Professor Corey Bradshaw uses the power of maths to chart the course of our changing planet. But he knows talking about science from the heart is the way to change minds.
Deep in the rugged wilderness of the Canadian Rockies in western Canada, a young Corey Bradshaw and his father spent their days hunting, fishing, and trapping their next meal. Far from the packed supermarket shelves and neon glow of fast-food outlets in the city, grabbing dinner involved going for a walk in the bush with a shotgun. “My main food as a child was black bear,” Bradshaw told The Brilliant.
Growing up with his feet firmly rooted in the natural world, Bradshaw had more in common with the First Nations communities living in the area than kids of his age in the city. But while the hunting trips with his father gave him an appreciation for natural systems, becoming a conservationist wasn’t originally on the cards for Bradshaw. At the time, he viewed the land as a resource to consume rather than protect. “I didn’t start out in conservation mode,” says Bradshaw. “I was quite anti-green in a lot of ways because I grew up with people who didn’t share those kinds of liberal left-wing views.”
But things couldn’t be more different now. Over a career spanning more than two decades, Bradshaw has been on a mission to awaken society to the trail of destruction left by human activities, from deforestation and habitat loss to pollution and climate change. As director of the Global Ecology Laboratory at Flinders University in Adelaide and a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Bradshaw uses mathematical approaches to understand how human activities and climatic changes have altered past and present ecosystems, and how these impacts might shape them in the future.
When he isn’t running his lab, Bradshaw writes about the good, the bad and the ugly in conservation science for his blog ConservationBytes, which attracts hundreds of visitors each day. He has also found the time to publish three books, become a public speaker and make regular media appearances discussing his research and environmental issues.
Tracking a changing world
While fierce environmentalism might not have run through Bradshaw’s veins in his early years, it didn’t take him long to realise that he wouldn’t have much to eat if the forest he and his father relied on disappeared. And it was already happening before his eyes. Bradshaw recalls watching loggers slice through trees in the “gobsmackingly beautiful” region he grew up in, which left enduring emotional scars. “When you see people trashing the place … it really affected me emotionally,” he says. “I garnered that internally for a long time.”
At 16 years of age, Bradshaw set foot in the city for the first time, and a year later he became a student at Pearson College, a United World College in Victoria, British Columbia. Here, he discovered ecology and took his first steps in science. Fortuitously, the school wasn’t far from the home of one of Bradshaw’s relatives, who happened to work as an entomologist at the Canadian Forest Service. He took Bradshaw under his wing and guided him through his first science experiment, which looked at the feeding preferences of budworm caterpillars, a common pest of conifers. “That was my first introduction to science proper, with hypotheses and everything,” says Bradshaw.
The fascination with ecology proved to be a lasting one. Following his undergraduate studies at the University of Montreal and the University of Alberta, Bradshaw moved to the other side of his world to study seal populations for his PhD at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He made several trips to the Antarctic for research, but the stark landscape wasn’t the only thing that stayed with him. “I realised that most of what we do isn’t walking around the bush with a notepad, it’s actually hardcore mathematics,” says Bradshaw.
After enduring multiple trips in below-zero temperatures for his PhD and a long postdoc at the University of Tasmania, Bradshaw was ready to shift his attention to an entirely different ecosystem that was under threat: the tropics. In 2004, he moved to Darwin as a principal research fellow at Charles Darwin University. In addition to the perks of working in warmer weather, Bradshaw was able to apply his growing interest in quantitative conservation ecology to fragile tropical ecosystems. He also developed relationships with the region’s Indigenous communities, an experience he describes as “coming full circle” to his upbringing in the wilds of Canada.
Now based at Flinders University, Bradshaw’s maths know-how has allowed him to dive into any topic that sparks his interest. Some of his latest modelling projects are exploring big questions like how environmental degradation and rising populations will impact child health, whether climate change will shift the spread of invasive species, and which factors make some vertebrate populations more vulnerable to extinction than others. If seeing death and destruction in the numbers each day has taken an emotional toll on Bradshaw, imagining the future his daughter will inhabit keeps him moving forward. “I can’t save things, I can’t prevent things, but I can minimise damage,” he says. “That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. It’s not ‘I’m going to prevent the sixth mass extinction.’”
Creating change through connection
With over 300 published research papers under his belt, Bradshaw is an academic powerhouse. But, he says, changing minds and making a positive impact takes more than producing a slew of journal articles. “Almost no one reads the primary literature … it literally is preaching to the choir,” says Bradshaw. “If you want to have any chance of effecting societal change, you have to communicate to a large audience.”
Australia is a good place to start. Over 80% of the country’s plants, mammals, reptiles and frogs are not found anywhere else in the world, and yet it has one of the highest extinction rates on the planet. And with the catastrophic bushfires of 2019-20 killing or displacing nearly three billion animals, many more species are likely on a knife edge. Overshadowing Australia’s fragile ecosystems is the spectre of climate change, which is projected to cause irreversible damage to coral reefs, kelp forests, alpine ecosystems and some forests if temperatures exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The message to act now is clear but getting it across to Australia’s largely urbanised population is no easy task, “Most of our population has a very large disconnect with natural systems,” says Bradshaw. “We don’t have that culture to protect.”
Still, the prospect of changing even one person’s mind can make it all worthwhile. Bradshaw says that engaging with people outside of science has improved his ability to make logical but passionate arguments for a particular outcome. And while he’s had his share of with death threats via email and blog comments over the years, talking with people from a non-science background has taught him how to stand his ground while also keeping an open mind to other perspectives, a handy skill for any good scientist. “If you’re having a discussion with someone who agrees with you entirely, they’re never really going to challenge your worldview,” says Bradshaw. “Even if your worldview is based on evidence, maybe you didn’t appreciate all the evidence or maybe there’s context in which that evidence doesn’t necessarily hold. That’s an important perspective.”
When communicating complex topics, Bradshaw thinks of Indiana Jones. Most people watch the films because they are fascinated by Indiana Jones’ character rather than his archaeological finds. It’s an important reminder that sharing personal experiences and making an emotional connection with audiences can go further than cold hard facts and statistics alone, a lesson he passes on to his students. “Being able to connect you and your life and your emotions to the work you’re doing is a powerful combination,” he says. “Science isn’t the pursuit of objectivity, it’s the pursuit of subjectivity reduction, because we’re still human beings.”
Article by Gemma Conroy