Can memes save the planet?

In 2017, Rhett Barker and his friends needed a way to stay in touch after graduating college. They were ecology majors, and meme groups were in vogue, so they created Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends on Facebook.

It began as a place to share silly nature-centered memes. The jokes were comically esoteric: about, say, the scientific name of a rare wild feline or the bites of Brazilian wandering spiders. You needed to know the science to laugh.

In spite of this — or because of it — the group attracted hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world. Now the group is a sprawling ecosystem of memelords with a “relentlessly optimistic” take on the natural world. Rhett decided to put the group’s popularity to good use. The results were overwhelming.

Endless Thread examines the psychology of conservation online and how people are using hope, fear, and humor to repair the planet.

Show notes:

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: Somewhere in the universe, on the edge of a spiraling galaxy, orbiting a flaming ball of gas, is a tiny world that came into being 4.6 billion years ago.

Dean Russell: On this world, formed seas and land and life and, eventually, the island of Borneo. There, in the mangroves, evolved a group of hideous monkeys.

[David Attenborough on BBC One: The local people call it orang belanda, which means "Dutchman" because they say its face reminds them of a sunburnt European.]

Ben: Proboscis monkeys: Beer-bellied and beady-eyed, and they have Squidward noses...

[Squidward: Nobody but me.]

Ben: ...wide, flappy, shaped like a pear. When people think of the proboscis, they think of this nose.

Dean: In 2013, a BBC poll ranked the proboscis (a word referring to its nose) one of the five ugliest animals in the world, just after blobfish.

Ben: Just behind blobfish. You know, what a lot in life to have.

Dean: But Ben and I have taken a liking to the monkeys ever since we learned about them.

Ben: And almost everything we've learned about the proboscis monkey, we've learned from memes. Like the fact that male and female monkeys actually have different noses. Noses that look surprisingly like Disney characters.

Dean: So this person they wrote up here, they said, Have you ever thought about how the sexual dimorphism of modern Disney characters has perfectly paralleled the sexual dimorphism of the proboscis monkey? And like, so you'll see a male character, and he's got this big long...

Ben: ...nose...

Dean: ... and then there's Elsa...

Ben: Her tiny little button nose. Yeah.

Ben: We found this meme — and many, many, many more — from a popular Facebook group with a specific approach to nature.

Rhett Barker: My name's Rhett Barker. I live in Panama City, Florida, and I started Wild Green Memes.

Dean: Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends. It is one of the nerdiest places I've visited on the internet.

Ben: And that's saying something, folks!

Dean: Co-founded by biologist Rhett Barker in 2017. The Facebook group has about 770,000 members; almost 200,000 more on Instagram and TikTok.

Ben: Many of the members, like Rhett, are scientists. Many more are just, as they might say, "ecological fiends." If you could sum up the vibe of Wild Green Memes in a few words, it might be something like...

Rhett: Relentlessly optimistic. Yeah, relentlessly positive works, too.

Dean: As the name implies, this is a place for wildlife enthusiasts of a particular ilk. The kind of folks who spend as much time outdoors as they do online.

Ben: And it's a place for memes about all kinds of animals and plants and fungi and bacteria. You've probably seen memes that went viral from here. Some are funny to just about anyone. Others?

Rhett: We talk about extremely esoteric ecological concepts a lot of the time, but the topics range from that to, I saw a frog today.

Dean: For instance, one meme shows an image of Gandalf, hand outstretched casting a spell on somebody. The text reads: Brazilian wandering spider. As in, Gandalf is the spider.

Ben: Below that is an image of a possessed King Theoden, the target of Gandalf's spell. The text over Theoden reads: Proboscis monkey. Theoden is the monkey. And he tauntingly says to the spider, "You have no power here!" Get it?

Dean: Oh jeez, congrats if you did. Because you'd first need to know that wandering spiders apparently cause erections in male victims...

Ben: ...and you'd also need to know that male proboscis monkeys — ha! — already have perpetual erections...

Dean: I didn't even know that was an actual thing.

Ben: Sounds painful. Does not sound comfortable.

Rhett: You said it was nerdy. It's absolutely nerdy.

Ben: To picture Wild Green Memes, imagine logging onto the morass of irrelevant posts and political rants that is Facebook, and then imagine navigating to this thriving community of nature fans, where hundreds of thousands of people are interacting through an endless feed of sometimes indecipherable memes starring odd-looking organisms, each with scores of comments that, themselves, digress into multi-leveled inside jokes. It's fun.

Dean: There is a meme about a cat-like animal from Madagascar, the Cryptoprocta Ferox...

Ben: ...a scientific name that, as we learned, means "ferocious hidden anus."

Dean: And there's a pride meme about the way male gourami fish fight.

Ben: They kiss. It's adorable.

Dean: There are inside jokes that even insiders don't get.

Rhett: I'll be gone and I'll come back and be like, why are people posting pictures of scallops and writing, "But can they why?" on it? That, that makes no sense at all.

Ben: On the less esoteric side, you may be familiar with the meme "There are many benefits to being a marine biologist." Have you seen that one? The image macro initially featured a bunch of sea turtles with those words superimposed.

Dean: The meme started on Tumblr, and then it exploded on Wild Green Memes.

Ben: People added the words to images of friends relaxing in a tent underwater or Sally Hawkins kissing the fish-man in that movie The Shape of Water. (Hmm. There are many benefits to being a marine biologist!)

Rhett: We wind up getting, you know, the rest of life kind of filtered through a wildlife association.

Dean: Wild Green Memes even has several spin-off groups, almost like green memes have become a genre of the internet. Rhett Barker says he never expected it to become so popular. Still, he gets it.

Ben: Because the reality of nature right now is anything but "relentlessly optimistic"...

[Dave Davies on NPR: We're living in an epoch many scientists describe as the Sixth Extinction.]

[Elaine Quijano on CBS: Today's children will likely see thousands of animals disappear in their lifetime.]

[Elizabeth Kolbert on NPR: ...a quarter of all mammals are considered endangered, for example, about 40% of all amphibians are considered endangered...]

[William Brangham on PBS: ...farming and fishing and mining, as well as the use of fossil fuels...]

[Davies: ...or as one scientist put it, "This time, we're the asteroid."]

Ben: ...so, Rhett says, people need memes. Nature needs memes.

Rhett: Media and discussion about this topic has been largely negative, very doom and gloom. But I think that there's also room to just be excited about nature and to be positive. 

Ben: And maybe Rhett's right. Because Wild Green Memes is doing its part to save the world, one meme at a time.

Dean: I'm Dean "Green Meme" Russell.

Ben: I'm Ben "Ecological Fiend" Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread.

Dean: We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR monkey reserve.

Ben: Mmm, lot of proboscis hanging about. Today's episode: the psychology of conservation online and how people are using hope and fear and humor to repair the natural world.

Dean: Can memes save the planet? Seriously. We wanted to know.

Today, Rhett Barker has a few jobs. One as a moderator of Wild Green Memes. Another as a biologist for Florida Fish and Wildlife. And another...

Rhett: About one month a year, I go and do film gigs.

Ben: And when he says film gigs, he doesn't mean like, you know, making a commercial for the local bistro. Rhett is talking about like James Cameron-style, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, epic nature docs. Rhett has gone to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to operate robo-cameras in the deep unknown.

Rhett: There's some stuff that was just impossible to describe down there. For example, there's a thing that genuinely looks like someone cut the head off of a rubber chicken, and it's swimming around in the ocean. But then, it also turns upside down, and, little arms come out and it walks along the bottom.

Dean: It's called a headless chicken monster. And yes, there's a meme for that.

Ben: Rhett grew up in Florida. He's always been a nature buff. The way he sees the environment, though, has shifted over the years.

Rhett: I started out to a large extent being upset, like as a kid even, about the problems that exist.

Dean: If you were a kid in America in the 1980s and '90s, you probably remember hearing, though parents or teachers, about acid rain, the Exxon Valdez, the ozone hole, condors and eagles.

Ben: The public image of nature was of fragility. Death. It weighed on Rhett. So he found himself gravitating to a particular brand of wildlife.

[Steve Irwin: Have a look at the size of that head! Three thousand pounds per square inch. One mistake, and I'm just a big patch of ooze.]

Rhett: Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin. I feel like their nature programs in particular had a positive slant.

[Jeff Corwin: I don't care how much of an unnatural fear of snake is coiled up in your body. You can't help, but to look at this creature, and see a beautiful animal.]

Dean: When Rhett got to college — the University of Florida — he majored in wildlife ecology and conservation. As the next Steve Irwin, maybe, he learned how to handle gators and execute prescribed burns. He bonded with his peers. Then they graduated.

Rhett: ...and as my friend group from undergrad started to disperse across the country, we wanted to have a way to continue to see each other regularly, which is better when you have something to do rather than just being in a group chat.

Ben: It was 2017. Meme groups were kind of a thing back then. So, that's what they did. First, with Florida-specific memes and jokes about certain professors. The group was public, though, and students at other universities got wind of Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends.

Dean: Suddenly, a group of a few turned into one of a few thousand. It didn't stop there. Things really blew up because...

Rhett: There was an internet-wide meme trend to make moth memes. Someone took a picture of a moth. The moth looked particularly expressive to humans for some reason and, as a result, people started making memes about it.

Ben: This was happening mostly on Reddit. Pictures of moths combined with the words "I like lamp." Things like that. The moth memes made it to Wild Green, and people followed.

Dean: What came next is a good window into the culture of this group. To capitalize on the internet-wide moth trend, Rhett and the other moderators started rejecting any posts that weren't moth-related.

Rhett: Eventually people started asking, Why are there just moth memes in this group? 

Ben: Then, Rhett made a post implying that he had been ousted by a moth. He replaced the group photo with a lamp.

Rhett: People kind of lost their minds at that.

Dean: Pretty soon, there were too many moth memes, so, as a joke, the mods started allowing memes about bats and other predators. To, you know, control the moth population.

Rhett: ...and as a result of it, the group grew to around 10,000 in a few weeks.

Ben: Wild Green Memes had started as pure silly fun. And then, Rhett says, as it grew and grew and grew, it turned into a community using memes to learn about nature and connect with it in a deeper way.

Dean: Which does sounds nice. Also, maybe a little starry-eyed? I mean, they're just memes. Seriously, what can memes do?

Ben: Oh c'mon, c'mon. They're the good stuff, man!

Dean: The field of conservation psychology came out of the green movement of the 1950s and solidified a few decades later, in the 90s, when Chicago's Brookfield Zoo hired a psychologist.

Ben: At the time, this was a weird idea. The zoo wanted Dr. Carol Saunders to evaluate its educational program. Saunders had bigger questions in mind about the role of zoos and how they influence people. In other words, what makes us care about creatures?

Dean: It may sound obvious, but nature has been through hell since the dawn of us. We've hunted mammoths to extinction, clear-cut forests to build farms and cities, poisoned water, and polluted the air. The UN estimates 1 million species — not individual animals but species — are at risk of extinction.

Ben: Humans broke it, so we must fix it. Conservation psychology asks, scientifically, how do we get ourselves to do that? To save nature?

Rupu Gupta: The role of emotions can really help or hurt the movement.

Ben: Rupu Gupta is a conservation psychologist with the Hudson River Foundation, an environmental nonprofit in New York City.

Dean: We asked her to check out Wild Green Memes for us. What did she think?

Ben: I just want to know if we can save the planet with memes. 

Rupu: Right, right. 

Dean: She wasn't wowed.

Ben: I thought for sure I'd get a chuckle out of you when I asked you if we could save the planet with memes. 

Rupu: I guess that answers your question to some extent, right? My non-answer.

Ben: Rupu was a little hard to pin down. You know, she's an academic.

Rupu: It's obviously a little bit more complicated, you know, like than a yes and no answer. So I'm going to again...

Ben: I was going to hope for a yes or no, Rupu.

Ben: Then again, maybe we were too direct. Maybe we were a little too, I don't know, meme-y? So we backtracked a bit: What is the best way to reach people? Is it hope? Is it fun? Is it fear?

Rupu: Fear messages have typically not been really helpful.

Dean: Personally, I'm a fan of the fear method.

Ben: Yeah, Dean "Death and Destruction" Russell, I think, is usually what we call you.

Dean: True. But I know that if I were to tell you that, on average, dozens of species go extinct a day or that half our coral reefs are gone, you might tune out.

Ben: Oh, sorry, say that one more time?

Dean: Maybe you won't tune out, but you'll feel bad. You're just one person — what are you supposed to do about it?

Rupu: Everything is so urgent and catastrophic, so there's a sense of fatigue, there's a sense of helplessness from being able to tackle these issues at such a grand scale. One person or one individual or even groups by themselves can't deal with...

Ben: Rupu says hope, on the other hand, is much more motivating.

Rupu: ...but then let's get to memes as you were asking, which brings in another layer of complexity in talking about humor, right? 

Ben: Research in conservation psychology suggests that humor presents a new way of thinking about an issue. Often a hopeful way that...

Rupu: ...takes you away to a different state of mind where you think, OK, I'm feeling better at this moment compared to the moment before I had seen the meme, right?

Dean: If humor downplays the overall issue, it doesn't accomplish anything beyond those good feelings. It needs to be somewhat directed. You need to pair it with a thing to care about and a thing to do.

Rupu: For instance, memes that center animals in its presentation can foster online actions like donating money to a campaign, that kind of thing.

Ben: And that is exactly what Wild Green Memes — and others — are trying to do. How? We'll get to that in a meme-it.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Rosemary Mosco: It's hard to be someone who does funny animal drawings and not run into Wild Green Memes.

Ben: Rosemary Mosco is a science cartoonist — yes, a science cartoonist. She draws what she calls "unloved creatures."

Rosemary: Anything that's slimy. I love salamanders and frogs.

Dean: Also, pigeons and vultures...

Rosemary: ...which are massively important to the environment, but also, you know, poop on their own feet to stay cool.

Ben: That makes the proboscis monkey's problems seem tame!

Dean: Rosemary's first reaction when she saw Wild Green Memes?

Rosemary: Ah, it's the youth! The youth are making their memes.

Dean: Honestly, that was my reaction, too. Got to admit.

Ben: Not me! I just turned my ballcap backwards and said, Hello fellow kids!

Dean: Oh man. Doesn't surprise me.

Ben: Rosemary never considered herself a professional meme-maker. Until...

Rosemary: I had friends who would send me screenshots every time they would post one of my cartoons and say, Oh, you've made it! You're on Wild Green Memes!

Dean: She sees herself as a kindred spirit in the green meme world. Humor can be a valuable tool, she says. That's something she learned firsthand when she was just starting out.

Rosemary: I felt like if I wasn't serious, people would not, you know, not pay attention and not think that I had credibility. And then I had this really funny moment where I made a chart, sort of a cartoonish chart, that aimed to help people figure out what to do when they found a baby bird outside of the nest.

Ben: Often, people have no idea what to do when they see a baby bird that's dropped out of the nest. Do you touch it? Do you call someone?

So Rosemary made two versions of the same cartoon to help educate people. Kind of like a choose-your-own flowchart. Starting with: "Is it visibly injured?"

Dean: If yes, contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

Ben: If no, ask yourself, "What does it look like?"

Dean: The serious version presented three options: (1) eyes closed;

Ben: Put it back in the nest.

Dean: (2) eyes open and only mostly naked;

Ben: Same deal. (Parents won't reject chicks because you touched them.)

Dean: (3) feathered but an awkward flapper.

Ben: Leave it alone. It's fine. It's just figuring it out.

Dean: The funny version added a fourth option. "What does it look like?"

Rosemary: It was like a Jurassic Park joke, you know, if your baby bird has a sickle claw on its toe and attacks you, then here's what you should do.

Ben: Rosemary worried the joke would muddle the overall message. But she posted both versions anyway. A kind of A/B, serious/funny testing. And?

Rosemary: The funny version was the one that everybody downloaded, and people would reach out to me every spring and say, I saved a baby bird, or, you know, I left a baby bird alone that didn't need help. And it's because of your chart with the dinosaur on it.

Dean: Humor can make facts stickier. I experienced this with the proboscis monkey. (And I will never forget some of those facts.) Rosemary says humor is also more likely to prompt conversation about subjects often deemed too sad or politicized for everyday chit-chat. It's a social lubricant.

Rosemary: We don't necessarily all have the sense that we're really concerned because people aren't talking about it, which is why I think it's important for us to make memes and cartoons and talk about it is, you know, many, many climate scientists and communicators just tell us just please start talking about it, bring it into the national consciousness so that we can start pushing harder.

Ben: But talking about something, learning about it, that alone won't save the world. So, what about money?

Dean: In 2018, Ashton Biological Preserve fell on hard times. The private nonprofit in North Florida is home to endangered radiated tortoises and vulnerable gopher frogs. It operates on an annual budget of $30,000, all donations. That year, they were barely getting by.

Ben: When Wild Green Meme's cofounder Rhett Barker heard...

Rhett: It got me thinking. Well, we have this group that's grown to around 10,000 people. Most of them are nature enthusiasts. Maybe we could do a fundraiser and help this nonprofit.

Dean: This is a group that excels at weird. They wanted to do something more creative than a Kickstarter. They settled on a "charity battle."

Curtis Sarkin: I don't even want to say infighting, but there's like competition between like birders and marine biologists, or geologists and people who study living things.

Ben: This is Curtis Sarkin, another Wild Green mod and meme maker who also teaches science at summer camps and afterschool programs. Curtis says the idea was to pit people against each other based on their interests.

Dean: Like you could be in "Trash Mob" because you love gulls and raccoons — or "Leafy Bois" because you like leaves.

Ben: That'd be me. I'd be in Leafy Bois, I'm pretty sure.

Curtis: That's how you joined the gang, by just saying, saying, I want to be in Leafy Boys. And now you're, now you're in it. 

Ben: The idea was that you would donate to the biological preserve in the name of your chosen group. The group that raised the most got bragging rights. Rhett would do regular livestream updates.

[Rhett: The front runner is herpetology gang. Although if anyone passes herpetology gang, I will eat one of these gross cookies that's made out of olive oil and salt instead of sugar and butter.]

Dean: The first time I visited Wild Green Memes was in the middle of a charity battle, and I had no idea what was happening. People were posting insults that made no sense and also about frogs and cranberries. Or the Toucan War? Which, honestly, maybe had nothing to do with the battles.

Ben: Again, that's just the vibe of this Facebook group, which Curtis describes as...

Curtis: ...this sort of playful gatekeeping of like, Oh you weren't here for the Toucan War? Of course, you don't know what's happening.

Ben: Anyway, the first charity battle raised nearly $2,000, enough to keep the lights on at Ashton Biological Preserve. Herpetology Gang won.

Dean: We spoke with the manager of the preserve. It's hard to overstate his gratitude. This is a place that takes care of animals and has helped preserve some 1,600 acres of land. Manager aside, there is no paid staff. Because, frankly, they can't afford it.

Ben: In the years since that first charity battle, it's become an annual event. In total, Wild Green Memes has raised almost $60,000 for Ashton Biological Preserve, money that was used to install solar panels among other things. To the preserve, Wild Green Memes was practically a godsend.

Dean: The charity battle has been extended. The money goes to a variety of projects, including Amazon rainforest restoration, funding pollination gardens, saving elfin butterflies, on and on.

This may shock you: there is very little scientific research looking into the effectiveness of internet memes for conservation.

Ben: By very little, we mean one paper. We found one scientific study that assessed the power of memes. Published in 2020, it was led by Magdalena Lenda, a conservation researcher with the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Dean: Lenda got the idea to study memes during a post-doc fellowship in Australia. She was homesick, scrolling Facebook, and came across a funny animal meme, written in Polish, featuring...

[Attenborough: No one is quite sure why the male's nose grows so big. And indeed, it sometimes seems almost to get in the way.]

Ben: The proboscis monkey is back, baby! Woo!

Dean: One of the main problems in attracting donations for animals is that humans are pretty judgy. Research shows that we give more to campaigns showcasing large animals with forward-facing, big eyes. Furriness helps. Cute noses, too. That's why the mascot for the World Wildlife Fund, one of the biggest nature NGOs, is a panda.

Ben: We are so shallow! A separate study at the Paris Zoological Park asked people to donate to specific animals. Aramis the jaguar raked in 89,000 euros. Zyko, the Amazonian codfish, got 1,900 euros. Other studies have shown that donations have little to do with whether an animal is endangered.

Dean: In the U.S., physical traits are better predictors of government conservation spending than extinction risk...

Ben: Perfect!

Dean: ...which is a bummer for the proboscis monkey.

[(Proboscis monkey calls.)]

Ben: The proboscis does not attract a lot of money, especially in Poland, where most people haven't heard of the big-nosed, small-eyed monkey from Borneo. Funny memes changed that.

Dean: The meme study found that before 2016, when proboscis memes took off in Poland, there were five news articles about the monkeys. After the memes, media coverage jumped six-fold. Google searches spiked. The memes got as many likes as NGO posts with cute polar bears or, you know, whatever.

Ben: Six Polish fundraising campaigns grew from the memes. They raised $610. Not much. But $610 U.S. goes a long way in Borneo. And these campaigns were loose, unprofessional efforts. The researchers concluded that if someone were to use memes in a more directed way, they could pull in a significant amount of money.

Dean: Case in point, after six years of Wild Green Memes charity battles?

Dean: How much money do you think you've raised by now in total? 

Rhett: It's a little over a half million dollars as of this year, yeah. 

Ben: Wow. All for memes?

Rhett: Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

Ben: Five-hundred and fifty-four bucks to be exact! Rhett says he never imagined this messy nook of the internet, a ragtag group of online ecology fiends — he never imagined they'd raise that much money in six years. He started a nonprofit called Wild Green Future to keep it going.

D: Here is one thing we didn't learn from Wild Green Memes about the proboscis monkey: It's endangered. People have fragmented the forests with palm oil and rubber plantations. Populations have declined 70 percent in the last three decades, and between 7,000 and 17,000 monkeys are believed to be left in the wild.

Ben: I mean, are you shocked that that's not on Wild Green Memes? A place that, as Rhett said, is "relentlessly optimistic"?

Rhett: Relentlessly positive works, too.

Dean: I guess that's the thing that always stuck out to me. Here's a bunch of nature nerds online. And if you were to scroll through their feed, you might miss that we're living through one of the six largest extinction events since the Earth came into being 4.6 billion years ago. You may overlook that our climate is falling apart. To me, that feels a little strange.

Margaret Klein Salamon: I don't think there's a way to be sunny and positive that's not perpetuating denial.

Ben: Uh-oh! Dean found a friend!

Dean: Yeah, Margaret Klein Salamon feels similarly. She's a clinical psychologist turned climate activist and heads up the Climate Emergency Fund, which raises money for nonviolent protests. She's not as anti-meme as she sounds.

Margaret: There is room for positive emotions and memes, but telling the truth is just critically important.

Ben: Knowledge and donations (from non-billionaires) can only go so far. Margaret says it is actions that matter. And...

Margaret: The core blockers to action are psychological and cultural.

Dean: Rupu Gupta, our other psychologist, told us fear prevents action. Margaret says that's...

Margaret: Totally wrong. Fear is probably the most reliable motivator. It's the evolved mechanism through which we respond to threats.

Ben: Fear — that you'll be eaten; or that your house is burning — that typically triggers a fight-or-flight response.

Dean: To Margaret, we're in the burning house but don't smell the smoke.

Ben: We're drinking our coffee, saying, "This is fine."

Margaret: There's this phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance, which means that humans evaluate risks socially, not rationally.

Ben: If the plane starts to shake but the captain sounds chipper, that usually means you're going to be fine.

Dean: But, Ben, what if the captain is just trying to manage your emotions?

Ben: Why you got to be that way, Dean? Margaret told us we can't say that being blunt about our environmental crises doesn't work. Because we've never been blunt. For years, the reality of climate change and biodiversity loss has been shrouded in false debate.

Margaret: Until we enter emergency mode, which is fundamentally different from what we're in now, normal mode, until we make that switch, I really don't have any hope.

Dean: When Greta Thunberg was 16 years old, she gave a speech to world leaders. She said adults were always trying to give young people hope.

[Greta Thunberg: But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.]

Ben: What does it mean to act? Margaret told us that while she supported the philanthropic work of Wild Green Memes...

Margaret: Yeah, I guess I would say I wish — I would love to see this group supporting the climate movement, like posting about places that people can join or get trained or support, in addition to their lighthearted vibes.

Ben: She also felt silly for using the word "vibes," which c'mon!

Dean: I use it all the time. Seriously, all the time. The research about messaging is mixed. Some studies favor fear, some hope. Both camps tend to agree that, whatever the message, it needs to give people a specific way to get involved.

Margaret: This is a problem that individuals cannot solve on their own. But the good news is, there's a rising grassroots movement, and that you have a critical role to play in that movement.

Dean: One reason Margaret might value joining a movement over donations to pollinator projects and saving the elfin butterflies is the "3.5% rule." Historically, if 3.5% of a country's population participates in mass protests, those protests have led to major change.

Ben: When it comes to saving nature, individual donations are great but small. Lasting change comes from doing something together.

Dean: I'm not sure I totally agree with Margaret's gentle critique of Wild Green Memes. Maybe I'm not thinking strategically. Maybe small preserves and pollinator projects are just band-aids compared to hardcore in-the-streets protests. Maybe I'm deluding myself still thinking we can do both. Because we do need both.

Ben: It's worth restating, too, that many of the members of Wild Green Memes are scientists who work on conservation everyday. After talking with Rhett, we heard through an acquaintance that he used to hold political bonfires, where attendees would talk about animal rights. He and other Wild Green members are not ignoring reality. Far from it.

Rhett: In context of the sixth extinction and climate change, those things would not be happening without humans. I think that's obviously true. But at the same time, the truest and most natural stewards of any landscape, and the people that are gonna fix this problem, are the people who live there.

Dean: To me, Wild Green Memes seems more like a safe space. A place to celebrate the good without the bad.

Ben: It's a way of coming together with other people who, for some reason, get really excited about the fact that scallops have 200 eyes. (That is exciting.) And that is a beautiful thing. Or, as co-mod Curtis Sarkin says...

Curtis: Honestly, just being in this group has increased hope. 

Dean: There is still something that doesn't sit right with me. And I think it has more to do with me than memes. This "relentlessly optimistic" outlook. In a safe space, I think that is wonderful, necessary, even. But at some point in the day, all of us have to step back outside into the unsafe world. And on the outside, I don't think we, as a species, worry enough.

Conservation is, fundamentally, an act of saving nature from ourselves. It is not something given so much as owed. And yet, the work is fragmented, underfunded, and left up to a few dedicated souls, such as Rhett. It's not enough. Species are going extinct. Ecosystems are going extinct. Our planet is changing for the worse. No meme can fix that.

Ben: But people can. And I think that just like any great meme, there are some real key ingredients for people to actually take action. A meme starts with an image, then it often adds some humor and context. And for us to all survive and thrive with our changing planet, we need some key ingredients, too. We need the context, and then we need to take a specific image from that context. And we need to take action. And if we're inclined to be too overwhelmed by the bad news and just give up we won't take action. So, I think we need the humor, we need the memes. We need anything and everything that is going to allow us to not give up. To do something and inspire our fellow humans to do something. And if that starts with memes? Call me a green memelord in training.

Dean: And I'll be an ecological fiend, I guess.

Ben: And also, you know, we'll do the other stuff to save the planet, too.

Dean: Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and co-hosted by me, Dean Russell...

Ben: ...also me, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed.

Dean: The rest of our team is Emily Jankowski, Samata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Paul Vaitkus, and Amory Sivertson.

Ben: Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the next big wellness trend: Brazilian wandering spiders.

Dean: If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR dot org.