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16: Josh Wodak: Think like a volcano
46 Plays3 days ago
Researcher, artist and author Dr Josh Wodak shares insights from his new book Petrified: Living during a rupture of life on Earth. In our conversation, we spoke about deep time, extinction and life on our volatile planet. Spanning 65 million years we cover the climate crisis, asteroid impacts, volcanoes and how pop culture can help us cope and make sense of it all.
Bio:
Dr Joshua Wodak is an artist, writer, and Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts, Western Sydney University. His lyrical, playful, and deadly serious work explores ideas about the unfolding rupture of life on Earth (climate crisis, Anthropocene, Sixth Extinction Event et. al.) in the context of this planet’s propensity to constantly unleash its own crises, time, and time again. That is: how to live on an inherently unstable Earth, and in an inherently catastrophic cosmos. His first book is ‘Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth’, published in the Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies series by Heidelberg University (De Gruyter, 2025).
Get Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111382937/html
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur. Post-production on this episode was completed on Worimi country as part of the Gunyah Artist Residency Program.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom Series
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I pay respect to their elders past, present and future.
00:00:20
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers and writers.
Conversation with Dr. Josh Wodak
00:00:29
Speaker
Today's conversation is with researcher Dr. Josh Wodak.
00:00:33
Speaker
In our conversation we spoke about deep time, extinction and life on our volatile planet. Spanning 65 million years, we covered the asteroid Chicxulub and the destruction of the dinosaurs, the fossilized skeleton of our ancestor Lucy, and how pop culture can help us cope and make sense of it all.
00:00:52
Speaker
Josh Wodak is an artist, writer, and academic at Western Sydney University in the environmental humanities. His work engages in issues around climate change, the Anthropocene, mass extinction, and technoscience interventions. He is the author of Petrified, living during a rupture of life on earth.
00:01:10
Speaker
Here's our conversation.
00:01:14
Speaker
Josh, congratulations on your book, Petrified. It's so nice to be able to speak with you. Going back, is that is it right that you saw the famous Lucy skeleton as a child?
00:01:28
Speaker
And in Lucy, we're talking about the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton. She lived something like 2.8 million years ago. i did.
00:01:41
Speaker
it would have been around about 1988, and I would have been around about, i don't know, eight or nine years old. I was in the Australian Museum in Sydney, and it had a huge...
00:01:55
Speaker
effect on me and I didn't at all comprehend anything to do with the significance of the fossil or the ideas of deep time or geological time back then.
00:02:06
Speaker
It was just, a I guess, the classic kid being dragged to the museum by a parent. And sometimes things really resonate and stick and sometimes they wash over you. And I think just my encounter with Lucy wasn't something until a few decades later that i I really got a sense of how it was ah a very, very a moving, moving experience.
00:02:28
Speaker
And of course, her discovery is made famous by the great idea that the archaeologists and colleagues had to name her Lucy after the Beatles. Is that right?
00:02:40
Speaker
After the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamond, because I think the story goes that they were just playing it over and over and over again on the archaeological dig. Well, not whatever, paleoanthropological dig.
00:02:52
Speaker
And that was how it stuck. Amazing. And think of all the other skeletons that don't have that staying power with without that name. Absolutely.
00:03:02
Speaker
Absolutely. have you seen Have you seen Lucy? No, that's why was so interested. i like I remember hearing about Lucy for the first time probably in high school and then that she's one of those famous things that would be amazing to see. I remember seeing, um going to the Australian Museum, maybe and it was in 2015 or something, they had, I think its name was Yuli, one of the perfectly preserved in Siberian permafrost mammoth babies that they had rediscovered. Wow. Which is very special, but not our own, not our ancestor, but maybe something our ancestors killed.
00:03:36
Speaker
Wow.
Wollemi Pine Conservation Discussion
00:03:37
Speaker
I did want to talk about what I think is a charismatic poster species that has an interesting story and that it's kind of left in an interesting place. The Wallamai pine, that's one that you've created past artworks on that I'll ask you about. it And the Wallamai, it is a plant native to, you know, it used to be the east coast of Australia for millions of years. It was rediscovered in 1994 in a small canyon Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains.
00:04:10
Speaker
It is an ancient plant in the Oricaryaceae family related to Arbena pine, Norfolk Island pine. And it was thought extinct for millions of millions of of years. It was known in fossil records. The story goes that David Noble, and environmental officer, was canyoning on his free time, saw this plant, knew that he hadn't seen it before, sent it to some friends that, you know, worked in the field. And it was discovered as a new species and one that was thought extinct. So it was it has this kind of incredible rediscovery story. Really, there are something like less than 100 in the wild. It could be understood as being on the verge of natural extinction.
00:04:57
Speaker
It's an an extremely vulnerable population. it has also been championed by the horticultural industry. it it had a lot of press. There's been a lot of campaigns to preserve it, a lot of science to preserve it, where now it persists. There's more, many, many, many, many more individuals in cultivation around the world. In Australia, it's sold at Bunnings. It's kept at Botanic Gardens around the whole world. It's kind of artificially kept alive in these different artificial garden environments and where the natural population of course is at extreme risk of you know the next fire if it goes down there could wipe out their population. What are your kind of thoughts on the the wall of mine? Can you talk about the artwork that you made about this species?
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Yeah, no, like you and many others, I share a a very longstanding fascination with this particular pine tree. I would bring it back to not just the Wollemi, but let's use the Wollemi as a kind of like a prism through which to unpack these bigger things at play. I would bring it back, as with many things, to Blade Runner. Well, actually, to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, the book that Blade Runner is based on, where both the book and the film draw at the idea that I mean, Blade Runner, ironically, was set in 2019. So we're already in a...
00:06:17
Speaker
a post-Blade Runner world from the original date that the film was set in. And in this futuristic society, you've got really two options. One is to, you know watch a species just go extinct before our eyes en masse. Another is to synthetically recreate them. I think the one thing about the Wollemi that's so potent is it lends itself towards that absurdity of, yeah, as you say, hey there is incredibly little genetic diversity between those 150 circa natural, so-called, you know, natural ones living in the wild. And although I'm not familiar with any particular research on the Wallamae for this, one of the things that there's an organization in the States called Revive and Restore, they're not the only ones, but they're kind of leading in this arena. They call it something like genetic rescue. So it's introducing, I know there's a scientist in Australia who are trying to do this with kelp.
00:07:07
Speaker
Introducing genetic diversity into existing organisms to, it's not as simple as, you know, inbreeding, but to offset the dangers of if a said population is all too closely related, if one catches COVID or whatever, yeah something they all do.
00:07:27
Speaker
And so I feel like the Wollumar is so potent as this, you know, so-called dinosaur species, because yes, it was alive during the time of the dinosaurs, that it lends itself towards this notion of how can one, first of all, you can increase from a population of 150 wild to say 15,000 in nurseries around the country, or whatever it might be, 150,000. But if they're all incredibly genetically genetically similar, one pathogen can just basically pass through one Yeah, all the ones in cultivation are essentially clones of these 100 wild ones. So I feel like a Blade Runner presents us with this very kind of surprise, surprise, dystopian prospect that they can either be nothing or a kind of synthetic proxy of something. It's not a real owl. It's not a real snake in the film. Toad, of course. They are synthetic recreations.
00:08:19
Speaker
And that the one of the again, the the challenges and dangers of assisted evolution, synthetic biology, geoengineering, is that they may give the appearance that something very bad, such as global heating, has been slowed.
00:08:33
Speaker
But it's a kind of synthetic masking of the still latent potential effects. the cataclysm because the the hubris of thinking that these genetically modified or or genetically induced biodiversity, for lack a better term, kind of feels like straight out of a sci-fi playbook. It doesn't present well as the notion of the the intrinsic autonomy of that ecosystem or species from human intervention or... Yeah, it's interesting. One of the... have a line here.
00:09:07
Speaker
by Jonathan Luttrell in his review of Petrified in Le Monde. And he says, i mean, talking about talking about your work, are we ready to accept that some species will disappear, that nature will no longer be natural? And yeah, I sat with that for a long time. Like, what does that? What does that mean? What does natural mean to us?
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, no, I imagine you've also wrestled with this whole conundrum. yeah If humans, are of course, are part of nature, not apart from nature, then what we do is, quote-unquote, natural.
00:09:39
Speaker
Therefore, I know this is a kind of cheap simplification of the phenomenon, but therefore, if forms of technology are human creations and they can be used arguably for the benefit of the more-than-human world,
00:09:51
Speaker
then what does it matter if the end result is supposedly unnatural, even if someone agrees that it is, if it actually has some capacity for helping said species or ecosystem?
00:10:05
Speaker
I'm not sure where you lie on this, but yeah, I find it troubling no matter which way you look at And I don't have a nice, succinct, coherent. I have incoherent, self-contradictory thoughts on the matter. Yeah, it's really interesting. There does seem like thinking about being kept alive in in gardens alone. There's like a a death to that. And then it makes me think also about ginkgo, ginkgo biloba, which is a species that it only lives in gardens, which I don't feel sad about.
00:10:38
Speaker
One more Wallamai question before we really jump into petrified. So Wallamai seeds were part of an experiment in 2008 or 2009. They were sent up to space along with some other Australian seeds. And part of this was to understand the effects of microgravity, maybe temperature and radiation on the seeds. to look at whether off-Earth seed banks were viable.
00:11:08
Speaker
is that the Is that the background to your
Experiments and Artworks with Wollemi Pine
00:11:12
Speaker
Wollemi project? Yeah, no, all of the things happened. Botanical Gardens in Sydney that sent up a few dozen Wollemi seeds to the International Space Station for six months with one of the astronauts to attest exactly those things, the effect of ionizing radiation and microgravity on the ability to propagate back on Earth. The rationale for this was because it was ah an experiment to see whether or not off-world seed banks could have any long-term efficacy.
00:11:40
Speaker
You know, if if it worked, they set up four Australian species, ah one of them, Wallamai, another one was model, I forget the other two. And I think the experiment was kind of like, okay, if this works, then, you know, maybe it's not such a terrible idea to try and do something longer term with many, many more species.
00:11:57
Speaker
And so what I did is i I reconstructed the temperatures that those seeds were subjected to over a 12-month period And I also got the data from the Bureau Meteorology of the temperature for the same period of time in Wadamai National Park and the data from Mount Anan Botanical Gardens. Yeah. Of the control samples there, so three points of data, and I used this for a sound artwork called um Seat in Space, Sound in Time. to try and draw out this yeah all this again these tensions ambivalence between one is a supposedly the natural temperature as in one of my national park and then you've got clearly the artificial control temperatures at mount anon and on the international space station and each one of them i had mapped to what they call the the thermometer cricket in north america because it modulates its pitch and frequency based on the ambient temperature in its surroundings You hear these three crickets chirping and the changes in their pitch and frequency and timber all reflect the changes in the temperature for those seeds at that part of the year-long experiment.
00:13:05
Speaker
And i guess it's kind of like it's ah it's a sensory experience of... data, but also much more about trying to get across the perversity of this being considered a, it's not it's not that the people who propose this said, yeah, this is viable, this is definitely going to work. It's just, it's kind of get across that it's it's come to this. It's come to the idea about storing seeds on a floating space station circulating in the planet.
00:13:30
Speaker
That is, that's where we're at. I'm just more trying to get across that, yeah, you can take a so-called charismatic megafauna like the Wallamai Pine and and the genuine love that people feel for it. And those things are all very well and good. But if we were to think through seriously about what sort of conservation prospects are available to us, it starts to open us up into realms which sound more like, i don't mean sci-fi in and in a good or a bad sense, but they sound so fictional because yeah they are so patently, wow, really? is this what is this is this what what conservation is as amounted to in the you know first quarter of the twenty first century?
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, I was wondering about the the cricket, where it was from, where was from, an North American cricket. And these, you know, these extreme cases that do seem like sci-fi, what is actually happening for this species alone is also so extreme. Like during the bushfires, they had officers essentially with hoses just trying to keep those plants in the wild wet, like helicoptered and extreme water networks to just save those species while fires. pass through the blue mountains like that is extreme and the very existence of seed banks on earth too right like they are trying to keep you know there's there's many seed banks preserved for future risk future conservation future like for worst case scenarios so this putting it in space I think see makes anything seem like science fiction but it's space is just also another place in our world kind of isn't it it's it just lives in our imagination a bit differently um Petrified.
Introduction to 'Petrified' by Josh Wodak
00:15:12
Speaker
So this year you released your first book, congratulations, Petrified, Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth. It was published, the Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies series by Heidelberg University.
00:15:26
Speaker
You described this book in your one of your bios as a book that synthesizes the science, philosophy and psychology about what it means to not only be alive during an upheaval of life on Earth, but what it is to become alive to that upheaval.
00:15:41
Speaker
And i think it is that it is not. a call to arms. It's not tracing the history of a disaster. It's not promising that technology can save us us. It's really about, you know, what are the tools that we have? How can we understand this loss, this change, this moment that we find ourselves in And there have been other disasters of this scale when you step out and look at the bigger picture. Josh, can you tell us about Petrified?
00:16:10
Speaker
Sure, thank you. Yeah, it's a storytelling approach to get at very vexing questions of old adage of where have we come from, where are we at and where are we going? So it's lyrical, playful, deadly serious, structured like a play. So it's in three acts, act one, the dower, where have we come from? act two, the dire, where are we at?
00:16:34
Speaker
And act three, the dice, you know, where are we going or where where could we be going? And I'm trying to open up a sensibility towards timeframes that completely diminish the natural obsession we have with the present and with but the fact that we are alive at this particular moment in time and try and draw on that absolutely there's no escaping the culpability for what and who got us into this particular rupture of life on earth. Again, the capitalism, the colonialism, consumerism.
00:17:06
Speaker
And yet at the same time, there is a kind of a narrative which I'm trying to butt up against, which is that if those things could have been curbed, ah lessened, dealt with, then there would not necessarily have been plain sailing into the future, but there'd be a long, rosy prospect for both the tenure of homo sapiens on this planet and also the vast majority of life forms that we inhabit the planet alongside. And to get at that, what I'm trying to point across is that, yep, no e escape in the culpability for what induced the disruptor of life on Earth. But at the same time, if we are to truly open ourselves up with fidelity to the science of
00:17:47
Speaker
how the planet functions, it also brings us to the very truth that this happens to be a particular planet with particular properties in a particular solar system, which is prone in and of itself to clearing the tenure of vast majority of the life forms on it in obviously mass extinction events, but also extinction events. I'm trying to point out that some I see a certain beauty in the fact that, like coming back to the Great Barrier Reef, is beyond heartbreaking for so many people that it is in the state that it's in and where its trajectory is going.
00:18:23
Speaker
But at the same time, it's also somewhat humbling to go, oh well, this isn't the only Great Barrier Reef that has ever existed. There's particular coral reef scientist whose name escapes me at Sydney University who studies um through through extracting the the ancient limestone of p prior reefs the the the when and where and how and what of prior reefs on what is that area on the coast of Queensland. He's the fellow who I remember at a conference talking about the the four major Great Barrier Reefs that are proximate to the site of the current one. And so it's this kind of sense of 99.9% of species that ever lived have gone extinct.
00:19:02
Speaker
That is the nature of the planet that we inhabit. Humans are no exception to that, no matter what dreams of techno mastery moving to Mars. And so how do we stay true to the fact that, yes, we can't escape the culpability for what induced this rupture of life on Earth, but nor can we escape the fact that this is a planet which undergoes ruptures of life on Earth from asteroids, volcanic eruptions, solar radiation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:19:29
Speaker
And that cosmos that we inhabit, that ah of course is the cosmos that has always been the one that we've inhabited, has no rhyme or reason. It has no purpose. it has no direction. It has no meaning. It has no interest in the welfare of any life form or even the capacity to have an interest in anything. But I still reside throughout the book with the idea that that is beautiful because that takes us towards a truth, irrespective whether or not that truth has supposedly quote unquote bad news for the plight of our species or species we care about.
00:19:59
Speaker
it's not at the behest of, you know, whether not someone wants to see octopuses or turtles or or whales or something, you know, live on for billions of years. It's not at the service of anyone or anything. it just yeah is of its own accord. And the dynamism and the volatility are part of what makes it it, if you like. You know, you can't have the earth without tectonic plates, without massive volcanic eruptions, you know, without tsunamis, without earthquakes.
00:20:28
Speaker
that yeah That's the planet, love it or hate it. And at this point in time, it's obviously lends itself more towards a fear of all of those those forms of of of existential risk.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, the universe does not ah favor us over trilobites, right? Like, they're probably more successful than we are in our time. And thinking about Lucy, like, yeah, past extinctions kind of mourn Lucy, but we're also our Lucy. Yeah, I find ah have just found a lot of personal meaning in thinking about evolution more. Like, something's come more into my practice of thinking about plants and time and that fluidity evolution. matter and material and cycling has been of some comfort. But yes, petrified. I think you probably hit a lot of this already. Why did you call it petrified?
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah, sure. um So it's it's trying to draw on, there's a lot of wordplay in the book, and it's trying to draw on the the two meanings of the the word because they very much relate to, you know, what what we're living through.
00:21:36
Speaker
So petrified in the in the affective sense is the feeling of, or you could call it eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, but the feeling, quite frankly, of being terrified at what's going on. And then petrification is the when certain matter fossilizes, it turns into ossified stone. So petrification takes place on two time frames. There's the affective, the emotional state, and then there's the the geological processes of fossilization when species go extinct, which is the deep time.
00:22:05
Speaker
And ironically, we are at least I'm trying to get across, we are experiencing both of those states because there's the there's the daily torment, you know, read the news and read the latest, you know, temperature records broken and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah And then there's the sense of I don't want to call it resignation, but there's a sense of.
00:22:25
Speaker
acquiescence to how likely the prospects for extinction are for the majority of the species that inhabit the planet, but that includes Homo sapiens as well. So it's trying to come to terms with the prospects of the end of the tenure of Homo sapiens on this planet and in the near future. And so I draw on, you know, amongst many other sources, you know Alice in Wonderland,
00:22:51
Speaker
that to try and get at the way that artists and writers and poets and musicians have pointed out delusions that we live by that keep society flowing because they promise us this rosy future that's just outside of our reach if we just believe in science a little bit more or technology a little bit more, the capacity for quote-unquote innovation a little bit more.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It's just it's posing that the questions and just inviting us to... to dwell. And the references, I wanted to talk to you about the the references. So there are hundreds and hundreds of cultural references.
00:23:29
Speaker
Blade Runner, you've mentioned, Frankenstein, Nina Simone, Three Blind Mice. It reminds us that culture is the best tool at making sense of these times and not all the work is about, you know, it could be borrowed from other situations. a lot of these works are in nu response to quite different, disparate circumstances. But can you tell us a bit about the works that you cite and the research involved and just how did you even track all of them?
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, it definitely was a labour of love. I think that trying to use the cultural culture in general, as you say, the music, art, poetry, is that trying to is trying to speak to those aspects of the human condition, which no matter how many facts you present to someone, at the end of the day, you know whether or not they might care about choral or whales whatever, is an emotional, it's an emotional decision if if someone feels it or or doesn't feel it. But I'm trying to bring a sense of, you know, what is it that makes us care about something or not care for that matter?
00:24:30
Speaker
And what role does culture in the broader sense play in helping us nurture values towards reverence for the more than human world, rather than see it as a ah utility for human benefit?
00:24:44
Speaker
And at the end of the day, yeah it's it's the stories which tell another, which which we tell another, but stick. Not so much the the getting across of, as much as I love science, you know, esoteric science phenomena.
00:24:56
Speaker
So I'm trying to basically use storytelling to to bring people into conversations. it's not just so it's not just a societal amnesia. I think it is, you know, to come back to one of the things I i talk about is I use the, the Empress, the Empress new clothes. So use that sense of, we all know that the emperor has no clothes on, but none of us are willing to actually talk, that say that openly.
00:25:18
Speaker
and yet in the fable, it's a child, it's the innocence of a child, or it's the non-self censorship of the child, which says that. And finally, when the child says, all these adults are like, Oh God, I can now finally say what I've been thinking the whole time. And I feel like that's on the cusp for a lot of us, is that we're thinking and feeling a lot of the same things, but they're so demonstrably unpalatable and scary that very few of us are willing to admit them in any public forum.
00:25:45
Speaker
And just to go back to the to the deep time, so petrified time travels across many different geologic eras and epochs, It looks at you know time that goes backwards, but also thinks about going into
Deep Time and Humility
00:26:01
Speaker
the future. what What can we gain by thinking about deep time?
00:26:08
Speaker
Well, my one word answer would be humility. that the yeah the The ability to to to to know something about the the deep part of this planet and if one is so inclined to speculate about the deep future of this planet um shows up a lot of the the narrow-minded conceits that that that we live by.
00:26:32
Speaker
But the humility is, is um I find, like, ah ah the book is meant to be basically a portal into other states of consciousness and other ways of thinking about individual well-being or livelihood in the greater context of the planet, the solar system, and the cosmos.
00:26:51
Speaker
And... I guess this is my bias. I find those things reassuring. Speaking of humility, there was a section I wanted to read from your book it and talk about. which is your passage about the rise of Rodentia, which tracks our own mammalian history made possible by Chikulu, which is a major character in Petrified. But you you wrote, the first layer to our riddle begins with Rodentia, one of the earliest orders of mammals already present during the reign of dinosaurs. But they only flourished by expanding into ecological niches made vacant when dinosaurs underwent petrification.
00:27:29
Speaker
This makes the rodents who lived alongside these dinosaurs a prime candidate for the last common ancestor to all modern mammals. With every modern mammal species descending from them, the flourishing of rodentia became the enterprise of everything from ape to zebra.
00:27:44
Speaker
And what's more what's more humbling for us than that? And there's actually a lot of mice running around your whole book. Can you can you talk a bit about rodentia and mice and rats Sure. Thank you for picking out that passage. it It hopefully does a job of getting across that. The flourishing of mammals has an an unrepayable debt owed towards an asteroid whose origins, by sheer coincidence,
00:28:15
Speaker
happened to start at the beginnings of the age of the dinosaurs. So the reconstruction of the trajectory of Draculob is that around about 240 million years ago, that was the initial collision that caused the offshoot to be put on its trajectory, which ended up with...
00:28:31
Speaker
um crashing into Earth 160 million years later. it just so happens that the age of the dinosaurs crudely, roughly began around 240 million years ago. for the So for the entire time the dinosaurs were alive, of course unbeknownst to them, unbeknownst to anyone, including ourselves, their future, if you like, and I'm not trying to sound deterministic, but their future was written in the stars.
00:28:54
Speaker
They were living on borrowed time up until the moment the asteroid actually impacted. And then, of course, because of the ecological niches made available by the by the disappearance of the dinosaurs over many, many millions of years, mammals flourished, starting with the Redentia, who were alive alongside the dinosaurs,
00:29:13
Speaker
So we, as one tiny subset of those modern mammals, could say, well, Chukulub was obviously bad news for dinosaurs and many other life forms. But also, so ironically, thanks, Chukulub, because, you know, we wouldn't have everything from A to Z, ape to zebra. The universe wouldn't get us without
Role of Rodentia in Evolution
00:29:33
Speaker
it yet. Yeah. And so we sort of say what what are considered beneficiaries in cataclysms owe unrepayable debts to those cataclysms.
00:29:44
Speaker
And I find, again, i find that reassuring. I find that humbling because it points towards the the sheer randomness of life, of the cosmos.
00:29:55
Speaker
And yet amongst that sheer randomness, you find the evolution of life forms such as coral, who Charles Darwin described as perhaps the most magnificent creatures he'd ever led eyes on, and David Attenborough's most favourite experience and favourite place on the planet, from what I've read, is his experiences scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
00:30:16
Speaker
The cosmos is is capable of of creating life forms of utterly beguiling complexity. And then it's also capable of just removing their tenure at the drop of a hat.
00:30:28
Speaker
To come back to Rodentia and us, when we think about our relationship to them, I'm hoping with also thinking about our relationship to their and our common ancient ancestors, the Rodentia, and rather than see them as pests or foes or competitors or harbouring us of disease or something, we can rather see them as some strange bedfellows on our strange journey around the sun o Love Thy Rat.
00:30:55
Speaker
Another section of your book you've you've dedicated to think like a volcano. i wanted to spend some time talking about this.
Volcano Metaphor for Climate Change
00:31:05
Speaker
It is a reference to Aldo Leopold's call to think like a mountain. Aldo Leopold being ah Forrester, famous conservationist and writer whose work really informed Western environmental thought. He was was writing, he was born in the late 1800s. Tell us about this. What was kind of your impression of reading Leopold? What's kind of the time and context he was writing?
00:31:31
Speaker
What did he mean by think like a mountain? Yeah, it's a beautiful piece of writing. I think was published in 1946 or 47 to do with his experiences in forestry in i think it was the Minnesota-ish area of North America.
00:31:48
Speaker
And his experiences of hunting a wolf killing the wolf and then realizing, as part of his job, realizing as he'd shot the wolf, the the error of his ways because his latent realization that wolves are actually beneficial to those North American temperate ecosystems because they reduce deer populations and excessive deer populations amongst other things.
00:32:10
Speaker
eat all the early seedlings and grasses that would ah go go ah grow on to become meadows and trees and whatnot. And because of the declining tree population, because of the excessive deer population, there's more soil erosion because there's less trees, etc. to hold the vegetation in the soil So his sense of thinking like a mountain was that obviously, and I'm not shying away from this either my own work, he's projecting onto the wolf, obviously his own human conceptions and follies, but he's trying to see the wolf as in its capacity as something which overall over the time periods of millennia is a benefit to the overall ecosystem, obviously not to the deer, the individual deer that it eats.
00:32:52
Speaker
And so this long durée that he opens himself up to, that, you know, thinking like a mountain, obviously mountains generally take millions of years to form, millions of years of existence and millions of years to erode away. i essentially, I take that and sort of go, well, in our purposes, as much as that deep time perspective is absolutely wonderful,
00:33:10
Speaker
we don't even have short time up our sleeves to do anything about the situation we're in, let alone deep time. So we're actually talking about mountains, in my view, which formed and exist in far more rapid timeframes, aka volcanoes.
00:33:26
Speaker
It kind of comes back to, that's my launching into the chapter about climate engineering, because of course that's about mimicking what volcanoes do. so that we're in this perverse thing where we are trying to dwell on phenomena which will take many many millennia if not millions of years to unfurl but we're trying to induce them in the time frame of a couple of decades and so how do we learn to grapple with the fact that we both need that deep time thinking that that that gradual processional thinking like a mountain But in a sense, it needs to be done far more violently and dramatically like a volcanic eruption does if it's to have any efficacy for the timeframes available to, say, avert runaway climate change.
00:34:12
Speaker
So it's it's not so much living in the shadow of a volcano and what that would mean for us. Absolutely. oh yes, we are not only living on the volcano civilization. Civilization has basically in its totality and its cumulative effects perform the same function of a volcano, such as exhuming hundreds of millions of years of chemical energy from the ground through fossil fuel mining and then burning that through combustion, which is kind of what volcanoes do. They take matter from the interior of the earth and and emit it into the atmosphere.
00:34:47
Speaker
So civilization is both a perch atop the volcano and is also a volcano itself. We are now tasked with this notion that if one wanted to play the role of the so-called beneficial wolf in this ecosystem, one would need to have have to learn how to not have the gradual, beautiful glacial mindset of Aldo Leopold but the rapid, violent, unpredictable mindset of a volcano.
00:35:21
Speaker
um And there's a fantastic scholar, Nigel Clarke, who's the main inspiration for the for the scholarly side of the book, who talks about how essentially with all this climate engineering, we're gearing up to fight fire with fire.
00:35:34
Speaker
If someone's gonna play with fire, you really wanna know some of the fundamental elemental forces of the the thing that you're playing with. um I love this quote by the climatologist, Kevin Anderson, when he went to the Paris Accord signing 2015, And he published an op-ed in Nature, and he said, the world has just gambled its future in the appearance of a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother, a.k.a. sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, negative emissions, synthetic biology, climate engineering, et cetera.
00:36:08
Speaker
And I think he hit the nail on the head. And so here we are back with the Emperor's New Clothes, with the three blind mice, with the nursery rhymes, with the, you know, with the lullabies, because we're talking about fictions that we're selling ourself to try and give us more of a sense of we have tools available to us or may have tools available to us in the near future.
00:36:30
Speaker
It's so interesting. It made me um think of a moment of clarity that I had remembering that, oh, actually, that is plants.
Plants and Carbon Sequestration
00:36:40
Speaker
Trees are the, like, plants are the best carbon sequestration technology that there is. And I don't say that to mean that that I believe that seaweed is... the silver bullet or anything, but it's kind of remembering these old ways, right? a lot of these processes exist. The kind of humility of remembering like, oh, plants do it way better than your machine that's going to suck carbon dioxide into the soil.
00:37:07
Speaker
there anything else? you Did you want to go back to anything? Is there anything else you want to say or or touch Not at all. Just that thank you for thank you for your time. Thank you for your um interest in having this discussion. I really, really enjoyed it and really appreciate it as well. It's it's lovely to be able to talk about these ideas with you. Thank you so much and congratulations. And I really enjoyed digging into it. And I have a lot more to look up and And research. And I gotta say, it was just full of my favorite things. It's like, I love Lucy.
00:37:36
Speaker
I love Chik-Sulub. I love this. Like, it i felt like, I don't know how to articulate it. I think maybe it's just the things that scared me as a kid that I've loved my whole life. It's a collection of those huge, scary things.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah. but Why don't we talk about this more? No, um um i would it's lovely to hear that you're you're on that similar kind of ethos because obviously there'll there'll be there'll be touch points for all sorts of people about something that may trigger in their childhood. And I'm not trying to draw up bad experiences or bad moments of people, but I'm trying to, i don't know if it's like for you, but like when I was a kid and I saw the dinosaurs, I never even thought about extinction or the fact that they used to here and that they went away or what that meant. I just saw them as big, great creatures. Yeah.
00:38:18
Speaker
So it's kind of like you don't want to destroy that sense of childhood understanding that people have about things. But at the same time, you want sort of go, why would you expect a young child to get their head around mass extinction when they're going to a dinosaur exhibit?
00:38:30
Speaker
But it's lovely that it takes you back to those formative experiences because I think that that we need to hold on to those as adults. Well, thank you so much,
Availability of 'Petrified' Book
00:38:39
Speaker
Josh. And where can we get petrified?
00:38:41
Speaker
So it's published in open access, which means that the digital copies, like a PDF or an EPUB, are free to download from the publisher, which is the German german publisher, DeGreuter.
00:38:52
Speaker
So free digital copies, and also the publisher sells hardback copies as well. But it is also available from bookstores in Australia. That's incredible. And I will link to those.
00:39:14
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Josh Wodak. Thank you for listening and thank you, Josh, for sharing Petrified. Petrified can be purchased or downloaded for free from the publisher, Digreuter. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Pultz. Our music is by Carl Deiter.
00:39:30
Speaker
This episode was produced on Waramai Country as part of the Gunya Artist Residency Program. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
00:40:00
Speaker
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