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See you.
The longest border fence in the world today
is not between India and Pakistan, or US and Mexico,
or Syria and Turkey.
Those are all very big, scary, long fences, but no.
The longest border fence on Earth looks like this.
It's 5600 kilometers long.
That's like if you were to draw a border
across the whole United States from LA to New York
and then add another thousand miles,
and this border fence doesn't even separate two countries.
Instead, this fence stretches across some of the most
remote territory on Earth.
It goes through farmlands, deserts, across mountain ranges.
But unlike most physical barriers that we use
to divide countries, to keep people out,
this long ass border was built to keep out
one very specific thing, dingoes.
(dingoes howling)
- Here in southeast Queensland
and this is the start of the dingo fence.
Now the dingo fence was established in the 80s.
(light music)
- Okay, can we just say something right upfront?
Do we all agree that Australia is pretty wild
and a pretty unique place?
(woman shouting)
- [Woman] Sweet Mother!
(woman shouting)
- There's a reason for this.
Back when all of this was happening,
all of these continents were still attached to one another.
But down here, Australia jumped the gun
on the whole breaking apart thing,
and it broke off from all the other land
way earlier than the others.
- Bye bitch! (laughing)
- Because of this, all the plants and animals
on the Australian piece of land evolved in isolation
for a really long time, far away from anything else.
When we talk about the seven continents, it's like,
North America, Asia, Africa, and then Australia.
It's a country, but it's basically its own continent.
This isolation resulted in around 90% of the wildlife
in Australia being wholly unique to the continent.
It doesn't exist anywhere else.
And it stayed this way for a very long time,
until of course, these guys showed up.
(hip-hop beat)
Ugh, another story of these guys.
It's always these guys showing up from Europe.
So the year is 1770 and humans have been living
on Australia for 70 thousand years.
But despite this, you get this guy who shows up
and quote, "Claims possession of the East Coast of Australia
"for the British Crown."
(royal music)
Soon, a bunch of British people showing up to Australia
to set up their own colony,
and this is where the whole pristine unique ecosystem thing
kinda starts to fall apart.
So in addition to what these British people did
to the Native people who were living there
for 70 thousand years.
- [Man] Massacres, a systemic purge
practiced against the Jews in the 20th century.
- The other thing the Europeans did when they arrived here
was they brought all sorts of plants and animals
and a desire to do farming and all the agriculture stuff
that they had been doing back in Europe.
Meanwhile, Australia's 120 year old ecosystem is like,
"Ugh, SMH, we had perfectly balanced our ecology
"and these guys are bringing camels?"
They also start growing a ton of non-native plants
like sugar, and when they started growing sugar,
there was one native species in Australia
that was very excited.
That native species looked like this.
It was a greyback beetle who was stoked about the fact
that these British people were growing sugarcane,
so they just started to feast on all these sugar farms.
So now the Europeans, now independent Australians,
instead of being like,
"Hey, maybe we shouldn't grow sugar here
"because every time we grow it,
"it gets infested by these beetles."
Instead, they're like,
"Let's go to Hawaii and get a bunch of frogs."
The idea is that the frogs would eat the beetles
and then the beetles would go away.
Right?
But no.
The frogs, or the cane toads specifically,
had no natural predator in Australia,
so they just exploded in their numbers,
and they became a pest in and of themselves.
- Hey look, those frogs are eating all our crops!
(Simpsons laughing)
- Okay, one more example here that I have to tell you about
before I get back to the border fence.
One more because I can't not talk about this.
So back in 1932, emus, these big giant weird birds
were harassing the farmers, and so the Australian government
sent out the Australian army,
thousands of rounds of ammunition, to fight these emus
and to kill them off,
so that they could control the population.
The best part about the story is that the emus won the war!
(birds cawing)
I honestly, I need to make a video
specifically about the emu wars, because it's just too nuts.
If you want me to do that, let me know
because I want to do that.
Okay, so those are all the ways
in which the European settlers brought invasive species
to this ecologically unique place,
and sort of started to mess with the balance.
So one of the big animals that the British brought over
when they were settling Australia were these guys, sheep.
Sheep have wool and meat, and were a big deal in England,
and so the Australians were like,
"Why not bring them halfway around the world to Australia
"and start sheep farming?"
(hip hop beat)
Sheep farming began spreading all around the country,
as Europeans settled in Australia.
But the farmers started to realize
that we're not in England anymore.
- No, I know we're not in Kansas.
- And their sheep were starting to disappear.
(mysterious music)
And it turns out that they were being hunted and eaten
by an animal with a very cool name, the dingo.
Dingoes are kind of like ancient wild dogs.
Man, ancient wild dogs, that should be a character
in an anime film, and it probably already is.
Dingoes like to eat kangaroos, and in doing so,
as per how ecology and natural food systems work,
eating the kangaroos keeps the kangaroo population at bay,
and this is very important so that we can avoid
this happening too often.
- He's getting mad that I'm trying to pet him.
Okay yeah, I'm done now.
- [Woman] I'm videotaping.
- No I'm kidding, that's actually not the reason
why it's important.
It's important to keep the kangaroo population at bay
because kangaroos eat vegetation and plants,
and if they grow too large as a population,
they'll eat all the plants,
they'll mess with the food systems for other herbivores
and the erosion and the soil content, et cetera, et cetera.
The whole ecosystem relies on this balance
of predator and prey.
- We are all connected in the great circle of life.
- So the dingoes are important,
but the Europeans didn't like the dingoes
because they were showing up to the farms
and eating their succulent lamb chops.
This became a big problem,
and eventually the farmers are like,
"How am I supposed to raise my livestock here
"in this wild country with these dingoes
"running around eating my sheep?"
Meanwhile, Australia's 120 million year old ecosystem
is like, "Deal with it, Liam the sheep farmer.
"We've been crafting this wild ecosystem
"for a really long time,
"and we're not gonna change it
"just so you can have your lamb chops."
And Liam the sheep farmer's like, "Hold my beer."
Oh excuse me, "Hold my beer."
(laughs)
I try not to do accents because it's kind of cliche
and I can't do accents very well, but I just love the way
Australians say beer.
- Beer it is.
- And thus begins another round of Let's Outsmart Nature.
So anyway, they start planning a fence.
What if we cut off a giant swath of this country
so that all of the dingoes stay on that side of the fence,
and all the sheep farmers
can stay on this side of the fence?
So they built the fence.
It took them eight years to construct this massive fence,
the longest on Earth, and it worked.
After they completed this fence, sheep deaths plummeted,
and so now the farmers are very happy
and the Australian government is very happy
because the farmers are happy.
Meanwhile, Australia's 120 million year old ecosystem
is not so happy.
- Not happy, Jen!
- Okay, so remember the kangaroos?
- He's getting mad that I'm trying to pet him.
- Yeah, so on this side of the fence,
there's now no dingoes,
which means no one to eat the kangaroos.
So the population of kangaroos skyrockets.
They start eating all of the grass and vegetation.
This overgrazing has left little food
for the smaller plant-eating animals
whose population is now declining,
and now it's also messed with the natural nutrient cycle
of the soil, so now stuff doesn't grow as well
in all of these soils.
This change in vegetation made it easier
for wind to pick up sand and create these giant dunes,
which then served as a wall to redirect the wind patterns,
which changes the weather patterns,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You build one fence to protect sheep
and you trigger a ripple effect
that throws off a balance in nature
that had been literally hundreds of millions
of years in the making.
But to the humans, it is very worth it,
because the Australian sheep industry
is worth $6.6 billion.
(sighs)
The reason I'm making this video,
the reason I'm fascinated with this fence,
isn't just because it's so long.
Yes, I like borders and lines and maps,
but I also see that this fence represents
an overt symbol of this very European, Western,
human-centric notion of humans controlling nature.
We can engineer our way out of anything.
The Western world has helped create this global culture
that says that we the humans can do whatever we need to
to serve our needs, whether it's food or shelter or wool.
And in the process, we can ignore the needs
of every other organism that shares the environment with us.
And what we are seeing is that there's a cost to this.
Over a million different species are set to be extinct
in coming decades because of our activity,
because we like to build fences to protect our sheep.
And what's crazy is that it doesn't totally
have to be this way.
So much of our modern culture is sort of a blip on the map.
We just started.
This idea of going out
and engineering our way out of nature.
Remember that before the Europeans arrived to Australia,
the aboriginals had been living there for 70 thousand years
with nature, not in spite of it.
They didn't need to manipulate it for their own needs
in a way that threw off the balance of these ecosystems.
So far, we've been able to engineer our way
out of quite a lot of things,
but this experiment of breaking away from natural systems
is brand new and we have no idea how much longer
the natural world will tolerate it
before it really bites back against the humans
and puts up in our place.
And maybe this is the wake up call we need
to actually start to put into practice
what indigenous communities have known forever,
which is that the only way for long-term survival
as a species is if we learn to share this Earth
instead of trying always to dominate it.
(light music)