S4E12: We Need To Talk About "De-Extinction"

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris): 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555 think the deserts are barren wastelands.

0:00:31 - (B): In.

0:00:35 - (Chris): It'S time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. So if you've been around the Internet for the last three days, and I mean of course you have, you will notice that one of the most popular top stories is the idea that ancient dire wolves have been brought back from the dead. This week, dire wolves were brought back from extinction. They were thought to have died out some 12,500 years ago, but now dire wolves are walking the earth again.

0:01:10 - (Various): That is the sound of a dire wolf. They've been extinct for over 10,000 years, but maybe not anymore. Jurassic Park. More like Jurassic Park. The first ever animal to be brought back from extinction is none other than the dire wolf. They were gone for over 10,000 years, but now they walk among us again. Dire wolves. Dire wolf. Dire wolf. Dire wolves. Dire wolf. You made a f cking. Direwolf. Direwolf. Direwolf. The howl of a dire wolf hasn't been heard on planet Earth for more than 10,000 years. That's because the species is extinct. Or was

0:01:45 - (Chris): Was and is. This is Chris. Welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I had a crazy weekend that took up a lot of my podcast production time. And I'll talk about that weekend. It was good. But yes, we want to talk about dire wolves which lived in the North American deserts, among other places, most of the southern part of North America, and they went extinct 12 and a half thousand years ago.

0:02:12 - (Chris): They are still extinct and we'll get into why in just a minute. But first, my weekend was pretty nuts, in a good way. Partly as a result of this weekend, we didn't send out our Desert Environmental News newsletter today. I'm recording this on Monday. We will catch up next week. But on Friday midday, I hopped in the car, drove the 2 1/2 hours to Los Angeles, got a room, and then the next morning walked from my room three blocks up to LA City hall, where I met 36,000 of my closest friends, listened to some great music.

0:02:47 - (Chris): We were, however, not there, crammed into a sunny and increasingly unventilated open park as it got more crowded in downtown LA just to hear music. That would have been a perfectly fine reason, but we were also there to hear civic leaders, union organizers, nurses on strike, teachers fighting for their students, and elected officials who were criticizing the Trump administration in no uncertain terms.

0:03:13 - (Chris): The event culminated in people like Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, and Neil Young introducing two elected officials in particular. First, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. And she could have spoken for half an hour or 45 minutes as far as I was concerned. And I was tired. I was ready to leave, but it only seemed like four or five minutes. She was a really wonderful speaker. And then she brought Bernie Sanders on and he knocked it out of the park as well. I was very glad that I was walking distance away, or at least my room was walking distance away from the park. Cause I saw 36,000 people try to get on the subway all at once.

0:03:51 - (Chris): And good for you folks. I hope it wasn't too unpleasant standing on the platform as at least eight trains went by before there was room for you. What did AOC and Bernie say that was so fascinating and that kept me in Los Angeles instead of working on this podcast and on the Desert Environmental News newsletter? Well, I didn't bring any recording equipment, but fortunately Bernie did show up at Coachella on Saturday night and he put his speech out on his YouTube channel.

0:04:18 - (Chris): And somewhere in this episode, maybe all the way at the end, I will play that for you. Besides which, other people did record the entire dang event and so look for a link to the 5 1/2 hour long YouTube video in the show notes. Anyway, while all this was going on and 36,000 people got together to raise my spirits about confronting the newborn autocratic fascist regime that we're now living under, the media world was losing its goddamn mind over something actually more trivial.

0:04:55 - (Chris): The claims that a biotech firm had brought the direwolf back from extinction, which is, on the face of it, preposterous. Now, I'm not saying that this biotech firm didn't do something important here. They could have led with a bunch of interesting things that they did in this project, or with a different project, which is far more important and valid. They have been working to boost the genetic diversity of red wolves, which still exist, that are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

0:05:19 - (Chris): That would have been great. And we would not be talking about that right now. Not only because it would have been a fine idea depending on the implementation. I mean, the devil's in the details. But also because there are no red wolves in the desert. They're all in the southeast of North America. At least the red wolves that I am thinking of. There are other animals called red wolves that are not actually true wolves, not genus Canis, Canis rufus.

0:05:45 - (Chris): Are all in the Southeast, not in the desert. They belong there, and we wish them all the luck in the world and we hope they keep that place wolf filled. At any rate, between being in Los Angeles and hearing all the bad takes on this alleged de extinction, hearing the frustration in the voices of the people that actually know something about evolution or mammalian biology or the environment or conservation of landscapes for wildlife habitat, all of them are pretty much going, this is a neat trick, but these are not dire wolves.

0:06:15 - (Chris): I'll slap a link to one of the more entertaining such responses from Hank Green in the show notes. So I'm in LA hearing this about dire wolves. So what am I supposed to do in Los Angeles other than go to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits? I paid my 18 bucks to get in. The La Brea Tar Pits are one of the holiest places in the Southwest, if you ask me, in my own personal religion and pantheon. It's a fantastic small museum, could be a lot larger. They have a lot of fossils that they take care of, only a very small portion of which are on display.

0:06:55 - (Chris): And incidentally, did you know that there's no tar in the tar pits? There's no tar in the La Brea Tar Pits. What's there is asphaltum. So anyway, I have some thoughts about why these creations of colossal biosciences are not dire wolves and never will be. And I have some thoughts about de extinction in general. I want to share, and I'll say right now, that I'm not uniformly opposed to this kind of stunt.

0:07:21 - (Chris): I think it's potentially tough on the animals. It ignores the fact that a lot of animals have culture that's passed down from generation to generation, emphatically including anything that's related to a dog. It's not all instinctive behavior. A lot of it is learned. And if you don't have parents to teach you this stuff, take it from someone who knows you grow up weird. So before we get into that all the way, I do have a little bit of housekeeping to take care of. And I'm very, very pleased to report that some folks responded to the gap left by the Trump administration's canceling funding to California Humanities, which cost us 50k and put our Amargosa Basin documentary project in doubt.

0:08:02 - (Chris): We have a number of new donors and a few people who have been consistent donors, but gave us more in response to this news. And that's just so wonderful and made my weekend, in addition to all the other great stuff that went on. And I'm not going to sort them out into piles. I'm just going to thank them all together. Alison Monroe S. Stafford, Mary Kay Moore, Katie Rodriguez, Edward Logue, Wayne Hazel, Robert Bagel and Mira Lee Sethi. Someone I have adored for a long time.

0:08:36 - (Chris): Good friend, one of those good friends that I've never actually met in person, but that increasingly doesn't matter so much these days, does it? Now, I will say that this increase in donations, while it hasn't filled the hole that the Trump administration left, it has filled a hole in my heart. And I thank you for that. You made this old guy a lot happier than he could have been. And speaking of fossils, bringing back extinct species is a controversial topic.

0:09:04 - (Chris): And that's for some good reasons. No species that we know of lives without having relationships with other species. And no species on Earth can possibly live without having relationships with the non biotic aspect of its environment. Once a species goes extinct, the relationships that individuals of that species had with other species or with a non bio environment they lived in also go extinct. Those relationships end the ecosystems that held the species and the relationships change. And sometimes that change is radical.

0:09:42 - (Chris): Mammoths lived in a steppe environment that died with the extinction of the mammoths because boreal forests grew up and invaded the steppe because mammoths weren't around to step on them. I think of it this way. If a particular species of bee and a particular species of annual plant have an exclusive pollination relationship, the bee only pollinates that plant. The plant is only pollinated by that bee.

0:10:07 - (Chris): One of them going extinct will cause the other to die out as well. But it might not have that much effect on the ecosystem that surrounds them. It'll be less diverse, it'll be more depauperate. But it doesn't necessarily mean a collapse. It does mean that the ecosystem that the extinct species might have lived in will change. Once one of their components is gone, they move in a new direction. They become to some extent, sometimes to a large extent, new ecosystems.

0:10:39 - (Chris): And no one's really talking about reviving vanished species so that we can keep them in zoos or research labs forever, you know, eventually we're going to be talking about letting them go loose. But the dire wolf, Even if you grant Colossal's claim that these are actual dire wolves, which we'll get into, the dire wolf was part of an ecosystem that hasn't really existed for 8,000 years. It died out a few thousand years after the direwolves did.

0:11:09 - (Chris): The ecosystems of North America haven't just sat around pining for their lost megafauna. They changed. And that raises the question, if you reintroduce a rebuilt extinct species into habitat that has changed in the thousands of years since that species was roaming that habitat, what's the difference between that and releasing an invasive species into a habitat that doesn't have a niche for it? That might cause even more new damage to the ecosystem and to the native critters and plants that have come to depend on the ecosystem being the way it is now. There are some animals that have gone extinct recently enough that the ecosystems are maybe more or less the same as when they left us.

0:11:57 - (Chris): Animals like the Yangtze river dolphin or the ivory billed woodpecker. The ecosystem is still there. But the reasons that the bird and the dolphin went extinct are also still there. And to explore this, it's illuminating to look at the project that was the closest thing we've ever had, as far as I can tell, to a successful DE extinction. And that's the captive breeding program for the California condor.

0:12:24 - (Chris): The California condor became extinct in the Wild in 1987. Due to direct intervention by humans. We captured them. There were fewer than two dozen live California condors in the world in 1987, 38 years ago. Right now, Easter Sunday 1987 is when the last one was captured. Now, condors do have culture. They do have things that the parents train the young birds to do. And that is not going to happen so well in captivity because they don't have the same curriculum that they would in wild condor friendly habitat.

0:12:56 - (Chris): But nonetheless, according to the Ventana Wildlife Society, there are now 565 California condors in the world. 200 of those are still living in captivity. Almost 200 but 368 wild condors are flying around in coastal California as far north as redwood country and around the Grand Canyon. The condor recovery program has been a crown jewel of the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service's overall work. And if Fish and Wildlife Service were to declare victory and stop putting money into breeding condors in captivity to release into the wild, which is entirely possible with this administration, I don't think that there will still be wild condors 25 years later.

0:13:40 - (Chris): It's not a sustainable population. And why? Well, because the things that put them in trouble in the first place haven't gone away. They're still having trouble interacting with a human built environment. They collide with power lines and things like that. They're still subject to environmental poisons. Chief among them, lead shot. You set a gut pile out in scavenger country and it's going to get scavenged and condors are still filling their bellies with lead shot. That's fatal in the medium term.

0:14:09 - (Chris): Lead poisoning is one of the main causes of death of California condors. So we brought them back from the brink, and they're still on the brink. And this is with a species that was still hanging on, still just teetering on the edge of extinction. We put tons and tons of effort into helping them rebuild their numbers with a lot of public support, and they are still not going to be able to make it on their own because we refuse to do things like get rid of transmission lines and outlaw lead shot across the continent.

0:14:39 - (Chris): And as for an animal that nobody really hates, nobody fears condors, or if they do, they generally don't act on it. So even if these were dire wolves, there's no place for them to go. Why would this not work while at the same time some of us are working to restore Mexican wolf populations and gray wolf populations? I mean, clearly, if there is room for gray wolves and grizzlies, it would make sense on sort of an instinctive level that there might be room for dire wolves. But here's something that I haven't really seen mentioned in the press coverage.

0:15:19 - (Chris): Given what we know about dire wolves and the way they were built, and we have tens of thousands of fossil dire wolves to look at. You can get a pretty good idea of what an animal did in life, what it was able to do and what it was unable to do by looking at its skeleton. And we have skeletons, we got direwolf skeletons up the yin yang in Southern California. One of the most striking exhibits at the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits in LA, which I looked at this exhibit for probably the 50th time in my life this past weekend, is an illuminated panel in which a little bit more than 400 skulls of dire wolves that came up out of the tar pits right next door to the museum are arrayed.

0:16:03 - (Chris): You can see the diversity. You can see that a lot of them have broken teeth. You can see that a lot of them have wounds that healed more or less successfully, often less. This was a thriving population and there was a lot of diversity within it. But one of the things that we can know from looking at the rest of the skeleton, not just the skulls, is that direwolves probably weren't all that great at running fast for long periods, certainly not the way gray wolves can.

0:16:34 - (Chris): That would be a disadvantage today if they were just released into the wild, because deer are pretty fast, bighorn sheep are pretty fast. They'd have to sneak up on things. And that's not really what they did. They were cursorial pack hunters, as far as we can tell. If you're going to be a hunter that hunts by running, which is called being a cursorial hunter, you have to be able to run a little bit faster and a little bit longer than the fleet footed animals you want to eat.

0:17:03 - (Chris): So how did dire wolves feed themselves if they are not great runners compared to other things like gray wolves? Well, when they were walking around on the continent doing their thing, we also had animals like giant ground sloths and mammoths and other really large animals that probably took a little while to get going. It's very likely that dire wolves focused on slower animals because wouldn't you.

0:17:30 - (Chris): It's easier that way. It's either that or become ambush predators. But there were already saber toothed cats and American lions and mountain lions filling that role. So unless we're going to release dire wolves into feedlots, which might be interesting, or other places where there are a lot of animals that just can't get away, they're not going to have that much of a food supply. In North America, we don't have ground sloths walking around. We don't have baby mammoths.

0:17:58 - (Chris): There's really nothing here for dire wolves to eat. That part of their menu has been discontinued in this restaurant. So why do I insist, along with a lot of other people, many of whom know more than I do, that these are not dire wolves? I'll say that if you want to call them direwolves, I'm not going to stop you. I mean, there's no actual true dire wolves walking around that are going to object. I'm not going to police your language.

0:18:29 - (Chris): You can call them what you want, but they're a genetically modified wolf. And genetically modified wolves are not a new thing. We've been doing that for thousands of years. Some people think 15,000 years, some people think it's more like 35,000 years. And I've had a little trouble recording this episode because of noises being made by some of those genetically modified gray wolves that happen to be bonded to me in a weird multispecies pack arrangement.

0:18:56 - (Chris): There are a couple of things that Colossal did that are really cool. And one of them is finding enough DNA in dire wolf fossils they had to look outside the tar pits because tar and DNA don't play well together. But coming up with a dire wolf genome, that is awesome. That's amazing. The animals that they created are extremely pretty. I would buy a calendar With a moment, I'd want to go be their friend.

0:19:22 - (Chris): They probably wouldn't want that. At any rate, Colossal made 15 edits in the gray wolf genome, changing those locations to be more like direwolf genetics in the gray wolf genome. And that's pretty cool, making one change at a time. We've been doing that for a while with CRISPR. Making 15 changes in a living organism and having it grow up and become essentially a functional adult. They're six month old puppies right now, but essentially functional adults.

0:19:49 - (Chris): That's pretty interesting. And you know, I can't help but think that this kind of technology might help us do things like curing genetic diseases. I mean, that's potentially fraught. There are a whole lot of examples of eugenicists trying to cure genetic diseases by getting rid of people's genes through sterilizing them. But, you know, if we're not doing that, I have trouble imagining that people would object to ridding the world of, say, Tay Sachs or favism or celiac syndrome or cystic fibrosis.

0:20:22 - (Chris): In a lot of ways, multiple gene editing could be potentially very interesting and possibly something like miraculous for people that are dealing with these genetic diseases. But, you know, call them what you want, but these multiply edited gray wolves are not the same as the dire wolves whose skeleton I reacquainted myself with this past weekend. They are tweaked gray wolves. They are slightly modified gray wolves.

0:20:49 - (Chris): And just to be fair, a lot of people on the northern out dire wolves side have been making a bit of a mistake as well, possibly because of the way cladistic diagrams are generally put together. A lot of folks have been saying that dire wolves are actually more closely related to jackals than they are to wolves. And that is not correct. The accurate way of talking about the relationships between the extinct dire wolves, gray wolves and dholes and jackals and African wild dogs is that all those other canids are all more closely related to each other than any of them is to the direwolf. Foxes and things like that are off in the side somewhere. But the direwolf had a common ancestor with all the other dogs, many of whom didn't split from each other until quite a bit later.

0:21:36 - (Chris): So if you wanted a parallel that's a little bit closer to home and maybe easier to understand if you found an extinct species of baboon in a fossil deposit. That extinct species of baboon is not more closely related to chimps or gorillas or orangutans than it is to humans. We are all the same distance away from that baboon, evolutionarily speaking. Anyway, that's a cool piece of science that Colossal did.

0:22:02 - (Chris): And given how much money was put into creating those six month old puppies, I'd like to think that those puppies are going to enjoy their lives and be well taken care of. But do I think that de extincting the dire wolves is a good idea? No. There's just not no similarity in our ecosystems. Those animals would go hungry, they would tangle with humans. Life would not be good for them. Does that mean I'm not in favor of any kind of de extinction?

0:22:29 - (Chris): Not really. This is something I've written about before. An ideal candidate for de extinction needs to have a few attributes. There need to be a few things that are true about the species. First off, the species would have to be able to fit into an ecosystem without damaging it, potentially filling a role that that ecosystem used to have filled and without which it's suffering. It could boost the survivability of that ecosystem.

0:22:58 - (Chris): Second, a species would need relatively unchanged habitat from when it was still extant. That habitat needs to be protected by law. We can't just nibble around the edges and box it in again. The bigger the species, the more acreage we're talking about. Three, the species needs to have a lot of DNA still sitting around, whether it's in fossils or similar deposits for the species in order to justify bringing it back. It needs to be valuable for behavior that it would perform.

0:23:30 - (Chris): Maybe that's that role in the ecosystem that it filled that the ecosystem is having trouble without. And fifth, just because we are the way we are, the species needs to pose limited potential threat to humans and should ideally offer some benefit to provide incentive to sort of mute opposition to reintroduction. At this point you might have started to suspect that. I have an idea, and I do. If you talk to anybody that thinks about Joshua trees these days, that cares about Joshua trees these days, you will likely hear something along the lines of the tree is in trouble in part because one of its animal allies is no longer walking the planet.

0:24:10 - (Chris): That animal, the Shasta ground sloth. Nothotheriops shastensis. Shasta ground sloths lived in a lot of different places in North America, generally in the southern half of the continent. A lot of them were in the Southwest, from Texas on over to the Pacific coast. And the thing about the Shasta ground sloth is that it fed on pieces of Joshua tree. As an herbivore. We do have evidence of that, strong evidence.

0:24:35 - (Chris): The idea that people have is that the sloth would have eaten the ripened fruits of the Joshua tree, swallowed them in one big gulp, and then the sloth would wander somewhere else at sloth speed and eventually poop out those Joshua tree fruits that would have been partly digested. Stomach acids would have scratched the coats of the seeds, and then the sloth would have deposited them around the landscape with a helpful addition of a little bit of moisture, some fertilizer, and a sort of protective mulch.

0:25:03 - (Chris): The idea is that the Shasta ground sloth was responsible for dispersing Joshua tree seeds, and that without the sloths, the tree is having trouble now dispersing its seeds. And there are a few things about this that ring true. One of the things is that Joshua trees hang on to their fruit. They don't shed them. You can find a Joshua tree that's got three or four year old fruit still hanging on it. The jargon term for this behavior is that the fruits are indehiscent.

0:25:32 - (Chris): If they drop off of their own accord, they are dehiscent. And if they are not dehiscent, then they are indehiscent. Another reason that that idea rings true is that there are caves that were inhabited by sloths up until about 10,000 years ago or so. And those caves in the desert preserved a huge amount of sloth dung, which is a huge resource for finding out not just about what the sloth ate, but what was in the neighborhood back in the day. And one of the things that we have found from having graduate students suffer through sampling sloth dung in desert caves is that we know that Joshua trees were part of the regular diet of the Shasta ground sloth.

0:26:17 - (Chris): So it all kind of hangs together and makes a little sense. And there are hitches with this really lovely story, which always happens. And one of the hitches is that the number of Joshua tree fruits that have been found in sloth dung deposits is pretty low. There's lots of Joshua tree leaves, not so much fruit. That might be because Joshua trees have leaves on them all the time and have fruit on them maybe once every couple of years. Which means the availability of fruit might play a role in how much is preserved in fossilized dung deposits.

0:26:48 - (Chris): So that's a little bit of a sticky detail. And the other. And I get this from Chris Smith, who's the originator of the Joshua Tree Genome Project. Chris is a biologist at Willamette University, a great guy. He did some modeling. And it turns out you don't need the sloths to explain the prehistoric spread of Joshua trees, because the models Work just fine with white tailed antelope ground squirrels, which are still here and still account for the majority of seed dispersal of present day Joshua trees. They climb up into the trees.

0:27:17 - (Chris): I've seen them carry the fruit away. I've seen them stay up there, gnaw into it and collect the seeds and go down the tree trunk with the seeds. They will eat a lot of the seeds immediately or hide them somewhere in the desert, make a little secret stash of Joshua tree seeds. But every once in a while, they'll forget where they put the Joshua tree seeds and fail to retrieve them. And there's also the fact that antelope ground squirrels are food for a lot of other desert critters. So if you get a successful hunt by a snake or coyote or kit fox or bobcat or what have you, those cached Joshua tree seeds don't get recovered and they have a chance to sprout.

0:27:58 - (Chris): So maybe the sloth had nothing to do with dispersing Joshua tree seeds, or maybe it only played a helpful role and not a crucial role. But it would be interesting to find out. And de extincting the Shasta ground sloth might be one of the more reasonable propositions from a conservation standpoint. There are some difficulties, obviously. I mean, with dire wolves, you have the ability to gestate them inside a domestic dog.

0:28:24 - (Chris): You could use elephants to gestate mammoths probably. You could use tigers or mountain lions or something to gestate saber toothed kittens. You could certainly use African lions to gestate North American lions to de extinct them. There is no such large relative of the Shasta ground sloth that could be used. We still have sloths. They're tree sloths. They're pretty small. It would be hard to persuade them to give birth something the size of a calf.

0:28:53 - (Chris): So we'd have to come up with some novel way of generating sloth fetuses and getting them to viability. And then, of course, we have no idea what kind of culture the sloths might have had. I don't think we know a whole lot about how sloths interacted with each other. If you're a desert paleontologist that can steer me in the right direction, please let me know. But as far as I can tell, we don't know whether they were entirely solitary, or maybe they interacted with each other on a regular basis, or maybe their interactions were hostile except for mating.

0:29:27 - (Chris): Kind of like mountain lions. Mountain lions don't generally like to hang out with each other unless it's mating time or unless they're kittens hanging out with mom. But the big important thing that makes this an interesting idea to think about, despite the huge commitment of research and time and motivation and persistence through failed attempts, is that to a large extent, the Shasta ground sloths habitat is still there.

0:29:52 - (Chris): The North American deserts are the most intact ecosystem outside the tundra in North America, although it's a little bit warmer and drier than when the sloths were hanging out. Also, Shasta ground sloths didn't just eat Joshua trees, which is reassuring. You know, Joshua trees are in big trouble these days and you could find a lot of reasons to object to introducing a large animal that likes to eat Joshua trees and nothing else. But Shasta ground sloths ate shad scale and grasses and acacias and other yuccas and ephedra.

0:30:24 - (Chris): So the habitat is basically there for them. A little drier than they'd like, probably, but their food plants are all there. And if it was the case that ground sloths were really important to Joshua trees as agents of seed dispersal, then what could be a better idea than bringing them back? If possible, the Shasta ground sloth would live again. Joshua trees would have a new lease on life or their offspring would.

0:30:48 - (Chris): Both of the two species of yucca moth that pollinate Joshua trees would have a new lease on life. Because if the Joshua trees go extinct, so does the moth. For conservation purposes, if you're going to de extinct an animal, I think the Shasta ground sloth is the way to go. And it's basically science fiction at this point. Nobody's working on building tanks to gestate baby ground sloths the size of calves.

0:31:09 - (Chris): But if we did, here's an interesting thought. If we did that, we are building a food source for the dire wolves that we still haven't recreated, but might decide to at some point. So all of this is arm waving and arguably not much of real value. However, there is an aspect to this story about the alleged de extinction of dire wolves that is incredibly concerning in a current political context. Last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had what's called an all hands talk in which everyone that works for the Interior Department has to sign on and listen to what he has to say. If you're an Assistant secretary or if you take out the garbage at a national park or a BLM campground, they were all obligated to listen to what Interior Secretary Burgum had to say. And a lot of it was, you know, attempts to build morale and glad handing. But he did say, and I don't have a recording of this or I would be sharing it with you. But I've heard from multiple directions that he mentioned Colossal Biosciences claimed de extinction of the direwolf and posed it as a reason to abandon the Endangered Species Act.

0:32:13 - (Chris): Folks like Burgum have the idea that the Endangered Species act is there to preserve species like objects in a museum, as opposed to preserving species that play critical roles in ecosystems and preserving the ecosystems that sustain those species. That notion is really seductive for people that want to develop the entire world. You hear it said about things like tortoises and California condors and bald and gold golden eagles.

0:32:36 - (Chris): You especially hear it about plants. As long as they're in Botanic gardens, we don't have to worry, right? But it's the relationships that are important here. We need those relationships among species and between species and the environment. And if you are a real reductionist, you might say that the important thing is the genes that we need to preserve. But there's a lot of reality layered on top of the genetics that the genetics make possible, but they don't control, like the animal's culture, like the expression of those genes and how the environment affects them.

0:33:10 - (Chris): Even if we grant Colossal Biosciences claims that they have de extincted the dire wolf, which I don't, the dire wolf is useless without its habitat. And if the process of theoretical de extinction is going to be used as an excuse to get our basic environmental laws, then companies like Colossal, who might be doing work that's valid, need to be so careful about their pr. Way more careful than Colossal has been.

0:33:34 - (Chris): Because Colossal's work is being held up as a reason to end environmental protection laws and species protection laws. And that's really the only thing about this whole story that is really truly dire. I want to thank you for listening to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. We are going to take next week off. I am feeling a little burned out. Need to conserve some energy, plan some future episodes in a scattered, less panicked way. So we will be back on the 29th of April.

0:34:09 - (Chris): We will be sending out the Desert Environmental News this coming Monday. You can sign up for that at our website, 90 miles from needles.com news. And again, thank you to Allison Monroe S. Stafford, Mary Kay Moore, Katie Rodriguez, Edward Logue, Wayne Hazel, Robert Begle and Mira Lee Sethi for responding to our unanticipated financial crisis in the last week. If you want to be counted among the ranks of these wonderful people, you can go to 9zeromiles from needles.com donate I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator.

0:34:46 - (Chris): Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. And you have been very patient. So I will tell you that after the theme song, at the end of the episode, I will just plunk in the entirety of Bernie Sanders speech at Coachella on Saturday night. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

0:35:24 - (Maxwell Frost): Please give it up for Senator Bernie Sanders.

0:35:32 - (Sanders): Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I wanted to thank Claro for allowing me to get up here and talk and to thank this guy. You may or may not know it, but Maxwell Frost is a member of the United States Congress, the youngest member, and in my view, one of the best members. Look, I'm not gonna be long, but this is what I want to say. This country faces some very difficult challenges. And the future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation.

0:36:29 - (B): Now, you can turn away and you can ignore what goes on, but if you do that, you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice, to fight for economic justice, social justice and racial justice. Now we got a president of the United States. I agree. He thinks that climate change is a hoax. He is dangerously wrong. And you and I, you and I are going to have to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them to stop destroying this planet.

0:37:33 - (B): All over this country, not in California, not in Vermont, where I'm from, but in Florida, where Maxwell is from. Many other states, politicians are trying to take away a woman's right to control her own body. We need you to stand up and fight for women's rights. We have an economy today that is working very well for the billionaire class, but not for working families. We need you to help us to create an economy that works well for everybody, not just the 1%.

0:38:23 - (B): We have a health care system that is broken. We are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people. We need you to stand up to the insurance companies and the drug companies and understand that healthcare is a human right. Now, I'm here to introduce Claro. Not just because they are a great band, not only because Claro, at the age of 13, posted videos on the Internet as a singer songwriter.

0:39:07 - (B): I'm here because Claro has used her prominence to fight for women's rights. To try to end the terrible, brutal war in Gaza where thousands, thousands of women and children are being killed. So I want to thank Claro not only for being in a great band, but for the great work she is doing. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Claro.