Part One: Humanity's Final Chapter / Lyle Lewis

The bureaucracy of species loss in North America

This is part one of my interview with Lyle Lewis, former endangered species biologist and author of Racing to Extinction: Why Humanity Will Soon Vanish. We discuss his decades long career working under the US Department of the Interior, and the various bureaucratic hurdles that stood in the way of protecting and preserving endangered species in the various roles he served there. Lewis holds a unique position, and describes why, and how, the human species precipitated the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.

The last half of our interview—part two—deals more with Lewis’s research into the evolutionary reasons why humankind is reaching the end of the road—our own extinction. That will be released shortly.

To read the full interview transcript, visit the episode webpage.

The transcript of our interview was edited for clarity and length.

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Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

Patrick Farnsworth

I do actually want to just begin the way the book begins. It begins with a disclaimer, and I want to read that really quick. You write,

This is a work of non-fiction. The current health and status of the planet has not been embellished. No names have been changed. The current and past actions and behavior of Homo sapiens have not been fabricated. No characters have been invented. The author is not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any mental challenges that may arise from readers absorbing the information provided in this book, including, but not limited to, anger, depression, horror, alarm and panic.

Was that your idea to put that disclaimer at the beginning of the book?

Lyle Lewis

It was, yeah. I kind of adopted it from—you see that in fitness books all the time. A disclaimer about "see your doctor" and all of that kind of stuff. And it just seemed appropriate for my book.

Farnsworth

I think having done this podcast over the years and having discussed the subjects that you really get into in your book, there's really no way to—it's good to have that warning and that disclaimer because there's really no other way to really approach it than to just say this may produce extraordinarily complex feelings, and all kinds of reactions. And it's good to come into this space to know that, to understand that.

And also, I just want to make this note that throughout the book, and especially as you get to the last chapter, there is something of a reflection on what we call the five stages of grief. I think you make the point that it's not really a linear process. Often we go back to anger, or sometimes denial reappears, or, we may enter a place of acceptance, but it's not like you stay [there]—at least for me, I'm speaking personally. I don't just stay in this place of acceptance. And so I do think when I started reading your book, it just sort of pulled me [in]—I felt like I got back into this mindset of really understanding the point of all of this and what I've been doing, and really just addressing the subjects that you are doing a great job of going over in the book, which is just explaining how human beings are part of a larger system, and we are not exempt from the laws of nature, as it were, or the sort of processes of evolution, and that we have overextended ourselves as much as we've overextended the life systems of the planet. And there are consequences for that.

And so, a basic question is, I'm sure you wanted to write this book for some time, but I wonder what your process was to get to that point where you really decided to put it all down on paper and print it and make it into, I think, a really excellent book. How did you get to that point?

Lewis

It wasn't until several years after I retired that I came to the conclusion that there was no way out. Because during my career, I've fought individual battles, usually for species or ecosystems. And so I was always really focused on the particular environmental conflict that I was dealing with at a time. I never had the time to actually step back away from the entire process that I was involved with and look at a bigger picture.

And so it wasn't until I'd had two or three years to kind of reflect back on my career that it just kind of hit me one day that there's absolutely no way that we can survive. It's just not possible.

I felt like I should try to articulate this book for people that either don't have the wealth of experience that I had in dealing with environmental issues, and also for people that, because of the status of the planet now and how most people are urbanized, very few people can experience nature, and I felt like I owed them at least the opportunity to understand what was happening and why.

But I didn't want to write a book. I honestly did not want to write this book. I didn't want to immerse myself in such a dark topic for such a long period of time. I didn't want to sit for such a long period of time to write a book.

And so I kicked the can down the road and kicked the can down the road. And finally, I was taking care of an elderly parent, and as a result, I was becoming more and more on a shorter and shorter leash as a result of her needs. I finally just decided that it was time. And even then, I started writing the book, and for the first six months, I didn't tell anyone that I was writing the book because I wasn't sure that I would be committed to finishing it. And it wasn't until the—I think I mentioned the article about Michael Shellenberger bad-mouthing Elizabeth Kolbert and Greta Thunberg and just spouting a bunch of disinformation in Forbes magazine. That was kind of the tipping point where I just became really committed to writing the book.

There was one other aspect to it. I kept hoping that somebody else would write the book. And what I learned from that episode is, my perspective is unique for a variety of reasons, and the main one is, most of your environmental books are written by either journalists and academics—they're written by people who just care, but don't have either any of those backgrounds. But no one has written a book that kind of takes the politics, the extractive industries, the bureaucracies, and melds those into the ecology of what's actually happening. And only the kinds of jobs that I worked in melded all of those [together]. I was kind of at the interface of all of those things simultaneously in the jobs that I worked. To actually deal with extractive industries on a regular basis, to deal with bureaucracies on a regular basis, that's where the actual action is.

Academics—I dealt with academics all the time in terms of trying to get them to produce research that would help give the rationale for why an extractive industry was hurting a species or not. And in many cases, they just like to do what they like to do. And so, they produce interesting research, but it's oftentimes not relevant to the issues that we are dealing with.

So I was at the interface of the academics, the bureaucracy, the politics, all of these other things, and few people seem to survive that. I'd never met anyone in my career that remained a staunch environmental advocate in the face of all the conflicts and confrontations—but still experience the full range of the political fallout, the bureaucratic fallout, the academic fallout, and just the internal politics, but that's where things either happen or they don't.

Academics can produce all the research they want to. And over the years, we'd go to wildlife workshops and fisheries workshops and ecology workshops where academics present their research, and then what they do is hope that somebody listens to it. They don't have any say in what happens with their research. You can do research until you're blue in the face, but until somebody is interested, or somebody cares, or is so compelling that the government is forced to do something, they just have their fingers crossed, unless someone like me, that does have the ability to do something—which oftentimes I didn't—uses their research in some manner.

There was a lot going on that made me realize that no one was going to bring my perspective to the table, because it just wasn't there. And so I felt it was necessary for people to understand my perspective,

Farnsworth

Right. The book is a lot of things. It's in part memoir or autobiographical. The Department of the Interior in the United States is a very large department, famously, and there's a lot that falls under it. Could you talk about what your roles were? Specifically, you're talking about how you were at this sort of nexus point of all these different things. So, I felt like the way that you told it is that, you have this expertise, you understood the consequences of these decisions that were being made bureaucratically. But you often stood as—if you could, at least—a sort of sticking point. You're throwing sand in the gears a little bit. You did everything you could as one person to stand in the way of some of these efforts to affect the ecology or various species. So could talk about just what your roles were, and what you tried to do as a person within this bureaucracy?

Lewis

Well, I started out as a range technician. I worked as a range conservationist, a watershed specialist, a hydrologist, a fisheries biologist, an ecologist, a wildlife biologist, an endangered species branch chief, an endangered species recovery coordinator. And during the course of that, I worked with livestock grazing and logging interests, with mining, highways, urban development, rights of ways, renewable energy, border issues.

And that was the other unique thing about my career: as a result of the experience I acquired, I had a really broad background in terms of seeing all of these different disciplines and how they interacted with each other, but then I also had a very broad base of extractive interests, not only the ones I mentioned, but irrigation and farming obviously has one of the biggest impacts on the environment we have today, and chemical applications and things like that.

I worked in all of those at various times, or supervised biologists that did work on those issues. And so, as a result of that experience, they gave me a very unique way of looking at environmental issues that most people who worked in one discipline their entire career, or an academic that worked on one issue their entire career, it's just not possible to have. All of those disciplines and the broad background gave me some insights into how all of these things interact.

We talk about the butterfly effect and how a butterfly flapping their wings in North America can cause a hurricane somewhere else. It made me appreciate how much everything is affected by everything else. And it also gave me an appreciation of working as a hydrologist, because I had a really solid plant background. But to bring the hydrology and the botanical expertise into wildlife management is really important in understanding how the whole ecosystem works.

And then, with the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), it was mostly habitat management that was the issue. But then I transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the last third of my career was with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and then I became a regulator and looked at the legal and the regulatory aspect of all the issues that we were dealing with.

All of those things together gave me both a unique [perspective] and an appreciation for how much everything affects everything else.

Farnsworth

Yeah, and there are certain points where you're really explaining just how you were a pebble in the shoe. You were the one who was actively trying to do what the job description of those positions were. But often that's not actually what you're supposed to do in those positions. By supposed to, I mean what the kind of social norms or the pressures are within those institutions. Because obviously, in these institutions, these bureaucracies, people are basically competitive. They're trying to get to the top. They're trying to get better careers, better pensions, better pay, and so on. And that has more to do with capitulating to various moneyed interests.

And so, give us a few examples of how you stood in the way or tried to stand in the way of some of these more extractive processes or projects that involved the Bureau of Land Management, or whatever it may be.

Lewis

Well, the kind of the final nail in my coffin was I moved to Northern California. I'd been involved in a bunch of issues in New Mexico at the time, and I thought, well, a change of scenery would be good for me, dealing with new personalities. And also the main issue was the northern spotted owl. As a result of the Clinton-Gore Northwest Forest Plan, I thought, I hadn't heard too much about northern spotted owl controversy in the first decade of this century. And so I thought, things were probably running smoothly, and a lot of the conflict and controversy surrounding water issues, especially in the southwest, I would escape and get some diversity and learn some new things. And so I moved to Northern California and became immediately embroiled in what I discovered was not what I thought.

Logging of old growth was continuing unabated, and as a result of the influx of barred owls into northern spotted owl habitat, the northern spotted owl was tanking, and that was exactly the opposite of what I thought was occurring. I was supervising biologists and reviewing the documents that they were reviewing, and what I discovered was that the Forest Service was lying to the Fish and Wildlife Service about what the effects were, or here were a bunch of half-truths in the documents they were sending us that we were supposed to analyze, to determine what the effects were to northern spotted owl.

I caught them in the lie. And as a result of that, it created a huge furor for a while. But the Forest Service, biologists, and other people had a direct line to politicians through their church and some other activities. And then the politicians came down on the upper management of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And over the course of about a year, they completely pulled the Endangered Species Program out from under me, and assigned me to a nothing job with no duties or no endangered species responsibilities at all.

It wasn't the first time that I'd been assigned to a purgatory in the bureaucracy. But it's hard to recover mentally and emotionally from being whitewashed into a nothing job as a result of trying to help a species or an ecosystem. And it happened to me before, but I was younger, and it's easier to bounce back, I think, when you're younger.

And so finally, I, after a few months, I just retired. And actually, it was kind of a semi-retirement. As a result of my career, I had got on the bad side of upper echelon people in both the Fish and Wildlife Service and BLM. And I thought the politics would maybe—people have a short memory, and that politics would kind of go the other direction. And then when I retired, my mom started having health issues. I was going to go back to work, but I just never had the opportunity. Which was fine.

That was just one example, but there were many. It seemed like my entire career, about every two to five years, I would have some major issue that would result in me being punished or reassigned or reorganized into. It's very hard to walk the fence and not fall off the other side when you're trying to be an advocate for the environment and species. And the federal government, because they do answer to politicians, and the politicians answer to people— you can see it in the news even today. The economy always takes precedence over the environment, and the economy comes at the disintegration of the environment.

And so those two things together made my efforts futile at best. I didn't realize it really until after I retired, but I did as much as I think anybody I ever encountered, and took as much flack and controversy and beratement as anyone. And yet, I didn't really accomplish anything.

I redefined success for myself as slowing the rate of demise, and I think that's the best we can do.

Farnsworth

That is a heartbreaking thing. But when you entered that field, when you started to do that work, did you sense that you were going to be doing something much more substantial, or somehow part of some movement or some sort of cohort that was going to reverse certain ecological trends, or that you were going to somehow be part of something that was going to make things better for human and more than human life on the planet? Or did you come into that field understanding how dire things were and were getting? Is that something that just sort of revealed itself to you over time as you worked within those fields?

Lewis

Oh no, it revealed itself to me over time. I was raised on a ranch. My relatives are ranchers and loggers. And so I kind of romanticized those things and believed that they were the same rote statements you hear now, that we're the environmentalists, we're out there all the time, and we know what's going on. But then, once I started working with those people, I realized that it just wasn't true. I thought that they were the environmentalists, and the more I was around them, the more I learned. It just opened my eyes to the point that it's just impossible to ignore if you really do care about the environment.

And as you pointed out earlier on, people in the government are trying to improve their lot in life. They want more money, and they want better pensions, and the way that you can do that is by sacrificing wildlife. As long as you don't care about wildlife, working in the government is the easiest job in the world. All you have to do is say yes to people, and you'll have a non-controversial, very rewarding career. Because not once has wildlife or lakes or oceans or fish come into the office and screamed at a manager,

Farnsworth

They can't speak in the way that we do.

Well, I just wanted to cover that because I think your background, obviously, is informing your book, and it makes its way into the book quite often.

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Lyle Lewis is a former endangered species biologist with the US Department of Interior. He is the founder of the Western Bat Working Group and Southwestern Carnivore Committee and has received numerous awards for bat, carnivore, and natural area conservation. His career and love of the outdoors has taken him to many of the wildest backcountry places in North America. In 2024, Lewis published Racing to Extinction: Why Humanity Will Soon Vanish, which provides new insights into factors triggering the current mass extinction event and examines conventional wisdom regarding human intelligence.