“Hope is the subject of much discussion in conservation circles, both the need for it and the lack of it,” Michelle Nijhuis writes inBeloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction. “Yet few if any of the most influential early conservationists were motivated by what might be called hope. They were motivated by many other things — delight, outrage, data — but they had little confidence that the work they were moved to do would succeed in rescuing the species they loved. They did it anyway.” Photo courtesy of Michelle Nijhuis.
In his seminal work on conservation, A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote of his view of humans’ moral responsibility to the natural world: “I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the result of a life journey.” Today, we tend to regard conservation figures like Leopold, and other giants like John Muir and Rachel Carson, as a pantheon, who penned a “conservation scripture” that reshaped our view of the natural world and pulled countless species back from the brink. Yet, as award-winning science journalist Michelle Nijhuis, writes in her superb new book, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, these vaunted figures have their own stories, filled with victories worthy of celebration, shifting ideologies, biases, imperfections, and unfinished work, all very much shaped by the worlds they lived in. And these stories–of how they loved, studied, hunted, preserved, and fought for animals both locally and around the world–ultimately tell a much broader tale of humanity’s relationship with animals.
In Beloved Beasts, Nijhuis tells the riveting history and evolution of the modern conservation movement. She introduces readers to the Swedish scientists who devised the system of naming and grouping species that endures today, the rebel taxidermist who led the fight to save the American bison from extinction, the New York City socialite who demanded that the Audubon Society stop ignoring the gunning down of game birds by sportsmen, and more. These inspiring, dogged, and often flawed characters transformed both the ecological communities and ideas that we inherited. In this episode, we speak with Nijhuis about what we can learn from the stories of past conservationists and their efforts to protect the wild animals that they loved.
In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician, he’d played guitar on Motown records as a teenager, replaced Pete Seeger in the folk band The Weavers in his twenties, and had become a pivotal figure in electronic music by age 30, mastering the synthesizer and introducing it to popular music and film. He worked with artists like The Doors and the Beach Boys, performed music and effects for iconic soundtracks for more than 130 films and shows like Apocalypse Now and Mission Impossible, and co-produced game-changing albums showing the world how the synthesizer could combine sounds into new timbres.
“My background is as a professional musician, so I have always thought of the sonic world as being a kind of chorus of sound,” Krause says. “It never occurred to me to take [animals] out and abstract them one by one. It’s a bit, to me, like abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the orchestra and trying to express the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You can’t really do it. You can play the theme, but it doesn’t give you the impact of it.” (Photo by Chris Chung, Press Democrat, Santa Rosa)
Then Warner Brothers commissioned his duo, Beaver & Krause, to create the first-ever album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats. Bernie headed into Muir Woods north of San Francisco with a portable recorder, mics, and stereo headphones. What he heard changed his life. A flowing stream; gentle winds in the tall redwood canopy; a pair of calling ravens, feathers resonating with each wingbeat. It was an immense new world of music. Listening to it made him feel calm, focused, and simply good in a way he hadn’t felt before.
Bernie decided he wanted to record wild animals for the rest of his life. And that’s what he did. He quit Hollywood, got a PhD studying bioacoustics (back when the field comprised about five people) and began traveling the world to record wild habitats. Over the past fifty years, he’s built what The New Yorker aptly called “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human.” His astonishing archive includes the sounds of more than 15,000 species, from barnacles twisting in their shells, to chorusing tropical forest frogs, to feeding humpback whales.
Visualizations of sound frequencies, known as “spectrograms,” are useful for understanding acoustic patterns in habitats. In 1995, in Vanua Levu, Fiji, Bernie Krause recorded two sections of the same reef: one alive and one dying. The first 15 seconds of this spectrogram capture what the healthy reef sounded like. Bernie estimates there were about 15 different types of fish. The latter 15 seconds were recorded within the same hour at a dying portion of the same reef, about 400 meters away. The diverse voices of fish are absent. All you can hear is snapping shrimp and the waves. (Courtesy of Bernie Krause)
Previous wildlife records isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Bernie recorded habitats as a whole. Hearing the interwoven sounds of plants, animals, and landscapes and the complex interplay between the timbres, pitches, and amplitudes, he proposed a remarkable new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like the individual players in an orchestra.
It cannot be overstated how impressive and important Bernie’s library is. There were no mentors, no guides for what equipment to use in extreme weather, no instructions for how to capture the subtle sounds of snow falling, the depth of a glacier cracking, or the whispers of wolves. Nor was there the scientific language to describe what he was hearing and what it revealed. Bernie and his colleagues had to figure all this out themselves, inventing a new scientific field called “soundscape ecology.”
“When we lived closely connected to the natural world, we learned these sounds from the animals,” Krause says. “We learned melody from the animals. We learned orchestration from the animals because that’s how they were organizing and creating this bandwidth for themselves. We learned rhythm by watching gorillas and chimpanzees mark out on the buttresses of fig trees. We have nothing original that we can claim here. All the copyrights are owned by the critters.” (Photo by Nick Nichols)
Bernie’s soundscapes were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Fifty percent of the habitats in Bernie’s archive no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din.
His work reminds us how much we have to gain by being quiet, listening, and saving the world’s animal choruses — and the gravity of how much animals and humans alike have to lose if we do not.
“The science is very clear about fisheries,” Daniel Pauly, the world’s leading fisheries scientist and Principal Investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us initiative, says. “You have to get rid of subsidies, you have to manage them, you have to prevent the fisheries essentially from committing suicide. A fishery left on its own will build capacity, will build bigger engines on bigger boats, more people will get in, and it will destroy the resource. That’s what it does if there is no management. It’s like your kids – if you leave them alone with a pan of chocolate, they will eat until they get sick. You have to tell them don’t eat the chocolate, or give them one chocolate at a time. This is the paradox, that the NGO industry is seen by the fishing industry and fisher communities as the enemy. We are the people that prevent them from committing suicide.” Photo by Alison Barrat, courtesy of Sea Around Us.
Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. He did this by, as he quoted from Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, “sciencing the shit out of it.”
Dr. Pauly as a boy. “I’ve read a bit about children that had difficult youths,” Dr. Pauly says. “It turns out that most of us end up badly, but there is a small percentage that is resilient. And I have been one of them.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we.
If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.
In 1995, Dr. Pauly — photographed here on a boat in the Philippines — coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how each new generation accepts the state of the natural world in which they were raised as “normal.” Lack of historical data and awareness warps perception about the severity of ecosystem transformation actually taking place. “It is happening so fast that young people now are not used to the winters that old folks like me recall,” Dr. Pauly says of climate change. “They don’t recall snow all over the place. They don’t recall cold in the winter, because often it’s not cold anymore. And if you add two generations, the stories they will read about how things were will not be credible anymore, and they will not be motivated to make any sacrifice to get back to the past. And so we can have a situation where we have every generation accommodating itself to a change that overall can be devastating.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“We must now, more and more, have the scientists speaking up,” Dr. Pauly says. “Because if they don’t, they leave the field to the politicians and to the pundits and to people who don’t know, and who make an agenda that is science-free. Science is actually not only what you can do, but also what you cannot do. It is okay to know what kind of things you shouldn’t be doing.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“I’ve been at this for almost twenty years now, and in my time, the vast majority of protected areas that have been established and designated in Canada have been either led or co-led by Indigenous Peoples,” Valérie Courtois, founder and director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI), says. “The boreal forest contains up to a quarter of the world’s freshwaters and wetlands. It has the largest terrestrial storehouses of carbon in the globe. These are things that Indigenous Nations know intrinsically about those landscapes. And so what the ILI does really is to provide a national kind of voice and framework for advocacy of that leadership that is existing on the ground.” Photo courtesy of Nadya Kwandibens.
In 2017, seven Indigenous Nations and groups in Eastern Canada came together to sign an historic agreement to save a herd of caribou that had sustained all of them for time immemorial. The region’s caribou herd was once the world’s largest with 800,000 individuals. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples and the caribou met in this region. But then the herd began disappearing. By 2018, there were only 5,500 caribou left in the herd – a 99 percent decrease from 20 years before. Canada’s governments weren’t taking action, so these Indigenous Nations stepped in to save the herd. Overcoming long-entrenched divisions, and united by their common relationship to the caribou, these Nations created a groundbreaking framework for sustainably managing the herd and stopping its decline.
That agreement, known as the Ungava Peninsula Caribou Aboriginal Roundtable, or UPCART, is just one of many examples of how Indigenous Peoples across Canada are leading the way on protecting some of the world’s most ecologically important ecosystems and treasured wildlife. For millennia, Indigenous Peoples have been the caretakers of the land and have relied on animals–caribou, marten, goose, and the abundance of other animals that call Canada home. But industrial development, such as logging and mining, is putting much of the country’s wildlife and wild places at risk–along with the ways of life that depend on them. While Canada’s provinces drag their feet on needed protections, Indigenous Nations are combining Indigenous knowledge, western science, and thoughtful strategy to chart a new path for their people and for the rest of the world.
Prior to UPCART, “the only management tool that the governments were using with respect to the caribou was ‘hunting on, hunting off,'” Cortois says. “The UPCART’s strategy plan really takes much more of a nuanced approach that looks at the conditions on the ground, what we know about the population size, and the dynamics that are driving that population size – and then also prioritizes access to the Indigenous Nations as the rights-holders for those areas.” Photo courtesy of Pat Kane.
