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Dr. Pablo Manzano is an ecologist and researcher with a focus on rangelands. In his new paper, Comparable Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Animals in Wildlife and Livestock Dominated Savannahs, Dr. Manzano concludes that well-managed livestock serves the same ecological niche as wild grazing animals.
There is often a halo over wild grazing animals like deer, moose, and wildebeests, while livestock is vilified. Now there is research showing this thinking is misguided and further demonstrates that “re-wilding” is not the answer.
During this episode, Dr. Manzano details how he developed and tested his theory regarding the climate change impact typically attributed to livestock and how it compares to that of wild herbivores. We also cover topics like:
- What a healthy herbivore system looks like
- The problems with re-wilding
- How our idea of nature may not be natural
- The need for food sovereignty
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 244: Dr. Pablo Manzano
Resources:
Comparable Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Animals in Wildlife and Livestock Dominated Savannahs
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUNC)
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Basque Center for Climate Change
William J Bond, South African ecologist
Knepp Castle Estate – rewilding project
Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree
Connect with Pablo:
Twitter: @pablopastos
Instagram: @pablo.pastos
LinkedIn: Pablo Manzano
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connolly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I am so excited to have with me today Pablo Manzano. He wrote a paper that recently got published called Comparison Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Animals in Wildlife and Livestock Dominated Savannas. I met Pablo in Ireland last fall and right? We connected there. Is that correct?
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And really, really excited about this research and wanted to have him on to explain it a little bit more so you all can understand why this paper is so important. So welcome to the podcast, Pablo.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Thank you very much, Diana. Glad to be here.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. So let’s start with just your background. Can you let people know who you are and how you came up with the idea to write this paper?
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, so I am an ecologist. I’m a Spanish ecologist. And I did a PhD on range land ecology, just very theoretical stuff on dispersal of seeds by sheep, and understanding a little bit how the ecology of range land goes. And then after some years, I started working in Nairobi for IUCN for… the International Union for Conservation of Nature, where I was heading, a program a global program on pastoralism, because of my scientific background, I could develop this course on the defense of pastoralists because of its environmental values. So, because of that job, I ended up representing IUCN at one of the consultation forums of FAO, the LEAP partnership. And there you basically discuss very strongly around LCA, analysis about lifecycle analysis, which for the layman are the analysis that establish the footprint, the carbon footprint or the water footprint of the products that we eat, or that we use. And this partnership is centered around livestock because of what I’m sure you all know, the environmental impacts that livestock is attributed to and on using these methodologies to try to achieve smaller environmental impact. So I went there as you know, as an external person, totally an external person. And ecologist, I’m not a chemical engineer. I don’t even have a degree in environment. I’m more from the purely ecosystem side, even if I’ve developed a transdisciplinary work. And then when I finally got why a grass-based beef and grass-based ruminants got attributed such a high environmental impact, I immediately told the guys in the meeting that was like the first or the second meeting I attended in that partnership. I said, well, but you know, this doesn’t make sense because you are attributing a very high impact in climatic terms to animals that are grazing… that are grazing pastures, that are grazing rangelands, just the way wild herbivore would do. And from the concept of ecological niche, if you just as a solution for climate change, you take out that herbivore, that domestic herbivore – that livestock, then someone else will move in and will use that resource – that cellulose that these ruminant was eating, and it’s very likely that they will emit the same methane, because the issue is not around the animal per se, it’s about the resource. And it’s good that we have so much cellulose in the world because otherwise this would be Mars, and we wouldn’t like that. So they basically quickly said, well, they just tried you know, because they were not ecologists, so it was like well, but we could burn the grass. I was like, well grass when you burn it, it also emits greenhouse gases you know. It also makes me think it means it emits carbon monoxide which also competes for methane for the hydroxyl ion and also it’s just nuts. I mean, how are you going to burn our rangelands? You cannot go around just killing wildlife you know, in order to prevent climate change. It doesn’t make sense. And also especially climate change is a problem that has only 200 years. And we are talking about the livelihood that has been there for very long and in very significant numbers – for 10,000 years or for 7000 years. So it just doesn’t make sense. Okay. And the conversation just ended when they said, Okay, where is that published? And I said, like, it’s not published, I just made it up. Okay, then publish it. And then we’ll talk. Unfortunately, it took me a little bit long to publish that. But I published the concept in 2019. And it took long because I think when you have to, you know, to innovative concepts, sometimes editors in the journals get scared and also some reviewers can get a little scared. So but finally, I published the concept in 2019. And that actually helped me because at the time, I was starting a postdoc at the University of Helsinki. But that started, that helped me getting in contact with the people that I’m working right now with, which is in Bilbao in northern Spain at the Basque Center for Climate Change. We connected to Twitter and just engaging in conversations on that, because they found the the concept interesting. And the problem I had with that paper, and this is why I it didn’t make waves is that it was theoretical. So you still had to show first that the herbivore abundances were high enough for these baselines. The theoretical wild herbivore abundances were high enough for these baselines to be relevant for these methane and nitrous oxide emissions to be relevant. And second, to have a practical case, where you would actually show that wildlife and livestock would have the same emissions per hectare. So for the first one, I started working on that when I was doing my postdoc, you know. It’s a good thing also with science that you’re criticized, and then you know which way to orient your research. And we published that earlier this year in another journal of the same family as where we have published this last one is called NPJ Biodiversity, where we actually revise the evidence from the last decade or from the last 15 years of natural herbivore abundances from fossil records. For example, in Britain, you cannot know how many herbivores there were unless you go to the last interglacial. Because during the whole Holocene, you already missed a lot of herbivores, so you have no idea what was going on there. And also the human presence and the human management of the landscapes first by hunter gatherers, and then by pastoralists was so strong, that you have kind of lost the idea of what was going on there. But there is information about the last interglacial about findings on bones and remnants of that fauna that was there. And it has been concluded that the density of animals there was the same as the one we observe – guess where – in Serengeti, today.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
And it’s very interesting to see that it’s not only in Britain, but generally, in all areas that are called by a South African ecologist, a very prominent one that is called William J Bond. The open ecosystems which basically are savannas that are not just tropical, but also temperate, and even boreal. There is some very interesting work being done by two Russian scientists: Sergey Azimov Nikita Azimov on the real Savanna like nature of the Tiger landscapes. So when we put that together in the same paper, in the same analysis, and we do a little bit of numbers, which is what we did for this first paper, we concluded that the abundances, the natural abundances worldwide of wild herbivores would be equivalent in size, in biomass to the current herbivore abundances if we consider livestock herbivores, which basically, we should do. And that’s important, because that means that we still have to, you know, to make our livestock system way better, because we have places where there’s way too much livestock. There are places where there’s too little livestock. There is a lot of unsustainable livestock production in a lot of places in the world, because there’s too many or because there’s too few, which is also a problem. And probably too industrialized and not imitating enough the way wild herbivores behave. But regarding food security, and regarding the world food security, it seems that we don’t have to eat less meat, but just different meat. And probably in developed countries, we should reduce a little bit so that there is more sustainable meat for the developing countries where there is a lot of child stunting and so on. But I think the lesson is very good because we’re talking all the time about less meat, less meat and it’s not less meat but better meat. It’s literally, you know, the motto: it’s not the cow, but the how, and I like that a lot. So going from there. And in parallel, we wanted also to test real numbers on this concept whether it was possible that the wildlife was completely overtaken the niche of domestic herbivores or vice versa, and that the methane emissions and the nitrous oxide emissions would be the same. And it’s not easy because a natural herbivore system has to have migratory animals. And we also hear very often that, you know, the problem for example of the deer overpopulation in Britain is that there are not enough predators. Where actually we have a healthy herbivore system. The herbivores will always be controlled by the abundance of grass and not by the abundance of predators. And in the Serengeti, you can see it very easily. Why? Because herbivores can migrate. And they just chase the rain where it falls. But predators are territorial. So if a lion moves to the territory of another lion, there will be trouble. So they stay where they are. So for example, in February, it’s the time where the wildebeests are calving in the Serengeti. And they’re calving the driest area of the Serengeti, which is also where the grass is more nutritious. So there lions in February is the big party. You know, there are a lot of wildebeest easy to hunt. But there are so many wildebeests that they cannot really eat, but just a fraction of what is there. And then in March the wildebeests leave. And these lions have to survive the rest of the world with the resident herbivores, which are very few of them. So it means that they will never be able to cull the wildebeest population enough to control the numbers. So that would have been the dominant dynamic in the whole world. And also the Serengeti ecosystem, I am fortunate enough to have lived 10 years in Kenya. So I had the opportunity to observe these ecosystems closely enough, let’s say. And some people, for example, criticize that they say, well, for the baseline, if you have so many tons of herbivores, many of them would be monogastric because elephants are monogastric. What they don’t know is that in the Serengeti Mara ecosystem, it’s the elephants that go away when the wildebeest come and not the other way around. So a wildebeest may be smaller than an elephant, but probably it’s less demanding on the environmental quality of its surrounding, meaning that you know, the wildebeest poo a lot, and they make a lot of noise. And that’s not nice for the elephants which are really intelligent creatures. So they just leave the Mara and go elsewhere because they don’t want to mix up with them. What that… what does that mean? It means that the numbers that we are observing today in the Serengeti where the biomass of wildebeests way above the biomass of elephants, may have been something widespread in our world without humans, which is important for this calculation of greenhouse gas emission baselines. So we chose the Serengeti for several reasons. One, because I had been living there. I had been working there and I had been working in an area in Tanzania that is dominated by livestock that I know they’re very good numbers from studies down there. And where we could compare with a high degree of certainty, how many livestock is in that area that also shares lithology climate, and generally environmental conditions grass productivity with the Serengeti, so we could be sure that it was going to be a fair comparison. And then we chose the Serengeti, because it’s one of the last national parks in the world, where it’s wildlife… completely wildlife dominated, where there is a huge migration, where nature works, as it should, where there are wild grazers, because for example, in Europe, we don’t have any wild grazers anymore. And that’s important. I will go back into that later on. But then we chose the Serengeti for that, because we could do the comparison. And when we did it, we weren’t surprised because we didn’t expect the emission of methane and or the emission in carbon dioxide equivalents to be almost the same. You know, we fear that if we send that to a journal, they would think that we have faked these results because they’re so similar. Biomass is not similar, because there’s more biomass in the Serengeti than in Loliondo in these livestock dominated area, but the emissions are almost exactly the same. So it just proved our point, you know, in, I hope it’s not the only ecosystem where we can do that in the world. But definitely one of the few less migratory ecosystems that we could test that hypothesis. You then ended up being completely proven so that was a very nice surprise. Yeah. And
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. And I think it’s in… you said so many things there. I’m trying to kind of recap a little bit on this. But, you know, as we see so many people, especially in the UK, I feel pushing for rewilding, it’s so important to understand that rewilding requires areas like Serengeti in order to be successful. I actually last summer visited a rewilding project at Neff Castle Estate. And what I saw there, you know, they… it was a large size, area, but I saw lots of over grazing and under grazing, because the animals just had complete free rein everywhere. And it wasn’t as successful an ecosystem, in my perspective, as a well managed, pastoral type situation. And I think some of the energy, at least in the UK is coming from, you know, complete decimation from poorly managed, especially sheep are so rough on the landscape. That I mean, and when you drive around in England and much of Scotland, there’s just no wild bits left. I mean, at least here in the US, we still have national parks with a lot of you know, trees, and I think that the US has obsession with we must have trees everywhere, which is also not necessarily what the environment wants to be or is best for the environment. You know, as a dietitian, who also you know, I didn’t… I’m not an ecologist but I approach this argument from an ecological perspective, which I’m… that’s why I’m so excited about your paper, because you’re looking at this not as a reductionist, not as a chemist, but as a ecologist looking at the whole entire, the wholism of the problem and not the just the emissions, which is what I see, especially in the tech scene with alternate meats and everything. But as a nutritionist, when I look at human health, and the species appropriate diet for humans, even in high income countries, I would argue that the idea that we need to be eating less meat might not be in everyone’s best interest, because we do have a protein requirement that is best met with animal source foods. And we don’t need more monocropping here in the US, we need more nutrient density. And I do believe that better livestock better grazing management, even in the US is the solution not monocropping and alternate meats. So that’s just my little recap of your of your monologue there, which I really enjoyed.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, the US is huge, you know, and there’s definitely more space. I also have worked with Frederic Leroy. And with diet, we have a paper in common just revising these things. And it’s not only the protein, I mean, you will know better than me that there is also a lot of micronutrients. Micronutrients exactly are in animal source food, but also regarding the ecology and regarding what you said about forest and about Britain. In that paper that I was mentioning that we published earlier this year, we also compare it with with densities of current livestock and in Britain, in the case of return, it’s well above the numbers that should be. And a reason for that is that there is a lot of activity. There are a lot of ruminants, but it’s on fertilized pastures. And of course, that increases the productivity of these pastures. But that also increases the density of animals. And this is why you are seeing some ecological disruptions there. But yeah, but of course, like if you’re going to take the meat production down, you’re going to need to import either meat or other foods from elsewhere. And the real problem of sustainability of Britain is not whether they have sheep or whether they have crops is that they have a lot of people because it’s only power it has been for 250 years it has attracted a lot of people. There were a lot of food imports there and full stop, you know, but also there is a huge myth and misunderstanding on forest if we take into account that we have had sustained high densities of livestock, sorry, not of livestock of wild herbivores during the last 15 million years, combined effects of prophecy millions of elephants and bovitz that have created the savannas that I was talking about. That means that closed canopy forest are only natural in the places where it rains more, of course the tropical rainforest, but also other temperate and boreal rainforests and occupy way less than we think. And for example, the whole eastern United States that people believe it’s a rain forest. You only have to go to the historical accounting. So the first European settlers, where they could, they could get their charts between the trees because there was enough space. And now there’s definitely not enough space because they lost the bisons. And they lost also the indigenous management of the forest. These forests were managed, because North America lost 35 genera of mammals 10,000 or 13,000 years ago, and these mammals were opening the landscape. And once they were going, it was indigenous peoples who were maintaining nature. But also I wanted to comment with you that we have a further paper that we have published this year, where we tried the same. Where we tried also to calculate the baseline emissions for Spain. We also tried in in Chernobyl, so that were the three places that that we tried: Serengeti, Chernobyl and National Park in Spain, that is called Cabañeros. Talking about size, and about the farm that you were mentioning, in Britain, the Serengeti has 25,000 square kilometers. It’s bigger than Yellowstone and some of the biggest parks in North America. And now they’re radiological exclusion of Chernobyl, which is now a national park in Belarus, and another national park in Ukraine has about 4000 square kilometers. It’s huge. But from the numbers that we were revising, it’s not huge enough to allow for a functional migration of herbivores, which my bet would be without really knowing at this point, but my bet would be that was a migratory system that reached up to cremate. And that these brilliant and very productive soils of the Ukraine are a result of the migration of millions of herbivores in the past that we have lost trace of. But in the case of Spain, we were a little bit more lucky because these place Cabañeros National Park is small, it’s only 400 square kilometers. But it has a configuration where you have planes that are full of grass in winter, and you have a nearby slope, where you have woodlands in summer. So that and there are no predators. Because of course, if there will be a pack of wolves there, the herbivores could not escape. So they would be controlled by the wolves. So these herbivores can migrate, they’re mostly red deer, and they can be in winter in the plains and in the summer in the slope. It’s not a perfect system. Okay. And this is something that I think people have to understand. First, they cannot migrate vast distances. So the productivity of the system is very limited. Because of this, this inability to migrate. Just for comparison, the traditional Moreno sheep, transhuman system in Spain, does migrations of up to 1000 kilometers from the southwest of the country that is very green and very productive in winter to the north of the country that are not in mountain ranges that are very green and productive in some, and they are 700 to 1000 kilometers away. So definitely not 400 square kilometers. And these are very, very productive systems. And there is some evidence that pre human herbivores were doing migrations there. But now that said, Cabañeros is not that bad in the sense that we have these migration only by browsers because the deer is a browser. We have no elephants that would open the landscape as elephants do in Africa. But still, we could observe that there. If we compare the performance and the emissions of greenhouse gases with what pastoralists livestock emits in the area, or what transhuman livestock emits in, in a nearby area, we can conclude that there the baseline is about 30%, so that we should subtract 30% of the emissions currently contributed to the sheep there from these emissions that deer naturally cause. That’s not the full picture, though. And I insist if we were to do a real rewilding, if we were to do like… if we would reintroduce elephants. If we would reintroduce migratory grazers like aurochs or wild horses that disappear from Europe 400 years ago, then we would see higher numbers of animals and then we would see something probably much more similar to the Serengeti question for a while there since obviously, they have not lived in Africa, because when I lived in Kenya, and I went to the countryside, and I wanted to do a trip, I had to go with an armed guards. Because elephants are really dangerous and more dangerous than lions, by the way, way more dangerous than lions and you have to be with a guy with a gun with a rifle in case an elephant appears. Sometimes an elephant appears and sometimes they have to shoot. So fortunately, Africa, I mean, fortunately for my personal circumstance in that moment, not fortunately for Africa, of course, but salaries are cheap there. So I would just pay $80 or $100 for that guard per day. Imagine how much you would pay in the States or in Europe, to just go one day out with your kids in the countryside. 1000-1500 would be expensive to enjoy the countryside. I don’t think that’s…
Diana Rodgers, RD
I never thought about it like that. I mean, I kept thinking that, you know, like, what do we do with all these people? Right, like, we have people that are living in areas where the proposed rewilding projects are to happen, right? So what about the people that live in that area? They’d have to move to a city or something and completely disrupt their way of life? The people who are living on the edges, you know, what do they do when their kids are waiting for the school bus in the morning? Right. But I never thought about the expense of having to have somebody protect you from the wild animals too.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
I like to think that way, because I think many of the proponents of rewilding are urban dwellers that really don’t understand rural livelihoods and that just really think that these people shouldn’t be there. So they think that if you’re going to give them better jobs, you’re going to go out. So I like to appeal more to the feelings of these urban dwellers, you know, that they like the theme park nature, right. And if there would be elephants in a theme park nature will turn into a terror park nature adventure.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s so funny. Actually, I did do a podcast with some folks in Hawaii that are managing cattle right where they filmed Jurassic Park like right next to it. So that’s kind of interesting. There’s, you know, I don’t think people really fully appreciate, you know, when I was reading, there are really good parts to the book, Wilding, by Isabella Tree. And she talks about how nature… natural areas right now, or like, patchwork quilts kind of they’re like these little tiny bits, but they’re completely ineffective as little tiny bits. And I think that’s what people don’t understand. And I even when I posted your paper on LinkedIn, and there were people who are sustainability experts commenting on it, they said, Okay, well, we can have, you know, it has to be well managed. And that’s one of the big key issues, of course, but also, we still have to have that nature in between. And I’m like, Well, what’s the use of a quarter acre strip of nature? If it’s, I mean, I get it for, you know, maybe birds and habitat, but it’s not like it’s going to, you know, sort of redeem the harm, supposedly, of what a well educated, regenerative grazer could be doing, which is only beneficial to the ecosystem, right?
Dr. Pablo Manzano
I think that’s really what gets on my nerves. That’s still there is this concept that grazing by livestock is not nature. Right? Why would it not? If it’s grazing – grazing is grazing, you know, and if you do grazing the way a wild herbivore would do it, then you’re doing grazing. And, for example, in Europe, it’s, or even in the North American Bison is a little bit more of a grazer. So it’s not the same. But in Europe, we put just drove all our grazers to extinction, we only have browsers and the problems that we see in this natural product that I was commenting before in Cabañeros National Park, there are some scientists saying that it’s not well conserved because it has too many deer. It doesn’t have too many deer. The problem is that it does only have browsers, it doesn’t have grazers. And the only grazers we have left are livestock. So you need livestock. If you don’t have livestock, it’s worse than if you do have it. And this is why when you see these interpretations that livestock uses so much agricultural land in the world, and people are just missing the very basic nuance that you have, you can do a positive or a negative use of land. And if you’re doing a positive use of land, compared to the abandonment scenario, I’m not talking about crops, then that’s something that you should do. And if you have ecosystems in continents that have had 15 million years to evolve under herbivory, which is a lot of time and you don’t have herbivory anymore, that’s a problem in and we are having troubles in understanding such a basic thing.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s why only an ecologists can see this the right way, right.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Talking about the savannahs on the open ecosystems, you know, I have become a little bit of you know, I do things on ecology, but on environmental science and on economy and on anthropology and so I’m doing a little bit everything. But there was a time I was visiting the congresses for vegetation scientists, which was my original discipline. And these are like in a congress and maybe maybe 60s, 70 I think in total. It must be like 400 in the world. So it’s a really tiny community. But among this community, everyone knows that these open ecosystems are natural, and that when you lose them, you lose biodiversity, and that there were no closed canopy forests, widespread all over Central Europe, or the eastern United States.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I mean, I think we need to say that even one more time for everyone in the back, closed canopy forests are not ideal. And certainly here in New England, where I live, that’s what everybody wants. That’s what everybody thinks it needs to be. We have a huge overpopulation of deer right now that are decimating the habitat of all the ground nesting birds. There’s a lot of disease and the deer population, they cause car accidents. Nobody wants hunting, because they don’t want to confront death, you know, while they’re driving their kids to school. They don’t want to see a dead deer on the back of a truck. They want to be able to walk in the conservation land and enjoy it without having the threat of hunting. And they just don’t get it. And they you know, they’re very excited when they, you know, buy, I don’t know, a pair of shoes, and every pair of shoes is a tree planted again. And it’s like, that is so just missing the point completely.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah. But also, you know, people sometimes have troubles in understanding ideas that are a little bit complex, not that complex. And I think also regarding the seeing of the forest and of the open ecosystems are no federal system, it’s actually not necessarily just a grassland. And again, you see that very well in natural savannas in herbivore dominated savannas of East Africa.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Can you explain what a savanna is for? There might be people listening that don’t?
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Well, it’s a mixture of trees, shrubs, and grasses. But it’s not an uneven mixture. And this is what I was going to explain. Normally the grasses are more competitive in plain areas, so that you… in the valley bottoms or even in mountain tops, but where, let’s say where, yeah, where the roads can make, let’s say a packed mat, they form pure stands. But that may not be very big, like there may be like I don’t… I mean, it really depends on the local conditions. But you may have like 15 hectares, or even 200 hectares of grassland, that may be surrounded by slopes, where you have shrubs, and where you have trees, which if you remember, that is the situation I have described for Cabañeros National Park, but it’s also what you see in in Serengeti National Park, or in the Mara… Masai Mara National Park. So you would have your stance of closed canopy forest in some slopes, but it would not be a dominated landscape, it would be a patch, especially at a little bit of a large scale, it would be a patch of grasslands, shrub, land, and forest. And I even coming from there, I even have a theory on how this idea of the sacred protection of forest may have come. You know, a lot of the interpretation of nature that we do nowadays comes from the Romantics, and from Alexander from Humboldt. And from people that were studying the… were starting to study ecology, and were starting to have to study nature at that time. And if you think about Central Europe, it’s a very densely populated area by humans. So for example, you used to have big herders that would go into chestnut forest or into oak forest the same way as we do in Spain right now. But they used to be something like that, in Central Europe, up to the 17th century, where the density got so high, that density of people, they basically…
Diana Rodgers, RD
They needed all those trees for wood for homes and everything.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
No. They needed not these trees, these pastures. These pastures in the Eden areas, they cultivated them all. And then well, the pigs disappeared because the use of the forests were more intense. But especially the pastures disappeared because they were all cropped. Yeah. And this is the distribution that we you will see right now you will have forests in the slopes and crops in a valley bottoms. So then imagine if you, if you are born are born at the end of the 18th century in the Romantics, and all the nature that you can see is the one that you see in the slopes, because they have the bottom of the valleys are all float that you will think that this is nature. And then now imagine that you want to discover the world as Humboldt wanted to and you are denied permission to go to India where they were elephants. But the king of Spain is in the middle of enlightenment – of the Enlightenment era. So they want to welcome foreign scientists to discover your place, to help catalog, to learn from your scientists, from your scientists in South America to learn from you, to do an exchange. So you Alexander for whom what you’re allowed to go to America, to South America, and in South America, the disease’s introduced by Europeans have decimated indigenous populations. So these indigenous populations that used to open the forest, the same way as elephants did 10,000 years ago, are no longer there. Because they have been extirpated from the landscape because of diseases. So you have a shrub encroached landscape, so you see trees everywhere. And then you go back to Spain with your… to Europe, sorry, with your theory on how nature works, which was brilliant, by the way, but you will believe that nature is Forest. And then I took up to the 70s when an American biogeographer Robert Whittaker started empirically observing biomes in the world observing ecosystems in the world. And he started to see that some of these dry forests that we see are sometimes forests, but sometimes they’re not. So he described an ecosystem uncertainty there in the climate ground that he built. And this is where William Bond has built on his theory on open ecosystems. So it has taken 200 years.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, you just blew my mind. That’s amazing that Yeah, I mean, I guess I was picturing also when I went to Iceland and I noticed there’s no trees at all, because the Vikings apparently cut them all down for all their…
Dr. Pablo Manzano
You know, but that’s a very… that’s a very interesting comment there now, because, okay, so we may wonder how does the world look without herbivores? We do have islands and I believe Iceland is an island emerged from the sea. So there were no herbivores. So the Vikings introduced herbivores there and brought havoc, because the local ecosystem there was not prepared for herbivores. When the Spaniards introduced goats in the Canary Islands, also there was a change in the state of these forests, because the floor of the Canary Islands has evolved without herbivores. And in fact, geo botanist called them tertiary forest, why are they calling them tertiary forest, because the tertiary forest would change the scales. And we no longer say that the Quaternary started 4 million years ago, but we say it started 50 million years ago. The tertiary forest, where a forest were rotting, dominated as a decomposition pattern of the matter, and not fire and not herbivores. So you find trees that are not very resistant to herbivory. They don’t have spines, but they do build closed canopy forest under a rainfall regime that is not too rich. This is what you see in the Canary Islands, unless the goats come and open everything. This is what you saw in New Zealand. New Zealand is very interesting. I had the pleasure also to work there for five months. And the natural New Zealand forest This is a forest grazed by Moas which were like giant ostriches. But the moment you introduce deer or sheep, you change the state of that ecosystem. And you turn it into an open ecosystem. Because grammatically, it would be an open ecosystem. Yet it was a tertiary forest full of brilliant tree ferns and very beautiful trees, because there were no herbivores. So I would say in the case of Iceland, either of Iceland, it’s a case of an island, whose flora had evolved without herbivores until humans came and messed up.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, and it’s so funny – this idea that while livestock is the whole reason why we’ve lost the wild herbivores, right, like, that’s another sort of like cows are bad because we have no wild herbivores left, and we need wild herbivores back therefore, we need to get rid of cows.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Well, you know, also having worked in Africa and still working in Africa, have a Tanzanian PhD right now that is working on that. I mean, it’s true that there will be some competitive exclusion. Definitely you cannot have the same amount of wildebeest or whatever if you have cows, and if you have not, but have you ever wondered why East Africa is the heaven of wildlife? And West Africa is not is because equatorial Africa normally has rain forests, and East Africa because of orthographical reasons because of mountain range reasons. It’s pretty dry. It’s in an equatorial position though. So it means that it doesn’t have one rainy season and one dry season it has to in a year, and that means that the milking animals do not dry up This is not what happens in the Sahel. In the Sahel, they have one long dry season, one long rainy season in Kenya, and in Tanzania and Uganda, they don’t dry up. So it means that pastoralists economies thanks to the milk are more competitive against agriculture. And thanks to that they have conserved their wildlife because livestock and wildlife are compatible. And there I mean, there have been also studies on trophic ecology showing that. So when you have actually lost the grazers, it’s because of hunting. It’s because of Well, I mean, if you go even further back into time, it may have been also with a conjunct because of a conjunction of human and climatic factors. But it’s not because of competitive exclusion of lifestyle, because there is an ecosystem that is possible and even good for the ecosystem.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I mean, even if you were to imagine here in the US, going to anywhere where there’s massive monocropping of soy or wheat or corn, you don’t see a lot of wild grazing animals just roaming around. But, you know, anytime I’ve gone to a, you know, a really nice, grass fed beef farm or bison farm, There’s herds of elk or wild deer or moose or whatever, passing through constantly,
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Or pronghorns
Diana Rodgers, RD
Or pronghorns. Yeah, exactly. Any… And I mean, that’s where you see the wildlife. Even in the chihuahua desert. When I was down with Alejandro, we saw more wildlife there than I could ever see here and in you know, in Vermont, in a closed canopy forest here in, you know, New England.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, of course, I was saying… I was talking about the pronghorns because if I’m not mistaken, I’m not sure if I’m not mistaking they’re grazers. So you may think there are no aurochs in Europe because they were displaced by the cows. Well, pronghorns are grazers you know, and you see pronghorns in livestock areas in the US, but you don’t see them in the prairie that has been completely transformed for monocropping. Yeah, I mean, we need to feed the world, okay, we are 8 billion people, it’s a lot of people. And we have to assume what we are about, obviously crops or the end of biodiversity and the end of of ecosystem functionality. We have to live with that. And we don’t have to feel too guilty for that. But definitely more guilty than if we eat a grass fed cow that is managed property.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I mean, that’s really the concern with the alt meat industry that I see is it means more monocropping. And that’s what people don’t understand. And as I mean, you know, in high income countries, we have a very large percentage 70% or so, obese, overweight. So, you know, people are over consuming monocrops that are nutrient poor. There’s nutrient deficiencies here, iron being one of the biggest ones, zinc, vitamin A, all best met with animal-source foods for the micronutrients in meat. And I just… so I tend to push back with you know, the US needs to eat less meat because even our beef… our beef consumption is less than two ounces per person per day. But yet our ultra processed food intake is, you know, 60% of calories.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
I don’t know, if you have reflected on… I’m worried also about the ultra process component, definitely. But also, as I work also with pastoralists civil society and service representatives and environmental groups, one reason of concern is also on food sovereignty, because it’s about, you know, just giving the whole production system on the whole food system over to, you know, to purely technological, industrialized ways of production that are also socially very obnoxious.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Completely. And, you know, it’s very interesting, because I, actually, the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast was to talk about the Jeff Bezos foundation that is, you know, they have a really big initiative for, you know, sustainable food systems. And I went through and I read all of it, and this was before I knew your paper was coming out. So I’m so excited that we got to talk about your paper and I know we’re getting close to running out of time. But one of the areas I was reading under the food initiatives there was about why he was giving a very large grant to the Good Food Institute, which is a think tank, you know, heavy heavily interested in the advancement of alternate meats. And one of the reasons they say is because of food sovereignty. And I can’t imagine anything more disruptive to the idea of food sovereignty than lab meets, especially when the you know, the driver behind it is going to be, you know, making profits for the investors. It’s going to further decimate rural economies. It’s more monocropping, which nobody is talking about. I can’t see any mainstream media talking about, you know, what is going into lab meats. It’s just all about this. I don’t know if it’s moral washing, it’s greenwashing. But in a more sinister, twisted way.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, moral washing is a good term.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Moral washing, right? It’s… they’re sort of stepping on people’s guilt around how animals are raised. Um…
Dr. Pablo Manzano
And you know, but it’s so blind, you know, because you kill… you kill many more animals when you eat a piece of bread, than when you eat a cow, you eat a cow. And you can give the cow a good death and good lives. But if you eat a piece of bread, you’re eating a lot of insects, a lot of mammals, a lot of birds, and have… I mean, you’re not eating them, but you’re killing them. And they have a horrible death, I prefer 1 million times to be killed like a cow is than crushed by a tractor.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right? And by pesticides.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, or by pesticides or buy or even like the, you know, the strengths of having synthetic clothing, because then you don’t enslave a sheep. But they are not aware of the poisoning for, not only for all fishes in the ocean by microplastics that are shipped by synthetic fibers, but also by dolphins and other creatures that we have a lot of empathy to. But also regarding the food sovereignty, I also don’t think people are aware that livestock as a food production system evolved in the Near East as a way to take advantage of marginal lands. And therefore, it’s naturally in all the best value systems in the world, our livelihoods for the most marginalized and more, you know, the people that are really in the… in less accessible areas. And they’re supporting lives and good lives there. So it’s something worth being kept.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yes, and especially for women to where in a lot of places, either when it’s illegal for a woman to own land, or they’re just not allowed. Even though it might be legal there. They’re blocked from owning land, but they can own goats and organizations like Heifer International have done really great work with, you know, getting women, chickens or goats that they can graze and actually liberate them from abusive situations, or, you know, just give them some economic freedom.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Yeah, and also, the role of women in pastoral societies is something that is really amazing, all the link with milk, all the link with the nourishment of babies, and also these nutritional demands that are higher for pregnant women and lactating women and small children. And also all the cheese industry and all the traditional cheeses that are linked to women. They were the ones that know how to do them, because they were the ones that stayed with the lactating animals. And it also shows how important it is to have a very integral and a very holistic approach for the development of rural communities, both in industrial countries in rich countries, and in low income countries. And I have also an interesting example of Spain, because in the 70s, with the 60s and 70s, with all the migration from the cities, from the rural areas into the cities, it was a differential migration by women, because they were not empowered in the rural communities. And this is something that I have also seen in, in the most back laid counties in Kenya right now. And this introduced a balance that put the whole sustainability that’s also social sustainability of the rural areas in Spain at stake, because of course, there were no there were no women, there was not a balanced population composition, but also opportunities for diversify income, and for making money in the future were lost completely because there were a lot of sorts of cheese, whose repository knowledge repositories were the women of the village and maybe all the women that have stayed in a given village. It’s women from other villages that married some of the men of that village, but the variety of cheese of that village has been lost forever. You know, and we very often do not understand that development is a complex thing that environment involves environment involves economics, but it is also involves very strongly, some social aspects that if we don’t care about them, we will have very bad problems in the future.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, so I see the alt movement and the drive to eliminate livestock as cultural imperialism very damaging and not just in developing countries, but also here in the US where we have such polarization between the urban people who think they know all the answers and assume that people who live in rural areas are not intelligent and unworthy of dignity. So…
Dr. Pablo Manzano
And that’s food sovereignty.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I know. Exactly, yes. So…
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Just for the audience to know.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yes, I know. So the whole… the whole idea of food sovereignty requires livestock. It must have livestock as part of that.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Definitely. Yeah. And also like sustainable crop systems, because if we think of the brilliant job that livestock has on recycling the matter, like I was saying also about the tertiary forests, you know, rotting patrician is also a way like more George Monbiot wrote recently about that, it’s also a way yes, but it’s a much slower way. It’s a much more inefficient way. And we have a couple of sayings in Spain about the miracles of manure that is, you know, in some popular thing, it’s revered as a magical thing as that really turns stones into food producing Earth, you know.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. Yeah.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Literally like that. It’s literally like that. And I don’t think we still know how it really works. And this is something that the regenerative grazing community is working on also because they need to understand better but I am sure we will have surprises in future years to come on scientific advances on that – on the marvels of manure.
Diana Rodgers, RD
The marvels of manure? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it just enclosing one of the really cool things that came out of the International Meat summit in Dublin where you were a presenter was that one German nutrition expert that was talking about or maybe he was the nutritionist or no, he was the circular economy right? And he was talking about how for every pound of plant-based protein there are four pounds of cellulose waste, that can be fed to an animal to be upcycled into protein or it can just sit in a George Monbiot pile, and slowly emit methane and not be upcycled into the micronutrients that are causing humans the biggest nutrient problems.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
That was Wilhelm Windisch
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yes, and they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. As you mentioned, we can be grazing livestock on harvested corn fields. It can… we can all you know, make it work all together benefiting the cropping systems, which you know, people are not gonna stop eating bread, they’re not gonna stop eating corn. But we can be making the entire system much better with the inclusion of livestock. Yeah. Where can people find you and learn more about your work? Read this paper, everything?
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Well, I’m pretty active on Twitter. I have a Twitter account that is called Pablo pastos. Pastos means pastures in in Spanish. So it’s like my gorilla name. And yeah, basically shared almost everything there. I also have an Instagram account and a LinkedIn account. But the one where I elaborate the contents first is on Twitter. And I tried to share everything there. I also tried to do layman summaries so that people do understand what the science that we do is about because I also feel a responsibility to give society back what society invests in us researchers, so yeah, I would recommend people to follow me there – @pablopastos.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Okay, we will put links in the show notes, and we’ll link to where this paper is, which is open access, people can read the whole paper, which is… thank you for that also. That’s really great. So I’m sure you had no control over that but I appreciate it very much.
Dr. Pablo Manzano
Okay, thank you, Diana. It was a pleasure.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
