Historian and philosopher Yuval Harari writes, "When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last." This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss extinction with longtime journalist and founder of the environmental news site, The Revelator, John Platt. We look at efforts around the planet to save endangered plants and animals, explore the plight of smaller, often overlooked creatures, and examine the effects of war on fragile ecosystems.  

00:01 Narrator: This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

00:13 John Platt: And then what happens if you lose a tiger from an ecosystem? Then you lose all the all the functions that it provided. Maybe small herbivores and they're going to go out of control and eat all the vegetation down. We've seen that in this country with when when Wolves died out the the deer took off. So I mean there are some species we may eventually only see in zoos, but I hope we can avoid that.

00:46 Narrator: In and philosopher Yuval Harari writes. “When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction. 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.” This week on Sea Change Radio we discuss extinction with longtime journalist and founder of the Environmental News site, the Revelator, John Platt. We look at efforts around the planet to save endangered plants and animals, explore the plight of smaller, often overlooked creatures and examine the effects of war on fragile ecosystems.

1:44 Alex Wise: I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Platt. John is the editor and founder of the Revelator. John, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

1:53 John Platt: Thank you very much.

1:55 Alex Wise: First, why don't you tell our listeners what the Revelator is - what your organization's mission is, and maybe a little bit on your background in the extinction space.

2:05 John Platt: Yeah, the Revelator is an environmental news and commentary site. We're published by the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a nonprofit devoted to environmental. Choose we're editorially independent from them, but we'd still tell a lot of the same types of subjective stories covering the extinction crisis, climate change, oceans, clean water and environmental justice and we're trying to tell stories that aren't being told in other places and really influence people who are super involved in the environment and care very deeply and passionately about this stuff. I've been an environmental journalist now for over 15 years. I've freelanced for 10 of that and I started writing about endangered species because I thought that was something that wasn't being covered in the general media. I was writing for Scientific American and a bunch of other places, and covered well over 1000 species. I kind of stopped counting once I hit 1000, and I've written more than a few species obituaries over the years, so it's been a big part of my life and it's something that I find infinitely interesting because there's so many interesting species to write about and so many interesting people researching and trying to save these incredible creatures.

3:20 Alex Wise: And you dive into the actual species that aren't necessarily covered by mainstream media, as often you'll see a snippet, maybe at the end of the PBS news hour about some panda made. Or the megafauna gets a lot more press, but we've done some pieces as of late that I thought were really interesting in term...