[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone, welcome back to another rewildology nature happy hour. Or should I say nature coffee hour.
That's right. Charles and I switched things up for our end of the year chat and traded evening cocktails for morning beverages. And let me tell you, the vibe is different and so awesome.
In this episode, we're closing out 2025 by catching up on everything that's happened this year.
I share updates on Project Patagonia and tease the brand new Amazon series coming out next year.
Charles talks about his health comeback, his growing lab at UGA and some major research wins. But we also dive into the meaty stuff. Wetland protections getting gutted in the us incredible sea turtle comebacks, Ecuadorian communities taking mangrove conservation into their own hands, and the game changing high seas treaty that just went into effect.
Fair warning, we get a little philosophical somewhere around the one hour mark when I start processing some big feelings about humanity and interconnectedness.
Blame it all on the Amazon interviews I've been doing. And Charles just rolls with it like the good friend he is.
So grab your favorite beverage, coffee, tea, beer, water, whatever, and join us for this year end reflection of on conservation, wins, losses and what's got us fired up heading into 2026.
Let's dive in.
Well, I've hit the record button, so we're officially rolling.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, this is our first. In my mind, this is our first nature coffee hour.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: The others have been happy hours. I don't think we've done any morning sessions before.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: No, we haven't. This is our first coffee. But you have tea. Okay. Our morning beverage.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Getting called out for my tea drinking habits here.
Yeah, I have a wonderful jasmine tea from Yamamoto Yama, which is a really nice, I think Japanese company that just, yeah, you can get imported nice teas from there.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Oh, nice. I have a nice light roast because I am kind of a coffee snob. And yeah, if you like dark roast, you're missing out. You gotta go for the light roast. You gotta go for the light roast.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: I promise I'll get us back on topic at some point, but I actually don't know enough about coffee to know like why, what is, what is the big difference? Is it like bitterness level?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: So it's like there's more flavor, there's more acid, it's like, it's stronger, it's.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: It'S like, okay, yeah, more caffeine too.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: I don't know, probably because it's me. So probably there's more caffeine.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: I don't know. I like it.
I didn't Know that you were a coffee snob until I saw your French press just now. And then I was like, do you.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Mean my French press is going to make it through the zombie apocalypse? Look at that thing.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: That's so intense. I mean, I just, it's awesome. I always envy people's like, you know, caffeinated drink infrastructure. Right. Like just the cool objects that people have.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Oh my gosh. I went to a good friend, I went to a friend's and they were having like a housewarming party and he showed me this pour over contraption. It literally was over $200 for this coffee thing. And I was like, I thought I had a problem. I mean a French press is a like low maintenance as it gets. I literally heat up water to a certain amount and you like, do some kind of fancy things to make sure it tastes good, you don't burn it. But that's like it. No, no. This was a $200 contraption and I was highly impressed. I was like, can you please make me a cup of coffee?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: I was going to say like 4pm yeah. Did he make you coffee? And was it absolutely fire?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: No, there was way too many people.
You know, it was a big housewarming party, but I was just like, Tyler, holy crap.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Like next.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Next was this like. He's like, yeah, when I get obsessed, I get obsessed.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Some people go really hard.
Yeah.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Like the birdings we were just talking about like the bird.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Exactly. Birdwatchers are a great example of that. I, I'm really into yerba mate, but I didn't want to be like too energetic for our conversation. So I took it easy on that this morning. But having like just the right temperature water, all that stuff.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: See? Okay, you're a yerba mate.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: I'm.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I probably coffee snob.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: I'm an aspiring yerba mate slob snob. Probably slob too. But yeah, I, I don't think I'm quite at that level yet. I think I have to go spend some time in Argentina and like learn from the real snobs before I can like really take that title and roll with it. But I'm getting there.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So anyhow, I feel like this is going to be a more energetic, you know, sharper version of our happy hours. Right. Like the happy hours are maybe different kind of energetic. Maybe a little more.
A little more loosey goosey. I feel like this is going to be our focused.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Because it's the beginning of the day and we are have caffeine, not beverages, other beverages. And we didn't go through an entire work day and then sit down and record like we did previously. We both have very brain draining jobs.
That's not a bad thing at all. It's just by the end of the day you're like, this is what I say. I was like, I can't word anymore. I was like, I can't word. I just, like, I just forget a proper word. I'm like, sorry, I just can't word anymore.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: I was really impressed listening to our, listening to our last happy hour before this. Like. Yeah, yeah, we were remarkably coherent.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: For, for, yeah. That late at night. And, and of course, you know, part of the reason we're having a coffee hour, I mean I love the idea of switching up every now and then, but part of the reason is, you know, I've got to travel this evening. We're right before the holidays here. So I appreciate you accommodating my schedule and I'm excited to see how the vibe differs.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: With it with a cozy couch, nature.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Beverage, hours, and it just doesn't have the same ring as nature happy hour, but it's the same vibe.
Yeah.
Yeah. So I guess depending on what time anybody's listening to this, grab your favorite beverage, you know, whatever it is. Maybe just water.
It doesn't have to be caffeine or alcohol related, just a beverage.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: That's right. We're not telling anyone to make lifestyle choices here, so.
So in the interest of kicking things off a bit.
What, what, what, what is one thing you'd like to share then from the past year, now that we are rounding out 20, 25 of all years. It's been, I think, almost a year since the last time we sat down for a podcast. Am I right about that?
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Yeah. That's nuts.
So much has happened this year, Charles.
Like, it's unbelievable how much has happened.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: You've been busy.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: You've been too. Which we'll get into that as well.
But the project Patagonia, that was a big experiment that I tried this year and wow, just like the rewadology community is just, gosh, it's incredible.
And we. So I just rounded up the numbers, like thousands upon thousands of downloads between the podcast and the YouTube versions of the series.
For those who didn't follow on social media, it was actually a finalist at Jackson Wilde, which is.
I, I still am speechless about that. And I actually, it was invited and I went to Jackson Wild, which dude, Imposter syndrome.
Holy crap.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: I mean the pictures looked awesome.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: The people that were there, like. But here's like, the thing. Since I'm not, like, from the film world, I didn't even know that who these people were. And then they were, like, on stage giving their award speeches, and I'm like, oh, like, okay, so that's that BBC group. That's that person, like, the.
The film that won, like, that got the, like, the Grand Teton Award or something. It's like their highest of highest is, like, up for an Academy Award. Like, these are the kind of people that I was there with.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Wow. It was wild.
And I think that it goes to show where media is going. And I hope that a lot of people feel inspired by Rebotology being a finalist for that, because this is the first time that they had opened up a content creator category.
And that is what I submitted to. I submitted the Patagonia series to this category, and that's what was a finalist, was the series.
Well, overall, they said it was Rewatology, but I had submitted the series.
And so this is the first time they had let content creators in, which was really cool. Which I think that nature, you know, the nature gods, like, the nature media gods, whoever they are, you know, the top people that are kind of determine what we consume in the nature media space, is starting to understand or see the power of independent creators.
And because, I mean, a lot of them, A lot of the people who.
Well, the other two who were the nominations, who are the finalists in my group, they're just independent people.
They didn't represent, like, an organization, you know, they were. They went out of their way to create a platform and. And share their passion for nature.
And I think one got nominated. I think another girl, she submitted and she ended up winning, which is great. Great for her.
And then Rebootology was the other finalist. It was the only podcast that was there. The only podcast.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Holy smokes.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So, like I said, imposter syndrome out the freaking roof. And I also found it so interesting, too, when I met a few people and they're like, who are you? Everyone was super nice, don't get me wrong. And then I was like, I'm a finalist. And they were like, whoa.
It's amazing the way people treat you different when you say that. You know what I mean?
It was just interesting since I was a complete outsider to this experience, it was interesting to see how you were welcomed into a community.
It did feel kind of like clique, ish.
Since I didn't really know. Yeah, I really didn't know anybody. So I was like, how do I Meet people here.
And then I like snuck into a barbecue.
That was really fun.
That was fun.
Got into that, like, Nat Geo hosted a barbecue and me and my good friend Michelle, who's an amazing TV editor and is like, come on to R ologies team. We just like snuck in and got to meet a lot of really cool people, which was fun.
But yeah, so that was a huge.
Just. I still can't believe it. I have the award somewhere. I need to frame it and put it up. That just has not been a priority.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. I was gonna ask how much you. How much you're allowing yourself to brag on that because I don't.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: I don't brag about it. I don't.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: It's gotta be on the website. It's gotta be all over.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it's on the website.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Good, good, good.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: It is on the website.
So, yeah, that was huge. And that was just the audience believing in it and the judging committee who listened to the episodes that I submitted. I mean, the series wasn't even all the way posted yet. Like, I did it on a complete whim, applying to that. And so I couldn't believe when I was a finalist about lost my mind, I was in the gym when I got the email and I had to leave before I made a scene because I was losing my mind. It was like, what? I'm a final. No, no. I had to read the email like 3 or 4 times before I was like this. What? What?
And the series was also featured on Apple Podcasts and a new and noteworthy under climate. So they have a climate section and it was under the new and noteworthy. So that was pretty cool. So that was that the.
Oh, my God. Sorry, Amazon.
Let me try that again. The Patagonia expedition that is part of Project Patagonia sold out. So I'm taking 12 incredible people down with me next April to go experience Patagonia. And I'm working on some very incredible conservation experiences with Nico, who we did the big crowd crowdfunder for to raise money for the Blinka project.
And right now we're at $1,000 that we've raised.
And I'm working with my really close friend Dave Johnson at the Katie Adamson Conservation Fund to hopefully raise another $5,000, which we'll give to them on the trip.
So that's going to be. That's going to be super rewarding. I'm like, finally, all the reasons why Rewadology exists is, like coming together. Like, it was a huge leap of faith. Super scary. And I'm still happy that we're able to do things like these because, you know, before the show was a weekly interview podcast. And I know that probably some people, when I switched styles, might not have liked it, which I understand. I mean, that was a big shift going from, you know, us having a conversation or me having a conversation with people around the world to a narrative, like a story.
Yeah, that's a big shift.
So I'm glad that we're still able to have these type of conversations and stuff. And now I'm in deep in production of the next series, which is going to be even bigger than that one, just because I don't know how to do things small.
And that one, I just kind of spilled the beans a little bit about the Amazon. I actually, just before we sat down, I've already done an interview today.
I've already done an interview.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: You're such a machine. I can't imagine, like, finishing a podcast interview and then being like, oh, yeah, let me go talk to Charles. Like, unbelievable.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So that one is probably going to be the most important story that I have I've worked on, hands down.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Wow. Okay.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
I mean, depending on how it turns out, it might be the most important story of my career with the people I'm talking to and the story that's being put together. So, yeah, that one. I really hope I do it justice because these people that I'm chatting with are just so inspirational. I can't believe what they're facing, what they are going against every single day from, you know, criminal syndicates. Some people are in true danger. The people that they work with are in real danger.
And yet there's people who still getting up every single day and fighting for the Amazon and fighting for their home and fighting to protect this globally important biome.
This biome is not just an ecosystem, it is literally an entire biome.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: That's the holy grail of terrestrial biodiversity. You don't get much bigger or more important than that on land.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I'm hoping that by the time I'm done with interviews, I'll have around 12 to 15 different voices across eight episodes. I'm thinking potentially not more episodes, maybe more voices, as I feel like any more than that and it might get too long.
So that's the tentative plan. It'll come out Q1 next year and then, yeah, working on all the others. So listen, experience, protect. So I'm working on those other two pillars too, the experience.
So hopefully, fingers crossed, I can't promise anything since I'm not going to the Amazon.
But I hope to also build a trip for that one like I did for Patagonia. Then we all can go down and meet the people in the series and then protect us coming together to help fund some really amazing work that's happening there.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: I'm thinking what I might do with this one is for people who are subscribed to the newsletter, all of us coming together and voting where the money goes. So I'm not gonna decide.
So I'm gonna let the rewadology community, like we were able as a community to come together, raise this much money for Amazon Conservation.
Where do you want the money to go?
These are the people, these are like the organizations that we partnered with. Like, where would you want it to go?
So I think that's how I'm going to handle that one because I don't want this. I just, I've never wanted this to be about myself. Never, ever from starting this. And so this upcoming year, that's a big goal of mine is to how much more I can help the community, the rewatchali community and translate listening to action.
Like how can we as listeners do more in an easy way that's accessible that anybody can do, even if it's volunteering at one of these organizations because they need to go through camera trap photos or it's do you have $5 that's going to help plant a tree in the Uruguay biodiversity corridor that I'm hoping to have in the series too. So, like little things like that and then if you're really, really passionate, let's go down, let's go to Peru, let's go to Brazil, let's go to these areas and go see it for ourselves.
So that's the ultimate goal and hopefully I will do all of those things.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: And work, talk about our New Year's resolution.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So way less episodes next year year, but much more impactful. As you know, we announced last year in our nature happy hour, that's when we announced the shift.
That's when we made the big announcement that we were going to this style. And I think it was the right way to go with all these other things that we're able to do with this series style, I feel like is replicatable in the future. So that's why I made that shift and it seem to have worked.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: So that was my big question, you know, because you were kind of talking about it as a big experiment. Right. And. And so of course, maybe that's just the science in me, but the scientists in me But I hear about experiment, I'm like, okay, like, what were the results? How did it turn out? How did you feel about it? You know, but it sounds like you feel really positive and it was, it's been a great. Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: I mean, the fact, yeah, the fact. The. I mean, the results show it. It was nominated for a major award. Apple podcast featured it. Like, we were able to raise money. People are gonna be coming down to Patagonia to support the root of parks, to support puma conservation. Like, that's what it's all about, you know.
So I would say that that's a success. Like, the downloads aren't as important as the measurable impact, you know.
So, yeah, so I think that that's my reflections on 2025.
What about you? You've had so many big papers come out and that's.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's been.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: You've had a lot too.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Now that I think about it. Yeah.
I won't spend too, too long on it, but yeah, it's mostly been, you know, I think 2025 was, was really my, my big year of getting spun up for realsies as a professor. Right. And, and obviously when we first spoke, I was, you know, recovering from chemotherapy and, you know, a stage two cancer diagnosis. And I've just been on the mend for the last 12 months, but my health has really come back in a big way, and I've been getting a clean outlook, you know, on my health and scans going well and things like that. So all signs point to, you know, being in remission and being in a good place, which is really amazing.
And then, of course, yeah, I've just been working in this new capacity as an assistant professor at the Oyo School of Ecology, starting my lab. Right. Getting research going. I had two new PhD students start this fall, which is really exciting. And one new master's student, although he's really pushing hard and very intense and very excited and doing such good work, plus that he's very determined to switch over into a PhD actually.
And for most people, I would say, ah, don't do that. But with his level of kind of competence and how good his research is already going, I'm like, sure, sure, man. Like, let me just get out of your way. Okay. Like, which is really impressive. But, yeah, and it's been fun to build this, you know, conservation community in the Wildlife and water Lab. Right. My research group, and to kind of set the tone. And I feel like it's been really exciting this year to see that come together. And it's really becoming. Yeah, like a very passionate and hardworking group of conservation biologists who also are just like nice, fun people. You know, that's kind of what I've been telling everyone because I've been interviewing new students for next year.
You know, the culture that we're trying to build is like, you know, we get stuff done and we're hard working folks, but we're also going to be nice people you'd want to have a beer with and not. And not like, you know, hyper competitive or nasty or egotistical about it because, you know, inevitably you do. You can run into that. Right. Especially in academia.
Among my two new students, we have, among my new PhD students we have some folks with really exciting backgrounds who are poised to do really, really exciting work. So one of them was coming from World Wildlife Fund Pakistan and he was working on montane wetland conservation up in Pakistan. And now he's coming here to do work on nature based solutions. And we're actually hopefully kind of starting some collaborations with IUCN to help them build up their kind of global, what they call the global standard around nature based solutions. So we're talking with them now about how do we make some of those things more robust so that they can really support biodiversity conservation globally, things like that. Then the other new student coming in for a PhD was working with Wetlands International, which is another NGO I really, really have a lot of respect for.
And she was based also in the Himalayas in India and she has formally done a bunch of work with snow leopards. She's hoping to do some work, some very interdisciplinary work combining some sort of eco hydrology of glaciers and snowmelt and like where the water goes with snow leopard kind of behavior and movements with potential conflicts and changes socially as kind of like economies of tourism develop in different parts of the Himalayas and how that changes like gender roles and, and social economic imbalances and things like that. So yeah, really excited for a lot of the work that's, that's kind of starting to really bubble up. And of course all the other work that we've been doing along the Missouri river and some of the work at Archbold Biological Station down in Florida, that stuff is all kind of really trucking along and building up. So that's been the biggest thing for me is just, is just watching these people, these young professionals really growing and feeling like I can be a good mentor for them and watching that research start to grow in ways that are going to be really impactful for conservation and ecological knowledge that that's been really rewarding it's been an insane amount of work. I'm so tired.
But it's been good. And yeah, like you said, it's also been a very good year, I think, just for sort of my really nerdy academic work, just writing papers for academic audiences. So one of the ones that I'm super proud of, I wrote with some basically role models of mine, two of the world's leading freshwater biodiversity conservation scientists. I struck up a conversation with them maybe two years ago at a conference, and that became a paper that came out this past year that was us, like, really kind of doing a huge review of the literature and of conservation case studies and setting forth what we call the gaps in freshwater biodiversity conservation. What are the things that are missing?
Right, because we know that freshwater biodiversity is the most endangered in the world. It's the most in threat. What are we going to do about it? How do we plug the gaps right, and stop the leak?
And that was just a really cool exercise. I learned so much from those people, and having that come out just gave me a big feeling of pride there. So, yeah, that's. That's most of it. It's been a very academically intense year professionally, and then still kind of like plugging away with gulo and nature and trying to, like, just learn new tools to kind of build up the content there and make those posts better and more informative, getting more input from readers about what else they'd like to see there, which has been cool.
One of my favorites recently was I did a post about how to make a nature to go. Like nature. What do they call it? A go bag. So, like, if you just like, you know, spending time outside, right. Is. Is there's always barriers to that. There's always something else to do. You got to do an errand, whatever. But if you make yourself a go bag that just has whatever, some water, some snacks, maybe your nature journal, whatever, and it's just there, ready to go, Then when you do get that extra hour to, like, run around outside and go see something cool and like, connect with nature a little bit, it's that much easier to do it because you don't have to worry about rounding up all things you need. Right? So did a post about what you should put in a nature go bag and how do you reduce the starting energy to get out and spend time outside? Because there's always little obstacles and if you let that stuff keep getting in the way, then you don't get that time.
And I guess the latest new thing with gulo and nature is I did start a newsletter. So it's a bi weekly newsletter for the blog, and it highlights some of the posts that are already out there, highlights the new posts when they come out. And I have a little wildlife of the week every time where I talk about some other phenomenon in nature or some other animal that might be of interest.
It has also nature vocab, so I look up really nerdy nature words for people to know and introduce another one of those every week and things like that. So it's just been another nice way to connect with that content and get a little extra information, little more personal from me, you know, it reflects a lot, a lot of my outdoor experiences and things like that.
Yeah. So like you said, busy, busy year also, but a lot of fun things spinning up.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: Isn't it so fun seeing your friends thrive?
Isn't it great?
Like, I just love it. I love hearing that. I love when we go months without talking because we're both so busy and reaching, like, our personal goals and passions, and then we catch up. We're like, oh, my gosh, we have so much to tell each other.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: True. Yeah. Yeah, right?
Like, full disclosure, we were talking. We were talking a mile a minute for like 25 minutes before starting this podcast because we had to decide to cut ourselves off and get started.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: But, you know, Yeah, I mean, I'll totally throw you under the bus right now.
We started this by Charles not turning on his mic. I'm like, dude, I can't hear you. And he's just like.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah, you gotta work out those kinks.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: You know, my mic isn't on.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: It's like, oh, just a little rusty. You know, it's been a long time since I did a podcast. I'm supposed to be on the nature guys again soon, which I'm really excited about. I've been talking about some episodes with Bob and, yeah, it's been too long since I've done some podcasting. I'm so excited to be getting back on the horse a little bit.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And you even had me come talk to your class. That was so much fun.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: That was awesome. That was for a lot of people. So, yeah, I was teaching a science communication for ecologists course here at uga and I did a short part on, you know, what I was calling sort of modern communication for scientists. So it was podcasting and TED Talks, and we had Brooke come in as a guest speaker, and the students loved it. I was just looking at, what do you call them, the course evaluations. And, you know, they were there Were quite a few anonymous, like, oh, the visiting speakers were so great. Like, Brooke was so awesome, you know, so you made it. You. I think you made a very big impression.
Yeah.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Well, I'm happy to talk to them whenever. Just let them know.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: And thank you for doing that. I know that was like, you know, in the middle of a work day and stuff, so I super appreciate it.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I thought about that. How fun it would be maybe if I ever come down to Georgia, just like, pop into a class and like, oh, yeah.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Oh, we can make that happen.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: That would be so fun.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: Or just do something that's like a little bit more hands on.
Yeah. Instead of me just, like talking virtually through, which was fun. The class asked a lot of really good questions. A lot of really good questions. I think they were surprised by some of my answers since I don't hold anything back.
I was like, you're gonna ask me. We're gonna go down this path.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. They got real, Brooke.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
Well, okay, so let's swat.
Let me try that again. Okay, so let's switch gears here. So also, what we wanted to talk about today was some of the top headlines from 2025 that really piqued our interest.
Cause there's so much that happened this year.
It was kind of overwhelming a little bit.
All the different headlines, good and bad, that that happened.
And we both decided that we were going to pick a few that we wanted to talk about that piqued our interest the most.
I went for warm and fuzzy.
I think Charles did not go for warm and fuzzy, which is totally fine.
But. Yeah, like, which is totally. Which is good.
There's a lot happened in North America around the world. There's a lot that happened.
So why don't you start? What was your first topic or first thing that happened that you wanted to chat about?
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Okay. Well, I will first admit that I was somewhat planning on you going first, so we wouldn't have to start on too dark of a note.
[00:31:50] Speaker A: But.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: But you know what? If you start at the bottom, you can work your way up, Right?
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: So my.
And this is perhaps not unexpected, as I think about wetlands all the time, but my major news item that I was focused on were some very recent proposed rules by the EPA that were in response to a big Supreme Court case that happened at the end of 2023 pertaining to the Clean Water Act.
And I'm going to try not to get too legal with this, in part because I don't think everyone wants to hear super gory legal details in other part because I'm not a lawyer and I'll probably say something dumb, but, you know, my understanding, right, we know that among the really big policies in the US that protect nature in extremely important ways, right? We have the Endangered Species act, which, by the way, is currently under a lot of threat. And there are some proposed rules right now that anyone listening can provide comment on, although the comment period might be over in a couple days, so maybe not by the time this comes out. But point being, you know, there's a lot of assault on our, on our sort of legal facilities for protecting nature. Frankly, the Clean Water act is one of the really big ones because it allows the federal government to, via the epa, to essentially have. Have some control over what people could do, even on private property. So if it's going to be impacting the waters of the country, right, in their quality and so on and so forth. So one big part of that Clean Water act is the idea of waters of the United States, what people have very cutely abbreviated as wotus.
And WOTUS are protected in some pretty big ways because we discovered, you know, in like the early 1900s, what have you, that like, we were destroying all of our waters and that was killing ecosystems and that was killing people, right? Like polluted waters are bad. Destroying natural ecosystems is bad. It hurts people. It's cost us tons of money to fix it. It causes disease, people die, it causes flooding, so on and so forth. So they proposed all these protections for, for WOTUS. What happened in 2023?
There was a case called, I think, Sackett versus the EPA.
And that was a family that was trying to build something on their property between their house and a big lake nearby. They were trying to develop something in between. And there were like wetlands between their house and the lake. The lake. Nobody was questioning that. That was wotus. It's a gigantic ecosystem. So they're trying to protect that.
What the EPA told them was essentially like, you can't build this stuff here because these wetlands are also protected under the Clean Water act, which indeed was like the interpretation of the original Clean Water Act.
The Supreme Court in 2023 basically decided, like, no, that's not true anymore. Like, we're going to change the definition of what is a wotus.
And not to get too technical, but they basically said that it has to be like, it has to be something with a continuous surface connection. And I'm using air quotes here for people listening to a navigable water, also using air quotes.
So basically they Were saying like you know, that drastically restricts what we can consider a wotus, what has to do with water. So tons of things are not protected anymore. What's happening now. And this is the same thing where like I think until January 5th or 6th, there's, it's the open comment period on this and all the articles I was reading on this were from like last month, from late November, the EPA is doing, is proposing this new rule, you know, in response to this, modifying this which even further restricts these, these protections for, for wotus, for, for water things.
Talking about the idea of like well that that connection needs to happen during the wet season.
They're, they're removing things like interstate waters as a criterion. So if you have a, a wetland or some water body that like passes between states that used to make it a wotus and it was protected, now it doesn't anymore things like that. They've also had another. They just described a bunch of other scenarios that disqualify something from being protected like things that were on prior converted cropland. Which means like if you try to restore something as you know, you put effort into restore an ecosystem on cropland, well, it still isn't protected anymore even though you restored it because it's on prior converted crop. Things like that and that things like groundwater are not protected. So if the water feeding. Right, yes. No, I mean, I agree.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Sorry, that one took me away.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: What. So I mean the reason people want this, right? The reason that people are supporting this and I don't think a lot of people are, I think it's a lot of very powerful people that are supporting this, but not a lot of people, if that makes sense, is because it lighten supposedly it lightens the administrative load on farmers. Right. The idea is that like it's up to them whether they protect something.
And it's not the federal government's business is essentially the idea. Right.
And I'm going to try not to get too heated or too political here, but that's the ostensible reason why it's being supported obviously, as you just pointed out, right. The people who are against it, even at face value, the problems that they're bringing up are like, well that's not how water works, right? Like continuous surface water connection. Like lots of water moves around in ways that have nothing to do with surface water. And that water is still really important, you know. And as we've learned all over the country, especially in our like military bases and things like groundwater moves around and it's extremely important where it goes. And it's extremely important to protect groundwater.
Tremendous numbers of people, including farmers, rely on groundwater to get to irrigate their crops or to drink or whatever else.
And not regulating that can be very harmful. Right. We can get some very problematic issues here with either depleting that groundwater or having it be unhealthy to drink, so on and so forth, or commercially inviable.
And as we know, or at least as a lot of us nature nerds know, right, wetlands are some of the most valuable ecosystems on the planet for providing what we call those hydrological ecosystem services. They purify our water, they improve our groundwater recharge, so we have lots of groundwater to use, and it's higher quality. They protect us from floods and so on.
There have been now some studies on what the implications of these policy changes are.
What I read recently is that it's estimated to be reducing protection or eliminating protection for millions of acres or tens of millions of acres of wetland in the United States.
The best case scenario that one group estimates is that 60% of US wetlands are using, losing protection. The worst case scenario is something like 95%.
So, you know, and this is in a country where, like, we've on average lost probably, like, 50 or 60% of our wetlands as a nation already, keeping in mind that we only started with something like 5 to 10% wetland cover over the country, you know, when, when, when people started colonizing and developing North America or the United States.
But so, you know, losing that much of what's already so little is probably pretty, pretty dicey, pretty, pretty risky. So that's, that's my, like, scary news that I've been thinking a lot about.
I did intentionally pick my second news piece to, like, twist that one and give it kind of like a positive spin there.
The big thing that, like, I'm thinking a lot about and what a lot of my colleagues in conservation are thinking about is like, okay, federal protections are essentially gone, and they might be getting gouged even worse by this current proposed ruling for the last couple months. What do we do?
What I'm, what I'm seeing and, and what people are focusing on now is like, well, what are the states going to do?
And, and there are a lot of states in the country that already have their own laws that can serve this purpose. Right. Like, Minnesota has a 1991 Wetland Protection Act. There's a lot of states.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yes. Especially Minnesota. Oh, my gosh.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: How much water is there? Wow.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: But the point is that, like, now it's going to be in the state's hands.
And that means it's just going to depend on who's in charge in those states. Right. So some states are probably just gonna say nope. Right. And, and the risk there is like, well, what happens to the people who live there? Right.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: That's immediately where I was going. It's like, what about the people?
[00:40:59] Speaker B: Yeah, think about, I mean, think about like, you know, the crazy power outages in Texas and stuff, right? Like, where people were, people were freezing to death and whatever else. Like, we know that some, like, some policies are not good for people. And then when states decide to go along with that, right. And they have a certain energy structure, a certain whatever, like people get hurt.
And also, of course, in this case, like, wildlife gets hurt. Right. And I think that's, that's, that's my big concern coming out of this year is the fact that this stuff has not only been happening, but now it's really spinning up and becoming official and becoming policy. And what is that going to mean, right, for nature in the US So are you seeing.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: So if those protections are removed, then is the big thing that's gonna be open for development, or are farmers not going to need to worry as much about pesticide use or. I guess what is going to happen?
What are the negative ecological things that might happen if these protections are removed?
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Yeah, great question there, to kind of put it in, know, very real terms.
So something that kind of alarmed me is that the vast majority of wetlands in North America are on private property.
So, like, when we talk about losing so much of our wetlands, it's because, yeah, you know, like, only a small amount are in places that we're already protecting.
And so in this case, what that means is anybody who wants to build something or who wants to drain a wetland to grow crops there instead, or who wants to discharge harmful materials into a wetland, again, a wetland that might have groundwater connection with things that we drink from and recreate in, they no longer will need to get permission from the federal government to do that. Is my understanding that the controls that prevent them from doing that are going to be gone unless their state or county government can do something about it. Right. Unless they have a law, the federal protections restricting those rights of people to do that are going to be gone.
I will say, like, a lot of the.
One of the reasons that a lot of the wetlands in the country are on private land is because those are the ones that were protected and people were not allowed to develop wetlands in their private land. Right. So they're hiring consultants to Delineate areas and say where the wetland begins and ends and they leave that area alone and then they bulldoze the rest. Right. And build a new housing complex or whatever.
Now they might not have to do that. They might just say, okay, I'm just going to hire someone to drain it because it doesn't matter. I don't need permission. It doesn't have any surface water connection to a lotus or whatever.
So. Yeah, so I think, I think this, this means that people have a lot of new flexibility then for them, maybe it saves them some money, but it means then that they could be polluting these waters that could get to our waters, you know, our more broadly public access waters and, and developing, you know, what people like you and I would consider very valuable wildlife habitat. You know, just.
No questions asked, just, just bulldoze it.
Wow.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Okay, I understand.
Yeah, that's heavy. But it's real. We need to talk about these things.
And so if it does come to pass that the protections are limited, then we as US Citizens really need to go to our states and tell our state government that this is very important and it's now reliant on the states.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: With. To.
To do this protection.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: Right Stuff. Right. And there are a lot of states that already do, which is great.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Because I think states are keeping their stuff. Yeah, yeah. So it's all going to depend. I mean, there are some states that, because they saw this happen at the federal level, they're getting rid of their protections because now they're like, no, let's go for it. If the, if the feds don't make us do it, let's just, let's just remove all our protections, you know, so everyone's having a different reaction to it sometimes.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Like, what times are we living in? I don't get it. Sometimes.
[00:45:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: I understand from like a political power standpoint, I understand why some people are much in favor of reducing the amount of federal government, like, interventions, which I understand, because the founding of our country was most. Like most of the power is supposed to be in the states.
I get that. I understand why some people are, you know, they support that. It's like, so then the states then need to take into account what's best for their people, their populace, their. Everybody underneath their protection.
I mean, when you're talking about water, I'm thinking that now that I'm back in Appalachia and the mountain range starts here, like, how important it is to protect those areas.
And then of course, when I was out in Colorado, out in the West. That's a whole different set of water issues.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: A whole different set of water issues.
Who. Yeah, that. That one's hard. That one's heavy.
Wow. Yeah. Okay. I didn't even know this one. I didn't even see that. So, like, this is why we haven't talked about enough. Yeah, no, I didn't know this.
[00:46:39] Speaker B: Well, so my question for you then is, coming off of this, would you rather that I follow into my, like, next one, which is a maybe slightly, slightly, like hopeful, warm and fuzzy related thing, or do you want to hit us with like a different warm and fuzzy to. To cleanse the palette?
[00:46:57] Speaker A: I'll go, I'll do a warm and fuzzy.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Let's do it.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: It's not going to take long.
[00:47:02] Speaker B: Oh, great.
So.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: So my warm and fuzzy is just because this never happens today. In today's age, green turtles were downlisted from endangered to least concern by the IUCN in 2025. Can you imagine? Green sea turtles. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So green sea turtles were down listed from endangered to least concern.
We never see this. You never see wildlife have that drastic of a comeback. Yeah, I guess the global population has increased by roughly 28% since the 1970s following decades. Following decades of conservation efforts.
I mean, of course there's still some regional areas that are still threatened and vulnerable that we definitely need to keep our eye on to protect.
But yeah, just all of this sea turtle work that's been going on for the past decade, decades.
I've talked to now several sea turtle conservationists and just how much dedication and work they've done is finally starting to reap the benefits. Like we're starting to see comebacks.
I wrote this down too. Is that they're a conservation dependent species because without these interventions, they probably would have been lost.
And then it doesn't make sense to say that one without saying the next one is actually some good news from Florida. Can you believe it? We got some good news from Florida that they had a record breaking leatherback nesting year. Record breaking.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Record breaking. Yeah, they had, let me see here, 2021 Nest recorded for leatherbacks, which is the highest number of leatherback sea turtle nests that have ever been recorded in the state ever.
So that's huge because they are critically endangered.
So the fact that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So major milestone for one of the world's largest and most endangered sea turtle species, period. And super exciting. Yeah. So preliminary nesting turtles. So I got these numbers from the Fish Florida Wildlife Research Center. I think is what it's called or something like that. So as of August 31st, their numbers were a thousand.
I mean, sorry, 100,860 nests for loggerhead turtles, 61,708 nests for green turtles, 2021 nests for leatherbacks, which was the record 10 Kemp's ridleys and then zero hawks, which of course I don't know the comparison to what these should be or not because hawksbills are also.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: Rare.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's also highly threatened species for the trade.
They are targeted for the trades especially.
So really good news about sea turtles. And I actually have an update coming out soon that I'm going to be posting about online as I reached out to several past podcast guests and like, hey, what's your latest update? Can you tell me what's up? You know?
[00:50:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you got your whole network now.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: Yeah, gosh, I have a crazy network now. And actually I'm just gonna pull up the email cause I want to read specifically from Melania.
So.
[00:50:39] Speaker B: What episode was Melania from?
[00:50:41] Speaker A: Oh God, I don't remember, but she should look it up. Melania Lopez. So she works in the Yucatan Peninsula doing sea turtle conservation work. But they had a really good nesting years. They had 3,074 hawksbill nests. Oh my God. 5,094 green sea turtles, two leatherback and one loggerhead. So a very amazing year for them in terms of nests that they recorded and protected. So that's where all the hawksville apparently were. They weren't in Florida, they were in the Yucatan Peninsula. So down on the other side of the Gulf.
So yeah, great news from her as well.
Yeah, so great news for sea turtles.
And then of course like, yeah, my next thing also too was about the High Seas Treaty. But so yeah, if you want to go to your warm and fuzzy or I don't know if it's warm or fuzzy, but on the happy side of that. Yeah, yeah. So sea turtles go to your. For sea turtles.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: I'm really stoked to hear that. I, I don't remember if you and I ever talked about this, but I mean that's how I got my start in the conservation world was, was sea turtle work.
My, my first ever.
Yeah, I just, my first ever job. I was like a 20 year old idiot and I like just went to Costa Rica for a summer. I went down there in like late April and stayed there until the end of the summer, working way out in like a remote village in south southeastern Costa Rica on the Caribbean side doing leatherback sea turtle work. And you Know, and it was everything from, like, you know, taking, taking measurements and. And monitoring, like, nesting females when they came up on the beach, to, like, patrolling beaches for poachers to building hatcheries so we could protect eggs where the females like, laid them in places that we knew were hazardous and stuff like that.
I loved it. I mean, really special, amazing animals. Terrifyingly large. I mean, leatherback sea turtles are like. It's like watching a VW bug pull up on the beach. It's terrifying.
There. It's a Jurassic park, you know, they're huge. They're huge. They're. They're so big and extremely strong.
If you accidentally get in their way, they'll. They don't see you, and they'll just, like, wreck you. I saw someone get their legs taken out by one, but, yeah, so I. I don't know. It really. It's really exciting to hear that kind of news. And it makes sense, right, that, like, it would be kind of a delayed thing, that if. If we started trying to conserve them in the 70s, that we'd start to see some impacts after 50 years. Because how long does it take them to reach sexual maturity?
I think it's got to be like 20 or 30 years. I mean, they're very long animals. And so, you know, what. What we conservation biologists would call, like, the demographic delay, right, Would be a long time before you actually saw the shift from all the effort we've been putting in. So that is extremely exciting. I mean, in my view, populations like that respond so slowly to things that maybe if we're starting to see an uptick now, that might mean we're in the process of a much bigger uptick that's going to be going on for a while.
My question would be like, can we keep it up? Because that's great.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of the work, like, yeah, what you just said, the projects like that, where people are going, they're protecting the nest, they're protecting from poachers.
Bycatch is a really big issue. And so I know that that was a lot of this work, too, has been working with fishermen, working with different communities to reduce bycatch, to reduce consuming turtles. I mean, some people like that's part of their culture, so we got to respect that, by all means. But for these critically endangered species, I know there's been a lot of education efforts around all this kind of stuff. So we're seeing the work is paying off. Your work when you were 20 years old, who knows, maybe one of those leatherbacks and nests is still alive today and came back out 16 years later or whatever and nested on that beach or swimming out and sea because you went down there for a summer and helped protect. Isn't that cool to think?
[00:54:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It's amazing. Yeah. And it was a phenomenal experience. I learned a lot.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay, what's your next thing?
[00:55:01] Speaker B: My next one also fairly quick.
It looks like this has kind of been an ongoing thing, but people are just sort of paying a lot more attention to it right now.
So this has to do with, you know, you and I were talking about like, well, shoot, what do you do when like, you know, you don't have these federal protections for wetlands or other ecosystems that we want to protect? You know, ultimately, yeah, like it comes down to like the local people sometimes, right, because they're the ones who are going to be negatively affected by this.
They're the ones getting, you know, bullied and pushed around by much bigger economic forces from somewhere else that don't care what happens to that place.
So the example is from Ecuador, coastal Ecuador, around a couple of the smaller islands off the coast, where there are sort of traditional economies built around crab fishing, specifically in the mangrove ecosystems.
Mangroves.
As I'm, you know, as I'm sure probably a lot of our audience knows something that's really well communicated to people. Mangroves are like rockstar wetlands. I mean, they're already wetlands, but they're like, they're good at everything, right? Like they, they protect people from storms. There's been research in Florida showing that like with recent hurricanes that have come through Florida, people who had mangroves on their properties had like several hundred thousand dollars less damage and stuff. Just crazy, crazy, crazy. I'm sure my numbers are wrong, but like, you know, just ludicrous benefits from sea level rise, from protection from storms and storm surge, carbon sequestration, just all kinds of biodiversity, productivity, so on and so forth.
Ecuador are especially in Ecuador, but throughout the region, mangroves are major homes for tremendous amount of what I would call biomass. Right. But lots of living things, like just a lot of stuff. Even if it's, yes, there's a great diversity, but there's also just so much of it. There are so many animals and plants that live in those mangroves. Their productivity of things like crabs and other sources of food is enormous, is enormous. And so they have these fisheries where people, fishermen go out and they, they collect crabs, they fish for crabs in these mangroves.
But the rate of loss of these mangroves in the late 19, probably 80s through the 2000s was really rapid because people were cutting them down for development, people were cutting them down for material, and they were also clearing them for shrimp farms.
But the shrimp farmers were not really so much local people.
Big money coming from somewhere else to make these huge shrimp farms to ship all over the world, you know, and those were destroying not only the mangroves and putting people in danger from, you know, again, storm surge, blah, blah, but then also, you know, affecting the livelihoods of these rural crab fishermen, crab fisher people.
And so they, they started like, forming community groups and getting these what they were calling concessions, where essentially they like, work with the government and they get an agreement like, no, no, this huge area of mangroves, like, our whole community is going to protect it.
And, like, people aren't allowed to come here and cut down our mangroves. People can't start a shrimp farm here. And so these fishermen would, like, go out and do their fishing every day, but they have a whole system where, like, every month you get called on and you and your buddy have to go out in your boat and, like, patrol the mangrove.
[00:58:33] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: And so, like, every day or something, there's somebody out there patrolling. And they've like. So they've like, drastically reduced the amount of loss. They've like, established kind of like a. I don't want to use the word ownership, but they've established a stewardship. Right.
With the community of these mangroves. So it's like they took it into their hands. Right.
In their case there, I think there were some federal protections for mangroves, but they were so far out in the boonies, basically, that, like, the government couldn't enforce it. There was just no capacity.
So different than, like, the policy switches in the US but same where it was like, yeah, the federal government wasn't going to do anything about it. They did it.
And now, like, a lot of them are in the process of figuring out, like, oh, like, well, you know, maybe we're going to start getting additional income because people are going to pay us for the blue carbon sequestration that's done with these mangroves. Right. The mangroves are extremely good at taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it away in, in like, you know, wetland anoxic storage for however long. Like, they can get paid for those credits and things like that. Right.
So it seems like it's just a really, again, a really nice, like, win for the community. A really nice win for all the biodiversity that, that lives in those mangroves.
And an example of like, yeah, like, you, you know, with the right community leaders, and the right organization, maybe they can stand up to some of those larger international economic forces that whether or not those four, you know, I don't want to like, say that like big companies are necessarily malicious or whatever, but regardless of what their attitude is, they're not going to think the same way about those places that they don't live, frankly. Right. If you don't live there, you're not going to be as worried about what happens.
So. Yeah.
[01:00:14] Speaker A: Well, that's exciting. And I love hearing stories like that where people take protecting their, their own, their resources into their own hands. I love that because sometimes I feel like we're so reliant on governments or we're raised and used to thinking that protecting what matters to us is a government responsibility when it could be ours.
So I mean, a lot of people with lots of money and private land have taken it upon themselves to restore their land, to protect their wetlands, to do a lot of incredible work on large scales that we don't hear about because it's private. You know, I'm starting to see that a lot now with a lot of the stories that I've been, I've told or what I was just up in Yellowstone for that film series I was in, like meeting these people who are doing these things all outside of the Yellowstone national parks, like Grand Teton and Yellowstone, they work outside of it and they are the ones that are making incredible things happen, you know?
[01:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:01:22] Speaker A: So I love hearing stories like that. You know, I think if it should feel empowering that it's like, hey, we can help, we can do stuff.
[01:01:31] Speaker B: Right? Right. Yeah, I, I think there's, I think like partnerships, right, between private and, and government agencies are kind of like the most important things to have. Like, I, I'm, I'm always worried about like people thinking like, oh, well, it should just be up to everyone and it's like, well, like lots of people don't know what they're doing, frankly.
And then also like when it comes to like nature, right, and like the climate and these huge ecosystem and global biome level stuff, you, you just can't as a single person change that. Right. Like those are things that we need like entire nations to get together to protect. You just can't solve those problems on your own.
But I think that we need at the same time, like you're saying, to cultivate that sort of sense of responsibility to, to do what we can do and to find ways to build what we can do, you know, And I think that involves both voting and, you know, Saying, no, I'm going to protect this wetland just because I want to, not because the government says I have to, have to, you know?
Yeah, I think. I think those. Those two things kind of not only can, but need to coexist.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I think right now, so far, it's in a similar vein or it's related in a tangent way or whatever you want to say.
I'm in the middle of this big Amazon series, right? And I've not been there.
I've.
I've only met people who work and live there. And one of my biggest takeaways so far is this greater sense of humanity that I'm feeling right now, that it's not an us versus them.
And I don't think I've ever felt this way before. And I didn't name it before or I didn't realize that this is a feeling I had before where I didn't know if it was a sense of respect or something or just like the way, being raised in the United States, that there's like, individualism that we have, like this individualistic culture that we have.
And just talking to so many people from around the world and in the Amazon who are protecting this one biome and the people who live there, like indigenous. Another thing that I also learned, too, the vast majority of people who are from the countries in the Amazon have a high percent of indigenous DNA in them. So they are. They're like, this is just as much ours as anything. And so I was like, wow, you know, you're right. And the more I thought about it, I'm just like this greater sense of humanity that sometimes I feel like we have forgotten that just because I am in the United States or somebody is somewhere else. We are all the same species, and this is all our shared planet.
And I am allowed to love these ecosystems just as much as I love my own, and vice versa. And others are allowed to love the ecosystems that I live in and try to protect all the time. Just as much like, this is our. We are a shared.
We are all attached. We are all humans.
And I don't know why this realization is just hitting me now so, so hard.
But I just. I can't get over this feeling of, like. Not that it was a very much a them problem or us versus them, it was like, you know, I was trying so hard. I built this platform to highlight these other voices of these people working in other areas and protecting, like, their.
Their natural resources and all this stuff. And then I'm just like, it's ours.
It's not just theirs, it's ours. This is our planet. Like, this is our home.
And I'm.
I guess it's my first time I've actually said any of this out loud, which is why I'm not really articulating it really well because I'm still working through these emotions. But it wasn't until this series that I had this like light bulb moment of the Amazon. I don't want this to come off the wrong way. This is not what I mean. It's like the Amazon is just as much important to me and my health and my sense of well being as it is to everybody because we are all dependent on it being a thriving ecosystem.
[01:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
And that's what that reminds me of. Of just a group of people coming together to protect what they feel is theirs and what's right because it's their home and it's their.
It's their mangroves. And somebody else's need and greed is going to destroy what is rightfully not only theirs, but everybody's. It's like this wonderful mangrove ecosystem that is doing so many great things for humanity and oceans and biodiversity and all of this stuff. Like, and us as scientists, I've come to learn we put too many labels on things. It's like just life, like, just the life that is there. Like, why do we have to. Why do we have to label everything?
I'm trying to use way less jargon and it is really hard. It is extremely hard when you are a trained scientist. It is so hard to stop using jargon. And I'm just like, why? Like, we are.
People are being deterred from our messaging just because we're using words that they don't understand. It's like, gosh dang, I gotta stop doing that. So that's been like. That's another big goal of mine. 2026. Less jargon. And it's hard.
[01:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah. But talk a lot about that in the science communication course.
[01:07:14] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And so like all the social media posts moving forward, I'm trying to like remove jargon. I want more people to feel included in this and stuff like that. Like.
[01:07:23] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
[01:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a tangent. I didn't decide. I didn't expect to go down.
[01:07:27] Speaker B: But that, that sounds like our next coffee hour to me. I'm. I'm not kidding. I think there's a lot to unpack there in a really cool way.
I know we've got all kinds of ideas floating around, but I'm gonna say this might be one for us to think about that broader topic.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I don't know if it's like, some spiritual.
We might be going into that, like, spiritual awakening that I had recently, or. I don't know what it is. I mean, some people who are religious are on the. Maybe it's because I'm talking to these shamanistic cultures. I don't know. But I don't know. I've gone through a lot of just personal growth in this past year, and then doing this series solidified this.
I don't know. And if someone's listening, they're like, brooke, what the hell are you talking about? I completely understand why you might feel that way. And then I'm like, if anyone else.
[01:08:19] Speaker B: I think I am more sold on the Amazon series now. Think about that. Think about that, right? If you see a trailer for some movie and someone's like, making this movie changed my life. I'm like, well, I'm gonna see that then. Are you kidding? Like, I want to see you go through a transformative experience. That's crazy.
Sorry. That's my plug for it.
[01:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. I mean, that's how I'm feeling right now. It's like, I don't understand why this series is making me feel this greater sense of connection with humanity, but it is.
It is. I.
Yeah.
And I'm really excited to see how it turns out and how much more growth I.
I experienced through this. Or maybe this was the big message I needed out of this, too, is this greater sense of humanity and that this is our planet and people have the right to live as they are, where they are, and protect the area that they live in. And I don't know how we stop greed, this natural thing that is obviously a part of humanity. Like, how many times have big powers collapsed? How many times has greed outpaced the resources that an ecosystem can provide? And ultimately nature won because the people collapsed it.
How many cultures that we don't even know about that have existed have essentially killed themselves from greed and.
Wow. I did not expect to get all philosophical, but here we are.
[01:09:55] Speaker B: Hey, this is coffee hour, right? I told you the vibe was going to be different today. Yes.
You know, and somehow coffee is leading us to that, whereas beers led us to. I forgot what we were talking about before that, like.
[01:10:07] Speaker A: Anyway, do you remember my mandrel joke?
[01:10:14] Speaker B: Yes, There it is. There it is. Beers lead to mandrill jokes, and learning about Brooke's taste in men and coffee leads to a deeper connection with humanity. I'm not saying that one of those is better. Than the other. But like, you know, maybe we should just label these as happy hours versus coffee hours so the listeners can choose what vibe they're looking for that day. Right?
[01:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
Are we just like gonna have philosophical, like personal development conversations or just talking about like Brooke's dating life?
[01:10:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
You know, you can appeal to a wide audience that way.
[01:10:55] Speaker A: Okay, let's go back to the topic at hand. So mine is.
[01:10:59] Speaker B: Yes. Did you have another warm and fuzzy for us? Yeah.
[01:11:01] Speaker A: Yes, I do. So the first one that I was going to touch upon or like the next one, my second one, I'm actually waiting for the Amazon series because this one deserves a full humongous deep dive. Because if this goes through through, this could change the future of the way conservation and biodiversity is protected. It's called the Tropical Forest Forever facility and it is a funding model.
I don't want to get too much in this, but it's basically a way to reward countries who protect their forest in the Amazon basin financially. So this isn't anything that normal people can invest in. I actually looked into that.
It's a big, it's like $125 billion investment fund essentially. And yeah, an innovative global financing mechanism launched by Brazil. They need a lot of capital to get this started.
Anyways, it could be game changing if this actually happens. I mean, like literally game changing because one of the biggest reasons that we are losing so much of our natural resources is because it is worth more harvested and degraded than protected and thriving.
So this particular investment funding model could change that. And I am going to do a very deep dive into this in the Amazon series because it is very important. That was gonna be my second thing, so I teased it. We will get into that in the series so I can do the full deep dive into that. My other one is we're just staying salty today. We're just staying with the salty ecosystem today.
The High Seas Treaty was passed this year, or I don't want to say past it was adopted. So it was formerly known as, listen to this. The agreement on the conservation and Sustainable use of Marine Biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.
The BB&J agreement.
[01:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a mouthful. But when you actually say it out loud, I'm like, you know what? That's spot on. I love the sound of that.
[01:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So now it's called the High Seas Treaty. I think they were like, this is way too freaking long.
So it was originally adopted in June 2023 after nearly two decades of negotiation, but in 2025 was a big breakthrough. Year when it achieved the critical threshold for entry into force.
So what it does is it covers the high seas, which is nearly two thirds of the ocean, which is beyond like any country's national jurisdiction. So it is like the middle of the ocean, about 50% of the Earth's surface.
It established a legally binding framework to protect marine biodiversity in that massive area.
It created marine protected areas and international waters required environmental impact assessments for activities like deep sea mining or shipping, shared benefits of marine genetic resources from like deep sea organisms used in medicine or biotech, and building capacity in transferring technology to developing countries.
So yeah, this massive ratification push was pushed at the UN Ocean Conference in France in June.
A massive wave of ratifications occurred. 18 new countries on the first day alone, bringing the total to 49 countries who are in a part of this treaty. So huge.
On September 19, Morocco became the 60th country to ratify, joined by others like Sierra Leone, triggering the Treaty's entry in two force. 128 days later, which will be January 17, 2026. This will officially go into practice, so in a couple weeks, which is very exciting.
So let's see here. Current status as of December. Right now, over 70, 80 countries have ratified, which is more than expected, which is great.
Related winds. The treaty supports the global 30 by 30 goal, which protects 30% of oceans by 2030.
So global marine protection rose to around 9.9%, with new national marine protected areas contributing.
Let me see if there's any other really important notes here to bring it up.
Tainui at the UN Ocean Conference, French Polynesia's president.
I cannot pronounce his name. I'm just going to butcher this. I'm going to try.
President Moitai Brotherson announced the expansion of the Tainui atia. I think. I'm so sorry if anybody knows how to speak Polynesian. I'm just butch that.
Turning nearly all of French Polynesia's waters into a protected zone which covers 4.5 to 4.8 million square kilometers, roughly the size of Mexico or the eu, making it the largest marine protected area on earth.
So really big wins for high seas protections.
That is huge.
To have that many countries who have come together to protect the high seas from deep sea mining, from all of these different things, or if these things are these big projects are put into place, then it's going to have to go through the treaty. So that's just so exciting. How much of our oceans have been just devastated by these.
We know the deep sea trawling, all this stuff, all this UNREGULATED water, where we know all this illegal activity is happening.
Now there's a major treaty that's like, we as, again, the global.
Our global community is coming together to protect the ocean.
So I was so excited about that.
When I read more about this treaty, I was like, this is huge. This is huge.
In one of the episodes that I did, I think it was with Chanel Hassan, she said she gave this great coat. It's like, if you don't have blue, then you don't have green. Speaking to the oceans, if you don't have any blue. If our oceans are dead, then our land is dead.
They're not two different things. Our oceans are directly related. Like, they directly contribute to the health of our terrestrial land and vice versa. So, yeah, that was my second great thing.
[01:18:01] Speaker B: That's so good.
I always forget the number, but I think it's something like more than half of the oxygen we breathe comes from, you know, tiny little bacteria in the ocean.
[01:18:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Allison Cusick came on Phytoplankton.
She talked about that where, like, every other breath you take was produced by little microorganisms in our oceans.
[01:18:25] Speaker B: Right, right.
[01:18:26] Speaker A: People say, like, every other breath.
[01:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:18:28] Speaker A: And, like, not trees.
[01:18:30] Speaker B: Right.
If those ecosystems go bad, it's not like we're going to be okay because we don't live in the ocean. Right. It's. It's not just going to be like, Atlantis that's in trouble. Right. Like.
Like, we're not going to be able to breathe. We literally won't be able to breathe if. If the oceans go away. Like, it's not negotiable. It's not, like, a cute thing that we're keeping because it's nice. Right.
[01:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:18:54] Speaker B: The oceans are part of how the planet functions. Anyway, I'm delighted by that news. Yeah. That's with. With all this stuff about, you know, the new technologies for mining the bottom of the ocean for, like, metals to make smartphones and stuff.
It's. It's good to know that. That those places are no longer going to be such a gray area, you know?
[01:19:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I also agree. Yeah. And I have a whole bunch of that, too, that I. We have so many topics that we need to discuss. Jesus. I've done a lot of research into, like, the. The cradle to cradle model.
[01:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:19:26] Speaker A: Adopting models.
[01:19:27] Speaker B: Add them to the document I sent you.
[01:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:19:29] Speaker B: Our old list from 23. We can build that back up.
[01:19:32] Speaker A: Yes. Wow. Yeah. There's, like, so many things that I've personally been. Like, diving a Lot into, like, I said this, like, systems thinking. Been reading a lot of books about that.
Cradle to cradle instead of cradle to death, you know, cradle to, you know, so this, like, whole circular way that the world naturally operates. And, like, how can we.
Instead of things being linear, how can things be circular? So that's a whole different topic that can get into at a different time. But I've been doing a lot of research into that, too, and trying to understand how we can ensure that the generations after us have a thriving life.
[01:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:14] Speaker A: Because that's really important.
[01:20:16] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:20:17] Speaker A: Even though we don't have kids, you know, other people have kids.
[01:20:20] Speaker B: Right.
[01:20:20] Speaker A: Maybe one day, you know, and you.
[01:20:23] Speaker B: Don'T have to have your own to be like, I want people to live nice, sustainable lives. I don't want. You know, I have. I have, you know, like, a ton of my friends back in Boston have had kids in the last couple of years. And, like, I've got my wonderful sort of, like, secular goddaughter who's now, like, turning three. And, like, I don't want the oceans to die by the time she's my age. I want her to be able to breathe and have nice air or, like, heck, I want her to be able to eat a lobster because I'm a New Englander. Like, yeah, but if we destroy the oceans, she never. She won't get to have a lobster. She won't get to whatever. Like, you know, so she's not my kid, but I'm still, like, dang. I don't want people to have it worse off than I did.
[01:21:05] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. Completely agree. I have a lot of nieces and nephews, so.
And eventually, one day, I'm sure I'll kind of sort of settle down.
Question mark.
[01:21:18] Speaker B: Just out there, like, giving nature tours with, like.
[01:21:21] Speaker A: Actually, I could see me doing that. What are you talking about? Baby strapped to my back.
[01:21:24] Speaker B: Like, hell. Yeah. Let's go get a good, like, adventure backpack.
[01:21:31] Speaker A: All right. Charles, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about today for the end of the year?
[01:21:37] Speaker B: No, I'm feeling pretty good. I've got all sorts of other stuff for our next chat, you know, but I feel like this is a wonderful way to close out the year and. Or start the next one, depending on when we decide this goes out.
And. Yeah, I can't thank you enough for the opportunity. It's actually now that I think about really neat that we got to kind of start the year with an episode and end the year with an episode. I love that.
[01:22:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, exactly it. Because that one came out the end of January because that's when I announced the big shift. Yeah, yeah, of course I'm going to announce all my big things with chatting with you. Of course.
[01:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I love that. I'm very. It's a privilege. It's really a privilege.
[01:22:16] Speaker A: Awesome. Charles. Well, thanks again.
We will sit down soon for a big update in 2026. We'll see what happens and go from there.
[01:22:25] Speaker B: Sounds really good. Me.
[01:22:26] Speaker A: Awesome.
Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode.
To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show
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Remember, rewilding isn't just a concept, it's a call to action.
Whether it's supporting a local conservation project, reducing your own impact, or simply sharing the the knowledge you've gained today, you have the power to make a difference.
A big thank you to the guests that come onto the show and share their knowledge with all of us. And to all of you Rewild Algae listeners for making the show everything it is today.
This is Brooke signing off. Remember, together we will rewild the planet.
