Mark Plotkin
speaker
534 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Why should I care about the Amazon?
Well, if you eat corn or potatoes or avocados or smoked tobacco or light chocolate or light vanilla, on your table is stuff that's connected to the well-being of the rainforest and those indigenous farmers that are planting those things and keeping them going.
This is what people need to know.
This isn't some sort of fun exercise.
It's about life on earth.
I think that conservation is first and foremost an ethical exercise.
It's the right thing to do, not because you make money at it.
It's because it's the right thing to do ethically.
The people that saved the Endangered Species Act decades ago when the evil Newt Gingrich tried to destroy it were fundamentalists, were evangelists who showed up on Capitol Hill with placards saying species.
God made them, we protect them.
So conservation can make strange bedfellows.
But I think the utilitarian case, who gives a shit what's in it for me, is in fact more compelling to most people.
And so, as an ethnobotanist, it's easier to make the case than saying, oh, we should protect the snail daughter just because we should, which I think we should, but to say, look, potential new medicines for cancer, potential new medicines for the next pandemic, which is undoubtedly coming.
uh, better treatments for current diseases like, uh, a postpartum depression, you know, it's the old and the new and what's still out there that, that to me makes this endlessly fascinating and, and, and endlessly saleable.
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