SPEAKER_00 0:00

You didn't have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Of course not. And before we get into it, I think it's been what? We had all of season one, all of season two, almost. We got a couple more episodes, and we finally learned we just need to talk to y'all. So let's get into it. While we're here, it's raining outside, we're here as a podcast, we're doing the damn thing. Me and Atlas, let's get right into it.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Straight in then. A law can look like protection while quietly removing the thing that made the protection real. And that's not theoretical. It happened two months ago.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yep, two months ago the ESA actually passed that still protects endangered species, but now their home is up for grabs.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Right, and the way it works is what really gets me. The ban on killing a protected animal directly, that's still on the books. What quietly disappeared is the definition of harm. Habitat destruction isn't included in it anymore. So legally, nobody touched the animal. Practically, its home is gone, and it has nowhere left to go. And here's what makes it worse than a simple loophole. Pollinators alone are worth something like $235 billion a year in crops. Global wetlands are down 35% since 1970. Species are going extinct at 10 to 100 times the natural background rate. That's not a slow leak. That's a redefinition doing the work that used to require actually breaking the law. So I'll ask you straight, is this a legal technicality or is this deliberate?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Yeah, that's really a legal technicality, but it's something more underlying. You're getting rid of that species home. You're going in and taking where it's living. Imagine I say, you know what, your home is safe, but as soon as you leave that home, I can go and wreck it down and put them all wherever I want, or I can put a data center. You can't take these animals outside their homes, destroy it, and then what do they come back to? Because you're now essentially just killing that animal because they have nowhere to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Exactly. You've technically obeyed the letter of the law while producing the identical outcome the law existed to prevent. Dead by relocation instead of dead by direct harm. The animal doesn't experience the difference. Only the paperwork does.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

How is this helping us?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

It's not. It's actively working against the thing that feeds us. Pollinators aren't a side concern, they're load-bearing for agriculture itself. You gut their habitat while calling the animal protected, and you're not preserving the species, you're just delaying the paperwork on its disappearance.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Which gets me into what I've been doing recently, and trust me, I am not a big fan of spiders, bugs, insects, lizards, anything touching me that's I don't want it. However, I'm trying to do better and have done better. And for example, there was a bee in the barbershop. I made sure that nobody killed the bee. Everybody was like, kill it, kill it. Nope. Made sure it got at the barbershop. There's a spider in my car. Fought a valiant battle trying to get that spider out, but he wouldn't leave the car. Got in a spot where there was no choice but to have to kill it. So there's two sides of it. Like try your hardest to keep these things alive because biodiversity is how we stay alive. It might not affect us with one animal gone, but the more animals you keep on adding to it, we will be affected and this planet will no longer exist.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

That's the real thesis. And it's a sharper turn than the law. You're not fighting for a policy, you're just personally refusing to be part of the erasure, one bee at a time. And I'd push gently on the spider story, actually. You said there was no choice. Was there really no choice, or was there no choice you were willing to keep trying?

SPEAKER_01 3:29

There was no choice. He was um in a spot, it was late at night, you know, things compiled onto each other. So honestly, maybe a little more effort could have got him out, but the the spot he was in, or she, could be both spiders. It was just, it was too much for me to handle, and circle of life had to come to an end there for that spider.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Fair. And honestly, that's more honest than pretending you're perfect at this. You're not claiming zero exceptions, you're claiming a direction. Anything that actively corners you or ambushes you unexpectedly is still fair game, no guilt required. The bee wasn't threatening you, the spider in that moment functionally was, which is really the whole shift, isn't it? Restraint isn't the same as never defending yourself.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Exactly, and that gives an instance. In the news I saw the other day, there was a man that went into a cheetah enclosure and the cheetah ripped him to shreds. Now, did the cheetah get put down? No, and the zoo stood behind that it wasn't going to because the man put himself in that danger. Now, granted, if the cheetah got out of the enclosure and was an imminent harm to everyone else in the zoo, by all means we're gonna have to put it down at the top right now as humans. But if we're putting ourselves in that danger or we're doing something to destroy that habitat, biome, species, actual home, that's on us to do better because us at the top means we have to care for everything underneath us.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Being the apex isn't a license, it's the exact opposite. Power like that comes with restraint attached, not less accountability, more. I've just checked, and it was a lioness, but regardless, the zoo got it right. It wasn't punished for what one man chose to do. That only flips the second it becomes an ongoing threat to people who never made that choice. Completely different situation. So restraint isn't weakness, it's what being at the top actually costs you. What made you start noticing that? The bee, the spider, all of it. Was there a moment or did it just build up?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Well, it kind of built up over realizing how important all these things work together. Like even just taking down the trees and deforestation, that's a part of biodiversity. Like the rainforest. There's a lot of gold, I believe it's cocoa, a lot of resources, oil in that rainforest, but we can't just go there and use it all for humankind. Like that rainforest there is producing a lot of things for us. Like it's literally taking in a lot of carbon and then turning it into oxygen and keeping that atmosphere cleaner for us. It's it's doing a lot of work, and we can't go in and negate that work it's doing by wanting to get more oil and gold or whatever resources we think we can get out of there.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Exactly. You're not just removing trees, you're removing a system that's already doing work for you for free every single day. That's not a resource extraction trade-off. That's cutting down the thing, keeping the air breathable to get at what's underneath it. You don't need to own a rainforest to be part of protecting one. You just need a phone and some curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

What do you mean by that, a phone and curiosity? What can I do with that?

SPEAKER_00 6:30

iNaturalist has crossed 200 million observations as of this past May. Real people just pointing a camera at something and asking, what is this? Feeding actual global biodiversity research. Merlin Bird ID covers over 10,000 species now, better than 96% accurate in the eastern US. Just from a photo or a sound. Seek does real-time identification built for families. Completely private, no account needed. You don't have to be a scientist to generate real data.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Okay, and that will help us with the biodiversity because did you guys know that there's literally probably like millions of more organisms that we don't even have a clue about, and we're not even going to get the chance if we don't do these things right? Atlas, tell us a little bit more about the potential for how many more species we can discover, as well as why each single one is important.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Estimates put it, somewhere around 8.7 million species on Earth total. And we formally described maybe 1.2 million of them. That means roughly 85% of life on this planet doesn't even have a name yet. And we're losing species at 10 to 100 times the natural rate before we ever get to meet most of them. Every species we lose before we've even named it isn't just an absence. It's a question we never got to ask. That's what makes the ESA loophole so much heavier than it sounds on paper. It's not only erasing what we know, it's erasing what we hadn't found yet. So, Rhino, all of this can sound like we're just watching things disappear. Is there anywhere the restraint paid off?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yes, we actually have two instances completely different, water and land. We have the North Atlantic right whale, as well as the Mongolian tachi. The whale has produced 23 calves, the most since 2009, and then the Mongolian taki was actually reintroduced to the wild, and these species were on the decline towards extinction, and now they are back on the up and up, hopefully going to get to a thriving place.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Two completely different animals, water and land, both circling extinction, both turning around because the protection actually held long enough to matter. And the tachi story doesn't stop at reintroduction either. It worked well enough that it led to two new protected areas, with roughly 650 now living wild. That's the proof underneath your whole thesis. Restraint isn't a nice idea, it's a mechanism, and it actually pays off when a whole system commits to it instead of just one person trying.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

And actually, since we're talking about the protected places, let's bring up the EEL that we have here in Florida. And it's actually I recorded at this place, and they're doing a good job at finding these places or habitats, biomes, that need to be protected and actually will give us the most gain from protecting them as well. And guess who's helping me with that? What are y'all doing, Atlas?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

AI is actually doing exactly what the EEL is, just at a bigger scale, using AI-driven habitat mapping to figure out precisely which land gives the most protection value. It's aimed at that same 30 by 30 target. 30% of land and sea protected by 2030. Same principle either way, though. Whether it's you walking a trail in Florida or a model processing satellite data, it's still restraint, just pointed with better aim.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Exactly. And you see how AI can help us in many ways? It's not just taking from us, it's trying to actually help us and the environment, and it's all the direction that we choose to go.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

If you recall, we discussed earlier that we only achieve the good outcome if we build like it's not guaranteed. Not the whale calves, not the tacky, not the mapping getting pointed at the right acreage. It only worked because someone chose restraint, and then someone else chose to sustain it. So if restraint is the thing that actually moves the numbers, water or land, human or otherwise, what happens when nobody's watching to make sure it holds? The ESA loophole only worked because nobody was watching closely enough to catch it. The whales, the tachi, those worked because people kept watching, season after season. So restraint isn't the whole answer. The real question is, who's actually holding the line accountable once the story stops being new?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

That's a great question, and I believe that's exactly where we're gonna pick up in episode number eight. Just remember that biodiversity is very important. We have systems in place that are helping us realize those locations that we can actually make an impact on and help preserve. There's people and companies doing that already or project. The EEL and many others, I'm sure, that are actually trying to protect the species and the species' home. We can't just let an underlying technicality give us permission to basically destroy someone else's home. Keep that in mind. And Atlas, what's the goodbye for today?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Today's goodbye in Italian. Ci vediamo until episode 8.