Carl Safina: Everything that is done by human beings flows according to our values. And all the technology that we create is used to execute on our values. If we think that only humans matter if we don’t know and don’t care and are told that the physical world Is useful only as a tailpipe and a smokestack and all of our garbage And waste can be dumped in the commons while companies can keep their profits and have no responsibilities for The cleanups or the poisons or for robbing the possibility of existence from millions and millions of other animals of hundreds of thousands of species then we get what we have

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay newscast. I’m your cohost, Mike DiGirolamo.

Rachel Donald: And I’m your co-host, Rachel Donald.

Mike (narration): Bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists. Working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet. And holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Carl Safina and author of many books. An ecologist, Safina is a noted expert on marine conservation. Today he speaks with co-host Rachel Donald about aquaculture or the farming of fish, which has outpaced the amount of seafood that is caught in the wild. Today, aquaculture is a hundred million metric tons annually. Safina argues the problems in aquatic animal farming reflect failures of care and conscience, which devalue nature, humans and reward abuse and drive accelerating planetary crises. In a paper he published this year in science advances he argues a moral reckoning is needed to change the economic policies that lead to the situation. In the following conversation. He explains how technology. Economies and our relationship with nature follows our values and offers insight into how we might change them.

Rachel: Carl, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you with us on Wonga Bay’s newscast.

Carl: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to see you again

Rachel: Likewise. So, we wanted to get you on because you recently published a piece in Science Journal about the moral reckonings of fish farming. And the piece is brilliant. We will hyperlink it in the show notes so people can go and read it. And there’s a lot to tease out from it. But I think we should start at the very beginning, which is, could you briefly explain what animal aquaculture is?

Carl: Okay. Animal aquaculture is the farming of aquatic animals such as fish or mussels or shrimp. And what it is not, is farming kelp, which is a plant.

Rachel: Okay. And how does the scale of animal aquaculture differ to the scale of animal agriculture on land? Yeah.

Carl: My guess is that there’s vastly, there definitely is vastly more area given over to growing animals on land. As far as individual creatures, I’m not sure the ones in the water tend to be vastly smaller. Even a relatively big fish–let’s say a 30 lbs salmon–is dwarfed by an 800 lbs cow, for instance, although, of course, a huge or pigs. Of course, there are billions of chickens that we grow every year. And there are sizes comparable to the size of many fish that we grow, but the scale of animal farming in the water is growing very, quickly. So, let’s say 30 years ago, it was just starting to take off. And now the amount of food that is grown in farms in the water has outpaced the weight of wild fish that are caught, wild fish and shrimp and octopus and things like that. So, the farmed what would you call it? I don’t want to call them products, but they, it amounts to products has now outpaced a wild catch. So, it’s growing very rapidly.

Rachel: This week actually for Planet Critical interviewed a couple of animal agriculture journalists and scientists. And so, I have some really shocking figures that I didn’t know before this week. When people when we think about agriculture, we tend to think about animal agriculture and the scale of that devastation is outrageous. There are tens of billions of animals killed every year for the animal agriculture industry. For the aquatic agriculture industry, it’s 1 to 2 trillion animals every year are killed for that industry and globally, it only makes up about 3 percent of our diet. So, the amount of violence, the scale of the violence..

Carl: …that’s very interesting. I didn’t know those figures. Maybe I should be interviewing you. I guess bear in mind that an awful lot of those are shrimps. They’re just massive amounts of them. And really the two main reasons or the three main reasons that we’re talking about this at all is that the waterways have throughout most of history been mostly open wild habitat and farming in water takes up room and space. It also creates pollution. It also, like farmed animals, it draws from a vast footprint for the food for those things that are grown. And unlike things like cows and pigs and chickens, which could eat mostly vegetable diets, although they are largely also fed small fish that are caught in the wild, most of the animals that are aquatic and farmed are also fed wild caught small fish and the demand for those fish flowing to farms often has begun to really ruin and wreck the ability of small fishers, small fishermen, small boats in mostly tropical places to actually feed communities. So, there’s a, there’s an enormous justice problem involved there as well. And another part of that is that the processing of seafood, whether it’s wild or farm. Also involves a lot of labor abuses that have recently come to light.

Rachel: I remember reading a statistic a while ago, although I will be asking my co-host Mike to fact check us on this, but I think it was about 80 percent of seafood now that we eat comes out of China, and a huge amount of that is now being processed by what amounts to slave labor and the Uyghurs.

Mike (note): Thanks, Rachel, not exactly. As of 2022 Asian countries account for 70% of global seafood production. With China producing 35%. This data comes from the FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and their state of the world fisheries report.

Rachel: And that’s also something that you mention in your essay this is the fact that this kind of massive injustice that’s happening on an ecological scale is also trickling down into the injustice of, workers who are being forced into very unfavorable conditions to keep supply high.

Carl: Yeah, that’s not just a China problem. There’s a lot of actual kidnapping and slavery in parts of Southeast Asia. People are lured with the promise of a job they get drugged and the next thing they know they’re on the open ocean somewhere and some of them stay at that for years. There’s all of the misery and violence and ruined lives that go along with that kind of a thing.

Mike (note): Mongabay has extensive reporting on forced labor on fishing vessels. I recommend you read our joint investigation on Dalian Ocean Fishing, which won an award it’s called Worked to Death. How a Chinese tuna juggernaut crushed it’s Indonesian workers. And the piece describes harrowing conditions migrant Indonesian workers suffered on this distant water fleet. A link is in the show notes.

Rachel: I want to move this conversation towards the wider extractive economic system that is driving these forces, but for now, if we stay with particular on aquaculture, it is interesting that seafood, fish, the life in the oceans is the only thing that humanity still hunts en masse, decimating the food chain as you’ve explained. Why, do you think that is? Why do you think we have this different behavior on land and on sea?

Carl: For the most part, first of all, the sea is a lot bigger than the land. It’s about two thirds of the land. Earth’s surface. The concentrations of large animals that travel together is like nothing else really on land. The great herds of the Serengeti really pale in comparison to some of the gigantic schools of fish that travel in the millions and large carnivorous fish that are hunting that are traveling in the millions. Same thing is true actually with in the tropics, aggregations of dolphins, which are mammals that weigh several hundred pounds. Often, they travel in groups of thousands. There’s nothing at all like that on land. That speaks to the scale and the concentration of life in the oceans, a large group of lions or wolves might number 20 and a large group of dolphins might have several thousand and those are mammals that need hundreds of pounds of food every day, so the scale and the way that life exists is really quite different. Plus, we’ve run out of room. We take about almost half of Earth’s land surface is put into agricultural production in one way or another. And most of the animal populations that are in any reasonable way huntable have been hunted and mostly reduced a lot because of all of the combined pressures of, cities and the built environment, agriculture and everything it takes to provide for cities. And all of the lost habitat for all of the other land animals. the aggregate wild populations of the world have declined by 70%, 7-0 percent according to the World Wildlife Fund. Since I was in high school, 70 percent since the first Earth Day, when everybody said, ‘Hey, there’s massive problems. We need to protect endangered species and clean the air and clean the water.’ And since then, we’ve lost 70 percent of all the wild animals on Earth. The ocean is bigger. The concentrations of animals are much more vast and we’ve just ruined a lot of the land for wild animals. And that’s why we have and have had for a few thousand years now, herds of domestic animals and gigantic flocks of domestic birds that we call poultry, chickens and ducks, mainly. 70 percent of all the birds in the world are now grown as quote unquote poultry. Their only reason for coming into existence is for us to kill and eat them. And 96 percent of all mammals are either human beings or the mammals that we call livestock, mostly pigs and goats and sheep and cattle.

Mike (note): These are biomass statistics that Carl is mentioning. And they likely originate from a 2018 paper in biological sciences called The Biomass Distribution on Earth, which tried to estimate the biomass of all living things. 70% of all the weight or the biomass of birds is estimated to be domesticated poultry. But only four to 12% of bird species are domesticated poultry, like chickens. Likewise, humans and their livestock combined make up 96% of the biomass of mammals. Humans at 34% and livestock at 62. It should be noted that in this same study, it was found that plants account for 82% of all life on Earth. Bacteria, 13%. And 5% is everything else, which includes the mammals I just mentioned. Within this, humans are only 0.01% of Earth’s total biomass. And to Carl’s point, the population drop in wild animals is 70% since 1970. But something he didn’t mention is the biomass study found that since the beginning of human civilization, humans have caused the complete loss of 83% of all wild animals.

Rachel: These are horrifying figures, and it astonishes me you know, the weight, as you just said, like 96 percent of all mammals weight are, humans and their livestock, quote unquote. We’re using 43 percent of the earth’s land for agriculture and yet this feels like it’s still something hidden despite it being all around us all the time and it’s something to do with, I think the, violence that is hidden in the way that we use language around it, the fact that we have these different words, as you said, that poultry rather than birds or beef rather than cow. And this is where your work on the morality of this problem, I think is really important and because it is a moral conversation around what are we using our resources for? What are we using our intellect for? What kind of society are we trying to build? And what. aims are and what ends, sorry, means and ends are we using in order to get there? And you’ve written a lot about the emotional intel, emotionality and intelligence and sentience of creatures. Why is it that we seem to believe or think that it’s justified to, I’m going to use this word, enslave sentient beings or breed them or murder them or kill them at a scale of one to two trillion a year?

Carl: I go into that in a lot of detail in my most recent book Which is called Alfie & Me which starts with raising a screech owl chick that was found abandoned and going into really what the human place in nature is and how we see it and why we don’t realize that the creatures around us have all these different capacities for relating and relationality and the ability to recognize individuals and know who they are and know where they are and all that kind of stuff and why it is that we don’t know any of this. I think in a very brief attempt to answer, we are taught our disconnection because in our culture, the Western culture, which has now globalized world, we are taught that we are the best thing on earth and that we are the only thing on Earth that matters. We are also inculcated by our education to become consumers and that’s what we are called much more frequently than we’re called citizens. We’re referred to as consumers because that’s our use and to be a consumer is to be disconnected from the consequences of our actions. So, we get all these things. We don’t have any idea when we graduate and get a diploma and we’re given a card and a balloon and a cake. Congratulations. You are now an educated person. We don’t know where our food comes from, where our water comes from, or any of the material things in our house or that we use have come from, how they got to us, where our waste goes, how our energy got to us. We don’t know anything about the other living things that are right outside our homes. But we do know one thing when we get our diploma. We know how to shop and buy stuff we have been made into consumers and in the West the value is that as I said humans are the most valuable thing and the only thing that matters on Earth that Earth is here to serve us. We don’t have anything like an ecological education about the relationships that create life or make life possible or are required or the consequences of the lives that we live and most of us enjoy, but we are not asked to think about that at all. We are told about our rights. We are told that many people don’t have their rights. In the United States, we have the bill of rights. The UN has a declaration of rights. In other cultures, they teach children what their responsibilities are to the community. We have no bill of responsibilities and no UN declaration of responsibilities. It’s not both sides of the same coin of existence. We are only taught to think about and care about ourselves. And it shows in everything that we’re talking about. Everything that is done by human beings flows according to our values. And all the technology that we create is used to execute on our values. If we think that only humans matter if we don’t know and don’t care and are told that the physical world is useful only as a tailpipe and a smokestack and all of our garbage and waste can be dumped in the commons while companies can keep their profits and have no responsibilities for the cleanups or the poisons or for robbing the possibility of existence from millions and millions of other animals of hundreds of thousands of species, then we get what we have. But on the flip side of that when we have a moral approach to things which really has no reliance on new technologies, we make the only progress that we actually see is real human progress. If we abolish slavery, that’s a moral thing. It’s not an economic equation, it’s in fact that was the fight for slavery. It’s cheaper. But when we get rid of those things that’s moral progress when other people or women or whatever group you want to talk about get their rights to citizenship or their ability to own things or function in the economy. Those are moral decisions based on values. There’s no technology needed to do those things. Even, simple things like when I first got on a commercial airplane, every seat had an ashtray. The idea that you don’t smoke in restaurants, you don’t smoke on airplanes. That’s because values change. It’s not a technology thing. It’s everything is driven by our values and all real human progress has been made according to values. So, in the 1970s in the U S., we had this enormous burst of environmental legislation. We got the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. All of these things were not because somebody invented something new. It’s because we felt differently about what was important.

Mike (note): Hey listeners. I hope you’re enjoying this conversation. And if you’re loving our podcast content. And you’re looking for a good way to support us. Please do leave a review on the platform. You’re listening on and subscribe to our show, doing this, elevates the profile of our podcast and helps bring us to a wider audience. But if you want another way to follow along with us, we have a weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to by visiting our landing page at mongabay.com and clicking on the newsletter button in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s it. Back to our conversation with Carl Safina.

Rachel: There’s so much in what you just said. And I do want to flag a little irony. Not in what you said, but I’m thinking of other conversations that we’ve had. And I’m going to quote you back at yourself if I may. It’s very interesting that I think oftentimes when we think of morals and moral teaching, we think of religions. And yet, as you have pointed out previously, it is also part of religious teachings to see the earth almost as this place of sin, as the place of profanity, and that there’s this other eternal realm that humanity is destined for where everything is perfect. And so, there’s a tension there are no exact there are no animals. And I really do love to think that the best of kind of human imagination of what perfection looks like is, white clouds and white marble and stairs. And there’s no green or blue or color, it’s just people, the limits. I think it really shows the limits of what we are capable of in comparison to what life has produced over billions of years. But there’s a real tension there and an irony there were up with regards to. Where is it that we’re getting our morals from? And what are the codes in the moral teachings that are already there that kind of, rather than speak to a real sense of morality and humanity and justice, actually speak to modes of organizing people in the most efficient way that is beneficial to power relationships? Because it really does seem that under, a system of extractive capitalism, being moral is swimming upstream.

Carl: Using the Western style economy and the Western ways of pricing and seeing how money flows basically. if you look around the world, an incredible amount of influence from the west, but if you try to go back A few thousand years to the original kinds of teachings of Indigenous people or South Asian religions and all the Dharmic religions or East Asian religions slash philosophies like Confucianism, the values and the teachings about the role of. Humans is totally different and in the West it really started mostly with Plato He was the first one to say that the world was created by a god before Plato the Greek gods Weren’t creating things they were jealous. They were they were like a big soap opera. They, weren’t, but a creator god was an idea from Plato. Plato had Jewish fans who took some of these ideas into Jewish theology. Jewish theology formed at first the basis to the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. The Christians super amplified this idea that the earth is not a good place. And that we should keep all our attention on getting off the planet into this perfect realm That exists outside of space and time and that’s the basis for western beliefs and western values comes that way and also actually a lot of the Christian theology actually comes from Zoroaster, from Persia. That’s it came both ways. Anyway, that’s a whole different kind of a conversation. But if you look, Indigenous people, tremendous variety of their cultures, some of them live in the Arctic, some of them live in the rainforest, but pretty much all of them, as far as I can tell, you All saw all living things as family in at least North America. Native cultures. There’s a common phrase, all my relations to refer to all living things, the constant recognition and reminder that we are all related. In the South Asian religions, the idea was that everything in the universe was a network, was a gigantic cosmic web, and the soul that is in us now was in other kinds of living things, and made these journeys in and out, because all life, although all different, Was all equivalent in value and in the east there was a tremendous sense that the apparent opposites that Plato saw as warring dualistic things like up versus down and back versus forth, life versus death, man versus woman, us versus them, me versus you were seen in the. East as necessary opposites that balance the whole and create unity from diversity. So that’s the yin yang idea that everything remains in balance and that the role of humans is to not upset the balances. there were very different ways that people store their place in. Nature in the universe and the West is a real outlier in that regard. And I don’t think that it was a better idea. I think that it excused a tremendous amount of violence. And that I think is why. It has pretty much taken over the place.

Rachel: You mean the sort of transgression of the Earth’s boundaries, and even perhaps of life’s boundaries, and now us living with the results, the symptoms, the eventualities of that system of violence.

Carl: Yes. if you see everything as here to take and use and no, no sense of network or equivalency or balance or family, then you get the tremendous imbalance. That we have and the lack of thinking or caring or frankly even knowing about it. Is really driving all these things all the time,

Rachel: I want to end, Carl, with a huge question which is how can we inject, insert, envelope the systems that we have with a sense of morality, with care and conscience?

Carl: By doing so, I think. I do remember the 1970s when the environmental movement really picked up a lot of momentum and it, was, a matter of what people were taught, what people were talking about. What people were shown and, and values, the air was really dirty. It hurt to breathe in big cities and people decided that was bad. Rivers were so polluted with oil and stuff that the surface of rivers caught fire several times, people decided that’s bad. People wanted to prevent other species from going extinct. And schools began teaching about these things and about, the environment and was needed and what could be done. And, a lot of progress was made, but then it faded. Mostly it faded because it was Seen and felt that caring about the environment and putting money into cleaning up pollution and things like that was just too expensive. So, there was an enormous multi decadal backlash that we are very much experiencing because that backlash is really accelerating. The same thing could be said for. The fact that people who are paid good living wages cost more than cheap labor overseas that you don’t ever have to think about. And that’s, why basically the entire us manufacturing economy, for instance, was just handed over to China where they don’t have environmental laws that cost money or, minimum wages that are expensive. And all we care about is getting stuff cheap. Yeah. We don’t care about what it costs to keep people well and to Have a clean and healthy and abundant world to live in we just want a lot of cheap stuff

Rachel: Carl, thank you very much for joining us today to reflect on the true cost of our actions. Thank you for your time.

Carl: Okay. you’re very welcome and I should add as a coda That when people do decide to make things better they get better and we’ve seen that in various ways. So anyway, thank you for your time. Thanks for having me

Rachel: Thank you.

Mike: So, I want to start if you don’t mind by reading a quote from the essay. And Carl’s describing all the policies that sort of resulted from what he describes as moral reckonings to, protect nature, things like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act in the United States specifically. And he argues that these sort of policies that are based on moral reckonings that are pretty hard and fast black and white policies there’s no room to argue about balancing Industry with these policies, is what he’s arguing here. He writes this, the tragedy of the commons commences when the commoners ignore natural limits and fail to implement policies based on that most crucial of all underutilized concepts enough. And I thought that was a really great little quote, as it were, to summarize some sentiments in this episode. But yeah, what do you think of that?

Rachel: He mentioned the commons quite a bit when I was speaking to him. And that phrase, the tragedy of the commons, I think is a really emotive and fantastic notion, really, for what has happened. I think the one quibble I would have with it, Is that arguably, it’s not the commoners that have in the mass destruction of the commons. The commoners were people who were enclosed off from the commons, who had the commons taken from them. And given that it is, in animal agriculture, it’s four multinationals that drive the vast majority of the industry. If we similarly look at the fossil fuel industry, it’s driven by a handful of companies. The corporate oligarchy really is responsible for the destruction and the commoners are essentially drafted in because there’s very little options under this sort of hegemonic global system of extractivism.

Mike: I agree 1000% with your quibble. The kernel of wisdom that I found in what he was saying, and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I, feel like he was heavily implying at various parts that we don’t teach people in school these systems of exploitation. We don’t teach them about it. He was saying that we’re educated to be consumers, and I agree with him on that. I think that we are largely educated to be consumers rather than like big systems thinkers and One could argue that people with vested interests in holding on to that power Like it that way. And they make it so that our education systems don’t teach us those things one might argue. And so, to that end, I thought his expression of that sentiment was quite prescient of the challenge that we face. But switching gears a little bit, this is not something he necessarily And I was trying to look for okay, what’s the, what’s like some frameworks where we can make a dent in this problem. And I came across a study called ecological empathy, relational theory and practice from a PhD candidate named Lauren Lambert from Arizona state. And it. It is fascinating, I have to say, and I would love for you to read this and report back to

Rachel: Oh, I will.

Mike: Let me know what you think about it because it, I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, it’s, massive, basically She is positing that we can make big policy gains by cultivating something that she calls ecological empathy which is a way of removing this sort of anthropocentric view of policy, which I think Carl was alluding to that. We drill into people’s heads from when they’re young and through when we graduate college, like we were just given this anthropocentric view of the world. And this paper from Lambert looks at ways, to break that can reconnect us to this empathy, where humans, Empathize in a very real sense with more than human systems, beings, and nature. And yeah, I wish that I could talk with you about it like right now. But it’s really cool, and I want you to read it.

Rachel: I absolutely will read it and definitely link it in the show notes for everyone to go and have a read themselves. I think it’s critical, and I think that this is also what Carl actually explicitly said when he was talking about the other ancient wisdoms and current Indigenous wisdoms that see the world as fundamentally relational. And it is Western thought that has created these binaries and divisions, and sought to, master, dominate and extract essentially, thus totally forgetting the web of life that also our human systems depend on. And in some research that I’ve been doing this year, on empathy, but more particularly on violence there’s some really interesting sociological data that is out that shows Just how destructive this sense of anthropocentrism or even human supremacy is. These sociologists I can’t remember which group I’m referring to. It might have been Dont and Salman. But they showed that, an attitude of human supremacy over the natural world and over animals is directly linked to higher beliefs of racism and higher beliefs of sexism. So, it’s not just a morality around how do we treat the more than human world. There’s also a morality around understanding how we treat the more than human world also directly impacts how we treat fellow human beings. Because we cannot exist in a hierarchy where it’s just humans and then everything else because the system is fundamentally hierarchical. And that’s how, we’ve all come into a world in which there is one particular political identity that is on, at the top of the heap to the detriment of everybody.

Mike: Yeah. I believe it was the environmentalist, John Francis, who said that how we treat the natural world is how we treat each other. And ever since I heard that it’s has just stuck with me. Something else I wanted to, highlight here is the somewhat debated, but scientifically studied concept of mirror, not concept of actual physical mirror neurons in our brain, where it’s a thing that where when you see another human being experiencing pain, you feel it yourself. It’s what makes you flinch when you see someone have an injury like in front of you and you wince because you are feeling that same thing. And there wasn’t a study done with monkeys and an MRI that watched like a lab assistant walked into the lab and opened the door. Like a nut and took the nut out and ate it. And the monkey had a mirror neuron response of what it does when it itself also eats a nut. And so, it shows that we have this capacity for this, capacity for empathy or interrelatedness is shared by a lot of beings. And I think it does lead to, I think at least the, science points to that, it leads to us having a much more A much more profound sense of the interrelatedness we have with our environment, if we see it suffer at least that is what all the data that I’m reading is saying, but it’s a dense topic that I feel like would be really awesome to explore on another episode. Perhaps we could interview someone on ecological empathy.

Rachel: Oh yeah, that’d be great.

Mike: But yeah, I thought that was very topical to what you and Carl were discussing.

Rachel: I think on that, Mike, this is something I I’ve been reckoning with this year. The seeming idea or belief that we have that we can live in a world that is Fundamentally built on violence and not be impacted by that on any level And I’ve been thinking about it with regards to you know The mental health crisis that we’re seeing sweeping the world right now, particularly the western world and certainly with regards to The really high rates and this is anecdotal evidence This is not you know, I don’t know the actual empirical data on this but the high rates I see of anxiety and sadness. I want to say sadness instead of depression, certainly in activists and fellow environmental journalists who are really on the front lines of witnessing the destruction and synthesizing the data coming in. And I think that it was a sense of madness, really, that we could witness so much violence around us all the time and not be hurt by that, even if that violence isn’t directly impacting our physical bodies, even though we know that violence from these systems trickles down. And I think it’s a really important point to highlight that it’s not just a question of morality, even though morality is seemingly the kind of one thing that we have left when we’re cased into all of these different systems, and we must make different moral decisions. There’s also a really strong argument for well-being, for wellness, for health that comes to deconstructing these systems of violence because there’s just No way to live in amongst this and not be impacted by it And that’s what these studies to me suggest That when we are seeing, the destruction of the rainforest when we see Oh god, I saw actually it was on Mongabay’s Instagram profile last night. Photos that have been put up of a mine Recently, I can’t remember where and there was the photo of the forest beforehand and then the photo of the land totally decimated and due to this huge mining activity. And it hurts. It hurts and it’s frightening because the earth’s body is our body, and we depend on the earth and it goes beyond this kind of intellectual thing. It really, you begin to feel it in your body, I think, the more and more that you look at it and there’s no way to, to escape it. We must deconstruct these things, not just out of a sense of morality, but out of a sense of survival, I think.

Mike: Yeah, 1,000 percent agree. I think that like subconsciously we do, and again, my eye evidence is anecdotal as well. We do understand that at a very deep level. I can also relate to what you’re saying and the material I cover definitely does. And watching environmental destruction since I was a kid also affected me too, really emotionally, deeply affected me. What you’re speaking of is definitely it’s not just a subjective concept. It’s a very real objective thing. And I think we all know that it is at least subconsciously. Great points. Would love to dive into this topic further. Definitely.

Rachel: But, let’s get that PhD candidate on the show

Mike: Let’s do that. Yeah, let’s, get her on.

Rachel: That’d be wonderful. That’d be wonderful.

Mike: All right, Rachel. I’m going to close it down there. And I’ll see you on the next one.

Rachel: See you on the next one. Thank you, Mike.

Mike (note): If you want to read Karl’s recent paper or Mongabay’s investigation into Dalian Ocean Fishing and the other studies that were mentioned in this episode, you can find links in the episode summary. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please do leave us a review and share this podcast with your friends and your networks doing so helps us reach a wider audience, but you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor at patreon.com/Mongabay. Did you know that Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet? So, pledging a dollar per month does make a really big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So if you’re a fan of our audio reports from nature’s frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more in support the Mongabay Newscast. You can join the listeners who have downloaded the Mongabay Newscast over half a million times, by subscribing to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, or you can download our app for apple and Android devices search either app store for the Mongabay Newscast app to gain fingertip access to new shows and all of our previous episodes. But you can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at mongabay.com or you can follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook and TikTok where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube at @MongabayTV. Thank you as always for listening.