Broadcast 3765 Mary Roach

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Guest: Mary Roach; Topics: Mary's new book, "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks The Law," human-wildlife conflict, changing environments for humans, lessons learned applicable to the space environment, co-existing with wildlife, dangerous animals, and more.

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We welcomed back to the show Mary Roach regarding her new book, "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks The Law."  The book is about human-wildlife conflict which to many will represent an off the space topic program for The Space Show.  However, I took away many lessons learned for humans wanting to go into space to live, either for outposts or settlement as humans don't always have a great track record for changing environments to suit and better themselves. 

We started our discussion talking about the California Mountain Lion which Mary covered in her book.  I told Mary that almost daily I get mountain lion alerts on my phone, all warning people to stay in, bring pets in and such.  Mary talked about the California mountain lion in an environment with lots of humans, California's mountain lion policy, and programs designed to bring all the interested parties together (not the mountain lion) to see how to protect the animal, the safety and interests of humans and move forward.  Note what she said about the approach being used and what seemed to work the best, especially when considering bear policy in Colorado mentioned later in our discussion. 

Mary talked about the issue with leopards in parts of Northern India that kill with intent.  She said locals have a way of assessing the intent of the animal that may have killed, including the killing of a small child.  Based on intent, the locals enact certainly policies and actions against the leopards.  Note how they take precautions but continue to live in an environment where leopards kill, even children, all the time.  Consider how we attempt to get along with or control our environment even when other life finds it suitable for themselves or just maybe we took the animal's environment for ourselves.  While I realize there is as yet no other life in space, there just might be something to learn by examining our dealings with wildlife that conflicts with us. 

Mary's book is full of rich examples.  One we talked about dealt with the monkeys and home invasions in India.  The Wildlife Institute of India provided much of the information for Mary, plus Mary actually visited the places where the wildlife conflicts with people..  As for the monkey home invasions, our guest reported that people die as a result of these home invasions but you need to listen to all of what Mary said about this and how people deal with it. In addition, different monkeys related differently with humans and the humans in turn relate differently with those monkeys.  Mary then addressed the conflict with wild elephants.  Eventually these animal examples led us to the subject of translocation, that is moving the animal species to some other location.

Translocation was a big part of Mary's book as humans have attempted to relocate conflicting wildlife all over the world, often without success.  Many times the moved animal species actually finds its way back to its original home.  Listen to the her talk about the birds in and around Midway Island and the efforts of the Navy to move them to other islands due to aircraft safety issues.  Eventually, all efforts failed, the Midway Naval Air station was closed down (for many reasons) and the birds are still three.  It hard to relocate a species and just maybe it will be hard for us to relocate humans like ourselves.  Take a look at the costs and the failed attempts, the policies, the good intentions.  Again, how does our track record stack up on translocation?  Is there a lesson to be learned here for our moving into space?

Our guest had many other wildlife-human conflicts to share with us. Listeners asked her many questions and we took two phone calls, one from Marshall and one from Ft. Worth John.  Many of the stories underscored the difficulty in trying to do good to protect or create an environment only to find out that the job done was not so good.  But a good example Mary referenced was the work done with bears in Colorado but look at what it took to make it a success and why that success does not spread easily to other locations.  Education and being able to shift human behavior is important but challenging.  As I connect some dots from Mary's book and our discussion to our moving out into space, I believe we can learn a lot that is relevant from how we work out conflicts with wildlife, not just in the West or in the U.S. but on a global basis as the challenges are there for all cultures, advanced or more basic.

Please post your comments/questions for Mary Roach on our blog.  You can reach our guest through me here at The Space Show.

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Special Day and Time: Mary discusses her new book, "Fuzz"

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01 Oct 2021 Mary Roach
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