 of the duo that organizes this series. Jessica Burton, the executive director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative is my partner in crime for the series. We're delighted to be in our third year. This is our last presentation of the season. We are taking our little summer recess. Everyone can enjoy their warm Wednesday, main evenings, and we'll see you back here in September. Tonight, we're very excited to have John Hagan, the president of management to be our last speaker of the series. Welcome, John. Thank you. When I showed up about five o'clock, the room was full. Chairs all the way to back, I thought, this is great. I didn't know it was gonna be such a popular talk. So anyway, then everybody left and the chairs got put away. But you're here, so thank you for coming this evening. Hearing what I've got to say, and I hope to hear from you as well. So as I go through this presentation, just jump right in if you've got a question or an idea that you'd like to share. Some of you, see if I ever heard of Man-O-Map before, just, okay, there's a few. Okay, that's really good. So let me explain who we are. We're a science-driven, nonprofit sustainability organization. We were founded, this is our 50th year. We were founded in the little town of Man-O-Map on the south shore of Massachusetts, part of Plymouth, Mayflower, The Rock, and all that, Man-O-Map is there. And we started out as an avian, a bird ecological research organization, and over the years we grew into what much more than just birds, really a sustainability organization. Because we realized we actually couldn't save birds if all we ever did was work on birds. We had to start engaging the rest of the world. And so really about 25, about midway in our evolution, we started to branch out and say we need to be working with the for-profit, even though we're a nonprofit, we need to be working with the for-profit sector. It's really in the driver's seat for how we humans use resources, and we built a lot of programs around engagement with the for-profit sector. And now that's about half our work, is with the for-profit sector, with everything from fishermen, to institutional investors, to the grocery sector. Hannaford is one of our partners here in Maine. Farmers, port authorities in Argentina, our work now spans pretty much the entire Western Hemisphere. So if you don't know much about us, go to our website, learn more. There's some information out on the table. Pick up our most recent magazine and learn a little bit more about us. This talk that I'm doing this evening is something that's been in progress for probably eight or nine years now. But I gave it, I gave the most recent iteration just a little while ago to my staff in Manimat, at the headquarters. I've got to say, we also have an office in Brunswick, so I go back and forth every week to Mastery's that live in Maine. But I gave the talk to our staff and one of my department, the head of our climate services department, said, John, that is the most depressing talk I've ever heard. So the good news is, I got that memo earlier, so I've improved it for you this evening. But also I'm really proud of the fact that my staff, don't mind telling me exactly what they think about my talks. So here we go. I am going to take you down through the Valley of the Shadow of Death for a little while before I bring you back up to the Promised Land. I promise we'll end on a positive note, but there's a lot of dark things that we need to talk about, sort of coming out of social psychology these days that try to explain what's going on in the world. I promise you I've got a solution. And I'm gonna tell you, it's only eight words, I'm gonna tell you now, in case you fall asleep, later on in the presentation, if you just remember this, you'll have all you need to know. Now, I'm a scientist, I'm an ecologist by training, so I can say this was some credibility. For a long time, we thought that science was what mattered that we needed to lead with our knowledge. And what we've discovered is if we want science put to use, we need to lead with the relationship first, quality relationship based on honesty and integrity, then science will be used. So I'm gonna talk a lot about this tonight, but that's all you need to remember. I'll come back to this at the end, that's my take home message. Now where this all started for me, this subject started for me, was in the Maine North Woods about 1992. And I was still back in my bird research days. Manomet was very interested in what impacts forestry, forest practices were having on bird populations. There were a lot of declines at the continental scale, and many of the species declining used forests. So I was in Massachusetts at the time, I said, well, who owns the forest in our part of the world? We should be working with them in understanding what's going on. Well, if you know Maine, I'm assuming you're all living Maine now, or spend most of your time here. And you know the northern half of Maine is just a big blank spot on the map. There are no dirt roads, but there are no paved roads. And you know, the towns, Greenville and Millinocket and Ashland are kind of on the edge. And then there's this great big blank spot that is owned by the forest products industry. It's growing and producing trees and paper and timber. So I said, well, we should start working with the timber industry, understand what forest practices are doing to birds. And we did, and the timber industry was very receptive. And we studied just about everything there was to study at the time, spent a lot of time in the remote parts of northern Maine. And after three years, I discovered that this was the mid 90s. Is anybody here in the mid 90s? It's okay to rate. Anybody go back that far? All right, thank you. Forestry was a big contentious issue in the 90s. And one of the big issues was clear cutting. There was a lot of public outcry over clear cutting, like what you see in this aerial photograph. And so we wanted to know the impacts of clear cutting on bird populations. Did lots and lots of so-called point counts in clear cuts and middle-aged forest and mature forest and old-growth forest. We covered the whole gamut. And after about three years of work, our central conclusion was clear cuts are actually pretty good for birds. And they're not good for some species, but they're good for others. Like they're not good for the oven bird, which is shown here. But if you're a chestnut-sided warbler, they love clear cuts and the scrubby regeneration that comes back from them. And there's lots of other species that like that young forest after a clear cut. So I was a lot younger in 1992. I didn't know a whole lot, but I knew how to count birds and do science. And so I just sort of, I started giving talks to groups like this about the amaze that clear cuts weren't biological deserts after all. Like you read about in the newspaper and magazines that they actually had ecological advantages. And yes, there were places you didn't wanna do a clear cut, but there were places you could. And that young growth is a part of a natural process too that creates habitat for birds. So anyway, as a young lad at the time what caught me off guard was that it was not a popular message about birds using the clear cuts had any positive effects at all. And I just didn't understand that. I thought this is really good news. Everybody ought to be happy about this. And everybody was not happy about that. And I just couldn't figure out, wait a minute, this is science trying to add information to the public discourse. And there was a backlash to it. And I have basically spent the last 25 years trying to figure out how science works or doesn't work in our society. And I'm gonna show a lot of evidence that it's gotten worse rather than got better in the last 25 years. But in, and I was kind of alone and felt awfully alone thinking about these kinds of things till about 2004 when a guy named Daniel Sarowitz published a paper titled, How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse. And I thought that is great because that's exactly what I did in 1993 with clear cuts in birds. And here was a peer-reviewed science paper that started to dig into what's going on with science and how could it possibly be that it makes some things worse, some public conversations worse. And of course, the scientific community just raked Sarowitz over the coals for suggesting that science isn't the be all and end all. So anyway, but at least it gave me a little bit of license to think about this some more and try to understand it more. And really, since that paper, he's an ecologist by training or I think he's an ecologist by training natural resources. But since then, the social psychology literature in the last decade has just exploded in helping us to understand how people process information. And I'm gonna talk about that. And hopefully have a, I'm tangled up here. Hopefully have a solution. Now, fast forward to the about eight years ago, Manomet was every organization, if you're around for decades like we are, you gotta do the rebranding thing because you need new logo and you need new language and all that. And we were in this process of needing to rebrand, we called it a brand refresh because the board didn't wanna do rebranding but it was a brand refresh. And so we got a new logo and hired a firm from New York, fancy firm called Fenton from New York City that came and helped us do a brand refresh. And the principle that the lead, the project lead working with us, her name was Jennifer Hahn. And she was giving like branding 101 lecture to the staff at Manomet. And oh, this is great. Got an authority from New York talking to us about branding. They specialized in non-profit work. And Jennifer said during like 10 minutes into her presentation to the staff, if facts mattered, we wouldn't be here. I said, Jennifer, you're talking to a roomful scientist. Facts matter, you can't say that to us. But her point was really well taken because what she was essentially saying is look, we studied sustainability and birds and climate change and a lot of serious stuff. And she said, she was saying, look, if people just read what you write and publish, it would be a no brainer, we'd go fix all those things. But since we're not, apparently you need something more than just getting your science out there. So anyway, that really, I remember it's a purpose, it's that quote of what Jennifer said that day and I've been thinking about it ever since. And more recently, some of you may know Daniel Kahneman. He just won the Nobel Prize in economics I think a couple of years ago. And with respect to climate change, he said, if you were to design a problem that the mind is not equipped to deal with, it's climate change. It's distant, it's abstract, it's contested. It is not going to be solved by presenting more evidence. Wait a minute, this is the biggest issue maybe humanity has ever faced and more science isn't what's stopping us, he's saying. So okay, well maybe we need to think about this a little bit differently. Then I think it was about a year ago, a little over a year ago there was a paper in the journal Science, the premier scientific journal in the world that had an article that said fake news spreads faster than true news. So that's problematic. If the truth doesn't move as fast as falsehoods, what do we do about that? Why is that going on? And just in the last five years or so, there's been a lot about sort of anti-intellectualism, anti-science and you just got to wonder, well what's going on with that as well? And everybody can, might have your own hypothesis about what's going on. But there's, I mean things have changed in the sort of 30 years that I've been as a scientist and functioning as a scientist. A lot has changed and it's a strange world we're living in right now. So anyway, these are two really good books about the trends that we're seeing. This is another one. I like a book where the title just, you don't even have to read the book because the title is a sentence and you don't need to go any further than that. But there's a lot that's been written about this and you just, at least for me, I just like I want to stop and think, well what in the world is going on here? I need to understand this. And it goes all the way back to the birds in the clear cut thing that I experienced way back. So I want to talk a little, this is kind of a very high level talk. You might say a little bit abstract, but I think at the end there will be practical things you can do or think about in terms of reversing these trends that we're talking about. But, and I've explored this whole subject from all different angles. And these are just things I put together. You may feel differently and that's fine. But I think part of what I see is going on is an erosion of trust. And there have actually been surveys, survey done that goes back to 1970 asking the question of the public. Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people? And it gives five different options. And so this is a graph of the percent of respondents who say can trust. This can trust each other. So over four or five decades now there is an erosion of trust in each other in our society. And I think this is part of the story. People just don't trust each other anymore. People don't trust scientists as much as they did before. Well, speaking of scientists, what about, this is sort of trusting each other overall. What about trust in scientists, people like me? Okay, well, maybe scientists are doing, the data don't go back but a couple of decades, almost three decades. But what about trust in science? Well, that looks not so bad. Maybe we're holding our own in the face of the larger issues in society. Well, let's see. I guess I'll go one step further. I don't know quite what to say about this, although what if you break out that one graph I just showed you by political party? Okay, so this is the same question but just Democrats answering the question. So it looks like scientists trust with Democrats is getting better over time. So if you've got any statistical thoughts at all and you're integrating the previous graph I showed with this graph, you know what I'm gonna show you next, don't you? So with Republicans, the scientific community trust is decreasing over time. Now what's up with that? I don't know what's up. I'm not gonna tell you the answer to what's up with this but it's a really, I think it's an interesting insight into what may be going on with science in our society. So why are these, if trust is eroding and our belief in science is, our belief in facts is a society is eroding. What, you know, really, who cares? Does it matter very much? You know, just trend. Well the problem I see with it is if you ignore facts you can actually get things wrong. It can cost you money. It can, if you've got any economics social or environmental values, things that you care about, that you wanna keep, you kinda need data to not make terrible mistakes. So, and secondly, so that's one thing. We just, don't we need facts to not make mistakes? They can be very expensive. But secondly, when we're running into really complex problems like say climate change, that economic, social, environmental, it's a tangled, complicated, complex problem, you actually need to come together as a society to solve that. Democrats can't solve climate change. Republicans can't solve climate change. It's going to take both of them, both types. It's gonna take everybody to solve that problem. So when we become polarized like this, it makes it harder for us to tackle complicated problems and yet we've got some of the most complicated problems ever. The timing is terrible for us to be so polarized when our problems, the complex problems are sorta through the roof right now. So it's not a good trend. Remember I'm gonna solve it at the end. So hang in, hang in there. But first we're going down into this valley of the shadow that I talked about. I've done a lot of reading, especially in the last decade, read lots of books, read lots of scientific papers. What I've tried to do in the next 15 minutes is take some of the essential things I've learned from all this reading and give it to you and the short version. And there are seven different things that I wanna talk about. I could have done a lot more, but these are the big ones as far as I'm concerned. One of the best books I read that really cleared it up, cleared up a lot for me and explained the buzzsaw that I ran into, that's kind of a pine, buzzsaw I ran into with the clear cuts and birds back in 1992 was explained by this book by Roger Pielke called The Honest Broker. And he talks in this book, it's a short book if you're interested in science and how science works, I recommend it. He breaks issues down just simplistically into what he calls abortion politics and I changed, he called it tornado politics, I changed it to cancer politics because it suits my argument better, but it's the same principle. And what he, the point he made was that if you've got an issue that needs science that we all agree on the outcome, more science is good, people will embrace that. So who here wouldn't like to cure cancer? I mean, you might, maybe you've had it, maybe you might get it, we probably all agree that a cure for cancer would be good. Yep, seein' noise, okay. So if we had more science that helped us understand how to cure cancer, we'd be for that, yay. Then take another issue like abortion which has been in the news again recently as you probably know, and think about, is there any science that we could, scientists could produce that would change your view on abortion? Probably not. So in fact, think about it, when is the last time you changed your mind about a major societal issue? We don't change our minds very often, no matter what. So what I, what this book helped me realize was the clear cutting thing, I had birds in clear cuts, I could take people out, you can count them yourself. I'm not making this up, they're singing in clear cuts. It did not, it was an emotional issue for a lot of people. And so science just didn't help. In fact, it kind of made things worse. So this book explained to me there are issues where science can help and everybody will be for it and issues where more science probably isn't gonna help. And it helped me start to think now, is this gonna be one of those or one of those issues? And it just sort of gave me a little comfort in knowing, it wasn't all me, it was sort of the emotional elements of the issue that I was working on at the time. Okay, so that's one, think of, if you're struggling with an issue or you're debating an issue with someone, think about whether if you're debating with somebody it's probably an abortion politics type issue. Climate science, climate change has unfortunately become kind of one of those type topics, which is strange because it wasn't 20 years ago. It's shifted somehow. All right, second thing I learned and some of these, like five years ago, a lot of these ideas, confirmation bias, you didn't, nobody really knew about or heard about much. The social psychology has come so far that you hear about this a lot now in the press, in the media. So you may be familiar with some of these ideas. Confirmation biases is the idea that we all, even scientists, seek information that reinforce what we already believed to begin with. And we gravitate to knowledge, we gravitate to the facts that support what we believe. And we tend not to gravitate to the facts that dispute what we believe. It's normal, we all do it. Scientists do it, it's just, it's what it is. We, you know, I could say as scientists we work really hard to try not to do that when somebody says something, spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. So when somebody challenges climate change, I try to read what they're saying and understand it because I wanna know where they're coming from. Is there merit to it? So I try to train myself to pay careful attention to the things that don't conform to what I believe. Maybe I'll change my mind, I don't know. But anyway, we all have this confirmation bias thing going on and it's good to be aware of it. Okay, passion is the reason, is the slave of passions. David Hume, a philosopher back in the mid 1700s, had this quote, you may have heard it, this quote has been used a lot. And so it goes back a couple of centuries. But the idea is that we think we're reasoning rational, logical beings and we can be, but our emotions are gonna win every single time. And it's related to the confirmation bias and absorbing information that supports us. So it's important to remember if you're emotional about a particular issue, watch out, because you're especially vulnerable to confirmation bias at that point. And if we weren't emotional beings, what use would there be in living really? So we're gonna be emotional, but we need to, Hume was saying we need to recognize that our emotional brain is in the driver's seat and our reasoning brain is just serving our emotional brain. Okay, next idea, there are only seven, so hang on. If only we could educate them. I don't know how many times I've heard this in my career. And it kind of drives me crazy to, partly because if, well, I'll explain, in this study done about a decade ago by a Harvard, I'm sorry, Yale, I think Harvard because I go to Boston all the time, it's that other school, Yale. And the study hypothesized, this has to do with perceived risk of climate change in relation to how much your scientific literacy. So they hypothesized that if you have low scientific literacy, if you can't answer the 10 basic science questions about something and you score low, that your perception of climate risk would also be low. And that if you knew more science and got it right, your perception of risk would be higher. You get the graph, it's their hypothesis, it made perfect sense to me as anybody thinks about it. You know more, yeah, oh, now I've got the facts. I'm worried about that now. So then they went out and did, this was their hypothesis, they collected data and this is what they got. So what's up with that? How is it that the more literate you are, the more scientifically literate you are, really there's no change, maybe a little bit decrease in your perception of risk. So the reason I'm emphasizing this is because if the more knowledgeable people, more knowledge isn't seeming to affect how people view the issue. So as a scientist I'm thinking, wait a minute, I thought science was supposed to be helping. It's not, I need to know why. Because my whole life is about putting science to use and if it's not working, I need to know why. Because maybe I shouldn't just keep producing more of it. So again, why is, why, why would this happen? So they, fortunately the researchers had other information about the participants and their scientists, so their social scientists, so they have to make up crazy names for their study groups and they call one group the egalitarian communitarians, and the other group the hierarchical individualists. And I would just simplify it to say Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives because I don't know why they have to, it's kind of like why you have to make up names for really, I think they actually had the political persuasion of the people involved in the study as well. But essentially the green line that, let's just call them Democrats for the sake of making it simple tonight, they already believed there was a lot of risk, whether they had low scientific literacy or high, they perceived the risk to be high. And if you were a conservative or Republican, you perceived climate science as a low, climate change is low risk, didn't matter how much you knew about it. So what's going on that your knowledge is not actually affecting your perception of risk in this case? That's why I was, if only we could educate them, they're already educated. That's not the issue. So what is the issue? And I don't know that I have, I don't know that I actually have the answer to that. So I'm just posing the question, that's really strange. All right, number five, the backfire effect is, I'm gonna ask who's heard of the backfire effect? Okay, one, it's been in the news more lately and I asked a room of 400 people about a year ago and nobody raised their hand at all. So we're getting better. The backfire effect is related to all of these other things that I've been talking about. In fact, all these, I'm up to five, they're all related in one way or another. The backfire effect is when you, I'm saying you because you know your stuff, you know truth, you know facts. And let's say you tell the facts you know about whatever the subject to someone that might disagree with you a little bit. Maybe you don't know what their position is but you share your factual knowledge with them and the result is they actually become more entrenched against you than if you just hadn't said anything at all. This gets back to if only you could educate them. Well, you just tried. You had your stuff straight, you shared your knowledge and they became more opposed to you than before. It's called the backfire effect. It's been well studied and replicated in lots of social psychology studies in the last five or 10 years. So, I mean this just drives me crazy. If you, as a scientist, if I share my knowledge, what I know about birds and clear cuts and it just makes things worse, what am I supposed to do with the rest of my time on the planet? Well, I don't know but it's nice to know that this effect happens because how many times have you tried to argue with someone over the Thanksgiving dinner table when you got relatives you wish weren't there and you're debating some particular issue and you think, well, I'll just let them know what I know and then I'll show them. And it just gets worse. You're like, why did it become? So, it's called the backfire effect. Now, there have been a couple studies since recently, 2016, that have shown it does not always backfire. And I wish I could tell you, I don't know yet why this happens, but there are circumstances where you can share facts and I think it's where it's a de-emotionalized, that's a word, where there's not a lot of emotion, you can share facts and you can actually get through or maybe somebody's trying to share facts with you and trying to get through to you. If you take the emotion out of it, it's easier and you may not get that backfire effect. So, that's a good lesson because knowing about the backfire effect, if you can get the emotion out of the conversation, it might work better. One of the things I've discovered is on climate change because I don't know where you all stand on climate change but I'll believe it because I was right up on it. But a lot of people don't and so it's one of the abortion, climate change, vaccines. These are kind of issues that, what's up with them? They're issues that we struggle with in society today. And one of the things that I practice in my interactions with the for-profit sector, which is a lot, is I try to make sure I'm leaving any emotion out of it and people think, you're just a robot. Why aren't you passionate about your work? Well, yes I am. But if I introduce the emotion into it, it's going nowhere with who's sitting across the table from me. So I take the emotion out of it and I also try to focus on, the mechanism of whatever I'm talking about. Like with climate change, one of the things that works and if you find yourself in a conversation with someone about climate change, you might use it sometime. I mean, what's going on with climate change is not complicated. We've known the physics of climate change for like 130 years and what happens is when shortwave radiation comes into the atmosphere and bounces off the earth, it gets converted to longwave radiation. Infrared radiation, hang with me, you're gonna be able to use this, I promise. And greenhouse gas molecules like CO2, the bonds that connect the carbon to the oxygen start vibrating when they're hit by infrared radiation as opposed to the ultraviolet that comes in. These molecules vibrate. It's not your fault, they just, they do. So it's not a, you see how you kind of take the emotion out of it and it's just physics that these bonds vibrate and so you put more CO2 in the atmosphere, you got more molecules vibrating and when things vibrate, they heat up. So if you can get people to understand, I guess this is sharing science, but you're kind of taking them into a zone of discovery and you're leaving the emotion behind and if you can get to that place, then you'll be more effective. So the backfire effect. Okay, groups, groups, bind and blind, this really, one of the best books I've ever read was this book called A Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. And his, just great book, covers a lot of this social psychology from many different angles, but he says, he makes the case that we, when we hang out with people who are like us, we tend to reinforce our positions, we tend to reinforce our entrenchment or belief about a particular issue. So groups bind us together. We like hanging out with people who see the world like we do, which is sort of natural to want to do that. So groups, like-minded groups, bind each other together, if you will, but they also blind us to alternative viewpoints. So groups, bind and blind. And he makes the case that you really need to hang out with people who are different from you. And so I've never done this before, but I think I'll try it and see how it goes. You can not participate if you don't want to, so you can opt out. But let me just ask, how many, think about a political spectrum, left, Democrat, right, extremes. Let me just say, raise your hand if you're willing, if you are just somewhere a little left of center or more left of center. Okay, thank you for participating. Now, raise your hand if you're a little bit right or a lot right. Okay, see, that's a problem, because you're all alike, or you're somewhat alike. So we tend to hang out, you tend to come to talks like this because there's probably some liberal progressive talking about science. But it's not good if we're hanging out with people who just think about the world or see the world like we do. And I would say at Manimat, we actually, by design, seek out people who see the world differently from us because we need them. We need, number one, we just need them. We need them participating. In whatever it is we're doing. But secondly, we need their perspective and their knowledge. And they always have a different perspective and a different knowledge set than we have. And we can't solve the problem without them, usually. So we learned a long time ago, don't hang out with people like ourselves. Hang out with people who are different from us. And being a nonprofit, it's really easy to find people who see the world differently in the for-profit sector because usually they're driven for lots of good reasons by some financial goal either they're being told to or... So they've got a financial thing they really have to attend to. Well, those of us in the nonprofit sector are just trying to make the world a better place. If it takes 50 years, that's fine. We're not in any big rush. So it's an entirely different way of looking at the world. But what we've discovered is when we partner with a for-profit, they get things done really fast where it takes us forever to get anything done. No one, they've got resources and money and people and they can move, but you... And this is the secret. You don't need science. You need a relationship of trust with that person. Okay, so the last thing that I learned I'll maybe the most disturbing and then I swear I'll stop telling you these things. A paper in 2011 that argued that we humans have evolved to win and not to be right or correct. This one really bothers me and I can't... I don't know what to do with it. It's a good thing I got the silver bullet solution because this would otherwise drive me crazy. But if you think about it, think about politicians who are just very charismatic or say are very persuasive. It doesn't really matter whether they're telling you the truth or not, the facts don't matter too much. Is there effectiveness as a presenter? So I've really been trying to improve my presentation skills ever since I learned this because apparently what the facts don't matter. My presentation matters. So this is a good point to remember because the somewhere in human evolution we must have passed the point and we're just not gonna get killed by the lion. We figured out how to solve that. So those problems went away and your effectiveness at persuading the tribe became more relevant to leaving offspring behind. So it's kind of a plausible idea. Churchill put it best, I love this quote by Churchill, of all the talents bestowed upon men, he's sorry for the faux pas and not including women because you're all guilty too. Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields power more durable than that of a great king. Same thing that the scientific paper was trying to say as well. So being a persuasive presenter matters a lot and probably more than the facts. Okay, so I'm gonna transition because this is where this seemed to be going. We're not actually doomed, but I found this book and I haven't read it, but I thought it would make a good transition to the next section. So let's go back to my line lead with the relationship, follow with the science because I have found that if I follow this, all that other stuff one through seven doesn't matter. I can overcome all that stuff if I just follow this rule. And I'm not saying it's only eight words, it's easy to write, it's harder to do, but I've gotten good at it over the years. And so Manimat, my organization, we work with fishermen, investors, dairy farmers, I mentioned some of these earlier timber companies, retailers, small businesses, big businesses, crayfish farmers in Louisiana, ranchers. It actually tends to be, it's on average, I'm not casting aspersions, but it tends to be a conservative group of folks that are in these fields, not all of them of course. But we, the timber companies out west were a really big challenge to have a conversation about climate change with, but we succeeded because we built a relationship with trust first. And eventually we were able to talk about the science. But if you think about it, and the way we think about it at Manimat, like I said earlier, we need, for the subject areas we work in, we need all these people helping. We can't do it without them. So you can either take them all on, which some groups will do, I don't have a problem with that, it's just not what we do. So what we try to figure out is build a relationship of trust with them and then get something done. And it has never failed if we put relationship first. Then science just takes off, that's the beauty of it. It's an odd thing for a scientist to say though, why, you know, if you're a scientist and have generated science your whole life, why would you say that relationships matter? Because it's not that science doesn't matter, it's just it's not enough. That's all you think about, you're doomed, you are doomed. It's gotta be about the relationship. So my advice for solving, if you're sort of struggling like I am and with the world today and like, what is going on? Have we all taken leave of our senses? These are my three things you can do. These are what I do and they work. Build a relationship with someone that sees the world differently from you. It takes a lot of fortitude and patience and it takes not talking a lot to do this. But try to find somebody that's, you know, bearable that really does see the world differently from you and hang in there with them. Develop a relationship with them, listen to them and you will be pleasantly surprised at what you can get done with them. It might take months, it might take years, but it works. The second thing that we do that works is come up with a specific project with a very specific objective that you can all both or all agree to that requires both of you to solve and just get to work on that project. And if you, like I did that with, I don't get to do a lot of research anymore, but I started a project four or five years ago with clam diggers in Maine trying to figure out why the clam populations were declining and this thing called the green crab is eating the clams and it's a long story, but it took me two years to develop a relationship with that constituency so that we could do anything on the ground. But once I had that relationship, there was nothing we couldn't do. So we started working on all kinds of ideas to solve that problem. So my point is sometimes it can take years. You kind of gotta know where you wanna go, what your destination is, and you're probably not gonna end up where you wanted to go. That's the other thing, when you build relationships like this, they're not actually going where you wanna go. That's the other thing you have to reconcile at some point. They're not going where you want them to go and you're not going where they want you to go. You end up going somewhere that's completely different but they're both of you. So yeah, that's okay, we can do that. So you gotta let go of whatever that destination that you want them, it doesn't work. That doesn't work in this approach. You gotta let go. And third, it just permeates everything I do and we do it man and man and it seems silly, it's only one word, but we do a lot of listening. And I know things and as a scientist, know a lot of technical facts. I just don't talk about that stuff until the time is right. I do a lot of listening. And it takes a lot of patience to listen, a lot of patience to listen, especially when you know that that's just not true. You wanna say it's not just not true. But you're better off, you're better off, it's just not saying it right now. If you build a relationship of trust somewhere down the line, two months, three months, six months, you can share that thing you know and it will be received entirely differently. Afterwards. So listening, it's like listening to my clam digger friends, it took me a while to see the world they saw. It took a lot of work and I just, there was language I didn't, there's all kinds of language, colorful language, but just words and things that they knew about the flats that I didn't know and could never have known, that they taught me over time and I just did a lot of listening. And once they trusted me, anything was possible. So I've seen this, so I don't know, it's like I said, the world seems to have taken leave of its senses, polarization and politics and we seem more divided than ever. All the data support that we're more divided than ever. But to me, this is the solution and it's not easy, it's one by one, it's bottom up stuff, not some policy or law passed by Congress. It's bottom up stuff of building relationships. And so even though I'm a scientist, I think relationships are our problem, not technical. This climate change is not a technical problem, it's a relational problem to me. We know how to solve it right now. We're not solving it because we don't have the relationships that we need to solve it. So I didn't get that, so I had it on here, but not on there. Anyway, this is a great book on how to listen. So why would you need a book about listening? But this can help you with that. So the point is there's a lot of hope but it's gonna be, I think, through relationships and probably not passing laws. It's not that regulations and laws are bad or wrong, it's just, boy, do we need better relationships in our society given the challenges that we have right now. Okay, so I'm gonna stop, because that's all I have to say. And if you've got questions or thoughts or comments or examples of something you've done where, yeah, that worked for me or that didn't work for me, can you help me understand why? Be happy to. In your work, what has been your experience in building relationships with indigenous people and tribes? Yeah, in most of the areas that we work, we haven't crossed with those parts of civil society right now, so not a lot is the answer. Some of our fisheries work in the down east part of Maine does intersect with indigenous people and that's going really well, actually, because indigenous people have a good, better understanding than many of sort of how natural systems work, especially fishery systems. Would you explain a little more about the projects that you... Some examples, good question, because I tend to enjoy the high level stuff and you just, can you tell me some specifics? So I mentioned the clam project work, we're trying to, we're out in the mud getting dirty, trying to figure out how to save soft shell clam fishery from green crabs and we've got a study to cover the flats with netting, fine mesh netting that actually does keep the green crabs out. They can't get through the net and eat the clams. We haven't been able to get it to work financially yet because you gotta buy the net and you gotta buy seed clams and it costs money and if you're a clam digger, you need at least, you need to double your return to put the investment in it, but at least we got the tech, the raw technique down. So that's one example. Rebuilding a fishery that and the green crabs are coming on because of climate change. So seems like everything's leaked to climate change. Another one is I mentioned Haniford earlier, so we've got a project with the grocery sector whereby we go into, we work with whatever the chain is and go into the stores and show them really easy things they could do to save, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money. So it's, and they love it because it's fun. It's not like some sustainability person coming and telling them what to do. So, oh, I didn't, I see the freezer doors were open. If I just had an employee go around every hour and close those freezer doors, they could save $5,000 a year in energy costs. I'm sorry, I'm really, you got me going into the weeds, so I'm gonna go. Another example in a grocery store is you ever been in the produce section where sometimes the carrots are falling over the edge of the shelf and they're covering the vent that recirculates air that keeps the vegetables frozen, or not frozen but cool. So when produce is falling over those vents like that, it makes the system work harder and uses more energy and releases more greenhouse gases. So we say, okay, every couple of hours have the person in the produce section go and open those vents up and you'll save a lot of money. One of your, part of your presentation, I think it was seven groups of man-mints trying to work with that are maybe don't see things to exactly how man-mint does. It was like timber companies and tailors and all. Can you give a concrete example there of how working with one of those groups, your objective or man-mint's objective changed and the entity you were working with also changed? I remember the timber company thing that we've got going on now is called the Climate Smart Land Network. And the idea is to engage timber companies like I did a long time ago in Maine, but nationally who own a lot of timber land in the US to get them to begin to manage their forest land so that it's resilient to the climate of 2050 and 2100 say. So what we want, first of all forest, the, let's say do the forestry lesson in 15 seconds. Forest contain a lot of carbon, keep it out of the atmosphere, filter a lot of water and forest produce clean water for us. They have a big role to play. It is habitat for songbirds like I showed earlier. So forests are really important for a lot of things society cares about. All you want is clean water, you care about forest. So we man-mint want forest to be able to make it through the next century with the changing climate that we know is already happening. Well, so we wanted to engage the timber companies because they own land, they got people, they're out managing land every day. Wouldn't it be nice if they had the science to manage it in a way that makes their forest more resilient? So that was our objective. So one of the companies we wanted to participate was in Birmingham, Alabama. And I'm from the South, so I can talk about the South. But Birmingham, Alabama is like the anti-climate state in the Union. Look at any pole climate. Alabama would be the last place you would go. Well, anyway, so we were sitting in the boardroom with the president of this timber company and I was saying, you know, we want you to join the Climate Smart Land Network. We'll bring you up to speed on climate science at your own pace. And he said, well, John, you seem like a nice guy, but you know, we watch the news and read the papers and one day it seems like climate change is a problem and the next day somebody says it isn't. And so we just don't know what to believe. And I said, you're right. How could you know what to believe when you're getting messages like that? It's a confusing time. And so what I was doing, I didn't realize it at the time, I read the social psychology later, I was just trying to get through that meeting and survive. But what I was doing was legitimizing his view of what he was seeing. And that defuse and sort of lowered the tension right away because I said, you know, you're right. You should be confused based on what you're seeing. If you join the network, you won't be confused anymore because we make it so easy to understand what's going on and you can put that to work in your land base at your own pace. We're not gonna make you do anything. So a week later, they call and say, sign us up.