KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Emma Marris

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matters on k e x the seattle many point three of them an online k t x t dido it my guests this morning as arthur him on their us since two thousand and four and i has written for the science journal nature on ecology conservation biology and other topics a seattle native her articles also have appeared in wired the christian science monitor and conservation and then there is this here today to tell us about her newly published book rambunctious garden saving nature in a post wild world welcome mr likely to be your idea write your book rambunctious garden what is the goal well i was covering apology for nature for a long time and i started noticing that there was a real shift going on in the field that there are some changes in the way that everybody was looking at nature also similar shift in conservation biology this room or applied field so i got really excited about this is to serve paradigm shift and i started to obsess over a little bit and eventually i decided that my obsession worn to the book because i wanted to

share the information with the rest of the world why the title rambunctious garden sensitive supposed to capture two ideas one idea is that was you describe the whole earth one thing i write about in the book is it's an accepting and the scope of our influences a species we humans have done so much to respond if we change the climate we've moved species around we change the way the land is organized we have to sort of really come to terms of them except that we are in control of almost all of these ecosystems so in that way the earth has become a little bit like a garden less so than say a wilderness but just because it's a garden run by humans doesn't mean that it has to be sterile or four more boring you can still have this coburn punctures exotic thriving life and so that's one way to look at the other way is that it can describe your own home garden i'm hoping that in the future we'll see a bit of a shift in people's own gardens will become more rambunctious as they invite more nature an answer let things get a little more wild and feral so it's going to work both ways in your book you

point out that much of conservation has been focused on protecting pristine nature would expand the definition of pristine nature i think that it especially in north america and even more so in the west there's been this long time obsession with pristine wilderness the idea is is that when the europeans got to north america what they saw was the sort of virgin untouched pristine wilderness and that this is what is valuable and this is what we should be protecting and tried to recreate in restoration projects but there's a lot happens with this idea the main promises that we're learning more and more about the huge changes that preserved and pre european people made to the landscape when clothes stuffed up the boat he wasn't looking at the wilderness he was living in a thoroughly humanize landscape that i've been shaped by generations of people living here burning and farming and making land change anyone driving animals extinct in the deeper past in what ways and what extent if humans altered nature historically you've alluded to go into

more detail yes sir i mean and it isn't as north america to mean the thirteen thousand years ago or so in north america there's this huge extinction paulson all these gigantic animals on grounds loss and cheetahs alliance we had all these fantastic beasts here in now they're all gone and sciences really coming around to the view that they're gone because humans kill them off so north america is really at much change place from what would have been had a you know he was ever crossed over a similarly with australian accent that happened fifty thousand years ago when people first got there there was a big extinction pulls all the major really large animals so all around the world where every human showed up on the set of cory area africa eurasia there would be this sort of burst of extinctions in new zealand people didn't get there until five hundred years ago or so and then the mole and gigantic fantastic bird that twelve feet tall went poof sort of overnight like one generation so they're the extinctions but there's also things that happen in more recent times massively and clearing for agriculture changes the climate massive burning

terms forests into prairie's then your asthma like the black death and everybody will die often in the force will come back and we can actually read that its signature in ice cores answered atmosphere concentrations so we've actually been changing the climate even way before the industrial revolution but of course since then things have sped up considerably now what we have is a point where every centimeter of the earth has been changed either by the introduction of a new species the change in helen's is used or climate change remained even a place that no one has ever visited or seen is now warmer and has more carbon dioxide than it did three hundred years ago you point out in your book that it is often assumed incorrectly that indigenous people didn't affect the land how much did and ditches people affect the land compared to later on want to listen to try to compare it in insects go you become drivers of crazy trying to figure out who's done more because while the changes that a modern colonial man has

done to the earth i really obvious in all around us those extensions were huge you know there's an ecological ripple effect that came out of extinctions so where we used to have large grasses than force would come and tree composition mixes would change over time and there's some evidence that those ripple effects are still playing out so that even if we had never done anything except kill off the megaphone as they're called we'd still be seen this gradual unfolding of that of that on the other hand modern climate change is really drastic and unprecedented speed so i think there's no human to me made the modern humans when the crown for the biggest gestures of earth but regardless of cruel usaid did the most changing this at the bottom line i think is that we've changed and to a power were not able to go back would you comment on the assumption that native are pristine ecosystems are superior to ecosystems that have been changed by human activity so because of all this new information about how much the diseases or changed before sheriff when you know

european colonizers got there the idea that these bass lines were somehow naturally correct it becomes a little more confusing now they're willing to spend to this accident of history of one one group moved in on top of another group and not to some serve correct or naturally inherent property of these ecosystems so one night when impulse you might have a sitter no further back before any human influence you know thousands and thousands of years ago for the public does that because isn't changed by themselves anyway all the time in the background glaciers move in the glaciers move out to suit species compositions remakes of move around so you know if you try to go back before any people you end up with pretty much face so there's no one natural state for any one place and in the more obsessed we become with these historical besides that we consider to be natural the moral we're limited in what we can do if we had a strict rule that only native species are allowed and then we might

resemble spend a lot of money than ever about exotic species that are actually do that much harm or we might not be able to move a species that at risk because of climate change because we're worried about moving outside of its historical range so as the earth the change isn't in response to what we've done to it the sort of historical fidelity can become a straitjacket that limits what were able to do to try help nature that you put in your book that the colleges have avoided studying areas with considerable human influence why this is the case part of it is it's this dark about how the field of ecology initially differentiate itself from other fields you know they sort of speak out best territory of human history was natural history part of it though has also they've been influenced by this cultural value system that nature is always superior when there's no people in a bad news you're with men women messing around and it isn't really that the authentic thing so there's sort of a cultural norm in ecology the hugo often you find some place that as pristine as possible to be your study site and as a result we have tons of information about how these so

called intact ecosystems operate but much less information about how ecosystems they're right next door to human kinder or even systems that are heavily invaded our ecosystems that happen change a lot operate and yet those kind of more change more damage ecosystems are becoming the majority on the planet so we have a lot of information that these tiny little museum piece areas but not a lot of information about the rest of the world what do we lose if the areas with human influence or neglected oh i think most crucially what we lose is a sense of their value such that anybody can just come up and say well look at this forest it's filled with all these exotic species from australia and brazil and so it's just trash award as canape vert over and turn it into a mall if we don't see that these quizzes are natural space is then we can't hold on to them in the face of development yet they are they'd sequester carbon they have sometimes very high species richness the city more novel ecosystems mixed up they can be very beautiful you can go camping in them and hunting

and fishing in and they can do all the stuff for us they have all the society for blind to it then we can just handed over to survive forces of development and diane warren and my guest is emma marris author of the book rambunctious garden saving nature in a post wild world and you are attuned to the sustainability segment of mind over matters and katie eckstein it point three fm and on the web a k x p fado it in your book you speak about ways to help nature beyond walling and often preserves and parks and one way weighted involves human intervention is radical re wilding tell us about radical re wilding so this is something that i just find deeply appealing on the one hand it is really looking back to history which is something that i do spend time for him and maybe we should be doing so much but but the way they do it is sort of in a break because they're not looking back to forty nine he won or seventeen seventy eight her eighteen fifty which is often the baseline around this area that would denny party

sharply to fifty one they're looking back to thirteen thousand years ago before these mass extinctions i spoke of and they're interested in restoring the causes of crisis is that went on at that time but they have to do it without all these animals that no longer exists so the use proxies so the idea here is that you'd say there's this fantastic project in the netherlands or the us fighters pass through their cause in charge of that said ok and he thinks they would have large heard of or acts these are these great huge cow like animals you seen cave paintings they're extinct now so he brings in the cattle that are bred to be a similar is possible to be extinct animals and he lets those were often these big huge herds and they would have these wild horses called park into lyrics into but he's become the story in a polish ponies that are very similar so he's got those in there in these big herds silly is re creating the set of grazing regime maybe a fire regime the herd group dynamics but he's doing it all with a totally new difference b cs so

on the one hand it's looking for to pass on the other hand it's making something totally new and the result is a landscape that looks and feels incredibly wild it's very difficult to believe that year you know within walking distance of amsterdam there but you are but it looks like an african savanna it it's unbelievable what do you see as the merits of this approach well once we move away from historical fidelity is our one be all end all goal then there's a whole bunch of other potential goals we can look at and one thing that re wilding does is that it brings back prophecies robin ince bcs so there's a group in the united states that interested in bringing in some animals as proxies for the ones we lost an army extinction polls elephants and cheetahs you know lions so what would that project you won't be scientifically interesting we can lie about how he says ecosystems work it could do in various things or the plant communities come in restoring these old regimes of grazing and browsing information it also help these animals themselves a lot of animals that they would use as proxies are in bad shape in their home countries elephants

suffer under a lot of poaching right now there are not a lot of tigers lions left so we'll give them a new home and refuge here might be useful for the overall genetic diversity of the species also he would bring back a certain amount wildness to north america that perhaps we've lost these animals are big and dangerous and exciting in and they certainly would be fantastic to look at assisted migration as another approach to saving nature you discuss in your book what are the arguments for and against assisted migration to help protect the seas that are threatened by climate change this is immigration is maybe the one that just really confuses the traditional conservationist the most because they have these to have goals that they've been working with her longtime one is historical fidelity and the other one is don't let things go extinct but if you have time change coming and you have a species that's not gonna be able to survive where it is it's just gonna get too hot is having a miserable it's gonna die out and you have a choice of moving into new looking towards never previously been then found then really you've got a choice between extinction and historical

fertility can have off you could only pick one if he refused to move it out insist her korean childers have the logical extent if you do not have is forever and to save it now the place that you did too has a brand new species running around in it that could be arguably categorized as an exotic reason invasive so it is a scary concept for a lot of colleges and conservationist but they're beginning to think that for some species that pretty much the only way some butterfly species of small mammals the difficulty of course is that it would be difficult to for everybody for all the little tiny microbes in neiman toes and snails and slugs a meal require a servant global effort but for certain species species of culture important iconic value he could definitely be workable and i think personally that it might be our responsibility to do it to what extent is assisted migration currently taking place it's a very tentative what's interesting is that the scientists are perhaps more traditional in their outlook

are moving very slowly but there are some citizen groups that are much more interested in and who have already moved a tree called the florida torino and this is a kafir and some historical rangers this teensy little area of the florida georgia border and it's just not a lot hasn't had a new generations of trees since the nineteen fifties so they're moving it a planet or the two north carolina long ago then what's also interesting is that when the ecologist only noticed this because it's not happening in what they see as nature of it these parks and reserves but in people's gardens it's happening on a brodsky oh there was a study in europe that showed that gardens and sweden now feature plants that you were originally a historically needed to england and sort of western europe so plants and animals are moving up or culturally end and in forestry and occasionally just because people love them but ecologists and conservation this haven't done so much that yet because it still scares them would you comment on invasive species and their threat to ecosystem health this is or elk hunters show one and it's actually been in the news a bit

lately there isn't an open letter in the journal nature by a group of ecologists who have suggested that we may have gone a little bit overboard culturally on are despising non native species they are certainly species that when they get to new places do things that we don't like the brown tree snake in guam has eaten up and driven extinct a whole bunch of little birds now the force in guam or virtually silent ad so good nobody likes that however hundreds and thousands of other plants animals have moved around without driving even extinct and it extinctions that are directly due to non native species are quite rare much more rare than you might think outside of iowans in leeks which are very small closed spaces they're virtually nonexistent the sort of terror that they were going to calm and make these huge monocle <unk> mole over everybody else it doesn't seem to have completely played out in that way so there's a little of a backlash among colleges about you we don't owe more money for conservation and if we spend all our money pulling out the common

read because it's not native to north america when we could be spending that money turning some huge born on into a nature reserve i would go for plan b every time you are listening to the sustainability segment of mind over matter is on at x t seattle many point to the fm and on the web add k x p dowd orgy i'm diane hein and my guest is emma marris author of the book rambunctious garden saving nature in a post wild world one of the chapters in your book is titled conservation everywhere and you covered a variety of places with conservation opportunities that aren't yet fully developed which you speak about opportunities for conservation and farmland yet so far as i remember was so interesting to me when i was starting out on this ecology be that the way they handled the stuff in europe are so different in the way you handle it here because in north america we had the dawning of this ecological ethic before we had sort of changed all of our country from what we perceive to be the wilderness condition so we still had yellowstone we were able to put a wall around it but

in europe they're ecological conservation ethic happened much later after they had basically turned everything into a farmer knowledge there isn't much quote unquote wilderness left so they have a very different take on it and one thing that they tend to do is they tend to use farms for conservation if you go to the website of the royal society for the protection of birds they have a whole category of endangered farmland burt's the way they think that these birds are quote india's to faraz and this is where they thrive center to protect them that you have to run your farm in a sort of a more gentle messy perhaps old fashioned way instead of the usual military precise rows of all one crop and then heavy inputs of fertilizers and pesticides and so on you do it in a sort of a more more natural in a while by friendly way and those are their teachers or the intent to mow them they tend to have plowed haven't seen them and do things like that they're practically farm so there are all sorts of opportunities for now in north america for farmers

to get involved in conservation they're probably under utilized and maybe not as well known as they should be but the important message i think is that even if you are a farmer whose toilet and it is what the copper says in agriculture were you get the absolute highest yield of your way and sometimes but even using lasers to figure out exactly how much fertilizer plant this little slow you could still squeeze more conservation biology or crime you know you could have six inch rose on the borders of letting them go and letting their be plants that that pollinate are some birds like you could change or scrap regimes farms are not lost spaces there's lots of opportunities to to invite smaller animals in there and to let them be used as corridors for large animals to get from more wilder natural spaces want to remember who did speak about opportunities for conservation in industrial areas such as the denomination's seattle gathered to watch as a good example i in i encourage you know your listeners to check out into onshore cleanup coalition offers kayak tour isn't alarmist was to sell a

lot of fun to get out onto the river at seattle's river which weise sometimes don't notice or six teams are tucked away down there but you know as originally of cancerous him and reverberate off end and still is a scam river then there's a long history of industrial activity and each bank it's now superfund site so that sentiment is pretty contaminated but despite that their salmon there's offspring kingfishers and there's a sense of meter there there's sections of the shoreline have been restored to more native commissioners are sections that are small blackberries and butterfly bush's but they are still green and then there are sections that are so active industrial use and what's interesting is that the drc see the daughter of a cleanup coalition are not arguing that the entire river should be restored to the way it looked a meeting fifty that we should and street unit that it should go back to a pristine condition they're arguing for a kind of owl what they called eco industrial vision we're people can have jobs there

but they can also in nature so that when you take your lunch break from your job it is thriving industrial occasion you can watch the salmon jump you can fish you can get out on the river and having experience with nature and that they can coexist on the same short river what are some examples of what you call waste places where conservation could be applied it is my own particular height worse now that i've started this project every time i'm walking around or driving around i see the spaces interstitial spaces of the urban suburban perry urban landscape the little lawn in front of the dairy queen the big incentives scrubby area behind a big box store and the grassy area on the freeway interchange empty lots brown fields even now that gas stations that are waiting for the damnation to leave so they can build something else parking strips would count in this category anywhere that's not paved and it's not being currently used these places are already pay for conservation instead of that little tiny lawn in front of this fast food restaurant you get a little tiny prairie or even just a

row of plants that butterflies why there's so much opportunity if you add up all these little tiny pieces of land they're gonna make an area much bigger than the national park system and what can be done by individuals in their own yards and gardens well that's what's exciting is that hopefully if you read the book you couldn't get excited about all the opportunities and you can kind of take stock of what your own personal conservation goals or an ira that nearly all cancers ingels can be put forward in a home garden exceptions being perhaps wolf conservation or something like that but one thing that's me about barnes is that although they're small they're many of them so they can act as madame populations for animals like birds or butterflies or plants frank it was my knee a larger area than a single backyard but if a group of people with backyards get together and they all plant species are they all plan plants that would attract the butterfly then adding those cards together can be enough area for them to maintain a little men apocalypse so

you know colleges have worked the salat mathematically about exactly how much they see exactly how far apart the yards need to be so yeah you can plant any of garden you can plant endangered species you can plant plants and that will attract animals of interest and you know you can even do a backyard that was completely organized on carbon sequestration if you amid to get maximum carbon in your backyard there's tons of different things you do and turning it back into a little tiny slices of what seattle look like before europeans came is one of those options and i don't know if that's what fletcher about your book you speak about accepting nature that looks a little more lived an unusual and working spaces that look a little wilder than we're used to which you elaborate while the swans are hoping to wrest the future that i see as a positive optimistic future is we loosened up this mantle divide between this over here is major and there's no humans in it and it looks perfect and this over here is not nature and we might as well just paid i think that we need to see these categories of bleed into each other and to mentor the continuum i'd like to see

public spaces parks backyards look a little messy or little while or more diverse there are downsides to this of course when my dog more mosquito bites you know we might have three to the neighbors over week the pollen drifting over the fence so it's not being a silly easiest and then our wilderness is to i mean i think that we have to accept the fact that we're going to be meddling in them due to yellowstone for example already park service personnel are busy breeding white bark pine that might be resistant to bark beetles so that they won't lose all the white bark pine in the park they're cutting downed trees there are around you and living with our pines they won't go in fires is essential ago are like gardening we just haven't really accepted it and what are the best overall pulse to go towards in protecting nature that's you know whether it's the rope i provide us with a list of possible goals in the book things like one of my favorites is instead of focusing on species diversity i mentioned genetic diversity so sometimes we'll say ok bisbee sees isn't extinct there's five of them so they're all fine but we've lost

on genetic diversity within that species so there's diversity of species diversity there might be a particular species you care about whales elephants you might care about ecosystem services like wetlands that filter water for people or protected and storms you might hear that recreational it is hunting fishing game campaign the reviews beauty spiritualize the song must be difficult it will be sorting out for any particular given piece of land which it is really go after because unlike historical fidelity which was a one size fits all gaul for every piece of land now we actually have to sit down and think about what we want out of different pieces of land which i'm afraid means meetings and discussions and speak older prophecy is a you know some sentimental work but italy's in our backyards we can say this is on a personal basis what do we care about nature other than what was here in eating fifty our goals are going to have to be personal on some level and social shared on another level

what's the message you'd like to leave our listeners with horses likely them with is this idea that nature isn't coming out they're really far away that you only see you if you get a national parks pass or you watch planet earth documentary that nature is it as gorgeous and pristine as it's made out to be number one and number two there's nature all around us right here in the city streeter is a major backyards feature a particularly diverse and beautiful natural city that amount of birdlife we have here the amount of things going on it greene laker in lake union nature is all around us we had to learn how to see that nature and chairs that nature otherwise we might lose it will thanks so much for being here and i think you you had just been listening to them embarrass author of the book rambunctious guard and saving nature in a post wild world published in two thousand an eleven by bloomsbury usa for more information check on the web that daddy daddy daddy about mr maris dot com again that's e m n a m a r r i s dot com the sustainability segment of

my never matters program you just heard will be on the streaming archives section of caveats keys website at atx feet out our g for the next fourteen days in addition sustainability segment interviews are available as podcasts go to k x p dot org she clicked on podcasting and scroll down to mind over matter sustainability segment i'm diane warren thanks for listening and be sure to tune into the sustainability segment again next week on any point the fm and k e x p dido it