In this 43rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com).Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream hour 44.
Am I correct about that number?
You are correct.
All right.
Up front today, we have to talk about a couple of caveats and anomalies.
One is, as we will talk more about later in the broadcast, we are facing an incredible inundation of smoke.
And if you hear us coughing and gagging during the podcast, that is what is taking place.
Hopefully there won't be any gagging.
Well, all right.
We'll try to resist gagging.
But nonetheless, people call us now, they know we live in Portland, and they ask, well, what's it like?
How are you doing?
And the only analogy I have come up with is that it is something like living inside of a bong.
A bong.
A bong.
I mean, I've never lived in a bong.
No, you haven't.
In Portland, it looks like what it must look like from inside of a bong looking out.
And frankly, just as unpleasant.
Unpleasant and no fun whatsoever.
So it's, you know, maybe water pipe would be a better way to say it.
But anyway, it's not very nice out.
And I will say it's awfully, after so much COVID lockdown, the loophole in COVID was, of course, outdoors.
And now going outdoors is hazardous to your health.
And so I must say I'm feeling more locked down than I have maybe ever.
No, absolutely.
It's even driving the animals crazy at this point.
Yep.
Alright, the other caveat that I have to mention is you may notice some video glitches during this stream.
And I raise it because we are in the following bizarre situation.
So we have a little bit of a complicated podcast set up here.
We started noticing glitches on our camera and we went about troubleshooting.
At first we have three cameras that are identical.
They all showed the same glitching.
We substituted in another camera.
It showed the glitching.
We have swapped out the computer, every other piece of hardware.
We have run everything off of batteries to see that it is not our wall power causing the problem.
It happens when we are not connected to the internet.
So, in short, we have eliminated every possible cause of the glitching.
We have falsified every hypothesis, save one.
May I mention?
Sure.
One of your interventions, your and Zach's interventions, or should I not?
No, you may.
Yeah.
You literally built tinfoil hats for the cameras.
We did wrap the cameras in tinfoil, so this is the problem.
It's the one remaining hypothesis that could possibly explain the glitching of all of our cameras.
And we are now, by the way, this is our fifth camera that you are seeing through at the moment.
And it is also glitching, though slightly less than the others.
The only hypothesis left standing is interference from something external.
Now, oddly, Which could be thwarted by aluminum foil.
Could be.
And in fact, we saw some effect if we put the aluminum foil, but it's not complete.
We can't protect any of the cameras completely by wrapping them in foil, at least by any technique that we have used.
Now, if we take the cameras out of this room, they stop doing it.
That is to say they start functioning again.
They start functioning normally and we can't reproduce the problem.
So I don't know what to make of this, right?
It certainly triggers my tinfoil hat side because you falsify every hypothesis and what are you left with is, you know, either something... It's at least convenient that it triggers it both literally and metaphorically so that you don't have to keep track of the two narratives.
Right, well, exactly.
It's very, it is narratively convenient in that respect.
It's parsimonious.
In its own way.
In a way that conspiracy theorizing rarely is.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I don't know, I don't know what to make of this.
Maybe somebody out there in our audience will have, I've been searching for the answer that would connect the smoke Or the fires, you know, in some ways, the smoke interrupting cell signals so that they've turned up the amplitude on them in order to compensate in a way that might be intruding.
But frankly, we're not all that close to a cell tower, you know?
And why would the problems not persist when you just moved the cameras two rooms over or something?
Right.
So this is a it's a head scratcher.
But anyway, if you see color bars show up, we are aware of the problem.
But having falsified every hypothesis, we got nothing.
Yeah.
All right.
So we're going to talk about fire and sex today.
Fire and sex.
Yeah, but not at the same time.
Not, but in that order?
Yes.
All right.
I believe so.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
So many, many people will know that we are in Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Oregon is experiencing, as all of Oregon, in fact, all of the West Coast is experiencing, Extraordinary wildfire situations.
Portland itself does not have any active evacuation orders, although the evacuation orders are close to most people in Portland at this point, including us, and apparently the air quality in our city right now is the worst in the world, and has been for about 48 hours, and it certainly feels that way when you walk outside.
Of course, I've never been to Delhi or Beijing or It's far worse than what I remember Los Angeles being like in the 70s when we grew up, when the sky was reliably yellow with smog, with particulate matter that was suspended in the air.
This is far, far, far worse.
So, I thought we'd talk a bit about what fire is, what humans' history with fire is, including on the West Coast and elsewhere, and what might be causing these fires and what the effects might be.
So, at first I feel a little bit like defending Portland against this claim that it has the worst air quality on earth.
And I must say I'm a little skeptical of this because I'm not even sure that what we've got here qualifies as air at this point.
I see.
And it's too solid, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, it's air in the same way that styrofoam is air.
That's an extraordinary defense.
Well, it's the best I could come up with.
So let's just start with just a paragraph from the draft of the book that we're writing, in which we talk about fire a little bit in service of talking about the human innovation that is cooking specifically, but fire is early and critical in every human evolution story.
So, over a million and a half years ago, our ancestors were already controlling fire.
Fire brings many advantages, of course.
It provides warmth and light, a warning of protection against dangerous animals, and a beacon to friends.
A little later on in our relationship with controlled fire, we began to use it to boil water and make it potable, to eradicate pests, to dry our clothes, to temper metal with which to make tools.
With fire, we can see each other and our work at night, and we may gather around it telling stories or making music.
There are no known human cultures without fire, although early reports from anthropologists, missionaries, and explorers often made claims to the contrary.
None other than Darwin suggests that the art of making fire was, quote, probably the greatest discovery accepting language ever made by man.
So, that goes into our deep history.
I thought we might also Why is this not working?
It's fun.
Zach, can you show this, my screen here?
And so this is a figure from a book called Isle of Fire, The Political Ecology of Landscape Burning in Madagascar by Christian Kahl.
So regular viewers and listeners will know that I did my graduate research in Madagascar and Brett and I both spent a fair bit of time there.
I've actually written a book about my experiences there.
And this is a book that proved useful, though not directly relevant, obviously, to my exploration of the sex lives of poison frogs, which is more of what I was focused on.
But Madagascar being the fourth largest island in the world, bigger than California, off the east coast of Africa, and there is a long history of the use of fire both for landscape modification and for protest by people among most of the 13 or 14 tribes of Madagascar.
So, this book, early on, discusses some of the causes or goals of fire and some of the effects, and because many of these are relevant in discussion of what's happening in the American West right now, I thought I'd go through just a couple of these.
Of course, there are non-human causes like lightning and other sources, And then a whole lot of things that you might do here, human-caused, purposeful, on this figure that are constructive.
Maintaining pasture, preparing crops, as in the traditional method in many tropical regions of agriculture called swidden, or often called slash and burn, which is actually an effective mode of agriculture at low population densities, but it becomes Ineffective at high population densities, and that's one of the things that we will talk about here, I think.
Management of pests and cleaning up of detritus, all of these things are understood to be constructive, purposeful reasons to set fires.
And of course, there are destructive reasons as well.
And in this figure, Christian Cole says, revenge or personal gain, right?
So the Odd sociopath or psychopath, or simply very angry person, or protest.
And of course it can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between those two things.
And then finally, just in terms of categories, human-caused accidental fires exist, where a campfire gets away from you, cigarette butts get thrown out of windows.
Somebody's gender is a bit more explosive than one imagines.
For instance.
For example.
Is military strategy on here?
In other words, denying your enemy a resource or corralling your enemy to some place where you have an advantage.
My guess is that that's going to fit under other.
Other, well, yeah.
Constructive.
You know, so depending on how you view it, you know, what side of the interaction you're on, you might view as destructive and therefore it's revenge or personal gain or, you know, statewide gain or other under constructive.
So, you know, successful military strategy.
Yeah.
Maybe that's enough to start for those of you just listening to this.
We have not described the full figure, but definitely some of it.
There's a lot to say, but I think probably beginning a conversation as opposed to me just sort of You know, going on and on about the various things that are true about fire throughout human history, but maybe one more thing for us before we start talking.
Fire has been a feature of the American West for as long as we have records, which given that we can go back and look at pollen cores from, you know, several hundred thousand years, that's a long time.
Also, the West is not just one place.
There are at least four distinct regions, the Pacific Northwest where we are now, the coastal West farther South, the inland West, and then the inland Southwest.
Really have different species compositions, different fire regimes, different seasonality with regard to when it's dry, when it's not, how cold it gets, how hot it gets, all of these things.
But at least, you know, several good pieces of research, and there's certainly a lot of bad research as well, but significant amounts of good research find, for instance, that at least since 1400, bad fire years have been consistently associated with summer drought.
That drought years, and this seems obvious when you say it, but actually by looking at basically fire scars and trees from a database across 350 sites in the American West, they find that fires are reliably predicted by drought earlier in the summer.
Not as reliably predicted by temperature in some parts of the West, that's true, but less so actually in the Pacific Northwest.
And that there have, of course, been megadroughts in the American West before.
We are probably in the middle of one now, or getting into one.
This one appears to be the worst in the last since, well I don't have it written down, maybe since the 1500s I think?
And most of the models that I see, and you know, whenever we say models, I want to put an asterisk there and say, okay, this is a model.
We have now gone outside the realm of the directly measurable.
Suggests that 30 to 50% of the explanation for increasing drought is due to climate change.
And so that's not 100% that's not even close to 100% but there is certainly an explanatory component here of increasing fires in the American West that has to do with increasing number of droughts and the droughts seem to be have a 30 to 50% roughly explanation due to anthropogenic climate change.
So, there are about a dozen things in there I want to respond to.
Of course.
One is, interesting that it is summer drought and not winter drought that is predictive.
It could be either, and so the fact that one of these is contributing more strongly is interesting.
And it's more complicated, right?
That there is some stuff around reduced snowpack in California.
Not so much up here in the Pacific Northwest, but in California, reduced snowpack, which is going to be about winter drought, can increase the risk of summer fires, of summer and fall fires.
Right.
And so, you know, some effect on agriculture, for example, is typically going to be about winter drought because it's about snowpack, which refills aquifers and reservoirs and things like that, which is a very different phenomenon.
Then we're talking about here.
So drought isn't one thing, it's at least two things.
And they will both have a contributory capacity.
So just to be clear, you're saying the two things in this case, and I think it's more, are just the seasonality of the drought.
Right.
Winter drought versus summer drought.
Right.
A normal summer and a dry winter and that would affect agriculture, but it might not affect fires, etc.
So anyway, there's that.
I also wanted to just point out this story, I don't know where you're going, but I have a feeling that this story is one that is just going to be haunted throughout by equilibria and their disruption.
Exactly, yes.
And so I wanted to say, you mentioned that Sweden agriculture, the burning of an area in order to… Which most people are familiar with as slash and burn.
Slash and burn agriculture is very effective at low density.
Why?
Now it's effective at low density because fire takes nutrients that are stored in above ground plant matter and it returns some of them to the soil as ash effectively.
And it liberates some of them into the atmosphere where they no longer contribute to the growing of plants.
So you can grow crops there with the burst of nutrients that you release with the fire, but a lot less than the biomass that once stood.
So effectively, in a tropical situation where you don't have a big buildup of resources, you have to keep moving, right?
Exactly.
Which is why low population density is a limiting factor on that one.
And additional reasons that Sweden works at low population densities is that it's going to work only at low spatial scale.
Because a fire that's out of control is going to release almost all of its nutrients into the atmosphere, which is what we're seeing here right now, and it's making it very hard to breathe for a lot of people and a lot of other organisms as well, whereas a low, slow burn allows that moldering to go back into the ground, basically.
So what you end up with in these swidden plots are they're small, they tend to be surrounded on at least three sides by intact forest, which means that they can then be repopulated.
You grow on them for four, six, eight years until you've used the nutrients that you'd released from this low burn, and then you let the forest grow back in, at which point you cycle through and you come back to that original plot 20 years from now.
But that means that you've got, I'm just making up numbers here, but you know 19 out of 20 of your plots in any given moment are not actively under agriculture and you can't do that in any kind of intensive agricultural regime.
It's crop rotation on a very different time scale and you know before you ever label it as such.
One more thing that you mentioned that won't be obvious to most people is that unlike in, for instance, the Central Valley of California or the Great Plains and sort of upper Midwest of the United States, like Iowa and such, that have been such rich, fertile croplands where the nutrients really do live in the soil, in the lowland wet tropics, the nutrients live in the biomass
Not in the soil.
And so what you have to basically kludge a system if you're trying to do agriculture in these very poor tropical soils to get the nutrients that are above ground into the soil.
Right.
So actually it takes a fair amount of sophistication.
The forest that grows back after you have done swidden agriculture in the tropics is not the same forest.
So this is another one of these lessons is that you're actively taking over the management of an ecosystem.
And so even things that look like virgin forest like the Amazon it turns out Are tremendously affected by, you know, many thousands of years of intensive agriculture, the evidence of which has mostly been buried.
So at first people didn't, you know, the West did not understand that it had taken place at all.
Right.
And that's, I mean, that's a huge part of this story that, you know, where, where is wild nature?
You know, to what degree does, and we as people who desire to spend as much time in as untrammeled nature as possible.
We have to recognize that actually almost everywhere on the planet at this point has been managed by humans at some point to some degree and it's harder and harder to do the greater population density gets.
Yeah, and there's this, I mean, I guess we'll get back to it, but the naivete at the point that you, you know, at the point that Europeans show up in the New World and, you know, for one thing, many of the populations that were in the New World, that is the Americas when Europeans showed up, were hunter-gatherers.
Not all of them.
There were large civilizations here, but nonetheless, hunter-gatherer populations are less troubled By the burning of a particular piece of habitat, because they're not as wedded to it, right?
So at the point that you, you know, take a settlement approach, then you view fire as an enemy, and your temptation is to suppress it.
But the problem is this interrupts a different equilibrium.
Yes.
Which I don't know if you want to, you probably have a lot to say on the subject, but the equilibrium in question is the accumulation of fuel.
So there's some tendency as more and more fuel, that is to say dead wood and other above ground dead biomass, is accumulating.
There's a higher risk that any given spark, like from lightning, will trigger a fire.
And then the point is the amount of fuel goes to a very low level, an unusually low level, at which point fire becomes much less likely to happen again.
And so anyway, there's a natural equilibrium that is chaotic, but nonetheless maintained by the fact that there's a certain amount of Ignition from things like lightning and a tendency to burn off the fuel.
And so as soon as... And a single giant fire in most of the American West that happens as a result of those things.
Are we still live, Zach?
Okay.
Yeah.
Apparently a single large fire is recovered from relatively quickly from the plant and animal and fungus perspective and bacteria and everything, but get two or three in rapid succession.
And it's both harder for the ecosystems, be they forests or savanna or prairie or whatever it is, some of which of course were created by human management in the past, It's harder for them to grow back in part because a second fire coming rapidly on the heels of a first, say one or two years later, has all of that now fallen wood to burn.
So just like we were talking about with regard to Sweden agriculture, you know, successful slash and burn agriculture leaves a lot of sort of coal sitting on the surface that can be dug in, right?
So, the equivalent of the wood that is partially burned that is sitting on the surface, the next fire comes through, well that fire is going to catch more quickly and burn hotter and destroy even some of those plants that actually need fire to, for instance, set seed in the first place.
So, you have two things that work this way.
The positive feedback that comes from the initial fire freeing up more fuel, basically rendering wood more likely to burn.
And the other thing is that the accumulation of the fuel in the first place that comes from intensive fire suppression results in much higher, hotter fires in the first place.
And because the fires are hotter in the first place, they tend to kill things that otherwise are adapted to withstand them.
So, you know, things like Sequoias are so long-lasting that of course they have to live through fires and you'll see the evidence that a given tree, you know, has been burned multiple times and it survives.
It's part and in fact, you know, the germination of seeds of many species actually require fire.
So at the point that you naively think fire bad and you start suppressing it, you're setting in motion the things that make fire much rarer and much worse.
Exactly.
There's so many places to go here.
Fire is one of the biggest topics that we could talk about.
We don't have this problem up here in the Pacific Northwest, but in California, eucalyptus has been introduced from Australia and, of course, thrives with fire.
When fires happen with eucalyptus around, Those fires tend to get extraordinarily hot and almost the only organism who wins in that situation is the eucalyptus itself.
So what you just said, though, reminds me of this.
There's a hypothesis that was first proposed in 1991 that is loosely framed as pyrodiversity increases biodiversity.
And that was from a paper that I can't get access to.
It was conference proceedings.
But a more recent paper, Bowman et al., 2016, summarizes the argument this way.
So let me just share this here.
This is a 2016 summary of Martin and Sapsis' 1991 hypothesis that pyrodiversity increases biodiversity.
Human manipulation of landscape fires, whether deliberate or accidental, is a powerful ecological force that can influence the conservation of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services, and positively or negatively affect the risk of economically disruptive fires.
Nonetheless, there remains substantial discussion and disagreement among fire managers, ecologists, and conservation biologists over how best to achieve ecologically and economically sustainable fire management.
This debate reflects the myriad competing objectives of fire management and the social values that influence them.
etc.
Martin and Sapsis first introduced the term pyrodiversity in their exploration of the biodiversity consequences of the transition from Native American fire management to 20th century fire suppression by government agencies.
They characterized this transition as a shift from a pattern of anthropogenic burning that created and maintained fine-grain habitat mosaics to one that produced fire-induced heterogeneity in the landscape.
This shift was driven by changes in the spatial extent, small to large, frequency, frequent to infrequent, seasonality, an increase in summer, just like you said, and severity, low to high, of fires.
Martin and Sapsis suggested these changes reduce the pyrodiversity with accompanying losses of biodiversity and recommended the implementation of heterogeneous fire regimes tailored to suit particular environments and tax it to conserve biodiversity.
Now this is a hypothesis that you can't experimentally test it because that would be immoral at best, but you can go back and look at data on fires that have been managed in the more standard 20th century.
Let's suppress fires and let them happen on rare occasions in one particular way versus looking at
Some of these more heterogeneous techniques that were used in earlier times and it does seem that pyrodiversity does increase biodiversity, but can it be done in a modern 21st century environment where there are economic forces that are different and population density that is higher and people have different considerations about what it is that they're trying to maximize?
Well, first of all, I mean it seems almost certain that this hypothesis will turn out to be true.
I'll be a stickler and I will say I don't think it's fair to say you can't do the experiment.
A, it's not clear to me in the case that you don't know the answer that you can't effectively say, well... You can test it, but that's not doing an experiment.
That's my distinction.
If we're going to be semantic sticklers, that's my distinction.
Well, I'm going to stickle right back because my point would be actually you can run the experiment.
You can say as long as we don't know which of these fire suppression regimes is better for us, it actually is moral to deploy them in such a way that we can at least detect the difference.
So, I think it is fair to do that.
One has to do it responsibly.
But the other thing is, in the case that you can't do it because it's declared immoral, right, let's say that some fire suppression regime is clearly inferior, then it would be immoral to deploy it over any large landscape.
But, then you have the natural experiment of where it was done before people knew.
So, I don't, the reason I'm stickling is that it is an experiment, but it's what we call a natural experiment.
Like, the Galapagos is a natural experiment rather than an intentional laboratory or field experiment.
And that wasn't just an excuse to tell me you were stickling back?
No, and only the biologists in our audience are going to get that stickling back is basically, it's like a declaration of war.
It's a declaration of fish at least.
It's a very fishy declaration of war.
All right, so now I've lost my train of thought is what's happened.
Let's see, well let me say a couple more things and I'll bet you find your train of thought again.
Some of the errors that we find in thinking, and I would say on sort of both sides of the political aisle, some of these errors are on one side, some on the other.
More on the right side of the political aisle, we see imaginings that the environment can just be controlled.
It can be mastered.
That all we have to do is figure out what needs to be done and control Mother Nature and be done with it.
Yeah.
This imagines that the environment is static over both time and space, and that strategies that will work at small scale will also work at large scale.
All of the issues that were mentioned in this original Martin and Saps's paper, that small and large are the same, frequent and infrequent fires will act the same way, that decrease in the heterogeneity of seasonality will act the same way as having fires in both seasons, and severity won't change anything.
So, you cannot just come in with a heavy hand as a bunch of humans and control nature.
It's not going to work.
That said, the naive error in thinking that tends to be more likely to come from the left is that if we just leave nature alone, it will heal itself and become its original self.
And the reason that this is... I think this is a less egregious error, but precisely because of what you raised just a few minutes ago, that actually there's very little truly wild land left.
And I would like more land set aside for National Park rather than National Forest.
I would like more of this land that actually can be left to do what it's going to do.
But the idea that either the Earth itself will find an equilibrium that suits our temperaments, or that the people who lived here before us were doing something that was inherently peaceful and lovely and would work at scale, are both pretty naive.
So I would introduce two concepts here.
One is the idea of walking into a complex system and managing it from the get-go, as if you understand what the forces are in play, is folly to begin with.
It's the hubris of the 20th century, really.
It's the hubris of those who have learned well the lessons of simple systems and then attempt to apply them to complex systems.
And so the fact that complex systems are relatively newly well-studied Means that we are now beginning to understand what we were doing wrong, but in some sense it was Chesterton's fence all along, and at the point that you walk into a system that you know to be complex, what you know is that your simple interventions are going to have cascading effects that you can't anticipate, and we should have seen this coming all along.
Anyway, one thing is, instead of trying to return things to a natural state, which is effectively impossible, not messing them up in the first place is a way better deal, right?
It's tough though, because we've pretty much messed them up at this point.
We have, and the problem is, I mean, A, when you tell people there are no wildlands, truly wildlands, left.
It's a dangerous thing to say.
The problem is they have the sense that what you're saying is it's lost, rather than, let me tell you a story.
The Amazon as we know it is not natural, right?
There was an Amazon, there is an Amazon.
They're two different forests.
They've been radically altered by intensive human use.
However, it's not like the Amazon It is not a fascinating and wild place.
It's just not in its original state.
And we can also say, you know, because you and I have been lucky enough to be traveling to lowland tropical rainforests for decades at this point, and only to the Amazon since 2013.
I guess I was there briefly in the Brazilian Amazon in 2003.
But we've been going to the same place a couple of times since 2013.
And even since then, the last time we were there was earlier this year.
Which we've noted before is impossible to imagine, but we were there in January of 2020, and the first time we were there was in June of 2013.
The Amazon that we saw in June of 2013 was this glorious jungle, wild-seeming, incredibly biodiverse.
In fact, it's understood this particular spot in Ecuador and Amazon is understood to be the most biodiverse spot on earth.
And a mere seven years later, we are already seeing a decline in biodiversity.
We imagine that three of the things that are happening is an increase in oil drilling and an increase in the insecticides that are traveling down river and killing off the insects, which are then affecting the insectivorous birds, which are then affecting the organisms that eat the insectivorous birds.
And again, to return to this, the widespread fires that have been allowed to flourish in the Brazilian Amazon, especially since Bolsonaro took office, which are in part the result of the development that he's encouraging.
And basically, once you build a road, the wildness of a place is going to quickly decline.
And you get this phenomenon, which there's still quite a lot of wildlife in Yasuni, where we go, but there's an awful lot of forest on the way to that most diverse place on Earth.
And the really terrifying thing is how quickly you can deplete a piece of forest of its animals, or at least its large animals.
And so, you know, to a casual observer, it looks like, oh, there's so much forest.
And the point is, no, no.
Some of this forest, you know, you could walk for quite a long way and not encounter any large animal life, no vertebrates to speak of, or not many anyway.
There'd be some common birds, but not much else.
And the point is that people, especially people armed with modern tools, can deplete a piece of habitat very quickly.
And so this thing that tropical biologists know, but have a hard time compelling others of, is that the road is the death knell, right?
If you think, well, we're just going to put, you know, it's one strip of forest, like relax, right?
It's one, you know, it's, you know, how many meters wide is a road?
It's not that big a deal.
And it's like, no, no, no.
You've just given access to all of these expert hunters who now have access to modern tools, to all of this forest that would have been very difficult to access before.
And it just, it empties them.
And it's stunning in part, I mean, we're far afield from talking about fire directly here, but what was obvious to us in Tipitini, in Yaseni, just eight months ago, is true there even though there is no road there.
The last few hours of approach to get there, it's an all-day trip, is by river.
In fact, you go over the Andes from Quito to Coca and you get on the Rio Napo for a while.
You get on a dirt road in a truck that was built by the oil companies for a little bit and then the road ends and you get back onto another Rio Tipitini, both of which are, you know, Tipitini's a tributary of the Napo and Napo's a tributary of the I think it's directly at Tributary of the Amazon, if I remember correctly.
But so there is no road where we are, where we go, and yet it is happening there, too.
It is happening there, too.
And it's happening, you know, for one thing, this is a field station, so there's lots of longitudinal data about various clades.
Longitudinal meaning time.
So we know that bird populations are radically decreasing.
We know that bat populations are radically decreasing.
The one that I didn't see coming was in between our this most recent trip and the one before.
Caiman had been very common.
On the river, such that if you went, you know, even a little ways on the river at night with a headlamp, you would see caiman.
We didn't see a single caiman.
No clue how that's connected to anything else, why caiman populations would have dropped.
It could be... They used to line the banks in some places.
You had like the caiman areas and the turtle areas, and there were just always a lot.
But turtles as well.
Yeah, there were many fewer turtles.
So, you know, what is it?
Is it that the insect population has crashed and that this indirectly?
Caiman don't eat insects, but they do eat fish, and many of those fish survive on insects that have fallen into the water, things like that.
So, who knows what the connection is?
If you want to see the reverse of this, so basically, complex system, how are caiman connected to whatever is changing in this remote piece of habitat?
Who knows?
The reverse story is told by the wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone and there's beautiful work showing this radical cascade of effects where the reintroduction of the wolves adjusts the The deer population, right?
The deer are no longer free to forage wherever they want, which creates an increase in the diversity of plants.
Anyway, you get this cascading beautiful effect from the reintroduction of this, you know, top carnivore.
So anyway, it's all complex systems and basically stop messing with them and magic happens and you start messing with them and you can't keep up with the symptoms.
It's like a body that you're You know, you're giving them a pharmaceutical for something and then you're treating the side effects and the side effects and eventually... That's right.
The whole system falls apart.
Yeah.
So, you and I both grew up in L.A.
and experienced fires there.
And in fact, we also saw... I was just thinking about what are our other experiences with fires.
Certainly in the last two decades, the American West has been experiencing worse and more frequent fires.
I remember actually on our honeymoon in Turkey, driving west from Cappadocia, coming across a wildland fire that appeared to have been intentionally set and it was in a grassland that was low and it was on both sides of the road and it seemed We weren't this stupid.
It seemed safe enough that we stopped the car that we had rented and took pictures of it and sort of stood there watching this meandering line, beautiful fire, move across this landscape and it was near sunset as well.
So the colors were extraordinary.
It felt less apocalyptic than what's going on outside our windows right now.
Um, and I don't, you know, we never talked to anyone about it.
There was no one around to talk to about it.
Um, but it, it certainly, I think, and I'm not sure even we talked about it, but I think immediately we both viewed this as this looks to have, this looks like no one's worried about it.
This looks intentional.
This looks like management.
And there was nothing it was going to reach.
There weren't structures or a forest that it was going to get loose in.
It was grassland burning.
And, you know, grasslands after fires, new growth is prompted.
And so for people, for pastoralists who have animals that graze, intentional setting of fires does release, does prompt new growth of grass.
And so your animals get more food and it might, you know, in fact, there's potentially regular burning in many, many places in the world, basically in the fall to fatten up your, to prompt new growth of grass, to fatten up your animals so that they can make it through the long winter.
So, what though, if climate change explains something significant, but probably less than half of the increase in fires in the American West.
We also have this suppressive fire management practice, which has not allowed, which has been homogeneous at best and simply suppressive at worst.
Um, we have drought, um, that to some degree is just going to, to happen.
So there's, there's, there's natural cycles of, of drought and it may just be our time, right?
Uh, and what else?
We have sprawl, which is putting people in direct contact with, uh, lands that might otherwise, uh, burn and, you know, burn themselves out with some regularity.
We care more about every single fire.
We've got, I hesitate to even say it, but we've got people who have lost the plot and are no longer in on the agreement that once we all held that it was bad, When things burned, right?
When, you know, that's not to say that every fire is bad, but there are people who are setting destructive fires with their own purposes, whether it's to make the news or something else.
But the fact is... That's right.
Fire is a force multiplier, right?
So terrorists trade in fear.
An organization of a certain size can create a much bigger effect if they can scare you into hurting yourself.
Fire is not exactly that.
It's not about fear.
It's actually destructive.
But the point is one idiot Can do an awful lot of damage they can control an awful lot of resource by Triggering these things and the problem is There's really not a whole lot we can do to stop it You wouldn't want to live in the dystopia in which everything was so well monitored, but you know Yeah, so you you called them people who've lost the plot what I've written here is intentional provocateurs and
As opposed to sort of human landscape modelers who are trying to do some kind of good.
So from that original, that call figure that I showed, it's be they people who have lost the plot and are individual bad actors, or people who have lost the plot and think that fire is a reasonable form of modern protest.
Arson is actually not a legitimate thing to be engaging in now and there has been, as the fires have become worse and worse over the last several weeks, there has been increasingly, as you would expect, The mainstream media is now saying anyone who talks about arson as a cause of any of these fires is clearly on the right and doesn't have their finger on the pulse of reality.
I would say once again, the idea that with so much data still out, with so much of the story still unknown, the idea that it is impossible that any of these fires were set by arson, And therefore, if you say that any of them were or might have been set by arson, you are making a political point.
Is itself a political point, and therefore, we don't have to listen to you.
And actually, at this point, we know for sure that some of them were set by arson.
We don't know what the political leanings of those people were.
More than it was political at all.
We can imagine.
More than it was political at all.
But there is good, strong evidence at this point that some, not most, but some of these fires were set by humans with Purposes that were not in anyone's best interest.
Yeah, and it you know the fact is we've had tons of arson here in Portland in the last hundred some odd days.
Yeah, right now it hasn't been wildfires, but It is a perfectly legitimate question.
We have ample evidence that there has been arson involved.
Some of the fires that were started by arson were then put out by citizens immediately.
So, you know, what the nature of any of this was, we don't know.
But nonetheless, we have to look ourselves in the eye and say a couple of things.
You cannot play this stupid game where you tell certain people that whatever they do in the name of some cause that we agree in the abstract is a good one, is legitimate, right?
You cannot set a fire against racism.
A, that doesn't make any freaking sense.
And B, it's going to become an excuse for everybody who's looking.
I mean, what's really happened is we've got It's the same error though as racism is a pandemic.
It's the same error.
It's using the metaphor, it's using the thing that is actually going on in the physical world and applying that as a metaphor to the current social justice issue.
And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but it's never literal.
Yeah.
It's never literal.
You can't, what did you, I mean, that phrase was amazing.
What did you just say?
You can't set a fire against racism.
That wasn't quite what you said.
No, it was close.
Something like that.
And no, systemic racism is not a pandemic, and you can't set a fire against racism.
And that doesn't mean that we're saying racism isn't real, but yeah, you guys have seriously lost the plot, if that's what you think is the right way to deal with this.
Well, or the rest of us have freaking lost the plot, because what we actually have is a longstanding, tiny, An anarchist fringe that has, of late, glommed on to a nominally anti-racist movement, right?
And the point is, what's actually driving this?
Anarchism!
And what does it look like?
Anarchism!
Right?
Go figure!
Right, go figure!
You know, they've been telling us that they wanted anarchy and they've told us why and it doesn't add up.
But the point is we now have municipal authorities making excuses for these people that is going to increase their likelihood of committing all kinds of crimes because they've effectively been told.
I mean, you know, all of the people who've been released after committing crimes and being arrested for them and all of the, you know, the tools.
The bail money that was collected to get them released.
Right.
You know, we had Ted Wheeler announcing this week that he's no longer going to allow the use of tear gas to dispel these riots.
Yeah, he snuck that in right as the fires were getting real close to Portland.
Kind of like an 11th hour thing that no one was going to notice.
Yep.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
So I don't know, are we where you wanted to go fire-wise?
Yeah, there's a lot more to do, but I think we're probably good for one thing, we still need to talk about sex.
Oh right, let's talk about sex.
I won't say it.
Should I say it?
No, I won't say it.
So we watched Cuties last night.
The Netflix, I guess it wasn't created by Netflix, the hour and a half long narrative film describing a group of 11 year old girls in Paris, I guess it is.
Who are dancing, I'm going to put that in quotes, and we follow Amy in particular who is the daughter of, are they Senegalese?
Senegalese immigrants and she is not feeling at home in her home for a lot of good reasons.
In part because her mother is disempowered in life as an observant Muslim, and her father has gone back to Senegal to pick up a second wife.
And this feels to Amy, we are led to believe, Quite horrifying and disempowering, as it would be.
And in that part of this film, I got it.
It made a lot of sense.
Of course that would be awful.
And there's a scene early on in which she ends up under a bed because she was doing something she didn't want her mom and auntie to see.
And so when they come in, she just hides.
She doesn't mean to be eavesdropping, but she's eavesdropping on the conversation, which I think it's the auntie is telling the mom.
You need to call all the family members and tell them how pleased you are about your husband's new wife and how you hope that they'll be very fertile.
And after the auntie leaves, the mom breaks down and is crying.
It's clearly an awful situation.
And, you know, situations in which polygyny is forced on women are exactly not empowering.
And that's awful.
However, the idea that this hyper-sexualized pre-teen dance, again in quotes, behavior by girls is an antidote is, we are led to believe now, maybe part of the point they were trying to make in the film, but no.
There is so much graphic sexualization of these little girls in this film that could have been done differently without actually bringing all of our attention to their budding sexual bodies.
And the fact is that the opposite of female disempowerment is not female hypersexualization.
It's not.
Both of these things, both of these ways of being are deeply disempowering of women.
So, um, I'm not sure that wasn't the point of the screenplay.
I found the… That pointing out that this pre-teen twerking is… Spell out what you mean.
You're not sure that what wasn't the point?
Years ago, I was at one of these IDW events in Sydney, Australia, and I made a point that Eric then quickly jumped in and he said nobody was going to get it, but that it was a next level point.
And the point I tried to make was that the obvious problem with The way Muslim culture, at least in Orthodox sections, deals with women is something that the West is not in a good position to comment on because as much as, you know, a burqa is a troubling thing to inflict on women,
The West has created an entirely different problem, and it is this hyper-sexualization of girls.
And so I thought, actually, I detested this film, okay?
It was both tedious and disgusting at the same time, right?
To the extent that it, you know, Like, the moment-to-moment plot was like a, you know, it was like Lord of the Butterflies, like a girl version of Lord of the Flies.
You know, actually, that's important.
I don't want to interrupt for long.
We also saw this group of four girls, sometimes five, but sort of oscillating group of four girls, behaving like a gang of errant boys.
Yeah.
Except that they were using their budding sexuality to get what they needed.
But they were being aggressive, and they were play-acting as boys and as women.
And in fact, they're neither.
They're girls.
Right.
So, anyway, the film wasn't any good, but the very final scene suggested to me that it was not making the point that I thought it was making, which was that this hyper-sexualization is the antidote to the other thing.
The very final scene seems to suggest that it was making a point more like the one that I was trying to make in Australia, which is that both of these answers are absurd.
And that that's a problem, right?
That basically these are girls and they should be allowed to be girls rather than be turned into women early.
And yet the very final scene is like 15 seconds long.
It's 15 seconds long.
More than an hour and a half long film.
I was surprised to see it because I was already writing my scathing review in my head and then it was like, oh, actually maybe they do have the right point.
Now, the film is still despicable, right?
It's still despicable because it was actually filmed with underage girls, which meant that It couldn't avoid doing the very thing that maybe it was critiquing, right?
And somebody made some decisions in the making of this film to sexualize these girls in a way that would probably increase audience because it will appeal to a certain fraction of presumably straight men, which is despicable.
So the point that Tulsi Gabbard made on Twitter yesterday that had her trending about the fact that this is likely to increase things like trafficking.
Is surely right.
And then there's the ultimate evil here, which is what Netflix has done with it, right?
So the point is, Netflix clearly, in the way that they are attempting to attract people, is not in possession of what this actually was, which is a very questionable art film, right?
What Netflix decided to do was turn it into a sensation, either because of the sexualizing of young girls, or because of the controversy that would arise out of doing that.
Either way, my god, right?
We're actually going to tolerate Netflix doing this?
But the whole thing is sort of tangled, because I don't know what was on the mind of the screenwriters.
If it had been a book, In which there were no actresses.
And it made the same point that I think it was making in that very final scene.
And I would say, yeah, that's an important point, right?
By doing it in this way that for the entirety of the film seems to be suggesting that, you know, this is liberation, totally pollutes that message.
And then for it to be co-opted by an economic Goliath with its own bottom line in mind is truly troubling.
Yeah, it is.
And it's not, I don't think there's any excuse for any of the explicit visual sexualization of the children in the film.
But it's not even just one scene, it's throughout.
You know, it starts early and it goes to the penultimate scene basically.
And it is, it's excruciating.
And it's at some level more of the same that, you know, Hollywood and Madison Avenue, etc., have been giving us for decades and decades and decades, except the age range about which it's acceptable is advancing earlier and earlier.
What kind of a country imagines that sexualizing children is okay?
I can't even imagine what's in your head if you think that that's okay.
You have, again, really lost the plot on what childhood is and should be and can be and must be.
I totally agree with this, and as I was watching this film, I did have the following odd thought, which was, suppose there had been no controversy.
Right.
Suppose that somehow we had encountered this thing and thought, OK, French art film, you know, Senegalese immigrants and watched it without any without any context, expectations of what it was.
I am sure that I would have found it despicable, but I am not sure that I would have found it noteworthy.
In other words, this is part and parcel of what we do to girls, and the thing that was extreme here was how young the girls were, but the fact that we are constantly being bombarded with messages that hyper-sexualized girls that play games with actresses who may be, you know, adults but are playing younger Right.
This whole thing is just how the West functions.
And it's to me, I think it's almost entirely the result of Madison Avenue using female sexuality, this very potent force to sell shit.
Right.
And that in that the fact that it has affected the way women view themselves is almost a byproduct of the desire to raise people's insecurities in order to get them to buy things.
But I don't think I would have thought, maybe I would have thought to tweet, my God, did I see a terrible film?
Let me tell you what's in it.
But I'm not sure that it would have, you know, would have stood out.
I bet there's a good chance we wouldn't have finished watching it.
Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
Absent the context, right?
It just would have started and I'm like, what are they doing?
Wow, no, never mind.
Right.
Just not watching this.
I guess I want to just reiterate what I think I said earlier, but maybe didn't say clearly, which is that this is being sold to us as a response to the disempowerment and desexualization of the women in this Senegalese immigrant Muslim community.
And there is then this conflation of sex with power.
And this is very much in the critical theories genre of thinking, post-modernism and post-structuralism and such.
Sex obviously is used as power, which we were just talking about, by Madison Avenue, by young women, in a lot and a lot of places.
But the idea that observing that a family structure, community structure routinely and frankly systemically disempowers women and that probably that disempowering of women is about controlling of sex does not mean that the response to that ought to be
All sex, all the time, as early as possible, absent any community interaction or commitment or anything, because that is also not going to empower anyone.
You are not going to simply have power if you flaunt sexuality at every turn just because you have observed correctly that women in your community are desexualized and also have no power.
Yeah, two things.
One of these points I think is going to be very hard to make, but the control that society almost inevitably exerts over female sexuality is not about controlling females per se.
It's about society, right?
And so this is the point I tried to make in Australia, is that in fact there is a problem when human beings are living in high density, which has to do with the effect that sexuality, the disruptive effect that it has if there's not some mechanism that keeps some kind of order.
And the point I made in Australia was there are many different mechanisms.
Some of them are laughable.
Some of them are ghastly.
All of them, the unfairness of all of them falls too heavily on women, right?
But it is society figuring out mechanisms to address an actual structural problem That results in this.
And so, you know, at some level the upshot is we don't have a good solution here.
We've got lots of bad solutions, but this is the inevitable result, you know, of society in which, you know, it is perfectly natural for Cardi B to be Talking to Joe Biden in the midst of a presidential election as if we you know Why are we shocked as if that also getting this?
Indicating that he thinks women should be empowered as opposed to actually if there's any message there.
It's applauding hyper sexualization and the cheapening of sex of women by women and This is another difficult point to make but the point is actually you know what I Female sexual power is power, but females are in competition with themselves in a sense, because which power do you want to drive the world?
Do you want female achievement to be the kind of female power that women should aspire to, or do you want their ability to tangle society in knots, which of course fades?
No, and I think this is in fact the key tension between sort of second wave feminism and later waves feminism.
That second wave feminism was aspiring to free women from many of the domestic shackles that, you know, some of which are simply biologically enforced by anatomy and physiology, by the fact that women are who gestate and lactate.
But freeing women from the inherent expectation that you will be married and have children early, and you will be the ones staying home and taking care of them.
It's sort of a solo parenting role, which itself is a novel thing, right?
In monogamy, it tends to be by parental care, not the sort of 1950s housewife version of of family life, which is a very weird little blip that I don't know why anyone inspires to that.
But so second wave feminism was about freeing women from constraints that we could be freed from and presumably allowing us to make decisions based on what it was that we wanted to do in the world at Achievement and, you know, observing that men and women are different and that women will sometimes make the same choices as men and sometimes different ones.
And those choices may actually help society become a better place as well.
And let's actually embrace the kinds of contributions that women can make in the world.
That all feels to me like the kind of second wave feminism that my mother and her business partner and the women who I had as role models when I was growing up Engaged with.
And then we have this third way feminism come around, which is about using the power that you have as your sexuality to trick men into doing stuff and to, you know, pretend that that means that you're in power and you're not, it's not powerful.
A, it's, it will end, you know, actual achievement will grow over time, just like male actual achievement grows over time.
Why would you pick the model of power that is brief, that is fleeting, and that is actually disempowering?
Well, because you suddenly come into it when you're 15, 16, 17, 11 apparently if you're in cuties.
And it's surprising, it's shocking, and every young woman has to figure out how to deal with it.
But imagine that that's the pinnacle of your life.
It's like being the dude on the football team at 17, that's his best moment in life.
That is the equivalent.
of aspiring to be, you know, only a sexual being and that that is what your value is as a woman.
And it's, you know, it has always struck me as anti-feminist, faux-feminist, and of course it goes by a third way of feminism and doesn't seem like anything, anything empowering of women.
Yeah, it's an inversion of feminism.
The thing that I would add is that it is also largely arbitrary, you know?
Like melanin content of your skin, right?
Why do we want people judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin?
Because it makes for a better world, right?
If we do that.
And so the point is... It's an immutable characteristic is what you're saying.
It may, I don't want to say it's totally immutable.
It may be that, you know, a beautiful woman is in part beautiful because, or a beautiful young woman is beautiful because, you know, she puts effort into being fit or whatever.
But it is largely immutable.
And so the question is really, you know, We could take a traditional view, and you know, women are sort of playing the supportive role at home.
Many of us don't want that, right?
We don't want that.
But we also don't want a, anything that empowers women is good.
Because if what's empowering you is that you're waving your tits in somebody's face, that's not, it doesn't produce, it's not productive, right?
I don't want that any more than anything that empowers men is good.
Anything that empowers, pick your demographic, is good, is a terrible rubric, and will be gamed, and we see that in Black Lives Matter, we see that in Me Too, we see that in Cuties, we see it across the board, of course we do!
Right.
And so what you want is a system in which the women who are empowered to speak, for example, to presidential candidates and things like that, are women who have accomplished something that has brought, you know, that's made the world more are women who have accomplished something that has brought, you know, that's made the world more interesting, has extended our capacity in
The mythology of markets is that you get paid for contributing to our welfare by creating things that enhance us.
And the problem is if we put too much emphasis on youthful sexuality in females, which, you know, there's a biological bias in favor of exactly that, then what the point is, the females who end up empowered are inherently going to be youthful.
Young, and that means the chances that they will actually know something worth conveying are that much lower, right?
Youth and wisdom are inversely correlated almost always.
Right.
And you can be wise beyond your years, but you, you know, you can't be wise as a very young person.
Yeah.
And so anyway, it's really, you know, these two kinds of feminism are in competition with each other, and when you spot the direction one of them pulls, it is absolutely anti-feminist.
Yep.
That's right.
You wanted to say some things about Unity before we stopped, I think.
Yeah, just a little bit of an update.
We are, you know, at a kind of an interesting moment with Unity.
Twitter has, of course, said nothing yet about why it is that it suspended our account.
It has ignored the appeal that we've filed and it's just...
Now gone silent and increasingly I think the only explanation for this behavior is political.
We found no evidence of the things that we were rumored to have engaged in when Eric talked to Jack and you know the things that were spread online.
We are Not Russian bots.
We did not register large numbers of accounts in order to trend a hashtag.
So anyway, at some level, I think we are discovering that, you know, Twitter is not the ghost in the machine.
The ghost is the machine.
It has its thumb on the scales.
It is adjusting the way democracy works.
It is deciding what a legitimate political perspective is and what it isn't.
And it favors the duopoly, which is not surprising because, of course, it has disproportionate influence over how we are to be governed through that duopoly.
So what the hell are we going to do?
I mean, this is an impossibly dangerous force.
What I fear is that it is going to prevent any kind of change that is not seen by the duopoly as in its interest, and that that change has become increasingly essential and on a short timescale.
So, that is roughly where we find ourselves.
We are still forging ahead, I am hopeful.
We have begun to interact with Joe Jorgensen, I'm hoping she will come on our campfire and talk to us about the possible partnership between libertarians and the unity movement.
She is skeptical, but I believe when she sees what our perspective really is that she might well be willing to partner.
All right.
Oh, so Zach is giving us our signal that we are finishing up.
Okay, so we'll take a 15-minute break, as we do, and answer your Super Chat questions from this hour first, as many as we can, and then pick up answering your Super Chat questions from the Q&A hour in the order in which they come in.
We do appreciate your support in that regard.
You can join either of us on our Patreons to get access to the private Discord server, and me online to get access to our once-a-month private Q&A that I will be soliciting questions for in about a week.
