What Does Water Want?

Water makes life possible. From the tiniest bacteria to the tallest tree, every living thing relies on this irreplaceable substance. Erica Gies, author of “Water Always Wins,” explores water’s unique role in the web of life, and how we might repair and reshape our relationship with it. Rather than telling water what to do, maybe we should start by asking what it wants?

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Featuring

Erica Gies is an independent journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and the author of “Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge.” She covers water, climate change, plants and wildlife for Scientific American, The New York Times, bioGraphic, Nature, and other publications.

Credits

  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
  • Produced by: Cathy Edwards
  • Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
  • Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
  • Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
  • Producer: Teo Grossman
  • Production Assistance: Kaleb Wentzel Fisher and Monica Lopez

Resources

Erica Gies – The Slow Water Movement: How to Thrive in an Age of Drought and Deluge | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

Embracing Slow Water: Rediscovering the True Nature of Earth’s Lifeline | Excerpt from “Water Always Wins”

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter

This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Water literally makes life possible. From the tiniest bacteria to the tallest trees, all living things rely on this irreplaceable wonder.

We hear from Erica Gies, author of “Water Always Wins”. She turned to people she calls “water detectives” to learn how we might repair and reshape our relationship with this blue gold that sustains life.

We live on a blue planet. Water is foundational to the chemistry of life on Earth. Leonardo da Vinci called it the ‘driving force of all nature’. Water transports nutrients, fills cells, and helps regulate the temperatures conducive to life. It also physically shapes the planet, too – carving out valleys, canyons and coastlines in slow geologic time – or sometimes in fast forward.

Water is ever-changing, traversing the globe as ice, vapor or liquid – yet every single drop stretches back into deep time. And all the water that’s here has been here for most of Earth’s history. Perhaps the water you drank today was once snow that fell on a wooly mammoth. Or shot out of a hydrothermal ocean vent, where life may have begun billions of years ago.

More recently, humans have sought to control water on vast scales: diverting mighty rivers, or building massive dams and reservoirs. But such brutalist interventions disrupt and damage the intricate relationships water has forged over geological timescales – creating unintended harms that plague civilization today.

So, rather than forcing water to do what we want, what if we start asking what it wants?

Erica Gies’ award-winning book ‘Water Always Wins’ maps the connections forged by water as it cycles through ecosystems.

One of the most startling examples is the interplay of water with forests. The symbiotic dance among forests, air and water illuminates a true marvel of planetary-scale ecology, which she described at a Bioneers conference.

Erica Gies (EG): Scientists used to think that most rain came from evaporation over the ocean, but now they know that at least 40% on average over continents, as high as 70%, comes from evapotranspiration from plants and soil. [APPLAUSE] And that vapor condenses into rain and falls again locally and regionally, something called precipitation recycling. And forests, with their rough surface, also help to create the rain because they are slowing the wind, and they’re releasing particles—fungal spores, pollen, and bacteria—which also help that vapor condense into rain. [APPLAUSE]

And these forests exhalations feed into jet streams and atmospheric circulation. So they’re seeding rain on the other side of the world. And on the flip side, forest loss can cause drought on the other side of the world.

People used to think that the temperature difference between the ocean and the land is what pulled in the vapor, and that trees grew where rain fell. But atmospheric physicist Anastassia Makarieva has shown that forests actively pull in the wind to deliver the rain that they need. Tree vapor condensing into clouds decreases local air pressure, which draws in more moist air from elsewhere. And she calls this the biotic pump. And that might sound radical to some ears, but it’s really not, she told me. All organisms possess knowledge of physical laws that allow them to make use of the environment.

Host: This biotic pump hypothesis challenges the conventional scientific paradigm. It asserts that forests don’t just grow where water happens to fall. Instead, they actually pull in winds to deliver rainfall. It depicts a whole-systems view of the climate, mediated by water’s dynamic relationships with all living things. 

But humans have radically altered these elaborate planetary water cycles. The extreme floods and droughts we’re experiencing are often unnatural disasters related to climate disruption – and by failed attempts to control water in misguided ways.

EG: Humans have drained or filled as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands, dammed and diverted two-thirds of the world’s large rivers. The land area covered by pavement in our cities has doubled, just since 1992.

In the dominant culture, we concern ourselves with human needs, and that leads to a single focus problem solving. Worried about scarcity? Build a dam, bring in water from somewhere else. Worried about flooding? Build a levee, build a wall.

But putting ourselves first in this way isn’t working, and it’s because that single focus ignores water’s agency and water’s complex relationships with soil, and rock, and microbes, and plants, and beavers and people. And by ignoring those complex systems, it damages them.

It’s an environmental justice issue. Levees, for example, may protect one community, but in so doing, by cutting off the river from its flood plain, they’re raising the water level in the river, which increases flood risk for other communities who perhaps can’t afford a levee. Dams similarly are an environmental justice issue. A 40-year survey of dams built around the world found that they brought water to 20% of the world’s population but decreased water availability to 24% of the world’s population.

But this problem is also an opportunity, an opportunity to change our relationship with water. Instead of seeing water as a what, a commodity or a threat, many Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world instead view water as a who, a friend or a relative. [APPLAUSE] That lens allows them to better see and understand water’s relationships, including the relationship with people, and to understand that with rights comes responsibility for maintaining and caretaking these systems.

Host: Structures such as concrete dams, levees and seawalls subvert water from where it wants to go. Because water is such a powerful force, it presents a constant struggle against the laws of physics. Levees regularly fail, causing flash flooding. Seawalls may protect particular zones, but they worsen erosion elsewhere.

In the end, water will have its way. It has formed its relationships over billions of years of evolution. The dynamic complexity is likely beyond our comprehension. So it’s not surprising that Erica met many people working with water whose first principle is humility.

EG: Instead of trying to solve one problem at a time, the water detectives—as I came to think of them, because they approach water with respect and curiosity, and these are engineers, ecologists, landscape architects, Indigenous Peoples, urban planners, farmers, ranchers, foresters—are instead asking a radical question: What does water want? [APPLAUSE] And what I’ve come to understand…is that what water really wants is a return of its slow phases that are particularly prone to our disruption. These are wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows and forests that absorb floods, clean water, store it for later, store carbon, and support life that maintains the health of these systems that in turn support us.

Host: Figuring out what water wants requires some serious sleuthing. That’s especially the case in cities, where centuries of construction have dramatically altered the natural landscape. So these water detectives engage in what’s called historical ecology. They look for evidence of where water used to go.

EG: Water is inclined to go where it wants to go, which is where it went before we subverted it. And so by mapping what used to be, we understand that homes built on wetlands are often the first to flood. And doing this kind of mapping allows cities to plan for when buildings turn over. Perhaps instead of building something else that’s at risk of flooding, perhaps, you know, we can return that space to water and have a more resilient city. [APPLAUSE]

Host: Erica visited a project in Seattle that began with the goal of stopping local flooding. By uncovering the deep history of water there, they found they could benefit the area in myriad other ways, too. 

EG: In Seattle, they used historical ecology to plan for the restoration of Thornton Creek, which was regularly flooding a road, a high school, and homes. And globally, the majority of urban streams are buried and built on top of them, and ones that remain on the surface first they’re deforested, then they’re straightened. That causes a kind of firehose effect, the ultimate in fast water, which scours, and so then it’s armored to prevent erosion. And this creates something that ecologists call “urban stream syndrome”, which is flash floods, unstable banks, heavy pollution, and waning life.

So restoration of urban streams has typically involved removing the cement, putting back some curves, putting in some wood and boulders. You know, making it look kind of habitaty. [LAUGHTER]

But what ecologists found is that the life that was coming back wasn’t very diverse. It was sort of a crows and cockroaches situation. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] And these restorations needed ongoing maintenance.

Erica Gies speaking at Bioneers 2024

So a biologist who worked for the city named Katherine Lynch realized it’s not just the stream we see, but the stream that we don’t see flowing underneath that channel. It’s called the “hyporheic zone”, which is from Greek—hypo-rheic, which is “under flow”. So there’s another river that is moving downstream through the soil and rock, but orders of magnitude more slowly.

On a creek, it could extend 30 feet from the banks. On a large river it can extend a mile on either side. And the hyporheic zone is home to all kinds of amazing critters— microbes, crustaceans, worms, aquatic insects, salmon lay their eggs there. And these critters play a pivotal role in nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon cycling. It’s basically like the stream’s gut microbiome. And so that’s why, when the hyporheic zone is scoured away, the waterway has very little hope of staying healthy.

Host: Because natural landscapes such as meadows and fields are porous, rainwater soaks in and disperses much more slowly, providing a steadier flow and temperature throughout the year, all of which fosters richer biodiversity. Slow water creates conditions conducive to more life.

 Recreating these intricate water landscapes in built-up urban environments is especially challenging.

EG: This project that Katherine Lynch conceived of to rebuild this missing hyporheic zone, an urban stream, was the first in the world. [APPLAUSE] Yeah.

They put back in some of the curves. They took out the cement. They carefully designed the rock and wood so that it would drive water down into the hyporheic zone. And because they did their historical ecology, the project was just 1600 feet in a river that was 15 miles long, and yet, the reason this area was flooding is because it was a flood plain. So by returning the flood plain to the river, it had an outsize impact and has eliminated flooding in this area. [APPLAUSE]

They did a chemical study. They measured more than 1900 pollutants, things like lawn fertilizer and brake pad dust that are just rushing off the urban concrete and diving into this stream, and they found that spending just three hours in a 15-foot section of the hyporheic zone reduced 78% of the chemicals by at least half. [APPLAUSE]

A few other markers of success, it’s a wonderful place for the community, the city hasn’t flooded, and chinook salmon returned and spawned in this hyporheic zone they created. [APPLAUSE]

Host: The outsized success of this kind of project is inspiring water detectives to radically reimagine our approaches to water engineering.

After the break, we’ll learn more about the growing global movement to foster a more harmonious relationship with water that can help nature heal, and ourselves with it.

Host: A watershed is an area of land that channels rainfall and snowmelt to rivers and eventually to the sea. Human interventions in the water cycle can in fact be very beneficial, if we consider the question ‘what does water want?’

According to water ecologist Brock Dolman, the goal of managing a watershed sustainably is to “slow it, spread it, sink it.” Erica Gies discovered that humans helping to return water’s slow phases has become a growing “slow water” movement.

EG: The slow water movement is a global movement that goes by different names around the world, but they’re all looking to return space to slow water, so restoring or protecting wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows and forests. These projects are local; they are unique to each place. Every place has unique geology, ecology, and culture, and these projects work within that. 

Slow water projects use systems thinking rather than that single-focus problem solving. They are environmentally just. They don’t take from some and give to others, or protect some at the expense of others. And they really do respect nature’s agency, and try to work with water and nature rather than try to control it. 

And in all these ways, water slows in its path, and often has time to move underground, sometimes going down with tree roots, sometimes filtering through the hyporheic zone into the aquifer. But that water/land relationship and interaction is really, really important for the hydrological cycle in all kinds of ways.

Host: In contrast to huge, centralized water infrastructures that dramatically halt or speed water up in its path, slow water projects are, by design, smaller and spread out across landscapes.

EG: One thing about the slow water projects is, you know, in our dominant culture, we’ve gotten used to centralized water projects that are managed by experts. So that might be a giant dam and reservoir, for example. But slow water projects tend to be smaller and many of them distributed across the landscape. So instead of centralized, they’re distributed. And that makes sense if you think of that 87% of the world’s wetlands that we’ve eradicated, because you need lots of spaces throughout the watershed, following water’s entire path, for it to slow again.

And a lot of the places I went in the world, in places like Peru or India, I met people who were actually actively building these projects and working with their neighbors on the land to restore these systems.

Slow water projects are something that people can do in their own communities with their neighbors to make themselves much more resilient, and the impact is cumulative. 

Host: While the slow water movement has been picking up speed in recent years, some of its methods draw on ancient water management techniques.

EG: So most of the projects I looked at were trying to conserve or restore, or mimic a slow water phase, so returning part of a flood plain to the river, restoring a wetland or protecting a wetland from development, or assisting beavers as their populations recover and they return to the landscape.

There’s a couple of chapters in my book where I look at older human techniques for managing water, and pretty much anywhere people had intermittent rain, you know, a longer dry season, and they were farming, they figured out a way to make the most of the water that came. And that often involved moving it underground in some way, because that dramatically extends the time in which the local rain that you get can be available to you locally. 

I looked at a culture in Peru from 1400 years ago called the Huari. The Tamil people in South India for 2,000 years had a system called the eris system. These were not irrigation projects. These were people inserting themselves into the local hydrological cycle and sort of expanding what nature was already doing. 

Host: Slow water projects in Peru today are reviving these ancient techniques in direct response to the climate crisis.

EG: In Peru, it’s a very water scarce place. They, like California, have a long dry season, and about 65% of the population lives on the very arid coastal plain, and they rely on mountain water from the Andes, which are right at their back. Historically, they’ve had glaciers, and so those glaciers have melted slowly throughout the dry season and they’ve had water year round. With climate change, some of those glaciers are already gone; other ones are melting rapidly, and the population is growing.

So one project involves restoring this 1400-year-old technique for extending water availability into the dry season. So there are at least three high Andes towns where communal farmers still use this system, which is called “amunas”, which is a Quechua word that means “to retain”. And when the river runs high in the wet season up at very high altitudes, they divert it into these natural infiltration basins, and then the water filters underground, and then it continues moving down the mountain, but much more slowly, because it’s moving through all that soil and rock. And then there are springs lower down the mountain where it emerges, and then they harvest it, and they have complex systems for sharing it and for maintaining this system. 

A lot of it had fallen into disrepair, so in some cases they’re restoring it. Because ultimately, when the farmers take that water and water their crops, a lot of that is going to go underground again and ultimately make its way down into the valley bottoms into the three rivers that supply the capital city of Lima.

And similarly, there are these special high altitude wetlands called bofedales, which—or cushion bog—and those are a very important place for slowing water, particularly as the glaciers melt. And they have been victim of peat thievery for the nursery trade. And, you know, when you cut out a square of peat and you separate the bog from its neighbors, the whole thing dries out and dies. So some of the money is going to protect the remaining ones, and some to restore the ones that have been damaged, and there is actually an ancient technique for expanding the footprint of the bofedales. And so some research has been studying how that’s done and how effective it can be.

Host: Restoring the infiltration basins and bofedales of the Andes directly helps human communities survive by evening out the water supply across the country and throughout the year.

However, what water wants is to nourish the entire web of life, not just to fulfill human priorities. There’s good reason that cultures and religious and spiritual traditions from time immemorial have held water as sacred.

If we relate to water not as a commodity but as our beloved relative, the questions arise: Does the web of life have an intrinsic right to exist? Has the absence of such an ethic precipitated today’s ecological crisis?

Bofedales in the Andes of Peru

EG: The bofedales are an incredibly important resource for all of the critters and birds who live in the high Andes. But, in all of the projects I looked at, even if we’re looking at it from a selfish point of view, it’s these microbes, these plants, these animals that are also maintaining the water system. You know? They all work together to keep it healthy and functioning.

And so I believe that other beings have the right to exist separate from whether they benefit humans. However, when they are allowed to do what they do, they also benefit humans. And I think that’s something we’ve lost sight of, you know. The reason we’ve been able to do a lot of what we’ve done in terms of kind of controlling nature is because there’s still been a lot of buffer that has supplied these critical things that we need.

But now, like 75% of land on Earth has been degraded by our activities, so we’re running out of that buffer, and that’s another reason why we’re seeing this big uptick in floods, droughts, mega fires, etc., because we just don’t have that buffer anymore. So it’s so, so incredibly important for our own survival and health and quality of life, as well as the animals and plants who live in these systems.

Host: One thing’s for sure: when you fight nature, you lose. If water always wins, perhaps we can embrace our place as partners in the web of life by asking a most basic question: How would nature do it? 

EG: I’ve come to understand that water absolutely has agency. It does. I think humanity, especially recent humans, in the dominant culture, have a history of undermining or ignoring animal intelligence, plant intelligence for sure, and I think a lot of it was really convenient. If you don’t think of other beings as being intelligent or as having agency or as being worthwhile or worthy, you create a permission structure where it’s okay to exploit them and not care about them and not think about them.

I write about science and I love science and I love scientists, but Western science is very reductionist, and that helps you get at certain specific answers, but often you miss the forest for the trees, literally, because you’re siloing what you are trying to figure out. So I think that natural systems definitely have intelligence, and that we, in the dominant culture, are only beginning to reacquaint ourselves with that. But, you know, if you spend any time with Indigenous people, that kind of observation, that close observation and care, will reveal a lot of this.

I was interviewing a Hopi farmer about dryland farming techniques, and he said, you know, 3,000 years of replication is a science. [LAUGHS]

Sooner or later, water always wins. So in the face of climate change, ecosystem collapse, water scarcity, we must shift our relationship with water. If we let go of our impulse for control and instead collaborate with water, we can win too. Climate change and the degradation of these natural systems that give us life can feel really overwhelming, but what I took away from meeting these water detectives around the world is that slow water projects are really empowering; it’s something that people can do in their own communities with their neighbors to make themselves, their neighbors, and their other-than-human neighbors more resilient to water extremes and climate change.

So I hope as you move through your own place, you’ll grow more curious about water, and ask yourself: What does water want?

Host: Erica Gies…

If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together.

Schoolyard Transformations for Ecological & Social Benefit: Daily Acts’ Climate Resilient Schools Program

This article has been republished with permission from Ten Strands.
By Morgan Margulies
January 8, 2025

The modern American schoolyard is dominated by two elements: asphalt (hardscape) and lawn (softscape). The living schoolyard movement, covered in Sharon Danks’s book Asphalt to Ecosystems, transforms schoolyards into lush environments “that strengthen local ecological systems” and provide opportunities for “place-based, hands-on learning.” 

While the conversation about living schoolyards has focused on asphalt removal, the transformation of underutilized lawn is an important tool for schools to conserve water, cool campuses, and encourage biodiversity, while expanding holistic and integrated educational opportunities. 

Daily Acts’ Climate Resilient Schools Program

Daily Acts (DA) is an environmental education nonprofit based in Petaluma, California, that connects people and builds community through education, action, and policy to address climate change. To demonstrate the effectiveness of schoolyard water conservation projects, DA has partnered with the Land Resilience Partnership to pilot the Climate Resilient Schools Program, a multi-benefit water conservation program to design and install projects at four schools through 2026. 

Rain tank and rain garden to harvest rainwater from the roof at La Tercera School’s campus / Photo courtesy of Ten Strands

The Land Resilience Partnership (LRP) is a statewide initiative to spread land-based resilience projects by providing design and install support where people live, work, and play. Grant funding from the Bay Area Integrated Regional Management Program, a subsidiary of California’s Department of Water Resources, enables DA and LRP to work with schools in Petaluma’s economically distressed and underrepresented communities. 

Three water conservation project-types were identified to improve student schoolyard experiences: 

  • Lawn conversion to climate-resilient landscapes 
  • Rainwater catchment and storage tanks 
  • Rain gardens and bioswales 

So far, DA’s Climate Resilient Schools project has partnered with two schools to transform 23,000 square feet of irrigated lawns to climate-appropriate gardens through sheet mulching and irrigation conversion. By first converting sprinklers to drip irrigation and then layering compost, cardboard, and mulch (sheet mulching), these lawns were composted in place and prepared for planting drought-tolerant and native plants. Additional water is saved through rainwater harvesting projects like storage tanks and rain gardens that sink water into the landscape. 

Emerging Benefits of Schoolyard Transformations

These lawns were not only underutilized and devoid of biodiversity, they were also massive users of water, needing more than 660,000 gallons annually to stay green year round. Once installed, these landscapes use about 85 percent less water, needing 87,000 gallons of annual irrigation. New plants are supported by nutrient-rich rainwater harvested in seven tanks, totaling 23,000 gallons of storage and two rain gardens that sink approximately 4,000 gallons every rainstorm.

Lawn transformation and rainwater harvesting projects at just two schools has helped Petaluma save over half a million gallons of water annually while supporting pollinator and wildlife habitat, providing shade, building soil health, sequestering carbon, enhancing evapotranspiration, recharging groundwater, increasing food access, and filtering stormwater runoff. 

In addition to ecological benefits, living schoolyard projects have emergent social, physical, and developmental benefits. According to Bikomeye et al, schoolyards with natural elements enhance physical and socioemotional health by creating shade, varied opportunities for physical activity, and improved mental health. 

Furthermore, student exposure to natural systems and native California plants ingrains a sense of place by educating students about our unique Mediterranean climate. These transformations are impactful for students who, according to Wendy Titman, read elements in the schoolyard as a “hidden curriculum” that informs their sense of place, perceived value, and self-identity.

Facilitating Engagement in Living Schoolyards 

Sustained community engagement and stewardship is key to successful implementation of living schoolyard projects. Through collaborative project development, community installation events, and curriculum-informed design, students and community members are more likely to feel connected, empowered, and responsible for stewardship. 

Collaboration Through Listening Sessions 

Community involvement in design through listening and feedback sessions is an iterative process that requires humility, openness, and collaboration. In DA’s most recent project at La Tercera Elementary School, various community engagement sessions solicited input from the following stakeholders:

  • Administrators: Project scope was collaboratively and iteratively developed with the principal, superintendent, and maintenance director.
  • Teachers: Through presentations at staff meetings and written surveys, teachers helped narrow the project scope, inform designed pathways, and determine gathering areas. 
  • Parents: Opinions regarding the plant palette and landscape elements were solicited at back-to-school night and via survey. 
  • Students: DA delivered educational presentations to classrooms on the water cycle, water conservation, and changes on campus. During these presentations, students voted for their favorite plants from our native plant palette, influencing the final planting plan. 

A Unique Approach to Community Landscape Transformations

DA’s community-centered approach to design and installation facilitates public engagement, connection, and care. Volunteer planting days, supported by local community service partners, bring intergenerational community members together to learn and plant side by side. For other elements of installation, DA works with educators to provide workforce training to future conservation workers through partnership with Conservation Corps North Bay. 

Students planting a Toyon with Daily Acts staff during student planting day / Photo courtesy of Ten Strands

The best way to empower student stewards to care for and engage with their landscape is through hands-on involvement. DA hosted two planting days with La Tercera Elementary School to plant fifty-three different species of drought-tolerant and rain garden plants, totalling over eight hundred plants! 

The first program was open to volunteers including students, parents, teachers, organizations, and community members. For the second planting day, which involved students only, every student on campus (paired with their big or little buddy) planted and watered-in their plant, from yarrow and grey rush to coffeeberry and valley oak. 

Student involvement in installation builds stewardship and leadership. Students who participated in the first planting day showed their peers how to plant during the second planting day. Additionally, students check in on the plant they planted, conveying a sense of ownership, responsibility, and care. Ongoing stewardship and involvement is encouraged by staff that designate class stewards and give school currency to students that pull weeds.

Designing Living Landscapes for Learning and Stewardship

Thoughtful and collaborative landscape design creates educational spaces in otherwise underutilized places. Teacher input to integrate plant design with curriculum and overall themes inspired the final planting plan.

Landscape transformation planting plan for La Tercera Elementary School designed by Angelia Rossi / Image courtesy of Ten Strands

At La Tercera Elementary School, various sections of the landscape highlight different educational and ecological themes:

  • The Nest includes a stump circle as an outdoor classroom, intentionally located outside the classroom of a teacher who often takes their students outside to read. 
  • The Food Forest includes successional layers of edible and medicinal plants with cultural relevance, selected with input from a social studies teacher whose curriculum highlights indigenous cultures and the role of colonization in California history.  
  • The Beaver Basin is the site of a rain tank and rain garden planted with riparian plants. Between the Beaver Basin and Nest is a wood edge of student art, a project spearheaded by their makerspace and science teacher. 
  • The Sensory Spiral was designed by grouping plants based on their blooming color, texture, and smell, with a special spot for plants with animal names. 

By integrating educational elements and existing curriculum in design, it is even more likely the landscape will be cared for in perpetuity by teachers and students.

Schoolyard ecology projects like lawn conversion to low-water gardens and rainwater harvesting transform the “hidden curriculum” of schoolyards. By not only teaching about ecology but demonstrating restoration, schoolyards communicate a “culture of care.” Starting with their school grounds, schools must plant seeds of change by inspiring students to appreciate the beauty of nature and become stewards of their environment. 

Daily Acts is a holistic environmental education nonprofit that takes a heart-centered approach to inspire transformative actions that create connected, equitable, and climate-resilient communities. Be sure to check out their website for further case studies and educational resources to take action today.  

This article has been republished with permission from Ten Strands.

Morgan Margulies is a land resilience partnership program coordinator at Daily Acts in Petaluma, California. With a BA in political science and sustainable development from Columbia University, Morgan finds his purpose at the intersection of ecology, equity, and governance. As a certified permaculture designer, Morgan works with his team at Daily Acts to conduct site assessments and develop integrated landscape designs for residential and public sites, with a specific focus on water conservation. The public site projects in schools and parks are particularly inspiring, as he has the opportunity to work collaboratively with a diverse array of community members to accomplish a goal of public access to green spaces. Growing up in the Yuba River watershed has ingrained in Morgan a sense of care and responsibility for the natural world, and he hopes that creating beauty through design will inspire others. As a passionate advocate for environmental justice, Morgan often returns to the quote “Justice is what love looks like in public,” by Cornel West. As Morgan continues on his path installing community-based ecology projects, he hopes to spread love to all corners.

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In this newsletter, explore how four trailblazing women are reshaping clean tech; hear humanitarian Zainab Salbi’s powerful perspective on feminine leadership; and dive into award-winning activist Sage Lenier’s blueprint for a circular and equitable economy.

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Sage Lenier – Towards a Just Transition: Blueprint for a Green Economy

We spend a lot of time talking about the ecological crisis and not nearly enough talking about real, workable solutions. If the ultimate goal is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, how must we transform our economy to make that possible? Award-winning activist and innovative educator Sage Lenier, one of the most impressive young leaders to emerge in recent years, sheds light on what a realistic and just transition looks like and the role we can each play in leading us toward a more circular and equitable economy.

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Keynote Spotlight: Women’s Earth Alliance

Women’s Earth Alliance Co-Directors Amira Diamond, Kahea Pacheco, and Melinda Kramer co-lead Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), a global initiative dedicated to empowering women’s leadership in environmental justice and resilience. Under their guidance, WEA has equipped over 50,000 women with technical, entrepreneurial, and leadership skills, impacting over 24 million people in 31 countries. Their collaborative leadership fosters networks that enhance climate resilience and address critical issues from clean water access to regenerative agriculture.

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“We Will Be Jaguars” Book Club with Nemonte Nenquimo & Mitch Anderson

The Bioneers Learning Book Club is honored to present an extraordinary new experience featuring “We Will Be Jaguars,” the powerful memoir by Nemonte Nenquimo. This groundbreaking book, a Reese’s Book Club Pick and one of Library Journal’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a fearless climate activist and Indigenous leader.

More than just a memoir, “We Will Be Jaguars” is a call to action—a bold vision for protecting our planet rooted in generations of Indigenous wisdom and resilience. Together, through this book club, we’ll not only explore Nemonte’s inspiring journey but also gather as a community to empower one another and discover actionable ways to champion change in our own lives and beyond.

Join us to reflect, connect, and draw strength from both this extraordinary story and the collective power of shared learning.

Register for this book club by March 3, and you’ll be automatically entered to win a free copy of “We Will Be Jaguars”!

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The Power of Story


…to reclaim our voices, express our truth, shed negative conditioning, identify what calls us, become who we yearn to be, awaken our vision, attract support, connect us with allies, and mobilize change… 

In this excerpt from the award winning book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred, Nina Simons shares her learning about how the stories we tell shape our world. When we reclaim our narratives, we reclaim our power to create a future rooted in solidarity, empathy, and transformation.

Nina Simons is Co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust and leadership development. 

Excerpted from Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership written by Nina Simons, edited by Anneke Campbell. Copyright © 2022. Used with permission of the publisher, Green Fire Press. All rights reserved.

Women’s oppression and the degradation of the ‘feminine’ in all its forms has been enabled, perpetuated, and strengthened by silence, shame, and isolation. When we contemplate the waves of women’s liberation and rights movements over time and throughout different parts of the globe, we can see that they are always preceded and combined with women getting together and sharing their stories. 

It’s only when we stop being silent and start to speak and make our voices heard that real change starts to happen. It is no exaggeration to say that when a woman speaks her truth, the world changes. As Ursula K. LeGuin, the late great poet and novelist, says: “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” 

A cognitive linguist focused on political change, George Lakoff studies how we respond to stories and how our behavior is influenced by the narratives and metaphors we use. His research strongly suggests that we humans are hard-wired for story. That means that once we’ve heard a story and our hearts and minds have wrapped around it, no amount of facts to the contrary will get us to let go of that story. We environmentalists and social justice activists often assume that if we present the facts we can change people’s minds, but it’s become clear that the facts are not nearly as sticky or convincing as stories are. Only a more compelling story can alter people’s prevailing narrative. 

The author N. Scott Momaday said: “We live in a house made of stories.” Stories are the seed forms of culture we carry around within us. Internalized, they define how expansively or tightly we offer the gift of our lives to the world. We decide how far we can go, how large a stand we’re willing to make, or what risks we’re willing to take, based upon the stories we tell ourselves. 

Sometimes these stories that help define us stem from our family, culture, and social conditioning, and we carry them unwittingly, unaware of how they shape our lives, so it is crucial that we do the work of unpacking and making conscious the stories we tell ourselves. 

About 10 years ago, I began unearthing my own hidden stories, and discovered that I thought of myself as the woman behind the man (and, as you may have heard: behind every great man is a woman, rolling her eyes). It was shocking to realize how self-limiting my inner narrative was. I was horrified to discover that this story or belief had unconsciously embedded itself within me. I asked other colleagues whether any of them — including my husband and partner — saw me that way. They did not. Once I understood that it was only my own story and not reflected by others around me, I understood that I held the keys to my own liberation. This insight expanded my definition of leadership, and an awareness of the centrality of stories has informed and guided my path ever since. 

Sometimes stories can help us to reconnect with emotions that have been banished or anesthetized. Given the scope of the losses we face, with species extinctions happening at an unimaginable rate, anger, loss, powerlessness, and grief are totally appropriate responses. Culturally, however, we have no rituals, no safe places to express those anymore. 

Stories can reopen us, allowing us to feel our emotions in a healthy way so that we can risk casting aside our numbness to respond to these crises from an awakened and alive place. Those kinds of stories are needed to heal our relations with our selves, each other, and this endangered, sacred Earth that is our home. We tend to be far more adept at resisting what we don’t want than articulating a future story of what we yearn for with all our hearts. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up where we’re heading.” I believe the need for a clear vision of where we want to go is essential to help us connect with and inspire a broad range of people, and to help us develop the stamina and persistence we will need in the years ahead. Much of Bioneers’ emphasis over the years has been to inspire people to act on behalf of a future they want, to understand how interdependent all the issues confronting us are, and to highlight those stories that can motivate us to help build the sort of movement of movements we now need to save our species from its own worst impulses. 

It’s vital that we tell stories of a future that’s believable, emotionally accessible, sensually connectable, and that we passionately want. I agree with Charles Eisenstein that we’re in a time “between stories.” There’s a story of fear, separation, and scarcity, based upon domination, ranking, and greed. It’s got a long and bloody history, and we’ve all had lots of practice adapting to it. 

The emergent story is one of solidarity, of relatedness, of empathy and equity, giving and sharing. It includes meaningful rituals to mark changes and to form new relationships and life passages, respect, and appreciation for diversity and for the sacredness of all life, and operates on principles of inclusion and mutuality. This new culture will simultaneously draw from the best of humanity’s ancient wisdom and the most positive emergent new ideas. It’s a story of the relationship economy, not one based upon exploitation and transactions. This story has at its foundation the shifting of focus and priority in our societies from counting things to mapping connectedness. It’s the story of a security that’s based upon love, rather than material acquisition. 

We’ve learned that neither fear nor threat can change people’s minds or behavior. It’s having a more enticing story — a narrative that speaks to our hearts, that describes a future we would all wish to live in, one that we all want to be invited into. Oh, I want to live in that story. Yes, I want to contribute to that future, that vision that someone just so beautifully evoked in their poetry or song. That’s the world I’m motivated to give my time, resources, and love to co-creating. 

Stories are also vital to mending the false separations, the pigeonholing that our society is so patterned to reinforce. They can enhance our empathy, our capacity to imagine walking in another’s shoes. Most of us yearn for intimacy and deep relationship. Really listening to others’ stories and sharing some of our own are among the most effective pathways to transforming our cultures and growing deep connections. They work on us through identification with the storyteller, connecting us with those we might not normally see or hear. They are medicine for our false isolation, a way to forge connection and community and help shift our course. 

Jensine Larson’s global media project, WorldPulse, connects women from around the world to share their stories and create networks of mutual support. It’s an example of just the sort of story-based initiative we need. Fortunately, WorldPulse is not alone. In the last few decades, whole new bodies of story-based practices, some based in ancient indigenous ways, some emerging from newly integrated understandings of neuroscience and psychology, have emerged. The practice of “Council,” of which there are many variants, and a slew of hosting and convening approaches and methods that use storytelling as a cornerstone of their methodology, is spreading far and wide. 

We’re all involved in midwifing a new world into being, as the old world is crumbling around us. How do we engage with the tremendous uncertainty of the current human predicament? 

Joanna Macy uses an especially powerful storytelling-based exercise to teach us how to shift our relationship to time. This is an exercise that comes from her Work that Reconnects: Imagine that time travel is possible and that you’re about to be visited by someone from seven generations in the future. A young person is coming back in time to interview you because you were alive in this pivotal moment. Take a moment to imagine and notice what you anticipate the tone of that interview might be, and let your body feel it. Notice any sensations that come up in your body, your heart, your mind, or your spirit. 

Joanna suggests that this young person is coming back from the future because you are a hero, or a shero, to them. They are coming back so excited to ask you how you knew what to do. They ask you: “How did you navigate this extraordinary moment when everything about human civilization had to change? What can you teach me about how you gave yourself to this immense and essential transformation?” Again, notice any changes in your body, heart, mind, and spirit, and then, very gently, when you’re ready, bring your attention back to the present moment. 

Did you assume initially that somebody coming back from the future would be mad, or angry? I sure did. I was pretty convinced that would be their stance. When I heard Joanna frame it that I was the hero, that I was here, that I helped make the change, I thought, wow, look at that invisible bias that I carry! 

It’s a story that anticipates and assumes — based in part on experience — that we good guys are losing. We have lots of reasons to have adopted that insidious belief: just turn on the nightly news, it gets reinforced all the time. But this is why it’s so radical and so important to monitor and question our inner stories. We can support each other in knowing that the outcome being predicted in the media spin is not the final word. Our attitude towards what happens is key, and if we can show up for a positive outcome in a wholehearted and believable way, we can engage others to join us. 

As Gandhi said, “Social change occurs when deeply felt private experiences are given public legitimacy.” 

When Water Becomes a Weapon: Fracking, Climate Change, and the Violation of Human Rights

Kathleen Dean Moore

Water sustains our living world, but as environmental advocate, moral philosopher and award-winning author Kathleen Dean Moore writes, it can also be a dark and dangerous thing. In the following essay, Moore, Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, examines the impact of fracking on this precious element.

The essay, “When Water Becomes a Weapon: Fracking, Climate Change, and the Violation of Human Rights,” is an excerpt from volume three, “Water,” of the five-volume anthology series “Elementals.” From the Center for Humans & Nature, publisher of the award-winning anthology series “Kinship,” “Elementals” brings together essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. Inspired by the four material elements, the “Elementals” series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?

As evening comes on, my friends and I look over rolling hills of wind-silvered grass and a stock pond beside a windmill, slowly turning. Silhouetted against a livid sunset, three pump jacks tilt up, tilt down, up and down, ceaselessly, metronomically, silently; we are too far away from the fracking fields to hear them thud and squeal. The stock pond turns pink as the sunset fades, and by the time we finally hike back to our car, the pond floats a silver ladder of moonlight. Long into the night, the water holds the light.

But water can hold darkness too, and that is the subject of this exploration—how water can be made into a dark and dangerous thing. This will take us on a journey into the blackness deep underground, where blind water seeps and shushes through sand and silt. Here, in this darkness, is where the industry of hydraulic fracturing is turning water, an element essential to all living things, into a weapon against life.

…

Imagine that we can make ourselves small enough to follow a root into a crack in the rock, and down, and down, between grains of sand and through porous rock. It’s dark down here—a prehistoric dark, a Pliocene dark, the dark of the past and of the future, the dark of dreams and crypts. Hard to say how far we have crept down through the tiny spaces. Fifty feet? Three hundred? But suddenly, water flows between every grain of sand. We have reached the top of the water table. Below us is an aquifer, water-soaked sand resting on an impermeable layer of clay.

On Earth, there is more fresh water down here in the silent rock than there is on the green and frenzied surface. In uncounted aquifers, fissures, underground rivers, and saturated sands, vast volumes of water silently, slowly move downhill under the pressure of gravity and the weight of tons of rock. Geologists call this groundwater “cryptic water” because it is mysterious and undeciphered.

This is what gives life to Earth—this water of light, this water of darkness—and the movement from one to the other through long space and time.

How can I describe the water? It is dull black, of course, so far from the light. Maybe it smells vaguely of life, because there is life down here, a complex biosphere of bacteria and other microorganisms—maybe a greater biomass of life underground than on the surface of the Earth. The water is cold. Or sometimes it’s hot. Maybe it tastes stale. I don’t know—the water might have been down here for ten million years, or longer even than that, at home in this black, shivering, watery world unknown to us.

Some of this water may be “dead”—that’s what the geologists call it when the water is imprisoned between impermeable layers, never to be part of the hydrological cycles. But most of the water is moving, flowing—if I can use that term for a process so slow— across a clay, maybe, or a glacial till, a giant sheet of water straining through sand, fracture systems, and fissures. Occasionally, water will find an opening and emerge from the darkness in a spring or a rancher’s well, an oasis, or even a river—in a sudden splash of light, tinkling, twinkling, released, free as a fish.

And then it will embark on the next stage of its hydrological cycle in a cottonwood swale, or in a bison’s flicking tail or the fly it flicks, in a quaking aspen leaf, in wild strawberries or spinal fluid, or in a glorious thunderhead blooming purple over the bison range. This is what gives life to Earth—this water of light, this water of darkness—and the movement from one to the other through long space and time. This is what creates the abundance of Earth, the singing of rivers and children, the paradise of plenty. This is how Earth grows beings who turn their faces to the night sky and sing praises. This is why Earth is not Mars.

…

A heavy drill with diamonds in its teeth grinds through the gravel and sandstone, down and down into the darkness, maybe a mile or more through dozens of geological layers and pockets of fresh water. Then it turns and drills horizontally, maybe another mile under the bison range. Who knows the sounds that vibrate so far underground or the smell of hot steel on sandstone? Who knows the sizzle when the bit touches water?

Roustabouts line the wellbore with concrete. Then into the wellbore, they pump fracking fluid or “slickwater” under pressure. Fracking fluid begins as fresh water. Oil companies draw the water from lakes and streams and often from the groundwater. How much water? It depends: somewhere between two and twenty million gallons of fresh water for each frack job.

Now slippery, gelatinous, and entirely poison, the fracking fluid is forced down the wellbore under tremendous pressure. Twelve thousand pounds per square inch? Nine thousand? Numbers vary, but approximately the pressure a hand would feel if it were crushed by a steamroller. The fluid hits an opening in the concrete liner, explodes out with enough force to crack rock into shards and open long fissures. Silica sand is sent down to prop open the caverns, and oil and gas ooze or gusher out, beginning their complex transformation into money.

In great slurry blenders, any of at least 1,021 chemicals can be mixed with the water to make the fracking fluid. It’s hard to say what they are exactly, because the industry conceals much of that information. Trade secrets. But here are some of the chemicals: Benzene. Toluene. Ethylbenzene. Xylene. Arsenic. Cadmium. Formaldehyde. Hydrochloric acid. 2-Butoxyethanol. Ammonium chloride. Mercury. Glutaraldehyde. Other secret poisons to kill the microorganisms in the rocks before they can gum up the drill. These are chemicals customarily used to kill insects, clean toilet bowls, strip paint, polish brass, etch glass, preserve corpses, and commit murder. At least 157 of the fracking chemicals are reproductive or developmental toxins, causing birth defects, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, and other heartbreaks. The health effects of an additional 781 chemicals used have not been studied.

As poisoned water becomes the explosive weapon that smashes rock, this process is called “hydraulic fracturing.” It might more properly be called “weaponizing water” against the very Earth.

Some of the poisoned water is forced through fissures in the rock, where it seeps into the underground aquifers, carrying radium that it absorbs from the rocks themselves. But between 18 percent and 80 percent of the used fracking fluid—what we used to call “water”—is brought to the surface. What happens to it then? Some of it is stored in open impoundments, which may or may not be lined to prevent seepage. Some of it is dumped into streams. Some of it is sprayed onto agricultural land. Some of it is evaporated from pits, the residue used to melt ice on highways.

But much of the fluid waste is injected back into the earth, where it finds its way along faults, through sands, eventually into the groundwater and some into well water, in an inevitable process called “migration,” as if the toxins were birds or wildebeests. There are more than 480,000 underground waste injection wells in the United States alone; 30,000 of them force fracking fluid thousands of feet through water-bearing layers underground. No one knows how many wells are leaking. No one knows how much toxin finds its way into babies and breasts, into forests and agricultural land, into rivers and so into rice, where water becomes again a weapon, an agent of darkness and death.

…

Water Protectors on the frontlines at Standing Rock / © AYŞE GÜRSÖZ, INDIGENOUS RISING MEDIA

The Dakota Access Pipeline carries “sweet” crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to oil terminals in Patoka, Illinois. In its 1,172 miles, it crosses hundreds of streams and burrows under twenty-two bodies of water, including Lake Oahe, an impoundment of the Missouri River that provides drinking water to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Fearful of the good chance that the pipelines would leak into water that sustains their people, the Sioux rallied to stop the pipeline. These are the famous Water Protectors of Standing Rock. Hundreds of people came to help them stand their ground. Setting up encampments along the planned route of the pipeline, the people moved to block the progress of the great machines. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, brought in private security officers, the governor called out the National Guard, and local law enforcement officers moved in to clear the protesters.

Imagine the Sacred Stone Camp on a frigid night in midwinter. Searchlights flash through darkness that echoes with cries of “Water, not oil,” “Water, not oil.” Tear gas and the smoke of concussion grenades sting the night air. On one side of the Cannonball River is a phalanx of armored vehicles and police in full riot gear. Facing them: a crowd of Water Protectors, some wearing raincoats, but others protected only by plastic garbage bags and goggles. As shouts and rubber bullets zing across the river, the officers bring out their most powerful weapon. Water.

With water cannons as fierce as fire hoses, law enforcement officers blast the Water Protectors, knocking the people off their feet, tearing their clothes, and drenching them in ice water. People scream and run, trying to protect their faces from the force of the cannons. “We are cold. We are shaking. We are wet. We are in pain,” one woman said, assaulted by the sacred element they were trying to protect—water turned into a weapon.

…

“Mni wichoni.” “El agua es vida.” In any language, water is life. But when water is made into death, we enter a sinister alternative moral universe where wrong is right, and profit is valued more highly than life itself. There is a breathtaking moral nastiness in wielding deliberately pressurized or poisoned water—naturally the source and sustainer of life—as a weapon against life. There was a time, and the time will come again, when this is morally unthinkable.

The wrongs begin as the oil corporation draws fresh water into its tanks. It is undeniably true that the life of every person on the planet depends on the 1 percent of Earth’s water that is fresh and available. Of this limited supply, the US fracking industry uses an average of 105 billion gallons each year—as much as the water use of three million citizens of Chicago. Worse, this water is often seized from water sources essential to local people and extracted from some of the most arid and water-starved places on the planet. Because no technology exists to return fracking waste to potable water, this water becomes removed, maybe forever, from the hydrological cycle—a dangerous waste of the rare and wonderful gift of water.

Move on to the slurry tanks, where the symbol of innocence and purity, that agent of cleansing and renewal, is laced with the seeds of death. No one knows how the poisoned water spreads through the lacework of rock formations or human veins. Thus, in the 2018 judgment of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, a respected international opinion tribunal designed to shed light on human rights abuses of parties who lack access to justice, fracking practices constitute “deadly, large-scale experiments in poisoning humans and nonhumans that the fracking industry is currently conducting in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”1 The judgment is particularly damning: the nations of the world wrote the Nuremberg Code after World War II to forbid that any government, ever again, would experiment on human beings the way the Nazis did in the death camps.

Moreover, the wide-scale contamination of fresh water is a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.” These are not just words; these encode the moral consensus of the nations of the world, with none dissenting—an extraordinary agreement reached after World War II. The declaration sets hard ethical boundaries, minimal standards of human decency, recognizing that, as in its preamble, “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”2

Clean water is a necessary condition for the exercise of the guaranteed right to life. Thus, UN Resolution 64/292: “The General Assembly… recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water… [as] a human right that is essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights.”3 When fracking contaminates drinking water, it is an encroachment on this right. When fracking contaminates a river or stream that people depend on for drinking water, that is an encroachment on this right. When fracking fluid sickens an unborn child, a child, or an adult, that is a clear violation of the rights to life, liberty, and security of person.

Clear enough. But when people protest against the violation of their right to fresh water, they run up against the violation of other rights—the right to peaceably assemble and speak their minds. In fifteen states, soon to be twenty-two, it is a felony to “impede”—literally, to make forward progress more difficult—the operations of a pipeline or power plant. Even as fracking companies weaponize the water, they militarize law enforcement, arming local law officers with the surplus equipment of military forces and degrading the processes of democratic decision-making.

…

But as important as these violations of human rights are, it’s when we go down with the drills into the seams that we encounter immorality even more grave, and that is the fracking industry’s assault on the sanctity of water and the life-sustaining systems of Earth.

If there is anything on Earth that is sacred, it is water. Sacred means many things to many people. To me, it is the good English word that describes what is irreplaceable, beautiful, mysterious, powerful, essential, astonishing, and beyond human control or creation—sacred water, holder of light, holder of darkness, holder of all life. If water is sacred, then when fracking companies take it from Earth and from the people who depend on it, that is a sacrilege—sacrilege, the stealing of sacred things, from sacra, sacred, and legere, to steal. And destroying that water, wasting it, despoiling it, using it as an agent of destruction? That is a profanity, literally, pro-, outside of, fanum, the temple—taking lightly the attributes or acts of God. Water has a terrible power; when oil industries take it lightly, when they profane it, when they tease it with unthinking hubris, when they fail to show it proper respect or fear it fully, they create consequences of cosmic proportions.

If we persevere, if we hold hard to what is right and name what is wrong, if we wrest control of water from extractive industry, our children may find a time when water can reclaim its innocence and rain remake the world.

Finally, we come to the truly world-destroying power unleashed when fracking industries transmogrify water into an explosive device. When fracking shatters ancient layers of rock, it releases the carbon that sank into prehistoric swamps and has slept there for two hundred million years, trapped in its underground crypts. Once freed by the explosive force of water, the carbon surges, snakelike, up the wellbore: crude oil and natural gas. After great amounts of money change hands, the carbon is burned. That releases carbon dioxide that traps enough heat in the atmosphere to irredeemably disrupt the systems that sustain life on Earth.

What systems? As we now know to our sorrow, climate warming caused by burning oil and gas disrupts the patterns of the wind, the force of the waves, the great currents in the seas, the reliable rivers of rain, the patterns of heating and cooling that allowed life to evolve in all its earthly sweetness and ferocity. Now, truly, the oil industry has unleashed watery weapons that lash out blindly, striking far more fiercely than a water cannon. Floods, hurricanes, rising sea levels, drought, saltwater intrusion: once water is made a weapon, it cannot be controlled. Climate chaos is the ultimate aggression, as the oil industry in so many ways enlists water as a foot soldier in its war against the world.

…

My friends and I found a strip motel not far from the fracking fields. Part of a man camp for the roustabouts, the beds smelled of cigarettes and hard use. Recoiling into the night, we sat under the flashing light of the motel’s marquee. On the western horizon, methane flares glared off black clouds that rolled eastward until they erased the stars. The wind rose, the electricity blinked out, and rain began to fall. Big drops plonked on the dust, and suddenly the world was nothing but darkness, mud, and sage, as if we had been carried in our aluminum lawn chairs back into the mysterious eons when water created the world.

If we persevere, if we hold hard to what is right and name what is wrong, if we wrest control of water from extractive industry, our children may find a time when water can reclaim its innocence and rain remake the world.

Notes

1. Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, eds., Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case against Fracking and Climate Change (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2021), 305. The full text of the Advisory Opinion of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Fracking and Climate Change can be found at https://www. permanentpeoplestribunal.org/category/jurisprudence/?lang+en.

2. For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see the United Nations web page: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of- human-rights.

3. UN Resolution 64/292, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/687002?ln=en#record- files-collapse-header

This essay by Kathleen Dean Moore has been reprinted with permission from “Water,” volume three of the five-volume anthology “Elementals,” published by the Center for Humans and Nature, 2024.

Joanna Macy, First Lady of Deep Relational Ecology

Joanna Macy, First Lady of Deep Relational Ecology

The beloved Buddhist teacher and intellectual Joanna Macy died on July 19, 2025. A profound teacher, author, and activist, Joanna was a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change that brought a new way of seeing the world as a wider global community. Her many books include Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power; World as Lover, World as Self; Widening Circles, A Memoir; Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects; and many more. Joanna was a deeply influential figure to those of us at Bioneers and to the wider community, and we are so grateful for her presence and impact on our collective endeavors over the years. 

Tributes to Joanna Macy have been pouring in from around the world since the day she passed away. Below is a reflection on her influence from Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons as well as a selection of some of Joanna’s teachings and stories from the Bioneers Conference stage over the past several decades.

It’s all Alive

It’s all Connected

It’s all Intelligent

It’s all Relatives

It’s all Alive

It’s all Connected

It’s all Intelligent

It’s all Relatives

A Reflection on Joanna’s Legacy from Nina Simons, Co-founder of Bioneers

I have been fortunate to have had many mentors in my life – some of whom haven’t even known how their actions, their embodied presence and their ways of showing up in the world were serving as role models for me. But of them all, Joanna was among the most profound in informing my own path, and the most enduring in influencing my evolution. She taught me so many things, not only through her writing and workshops, but through her ways of being.

The writer Terry Tempest Williams shared with me that among the most fertile explorations in her life was how to marry apparent contradictions, how to bridge domains that our Western culture has tended to falsely separate. Joanna embodied the integration of seemingly opposite ideas in so many ways. Her joyous and determined practices of honoring and allowing herself to combine realms not often braided together gave me and thousands of others permission to do the same.

Joanna Macy

For example, her life combined an intensely focused scholarship (her translations of Rainer Marie Rilke’s poetry), with a devotion to the sacred through Buddhism and an impassioned love of the world. She combined a lifetime of anti-nuclear and peace-making activism with a dedication to human and ecological healing. As she aged, she integrated the stillness of her elder wisdom with the exuberance of a small child, being continually elated and awed by the beauty and mystery of this world. She showed me that it was possible to live guided from the wisdom of my body and intuition, and by my heart, without sacrificing my pattern-seeking intellect and passion for healing. That it was possible to weave together a life from all the facets of myself that I valued most.

Joanna had a refined quality of relational intelligence that honored our storytelling minds and natures, and our true interdependence with all of life. While I’ve heard her called the Great Lady of Deep Ecology, in my view she evolved that realm from one that often considered humans to be a blight on the planet to embracing our full and flawed humanity.

She wrote and taught widely about “The Great Turning”, recognizing early the breakdown of human civilization that was necessary to reinvent, envision and midwife a new world. With her profound relational intelligence, she identified essential phases we’d need to move through consciously to become resilient. Joanna taught me and us about the telescopic nature of time and narratives, inviting us to become inhabitants of the future, to interview each other about how we survived this time and made it through, to better envision our successful passage.

In The Work That Reconnects, she helped us to notice how our deficit-oriented culture biased us toward the negatives, to express the truth through our emotions, and then to imagine more fully the futures we yearn for, to be better able to co-create them.

Joanna Macy and Nina Simons at Bioneers 2023. Credit: Katelyn Tucker for Nikki Ritcher Photography

Joanna and Bioneers had a mutual love affair, and she was an important presence and keynote speaker at the Bioneers Conference, returning multiple times as the years passed, to share wisdom and inspiration with the community. From the Bioneers stage, Joanna offered a simple set of four phrases that have become, over the years, a core part of the ethos of Bioneers as an organization: “It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.” A recording of Joanna speaking that poem opens every episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio shows and podcasts, one of her many gifts that endure. Her voice is the prelude to deeply inspiring stories profiling thousands of the world’s most passionate activists and leaders working to heal people and planet.

As she was dying, in hospice for several weeks, her love for life, and her peace with death illustrated how to die well. Attended by two women she adored, who posted daily and generously on her Caring Bridge site, her hospice was shared with thousands of us, who hung on every word and image. When her bed was surrounded by family and grandchildren, they sang to her while she waved her arms joyously, conducting them. Surrounding her in her bedroom were stuffed animals and other toys, amidst Buddhist deities and candles. It’s been said that her last words were, “wow, wow, wow!”

I was in Berkeley after Joanna died and attended her wake. She was laid to rest swathed in a gloriously colored kimono, with rose petals strewn all over her body. Her face bore a peaceful, beatific grin, and she looked like an angel. In her backyard, food was offered and music was played. Everyone was wide eyed, seeming to share in the liminal experience of joy and loss, in that combination of apparent opposites that she embraced throughout her life.

I feel honored to carry the seeds of Joanna’s flourishing garden deep in the rich soil of my being, and to know that so many of us will carry her work, her vision and her deep love forward through the fog. Together, we will embody the joy, the commitment, the purposefulness and the love that Joanna so completely lived to inform the resilience needed to navigate the Great Turning.

— Nina Simons

Media & Resources to Connect with Joanna’s Legacy

Joanna shared her wisdom as a keynote speaker at multiple Bioneers Conferences over the years, and her voice has been heard by many thousands through the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio show and podcast.

Bioneers Keynotes

2023: A Call to Reconnect with Our Planet

2013: On Choosing Life

2009: The Hidden Promise of Our Dark Age

Bioneers Radio Shows

Inalienable: Belonging to the Earth Community

They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth for Nothing: Women Re-imagining the World

Resources

Joanna Macy Website

Work That Reconnects Network

Essay: “Entering the Bardo”

Dive Deep into Oceans: Stories of Marine Science and Conservation

Oceans cover more than 70% of Earth’s surface and comprise 97% of its water, yet we know far less about this vast, underwater world than we do our terrestrial one. Scientists estimate that 91% of ocean species have yet to be classified and that more than 80% of the ocean is unmapped, unobserved and unexplored. Some are striving to bridge this gap, valuing kelp forests alongside deciduous ones and marine creatures as much as those on land. With the threats of climate change and contamination looming large, their work is increasingly vital to the preservation of ecosystems, marine life and our human future. 

Below, we explore shark scientist Jasmin Graham’s efforts to promote diversity in marine science, a Brazilian city’s innovative marine protection strategy, the preservation of wild salmon habitat in Alaska, and marine biologist Danna Staaf’s insights into the remarkable cognitive abilities of octopuses, squid, and other cephalopods. Photo credit: Sumer Verma

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‘Come as You Are, Bring What You Can, and There Will Be Enough’ With Jasmin Graham

Jasmin Graham, 29, is a shark scientist and environmental educator, the 2021 recipient of the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Leadership Award and the Co-Founder and CEO of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS). MISS is dedicated to supporting gender minorities of color in the field of marine and shark sciences. “We have a vision where seeing a person of color studying the ocean is not weird, where it’s normalized,” Graham says. “We preserve biodiversity with sharks, but we also preserve diversity among scientists who study sharks and do conservation because we feel true innovation comes from having people with a diversity of experiences and backgrounds.” 

In this conversation with Bioneers, Graham discusses the meaning of an expansive view of science and how her work prioritizes uplifting and “legitimizing” a multigenerational wealth of knowledge that spans diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds. Check out the captivating conversation and see Graham in the 2025 Bioneers conference session highlighted later in this newsletter. Photo credit: Cliff Hawkins

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For the First Time, Part of the Ocean Has Been Granted Legal Personhood

By affording rights to its iconic waves, a Brazilian city is paving a new path to marine protection. Linhares, Brazil, a world-renowned surf destination, has legally recognized its prized waves as living beings, granting them the inherent right to exist, continue to form naturally and be restored. Learn about this significant news for ocean ecosystems in the following article written by Isabella Kaminski for Hakai Magazine.

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Native Alaskan Fisherman Turns to Kelp Farming to Restore Ocean Health

Dune Lankard, an Eyak Native, was a subsistence and commercial fisherman before the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In response to the catastrophe, he founded the Eyak Preservation Council and Native Conservancy, which has helped preserve more than a million acres of wild salmon habit along 3,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska coastline and is helping to build resilient communities and regenerative economies. Read about Lankard’s work in this Bioneers interview from 2022. 

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Youth Keynote Speaker Spotlight: Asa Miller – Marine Science Researcher

Asa Miller, 18, a marine science researcher and Greenburgh, NY’s Youth Poet Laureate, is an international leader in marine conservation who combines an acute knowledge of the issues facing marine ecosystems with the sensibility and creativity of a poet. He has conducted coral reef conservation in both his native Cuba and in Israel, each time working with teams whose collaborations transcended conflicts and borders. His documentary short “Coral Reef Restoration” has screened and won awards at 26 international film festivals. He is a winner of the Brower Youth, National Marine Educators Association Youth Leadership in Marine Conservation, and Blue Hatchling Youth awards.

Catch Asa and other visionary speakers at the 36th annual Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, from March 27-29.

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Defending the Living World: Co-sponsored with the Safina Center’s Fellowship Programs

We will never be able to address climate change and ensure healthy, just human communities unless we protect and defend the entire web of life. The Safina Center, founded by renowned ecologist and author Carl Safina, has for more than 20 years drawn from science, art and literature to advance the case for Life on Earth. 

This Bioneers 2025 session will feature three recent, extraordinary Safina Fellows: Danielle Khan Da Silva, award-winning documentary photographer, director, conservation activist, founder/Executive Director of Photographers Without Borders, and co-founder of the Sumatran Wildlife Sanctuary; Jasmin Graham, a young shark scientist and environmental educator, President/CEO of Minorities in Shark Sciences, an organization dedicated to supporting gender minorities of color in shark sciences; Katlyn Taylor, passionate marine biologist and conservationist, naturalist, guide, and widely traveled Coast Guard licensed captain, co-creator of The Whalenerd’s Podcast.

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A Look into the Fascinating World of Octopuses, Squid and Other Cephalopods with Marine Biologist and Science Author Danna Staaf

Imagine meeting a creature that feels both familiar and alien — one that observes you as intently as you do it. When marine biologist Danna Staaf first locked eyes with an octopus at age 10, she was spellbound. This creature, with its shape-shifting body and expressive gaze, sparked a lifelong fascination with cephalopods, the group of marine beings that includes octopuses, squid and their relatives. In this conversation with Bioneers, Staaf shares insights on how her early encounter shaped her work and discusses the captivating characteristics of cephalopods that continue to motivate her research and writing.

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Don’t miss the International Ocean Film Festival, April 11-13 at the Cowell Theater Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco

Launched in 2004, the International Ocean Film Foundation is a year-round ocean conservation non-profit organization that uses the power of film to educate, entertain and engage audiences about the importance of our oceans. The annual film festival is the leading Bay Area ocean destination event and the largest ocean-centric global film festival in the world. Now celebrating its 22nd Anniversary on April 11-13, 2025, the three-day film festival features more than 40 independent films from around the world, visiting filmmakers, special guests, panel discussions and opportunities for patrons to engage with Ocean Hero Community Partners. 

Register Now

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses 

We’re so excited to share this new season of Bioneers Learning courses! We’ve designed this season of both live and asynchronous courses for leaders like you — those who seek empathetic, intersectional conversations with leading activists and experts on the issues you are passionate about. Together, we will reimagine philanthropy, learn to harness nature’s timeless strategies to drive social transformation and build emotional resilience for frontline activism. 

Learn more 

‘Come as You Are, Bring What You Can, and There Will Be Enough’ with Jasmin Graham

Jasmin Graham (29 years old) is a shark scientist and environmental educator, the 2021 WWF-US Conservation Leadership Award recipient, and the Co-Founder and CEO of Minorities in Shark Sciences. Minorities in Shark Sciences is an organization dedicated to supporting gender minorities of color in the field of marine and shark sciences. They provide fully-funded and community-centered opportunities for research, education, and conservation. Jasmin is also the MarSci LACE Project Coordinator at Mote Marine Laboratory, which is an initiative that opens doors into marine science research, education, and careers for underrepresented minority students.

In this conversation with Bioneers Youth Fellow Anna Steltenkamp, Jasmin speaks about what an expansive view of science means—beyond the Western definition, research model and valuation process. She shares how her own work prioritizes uplifting and ‘legitimizing’ a multi-generational wealth of knowledge that spans diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds. Jasmin reflects on the pivotal experiences and relationships that cultivated her admiration for the ocean and sharks in particular, and then she expands on her journey through academia and the importance of inclusion and belonging in the science and conservation fields. Throughout, Jasmin deeply explores the question: How do we welcome people’s whole selves into these spaces, whereby their unique lived experience, stored wisdom and identity expression are respected and appreciated?

This article is part of “Passion, Power, Purpose: Global Young Leaders Weaving Care for Person and Place”, an upcoming media series produced by Anna Steltenkamp as part of the Bioneers Young Leaders Fellowship Program. Learn more about the Bioneers Young Leaders program.

Jasmin: I work with communities that haven’t traditionally been heard in conservation, including fishing communities like where my family is from in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. One of my big projects is a local ecological knowledge study that I’m doing with my dad, who is a fisherman in Myrtle Beach. I also run Minorities in Shark Sciences, affectionately called MISS, which was founded in 2020 through a tweet. It was during a time of a lot of unrest and political activation when there was a big upswell of the Black Lives Matter movement. There was a hashtag #BlackinNature going around with people posting pictures of themselves enjoying nature. It was this really beautiful movement on Twitter to say Black people should be able to exist in nature without fearing that we’re going to be harassed, or have the police called on us, or shot. 

I came across a picture of one of my future co-founders, Carlee, doing shark research, and I got really excited because I’d never seen anyone that looked like me doing shark research. I felt like I was the only one. I responded to her tweet: You’re a Black girl that studies sharks? I do too! We had our other two co-founders come into the conversation and say: Black girls that study sharks? We’re here! It started out as DMs joking that we should start a club, and it turned into a nonprofit, a whole movement, which four years later now has 500-plus members in 33 different countries. It’s pretty wild that the call was made and the answer was overwhelming.

If you aren’t hearing all voices, you aren’t getting the whole picture, and therefore you can’t actually tackle conservation problems.

We have a vision where seeing a person of color studying the ocean is not weird, where it’s normalized. We preserve biodiversity with sharks, but we also preserve diversity among scientists who study sharks and do conservation because we feel true innovation comes from having people with a diversity of experiences and backgrounds. If you aren’t hearing all voices, you aren’t getting the whole picture, and therefore you can’t actually tackle conservation problems. We’re all about engaging people, whether as scientists working in the field or as community leaders using science as a tool to protect the resources of their community. 

We also have an expansive view of what science is—beyond what has traditionally been seen as science. We want people to have the resources, knowledge, and tools that they need to engage in the protection of our oceans because it impacts all of us. We live on a blue planet, and if the ocean ecosystems were to collapse, you’d feel it. Everyone should be part of the conversation, not just a select few powerful people. They shouldn’t be the only ones making the decisions because they don’t have the whole picture.

Anna: MISS has grown quickly since its founding. Would you share some of the main initiatives MISS has implemented to drive positive change and make science more accessible and inclusive? 

Jasmin: MISS has three arms. One is outreach and education, which is all about teaching people how to engage on a community level. All of the ways that we can meet people where they are, that’s where we go, and we serve K thru Grey [all ages]. When you are capable of making thoughts, you are capable of action, and you are capable of acting until you step foot in the grave. That’s our feelings. It’s never too late or too early to engage, and we’re all about getting people in contact with the natural world and teaching them about how what they do impacts it. Then we have our professional development arm for folks who want training on certain equipment and research skills. We provide all sorts of events that anyone can attend for free, all expenses paid, and we offer stipends to offset the time taken away from family or work. We never want there to be a financial barrier to access training. 

Last, we have our research arm. A lot of the folks we work with are one-person shows who are like: I don’t have any money or a building. I’m doing this totally grassroots. I just care about my community. We support by providing infrastructure, helping with grant writing, and fiscally sponsoring projects so that we can combat the way science is right now, which is that you need to have an institution and a title to be trusted with money or resources. We disagree with that, and we’re going to fight to change that. But in the meantime, here’s a thought: we just give everyone a title. Now you are a community researcher within this organization. Now you are ‘legitimized.

What if we trusted people to do the work that they’re doing, gave them the power to do it, and we were just here to help instead of trying to take over?

Anna: You mentioned that your programming welcomes all ages. Would you speak more to this experience of cultivating a multigenerational space and why it’s so important to welcome students across generations?

Jasmin: It’s so huge. To me it seems so straightforward, and yet everyone acts like it’s very innovative. You get the wisdom of the elders and the excitement of the youth all in one place. Our youth are an unappreciated powerhouse. In a lot of conservation spaces, people are starting to recognize the impacts of youth, but not with the same value as those of non-young people. There’s a difference between inviting someone to the table and valuing their voice. I noticed this at Capitol Hill Ocean Week. There were panels, and then there was a youth who responded to the panel. I thought to myself: Why not just put the young people on the panel? There’s this idea that your value only increases over time. Therefore the older you are, the more you know, which is not necessarily true. It means you have had more experience; it doesn’t mean that you are right. 

On the other side, we have older folks whose knowledge isn’t valued because it’s not in the same acceptable form that the Western world has viewed as valuable. That’s where my local ecological knowledge study came from. My grandmother was one of the best fish scientists that I have ever known. She wouldn’t have called herself that, and I don’t know that she really had a concept of what science was, in the traditional sense. But, she could tell you what fish you were going to catch based on the way the wind was blowing and what was floating by—that is a really deep understanding of ecology. I remember going through school and being like: My grandma taught me that. She didn’t call it that, she had a different name for it, but that’s what it was. But her voice was not valued because she was largely illiterate, didn’t finish grade school, and was poor and Black and fishing in the South. 

This local ecological knowledge study is about harnessing all of the great knowledge that fishermen in my dad’s community in Myrtle Beach have and inserting their voices into the scientific literature to make it citable. If I take all of these people’s knowledge and put it in a journal, once it makes it through peer review, it’s ‘legit’ and going to be valued—that’s what you [the Western World] said. It’s upsetting that we have to do that, but until the systems are broken, we have to help people get around them to have their voices legitimized and recognized in the science space.

Anna: I would love to hear more about what it’s like working on this project with your dad and his community. 

Jasmin: It’s been pretty cool working on this project. I first approached my dad with this idea to interview people and write a scientific paper together, and he was like: What? I don’t do science. I responded: You do though. You actually know more about this topic than I do, so you should help me because you have all of these years of experience that I don’t have. Sure, I know how to form an open-ended interview and analyze the data, but you know how to talk to this community in a way that I don’t know how to—and that’s the value you bring. So he came to all of the interviews with me. 

He knew to ask things that I didn’t know to ask because he had the context for what they were talking about. He could ask a question that would trigger them to expand on something that I would have missed if he hadn’t been there. My dad is a really joyful person who is well respected in the community and has known all of them for a long time, so it feels less like work and more like coming home. A lot of people have asked: How did you get the fishermen to talk to you? Most scientists can’t get fishermen to talk to them. Have you tried being a human talking to another human instead of a scientist talking to a research subject? That helps. 

Then, when writing the paper, he was a large contributor to the introduction, contextualizing the economic and social dynamics of Myrtle Beach in the time period when all of these people were fishing. I was able to talk to him and my aunts. He would say: I remember when the beaches integrated, but I was too young to understand. You should ask your Aunt Rose. That’s a very important context when talking about a Black fishing community that couldn’t legally access that water until a certain point in time and how that impacted their fishing. Then, when submitting a paper, it won’t let you skip affiliation. I asked my dad: What do you want me to list your affiliation as? He said: I don’t know. I’m not affiliated with anybody. Jasmin’s dad. We ended up putting ‘fishing community member.’ I realized that this process wasn’t made for people like my dad to engage in.

Science is asking a question and trying to figure out the answer. That’s all. You can do that in a lot of ways, and all of them are valuable.

Anna: You have spoken a few times about creating a more expansive view of science. If you were to give an explanation of what you and MISS understand science to be, how would you define it?

Jasmin: This is something that we say in all of our programs: doing science is asking a question and going through a process to figure out the answer. The way you do that varies, and the techniques you use can vary in complexity and length of time, but that is the scientific method. I often use this example, especially for young kids: Do you ever see ants walking in a line, and you’re curious where they are going, so you follow the line? You just did science. Your question was: Where are the ants going? Maybe you hypothesized they’re going back to their anthill. Then you followed the line, and yep, they’re going to their anthill. Hypothesis supported. 

People are always like: What? That’s not science. Science requires a lab coat and a PhD. No, science is asking a question and trying to figure out the answer. That’s all. You can do that in a lot of ways, and all of them are valuable. It’s just as valuable to say, my hypothesis is supported by generations of people doing this thing, as it is to say, my hypothesis is supported by an experiment conducted in a controlled lab environment for a period of time. If it answers your question, it’s a valid tool. 

Our work at MISS is very experiential and learner-driven. Getting people to learn in a way that is conducive to them and what they’re interested in is the beautiful part about doing informal education. All of our programs have a component of independence to them. You come up with a question; you follow that thread to get somewhere. Guided journeys to discovery, not lectures, really make people connect with the scientific method. Our summer camp is held on an island in the middle of a nature preserve. There is a lighthouse, classroom and dock. That’s it. I remember during our first camp, we got to the island, and the kids were like: This is wild! We’re going to be here in the wilderness for a week? The only way to get off this island is that boat? Correct.

Seeing the apprehension at first because they have never been so far from civilization. There’s bad phone service and no air conditioning. What are they going to do? All of that shock. The first night, all of these parents and guardians are calling: My child is concerned. They’re going to panic, but that’s part of the process. Then the next day the kids are like: Wow, this is actually really cool. I’ve never been this free before. I can run around this island and just explore and ask questions. Then the parents are calling: I haven’t heard from my child in days. Are they alive? Yes, they’re just having fun. We work with youth to get them comfortable being outside and exposed to nature, because it’s easier for you to appreciate something that you know and have experienced.

Anna: Speaking to the value in early opportunities to connect with natural spaces, would you share more about your own experiences with the ocean as a young person?

Jasmin: Fishing with my dad was a huge part, being out on the pier and learning about fish by actually holding them. Also this beautiful relationship between my family and the ocean as a source of food and sustenance, and that the community exists and thrives because of the ability to fish. That area was, and still is, a food desert. The majority of the food comes from the ocean, so being able to say this is a place that is beautiful, brings me calm, and also literally fuels my life.

Whenever I go to the ocean, it’s similar to people going to church. It’s a very cathartic experience to look out on the water and connect with something bigger than myself. The more you look, the more life you see. You can sit on a dock for hours and see all sorts of life: pelicans diving, jellyfish and seaweed floating by, fish jumping, little ripples of water from some predator chasing bait fish around. At first glance it doesn’t look like anything but water, and then you keep looking, and you see all of this activity. It’s very beautiful and powerful that all of this life is going on beneath the surface that you can’t see unless you care to look and pay attention.

Anna: And why focus on sharks in particular? 

My interaction with sharks as a kid was with fishing. Someone would get a shark on the line and everybody would quickly reel in because the sharks would run and tangle up all of the lines. I never really got to see sharks up close because they would break off, or fishers would dehook them hanging over the dock. Then in college, I met a professor who was studying sharks, and I went to work in his lab because he was the only professor who was willing to pay me. Marine science has a big problem of expecting people to work for free. 

I fell in love with sharks and realized how cool they are while we were studying genetics and phylogeny [how different species are related to each other]. I learned how old they were and how little they had changed in the grand scheme of things. We went from T-Rex to chicken—the closest living relative to a dinosaur is a chicken—and yet prehistoric sharks look pretty much like sharks do now. I thought it was really impressive that they had millions of years of opportunity to change and instead were like: I’m good. This works pretty well. Also the fact that people dislike them so much made me like them even more, because I wanted sharks to have better PR [public relations] people. Dolphins and orcas get movies like Flipper and Free Willy, and then sharks get Jaws? Why do some species get to be friends with small children while sharks are portrayed as eating children? That’s not fair PR.

Here’s this misunderstood animal, and people make assumptions that its very simple behaviors are aggressive. I see a parallel between sharks and Black people. Sharks are seen as scary or threatening by default. We have news stories of a shark swimming down the beach in Miami, minding its own business, with the headline: Killer Shark Stalks Beachgoers. It didn’t bite anyone. It literally just swam past. I see it the same way with how the news portrays Black people: something happens, and it’s always the most thugged-out picture of the person that’s used. 

There’s this misunderstanding and misinterpretation of sharks, meanwhile they’re actually the ones under threat. [Over the last 50 years, there’s been a 71 percent decline in oceanic sharks and rays, according to research published in the Nature scientific journal.] People are so busy being afraid of them that they don’t realize that we’re losing them, and that that’s a problem. Sharks are good mascots for myths when talking about ocean conservation, especially with communities who have been demonized because sharks have been demonized as well. We’re trying to combat that both with sharks and communities.

If you’re expecting people to leave part of themselves at the door, you’re losing all the value that comes with having a diversity of experiences.

Anna: On this point about creating inclusive and equitable spaces in conservation, I read your research study about the importance of a sense of belonging, science identity, and self-efficacy for career retention with BIPOC students. How did these factors affect your own journey, and how does MISS seek to strengthen them for others?

Jasmin: My experiences in academia were a mixed bag. There were some spaces where I felt like I belonged; there were others where I was made to feel like I didn’t belong. There were a lot of times where I felt that my knowledge—not the traditionally accepted form of science—was not valued. That was frustrating, especially in classes where students and professors were talking about conservation in ways that seemed very anti-fishermen. I was sitting there like: Why are we hating on the fishermen? I had classmates say: People should stop fishing. That’s the answer. The answer for whom? My family fishes for food. What are you expecting people to eat? What’s the alternative? It’s easy for you to say that when you live in a place where there’s a Whole Foods. What about people who live in a food desert and can’t get to a grocery store?

If you’re expecting people to leave part of themselves at the door, you’re losing all the value that comes with having a diversity of experiences. At MISS, our learning spaces are an open dialogue, and we’re here to learn from you as much as you’re here to learn from us—coming from the perspective that we don’t know everything. We’re all about helping people bring their whole selves and that means preparing our spaces for everyone’s whole selves. There’s a difference between feeling like you belong as long as you aren’t too ‘insert whatever.’ As long as I’m not too Black, as long as I’m not too feminine, I’m accepted here. That’s not feeling like you belong; that’s feeling like you can assimilate properly. 

How people choose to express themselves at our MISS events—it’s beautiful. We have potlucks where people bring their cultural dishes. We set up a playlist that people can add whatever music they want. We actively encourage people to bring these other elements of themselves in. It does not matter what you are wearing, how your hair is, if you have tattoos or piercings. We’re not here to police how you talk or what you value. Feeling like you need to conform adds a lot of pressure. I’ve had people make comments about my hair all the time. Sometimes scientists have purple hair—doesn’t make them less of a scientist.

We have these moments to see each other as people first because scientists are people. Sometimes we act like scientists are robots that are entirely objective and have no other things going on. We’re human beings. We have biases, agendas, and values. You can try to ignore that, but it’s not true, so connecting with people on a human-to-human level first is really important to us. Connection happens in a lot of ways, but for many cultures food and music are huge, so that’s usually where we start.

Anna: In the spirit of celebrating with food, and recalling your ties to the ocean as a source of nourishment for your family, I’m curious if there was a favorite meal that you made with your family growing up.

Jasmin: There were a lot of them. We love, love, love crab. And fish fries. Fish fries are huge because if someone’s pulling out the fryer and we’re getting ready to go nom on some fish, it’s a whole community gathering. Everyone from the neighborhood is there. It’s a fun time. 

I love the sense of community that comes with eating seafood, gathering people together and cooking large amounts of food—and this idea that there’s enough. That’s something that’s really important to my family. You can never not be welcome at a fish fry. Fish fries are for everyone. You could roll in off the street and nobody knows who you are, and, yeah, grab a plate. There’s never a question about whose fish is this or that. Come as you are, bring what you can, and there will be enough. 

What if we existed from a place of abundance, where we were less concerned about who owned what and more concerned about the community as a whole having enough? Not having to worry about someone taking too much because everyone’s main concern is that no matter how much we have, everyone gets enough. That is a fish fry. No matter how many fish we have, everyone gets to eat. I don’t know how it happens, but it does.

The Cedar Waxwing — How to Befriend a Wanderering Frugivore

Birders know that few thrills parallel the meeting of a new bird species. We anticipate their migrations, we listen to their calls on the Merlin Bird ID app, and we find ourselves venturing farther and farther from home to add them to our list. Descendants of prehistoric creatures become collectables — numbers. 

“But what these numbers leave out is nearly all of a bird’s life,” Joan Strassmann writes in the introduction to her book “Slow Birding.” “What are the birds doing? What can you learn about the birds?”

When focusing only on the novelty of birding, so much opportunity for grounding and connection is lost. As an evolutionary biologist and lover of animal behavior, Strassmann calls birders to tune our curiosity toward the life stories taking place in the canopies all around us. “What if instead we stayed close to home and watched the birds that intersect our lives?” she asks. 

“Slow Birding” — and its companion, “The Slow Birding Journal” — will lead birders everywhere to find a deeper appreciation for even the most familiar avian kin.

Joan E. Strassmann

Joan E. Strassmann is an award-winning teacher of animal behavior, first at Rice University in Houston and then at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is Charles Rebstock professor of biology. She has written more than two hundred scientific articles on behavior, ecology, and evolution of social organisms. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives with her husband in St. Louis, Missouri.

Reprinted from Slow Birding by arrangement with TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022, Joan E. Strassman

Cedar Waxwing: Evanescent Berry Pickers

Cedar Waxwings are like thoughts that arise unbidden in meditation. Try to focus on your breath, on the pattern of light, color, and dark right in front of you. And yet thoughts wisp in like bits of smoke, to-do lists, something left astray, or a worrying conversation. Let them all go and focus on your breath, my meditation guide tells me. Still, thoughts float in unbidden, just as Cedar Waxwings arrive unpredictably from on high, their sweet whistles in the morning sky too high-pitched for some to hear. I could not take you to see Cedar Waxwings, but I could tell you when they are suddenly here. These enigmatic birds present a mystery I would love to solve. 

I could not take you to see Cedar Waxwings, but I could tell you when they are suddenly here.

Cedar Waxwings are an improbable bird, from the black mask outlined in white to the feathery crest, or the tail dipped in yellow the color of yolk. Best of all are the little waxy tips of crimson on the ends of some wing feathers. Their other colors are more subtle, a yellow wash on the belly, chestnut on the head and neck fading to gray across the back and then intensifying to black on the tail. They look as if painted by one of the great Japanese artists of long ago, delicate yet strong, subtle yet stunning.

I see Cedar Waxwings sporadically in Flynn Park, two blocks from my home. In autumn, they twist around in the Sargent cherry trees as they eat small fruits, not competing for fruit with one another but sometimes chasing a robin away from a cherry-filled branch. Cedar Waxwings are always in groups, so when I see one, I know to look for others. But I never know exactly when I will encounter them. First, I hear their thin whistles. It is a pitch so high that my husband cannot hear it. 

Cedar Waxwings breed in the northern half of the United States and the southern half of mainland Canada, south of the boreal forest in open woods and old fields. They move out of the northernmost parts of their breeding range to winter along the southern fifty miles of Canada and then all the way south to Nicaragua. In St. Louis, we have Cedar Waxwings year-round according to eBird. I like to think of Cedar Waxwings wintering in Mexico, country of my early childhood. Perhaps they are in the eucalyptus groves of Chapultepec Park, where I once played. But even there they do not stay in one place long, as I will discuss later. 

Cedar Waxwings are true frugivores. From October through April they survive almost entirely on fruit.1 Jean McPherson did a thorough study of their diet during the winters of 1983 to 1985 on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman.2 She rode her bike frequently through campus, documenting the amount of fruit on trees and the Cedar Waxwings that fed on them from early December to mid-May. She rode her 7.5-mile route eighty-three times, stopping whenever she heard or saw Cedar Waxwings.

I guess Cedar Waxwings were not so hard for her to find once they came to campus. But that could vary a lot from year to year. There were none in 1985 until late January, for example. But then on February 27, 1985, she saw a record 673 birds!

McPherson found that Cedar Waxwings favored the sticky white fruits of mistletoe, stripping these berries entirely before trying other fruits. Their second favorite fruit was hackberry, followed by yaupon and deciduous holly berries, but really any fruit would do.

This is a bird so social, it will die when alone rather than eat.

Next, McPherson looked at food preference in aviaries, where she could control what the birds were fed. She wanted to study individual birds and their personal choices, but when she put a Cedar Waxwing in a cage by itself, it sat there and refused to eat.3 This is a bird so social, it will die when alone rather than eat.

McPherson found that in groups of eight birds, they ate the fruit readily, allowing her to do her study and conclude that Cedar Waxwings like small, red fruit best and do not seem to take into account nutritional aspects like protein content. But that does not explain their love of white mistletoe fruits.

It takes a special physiology to live on a diet of so much fruit. Margaret Morse Nice temporarily adopted a fledgling Cedar Waxwing to see how it digested fruit.4 She fed it fruit first thing in the morning, then waited for the fruit to work its way through the bird’s digestive system. Since fruit has so little protein, she reasoned that the Cedar Waxwings would digest it quickly. And so they did. Margaret found that blueberries took twenty-eight minutes from entry to exit, chokecherries forty minutes, and black cherries twenty minutes. Her lone Cedar Waxwing fed readily, but it was not truly alone because it was in a room with two Song Sparrows that the youngster took to be his own kind, begging readily from them.

Because they are so dependent on ripe fruit, Cedar Waxwings reproduce later in summer than other birds. The first fruits they eat in the spring are often berries left over from the previous year.

Perhaps the best way to determine what a bird eats and when it eats it is to simply shoot it and see what is in its stomach. We do not do this anymore, but there was a time when it was normal to shoot birds for study. The US Bureau of Biological Survey, now the US Fish and Wildlife Service, shot thousands of birds and documented what was in their stomachs between 1885 and 1950. Mark Witmer went to those records and reported on the stomach contents of 283 Cedar Waxwings.5 From November to April, their stomachs were half full of red cedar berries. Other common fruits in their stomachs included apples, crab apples, black haw, American pokeweed, riverbank grapes, blackberries, mulberries, service berries, and black cherries. In all, Witmer found the diet of these birds was 84 percent fruit, even more than that of American Robins, at 57 percent fruit, the next highest.

If I followed the appearance of fruit on trees, I might more regularly find Cedar Waxwings. Maybe this is what Alan Monroy-Ojeda and his team had in mind when they banded birds including Cedar Waxwings in the lush Ethnobotanical Garden in Oaxaca, Mexico.6 Though it is only five acres, the garden’s grounds and water supply make it a natural refuge for migrants. Monroy-Ojeda trapped birds with mist nets on the last Sunday of each month between December 2001 and April 2010. His crew identified, banded, and measured them before letting them go. The most common migrants they caught were Cedar Waxwings, Warbling Vireos, Nashville Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers (the Audubon’s subspecies), Western Tanagers, and Orchard Orioles. In all, they caught 1,565 birds. If the birds did not already have a band, they banded them with an aluminum band embossed with a traceable number. A fifth of them had already been caught before, either the same winter or a previous winter.

But they never recaptured a Cedar Waxwing.

But they never recaptured a Cedar Waxwing. Even on these wintering grounds, Cedar Waxwings are evanescent and social, tracking the fruit trees and neither staying long enough to be recaptured in one place nor necessarily returning the next year.

I don’t know if the migrants I see in the spring come all the way from Oaxaca. They are here in number by May. To be exact, last spring I heard them at home for the first time on May 11, when three flew overhead then perched on a dead snag high in a maple tree across the street. That spring I last saw them on June 1, when twenty individuals flew overhead, pausing in two separate groups in the high tops of sweetgums and oaks. I saw them nearly every day between May 11 and June 1, 2020, for a total of 199 birds, all likely to have been different individuals given how they move around. They were probably heading north, perhaps to my home state of Michigan. I have not figured out where to find Cedar Waxwings breeding near my home, though my Missouri Breeding Bird Atlas says they are here.7 I did not see them again until October 3, as they moved through flying southward.

…

Cedar Waxwings flit in and out of my life since I never know when I will see them. There is no lifetime researcher of Cedar Waxwings the way there is for House Wrens, Dark-eyed Juncos, Northern Flickers, or Cooper’s Hawks. Maybe it is too discouraging to study a bird that you band and come to love only to never see it another season. But many of us love them anyway.

…

CEDAR WAXWING ACTIVITIES
FOR SLOW BIRDERS

1. Check the size of the flocks. If there is one Cedar Waxwing, there will be more. See if you can count the flock size. It might be easiest as they fly away from a fruit tree, for when one leaves, they all tend to leave. What do flock sizes relate to? Are flocks in trees with copious fruits larger? Are they larger at the beginning or end of the season?

2. Watch Cedar Waxwings in a fruit tree. If you have fruiting trees nearby, Cedar Waxwings are likely to find them. Pick out one bird and watch it eat. Can you count the berries it swallows per minute? With their short guts and fast digestion, they defecate often. See if you can observe that too. What are their techniques for getting berries? Do they shake the branches to get them to fall? Maybe their techniques vary when there are a lot of birds nearby. Do the Cedar Waxwings eat all the fruit or leave before it is gone? Can you quantify this? What would you count?

3. Watch a nest. If you are lucky enough to find a nest, perhaps near a stream, take some time to watch it. See who comes and who goes and for how long. Maybe you will be there when the babies leave the nest and can watch their early attempts at flight. You won’t be able to capture one and watch it the way Margaret Morse Nice did, but wild watching is just as rewarding. See if you can watch the young birds land, as they have trouble with that long after they succeed in flying.

  1. M.C. Witmer, D.J. Mountjoy, and L. Elliot, “Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum),” version 1.0, in Birds of the World, ed. A.F. Poole (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2020). 
  2. J.M. McPherson, “A Field Study of Winter Fruit Preferences of Cedar Waxwings,” The Condor 89, no. 2 (1987): 293–306. 
  3. J.M. McPherson, “Preferences of Cedar Waxwings in the Laboratory for Fruit Species, Colour and Size: A Comparison with Field Observations,” Animal Behaviour 36, no. 4 (1988): 961–69. 
  4. M.M. Nice, “Observations on the Behavior of a Young Cedar Waxwing,” The Condor 43, no. 1 (1941): 58–64. 
  5. M.C. Witmer, “Annual Diet of Cedar Waxwings Based on US Biological Survey Records (1885–1950) Compared to Diet of American Robins: Contrasts in Dietary Patterns and Natural History,” The Auk 113, no. 2 (1996): 414–30. 
  6. A. Monroy-Ojeda et al., “Winter Site Fidelity and Winter Residency of Six Migratory Neotropical Species in Mexico,” Wilson Journal of Ornithology 125, no. 1 (2013): 192–96. 
  7. B. Jacobs and J.D. Wilson, Missouri Breeding Bird Atlas (Jefferson City: Missouri Department of Conservation, 1997). 

Reprinted from Slow Birding by arrangement with TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022, Joan E. Strassman

Hark: Rediscovering the Lost Symphony of the Natural World

Photo above: Amy records a soundscape during a reporting trip to Kenya for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Jed Allen

In a world dominated by human voices—buzzing highways, endless notifications, the hum of urban life—it’s easy to forget that Earth is alive with countless other sounds. From the songs of whales to the crackle of coral reefs, the natural world is a symphony we’re often too distracted to hear. Yet, as noise pollution rises and ecosystems face unprecedented threats, listening to these nonhuman voices has never been more critical. This idea is at the heart of the 5th season of “Threshold,” a Peabody Award-winning podcast exploring the profound connections between humans and the natural world.

Founded by journalist and storyteller Amy Martin, “Threshold” has captivated audiences with its immersive, field-based reporting and commitment to complexity. Each season tackles a pressing environmental story—whether it’s the reintroduction of bison to the Great Plains or the fight to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Amy drives through the Australian outback during a reporting trip for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Amy Martin

Season 5, titled “Hark,” takes listeners on a journey into the realm of sound—investigating what it means to truly listen to the nonhuman voices that surround us. From frogs to dolphins, coral larvae to elephants, the season explores how sound shapes ecosystems and how we might reconnect with the world through the simple, yet transformative act of listening.

Bioneers Media Producer Emily Harris recently sat down with Amy Martin to discuss her process, the inspiration behind “Hark,” and the unique challenges and joys of bringing nonhuman soundscapes to life. Drawing on her expertise as a sound engineer and storyteller, Emily explored how Amy’s work creates profound connections between listeners and the natural world.

EMILY HARRIS: Your work is such an immense project, and it’s incredible how you bring listeners into the field—something you don’t often hear in podcasts. You describe your experiences beautifully and really transport us to the worlds you’re observing. Can you share more about your process and how your team brings these stories to life?

AMY MARTIN, “THRESHOLD” FOUNDER: I’m so glad you mentioned being out in the field—that’s such a huge part of why I started “Threshold.” I’ve always loved audio, even as a kid. I grew up listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” proudly flying my nerd flag early and strongly.

Growing up as a farm kid in rural Iowa, audio captivated me because it allowed me to travel to Zimbabwe, Poland, or some fascinating part of the U.S. before I even left for school. That’s what audio storytelling is for me: the power to take people places.

Amy records a soundscape during a reporting trip to Kenya for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Jed Allen

I feel there’s a real shortage of storytelling grounded in place and on-the-ground reporting. There’s so much incredible work we can do in studios—interviews, imaginative storytelling—and a lot of our production happens there too. But there’s something so vital about connecting listeners with actual places and people out in the world. Talking remotely, as we’re doing now, is magical, but it’s entirely different from being physically present in the environment I’m describing.

You’re right that it’s unusual for a podcast to take this approach. It’s expensive, time-consuming, difficult, and hard work—but it’s also wonderful. I believe it’s part of what makes “Threshold” special, and it’s something I never want to lose.

Ultimately, I feel that if “Threshold” can’t include these on-the-ground reporting trips, then there shouldn’t be a “Threshold.” That’s what the show is at its core.

EMILY: Your show creates a bridge for people to experience the natural world even if they may never physically visit. I’m curious about how belief and understanding are shaped by experience. Have there been moments in your work where being present in a place changed what you thought you knew?

AMY: What comes to mind for me is how much easier it is to think we know something about a place, a person, a group, or even animals—until we get closer. Proximity has this way of revealing complexity that we just can’t see from a distance.

Amy with elephants during a reporting trip to Kenya for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Naomi Lechongoro

A couple of examples from my work stand out. In the upcoming season, listeners will hear from elephants in Northern Kenya. Elephants are enormous and incredible, and this season is all about sound and listening. But while I was there, trying to record elephants, the loudest voices weren’t the elephants at all—they were frogs. It was almost comical. I couldn’t see most of the frogs, but their voices dominated every recording. While I watched majestic elephants, my tapes were filled with the constant, almost comical, sound of frogs drowning everything else out.

Another example is from season 3, which focused on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I spent time in Kaktovik, the Iñupiat village closest to the proposed oil and gas drilling sites. People often presented this narrative that Gwich’in communities on the refuge’s south side oppose drilling, while Iñupiat communities in Kaktovik support it. But on the ground, it wasn’t that simple. I talked to people who were pro-drilling and framed it as a matter of Indigenous sovereignty—this is our land, and we get to decide. Others in the same community felt the same about sovereignty but were firmly against drilling. Proximity shattered the binary and revealed a far more nuanced reality.

That’s what I love about this work: proximity brings complexity, and complexity reveals unexpected voices—like loud frogs or quiet elephants. It also surfaces perspectives that don’t fit neatly into categories, and that’s a good thing. I aim to bring that kind of proximity and complexity to listeners because it works on us in powerful ways.

EMILY: Your show masterfully invites curiosity and challenges preconceived notions without overwhelming listeners with assumptions about climate change. Was it a conscious choice to focus on the relationship between humans and the natural world in the way you write, produce, and approach your topics? How do you bring listeners into that connection so effectively?

AMY: To start, I completely understand why you’d think the foundation of the show is climate change, but it’s actually not. Of course, every environmental story is ultimately a climate story right now; it’s inescapable. Whether we’re talking about school lunches, banking, or biodiversity, it’s all connected. But the foundation of the show is really about the relationship between humans and what we call the “natural world.”

That term itself—“natural world”—reflects such a deep arrogance, doesn’t it? As if there’s this whole category of existence that’s separate from us. What I aim to do with the show is tell stories that help knit back together what we imagine has been pulled apart—or better yet, start from the assumption that it was never truly separate and see what unfolds. 

As for bringing listeners in without hitting them over the head, I think it comes down to storytelling. When we’re talking about climate, biodiversity loss, or species reintroduction—like our first season on bison—it’s not interesting to lecture people or rely on narratives where the outcome is obvious from the first sentence. That’s just not engaging to listen to or create.

At the same time, I’m very conscious of not falling into false equivalencies or “both-sides-ism” that avoids taking a stand when it matters. There’s a version of making space for different perspectives that can feel like wimping out, and I don’t want to do that. But there’s also a version of storytelling that pushes an agenda so hard it eliminates complexity and the opportunity for surprise—for people to find common ground or for unexpected truths to emerge.

But there’s also a version of storytelling that pushes an agenda so hard it eliminates complexity and the opportunity for surprise—for people to find common ground or for unexpected truths to emerge.

I aim to work in a space that feels like a third path—between pushing an agenda and retreating from responsibility. When something feels unjust, and there’s evidence to support that, we’ll address it. But even then, I want to invite people into the conversation rather than shutting them out. It’s about creating room for thoughtfulness and connection, even in the face of difficult truths.

EMILY: This season of “Threshold” is called “Hark,” and it’s focus on sound feels so immersive and encourages listeners to slow down in a fast-paced world. Is that something that comes naturally to you—slowing down and embracing silence—or is it something you’ve cultivated through your work and experiences?

AMY: I have to laugh because if you asked the people around me, they’d probably say, “Slowing down? Not exactly her strong suit.” I can practically hear my partner teasing me about needing to slow down.

So, no, it doesn’t come naturally. I tend to approach things full speed ahead. But slowing down is something I’ve consciously worked on, and sound has played a big role in that.

One reason I wanted to focus this season on listening and sound is because sound has always been one of the few things that can stop me in my tracks—in the best way. Long before I became an audio producer, I was just a curious kid struck by the sounds around me. Growing up on a farm, I have vivid memories of the voices of the sheep we raised. Those sounds are so clear in my mind even now. Sound has always been this connective thread for me, as I think it is for so many people.

This show isn’t about slowing down because I’m naturally calm—it’s because I love how it feels when I make space to listen. Sound is such a powerful way to connect, and it’s been profoundly grounding for me in difficult times. It’s not about hearing a bird and suddenly feeling happy, but about that subtle reminder that we’re not alone in this world. There are other beings here.

There’s such an imbalance in our lives right now. We’re constantly surrounded by the voices of our species—media, machines, roads. I know I need to hear other voices. If a single person wandered around talking only to themselves, we’d think something was wrong. But as a species, that’s what we’re doing. I think we need to consider what that’s doing to us.

EMILY: Beyond your personal connection to sound, what inspired you to focus on it for this season? Why does now feel like the right time to explore sound in the natural world?

AMY: The personal connection I have to sound is a big part of it, but honestly, I could have chosen to focus on sound in any season—season one or twenty. What makes now feel especially relevant is the unique moment we’re in when it comes to sound in the natural world.

On one hand, we’re filling the world with more and more of our own noise, and it’s having real, devastating impacts on ecosystems and species. Sound is essential for communication and survival for so many animals—whales, birds, and countless others. This noise pollution is a major problem, even contributing to the extinction of species we cherish. But it’s also a fixable problem, which gives me hope.

At the same time, we’re in an exciting era of breakthroughs in bioacoustics. The equipment for long-term sound recordings is now more affordable, smaller, and easier to deploy than ever before. Ten years ago, setting up microphones deep in the Amazon or the middle of the ocean would’ve been almost impossible. Now, researchers can leave recorders in remote locations for months, even a year, capturing extraordinary soundscapes.

Recording under the ice in Sweden for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Amy Martin

For example, in Australia, there are desert areas that come alive for just a few weeks after rain. Creatures arrive en masse, creating a symphony of sounds, but it’s the hardest time to physically access those places. Now, researchers can leave microphones in advance and discover that instead of five species of frogs, there are thirty. These recordings are uncovering so much biodiversity we never knew existed.

Even more exciting is how AI and machine learning are helping us analyze these recordings. People are dreaming of tools like a “Google Translate” for animals, where one day we might decode the meaning of an elephant’s call. While we’re a long way from that, the potential is incredible. Of course, none of this would make sense without the fieldwork to understand animal behavior and context, which adds layers of complexity and richness to the data.

It feels like we’re at a moment with sound that’s akin to the invention of the microscope in the visual world. For centuries, we tried to understand the natural world by looking at it, and then suddenly, microscopes revealed cells—a whole hidden universe. With bioacoustics, we’re uncovering the hidden worlds of sound and communication in nature.

This moment is poignant. We’re dominating the global soundscape, sometimes silencing species permanently, but we’re also on the cusp of listening in ways we never imagined. The hope is that these recordings won’t just document what we’ve lost—they’ll inspire action to protect and preserve these voices. Many researchers working in bioacoustics are driven not just by scientific curiosity but by the hope that this work will reconnect us to the magic of the natural world and encourage us to cherish it more deeply.

That’s why now feels like the right time for this season of “Threshold.”

We’re dominating the global soundscape, sometimes silencing species permanently, but we’re also on the cusp of listening in ways we never imagined.

EMILY: The coral reef project you covered was fascinating, especially the idea of using recorded reef sounds to encourage repopulation. How did you come across this research, and as a musician, what was it like to explore the interplay between sound and the natural world in this context?

AMY: I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about the coral reef playback experiments—maybe a year or two before I started working on this season. But it immediately struck me as incredible research.

A view of Shark Bay, Australia from a reporting trip for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Amy Martin

The interplay between fish populations and corals is fascinating. Corals lay down the skeletal structure of reefs, while fish bring in the sounds that give these ecosystems their vibrancy. What’s even more amazing is that coral larvae—tiny planulae, just barely visible to the naked eye—extend tiny cilia, little hairs that can detect sound vibrations. It’s essentially the same mechanism inside our cochlea, the part of our ears that processes sound. That connection is mind-blowing to me.

Corals are such ancient organisms—some of the oldest on Earth. There are many species, but they share this incredible longevity. Even if coral reefs were completely healthy, this kind of research would be worth doing. These reefs are biodiversity hotspots, and there’s still so much we don’t know about them. They hold immense beauty, mystery, and lessons we haven’t even begun to uncover.

At the same time, coral reefs are among the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. Their decline impacts not only marine life but also fish populations, communities living on coral islands, and cultures that have relied on reef-based hunting and subsistence for millennia. It’s heartbreaking and awe-inspiring all at once.

In many ways, coral reefs encapsulate the dual narrative I often encounter in my work: profound beauty and scientific wonder intertwined with deep environmental loss. 

EMILY: Are there actions or practices in your own life, like listening to non-human sounds, that inspire you and might encourage others to connect more deeply with the natural world?

AMY: I always feel a little stumbly when it comes to suggesting actions or practices, but thinking about this season makes it easier because it’s so focused on listening. Unlike other seasons, which were centered on human conflicts, this season turns the microphone toward non-humans. Human conflict isn’t absent, but it’s not the main focus this time, and that shift feels significant.

So here’s what I would propose: think back on your day. How many non-human voices did you hear? How much did you pay attention to them? Did you hear any sounds today that weren’t made by humans? How long did you listen to them, and how did that make you feel? It might have been the meow of a cat or the buzz of a fly—sounds we often overlook or dismiss. Instead of swatting the fly away, consider: what is that sound saying? Who else is hearing it? 

This small practice of tuning into non-human voices can open you up to a richer, more connected sensory experience of the world.

We’ve become almost numb to the dominance of human-made noise—airplanes, highways, shipping traffic—and it’s not about dwelling on the unpleasant, but noticing how much it intrudes and asking: what would it feel like to hear something else? This small practice of tuning into non-human voices can open you up to a richer, more connected sensory experience of the world.

What’s also exciting is how this season connects us to the story of sound itself. We’ve designed the narrative to loosely follow the evolutionary timeline of sound on Earth, starting 4.5 billion years ago and moving up to the present. Right now, in the season, we’re exploring some of the earliest sound creators and listeners—corals, fish, the first land animals.

Shark Bay dolphin researchers on the lookout during a reporting trip to Australia for Season 5 of Threshold. Credit: Amy Martin

And here’s the cool part: those first land animals weren’t some dog-like creature. They were arthropods—tiny critters we often overlook or find annoying. These were the first inventors of song on land, and plants joined the soundscape as both listeners and creators.

But I have to admit, as mammals, we crave the complexity of mammal communication. So even though dolphins come much later in the timeline, I decided to sprinkle them throughout the season. I couldn’t resist—it was too fun working with dolphin scientists, and their vocalizations are fascinating. It’s like a little “dolphin spice” woven into the season, offering glimpses of what’s to come.

This exploration of sound is such a joy because it connects us to the vast history of life on Earth while inviting us to listen more deeply to the present. And I hope that encourages others to tune in, too.

Saving Nature Means Saving Ourselves

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant shares her personal odyssey as a wildlife ecologist, conservation biologist and co-host of the famed TV nature show “Wild Kingdom.” As a scientist dedicated to protecting and conserving the diversity of the web of life, she reminds us that, as human beings, we are part of nature. It’s all connected, and it’s high time to bring about peaceful coexistence, not only with nature, but with one another.

Featuring

Rae Wynn-Grant, Ph.D., is a wildlife ecologist and conservation biologist, creator of the award-winning podcast “Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant,” co-host of Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom,” and author of “Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World.”

Credits

  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Written by: Leo Hornak and Kenny Ausubel
  • Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
  • Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
  • Producer: Teo Grossman
  • Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
  • Production Assistance: Leo Hornak and Monica Lopez

Resources

Rae Wynn-Grant – Wild Life: How Personal Journeys are Essential to Sustainable Leadership in Environmental Science | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

Rae Wynn-Grant – Becoming a Wildlife Ecologist in a Rugged World | Excerpt from “Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World”

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant shares her personal odyssey as a wildlife ecologist, conservation biologist and co-host of the famed TV nature show “Wild Kingdom.” As a scientist dedicated to protecting and conserving the diversity of the web of life, she reminds us that, as human beings, we are part of nature. It’s all connected, and it’s high time to bring about peaceful coexistence, not only with nature, but with one another.

This is “Saving Nature Means Saving Ourselves”. I’m your host, Neil Harvey. Welcome to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Beginning around 2020, a significant global political movement began to crystallize to bring about the large-scale conservation of the lands and waters on which the biological diversity that underpins the web of life depends – including human beings.

This movement was inspired partly by the late biologist E.O. Wilson’s 2016 book “Half Earth” in the stark shadow of what scientists call the Sixth Age of Extinctions. Running at 1,000 times the natural rate, today’s mass extinction event is the first caused by the human hand.

A growing global consortium of scientists, activists, NGOs, governments, policy makers and Indigenous Peoples is working to translate the best contemporary science as well as traditional ecological knowledge into actual practical goals to conserve half the Earth’s lands and waters by 2050.

This movement reflects a historic paradigm shift: That what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant further suggests that what we do to each other, we do to the Earth. In other words, social justice is imperative for us to achieve ecological wellbeing.

Telling that new story of interdependence is her life’s work. When she became co-host of the long-running program Wild Kingdom, Rae fulfilled a dream she had since childhood.

Rae Wynn-Grant (RWG): I’m about to do something you’re never supposed to do. You should never disturb a hibernating bear and never get between a mother bear and her Cubs. But today I’m part of an important conservation research project and we’re about to come face to face with wild bears. I can already see a little cub, it’s like white, kind of greyish color, I’ve gotta get in there…Okay, we’ve got two! We’ve got two, hello. And we’ve got three newborn cubs to this mama.”

Host: Her memoir, “Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World,” chronicles her improbable dream of a career marrying storytelling, science, and the great outdoors.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant spoke at a Bioneers conference…

RWG: Before I was Miss Wilderness, I was a little urban kid and I had an extremely urban upbringing, which I think is a good thing. I’m very proud of that. But I grew up with parents who lived in the big city. We went on trips to other big cities and my whole world was urban.

And that was enough for me. I loved it, right? I saw, you know, the occasional pigeon and squirrel, maybe a couple of earthworms, and that was great. Ironically, the place where I really became super passionate about nature was indoors. It was by watching TV. It was sitting on the floor of my grandparents living room, here in the Bay area and watching nature shows. And they took me to Africa and Australia, Asia, South America, kind of everywhere, but you know, the United States. And showed me these incredible landscapes and these creatures that needed protection.

And when I was a little kid, I said, I want to be a nature show host. I want to do what these British and Australian guys are doing. And my family was very supportive. They’re kind of like, Oh, you know, I guess it could be worse. That’s, that’s fine. Never heard of it, but that’s fine. And I took that desire all the way through college.

Photo by Tsalani Lassiter

Host: As Rae entered college, once again her unusual vision hung in mid-air, looking for a place to land.

RWG: And I have this distinct memory of entering college and going to my advisor’s office in the first week of my freshman year and saying, I want to be a nature show host. What do I have to major in to do that? And my advisor was stumped and said, I don’t know, maybe theater, journalism, maybe.

And then finally arrived at environmental science. “What about environmental science?” And I said, never heard of it, but sounds good. And I dove into environmental science, which was the exact right place for me to land. And I found for the first time as, you know, a freshman in college that those nature shows that I was watching as a kid and as a teenager were introducing me to science.

And that was a fit for me until a couple of years into it. I thought to myself, you know, what’s missing though, is that I’ve never been outside. There’s something about reading about forests and savannas and a textbook and seeing animals on a PowerPoint that just doesn’t quite hit. And I realized this. And so at 20 years old, I got outside. And I signed myself up for a study abroad program. I, again, went back to that same advisor in college and said, I need the most hardcore wildlife ecology study abroad program you can find. And they did. And I landed in Southern Kenya.

Host: In Kenya, Rae began deepening her craft in the field. She lived for a semester as part of a community of students in a Maasai village in one of Kenya’s awe-inspiring national parks. But then, as the saying goes, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

RWG: Now, this was 2005 in Southern Kenya. The world had the internet. Kenya had the internet, but not in the bush where we were living. We barely had electricity. So mail was sparse. But the very first package that I got from my parents had letters and postcards and some CDs that they sent me. And it also had this edition of Time magazine. Because while I had been away, Hurricane Katrina had occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, in Louisiana, in Texas, and Mississippi.

And almost a thousand people perished in that tragedy, and it was a highly racialized event, right? People who were evacuated didn’t necessarily look like the people who weren’t evacuated. The people who died didn’t reflect the people who lived. And there I was, just enveloped in this passion for wildlife ecology, reading this article and crying around the campfire.

And folks from the Maasai community that also served as the staff for the program came over to comfort me and to ask me questions. And they said to me, so why are you here? You’re all the way across oceans and continents studying our wildlife, but it looks like your people and your community at home really need some help.

And it was at that moment that I realized that I couldn’t shake that passion for wildlife ecology. There’s nothing I could do. I was in it. I got that spark, but because of my identity, I would never be able to solely do this science work in that vacuum as I had been taught. My personal identity as a black American millennial woman would mean that I would always be concerned for social justice at the same time, if not more, than the work that I was doing with wild animals. And I needed a way for that to be okay and for that to be a part of who I was and my work.

Host: Returning to the U.S., Rae began building a career as one the country’s great large animal ecologists. Her special passion was black bears and Grizzlies, and how humans impact them in the wild. As she neared the end of her Ph.D. program at Columbia University in ecology and evolutionary biology, she alternated between living in New York City and studying black bears in the wilds of the Western states.

Photo by Peter Houlihan

On her way to an ecology conference on the West Coast to deliver a talk about the threats to black bears, once again life intervened.

RWG: And so I flew across the country. And…and there was news, and there was news that a young man – a young black man – named Michael Brown had just been shot and murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri. And the people of Ferguson were outraged and they were protesting. Some media outlets would say they were rioting and Ferguson was literally on fire.

And this wasn’t new, right? This was another example of police brutality to black communities that was getting more media attention before, because we have smartphones that can record it these days and body cams that can record it instead of in years past.

And I found myself driving to the conference. I made the mistake of driving the day I was presenting and I realized I was about to go in front of thousands of people, of ecologists, and talk about the mortality risk of black bears in America. And all I could think of was the mortality risk of black men in America at the same time.

And I had this prop for the conference. I thought, you know, let me jazz up my ecology talk a little bit with a prop. And it’s a bear skull. And in the picture, I’m pointing to a bullet hole in the bear skull, where it was shot and killed by an intolerant and hostile person.

And I brought it up there, and I bravely said, “I’m here to talk about how this bear died. This is a bullet hole to its brain. But I’m so afraid that nobody cares about how Michael Brown died the day before with a bullet to his body.” And these conversations need to be a part of the ecology community and the scientific community. [Applause]

Host: For Rae, the question became: How does science relate to justice, and vice versa?

RWG: My main point was that we care so much about science and the people I was with supported science. I mean, there is no question. But did they support scientists? And I went on stage to say, if we will do anything for science, we have to offer that energy and that passion for scientists also. Scientists who are women, who are non-binary people, who are black and brown and immigrants and Muslim and from the LGBTQ+ community and any kind of oppressed group. [Applause]

And when a scientist comes from a community that is on fire facing oppression or violence or famine or genocide or anything like that, that scientist can’t focus on their science. And when their science is in service to the planet and is helping to create a healthy thriving ecosystem, then we all lose.

Rae Wynn-Grant speaking at Bioneers 2024. Photo by Nikki Ritcher.

And I realized in this moment, and I called on my fellow ecologists to say, we have to have social justice at a minimum as a foundation for environmental solutions. Otherwise we only have the most privileged people working on these solutions, and it’s too slow.

I was able to say that from a safe place. The cops weren’t after me. You know, I realized that I always hold so much privilege to be able to make these confessions and announcements and epiphanies, but not everyone has that. There are so many people who don’t know they’re ecologists because they’re dealing with the hardest things in life. And it is our duty to alleviate a lot of that so that we can all work together. [Applause]

Host: If what we do to each other we do to the Earth, says Rae Wynn-Grant, then social justice is a precondition for environmental solutions. Can we learn how to peacefully coexist with both the natural world and each other? More when we return … I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers.

Host: The Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it.

Since 1970, there’s been a mind-blowing collective decline of two-thirds of mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations. More than 80% of wild animals have disappeared.

If we look at total Earth’s biomass of mammals by weight, 96 percent is livestock and human beings. Nearly half of all habitable land is taken up by agriculture.

Climate change radically disrupts natural cycles and already shrinking habitats, trapping wildlife within smaller land and marine areas. Less than a fifth of lands and inland waters are protected, and not even a tenth of marine areas.

There are efforts to turn things around. The 30/30 initiative is a global effort to conserve half of the Earth. Domestically, California is at the forefront, protecting 25% of lands and 16% of coastal waters.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant is working to understand how our human impacts on wildlife can be beneficial instead of destructive. As a TV personality reaching millions of engaged viewers, she tells those stories to inspire the same spark in others

RWG: What I find is that often when speaking with people, whether it’s one on one, whether it’s presentation form, whether it’s in the media, one thing that I often try to suggest is that, you know, wild animals are doing their very best to coexist with us. Are we doing our best to co exist with them?

Because they’re not trying to start problems. They don’t want to be killed. They don’t want to pick a fight. They really just want to eat something. The elephant that we saw blasting through that fence, the lions that ate the camels, the bears in your backyard getting into your bird feeder, most of these animals really have a strong instinct to eat food. I think some of us can resonate with that. And so I honestly find that getting people to understand that we too are animals. We too are driven by the same instincts. We too build shelter, look for food, care for our young, build communities. We are nature and we’re trying to save ourselves.

Rae Wynn-Grant speaking on a panel with Zoliswa Nhleko at Bioneers 2025. Photo by Boris Zharkov.

We are actually all trying to coexist together. I mean, humans haven’t figured out how to coexist with one another very well. Those are the, you know, extremely non-scientific but I think very important messages that I feel compelled to offer to folks. It’s that honestly, like, let’s give these species the benefit of the doubt.

Host: Before the 2020 pandemic, Rae spent several years studying grizzly bear movement and behavior on the great plains around Montana. Much of the land is fenced off by cattle ranches that make it very hard for wild grizzly bears to survive, much less thrive.

Rae encountered fierce hostility toward her beloved grizzlies from cattle ranchers whose families had occupied the land for generations.

Although there’s increasing openness among ranchers today toward holistic rangeland management that embraces coexistence with wildlife, the burdens of history still weigh heavy in the cattle culture.

RWG: I found as I was studying these grizzly bears that I had to interact with a lot of cattle ranchers and kind of tell them like, “Okay, hi, hi, I’m Rae and I study grizzly bears that you probably think are going to eat your cattle. But I’d like to just set some camera traps up on this landscape to just see if they’re already here, because we have reason to believe that they’re already here.”

And I would have these conversations with folks about coexistence. And the conversations were all over the place, but I did encounter a number of cattle ranchers who said, “My great great grandfather killed every grizzly bear he ever saw because they were a threat to the cattle. And if I let a grizzly bear on my ranch, that would be an insult to my family, to my great great grandfather and all that effort he put in slaughtering wild animals.

You know, and you can imagine me being like, Oh, gosh, I, okay. Noted. I’m going to move on to the next ranch.

Host: Even after Rae presented bulletproof data that the grizzlies ate only roots and plants and posed no threat to the cattle, these ranchers were unmoved and maintained their traditional war on grizzlies.

Photo by HenryTheCanonGuy | Shutterstock

RWG: That is my example of coexistence not working out. So I found that coexistence didn’t work in places where people were so rigid with their belief systems, that we’re not able to have new information change their mind. This probably sounds familiar because we talk about it when it comes to politics.

But it was really rough for the way I felt at the end of the day, doing my job, trying to help, it was really difficult and painful, let alone knowing that most of the people who held this hostility towards wild animals that were referencing their family background were referencing a family background that only existed because of genocide and because of stealing land.

And they were holding staunch in those very rigid and, in my words, violent beliefs. And that’s part of an American story. But it doesn’t mean we will continue down that path of failure. We can absolutely turn it around to a success.

Host: The history of the conservation movement is itself complicated.

In the U.S., the movement to create national parks defined wilderness as nature without people. It resulted in banishing the Indigenous peoples, old-growth cultures who had lived there sustainably for centuries. Today, it’s well documented that traditional cultures often measurably benefit their landscapes and enhance biodiversity.

Almost all the founders of the conservation movement were white, and many promoted overtly racist views, including white supremacy and eugenics. Often the goal of “nature preserves” was colonial – such as to create privileged game reserves for rich trophy hunters.

In this light, the current conservation movement is explicitly beginning to recognize the sins of the past and to bring Indigenous Peoples into the decision-making process. In California’s 30×30 initiative, the state has demonstrated ancestral land return in action, providing $100 million to tribes to regain almost 40,000 acres of traditional territories.

Nevertheless, animals are on the run and heedless human impacts are heartbreaking. Rae recalls one call she got while working as a biologist near Lake Tahoe. A hiker had found a bear who died under strange circumstances.

RWG: And so my colleague and I went to investigate, and we found a young black bear dead in a small stream, in a very shallow stream, about maybe four inches of water. So it couldn’t have drowned.

And my colleague said, okay, in moments like this, we actually do a field necropsy. So we will open up the animal and the first place we should explore is its stomach to see if maybe it ingested something that had killed it.

But we opened the stomach of this young black bear in Tahoe in the middle of the forest. The stomach was full, and it was full of ketchup packets from the local fast food dumpster and that young animal must have wandered from the forest to the dumpster that was open, devoured a lot of goodies and crawled its way to the nearest stream to get some water to try to save its own life and didn’t. And man, that was a tough day, because one individual suffering meant that the population wasn’t doing as great as we thought. And how the suffering of one individual can symbolize a huge problem.

And essentially this is not new, right? There have been many incredible scholars and thinkers who’ve articulated these ideas way better than me in the past. And Audre Lorde is one of my favorites, but we do not lead single issue lives. So we cannot look at a single issue struggle. It’s not “save the whales”, right? It’s, we are nature and we are saving ourselves. And it’s okay if that focus is on people and communities and social justice. It’s okay if that focus is on wild animals, but it needs to be comprehensive and radical.

Photo by Peter Houlihan

Host: Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant knows up-close-and-personal how dire the threats to wildlife are. Yet she also sees the epic paradigm shift underway that’s radically changing the story and helping drive an unprecedented global popular movement to conserve half the Earth by 2050. She’s using her torch to light other torches.

RWG: Whether it’s TV or radio or books or social media – I often think social media gets a bad rep – but my goodness, my algorithm is a whole bunch of environmental justice information that I wouldn’t get otherwise.

You know, I think the power of non-traditional education, informal education, can really help people. It can be accessible to kids. It can be accessible to people from many different income backgrounds, and many different languages and many different places. I, for one, would not be the career person that I am today without television shows. No one in my family or community or neighborhood and my low income inner city upbringing ever asked me what kind of ecologist do you want to be? But I could ask myself that question because I watched TV. And it brought me to those places and allowed me to aim higher and want to be a part of a whole movement.

There are so many important movements that I think different aspects of media can lend itself towards. And it helped me. And I’ve seen it help a lot of other people.

I have this personal goal to make heroes out of environmentalists. I think that folks all over the world find heroes in, you know, fictional characters. They find heroes in athletes. They find heroes in entertainers, but I think, my gosh, if environmental scientists or other types of environmentalists could be household names, as well, across the world we would be in much better shape.

Host: Rae Wynn-Grant… “Saving Nature Means Saving Ourselves”

Spiders are much smarter than you think

Cognition researchers are discovering surprising capabilities among a group of itsy-bitsy arachnids.

By Betsy Mason 10.28.2021

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

People tend to associate intelligence with brain size. And as a general guideline, this makes sense: more brain cells, more mental capabilities. Humans, and many of the other animals we’ve come to think of as unusually bright, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, all have large brains. And it’s long been assumed that the smallest brains simply don’t have the capacity to support complex mental processes. But what if they do?

The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are rather small, and a vanishingly small portion of them have been studied at all, much less by cognition researchers. But the profile of one group of diminutive animals is rapidly rising as scientists discover surprisingly sophisticated behaviors among them.

“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”

Behaviors that can be described as “cognitive,” as opposed to automatic responses, could be fairly common among spiders, says Dimitrov, coauthor of a study on spider diversity published in the 2021 Annual Review of Entomology. From orb weavers that adjust the way they build their webs based on the type of prey they are catching to ghost spiders that can learn to associate a reward with the smell of vanilla, there’s more going on in spider brains than they commonly get credit for.

“It’s not so much the size of the brain that matters, but what the animal can do with what it’s got,” says arachnologist Fiona Cross of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Cross studies the behavior of jumping spiders, the undisputed champs of cognition among spiders. Although these tiny arachnids have brains that could literally fit on the head of a pin, the work of Cross and other scientists suggests that they have capabilities we’d have no problem hailing as signs of intelligence if exhibited by animals with much larger brains, like dogs or human toddlers.

“Jumping spiders are remarkably clever animals,” says visual ecologist Nathan Morehouse, who studies the spiders at the University of Cincinnati. “I always find it delightful when something like a humble jumping spider punctures our sense of biological superiority.”

One possible reason jumping spiders are so behaviorally advanced is that they have the sharpest vision known for animals their size, which is typically just 1 millimeter to 2.3 centimeters in length. They use this visual prowess to find, stalk and pounce on their prey, rather than the better-known spider strategy of building a web and waiting for a meal to arrive.

“Their vision has emancipated them, leading them to be able to explore an environment,” says animal behavior researcher Ximena Nelson, who also studies jumping spiders in her lab at the University of Canterbury. Being out and about in the world, they need to be able to see things — predators, prey, mates — from afar and make decisions before approaching them. “In my view, that’s what has led to their pretty remarkable cognition.”

[photo caption] Among jumping spiders, the most skilled hunters are members of the Portiagenus. Spiders like this Portia fimbriata are known to plan out attacks on other spiders that involve long detours and strategies tailored to the prey’s species.

Spiders play mind games

The jumping spiders shown to have the sharpest eyesight and the most impressive smarts belong to the genus Portia, found in Africa, Asia and Australia. These spiders prefer to hunt other spiders and have strategies tailored to each species they prey upon. Renowned University of Canterbury jumping spider researcher Robert Jackson has discovered that many of Portia’s tactics are quite devious.

When hunting another group of jumping spiders called Euryattus, Jackson reports, Portia employs a clever trick. Euryattus females build nests in curled-up dead leaves suspended in air by silk attached to rocks or vegetation. Courting males crawl down the silk suspension ropes, stand on top of the nest and shake it in a specific way. The signal draws the female out of the nest. Portia appears to take advantage of this system by mimicking the male’s shake and luring the female into an ambush.

For Portia, finding the right strategy is especially important when pursuing spiders that also eat jumping spiders. To attack a web-building spider, for example, Portia deceives the spider into moving closer by plucking some of the silk strands of its web. If the target spider is relatively small, Portia plucks the web to mimic a trapped insect, prompting the spider to rush over thinking it’s about to have a meal — only to become one instead. But if the resident spider is bigger and potentially more dangerous, Portia may instead create a gentle disturbance similar to a fruit fly contacting a single strand at the edge of the web that the spider will slowly wander over to inspect. As soon as the target is close enough, Portia pounces and strikes with venomous fangs.

If these strategies don’t work on a particular web spider, another of Portia’s tricks is to shake the whole web so it moves as if a gust of wind had hit it. This acts as a smokescreen for the vibration Portia makes as it crawls into the target spider’s web. In laboratory experiments, Jackson found that Portia will try different plucking methods, speeds and patterns until it finds just the right combination to fool each individual web spider it hunts — essentially learning on the job.

“Even amongst this surprisingly intelligent group, Portia stand out as being oddly brilliant,” Morehouse says. “They are, after all, hunting very dangerous prey, so caution and cleverness are useful tools.”

Spiders make plans

One of the most fascinating aspects of Portia’s hunting strategy is that it often involves spotting prey from a distance and then planning out an elaborate route to get to it. Jackson first observed this in the wild when Portia encountered a species of orb weaver that defends its web by violently shaking it, tossing any invading jumping spiders to the forest floor. Instead of entering the web, Portia navigated a roundabout path to find a better position from which to attack. “In that context, it was better for Portia to take the detour, go around the tree trunk, go up above the spider, go down on a line of silk, and swing in, grab the spider in its web without even touching the silk,” Cross says.

To find out how these itsy-bitsy spiders map out such complicated routes, Cross and Jackson put Portia’s mental abilities to the test in the laboratory. They built an apparatus with a central viewing tower on a platform, surrounded by water, from which a spider can see two other towers topped with boxes: one containing dead spiders that Portia likes to prey on, and one with dead leaves. The only way to reach the prey without getting wet, which jumping spiders loathe, is to climb down onto the platform and then choose the correct one of two separate walkways leading to the boxes.

From the perch atop the viewing tower, the spiders carefully surveyed the scene before descending the tower and climbing up a walkway. Most spiders chose the path that led to the meal, even if this meant moving away from the prey and passing the incorrect walkway on the way. Cross and Jackson argue that the spiders planned the route from the viewing tower and then followed it, possibly by forming a mental “representation” of the scene — an impressive cognitive feat for a brain barely bigger than a poppy seed.

[photo caption] In laboratory experiments, Portia spiders are able to execute planned detours to get to their prey. Portiastarts out on the tower at the center of this apparatus with a view of two boxes, only one of which contains a potential meal. The spider must descend the tower to a platform surrounded by water and use the correct walkway to reach the prey.

Spiders can be surprised

In another test of the idea that Portia uses mental representation, Cross and Jackson borrowed a classic psychology experiment designed to assess the cognition of human infants. Since infants, like spiders, can’t tell you what’s on their mind, the idea is to deduce what they understand by seeing what surprises them. For example, a baby who sees a toy fire truck move behind the left side of a barrier, and then sees either the fire truck or a stuffed rabbit come out on the right side will tend to stare at the unexpected rabbit longer than the fire truck that emerged as expected. This suggests the baby had formed a mental representation of the fire truck and was baffled when the rabbit didn’t match it.

To see if they could surprise Portia, Cross and Jackson built a prey display for the spiders to view. First they would show Portia one type of prey for 30 seconds. Then they would close a shutter on the front of the display and swap out the prey before reopening the shutter 90 seconds later. If Portia first saw a dewdrop spider, but then saw an orb weaver, what would Portia do?

The scientists discovered that if Portia saw a different kind of prey after the shutter was lifted, it was far less likely to attack than if the prey remained the same. They assert that this shows that the spider formed a mental representation of the prey at the beginning of the trial that didn’t match what it saw at the end.

“This work uses really creative experimental designs and has inspired our own work,” says behavioral ecologist Elizabeth Jakob, who studies jumping spiders at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Spiders can count

Using a modification of their detour test, Cross and Jackson have explored other ways to surprise these spiders. “It’s like digging into Portia’s brain and saying, ‘Well, what are you paying attention to, Portia? What matters to you?’” Cross says.

This is how they discovered Portia is good with numbers. Using a species from Kenya, Portia africana, Cross and Jackson let Portia see a number of prey items from the viewing tower, and then switched up the number of prey items while the spider was en route and the target was out of sight. They found that if Portia had seen one prey spider from the tower but arrived to find two spiders, it was less inclined to carry out an attack. The same was true for one versus three prey items, and two versus three, and also when it encountered only one item after initially having been shown two or more. When tested with larger quantities, the spiders didn’t distinguish between three or higher, lumping them all into one category of “many.”

Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.

Spiders assess risk

Being a tiny spider wandering about in the wild is risky business. Though they are known for their hunting abilities, jumping spiders have many predators themselves, including other spiders, ants, birds, lizards, toads and, horrifyingly, mud-dauber wasps that like to paralyze jumping spiders and seal them inside the cells of the wasps’ nest to be eaten alive by hatching larvae.

But these clever little spiders are skilled at getting out of dangerous situations, as Nelson found. Her lab at the University of Canterbury developed a test to see how good Portia is at assessing escape routes. Though they can swim, jumping spiders hate water, and for these experiments a spider started on a platform surrounded by a tray filled with water. It had four ways to get across the water to the edge of the tray that involved leaping between little islands made of wooden dowels sticking out of the water.

[photo caption] Portia assesses the riskiness of escape routes from a tower set in a tray of water, which the spider naturally avoids. To reach safety at the edge of the tray, the spider has to leap between dowels. The safest choice is the shortest route made of the fewest dowels, which requires the fewest jumps. CREDIT: SAMUEL AGUILAR-ARGUELLO

Portia chose the safest route that covered the shortest distance and required the fewest jumps more often than chance would predict. But when they didn’t choose the safest way, the spiders unexpectedly seemed to prefer the longest route with the most dowels. It turns out Portia had simply outsmarted the test: The longest path was curved, and Portia often took shortcuts by skipping dowels. “Basically, they just cheated,” Nelson says.

The only catch is that it can take Portia quite a while to complete tasks like these — sometimes several hours — and usually much, much longer than other jumping spiders that Nelson tested, she says. Nelson found a clear relationship between the time a spider spent surveying the route and the likelihood of choosing a safe path. “Seeing is thinking, in my view,” she says. “Portia spent a lot more time looking at the route before making a decision.”

It’s a good bet that as scientists continue to study jumping spider cognition, these animals will keep surprising us with their mental abilities. And if other arachnid families received as much attention, who knows what else we’d learn is possible even for the tiny-brained.

Jumping spiders are not the biggest spiders, but they are probably able to perform the most complex behaviors among spiders, Dimitrov says. “So I think we still don’t really understand what is the threshold, how small is too small.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.