Speaker 1what is up gorgeous people how the hell are you guys doing welcome back to the james kennedy podcast boy do we have a good one for you guys today but first i've got to tell you guys about a little something that we dropped with the band this week we dropped our brand new video for the song revolution featuring the one and only the mighty the monstrous the wonderful the brilliant mr benji webb from skin dread is on our track he's in the video looking cool as ever and doing his thing if you haven't seen the video or heard the song yet revolution by james kennedy and the underdogs is out now check it out on youtube turn it up as loud as you possibly can enjoy it i hope you love it give it a like give it a share leave a comment let us know what you think of it we're two singles in now on the promo campaign for the new album rebel which is coming out later this year and we are dropping new songs thick and fast for the next few months so keep your eyes peeled on the facebook page and the instagram at james kennedy and the underdogs but now let's get down to the main course of business today we are joined by the evolutionary biologist journalist author and the editor of the new scientist podcast dr rowan hooper chatting all about his brilliant new book togetherness and the wonderful bounty of all inspiring insights within it rowan thanks so much for joining us brother how you're doing i'm good james good to be here great to have you with us man honestly i've got so many things i could ask you but i don't have you all week so i'm going to try and keep this within the confines of the book your amazing new book togetherness which is out now it's super fascinating stuff for those who haven't yet read it how would you describe the basic premise
Speaker 2of the book the idea it's all about symbiosis which is what scientists call when two different species live together so it's not just being together in sort of some fluffy way like you know a bee might pollinate a flower and that's not symbiosis it's living together very very intimately and this turns out to happen much more than people even biologists really know it's it happens all over the world all organisms do it in one way or another and it's responsible for really the evolution of complex life the maintenance of all ecosystems on the planet and if we don't understand it and get to grips with how it's what what it's doing then we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it transition to a sustainable way of life in the future so it's just super uh it's super important it's super prevalent throughout the world yeah and you give lots of examples of this symbiosis
Speaker 1throughout the book and some of them are quite interesting and bizarre almost aren't they some of them are quite surprising would it be okay to give us a few examples of this symbiosis in nature some of the ones that stand out to you has been a bit more interesting and surprising because some of them are quite out there aren't they
Speaker 2well they are okay let's let's start with lichen though right so that that's not something that will blow people's minds straight away lichen people just think uh what is that that's that stuff that you see on a gravestone or on a growing on a tree um but lichen is a is a kind of composite organism made of two different species algae and fungi that grow together and form something different um and that's and it was actually the argument over what lichen is which led to the coining of the term symbiosis in the first place like a couple of hundred years ago um so okay that's cool but lichen turns out to be absolutely everywhere in many different species and it's it's like a pioneer species uh in in different ecosystems which means it's one of the first species that you get growing in a in a sort of virgin new area say um if there's a you know a volcanic eruption and you get uh everything that you get is a volcanic eruption everything's cleaned off and you get sort of fresh lava cools down and then you've got bare sterile rock some of the first things that will colonize that are lichen and the same with with glaciers that we see more and more when glasses retreat and you've just got bare rock underneath it uh lichen is some of the first thing first thing that comes in and it grows on rock and it can grow in extreme conditions because it has this symbiosis with uh between uh two completely different life forms like a plant and a fungus growing together um it gets a kind of superpower from from this combination of both of them so it can survive in extreme conditions it grows slowly but it creates from the rock that it grows on it starts to create soil so it over many hundreds thousands and then millions of years you start to get soil building up so everything that we rely on starts from the very slow decay and breakdown of rock by by lichen um so it's in the end you start to get soil and then you're then other things can come in and grow in that soil you get plants you get plants and trees and then that will support a bigger uh ecosystem so you know lichen is so easy to disregard yet it's absolutely fundamental to to the literally the basis of our planet um so it's really really important organism but also just take a look at it like with a magnifying glass this is something i always tell people um if you peer down get right close to it it's really incredible it's like a little rainforest it's so complex and and actually quite beautiful there's many different species many different kinds of it uh and it's everywhere it's something you don't have to go you know to some exotic place to see it it's it's pretty much everywhere so go and take a look at it so that's one lichen okay um what's another one like orchids right at the moment i'm seeing a lot of orchids around the place um they're the second biggest group of of flowering plants there's 28 000 species everyone sort of loves an orchid beautiful beautiful plants beautiful flowers um and yet they complete they only exist because of symbiosis um they can't grow without symbiosis with a with a fungi um so that that ability to be able to be able to grow and to grow and to grow and to grow with it with a fungus has unlocked again unlocked this opportunity and power for orchids to be able to grow and diversify into thousands of different forms thousands of different species so so that's another one one more and then i'll let you come in again right well okay two more don't go for it give it to us okay it's fascinating um the the mycelial network and in in forests and and underneath yeah yeah well we can come back to this again later on perhaps but um so all almost all trees and plants their roots when they go in the soil they form a connection with a fungal network that exists beneath our feet and what happens is the tree or the plant will make food from photosynthesis it goes down into the roots and it trades it with the fungi in the soil in return for nutrients or or in return for maybe water or something that the plant needs so the fungus might need some food uh the the tree needs something else and they they'll swap this over uh and this this agreement this symbiosis uh is unbelievably prevalent right so i'm saying this a lot but it happens all over the world um and this so so they've just made made it like a really thorough estimate of the amount of the sheer extent of the fungal network underground that that connects with uh the roots of different plants and it goes on i can only give that if you if you if you put the line if you put all the fungal threads in a line uh together all over the world it's ridiculously long and complex but if you if you could do it it would go on for something like 12 light years in length there's so much of it so this is it is insane it's nuts there's this absolutely unfathomably complex network underground that's that's got that that's some sort of trade agreement going on system between plants um and fungi okay and the other one that i was going to say is also underground and that's the legumes so the legumes are plants like beans peas pulses lentils all of those sorts of plants they grow um they have on the nodules of their roots they have these uh on their roots they have these nodules like little little little balls of uh which is a special kind of bacteria which makes fertilizer for by getting up but getting nitrogen from the air and turning it into ammonia that then the plant uses as fertilizer because the plant can't can't do anything with the nitrogen in the air but the bacteria can so they have this arrangement where the bacteria make not make um fertilizer for the plant and then and again in return the plant then gives some food back to the um the bacteria in payment so it's super important um and it happens in all legumes and uh and it helps fertilize the the plant that has the nodules but also the rest of the soil which is why farmers often will rotate the crops and they'll put a leguminous crop or if they want the field just to not you know not have a crop on it and they'll put a leguminous crop on it and They'll sow clover, perhaps, on it for that year. a legume and it helps fertilize and refresh the field for the next year so in in summary of all of that symbiosis is just absolutely everywhere we haven't even gotten to all of it yet i haven't talked about ants which is one of my favorite ones that is absolutely everywhere uh and super
Speaker 1important for the functioning of life it's fascinating man all of those examples and then we've got to mention the ants as well because yeah okay the ants are incredible the leafcutter ants i'm guessing is the most specific example that really yeah this yeah um and i was going to mention fungus as well i mean i mean you know the the mycelium networks and the interaction the fungus is like part of everything everywhere isn't it you know yeah yeah it is it's it really
Speaker 2is because this is going on all around us and people like okay some scientists know about it and work work on it but they tend to be quite siloed right so that there'll be um really they're really important you know and uh thorough brilliant scientists who are working on the mycelial network and understanding how this arrangement happens between trees and fungus um but then they don't really that's their subject right they don't they don't talk to people who are doing stuff working on um legumes and look looking at uh the symbiosis there or or or other forms of symbiosis in different parts of the ecosystem so you mentioned ants right i can't remember how many ants there are on the planet but it it numbers in the in the trillions it's isn't it something like there's two and a half million ants per person per person or something like that it's nuts it's absolutely nuts there's so many of them and everything they do um relies on symbiosis if we didn't have ants we'd be absolutely where it'd be in a very bad place right basically and yeah you mentioned the leaf cutter ants that's one of my favorite species and i i i i went to brazil when i was researching the book and i went to the rainforest there and um one night i was out and i found this big colony of leaf cutting ants had come out at night to process all the leaves leaves off a bush and they i just found them all trooping back to the nest all carrying fragments of leaf and what they do they take it back no one knew no one actually knew for hundreds of years what they were doing and and darwin saw them and he thought oh they're they're just going to their nest to eat the leaf in safety um but that's actually what they're doing is taking it into their nest where they have a garden a crop of fungus that they grow underground and they clean the leaf feed it to the fungus the fungus digests the leaf uh because the ants have lost the ability to do that uh and then the ants eat the fungus like not all of it but they eat some of it and they but they help propagate the fungus they they clean the garden they weed out other species that are growing there so the fungus is is happy to have some of it eaten because it gets a lovely safe place to grow for the rest of it and then it goes on to the neck when the ants leave to make a new nest they take the fungus with it so it's a fantastic arrangement it's been going on for hundreds of millions of years uh it happens all over the place but it was all ah it was thrilling for me to witness this you know i love you know i'd read about it over the years and i've just thought i love the whole the whole process and the whole to witness the phenomenon of of stripping down a tree and get taking it all back it was amazing it's really i can imagine what what an interesting life man oh well i mean i was really was happy to see those ants you know so but maybe not as you know not everyone will share such such my joy of of seeing a whole load of ants but for me that was really i really did like that oh man i can imagine i mean
Speaker 1the fact that these things happen in nature is just mind-blowing to me you know and it's answer just uh such a fascinating example as well because the way you see them operate like a military regime you know yeah it's almost like they're consciously aware of what they're doing but of course they're not you know they're they're fulfilling their evolutionary role but it does
Speaker 2look like that from the outside doesn't it yeah well it's it's really weird because i watched them for a long time um and it was in the rainforest after all after a while that suddenly and i watched the thing oh what's what's gonna happen and um in the end it got too much i went in it was chucking it down um when i when i went back the next morning when the rain had stopped i noticed like there was still piles of uh leaves that they'd cut and and hadn't processed fully they just let basically they just cooled it off right they thought it's raining lads let's get back in uh so but how did that happen how did that signal get processed so you know it's there's so many weird things that go on when you start to really get into thinking about this stuff like you say like but yeah so we can't answer that but it was just it did occur to me like what went on there last night when it chucked it down i went in because i thought i'm not getting soaking wet but then they also thought that as well yes it's mental man absolutely mental i mean
Speaker 1i gotta say i'm very envious that you get to do all of this cool stuff and call it a job
Speaker 2yeah i know i know i mean uh it's it was absolute privilege to be able to uh take it took quite a lot of time to write this book and i was able to go to some great places uh meet some amazing scientists who told me what they're doing and then my job was to try to stitch it all together um but it was a yeah i really enjoyed
Speaker 1doing this oh man i bet you know what an adventure and there's so many great examples of this throughout the book but i think one that people might also be able to relate to you know that's closer to home of course there's the gut microbiome you know where we've got an entire community living uh you know inside us without which we
Speaker 2just couldn't function yeah yeah yeah yeah um so i think there's something like this i don't know like about a trillion bacterial cells in our in and on our bodies so they live on our skin as well as inside us in our teeth absolutely everywhere um and yeah like they a bit like uh you know we've been talking about it in other forms of symptoms but i think it's a really good book and i think it's a really good book and i think it's a really good book and i think it's a really good book we it happens because the the symbiosis the partner and the symbiosis brings an ability into the arrangement that the other part the other partner doesn't have so that we're the host we're not able to do a lot of different digestion to produce a lot of the nutrients that we need we can't do it on our own but we have bacteria in our guts that do it for us and in return they get food yeah so we eat plenty of food they get some of it they they live in our gut and they produce many nutrients that we need and we can't do it on our own and we can't do it on our own and we can't do it on our own and we can't do it on our own and we can't do it on our own and we can't different nutrients for us they digest our food but also they produce lots of hormones as well right right so probably people have heard of serotonin uh it's a it's a it's a hormone that sort of makes us feel good um but a huge amount of that about 95 of that hormone is made by bacteria in our gut so our mood our very mood is influenced by the the gut bacteria not by our own cells and i i just find that really quite amazing because what does it mean for who we are right um we're getting quite deep in this conversation already but like that that's what it does that's what symbiosis does like what is what does it mean to be human when our very moods and our and our physiology are not all determined by human cells but they're determined by uh or certainly hugely influenced by uh other species completely different ones bacteria bacteria so uh it's it makes you question what it means to be an individual uh and certainly an individual human is it is it what does it mean to say that because we're not we're not just human cells we're made by this this symbiosis with with other beings uh from a completely different realm of life so i think that's something that's really profound and it means and i think it's important that we start to think about these things what what does it what does it mean to be an individual
Speaker 1yeah well i want to come on to that actually that's that's hopefully the direction we're going to steer into um it's because you know we um as humans we tend to think of ourselves i think of outside of nature you know um yeah but we're actually interwoven into this very delicate you know tapestry of yeah of the rest of the of the natural world and you know a lot of our activities are doing a lot to destroy and dismantle that you know but we can't survive without being subjected to that tapestry yeah i want to come on to it to all of that because yeah you know that there's a whole load of other subjects to come out of that as well yeah yeah yeah well no that is
Speaker 2that's really kind of the driving force behind the book is exactly that it's that we have got into a position where we think we we look at nature you know we we watch a david attenborough show and we go oh look at that isn't nature beautiful over there on the tv or you know or might go to a nature reserve and go oh let's get some nature um and we all enjoy doing that right but it's it means we we do start to kind of automatically think of of nature as something that's over there um and yeah it's not you know just the example of the microbiome tells us that like we're part of something that's much uh more much more intimate than we think uh much more important to who we are and how we live than than we think and that's i think the really important point as well is that that's not um that can sound quite hippy dippy to say that sort of thing right um and i've got nothing against that you know that's fine but it's also just saying it scientifically actually it's fact yeah it's not it's like yeah exactly this is the thing it's not woo this is really what's going on um so i think that it's a really important part of the book is to try to get that across that um nature is not something that's just oh that's nice over there um it's something that we are all part of um and you know ecology the the the study of how different species live and interact with each other um has to be really appreciated for the vitally important science that that it is because um you know there's there's a horrible phrase that i i think the conservative party started it we're all in we're all in this together you know uh but in an ecological sense everything is together all right we're all we're all connected and things that we do have a real influence and often a bad influence on the rest of nature and it will come back and bite us and we've managed just to get away with it um for a long time but we've we've done so much exploitation of nature um without considering how we're connected to it and we've done so much exploitation of nature that we've got ourselves into a terrible crisis that uh we need to we need to stop that as soon as possible so that again is well that's part of what um i'm trying to do what by illustrating or all these all these different threads all these different parts of the tapestry
Speaker 1that we're connected to beautifully put man yeah well i'm really glad that the conversation has waded into these areas because um i was hoping that we could touch on some of the existential connotations of togetherness and i'd love to come back and talk to you about that in the next couple that's cool i got one last question on symbiosis before we move on is it fair to say that on a like a real base molecular level that it is this symbiosis in nature that actually drives the mechanics of evolution uh for want of a better way of describing it i mean is it is it accurate to say that without this symbiosis which just seems to be omnipresent all through nature that life as we know it today just would not have evolved well so so the biggest
Speaker 2thing that that happened about two billion years ago on our planet was a symbiosis between two very basic life forms that were around for about about two billion years right so they're called bacteria and another kind of very not very simple but simple organism called archaea that people for many years thought that they were just back also bacteria but they're different so for about from the origin of life four billion years ago to for two billion years there was only these bacteria and archaea on the on the whole planet that's all that's all we had it was just this slime ball of across the planet primordial soup yeah but but made of just this very simple but but millions billions trillions of these cells but not doing anything particularly interesting right um and it would have gone on like that and for for another two billion years so until well when until whenever right but what happened was these two organisms uh joined together in a in a something we call endosymbiosis so that's so what happened was the archaeal cell engulfed one of the bacterial cells and instead of eating it which normally would happen the bacterial cells survived inside the archaea and that became what we we have now in all our cells called mitochondria and those cells are the ones that provide the power to our cells and when i say our i mean all complex life so all all humans but also all plants or mushrooms fish trees birds every everything you see around you is a complex life form and it all all has to thank this event that happened two billion years ago when an archaeal cell formed a symbiosis with a bacterial cell and all complex life stemmed from that single event because what happened when those two life forms came together it like we've been seeing in other other examples it unlocked an incredible opportunity that that uh access to power that the other cells didn't have so working together in this in this symbiotic union uh unlocked all of complex life to suddenly be able to evolve over the next two billion years and so that that unlocked the entire diversity of life right or you know it's just absolutely it's hard to you you can't overestimate or overstate how important that event was uh to life on earth second only to the actual origin of life that happened you know about four and a bit billion years ago and obviously we wouldn't be anywhere without that but only just a slight second in in terms of importance is this was this symbiotic union that happened uh which as i say unlocked all of the diversity of life and all of complex life to come mind blown man yeah well there's another well there's another kind of of this endosymbiosis so the one event was the getting the mitochondria on board the second one that was uh also super important was when these so then that made these complex cells that started to have loads more energy and they started to develop but then what happened was they they themselves had another endosymbiosis event so they took in another cell another bacterial cell went into this complex cell this was a bacteria called a cyanobacteria which worked by which works through photosynthesis it grows through photosynthesis getting light from the sun and making food out of it um out of the air and water and what the complex life form did was take a cyanobacteria into its cell and became plants so they plants work because they have these chloroplasts in the cell which make uh food from photosynthesis that but those chloroplasts used to be free-living bacteria on their own and in another endosymbiosis event uh they they were engulfed into complex cells and because of that we get all of plants right and that obviously transformed the entire entire structure of the of the whole the planet itself uh and the atmosphere changed completely as well and that then allowed uh allowed uh animals to evolve because then we could uh we could use uh we could breathe oxygen that was made by the plants so uh so the first one was was mitochondria that unlocked the the sort of pathway to all complex life and the second one was um the the origin of of plants by this this event that brought uh chloroplasts and allowed photosynthesis to happen in these complex cells
Speaker 1man it's absolutely insane and i mean how do you wrap your head around the idea that symbiosis is basically the seed of all natural life yeah i keep saying mind-blowing but i don't know why
Speaker 2i was to describe no it's uh so you know i'm glad i'm glad it's blowing your mind because it is it is um it's so fundamental to the operation of the evolution and the operation of life that um you know i think it's i think people need to know this you know people need to know this and appreciate it more and it'll start to it's not just as i say it's not just really cool and and fascinating stuff but it's really important that we know this stuff as well 100 man especially i
Speaker 1think at the the junction that we find ourselves in right now in humanity's journey and ironically i think a big part of how our kind of disrespect and destruction of nature um has been justified and explained over the past 200 years is actually through a gross perversion of the words of the godfather of evolution himself mr charles darwin of course we haven't really given him much of a shout out yet and i'm you know talking of course about the famous line that everyone can quote survival of the fittest but unfortunately correct me if i'm wrong he never
Speaker 2said that survival of the fittest yeah so it's a it's a phrase that uh we all think we just assume darwin wrote it and because it's so tied up in what most of us think of as darwin's message evolution survival of the fittest but it wasn't it was a contemporary of his called herbert spencer who went on to develop some very frankly nasty social darwinian ideas about human society about how humans should live um and it it was very cutthroat based on competition uh and he he had this phrase survival of the fittest and he persuaded darwin to put it in the book and he put it into a later edition of the origin of species so and darwin did um and so what that has helped do and it wasn't just that but but what's happened is that darwin's message about how evolution works has been basically biased towards tilted towards competition being the absolute key to how life operate how it evolves and how it operates as a as this cutthroat competitive way of of of life um but but actually it's not as we've been saying it's really not just that there is that but it's also super reliant on cooperation and symbiosis so um that's the sum of that is in darwin's work but it's just overshadowed massively by the idea of competition and and there's there's lots of reasons for that i mean i think the the most obvious reason is that at the time um it was the height of the industrial revolution uh it was the height of the british empire uh people wanted to believe that nature worked the same way that rampant capitalism worked right uh so they they thought oh great here's some scientific sort of support for for capitalism justify it right yeah uh so it was kind of twisted um darwin was knew this as well but i think it kind of went too far out of his hands really and uh and now we're in this position where where for for many years people have thought that um there is this justification for uh for a capitalist way of life because that's what we see in nature but we don't see that in nature yes and i mean one yeah i mean one thing that um really surprised me as well was um tennyson's poem in memoriam that has this famous phrase in it nature red in tooth and claw um i always thought that this image of nature um of bloody fighting you know you can imagine lions fighting with blood and red in tooth and claw um i always thought that tennyson had written that after after reading darwin and after sort of understanding okay this is this is how the world works because darwin and tennyson were exact contemporaries um they're born in the same year and and tennyson did did read darwin but he wrote those words i think 15 years before darwin published his book so tennyson but when he said nature red in tooth and claw was describing the way people already thought the world was so darwin was adding to that and then people then took that as more scientific support as you say for for how they wanted the world to work right um but but as we've been saying you know that is not that's not the way the world works yeah or not only the way the world works
Speaker 1yeah yeah no no it's disappointing man like still even to this day you know i hear people say you know if we're talking about you know the economy or you know the social inequality or something people are like well the thing is mate you know it's just how would it science mate you know it's dog eat dog or something yeah yeah dog eat dog you know it's science bro you know you can't do anything to change that it's like you can't do anything to change that it's like you can't do nature is yeah and it's like no dude it isn't really not um so yeah i think you know
Speaker 2that way of thinking has been used to justify terrible things yeah um and and um and it's really not the way the world works and so this is another really important thing that i'm trying to do with this book is to uh correct that misapprehension and that terrible that wrong way of thinking and that's what i'm trying to do with this book is to correct that misapprehension and that terrible that wrong way of thinking yeah um and show well this is not how it's working in nature and look at and just look at all this is why and these are this is the reasons why so yeah that's that's what i'm trying to do well togetherness is such a great way of encapsulating
Speaker 1that whole concept and i feel like darwin might have been victim there to the need for a snappy title himself you know like survival of the strong it's snappy you're memorable it sounds good and i feel like um also uh richard dawkins with the selfish gene had a similar problem i mean selfish such a great title classic iconic book but you know in reading that i do remember him actually stating at one point in the book that um genes require the survival of the broader ecosystem within which they live yeah yeah vested interest call it selfish if you want but they have a vested interest in the survival of the whole i remember there's a passage where he actually says that in the book yeah when people talk about the selfish gene again it it always comes with that kind of tone of well you know it's genetic mate it's you know it's selfish by nature yeah yeah well i mean
Speaker 2people people don't really read the book they just read the title and they then they think oh well that's we're we're some people are born selfish just got to get on with it and that's what it means um but it's really as they say it's it's it's not what it means it's really interesting like um i was actually talking to richard dawkins earlier um a few weeks ago about this um about the title of his book uh because because um it wouldn't have done so well if it was called something else if it was called the immortal gene or the socialist gene i mean well he did consider the cooperative gene right which is what you're saying like genes have to cooperate to in order to get to the next generation yeah they also do have to be or you can think about how they behave selfishly um but at the time he wrote it in 1976 um he really wanted to get over to get away from the idea that many people had then that evolution worked for the for the good of the species and and and so he needed to wrench that idea away from people and say well no evolution works at a different level a lower level to that that and we need to think from the genetic point of view from the genes i view right and that's why he went with the selfish gene because it really forces you to think from the gene the genes i view um but as we've been saying you know it does mean people take what they think it might mean without reading the book so it's been a it's been a really strong point and a really bad point uh about that book is the title like it's both brilliant and not not so good at the same time that's fascinating that you actually had that conversation with him yeah recently yeah yeah well so well because the book is it's a 50 50th anniversary of the selfish gene so um he's republished the book and uh i did an interview with him about that
Speaker 1wow what a privilege that was man yeah yeah yeah right well we have got to bring human beings to the center of the conversation which is where we always like to be as a species and speaking of this disconnect from nature that we have justified for so long is it accurate to say that this is a mentality that began in the agricultural revolution you know this idea that the rest of the natural world is just there to be mined and looted and stripped of all of its bounty without much regard for the broader need for balance that kind of holds the whole thing together you know is this something that began with the agricultural revolution has got progressively worse since then or with things
Speaker 2already moving in that direction before then yeah that's a that's a great question uh i think i don't know if there's been a i i want to tie it to a single moment where this separation happened it's just been sort of gradual um and you you can see it more in in our society in western modern civilization right that where we don't really think anymore about where our food comes from and how we get it it just we get it from the supermarket and then we we cook it and eat it but if you look in more traditional societies um they are still much more aware of where their food comes from because they grow it and then in even more traditional ones they might literally go and gather it um rather rather than grow it in farm in their own sort of plots um but when you're so when you're tied when you're living much more closely to nature you of you can't help but be connected to it because you you do know that you know where everything's coming from and what consequences there will be if you went and you know chopped down your whole orchard one year um you know you're not going to get anything next year or if you've if you you know all of the fish you know there's no more fish yeah in the pond but um and so but so we've been acting like that and we've we have been managing to get away with it because there is a lot of bounty you know or well because you know i can't help but use that word but we see nature as resources for us to use um but if you if we carry on if that's unchecked then it will start to fail and well you know you mentioned the fish um you know fish numbers have completely crashed you know we we thought the sea was was boundless with it in the amount of resources we could take from it um and but we've taken so much in in on an industrial scale that there's it's starting starting to dwindle even the the amount of food in the sea um so and that's just one example so we've been going over the top um in our extraction from nature um for many years and and that's led us into this place where many of the ecosystems uh that support us that support our planet and our life um are not in a good way they're teetering towards collapse so yeah we we have to rein in that tendency to to just think of certainly to think of nature as this bound boundless like resource for us to get and start thinking about it as like well this is something that we we are uh that is supporting us very much that's whether we're relying on that we're we're having to we have to work with it
Speaker 1not just against it yeah yeah well you've mentioned the c word a few times so let's talk about that i'm talking of course about capitalism it seems to me that capitalism is incompatible with the sort of ethos that you're describing here this symbiosis that occurs all through nature runs very contrary to the whole ideology of capitalism and the unfortunate way that it has been justified through this misuse of the darwinian language yeah i don't want to make this political but is capitalism going to have to be addressed if we are going to attempt to repair any kind of symbiosis with the rest of the natural
Speaker 2world um well i think it is yeah so i don't you know i'm not a sort of policy wonk or uh i don't get too much into sort of um how we recalibrate our our politics but i i think that from all that we've been saying that the idea of unchecked exploitation of nature uh doesn't work it uh so so yeah i don't think capitalism can work now how we get rid of it or how we adjust it into some something that's that works better is is a whole nother book you know that's not just one but that's uh that's something else right um so i i don't know i wish i knew how we could move away from it you know because it's one of the biggest challenges we face um because because that that sort of unchecked capitalism um has brought us into into this terrible place and i think that's a big challenge for us and i think that's a big challenge for us and i think that's a big challenge for us and i think that's a big challenge we haven't really mentioned uh fossil fuels because that's not really part of the symbiosis story but it's still part of the exploitation of nature right we're using all these all this you know fossilized um energy from the sun that that plants made through through symbiosis over millions of years and then it turned into oil and gas and coal we're digging that up um setting it on fire and setting on fire and and it's changed the atmosphere and it's driven us into this terrible place you know so um yeah how we get away from that is is the question of our time right it's the most important question we face um so i don't know i don't know but i'm just helping trying to help in in this in any way i can just to start nudging us into this direction of a way from this away from capitalist exploitation of the world um and into a into a better place where we understand symbiosis and cooperation with nature and we understand that we're part of nature and that we can't just um exploit it destroy it for our own will uh in an unchecked way
Speaker 1yeah beautiful man i totally agree i mean unfortunately i think it might be a situation where change is going to be thrust upon us whether we like it or not you know i mean it's we're in a situation now whereby you meddle with nature too much you know and it's gonna bite you on the ass and that's that's what we're seeing right now yeah i mean i'm a bit of a cynic though i mean i don't see progress going in the right direction at the moment i think i see it going in the opposite direction um where do you sit on this are you more hopeful than myself look i'm i think i'm
Speaker 2i'm like you as well like i i don't i'm not very hopeful about how how we're going to turn this around and and you see you you see um you know well i think i think elon musk has has has became a trillionaire and then he's lost money again so he's not quite a trillionaire yeah but he's too bloody rich for sure and as you say that the one percent has just been getting richer and richer so how you turn the ship around is it sometimes looks like uh we're losing it like the rich are just getting richer um we're how are we gonna get this get this ship turned around how are we gonna how are we gonna adjust it it does seem to be a hopeless task um but there are still more of us than there are of them even though they're rich right and and and i feel like you you just have to um keep on pushing and keep on um working towards a better world even if you feel like it's hopeless we're out we're outgunned um i just feel you just gotta keep on doing it and i um so some inspiration i always take is from um the the woman who got the the um paris climate deal over the line in 2015 um christiana fugueres she was the head of the um the climate change um the international climate change group that and and it was her basically her will that got that paris agreement over the line um and the commitment to trying to reduce uh uh global warming to keep it under two degrees so you can argue whether that's worked or not and it's it's what it has worked a bit but anyway what she said she calls um her way of thinking gritty optimism right so she just forces herself to be optimistic um you might not feel optimistic but you just got to do it because what else are you going to do so and uh and i just think that's a great way of thinking about it and i think that's a great way of thinking about it sometimes we just don't feel optimistic about the world we we we're not all going to wake up again yeah everything's great yeah but you've just got to grit your teeth and get on with it in a in a grittily optimistic way um so as i i do like her way of thinking about that and i often use that myself when i'm not feeling the best about the world just get it you've still got
Speaker 1to get on with it love it love it and what a great message to get us towards the end of the let you go yeah yeah no no worries well well it does segue from your last point and it's basically you know what does a state of togetherness look like for humanity together with the rest of nature
Speaker 2well i i do think you can you can imagine a future where there is a much closer understanding of the benefits that we get from nature so i think that there is a growing understanding that being in nature is a much closer understanding of the benefits that we get from nature so i think that nature has really positive mental health benefits but imagine if we didn't have to you know go on a bus ride to a you know a nature reserve if if our if our communities started to integrate nature uh much more closely from from where we live then we would get those benefits those mental health benefits right away but we'd also get loads of other things so um we know that um uh how our communities are cooler if the more trees there are around we've all been living through really horrendous heat wave at the moment um in places where there are lots of trees that brings the the temperature down so working with and living with nature was going to help us get through uh climate change which we which some of which is already locked in um so that's one thing but also i think understanding that as we're living in a world where we're living in a world where the choices we make in our lifestyles so what we eat especially and so not just how we do our transport like using fossil fuels or heating our heating our homes with fossil fuels that that needs to change but also the things we eat and i think understanding that um for example some of the fertilized some of the food we we eat has been over fertilized but if we if we think in a symbiotic way we can grow food with with less reliance on the food that we eat and we can grow on synthetic fertilizer which has all these knock-on effects on damaging our ecosystems polluting our rivers we can work with nature and still produce food that's uh that's good for us but without having such a bad footprint on the rest of on the rest of the ecosystem and i think that does involve also eating less meat and dairy dairy which has a an outsized bad impact on on the on the planet so people get very touchy when they get they feel like they're being lectured to about what they what they can eat and what they can't eat so that's something that's really we have to do in a very sensitive and educated way that's not really i don't really get into that in the book um but i think as i was looking forward that that is something you need to we do need to start um well that's something i think flows from the book is uh is how we not need to start thinking about changing our lives is that we need to start thinking about changing our lives and i think in order to live in a more sympathetic symbiotic way amen to that man beautiful way to end up well
Speaker 1rowan i've got to let you go because i know you know you've got a million of these to do and i really appreciate you taking the time out today um this has been an incredible chat thank you so much for the book um yeah fascinating and timely read which i would encourage everybody to rush out right away and buy togetherness is out now available everywhere go grab a copy grab 10 copies give them to your friends uh rowan can also be heard on the brilliant new scientist podcast and followed on instagram at ro who i'll put links to the book and links to the socials and everything else in the show notes please click click click and uh rowan we're going to let you go thank you so much for your time
Speaker 2thanks james appreciate you brother thanks james really great chat really great chat we covered a
Speaker 1lot of ground today yeah we did it's brilliant brilliant stuff well thank you so much appreciate my best wishes with the book cheers man bye-bye rowan hooper ladies and gentlemen a standing ovation please oh man i love that stuff i love all that stuff and i think i've said this before in a previous episode if i have my time again i'm going to be able to do it in a few minutes i would have gone into the sciences 100 i mean how mental is that stuff how is nature you know leaf cutter armies of leaf cutter ants you know chopping up leaves to feed it to a fungus they've got growing underground i mean you could make this stuff up but seriously you need to go and check out the book togetherness there is so much more stuff in there that it just will absolutely blow your mind it's an absolute joy to read and it's got a great message as well it's a real tribute to the majesty of nature and just a great read togetherness is available everywhere right now go and grab a copy and check it out and give it some love and once you've done that if you thought i wasn't gonna nag you to subscribe to the podcast before this thing closes then you got me wrong if you want more of these interesting chats with super interesting dudes then you gotta click subscribe dude hit that like button hit that share button spread this goodness around and share it with your friends leave some comments leave some suggestions for other guests in the comment section and get involved man i'll be back next week with another awesome guest in the meantime go and check out the new james kennedy and the underdog song revolution featuring the mighty benji web it's over on youtube right now go and give it some love give it some volume and i'll see you next week take care of yourselves take care of each other love you loads
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