Kara Manke: Hi, Anne. It’s nice to be here.
Anne Brice: So, Kara, you recently interviewed Rosenblum about her work in global change biology. Can you explain what Rosenblum studies, broadly?
Kara Manke: Yeah. Rosenblum studies a lot of different things about biodiversity on our planet. She’s interested in how we get new species and why we’re losing species at an alarming rate. And also, how the choices that humans make can affect both of those biological processes.
Anne Brice: You started out the conversation talking about her favorite animal. And so, I was wondering, could you talk about what animals she studies in her research and a little bit about her favorite animal?
Kara Manke: Sure. In her research, she studies reptiles and amphibians. And she said her favorite species is a Holbrookia maculata, commonly known as the lesser earless lizard. During the interview, she actually held up a drawing of the lizard that a student had made for her.
Bree Rosenblum: These are lizards that live in the southwest desert in the United States. And the reason why I love them is because, for me, they’re really an example of how quickly life on this planet can adapt to changing conditions.
So, the particular drawing that I showed you is of a white lizard, and they’ve evolved this white color very, very quickly, just in the very recent past, because their environment changed and they’ve colonized a whole suite of white sand dunes where normally they would be living in the dark desert.
And so, I think just being able to hold these little white lizards and these little brown lizards that were, you know, until a couple thousand years ago, probably the very same species and then underwent this really rapid divergence is compelling to me because I get to study all of the things that that lead critters to adapt to changing conditions.
That was really kind of my entry as a scientist into thinking about global change, was thinking about it in the past. Now, I think a lot about the future. But at the time, you know, as an evolutionary biologist, I was really focused on how did species get to where they are today, and how might they have changed in the past to meet changing environmental conditions?
And then obviously, in our generation, we find ourselves at a moment in history where the environment is changing so rapidly that those studies of the past are really most relevant when we can think and apply them towards the future.
Kara Manke: That’s really fascinating. I love that framing. Could you talk a little bit about how you’re finding that climate change and other environmental impacts are affecting some of the creatures that you study?
Bree Rosenblum: Yeah.
So… I’ll probably broaden out a little bit because I study a lot of different things that I consider part of global change that aren’t climate change.
You know, I study not only how the climate is changing, but other ways that humans are changing not just the atmosphere, but conditions on the land and the sea and ways that we’re moving species around, ways that we’re moving diseases around. There’s a lot that we’re doing to the environment and with the environment that is beyond just changes in climate per se.
There are all of these different components of environmental change that are working in synergy. So, a lot of what I study is how those synergistic effects kind of add up to more than what they would if they were there on their own.
Anne Brice: Last year, Rosenblum published the textbook, Global Change Biology: The study of life on a rapidly changing planet. She says while she was writing the textbook, she relied on her students to help guide the process.
Bree Rosenblum: In those first years of teaching, my students were really involved in helping me think through, “What materials do they really need to learn this well?” And there wasn’t a textbook for the field. There are much more narrow books about climate change by itself, or marine ecosystems by themselves.
So, I really wanted to think about: Is there a way that I could present all of this material in a very student-centered way that felt more natural and like we were really just sitting down and looking at the world together, and we weren’t making people feel horribly guilty or horribly depressed or unabashedly optimistic. That didn’t have a particular stance, but kind of let students be on a journey.
One of the subtle shifts in the way I wrote that textbook was kind of challenging myself to be honest about what I think, but also not preassume that there’s a villain in every story, because I find that a lot of the material around, you know, climate change and global change has already preassumed humans as a villain. And not only is that depressing for students, but in my experience, it actually brings out the worst in us as humans.
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Anne Brice: Rosenblum says that because we live in such an externally oriented culture, it’s really easy to look at our own individual lives as separate from what’s happening on a global sphere. So, climate change is out there in the atmosphere. Or, habitat destruction is out there in the Amazon rainforest.
And by thinking that everything is out there, we’ve completely neglected our own internal landscape of what it means to be human and what culture we actually want to live in.
Bree Rosenblum: So, a lot of my work with students is really around addressing the way that culture lives in each one of us, because it’s way too easy to say everyone else is to blame. The factory farmers are to blame. The people cutting down the trees are to blame. It’s way too easy to put that blame out there and not address the ways in which the root causes of disconnect and alienation and lack and loneliness live inside of our own hearts.
Kara Manke: Hm mm. I’d love some specific examples, because I think we do live in this very, you know, the external culture is very strong. And so, I’m curious about how to sort of shift that, even on a small level?
Bree Rosenblum: One thing that we do is we do a lot of mapping of root causes. Like, imagine a tree, right? And the branches of the tree are all of the symptoms that we see on the planet right now. So, you could put climate change and species extinction — not all the symptoms of everything, but just in the global change arena.