“I remember during my training having professors tell me, ‘one day you might do something important and you'll tick off a vested interest, and they're going to come into a meeting with you, and they're going to bring a copy of your dissertation and slam it on the table and start challenging you.’ And that is exactly what happened.” – Keeve Nachman

This is the 2nd episode in a special four-part series about where we go deep into the food system with some of the brightest minds at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. 

This conversation is Dr. Keeve Nachman, a powerhouse in the fields of environmental health, risk assessment, and food systems research. Keeve is the Robert S. Lawrence Professor and Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. He’s also a leading voice on issues like antibiotic resistance and industrial agriculture’s impact on public health.

I asked Keeve to come on the show to talk about how his work helped ban the use of arsenic in our food system—a fight that spanned 15 years and had a ripple effect around the globe. 

Keeve’s story is a masterclass in persistence and the power of science-driven policy change.

We also explore his ongoing efforts to address antibiotic misuse in industrial agriculture, a growing threat to global public health, and discuss what it will take to create lasting change in our food system.

Links :

Keeve Nachman: https://clf.jhsph.edu/about-us/staff/keeve-nachman

Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future:  https://clf.jhsph.edu/

Unconfined Podcast https://clf.jhsph.edu/unconfined-podcast

“My colleague and I went out to Arizona because there was a community that was concerned about the expansion of an egg laying operation, essentially in their backyard. At full capacity, that operation was slated to house 12 million birds. 12 million birds. It's like New York City, but with chickens.” – Brent Kim

We know that what we eat has an enormous impact on billions of animals, our health and the health of the planet. If we fail to change our diets and the food system, the planet will face increasingly severe environmental, social, and economic consequences, many of which are already beginning to unfold. We know this, we know that there is much we could be doing about it, on large and small scales, yet the urgency is not there. 

I think the more knowledge we have, the more we are willing to demand change and even change ourselves. So, I wanted to go deeper into the food system to get a better understanding of its impact on public health, the planet, ecosystems and social justice, and mostly - to hear about how we change it.

This episode marks the beginning of a special four-part series with some of the experts from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.  

This conversation is with Brent Kim. Brent is a program officer for the Center’s Food Production and Public Health program. His research spans issues from farm to fork with published works on sustainable diets, climate change and industrial food, animal production, food and agriculture policy, soil safety, and urban food systems. He and I talk about much of it, how to change it and solutions for a much better future.

Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future https://clf.jhsph.edu/

Brent Kim https://clf.jhsph.edu/about-us/staff/brent-kim

Unconfined Podcast (from the Center for a Livable Future) https://clf.jhsph.edu/unconfined-podcast

"In the case of lions, they're not easy neighbors. They're also not the worst neighbors. I think in in most cases, it's a matter of learning how to live next to nature, next to other animals and animals that can potentially be dangerous." - JG Collomb

JG Collomb is the CEO of Wildlife Conservation Network, an organization that connects global donors with community based conservationists, and they're changing the way the world finds and funds often overlooked projects in the field and helps foster coexistence between communities and the animals who live among them. 

Please listen, share and check out the Wildlife Conversation Network.

“I think there's a lot of people out there who feel the way I felt for many years, which is, ‘look, I feel a bit guilty, I know in some sense that having the diet I have makes me complicit in some things that I don't like. It makes me a bit uncomfortable, but it doesn't feel like there’s anything I can do about it right now. I have this guilt. I'd like to do something about it, but just all the options I'm presented with seem a bit shit.’

So, when we present people with something else that they can do, many of the people we've spoken to say it's quite a relief to know that they don't have to sit with this tension. You know, psychologists call it the meat paradox, the thing where we love animals, but we also eat them. How can we resolve this? Well, one thing that can maybe help us resolve this kind of cognitive dissonance is to actually be a part of helping animals even whilst you still haven't changed your diet.” - Aidan Alexander

The animals that need our help the most are animals that live on factory farms. Yet charities protecting farmed animals receive 28 times less donations than pet charities. There are all sorts of reasons for this, which we get into in this episode.

This conversation is with Aidan Alexander and Tom Norman. Aidan and Tom have started an organization called FarmKind. It is a way to support your favorite charities, that is, nonprofits that you’re already supporting - pet charities, conservation charities, etc. but also at the same time to help animals that are living on factory farms.

Why? Because factory farming is the biggest source of suffering for animals on the planet. Helping to protect these animals and bring factory farming to an end is one of the biggest ways to help animals in need. FarmKind makes it easy to make a difference for millions of factory farm animals when you donate to the causes you care about.

FarmKind helps people who feel compassion for animals to help the animals most in need and support their favorite charities at the same. OR FarmKind helps anyone be a part of the solution to factory farming, regardless of their diet. Because diet change isn’t the only way to help farmed animals.

Donating is an incredibly powerful way to express our compassion for animals. When we donate to the charities that have been shown to make a difference and use our money wisely, it can make an even bigger difference than changing your diet.

Farmkind collaborates with experts to identify some of the most effective charities combating factory farming's impact on animals and the planet. They enable users to split their donations between these expert-recommended, super-effective charities and their personal favorite causes, like your local shelter. And they provide a bonus to both, allowing donors to do the most good to combat factory farming while supporting causes close to their hearts.

Please listen, share and if you are able, please consider donating to FarmKind:

https://www.farmkind.giving/split-and-boost?utm_source=speciesunite&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=speciesunite

"We may think that we're just eating our dinner tonight, but when you multiply it by all of that food every day, every day of the year, everyone in the country, everybody in the world, it's a tremendous production. Just to give you a sense, in the US, we slaughter about 18,000 animals every minute for food just in the United States." - Peter Lehner 

Agriculture and our food system are responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. That is an enormous amount. Yet, the food system is all too often left out of climate conversations and is rarely held accountable for its destruction to our planet. I asked Peter Lehner to come on the show to explain some of this, to talk about agriculture's role in climate and how and why they are so often left off the hook.

I asked Peter Lehner to come on the show and explain what agriculture's role is in climate, and how and why they are so often left off the hook. Peter is one of the leading experts on the impact of agriculture and climate change. He directs Earth Justice's Sustainable Food and Farming program, developing litigation, administrative and legislative strategies to promote a more just and environmentally sound agriculture system and to reduce health, environmental and climate harms from the production of our food. He is also the author of farming for Our Future The Science, Law and Policy of Climate Neutral Agriculture. He also teaches at Columbia and Yale Law schools.

Please listen and share.

"Why do we need large carnivores? Obviously as a scientist, I like talk about the biological roles that they play and the ecological roles, but I will drift and say that I think they're important for spirit and sort of human health more broadly, whether that be mental health, spiritual health, whatever, that sense of wildness that they bring to a landscape, that they force you to listen when you're in the woods, that you hear sticks break around you, that you hear what the birds are doing so that you know whether there's something coming around the next bend. These are all, in my opinion, truly enriching moments and necessary for human spirit and really for human health." - Mark Elbroch 

Mark: [00:12:23] These are all, in my opinion, truly enriching moments and necessary for human spirit and [00:12:30] really for human health

Mark Elbroch is an ecologist and author, storyteller and the director of the Puma Program for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.

Mark has been on the podcast before to talk about cougars, but something has changed since the last time he was on. For years, many people in the scientific community, and this is backed by research, have claimed that cougars would return to their historic range in the eastern US in the next 10 to 20 years.

But there's a new study from Panthera that says that this is not true, that they won’t make it to the East Coast even by 2100, which means, if we want cougars in the east we're going to have to help them.

This is a big deal because we do want cougars in the east. Large predators make fragile ecosystems strong. Mountain lions interact with nearly 500 other species and their reintroduction could lead to healthier forests, less zoonotic disease, and many other benefits. 

Let’s bring cougars home!

“And so I've been doing this for about 40 years, and I still don’t get tired of seeing parrots. I see a parrot or I see a bird and I go, I belong. There is such beauty in the world. Oh my gosh. It's like everything is okay for a minute you're intrigued, you're curious, you're seeing beauty, you're seeing flight. But at the same time, you've trained yourself to hold the tragedy because there aren't nearly as many as there used to be and there's all kinds of complex threats against them, and there's little we can do. So you see a wild parrot that is also the internal conversation, they're in trouble, it's not like it was or it should be or could be. So that's what it's like to see a parrot is to see the beautiful and the tragic.” – Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner

I only learned recently that parrots are the most endangered group of birds on the planet. As with so many other species, our tendency to take and take is what is driving parrots toward extinction. We've been stealing them from the wild for 60 years to live these pitiful lives in cages, in people's kitchens. That, combined with habitat loss and climate change is pushing these spectacular birds to the brink of extinction.

This conversation is with Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner, a wildlife veterinarian, a conservationist, a Unitarian minister, and co-founder of One Earth Conservation. LoraKim has spent the last 40 years in Latin and South America, working with communities to save their parrots – by building their capacity to transform poachers into protectors. 

One Earth Conservation grows conservationists of all ages by empowering and standing in solidarity and resistance with the people of the Americas. They have projects in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Guyana, Paraguay, and Suriname.

To learn more: https://www.oneearthconservation.org/

“In terms of specialized AI within these industries. They're years and years ahead of where the animal movement currently is. Factory farms are increasingly using AI as well to do things like predicting the growth rate of chickens so that they can set the environmental variables up perfectly to exploit these animals as efficiently as possible.” – Sam Tucker

Sam Tucker is the founder of Open Paws, a nonprofit aimed at creating ethically aligned AI systems and he’s the creator of Veg 3, an AI chatbot promoting animal rights.

Sam’s expertise in AI development and animal protection provides both a practical and theoretical understanding of how to create technologies that benefit all species.

I asked Sam to come on the show because I want to understand how we, Species Unite and other organizations like us can be using AI to be way more effective.

“We enacted what's called the Beagle Freedom Project Bill. Basically, what it said was, if you're a facility that tests on dogs and cats, when the testing is over, you are mandated to release those animals to give them a second chance at life to a 501C3 charity like Beagle Freedom Project or any other type of facility like that, like a rescue facility. You wouldn't believe how hard that was to pass.” – Shannon Keith

The story sounds like a dream: hundreds of animals used for research and testing are now free and the former prison that they were forced to call home has been torn down to become a safe and loving animal sanctuary. 

This conversation was done as a live interview a few weeks ago. It's with me and Shannon Keith, the president and founder of the Beagle Freedom Project. I invited her on to discuss the shutdown of a massive dog and cat testing laboratory in Nowata, Oklahoma. Not only did the Beagle Freedom Project and Shannon shut down this laboratory, but they rescued all of the dogs and cats that were being tested on there, and they took over the laboratory and it's grounds and are in the process of transforming it into a 30-acre sanctuary called Freedom Fields.  

The closure of this laboratory ends one-third of the toxic flea and tick testing industry in the United States, sparing the lives of thousands of dogs and cats.

Beagle Freedom Project is the world’s leading organization for rescuing and rehoming animals used in experimental research. Since 2010, they have liberated thousands of animals while working to end their abuse through education, advocacy, and legislation.

We talk about the shutdown, the rescue of hundreds of animals that were being tested on, and the magic of transforming a dark and terrifying animal research lab into a beautiful sanctuary. And, we discuss not only how to help these former research animals, but also the more than one hundred million still being used for testing and research in the United States.

"And the thing that really makes me sad is that we humanize them when they're little, by putting them in diapers and feeding them bottles and dressing them in clothes. And then we demonize them when they grow up and act like the wild animal that they are, because people think if they neuter them, if they get their teeth removed - not my chimp, my chimp is not going to act like that." - Angela Scott 

Last week we released an episode with Brittany Peet, PETA's general counsel for captive animal law enforcement, who is featured in the HBO docuseries, Chimp Crazy. If you haven't seen it, please see it. It's made by Eric Goode, the guy who made Tiger King, and it is equally shocking.  It also shines a light on the need to pass the Captive Primate Safety Act and there are many high hopes that that act could get passed this year because of Chimp Crazy. 

Chimp Crazy focuses on chimpanzee owners, private owners that buy cute baby chimps, dress them up and treat them like human children until they are 5 or 6 years old, when the chimps become large, and very strong wild animals. This part usually ends badly. Well, it always ends badly for the chimps but quite often it does for the humans too.

This conversation is with Angela Scott, the whistleblower in Chimp Crazy, and for this entire case.

A little background: Angela volunteered at a place called Chimp Party for a woman named Connie Casey. Connie and her husband Mike bred and sold chimpanzees and other primates for decades.

PETA got involved because of the horrific conditions these chimps were living in. Angela was the whistleblower who worked with PETA. But before the case could fully go through, Connie gave her chimps to a woman named Tonya Haddix. And the chimps were in Tanya’s care when they were rescued, all except for one, a chimp named Tonka. Tanya tried to keep Tonka for herself and she hid him from PETA for months in a cage in her basement.

All of the chimps, including Tonka, were eventually saved because of Angela’s willingness to go back to Connies and film what she saw. Angela’s stories of what these chimps went through are astonishing and I am so grateful to her for sharing them with us.