 Sober times and kind of perfect timing to be talking about this stuff considering what's happening in Texas But before we get to the politics, I wanted to ask you guys about yourselves as writers how you got into environmental writing And how you integrate that into your work your own experience into your work. So let's start with Mary Ellen Well, thank you Susan and also. Thank you to the library. I'm a huge fan and booster of the library as you know the ultimate Instrument of democracy par exemplar and my book my most recent book citizen science Scientist is is about really a democratizing of science and There's a wonderful environmental library in here who is Integrating some citizen science with the library, which is the right thing to do and I'm really pleased to be Hopefully helping her with that. So I'm resolutely an English major sort of a gal I started out as an editor, you know a book review editor a travel editor I thought when I was growing up. I wanted to be an English professor So it was it was kind of a slow change for me to become so interested in science and then in the environment and in Ecology essentially and it happened pretty gradually But a very very important moment came when I did write this book evidence of evolution it was my third book came out in 2009 and that was an honor of Darwin and his the centennial of his birth and the anniversary of on the origin of species So I wrote this book to explain evolution actually kind of hard to explain and really understand it when you drill down a Lot, you know, what's the context for it and all sorts of books are out there about it but they tell you about it in one way or another how to put it together so we could really understand what is evolution and I focused on specimens from the California Academy of Sciences and so I interviewed the taxonomous there and taxonomous study the vast tree of life that all life forms are part of all life forms have common ancestry everything is related and And ultimately taxonomous are making a vast genealogy of all life forms on earth So that it's a very ivory tower science taxonomy, but today with this mass extinction going on It's a particularly important ivory tower science But when I was researching that book over and over again, I kept hearing and this is 2007 and 8 when I'm researching this book the scientists were telling me Plants and animals are disappearing at a rate and magnitude Equally that which took out the dinosaurs were in an extinction. We're in a mass extinction Now Elizabeth Colbert's book probably most of you have read it or heard about it six extinction that came out in 2014 This is well before that and I'm like what you know, what are they talking about and It took me a long time took me months and several, you know talking to one after another of them To really grok what they were telling me and once I did. I mean I couldn't look back I had to say okay. What is going on here is It is a paradigm shift in in life on earth and Nobody knows what's really going on people don't understand this and I said okay next book I got to understand how this is happening and why that led me to my next book which is called the spine of the continent and The spine of the continent is kind of an overview of conservation biology Conservation biology is only about 30 years old and it's a science founded by famous people. You know Paul Ehrlich Jared Diamond E. O. Wilson and Conservation means to save so this is a science actually formulated to save biodiversity and they knew then in The 50s and 60s and 70s that what they saw the processes they saw in motion were only going to get bigger Only going to get worse and they said if we're going to do anything about this we have to quantify it So conservation biology was set up to quantify extinction essentially and the spine of the continent is the Alaska to Mexico And there's there's a lot of reasons to focus on that particular mega linkage to describe Some of why we know extinction happens how it does and what we still have to save and then I'm on that book I'm researching that book and I'm thinking God bless nonprofits. God bless university professors They're not what they're doing day in and day out is making zero impact in In terms of really the forces that are set against nature and I could really see up close and personal what was happening and Thought well, what could possibly scale what could happen that would actually meet the level of Destruction that's actually happening and I worked on a couple of citizen science projects as part of that book They weren't called citizen science, but they were regular people contributing data over long periods of time To scientists who used their data to show long-term patterns of change So this goes all the way back to Darwin. We see where species are when and how those patterns change. That's how we know What's true? What's happening? What's real? You need data across? Decades there aren't enough scientists to get that data There are people like you and me to get that data and the thing that I saw about citizen science was all kinds of people did it Republicans Democrats old people young people rich people poor people black people brown people Everybody and nobody talked about any of that. We talked about what we were doing with nature And then the most important thing is that the data was used to achieve concrete conservation outcomes. So one project was Helped reform grazing regulations in Utah and one helped Determine where highway overpasses would be built in the state of Arizona so that plants so that animals could move across highways without getting hit by cars and Historic animals are moving north as the climate is changing So that's my long answer. I said, okay citizen science this has the potential to scale and In 2012 I said I'm gonna write my next book about citizen science and then the whole thing boomed I mean, I hit it right. I hit it maybe a little early But I hit it at the right time and basically due to smartphone technology computing power and statistical analysis the and the understanding that Ecology the developments in ecology have shown us. There's no such thing as one-off Processes that occur everything is totally connected at different scales local regional continental global The only way you can get all those scales is by massive amounts of data and There's a lot of people doing this and it's burgeoning all over the place. So it's a fantastic thing it I have complete hope and Trust that we're gonna use it more and more to actually even change how we understand how life on earth unfolds and To also focus in on what needs what we need to do to make sure that it does keep unfolding great, so It sounds like for you sort of the emotional heart and then the connection for you into environmental writing was the this Awareness of extinction the sense of loss and the sense of grief over that You cut your teeth on the movement. So tell me a bit about that But what was it like growing up with Dave Brower? Kind of where you came into it. Yes, my my experience with the exact opposite of Mary Ellen's I was indoctrinated from the cradle in this. There's no way I could escape it My dad became the first ED of the Sierra Club in in 1952, but by then he'd already been doing He and Ansel Adams had worked together just to make King King Canyon National Park when he was still a very young man. So My dad was one of these guys who lived in lived in and slept it. He Norma's energy. He is all he thought about He brought it home to the family dinner table. There was no audience too small for my father You know his four little kids. He would try to evangelize. We had no chance We're totally helpless little kids and and so in fact as a as a Because he what we were early in the game This was my father in becoming the ED of the Sierra Club became only the second full-time employee of the Sierra Club The first was a was a secretary Virginia Ferguson So his becoming an ED D double the staff of the Sierra Club But there's still only two people and when you think of the Sierra Club today, I mean, I don't know it's like 800 staff And they're all over the country so These eyes it when I was a kid in the 50s these ideas were new and One of the things I did because I've been so indoctrinated. I discovered that in school essays I could get my blood up I could get really emotional about things on cue because I had all these arguments and Automatic a each time so I was sort of like a little grade school hack, you know And even at the time I knew that there's something a little I was getting myself I was I was using it, you know, and I you know even in like like ten years old I realized is this quite right what I'm doing, but But um, do you remember any of the things you wrote, you know The one thing I wrote when I was 14 my dad put in the Sierra Club bulletin. It was it was it was on it was on Moby dick but um, I That's how I really began this writing thing my I finished my freshman year at Berkeley and my dad was doing At this point he and Ansel and Nancy knew all it started this exhibit format series these big books that nobody Had ever heard of before you they were a new genre When my father first proposed a bookstores, we're gonna do this 11 by 14 book they said we can't sell a book like that It's we don't have shelves for book like that and we've seen the future I mean it's now the past but but you know they broke coffee tables all over the land soon soon enough but He was having a on the 10th book he was having a problem with the Editor it was a book of that would marry pictures of the big sir coast with photographs With poetry by Michelle's father Robinson Jeffers No joking But but the put the he hired a poet to do the poet The poet was too poetic. He didn't quite get get it. So my father said why don't you take a sabbatical at the end? Freshman sabbatical at the end of your freshman year and go do this book for me. Oh, so dad. I'm a freshman. He said well You're an English major aren't you? Well, I said yeah, I haven't declared it yet, but I'm gonna be an English major and And he said well you're you're an artist weren't you and I was an artist when I was 12 Me and Michael Heiser who's now famous won the gold medal in this classic After two competition when I was 13 I said but dad that I was 13 back then And he said he wasn't one of these guys who would press It was like he was like the British Royal Navy in the age of sale He would press young people into service and and you could just be walking down the street and and I again was Hapless because I was handy So anyway, he draft drafted me and I I said, okay, I'll do it and I went down to Live two weeks in Ansel's house and saw him's house in in Carmel Highlands Forage the country for photographs came back and had Ansel vet them. Are these okay Ansel? Yeah, this one's pretty good And that's what crop them It was amazing experience because I was taking pictures in from really great Photographers on the coast when Bullock and and the West and and Ansel had this sort of presumption to take these pieces of paper And I'm watching over his shoulder, and he's cropping the picture It's just a wonderful experience to have and all of a sudden as it comes in like this, you know There's that moment where bing, you know, inevitability can't move one piece of paper anymore And he's doing this to the photographs of these these famous photographers anyway So I do that book and it's a very successful book. I Have asked the other thing he told me when I said I'm just a freshman. I'm just you know I'm I haven't been an artist for a long time and He said well, you did watch where when Ansel and Nancy and me put This is the American Earth together the first of the books and I said, you know, that's right because I had watched I was to fly on the wall while these three people put this first book together and I just I still remember the The creative excitement of these people as they did it. They knew they were onto something New and amazing They it was such a process because because Nancy This is the 50s everybody's drinking then they all everybody breaks down, but they they really drank in those days So my dad and Nancy were big my dad and answer big people and they could handle alcohol Nancy after a certain part of the evening Couldn't handle her alcohol and I remember a couple of times were this moment When she would say even I'm I'm about eight years old and I and she says something that's really off the wall It just doesn't compute and I remember Ansel and my dad looking at each other. Well, you know, that's it for tonight You know and then they would pour this huge one, you know, so To go away with but I liked in your book Ten's book is interviews with 19 different people who worked with his dad and almost every one of those interviews They talk about going out with your father and drinking martinis and him drinking them under the table You could not stay with my dad. Yeah, I tried to stay with him once. I remember six martinis in New York Oh my god, and I mean, I mean it was nothing to him, but I was just you know, but but um anyway I'm gonna finish this up, but but I went um so I go back to I go back to my to cow To start my fresh after this experience. I get all these honor courses because I'm an editor of a book, you know And I I do my six months at the end of the six months my dad says well You can finish your sophomore year or you can go down with Elliott Porter for four months The Galapagos Islands and do a book for me on the Galapagos and that was that was the end of my formal education and and I did 14 more books writing and editing 14 more books for him environmental books for Serif up and friends of the earth. Now. I finally made man made my escape and and Went off on my own. Mm-hmm. Wow. That's cool. That's cool. So both of you Let's talk a little bit since that the evening has been billed as a Discussion of Trump Let's talk a bit about where we are with with Trump Both what you see happening right now and given your longtime experiences environmental writers Put it in some context for us Take it away. Well in both when I wrote the spine of the continent and then citizen scientists both in both processes I realized there's no There's no differentiating there's no teasing out what's happening with the environment from the forces of history and history of the human humans on earth in the last hundred two hundred years has been about colonialism taking of territory often from indigenous people and Developing land and and over extracting resources. So the forces of history are Creating the environmental crisis that we are in Trump did not Create it. He's taking you know this ridiculous stand By the way in in terms of what we can actually physically do right now With Trump is in key our secretary of the interior has delivered and I don't think that this has been revealed yet I didn't read the Times today, but Zinke has delivered this his report on his recommendations for what to do about the national monuments to Trump It has not been revealed what he said nobody kind of knows why except that the The anniversary of the the National Park System is August 26 Maybe remind people what what is at stake here? So Zinke Zinke has reviewed all of the protections of the National Monuments of of the of America the United States and he is obviously going to be recommending that the protections be unrolled pulled back and that extractive industries are allowed to go in there and extract metals and and oil and gas and This is a disaster and it should not happen and it's ridiculous And what you can do when this gets revealed, which will be any day is start writing letters and get on the internet and an object We have to really make a big stink out of it These national monuments have protected for a reason and you know as evidenced by the sixth mass extinction We lose the plants and animals because they lose their habitat So these places are very very important habitat for creatures and by the way What we don't understand is that we actually need these natural systems for even human life to go on and so we're actually a Self-consuming system here. We're eating out of our of the very ground of our own being by taking away these national this functioning ecological landscape So Trump here's what's the bright side of no shadow without light We have to do it ourselves. This is happening in many many levels with Trump people are understanding women's rights You know gender identification rights Immigrant rights, we have to take local control and be active Personally, this is not this could not be more important to be active personally in the environment And I'm just gonna say that the environment is the biggest issue of them all because without the environment All of those other things go way way down the minute we start having like really really Scarce resources like scarce fresh water. What's gonna happen to women's rights? What's gonna happen to immigrants rights? Nothing good. Whatever you care about add the environment in I mean, you're all here tonight. Thank you, but everybody who is really invested in these other issues I wish we didn't see them as separate issues because they're all connected and So for me Trump is about Forget it. We have to do it ourselves and here's the thing about citizen science is we can do it ourselves And there's immense amounts of free Software free databases free projects to actually visualize information That then creates a case that you take to your county state and federal officials to to argue for why Something needs to be protected Can you made the point when we were talking about what we were gonna talk about tonight that this is nothing new That what we're seeing with Trump is we've seen before we've been there before What are the lessons to draw from those previous? Yeah, um Zinke seems so bad now and he is but um, we don't want to forget James Watt under Reagan I mean remember why you remember how you felt back then? I mean there was a character. I mean Zinke I Mean he was there's something reptilian about the guy. I mean I like lizards, but this guy To the list yeah But um, but but then don't forget um a gale-norton under under bush the stuff these these interior secretaries did was terrible And we got over it. So um, so it's happened before it. This is not exactly end of times, you know, but but um, I Yeah, I'm just thinking what what you're saying about the science You know one of the wonderful things that our citizen scientists and government scientists have done is protect this information Protected global data was one of the first things they did. It's like these people who who took the the The Muslim library out of out of Timbuktu. They ran in there and said we got to save this stuff and they've They were very worried justifiably that that information would disappear all this climate science that has been assembled is These people protect it. So we have a lot of Institutional people working for us people in the departments who care about this people in the Park Service have been pretty good you know people people in EPA are pretty shell-shocked, but um, but We haven't cut out for us. I I also like to think let's let's think post-trump um, too and let's You know, we spin our wheels in Trump mud so much, you know every day every treat tweet We need to get over that and and I keep thinking. What do we do? This can't happen again You know, we can't let something like this happen again in not just for environment, but for democracy and then you said yeah We can't have another Trump type episode. We have to we have to this is so dangerous It's not just the environment to the life on earth to our cities. I mean, there's that red button, you know We can't we can't let this happen again. So we need to be working toward that Systemic changes electoral college changes stuff that um Long-range stuff to stop. This is just an episode, but we can't have too many more of these episodes Well something that that you said Mary Ellen struck me I mean you were saying that you know the environment is sort of at the core whether you're concerned about women's rights You know civil rights or whatever, but you know one of the blasts against the environmental movement has always been that it's a white Middle-class upper middle-class movement. So how do you pull that? Now, you know, how do you how do you pull in those other people or is that an anachronistic? No, I mean, I think there certainly the environmentalists all over the place Are very concerned about About trying to connect with other kinds of constituencies then then white people older white people about the environment I wish that the environmental movement would not and I'm be so interested what you think can I mean I Wish that the environmental movement would not flagellate itself over this I mean we have it's like let's look at Planned Parenthood who's really supporting that probably old white people are doing that, too You know we're part that's an establishment Demographic that has money in time to put into social causes You know it's really an interesting thing happening in the state of California And I'm forgetting who did this but somebody aggregated all of the Instagram and Facebook pictures of what people were taking in the state parks and Actually, there's a lot of people of color a lot of people of different socioeconomic demographics in the state parks and they've been taking pictures of themselves having fun in the state parks But the state park people who are running it haven't necessarily seen them So the tagline was there's a party going on in the state parks, but we don't know about it So actually, you know lots of different cultural groups do care about the environment You know, it's a messy kind of thing. It's it feels like a It feels like a luxury to care about the environment that it's something that wealthier people can do But the the social and environmental justice movements are just just hugely important And they are very much integrating with with You know the more the more white people ones Look, I mean the thing is like we have Syrian refugees that are climate change refugees that is a social and You know environmental justice issue that's happening. So if you care about But though the people that are the refugees themselves, are they saying I care about the environment first? No, they care about their freaking survival first But their survival actually depends on the environment The everybody needs to understand that our survival depends on the environment, although we don't frame it that way I mean now we know I think that's in fact I think the argument made that the Syrians actually heard about environment first I mean it was in this drought that preceded what's happening now. I agree with you on self-flage elation I think we do too much of that. Number one. I think it's a totally bunk charge. You're elitist. I mean Watch the next guy on the trail you see the next kid on the trail and tell me how eliti is I mean, it's a total bullshit argument and And the same and the same with them, you know, same with our whiteness You know, I black folks if you want to join join the movement, you know, I my own family's back My wife's I've been married to black women. So It's a it's a rut I'm in but but uh but but but I way back with my first wife I I ran for the chapter that SF chapter the Syracuse of the Bay chapter on the grounds. Let's diversify and I couldn't get anybody in my family in there My my in-laws, you know, they had other stuff to worry about it was that was the 60s They were getting there, you know, they were the police dogs and hoses But but um, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna apologize anymore if you want to join the movement join the movement Everybody's been trying to get you in every environmental outfit. I know has been trying to get you in come on in, you know So there's this is one of the reasons why I think citizen science has such an incredible potential because it is it can be addressed like purely as a social justice kind of thing that most of the way that exploitation has happened of peoples and lands and is by, you know, taking over territories that belong to other people or Ignoring, you know when it went at the citizen scientist citizen science Association conference this it was in May and the main speaker was the gal How a single mom? I think she's a single mom who was the whistleblower in Detroit Who said my water is tainted and she went to officials who said oh your kids are just not that bright and She said no, they are bright, but something is wrong with the water and She got this professor from the University of Richmond to come and bring in Postdocs and and grad students. This is a citizen science project. They then empowered people in Detroit to test the water and keep the data and to make documentation of of what was happening with the water this woman is a citizen scientist That's what citizen science is So citizen science is a free available platform for any community of people to use to create data and to make it spatially and visually explicit to show it to other people to make a case for defending Territory and defending quality of things like water and and air Well, let me just say I think you're right about this business about environment and underlying all these other causes My dad used to say that he he would say this is the one thing. We absolutely have to get right We can mess up some of the others, but this one we have to get right because And his line was there'll be no art. There'll be no music. There'll be no sign There'll be no social justice. There'll be love music on a dead planet And this is where we live and and and this is this is the this underlies every single cause Important cause we have I really agree. Mm-hmm. So how do you get to people who don't see that? I mean, I was thinking about early hush child had this book this year where she talks about the ways in which all these people living in chemical alley in Louisiana are totally aware of the pollution around them in the way in which it is just destroying their lives and yet Don't make the political jump from that too. They're dying of their own poisons. I read her book I mean there they they have cancer because And they still are taking this other position But you know, I mean we're all writers the three of us here I think that we're probably all kind of constantly thinking where's the story? Where's the way to tell the story where you get the connection the emotional connection that opens the heart and mind of the reader To this other information that softens the barriers to that I mean her book is a good example because these people to me. I felt like they were just very defensive they very much wanted to Have some kind of power that they did not feel that they had and taking the position that they took They felt like they were aligning themselves with powerful forces. Yeah, they were like their own death But you know with chemical companies, but this is I think to the point And I think you know Ken has such an amazing story with David Brower being your dad of This generational understanding and connection that really is from the heart of what you take in from someone you love and How you see the world, you know, I wrote about my father's death in my book partly because it intersected so amazingly with some of the things I was trying to convey about Observation, he was a writer. He taught me to write to be a writer based on observation And you think of your dad teaching you to observe and also Empowering you to be creative in with these. I mean, I don't know. I think that's what we have to do and more of us do it Connecting people, you know, and there's a wonderful book by Terry Tempest Williams called refuge for example in which she This is her classic book Her mother's dying of breast cancer and she goes she goes through all of these birds in Utah And and goes through the death of her mother and but she also highlights all of these birds And she just so seamlessly connects the process of her own Understanding of her mother's death the process of her mother's death and the natural world Which is still there to sustain us through these, you know, huge developmental Moments in our life and to me this is what is at stake. We if we don't have nature, for example, where's our consolation? Where do we go? You want to take a walk in the woods when you experience something big a loss or or love or Any kind of moment in your life? What if there's no woods to walk in? I mean, are we nuts? Yes, we're kind of nuts. I Guess the first thing you'd have to say is we're not succeeding No, so true. I'm not just environmental writers, but on our environmental movement In the list of concerns of American citizens is down there around ten usually so we're not doing it And and it is a how and this question. How do we do it better? I don't know the answer My own thing is long for him, which is really not the way to do it It's why do you say that because nobody's reading anything but but you know, but sound lights anymore. I Used to think that that at least you know, and it's true and it's still partly true that in the place It appears if you appear in the New Yorker or the Atlantic you are your are influencing people who count There was once this class of people who it's horrible, but this class of people who made things happen I'm not sure that's it's true anymore So so for me the long form is even less and less if you're a writer you want to write well one of the things that people keep saying is Correctly is that the that the right has found the language to get to people we have not and But the trouble is this mendacious language We don't want to do that do we I mean I I don't want to do that So it really is this dilemma I think it's very tough and and I think it's it is very tough to get beyond preaching to the choir, which I think Certainly every time I've ever appeared on environmental things. That's who is in the audience It's people who are already been convinced of these problems And I don't know how you get past them I don't know how you get to people your dad in your book There was a quote somebody quoted your dad saying you cannot reason prejudice out of a person Because it didn't get in that way and I thought okay So it's emotional, but I will say something that I think we should all do which is talk about it all the time Bum people out at the dinner parties that you go to like talk about extinction Really, I always do it. I'm very popular Like Mary Ellen the problem had one glass of wine what happens if you've had three well, I get even worse But I mean if I will say that if you go into any denies across the United States today I bet you everybody in those denies Knows the term climate change they might tell you that they don't believe in it But they know what you're talking about and I think secretly they know it's real But did they know biodiversity loss? No because even Professional scientists in other fields don't know about biodiversity loss There's a scientist that I you know kind of keep tabs on it Stanford his name is Rodolfo Deerzo and he he recently had a paper out about this You know not only the extinction of you know the termination of the entire lineages of Lifeforms that is accelerated today, but this huge amount of numbers of bodies of wildlife of Vertebrates and birds which are vertebrates, you know mammals every everything has decreased by like 40% Since 1970 Now, why do we need why does that matter? Well, here's one reason why it matters those bodies are actually They're keeping us healthy Because so let's say we cut down the Amazon the Amazon has plants and in it that have Co-evolved with viruses for millions of years and you cut down the plants and then the mammals and the birds and the reptiles and Amphibians go because they don't have habitat, but the viruses don't go and hello Ebola. Hello Zika They look for a host and they find a super abundant big mammal. That's us and Rodolfo also so he coined this term Defonation of planet earth which I find sort of a horrible word but very descriptive and another one rodent identification So when you lose all this biodiversity of other types of biodiversity What what booms rats rats do and rats are also disease vectors So, you know people in the Presidio There's a coyote population in the Presidio and people have conflicts with their dogs all the time and they want the coyotes like taken out of the Presidio But the the the coyotes keep the rat population under control So there's a reasons of why we need the bodies of of plants and animals So we need to just talk about that like it's not going to be easy Necessarily to live with coyotes for example nearby, but we actually have to figure out how to do that for our own health Well, you're talking about sort of Reinforcing the idea of the interconnectedness of exactly system that we live in and you know that it's a fantasy That we can be separate from it and actually love to hear you know can talk about the fantasies that people have about human life being kind of in a pod that could just be sort of shot up to Mars and Maybe that will save us. Yeah, there's this idea a lot of people have that we're actually doing pretty well in managing Natural systems or or farming systems this idea that well if if this is web of life that that nurtured us and created us and Sustains us was gone. Well, we'll be able to muddle on through and and that's completely ignores the history of our record in Trying to manage natural systems or even how badly we farm You know the dust bowls and stuff we're not through that Every generation of scientists and technicians thinks oh, we've got it knocked now Now we understand how this system works. We can reproduce it. No, you can't Because every time you try it you screw up. I mean the list is amazing So this is an illusion everybody have that we can somehow operate Independently of this I did a piece on a guy. I love Freeman Dyson I did a book on him and this call the starship in the canoe him and his son He believes this is a very bright man He somehow thinks that we can because he's so smart that humanity smart enough to do this We're not and and that thinking forgets that even the smartest of people is but a subset of the bigger thing of nature So we can really probably never Know we the human brain can't like encompass nature because nature encompasses the human brain But so much of human experience has been Positing that humans exist outside of nature. It's different. It's separate. It's the park. It's the forest. It's the mountains. It's not The whole enchilada the same time we get we get told we get this complaint Well, you you're this man nature and dichotomy You people you environmentalist man is part of nature. Well, yes and no It happens that the man nature the human nature dichotomy happens to be very Effective way of describing my problem that there is a dichot. Yeah, and For environmental writers, I think number one one of the things we can't keep doing and most and many of us have learned This is doom save them to death It gets so depressing You and I've learned this long ago back in the Sierra Club. You cannot just bombard them with gloom and doom You have to leave some hope there and and you have to tell story you have to find a different way to To convey this an awful lot of environmental writing is very the same There's a kind of a reporting that that's pretty predictable. You need to I'm sure you're doing with some of the stuff you're doing that that um You got to tell story that's gripping a story And and be an actual writer I'm just I'll say what I'm working on right now my Very good friend of mine Tony de Broom who's the foreign secretary of the Marshall Islands. There's a great Climate change advocate. He's the guy talking to the UN all the time. He died on the 22nd So I'm I'm I'm going back to a thing I wrote about him way back in 1980 when I was going through I did four books on Micronesia I was going through Micronesia and um Hooked up with him found this dictionary. He was making as a student. He made something called a touche in a it was the Marseille's English Dictionary and and I read in this book Um, I absolutely fell in love with this book What you learn about a people from 600 pages of their dictionary how they see the world When he started feeding fishing terms and he didn't even know this the computer started smoking and burning fishing turns Just come on forever this incredible variety canoe terms For some reason Marseille's smell terms It's like they have a heightened whole factory sense the smell pages go on and on you get a sense of who these people are so This these people are going under Marshall Islands are you know average six feet above sea level. They're they're going under So my approach in the piece I'm Revising right now is words words are going to be gone all these words that are attached to these places And in the marshals there's these tiny little areas have names because they're so small. There's 70 70 square miles of of um Of dry land or about a hundred million miles of ocean, you know, that's not that many two million miles one million mile of ocean, but Square miles of ocean, but um, but the kinds of things you're losing This whole worldview that you saw in this dictionary. Um, it's a way to approach this problem that's not the routine way of approaching And one of the reasons to not lose indigenous historical knowledge is because many of these peoples have Figured out things that we don't we don't understand and we are at pains to understand and in my book You know, there's a category of citizen science called co-creation and I was looking for a story about co-creation That's where you really have like not just the researcher saying I'm the researcher I'm going to study you but the researcher says I have a question that I want to ask about your people or where you live Do you also can you want to collaborate with me? Is there a question that you have? To that can be investigated at the same time and the story that I found which really changed the whole way that I wrote The book was about the Amamutsan people in the Santa Cruz Mountains Anyway that the native Californians and this is not true of indigenous people everywhere or even just in the United States But in California native Californians Cultivated the wild without depleting wild species or domesticating them. We don't know how to do that We domesticate animals, you know, we've got our cows and our sheep our dogs our cats Our birds, you know, we domesticate animals or we deplete them and they go extinct like grizzly bears and wolves But the the native Californians actually cultivated wildlife increasing their populations feeding themselves and Everybody lived a vibrant life together. How did they do that? The way they did it was has specific practices associated with it, but absolutely inextricable from their culture So these are the things these are examples of you know, we lose that knowledge We actually might be losing a way forward for ourselves Because we don't have a way forward if we take off all of these wild animals The wild animals create the environment that we live in they actually create the oxygen that we breathe and the fresh water that we drink And we don't we don't live without that. We can't make that ourselves So we need those wild animals. So how are we going to keep them keep their populations vibrant? We don't know how to do it. This is amazingly especially true in these low coral islands in the Pacific And I think it's just because there's everybody can see that they're finite You know these people arrive by canoe you come to a coral islet, you know You start at the lagoon beach and three minutes later at the ocean beach. That's it. There's no it's no slash and burn We're gonna move on to the next the next for us because this is my own theory And I'm sure it's true of why these people develop these wonderful Systems for managing these small places where they can pass down for thousands of years a pristine reef There's things like I mean We'll go out there Our guys with spear guns will shoot spawning grouper in the past female grouper And the island is this you're gonna you're gonna shoot this spawning female grouper. That's dumb What are you thinking or they'll all they'll In a coral at all. There'll be a number of islets together the third and for the fifth. That's that's a reserve Yeah And the way coral Spawning goes you're up if you're a downstream of that you're all you're always gonna be all right If you have a place that pours out all these coral spawn so And all kinds of taboo systems if you're in this clan you can't eat that if you're in that plan you can't is and at all Combined to make this wonderful management system. I just give one example of Palau Islands where I spent a year of my life is our They were once thought to maintain to have been inhabited by 40,000 people it's a big archipelago And and they passed on this beautiful people the most beautiful reefs in the world pristine We've been there for 20 years or now 40 years and 15,000 people can't live there because Fishing for cash Ignoring all the conservation rules. There's only 15,000 people you look at those old village site There were 40,000 people and they gave us this wonderful System so our system isn't very good that way. Yeah, I'm gonna I think we want to open it up to questions, but first I just want to give a plug to both of these guys books Which I meant to do in the beginning Mary Ellen's is citizen scientist and it's just a wonderful sort of tour of The age of extinction through the lens of people doing citizen science and then kens The wildness within which is really interesting kind of coverage of his dad's career through the eyes of people who worked with him So now let me open it up to questions