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The human footprint may not be easily measurable, but it is crucial in shaping the planet for better and for worse – but most of the time it is the latter. Corinna Bellizzi sits down with biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, PhD, who hosts the aptly named show “Human Footprint.” He talks all about his experiences traveling around the world to delve into different human activities, cultures, and lifestyles to understand how they impact our society and environment. Shane also shares insights on how supermarkets changed the way we eat, the value of humanity’s fundamental interconnectedness, the true costs of hydroelectric power, and the truth behind the bee colony collapse.

About Shane Campbell-Staton, PhD

Shane is interested in how human history, culture, technology and politics influence life, biological stress and evolution of species around the world. He uses physiology, gene expression, genomics and experimentation to identify genes and traits that allow animals to rapidly adapt to new environmental pressures faced in a human-dominated world.

Shane also has a deep passion for sharing science with the public. His own passion for science was kindled through television as a child. Growing up in a small town in South Carolina, he was not exposed to much nature or the outdoors. But watching nature documentaries and TV shows featuring passionate presenters, like Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin, he developed a love for the natural world. Now Shane is sharing his own passions and the wonders of science with a diverse audience through his research as well as visual and audio media.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-campbell-staton-034a1380/

Guest Website: https://www.campbellstaton.com/

Guest Social:

https://www.pbs.org/show/human-footprint/

https://www.instagram.com/shane.campbellstaton/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-biology-of-superheroes-podcast/id1314139416

https://www.tiktok.com/@pbs

https://www.youtube.com/@PBS/featured

Additional Resources Mentioned:

The Impact of Climate Storytelling with Trip Jennings and Maiya May of WEATHERED, a PBS Docuseries

The Impact of Dams on the Health of Our Ecosystems with Steve Hawley, Author of Cracked

The Consequences of Farmed Salmon with Simen Saetre, Author of The New Fish

Show Notes:

• 00:02:37 – Shane Campbell-Staton And Human Footprint
• 00:08:24 – What To Expect From Season 2
• 00:11:19 – How Supermarkets Changed Our Daily Lives
• 00:13:41 – Understanding The Honey Trap And Colony Collapse
• 00:17:49 – Insights About Hydroelectric Power
• 00:24:50 – Appreciating Fundamental Interconnectedness
• 00:26:52- Environmental Response To Human Footprint
• 00:34:45 – Telling Stories About Social Justice
• 00:46:12 – Evolving From Domination To Reciprocity
• 00:53:39 – How To Remain Hopeful And Keep The Faith
• 00:56:17 – Making Small Changes For The Greater Good
• 00:59:51 – Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

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True Impact Of Our Human Footprint With Shane Campbell-Staton, PhD

This conversation is one I’ve been eagerly awaiting. I’m joined by evolutionary biologists, a Princeton professor, and the Emmy-nominated host of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton. Shane is a rare voice in science media. Someone who doesn’t just study how humans shape the natural world, but who explores how our culture, history, and even politics impact evolution itself. His work brings cutting-edge science to the public through powerful storytelling, something we desperately need more of now.

This episode is also a celebration of Season 2 of Human Footprint on PBS, airing on Wednesdays starting June 25th. PBS remains one of the last truly nonpartisan public service media platforms, yet it’s facing growing threats to its Federal funding. Supporting programs like this matters more than ever. Shane’s new season takes us from supermarket aisles in New York to beekeeping villages in Thailand, unraveling how humans are transforming ecosystems, species, and even the fate of life on Earth.

Remember, this show is proudly climate positive. Through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org, we plant one tree for every new subscriber to our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or on our website at CareMoreBeBetter.com. Yes, that means we could plant four trees for every single one of you. We’ve already planted 17,615 trees toward our 2025 goal of 20,000. We are well on our way. Go ahead, click follow, plant a tree, and help regenerate this world we share. Let’s dive into this powerful conversation with Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton.

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Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Shane Campbell-Staton And Human Footprint

I’ve been excited to speak with you, not because of your work at Human Footprint, but because you bridge science and storytelling so beautifully. I’d love for you to talk about that.

For me, science and storytelling go hand-in-hand, especially when you talk to most biologists about how they got into science. Any scientists in general, how they got into science, what you will never hear is, “I love statistical significance ever since I was a kid.” There’s always a story. There’s always a moment in their lives that captures them. It sparks some curiosity that then takes hold of them and drives them. For me, those moments came through television.

It’s interesting, and I feel very lucky now to be on the flip side to be able to tell stories about science for a public audience. They are two sides of the same coin. Science is about stories. Many people have said, “What’s the greatest story ever told?” It’s the story that links everything and every organism that has ever existed together throughout the entire history of the planet. It’s an incredible story. As much as we like to think of ourselves as apart from that story, and we are separated from it, we are very much intertwined in it. We always have been, and we always will be. As modern humans, we’re twisting and turning that story in a bunch of ways that we never expected.

You said that you were introduced to nature or this environmentalist perspective through television, which reminds me of my own childhood, growing up watching something of that nature, or by David Attenborough narrating some lioness killing a zebra or something to that effect. As a parent now, I freely let my kids watch any nature programming that they want to. It opens the door for having uncomfortable conversations about death.

I feel like now, we try to shelter our kids so much from these types of experiences that when they confront them later, they’re less prepared. I like the idea of being able to talk to them about the cycle of life, food, the nature of being, and how we have some animals that eat vegetation and other animals that are obligate predators. To introduce these types of language to my kids at an early age means that they have a pretty broad vocabulary, which is often critical. Shows like yours do that, too. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about how you build the episode arcs that you create to help engage people and bring them into topics that they might not be familiar with.

Television can be a bit reductive. In general, our society has become somewhat reductive. We like to keep things simple and keep it easy. The biggest questions that we’re dealing with now are not simple questions or easy questions. They’re not yes or no questions. They’re very complex things. The one thing that I’ve appreciated so much about PBS is that they’ve given us a platform to tell complex, complicated stories in a way that allows us to dive into how deep and how broad those questions are, in a way that I don’t think we get to see much these days on television.

In terms of how we build the story arcs for the show, first and foremost, I have to give props to Neil Losin and Nate Dappen, the directors, Page Buono, and the rest of the producers for the series. There are a ton of writers and researchers who put different pieces together. Each episode starts as a journey. It starts asking a question that seems simple at the face of it, something that surrounds us every day that we may or may not even think about because it’s so ubiquitous.

When you start thinking about it deeper and deeper, the more convoluted, weird, and strange it gets. You realize how intertwined our personal decisions, our culture, our history, and our politics are in the natural world, and how we change the natural world, but then also how those changes, turn around, and then flip back and change our history, our politics, and our culture in so many different ways. Each episode is five acts. Each act takes us to a different place. I interviewed different people, and those acts combined to take what seems like something very simple in the beginning and blow it up into the global phenomenon that it is.

Our personal decisions, culture, history, and politics are intertwined with the natural world and how we change it.

What To Expect From Season 2

This is a perfect spot to introduce people to the show. I’m now going to play the introduction to your Season 2 for Human Footprint. This new season looks incredible, from global food chains to fashion to the plight of pollinators, which is critical to our time, with massive colonies collapsing all over the globe. What’s the central message you hope that viewers walk away with from each episode, and from the season as a whole?

I hope that people walk away with an understanding that our decisions matter. That’s something that can be increasingly hard to understand sometimes. Especially given the way things in society can be, it’s hard to feel like we have any power. If these episodes have taught me anything, having gone on each one of these journeys, it’s that each of us can do something, and there are solutions. For me, the big thing is that when we tackle the big questions of life, be it the hunger crisis or climate change, or all these big questions can seem so completely overwhelming.

It would be one thing if there weren’t any answers. That’s a situation that’s hard to be in. Many times, at the end of the day, you realize there are answers. Sometimes, they are pretty clear and simple answers. The question is, will we make the changes that need to be made in order to get to these answers? As frustrating as that is as a position to be in, it’s also something that gives me a lot of hope because there’s something that we can move towards to make things better. We can see it, and it’s there. I hope that’s what people take from each of these episodes, for each of these different topics, and also from the season as a whole.

How Supermarkets Changed Our Daily Lives

Let’s talk about a few examples and shelf life. I’d love for you to share what surprised you the most about how the supermarket changed us biologically and culturally.

The idea of the supermarket seems so normal. Every weekend, you go out and you make your supermarket run, buy your groceries, and you have your food for the week. Everyone has been to a grocery store. It’s such a ubiquitous part of everyday life. You walk into the grocery store, and there doesn’t seem to be anything strange about it, but it’s one of the weirdest places on the planet. You walk into this place where there are thousands upon thousands of choices.

There are fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t even grow that time of year, and you’re there getting them. They may be growing on the complete opposite side of the world, but you get them and they’re fresh. You can eat them. We have to change the entire world in order to make that happen. We’ve had to put together an entire global food chain, an artificial food chain, in order to make that happen. The degree to which it’s changed the planet is astounding. The history of it is astounding and disturbing, a lot of the time as well.

Understanding The Honey Trap And Colony Collapse

Coming from the food industry, I could not agree with you more. We used to have a more market perspective, where you would do your local shopping, get your bread each day, and buy what fruit was in season. You would eat more types of food over the course of the year than most Americans do. Most people here might consume a total of ten vegetables in a given month. That’s quite different from how our ancestors were certainly going about things back in the day. I’d love to talk a bit about the Honey Trap. As you know, I mentioned that a bit in our introduction. The importance of pollinators can’t be understated. Bees do so much more than provide us with sweet honey and nectar. What is the real story behind their collapse?

There are a few different things that are going on. Typically, when people think about bees, they think about the honey bee. That’s the ubiquitous bee that is always on everybody’s mind, but there are thousands of species of bees that are very different than the honey bee. Many of those bees are solitary bees and live a very different kind of life, but they’re crucial as pollinators. When you think about ecosystems and the value of ecosystems, some people like to put that in terms of money. How much is the ecosystem worth? If we didn’t have pollinators, most of the food that we know and love would not exist.

It would be essentially corn and Twinkies, and not much else besides that. Even the food that we feed food animals has to be pollinated for the most part. These pollinators are on a steep decline. We’ve had this close relationship with them for our entire history as a species. Even in terms of our relationship with the honey bee, we started cultivating honey bees 4,000 years ago. It’s a very old relationship.

We depend on them for so much. We know we depend on them for so much, yet they are under attack because of our current systems. The thing about humans is that we never do anything a little bit. We don’t know how to. If we’re going to do anything, we have to do it huge. When it comes to food, that means these massive swaths of land that we’re using to plant one thing typically at a time, and then we protect it with pesticides and all of these things. It’s a triple threat for any pollinator because these are insects as well. As much as the things that eat those crops, they can be vulnerable to pesticides, so can the things that pollinate those crops.

They’re facing this challenge of pollution, but then they’re also facing these other diseases like colony collapse disorder, which we’re still trying to understand. These things, like varroa mites, a mite that was introduced into Florida around 50 years ago, have led to one of the biggest collapses of honey bee colonies that we’ve seen in history. That happened a few years ago. There are a lot of different things that pollinators have to face in order to survive, function, and reproduce. A lot of those necessities we’re taking up because we want to grow food, even while knowing that we need them in order to pollinate that food.

Insights About Hydroelectric Power

There’s one last episode I want to touch on before we move in to our next stage of the interview and that’s Damned If You Do. Water is life, but it’s also controlled. We’ve looked to water to provide green energy. I would love to know what your thoughts are around hydroelectric power and what you learned by traveling the Colorado River.

One of the things is that when you consider a river, it’s a force of nature. The most literal raw sense of the word is it’s a force of nature. It forms the basis of so many different kinds of ecosystems in so many different ways. For us as a species, we’ve taken that force of nature and harnessed it. We’ve domesticated it and turned it into something fundamentally different from what it used to be, especially when it comes to the Colorado River. We’ve done so far on our own means. There are so many people who are dependent upon the Colorado River. Not just for water but also for power and the politics around who gets how much water, who gets how much power, etc.

The decisions that are made are not always decisions that are based on reality. A lot of times, they are based on numbers that were from one specific year that was ridiculously wet for whatever reason. Instead of taking whatever percentage of water is available and digging that up, there’s a number that’s put on. You get so many gallons of water. By all estimates, the Colorado River is shrinking. There isn’t enough water to meet that demand. We know this, but the policies haven’t changed. As much as people have been lobbying for the policies to change, it’s going to be a very hard sell in order to get those policies to change.

What does that mean for the river itself? It means that it has become something fundamentally different from what it ever was in its entire history. It’s like that river that carved the Grand Canyon. That river is gone. What we have now is something completely different. I started that journey at the head of the Colorado River. Looking at these massive dams that are built and structures that are some of the most incredible structures I’ve ever seen in my entire life. They speak to the ingenuity of who we are as a species, and there’s something to be proud of there.

Also, as you start to move down the river, you realize what those downstream consequences are for taking something that is supposed to flow freely, latching it to a dam, and using it for your own purposes. At the end of this journey, I walked maybe 3 miles through what was supposed to be a riverbed out moving towards the gulf. That was completely dry, cracked, and literally nothing. You can even see whale skeletons sticking out through the mud where they were supposed to be.

What you think of as a river is the farthest thing from it, not because of anything natural, but because we are now using it for our own purposes. It says a lot about who has made those decisions, why those decisions were made, who gets what from those decisions, and the people who get left out of those decisions. One of the very first things that I learned on that process is that the contracts that we make about water can teach us a lot about what society values and who society values.

The contracts we make around water can teach us a lot about what and who society values.

That whole episode is about this journey of learning the cost of harnessing something as fundamental as water. To me, it hit the most, especially in the States. You get life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the three foundations. How much closer to life can you get than water? Water is life, very literally. When you take something that fundamental and then there are haves and have-nots, it makes you think a lot about what those foundational principles are and what they mean when it comes to our decision-making process as a population.

I want to recommend that people who are interested in this topic also revisit my episode interview with Steven Hawley, who wrote Cracked, which is specifically about the crumbling infrastructure of dams, specifically in the Pacific Northwest, but it applies elsewhere as well. If you look at places like the Colorado River, what many people don’t understand is that it supplies water to much of Southern California, as an example. It supplies water to a lot of our farmland in California.

California grows more produce than any other state in our Union. The fruit and the vegetables that you eat that are grown in the United States often come from this state. Water rights are in part tied to that because we need our food supply. These stories are definitely connected. I even see that throughline from your mention of grocery stores earlier to the food we grow. These are connected ideas.

Appreciating Fundamental Interconnectedness

One of the things that I’ve learned by going on each of these journeys is this fundamental interconnectedness of pretty much everything. In so many different surprising ways, you would make connections that you wouldn’t think about under normal circumstances. When you think about this relationship between food, water, and dams, once it’s said out loud, it’s like, “That makes sense.” How many people go to the grocery store and are trying to choose between asparagus and romaine lettuce, and are thinking about the Colorado River or water rights?

Also, typically, in a place that’s very far removed. I’m here in Princeton, New Jersey, thinking about the Colorado River, which is so far away. One of the things I keep learning over and over again in so many different ways is that we live in these two sensory worlds. One is our local biological senses, or the things that are in front of us that we can see, feel, taste, etc.

The other is this wider sensory world that we live in that connects us globally. You pick up your phone, and you’re connected globally. Those connections are as physical as they are abstract. The infrastructure that we put around the planet to connect us all. There can be a complex interaction between those two sensory spheres that messes us up when it comes to trying to understand the impacts of our decisions on a global scale.

Environmental Response To Human Footprint

In this next section of our interview, I want to talk about the connection between human evolution and the Anthropocene. You study how human activities, our culture, our politics, and even technology are now evolutionary forces. What are some of the species that have adapted in surprising ways to this Human Footprint?

My lab studies this in a very broad context. We study a lot of different organisms in many different places. We can think of cities, for instance. Cities are the fastest-growing ecosystems on the planet. We’ve crossed the point where half of the human population, or half of our species, lives in cities. In the next 50 years, probably two-thirds of humans will live in major metropolitan areas or these urbanized environments. In order to live alongside us, other organisms have had to find interesting and sometimes weird and extreme ways to occupy this ecosystem that’s so fundamentally different in so many ways than any other ecosystem in evolutionary history.

The structures are different. The dangers are different. The air quality and the noise environment are so different. We’ve been studying adaptation to urban environments. In our case, we’ve been studying these small lizards called Anoles, which occur on the island of Puerto Rico. This one species, the Puerto Rican crested Anole, has moved into cities independently from different forest areas across the island. They’ve adapted in very similar ways over and over again independently. These lizards are using the sides of buildings and things like concrete and metal instead of things like trees, leaves, scrub, or whatever they may use in a natural “environment.”

They’ve evolved longer limbs by doing this over and over again. This is something that we see persists. Even when you bring them into the lab, and they’re born in the lab, they still grow longer limbs. It seems to have a very strong genetic component to it. The urban environment is also much hotter because of all the reflective and absorbent materials. Heat bounces around. It’s what we call the Urban Heat Island Effect. The urban lizards are much more thermally tolerant than lizards that live in forest areas. They can take a lot more heat and are able to function at higher temperatures.

That’s one aspect of our Human Footprint. We’ve also studied the evolution of tusklessness in elephants in response to poaching, and the evolution of alligators in the South in response to endocrine-disrupting compounds in water sources. One of my postdocs is studying the evolution of wolves in Chernobyl in response to ionizing radiation. Each of these stories is about our human footprint. It’s about the fundamental interconnectedness of us with the rest of the tree of life.

I love that answer. You’ve touched on a couple of the unintended consequences that are key. One of which is the heat pollution we create because it is, in a way, pollution. I visit Arizona fairly routinely on business or conferences, or whatever, even to do field work. I recall days when the Phoenix and Scottsdale area had far less pavement in general. They used to cool off a lot at night, and they don’t so much anymore unless you’re in the foothills, where you are in true desert land. That’s part because the black top stays hot a lot longer. It doesn’t cool off the same way as real Earth does.

We need to all remember that as we think about things like building new cities. How are we going to build them differently? How can we introduce more of a permeable layer so that there are breaks or there are more breaks, when we have to pave something over to ensure that natural ecology can respond the way it’s meant to in a way? It’s something a lot about, and I know that we are now working towards building greener cities, where we have more plant life that can truly restore the environment, absorb some of the carbon, and work to build cooler cities that don’t get so hot.

I gave a talk on this subject and did some ‘back of the envelope” calculations. I’m thinking about what the city of the future should look like. When I say the city of the future, I don’t just mean cities that will be in the future, but even cities that exist now. In Season One of Human Footprint, we went to Singapore to look at how they approach cities. One of the things that they have implemented is that if you’re going to build something, for every square foot of green space that you take away in order to build that structure, you have to put back in.

Somewhere in that structure, you have to build it into that structure. Thinking about that as a basic concept, and thinking about high rises, like anything higher than three stories, if you make it a vertical garden. If you did that in the largest ten cities on the planet, you would have a green area that’s three times the size of Ireland, which is not insignificant. It’s only like 0.4% of the Amazon rainforest, but that’s still a lot of greenery. The thing that I think about most now is building cities for the future. What if we built cities that animals did not have to adapt to, cities that were already pre-adapted to them because they’re so similar?

There are some habitats like the birds and the insects.

We know that it can happen. In Singapore, there is as much, if not more, biodiversity in the city proper as there is in the national parks. Singapore is a very specific example. They have a very specific government structure and history, but there’s something that everyone can take from those examples.

Telling Stories About Social Justice

I 100% agree. This gets to more of the storytelling and social justice perspective now. You’ve said that science should be accessible and deeply human. What does that look like to you in practice?

This is something that I’ve had to learn along the way as a science communicator. I was trained as an academic, as a researcher, and as a professor. I’m used to telling people what I know. That’s fine and great. In some cases, that is necessary, but very few people want to be lectured to. I can tell you as a professor that even in the classroom, very few people want to be lectured to, but everybody wants to have a conversation.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that in order to be a successful science communicator, you have to give more of yourself than just what you know. You become a conduit for the information. As a human, it’s easy to put off a fact or forget a fact. It’s easy to brush away information. It’s much harder to brush off people. One of the things that I love about Human Footprint is how many different people I’ve gotten to interact with, coming from different walks of life, that have taught me so much about the thing that I thought I was the expert in, like going into something like invasive species, which we did in season one.

It’s one thing to think about invasive species as a biologist. It’s like species get introduced from elsewhere. They adapt to these novel conditions, but they have a foot up because they don’t have the constraints of the ecosystem, etc. An invasive species means something much different after you go to a “redneck fishing” competition in Central Illinois, and you spend the day with a third-generation fishermen who now can barely make a living because the river is full of Asian carp that have been introduced from elsewhere. It now makes up the vast majority of the biomass of this river.

It’s one thing to think about cotton and domestication from a biological standpoint, but it means something different after you’ve talked with a fifth-generation Black cotton farmer in North Carolina, who can step out of his house and look at the old plantation where his family was enslaved and still chooses to plant cotton because he’s proud of it. It means something totally different.

It’s these individual stories that give the perspective and give weight to the scientific understanding. I found that even as a scientist, I know what I do so much better now for having gone on all of these journeys and talked with so many people. I understand the context of the science that I’m trying to do now in a deeper and broader way than I would have ever been able to do without being a science communicator, without Human Footprint, and the support of PBS.

It’s because you’ve essentially developed ethnography. That’s what this effort is. You’re going deep into each of these topics with people who are directly affected. That’s what makes it so different. Many science documentaries still center a White male areocentric lens. You’ve already answered this in part, but I’d love for you to talk more about how Human Footprint aims to shift that vernacular.

Human Footprint is different in a few ways. For me, Human Footprint is the first thing I’ve ever hosted. I had this idea of doing this show about the Anthropocene and evolution in the Anthropocene, how our actions impact the world around us. I talked with the directors, Neil and Nate. We had done some work previously, and they had a similar idea that they wanted to pitch as a nature documentary initially.

I was like, “It should be something hosted.” They’re like, “That’s bold,” given that I’ve never hosted anything before. They got on board and they bought into it and bought into me in terms of my background, my culture, my insights, where I come from, and what I’m about. Much of that is given to the show. For instance, the soundtrack is driven by R&B, hip-hop, and blues. The original scoring was done by Adrian Younge, who’s a hip-hop legend. A lot of the cinematography was inspired by the ‘90s music videos. It’s something that I can truly say no one has ever seen before in a science or nature show.

I wonder how you feel hosting is different from teaching. What has hosting taught you?

Hosting has made me a better teacher as well. The thing that’s most different about hosting is that most of the time on Human Footprint, as much as I have expertise, I’m not the expert. I am a proxy for the audience. I can give my own insights, and you see them scattered throughout each of the episodes, but every person I talked to, it’s their expertise that I’m learning from. As a proxy for the audience, I’m literally inviting you to go on this journey with me, this person who thought I knew so much in the beginning, and then constantly gets humbled throughout the entire experience because I realized that what I thought I knew was a tiny piece of the whole.

The other thing that hosting has taught me is that I have an opportunity. This is one of the things that’s important to me as a scientist. I have the opportunity to not just share my own work but to share my colleagues, their brilliance, their work, and their passions with the wider world. That’s something that I’m so incredibly grateful for. It’s far beyond me being on the screen myself. The fact that I can sit down and be a bridge between science and society is something special for me. A lot of my colleagues are not going to have a chance to do this thing or host this kind of show.

Most of them probably wouldn’t want to, honestly, because it can be very uncomfortable. Sometimes, it’s a very odd thing to do in many ways. What I can do is offer them an opportunity to share their work while talking to another scientist or another practicing scientist, but have a real conversation that we can have anywhere. We could be sitting on a park bench. We could be at a bar and turn to the person next to us, whoever they are, whatever they do, and wherever they’re coming from, and invite them to be a part of a conversation.

That invitation is something that is probably the most important thing when it comes to science communication, inviting people to a conversation, even if they don’t agree. There were some things in the first season that I got a lot of angry emails about. I was like, “Good.” If you’re passionate enough and you’re engaged enough in the subject matter to yell at me for twelve pages, at least you’re engaged.

You inspired them to respond.

Exactly. The biggest enemy to progress isn’t disagreement. The biggest enemy to progress is indifference and not caring enough. As long as people are invested, there’s always room for a conversation. A conversation can be had. If there’s anything we need now, it’s conversation.

The biggest enemy of progress is indifference. But as long as people are invested, there is always room for conversation.

More discourse. It sounds like you’ve fallen in love with hosting. I wouldn’t be surprised if you end up with your own podcast down the road.

I do have my own podcast.

Let’s talk about that for a moment.

It’s called the Biology of Superheroes Podcast. It was one of the very first pieces of science communication that I ever undertook. We made sixteen episodes over the course of a couple of years, and now, through NSF funding. We’re at the end of producing another set of twelve episodes that will be released, hopefully, by the end of 2025.

Evolving From Domination To Reciprocity

Thank you for sharing that. At Care More Be Better, we talk a lot about concepts like regeneration. Not just ecologically, but socially and economically, too. How do you think that we can evolve from domination to reciprocity in our relationship with the planet?

That is a very difficult question.

It is. It’s one I worked to answer every day, too. Do you have any insights?

A big part of that has to do with connection. It’s one thing to see a cheetah running down a gazelle on television in some far-off place. To realize that those fundamental things, the ecosystems that dominate this planet, are all around us. Life is all around us, and it shares that story with us. That one story of evolution and that interconnectedness is the thing that we’re missing because we get so caught up in our own thing. We are so caught up in our own problems, our own stresses, and those things are real.

For us to move past domination and to rediscover some equilibrium, we have to reconnect in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go kayaking or go hiking and get lost in the woods. Even walking in the park like a breath of fresh air, those little things can be very important and are very important to so many different people, but it’s the idea that something has value beyond us and beyond what we can get from it. It’s that thing that we need to move beyond, but at the same time, those immediate problems can get in the way of it.

When I was in Mozambique in the first season, I sat down and talked with a park ranger. He was like, “Conservation can only exist when people are being taken care of.” When people aren’t being taken care of, you can hang everything else up, because you can talk all you want to about the majesty of this animal or that animal, if someone has to worry about what they’re going to feed their children at the next meal, there’s a luxury to thinking about the grandeur of nature that they don’t have.

When I say that fundamental interconnectedness, I mean that if we treat each other better. If we can give each other the basics that we need to survive, then we get freed up to solve these greater problems. They’re one and the same. Conservation problem is a human problem as much as it is a biological problem, a political problem, or a cultural problem, as much as it has anything to do with “nature.” A holistic answer is the answer.

If somebody is worried about the food that they’re going to put on their plate to feed their kids, they might sell that plot of land that they have and divest it to buildings as opposed to the force that it is now. That has happened. That does happen. We also see the same with regard to pollution. People can’t afford garbage pickup, and when the service that is paid that isn’t provided, then they tend to litter or stop off somewhere and throw their washing machine down into a river. This does happen. It happens in the United States and in what we’ve considered the developing world or the third world because people are struggling. They make choices that may not be ideal for our environment because they’re in that struggle, and that’s their reality.

It doesn’t bring that back around to thinking about food and some of the things that we explore in that episode of Human Footprint. We can be a conundrum as a species. The idea that we can both be dealing with a global hunger crisis and an obesity crisis at the same time is very strange. Solving global hunger, how long has that been in the top five of the biggest problems that we’ve had to face as a species and a growing population?

Again, it’d be one thing if there wasn’t an answer. A lot of times, it gets presented as though, “How could we possibly solve something so large?” Throughout this episode, we learn how much gets invested in this global infrastructure, the cold chain, and how much gets invested in the marketing. You’re talking about billions upon billions of dollars each year. Something that we find so fundamental and so valuable, yet in the US alone, 30% to 40% of that food ends up in the garbage before anybody eats it.

It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out, “Maybe the first step in solving global hunger is not throwing out 30% to 40% of the food that is grown, that is there, and is available at one point.” At least part of the solution is right there in front of us. The issue isn’t finding the solution. It’s making the decision to move towards the solution, which is simultaneously incredibly frustrating, but also is the thing that still gives me hope.

How To Remain Hopeful And Keep The Faith

Speaking to hope, what inspires you to remain hopeful in times like this, when we can feel like there is a barrage of negative news stories coming our way, and loosening restrictions from the Environmental Protection Agency, or the many threats to our environment? What helps you stay on that hope train, so to speak?

Sometimes, it’s very difficult. Sometimes I do tumble down the rabbit hole. At the end of the day, I have to have faith in humanity. I have to have faith in the human conscience, like our collective. Nobody wants to be the bad guy in their own story. I don’t think anyone sees themself as a bad guy in their own story. There are always going to be differences in opinion, the approach, and what different people value.

I feel like I have to believe that over a long enough period of time, humanity is going to bend its decisions in the right direction. The ark of humanity and the ark of morality are going to bend towards the greater good. If we look at the course of human history, we’ve seen many travesties, incredibly bleak times, but we’ve always come out on the other end, and we’ve continued to progress.

Given enough time, humanity will eventually bend its decisions towards the greater good.

That’s the thing that we do. If our history teaches us anything. It’s that we can make huge mistakes. We can do some awful things, but we also have the capacity to do incredible good. As much as that Jacqueline Hyde equation, it’s like always constantly moving back and forth. I have to think that in the end, the arc will be towards good.

Making Small Changes For The Greater Good

Aptly said. Thank you so much. How can people get involved? Whether it’s watching Human Footprint, supporting biodiversity, or bringing science into everyday conversation. I’d love to know your thoughts.

Watch Human Footprint. It’s a step in the right direction. In general, there are many ways for you to get in touch with the space around you. It doesn’t have to be a big leap. You don’t have to rewire your entire life in order to make this happen. Little changes can make a huge difference. Whether that’s having a garden outside or whether it’s deciding to take a walk in your neighborhood for ten minutes a day.

Getting connected to the space around you, that in and of itself is a step in the right direction. We can live very individualistic lives. Those individualistic lives can disconnect us from that thing that drives us to make decisions for the greater whole. Reconnecting in any small way, like a community park, or connecting with your local politicians. Connecting, generally speaking, can be a very powerful thing.

Thank you so much for joining me. This has been an absolute pleasure. I could keep talking to you for days. I am going to direct people to Human Footprint airing on PBS starting June 25th. It’s also streaming. People can go online now and review past episodes from Season One. Enjoy all that and get caught up in time for this new season. I’ll also encourage people to follow your Instagram and LinkedIn, and the Biology of Superheroes Podcast, which has about 30 episodes out between 2019 and 2020, with a new season soon to launch. That’s all fantastic. Is there any other site you’d like to direct them to?

To keep up with the research that’s happening in my lab at Princeton, go to CampbellStaton.com.

Thank you so much for joining me. I truly appreciate what you’re doing. This show, just like the one that you’re hosting, is an invitation to care more, so we can be better. I love that about the Human Footprint. I’ve enjoyed reviewing episodes and previewing some of Season Two. I wholeheartedly suggest people connect with it, and if they have the means, to also donate some funds to PBS. We know that they’re funding is presently under threat. We want to be sure great programming like this is able to sustain the generations.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a true pleasure.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

What a journey from the ripple effects of our choices to the evolutionary consequences of supermarkets. Shane Campbell-Staton brings a bold and deeply human lens to science, one that encourages us to not just ask how we live but what kind of species we want to be. If you’re as inspired as I am, make sure to tune in to Season Two of Human Footprint on PBS and go back and look at Season One as well. This is storytelling with heart, intellect, and integrity. It’s the kind of public programming that we must fight to protect, as Federal funding for PBS is threatened.

Ultimately, we want to preserve these sorts of assets for all people. Support it, share it, and bring others along for the journey. If you haven’t already, follow this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and on CareMoreBeBetter.com. For every new follower, we plant a tree through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org. I understand Hank is on the ground in Tanzania now, looking at the restoration of effects and efforts he has in place, restoring mangrove forests.

We’re now at 17,615 trees and counting, chasing our goal of 20,000 by year’s end. I think we’ll screen passed it this summer. That’s real impact. It’s powered by you and this show. Until next time, remember this. We can all take steps to regenerate this world that we call home. We can care more, we can be better, and together we can shape a future where all life thrives. Thank you.

Important Links

• Shane Campbell-Staton
• Shane Campbell-Staton on LinkedIn
• Shane Campbell-Staton on Instagram
• Shane Campbell-Staton in X
• Human Footprint
• The Biology of Superheroes Podcast
• Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World
• PBS
• PBS on TikTok
• PBS on YouTube
• The Impact of Climate Storytelling with Trip Jennings and Maiya May of WEATHERED, a PBS Docuseries – Previous episode
• The Impact of Dams on the Health of Our Ecosystems with Steven Hawley, Author of Cracked – Previous episode
• The Consequences of Farmed Salmon with Simen Saetre, Author of The New Fish – Previous episode
• ForestPlanet.org
• Care More Be Better on Apple Podcasts
• Care More Be Better on Spotify
• Care More Be Better on YouTube