The Case for Conservation Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

The intersection of science, politics, and environmental discourse is full of puzzles: why has nuance gone missing from the conversation? Why are heterodox or balanced views often sidelined? And how do echo chambers, alarmist rhetoric, and the erosion of trust hinder lasting progress in conservation?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist well-known for his work on contested science in contentious policy areas, from climate and extreme weather to COVID origins and sports governance.

Links to resources

• The Honest Broker - Roger's website and blog, with lots of free content and even more in the paid version.
• What Happened on Deliberation Day? 2007 paper mentioned by Roger in which the researchers found that like-minded deliberation led to stronger, more extreme post-discussion views, while mixed groups became more open and less certain.
• The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change - Book by Roger, emphasizing evidence-based nuance over alarmism.
• Messaging Should Reflect the Nuanced Relationship between Land Change and Zoonotic Disease Risk - BioScience paper that we discussed, on the links between land change and zoonotic spillover risk.

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The concept of rewilding has been applied in various ways, from the simple restoration of a single natural process like removing livestock to allow vegetation to recover, to ambitious proposals to reintroduce long-extinct megafauna. While some applications have obvious conservation benefits, rewilding also raises legitimate concerns, especially about how renewed interactions with reintroduced wildlife like large herbivores and carnivores, might affect human wellbeing, livelihoods, and land use. Rewilding has become a popular and sometimes controversial topic within conservation circles. It has also been gaining traction and growing public and governmental interest as societies search for more holistic approaches to restoring ecosystem processes and biodiversity.

Joining me to unpack what rewilding means, and to explore the potential conflicts and compromises that come with it, is Marine Drouilly. Marine is the Regional Coordinator for Wild Cat Surveys and Research in West and Central Africa with the NGO "Panthera".

Links to resources:

• Guidelines for evaluating the success of large carnivore reintroductions - A relevant paper in Biological Conservation co-authored by Marine
• Panthera - Website of the organization Marine works for

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It’s not often that biodiversity legislation grabs international headlines, but thats what happened repeatedly in 2024 with the European Union’s new Nature Restoration Law. It happened first because of the ambitious nature of the law; and then because of the political tussle around its rejection and eventual approval. Along the way it gathered a trail of detractors and supporters, and has raised hopes as well as concerns, depending on who you speak to. The law’s overarching target is for Member States to put in place restoration measures in at least 20% of the EU's land areas and 20% of its sea areas by 2030.

Brian MacSharry, who was also my guest for episode 10 on protected areas, is Head of the Nature and Biodiversity Group at the European Environment Agency and he has had a birds-eye view of the development of the law. He kindly agreed to respond to some of the critiques of the law, but first he goes into some detail about its content and its journey through the political process.

Links to resources

• Nature Restoration Law - Outline of the law on the website of the European Commission

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From time to time certain concepts rise to prominence in biodiversity conservation circles, and some of these follow in the footsteps of climate change analogs. One such concept is biodiversity credits. Biodiversity credits are a mechanism that allow for biodiversity conservation or restoration activities to derive a revenue stream through the production and sale of a quantifiable unit of improvement in biodiversity. Despite the technical and philosophical challenges involved in trading in biodiversity credits, or even defining a single unit, biodiversity credits are being used to offset damages to biodiversity. And given the explosion of private and public interest in biodiversity credits, they are worthy of further exploration. 

Helping us to explore them is Harrison Carter, an interdisciplinary conservation scientist at the University of Oxford’s Biology Department. Harrison has studied biodiversity credits in detail and shares his personal views on this complex topic. This is a fairly technical conversation, but non-conservationists should still find it interesting, and it gets easier as it goes along. We talk about the good and the bad around biodiversity credits, starting with a broad description of the concept. 

Links to resources:

• What is a unit of nature? A webpage from the University of Oxford's Department of Biology about biodiversity credits including Harrison's work
• What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market - 2024 paper in the peer-reviewed jouirnal, PLOS ONE

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Half a century ago a group of more than 2,000 scientists signed a warning of environmental crisis and nuclear war. Named after the French town where it was compiled, the “Menton Message” turned out to be somewhat hyperbolic in its environmental predictions, and did not account for some of humankind’s remarkable developmental progress over the following decades. However, some of its concerns certainly remain prescient today. And so another, smaller, group of scientists convened, on the 50-year anniversary of the Menton Message, to revisit and modernize some of its assertions. The resulting document is “A letter to fellow citizens of Earth”, which was also summarized in an article for the journal “Nature”. It makes three key points:

• “individualistic, materialistic, exploitative short-term thinking has led us to lose sight of the public good”
• “a focus on economic growth distracts from achieving well-being and happiness… and… destroys our shared resources”
• “current economic, political and social institutions are failing us”

Although the new letter acknowledges some of the progress that we have made since the Menton Message, it emphasizes the threats and asserts the urgent need for change. 

Sharachchandra Lele is one of the two main authors of the 2022 letter, and the Nature article. I pushed him on the accuracy of some of the letter’s claims and assertions. The resulting conversation interrogates different aspects of the letter, and questions the idea that we are on completely the wrong track to make things right. Our conversation jumps around a bit and does not follow the sequence of the letter. But it’s about more than the letter. It’s about the notion that we need to drastically change the way we run the planet and how to affect those changes. This episode and episode 48 with Ron Bailey function as counter-points to each other, so they can be listened to as a set.

Links to resources

• The Menton Message - The original French version of the message (the English is probably available online somewhere)
• A letter to fellow citizens of Earth - The follow-up to the Menton Message, compiled by Sharad and others
• Fifty years after UN environment summit, researchers renew call for action - 2022 correspondence in the journal, Nature, co-authored by Sharad, and summarizing "A letter to fellow citizens of Earth"

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International organizations, or “IOs” for short, are typically organizations to which multiple countries belong as members. They cover virtually every aspect of human endeavor and there are many that are related to environmental protection. International organizations may influence our lives quite profoundly and yet, outside our own field, we might struggle to name more than a few of them. Furthermore, it has been proposed that most of them are not functioning entities, but rather so-called“zombie organizations”.

That’s what Julia Gray has suggested. Julia is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been researching zombie organizations for years. She joins me to explain how zombie organizations come about; why we don’t notice them; and what are their consequences.

Links to resources

• Life, Death, or Zombie? The Vitality of International Organizations - A 2018 article on the topic of zombie organizations, in International Studies Quarterly
• The Montreal Protocol - Background on The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, to which we refer in the episode
• CARICOM - This is a link to the website of the Caribbean Community, to which Julia refers at the end of the episode

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Protection of the environment is strongly associated with regulation of the human activities that threaten it, and regulation is usually administered by government. Although almost everyone would probably agree that some regulation is necessary, regulation has a patchy record when it comes to environmental protection. And there is another approach to achieving environmental goals. Free market environmentalism, instead of protecting nature from market forces, harnesses those forces to protect nature. Or at least that's the idea.

Ronald Bailey is the longtime science writer for Reason Magazine, a renowned American libertarian news & opinion outlet that’s been around for more than 50 years. Ron joins me to flesh out the case for free market environmentalism.

Links to resources

• Ronald Bailey - Ron's profile page on the Reason website
• The limits to growth - 1972 book about the possibility of exponential economic and population growth
• Population bomb - 1968 book by Paul Erlich that speculated about the dangers of overpopulation
• Silent Spring - 1962 book by Rachel Carson about the effects of pesticide on the environment and people
• Environmentalists Shocked That Local People Protect Forests Better Than Do Governments - 2014 article of Ron’s in Reason Magazone, including links to further information, about how indigenous peoples and local communities can be good stewards of the environemnt
• The Environmental Trinity — 2024 article by Jesse Ausubel about ecomodernism and decoupling from resource-use
• Our World in Data - A website that shows global trends in easy-to-grasp graphic format

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There are few environmental issues more emotive than the hunting of whales. Although the focus of environmentalists has shifted to other topics in recent times, whaling remains contentious whenever it is brought up. This is understandable considering that, for the first half of the 20th century and into the 1970s, several whale species were hunted to near-extinction. But as crude oil took over from whale oil as the fuel of industry whale populations began making impressive recoveries. Nevertheless, a handful of countries and populations continue to hunt them, much to the chagrin of the rest of the world. Perhaps the most high profile whaling country is Japan. To add to the saga, in 2019 Japan ended about seven decades of membership of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) - the global body responsible for the “management of whaling and conservation of whales”.

There are countless sources providing the anti-whaling point of view, to some of which I will provide links in the podcast description. But comprehensive accounts of the other side of the story are less easy to find. Joji Morishita has been, among many other things, Japan’s Commissioner to the IWC (2013 - 2018) and IWC Chair (2016 - 2018) and I doubt there is any better person in the world to tell Japan’s side of the whaling story. In this fascinating discussion he explains why Japan withdrew from the IWC, and he takes on many of the core arguments against whaling. 

Links to resources

• Japan whaling: Why commercial hunts have resumed despite outcry - 2019 BBC overview of the topic
• Japan's Withdrawal from International Whaling Regulation - Book co-authored by Joji in 2023
• Commercial Whaling - International Whaling Commission statements on the whaling moratorium and commercial whaling
• History of Whaling - A chronology of whaling going back to the 9th Century, on the website of the Japan Whaling Association
• Save the Whales - GreenPeace website on whaling
• Reflections on the Future of the International Whaling Commission - The first of a four-part series of articles by Joji 

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Agriculture has been by far the biggest driver of land change and land degradation worldwide. And yet, it is also fundamental to the very existence of humankind. This mismatch often comes up in public discourse. Over the past year or two, for example, several European countries have seen extensive farmer protests - against rising costs and restrictive environmental regulations, among other things. Environmental groups have responded to the farmers’ appeals mostly with indignation… and yet farmers and environmentalists have a lot in common - at east potentially.

Philippe Birker is co-founder of “Climate Farmers”, and his work is aimed mostly at promoting regenerative agriculture. He and I cover a range of topics in the discussion that follows, from the farmer protests to the relationship between agrochemical companies and government. Along the way, there were several “rabbit holes” that we could have gone down, and several points that I would have liked to challenge Philippe on in greater depth. But, with limited available time, I needed to bookmark most of these for another time and for future guests.

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Insects are among the most abundant organisms on Earth. About 350,000 beetle species, alone, have been described by science and this is considered to be only a fraction of their total number. In a variety of ways, insects are a fundamental part of natural and human-adapted systems. While some cause disease or ruin crops, others play a key role in ecosystem service provision, for example by pollinating certain crops or as food for other beneficial animals and people. Overall, the loss of insect species is a major concern. Some of the more exuberant headlines broadcasting this message have gone so far as to declare an imminent “insectageddon”. However, although many insect species are declining or in danger of decline, there is reason to be wary of such excessive claims. Data need to be carefully considered, revealing the complex patterns of change. Unfortunately the media, in particular, is often incentivized to focus on the more extreme findings and neglect the nuances. 

Jane Hill (OBE) is president of the Royal Entomological Society and a professor at the University of York. She helps me to pick apart the "insectageddon" idea, including how valid it is and how it came about in the first place.

Links to Resources

• How worried should we really be about "insectageddon"? - A Guardian interview with Jane in 2022.
• Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature' - An earlier Guardian article, pushing the idea of "insectageddon".
• Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers - The 2019 peer-reviewed literature review that may have started the "insectageddon" idea, in the journal Biological Conservation.

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