Ghosts in the Green Machine

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Speaker 7 This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.
So Earth Day is coming up in just a couple of days, and we wanted to take a moment to truly consider the value of Earth,

Speaker 7 which is admittedly a sort of doomed and impossible task, but it's also super fascinating to watch people try.

Speaker 7 So today, we've got two stories for you about people attempting to evaluate the invaluable.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 join me if you will, take a sip of water.

Speaker 7 Cheers, the blue planet that gives us all life. And enjoy this episode from the archive, which we are calling Ghosts in the green machine

Speaker 10 wait you're listening

Speaker 3 to radio lab

Speaker 3 radio lab from

Speaker 12 w n y

Speaker 3 i'm robert krillowich this is radio lab the podcast

Speaker 3 and today we're going to talk about global warfare

Speaker 3 A vast battle across the planet on a scale that is really hard to believe, involving trillions of deaths. And yet,

Speaker 3 we really need this war because without it, I wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here.
Jad wouldn't be here. And you may have noticed he isn't here.

Speaker 3 And it's not because of a war, it's because he had a baby. But before Jad went on paternity leave, we sat down with Ari Daniel Shapiro.
Okay. And he told us this story.

Speaker 10 Here it comes. That's right, yeah.

Speaker 11 So here we are at the Center for the Culture of Marine Phytoplankton. This is Willie.

Speaker 15 Willie Wilson. Willie Wilson is his name?

Speaker 16 Yeah. That's tough.

Speaker 17 Just like his grandfather, actually.

Speaker 11 Yeah, my dad's William Wilson. There's a long line of William Wilson's.

Speaker 18 Your son?

Speaker 11 My son is Angus, but he's Angus William Wilson.

Speaker 3 I love that guy.

Speaker 17 Willie works at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 17 And he studies these tiny plant-like creatures that live in the sea called phytoplankton.

Speaker 17 He keeps them in a fridge in these little test tubes, half full of kind of greenish water. Let's have a look at this.

Speaker 17 He pulled one out and showed it to me. And it doesn't really look like there's that much going on in there.

Speaker 11 But actually, right at the bottom, you can see what looks like a

Speaker 17 white.

Speaker 16 What is it?

Speaker 17 It's the carnage of war.

Speaker 3 Huh.

Speaker 17 In that test tube that Willie's holding are millions of tiny single-celled plants called coccolithophores?

Speaker 16 Cococcolithophores.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 And there are lots of them in the sea.

Speaker 11 There's probably about 100,000 of these coccolithophores in a teaspoon of seawater.

Speaker 17 Tell me about the coccolithophytophilic. What do they look like?

Speaker 11 They're basically like

Speaker 11 tiny little

Speaker 11 translucent balls with, you know, there's a slight tinge of green. But the key thing is they're outside of that ball.

Speaker 17 It has these white plates.

Speaker 11 Tiny circular shields of chalk.

Speaker 17 Because the coccolithophores are fighting for their lives.

Speaker 16 Fighting with whom?

Speaker 3 Each other?

Speaker 19 Viruses.

Speaker 17 These viruses that are shaped like

Speaker 17 diamonds.

Speaker 17 So here's what happens. Imagine you're a coccolithophore.
Okay. Floating in the ocean.
and along comes this diamond-shaped virus and it jams its diamond tip into you.

Speaker 11 Between these plates and actually get inside the cell.

Speaker 17 The chinks in the armor.

Speaker 11 That's right, it's like the chinks in the armor.

Speaker 17 And the coccolithophore just engulfs it.

Speaker 11 And the virus thinks, yes, I'm in here. And then it sort of makes straight to the nucleus.

Speaker 17 And it's at that moment that the viral takeover begins. The virus kind of hijacks the cellular machinery that's usually used by the coccolithophore to make more coccolithophore stuff

Speaker 17 and it starts making more viruses

Speaker 17 so inside the coccolithophore now there are these little diamonds multiplying yeah they're filling up that space and eventually all these viruses head out of the coccolithophore in big belches or like a steady stream of viruses wow and each one of these viruses has the ability to to go on and infect another coccolithophore cell.

Speaker 17 In fact, those coccolithophores in that test tube that Willie showed me.

Speaker 11 If I shake, this stuck to the bottom a little bit, yeah.

Speaker 17 Those were in the process of dying.

Speaker 11 You smell that, yeah. So what you're smelling there, that's the infection.
That's dimethyl sulfide, you're smelling. So the infection is already occurring in this culture.

Speaker 17 And when the coccolithophore dies, those white shields kind of fall off the cell.

Speaker 11 They sort of gradually sort of rain off over the course of the infection.

Speaker 16 So as it's dying, after it's spewed out these viruses, it just sheds its plate and it kind of

Speaker 16 and then it dies. Yeah.
And that creates this white chalkiness. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well so this means like the coccolithophores are not doing very well.

Speaker 17 Well they've got a couple of tricks up their little calcified sleeves.

Speaker 17 Sometimes when a virus enters the coccolithophore will send out a chemical signal.

Speaker 11 They're sort of shouting, hey, it's too late for me.

Speaker 17 But save yourselves.

Speaker 17 And initially, this signal is pretty weak in the water. But as more and more coccolithophores are infected, the chorus of this chemical beacon grows louder and louder.

Speaker 11 And so the other cells, they hear these messages.

Speaker 17 And they change by messing with their DNA a bit. And they go from having those white shields on the outside to having these jaggedy scales.

Speaker 11 Which we think might be impenetrable.

Speaker 17 Scales instead of these plates. That's right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 16 Why aren't they just scaly all the time?

Speaker 17 Because when they're scaly, they can't be the best coccolithophores they can be. They just don't grow as well.

Speaker 16 So scaly is an adaptation against the viruses.

Speaker 17 Exactly. And then finally, if all else fails,

Speaker 11 program cell death.

Speaker 17 The coccolithophores just commit suicide.

Speaker 11 It just shuts down and kills itself to prevent propagation of viruses.

Speaker 17 But over time, the viruses have figured out how to prevent the cell from killing itself.

Speaker 17 So it delays the death of the coccolithophore for as long as possible to maximize the number of viruses that can get out.

Speaker 3 Wow, this is serious.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's like an arms race.

Speaker 11 There's a constant battle to be fitter than you were several generations ago. And without

Speaker 17 this battle is happening all through the surface of the ocean.

Speaker 17 There are legions of coccolithophores dying all the time.

Speaker 17 And the coccolithophores are shedding their white shields.

Speaker 11 It's like taking millions of tiny little mirrors and putting them in the surface of the ocean.

Speaker 17 So many that you can actually see this carnage from space.

Speaker 16 You can see this from space?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 11 You get

Speaker 11 the massive blooms that cover almost the whole of the North Atlantic.

Speaker 11 I mean, you get this sort of milky bloom that covers anything from you know off the the west coast of scotland under southern iceland almost all the way to newfoundland um in the southern hemisphere you get this sort of massive milkiness that circumnavigates the the globe these vast swirls of milky water curling around islands and continents and that's all carnage from this battle billions and billions of soldiers that have fallen in the field

Speaker 16 that we can view from space It probably is trillions if you're talking on that scale.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I think.

Speaker 3 It's the trillions.

Speaker 17 Quadrillion?

Speaker 16 You think it's wearing the quadrillions? Just say it, see how it feels.

Speaker 17 There are quadrillions of soldiers dying.

Speaker 12 How did that feel?

Speaker 3 It felt good.

Speaker 17 If I were to be an astronaut, how often would I see these sorts of blooms?

Speaker 11 All the time, somewhere on the planet.

Speaker 17 Every day, every hour?

Speaker 11 Every day, every hour.

Speaker 10 There's going to be a bloom going on somewhere.

Speaker 11 You You know, a good example is off the Norwegian fjords. They start in the fjords in late April into May time, and then they sort of creep out of the fjords like this huge living

Speaker 11 amoeba. Fishermen hate it because the fish can't see the lures, so they can't catch the fish anymore.

Speaker 17 And as the shields rain off, and fall down to the ocean floor, they build up and build up over time.

Speaker 11 Millions of years of sedimentation of these sort of chalk particles.

Speaker 17 That's actually what led to the creation of the cliffs of Dover, the white cliffs of Dover in England. Shut up, really?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 11 This is sort of geology in action.

Speaker 17 And not just that, when the coccolithophores get decimated by the virus, it kind of clears out the ocean for other phytoplankton to bloom. And then they get mowed down by their viruses.

Speaker 17 And then the coccolithophores might bloom again, and then they get wiped out. And this cycle...

Speaker 11 I mean, all these battles, I mean, it's all responsible for about half the oxygen that we breathe.

Speaker 3 Really? Half the oxygen we breathe?

Speaker 17 Half the oxygen.

Speaker 17 Because when the phytoplankton bloom, they take in carbon dioxide and they release a puff of oxygen.

Speaker 17 And then they're cut down by these viruses,

Speaker 17 but they grow back up again,

Speaker 17 and another breath is released.

Speaker 17 So the whole system is

Speaker 17 just kind of breathing.

Speaker 11 People think of the lungs of the planet

Speaker 11 are the rainforests. And that's kind of half the picture.
But every other breath we take comes from the phyloplankton in the ocean that are going through these battles

Speaker 11 on a daily basis.

Speaker 16 So this is a battle that rages every single day somewhere in our oceans.

Speaker 17 Yeah, we need the battle to live.

Speaker 7 After the break, we go even deeper. into the question of how much is nature worth anyway

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Speaker 7 Lulu, Radiolab. Today we're talking about the things that nature does that are mostly hidden to us.
So we thought it would make sense to try to look as objectively as we can

Speaker 7 into what it's all even worth.

Speaker 13 So we think of ecosystems as just kind of sitting there.

Speaker 13 Actually, they're doing things. If they weren't doing them for us, we would have to pay to do them artificially.
For example, cotton farms in South Texas.

Speaker 13 So, you know, the farmers are doing their thing.

Speaker 19 Like this guy.

Speaker 13 James Parker. Planting their cotton, they're collecting it.

Speaker 14 I farmed about, I don't know, usually five to six, seven hundred acres of cotton. so say 2,000 bales.

Speaker 13 They're doing what farmers do.

Speaker 14 I spend a lot of time on a tractor and

Speaker 14 you have to check your water every morning, every evening.

Speaker 13 Meanwhile, they have all this extra help in the air. Yes.
They have bats.

Speaker 14 How many bats are out there, you really don't know.

Speaker 11 Flying all around.

Speaker 13 The bats eat the equivalent of two-thirds of their own weight. insects every night.

Speaker 3 Wow. They eat all night long all kinds of bugs.

Speaker 13 A whole bunch of pests that would otherwise be eating the cotton.

Speaker 3 Now a few years ago, a guy named John Westphal did a calculation. Just to see how this arrangement was working out.

Speaker 14 He came out to my farm and did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him and those girls were out there all hours of the night listening to what the bats were saying.

Speaker 13 Each year, the farmers, collectively, they make about four or five million dollars off of these farms.

Speaker 3 The question was, how much of this was because of the bats? Because, you know, bats are natural natural pesticides.

Speaker 14 You know, the more they're eaten, the less I got to spray.

Speaker 13 And here's what the scientists figured out: out of four to five million dollars, it was around $700,000 that you could ascribe to the bats.

Speaker 11 It's just beautiful. Wow.

Speaker 16 I mean, it does make me think that if you're those farmers, you should be compensating the bats somehow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, yeah.

Speaker 13 It does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value, that nature has that we generally just totally ignore.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 16 we talked to a guy who didn't ignore it.

Speaker 22 My name is Robert Costanza.

Speaker 3 In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute limit.

Speaker 22 Yes. So the question was: what's the value of all of these ecosystem services globally?

Speaker 13 All the services on Earth.

Speaker 3 You know, it's bugs eating leaves, worms turning the soil, beetles chewing tree stumps, coral reeves protecting cities during storms. Everything.

Speaker 22 We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done around the country and the the world.

Speaker 13 Like the bat study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms, they looked at tropical forests, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean, woodlands, temperate forests, you know, it goes on and on, grasslands.

Speaker 16 This must be some Excel spreadsheet.

Speaker 13 It's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from health.

Speaker 22 It can get tricky.

Speaker 3 So Costanza and his colleagues took all these different studies, summed them together, did a whole bunch of math, and

Speaker 3 came up with a number.

Speaker 13 Which, in today's dollars, is $142.7 trillion dollars per year of services and that's more than all of the gross national products of the world

Speaker 13 that's how valuable the services of nature are

Speaker 16 yeah let me ask you like i get the i get the way this would work with a bat like the bats eating the bugs but like how do you do it with like

Speaker 16 with like a like a field or something like do you just walk through and you're like oh that's 20 bucks of services that's 50 like how do you even figure out what the services are well they they came up with a list

Speaker 13 so it the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about because different ecosystems provide different services for example

Speaker 13 a a salt marsh

Speaker 10 and we are in the water now yes we're in the water

Speaker 18 What is wait, so a salt marsh, is it like the Florida wetlands, but salty?

Speaker 16 I suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is.

Speaker 13 Salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast.

Speaker 10 Got it. Yep, we're standing in about a foot of water here.
We're quickly approaching high tide.

Speaker 3 We sent one of our producers, Simon Adler, to a nearby salt marsh.

Speaker 16 Partially to Hazen.

Speaker 10 Your boots are much more waterproof.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But really, to talk to this guy.

Speaker 10 My name is Adam Welchell, and I'm the director of science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut.

Speaker 3 And Adam gave Simon a kind of inventory of...

Speaker 10 Some of the services provided by coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that have been provided over time.

Speaker 13 One of the things it does is it takes water that's coming in from inland and that's laden with all sorts of pollutants, all sorts of bad stuff.

Speaker 18 The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle.

Speaker 16 And then very often the marsh grass will suck up that water into the roots and clean it up.

Speaker 13 Yep. So you could ask very simply, how much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean?

Speaker 10 One second. Well, there is one other study I wanted to.

Speaker 16 Adam Welshall said that scientists in New England have already figured that out.

Speaker 10 For flood control, water supply protection, pollution control, it's roughly about $31.22

Speaker 10 per hectare per year.

Speaker 3 Then you got to add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plate.

Speaker 10 $338 annually per acre.

Speaker 16 Then there are the bird watchers that buy lattes that support the local economy.

Speaker 10 $490

Speaker 10 per hectare.

Speaker 16 And then there's habitat provisioning.

Speaker 3 The list goes on and on and on and on.

Speaker 13 You do get kind of obsessed with it.

Speaker 13 You start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously.

Speaker 13 And it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before.

Speaker 15 There's this galling element, though, or this aspect. Like, when I first came across the.

Speaker 16 At this point, our producer Tim Howard jumped into the interview, and you'll also hear our producer Soren Wheeler in just a second.

Speaker 15 I do feel like, in an example, like the salt marsh, which cleans water, that's all reliant on people being there that need the water.

Speaker 15 So, if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?

Speaker 16 But Tim, haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get

Speaker 16 like if you make the aesthetic argument which is that nature should be should be preserved for its own sake there's a whole category of humanity that just doesn't respond to that argument it's this becomes a way to

Speaker 15 talk across the aisle but it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of

Speaker 13 a paid leave out it can't really be infinite value i mean what's like a mother's love you don't think your mother's love is priceless i mean you know okay i i totally accept that there is this sort of priceless aspect of nature.

Speaker 13 But if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make. If somebody comes to you and says, okay, you've got these lovely mangroves.

Speaker 13 Now, it turns out that this sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aquaculture.

Speaker 16 Because shrimp farms need lots of seawater, so it makes sense to put them by the sea.

Speaker 13 We're going to put in these farms, we're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Speaker 13 If you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving, that might be a really powerful argument.

Speaker 13 Now into that kind of a discussion you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there very quietly doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things.

Speaker 13 In fact, they've done these kind of calculations. And in some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp.
So it's stupid.

Speaker 13 It's just stupid in a very basic sense to wantonly replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture.

Speaker 16 Is that a hypothetical situation?

Speaker 23 No. That's a co-that's what we're asked.

Speaker 3 This is Glenn Marie Lang. She's an environmental economist for the World Bank, and she says very often she finds herself in exactly this kind of conversation.

Speaker 3 Particularly, you know, I work for the World Bank, so our primary clients are our governments.

Speaker 16 Philippines, Vietnam.

Speaker 23 And when you're talking to a minister of finance and saying, you know what, you really need to.

Speaker 16 I know jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value.

Speaker 23 They'll say, well, yeah, that's true, but that means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget. So you've got to really make a strong argument about the benefits.

Speaker 23 That's really where the rubber hits the road.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, that's it. Here's the counter-argument.
It comes from Doug Macaulay, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Speaker 12 The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money.

Speaker 12 And then we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.

Speaker 16 What do you do in a situation, he says, where just say a bunch of rivers are running dry and they're

Speaker 16 quote, depreciating in value.

Speaker 12 You know, by the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets. That makes me feel really uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 He says it's just kind of a weird way to think about nature.

Speaker 12 We had a proposal here in the state of California to make gay marriage legal.

Speaker 12 And economists had a look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California.

Speaker 12 Well, it's good to know that.

Speaker 3 I appreciate having that information in front of me.

Speaker 12 However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation, and I would say that when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state.

Speaker 12 They're thinking about a different set of values.

Speaker 23 On the other hand, I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these services, basically they don't get counted.

Speaker 16 They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn Marie Lang.

Speaker 16 And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty?

Speaker 24 The parable of the bees.

Speaker 3 We heard this first from writer J.B. McKinnon, who says the story begins.

Speaker 24 In Mao County in central China, rural area, fairly remote.

Speaker 3 Lush green mountains filled with apple orchards.

Speaker 24 And apple orcharding was the main business. And according to J.B., in the 1990s, the wild bees of Mao County slowly started to disappear.

Speaker 24 And there's a few different reasons reasons given for that.

Speaker 24 It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

Speaker 3 But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one, because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market-based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples.

Speaker 3 So they started spraying pesticide.

Speaker 24 Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others. End result is the bees stopped buzzing in Mao County.

Speaker 3 Which, if you're an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

Speaker 24 As bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar,

Speaker 24 they're dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So, if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then

Speaker 24 you don't get fertile flowers

Speaker 24 to turn into fruit.

Speaker 3 And obviously, if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income.

Speaker 16 So, what do you do?

Speaker 24 If You're an apple farmer and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers.

Speaker 24 And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand.

Speaker 25 In Mandarin Chinese, we say Zheng Gong Shoufen. So basically, that means a manual pollination.

Speaker 25 This is Harold Thibault. I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper Le Monde.

Speaker 3 A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao County, so he flies to Chengdu, and he and a friend hop in a car.

Speaker 25 We drive for like five or six hours until we reach this village, Nanxin.

Speaker 3 Tiny little village.

Speaker 25 It's like only a few houses. And then we took a small road between the fields and we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the trees, like on the apple trees.

Speaker 24 Straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches. Men and women that I've seen in photos in any case.

Speaker 3 Harold and his friend took pictures and if you look at those pictures you'll see the farmers holding a little brush.

Speaker 24 This little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

Speaker 3 And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen and then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen.

Speaker 3 They dip their brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again and they dip the brush back in again and they paint again and they dip again and they paint again.

Speaker 24 To make sure that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.

Speaker 3 We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.

Speaker 25 It was very strange to see

Speaker 25 humans doing the job of the bees.

Speaker 3 God, what a pain in the ass that sounds like.

Speaker 24 Yeah, the image of

Speaker 24 these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world through environmental circles.

Speaker 24 And the message that it seemed to send was that this is what happens if you lose biodiversity. You end up standing in the trees doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing for free.
For free.

Speaker 26 Those people are just like human bees.

Speaker 16 But then this guy enters the story.

Speaker 17 This is Yin Sun Chen.

Speaker 26 Yeah, human bees.

Speaker 16 Four years ago, he traveled to Mao County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County.

Speaker 16 But what he discovered, weirdly, was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.

Speaker 3 More production, more production.

Speaker 26 This can be confirmed.

Speaker 26 There are more production for a ham pollination apple tree than a bee pollination apple tree. Humans are more efficient.

Speaker 14 Really?

Speaker 3 I mean, the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?

Speaker 23 Yes.

Speaker 24 A lot better. Fruit production went up 30%.

Speaker 3 That's what the farmers told Yin Sun Chen, which is kind of. Amazing.

Speaker 17 The only word I remember.

Speaker 26 Amazing. Because I think ham pollination can pollinate more thoroughly.
They can pollinate every flower.

Speaker 16 And bees don't pollinate every flower?

Speaker 24 Bees are a little bit,

Speaker 24 you know, they're a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating.

Speaker 3 You're so polite.

Speaker 24 They don't like it if it's cold. They don't like it if it's damp.
They don't like it if it's windy.

Speaker 3 In all those cases, bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off.

Speaker 24 But you send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom,

Speaker 24 and they're going to do it.

Speaker 24 And there was the additional benefit of the people that you paid, they'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries, they'd spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.

Speaker 16 So, here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are, you know, this whole parable of biodiversity.

Speaker 3 It turns out maybe the lesson's just the opposite, that actually we don't need bees, and maybe we never did.

Speaker 24 If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that

Speaker 24 some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places, or that we might even do better to take care of those processes ourselves. Right.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 25 let me find my notes about the wages exactly.

Speaker 16 But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold Thibault told us that when he visited Nan Chen.

Speaker 25 I talked with one farmer, his name is Zheng Zhugao. He's 38.
And he said, in his opinion,

Speaker 25 the hand pollination

Speaker 16 might disappear in a few years.

Speaker 3 Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.

Speaker 25 The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them. Basically, it's not efficient economically to do the end pollination anymore.

Speaker 25 That's what a lot of farmers say.

Speaker 17 Now they're likely thinking, damn, we need those bees back.

Speaker 3 Right, yeah.

Speaker 25 Problem is, there are no bees in those villages anymore.

Speaker 3 One farmer told Harold, beekeepers in other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used.

Speaker 3 As for when wild bees might come back?

Speaker 25 Well, for this we have no idea. It's very hard to make a prediction.
If you ask the farmers, they're like,

Speaker 11 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Here's where that story leaves me. It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go.
Putting a value,

Speaker 3 even a precise and thoughtful value, on a bee or on a pound of pesticide, you do it and you think you're smart, but then the value changes.

Speaker 3 The bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing to being worth everything. All within a few years, this is what markets do.

Speaker 3 They swing back, forth, and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can. So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong.
That's why you know this is a dumb thing.

Speaker 16 Well, no, no, I want to argue the other side for a second. Nowhere in this story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, you know what, the bees do have value.
Here's the number.

Speaker 13 In fact, you know what, Carl, when we were talking to him, told us, you know, there have been estimates estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees is $190 billion.

Speaker 16 So that's globally, right? But still, there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero.

Speaker 3 But remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued more than bees go down and bees go up. You have to have a lot of numbers in your head.

Speaker 16 But here's what I like about this idea is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking. You can't just say don't do that.

Speaker 16 I mean, that's the thing that conservationists say, don't, don't, don't. But if you say don't do that, because here's the value.

Speaker 12 Here's the loss, you're going to see.

Speaker 16 Yeah, here's the loss. Well, then that actually gives the whole precautionary don't thing some teeth.

Speaker 3 Except for this, that if you go businessy on nature and you're wrong.

Speaker 23 There are irreversibilities.

Speaker 3 That's how environmental economist Glenn Marie Lang puts it.

Speaker 23 This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems, and what we produce. You smash your car, hey, someone can build a new one.
If you lose the bees,

Speaker 23 many instances, you cannot bring them back.

Speaker 16 So, the question we got to is:

Speaker 16 is there another way to think about the value of nature?

Speaker 16 I mean, a way that's not economic and therefore short-sighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty, because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

Speaker 24 The best I was able to do thinking about this, writer J.B.

Speaker 24 McKinnon again, was when it struck me that, in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diversity, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do is like an extension of our own brains.

Speaker 24 There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own that we can think of it as as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we as humans are able to draw.

Speaker 24 And that when we draw down on

Speaker 24 that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves.

Speaker 24 In a sense,

Speaker 24 we are doing harm to our own ability to think and

Speaker 24 to dream.

Speaker 3 J.B. McKinnon's book is called The Once and Future World.
He's written many, but this one is my fave.

Speaker 16 Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's reporting in the New York Times on this topic, is really what got us launched into this whole thing.

Speaker 3 And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Adler, whose production assistance was invaluable.

Speaker 16 That was him freezing his ass off in the marsh.

Speaker 3 I talked so long, and

Speaker 3 he nearly died.

Speaker 3 His toes fell off, I think.

Speaker 3 Anyway.

Speaker 11 Thank you, Simon.

Speaker 17 Thank you, Simon.

Speaker 16 And thank you guys for listening. I'm Jad Abumra.
I'm Robert Groich. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 27 Hi, I'm Paolo Mara Biggs, and I'm calling from Nuuli, American Sahamoa. And here are the staff credits.
Radiolab was created by Jad Abimrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Speaker 27 Lulu Miller and Natap Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.
Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 27 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Namasamandam, Matt Kielty, Enna McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sara Sandbach, Anissa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 27 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Bapatai, Tele Laba, Maro.

Speaker 28 Hey, I'm Steph. I'm from Melbourne, Australia.

Speaker 28 Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 28 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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