‘How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature’ is out now, available from all good bookstores. Or you can buy a copy from me here – I ship daily, print on demand, all over the world! This week I did an interview on How to Survive the Next 100 Years with Kelly Higgins-Devine on ABC Radio Queensland about the role of animals in ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More, intelligence, encounters with stingrays, lessons from nature and our mental and physical health.
Listen to the interview extract here
Transcript: Interview, How to Survive the Next 100 Years
Introduction
Higgins-Devine: Simon Mustoe is an ecologist and naturalist. His latest book is called, How to Survive the Next 100 Years. Hi, Simon. Hi Kelly, how are you? Now your book mentions Ecuador as the first country to recognize the rights of nature. What right does nature have to exist?
Mustoe: That’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? That was a lovely introduction, by the way, about the wolves. And perhaps actually starting with that example is really interesting because in exploring that subject, you find that there’s a recent study done on the impact of wolves on the ecosystem and, sure, changes have occurred, but there’s this debate among scientists about, well, is it good or is it bad? Right? They can’t really figure it out. And the scientists pretty much concluded that life was too short to actually work that out. So we’re in this kind of weird situation where, you know, in our heart of hearts, we, in our knowledge, our wisdom, we know that an ecosystem without its predators is missing something incredibly important.
So, Beth Fulton, for example, at CSIRO, who is a leading scientist on ecosystem modellingThe process, either mathematically or in the human brain, of creating an internal version of something that we can refer to, to better understand how it functions and our place within. Scientific modelling is where we take the best knowledge we have and build a version of what will happen, if we assume certain parameters. For example, we might model More, will say that if you remove sharks from the system, it collapses like a house of cards, right? But we can’t prove it. So the question you’ve asked is, really, do animals have an inalienable right to exist? We’re beginning to kind of work out that, yes, they do. And in fact, the reason they do is because almost everything that we depend on for our own lives is in the ecosystems we live in are regulated by animals. Even though if we can’t prove it, we need to understand and give them some autonomy.
Overfishing?
Higgins-Devine: I’m going to go to one of the biggest problems that I think we’re facing, using too much land, taking too many resources in one hit, such as overfishing, in that we have this need for so much that we just take the resources out with very little thought of sustainability.
Mustoe: Or if you talk to colleagues of mine, they’ll tell you that under their evidence, the Australian fishes, for example, are very well managed and quite sustainably managed. And in fact, interestingly, a lot of that sustainability has been driven by the fishing community itself. So it’s come from a place where, I suppose economically, the fishing society wants to sustain itself, and so it’s self-determined its own levels of take to be more sustainable.
It’s a problem, but there are also many examples where it isn’t. And I think the question we need to ask ourselves more is where we connect with it. So it’s easy to understand where I say a commercial fishing industry connects with fish.
But for the rest of us, for example, who live along, say the coastline, where fish abundance may be thwarted by spearfishing, maybe in some cases, fishing that’s unregulated recreation, and it’s having some impact, we know in places like Port Phillip Bay, we’ve lost almost all our resident reef fish, which are the reef building fish. We need to ask ourselves a different question, like how do we depend on it as members of the public? And it’s not as clear cut as a straight-forward monetary question that it’s more about our values and the way we connect with nature. But there’s lessons we can learn from certainly looking at animals and thinking more about what it means to ourselves and our lives.
What lessons from nature means to our lives
Higgins-Devine: What do you think it means to our lives?
Mustoe: Well, so we’re going through a process at the moment with a project here where we’re asking people three simple questions. The first question we’re asking members of the public is, what do you do to connect with your local environment? In my case, it will go snorkeling or swimming or walking along the coast. And the second question we’re asking them is, tricky question is, can you describe the feature of the ecosystem?
The system that you are looking for that enables you to do the thing that you enjoy doing. And the third and most vital question, the one that’s never been asked is, how does it make you feel? And this is important because when you start to talk to people about that with some vigour, you find that people are like, oh, actually, now you mention it. If I didn’t have access to that, I might find it quite hard to work. And it’s probably having a huge impact on my mental health.
I made my physical health, my family life. As you speak, the surface, you realize that maybe the majority of our economists, certainly the resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More of our minds and our bodies and our ability to function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More in an economy and thrive, is to a great degree, I mean, I’ve challenged anybody on this show to tell me that they don’t go outdoors and seek a specific place that is a value to them in order that they can work more productively or have a happier life. That’s, I think, what it means. And it means that means something slightly different to everybody. But overall, I think we all share the same kind of feeling.
Pets and wildlife
Higgins-Devine: What about those who might have that connection with domesticated pets, for example? Is that the sort of thing you’re talking about?
Mustoe: Well, it’s the same principle. I think when we look into the eyes of our dogs or our pets, we see a sense of… It goes back to your first question about, I guess, right to exist. We see a creature that has its own autonomy. It’s not something we control.
It has a life, it has thought processes. I think when we look into the eyes of our pets and we enjoy our pets, when we go out to nature and we have those moments, again, I suspect most Australians at some point have had one of those moments because we’re very lucky to live in a country with incredible wildlife where something confides in you and has a second where it kind of looks you in the eye and you go, wow, that was unexpected. It leaves an imprint on you. And it says something about our own psyche. I think it’s almost like a window into our own minds.
A Stingray encounter
Higgins-Devine: Yeah. Well, you have a lovely story in the book about an interaction with a stingray that rests on your feet while you’re having a bit of a paddle. Can you talk to us about that interaction and what it meant to you?
Mustoe: Yeah, so that was one of those moments, right. So I was snorkeling. It was about this time of year, so it was getting a bit cold in the water. And we were getting in late evening.
I’d seen some seabirds and I’d seen to be quite a bit of fish offshore. And we went in for a third swim late in the evening. We were quite cold already. And as we got into the water, there was just bait fish everywhere. It was like a swarm of just swirling around our bodies.
And it was only maybe waste, or chest deep water. So I could stand if I needed to. I could look in the water and I had my camera.
There were salmon coming in and eating this bait fish. And they were colliding off my legs. It was so close.
And there were seabirds diving in around my head. So I dropped down to take photos. And all of a sudden, a stingray appeared, a huge stingray. And there was a genuine moment of pause between the two of us.
We looked at each other. And the stingray actually, to my surprise, stopped. Everything it was doing. And it turned around and it swam straight at me. So I just stood there. And it rested its head on my feet and kind of looked up at me. And we kind of, if you like, did a bit of a handshake. Not physically, but mentally a handshake.
Like, welcome. And then it started feeding around in front of me. So I put myself up at the top of the water and went over the top of it and made sure I kept out of its way. It kept out of my way. And I took photos and it fed on fish. And it came back into this second time. So there’s that acknowledgement of two intelligent animals doing what they were doing.
So the stingray was able to be a stingray with me in its presence. And I think, again, the changing relationship we have with animals as we become more outdoorsy and perhaps animal populations change and we get thrown together a little bit more. I think more and more people are having those moments. And it’s really altering the way we relate to each other.
Animal intelligence
Higgins-Devine: I’m speaking with ecologist and naturalist Simon Mustoe, you’re with Kelly Higgins, Divine on ABC Radio, Brisbane and Queensland. Simon’s book is How to Survive the Next 100 Years. Do you think we just underestimate the intelligence of especially wild animals, like domestic animals, domesticated animals we do interact with them? We know how smart, I’ve got a shepherd, she’s smart as a whip.
The cats just do what they want. And we get used to the fact that they have personalities and in a lives in many ways, but that we don’t extend that to then wild creatures.
Mustoe: Right, and intelligence, as you know, is cultural. So it’s based on our ability to survive. And I suppose there’s a combination of intelligence and adaptation. I did just remember, of course, there’s the wonderful story of the Dachshund on Kangaroo Island recently, which is an incredible example of how adaptable and what can be even domestic animals, right? I mean, that’s amazing. And so you can throw wild animals in a similar context where it’s new and novel and they will very quickly adapt to the conditions and then they immediately start creating a new landscape and stabilizing things.
And if you allow them to do that on mass, the results can be quite remarkable. But I think the thing we have to be wary of, of course, is that as we disconnect, like we’ve disconnected our own lives from nature, if we disconnect animals, it has the same impacts on them as well. They have to relearn their behavior and patterns in order to sort of function within that system, which is why preserving what we have left is really important because those animals can actually teach other animals as we restore populations to function and to bring back all those natural processes that we depend on to survive all things like food, nutrition, soil health, flooding, mitigation, bushfire, alleviation, everything.
Plants and insects
Higgins-Devine: The book also explores the relationship between plants and animals and some insects and soil, as you say, and the earth. Not a lot seems… I mean, how much is known about that, I suppose, is the question. What do we know about those interactions?
Mustoe: Well, there’s probably two parts to this answer. The first let’s take the example of the Rothwell Sanctuary, Nigel Sharps, amazing organization that has restored Eastern Barred Bandicoot populations from extinction. And those animals are now being used to rebuild soil processes in farmland.
They’ve increased the economic value of sheep, wool from a farm in a matter of years, alleviated flood risk and so on, just by reintroducing predatory animals, small mammals, back into the grassland. Then there’s this incredible work by Oswald Schmidt, from Yale University that looks at the relationship between jumping spiders, predatory spiders. Again, we’re talking predators in our landscape now at a small level and grasshoppers. And grasshoppers, it turns out, are what he calls analogues for larger animals. So you’ve got a grasshopper here that is kind of acting the same as, say, a bison. They’re not competing with a bison, they’re serving the same role at different scales. And what they’ve discovered is that as when he rebuilds back in the predators and rebalance the system, the grasshoppers become less obese.
They don’t travel as far. They have to eat where they are, which means they make wiser food choices. Now, there’s this parallel here with the way our society is beginning to find sugary, processed food, right?
If we don’t have access to that we will also make better food choices. And now, grasshoppers have revolutionized our understanding of human diet. So Robinheimer and Simpson, the Sydney-based researchers, created the protein leveraging hypothesis based on grasshoppers.
And initially, they weren’t taken seriously. It turns out that their work and our understanding now about grasshoppers is not only helping human beings understand how to be more physically healthy and eat more wisely, but through the kind of work that Schmidt’s is doing at Yale University, we understand now that by restoring landscapes with animals, we can also increase nutrientEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More density and carbon uptake in soil by up to 50 times, which means we have healthier food. So immediately, we see insects, animals, and everything and ourselves becoming part of a system that not only helps us be healthier in our bodies, but also in our minds. It’s an extraordinary set of information that flows through this and just captures everything about why we’re humans and our relationship with animals.
Will we survive the next 100 years?
Higgins-Devine: Simon Musto, do you think we’re going to survive the next 100 years?
Mustoe: I do, absolutely. If anything, I wrote this book, sort of, for my kids, because I want them to understand that despite all the doom and gloom for which is mostly, if I’m honest, probably largely evidenced by computer algorithms, so we’re fed all of this negativity, there’s an equal and opposite amount of evidence for extraordinary positive change that if you spend the time looking for it, you’ll find. And what’s probably most exciting is in the coming years, as low as a community, people in the community, we’re going to get more and more chance to actually participate in those outcomes and start seeing it for ourselves and feeling it for ourselves. And I think that’s just phenomenal.
Higgins-Devine: Well, it was a wonderful read and thank you so much for the discussion tonight. Ecologist and naturalist Simon Mustoe, and the book is How to Survive the Next 100 Years. Thank you. Thanks, Kelly.
