Carolyn Hunter
“The T. A. Barron Podcast.”

T. A. Barron
Today let’s welcome Carter Roberts to this podcast. Carter is President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund in the US. It’s the largest network of international conservation organizations on the planet. Carter leads WWF’s efforts to save the world’s greatest ecosystems, and also address climate change by linking science, field and policy programs with ambitious initiatives to work with businesses to lighten their impacts on the planet. In addition to that, he is also an avid birder and a wonderful hiking companion, I can testify, whose sense of wonder – and sense of humor – are alive and well. Carter is also one of my most favorite people anywhere. He is, in his own life and work, I would say, as striking as a resplendent quetzal. Welcome, Carter.

Carter Roberts
It’s a great pleasure. There’s nothing better than being with a magnificent spirit and a magnificent place where we’ve got the Rockies to the west and the grasslands and prairies to the east and meadowlarks singing. So, what could be better than that?

T. A. Barron
I agree, lots of reasons for inspiration. Carter, recalling that wonderful leader, that visionary Rachel Carson, whose best book in my experience is The Sense of Wonder. It’s one of her lesser-known books, but I’ve always treasured that, because in following around her young grandnephew, she found her way back into rekindling that sense of wonder that she had as a child. She makes a beautiful and compelling case in that book that all of us deserve to rediscover that young child in ourselves whose sense of wonder in nature is so alive. Because if we start with love of nature, then we want to learn more about it. And then, once we understand it better, we want to work hard to protect it. But it all begins with love. So, in that spirit, could you talk about what were your first truly awesome, magical experiences in nature that really got you on the path that you’re on today?

Carter Roberts
There is one that looms large above all others. And it was when I was growing up in Georgia and I grew up in a boisterous household and found myself compelled to leave and to disappear into the woods and just soak it all up. And the moment that I flash back to was – I developed the practice of turning over things because there’s always something underneath. And it was that great sense of curiosity, of just wanting to not look at things the way they strike you immediately, but to turn them over and see what they were hiding. And for me, it was always turning over logs and finding these brightly colored salamanders that were improbable. Like these jewels that were underneath these logs swarming around. And the dark, rich humus of decomposing soil underneath. And I love those salamanders. I loved them then, I love them today. And that was just the beginning. And it led me to sit in the woods and also just listen to the songs of birds, which is now one of my greatest loves. But you can only do that if you sit quiet and you still your mind and you open yourself up to the equivalent of those tidal pools that Rachel Carson and her family saw.

T. A. Barron
In your busy days leading one of the largest conservation organizations on the planet, do you find time to get out in nature and rekindle that love?

Carter Roberts
I was born with the unfortunate pathology of waking up at 5:00 every day, [Laughter] and I’ve been that way since I was a little kid. And what that means is even to this day, I wake up that early. And I don’t sit in bed because nothing looks good when you’re lying in the dark, you got to get up and get busy. And so, every day I end up – one nice thing about having a dog is the dog needs to be walked. And I go for long walks with my dog in the morning. But when I am either at home or in a new place in the world, the very first thing I experience is sound. And typically, song, and the songs of birds. And when I wake up in a place where I’ve never been before and I hear songs I’ve never heard before, it’s like Christmas morning, and wondering who is singing and wanting to go out and find them and see what they look like and identify the creature. And I don’t care where I am in the world, it could be downtown London and it could be on the east coast of Africa, it could be in the mountains of Mexico. And in those early hours is magic. And it’s before the world wakes up, it’s before I have meetings to attend, it’s before any of that. And it is the most magical experience to just soak up the sounds, the songs, and who’s singing. And if I’m in a new place, to learn something new that I’ve never seen before.

T. A. Barron
Wonderful. Let’s turn now to this great organization that you lead. Carter, could you talk a bit about in this era, 2022, in a world that clearly is struggling with great crises in biodiversity and loss of nature, in climate change, in the oceans, in so many realms, can you please give us a sense of what are your greatest goals in managing World Wildlife Fund and also, what are the most important challenges?

Carter Roberts
It’s a big job, if your mission is to save the planet and to build a future where people and nature both flourish. That’s a big goal.

T. A. Barron
Yes, it is!

Carter Roberts
It’s not just about nature, but it’s also about the extraordinary degree to which we, all of us, depend upon nature for our culture, our myths, our food, our livelihoods, our economies, everything. And we screw it up at our peril. And so, as an organization, we think a lot about – what is our unique niche? Or, what is our added value? And I often say, if you want to understand what an organization is all about and what its core DNA is all about, go back to the moment of conception and why it was created and the very first act that that organization took. And for WWF, our work is really all about the landscapes and seascapes of the world. And we were born to capture the world’s imagination, galvanize the world’s action to save them before they’re gone. Places like the Serengeti or the Amazon or the Mekong.

And so, for us right now, our work really boils down to keeping those landscapes and seascapes intact. And at the same time, lightening the footprint of humanity is a major contribution to that. So right now, among our biggest goals, one is a partnership that we built with the Nature Conservancy, the Pew Charitable Trust, a lot of the biggest philanthropists in the world to work with governments to expand park systems in 25 countries in the world and to fully finance them so they can be defended in perpetuity. We’ve done that in Brazil. I’m working on that right now in Colombia. We’re doing it in Kenya and Chile and Mongolia and Peru and Belize and so many other places in the world. And I love that work. It’s at a scale. It’s the biggest conservation move in the world right now. And it takes advantage of the fact that many leaders in the world right now have set a goal to set aside 30% of their country by the year 2030. And right now, we’re working with the President of Columbia and achieving that by the year 2022. So, I love that. That’s a big play for us.

Another major objective is to change the way food is produced and to do that by working with the biggest companies that buy food to burden their supply chains, to make sure they did not drive deforestation and how food is produced. And for your listeners, don’t forget, 70% of the water in the world is used for food production. Food production is the leading cause of habitat destruction in the world. Food production delivers 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. So, if you can move food production from using a lot of land, energy, and water, to the best practices, which use one 10th of that, you’ve accomplished something great. And so that’s another major goal for us.

And then something that you and I both love is to think about the next generation of leaders. And how do you give them the support, the contacts, and the resources for those leaders to save their own places? Because at the end of the day, that’s what every place needs, is a leader that can draw the world’s attention, spark great things in the part of the community, and keep those places intact for generations to come.

T. A. Barron
There is enormous power in that, isn’t there? You’ve often said that the world pays a lot of attention to climate change now, but not enough attention to the loss of nature. Could you expand a bit more on that?

Carter Roberts
Well, the world pays a lot of attention to climate change and not enough attention to nature. And I’ve had people say to me, you will regret having not spent every dollar on climate change because it is the great threat of our time. But when I look at the world and I look at the degree upon which we depend on it, the places that we care about will be long gone by the time we fully solve the problem with climate change. And when we lose those places like the Amazon, for instance, not only will we lose the world’s greatest forest and the world’s biggest free flowing river, but we will lose glittering diversity of life there. All the terrestrial forms of life, all the forms of aquatic life. We will lose the home of 300 human languages that are spoken. We will lose an engine for sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. But the real hidden magic of the Amazon is we will lose an engine of hydrological cycles that takes salty air off of the Atlantic, which drops rain, evapotranspires up through the forest leaves, creates clouds that drop rain, that is repeated over and over until it slams into the Andes and then heads south and creates the rainfall for the second biggest breadbasket in the world. So when you break that weather machine, the world will suffer. That is why nature matters to us.

T. A. Barron
Well said. I would only also add that we would lose something irreparable in the human spirit with the loss of nature.

Carter Roberts
You know, I think if you go into any nursery school classroom or any elementary school, kids are obsessed with animals. It’s not just me as a little kid with salamanders. They are besotted with animals. They love them. And they love them out of a sense of wonder that – isn’t it amazing that we inhabit and share this planet with creatures that are so different from us? Hippopotamus, elephants, tigers, dragonflies –

T. A. Barron
Resplendent quetzals.

Carter Roberts
Resplendent quetzals. I mean, birds, that – resplendent quetzals that live in cloud forests, in oak trees festooned with orchids, live in nest holes and only eat avocados for a living.

T. A. Barron
[Laughter] Is that right?

Carter Roberts
That’s all they eat. And yet they are revered by the Maya. Their feathers change color based on the way that light hits them. And every time we lose any one of those species, my conviction is we lose part of our soul. And people talk about the economic value of nature. I’m not in this business because of the economic value of nature. I’m in this business because of that sense of wonder you talked about. And also, when I’m in nature, it feeds my soul to be in such awe that we share this planet with thousands, millions of creatures. And it’s our responsibility to make sure we don’t lose them.

T. A. Barron
Brilliant. That’s exactly right. It is the great challenge of our times.

[Music]

Carter Roberts
If I could add one more thing, having been at the Global Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow this past fall, kind of wandering through all the corridors with people in dark suits and negotiating agreements. For the first time in 20 years of attending those, the role of nature was elevated and omnipresent throughout all of that because the world has woken up to the fact that you cannot solve climate change without saving nature. And at the same notion, you can’t fully save nature without solving climate change. The two issues are as wound together as the strands of a DNA Helix, and we have to be able to think about both at the same time.

T. A. Barron
So true. Let me ask you, if you went into that hypothetical nursery school classroom, and you sat down and you looked into the eyes of a young girl in that room, and imagined her world 50 years from now, what do you hope that world will be like for her?

Carter Roberts
Well, I have three kids, and I think about that all the time.

T. A. Barron
I understand. [Laughter]

Carter Roberts
And what I – [Laughter] and you do, too. And what I wish for is that the air will be clean, and the rivers will be drinkable. But that all the many creatures that we know and love in these landscapes that are part of our culture and part of everything we grew up with, that they are not only still there, but they are flourishing. Because one thing we’ve learned is if they flourish, so does humanity. And so what I wish for is, that little girl can not only know what it’s like to wander around in her backyard with a fair amount of freedom and roll over logs, find some salamanders, get lost in the glory of it all, but also as she becomes 50 years old and she is out there in the world, that there is stability and security in the world. Because people, wherever they live, can not only enjoy nature, but can feed their families because of the fish they catch in the ocean, because of the water that they can find locally and drink, and because they can provide for their families in ways large and small, knowing that the planet that is our home, is still a home that provides for us all.

T. A. Barron
That’s a wonderful aspiration. And that’s what I think we all need to think about is what world are we handing on? And in every decision, it helps to telescope, the choices we have to make today, don’t you think?

Carter Roberts
Yeah. We have several challenges in this work. One is to think about the immediate, but also to understand the consequences and the consequences of the food that we eat, the way that we live our lives, the institutions that were a part of the choices that they make. And at least in the United States, a fair amount of the world that we inhabit is driven by quarterly financial reports and stock prices that drives decisions by government and businesses. When in fact, the leadership that we need is looking at the very long term. What’s the world that we’re going to leave to our children and our grandchildren?

T. A. Barron
Seven generations.

Carter Roberts
Seven generations, perhaps. And one of my great friends, Jeremy Grantham, asked the question for those politicians who were questioning climate change and fighting putting a price on carbon and all of that, just ask the question, have they no grandchildren? Because those decisions are fundamental to the life our kids are going to inherit.

T. A. Barron
Right. Look, all of us who are conservation minded, completely understand and passionately support what you’ve said. What can we do better to reach folks who don’t understand or even agree with these priorities today, in order to help us all collectively make wiser choices for the future?

Carter Roberts
You know, we live in a world today in which people are having a hard time understanding each other. We live in a world today where people demonize people who are different than they are. And we live in a world today where with social media, and its various algorithms, where controversy and attacks get more attention than bridge building and compassion.

T. A. Barron
Right.

Carter Roberts
And I think for all of us when it comes to – how do you convince people who don’t quite understand – the very beginning of that begins with understanding where they’re coming from already. It’s to take the time to understand somebody’s reality, to meet them halfway, and then to tell them stories in a way that they understand the relevance of this issue to their lives. And you do not do it by shouting. You don’t do it by demanding. You do it by dialogue and mutual understanding and meeting people in the middle. I’ve often said we don’t inhabit a world that is black and white. We inhabit a world full of shades of gray. And our job in conservation is to help individuals and institutions transition from practices of the past to practices of the future, from fossil fuels to renewable energy, from extractive approaches, to business, to circular economies and renewable forms of production. And I think you need to be patient, but you need to build bridges. And as a society, we need to take more time building bridges than we do today, because only then will you come up with solutions that last.

T. A. Barron
Marvelous. That’s the vision. That’s the vision. Carter, one last question for you to end our conversation. Of all the marvelous wildlife encounters you have ever had, what would you choose as your most favorite, cherished encounter?

Carter Roberts
Boy, that is like asking me to choose between my children. But I love my job. I think I’ve got the greatest job in the world. I’ve seen all the great coral reefs of the world. I’ve been in rivers, I’ve been in the mountains, I’ve been to forests. I’ve been to the Arctic. I’ve – so many different things. And I’m actually sitting here flipping through the catalog in my mind of these moments where I have been transported.

T. A. Barron
So just pick one.

Carter Roberts
I’ll pick one. And the one that I’m going to pick is when the very first time I had learned to scuba dive in some lakes on the east coast. Not particularly interesting inside the lake, but it was in preparation for going and flying all the way across the world to the very western tip of the island of Papua. To a place called Raja Ampat, which is the world’s richest coral reefs, which are surrounded by these vertical karst mountains. And before slipping over the side of the boat, seeing cockatiels, birds of paradise, in these forests, and then putting on my gear, slipping over the side of the boat, and sinking down into the most glittering, magical kaleidoscope of color and shape, fantastical creatures, coral reefs, and wobbegong sharks and schools and multicolored fish and sea horses and sea fans and just being transported by the wonder of it all. It is improbable that we would live in a world with such glories.

T. A. Barron
Highly improbable.

Carter Roberts
Highly improbable. And I remember just getting lost in it all until my guide tapped on my shoulder, pointed to my gauge where I’d realized that I was about to run out of air.

T. A. Barron
Right.

Carter Roberts
And I had to go back up to the top. And I just remember ripping off my goggles and looking at my friends and just with my eyes wide – that I just felt like I had seen the most incredible thing I’d ever seen in my life. And those places, those coral reefs, are very much threatened today. And so that little girl in that classroom, I’d love for her to have that experience when she’s 50 years old.

T. A. Barron
Well said. So saving nature is saving all of that, that you just described, times 50 million.

Carter Roberts
That’s right.

T. A. Barron
In places large and small, in creatures diverse as we can possibly imagine, more bizarre than any extraterrestrial being that’s ever been described right here on our home planet. If we can do that, think what we will have saved. Thank you so much, Carter, for everything you do every day at World Wildlife Fund and for spending your time here today. I can honestly say that a conversation with you is as sparkling as the wings of a resplendent quetzal. Thank you so much.

Carter Roberts
Tom, thank you. I don’t know if your listeners know this, but you have touched the lives of so many organizations in this field and so many individuals and have given them the confidence and also the encouragement to do great things. And I think at the end of the day, for all of us, whether we’re parents or teachers or involved in this work, that’s one of the most important things we can do is help other people do great things in this world. And I’m sure all of your listeners have been inspired to do great things because of the conversations you’ve had. So thank you for all of that. And thank you for having me.

T. A. Barron
You’re welcome. And thank you back, Carter. Honestly, folks like you inspire me much more than any inspiration I’ve been able to give to you. Thanks again.

It’s been great in the last two episodes to speak with Rue Mapp and Carter Roberts, two heroes of conservation. And whoa, we need our heroes today more than ever. I think of heroes as kind of trail guides. Trail guides for us all as we take our walks through life. These are folks who can show us just how far we can go and just how high we can climb. Join us for our next episodes as we explore the importance of heroes and meet some inspiring young heroes.

To everyone out there, let me just say thank you so much for joining us for “Magic and Mountains.” We’ll see you next week. And in the meantime, may you have magical days.

Carolyn Hunter
We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of “Magic & Mountains: The T. A. Barron Podcast.” Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information and to find all of T. A.’s books, visit TABarron.com. Have a magical week.