Biodiversity Loss, featuring Professor Jon Bridle

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE (INTRO)

Most extinction now is being driven by human overconsumption, and by a very small proportion of people on this planet – certainly a small proportion of people who’ve ever lived – and we need to start living on this planet as if we intend to stay here. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Okay, so my name is Jon Bridle. I’m Professor of Evolutionary Biology here at UCL and I’m also the director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research. 

My own research really is mostly focused on understanding our maximum rates of evolution in response to environmental change, to understand how quickly populations and organisms or populations will be able to evolve to cope with the huge challenges that are being put onto the communities that they’re part of as a result of climate change and biodiversity loss, so human activities largely. 

And that’s very pertinent at the moment, because we think that environmental regimes are now changing beyond the point that most organisms would have experienced them during their last thousand years of history.  

So, the average now is more like the extremes they would have been prepared for and as those averages move beyond, so the extremes around those averages become actually unusually and totally different to what they’ve ever experienced. 

And what’s interesting there is they might start to behave or they often start to behave in ways that are totally nonsensical. There’s all kinds of interesting examples where organisms have responded to anthropogenic pressure. One of the most celebrated examples is overfishing of cod. It has the life history of something that should actually be very common, but because it’s so overfished, it’s actually become more and more hard to find. And the evolution that happened to the populations of that species was that they developed much more quickly and they actually ended up becoming much harder to find. They stayed closer to the bottom of the ocean and actually their adult size is much smaller because they have to develop more quickly. So they’ve adopted a sort of faster life history which actually makes them less profitable to fish. 

So, examples like that are kind of evolutionary examples where populations have adapted, have evolved in response to pressure, often in ways that one can’t predict. Nature is continually surprising us by what it reveals to us as we study it.  

This is more something that happens within the lifetime of a genotype of an individual and different genotypes vary in how flexible they are throughout their lifetime. So, the idea of learning in some vertebrates and someone in many animals is the idea that you’re constantly able to acquire new skills in response to the environmental need. But also, that form of flexibility is a double-edged sword because it can also mean that other organisms can change your behaviour for their benefit. 

So, if you’re infected by a fungus or infected by something or if you’re manipulated by your peers you can do behaviour that’s actively destructive to your own welfare or to welfare of your family. So, this is a whole different issue here, where we’re talking about maybe the idea that societies of some human societies and some other primate societies function around social manipulation and driving individuals to do acts which are actually against their own interest or society. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, I mean, in a sense, is that what the human race is doing at the moment to the planet?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Well, that’s very interesting. So there’s a system in place where society is organized around the benefit of a few individuals and maintaining the privilege of those individuals the expense of the planet and actually the expense of the well-being of most people on this planet and most people who are going to be born in the future as well as all the other biodiversity on the planet.  And that’s the really fascinating thing that that system to basically transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy continually is becoming more more efficient and more and more finely honed and arguably a way of buffering the consequences of our destruction of nature from us initially even though our children and our grandchildren will be directly affected by the loss of the ecosystems that we depend on. 

So, it’s really fascinating how that’s happened, and, you know, you could argue that the presence of the evolution of a brain which allows you to be constantly reprogrammed and affected by your immediate environment and your reputation you have among your peers is actually a form of cognition that can lead to a lot of self-delusion. 

I mean, there’s a lot of argument about the idea that we’re encouraged to consume things that make us less happy, consume things that make us less healthy, spend our time in ways which are destructive to our family life and our own lives. You know there’s the famous quote that we’re borrowing money we can’t afford to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about. 

And the irony of that is that that consumption is destroying the planet and it’s destroying the ecosystems that we depend on as well as destroying the option and the futures of our own children and most of the people on this planet now. 

And that’s, you know, that’s an incredible tragedy and the added tragedy to it is we’re actually paying taxes to make that happen. It’s not how something happens naturally; it’s not a natural economic system that would make that happen; it’s because those types of activity are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. The public money is being used to make the destruction of nature profitable for a few individuals now. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

That would make perfect sense to Bentham. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yes.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

You know, because I mean on the one hand, he would say, you know, you look at the structures that people are placed in and it’s not that these oligarchs, let’s say, or even people in Europe or in America, are necessarily bad people – but they’re just pursuing their interest, and if we were in the position of an oligarch or Bill Gates we’d probably do exactly the same thing. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Well, Bill Gates is an interesting example – but I think that’s quite a pessimistic view, because I think there’s a continual need for society to negate those things – or for capitalist society to negate those things – that really make people happy, which is the love and respect of their peers, their family, and the feeling of contributing to a community that values them.

If you think about left-wing and right-wing politics, I mean, one could argue that that’s a question about how wide you put your net of people whom you care about. 

If it’s just your family, I don’t think there’s any political system that says you shouldn’t love your family. There’s lots of reasons, like, from a biological point of view, why loving your children is a very important thing that’s evolved, right? But it’s the ability to reimagine and to love those people who are different, and who you don’t have a direct connection from, which is one of the things that we as evolutionary biologists really try to understand. 

And that brings us onto another sort of aspect of what UCL is famous for, from a biological point of view, which is understanding the rules, trying to understand the rules that govern what makes forms of life cooperate with each other rather than come into conflict, and what’s caused the evolution of complex organisms from single-celled organisms. 

So, this big leap from single-celled organisms that are sometimes form colonies, but are mostly independent, to multicellular organisms, essentially societies of cells which choose to devote themselves to the reproduction of the whole organism – the superorganism, if you like. I know I’m going all over the place.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, no, it’s all right. I want to just backtrack a bit and ask you about evolution, and particularly the term, because, as Bentham tells us, words are important. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Yeah.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And the associations of the word ‘evolution’ are usually quite positive, in that evolution means things are adapting better to the circumstances in which they live. But the way you’ve been talking about evolution is that it’s sort of crisis management.

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

I mean, that’s maybe how we couch it – as kind of, organisms have got to respond. It’s like a reaction, a sort of emergency response. But evolution is much more fundamental than that. I mean, it’s everywhere. I think people probably not really conceiving of evolution in that sufficiently broad sense are kind of losing that message. 

So people typically think of evolution as survival of the fittest, which is a very, very narrow and shallow way of thinking about evolution. I mean, what’s attracted me to study evolution, actually, is the fact that evolution is quite contingent on what’s available, what types of variation are available in that moment for natural selection to work with. And all it’s doing is basically maximizing the transmission of information from one generation to the next. And it favors genotypes, or it favors alleles, or bits of genotypes, which are able to do that more effectively in that particular environment. So, it’s not necessarily universally better or universally more fit. It’s just a system where organisms will evolve or genotypes or genomes will evolve to be more effective at transmitting their information. And they’ll get as complex as they need to be, if you like, but complexity has a cost. So, in many circumstances, they might evolve to become less complex. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, we should think of evolution as a descriptive rather than a normative term?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

I mean, this is the thing, I mean, people imagine this kind of ascendancy and this ladder of life, but I think it’s absolutely the case that, I mean, evolution is important because it’s creativity. There are new ways of living that are imagined through evolution, that become apparent through evolution, and the history of life has long periods of diversification, you go from the origin of life to increasingly diverse forms and the proliferation of life into many different forms.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And we’re losing that, do you? 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yes. Yes. So, well, we’re simplifying a lot of communities because selection is very broadly being shaped increasingly by human activities. So those human activities impose certain types of selection that are quite consistent and quite strong. 

I mean, for example, applying pesticides to populations of insects, same mosquitoes, that will drive them to evolve in a particular way at all costs, because the most important thing there is they have to survive the pesticide. And normally what happens when you select on one particular thing, is you cause other things to become less good. And this is really interesting and fundamental, is this idea of trade-offs, the idea if you do one thing well, you can’t do something else well, because you only have so many genes that do things in your genome, you only have a limited amount of life, a lifespan that you can develop an organism or phenotype in. 

So, we know that when you select for pesticide resistance, if you compete those individuals in an environment with organisms that are not pesticide resistant but without the pesticide, they won’t do very well, because typically they have lower metabolism to cope with the pesticide. They might have lower fecundity, so lay fewer eggs. They might well be less good at evading predators or parasitoids or infection. 

So, everything that happens in evolution has a cost.  And that idea, that genomes evolve for particular sets of circumstances, is fundamentally what creates the diversity of life. If there was no cost to doing one thing and not another, then you just have one or two species that do everything that are quite simple. 

But, actually, the challenge for evolutionary biologists is to understand why life has proliferated into so many different places, when the joy of being a biologist is you go to anywhere in the world, any community, where there’s life and there’s lots of diversity. And it’s not just one species that’s very plastic. It will be different species that fill different niches, and they have different jobs. And we see that within the organism as well. We see that in terms of organ systems and the specialization of a body into different forms. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So is this sort of a warning about unintended consequences? Because there are things which we regard as nasty, at least nasty to humans and perhaps to other species, but by annihilating them that may cause all sorts of other problems for other species which are regarded as beneficial?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

We potentially have the technology now to eliminate malarial mosquitoes from populations by certain types of engineering techniques. The question is, what are the consequences of eliminating mosquitoes? Do they have other roles in communities that would actually cause other things to become much more common? 

One of the things about communities is if one thing becomes very abundant, something else would increase in number to reduce the abundance of those things, so nature abhors a vacuum.  

So they’re constantly finding ways, new ways of living, and it’s beautifully creative, and that creativity comes out of natural selection. The difficulty is when you start to see natural selection as a good thing or as a bad thing, as you say. 

You know, every time I have a tutorial group, almost always, there’ll be one student that says, well, surely extinction’s natural, because one species is just becoming dominant at the expense of another. But making that case for ethics out of naturalness is very dangerous, because then I’ll say, well, I assume you can justify murder in the same way, or genocide, you know. Anything that’s natural doesn’t necessarily good, right? This is pretty fundamental.  

And there’ll also be people who say, well, surely humans are no longer evolving because we have hospitals. And you think, well, that’s a really limited way of imagining what evolution is, that you’re just some forms of early mortality you’re preventing, but you’re preventing those forms of early mortality only for quite privileged societies on the planet. I mean, most of America doesn’t have access to health care, right? So many societies fail to provide even basic health care for their citizens.  And also, you’re ignoring the fact that what is really driving evolution is differences in reproduction rate. It’s not when you die at 70 or at 90 or at 50, it’s actually what’s happening in terms of the rate of proliferation of the spread of different genes at different points.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Is that because you only have to live to a certain age to reproduce?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yeah, so well, then you draw me into talking about the evolution of aging, which is something else that was pioneered at UCL, which takes us back to this idea of thinking about the organism as a society of cells, the multicellular organism as a society of cells who have chosen or have evolved to cooperate to maintain an organism for X number of years. But the main role of that organism is a vehicle for genes to be transmitted to the next generation through your sex cells.  

Sex is a very hard thing to understand from an evolution point of view because it’s not necessary for reproduction. So what’s happening with sex is that a genome that is only transmitting half of its genes to the next generation is, and that’s the female genome is transmitting only 50% of its genome to the rest of the generation when it could be transmitting 100% by reproducing without sex, which is what most cells do most of the time when they undergo mitosis. So what a female genome is essentially doing is allowing the evolution of males, the male sex, to come in and basically parasitize them, an unrelated genome, then 50% of that fuses with your own genome. And so each one of your genes, it’s only got a 50% chance of being transmitted, a 100% chance of being transmitted. And we call that the two-fold it does is almost all eukaryotes have sex. It has to be sufficiently advantageous to be twice as good to have a genome that’s a mix of two different genomes than one that’s just a reproduction of the mother. 

So when you see a pregnant placental mammal, you know, around here there’s lots of females and some of them are pregnant, you can look at them as hemiparasites. They’ve essentially been parasitized by a male and they’re carrying around a huge cost to themselves physiologically, psychologically. And, you know, in terms of their fitness, they’re carrying around this baby that 50% of them is totally alien to them. And actually, placental mammal evolution involves inheriting genes from viruses that stop an immune reaction against that thing that you’re only 50% related to.  

So, the best explanation for that goes back to the beginning of the interview, the best explanation that we have is that ultimately it increases the variation. So, in the situation where the environment is constantly changing, it’s not good to be just like your parents, just like your mum. You have to acquire new genes which can allow you, that population will be able to respond to new challenges. And that distinction between the somatic eye and the maintenance of the organism and the transmission of information was, well, it was first thought of by August Weisman, a German scientist, but was really recognised as important by Lancaster, who was one of the first zoology professors at UCL.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Oh, when was that? 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Oh, they would have been 1870s, I think. So, Grant was the first person to teach evolution, at least in England, to teach evolution by natural selection to undergraduates. And he’d interacted a lot with Darwin in Edinburgh. By the time Darwin was living in Gower Street, just opposite the close to where Grant was working. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And we’ve got the blue plaque on the wall

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Yeah, we’ve got the blue plaque on the wall, yeah exactly. It’s funny, though – we don’t really know how much they interacted, because Lancaster was the person after Grant. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Okay 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

But it’s interesting. 

So, one of the things that really surprises people, I think this is one of the, I mean, we talk about biodiversity loss, or biodiversity is some one of those things that’s quite hard to see or to imagine, because people often think about exotic animals that live there in zoos or on television, or, you know, in exotic parts of the world. But really, biodiversity is absolutely everywhere. 

George Orwell has a fantastic essay about toads called ‘On the Common Toad’, written in 1946. And he wrote it in response to socialists who were saying that interest in nature was kind of trite and bourgeois and sentimental. And we should just be interested in factories and, you know, Bolshevik projects and all this stuff. And he argues, no, studying nature is what brings us back into what matters, the idea of beauty, the idea of the soul of man under socialism, which is Oscar Wilde.  

So, he talks about what we think of as mundane, the frogs born in the pond and the way that frogs live, brings us back into this world of communities. Because what we’re studying when we study biodiversity, we’re studying the evolution of communities and seeing communities everywhere. 

You know, we talk about ourselves as a society of cells. And that really is a big revelation for students when you say you are yourself as a cooperative society of cells. But you’re not just a society of cells. You’re also an ecosystem yourself. Because there are as many cells within you that aren’t human as are human. Within your guts, you’ve got trillions of cells which are not human. As many as you have cells that are human, that are the same genotype within you. And that is that is a huge revelation for people, especially when I talk to artists about these things.  

The idea of the self, in itself, is a strange concept that we’ve imposed on all this biodiversity that’s within us, as well as without us. There’s an ecology within a community within us, every one of ourselves. And if you’re a plant, you also have chloroplasts, photosynthetic cells, which also have different genomic origins. So, understanding how those conflicts are overcome to make these cooperative cells, that by and large work most of the time pretty well across many conditions, is one of the fundamental problems of being an evolutionary biologist. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And what are the implications of climate change for these processes?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Well, that’s what we try and understand, one of the things we try and understand. 

And I think there are two things going on and each of those are crises that would be equally weighty on their own. 

So, climate change is a huge challenge. I mean, the magnitude of climate change seems quite small, two degrees, you know, at least two degrees, maybe four degrees, you know, in the next 30 years or so. One of the things we don’t know is how that’s going to affect the variability of climates. So, one of the things that we study is the fact that climate is actually as perceived by organisms is already very variable, but organisms evolve in order to cope with variation. Now you think about an intertidal zone, you think about an enemies living on a rock or a barnacle on a rock, the temperature change between being covered by the ocean, maybe the antique ocean or being exposed to a summer day in Dorset, that’s a huge difference in temperature and a huge difference in salinity and all these other aspects, a whole different environment of other organisms you’re coping with. Birds are attacking you if you’re, when the tide’s out and when the tide’s in, it’s like fish attacking you, right? So, you’ve got these two very different systems, but they can cope with that because they know it’s very predictable. The tides have a regime that they can evolve to match. The challenge of climate change is that variation will become much less predictable.  

And we have to, organisms will have to evolve to cope with, to make this new environmental regime predictable. And they might well be beyond the limits of what they can achieve. And so that species will go extinct if they can’t evolve to cope with those changes or change their phenotypes within their lifetimes to cope with those changes. 

And so we’ll have species dropping out of communities in a non-random way. And that species and those communities themselves may well become extinct entirely. And so you’ll lose information if you like, five billion years of evolution, you’ll be losing species from that, from that information, you know, that history with the only planet we know in the universe where life has evolved, you know, we’ve got five billion years of a legacy of five billion years, which we’re destroying in a blink of an eye. 

So climate change is a challenge. And it’s a challenge that many members of the public are very well aware of. And it’s something I hear about a lot. 

But the biodiversity crisis, even without climate change, would be a huge global emergency. And that’s mainly the main cause of extinction right now is not climate change. It’s the loss of habitat and the destruction of habitat, mainly for things like farming. One of the biggest sources of biodiversity losses is cutting down and moving ancient biomes like rainforest in order to grow meat to go and vertebrate products. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

There was a report, I think yesterday, that said that last year there was more rainforest lost in a single year than ever before, which is quite shocking, given that we’re all supposed to be aware of – well, you’re saying it’s not just climate change, in that case, it’s losing habitat – and we’re all supposed to be aware of this, and our politicians are supposed to be aware of it, and yet big business seems to be profiting nevertheless. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

So we can talk about that. I mean there’s things that, you know, very biological questions that come into play there.  

I mean, the first thing I would say is one of the things we do in the centre that I’m the director of, in CBER, is we try and understand at what point we’ll reach, where we reach tipping points in the persistence of really important biomes like rainforest, like coral reefs. We try and understand how communities are assembled by evolution, like ecosystems are assembled by the kind of ecosystems we absolutely depend on for things like rainfall. 

Rainfall in the prairies of North America and the Ukraine absolutely depends on rainforest around the equator. That, you know, millions and millions of tonnes of water, freshwater, leave the rainforest in clouds and through the Amazon. The Amazon itself has 20% of the world’s freshwater. So that raises a really important issue, in terms of how is it possible that one person like Bolsonaro can control 20% of the world’s freshwater?

So the whole idea of nationalism, you know, is utterly absurd when you think about the fact that everyone on the planet depends on resources that are mostly concentrated in those areas of the planet that are very, still very biodiverse.  Europe lost most of its biodiversity in the industrial and agricultural revolutions. But most of the biodiverse in the planet is around the equator and in the shallow tropical seas. The coral reefs, they’re being lost mostly because of climate change. There’s very interesting reasons why climate is a main driver, apparently, of coral reef loss. Rainforest is a more complicated combination of biodiversity loss and climate. Because we need to remember that biodiversity is what creates climate. The history of the earth was that particularly as land plants evolved, came onto land, they released oxygen into the atmosphere, took away carbon dioxide, changed the climate completely, made the world much more wetter, and so created terrestrial water in large abundances in higher latitudes, which other forms of life could use, and they spread out, you know, diversified in response to that. 

So, the climate is not a passive thing.  It’s created by organisms. And what we try and understand in CBER is, you know, both why does biodiversity matter and how does it matter? So how does biodiversity, why does biodiversity matter for human economies? 

And that’s a really zero-sum game. I mean, it fundamentally matters, because without biodiversity, there’s nothing, you know, we can’t photosynthesise, you know, we can’t project all the food we eat, it comes from other organisms, either directly or indirectly, right.  

So, you know, there’s a zero-sum game there. But the point is, where do we reach these tipping points where economies have to pay attention to that biodiversity loss? I mean, to paraphrase, you know, Pericles, you know, if you don’t take an interest in politics, you know, sooner or later politics takes an interest in you – well, that’s true of biodiversity. 

And we are rapidly approaching these tipping points, and we don’t know how close we are, maybe some of them have already been exceeded.  

But I think it’s very important that we, the danger of like saying everything’s too late, and that’s a huge danger in terms of motivating action, the sort of doomsayers saying, ‘Oh, it’s already too late’, and the preppers, you know, the fact is, there’s a huge amount of uncertainty. And nature is very good at recovering from, from these kind of perturbations. If you leave rainforest alone, it will grow back, and it will become almost as good as ancient rainforest. One of the problems is once you remove ancient rainforest, you release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, a lot of the carbon dioxide emissions are due to rainforest loss. So, there is this kind of like this connection between biodiversity loss and climate change, but there are two very different things. 

And most extinction now is being driven by, by human over consumption, and over consumption by a very small proportion of people on this planet. It’s certainly a small proportion of people who’ve ever lived.  And we look at the wealth distributions, the social, the inequality in terms of wealth, you can see that the people who benefit, as you were leading to before from this destruction of nature, are largely already very wealthy people, or very privileged people who are largely buffered, at least initially, from the consequences of it. The people who are suffering the most are the world’s poor who rely more directly on local biodiversity for the food. If they want to get some fish, they walk into the sea and they catch some fish or into the forest and they catch some mammals or they collect insects. Those people suffer directly.  But of course, as well as that intergenerational poverty, we’re committing our children to intergenerational poverty. And it’s our own children. And we have to start living on this planet as if we intend to stay here. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, I mean that’s again an interesting point from Bentham’s point of view, he says everyone to count for one and no one for more than one and that applies, can be seen to apply to the future. I mean there’s nothing we can do about the past, but this earth might last another five billion years.  But you know, that could be a lot of people over that time providing it’s looked after. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

So, we’re not, I mean, this is interesting, this idea of stewardship, it’s quite, you know, this idea of dominion, it’s kind of quite a Christian sort of notion.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Looking after… Yeah. ‘We’ve been placed here by God to look after this creation’

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

And that actually, this idea that the world itself isn’t divine, but we can achieve divinity through our use on this, our time on this planet. And also that man is created in God’s image, which kind of justified a lot of the colonialism, the destruction of other forms of human civilization and culture by Europeans. 

So that worldview of like in the world is someone we must look after and cradle, I think it’s interesting because it really makes the natural world seem sort of frail and in need of protection.  

And actually, it’s the very thing that we depend on. It’s the water that we swim in. And to quote, well, Otis Redding didn’t write the line, but you don’t miss your water until the river runs dry. Those tipping points are fundamental to how we think about the world. We think about these tipping points. We see them around us all the time. 

The tragedy of unintended consequences is writ large in Shakespeare. You talked about good people and bad people. There’s no bad people in Shakespeare. I mean, maybe Iago, but there’s reasons you might explain why he’s so horrible. But most of the people are valiantly and genuinely trying to understand what’s going on and trying to do the right thing. When Hamlet does the right thing, but two weeks too late, it takes him a long time to realize, are these cues I’ve been getting, are they accurate or not? How should I react to this terrible slur, this insult? So, I think this idea of the way that we behave is driven by the circumstances that we’re placed in. 

And the global economy places us in circumstances where our choices are very narrow because the entire situation is set up to serve billionaires, to transfer wealth and joy from the poor to the rich. And this is what the socialists from Bloomsbury were arguing 150 years ago, what Bentham to some extent was arguing. And I think the danger there is that we talk about things like ‘we should know about this. We shouldn’t be doing these consumptions.’ People always say, ‘oh, I shouldn’t be behaving this way because it’s bad for the environment’. But you’re coping with the structure, which is essentially bad, essentially created to prevent us seeing the consequences of our actions. So, we’re operating against a system that has to change.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So is there any particular change…I mean, in one sense, it’s very pessimistic. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

No, I’m trying to be optimistic – I mean we have to be, because the uncertainties are enormous.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, what can we do as individuals? As collections of cells?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

As societies of cells. I mean, everything I would say is that we are facing a huge path, a bifurcation. 

There’s different futures ahead of us and one of them is one that we can bend the curve of biodiversity loss and actually we can act to create more biodiversity. You protect nature, if you stop, well it’s not so much protecting nature, it’s stop having a system that actively funds its destruction through public money. 

You know, we’re facing these two bifurcating paths and there’s a lot of pressure for us to take the wrong path.  The way the society is currently organised is to benefit a few for the cost of the money. This idea that it’s natural for us to destroy nature, I mean it’s not true, it’s because you put in place, you choose to vote, you choose to have systems in place, international systems which are working across a framework of nationalistic governments who are pretty much powerless to cope with those things. 

So, it’s an active choice, we can choose to destroy nature and destroy our own futures. You won’t destroy the planet, you won’t destroy life, you’ll just make life very, very difficult for many people for a long time and then for everyone. The rich aren’t inoculated completely, they will live in their gated communities and in their private healthcare and in their private cars, eventually they will too will suffer. 

I mean there’s that quote from the mayor of Bogota, he said, you know, a healthy civilisation is not one where the poor drive is, where the rich use public transport. 

So, I think one of the most positive things we can do is to recognise the value of a community and being part of a community and move away from this idea of individual families operating independently. 

I mean, this is quite Benthamite in a way because of course Bentham’s always criticised for being against individual liberty, about the liberty of the society and the two, you know, the best for everyone but even at the expense of individual freedom and of course there’s a tension always between those two things – but you think about why did the idea of the nuclear family happen?  

It was essentially a way of selling more fridges and televisions and cars so every family had to have, you know, those things but I say, you know, look in your house and say, do I actually need to have, you know, my own car, can I use the streets car, you know, can I go to a library of things and borrow a drill, do I have to buy my own drill, you know, or buy my own lawnmower. So that’s one step forward, is think about how you consume. It’s okay to consume things that damage the environment sometimes but think about, do that consciously. If you’re going to fly, fly consciously, think about the fact that you’re flying. I mean we, you know, if you’re going to consume meat, you know, make sure you enjoy it and make sure it’s good. So we have options about how we consume. Consuming less meat is probably one of the most important things that anyone can do, anyone who can afford to eat meat. 

What makes you happy is being part of a community and being loved and not driving a big car or, you know, consuming, having a very highly consumptive lifestyle. But it’s also about feeling like you have agency.  

And I think that the sort of rhetoric from conservationists can sometimes be ‘it’s all hopeless and it’s all your fault’ and that makes people feel powerless. So, I think one of the things we have to do is we have to sell dreams, not nightmares. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘I have a nightmare’, he said ‘I have a dream’. And so I think, say what one needs to do is to consume more consciously, maybe consume experiences rather than goods. You know, having a good experience that doesn’t involve lots of material production can be expensive and can fuel an economy without necessarily costing the planet huge amounts of resources. 

Stop thinking about nature as something that’s outside you. Think about reimagining the communities that you’re part of, which are around, which are everywhere. You don’t think you have to go to the Amazon to see biodiversity. There’s biodiversity inside you and there’s biodiversity everywhere. And don’t think that a biodiverse future is one where you don’t get to do anything. It’s where everything, many, many, many more things are possible. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, that’s brilliant. Jon, thank you very much indeed.

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Well, I didn’t talk much about biodiversity.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I think we did.