A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

The Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit is all women, and they are unarmed, and they dress in camo, and they walk on foot through areas that have all of the large animals that you would expect to see on a safari. So the big five, as they’re often called, they are one of the most inspirational groups of people I have ever had the good fortune to work with.

They’re out patrolling the fence line and looking for any incursions, any snips of the fence. They’ll detect those snips, repair those snips, and then stop the aggression from people who are going in to hunt illegally or to take things from the protected areas.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program today. Dr. James Danoff-Burg. Dr. Danoff-Burg has got an amazing career. He’s worked in so many different areas. Currently, he’s at the Living Desert garden Zoo and Gardens out in Palm Springs, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting on more than a few occasions. And it’s an amazing place. I first went out there with my kids like, 30 plus years ago, so I’ve seen how it’s grown from where it was 30 years ago to where it’s at now, which is an amazing feat of, you know, putting more stuff together out there.

He’s also a conservation psychologist and teacher at UC San Diego. Taught there for a number of years, helped found, helping rhinos USA, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. Two-time Fulbright specialist alumnus in India and South Africa. He’s also designed environmental programs to expand and enhance Pro Environmental Action and coexistence, and he’s advised on projects in Cambodia, Mexico, Japan and the Dominican Republic, as well as India, teacher at Columbia University for 14 years, and certainly a fascinating area that your bio touched on was the intersection between human behavior and biodiversity preservation. Without further ado, welcome to the program.

Thank you much, Matt. Appreciate it pleasure being here.

Well, tell us. You know I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump in at the intersection between human behavior and biodiversity preservation. I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody about that subject before.

All right. Well, yeah, so I’m, my training is as an entomologist, person who studies insects. My office is decorated with insects all over the place, as well as many other things. And for a very long time after, during and after, I got my PhD, and while I was a professor in New York at Columbia, most of my research was very much focused on how human activity has degraded ecosystems, right?

And I used insects as the the organisms that I used to document that decline, those degradations, right? And so I do all this, what I hope was really good work, and published a bunch of papers, book chapters, reviews, all sorts of things about it, but I felt like it wasn’t really making a difference for the things that I cared about, right for the insects, for the ecosystems, for the plants that are in that ecosystem too.

I also was a botanist as an undergraduate, so I’m passionate about things that are often overlooked in conservation, insects and plants especially. And so I had the great fortune while I was at Columbia of leading this organization, founding this organization, and leading it in the Dominican Republic, it was called the Center for environmentally and economically sustainable economic growth, and we were really focused on people, because the reasons why that ecosystem was really degraded was because of human choices, right because of our choices as people.

And I came to realize that, you know, we could do all the surveys of all the different species and all the ecosystems, the Marine the marshy mangrove forest, the upland forests, and know what species were where, but we weren’t making any impact on helping them out. So I started to realize, because of that project, that really I go into conservation because I love the species, but I do conservation with people because I love the species and because I love people, because we are the problems, and we are causing the species to decline, so we can also be the solution.

So yes, the motivation of how we can motivate people to be more engaged on this, and I was having a lively discussion with some friends about this. And. Matern, and there’s certainly school of thought, which is that we need to have like public policy changes made that are sufficient to alter the course of the environmental degradation. And that’s where our best efforts should be put. And some say that the big fossil fuel providers, among other companies, want to kind of put the onus on individuals to take action, and kind of blaming individuals for not maybe recycling enough, and that kind of thing. And I guess I’m curious as to where you come down in that and that spectrum.

It’s a great a great thought, Matt, because I think that we all have roles to play, right as individuals, as organizations, as corporations, and the idea of companies placing the onus for the behavior change on only on people while distancing themselves from the impacts of their actions, is completely wrong. Is specious. You know, right. I agree with them, with the corporations, that we have to change our behaviors. We do have to change what we’re doing. They also need to change what they’re doing, and they need to advocate for things that are more sustainable for the planet, not just for this quarter’s bottom line, you know, right?

Yeah, I think, you know, I was talking to the friend, and he was saying, well, the Rosa Parks kind of moment. I said, well, that kind of makes the point, or makes my point, that individual action is still very necessary in this front and that somebody who is kind of that equivalent to spark the movement in the environmental space to say, hey, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Type of thing needs, kind of needs to happen. I mean, there seems like there have been moments where it we were on the verge of more of that, but it hasn’t really taken hold, marching steadily, as steadily as we might like, towards stopping the environmental degradation. Do you see any pivot points or things that might shift that.

Well, I want to agree with you partially, because I think it’s true that we are not there as much in the United States as we should be, but I think other countries are way ahead of us. There’s a lot that we could learn from so many countries in Africa, for example, because in Africa, most of the work that has been most successful is bottom up based. It’s all community based conservation. There’s the campfire program in Zimbabwe. There are comparable programs that are very much originating from the community owned by the community owned by the indigenous people and local communities in those areas.

And they make the decisions there, and they on land use, on how the resources are allocated, that kind of a thing. Partly, that’s because those governments don’t have the ability to really make the top down control and decisions on what’s happening with those resources locally, because the governments aren’t structured that way. In the United States, we have a very strong government that does make a lot of those restrictions and changes determinations, I guess I’ll say is a better way. But in other countries around the world, that is not the case. And it’s not just Africa, a lot of Asia, a lot of South Asia, a lot of Central Asia. A lot of these things really come about because of local people making a decision to make their environment better.

Yeah, that’s certainly hopeful. And I mean to say, hey, there’s nothing being done. I do find there’s probably millions, 10s of millions of people working on environmental problems all over the world, and doing incredible work, and yet it, you know, it isn’t enough. I guess the question is, and, and what? What are the things that you think we could do more of that would be the most effective?

Oh, man, there’s so many. It depends on the question, it depends on the scale, it depends on the location, what we can do, but in in the area well. So I live in Southern California, here in the Coachella Valley in Palm Desert, and we’re we focus very much on individual actions of what people can do to benefit the area right outside their door, right. So the things that we can control here at the Living Desert and with our collaborators, federal nonprofit state organizations, are things that are in the control of the people who live in this area.

So. For example, we are on the western flyway, which is a lot of the migratory pathway for birds and insects and things, saving energy here as we speak, as my timer on, my light just goes out. Anyway, so we’re on that Western flyway. And as a consequence, a lot of the birds and insects that come through are coming through the Coachella Valley. And if it was all concrete and all developed all pavement, this is a dead zone for them, and also we would lose all the local species.

So one of our major efforts that we’ve been really successful with here is working with schools and cities and the county and some some Native American tribes, to make local pollinator gardens. We call it the pollinator pathway so there are, we will come in, we’ll we’ll plant native species that are sourced from that area, that are native to that area. And those pollinator pathway gardens are there for the migratory birds and insects. They’re also for the resident birds and insects that are here.

And the nice thing about this approach, which is how we try to structure all of our conservation projects, is that it’s good for nature, but it’s also good for people, right? The best conservation successes are those that benefit people nature and ideally the local economic bottom line too, right? So when all three of those do well, what an economist at Columbia named Jeffrey Sachs termed as the triple bottom line, that’s when we are going to have our greatest success.

The pollinator gardens certainly help with the people and the environment, because it provides green space in areas where there wasn’t previously green space. It provides native green space. So there’s opportunities for use for education, which we do with the schools quite a lot. And so planting native, going back to your original question, Matt, is a great way that you could improve the ecosystem where you live. Take out the grass. As it turns out, we are not Scotland here in Southern California or across anywhere in the United States. We don’t need to recreate Scotland’s lawns, you know. So let’s create habitat that’s here.

Let’s make it look beautiful for where we are. You know the beauty of the Midwest, the beauty of the North West, the southeast, the North. There’s just so many great places and beautiful ecosystems and plants that are around where we live. We should take advantage of that, and not just plant grass or the often invasive species that are for sale at some of the big box construction shops buy native. There are gardens. There are nurseries everywhere. Plant native. You’ll benefit yourself. You’ll benefit the ecosystem, and you’ll benefit your bottom line too, because you will probably be irrigating less and you don’t have to mow native plants.

Outstanding advice, you know, a triple threat.

So, triple benefit, triple benefit, right?

Yeah, always trying to be positive.

Matt, always, always positive.

So, you know, just on a personal note, it must have been a bit of a change, a culture shock, maybe coming from Manhattan at Columbia all the way out to the Living Desert in Palm Springs or in that area. Tell us a little bit about that shift and and maybe shift of focus by by moving from university to the Living Desert.

Ah, yeah, thanks, Matt. Yeah. It was. It was one of the most jarring transitions in my life, to be honest, jarring in a good way, because I I love New York, I love the Northeast. I’m not from there, but I lived there for at the time, like half my life. And it is, it was. It’s just an amazing place with so much beauty, so much natural beauty, so much awesome human diversity and and interesting cultures are like the best food everywhere, you know, and two of the best baseball teams in the country and baseball fan. And so to move from there to Southern California with just completely different right?

The Northeast is very verdant and very wet. And here in Palm Desert, for example, we get less than four inches of rain a year, yeah, a year, right? That’s like a day’s rain in Albany, Manhattan, you know, right on a nor’easter. And so, you know, to move to this dramatically different ecosystem with really stark beauty. You know, I grew up in Wyoming, so I love big things.

And like, we have mountains everywhere and these really dramatic canyons everywhere in our valley, which is one of the most biologically diverse hot spots or diverse areas in the country, we have mountains that have tundra at the top, Mount San Gorgonio, all the way down to the Salton Sea, which is 264, or so feet below sea level. So in that altitudinal difference that we have from top to bottom in the ecosystem, you can pretty much traverse the whole of the United States’ ecosystems.

Yeah, it is pretty phenomenal out there. And coming from the Midwest and New Orleans, I came out here, and I was like, Why does anybody go out to the desert? What, you know, what is going on? Why would you go to the desert? We’ve got the beach and the mountains. And then, after living here for a while, I, you know, I started to see it. It took, it took a while for my eye to to appreciate the amazing plants and nature that you have that can survive on four inches of rain, or say, other places where there’s two inches of rain. I mean, they’re just right, amazing how life can can survive under such extreme conditions.

Yeah, and it’s such an a stunningly different and beautiful life that’s here. You know, sometimes you have to search a bit more for it, because it might only be active at night, after you’ve already gone to sleep, or after the sun is set, you know, when it’s much cooler, or they might be things that that might startle people, like vinegar owns and sun scorpions, those kinds of things. As an entomologist, I love those kinds of things, but the beauty is really dramatic and striking here.

Tell us a little bit about some of the things that you’ve done. One of them that struck me was the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit in South Africa, which is an unarmed, all female team that is protecting areas where what was your involvement in that?

Sure. Well, the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit is, as you say, all women, and they are unarmed, and they dress in camo, and they walk on foot through areas that have all of the large animals that you would expect to see on a safari. So the big five, as they’re often called, and they are one of the most inspirational groups of people I have ever had the good fortune to work with there. They have two main goals.

One is to be the bobbies on the beat, as they say in English, or in England, rather, where they’re out patrolling the fence line and looking for any incursions, any snips of the fence, they’ll detect those snips, repair those snips, and then stop the aggression from people who are going into hunt illegally or to take things from the protected areas. This is often how poaching I don’t really like the word poaching, but illegal hunting, because it stigmatizes people poaching. Illegal hunting often happens.

They’ll come in and they’ll cut some areas, and if it’s not repaired, they’ll know that that area is not being patrolled. And then they’ll go in. So they’ll patrol the fence line. They’ll take out any snares that might be there, because that’s often how these this hunting happens. And they will fix the fences. And if there is an, I won’t say an altercation, but a meeting of the Mambas with a poacher, it’s almost always male, and they’re almost always armed. Of course, though, women all have everyone that I spoke to, there’s 36 of them at the moment.

They all have the similar story, which is that they’ll be walking down the fence line, they’ll see someone come underneath it to come into the Preserve, and the women wearing camos looking amazing, being women unarmed, everybody knows that they’re unarmed in the area, the men will see the women, and rather than getting the dreaded finger waggle, they’ll turn around and they leave, right so they don’t even want to be confronted by the women.

So it’s sort of like using sexism against as a weapon. So that’s one of their main goals, right? And that’s been super successful. They’ve reduced illegal hunting or poaching by upwards of 80% they’ve reduced rhino poaching in the area dramatically, such that they haven’t lost a rhino in many, many years on their lands, while all of the rest of the areas around there have. It’s been many, many years. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s at least six. Might be seven or eight, which is remarkable, because this has been this includes the peak poaching times. So you know, you don’t always have to have guns to stop people from doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

The second goal that they have is to change the hearts and minds of people in the communities that surround this protected area, because the best way to prevent a. Um, illegal actions is to stop people from wanting to do them, right? So, yeah, they’ve been very involved and in trying to reach out to the communities. And they have an education program, a whole series of education programs, with kids with with the elderly women, with people in the communities, and that relate, series of relationships have changed how people view wildlife, protected areas and poaching pretty dramatically. And I know this because I did the study. It’s been demonstrated and so they they’ve changed the communities around where they live and work.

What a fantastic story. Yeah, we certainly need more of that. So I guess people can check that out. Where would they find this group? And maybe if they want to contribute in some way, shape or form?

Well, they can go to just search “black mambas” online. You can do “Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit” in particular, and they’ll come up in a moment. There are so many videos and movies and websites that have been made about them, you’ll find their main website. You can also come to our website at living desert.org because we have been working with them since I joined here about eight years ago, so we’ve got a host of stories about the work that we’ve been doing with them over the last decade.

Now is the Living Desert involved in in kind of getting more area around the Palm Springs, area dedicated as nature preserves.

We that is not our role. We are not land managers. We don’t own the land, even the land that we’re on, it’s actually owned by the two cities that we’re on and the water districts in our area as well. So we’re not we don’t want to be land owners. We our main role at the moment is land improvement, restoration of projects, restoration of ecosystems. So we work with a couple federal partners, the Bureau of Land Management in particular, but also US Fish and Wildlife Service and several smaller local nonprofits to help to restore ecosystems across all of the Southern California deserts. So we’ll go out and we will remove invasive plants. We will plant native plants that we have grown ourselves.

We will disperse seed into the ecosystem that helps to improve the seed bank in that area, and we will change how water flows through ecosystems, which is imperative in desert ecosystems, especially in a time of climate change, because as climate change is affecting our ecosystem, it is slightly changing and reducing the amount of water that we get, but we Get it in isolated bursts, now stronger rainfalls, so the rain will fall, it’ll deeply erode channels through the desert and then leave the ecosystem, and then there’s no water, and the water table has fallen because the channels lower the water table.

So we go out and we do a series of small little interventions. Call them one rock dams, because they’re one rock high, but they go all the way across the little channels, and it slows the water flow. It retains the soil, and as a consequence, it helps to raise the water table in the ecosystem, so that the plants and the animals that depend on them have more are more present because of the water that has been retained in the ecosystem. So we do those kind of things all the way from the border of Mexico to the north of Death Valley and from the California border to sort of Eastern Los Angeles County.

That sounds great. What results have you? You’ve had that are most kind of use for dramatic.

There’s an area that is now part of the chuck Walla National Monument, a newly designated area which is really a stunningly beautiful place just to the east of us and south of Joshua Tree, that we have been able to change with those hydrological control structures and the restoration projects, we’ve changed what plants are there, increased the amount of natives, decreased the amount of invasives, and this is benefiting many species, but especially the desert tortoise. There’s a population of them there, which is our state reptile in California, and we do a lot of things to benefit the desert tortoise, mostly focused on behavior change. This is one that is mostly ecological based.

So you’ve you’ve described your conservation work as rooted in hope. Where does that hope come from for you? And how do you think. Get sustained through your nearly three decades in this field.

Yeah, I think Hope’s essential. You know, if you don’t have hope, all will to do anything changes, right, goes away. So for me, the hope comes from that realization of that first problem that we were talking about earlier, that like my changes, my impacts on the on the ecosystem, are the reason why species are declining, right? It’s a downer, but that means that if I change my behavior, I can make things better, right?

If I do the things, hopefully the corporations will as well, going back to your earlier point, but if I do the things, my impact will be mitigated, and maybe even my presence would improve the ecosystem, right? So for me, that is a great wellspring of hope, because if I know I can change things by changing my behavior and maybe helping work with other people to see if they want to change things as well in a similar way or some novel way that is unique to them, that is hopeful, that drives a passion for conservation, right?

Because then, if people feel like, oh, I can. I can contribute to the conservation of Indian rhinos, for example, my desk is filled with visual aids or or bison in use in Yellowstone. You know, I can care for these things by changing what I do and what I what my family does and what my friends or my community do, right? I think in community is the wellspring of hope, you know, and working with other people, we can help to drive that, that that hope, creation.

Yeah, it’s well said. And I think all of us can go out there and find things that we can engage in things that we’re passionate about, things that would make we can see some change resulting from our actions, and that that spurs maybe further action by ourselves as well as by others.

So precisely, it’s the virtuous circle, right? We see good things. We want to do more good things.

So why is behavior change such such a critical and often overlooked pillar of climate action compared to technological solutions and policy reforms?

Good question. I think that I grew up in construction, very blue collar family. I’m very proud of that the if you have a hammer, everything is a nail, right? So if you have a solution, every problem needs your solution, right? So I was a biologist. I like to say I’m a recovering biologist. Hi. My name is James. This is my first step on the 12 path, 12 step program. I’m a recovering biologist. I’m still a biologist, let’s be honest. But if you are a biologist, you look for biological solutions to things.

If you are an engineer, you’re going to look for engineering solutions. If you are a government, you’re going to look for the thing that you can control, which is top down projects, right? You’re going to put in carbon capture devices, or whatever it is that’s appropriate for large scale climate change mitigation, right? Because that’s the tools that you have. That’s your hammer as a government you can affect big picture engineering changes. That’s why, you know, we, our leaders, look for things that they can control. The leaders can’t get everyone to be passionate about desert tortoises and and recreating responsibly or or planting native gardens. That’s not their role, right? That’s our role.

That’s our personal role at the zoo, but also us as community members, we can do those things ourselves. And so behavior change is not something that governments do particularly well, unless it’s a top down very much, not a carrot, but a stick approach, you’re going to be fined, you’re going to be arrested. This is illegal, right? Those are negative and the positive things that they have are financial incentives, usually, right, like tax rebates and so on. If you take those away, the good behavior stops. It’s documented across all sorts of psychological behavior change research. You know, people will keep doing a behavior if you keep paying them for it, sure they will. But if you stop paying them, will they continue it? Would you less likely?

Less Likely, exactly, less like but if you come up with a solution together, right, you co create a solution with the local people in that area, like we do with indigenous. People in Africa, the indigenous people in Mongolia are here in Southern California with our local tribes. If we work with the local people or the indigenous people in those areas, you’ll find the solution together. You know, it’s the solution that that community wants. Hey, we need more trees in Coachella, because it is super hot here in the summer, and if we could put more trees out, it’ll make our downtown Plaza more livable, more green, more verdant, cooler, and it will reduce the urban heat island effect. We would like more trees.

That is how we are going to be more climate resilient as a community. Well, that’s a fantastic thing, because those trees can be native trees, and they can be of great value to migratory butterflies, migratory birds, right? And if it’s cooler downtown, then more people will want to come downtown, and the businesses surrounding that Plaza are going to make a lot more money, right? Because they’re going to have more business again, the people, the economy and nature all win. So when we when we listen to communities, when we put center communities in this process. That’s where we…

So have you guys planted the trees in downtown Coachella, or is that a project to to happen in the future?

We have indeed, and also Oasis, and we’re putting some in and Desert Hot Springs, and we’re putting some in thermal later on this year, and all Death Valley area on the Amargosa River, just lots of places. So, yeah, it’s just, it’s a great example, because it really does. It’s something that we can do as individuals right here, right now.

Right and we all feel the effects of that everybody loves to be in the shade when the sun is 100 degrees plus out in those areas. Yeah, for sure, exactly. So you often say we can’t engineer our way out of climate change. What are the biggest misperceptions about the belief that technology alone will save us?

Has it yet in particular?

You know, throw in some AI in there. Because, you know, I just read a quote from, was it Sam Altman of open AI saying we need to build like a megawatt of electricity, which is, I think, the equivalent of a nuclear plant every every week or every month, it was like a ridiculously fast pace, which seems, seems kind of unsustainable. But what do I know?

I think you know? Yeah, so my answer to that, that question is, well, have we, as engineering, solved it. It’s not. This has not been a new problem, right? Climate change is a thing that’s been an issue and has been identified as something for a long time. Have there been great technological solutions that have reduced it, that have that have solved the problem?

There’s been some improvement. Solar panels are better. Wind technology is better 100% some pollution control devices are better percent, etc, but, and yet, the temperature is still going up, right? And now we just carbons in the in the atmosphere is still increasing, yeah. So the way that we’re going to be able if those things are useful, right? The way that those things are going to be successful is if we can get them in the hands of everyone, right? It’s not just big corporations that are making the emissions. You know, they make a lot.

That’s for certain. Farming makes a lot, but if we get them in the hands of everyone, right? Look at all the buildings that are outside of our homes right now. If every one of those those buildings had their own solar farms, and those things were super easy and cheap and productive, you know, that’s going to reduce the need for a new megawatt of energy every couple days, or whatever Sam was saying, right?

So if we need to decentralize and democratize, the ability to have these things, right now is a luxury item. Only people who can afford those things have those things, and they’re usually the more well off. You know, like myself, I have them as well. But, you know, they need to be made available for people to do on their balconies of their apartments, right?

Yeah, I was looking around the neighborhood and seeing how many people don’t have them. And so the opportunity to expand is, is massive. You know, this massive opportunity to roll out rooftop solar on people’s houses all over California and all over the country, all over the world, so precisely.

But that’s that I think I would say is less an engineering and more of a behavior change, right? Because you need. To be able to have things so that people will want them and have it, so that the bar to adoption is low enough, or the incentives to adoption are high enough that that behavior change can happen, you know.

So how do we scale successful behavior change models from small communities to global climate resilience efforts?

That’s the way. Right. The way is to reduce the barriers. And for most people, the barrier is cost. I think, you know, if it was if, if it was, you know, 100 bucks, 1000 bucks, to do your house. I think everybody would do it. You know, if, or if they could get for a couple $100 enough solar power to run their their apartment. I think everybody would do it, because in the long run, it saves them a huge amount of money. You know, it’s, it’s the it’s the opportunity to find, what are the costs to adoption, what are the barriers?

Sometimes it’s cost. Often it’s cost, not only sometimes, it’s also having the space or the infrastructure or the wherewithal or the skill sets to put it in, but knowing what those costs are to be able to address them, but also making clear the benefits and that they they are benefits that people want. Because sometimes we’ll come in as scientists or as engineers or whoever it is, and we’ll say, you want this like, Did I ask that? You know, no.

So if we, if we can work with people to find what it is that would make it easiest for them to be able to adopt these behaviors, whatever it is, solar panels, wind, you know, I love those, those wind turbines that you just put up and that they’re not the turbines that chop all the birds to pieces, but they just go around in circles, and so they’re easy to see, and the animals can avoid them. I love that idea of putting those on everybody’s house. I mean, we get a lot of wind here. There’s a reason the western part of the valley is is basically just all a wind farm, but let’s have everybody have it, right?

Yeah, and it ultimately will save money. So can you share a real life example where shifting social norms, not tech, unlocked some massive climate benefits?

Hmm? Climate in the sense of climate change, kind of benefits or yeah, reducing energy, reducing pollution, you know, increasing quality of water or air.

Well, most of my work is with wildlife conservation, so I can speak most directly to that thinking of so those, those kinds of stories, I have dozens and dozens of but in terms of climate change, things, I think you know to a degree that those local gardens, The pollinator pathway gardens, are a locally sourced in demand project that helps to ameliorate, mitigate anyway, the the effects of climate change, right?

Because most people are still needing to be able to live with the change that’s going to be that is coming has already come for for us, has come from most of the world, and so we need to be able to live with those things. So, you know, encouraging people to plant native, to take out grasses, which are actually super energetically as well as water consumptive. And in an area where we get so little water, and most of our water comes from other places, like the Colorado River or the Sacramento Delta, we need to be mindful about how it’s used.

So that isn’t so much a climate change solution, as much as it is being able to live with it, but it’s also that resilience in communities is an essential part. You know, we need to be focused on the things that will help to arrest and hopefully reverse climate change, but at the same time, we also need to make it still livable for people and ecosystems to be able to function right? So my focus is more on, I guess it’s more of a triage, right? We’re kind of the ER, we’re trying to work with the communities so that they can continue to live, whether it’s people or wildlife.

So tell us a little bit about some of the projects that you’ve advised on all over the world, like Cambodia, Mexico, Japan, the Dominican, India. What are some of the things you’ve done in those in those places?

Well, pretty much all of them are very much community based work, right? So in several of those, like, for example, in Cambodia, i. Part of a team that went down there to try to assess whether it would be feasible to reintroduce Tigers into eastern forest in the country, forest on the eastern side of the country. And this was very much of a top down project from the government. We want to have Tigers present in all of Southeast Asia, Tiger is, is a hugely important symbolic animal for them. And so the government asked myself and the folks that were that were part of this, to go in and assess whether it’s feasible to introduce tigers.

Their entire focus was, was just on whether there was enough natural space, whether the prey base, the animals that the Tigers would eat, are numerous and diverse enough for them to be able to be supported. And I was made a part of this team because I said, well, would the local people support this? Is this something they want? Right? Because they’re the ones that are going to be living with it, right? Very often, Tiger and then a tiger in the neighborhood, right? I mean, we do in Southern California, a much smaller Tiger.

It’s a mountain lion, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a big cat that’s a predator and is and quite threatening. For a lot of people, they’re not, in reality, if you know how to live with them, they’re pretty easy to live with. But so my job was to go around and talk to people in those communities and ask them what they thought. Did they really want a tiger? There were they of the same mind as the government that was prioritizing the reintroduction of this animal, which hadn’t been in the country for many years, and not surprisingly, most of them were not very supportive of it, right?

They were supportive of other projects that would bring back wildlife but large predators. Let’s be thoughtful about how we do these, you know, and I think that very often top down solutions to problems, don’t think much about the impacts on the local people.

Well, let me ask you, did they go ahead and bring back tigers to Eastern Cambodia or or not? No, they did not. Okay, they listen to your advice.

Well, I don’t know. I hope so. I don’t know if they said it’s that jerks problem, his fault. But, you know, how about, how about in Mexico? What? What type of work did you do there?

Oh, Mexico is amazing. So we work a lot in Baja, in Baja, California, and both the northern and southern parts of it, and a lot of the work that I do there is with the Vaquita, which is the world’s most endangered marine mammal. And it is not intentionally endangered, but it gets caught in Fisher’s nets quite a lot, as an incidental caught. It’s not they’re not trying to catch it, right? So they are caught by shrimpers who are using nets to catch shrimp. Knew that you use shrimp nets to catch shrimp, but they just set them up like gill nets, interference nets in the water, and the shrimp go in and they get caught, but the Vaquita are very skilled at getting caught and nuts, unfortunately, too.

So I’ve been the lead of the zoo and aquarium world’s response to the Vaquita crisis for almost Well, it’s been a decade. I just got a plaque this year, yay. And so we work with the fishers in the area to try to identify how they could still make a living, and ideally, make a better living using other capture nets, right, other methods of fishing. And so a lot of this is ideas that come from the fishers. I love working with fishers. They’re they’re some of the hardiest, most resourceful and creative people I’ve ever worked with. You know, you lit you’re on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

You have whatever you have in your boat to solve the problem that you’re trying to deal with. Don’t forget, they’re so smart fishers. So, so we work with this organization called pescabe, say alternatives Baja California for pescado, for fishing. So they they work with their collective of fishers, 40 some, and we work with them on testing out different techniques and trying to help with monitoring the Vaquita population, in the small area in which they live, that we work with the Mexican Navy to try to control the ghost nets, which people often string out, and then, you know, they get broken or whatever.

And then the fishers can’t get them back, and they just kind of drift around underground. Underwater, rather, and things get caught in them. So the thing that I am most passionate about with that is working with the fishers, because they need to be able to make a living, and they need to be able to make a living that is at least as good as what they’re doing now. It should be easier, maybe cost less, provide them more. All three of those are things that we can try to improve, you know.

And have, have you seen, you know, progress on that front, that less the Vaquero is being caught and and the fishermen doing better?

Yeah, the Quitos, surprising there. The population was never huge. They were always less than 600 but in the last decade or so, their numbers have have plummeted down to around 12, 6 to 12. We don’t know the exact number. They’re really hard to find. Is a very murky water. And when they when they come up, they porpoise. They’re a porpoise. So when they come up in Port, they don’t really porpoise, because they just barely come above the water and then they go back down, so they’re like a manatee in their hospital. Okay, so we do it using hydro Sonic, hydrophones. Excuse me, this is obviously not something I’m a part of.

We work with partners who do this, and they they survey the population, they census the population using those hydrophones, and we can guesstimate the population size. The amazing thing is that their population size has stayed pretty constant the last seven or eight years, despite having the same number of fishers in the area, right and there’s new babies being born almost every year that we can, that we see or that we record on the hydrophone, because their calls are different. And so it’s a pretty remarkable situation.

In this case, you have to be excited, not so much about increases, but about steady state, and that there is ongoing reproduction of new animals. So the changes that we’ve seen, there’s almost no ghost nets anymore. In the core vaquita zone, the fishers Don’t go in there anymore. They don’t fish in that area. They’re trying out new techniques. There’s this one in particular that’s very successful at catching shrimp with like zero bycatch. It’s called a su repairer, and we’re very proud of the our partners, those fishers down there, for what they’ve done.

Yeah? It sounds great. Well, good educational work and helping them and helping the environment same time. Yeah. So you know, thank you, Dr. James Danoff-Burg, for being on the program, it’s been a pleasure getting to hear some of the great work that you’re doing, and certainly kudos to you for that, and encourage you to keep doing it. And if you could let our listeners know where they can go to kind of support the work that you’re doing would be fantastic.

All right, yeah. So yeah. Come to the living desert.org. Our Website, we have a brand new center for behavior change that we are rolling out right now, at this moment, where we are working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to help conservationists around the world do better community based conservation projects, working with people, learning from local communities. So come to our website, check us out, learn about our Center for behavior change. Save power by turning off your lights, even when you’re using them, as I do here in my office and there’s the world is very rich. Get out and enjoy it, be an advocate for its conservation. Recreate and care for a while.

That’s a great message. Thank you, James. I really appreciate having you on the program. And everybody go out and check out the Living Desert. It’s a it’s a real jewel out that we have here in California, if you’re visiting or whether you’re a native species here, it’s, it’s a great place to go and and see nature and see the desert. It’s, it’s phenomenal.

Thank you, Matt.