Worth

We will be headlighting the podcast program with this one night only live show at the festival's 25th anniversary. Come on out on June 9th at 6pm for a show that will literally give you chills. Mmm, tickets are available now at trybackofilm.com/audio that's trybackofilm.com/audio. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nasser and today we're resurfacing a quite provocative episode we originally reported in 2014. Now that sounds like a long time ago until you start listening and you start to realize how many parallels there are between 2014 and this moment right now.

I'll read just healthcare costs, war in the Middle East, climate change. In every one of these cases, the specifics that they're referring to have changed. But the overall picture remains depressingly the same.

“Honestly, since it came out, I still think about these stories.”

I still remember them all the time, especially the last one. I would say this episode is one of my all-time top 10 radio lab episodes.

I hope you feel the same way whether you are hearing it for the first time or hearing it for the tenth time.

Here it goes, worth. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio from New England. WNYS. Yeah. Read why. Are you ready?

Yes. I'm fully worth it. I'm feeling full of value. Well, in that spirit, I'm Jad Abum Run. This is Radio Lab and today.

Three very different stories that try to put a dollar value.

Move in, it's okay. $1 million. $7. $10,000. Yeah, I would say $5.

One thing that seems... Priceless. Priceless. Priceless. Okay, so start at the top.

Bring on the pressure. Alright, we're going to start the show with a story from our producer, Molly Webster. I don't remember any of this.

“Could we might actually want to rename Molly Wongster?”

Because she recently got herself to some serious numericizing.

Actually, it didn't start as a Wongky thing.

It started actually with some medical journals. Yeah, it was. So that was, that was interesting because it was some of the most poetic writing I've seen out of doctors ever. One journal article said like, "What would one more month mean?

To a 37-year-old mother who has four children?" Or, "What would one more month mean if you are a 67-year-old? Who's about to go traveling around the world?" People were just kind of like drifting these questions out there. Were they...

All these questions seem to circle around a seemingly simple story of the pricing of a drug. Cancer drug. And the story, if you really want to tell it from the beginning, it begins with this guy named Leonard. Leonard salts, I'm a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kitter and Cancer Center.

Which is here in New York and it's one of the largest cancer centers in the country. I mean, we have 17 doctors here who treat colon cancer. Just for colon cancer.

“I treat a very large number of patients.”

It's a huge hospital and one of the things Leonard's been noticing in the last, I don't know, decade, is cancer drug prices have just gone through the roof. I mean, we have drugs out there that are many hundreds of dollars per pill. Really? Yeah.

Just wait. Let's see. Where does this start? It starts? It's June in 2012.

Leonard salts is at a conference and at this conference is a pharmaceutical company called Sanafi. And they give a presentation about a new drug that they have. A drug called Zaltrap. And Zaltrap is a drug that without getting into the science too much targets the blood supply to the tumor. It cuts off the blood supply, which means the tumor can't grow.

That's the scientific hypothesis. So this new drug is presented and they present the data. And they showed that the survival difference between the people who got Zaltrap and the people who didn't was 1.4 months or 42 days. In other words, if you take this drug, you could get 42 more days of life on average,

which means you could get three more days. You could get no days. You could get 42, or you could live another three years. 42 days. Yeah.

Oh, please, I could show you some graphs that have been put up at meetings that show survival curves calculated out to two decimal places in terms of months. So I'm looking at this. It's not a tenth of a hundredth of a month. A hundredth of a month.

That's a little over seven hours. Pretty amusing, actually. Why would you? Why would you? It's pseudo precision.

Anyways, after the conference, the FDA approves the drug.

And then the private insurance companies just follow suit.

“Which means you get prescribed the drug and people pay for it.”

And what is the drug cost? That's the thing. It costs roughly three thousand four three month course. So Leonard's like, wow, that is expensive. And there was already another drug on the market.

Did the same thing and it cost half as much. To put that in context, this is just one drug that's eleven thousand dollars a month. A normal cancer patient might take dozens of drugs. There are anti-nausy medicines that are sometimes used that are in the range of ninety to a hundred dollars of a tablet and you take a tablet once a day for three days.

One needs growth factors to help support the white blood cell count, which you sometimes need in chemo. This can be five thousand dollars every two to three weeks.

If you need antibiotics to treat infections, those aren't cheap.

And then you need a pharmacist to prepare it. Their labor intensive need tubing and equipment and needles to give it. You need train nurses to administer it. You need doctors to take care of the patients. And don't forget there's a cost for a CAT scan or MRI.

And then of course someone's got to pay for the real estate that he'd in the likes. None of those prices are figured into it. Okay, I'm just giving you the cost of the drug. So Leonard calls up one of his colleagues. My name is Peter Bach.

I'm a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Peter is the number crunch of the group. He does this statistical analysis of, I don't know, the cost of care. And lend grabbed him and ran him through all the data. And we walk through the out of pocket expenses for Medicare beneficiaries.

Medicare beneficiaries if they don't have additional insurance. Twenty cents of every dollar they pay out of pocket. And that number sort of hit him because he realized for Medicare patients. They'd be paying something like $2,000 out of pocket every month for just this drug.

“Twenty-two hundred if I remember the number correctly.”

For a lot of Medicare patients. That's all of their money. Never mind other drugs. That's when I thought we should go public with it. Memorial Sloan Kettering, they decide to boycott this drug.

Now, is that, I mean, I'm just stopping you because when you guys made that decision, was that that feels like a big deal. It did feel like a big deal. And it felt like a big enough deal that we decided to write the op-ed piece in the New York Times.

They write an op-ed in the Times that basically says, look, this is crazy. $11,000 a month for a drug that maybe gives you 42 more days of life. Is that worth it? And little less than a month after the op-ed piece came out. The company that makes soundtrack.

They went to individual doctors offices. They sent representatives and said, we're offering a 50% discount. They cut the price in half, just like that. Yeah. Nationwide or like just in this area.

Nationwide.

It was sort of incredible.

We reached out to Santa Fe to talk about the price of Zaltrap, and they declined to comment. But in a statement that they released when this whole Zaltrap thing happened, they said that they incur so many costs for researching and developing and bringing a drug to market that that is what their pricing is based on.

Leonard doesn't disagree. We need these companies. They're the ones developing the drugs. Which aren't easy to develop. I mean, Leonard gave us just one example.

If we talk about colon cancer. He says for years, there was only one drug on the market called 5FU. 5FU was patented in August of 1957. It was from 1957 until 1996 that a second drug came along.

“That's how long it takes to develop a good drug.”

Or in that interim, there were over 70 drugs that were tried and failed. Like I don't give it enough credit because that just astounded me. It's very, very hard. And that, according to Leonard, is one of the reasons why prices are just going to keep going up. But sooner or later, this system is going to fall apart.

And at what point does society say, there isn't an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system. It's funny because I had this interesting reaction to the word society. Because all of a sudden I thought like, why is not not like a crazy death panel way? But I thought, why is society involved in my conversation with my doctor about if I want to take this drug

that may give me another month and a half of life? Why is society involved? Because you're not paying unless you have hidden resources I'm aware of, probably couldn't afford ten to fifteen thousand dollars a month in drug bills. Someone else has to pay that.

Obviously he says it's your insurance. I mean, say you're part of a policy that has one thousand members. Let's say that the premium for that is a hundred dollars. So we had a hundred dollars, thousand people.

Okay.

“So we now have a hundred thousand dollars to take care of that thousand people.”

For that month. Whatever amount of time.

If now one person comes up with a healthcare cost, let's say it's for a month.

That is a hundred thousand dollars in that month. Everybody else has a trouble. There's no money left. So they write this up ed saying prices are too high and the drugs are not that great. And sort of the next notable wave is there was this, there's this journal called Blood,

which is really big to anybody that works in a community that has called Blood. Yeah. How did we not know about this? We made the blood show. Oh, I knew.

Just kept it in here. So yes, the journal called Blood, which is basically like the the journal for anybody that works in a field that has to do with blood. And what happens is like a hundred doctors get together and they co-sign an editorial, which basically says we totally agree with everything you guys are saying, but we haven't even bigger issue.

You know, with zoutrap, you're talking about an expensive drug that maybe doesn't really do that much.

It's kind of easy even though it had never been done before to say we're not going to use this.

What all of these doctors in the blood editorial are saying, what do you do when you have a really expensive drug, but it's really, really good. It's like a drug you actually want to take.

“Is that like a like a one day in the future we will face this kind of question?”

No, that is like a now today question. The most important new medicine approved this year. Everyone I talked to pointed me to this new drug, Solvaldi. So known as Savaldi, Savaldi, many in the medical community are calling the new medication. The blockbuster.

Savaldi came on the market last December. So that's December 2013. That's correct. This is Bruce. Bruce Moore.

I'm the editor of Commonwealth Magazine. He's written about Savaldi and here's the basic story, right? It is a drug that treats hepatitis C, which is caused by a virus. And the disease itself goes to work on your liver. It inflames it.

It scars it. It can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis. It can be fatal. And for the longest time, the treatments that they had just really weren't that great, or they just had Rretched side effects.

But along comes Savaldi. And it's one pill 12 weeks. You take it with some other anti viral meds. It is a super simple treatment option. And the side effects are very minimal.

It was like kind of like the savior drug. So a lot of doctors start to prescribe it. And the first half of 2014, 70,000 people in the country in the United States were treated. And it had a 95% rate of cure. In other words, the virus was eradicated.

That's very big. But in fitting with our story. This drug costs $1,000 a pill. For like one pill that I take one a day. Which, as you can imagine, it angered a lot of people with hep C in total.

It costs $84,000. And if you think about the fact that in 2014, we know at least 70,000 people got this drug. Then you're starting to talk about serious money. Wait, I just want to say that I, I just timed out 70,000 times 84. And I got something with seven zeros in it.

It's five eight eight and then there's seven zeros, which is like a bit five billion dollars.

Yes. Yeah.

“The big question is, how states will pay for what could be upwards of it?”

And so we have a situation where states are basically having to ration. Yeah. Say in Massachusetts, most of the insurers currently are requiring some liver damage before you can take the drug. Similar restrictions are happening in other states. Florida is happening in Oregon, Illinois.

The doctor says the only option may be to wait until you're even sicker. And then there's Arizona out of the entire state. Public insurance only approves 180 people for treatment. Well, it's just 180, just 180. Now, when I talk to a representative of the company that makes the drug.

Greg Alton, executive vice president for corporate and medical affairs for Gillian sciences. He says you gotta keep in mind. This is not a chronic care situation. This is a cure. Here, you're actually curing a person of a disease.

We're talking about 12 weeks of therapy period that's it. And you're done and you've cured somebody. So he says, this is a one time deal. This is like one time, $84,000. And then you're done.

Think about all the years you'll live without having an illness. Then you'll see over a 20 year period, the savings that will accrue to the system by having a patient cured of hepatitis C. He also said it's important to understand that every hepatitis C suffer is not going to hit the system at the same time.

Which is totally true, but I think there's like this bigger picture here.

And Bruce points it out too. It's sort of like a precursor of what could come because these companies are developing drugs all the time.

“What if you could get a drug, but it was very expensive to treat diabetes?”

And then you're talking tens of millions of people. In enormous segment of the population. Even if just a fraction of them want a drug that's a thousand dollars per day, that's practically our entire US budget. What do you do in that case? A drug comes along like that and throws everything out of whack.

This is the part where I really sort of got hooked in where it's like, how do you answer this question? Is it that, you know, at a certain point, you just draw a line and you say, beyond this point, we're not paying. But beyond what point? Exactly. I mean, that's the hard part. Like, how good does a treatment have to be for you to say?

This is worth the price that it's been set at. I don't think we had rejected out of hand, but I don't think I got into this a bit with Leonard. In the case of Zaltrap, they said, all right, 42 days, that much money, we're not going to do it. But would it have been different if it was 50 days or 100? Is that enough?

“I'm sure you wanted to be talking in years, but I guess the question is, what would be them?”

Is there a magic line for you? Um, if I, this is it, I can't personally determine it for everybody. I wouldn't presume to try, but ultimately, as a society, we're going to have to reach an understanding of what that cut point is. Because we can't afford not to. And the question that sort of bubbles out of this conversation is, what is one more year or one more month or one more day of life worth to us?

Are we going to pay a thousand dollars for an extra day of life? Well, what about a hundred thousand dollars for an extra day of life? You know, people like to say, yeah, so what's the value of human life?

And the answer is, boy, that's a complicated question, but a really important one.

Because nobody thinks it's infinite. He said that, and I was like, okay, it's not zero, and it's not infinite. Is there an answer like in the middle? And so I started looking around, I don't know, I guess I was wondering, has anyone actually thought about this? And so I started looking around and what I realized was that the World Health Organization actually,

I mean, I guess they almost have a number, but it's a number per country. They have the recommendation that country's spend. It's going to get gobbly gookie, but just bear with me. The country spend one to three times the GDP per capita, which is like the gross domestic product per individual. So take the entire fat ball of money that is in a country and divide it per individual.

Divide it by the individuals, and then you spend one to three times that on one more good year of life. And what would that be for us? So for the US, if that's about 50 to 150,000. Interesting. Is that, does that have any teeth? That recommendation?

It legally doesn't have any teeth, but it has teeth in the sense that doctors in the US are actually going to start using this WHO number to evaluate medical treatments for cardiology. They said they were going to do this in a paper, and it was kind of very quiet, very subtle. But in other countries, this conversation is very loud, actually, it happens at the government level. They're also passing out surveys where they're asking citizens what is your limit on how much you want to spend on one more good year of life.

Have they done that here? As far as I know, no. Why not? Because because the last time we tried to talk about cost in medicine, it ended up in the whole... Death panels?

Death panels, or so-called death panels? Something. And... I don't know. I just wondered right into the mess of it. Hey, times square.

“If I actually tried to go out and ask this question in a very basic way, how would people respond?”

Excuse me. Can I ask you a question? What is a year of life worth? Wow. What a question? That's deep. Can I think about it? That's a tough one, but... I was a really surprised at how seriously people took the question.

Man, what is a year of life worth?

That was the first thing I noticed. Then the next thing was, no one could answer the question until I had answered like a million questions of theirs.

Am I going to die tomorrow? Yes. Where do I get that year? So I get it at the beginning of the middle of the end. How would I spend that year of life?

Good. It would be a good year of life. A good year of life depends. Is this like a pie in the sky, kind of answer? They wanted to know, would they be emotionally happy alone with friends or family? Where do they get the money?

Because they borrow the money. They have to pay the money back. Where they dying wasn't an emergency. Other people also trying to get money at the same time because then there'd be like a rush on the money in America.

Did you actually ever end up getting numbers?

I did get numbers, but they were... At least $10,000, $15,000. The $13 million? $7. All over the place.

Yeah, I would say $5,000. $10,000. $4,000. $44,000. Interesting.

One woman said $10,000. $10,000. For a year, it's irresponsible. Will you ask me about my personal choice? $10,000.

Not about a public policy question. What do you have any way of parsing office? No. I really, I honestly don't.

“I think my biggest takeaway was like no one punched me.”

Which makes me feel as if people are ready but willing to engage in this conversation. But I also realized I kept talking about things and I just wanted to be in the room with patients. I just wanted patients in the room with me because it was like we were all having this conversation that eventually will all be patients, I guess. But we were also having this conversation around a group of people that weren't ever present.

Like, they're not at conferences or not in research articles. And so that was when I started talking to patients. Ah, well, I guess what is 42 days mean in the sense of is that something that you'd pay $50,000 for? If you were, I mean, of course you would. It's like, no, I almost didn't even ask the question but I don't know.

Well, I know I think it's a good question. I think, ethically, it would be to the good of patients and doctors to have this conversation. This is Susan, Susan Goobar, writer of the Living with Cancer Blog for the New York Times. Back in 2008, Susan went to the doctor.

“She hadn't been feeling well for a while.”

They thought it was some sort of bowel issue. But then the doctor walked into the room and said she had the advanced stage of varying cancer.

Most of varying cancers are diagnosed at a late stage and it's basically incurable.

It can be handled. It can be managed that it can be kept at bay and for longer periods of time now we hope. But you're given a diagnosis of three to five years. Wow, that is. You go from having unlimited time in your mind to three to five years and like a doctor's visit.

Yeah, it's it's it's a big shock. You sort of enter his own. Well, you're not quite aware of what you're doing. That day the day she was diagnosed, she was told pack a bag getting a car and drive to Indianapolis. You need surgery now.

So I went the next day to Indianapolis and the day after that I had the debugging surgery, which takes out the ovaries and the uterus and the philopein tubes and the spleen. And sometimes the cervix and sometimes the appendix and the bowel. Are you serious? Yeah, it's called the mother of all surgeries.

And then just like that, she was doing multiple rounds of chemo. Chemicals that are used, they destroy all quick growing cells. So for example, you have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes that you know. You also can I got terrible saws in my mouth. I have no idea why, but I know this happens to other people.

But yeah, the other thing is this extreme fatigue. And Susan, who writes for a living, couldn't even read,

“I would look at the page and think, had I turned a page?”

Chemotherapy, it really is toxic to the spirit, to the heart, to the mind. Just the normal aspects of life feel polluted. Have you ever had to think about cost?

I was never informed of the cost of any drug or any procedure I was given.

Which really makes me think about how masked these costs are. Would you want to be thinking about cost while you're going through it? Or is it better to just say, hear your treatment options? These are statistical outcomes like pick one and then we'll deal with it on the other side. I think there's an kind of unspoken agreement among everyone that the insurance company or Medicare is going to pay.

And if it's the government, that means that our grandchildren are going to end up paying for all of this money. So yes, I guess to answer your question, I think it would be healthier to know what these things cost. The other hand, I have to say, as a patient, I was so traumatized. I'm not sure I could have taken that information in. I was thinking about what is worth, what's it worth?

A title, and I was thinking that the American individualistic optimistic response would be,

But whatever it takes will not cure my cancer.

So I think this question changes when you have incurable cancer. It becomes a different question which is when is enough enough. I remember she said that when is enough enough? I was just, I don't know that we are ready to say there's one magic line. Throne back to this conversation that I had with Leonard Salt, where he was saying that we have to look at everything in terms of value.

“You need to think deeply about the kind of life you want to live.”

It's not just about how many days, it's about what kind of day. So if you told me that there was something that gave 72 days survival benefit, but it makes people feel nauseous for most of the time. Is that worth it? We're trying to draw this line as a society before we figure out what we're willing to pay. We have to think about what we are paying for.

Yeah, I don't think we know what for Susan, six years ago she decided that she was going to get chemotherapy, because in part it would be more time with her daughters. Yeah, and suddenly it's worth it. Yeah, but I think we changed by the treatment too.

For now, Susan's cancer is basically under control, because she's on this new drug.

For two years and now a month, and I am counting. I've been alive without our occurrence, without the cancer growing, by taking these pills every day.

“And I take them at home. They're not infused in the hospital through my veins. They're just pills.”

And it's made last few years remarkably normal, like the new normal. But when these drugs stop working, and I've been told they will stop working, I'm not sure I would want to go back to chemotherapy. But I suspect I don't know until I get there. [Music] Producer Molly Webster.

And now, for the thank yous for that piece, we want to thank Stephen Hall, and as you mentioned, Susan Gubar's book called Memoir of a Deboked Woman.

And thanks also to Dr. Tugwonday for all his help and his latest book.

Which is really, I really thought it was a wonderful copying mortal. Yeah. And thanks also to Nikki Haines. And to Glenn Blumquist. Radio Lab will continue in a moment.

On this week's on the media, I spoke to the Maga Warrior who ended up defending the federal emergency management agency against the administration's assault. He proceeded to break me over the fact that the media got a whole story and was running a topic that they felt was too sensitive and not fit for public domain. The topic was abolishing FEMA.

Correct. You don't want to miss this one tune into on the media from WNYC. Find on the media wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] 3, 2, and hey, I'm Jedi Boomron.

I'm Robert Crowwich. This is Radio Lab and today. Well, we're still on the subject of worth, but this is a totally different take. Yeah, and this comes from our producer Matt Kielty. So, next, a slightly different story about worth.

A story that rather than being about how much we value our own lives is about how much we value someone else's. Right. And it starts with Buzzfeedwriter Gregory Johnson.

“So, okay, maybe you should start with what does now become sort of the infamous wedding,”

wedding drone strike, is that right? Was that sort of where it started for you? So, this strike happens in a very rugged part of Yemen, where there are no paved roads, no electricity, there's no running water. It's Thursday morning, December 12, 2013, and early that morning in a small village. A group of guys roughly 50 to 60 people including a soon-to-be-married man, pal and no bunch of cars, and they start driving.

This is the convoy, the wedding convoy. Now, in the lead car of this convoy, was this man? His name is Abdullah Muhammad Al-Taisi. We spoke to him through an interpreter in Yemen. And Abdullah told me it was his neighbor who was the groom to be married that day.

And so, they were all driving up to the bride's village. Abdullah said they got there a little before noon, eight lunch, recited wedding poems. After lunch, they grabbed the bride, and just a few of her bridal attendance, a few females,

Abdullah said that everything they'd left that morning through lunch all day long. They heard this humming.

“This sort of metallic worrying, this metallic thumping overhead.”

No one in the convoy could see it, but they knew what it was. It's nothing new for people in rural parts of Yemen by this point, they don't think anything of it. It's common to hear those sounds. So, they keep driving.

Basically, if you can imagine it, they're sort of winding through these waddies, these desert mountainous places.

They're all strung out on this rotted out little dirt trash. 11 cars, single file. Finally, they reached this little clearing. Up near the top of this cliff, where they all slowed down and started to bunch together. Because apparently, one of the cars that got in the flat.

Some guys got out, fixed it, got back in their cars, then right at that moment. The sound shifts somehow, and then the missile started. Four of them. In quick succession, the shrapnel is just flying everywhere. In a blink, it's over.

“People are trying to figure out what has happened, all the screaming.”

There's fires that are burning. In a duel. Oh, shawaiyata shawaiyata. His car was torn up. He had shrapnel in his face. One in the right hand, left thigh, one on in the back.

And he says that once he saw there was smoke.

His first thought was, "Where's my son?"

He was looking for his son. His son was there? Yeah, a young man who'd been a few cars back from him. The fourth car on the con boys. And he was married with two boys and one daughter.

A duelist said he could move, so he got out of his car, and stumbled back toward the fourth car. Hey, why don't you get down to say that? Why don't you get down to say that? To find his son.

Yeah, he said he found him just next to the car. Before he just, he died.

I'm telling you what's going on in Tokyo.

No, he didn't talk to him. He looked at him and just passed away. So it turns out that there are 12 dead. And typically what happens in Yemen is that as soon as someone is killed, they're buried very, very shortly thereafter.

What happens here is something different. The people in the con boys take the bodies of the dead, and they take them back to redda. This big town, you're where the drone strike occurred. There's a video I have.

“That's what you're hearing, receive some and take these 12 dead bodies.”

And they align them up in the street on this bright blue tarp, and they sort of wrap them in these cheap blankets. And so there's this huge crowd that just gathers around to stare at these dead bodies who are laid out in the street, and at a certain point. This very tiny, very leathery old Yemeni,

who sort of holding onto the back of a pickup with one arm. He stands over the dead. Sort of swaying over the bodies and just lecturing the crowd on what happened. He's just screaming at them, and so... You can hear his voice.

And then he starts to go horse. And he's screaming in American drone killed these. It was a massacre. His people are on their way to a wedding. Why did this happen? Why were they killed?

Why did they target this convoy? Well, according to the US government, they had received intel that on that day, in this convoy, was an al-Qaeda operative. Name Shoki Al-Badani, who apparently had been planning attacks against the US. That's why they took the shot.

And in fact, they say that he was wounded in this wedding convoy strike. And do we have any reason to believe that? I have no reason to believe it. Greg spent weeks in Yemen talk to survivors of the drone strike. Talk to people who are there, no one knows this guy.

And Greg says the guy isn't really a member of either the tribes that were involved in the wedding. And so to him, it makes no sense that he would be there. To him, this was a terrible mistake. But what really got me interested in Greg's reporting, which can read on buzzfeed.com, highly recommend it,

"What the US did next?"

“Because the question is like, "What do you do in this case?”

How do you repair something like this?" When you have two totally different cultures with two different traditions, how do you find a way to try to make this right? The galaxy can't think of you. I mean, historically do soldiers have an obligation to repair a damage they do?

No, there's no obligation. But what's happened is we've actually created an obligation for ourselves. Hmm, in Americans, huh? Yeah, yeah, this has a really long history, a history that's, I mean, really legal, legally?

Yeah, yeah, legal history, really. And there's a great law professor at Yale. What's his name? His last name is Witt. It's John Witt.

That's me. Uh, we ended up checking down John Witt. I jet, how are you?

“To talk about how the US first started to try to write their wrongs in war.”

So, what is the foundation story of all this? That starts with General Persia and World War I. So, 1917. America is called to all. It's a great war ramps up, so we start shipping on men.

Thousands of them and millions more to follow. Over to Europe. We'll be all over, we're coming all over. Specifically France. And in charge of these men was a man named John Jay.

Commander of American forces on the Western Front. Sternman, handsome mustache, bit of a fabric. General Persia's nickname was Blackjack.

And when he first arrived in France with his troops, General Blackjack Pershing.

He's got this problem, which is that he has jeeps. Filled in America, shipped to France, and man by our men. So World War I is the first war in which the US is shipping a lot of automobiles. More than 100,000.

“For the soldiers to drive cars, trucks, jeeps.”

And jeeps are really great. They get his men from one place to another. For Perdi. Damien to, I don't know what to say. But they also run into French farmers, chickens and cows.

Children sometimes just the farmers themselves. With these random collisions or with their no roads. I'm going to bet there was some of everything. Sometimes it was probably just ordinary car accidents. And sometimes no doubt a little French wine was involved.

So this is Pershing's problem. He's trying to run a war overseas. And it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear. And so Pershing has an idea, which he actually bars from the Brits. And that is he will use cash money to write our wrongs.

Well, and so he goes to Congress and begs for a statue. And Congress obliges really quickly. There's no sign this is a controversial thing.

But it was genuinely new thing because for the first time in the history of war, as far as we could tell,

you had a state compensating individuals. Usually it's state to state. Here you have state to individuals. And so the US government starts systematically pain money for the loss of a non-American life in war. How much?

I don't know. It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation, mentioning specific amounts. But whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked. Pershing wrote in his biography that the swift and prompt settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people. So it seemed to work really well.

And it's just the idea here that this is what we would do with the drone strike victims we talked about that we'd pay them money. Well, it's actually, it's a bit trickier than that. Because the thing that Pershing got in World War I came with a catch. And that is that there's a combat exclusion. In case you just walked in, that's Gregory Johnson.

And what he means is that this law basically what it said is that we'll pay your claims if it didn't happen on the field of battle. And it wasn't a combat situation. If it was combat and it was on the field of battle, then tough luck. That's just war. So if US soldiers were driving to a fight and they ran their car into somebody and they damaged that car, killed that person.

Those people would not be able to get compensation. Whereas if the US soldiers were driving to a bar and got in an accident, they would be able to get compensation.

But the problem is, once we get into these counter-insurgency wars.

Civilians are suddenly in the middle of the fray. Chargers have been made that troops killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians during a sweeper. This isn't a way this story of modern warfare. There ain't pirates that'd be getting to sound over back there. President Karzai says he's delivering his final warning to the US after US air strike accidentally killed one of the dozen mothers and children.

By the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting is happening in cities. So there's no difference really between the battlefield and where people live. And so the line between what's combat related and what's not combat related, it starts to get blurry. And so in 2003 in Iraq, what happened was there were actually people lining up.

People started lining up outside of the he's saying, "My family has been harmed. I want help." How many people do you remember? If I had to guess, it was, you know, maybe around 80 people or so. That's a ton of people. Yeah.

That's John Tracy. He was a military lawyer in Iraq in 2003 and before him, Marla Keenan. I'm managing director of Center Force civilians in conflict.

“So when they came with a complaint, what sort is it like you ran over my chicken?”

Are you knocked out my window? No, no, no, no. Much more serious. I think of cluster bombs during the shock and all campaign. One of the types of bombs that we were using, or the air force was using, what were they called cluster munitions.

Basically, John says air force planes would fly over these targets and drop hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little bombs smaller than a coat can.

A lot of them with land and maybe a parking lot or a field. I mean, wouldn't explode. So on a number of occasions, you'd have mostly was kids, right? Because the kids would see it and they didn't know any better. It would just run over and kick it and then that's when it would explode.

That's what I mean. Right. I had a lot of those close to a dozen. And so that was a, that was a difficult one because, well, it's combat because they are forced dropped it because they were, you know, bombing the city.

Right. But at the same time, days, weeks, even months have gone by and this thing is just sitting in the ground. Couldn't we say, it's not combat. And this was a real question that John had to ask his boss and then his boss, his boss. They eventually sent the question up to the army claim service and they said, no, it's combat.

Meaning they're not going to pay.

Basically, like, we are in an, in an armed conflict and this was an unfortunate incident.

But an incident that happened during a lawful combat operation and therefore, we're sorry. And that's basically it. So I said no to a lot of people. And so like in World War I, with general perishing military officers, they started lobbying their bosses for an expanded system. So they could start making more payments.

And eventually the military does expand it. In fact, I taught to one of the military's top lawyers. I'm a regular general, Richard C. Gross. I go by rich. I'm the legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And he told me that around 2006, paying out these kinds of condolence payments actually became sort of a key part of military strategy. Absolutely. Even had its own acronym. Maws. MAAWS.

It's money as a weapon system, which, you know, I'm not sure that title resonates with everybody, but Interesting phrase for sure. Yeah, exactly. But it's the idea that money can be used to win hearts and minds that help bring the population over.

“And it just got me wondering, how much money makes a good weapon?”

Well, I haven't, like the US military hasn't given me access to a database or anything like that. But through FOIAs and interviews, I've seen different numbers. Maws is that in 2006, the ACLU filed a FOIA request. And eventually got their hands on hundreds of claims files. And in those files, what you see are a bunch of different numbers.

But one that comes up again and again, $2,500. $2,500 by large. Now, someone like John could have paid more, but that meant they'd have to run the claim up the chain of command. Exactly. So it was almost like there were these ceilings.

$2,500 for a life. $1,500 for property damage. And then eventually the property damage amount got raised to $2,500 as well. And that didn't make any sense to me. That somebody could get so much for a Toyota Corolla, but you were just going to get the same amount for a loss life.

Like, I can't get over, I mean, $2,500 seems like just such a nominal amount. And the practicality of that money of, like, if you were to kill someone who is the bread winner of a family that $2,500 would not be able to support this family in any way.

“But we're not actually trying to pay full compensation, right?”

Like, we're not trying to say, we think if this 20 year old man had lived to be the average age in Afghanistan, then he, you know, that it would have been $60,843. Right? Like, that's not the thing. If you ever, you know, we had people who were killed here in an attack.

The federal government is one step closer to cutting its first checks to families of those killed and injured on September 11. And those people have been compensated. The levels of compensation to the New York victims is pretty high.

The range of payments for a death claim ranged anywhere from $250,000 to just under $7 million.

Do you notice that? I do. I do. But it is to a large degree of comparing apples and oranges. That's general gross again.

Because you're talking about a legal system. Where a country is paying their own victims.

So, that's a very different type of monetary payment.

Well, yes and no. Essentially, it's a person's life. Yeah.

“I mean, I think there's an argument to me made that there's an empathy in the number that you come up with.”

And the amount that you pay for someone's life. I totally get what you're saying. The $2,500. I think it's any amount of money. If I told you 10 would you feel better about it?

I feel a little bit better. You went? I think so. What does it get you though? In the end, $10,000 doesn't buy anything more back than what you lost.

I don't know what 10,000 gets you exactly in Afghanistan. But my assumption is that it gets you a lot more than 2,500. But does that really help you? Is that really what you want? Is the money unimportant to you, really?

Sounds like the money is really.

“I'm not a victim, so I don't know that I can answer that to me if it happens.”

And at this point, Marla told us a story about how before she got into this line of work. I had several friends who were journalists. One of those friends was a man named Chris Hondros. Yeah, he's a photojournalist. He was a photojournalist.

And back in 2011, Chris was on assignment in Libya, moving with a rebel group when they were fired upon. And Chris was killed. Yeah. And Marla says, "When she found out that happened,

I wanted someone to explain to me why that happened." I mean, so I just wanted to explain. I didn't, you know, like, I knew his family wasn't going to get any money. I knew that these guys shot a rocket propel grenade at him. We're going to care.

No one was going to explain. But I wanted that. And the money then becomes an occasion, for you say,

like, not just I'm sorry, but here's what happened.

It's the here's what happened part. I think it's the token that's given with the apology and with the explanation. But it's the apology and the explanation that matters to you.

“Yeah, that's why we call it a mince, making a mince.”

One of the things that is true of money damages generally is there are desperate effort to find some common language between the party paying and the victim. Some Esperanto for communicating the meaning of what's happened in a language that the other side knows matters.

That's how John Whitt puts it. Because we see it everywhere we look. We see a pod not just apologies, sometimes not apologies at all. But we see the the almighty dollar, which is both distressing and also we know it's meaningful.

But the problem is, in order for that Esperanto to work,

it has to say the same meaning to both sides, which for John Tracy, wasn't really about the money at all or not just about the money. It was as much about the envelope that the money was in or that there was a real person there to hand it to them. I wasn't the one who rated their house.

I wasn't the one who killed their daughter. But most of them, you know, just wanted to look at somebody who's in a uniform and say, you really messed with my life. And that opportunity is exactly what Abdullah Al-Tayisi. Mahumaham, a letter that or what like this.

We'll never get. His son was killed by a drone he never saw, operated by a man who never met on behalf of a country and still doesn't admit it was a mistake. And so the money he got,

which in the end he says was the equivalent of 30,000 US dollars, way more than anyone got in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, all he can do without anything else to go on is just compare amounts. Well, he can accept that. Only if he gets the payment equal to those, you know,

to like an America. How you can persuade someone who lost his son, for example, killed. It's the payment was equal. Yeah. Producer, Matthew, killed him.

Big thanks to Gregory Johnson, right, for Buzzfeed, who started us off on this adventure when he brought us to the initial story. He also thanks to Buzzfeed Editor Steve Candel. And to Shahi Ba Masawa for helping Matt organize that interview in Yemen,

and he was able to get interviews that we didn't think he could get.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to him. Coming up. That's next. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour,

UFC President and a close friend of Donald Trump's. Dana White. People can ask me about Donald Trump for the rest of my life, and I'll tell you all the great things that I love about this guy. What I'll be happy to be out of is politics.

I don't want to talk about politics, whether there is Obama's this guy or that guy. None of them. That's the UFC's Dana White on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

“Okay, now it's my left ear. Hello. So, how are you?”

Good. How are you doing? I'm good. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Ron. I'm Robert Crowe.

This is Radio Lab, and so far we've been talking about the value of our lives.

And then the value of other people's lives. Next up, the value of... Everything. All of it. Everything.

Everything. I'm by everything, of course we mean. The value of nature. That's Carl Zimmer, science writer, regular, lower of minds. So, we think of ecosystems as just kind of sitting there.

But actually, they're doing things. They weren't doing them for us. We would have to pay to do them artificially. For example, cotton farms in South Texas. So, the farmers are doing their thing like this guy.

James Parker. Plant in their cotton, they're collecting it. I formed about, I don't know, usually five to six, seven hundred acres of cotton. So, say 2000 bills. They're doing what farmers do.

I spend a lot of time on a tractor.

“And you have to check your water every morning or even.”

Meanwhile, they have all this extra help in the air. Yes. They have bats. How many bats are out there? You really don't know. Flying all around.

The bats eat the equivalent of two-thirds of their own weight in insects every night. Wow. They eat all night long, all kinds of bugs. A whole bunch of pests that would otherwise be eating the cotton. Now, a few years ago.

Then John Westfall. Did a calculation. Just to see how this arrangement was working out. He came out to my farm and did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him.

And those girls were out there all hours of the night. Listening to what the bats were saying. And each year, the farmers, collectively, they make about four or five million dollars off of these farms. Question was, how much of this was because of the bats.

You know, bats are natural pesticides. You know, the more they were eating, the less I got to spray.

And here's what the scientists figured out.

Out of four to five million dollars, it was around $700,000. That you could subscribe to the bats. It's just beautiful. Wow.

I mean, it does make me think that if you're those farmers, you should be compensating the bats. Yeah. Well, yeah, it does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value that nature has that we generally just totally ignore.

But we talked to a guy who didn't ignore it. My name is Robert Costanza. In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute limit. Yes. So the question was, what's a value of all of these ecosystem services globally?

All the services on earth. You know, it's bugs, eating leaves, worms turning the soil. Eidles, chewing, tree stumps. Coral leaves, protecting cities during storms. Everything.

We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done around the country in the world. Like the bats study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms. They look at that. Tropical forests, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean, woodland, temperate forests.

You know, it goes on and on. Grasslands. This must be some Excel spreadsheet. It's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from how it can get tricky. So Castanza and his colleagues took all these different studies.

Some of them together did a whole bunch of math and came up with a number. Which in today's dollars is $142.7 trillion per year of services. And that's more than all of the gross national products of the world.

“That's how valuable the services of nature are.”

Let me ask you, like, I get the way this would work with a bat. Like the bats eating the bugs. But like, how do you do it with like a field or something? Like, do you just walk through? Like, yeah, that's 20 bucks of services.

That's 50. Like, how do you even figure out what the services are? Well, they came up with a list. So the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about. Because different ecosystems provide different services.

For example, a salt marsh.

We're in the water. What is it?

Salt marsh isn't like the Florida wetlands but salty.

I have suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is. Salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast. Got it. Yep, we're standing in about a foot of water here. We're quickly approaching high tide.

We sent one of our producers Simon Adler to a nearby salt marsh. Partially to hazeln. Your boots are much more water. Yeah. Really the doctor this guy.

My name is Adam Welchall and I'm the director of science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut. And Adam gave Simon a kind of inventory. Some of the services provided by coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that can provide it over time. One of the things that does is it takes water that's coming in from inland.

And it's laden with all sorts of pollutants. All sorts of bad stuff. The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle. And then very often the marsh grass will suck up that water into the roots and clean it up. Yep.

“So you could ask very simply how much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean.”

Well, there's one other study. Adam Welchall said that scientists in New England have already figured that out. For flood control, water supply protection, pollution control. It's roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year. Then you've got to add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner.

$338 annually per acre. Then there are the birdwatchers that buy lattes and support the local economy. $490 per hectare. And then there's habitat provisioning. The list goes on and on and on and on and on.

You do get kind of obsessed with it. You start like you start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously. And it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before. There's this galling element though or this aspect.

Like when I first came across at this point,

our producer Tim Howard jumped into the interview and you'll also hear our producer Soren Wheeler in just a second. I do feel like in an example like the salt marsh, which cleans water. That's all reliant on people being there that need the water.

“So if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?”

But Tim haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get like if you make the aesthetic argument, which is that nature should be preserved for its own sake. There's a whole category of human and it just doesn't respond to that argument. It's this becomes a way to talk across the aisle. But it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of a paid leave value.

But you can't really be infinite value. I mean, like a mother's love. You don't think your mother's love is priceless. I mean, you know. Okay, I totally accept that there is the sort of priceless aspect of nature.

But if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make. If somebody comes to you and says, okay, you've got these lovely mangroves. Now it turns out that the sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aquaculture. Because shrimp farms need lots of sea water, so it makes sense to put them by the sea. We're going to put in these farms.

We're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue. If you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving,

that might be a really powerful argument.

Now into that kind of a discussion, you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there. Very quietly doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things. In fact, they've done these kinds of calculations. And in some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp. So it's stupid.

It's just stupid in a very basic sense to want to replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture. Is that a hypothetical situation? No, that's what we are asked. This is Glen Marie Lang. She's an environmental economist for the World Bank, and she says very often, she finds yourself in exactly this kind of conversation.

Particularly, you know, I work for the World Bank, so our primary clients are our governments. Philippines Vietnam.

“And when you're talking to a minister of finance and saying, you know what?”

I know jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value. They'll say, well, yeah, that's true. But that means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget. You've got to really make a strong argument about the benefits.

That's really where the rubber hits the road. Well, I mean, that's it. Here's the counter argument. It comes from Doug McColley and ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The real danger is that we actually succeed that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money.

And then we're really in trouble, and the many instances where it doesn't make us money. What do you do in a situation, he says, where, say, a bunch of rivers are running dry. And they're, quote, depreciating and value.

That makes me feel really uncomfortable.

“He says it's just kind of a weird way to think about nature.”

We had a proposal here in the Santa California to make gay marriage legal.

And economists had to look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California.

Well, it's good to know that. I appreciate having that information in front of me. However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation, and I would say that when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand. They're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state. They're thinking about a different set of values.

On the other hand, I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries. That when you don't put a value on these services, basically they don't get counted.

“They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn Marie Lang.”

And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.

The parable of the bees, we heard this first from writer JB McKinnon, who says the story begins.

And Mow County in central China, rural area, fairly remote, lush green mountains filled with apple orchards. And apple orcharding was the main business. And according to JB in the 1990s, the wild bees of Mow County slowly started to disappear. And there was a few different reasons given for that. It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one. Because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market-based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples. So they started spraying pesticides. Probably it was a constellation of all of those things in a few others. And result is a bee stopped buzzing in Mow County, which if you are an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

As bees travel from flower to flower and search of nectar, they are dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then you don't get fertile flowers to turn into, to turn into fruit. And obviously, if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income. So what do you do?

“If you're an apple farmer, and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers.”

And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand.

In Mandarin Chinese, we say Jengong Shoufeng, so it basically means a manual pollination.

This is Harold Tibo. I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper Lumoon. A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mow County, so he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car. And we drive for like five or six hours until we reach this village, Nanxin. Tiny little village, like only a few houses.

And then we took a smaller road in between the fields. And we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the trees, like on the apple trees. Straddling up on this often thin and spindly branches, men and women that I've seen in photos in any case. Harold and his friend took pictures and if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding a little brush. Just a little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chop sticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen. And then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen. They dip the brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again and they dip the brush back in again. And they paint again and they dip again and they paint it to make sure that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.

It was very strange to see a humans doing the job of the bees. What a pain in the ass. That sounds like. The image of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world through environmental circles. And the message that it seemed to send was that, you know, this is what happens if you, if you lose biodiversity, you end up standing in the trees doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing for free for free. Those people just like human bees. But then this guy enters the story. This is Jinsun Chen.

Yeah, human bees. Four years ago, he traveled to Mount County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mount County.

More production, more production. This can be confirmed. There are more production for hemp on nation apple trees than a bee on nation apple trees. Humans are more efficient. Really? The people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it? Yes. A lot better.

“Fruit production went up 30%. That's what the farmers told Jinsun Chen, which is kind of amazing.”

The only word I remember amazing. Because I think hemp on nation can pollinate most thoroughly. They can pollinate every flower. And bees don't pollinate every flower. Bees are a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating. You're so polite. They don't like it if it's cold, they don't like it if it's damp, they don't like it if it's windy.

In all those cases bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off. But you send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom and they're going to do it.

And there is the additional benefit of the people that you paid, they go to the bar, they buy groceries, they spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.

So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are, and it's whole parable of biodiversity. It turns out maybe the lessons just the opposite, that actually we don't need bees, and maybe we never did. If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that some species or some ecological processes, just aren't necessary in certain places, or that we might even do better to take care of those processes ourselves. Right.

So let me find my notes about the wages exactly. But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold the boat told us that when he visited Nen Chen. I talked with the one farmer, his name is Zeng Zegao is a 38, and he said in his opinion, the hand pollination might disappear in a few years. Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.

The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them, basically it's not efficient,

“economically, to do the pollination anymore. That's what a lot of farmers say.”

Now they're likely thinking, "Damn, we need those bees back." Right, yeah. Problem is... There are no bees in those villages anymore. When farmer told Harold, beekeepers and other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area,

because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used, that's where when wild bees might come back. Well, for this we have no idea, it's very hard to make a prediction. If you have the farmers, they're like, "Oh, well, I don't know." Here's where that story leaves me. It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go.

Putting an arc of value, even a precise and thoughtful value on a bee, or an amount of pesticide, you do it, and you think you're smart. But then the value changes, the bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing, to being worth everything,

all within a few years, this is what markets do, they swing back for us, and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can.

So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong. Or try to give me... When are you the other side for a second? Nowhere in the story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, "You know what? The bees do have value, here's the number." In fact, you know, Carl, when we were talking to him, told us, "You know, there have been estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees,

is $190 billion." So that's globally, right? But still, there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero. But remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued more than bees go down and bees go up. I get to have a lot of numbers in your head.

But here's what I like about this idea is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking.

You can't just say, "Don't do that." I mean, that's the thing that like conservationists say, "Don't, don't, don't." But if you say, "Don't do that because here's the value." Here's the loss. Yeah, here's the loss. Well, then that actually gives the whole precautionary don't thing some teeth. Well, except for this, that if you go businessy on nature, and you're wrong...

There are irreversibilities.

“That's how environmental economists Glenn Murray Lang puts it.”

This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems, and what we produce. You smash your car. Hey, someone can build a new one. If you lose the bees, many instances, you cannot bring them back. So the question we got to is, is there another way to think about the value of nature?

I mean, a way that's not economic, and therefore short-sighted and all about us. But also, not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

Right, or J.B. McKinnon again.

“Was when it struck me that, in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diverse.”

The all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do is like an extension of our own brains.

There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own. That we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we, as humans, are able to draw. And that when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply empower ourselves. In a sense, we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to dream. [Music]

J.B. McKinnon's book is called The Once and Future World.

“He's written many, but this one is my favorite.”

Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's reporting in the New York Times.

On this topic is really what got us launched into this whole thing. And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Adler, who's production assistance was invaluable. That was him freezing his ass off in the marsh. I talked so long that he really died. This tool is fell off, anyway.

Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Simon.

And thank you, guys, for listening.

I'm J.B. McKinnon. I'm Robert ProLitch. We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Gabby.

“I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits.”

Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lottiff Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor's Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

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