 Hi, I'm Ethan Allen and you're joining us on likable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. As we all know, likable science is just what its name suggests. It's how science is likable, how science is fun, how science is interesting. Science is not something that occurs often distant ivory towers done by arcane strange people with bubbling chemicals. It's all around us. It impacts our lives every day and it should be embraced. And with me today on Think Tech Studios is Danny Ruthenberg Marshall. Welcome Danny. Thanks for having me. And Danny is a videographer, also a human ecologist by education, I guess, and I thought we'd explore some of the issues around how to share aspects of science, particularly nature with people, why this is important, what it may do, what happens if we don't do it. Danny is just back from a long journey through Yukon River, right, from source to mouth. Very long. Sixty days or something on the river. About two months, 1,800 miles, it was a long journey for sure. Yeah, but it must have been amazing to do and you essentially documented this all the way down the river, the skies, the mountains, the people that you were with, wildlife you ran into. Yeah. Yeah. Before we get into that, you've done some other video before this. You had, I've seen one or two of your pieces, some shorter pieces mostly. Anything you want to tell our audience about those before we? Well, there's not really much to it. It's something I've been doing now for six years since I graduated college. I studied human ecological film in school and really dove into it with a passion once I graduated. Mostly I work with environmental nonprofits and other organizations that deal with nature to really tell the stories that they want told, to educate the general public about them. And so I've been doing that for a while and there have been lots of great clients. I've worked with the Student Conservation Association, the Sierra Club, 350.org, a bunch of great organizations there, but I haven't done a full-length feature-length documentary until this endeavor. Cool. And I think we've got a video clip that you just put together from some little snippets from this. It's not a full-length documentary. I don't know. It's about two, well, maybe three minutes, I guess, which we can show at any point here. The Yukon River, 1,800 miles across two countries and in some of the most remote regions left on planet Earth. That's what we set out to paddle and paddle it we did. The land we passed there varied wildly from spectacular mountain ranges towering over the landscape to endless flats stretching into the distance. The weather was constantly changing. At times it was beastly hot, even in the Arctic, with the sun burning our faces and forcing us into the river. Other times we'd have on everything we own can still be shivering to the bone. Some direct havoc on our schedule and filled our boats with water. So we pulled over for a major storm on the tarp up and everything. And right as we were getting ready to start leaving again, decided to start raining. But there's not too much wind and not too much thunder and lightning. So we're just going to keep plowing through it bit by bit. We crossed paths with wildlife all along our journey. Fish play an integral role in the ecosystem and we both observed and ate them. To protect our smell of bulls from bears, we had an electric fence with us. The only things we successfully shocked were ourselves. At the sea we even found a dead beluga whale. Yeah! They're all beached whales. It is day 57 and we've made it to the Bering Sea. You can see behind me, finally the ocean. After all this time, we just spent three, four, five hours sitting on this coast, hanging out, enjoying the experience and waiting for the tides to slowly, slowly reverse. We think it's pretty much at its lowest tide and we'll start being able to ride that high tide coming back in to the island we left our camp at. We can tell them a little out of breath because I'm out of shape and we just hauled our boat from where we got beached three or four hours ago as the tide was higher up pulling all the way out to now. But it's different being here. I'm so excited to be done, so excited now that we're paddling in the reverse direction. I think I'll be even more excited when we're done paddling entirely, but it's been a good ride. Wow, that was amazing. A nice summary of what went on, some of the scenery you saw, as you were saying, while we were actually watching that, there were more mountains that really showed in the journey. Yeah, earlier on when we were in the Canadian part, we were deep in those mountain valleys. So in part you were trying to capture in this scenery of course, the wild, the river, but it was also somewhat about the people, right? And you had a crew of nine, right? Nine people. And I would say it was almost entirely about the people in the natural environment. So I'm not making a nature documentary here, I'm not telling the story of the river. I'm telling that story of how we as this group of human beings are interacting with our natural world and growing and learning because of it, because of the experiences that we have on a daily basis out there, and being in a situation that's so wild. Now this region of the world, the Yukon territory in Alaska, is 40 times less populated or something along those lines than Siberia. It is incredibly remote. We would find mostly just villages with a few hundred people, a couple larger ones to about 1,000. For the most part we were just in wilderness day after day. So it was the story of how do these people grow? How do these people experience this natural world and learn from it? That's putting people in natural or particular sort of stressful situations. It's a very thought-provoking thing. They can react well, they can react badly, right? I don't know if you've ever read the story of Ernest Shappleton's expedition to Antarctica. I know of it, but I haven't read the story. Yeah, I'll let it come to me later. I wonder what about that, about all of his ships crushed. He gets his whole crew, tracks 800 miles across the Antarctic ice, hundreds of miles across open ocean and small boats. To be clear, that expedition was orders of magnitude larger and more difficult than what we just did. Are those fun? Endurance is the name of the book, yes. It's actually a great book to read. If you're ever feeling bad or feeling life is being really tough, mean to you and you're having to put up with a lot and suffer, you read that and you think, no, my worries are very trivial. Anyhow, so talk about this. Tell me a little bit about how this thing came about. I mean, this is obviously a huge logistical undertaking. How did you get involved in it and how much time did that take? Yeah, well, I have a friend and he does all sorts of these expeditions. And we actually met, I was attempting to do like the Appalachian Trail in 2010. He successfully did it, but we met along the trail and he was part of my student thesis of documentary that I produced about that expedition. And I hadn't seen him since then. But we stayed in touch loosely every couple of years checking in. How are you? How are you doing? And he called me up about two years ago, two and a half years ago now. Said, Danny, how are you doing? Great Anthony, how are you? And he said, I've got an idea. Want to paddle the entire Yukon River with me? Sure. And so for two years then, we planned, mostly he planned, I was along for the ride and to make the documentary. That was the very initial contact was we want a documentary made about this experience, made about the journey. And so then he did the logistics, I planned for the documentary. And over time, he connected one way or another with all these other individuals. Sometimes very loosely through friends of a friend and everyone was interested. We all came together. We contributed the funds that we needed. He did the logistics and we showed up and paddled the entire river. And it wasn't like you were all expert canoeers or experienced outdoor persons. Most of us had some level of experience in the wilderness. I'd say of the nine of us, probably seven had good wilderness experience. And Anthony had good canoeing experience. He'd done the entire Mississippi River and the entire Missouri River. So he already had 5,000 miles of river under his belt. But for the rest of us, I had a 40 mile trip I did last summer because I thought I should be in a canoe before I go out here. I should have some experience with that. And some people had never been in a canoe until we got to the beginning of the Gun River and said, here's a battle, jump in the canoe. Which end do I hold? Yeah, right? But everyone, we took it very slowly in the beginning and everyone had time to learn and get accustomed to the boats, figure out how to do the different strokes, how to steer, what the difference between the bow and the stern was. And by the time we got 100 miles down the river, we were all doing very solidly. Oh, good. And so you've been looking at this issue of how people interact and interact without nature. What do you think is the value of impact? What are you trying to do with videoing in this? Ideally, through most of my videos that are along these lines. If I do one for a client, that's a different story. The videos are just about an experience in nature. I want folks to watch it and be inspired to have their own wilderness experience. Not necessarily two months on the Yukon. But even going for a hike in the local park, even going out and checking out your local national park or the nearby mountain range up there, or throwing pebbles into a creek, anything that's going to get you outside, away from the screens, away from the computers and smartphones and everything, and have that experience with nature is going to provide some value to you emotionally and mentally, and give you a better understanding of what is that we are steadily losing through the massively growing population and environmental degradation. Yeah, there's actually now some studies going on, because more and more of the world's population lives their lives in urban centers, increasingly large urban centers, and spends less and less time out in any sort of, you might think of as authentic nature, whatever that may mean. But, and people are speculating, and the scholars are studying this, is what are we losing here? If people don't go out and spend time in the wild, will they appreciate the wild? Will they fight to save the wild? Will they contribute to save the wild? Will they ask their elected representatives to vote to save the wild? Or will they let the, will they get paved over basically? Yeah, so this is you're trying to figure, seeing a video is probably better than not seeing the video, right? Yeah, and you know, even of all that work only inspires one person to get out for one more moment. That's still something that's worthwhile. Ideally inspires a lot more people to get out and truly learn and experience. But yeah, it's definitely something that I want, I want to understand better in my own life. I still feel like even after this experience and so many others, that I'm a novice when it comes to understanding the natural world, the environment all around us. And if I can do this and still feel like a novice, I know that the people who are glued to their screens definitely don't have that understanding of the natural world. Yeah, yeah. Hey, we're gonna come back and explore this further and more in depth, but right now we're gonna have to take short break. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Lakeable Science here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Daniel Ruthenberg Marshall is in the studio with me today. We're talking about his journey down the Yukon and about human ecology, nature, and videography, all rolled into one. We'll be back in another minute. This is Think Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. Back here on Lakeable Science, I'm your host, Ethan Allen. You're on Think Tech, Hawaii. With me today is Daniel Ruthenberg Marshall. Danny is just back from a eight week trip from source to mouth on the Yukon, paddling down it, videoing it. I would say every step of the way, every stroke of the way I guess it would be more appropriate. And we saw earlier a wonderful video of a little overview of the whole thing and I snippet you put together. And we were talking about the value of being in nature, what this means to people. So tell me, what did you learn from this experience? What did I learn from this experience? I learned that I should get into better shape before I try and paddle almost 2,000 miles. I had some shoulder injuries that I dealt with and a couple back injuries, just overuse. So definitely learned that in terms of my own personal life. I also learned that the things that we think of is true wilderness or even less wilderness than I expected. I was thinking I would go out onto the Yukon River and I would go days on end without seeing people. You know, you're in this incredibly remote place. But the river in essence has become a very lightly traffic highway for all the commerce between these towns and people traveling back and forth because a lot of these places don't have roads in and out of them. It's all by plane or by boat to get in and out of the town. And so every four or five days at the longest, we would come across a small town and almost every single day we would see at least one motorboat go by or one fish camp. Set up on the river where locals would spend their summers fishing. And I was not expecting that. I'm hoping there's still some place I haven't found that is even more remote where I can truly experience that wilderness, but I was surprised. Yeah, but waterways are always used as means of transportation and the great connectors of small things. It's funny, in the Pacific here, we often think of the Pacific Islands out in Micronesia as tiny little islands separated by vast distances of ocean. The people there think of them as tiny little islands connected by an ocean. And they really have a very different mindset about the whole thing because they understand the ocean was what they used to get back and forth and see other people, you know. So yeah, it's intriguing. I've never looked at it that way. That's a good perspective. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, thank you. So besides learning these things, you've dealt with had some highs and some lows on this trip. Can you discuss some of those? Some of the best and some of the worst? Yeah, let's start with the highs. Let's start off good. There were some moments that we really got to experience nature in a way that I never had before. You hear the first wolf pack howling or we even saw a wolf pack on the shore at one point when we were paddling by. They got startled by us and ran off. And seeing a wolf pack up close was so incredible. I had never seen a wolf outside of a zoo before while there's some educational level to getting to see those animals in a zoo, seeing them in their natural environment, how massive they are, the footprints they leave behind, the kills that they're making, was genuinely a good learning experience. I won't say it's a joy. You're a little scared of the wolves and you're a little sad for the animals they're killing. So awe-inspiring, right? awe-inspiring, that's a good way of putting it, yeah. On the low end of things, it would probably be the injuries I mentioned earlier. At one point I got some spasms in my lower back and thankfully we had just pulled off the river because there was high wind and so we were stopped for the day anyways. But it got to the point where I could not walk and I was trying to use a canoe paddle as a crutch to get myself to 20 meters to the tent where I was trying to curl into my sleeping bag for the next 18 hours and I couldn't make it those 20 meters. So I ended up falling over because my lower back was just so stiff. So the lows would probably definitely tie into that and then those moments that were both low and high. When we saw the beluga that you saw in the video earlier, it's fascinating to get to see this animal up close but it's tragic. We don't know how it got beached, how it died, what its story was, how old it was. We don't know any of that. So you see the sadness of nature and the joy of getting to learn from it being there. Yeah, yeah, okay, great. And then there were the odd human interactions you had. You were telling me earlier the story of being in Dawson and the peculiar beverage concoction they have there. Yeah, so Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada. It's familiar to most people because of the Yukon Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century. And there's only about 1200 people who live there now. But the town has still a huge tourist attraction, still lots of people coming through every season. And so one of the bars decided to capitalize on this and come up with a unique concoction that you have to go to the bar by something that's at least 80 proof and then you stand in line for the human toe shop. They got this human toe. I don't know if it was from where, I don't know. And you go up, they keep it salted and that's why you need 80 proof liquor. So it's sterile or whatever, but it's gross, shriveled black and they throw it in your drink and you pay $5 for the honor of taking a shot. And it's, I think a $3,000 fine if you swallow the toe. Oh, they take one from you. So a lot of the people on the team did that shot. And a lot of the folks that we'd met and were hanging out with in Dawson City did it. I declined. Smart man, smart man. I didn't take this shot. And yeah, it was gross. Yeah, yeah, huh, okay. Amazing, amazing. A different side of a cultural experience. Yeah, exactly. But they can't even associate with Canada. You have to associate with the very small town, remote areas where you can do something this unique. And it is that attraction for all these tourists. Yeah, exactly. Well, we talk about police-based learning and that sounds like a cute little example of that. Yeah, but Justin, that's gonna be right there. So do you think that your videos will have different impacts on people who are familiar with nature, who spend time out in the wild versus people who don't? Do you think there's a difference in how they're gonna react? I certainly think there will be some level of difference in how you react. As I mentioned, my primary goal is to inspire people to get out there and experience it, no matter how small or large the experience may be. And so if someone who is already doing these sorts of things sees that video, sees the documentary, they'll probably really like hearing the story, they'll really enjoy seeing the shots from the Yukon if they've never visited, and to get a better understanding of what that river's like. But they'll be less focused on the people, which is what the story is really about because they're already in those people's shoes in whatever adventures they have. Someone who hasn't done those things is probably gonna have more of an attention on the people and hopefully feel compelled to get out there and hug a tree or whatever it is they choose to do. Yeah, yeah, excellent. That's what you want to do is inspire people to action and make them a little more aware of the beauty of nature's all around them, the fact that it is, it's a disappearing resource that you've commented, right? We are trashing large sections of this planet. Some parts of it pretty irrevocably, that certainly for centuries if not eons will never be the same, less and less truly unspoiled places. People even think the big island here which has a relatively small population, they think of it as relatively unspoiled, but much of the plant life on it was brought by the early Polynesians. There's actually a whole issue here about what are native plants? Because do you mean native before any human contact or do you mean native before European contact? Those are two very different flora assemblages basically. So yeah, there is that whole thing. So in sort of learning to do this and preparing yourself, what advice would you give to any students who are thinking, wow, this looks like this would be fun. I'd love to get out there and then you take nature and go on these kind of journeys and all of that. What kinds of backgrounds do you need? What kinds of skills, mental attitudes do they need? The biggest thing you need is a love for doing that sort of thing, for getting out into nature. Because I had that when I got to college. What I didn't have was a sense of direction as to where I would go. I went through 11 different majors, my freshman year, 11. I would be like, oh, doing Spanish sounds great. Doing archeology sounds great. Oh, I would love to learn more about sociology or English or history. And I would sign up for these majors and think this is it. And then two weeks later I'd be like, oh, but what about this other thing? And it wasn't until someone suggested that for my senior thesis, we'd do something called the, I went to St. Mary's College of Maryland. We'd do something called the St. Mary's Project during your whole senior year. Someone suggested, at the end of my freshman year, you should do like the Appalachian Trail and make a documentary about it. My first always had that idea, stupid, you can't do that for school. And 24 hours later I'm busy researching everything I can find about the Appalachian Trail wanting to do that. And as mentioned earlier, I did not succeed in completing the trail, but I did make a documentary for my senior thesis. What I didn't have though was a major. And so my college had a student design option that I was able to do. And I looked at what I wanted to do for my St. Mary's Project and designed the entire curriculum around that idea of going out and looking at how these people on the Appalachian Trail interact with their natural and built environments with the towns that are along there. And the fact that a trail itself is not natural. And it was really a joy to get to design that major, to get to better understand what it would take to do this. So anyone who's interested in getting involved in it, once you have that passion, you just have to take that passion and find a way to shape your learning, shape your educational experience into that field. Okay, that's great. That's very different from what I often hear when I ask this question, pretty common. My guests here most of them say, oh, well, you know, start taking a lot of math courses, a lot of good science courses, prepare yourself in engineering, dah, dah, dah, dah. No good to take those courses if you don't have the drive. Right, right, yeah, yeah. It's interesting to think about it in those terms. And indeed, I mean, that is ultimately what will make you a success in life, right, is to have real passion that will keep you, at least keep you showing up for work, whatever it is you do in the way of work, and not finding it drudgery, right, if this is, yeah. The beauty of my field is it's really easy to reignite that passion. You just go out to a park. You're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling stressed out, go out to whatever local park, whatever river, and an hour later, you're feeling much better. And you're ready to tackle it again. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, I'm sure there must have been moments on your journey when you didn't feel like you really wanted to get up and get going on it, but you, of course, went to run on that kind of journey, you used to have no choice but to continue it. Going forward or not going? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's super. You know, it's really, it's amazing, hearing your story about 11 majors, I just gotta ask you, did you keep your parents surprised of these changes? Occasionally? On the occasion. Mostly you, too fast of a turnover for them to be worried about it. I didn't talk to you this week. I had two majors since I last talked to you. But that's great that you were creative enough to design your own educational program, very, very admirable that you did that. I can't say how much I've enjoyed this, that I would see in your video there. I enjoyed talking with you, watching these background shots have been popping up here. It's been great being on here and getting the chance to talk to you with it. So I thank you very much. I look forward to talking to you in the future when maybe when you get the video really cranked up, we can talk again and shoot a little segment of it on here and see what we can do. That'd be wonderful. Okay, well thank you very much, Jenny. Hello. Thank you, Ethan. And join us next week on another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii.