Why Are Conflicts Over Nature Escalating?

00:00:00: Dotson: We have gone astray when we think we can settle a high-stakes conflict by having enough science to say the other side. Well, the stakes that you care about. Sorry, they don't matter. We've got science to prove that the stakes are too big for it, and your two cents should just go away. And so really, the mistake was, was thinking that this was a search for knowledge rather than a search for solutions.

00:00:25: Hahn: Welcome to Inside Biodiversity. This podcast is hosted by iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. My name is Volker Hahn. I'm head of the Impact unit at iDiv. My guest today is Taylor Dotson. Taylor is a Science and Technology Studies scholar and an associate professor at New Mexico Tech. In this episode, we will discuss Taylor Dotson’s new book, “Conservation by the People”. In it, Taylor describes what he calls “fanatical confrontations over nature”, and he explores ways of resolving environmental disputes in productive and democratic ways. How can we better understand those who oppose conservation policies? How do we prevent biodiversity policy from becoming as polarizing as climate change? How can incremental change, through trial and error help us achieve what Taylor calls “biodiversity democracy”? Enjoy challenging questions and challenging answers in this new episode. Welcome to Inside Biodiversity, Taylor.

00:01:30: Dotson: Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:01:31: Hahn: Today we'll talk about your new book. It's called “Conservation by the People – The Future of Biodiversity in a Divided World”. You're not a biologist, but a professor of social science. Do you have a personal link to biodiversity?

00:01:47: Dotson: So I would say I have a personal link to to nature and the environment. I'm from New Mexico in the United States, which is a state that's sparsely populated, perhaps slightly smaller than Germany, but with a population of about 2 million people. And so I've spent a lot of time out in nature enjoying it. There's wildlife refuges just a stone's throw from my house. I did a lot of backpacking in the Gila Wilderness as a kid. Hiking, backpacking, camping is a big part of my life, so I'd say that I'm a nature lover. I would also say that I'm an environmentalist, and actually, I would describe myself as a recovering environmental doomist that my environmental beliefs for a long time, especially for biodiversity, were fairly typical for people with my level of education and social class. Which is to say, I thought that whatever organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace said was and questionably right. Um, so yeah, so when it came to species issues, biodiversity issues in my own backyard, like salt cedars in the Rio Grande Valley, uh, or the question about returning Mexican wolves. New Mexico, To me, it was very obvious that, oh, these are harmful invaders, and that the return of wolves was sort of an unquestionably right thing to do, but actually really engaging with biodiversity came later. So it's kind of perhaps a little bit of an accident or of history or chance that I ended up focusing on it professionally as well. So I regularly teach a class on the unintended consequences of science and technology at my university, and rewilding ended up being a topic for a student project, and I think I ended up getting a lot more excited about the project and the student doing it did. And that piqued my interest. And I ended up. I actually started reading by reading George Monbiot’s book, “Feral”, which at the time I think I kind of embraced very uncritically. And that was one reason, part one of the reasons that pushed me to pitch a project through a Fulbright fellowship, where I wanted to explore rewilding and its connection to ideas from democratic theory. So not only seeing what would be a democratic approach to conservation, but also seeing rewilding itself as a as an application of democratic ideas to nature. And that's how I ended up at at iDiv for seven months in 2022. I was lucky in that I was awarded the fellowship, but that stay was very instrumental because my my personal and professional connection to biodiversity became much deeper and also a lot more complicated.

00:04:25: Hahn: So before you came to iDiv and started to focus more on biodiversity, you had a book published. It's called “The Divide – How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy”. And I think democracy is a core theme of yours. We'll talk about your new book later, but there are some common themes. Can you tell us where is the overlap of the two books?

00:04:50: Dotson: Yeah, the overlap is about what is the place of science in a democracy. And what motivated me to write that book was that, even so, my back on training, you know, social sciences is kind of vague. My my actual field is Science and Technology Studies. And a big focus of science and technology studies is to see that the line between science and human values is is hard to draw, that that actually human values, human judgments come in to shape science of how what do we study? How do we study it? What do we do when we when we're uncertain? Uh, what do we do when when we especially when we're doing things with risky science and technology? And, uh, maybe I'm getting a little bit on a historical digression, but I, I was motivated to write this book, my second book, after Trump was elected. And I was watching sort of the rhetoric about most of our political issues, whether it's climate change, whether it was the economy, whether it was nuclear energy. And I was seeing this pattern. I was seeing this pattern that multiple sides of a debate had, this attitude that the facts were known on this subject, whether it's scientific facts or is something coming from the idea of common sense, and that all that needed to happen is that we just needed politicians to have the guts to do what was right. But the trouble is, everybody thought the truth was something different. And so my thinking is seeing in how sort of pathologically polarized the United States and other countries where it was, in my view, that people were trying to reduce political problems to knowledge problems, and that that this preoccupation with the facts led to our political institutions and our democratic debate to cease to function, that people were, in a sense, becoming fanaticism around their idea of truth, and they would become what's called an in philosophy, naive realists, that what they believe or what they've what what the scientists they trust have told them is absolutely correct. And anyone who disagrees has to be ignorant or corrupt or lying. And that's an attitude that's Kryptonite to democracy. So in order to counter this, my argument is that we have to try very hard to reawaken our sense of curiosity, not just about the problems that we face, but the people that disagree with us, you know. And so to take it to maybe applying it to biodiversity, you know, question that was guiding me writing this, my latest book is, is how could reasonable people see the same science, the same landscapes, the same natural world, but believe very different things about nature and conservation? And how do we understand this disagreement rather than just diagnosing one group as as being the one with truth on their side and the other side is is suffering some sort of personal cognitive failure?

00:07:31: Hahn: Yeah. In your book, you are already describing some of the confrontations that we see in the biodiversity and conservation area. And you call this fanatical confrontations over nature. And you also write I'm quoting here. I predict that political hostilities will surpass what we've experienced for climate change. That is, it will. Unless we are willing to learn from our past experiences and to strive for better, strive to better understand the roots of conservation. Disagreement. The picture. Your painting sounds pretty grim. Um, but I find, you know, the examples that you give and there are several are are convincing that we are already having such confrontations, but maybe also for our audience. Can you give us just one example of the the several cases that you describe in your book?

00:08:29: Dotson: Yeah. I'll get I'll give you a case though. The one thing that I want to clarify about why I see conservation is potentially more generative of confrontation and hostility than climate change is, you know, while climate change has been sort of at the center of our political divisiveness and culture warring for a few decades. It's actually kind of surprising that hostile action has been mostly limited to protesters gluing themselves to things to glue themselves to roadways or priceless works of art. There's actually a book that came out a few years ago by Andreas mom called “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”, where it's kind of sort of advocating more radical action. And I think it was Ezra Klein or someone reviewing the book quipped that it should be called “Why Nobody Wants to Blow Up a pipeline”. Because despite there being this widespread belief of a climate crisis, we see a surprisingly small amount of eco terrorism. And so I think actually that that biodiversity is different than climate change in important ways. That makes it more prone for it to to move beyond sort of symbolic or performative gestures, and that it's dealing with literal pieces of land that we might talk about biodiversity on a, on a national global scale. But when you're talking about conservation, it literally means a land that is where somebody lives or it's their, their backyard. And so yeah, as you mentioned, I had a lot of examples of these kinds of confrontations. But my my favorite one is, is at the beginning of the book. And it's this, this arm showdown that happened in Nevada in 2014 involving the Bundy family. So Cliven Bundy and his sons, it was actually the first of two arm showdowns he had with the federal government. He took over a wildlife refuge in Idaho later, but this one was the first 1 in 2014, where Bureau of Land Management officers impounded his cattle. And that brought not only his family armed, but also people from across the country. It became sort of this, this flashpoint for a lot of rural resentment against the federal government. And it was perhaps just because federal officers backed down at the last minute that it didn't become something like Waco or Ruby Ridge. One of these incidents where you have a have US citizens being killed by federal agents in a, in a, in a face off. But the interesting thing about this confrontation and something that it's one of these many cases where I was actually sometimes very angry that there was a story that I had sort of tacitly believed about a lot of conservation conflicts. And it ended up that the reality was far more complicated, and the people on the other side of it were a lot. I could understand their position a lot more. That the standoff involving Bundy was the culmination of actions and policies put in place to try to conserve desert tortoises, and that the Bureau of Land Management, with some environmental NGOs and Clark County and the city of Las Vegas, had worked out this agreement to try to conserve the desert tortoise while still allowing suburban expansion. And but that meant that the cattle ranchers had to go. So basically, it's the end of ranching. Ranching was being sacrificed not just for the tortoises, but to build strip malls and subdivisions in the desert. And it's very understandable. And for the ranchers, it meant the end of their way of life. They might have been there for generations. They have a connection to the land that they care about very deeply. It's not just a source of revenue for them. And so that made me sort of, I think is a great case for showing how when you're dealing with conservation issues, it's not just this thing of, oh, we might have higher energy prices, or we might have to just eat less meat or some or something like that, but it's dealing with the with the things that people really, truly care about and they're sometimes willing to die over. I think we're going to see this conflict get more polarized if, say, the policies become a lot more, have a lot more teeth to them, that there's going to see this more of these confrontations between those who believe we should just view nature from a distance and appreciate it, and those who live on the land or make a living from it. And that as biodiversity gets seen as sort of existential terms, which I we see a lot of with ideas like the six extinction or whatever else, that these disputes will become seen as zero sum that, that they must be sacrificed for the sake of planetary health. And then we'll really see, in my view, a lot of immense political polarization and potentially more sort of potentially violent confrontation.

00:12:47: Hahn: Yeah. Well, we'll also talk about solutions, how to do it better later in the interview, but just for the audience to get an idea of, let's say, the breadth of topics that you have and that it's not just this, this one Bundy case. Can you just name a few other conflicts that you describe in your book that have to do with biodiversity and conservation?

00:13:09: Dotson: Yeah, yeah, maybe I've, I've a little bit too exhaustive, but I found so many cases that I found so fascinating that I try to cram as many as I could into the book. So I have one similar ones on, say, ranching would be, you know, the effort to restore buffalo to the Great Plains in the United States. But there's also conflicts over non-native species, such as the hippos that were accidentally introduced by Colombian National Police after they shot Pablo Escobar. And they just kind of let they're his hippos on his sort of private zoo run rampant. But there's other cases like beavers in Patagonia, but there's also cases that involve big environmental laws, like the Endangered Species Act in the United States that have fed sort of a lot of NGO laws, NGO lawsuits and logging and other kinds of uses of the land. Uh, but also things like, say, the, the nitrogen law in the Netherlands and the, the sort of the political crisis that's erupted there in response to it. But even bigger conflicts, like, what should our what does what should a food system look like on a more biodiverse planet? Or ideas about genetically engineering coral to be more resistant to climate change, or resurrecting long extinct species? That each of these, while maybe not bringing up the same risk of, say, a of a of a violent confrontation, still divide us very, very starkly.

00:14:35: Hahn: We already talked about climate change and that there are some some parallels. And since this climate change dispute is kind of preceding the biodiversity dispute. Maybe we can learn from that. We're not talking about solutions yet, but what would you say are the things that have been going wrong in the climate discourse, and what we could do better in biodiversity conservation?

00:15:03: Dotson: Yeah, there's a lot to to go on there, but I'll limit myself to one that I think the biggest mistake that we made with climate change is by making it into a knowledge problem that it's for too long guided by the idea if, well, if we could just narrow the error bars on our predictions, if we can just get nailed down some scenarios and and and what's exactly what are the social costs going to be and what the impacts will be in different places and, and convey very plausible and and scary sounding scenarios then the right policies will just get legislated and implemented. It's this idea that if we just get the science right, then all this pesky politics that make action difficult will just go away. Right? And this polarizes the debate because both sides then say, well, oh, wait, if if it's if the policy is going to be made on the science, then the science became this or being possession of the facts or seeming to be in possession of the facts became seen as this very powerful political weapon, that it would be this trump card that would get one's preferred policies in place. I think conservatives to to sort of throw them a bone, were genuinely frightened that the idea of climate change would have been used to usher in a world that they didn't want, that would be socialist policies or whatever they were afraid of. And it didn't help that you had environmentalists basically say that. I mean, more recently, I mean, she wasn't involved early on, but Naomi Klein said as much. She said that climate change supercharges the argument for progressive policies. You know, more than we could ever dream of. And of course it hasn't worked out that way. It ends up that science isn't this trump card in politics. It doesn't. It doesn't work like that. But it didn't stop the fear that it would be, or the promise that it could be for those who believed in climate change from. From polarizing thing. The trouble is, is that there's easy to find plenty of counterexamples about things working in the other direction. Like the classic example is about the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs, which was signed before science on the ozone and was really settled that lots of people, when they think of history about that, they actually have their causality backwards that the agreement happened and then the science became more settled. And what helped there besides, of course, a lot of, you know, complex international relations that I don't pretend to understand, but that there were alternatives already in developed. And so you had arch conservative President Ronald Reagan in the United States signing this, you know, and he was in some ways actually was an environmentalist, but he signed it primarily because it was American chemical companies that had an alternative, a non-CFC refrigerant already in the works. So for a lot of these cases, what helps us get out of our our issues is not knowledge so much, but technologies or other solutions that make a phase out of an environmentally risky chemical more tolerable. And so that's one of my, my main points is that we've gone astray when we think we can, we can settle a high-stakes conflict by convincing it, by having enough science to say the other side, well, the stakes that you care about, sorry, they don't matter. We've got science to prove the stakes are too big for it. And your two cents should just go away. And so really, the mistake was was thinking that this was a search for knowledge rather than a search for solutions.

00:18:22: Hahn: Going back to that conflict over, over climate change, what you're saying is not only that, you know, focusing only on the facts doesn't resolve the the conflicts, which are ultimately political. But it also backfires on science, doesn't it, because it politicized. So you are synthesizing the politics on the one hand, and it is not it's not helpful. It doesn't resolve the problems, but at the same time, it politicize the science, which can be a problem too, as how science is seen as maybe not the objective arbiter that we would like it to be.

00:19:06: Dotson: Well, so let me back up that I think that for a lot of people, whether they're willing to believe a scientific claim is isn't just about how educated they are or whether they've read the study. Because honestly, most of us have not read the studies, that a lot of it comes down to their trust in science as an institution and their trust in particular scientists. And so when people are trying to decide for this contentious issue that might force them to make sacrifices or force difficult things. And they look out and they seem like, oh, why does it seem that one side of the of the of the political spectrum seems to be almost in a coalition with scientists? It's very detrimental to trust because it no longer can scientists have this pretense of neutrality, that people worry that there's that there's things happening behind the scenes because it seems to all too convenient for their political opponents, I think. And I think that's actually a very reasonable position, because if you don't have if you're not able to understand a science and most of us are, the best you can do is say, well, are the people that are trying to push forward an effort. Do I do, I do I believe them? Are they are they acting in ways that I think are trustworthy?

00:20:19: Hahn: Yeah. Do you think that the current hostilities that science is facing in the United States has to do with that, that science is seen as being not politically neutral, but being more on the liberal side of things.

00:20:38: Dotson: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help when you have major scientific magazines coming out for one presidential candidate over the other. Um, I think there's I think, I mean, if we if we get to it in the conversation, I think there are very important ways that scientists can act politically. But I think positioning themselves as, say, directly aligned with the Democratic Party was a major mistake. They can still I still think it's right for scientists to have their political opinions act as citizens. But there has to be a little bit of separation. I mean, I mean, I mean, in the United States, it goes into even the whole mistrust of I mean, it's not just science, it's it's mistrust in universities as a whole. You know, and I and I don't want to air out too much dirty laundry of, of my colleagues and stuff, but I but I have seen things where some of the things that conservatives will say about universities. I've seen it. I've seen elements of intolerance for dissenting ideas. Uh, that I mean, it's a digression, maybe from the biodiversity topic, but there was, you know, there's been this period in the last five years where I think there was a lot less tolerance of ideological diversity or idea diversity in thought. That's happened all over where it made it very difficult for, you know, to get people to, to believe an idea. It can't just be a bunch of people who seem to be elites, whether in media or academia or whatever else, all seeming to just give the same line, the same position, the same opinion and say, well, you can't, you know, it's not acceptable to to dissent to this, even if they think it's right that there has to be at least a process by which people are allowed to air their concerns, express their their doubts in a way to be able to be able to trust that that. That the expert is not just wholly captured by one side of the political debate, or is hopelessly biased, or letting their own personal ideologies shape what they do. And so even if they even if they're not letting their ideologies shape what they do and their science is totally fine, that that the perception that it is, is, is, I think, very deadly to a democracy.

00:22:49: Hahn: Yeah. So I'm sure that also applies to, um, controversial issues around biodiversity. So let's go back to biodiversity and talk about the solutions. You've already touched this in your book you write, I quote, we need biodiversity, democracy and other keywords in your book are incrementalism and intelligent trial and error. Can you tell us a bit more about what what that is? How do we how do we achieve biodiversity? democracy.

00:23:24: Dotson: Yeah. So let me put a little caveat in there just so I make sure I'm not understood. So when I talk about solutions, some people's mind go to, oh, they must be thinking we need Silicon Valley to develop technologies. And they'll just make all our conservation problems go away. So when I talk about solutions, I'm thinking about mixtures of policies and technologies and norms and other things. But mostly I'm thinking about actions that that enable political compromises. So for instance, rather than saying logging has to end in order to save such and such species, because that's a very high stakes framing. And you might get that or you might not, um, or you get it for a period of time, and then the next presidential administration reverses course. But I'd want to see I see that more durable solutions are ones that try to incrementally reconcile logging with conservation goals. And if logging has to go eventually, then it then it goes. So my my inspiration for this and I know I always like to. I like to go through some, some history to kind of show how I arrived at my position comes from the world of chemical regulation. So the the default mode of regulating toxic chemicals in the United States is the Toxic Substance Control Act. And it's been pretty much an abject failure for the last 50 years. Sorry to any toxic chemical policy people who might be listening, but we have tens of thousands of chemicals in the United States that have never been evaluated. And it's it's very difficult to get anything banned. Like, for instance, asbestos is still allowed in the United States because it was just too difficult of a political battle. And the problem with it is that it was it was a epistemologically or a knowledge challenge that was pretty much impossible, or next to it, and also a political challenge that's next to impossible. You're expecting scientists to. Prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this chemical is dangerous, and that we can ban it. And then you're wanting to take a chemical that's already widespread throughout industry and then tell the industry, we're going to we're going to stop you from using this. Uh, it's crazy to actually think that we believe that that approach will work, but the opposite. But there's an alternative that's on a small scale only in Massachusetts, as far as I know, called the Toxic Use Reduction Act, which developed an institute that directly works with businesses and factories in Massachusetts to detoxify their workplace and their process. How can you still create what you're creating? But we're going to use more benign, chemically benign alternatives. So what was previously an existential confrontation? Right. You're telling businesses this thing that you're making that your business is completely relying on. We're just going to tell you it's it's it's toxic and you're just out on your own. Instead, they replace that sort of zero sum battle with a, a a cooperative negotiation. You know, one that provides obviously a partial solution. If you could just snap your fingers and ban all the toxic chemicals. Yeah, certainly the world would be a better place, but we can't. That's proven to be impossible to achieve. So. So the best thing is actually to proceed in my mind more democratically. Right. This is even though this is not like something we're voting on, but it's it's a, it's an, it's public institution that's acting in the public interest to negotiate with other stakeholders to come out with a solution that can work for most everybody. And in most importantly, I think, is that it makes it more believable that the detoxification doesn't always have to be this fanatical zero sum battle with business. So I when I mean biodiversity, democracy, I mean not just something kind of like this Toxic Use Reduction Institute (TURI), but a whole gamut of possible solutions that are collectively arrived at that. It's not a matter of conservationists sitting at a in a, at an IPBES meeting or somewhere else and saying, here we've rationally deduced an ecologically harmonious world and society, and all we need to do is just get politicians to deploy the transformative actions that will make it reality. And if people, you know don't like our ideas of a non materialistic society, then what? We need psychologists to help us get over their cognitive biases. But instead I'm wanting to see, I think that if we were to actually approach this democratically, it doesn't mean that experts don't play a big role. The conservations are key to it, because they're the ones that kind of understand the risks and hazards as it as opposed as opposed to the environment and to non-human species. But what what we'd want to see is a discussion with other people who actually have a stake in the land, whether they have a differing vision of nature or whether or not they live off of it, and that we can use that Association to explore experiments in trying to partially reconcile these differing views and natures and these differing desires for what we get out of nature, and that we can proceed intelligently to learn about the balance of the benefits and the harms and the risks. Recognizing that mistakes and can't happen, but trying to bring as many people as possible along with it.

00:28:38: Hahn: This example you gave about this TURI Institute how could that work for biodiversity? Do you have an example how your suggestions of biodiversity, democracy and incremental incrementalism would work for cases of dispute in biodiversity?

00:28:58: Dotson: Yeah, I think for for lots of cases, some of the ones that loom large is some of the most contentious is, is a reduction of species that can be very inconvenient for farmers and ranchers like the, you know, the rewilding wolves or beavers. I think I go over the case in the book about reintroduction of beavers in Scotland, where it worked out very differently depending on where it was released. And, you know, you could think about what would be the sort of the very kind of knowledge heavy, uh, rationalistic planning approach where we would spend millions of euros and several years developing models for, say, the return of beavers across the European continent. And we could try to deduce what would be the balance of harms and benefits and the policies that should work. And then then just be like, then we just have to implement it because we've figured out what the most ecologically harmonious and and politically optimal solution is. What I would argue the better way would be to take an approach that is actually, in some ways actually still about knowledge, but a very learning based approach where where the beavers are released or whatever contentious animal and the most in any area is least likely to evoke conservation conflict and to use those as experiments, not just in terms of the ecology of restoring a species, you know, to what to what extent does it actually work and whether those populations can sustain themselves, but also the sort of the the social and political sustainability of it. Um, can you implement devices that make beavers less of a, of a nuisance? Can you preventing them from gnawing down treasured trees and flooding farmers crops because there are proposals of of technologies to do that. But we need more hands on experience of how well do those work. Can they be can it be done more cheaply? Can it? How can we make it more reliable? And then only after those sort of less contentious areas, then you start thinking about reintroduction in areas that are more ripe for contention, where maybe people are a little bit more resistant or there's a greater percentage of land is is farming areas or the flood risks are higher. Then you can work incrementally, step by step, doing sort of trial and error with these kinds of solutions to maybe you might go to a place where actually you figure out a way of implementing levers where, you know, you can you can get conflict down to a minimum. The conflict with farmers or conflict between wild animals and people and and that this in turn will make future compromises for biodiversity conservation a lot easier to just like with TURI, all of a sudden you've made it more believable for the people who live in this area that that that these these environmentalists coming from Berlin or coming from the city aren't just there to destroy their way of life, that there's a way of everybody getting. You know, of course, I don't want to be too utopian. At the end of the day, you can't do things perfectly, and somebody has to lose, right? That either environmentalists don't get everything they want or farmers are going to have. What would end up accepting a less than ideal situation for their farms. Um, but but anything would be better than this sort of black and white, zero sum existential confrontation that it often becomes.

00:32:16: Hahn: So it's it's not about finding the perfect solution in advance and just then just implementing it, but rather going forward step by step, incrementally. And what I'm asking myself then is what is maybe the new role for scientists in this in your world?

00:32:39: Dotson: Yeah, in my world, I still think scientists have a very important role to play. And even then, even if I could snap my fingers and get what I'm imagining here for sort of a perfect democratic approach to biodiversity, there'd still be people doing pure science. There'd still be sort of people doing sort of popular science communication. But I think my, my contention is, I think that it's, um, overly prioritized because I think that the that the role that we often expect from scientists in these, like I've mentioned before for climate change is actually something that science has a hard time delivering, right? That actually fact and truth is important. But but the facts within science, I think most practicing scientists recognize that truth is something that we sort of maybe approach but never quite get there, and that often things that maybe seemed certain ten years ago very often gets disrupted by new science. But in the political field, all of a sudden facts and truth becomes these sort of like understood in these terms that actually aren't very scientific, as if it's these kind of durable things that that are almost eternal truths. Um, so I think so one thing is, I think that we expect too much in the wrong thing from scientists. I think that one a role for scientists that is, is under emphasized, and I think is actually with every year, more and more important is, is that they could have a role as sort of bridge builders is a is a phrase that I use in the book and that so say biodiversity scientists, instead of spending so much of it endlessly catalog cataloging human harms or ever more scary looking environmental metrics that they could be providing that kind of scientific and technical knowledge to make these kinds of solutions possible. If you're if you're talking about incrementally rewilding with beavers and stuff, you still need people to understand the scientific aspects, the ecological part of doing that, that rewilding. But, you know, just like you say, creating a non CFC refrigerant required a great deal of scientific research, both pure and applied. Uh, and so I think there's a huge role for scientists in thinking like how yeah, how do we make human spaces more amenable to wild species? How do we make the wild species living in human spaces? How do we reduce those kinds of conflicts? Can our backyards and parklands better support rare bird populations? Can we make artificial lighting incrementally less harmful to birds and insects? Can we make non-lethal controls of wolves easier and cheaper to me. These are very exciting. These are. These are very exciting scientific questions. Not just political, political ones, but I think that these kinds of applied scientific questions, one, they don't get the kind of esteem that other areas of science get. And I and I and I don't think they get quite as much funding as they require. Um, I mean, again, I want to say I don't want to be I want to be careful. I don't want to say that pure science isn't important. Um, but there's this there's this again, there's this sort of bias within our institutions of thinking that science is just in the business of producing this, kind of, this, this vault of, of knowledge and the solution to our problems will just come out of that. And instead we've had sort of, you know, the amount of science that's being published every year. It's just it's just overwhelming, burgeoning wealth of knowledge. But ah, but our problems have seemed to only grown at pace to be to be even almost harder to resolve in this glut of scientific knowledge and often very competing studies. So I think to me, there's billions of hours of scientific work that could be done and has been. You know, of course there are people that are doing this. There's like USDA research in the United States and stuff, but not as much as there could be.

00:36:19: Hahn: What would you like the audience to remember from this conversation?

00:36:26: Dotson: Uh, yeah. What I'd like them to remember is that I think one of the most important things that we can do is try to move away from this dismal narrative that humanity and nature are incompatible, and that science and democracy are incompatible. That there's a place for humans within wild nature, and a place where wild nature and human societies and a place and a place for science within democracies. But getting there will ask for us to approach these problems and our opponents with a great deal more curiosity. And that goes for both ways, that environmentalists should be more curious about the lives and the the fears and the desires of people that live on the land. And, and, you know, sort of people who see environmentalists as the, as the enemy ought to be a little more curious about why environmentalists care about the things that they do. But the one thing is also humility, and that environmentalists will never be strong enough in number or influence to get 100% their way. So we might as well learn how to think better about our disagreements and work through them in a constructive way, so that we can collectively realize a wilder world together.

00:37:44: Hahn: That was a very thought-provoking discussion. Taylor, thanks so much, and thanks for joining Inside Biodiversity.

00:37:53: Dotson: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Inside Biodiversity. Available on all major streaming platforms.