And therefore, in order to save those things,
what you needed to do was exclude people.
It's a fairly simple system.
Now nature got humans, humans are problems, you keep humans out, and
nature's okay.
Because then, without humans, it would be free to interact, evolve, and
in all of its splendor, be the natural world, and all seemed good.
I mean, and I spent decades of my life trying to make this remain like that and
feeling that that was it, the job was done.
And then it all went to hell,
which is an odd place to go if I'm on a mission from God but.
>> [LAUGH] >> But these are square watermelons, or
cubicle watermelons.
And they were made, not made, they were grown in Japan,
because Japanese buy small refrigerators.
And if you've ever tried to put a watermelon in a refrigerator,
you know how inefficient it is.
And so, Japanese weren't buying watermelons.
And so, the watermelon growers in Japan made square watermelons,
and then sales went up.
Or we had this extraordinary case, and it's now being repeated more and
more with other bird species.
But these fabulous birds, Lyre birds,
which are great singers in the South Pacific were imitating chainsaws.
They'd added the sound of chain saws to their vocal repertoire.
And that's found more and more now, so
that cat birds in the United States imitate cellphones.
And there are some very funny stories about people trying to answer their bird,
I mean, because they're sure their phone is going.
Or in this case great tits in the UK,
this is one worth a little moment of explaining.
So if you see on the left that's the natural song of great tits,
you see where it falls.
And then on the right hand side, my right hand side you see what a great tit lives
in, in an auditory neighbourhood In a city where all that red and blue are the sound
of city traffic and humans, and notice what's happened to the calls of the birds.
It's gone up, so the very fact of the matter that we make
noise has caused the natural world to respond.
And this is just half a block from where we used to live in
Westchester County in New York, which was a place just ridden with deer.
It turns out it was a town that had 2.2 acre minimum lot size.
And it turns out in a study that was done,
2.5 acres fragmentation is the ideal size to grow white-tailed deer.
So we had lots of white-tailed deer, and we had so many white-tailed deer,
that the state of New York collected road kill deer and composted them.
So you have to understand the logic.
So if you wanted to grow a garden you could go to the state and
get compost, which would make the garden richer which
would attract more deer [LAUGH] >> And you understand you're all at Duke,
you know what that means.
And what you perhaps don't know, being at Duke is there are also places that
you can go to get a pedicure with fish.
It's a particularly expensive pedicure, but
these little fish will pick off the dried bits of skin.
And you can sit, these are ladies, I asked to go.
I spent a little of time in one of these.
And once you get over the ticklishness it's quite fun.
It's a kind of odd relationship for the natural world you have to think.
Being at Duke you might not know about furries.
Although it sounds as if Xander might know about furries.
[LAUGH] You can talk to him later.
In fact, maybe there's a Duke furry club you can join.
>> [LAUGH] >> The point is that this is a whole
subculture in the United States and in other parts of the world,
in which there are people who believe that they should not have been born as humans,
but should have been born as animals.
And so you go to conventions wearing the suit, and
you notice the Star Wars guy in there who clearly got the wrong room,
but you can imagine in, anyway, you can imagine.
And so you vocalize as your animal, I draw your attention to the bunny sitting down,
he's actually a jackal-a-lope.
If you know because it's a bunny with deer antlers.
So again, but I mean everybody's fine.
But it makes you pause to think about what generates this as a view
about your relationship to the natural world.
And on this more serious note, there was the development of this field called
Historical Ecology, which is a really interesting one, and it has shown,
this is from low land Bolivia, a place where I spent some time.
It is shown that many of the things that we think are emblematic of the natural
world, in fact, are ghostly manifestations of previous human occupation.
So that these things, that I was trying to call forest islands, these patches
of forests in the back, this is a flatted savanna in the Belize Savannas.
That is a forest island, but
it's entirely constructed on the reminisce of human civilization.
But they were created and the trees then are recruited to them.
And in fact, some of this work you've seen Hackenberg and
others has suggested that vast parts of the Amazon, and other researchers in
West Africa saying vast parts of that, in fact, are the very forced composition
itself reflects previous human action in advertent and inadvertent.
Then we have a set of things called Human-dependent species.
So this is a Corncrake from Europe, and these birds used to inhabit
natural grass lands in the island of Britain and, in fact,
only reproduce in a nest, raise their nesting in grass of a certain height.
Well, that grassland long disappeared, but
they took over nesting in agricultural fields.
And unless you practice a certain kind of agriculture, you drive corncrakes extinct.
So they are entirely dependent on traditional forms of grassland management.
So I'm building this case for how this world in which I was raised is no longer
one in which really allows me to continue to think that way.
This really kind of ironic and sad picture is of
the New York Aquarium, after hurricane Sandy hit.
And you notice it's a marine fish tank, with the ocean,
that's the ocean that flooded the aquarium,
outside the tank, kind of strange.
And of course, you're very familiar with this notion of the Anthropocene,
that we're entering a geological epoch in which the very basic
formation processes of the natural world by our geochemical processes and
evolutionary processes have been co-opted or
at least largely altered in scale and extent and nature by humans.
So this simple dichotomy, right, in which you had fields with cows in them,
or the natural forest, is no longer one that works.
And instead you're in a world like this one in which there's
an amazing intertwining and intertangling.
A hybrid world of humans and nature.
And it's not all clear how you're going to separate those.
And so we find ourselves engaged in practices.
And I'm going to give you a couple examples.
Re-wilding and de-distinction.
So re-wilding is an attempt to bring the wild back in
an already more modified human world, bring the wild back.
So you're sort of trying to reach back and bring something forward.
And part of that is being done by this process that the Europeans are engaged and
called D-Domestication which is exactly what is says it is.
Here is a place, and I won't try to pronounce that, it's a Dutch word you see
it Oostvaardersplassen, I said I'm going to pronounce it.
There are going to take these horses, which are a breed that is as close as
they can get to what they think where the plactacen to see horses in Europe.
And they're placing them in nature reserves and
they've gotten a special dispensation to allow the animal
rights laws of the Netherlands not to apply to those horses And
when it snows and the winter is hard those horses die.
Old ones die and young ones die.
They are reestablishing natural selection on a domesticated breed.
And an even kind of wilder version,
there are no South China tigers left in the wild.
So, you can imagine, if you think about what South China looks like,
but they have them in captivity.
So, there is a group that is really interested in reestablishing,
rewilding South China tigers.
But they can't do this in China, so they have leased land.
And if you are a people like Cathleen and
Louise over there should recognize what's wrong with this image.
That's a South African antelope that's being killed by a tiger.
Now, remember your zoogeography, those things are separate and
they shouldn't come together, but we are, this group is teaching predator behavior
to South China tigers by having them learn how to kill South African antelopes.
And something that I know you guys have covered in the course that has received
a certain amount of press is this notion of novel ecosystems, that is,
combination of species in ecological processes that have not previously
seen in Earth's system.
So you have a set of forests in Puerto Rico, for example, which mix tree and
bird and mammal species in ways that are correctly managed in an ecological
structure, but involve pieces that come from all over the world.
Ecological actors that hadn't met until this long bus ride they got put on in
Puerto Rico.
And they're going, okay, fine.
I'll be the predator.
No, you can't be the predator.
I said I wanted to be the predator first.
You be the seed disburser.
And off they're going in these novel forest ecosystems.
And then this that I mentioned before, cyborg ecosystems,
in which there's a deliberate mechanical intervention to try to
reestablish what you might call natural geochemical patterns of deposition.
So this is a basin in the Gulf of Mexico that doesn't
have the soil deposition that it should have.
And so they're building these little modules which then pick up
the sedimentation and carry it forward and then drop it where it, quote, should be.
Alex Dehgan, J.D., M.S., Ph.DThe Chanler Innovator in Residence and the Inaugural David M. Rubenstein Fellow
