In this episode I speak with my good friend, James Fitzgerald. He works as the Research & Policy Manager for BCarbon, a carbon credit registry focused on nature-based solutions. We discuss:
How evolutionary anachronisms like the papaw tree reveal ancient relationships between extinct megafauna and modern plants.
Whether the concept of "invasive species" remains meaningful in our globalized world.
How Long Island's geological youth makes it vulnerable to climate change, while New England's bedrock makes it resilient.
The remarkable transformation of New England from farmland to forest over the past century, leading to the return of bears, bobcats, and pine martens.
How the Victorian "pteridomania" craze stripped Scotland and Wales of native ferns, showing the dark side of botanical enthusiasm.
Why black bears successfully coexisting with humans in New York City's suburbs represents an extraordinary example of megafauna adaptation.
David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it shapes your view of the natural world?
James FitzGerald: Religion was not really a big component of my early life. I was baptized more out of ceremony more than anything else, but didn't grow up attending church or any other religious services. My friends and family weren't really religious either. But over time I became engaged in questions of faith and spirituality through my general curiosity for the world.
The first tradition that impacted me at a personal level, rather than merely academically, was Zen Buddhism. I became involved with it during undergraduate days at Williams College in western Massachusetts. An English professor there hosts a Zen sitting group for students which I made really great friends through. What began out of curiosity turned into a lasting and profound engagement. It has changed the way I think and practice the art of moving through life, even though I haven't become a Buddhist.
The second major event was during my time at the University of Cambridge over in the UK, where I was pursuing two master’s degrees. During my first year there, quite contrary to my expectations, I became captivated by the chapel at the college where I lived.
Colleges at Cambridge are self-contained communities where you live, eat, and socialize, while classes are held elsewhere. The vast majority of colleges at Cambridge have chapels, which is a legacy of their role as seminaries in centuries past. Over time they've become secular educational institutions, but they were originally started to train people for religious service. And that legacy is still there.
The college is really a place for community, and I found mine at our chapel. It hosted an eclectic cast of characters, many of whom I befriended. They spanned the gamut: from a retired Anglican priest to a former Nashville alt country star. They were just a wonderful group of people. I became involved there as a server. Lighting candles, passing out leaflets to congregants. Nothing special by any means, but it was a really nice way to meet people.
I connected with the people there because of our shared interests in the big questions of life, and our determination to find meaning in the universe. We differed in the way we approached these problems, especially on the topic of judgement, but the desire to find answers was shared. We were all committed to care for the downtrodden, and invested in ecological justice.
What drew me to the ideas my friends at the chapel held was their belief in the importance of forgiveness and compassion. I differed with some of the people there on the extent to which we were willing to extend forgiveness and compassion. It's something that I am willing to extend in a wide range of situations, while others were less willing to do so. I found that to be challenging at times. But it was a diverse group of people. Not just by background, but also by their theological views.
David Valerio: How did you fall in love with nature?
James FitzGerald: Like many people that I know, I had a childhood fascination with nature. But for me it was all consuming. I spent hours most every day out in the garden or in the woods, exploring and learning. I also poured over books a lot. Mostly field guides and other nature-related books, but also maps and introductions to history and geography.
I also worked at a garden center when I was young. One of my earliest memories was when I was about six years old and I went with my parents to a jasmine tree from the local garden center. The guy who ran it said that when you are 14, I will hire you. He followed through on that. After several years working there part-time, I worked at a farm and educational forest where we harvested syrup from maple trees and banded owls. That work gave me real, practical experience with the topics I found so exciting at a deep level.
There was a sense of loss that accompanied my passion for nature, since I first grew up on Long Island. It’s an area under tremendous development pressure by New York. Basically all of the land that isn’t protected is either being developed, or is in the process of being developed. So there was a sense of fragility there, and a sense that a lot of the places that I explored might not be around for that much longer.
Then I moved to the somewhat wilder terrains of New England. It was a very different experience because, more than anywhere else beside parts of Europe that are experiencing population decline, it is pretty much a singular case of self-managed rewilding. Over the last century, the ratio of farmland to forest has flipped. 100 years ago, depending on which state you were in, the land was somewhere between 70 and 90 percent cleared for agriculture. Now the ratio is reversed. We've seen this influx of all kinds of wildlife that had been gone for many years. Bears, bobcats, pine martens, all kinds of things. That was a really fascinating process to watch. You have this sense of both history and of future promise that left a really different impression than my time in Long Island did.
A bit of a historical diversion here, but Long Island is an interesting place because it used to essentially be a part of New England. People would cross the sound on boats to get supplies in the ports of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Many people had been on whaling trips to the Azores and the South Pacific, but had never made the 100-mile trip west to New York City. So these places have a very deep history of connection, but the experience living in them was quite different.
David Valerio: How do you think about climate change impacting these two regions that you care deeply about?
James FitzGerald: Climate is a pretty omnipresent topic if you think about ecology and live on Long Island. It's hard not to be conscious of the future, and the fact that we've only been around as an island for 10,000 years. Glaciers left some debris in the ocean, and that's what now forms the island. And now we're probably nearing the latter portion of that history, already a brief one, because of sea-level rise. That was something I was quite conscious of as a kid. Hurricanes pass through and are becoming increasingly potent. The abrasive force of the ocean works on the island day after day, year after year.
New England seems more stable. At the most basic level, we have bedrock in New England. That was a bit of a revelation moving away from the island. Seeing rocks that weren’t a single boulder left behind by a glacier, but were this connection to the core of the Earth, coming up to the surface. We're a terrestrial place in a way that Long Island isn’t. Long Island is a blend of sand and water.
New England will be more stable under climate change. The evidence of it is present all over. Changing temperatures. Different trees thriving and dying. But it's going to be a hilly forested landscape for the foreseeable future, which cannot be said of Long Island.
David Valerio: Why do you think climate adaptation and resilience is so under-discussed relative to mitigation?
James FitzGerald: There's a lot of overlap between why climate adaptation is under addressed and why climate mitigation is often not implemented. It relates to the sheer cost and complexity of the issue, and its entanglement with every aspect of our society and economy. All of which means that there's a huge amount of friction and resistance to change.
There's also the issue of short termism that we see with all assessments of climate risk. Sometimes it's irrational and people are unduly discounting future harm. But there's also a rational short-termism in which people—whether they're investors, home builders, or whoever—make decisions that are rational on their own timeframe but don't extend beyond it. That can be conscious or unconscious, and it's certainly not a reason to condemn the judgment of those people. It's a natural tendency to assess risk on your own time horizon, but it can be problematic when we zoom out.
Climate adaptation tends to involve issues that directly intervene in people's lives and force them to change the way that they live. A lot of the changes to solve climate change are at the macro level, stuff that governments can implement. Changing the nature of the electric grid and other high-level modifications. Whereas for climate adaptation, for example if everyone on the coast is legally compelled to move to another location, that's truly disruptive.
On top of those practical changes, there's a stigma against perceived efforts to dodge the root cause of climate change. Often climate adaptation gets a bad rap for that reason. Sometimes justifiably so. There are a lot of bad faith communicators who deemphasize mitigation in favor of adaptation, and it is part of a defeatist message. But at the same time, it is going to be necessary to some degree. It needs to accompany climate mitigation.
There is a substantial crossover between climate adaptation and mitigation. Building more energy efficient homes, finding better sites to build for people and nature, and developing a cleaner, more robust food system—all of these involve elements of both mitigation and adaptation. Perhaps the most fruitful conversations lie where both can be accomplished in tandem. But that won't always be the case, and there is a genuine tension between the two at times.
David Valerio: My next question is a hard pivot from the previous ones. What languages do you know? How do each of them affect the way that you think, speak, and perceive the natural world?
James FitzGerald: I began with the basic languages that most people have had some exposure to. I was taught French and Spanish in school, but I found it to be a chore to write. I didn't feel inspired to learn or progress. It wasn't until I started learning outside of class, because I found the cultures and histories of these places to be fascinating, that I started to progress significantly.
A lot of my involvement in language learning has come through various kinds of work or research that I was conducting. Part of the draw of Spanish and French was that I knew they were extremely important for understanding ecologically interesting parts of the world like Latin America and Francophone Africa.
I learned a good amount of Portuguese because I went down to Brazil for a summer to work on a wacky project. I worked at a landscape design firm run by the children of Roberto Burle Marx, who's famous in Brazil but not so much elsewhere. He was a visionary artist and landscape designer. They put on an incredible show in which they turned a large portion of the New York Botanical Garden into a Burle Marx-inspired garden filled with tropical plants.
After that, I wanted to learn a non-European language. I decided to study Chinese at Williams College. I thought the culture was interesting. The department was fantastic and they encouraged me to give it a go. That led to a new chapter of engagement with East Asian studies that I had not been involved in at all up to that point. I made friends in Taiwan and China, and encountered a lot of new perspectives.
In terms of nature, I would say each language that I studied exposed me to the way that people relate to the natural world in a new cultural context. Sometimes that was practical, by understanding an issue that was present in that place which I could engage with through original source materials. Sometimes it was talking to people and learning about what words they used for this or that natural phenomenon.
David Valerio: I'm finally becoming motivated to learn Spanish. I'm half-Mexican and half-Cuban. My Spanish is passable, but I never bothered to go deep on it because I never had a use for it. There was also an embarrassment that kept me from learning it more deeply. I felt awkward because I am Hispanic by background and don’t speak Spanish fluently.
I currently work a lot with international carbon market operators, and I've had enough calls with people from Latin America and the Caribbean that I’m thinking it would be valuable for me to know Spanish. Plus, I like the aesthetics of it.
Anyways, could you expand on how the Chinese language frames how humans interact with the natural world? Any insights into the Chinese psyche with respect to the natural world?
James FitzGerald: All of this is from my own experience thinking about these topics through the language learning that I was doing personally. I studied classical Chinese for a semester, but barely scratched the surface in that time. But between that and some of the coursework I did on ancient Chinese history, my perception was colored by the way that ancient Taoism and Buddhism approached nature.
I've never been very fond of Confucianism, but it's certainly an interesting, regimented approach to both nature and society. It didn’t resonate with me as much as the Taoist approach, which is much more about observing and flowing with whatever happens. Being part of the movement of the world was much more appealing to me.
The word for nature in Chinese reflects the movement. It's nature in the sense of the way things are, in their essence. I guess it's the same nature as in English, nature in the sense of the natural world is the same word as it is in the sense of one's own personal nature. However, there's a more direct link in the Chinese language than there is in English.
There are all kinds of great stories in the Taoist body of literature related to the environment. There's the story of Ox Mountain, which is this splendid, natural forest that is despoiled through human negligence. There is an ethos of care and compassion that is really valuable.
I actually have this book on my desk right now, which I haven't read yet, called The Retreat of the Elephants by Mark Elvin. It's about the progression of environmental history during China's development from very early on, and the ways that ideology played into it. Maybe we can have a follow up conversation once I've worked my way through it.
David Valerio: It would be great to have a book study about it!
You've alluded to your diverse travels, and I’d like to know how going to these wildly different ecologies around the world has shaped your approach to gardening in New England.
James FitzGerald: I would say the garden center I worked at when I was younger was the most influential. I would see these plants from a wide range of different places and think about where they came from. What did the places look like where they grew? I also read a lot about early botanists as well. Some of the classical ones like Dioscorides.
Then I got into the stories of the Victorian plant hunters. That was a really bizarre chapter in history in the late 19th century. People from Britain and other European countries traveled far and wide gathering plants that they then brought back to acclimatize in their home countries and grow in their gardens. There was a pretty destructive legacy to a lot of that, even within Europe.
While I was in the UK I learned about how people went to the Celtic fringe of the British Isles, so to Scotland and Wales, and collected so many ferns that whole ecosystems were just stripped bare of them. It was part of this craze called pteridomania. Pterido means fern. People were so obsessed with ferns that they denuded much of Scotland and Wales of their native foliage in order to get them. It’s a complicated story on many levels, but those histories fascinated me and made me want to see what those ecosystems looked like.
I've been extremely lucky and have been able to see many different places. First as a kid, because my parents had to travel a good bit for their work when I was growing up. Then the summer I spent in Brazil. Living in the UK for two years allowed me to do a lot of roaming around Europe and the British Isles. I was able to visit a lot of rewilding sites, one of which was an eco-anarchist commune.
David Valerio: How did you first get into rewilding?
James FitzGerald: Plants are a bigger feature of the rewilding issue for me than for most people. Charismatic megafauna get the most attention. I'm excited by them too. But for me, plants are also a part of this story.
I like plants that are native to wherever you're planting them, but also evoke other parts of the world and seem slightly out of place. The papaw tree is one of the best examples of this phenomenon because it's a member of the custard apple family. All of its relatives grow in the wet tropics. It has those drip tip leaves like the classic ones you would see in a documentary about the Amazon. All of these trees have leaves that are designed to funnel water down to the end so it runs off. Papaw have the largest fruit of any tree in North America. This huge papaya looking thing. Species like it were able to persist in North America because up until around 10,000 years ago, they were dispersed by mastodons and ground swaths. Now they're evolutionary anachronisms.
When I moved to the UK, I was able to go to a lot of sites where they're conducting various forms of rewilding. Over there it's less about Pleistocene rewilding—where they're talking about bringing cheetahs to the American West—and more about agricultural rewilding. This is where you continue to farm but do so in a different way, using different techniques. Bringing extirpated fauna back in and allowing it to return. It creates the conditions for birds, butterflies, and even mammals to recolonize some of the territory that they used to occupy.
Like you, I’ve always been interested in how these things actually work in practice. I've seen strengths and weaknesses to agricultural rewilding. I think it has a very important role to play, but we need to also think about agricultural productivity. There are going to be hard questions in the future about how to balance nature and food production. That's definitely an area that I could see myself being very focused on in my future work.
David Valerio: Which version of rewilding is most appealing to you?
James FitzGerald: There are so many approaches that are suitable for one context, but not another. We need a really wide spectrum of methods. But the term rewilding should not become so broad as to be rendered meaningless.
Under no circumstances should excising the human presence from the land be viewed as necessary. Rewilding should be conceived of as a way of reducing the pressure that we exert on ecosystems by changing the way that we go about using land, so that they can more fully express themselves. Not in our absence, but alongside us. With some exceptions. Perhaps the deep ocean should be a province entirely devoid of human interference in an ideal world.
But in general it should be some spectrum of human-nature coexistence. For example in the American West, where maybe we can bring back some species but obviously people will continue to use the land too. Or even in the case of urban rewilding. It sometimes gets a fair share of derision, because it seems oxymoronic, but it makes sense if you conceive of rewilding as letting nature express itself.
David Valerio: It’s interesting that you are more inspired by plant rewilding than megafauna rewilding. I hadn't thought about rewilding plants, but that’s brilliant.
The tension between man and nature that you point out is key. There's a version of rewilding where you get rid of all the people, and let nature have half the Earth like what E.O. Wilson proposes. But humans are still around. They're going to have a say in it. If you frame rewilding in such a way that humans do not have a role to play in cultivating ecosystems so that they can best express the most vigorous versions of themselves, then the project is doomed from the start.
The land use economics involved in balancing human agricultural production and other land uses with regenerating wilder ecosystems is the most important thing for us rewilding enthusiasts to think about. Rather than engaging in our grandiose visions of hippopotamuses in the Louisiana swamp.
James FitzGerald: Don't get me wrong. I am excited by the megafauna as much as you are. As a local example, I find it so incredibly rewarding to see large animals like bears and moose roam around the area I live. The case of the bears is a slight obsession of mine. This amazing reality that there is a huge, omnivorous mammal—they’re not carnivorous in the way a lot of people think, they eat about 90% plants—but still the fact that this huge predatory animal is able to live in the suburbs of New York City is extraordinary. I don't think there's anything quite like it.
David Valerio: Another example is coyotes. We talk about Pleistocene megafauna and the great emptying out of this once amazing American continent filled with huge creatures. But coyotes are expanding their range quickly. They're everywhere now. They've managed to adapt. Also, armadillos are on the march north. Last I heard they’re now being seen in Virginia and Maryland. Not that long ago they were only in Central and South America, but they're coming. Both of these examples speak to the beauty of nature. Ever-evolving, ever-changing. Always adapting, yet still here.
On that note, I've come to question the idea of invasive species, as a concept. What would you think about the idea of bringing African lions to the American Great Plains to replace what the large cats that we formerly had? We have a lot of extant megafauna in Africa that could be brought to other parts of the world that have none. They aren’t “native”, but we live in a very different world now that is globally interconnected. So in a sense, the fact that we could bring them here means that they could be native here.
James FitzGerald: I won't get into the practicality of lions on the Great Plains. I'll stick with the theoretical for now. I am also very skeptical of the idea of invasive species. There has been a lot of wasted effort trying to combat things that are inevitable. It's sensible to mitigate against unnecessary introductions of species that could be harmful. It's a good idea for island nations to check incoming freight carefully for insects and other species that could cause harm to their existing ecosystems. To the extent that it can be prevented in those cases, I think it's a good thing. But once it's already happened...
I think timescales matter in this as well. It might seem sensible when an invasive moth first arrives in the US and starts breeding rapidly that we could keep it down for our lifetime. But are you telling me that in 1000 years, there's still going to be a mitigation program in place that's successfully tamping down its population? On so many levels, it's not the best use of our resources.
We always need to have a level of existential humility about what we can know about what the impacts bringing back some type of keystone species will be on an ecosystem. There are certainly ways in which an African lion differs from its antecedents. There are cases where there's a strong argument to be made for it. It's not the issue on which I'm most rational because I would just be very excited about it. The inner fan boy would be delighted by it. But there are cases where it would make sense.
David Valerio: Likewise. I would do it because it's cool.
We’ve talked a lot about living ecologies and our love for plants. I'm obsessed with deep time. I studied geology in undergrad. You think about deep time a lot in that context. I roam around the world thinking about the timescales of the formation of mountains and rivers.
I don't think too much about cosmology, however. I've never been super interested in space. What do you think about space and its relationship to the Earth system?
James FitzGerald: For a long time I wasn't very interested in the stars or cosmology. Not in the way that I was interested in nature. I read about it some, but it wasn't a major focus. It wasn't quite visceral enough. I wanted something that I could dive into and see for myself, or at the very least know that I could eventually do that. Even if I was reading about an ecosystem on the other side of the world that I couldn't access at that moment, I could think that someday I might experience it for myself. That tangible quality made it really appealing to me. Whereas the stars are very remote.
In recent years I've started to see the cosmos as an extension of landscapes and ecology. It’s so far beyond anything that we have on Earth in terms of scale. When I'm walking through the landscape and I look up, I think of it as part of my habitat and part of that continuum in which people have always lived. Everyone who has ever been in tune with nature has also looked up at the sky to navigate, or thought about what it might mean.
Seeing it as part of that whole has made me more interested in it. Certainly if there were other planets where we knew that there were ecosystems and life, what we have on Earth, I would suddenly become extraordinarily interested. But given what information we have now, it's more remote and detached. But it is still important to me.
Tapping into the idea of deep time, maybe there are also parallels between the terrestrial environment and the sky in that sense. A landform might remind you of deep time in a similar that looking at the stars might, because they're both reminders of scale, complexity, and the infinite progression of minute changes over time
David Valerio: I was interested in Mars for a while, but that was mostly because Mars might be like another Earth. What does a different planet look like? What would it be like to explore the geology of the Martian landscape? All of these interests are in terms of how it might compare with Earth.
Relatedly, as I have become more devoutly Christian, I’ve come to more fully appreciate that God made the world. That reality, the cosmos, and nature as whole has a cruciform nature. Christ, the Logos, is reflected in everything that I see around me. I see the entire world as being mystical, divinely inspired, and beautiful. The same God who created the trees and the mountains that I appreciate so much, also created this laptop that I have to work at for eight hours a day.
I always leave my conversational partners with a huge question at the end of these discussions. What are you striving to achieve in your life and work going forward?
James FitzGerald: To begin on that spiritual note, I would say that we are on somewhat different wavelengths there in our lives. At this time, I’m more content to be exploring, examining, and thinking about what has meaning to me. I'm not sure exactly where my path will take me regarding faith and spirituality. I'm convinced by the meaning in the universe, and the awe and wonder that it inspires in me. I trust that in time, if I'm meant to be swayed by something, it will happen. But for the time being, I go about learning and absorbing as much as I can.
At least as a stage in one's life, I think agnosticism is highly underrated. It's always described as not being able to make up your mind. But it's perhaps the most rational position for a lot of people to be in. You can be an agnostic while also a believer. There is a spectrum of agnosticism.
At the more practical level, I definitely see myself moving in a different direction from where I have been over the last couple of years. The research I did at Cambridge was very focused on food systems, and that's something that I think I would like to get back into at a more concrete level. My current work has provided a lot of insights and lessons, but it's definitely not where my long-term passions lie. It's allowed me to tap into them probably more than any other first job could have, frankly, and I'm so grateful for that.
I am going to be moving away from my current focus on market-based approaches to ecosystems and nature, and towards policy ideally. For that reason, I decided that law is the next step for me. I expect to start law school somewhere—I don't know where yet, will probably find out in a few months—next fall, and focus on environmental law and policy.
I don't know what precise form it will take, but I want to be either in a nonprofit or in government, perhaps. Although I think that's unlikely. Or even in a private sector setting where policy is front and center. Do work that relates to food systems and agriculture. Basically the way that humans use land on planet Earth and what tradeoffs are involved. What the most prudent balance between different needs are. I think that's, in so many ways, the central issue of our time. I see myself focusing on land use in its manifold forms. Nature, farming—and for my own interests—gardening as well. Even if that's a little bit less world changing.
One final note here, the community I find over time is important to me. Work and spirituality, those are important, but so is fostering community. As I go on through my life, I want to gradually find people that have congruent interests and visions to mine. They could be very different from my own, but having parallel interests that allow us to help each other through life. I'm certainly grateful to have found a kindred spirit through our friendship. I'm excited to go to the American Prairie Reserve at some point in the not too distant future where we can talk about all of this more.
David Valerio: Absolutely. When I first met you, I thought that this guy is going to be a very good friend of mine. We didn't even talk all that much. So I'm also very blessed and grateful to get to know you.
I have also basically given up on voluntary climate and nature action as an avenue for pursuing the dreams for the future of the human and natural world that I desire to see. I’m also becoming more interested in policy and trying to figure out how I engage with it. I used to be a philosophical anarchist and still don't like the state or government all that much. But in terms of the practical aims that I want to see implemented in the world, it seems that some version of government or think tank position is where I would be most impactful.
As you said, community is also central for me. It has a spiritual meaning for me. My relationship with my wife, daughter, fellow church members—it's really what makes life what it is. That's why I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to talk to people like you for this project, and in everyday life as a friend, so I can figure out how all these other human beings are trying to traverse the very strange and uncertain universe that we inhabit.
Share this post