Bree Rosenblum, Global Change Biology professor at UCBerkeley
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Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can subscribe on Acast, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
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Matt Shears: Hello, OLLI at Berkeley. Happy Friday. My name is Matt Shears. I’m the curriculum coordinator at OLLI. And we’re happy to have you join us for our Friday Speaker Series. Today’s speaker is Bree Rosenblum. Bree Rosenblum is a professor of global change biology. Her research focuses on understanding biological diversity on our planet and has been featured in many textbooks, the New York Times, Discovery Channel and the BBC movie, Endangered.
Bree is also dedicated to transforming higher education and is the faculty director of Berkeley Discovery. Our talk today is entitled, “Finding Hope For Biodiversity Conservation in an Era of Rapid Global Change.” If you have questions throughout the talk, please put them in the chat and we can fill them later, but for now, please welcome Bree Rosenblum.
Bree Rosenblum: Hi, everyone. It’s so nice to meet you all virtually. I’m looking forward to spending this hour together. And I am going to share my screen so that I can give you a little bit of a sense of the work that I do. And it’s totally fine if people prefer to stay with their video off, but I can see you in a little sliver on the side and it’s nice to see a couple of people’s faces. So if there’s a couple of people that actually feel like being in conversation it’s nice for me to have that connection while I’m speaking with you about a topic that’s really dear to my heart. I’m a Global Change Biology professor at Berkeley and my research is all focused on the impacts of humans on our planet. And as you can imagine, this is a topic that many students and colleagues find really depressing.
What I’m hoping to do today is share a little bit of my research with you, but also some bigger picture thoughts about how we can really be meaningfully engaged in the conversation about what’s happening on our planet. And I am promising you not to have a whole bunch of fake rainbow and unicorn kind of hopeful statements, but actually hopeful statements that come from a lot of inquiry about what does it mean to be humans on this planet right now in this day and age. So what we’re going to journey through together today is four chapters of a story. I want to just briefly nod to the history of how we got to this moment and share a little bit about my own research about frogs, my own thoughts about how our environmental worldview is at a really crux moment right now, and some thoughts about where we go from here.
I am an evolutionary biologist by training which means when I think about the question, how did we get here? I think way back. I don’t think about what’s happened in the last 200 years that led to the impacts of human on the planet, I think about how does this big story start? How does the whole thing unfold from really the moment where the universe was created? And we know now that we are a very small part of the universe’s story, there are more than a 100 billion planets in our galaxy and more than 200 billion galaxies in the universe and scientists almost universally agree that the chances that there is life on other places beside our planet is absolutely positively, almost certain.
And so we are part of a big story of life in our entire universe which we don’t often place ourselves inside of because we don’t experience it. We experience ourselves as one species on one planet but the way that life unfolded even as art in this planet is pretty remarkable. The process of evolution that’s occurred over the last billions of years, that’s led from single celled organisms to complex organisms, to an incredible blossoming of life across the planet is remarkable. And what always is important for me to remember is that life has always changed the environment on planet earth. That doesn’t mean something important and different isn’t happening today because it is, but even billions of years ago when life first began to develop photosynthesis, we changed the atmosphere.
So this process of life evolving and interacting with the environment around it has been happening for billions of years. And in our own lineage, it’s been happening for millions of years. We are not the first humans to even have walked this planet, there are a ton of other early human lineages some of which actually co-existed on earth at the same time and we’ve adapted and evolved over millions of years to be who and what we are today.
And as I know, we’re in the middle of a four-part series that you’ve been on thinking about global change and climate change. I know that you’re already thinking a lot about, well, but our species is doing something different. Our species isn’t just run of the mill interacting with his environment. Our species is literally changing the face of earth and not just the face of earth, but the atmosphere of earth down to the deepest reaches of the seas, of earth, we have had an impact from the bottom to the top of the planet. And that comes in many flavors. This is just an indication of like the flight paths in a given day on our planet. So we’re moving around all the time, less now than we used to. We’re creating an incredible amount of waste. We’re changing how land is used and what that has led to is dramatic impacts on every single species that lives on the planet, including our own.
And so I, as an evolutionary biologist have always been fascinated in life itself, in how life has developed, emerged, changed, responded to environmental perturbations. And as an evolutionary biologist, I started my career studying the process of speciation, studying how species form on our planet. And this is really fun. It’s really fun and inspiring to study how new things emerge. And I had been studying speciation in a particular part of the desert US that I love. When a new story started emerging, that was really unavoidable to pay attention to as a scientist. And that is the story of extinction.
Extinction is also not new on our planet. We estimate that more than 99% of species that ever existed on the planet have gone extinct. So extinction is a natural process on planet earth but what’s different about the dynamics of extinction today are the pace, extinctions are happening much more quickly than they have in the past, and the cause. Extinctions have never before been caused by a single species. So species have always caused each others’ extinction because of species interactions. But the fact that we have a single species, our species, that’s having a global impact on extinction patterns around the world is new. This is something that we think has never happened before on the history of our planet.
And so extinction is a natural process, but extinction is being accelerated because of human impacts on the planet. And scientists basically agree that we not only are floating on the outskirts, but we have probably pretty solidly entered the sixth mass extinction on our planet. This was a seminal article that was more than 10 years ago now asking the question and answering the question and saying, yes, rates of extinction on the planet are so high that we’re anticipating that we’re heading into one of the major spasms of extinction.
And when I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley about 20 plus years ago, I wasn’t working on extinction and I certainly wasn’t working on frogs. I love frogs but they weren’t my childhood best friends like they were for some people. But what was happening is that my colleagues from around the world were starting to notice these massive die-offs of frogs all over the place, very similar timing with a mysterious cause. And so the question became, why are these frogs disappearing all over the world and what can we learn about the extinction crisis more generally from studying specific groups?
