Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant shares her personal odyssey as a wildlife ecologist, conservation biologist and co-host of the famed TV nature show “Wild Kingdom.” As a scientist dedicated to protecting and conserving the diversity of the web of life, she reminds us that, as human beings, we are part of nature. It’s all connected, and it’s high time to bring about peaceful coexistence, not only with nature, but with one another.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant shares her personal odyssey as a wildlife ecologist, conservation biologist and co-host of the famed TV nature show “Wild Kingdom.” As a scientist dedicated to protecting and conserving the diversity of the web of life, she reminds us that, as human beings, we are part of nature. It’s all connected, and it’s high time to bring about peaceful coexistence, not only with nature, but with one another.

This is “Saving Nature Means Saving Ourselves”. I’m your host, Neil Harvey. Welcome to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Beginning around 2020, a significant global political movement began to crystallize to bring about the large-scale conservation of the lands and waters on which the biological diversity that underpins the web of life depends – including human beings.

This movement was inspired partly by the late biologist E.O. Wilson’s 2016 book “Half Earth” in the stark shadow of what scientists call the Sixth Age of Extinctions. Running at 1,000 times the natural rate, today’s mass extinction event is the first caused by the human hand.

A growing global consortium of scientists, activists, NGOs, governments, policy makers and Indigenous Peoples is working to translate the best contemporary science as well as traditional ecological knowledge into actual practical goals to conserve half the Earth’s lands and waters by 2050.

This movement reflects a historic paradigm shift: That what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant further suggests that what we do to each other, we do to the Earth. In other words, social justice is imperative for us to achieve ecological wellbeing.

Telling that new story of interdependence is her life’s work. When she became co-host of the long-running program Wild Kingdom, Rae fulfilled a dream she had since childhood.

Rae Wynn-Grant (RWG): I’m about to do something you’re never supposed to do. You should never disturb a hibernating bear and never get between a mother bear and her Cubs. But today I’m part of an important conservation research project and we’re about to come face to face with wild bears. I can already see a little cub, it’s like white, kind of greyish color, I’ve gotta get in there…Okay, we’ve got two! We’ve got two, hello. And we’ve got three newborn cubs to this mama.”

Host: Her memoir, “Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World,” chronicles her improbable dream of a career marrying storytelling, science, and the great outdoors.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant spoke at a Bioneers conference…

RWG: Before I was Miss Wilderness, I was a little urban kid and I had an extremely urban upbringing, which I think is a good thing. I’m very proud of that. But I grew up with parents who lived in the big city. We went on trips to other big cities and my whole world was urban.

And that was enough for me. I loved it, right? I saw, you know, the occasional pigeon and squirrel, maybe a couple of earthworms, and that was great. Ironically, the place where I really became super passionate about nature was indoors. It was by watching TV. It was sitting on the floor of my grandparents living room, here in the Bay area and watching nature shows. And they took me to Africa and Australia, Asia, South America, kind of everywhere, but you know, the United States. And showed me these incredible landscapes and these creatures that needed protection.

And when I was a little kid, I said, I want to be a nature show host. I want to do what these British and Australian guys are doing. And my family was very supportive. They’re kind of like, Oh, you know, I guess it could be worse. That’s, that’s fine. Never heard of it, but that’s fine. And I took that desire all the way through college.

Host: As Rae entered college, once again her unusual vision hung in mid-air, looking for a place to land.

RWG: And I have this distinct memory of entering college and going to my advisor’s office in the first week of my freshman year and saying, I want to be a nature show host. What do I have to major in to do that? And my advisor was stumped and said, I don’t know, maybe theater, journalism, maybe.

And then finally arrived at environmental science. “What about environmental science?” And I said, never heard of it, but sounds good. And I dove into environmental science, which was the exact right place for me to land. And I found for the first time as, you know, a freshman in college that those nature shows that I was watching as a kid and as a teenager were introducing me to science.

And that was a fit for me until a couple of years into it. I thought to myself, you know, what’s missing though, is that I’ve never been outside. There’s something about reading about forests and savannas and a textbook and seeing animals on a PowerPoint that just doesn’t quite hit. And I realized this. And so at 20 years old, I got outside. And I signed myself up for a study abroad program. I, again, went back to that same advisor in college and said, I need the most hardcore wildlife ecology study abroad program you can find. And they did. And I landed in Southern Kenya.

Host: In Kenya, Rae began deepening her craft in the field. She lived for a semester as part of a community of students in a Maasai village in one of Kenya’s awe-inspiring national parks. But then, as the saying goes, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

RWG: Now, this was 2005 in Southern Kenya. The world had the internet. Kenya had the internet, but not in the bush where we were living. We barely had electricity. So mail was sparse. But the very first package that I got from my parents had letters and postcards and some CDs that they sent me. And it also had this edition of Time magazine. Because while I had been away, Hurricane Katrina had occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, in Louisiana, in Texas, and Mississippi.

And almost a thousand people perished in that tragedy, and it was a highly racialized event, right? People who were evacuated didn’t necessarily look like the people who weren’t evacuated. The people who died didn’t reflect the people who lived. And there I was, just enveloped in this passion for wildlife ecology, reading this article and crying around the campfire.

And folks from the Maasai community that also served as the staff for the program came over to comfort me and to ask me questions. And they said to me, so why are you here? You’re all the way across oceans and continents studying our wildlife, but it looks like your people and your community at home really need some help.

And it was at that moment that I realized that I couldn’t shake that passion for wildlife ecology. There’s nothing I could do. I was in it. I got that spark, but because of my identity, I would never be able to solely do this science work in that vacuum as I had been taught. My personal identity as a black American millennial woman would mean that I would always be concerned for social justice at the same time, if not more, than the work that I was doing with wild animals. And I needed a way for that to be okay and for that to be a part of who I was and my work.

Host: Returning to the U.S., Rae began building a career as one the country’s great large animal ecologists. Her special passion was black bears and Grizzlies, and how humans impact them in the wild. As she neared the end of her Ph.D. program at Columbia University in ecology and evolutionary biology, she alternated between living in New York City and studying black bears in the wilds of the Western states.

On her way to an ecology conference on the West Coast to deliver a talk about the threats to black bears, once again life intervened.

RWG: And so I flew across the country. And…and there was news, and there was news that a young man – a young black man – named Michael Brown had just been shot and murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri. And the people of Ferguson were outraged and they were protesting. Some media outlets would say they were rioting and Ferguson was literally on fire.

And this wasn’t new, right? This was another example of police brutality to black communities that was getting more media attention before, because we have smartphones that can record it these days and body cams that can record it instead of in years past.

And I found myself driving to the conference. I made the mistake of driving the day I was presenting and I realized I was about to go in front of thousands of people, of ecologists, and talk about the mortality risk of black bears in America. And all I could think of was the mortality risk of black men in America at the same time.

And I had this prop for the conference. I thought, you know, let me jazz up my ecology talk a little bit with a prop. And it’s a bear skull. And in the picture, I’m pointing to a bullet hole in the bear skull, where it was shot and killed by an intolerant and hostile person.

And I brought it up there, and I bravely said, “I’m here to talk about how this bear died. This is a bullet hole to its brain. But I’m so afraid that nobody cares about how Michael Brown died the day before with a bullet to his body.” And these conversations need to be a part of the ecology community and the scientific community. [Applause]

Host: For Rae, the question became: How does science relate to justice, and vice versa?

RWG: My main point was that we care so much about science and the people I was with supported science. I mean, there is no question. But did they support scientists? And I went on stage to say, if we will do anything for science, we have to offer that energy and that passion for scientists also. Scientists who are women, who are non-binary people, who are black and brown and immigrants and Muslim and from the LGBTQ+ community and any kind of oppressed group. [Applause]

And when a scientist comes from a community that is on fire facing oppression or violence or famine or genocide or anything like that, that scientist can’t focus on their science. And when their science is in service to the planet and is helping to create a healthy thriving ecosystem, then we all lose.

And I realized in this moment, and I called on my fellow ecologists to say, we have to have social justice at a minimum as a foundation for environmental solutions. Otherwise we only have the most privileged people working on these solutions, and it’s too slow.

I was able to say that from a safe place. The cops weren’t after me. You know, I realized that I always hold so much privilege to be able to make these confessions and announcements and epiphanies, but not everyone has that. There are so many people who don’t know they’re ecologists because they’re dealing with the hardest things in life. And it is our duty to alleviate a lot of that so that we can all work together. [Applause]

Host: If what we do to each other we do to the Earth, says Rae Wynn-Grant, then social justice is a precondition for environmental solutions. Can we learn how to peacefully coexist with both the natural world and each other? More when we return … I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers.

Host: The Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it.

Since 1970, there’s been a mind-blowing collective decline of two-thirds of mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations. More than 80% of wild animals have disappeared.

If we look at total Earth’s biomass of mammals by weight, 96 percent is livestock and human beings. Nearly half of all habitable land is taken up by agriculture.

Climate change radically disrupts natural cycles and already shrinking habitats, trapping wildlife within smaller land and marine areas. Less than a fifth of lands and inland waters are protected, and not even a tenth of marine areas.

There are efforts to turn things around. The 30/30 initiative is a global effort to conserve half of the Earth. Domestically, California is at the forefront, protecting 25% of lands and 16% of coastal waters.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant is working to understand how our human impacts on wildlife can be beneficial instead of destructive. As a TV personality reaching millions of engaged viewers, she tells those stories to inspire the same spark in others

RWG: What I find is that often when speaking with people, whether it’s one on one, whether it’s presentation form, whether it’s in the media, one thing that I often try to suggest is that, you know, wild animals are doing their very best to coexist with us. Are we doing our best to co exist with them?

Because they’re not trying to start problems. They don’t want to be killed. They don’t want to pick a fight. They really just want to eat something. The elephant that we saw blasting through that fence, the lions that ate the camels, the bears in your backyard getting into your bird feeder, most of these animals really have a strong instinct to eat food. I think some of us can resonate with that. And so I honestly find that getting people to understand that we too are animals. We too are driven by the same instincts. We too build shelter, look for food, care for our young, build communities. We are nature and we’re trying to save ourselves.

We are actually all trying to coexist together. I mean, humans haven’t figured out how to coexist with one another very well. Those are the, you know, extremely non-scientific but I think very important messages that I feel compelled to offer to folks. It’s that honestly, like, let’s give these species the benefit of the doubt.

Host: Before the 2020 pandemic, Rae spent several years studying grizzly bear movement and behavior on the great plains around Montana. Much of the land is fenced off by cattle ranches that make it very hard for wild grizzly bears to survive, much less thrive.

Rae encountered fierce hostility toward her beloved grizzlies from cattle ranchers whose families had occupied the land for generations.

Although there’s increasing openness among ranchers today toward holistic rangeland management that embraces coexistence with wildlife, the burdens of history still weigh heavy in the cattle culture.

RWG: I found as I was studying these grizzly bears that I had to interact with a lot of cattle ranchers and kind of tell them like, “Okay, hi, hi, I’m Rae and I study grizzly bears that you probably think are going to eat your cattle. But I’d like to just set some camera traps up on this landscape to just see if they’re already here, because we have reason to believe that they’re already here.”

And I would have these conversations with folks about coexistence. And the conversations were all over the place, but I did encounter a number of cattle ranchers who said, “My great great grandfather killed every grizzly bear he ever saw because they were a threat to the cattle. And if I let a grizzly bear on my ranch, that would be an insult to my family, to my great great grandfather and all that effort he put in slaughtering wild animals.

You know, and you can imagine me being like, Oh, gosh, I, okay. Noted. I’m going to move on to the next ranch.

Host: Even after Rae presented bulletproof data that the grizzlies ate only roots and plants and posed no threat to the cattle, these ranchers were unmoved and maintained their traditional war on grizzlies.

RWG: That is my example of coexistence not working out. So I found that coexistence didn’t work in places where people were so rigid with their belief systems, that we’re not able to have new information change their mind. This probably sounds familiar because we talk about it when it comes to politics.

But it was really rough for the way I felt at the end of the day, doing my job, trying to help, it was really difficult and painful, let alone knowing that most of the people who held this hostility towards wild animals that were referencing their family background were referencing a family background that only existed because of genocide and because of stealing land.

And they were holding staunch in those very rigid and, in my words, violent beliefs. And that’s part of an American story. But it doesn’t mean we will continue down that path of failure. We can absolutely turn it around to a success.

Host: The history of the conservation movement is itself complicated.

In the U.S., the movement to create national parks defined wilderness as nature without people. It resulted in banishing the Indigenous peoples, old-growth cultures who had lived there sustainably for centuries. Today, it’s well documented that traditional cultures often measurably benefit their landscapes and enhance biodiversity.

Almost all the founders of the conservation movement were white, and many promoted overtly racist views, including white supremacy and eugenics. Often the goal of “nature preserves” was colonial – such as to create privileged game reserves for rich trophy hunters.

In this light, the current conservation movement is explicitly beginning to recognize the sins of the past and to bring Indigenous Peoples into the decision-making process. In California’s 30×30 initiative, the state has demonstrated ancestral land return in action, providing $100 million to tribes to regain almost 40,000 acres of traditional territories.

Nevertheless, animals are on the run and heedless human impacts are heartbreaking. Rae recalls one call she got while working as a biologist near Lake Tahoe. A hiker had found a bear who died under strange circumstances.

RWG: And so my colleague and I went to investigate, and we found a young black bear dead in a small stream, in a very shallow stream, about maybe four inches of water. So it couldn’t have drowned.

And my colleague said, okay, in moments like this, we actually do a field necropsy. So we will open up the animal and the first place we should explore is its stomach to see if maybe it ingested something that had killed it.

But we opened the stomach of this young black bear in Tahoe in the middle of the forest. The stomach was full, and it was full of ketchup packets from the local fast food dumpster and that young animal must have wandered from the forest to the dumpster that was open, devoured a lot of goodies and crawled its way to the nearest stream to get some water to try to save its own life and didn’t. And man, that was a tough day, because one individual suffering meant that the population wasn’t doing as great as we thought. And how the suffering of one individual can symbolize a huge problem.

And essentially this is not new, right? There have been many incredible scholars and thinkers who’ve articulated these ideas way better than me in the past. And Audre Lorde is one of my favorites, but we do not lead single issue lives. So we cannot look at a single issue struggle. It’s not “save the whales”, right? It’s, we are nature and we are saving ourselves. And it’s okay if that focus is on people and communities and social justice. It’s okay if that focus is on wild animals, but it needs to be comprehensive and radical.

Host: Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant knows up-close-and-personal how dire the threats to wildlife are. Yet she also sees the epic paradigm shift underway that’s radically changing the story and helping drive an unprecedented global popular movement to conserve half the Earth by 2050. She’s using her torch to light other torches.

RWG: Whether it’s TV or radio or books or social media – I often think social media gets a bad rep – but my goodness, my algorithm is a whole bunch of environmental justice information that I wouldn’t get otherwise.

You know, I think the power of non-traditional education, informal education, can really help people. It can be accessible to kids. It can be accessible to people from many different income backgrounds, and many different languages and many different places. I, for one, would not be the career person that I am today without television shows. No one in my family or community or neighborhood and my low income inner city upbringing ever asked me what kind of ecologist do you want to be? But I could ask myself that question because I watched TV. And it brought me to those places and allowed me to aim higher and want to be a part of a whole movement.

There are so many important movements that I think different aspects of media can lend itself towards. And it helped me. And I’ve seen it help a lot of other people.

I have this personal goal to make heroes out of environmentalists. I think that folks all over the world find heroes in, you know, fictional characters. They find heroes in athletes. They find heroes in entertainers, but I think, my gosh, if environmental scientists or other types of environmentalists could be household names, as well, across the world we would be in much better shape.

Host: Rae Wynn-Grant… “Saving Nature Means Saving Ourselves”