YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Roman

lines on the record: 26
first: 2024-05-04
most recent: 2024-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That by the animals that are eating other animals are helping to either restore, in some cases it'll be restored, in other ways it'll be creating new pathways. But essentially, I think it's staying humble and curious is what's going to get us a lot further than trying to, as you would say, it's broken. Let's buy something new. Let's figure out some new technological advance.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, have some good deep knowledge to the system, so employing that, being humble in, like you say, not buying new or figuring out some hard structure way of fixing things, but some way of restoring these nutrient pathways. And that could be through people, through adapting in different ways, but also restoring rewilding. And we mentioned a little bit sea otters, but I'm looking out the window here in Vermont and there's an effort to restore mountain lions to this area. They've been extinguished for over 100 years. What would that do? It would change the behavior of the herbivores, the white tail deer here, and a lot of things that we might challenges in this area could be addressed by restoring carnivores. So it's one way, one term we use is trophic rewilding.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Just in a course during the time of my career as a conservation biologist, we didn't really have the term traditional ecological knowledge. That is learning from the people that have lived in these areas. It makes sense, but the idea that people, and this would be true for animals as well, that have been in these systems for hundreds, thousands of years.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be really important. Keeping animals in place. We talk about, we talked about whale falls often when whales strand, we put them back in the ocean or we bury them. But by leaving them on that coastline, if it's not in an area like a beach where lots of people are using, can feed hundreds of different animals. So restoring that system, we will learn a ton. And again, 50 years ago, a lot of the things we're talking about today, people didn't really know. So who does what we're going to learn in the next decade or two as we allow these pathways to become restored?”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even in England, you weren't allowed to disturb either carcasses or defecation because they were important on those pastures. The farmers knew it at that point. So I think we moved away from it understandably when we moved to cities because you can't just have carcasses and feces and urine all around. It doesn't work, right? So you've had to have different ways of processing it. Now we're thinking about ways how can we get back into that cycle. And for the book, you know, I went up to a local place called the Rich Earth Institute and got a peacler and saved my pee and put it out in the fields near here, trying in the same way for us to be part, to restore our place in the environment. When we live in cities, it's going to involve different processes, you know, but this container-based movement.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I certainly think culturally the traditions, for example, in the Pacific Northwest of returning salmon carcasses to the streams because we haven't spoken about salmon, but they spend most of their life offshore and then they come to breed and they die. They just breed once and they die and that can be an enormous resource not only for humans, but also for nutrients in that area. My understanding is that those cultures would have understood that. But certainly, I mean, we've had terms like night soil, which describes human feces. I mean, just the description alone indicates that they knew what it was, right? You know, that this could be an important form of fertilizer that comes from humans. So we could think about it. One is thinking about what we're going to do with the carcasses. And for sure,”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Acids and the sugars for the worm that lives there. These animals are absolutely dependent on these bone. So one of the sad things is because we kill so many whales in the 19th century before that, we think that probably some of the earliest extinctions in the ocean might have been in these deep sea communities that we didn't even know existed at that point. because we're taking the habitats out, right? When you remove the habitat, of course you're more likely to have extinction. The good news is we have more whales now than we did in the 1970s because of good conservation efforts. So now we believe that some of these species could be coming back. And they form entire communities that persist for decades.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years worth of carbon that would just fall out in particles lands there in a single dead whale. And over the past couple of decades, a hundred species have been described that are only found on whalefalls, unique to that habitat. They're endemic to this area. And some that are really quite bizarre. For example, Osodox is a type of worm. It means bone eater. Unlike most of the animals I talk about in the book, it doesn't have a mouth. It doesn't have a gut and it doesn't have an anus. So it doesn't eat horcut. But what it does, it has like a root system in the whale bones and it's taking up sulfides and nitrogen and other elements and providing it to chemosynthetic bacteria that are in its troposope or what is what used to be its gut and they're producing the amino acid.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so this is another one where you talk about how long have people known this. The first whale fall, which is one term we use for a whale carcass when it sinks into the deep sea, first time humans saw humans saw that was in the 1990s, not that long ago. And when they first looked at that, okay, dead whale, no surprise. They died deep at sea, but then they saw all these living creatures on the whale carcass, which was surprising because only a hundred years ago people thought there wasn't much life in the deep sea. We don't have large trees in the ocean, but we have large animals. In fact, the largest animals that have ever lived, think of a blue whale. When that whale dies, it's this huge habitat that's crazy. It's like an island in the deep sea because the deep sea doesn't have a lot of nutrients. In one pulse, about a thousand years.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does, and I mean, one way we framed it is are they passengers or are they driving these ecosystems? And the truth is some animals are having a big impact and others are having a little impact and somewhere in between. But those animals like the sea turtles, a great classic study because they spend their entire adult lives at sea feeding and then they come up to nest and they're releasing eggs and yolk and the eggs that die and that's that as you had mentioned it has a big impact on the dune system in that area. That's a great early classic study of this kind of work is when you see animals moving between two different habitats and what kind of impact that can have that can also benefit the turtles as well as the dunes.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that so, you know, here's the thing. If you have been to a tropical beach that often they're surrounded by corals, right? And the source for the sands that you're sitting in are ultimately those corals, but they don't break up into small pieces. What happens is parrot fish, which can be 100 kilograms. They can be quite large. They continually are biting on the dead corals, getting some of the algae that grows on it. And then you can see.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Areas around there. So we've been proposing that as one approach is to use animals as a facilitator for moving these nutrients around the world and maintaining that kind of balance.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's very energetically expensive. Again, it has been valuable, but unfortunately we've also misused it. And so, you know, one dream is to think, and we've had problems with both phosphorus as well as nitrogen, can animals help restore the natural movement of these elements around the world and what would that look like? So that's one of the things we think about is one of the phosphorus is certainly, unlike nitrogen, we cannot create phosphorus. There's no artificial way. We have to mine it. So can animals help move the phosphorus and the nitrogen around, which would, one, reduce areas where there are hot spots, there's too much of these, and help it disperse it onto fields or into forests.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you eat a regular diet and you eat at the supermarket, certainly a lot of it is coming from artificial, you know, something that's been artificially developed, which has allowed human populations to increase around the world, but also as these things do, comes at a cost. That would be true for phosphorus or nitrogen. And that we have now areas that have way too much nitrogen in the system. So it could be affecting rivers or oceans and changing the way those systems are. Ideally, we want it to be a balance that's dynamic, but not one where you're continually adding these. And one of the other problems with the Haber-Bosch is that they're energetically very expensive. So you need a lot of petroleum in order to put this process through. So yeah, it can have an effect also on global warming as well as on nitrogen presence around the world.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so we did, we've just spoken about what happens if you take the animals out of the system and then also where you're shipping the guano around the world. And that makes really allows Australia to become a wealthy country based on the guano because all of a sudden you could have all these vast grasslands. So it changes the fate of a lot of countries around the world. It was in the beginning of renewable resource, but we overexploited it. So we couldn't, you know, we didn't have enough to continue. In the 20th century, there's a development of this process, the Haber-Bas process, which allows us to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere and to create ammonium, which can be used for fertilizers. If we'd make a muscle right now, half of the nitrogen in my body is coming from artificial processes.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had to read when I first read that paper, I was really the same. I didn't believe it. I'm like, but does this include whales? Does this include this? So we're talking about mammals just to be clear. Not all wildlife, right? This is for mammals. It's also true for birds, but it's 70-30 for wild birds. So about 70% of birds on the planet are chickens and turkeys. Of course, we've changed the way the world works. If we've removed all those large animals. And we've been talking about seabirds, but I'm sitting here in North America. We can think of there used to be 30 million bison migrating across the continent. And they were reduced to a few hundred. And now there may be a couple of thousand, but they don't do this migratory patterns anymore. Of course the prairies are different and the ecosystems are different now that they've”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were reintroduced to parts of Alaska in the 1960s and 1970s, no one knew what was going to happen. But now their kelp forests have returned, nurseries for fish have changed, the feeding habits of bald eagles, all because this one animal was restored to that area. So we have a lot of these individual examples where animals are changing it over time. Then we're also looking at these long-term impacts. So you could think of migratory salmon or the work that I do on migratory whales as another way. But I think getting back to your question, it's not about facts. It's about learning new things. I'm not in this field to memorize facts. And I tell my students that, right? You know, you need to have some basic understanding. But what's cool is over the years, I'm telling a different story from what I told 10 or 15 years ago.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of effort understandably goes into studying microbiological processes as well as plants around us. We can see that. We can see the impacts. Animals are moving and we're not necessarily seeing that circulatory system in action. And that's how I think of it, right? That's because they're hard to see, but also because wild mammals right now, they're only 4% of all biomass on the planet. So it's not surprising that we don't think animals that are important because if you look around you, it's cows, it's sheep, it's other humans. We really altered that. When we learn about these systems, often the most exciting discoveries, sea otters are an example, are when species are restored and all of a sudden you see the ecosystems change. We have Certes as an example. Another example would be sea otters.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I mean, so no one knew what was going to happen on Cersei. They had been studying it, you know, and then in the 1980s when they started to seeing these changes. And really, this idea, there's a new term for it, one of the people I meet in the book O Smiths. They use the term zoo geochemistry. It's like biogeochemistry, but what the animals do, right? So how do animals affect the world? This is a brand new term. And this whole, people have been thinking about it mostly through seabirds. Guano has been known and there were some studies done in the early 20th century looking at that seabirds might actually enhance the amount of fish in an area because they're bringing nitrogen in. But beyond that, there were very few studies really until the 1990s and 2000s. This is when people really started to focus on animals. I think that's partly because a lot of them”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know why this story is so compelling is as one of my colleagues said, ecology isn't rocket science, it's a lot harder. Everything is so complex. Here, the scientists had actually been following the individual plans, the individual birds, and watching year to year. And they've studied it now for 60 years. It was just the island's 60th birthday. And by the way, some of the researchers are older than the island, so it's kind of cool to be on an island with people that have been around longer than that. So this really was a natural laboratory that Iceland has protected two weeks a year only scientists were allowed to go. I was lucky to go in 2021 and join the biologists for a week there and become an embedded writer or scientist helping them count the birds or looking at soil. Samples and getting to look in the intertidal was fascinating.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carry a lot of nutrients with them, right? They've got the nitrogen in there. Anything that's blowing in has to travel light. It's not going to survive. So what happened in the 1970s and 1980s is Dozens, hundreds of seabirds, including gulls, kittywigs, and other species, started nesting on this island. A good safe place for them, no predators. You know, it's pretty, it's a chill place, right? And they're feeding from the ocean. So they're going back and forth to feed themselves and also to feed their chicks.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's amazing. So November 1963 was a fishing boat off the southeast coast of Iceland. They smelled some sulfur and the engineer looked around. The boat was fine. And then they noticed they were in a bit of a whirlpool. And all of a sudden there was this eruption column that went up. Within a few hours, that eruption column was reaching a mile or two in the sky. Within a few years, a brand new island was formed with no life on it at all, of course, right? So all you've got is this hot lava that's cooling down. Scientists really at that point didn't know how life was going to colonize on this area, how long it would take, how it would get there. A few plants came in from the ocean. What maritime plants can survive on these islands because they can float on the ocean and”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't move. What animals do is they allow these elements to move through the system. I think of whales as a good example. They dive deep down in the oceans. They come up to the surface to breathe. And when they poop, they release this nitrogen. That's really the essential core of this idea for me is how animals can move these nutrients and why it matters, how we can build ecosystems through these processes.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. There are essential nutrients in anyone that's grown a garden knows this, right? You know that there are certainly elements are essential to life on earth, nitrogen, phosphorus are two of the macro elements, and then iron is another one that I talk about in the book. Without that, we wouldn't have DNA. We wouldn't have reproduction that we couldn't form muscle mass, so we really couldn't function at all, either as animals or plants. We've long understood that plants are the lungs of the planet, let's say, right? They're taking carbon dioxide, emitting oxygen, and allowing life on Earth as we know it. But I think has long been overlooked is the other elements that are essential to life and how they move around. Because, of course, plants, they grow in place. I'm looking out the window, I'm seeing the forest, but they”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. A few years ago, I was on a Fulbright in Iceland and was putting together a talk for the final talk after a year of work and got up early in the morning, put a slide together, and I said, for the past decade, what I've been looking at is how animals eat, what happens when they poop and what happens when they die. And surely that should be the title of my next book. It took a little, you know, it took a couple of years to find the agent to want to pitch this. And we held our breath whether the editors were going to stick to the title, but they did. So, yeah, you know, it was cheeky, but we got lucky.”
2024-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · The Circle of Life, with Joe Roman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT