Transcript

Jad Abumrad: Hey, this is Jad. Radiolab is supported by IBM. The world needs a technology company that applies smart technologies at scale, with purpose and expertise. Not just for some, but for all. Let's expect more from technology. Let's put smart to work. Visit IBM.com/smart to learn more.

Carl Zimmer: Okay, now it's my left ear. Hello Soren, how are you?

Soren Wheeler: Good, how you doing?

Carl Zimmer: I'm good.

Jad Abumrad: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich: I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad: This is Radiolab and so far we've been talking about the value of our lives...

Robert Krulwich: And then the value of other people's lives.

Jad Abumrad: Next up, the value of...

Robert Krulwich: Everything

Jad Abumrad: All of it.

Robert Krulwich: Everything.

Jad Abumrad: Ev-ery-thing. And by everything, of course we mean...

Carl Zimmer: The value... of nature.

Jad Abumrad: That's Carl Zimmer, science writer, regular blower of minds.

Carl Zimmer: So, we think of ecosystems as just, kind of, sitting there. Um, but, (laughs) actually, they're doing things. If they weren't doing them for us, we would have to pay to do them artificially. For example, cotton farms in South Texas.

Robert Krulwich: Hmm.

Carl Zimmer: So, you know, the farmers are doing their thing.

Jad Abumrad: Like this guy.

James Parker: James Parker.

Carl Zimmer: Planting their cotton, they're collecting it.

James Parker: I farmed about, I don't know, usually five to six, seven hundred acres of cotton. So, say 2000 bales.

Carl Zimmer: They're doing what farmers do.

James Parker: I spend a lot of time on a tractor, and uh, you have to check your water every morning, every evening.

Carl Zimmer: Meanwhile, they have all this extra help. In the air.

James Parker: Yes.

Carl Zimmer: They have bats.

James Parker: How many bats are out there, you really don't know.

Carl Zimmer: Flying all around. The bats eat the equivalent of two-thirds of their own weight, in insects, every night.

Jad Abumrad: Wow.

James Parker: They eat all night long, all kinda bugs.

Carl Zimmer: A whole buncha pests, that would otherwise be eating the cotton.

Robert Krulwich: Now, a few years ago...

James Parker: Guy, named John Westfall ...

Carl Zimmer: Did a calculation.

Robert Krulwich: Just to see how this arrangement was working out.

James Parker: He came out to my farm and did a- did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him and those girls were out there all hours of the night, listening to what the bats were saying, and...

Carl Zimmer: Each year, the farmers, collectively, they make about 4 or $5,000,000 off of the- these farms.

Robert Krulwich: Question was, how much of this was because of the bats? because ya know, bats are natural pesticides.

James Parker: You know, if they more they're eatin', the less I gotta spray.

Robert Krulwich: And here's what the scientists figured out.

Carl Zimmer: Out of 4 to $5,000,000 it was around $700,000 dollars that you could ascribe to the bats.

James Parker: Uh, it's just beautiful.

Jad Abumrad: Wow. I mean, it does make me think, that if you're those farmers, you- you should be compensating the bats somehow.

James Parker: (Laughs).

Carl Zimmer: Yeah, welL, yeah. It does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value, that nature has that we generally just totally ignore.

Jad Abumrad: But, We talked to a guy who didn't ignore it.

Robert Costanza: Um, my name is Robert Costanza.

Robert Krulwich: In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute limit.

Robert Costanza: Yes, so the question was, what's the value of all of these ecosystem services, globally?

Carl Zimmer: All the services on Earth.

Jad Abumrad: You know, it's bugs eating leaves ...

Robert Krulwich: Worms turning the soil ...

Jad Abumrad: Beatles chewing tree stumps ...

Robert Krulwich: Coral reefs protecting cities during storms.

Jad Abumrad: Everything.

Robert Costanza: We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done, um, around the country and the world.

Jad Abumrad: Like the bat study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms, they looked at ...

Carl Zimmer: Tropical forests, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean, woodlands, temperate forests.

Robert Costanza: You know, it goes on and on.

Carl Zimmer: Grasslands.

Jad Abumrad: This must be some Excel spreadsheet.

Carl Zimmer: It's- it's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from hell.

Robert Costanza: It can get tricky.

Robert Krulwich: So, Costanza and his colleagues took all these different studies, some of them together, did a whole buncha math, and ... Came up with a number.

Carl Zimmer: Which, in today's dollars, is a 142.7 trillion dollars per year.

Robert Krulwich: (Laughs).

Carl Zimmer: Of services. And that's more than all of the gross national products, of the world.

Jad Abumrad: Wow.

Carl Zimmer: That's how valuable the services of nature are.

Jad Abumrad: Yeah, let me ask you, like I get the- I get the way this would work with the bat, like, the bats eating the bugs, but like, how do you do it ... with like- with like a- like a... field or something like? Do you just walk through and you're like, "You know, that's twenty bucks of services. That's fifty." Like how do you even figure out what the services are?

Carl Zimmer: Well, uh, they, they came up with a list, uh, so, it- the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about. Because different ecosystems provide different services. For example, uh, a- a salt marsh.

Simon Adler: And we are in the water now (laughs). Yes, we are in the water [crosstalk 00:04:37],

Jad Abumrad: What is it? Wait, sorry, a salt marsh, is it like the Florida wetlands, but salty? I suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is.

Carl Zimmer: Salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast.

Jad Abumrad: Got it.

Adam Whelchel: Yup, we're standing in about a foot of water here. We're quickly approaching high tide.

Robert Krulwich: We sent one of our producers, Simon Adler, to a nearby salt marsh.

Jad Abumrad: Partially, to haze him.

Simon Adler: You're- you're [crosstalk 00:04:54]-

Adam Whelchel: Six feet [crosstalk 00:04:54]-

Simon Adler: Boots are much more water proof.

Adam Whelchel: Yeah.

Simon Adler: Than mine-

Adam Whelchel: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Krulwich: But really to talk to this buy.

Adam Whelchel: Uh, my name is Adam Whelchel and I'm the Director of Science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut.

Robert Krulwich: And Adam gave Simon a- a kind of inventory-

Adam Whelchel: Of some of the services provided by ah, coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that have been provided over time.

Simon Adler: One of the things it does is it takes water that's coming in from inland and that's laden with all sorts of pollutants, all sorts of bad stuff.

Jad Abumrad: The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle and then very often the marsh grass will suck up that water into their roots ...

Simon Adler: And clean it up.

Adam Whelchel: Yep.

Robert Krulwich: So you could ask, very simply ...

Simon Adler: How much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean [crosstalk 00:05:38]-

Adam Whelchel: Hold on ne second. Well there- there is one other study I want- want [crosstalk 00:05:41]-

Jad Abumrad: Adam Whelchel said that scientists in New England have already figured that out.

Adam Whelchel: Ah, for flood control, water supply protection, ah, pollution control, it's roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year.

Robert Krulwich: Then you got to add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plates-

Adam Whelchel: $338 annually per acre.

Jad Abumrad: Then there are the bird watchers that buy lattes to support the local economy.

Adam Whelchel: 400 ah, 90 dollars per hectare.

Jad Abumrad: And then there's habitat provisioning.

Robert Krulwich: The list goes on and on and on and on.

Simon Adler: You do get kind of obsessed with it. You start like- you start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously-

Jad Abumrad: (Laughs)-

Simon Adler: Um, and ah, it- it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before.

Tim Howard: There's this galling element though, or this aspect like when I first came across [crosstalk 00:06:27]-

Jad Abumrad: At this point, our producer, Tim Howard jumped into the interview and you'll also hear our producer, Soren Wheeler in just a second.

Tim Howard: I do feel like in an example like the salt marsh, which cleans water, that's all reliant on people being there that need the water. So if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?

Jad Abumrad: But Tim, haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get ... Like if you make the aesthetic argument, which is that nature should be preserved for its own sake, there's a whole category of humanity that just doesn't respond to that argument.

Jad Abumrad: And so this becomes a way to talk across the aisle.

Tim Howard: But it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of a- a- a piddly value.

Soren Wheeler: Well, it can't really be infinite value. I mean, what's that mean [crosstalk 00:07:11]-

Jad Abumrad: Like a mother's love [crosstalk 00:07:12]. You don't think your mother's love is priceless, I mean, you know?

Tim Howard: Okay. I- I totally accept that there is this sort of priceless aspect of nature, but if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make. If somebody comes to you and says, "Okay, you've got these lovely mangroves." Now it turns out that that the sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aqua-culture.

Jad Abumrad: Because shrimp farms need lots of sea water, so it makes sense to put them by the sea.

Tim Howard: We're going to put in these farms, we're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue. If- if you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving, that might be a really powerful argument.

Tim Howard: Now into that kind of a discussion, you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there very quietly doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things. In fact, they've done these kind of calculations and in some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp.

Tim Howard: So it's stupid, it's just stupid in a bay- in a very basic sense to wantonly replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture.

Jad Abumrad: Is that a hypothetical situation?

Glenn-Marie Lan: No.

Jad Abumrad: That's a conversation [crosstalk 00:08:33] have-

Glenn-Marie Lan: That's what we're asked.

Jad Abumrad: This is Glenn-Marie Lange. She's an environmental economist for the World Bank and she says very often she finds herself in exactly this kind of conversation.

Glenn-Marie Lan: Particularly, you know, I work for the World Bank, so our primary clients are our governments.

Jad Abumrad: Philippines, Vietnam.

Glenn-Marie Lan: And when you're talking to a Minister of Finance and saying, "You know what? You really should ..."

Jad Abumrad: I know jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value.

Glenn-Marie Lan: They'll say, "Well, yeah, that's true, but That means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget." So you got to really make a strong argument about the benefits.

Jad Abumrad: Hmm.

Glenn-Marie Lan: That's really where the rubber hits the road.

Doug McCauley: Well, I mean, that's it [crosstalk 00:09:13]-

Robert Krulwich: Here's the counter argument. It comes from Doug McCauley, an ecologist at University California, Santa Barbara.

Doug McCauley: The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money. And then we're- we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.

Jad Abumrad: What do you in a situation he says where, say a bunch of rivers are running dry and quote "depreciating in value."

Doug McCauley: You know, buy the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets. That makes me feel really uncomfortable.

Robert Krulwich: He says it's just kind of a weird way to think about nature.

Doug McCauley: We had a proposal here in the State of California to make gay marriage legal. And economists had a look at this legislation and said, "This is expected to generate $163 million annually for the State of California." Um, well, it's good to know that. I- I-

Glenn-Marie Lan: (laughs)-

Doug McCauley: Appreciate having that information in front of me, however when I'm making a- a decision on this legislation, and I would say when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state. THey're thinking about a different set of values.

Glenn-Marie Lan: On the other hand, I want to say and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these services, basically they don't get counted.

Jad Abumrad: They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn-Marie Lange. And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.

J.B. MacKinnon: The parable of the bees.

Robert Krulwich: We heard this first from writer, J.B. MacKinnon, who says the story begins ...

J.B. MacKinnon: In Mao County in central China. Rural area, fairly remote.

Robert Krulwich: Lush, green mountains filled with apple orchards.

J.B. MacKinnon: And ah, apple orcharding was the main business-

Robert Krulwich: And according to J.B. in the 1990s ...

J.B. MacKinnon: The wild bees of Mao County slowly started to- to disappear. And there's a few different reasons given for that. It could have been the destruction of habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

Robert Krulwich: But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples. So they started spraying pesticides.

J.B. MacKinnon: Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others. End result is, the bees stopped buzzing in Mao County.

Robert Krulwich: Which if you are an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

J.B. MacKinnon: AS bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar, they are- they're dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms that um-

Robert Krulwich: (laughs)-

J.B. MacKinnon: Then you don't get fertile flowers to turn into- to turn into fruit.

Robert Krulwich: And obviously if you're a fruit farmer, and you have no fruit to sell you have no income.

Jad Abumrad: So what do you do?

J.B. MacKinnon: You're an apple farmer and you don't have bees? Then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers. And I guess they concluded, well we'll have to do that (laughs) ourselves by hand.

Harold Thibault: In Mandarin Chinese, we say, "Ren gong, sou fen." So basically ah, that means ah, manual pollination.

Robert Krulwich: This is Harold Thibault.

Harold Thibault: I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper, Le Monde.

Robert Krulwich: A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao County, so he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car and-

Harold Thibault: We drive for like ah, five or six hours until we reach a this village, Nanxin.

Robert Krulwich: Tiny, little village.

Harold Thibault: It's like only a- a few houses. And then we took a smaller road in between the- the- the fields and ah, we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the- in the trees like on the apple trees ...

J.B. MacKinnon: Straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches. Often men and women that I've seen in- in photos in any case.

Robert Krulwich: Harold and his friend took pictures and if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding a little brush.

J.B. MacKinnon: This little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks, and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

Robert Krulwich: And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen and then what they'd do, they'd dip the brush into the bottle and they'd paint a flower blossom with the pollen. And then they'd dip their brush back into the pollen and they'd paint the next flower blossom again and they'd dip the brush back in again and they'd paint again and they'd dip again and paint again ...

J.B. MacKinnon: To make sure that- that all of the blossoms that they could possible fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.

Robert Krulwich: We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.

Harold Thibault: It was very strange to see a- a humans doing the- the job of the bees.

Jad Abumrad: God, what a pain in the ass that sounds like.

J.B. MacKinnon: Yeah, the image of this- of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees, traveled around the world through environmental circles and it- the message that it seemed to send was that this is what happens if you- if you loose biodiversity. You end up standing in the trees doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing.

Robert Krulwich: For free.

J.B. MacKinnon: For free.

Yunzhong Chen: Those people just like human bees (laughs).

Jad Abumrad: But then this guy enters the story. This is Yunzhong Chen.

Yunzhong Chen: Yeah, (laughs) human bees.

Jad Abumrad: Four years ago, he traveled to Mao County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County. But what he discovered weirdly, was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.

Yunzhong Chen: More production, more production. This is can be ah, confirmed. There- there are more production for hand pollination apple trees than ah, bee pollination apple (laughs) tree. Humans are more efficient.

Jad Abumrad: Really?

Robert Krulwich: You mean, the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?

Yunzhong Chen: Yes.

Jad Abumrad: A lot better.

J.B. MacKinnon: Fruit production went up 30%.

Robert Krulwich: That's what the farmers told Yunzhong Chen, which is kind of ...

Yunzhong Chen: Amazing (laughs). The only word I remember, amazing. Because I think hand pollination can pollinate more thoroughly. They can pollinate every flower.

Jad Abumrad: And bees don't pollinate every flower?

J.B. MacKinnon: Bees are a little bit ah, you know, they're a little bit ah, uneven-

Jad Abumrad: (Laughs)-

J.B. MacKinnon: When it comes to pollination.

Jad Abumrad: You're so polite.

J.B. MacKinnon: They don't like it if it's cold. They don't like it if it's damp. Ah, they don't like it if it's windy.

Robert Krulwich: In all those cases, bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off.

J.B. MacKinnon: But you send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom (laughs) and they're going to do it. And there was the additional benefit of the people that you paid, they'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries, they'd spend earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously, bees never did.

Jad Abumrad: So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are, you know, this whole parable of biodiversity.

Robert Krulwich: It turns out maybe the lessons just the opposite, that actually we don't need bees. A- and maybe we never did.

J.B. MacKinnon: If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that that ah, some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places or that we might ah, even do better to- to take care- care of those processes ourselves.

Harold Thibault: Right. So, let me find my notes about the wages exactly.

J.B. MacKinnon: But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold Thibault told us that when he visited Nanxin ...

Harold Thibault: I talked with one farmer. His name is ah, Zeng Zigao. He's 38 and ah, he said in his opinion, ah, the- the hand pollination ah, might disappear in a few years.

J.B. MacKinnon: Apparently as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better apy.

Harold Thibault: The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them basically it's not efficient economically to do the hand pollination anymore. That's what ah, a lot of farmers say this [crosstalk 00:16:59]-

Jad Abumrad: Now they're likely thinking, "Damn, we need those bees back."

Harold Thibault: Right, yeah.

Robert Krulwich: Problem is ...

Harold Thibault: There are no bees ah, in those villages anymore.

Robert Krulwich: One farmer told Harold, bee keepers in other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used. That's when wild bees might come back?

Harold Thibault: Well for this we have ah, no idea. It's very hard to make a prediction. iF you ask the farmers, they're like, "Oh, Wo bu zhi dao. I don't know."

Robert Krulwich: Here- here's where that story leaves me.

Jad Abumrad: Hmm.

Robert Krulwich: It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go. Putting an arb- a value, even a- even a precise and thoughtful value on a bee or on a pound of pesticide, you- you do it, and you think you're smart, but then the value changes and the bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing, to being worth everything all within a few years.

Robert Krulwich: This- this is what markets do. They swing back, forth and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can. So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong.

Jad Abumrad: Or but let me [crosstalk 00:18:02]-

Robert Krulwich: That's why economics is a dumb-

Jad Abumrad: No, no, no, I'm- I want to argue the other side for a second. No where in this story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, "You know what? The bees do have value, here's the number." In fact, Carl, when we were talking to him told us ...

Robert Krulwich: You know, there have been estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees is $190 billion.

Jad Abumrad: So that's globally, right? But still there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero.

Robert Krulwich: But you remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued as more, then bees go down. Bees go up [crosstalk 00:18:34]-

Jad Abumrad: I get it [crosstalk 00:18:34]-

Robert Krulwich: yOu have to have a lot of numbers in your head.

Jad Abumrad: But here's what I like about this ides, is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking. You can't just say don't do that. I mean, that's the thing that conservationists say, "Don't, don't, don't."

Jad Abumrad: But if you say don't do that because here's the value-

Robert Krulwich: Here's the loss.

Jad Abumrad: Yeah, here's the loss, well then that actually gives the whole precautionary, don't thing some teeth.

Robert Krulwich: Except for this, if you go business-y on nature and you're wrong ...

Glenn-Marie Lan: There are irreversibilities.

Robert Krulwich: That's how environmental economist Glenn-Marie Lange puts it.

Glenn-Marie Lan: This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems and what we produce. You smash your car, hey, someone can build a new one. If you lose the bees, many instances you can not bring them back.

Robert Krulwich: So the question we got to is, is there another way to thing about the value of nature in a way that's not economic and therefore short-sighted and all about us? But also, not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

J.B. MacKinnon: The- the best I was able to do (laughs) thinking about this-

Robert Krulwich: Writer, J.B. MacKinnon again.

J.B. MacKinnon: Was when it struck me that- that in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diversity, all of this wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do is like an extension of our own brains.

J.B. MacKinnon: There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own, that we can think of it as- as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we, as humans are able to draw. And that when we draw down on that- on that pool of creativity and imagination, we- we deeply impoverish ourselves. You know, in a sense we are- we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to- and to- and to dream.

Robert Krulwich: J.B. MacKinnon's book is called, The Once and Future World. He's written many, but this one is my fav.

Jad Abumrad: Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's ah, reporting in the New York Times on this topic is really what got us launched into this whole thing.

Robert Krulwich: And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Adler, who's production assistance was invaluable. That was him ...

Jad Abumrad: Freezing his ass off-

Robert Krulwich: (laughs)-

Jad Abumrad: In the marsh.

Robert Krulwich: I talked so long (laughs) he nearly died.

Jad Abumrad: (Laughs).

Robert Krulwich: His toes fell off, I think. Anyway-

Jad Abumrad: (Laughs)-

Robert Krulwich: Thank you, Simon.

Jad Abumrad: Thank you, Simon. And ah, thank you guys for listening, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich: I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad: We'll see you next time.

Speaker 17: Start of message.

Carl Zimmer: Hi, this is Carl Zimmer.

Robert Krulwich: Hi, this is Robert Constanza.

Harold Thibault: Hi Radiolab, this is Harold ah, the China correspondent for Le Monde, based in Shanghai.

Glenn-Marie Lan: Hi, this is Glenn-Marie Lange.

Adam Whelchel: Hi, my name's Adam Whelchel. I'm calling in to read some credits.

Harold Thibault: So here we go.

Adam Whelchel: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.

Glenn-Marie Lan: Our staff includes Ellen Horne,

Robert Costanza: Soren Wheeler,

Harold Thibault: Tim [Hoab 00:21:46],

Glenn-Marie Lan: [Brenna Farrell 00:21:46],

Adam Whelchel: Molly Webster, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe,

Harold Thibault: Jamie York,

Carl Zimmer: [inaudible 00:21:50],

Glenn-Marie Lan: Andy Mills,

Adam Whelchel: Kelsey Padgett,

Robert Costanza: And Matt Kielty.

Carl Zimmer: With help from Arriane Wack,

Robert Costanza: Simon alder- Adler, Simon Adler,

Harold Thibault: Danielle [inaudible 00:21:59],

Glenn-Marie Lan: Reem Abdou and [Claire Tennisketer 00:22:01].

Robert Costanza: This episode was fact checked by Michelle [Saraka 00:22:05].

Carl Zimmer: Special thanks to Rich, oh, my goodness. Rich [Di Meglio 00:22:11].

Harold Thibault: Glen Blumquist,

Glenn-Marie Lan: Lilly Sullivan,

Robert Costanza: Shaheeb [inaudible 00:22:15],

Glenn-Marie Lan: Grace Volckhausen,

Robert Costanza: John Kim,

Glenn-Marie Lan: [Yara Al Moussawi 00:22:18],

Robert Costanza: And reprieve for expertise in Yemen.

Carl Zimmer: Well, that's my best shot.

Harold Thibault: Thank you all, bye.

Speaker 17: End of message.