A biotech company in the United States made headlines last month by revealing photos of genetically modified gray wolves, calling them "dire wolves," a species that hasn't existed for more than 10,000 years. Colossal Biosciences edited 14 genes among millions of base pairs in gray wolf DNA to arrive at the pups that were shown, leaving millions of genetic differences between these wolves and real dire wolves.

This hasn't stopped some observers from asserting to the public that "de-extinction" is real. But it's not, says podcast guest Dieter Hochuli, a professor at the Integrative Ecology Lab at the University of Sydney.

Hochuli explains why ecologists like him say de-extinction isn't just a misleading term, but a dangerous one that promotes false hope and perverse incentives at the expense of existing conservation efforts that are proven to work.

"The problem with the word de-extinction for many ecologists is that we see extinction [as] being an irreversible event that has finality about it, a bit like death. The idea that you can reverse those sorts of things is anathema, I think, biologically, but also philosophically and ethically," Hochuli says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: Thylacines, female and male in the National Zoo Washington D.C.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

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Time codes

(00:00) They aren't dire wolves

(03:57) Why extinction is final

(04:50) Ecological barriers to 'de-extinction'

(12:25) Problems with species reintroduction

(20:25) How 'de-extinction' can mislead

(25:32) Is conservation a zero-sum game?

(31:58) Can this technology truly aid conservation?

(39:24) Is the marketing hype justified?

Biological oceanographer John Ryan joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss his team's multiyear study that examined vocalizations of baleen whales, including blue (Balaenoptera musculus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus), and how this science is critical for understanding their feeding habits, and thus informing their conservation.

The study found that these whales' songs rise and fall with their food supply, which provides valuable insights into how changing ocean conditions can affect their health and guide management measures.

"Some of the research we did tracking the movement and ecology of blue whales helped our sanctuary [to] act on this long-term concern about ship strikes, and to join a program that is called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies," the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researcher says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Mongabay's East Africa editor, Ochieng' Ogodo. Read here about his life, legacy and achievements.

Audio credit: Blue and humpback whale calls featured in this episode are courtesy of MBARI and John Ryan.

Image credit: A humpback whale dips back beneath the surface of the ocean. Image courtesy of Cristina Mittermeier/SeaLegacy.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Marine heatwaves and their impact

(06:33) Analyzing whale songs

(12:30) A change in tune

(20:13) Interspecies communication?

(25:16) The reason behind the heat

(27:36) Informing conservation

(36:52) Credits

Two decades ago a group of NGOs came together with the government of Kazakhstan to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope living in the enormous Golden Steppe. Since then, the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has successfully rehabilitated the saiga (Saiga tatarica) from a population of roughly 30,000 to nearly 4 million. For this effort, it was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the "protect & restore nature" category.

Joining the podcast to discuss this achievement is Vera Voronova, executive director of the Association for the Conservation Biodiversity of Kazakhstan, an NGO involved in the initiative.

Voronova details the cultural and technological methods used to bring the saiga back from the brink and to help restore this massive grassland ecosystem.

"When [the] initiative [was] started, the saiga would be always like the flagship and the priority species because we did have this emergency case to recover saiga," she says. "But the whole … picture of restoring the [steppe] was always behind this, and will be now a long term strategy."

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image credit: Saiga calf. Photo by Kibatov Arman/ACBK.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Saving the saiga antelope

(07:13) The Golden Steppe is massive

(13:00) Using conservation technology

(17:07) Incorporating local knowledge

(20:56) Wild horses and agriculture

(26:40) Community connection

(29:37) Credits

Media outlets are downsizing newsrooms and the audience for traditional news is in decline, but Mongabay continues to grow thanks to its impact-driven, nonprofit model. Mongabay's director of philanthropy, Dave Martin, joins the podcast this week to explain the philosophy behind Mongabay's fundraising efforts, why the nonprofit model is essential for impact-driven reporting, and how the organization ensures editorial independence.

" Those who fund us and read us, they're really expecting real-world impact and high-quality journalism. So, people are coming back to Mongabay because they're interested in what we're reporting on. There's a really high level of quality that is informing their decisions," he says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Dave can be reached at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

Image Credit: Galapagos tortoise, Ecuador. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Dave's story

(08:50) Why nonprofit news creates impact

(15:08) Funding and ethical considerations

(23:27) Explaining trust-based philanthropy

(29:10) Reflections on the Los Angeles wildfires

(32:19) Dave's favorite animals

Renowned author, activist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life, and argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing.

Instead, Hawken argues that real change begins in, and is propelled by, communities: "Community is the source of change, and what we have [are] obviously systems that are destroying community everywhere."

The title of Hawken's book, carbon, is also the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and a fundamental building block of life. He argues it is being maligned in a way that distracts from the root causes of ecological destruction in favor of technological solutions that are not viable at scale, or international agreements that prioritize carbon accounting.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image: Sumaco volcano in Ecuador at sunset. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Language in the climate movement

(18:10) What is a 'nounism'?

(23:45) Leadership is 'listening to all voices'

(33:49) Community drives change

(40:24) Why does carbon get a bad rap?

(50:01) Normalizing the conversation around climate

(54:22) 'Decentering' the Global North

(59:19) Humans are not 'alpha'

The Australian government recently shelved key environmental protection commitments indefinitely, including the establishment of an environmental protection agency, and a robust accounting of the nation's ecological health via an environmental information authority. The latest suspension was announced by the Prime Minister just ahead of a federal election. Australia initially proposed these "nature positive" reforms in 2022 and hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit in 2024 to great fanfare, but has not implemented any substantial domestic legislation to overhaul its old environmental laws.

Joining the podcast to explain this situation is Adam Morton, the environment editor at The Guardian Australia. In this podcast conversation, Morton details what the Australian government promised, what it reneged on, the potential global influence of its backtracking, and why the nation's environment will continue to degrade without intervention.

"I think that the message internationally from this term in parliament has been that the resources sector is winning, and environmental protection is losing out. Now, that's a very simple dichotomy, and it doesn't have to be one or the other, but on every front at the moment, that's how it feels in Australia. That applies to fossil fuel extraction. It applies to native forestry [and] logging, which still continues in a significant amount," Morton says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: A koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in Queensland, Australia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Australia breaks a key promise

(07:30) What does 'Nature Positive' mean?

(16:39) Koala protection sidelined

(20:53) How to 'right' the 'wrongs'

(28:30) Credits

Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that's new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week's Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it.

" When we look at examples from the past, [societies' ecological impacts] have tended to be confined to a particular region, to those states, and perhaps to their neighbors. Because of where we are in terms of anthropogenic warming [and] planetary boundaries, I think the scale of any risk, the scale of any potential crossing over into irreversible thresholds, is going to have impact on a scale that I'm not sure historical precedents would give us much insight into," he says.

Amrith is the author of The Burning Earth: A History, which examines the past 500 years of human history, colonization and empire, and the impact of these on ecological systems. In this conversation, he details some historical parallels, what lessons can be learned, and what periods of history resulted in the most peace and prosperity.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image credit: Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Historical parallels to the current moment

(09:43) The context of 'planetary risk'

(20:36) Lessons from history

(26:10) Credits

A new framework for considering the needs of the "more-than-human world" when designing human-made systems is "ecological empathy," the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm.

Her research, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University. She joins the podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.

"Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work," she says.

Previous newscast guests like Carl Safina, argued for overhauling how humans raise and farm seafood. Ben Goldfarb discussed how road crossings can help humans move toward a less environmentally damaging road infrastructure network in his award-winning book Crossings, which documents what he calls "road ecology."

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) in Indonesian New Guinea. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.

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Timecodes

(00:00) What is 'ecological empathy'?

(10:50) The limits of feelings

(15:38) The theory of change

(21:22) How do you apply it?

(33:29) Real-world examples

(44:29) What empathy is and isn't

(52:30) Credits

Middle and working-class citizens in nations across the globe are feeling their purchasing power diminish while billionaires hoard historically high levels of wealth. People are looking for economic solutions out of the inequity that are in line with their ecological values and planetary boundaries.

"People are really hungry for solutions [and] really hungry to find alternatives," says Alvaro Alvarez, the documentary filmmaker of the new BBC documentary Less Is More: Can Degrowth Save the World?

Alvarez joins Mongabay's podcast to detail real-life solutions using the concepts behind "degrowth" in the city of Barcelona, which he highlights in the film and which have garnered widespread interest.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Listen to a previous conversation on degrowth on the Mongabay Newscast here.

Image Credit: La Brugera de Púbol, a sustainable living and educational eco-estate roughly 2 hours from the city of Barcelona operated by Mike Duff. Image courtesy of Alvaro Alvarez.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Degrowth momentum in Barcelona

(06:26) Degrowth and housing cooperatives

(09:01) Growing international support

(13:06) Challenges and criticisms of degrowth

(24:51) Degrowth and global inequality

(32:42) Green gentrification

(39:03) Challenging the 'wealth=success' narrative

(42:24) Keeping inside the planetary boundaries

A paper in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes there is limited accountability for corporations that fail to achieve their climate change mitigation targets. The analysis shows 9% of company decarbonization plans missed their goals, while 31% "disappeared."

However, 60% of companies met their targets. While this might initially seem like good news, it may not be leading to genuine climate action.

This week's podcast guest, Ketan Joshi, a consultant and researcher for nonprofit organizations in the climate sector, explains that many corporations are not actually decarbonizing their supply chains, but rather relying on buying renewable energy certificates and carbon credits to "offset" additional carbon emissions from their business.

While carbon offsets are often touted as a way to directly fund climate action on the ground, Joshi stresses there is no verifiable way to track how much is funding these projects. Typically, credits are purchased from a broker, and 90% of these intermediaries arranging such deals on the voluntary carbon market don't share their data.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: The 2015 Paris Agreement stipulates that countries must reduce carbon emissions in order to limit warming to 1.5°C, or at least well below 2°C. Image by jwvein via Pixabay (Public domain).

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Timestamps

(00:00) Are companies actually decarbonizing?

(16:06) The rise of climate litigation

(31:00) Carbon removal tech as an offset

(42:00) What is GreenSky?

(50:38) Credits