Chiricahuas in Arizona, and we were literally driving around in one of our pickup trucks one day and we started talking about this, we said, you know, maybe this is not quite as crazy as it sounds. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could think about using the end of the Pleistocene as an appropriate ecological restoration benchmark?
Harry Greene 29:42
And so long story short, we brought together about a dozen people we cramped us up in this bunkhouse for two days. And we hammered out a manifesto which was first published in a brief form in Nature and later is a much longer piece and American Naturalist. And it was, as you say, extremely controversial. We got about 1000 letters and emails. Within a week or two, he and I interviewed I think about 50 times on radio and TV programs. I was on CNN, facing off with Eric Dinnerstein, who at the time was with World Wildlife Fund, I think. We got heavily criticized by people at the major conservation NGOs, who wrote letters to Nature. But that kind of settled down. And I've changed my mind to some extent about it. I no longer think anything in the past is an appropriate restoration benchmark.
Harry Greene 30:30
I follow people like Sam Fuhlendorf, who's a range ecologist at Oklahoma State University who think that what we're in now, as is planning for the future. That's what we have to decide is, what can we have downstream given the tremendous human impact on this planet? When we had our bunkhouse meeting, there were a couple mistakes we made, we didn't have a Native American ecologist there. And I wish we had because this, of course, this continent was inhabited by people before we got here. We didn't have a philosopher. And I think that was a huge mistake, because all this really comes down to values, not to science. And that was something I completely did not appreciate 20 years ago that, you know, the science is important. And hopefully, we'll all be honest and non rhetorical about presenting our science. But in the end, this is about values. This is about what people think is right and wrong. It's about what people care about. Philosophers can help us work through things like that.
Marty Martin 31:25
That's interesting. I mean, I'm, you know, excited to hear that the involvement of philosophers. I think biology, broadly, could probably benefit from the merger of philosophy and empirical sorts, which is a lot of what we try to do on this podcast. It almost sounded like, you know, the rationale that you had for Pleistocene rewilding, which was, you know, bring back the megafauna because of the ecological roles that they provide. It almost sounded like now you think that part isn't there? Or that is one of the values that a philosopher would sort of put together with other not necessarily scientifically motivated values? How do you see ecological function ecological services as this future of conservation, when the philosophers are involved?
Harry Greene 32:12
Yes, thanks for clarifying. For me, personally, I think restoring ecological function is tremendously valued. So my notion of literally almost at a spiritual level, what do I want the world to be like, includes maximum biological diversity, maximum authentic ecological function among organisms with which we coexist. I'd like to see that as authentic as possible in terms of the component organisms and the processes that are happening among them. So if I were to find what I would like, for example, the Texas Hill Country to be like, it would be that we'll have jaguars back here someday. We had them until 1948 in Texas, that was when our last jaguar is known to have been killed. And I would like to rewild Texas with that as the standard. Now there are a lot of things that flow from that, we'd have to figure out a lot of problems to get jaguars back here. But that's what I personally aspire to. Not everyone shares my values about that. And so I think that's where the philosophers come in, they get us to thinking harder about. Well, here's an example. I think a lot of people with, I'm going to generalize probably all three of our values, like to think in terms of intrinsic value. And we might even casually comment about a cheetah having intrinsic value, or a liverwort having intrinsic value or prairie ecosystem having intrinsic value. But it turns out, that notion of intrinsic value is super problematic among philosophers, they'll right away get you to ask yourself, "Well, where did the intrinsic come from?" You know, who put it there? If there weren't people around would an oak tree still have intrinsic value? I mean, and I think that's a very challenging question. And it turns out, there's a lot of research on values. So including a paper in PNAS, by the way, that shows how our individual experiences and our diverse cultural traditions shape, moral judgments, shape values. So, you know, a lot of people, including myself, were raised to think that values just came from the religious traditions in which we in particular grew up and it's really clear, that's not true. You know, I mean, it's true for you, if you believe a particular religious tradition, but there are obviously many religious traditions. And then people have different values. And it turns out, we know a lot about where values come from. And so all of this, for me is sort of rolled into what nature is going to be like, over the coming centuries.
Cameron Ghalambor 34:43
So Harry, I think Texas is a it's kind of a fascinating place to think about these concepts, because my understanding is that there are currently lots of non-native, large mammals many like African ungulates and various related species that are semi-wild or feral? Some are maybe in captivity in Texas. Do you know of any research that's being done to kind of see how those animals are kind of impacting the ecosystems that they're part of and whether ecological functions at least that we think about scientifically are being restored or maybe negatively impacted? Because of these introductions?
Harry Greene 35:35
Yeah, that's a super question Cam. And I know that there is research underway in terms of range management. And, as you probably know, almost all of Texas is private land. A lot of the land where those especially those big African and Asian ungulates, occur is high fenced, which is a super controversial phenomenon in terms of stopping gene flow among white tailed deer and all sorts of other organisms. So there is research underway in terms of the impact of some of those big ungulates on grassland function, and productivity and so forth. What there is not, for example, is anything about how apex predators might affect them, because we have almost no apex predators left. When I was a teenager in the 60s in Texas, there were either no mountain lions, or extremely few mountain lions, and there were no black bears. And there were no jaguars, or literally our biggest carnivore was a coyote, which is, our coyotes are not big. Now, mountain lions are coming back big time, even though we persecute them horribly. Black bears are coming back from three different directions into Texas. So I think the evidence is clear that most of these carnivores are quite fecund when you give them the chance. And absent just relentless persecution, they will come back. And so I expect that mountain lions and bears will continue to gradually spread in Texas and continue to have more and more of a local role.
Harry Greene 37:01
I'm getting away from your question, I'm afraid Cam. I don't know too much about that. But you inspire me to mention one other thing. We have a lot of feral pigs. And the general attitude is that they are a horrible pest. Agriculturally, certainly, here on local properties in Hill country, we see their diggings all the time. We see them sometimes we eat them. And so mostly, they're regarded as a bad thing. And that's a value judgment, right? I'm not entirely in step with that, in that I know that, in the not too distant past, we had a giant peccary in Texas. That I presume was doing peccary things that are sometimes similar to pig things. And so I'm not convinced. And I'd like to see this studied more that in fact, our feral pigs, at some reduced population sizes, might even be a positive thing in terms of local ecosystems. I don't know if you've ever watched feral pigs. But one really interesting thing is that they revert to the wild type over time. And I don't think this is well understood. But if we went out and saw 20, or 50, or 100, feral pigs here, most of them would look a lot like European wild boars. High deep head, a narrow body, a long tail with a bushy tip or a big roof down the middle of the back, large tusks. Some of them are red with black spots, you know, there's variation, but they tend to look like wild pigs. And I can even imagine a situation with lower numbers and a different sort of educational context that we might even appreciate wild pigs. I promise you anyone listening to this is going to think I'm nuts, talking about pigs like this.
Marty Martin 38:42
Well, living in Florida. Yeah, I think most of the people around here will think you're a little bit nuts. We have a pig problems here.
Harry Greene 38:49
Yeah but Marty, I would say this is where the Pleistocene might be informative, because Florida is like a hotbed, a place to see paleo ecological research. We know so much about that place in terms of paleoecology. And we know that only a couple of bristlecone pine tree lifetimes ago, Florida was a very different place in terms of a constituent megafauna. And everything in Florida and Texas that's native evolved in a megafaunal context. So it's worth thinking about.
Marty Martin 39:22
Yeah, it's worth thinking about what you said just a minute ago. I'd like to circle back to because you know, it's the future that any conservation efforts that we try to do have to be mindful of what's coming. And so the last thing that Florida is going to be is like the post-Pleistocene in the near future, right? How are you thinking about that now, merging what you have thought about with rewilding in the past, and we've used it in, you know, sort of modern context of maybe we're going to do some introductions of jaguars, or jaguars are going to somehow come come back to Texas. How are you thinking about rewilding as an idea, versus this new sort of focus that you're putting on conservation in the interest of the future. Where's your attention going?
Harry Greene 40:02
Yeah, thanks so much for asking that. I see wildness as a continuum. And one way to think about it is in terms of concentric circles of wildness out from the centers of human population. Now, of course, they wouldn't be circles. They probably have jagged edges and broken corridors and all sorts of things. But I think I first started thinking about this when I walked out the front door of our building on the Cornell campus and saw a red tail hit a cottontail. Right in front of the building. I mean, there must have been hundreds of freshmen walking down tower road at that point, and a red tail had just grabbed a cotton tail right in front of them. I remember thinking to myself, this place is wilder, for that cotton tail and that red tail. How could anyone not argue that a place is wilder if it has predation still going on of vertebrates, you know. And we have peregrines on the Texas tower, nesting peregrines on the Texas tower, we have hundreds of thousands of freetail bats, which have become a phenomenal tourist attraction in the center of the capital of Texas under the Congress Street Bridge. So I'm always looking for ways to foster coexistence between people and wild nature, to whatever extent we can generate it. And then I envision that sort of reaching outward, to places like national parks, but also to landscapes where we adjust our incentives, such that private landowners also favor biodiversity. And Marty, you mentioned being in Kenya earlier, you know, in other countries, we don't go tell people in Botswana, "Oh, you gotta save elephants, because, you know, I live in New York City, and I really like elephants. And so I insist that you, you, put up with what it means to actually coexist with elephants," which can be quite difficult. So I'd like to see us encouraging private landowners in the United States to coexist with nature. And I think that's going to come down to changing certain practices, like maybe leaving horns on cattle so they can defend their calves against apex predators, maybe providing tax incentives to coexisting with coyotes. Or having camera traps, and if you can document that you have jaguars on your property, you get a huge tax advantage at the end of the year. I mean, things like that. We shouldn't expect private landowners to just do this for our sake, because we love it. That's where I'm going with wildness is looking for ways to have it in the future.
Cameron Ghalambor 42:36
So Harry, I know, several years ago, you and Kelly purchased this sort of overgrazed ranch in Texas, and I follow your posts on Facebook. And as a private landowner, I see the kind of steps that you've taken to kind of restore your private land in really interesting ways. And I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about, you know, the Texas Longhorns, the cattle that you have grazing on your land, because some conservationists might say like, well, you have this grassland or you have this part of this Texas Hill Country, and it's overgrazed, why would you want to put cows back on it? But I also know that you have a really interesting sculpture of a dung beetle. That is also like at the entrance to your property. And so can you talk a little bit about your efforts with keeping Longhorns? And what kinds of changes you've seen because of the steps you've taken?
Harry Greene 43:42
Yeah, sure. And I have to be fair here because I didn't start this by myself. I have a neighbor down the road named David Hillis, a long friend of mine for decades and is a professor at UT as well. And David has been ranching a herd of Longhorns now for about 25 years. And so, my Longhorns came from David's herd and I started studying the behavior of his Longhorns more than 10 years ago when I started deer hunting on his property. So I gotta give David credit for pretty much everything I'm gonna say about Longhorns. The second thing I want to say is a friend of mine, Darragh Hare, who's now at Oxford running something called Morally Contested Conservation, and has a philosophy background. He just posted a little paper, that's about the concept of "one big thing." And he's arguing that we too often use a word like "cattle" or "hunting" or "meat" or "ranching" as if it's this one big thing. And then we go on to deal with it rhetorically and supposedly factually, and so forth. And Darragh's argument is that this is tremendously counterproductive to really making progress. I think cattle is a word that's often used as one big thing. when in fact cattle are tremendously diverse.
Harry Greene 44:55
So here's the deal with Longhorns. Cattle arrived in the New World about five hundred years ago, thanks to Columbus. He brought them to an island in the Caribbean. And within two or three years, Ponce de Leon took some of them to Florida, and some other ships took some of them to Mexico. These were Iberian cattle. So if you've ever been in Spain, think Andalusia, think Spanish Fighting Bulls. Think whatever you want to, but they were something like that. 500 years later, we have a very distinctive, I would say native breed of cattle in Florida called Cracker Cattle. And we have very distinctive other lineage that evolved in a semi-arid context for 500 years, in the southwest, which we call Longhorns here. They're called other things in other places.
Harry Greene 45:42
So these are two different lineages of cattle that are distinctively different from each other, and are locally adapted. They happen, by the way, to have extremely lean tasty meat. They're great at defending their calves. They forage on a much wider range of plants than do her foods and Angus, for example. And so, to me a huge appeal of having Longhorns is that they are, by my conception of wildness, they are wilder than other cattle. They're super self-sufficient. I mean, during the worst drought and heatwave in Texas recorded history, my Longhorns were digging pits under oak trees, in which they conductively cooled themselves by laying on the damper, cooler soil. They did it on their own, I didn't go out there and say, I'm gonna give you a lecture about conductive cooling. They just did it. You know, they got a lot of knowledge based on that 500 years of adaptation.
Harry Greene 46:40
The other thing you referred to Cam, I'll just get into that. Is that Hillis one day, asked himself, why am I giving my cattle ivermectin, this poison, you know. And he thought, well, because somebody told me to. And then he thought, well, I don't know if I believe that, you know. And so, he did the experiment, he stopped giving ivermectin to his cattle. One thing didn't happen. His cattle didn't get sick. They didn't get skinny. He didn't start seeing nematodes in their feces. His cattle were just fine. What did happen was his dung beetle fauna came back. And I am not exaggerating the life when you don't give ivermectin to your Longhorns, or I presume any cattle, during the warmer parts of the year when dung beetles are active. If you don't give your cattle ivermectin, that life of a cow pie goes from months or years to minutes. Here's natural historian Harry at work. One time I saw one of my Longhorns raise its tail, and I whipped out my cell phone, hit the stopwatch and 13 seconds later, a dung beetle arrived. I mean, when you have a healthy dung beetle fauna they're just out there all the time, looking for dung. And they're there right away. And literally, if you're on my ranch or Hillis's ranch during the warm part of the year and you're out walking, you see a big, fresh, wet, greenish brown cow pie. If you come back an hour later, it won't be there. And you'll look at the grass, it'll look like the ground is sort of wiggling or wobbling or something. You look carefully. It's all these dung beetles pushing their little dung ball. And pretty soon all that dung is underground, involved in nutrient cycling, not putting methane into the atmosphere, on and on and on. What a fantastic thing. Right. So I view all this as is sort of exemplary of wilding, rewilding.
Cameron Ghalambor 48:31
Yeah. I think what what's so powerful about that story is that for myself, and I'm imagining for many other people who, you know, spend time outside where cows have grazed, if you've been hiking or camping in those areas, inevitably, you will come across these very old dung piles, you know, that are, that are just sitting around and who knows how long they've been there. And that connection with ivermectin, I just assumed that, that cow patties just stuck around. And like that was just a natural part of the cycle. And so just that story alone, I think is super powerful.
Harry Greene 49:14
Yeah, you know, it turns out that cattle I mean, why should we be surprised at this? Cattle don't like to eat grass that's right next to their own droppings. Who would, right?
Marty Martin 49:23
Yep
Harry Greene 49:24
But they don't. So it turns out somebody has actually calculated the economic impact of increasing the amount of available forage by not having cow pies, littering your pasture. Lay that I mean, isn't that incredible? So here again, here's science and theory and practice and people and making a living. These things are all intertwined and connected. And our challenge is to figure out how to do this better and have a wilder future.
Marty Martin 49:51
Yeah. So okay, let's push this envelope. You've sort of done this for pigs, but they were feral pigs. So this is not the same kind of thing for pork, as it is for this form of beef. But do you think that this kind of mentality could generally apply to domesticated livestock? And I'd like to hear your perspective on that. But I'm also thinking about because of my bias of working on invasive species, and a lot of that happens in cities, you know, cities are going to become bigger and more people in them and their imprint on the local environment is going to get larger over time. Do you think that there's a sort of a change in the philosophy of conservation such that we can lean into the kinds of organisms that can do best in these places? There's almost the opposite of the rewilding mentality that we try to recreate the past. Instead, we foster what the future is inevitably going to become.
Harry Greene 50:44
Yeah. Well, you know, what that suggests to me is that maybe I and we are using the wrong word. Maybe rewilding is not what we're really talking about anymore, at least in the concept of what you've just said, which I think is really important. So I do think the past informs our values, it informs what we might decide we want. It informs in terms of what kinds of associations and relationships are known to have happened in the past that we might look forward to. But you know, it's the future that we've got to rewild, not the past.
Harry Greene 51:20
I thought you might be about to ask me about something. So can I just bring it up? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So you know, when we had this bunkhouse meeting, I had a bunch of exemplar organisms for us to talk about sort of chew over you know, and that was included mammoths and elephants, lions, which used to be the most widely distributed mammal on the planet, they went all the way to Peru, cheetah. And then because I knew people were gonna go nuts over those, I put in the Bolson tortoise. And I put in the Bolson tortoise, which occurs only in this small part of North Central Mexico, because technically, if it reaches 50 kilograms, it's megafauna. And it used to occur all over the southwestern US. And nobody's going to care at all about bringing back a tortoise. People love tortoises. So I deliberately put in this ringer. And my experiment work because in all the criticisms of our paper that were published, and that were brought to my attention, otherwise, no one ever complained about the tortoise. And not only that, one published critique erroneously claimed the tortoise was part of the native New Mexico fauna today. It was ifthe authors of that critique couldn't intellectually deal with this irony that I'd purposely injected in the whole thing.
Harry Greene 52:38
So it turned out that as a result of our meeting, and even much more so as a result of the fact that Ted Turner loves turtles, his Turner Endangered Species Fund, moved legally with a great deal of forethought and planning, a group of about two dozen Bolson tortoises from a ranch in southern Arizona to one of Turner's ranches in New Mexico. And the experiment was so successful that last September, it was the most wonderful 78th birthday present I could have possibly had. I was part of a ceremonial release of bolts on tortoises led by director of Fish and Wildlife Service, Martha Williams, out into the New Mexico wilderness. So those tortoise are literally free living in New Mexico, for the first time in about ten thousand years. They're out there. And the interesting thing is that Fish and Wildlife is fully in on this. And the reason is they see this as conservation, responding to the threat of climate change, to the possibility that Bolson tortoises might not persist in their native range.
Harry Greene 53:41
Now, what they're not doing yet, and, they probably wouldn't even want me to talk about this, is what if instead of the same species, we applied that kind of thinking to a closely related species, And that we admitted, the closest living relative of the old world cheetah, which everybody agrees is super endangered, the closest relative to the old world cheetah is our mountain lion and our jaguarundi. We have a prey item, a pronghorn that's apparently designed for a cheetah predator, and we had Pleistocene, we call them cheetahs, they were more closely related to our new world ]pumas, mountain lions than they are to the old world cheetah but we call them Pleistocene cheetah. Maybe we should take a couple of hundred cheetah that are in zoos in this country and put them out somewhere as part of the future conservation of cheetahs globally. I'm going to get a lot of mail about that.
Cameron Ghalambor 54:38
Harry, I'd like to follow up a little bit on the Bolson tortoise, just because I think many of the listeners might not be familiar with this very large tortoise, and what what its behavior and sort of ecological impact actually is, so can you describe a little bit about their lifestyle and how they change the environments that they inhabit.
Harry Greene 55:01
Yeah, thanks Cam. This is a really important part of the story. We have four living species of North American tortoises. They're all in one genus, and they're all burrowers. So there's a couple of key things here. All tortoises globally are pretty strictly herbivores. And they've been shown in numerous ecosystems to have major seed dispersal roles. They're even putting tortoises back on an island in the Indian Ocean to restore a seed dispersal role, and therefore contribute to the conservation of local vegetation. So we know from research on desert tortoises in the southwest, gopher tortoises in the southeast, that these tortoises play similar roles. And Bolson tortoises, arguably the largest of the four species, they're sort of neck and neck with gopher tortoises actually, they dig these burrows that could be tens of meters, tens of yards long underground. So they're moving soil, they're eating plants, they're dispersing seeds. They live for decades. One of the tortoises on the Turner Ranch is thought to be more than 70 years old now. And she was just laying clutches of eggs every year like crazy. So they have major ecological roles. And I'm super interested in what continues to unfold with putting this animal back in the US.
Cameron Ghalambor 56:18
Yeah the habitats that they create, and how other species will potentially be benefiting from that.
Marty Martin 56:24
I mean that's one of the species that gopher tortoises in Florida, some of the developers don't really go for them. But I mean, the general public, it's such an iconic species for us here. Everybody is passionate about our gopher tortoises.
Harry Greene 56:36
Marty, it's from studies on gopher tortoises that we know how important their burrows are to such a wide variety of other organisms all the way from tiny insects to Diamondback rattlesnakes and skunks and, I mean, their burrows are just a major component of natural Florida.
Marty Martin 56:52
Yeah, and every second grader, it seems, here in Florida knows that. So it's really encouraging.
Harry Greene 56:58
Awesome.
Marty Martin 56:59
I'm gonna do one more question and then sort of future of conservation by merging lab, very creative novel lab approaches with, you know, your advocacy in the paper. And I wonder what you think about it now for bringing back the elephants, bringing back the mammoths. So George Church famously has talked for years about, you know, bringing back the mammoths, he means something slightly different than you do. But I wonder what you think about his ideas of cloning mammoths, and the arguments for bringing those back? We're not talking about necessarily the same parts of the world. But what's your impression of those approaches to rewilding?
Harry Greene 57:46
Yeah, I want to be really careful how I answer that, because there's so much of that about which I am not an expert. I certainly read about it. I'm intrigued by it. And I've read a lot of objections to it being done that involved actually animal behavior and animal welfare. So it's like, well, if you got one of these, who would it be with or even if you got two, I think that's, that's a legitimate serious concern. With the Bolson tortoises, what Ted Turner's group did was to convene a meeting for several days of experts on burrowing tortoise biology and conservation. They very smartly included Mexican conservation officials, they included the most prominent tortoise vet, they included people from Florida who, who knew that you had to transplant these tortoises in social groups. They had to dig starter burrows for every tortoise, and the spatial arrangement of those starter burrows had to match the burrow spatial arrangement and Arizona, so that when Harry came out of his Burrow went, "Cam," and then Harry says "cool Cam and I are still, he's still to the South of me".
Marty Martin 58:59
Hey!
Harry Greene 58:59
Yeah it turns out you have to use soft releases on gopher tortoises and Bolson tortoises. So if you just let them go they do like your house cat would if you moved to St. Louis from Tucson, your house cat goes out the front door and tries to go back to Tucson. You have to keep it indoors for a while, you have to do a soft release. So I'm going into this because I think anything like that, like the mammoth cloning thing, or even just using Asian elephants as proxies, which I think seems like a more realistic possibility. The experts got to do this, not Harry the herpetologist so when I brought up cheetah, it's not that I think I know how to do that. The one thing I would do if I could just snap a finger would be to get all the cheetah folks to talking about this and talking about the possibility of doing something like that. I know I kind of dodged your question, but I don't feel competent to really address it in detail.
Marty Martin 59:51
Yeah, that's fair. And I haven't read up on it recently. And I think I feel the same way. It seems very cool, but in terms of actually working out in the intended way, I'm a little skeptical?
Cameron Ghalambor 1:00:11
So Harry, we've been talking for a while, and I kind of want to wrap things up. But one question that I want to ask you, which I think sort of integrates across a lot of the topics that we've been talking about so far today, revolve around the relationship between humans and wilderness. And I know you've thought about this a lot. And, in particular, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between humans and wild places, as in ways in which humans sort of observe and are kind of separate from wilderness versus interacting and being part of wilderness and, and how that relates to, this concept of reciprocal healing? That I think you've you've you've written about. And that's sort of kind of a big question, but I really want to know your thoughts on it.
Harry Greene 1:01:14
Thanks, Cam. And I have to say, again, this is something I'm sort of actively exploring myself right now in a book I'm working on. So I don't think I've even completely satisfied myself with my answers. But I am convinced that humans have always been part of nature, and that we always are part of nature. It's just a question of, sort of how removed from it do we feel and seem. And so I'm especially intrigued now by the notion of ecokincentricity or ecological kinship. The term was coined by a Native American environmental scholar named Enrique Salmon in a paper and Ecological Applications in 2000. It's been popularized, in particular by some of the books by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who's also an indigenous writer, and scholar of mosses and other plants. And the key part of it is reciprocity. And a really important aspect of things they write about is that people are, in fact, using nature. So I think our sort of preservationist, Euro-view of our relationship to nature that I at least grew up with is it we're more spectators than participants. And in fact, we use, we use phrases like, "take only photos and leave only footprints.” And I'm telling you, no other species has ever done that. Nor have we. And I think it's misleading, I think it's misleading. I mean, there's nothing else out there that's leaving only footprints. We're the only ones with cameras, but everybody else out there from bacteria to elephants, is, in fact, leaving more than footprints. And some of them are major landscape transformers, like elephants, you know. So I think that's a misleading notion. And we should, we should reimagine what wildness and wilderness ought to be, and can be, and get past that, that version of it. And so this notion of reciprocity is not just about well, I like nature, so I'm going to give money to Nature Conservancy. I think it's also about sort of owning up to participating in nature, you know, it's where our food comes from. It's where our wastes go.
Harry Greene 1:01:17
Just one little anecdote on that when I was a kid, it was common in elementary school, I don't think it is now they have a class called geography. Who knows why in old age, we remember these things. But I remember learning about dairy production. In the geography class, I actually think I first, Cam, learned where Norway is, in that geography class. And I probably learned something about what people do in Norway or what they export or something like that. One of the things we did in that geography classes, we took a field trip to a sewage treatment plant. And so it has never been a mystery to me, where that stuff goes in the white porcelain bowl. And I think by having things like, you know, that system, we're allowed to sort of forget about the fact that we're participating in that way, in nature. So I'm trying to work through and write about and engage with other people about this notion of reciprocal participation, as opposed to being at least superficially, just spectators.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:04:23
I feel very much along the same lines as you that it's important for humans to engage and recognize that we are part of nature. I guess what I struggle with, though, is given the large human population, any species, elephants included or bacteria that, you know, the numbers get to be too large, the impacts also kind of go up. And so how do we balance the huge human population in the there's just the sort of absolute magnitude of impact, even if you Just taking pictures, you know, we've we've all been on trails that have been, you know, used heavily and seeing just, you know, just what walking on a trail does to the landscape. Is there an education component there that needs to be included on just how to better interact with nature, so that those impacts are kind of minimized? How do you see that?
Harry Greene 1:05:26
Yeah, well, I think you've just said it, in a way. I mean, it's, again, it's all about values, and part of where values come from, it's through education, through communication, and so forth. And so, you know, it's almost like step one is getting all of us to care more. And then there's step two, three, four, and five down the road from that, you know, figuring out kind of technically how to achieve these things. You know, earlier I talked about a notion of wildness as being concentric. And I'm imagining, in fact we know, that we can't even have elephants roaming Travis County where Austin is, we're only going to have elephants in places with relatively low population densities. Same goes for lions, and polar bears, and tigers, and grizzlies and stuff. So we're gonna have to figure out how to have places that have low enough human densities and human impact that there can be, which I surely myself hope there will be, those really big animals and not just the apex predators. Would it be horrible if we no longer had any migrating large ungulates? I mean, that would just be a phenomenal tragedy to lose that from the earth. So to have that we have to have these stretches and corridors of open landscape. So we have to figure out how to achieve that. And that's beyond my toolkit, but that's what it would take.
Marty Martin 1:06:51
Well Harry, I really enjoyed our conversation. And please let us know when the book is ready to come out. We'd love to talk to you about it just in general, or on another episode, if you're up for it. We always wrapped by giving our guests the sort of last word. Is there anything else that you wanted to say that we didn't prompt you?
Harry Greene 1:07:08
You know, as one gets older one reflects more and more on one's life and hope I've got a lot more time to go. And I plan to keep working hard on things that I care about. I feel just amazingly lucky to have been a nature lover, and to have had a career in academia studying nature, and so I just wished the best for others out there that would want to do that as well.
Marty Martin 1:07:30
Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:07:32
Yeah. Thanks, Harry
Harry Greene 1:07:33
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Marty Martin 1:07:45
Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, let us know via X, Facebook, Instagram, or just leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you don't, we'd love to know that too. Write to us at info at Big biology.org Thanks
Cameron Ghalambor 1:07:56
Thanks to Steve Lane, who manages the website, and Molly Magid for producing the episode.
Marty Martin 1:08:01
Thanks also to Dayna De La Cruz for her amazing social media work, and Keating Shahmehri who produces the fantastic cover art.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:08:07
Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida and the National Science Foundation for support.
Marty Martin 1:08:12
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello.