99% Invisible - 436- Oops, Our Bad

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

In the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature, but now that we’ve spent some time with the consequences, such as species extinction and climate change, humans are focused on the control of the control of nature. In this episode, Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky, talks about everything from the introduction of poisonous frogs in Australia to launching diamond dust into the stratosphere. Oops, Our Bad

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Chicago River used to be completely filthy. I mean, it's not great now, but it used to be so much worse. The people of Chicago were doing disgusting things to it. waste, human waste, and also as a stock yard screw up in the city, all of the animal waste was jumped into the river and it was said that the river was so thick with a filth that a chicken could walk across it without getting her feet wet. That's Elizabeth Colbert, author of the new book Under a White Sky. What needs to be also understood is that the Chicago River in its original incarnation it flowed eastward into Lake Michigan which was and still is Chicago's sole source of drinking water. So to fix this problem, the city of Chicago carried out a massive project. They reversed the river and sent the sewage water into the Mississippi. When this enormous construction project was completed, which was one of the most enormous

concerted products of its era, there was a facetious headline in the New York Times that said something like, water in the Chicago River resembles liquid again. By the way, if you want to know more about how it's even possible to reverse the river, we did a whole story about it. Episode 86, it's a good one. Anyway, the river reversal was a big success. Chicagoans had a reliable supply of clean drinking water. But like many large-scale human interventions, there were unintended consequences. The reversal meant two unconnected drainage systems, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, were suddenly linked up, and that invasive species could move from one to the other.

Both the gray legs and the Mississippi system became highly invaded water systems, especially the gray legs. The gray legs are like a hundred and eighty known invasive species established in the gray legs. And the species of interest right now, sort of as it was put to me by one engineer where the Army Corps of Engineers is Asian carp. If Asian carp reached the Great Lakes, they get pretty much ruined everything. They would eat all of the endangered mollusks

and even threaten the safety of human beings. One of the species has the very annoying habit from a human perspective of flinging itself One of the species has the very annoying habit from a human perspective of flinging itself out of the water when it's disturbed. And what disturbs it often is a boat, a motor, a sound of a motor. And so you get, you know, man-v fish, you get a lot of injuries.

You know, I met people whose eye sockets had been broken by Asian carp. Face with this epidemic of fish jumping out of the water and smacking people in the face, the Army Corps of Engineers were told, you have to fix this. And they came up with a series of plans to stop the carp from migrating up the Chicago River, like zapping the river with UV radiation or putting in a big filtration system or dumping nitrogen in the water to basically poison the fish. But what they eventually arrived at was the idea of setting up an electric barrier in the water. This underwater sort of you-shaped structure that has these nodes in it that just causes a lot of voltage through there. So just a recap, we dumped sewage into a river, then reversed its flow by connecting it to an entirely different river, and finally we electrocuted the river.

This is something humans do a lot. We metal with nature, and years later we discover that that creates a whole bunch of unintended consequences, and then we have to metal with nature all over again. These kinds of interventions are the subject of Elizabeth Cobert's new book. Today we're going to talk with Cobert about all the extreme links humans will go to try to undo our mistakes. There are so many examples of situations where people intervene to undo the consequences of previous interventions, but one that really caught me in your book is the introduction of cane toads in Australia.

So let's start right there. How did cane toads get to Australia? So cane toads are native to South America and Central America and the very southernmost tip of Texas actually. They were introduced all around the world interestingly enough into the Caribbean, into Hawaii, and into Australia under the theory, and I don't know where this theory came from,

that they were going to eat the beetles or the beetle grubs that plague sugarcane crops. And so they were introduced into a lot of sugar-producing areas. And they were introduced into Australia in the 1930s in the hope that they were going to do something about these pests in Northeastern Australia, which is a big sugarcane growing region. Now, I think right now, the consensus would be they did nothing. They did absolutely nothing for the sugar cane, but they were like the Asian carb highly successful invaders. They have, you know, basically no natural predators.

They're highly toxic. So anything that does try to eat them drops dead very quickly, which has been a huge problem for Australia's native wildlife. But they continue to expand around Australia in coastal regions or a ring around Australia. They can't survive very well in the center of Australia, which is simply too arid, but they're very good at exploiting any source of water. And I myself saw this when I went looking for them one night and wherever there was a little puddle from an air conditioner or whatever there were cantoids. And they're particularly pernicious because they can eat anything. So they're sort of detrimental to the everything below them on the food chain. And there's a toxic. They're detrimental to all the predators because when a predator

tries to eat them, they kill them. Yeah. And another thing that is important to add here is that a study has no need of turrets. So turrets are just a whole, you know, a class of organisms that did not get to us. I suppose this study has been quite isolated for quite a long time, evolutionarily. You know, there have been interventions, kind of, I don't know, more homegrown style interventions, to deal with cane toads from the beginning. Can you talk about toads busters? Yeah, so toads killing in Australia is a major pastime.

People bash toads with golf clubs, they run them over with their lawnmowers, they organize toad-busting malicious to go out and capture toads and put them in the freezer, which eventually kills them, but supposedly painlessly they've come up with sprays. They are constantly looking for ways to reduce their numbers, but when you're talking about, I don't even know if there's an estimate of how many hundreds of millions. It's pretty hard to make a dent in them. As cane toads make their way across the Australian coast, the government is considering more high-tech interventions to stop them. One of those measures is using CRISPR, which is a technique that allows scientists to make small tweaks to DNA. This particular project that I visited at this highly biosecure facility outside of Melbourne,

they were using CRISPR-2 produced hoards that were less toxic. They had disabled the gene that creates an enzyme that makes this toxin so potent. There are two good reasons to make cane toads less toxic. For one thing, they won't kill their predators when they're eaten. But also the predators learn a valuable lesson that cane toads taste bad and will make you sick. This has a lot of potential to mitigate the bad effects of cane toads, but for many people it's a bridge too far. You could potentially disrupt reproduction, so you could potentially have cantoes out there that could not reproduce. And if you manage to spread that trade, then you could potentially make

a big dent in the cantoe population. But there's a lot of steps along the way and evolution being what it is, the question of whether you could do that is unclear. So the difference between toad busting or even electrifying carp in a river and using CRISPR, it feels different. It might not be different. How does it feel to you? Do those things feel different to you? Well, I think that there is this interesting continuum and somewhat slippery slope.

And I think that people will look at one intervention and say, oh, yeah, that made sense. And the next one, oh, that made sense. And then you one intervention and say, oh, yeah, you know, that made sense. And the next one, oh, that made sense, you know, and then you kind of go along and go, maybe I'm not so cool about that with that, you know, but I don't subscribe to the notion that there's clearly interventions on one side and clearly interventions on another. They are brayscale, I guess, basically. And

where one draws the line is a very individual choice. But I think one of the points of the book is also to try to challenge a little bit, or maybe more than a lot, you know, where people do draw a line because gene editing is a technique, for example, that a lot of people find anathema, you know, just shouldn't do it. Now, to be frank, we already do do it a lot, a lot, a lot. Every, I guarantee you, you know, you ate some genetically modified organism in the last few days, you know. It's gene-edited corn, gene-edited soy, as ubiquitous in the U.S. But still people might say, well, you know, I don't want to, I don't

want anything out on the landscape. Certain organisms may not be on the landscape. And I use the example of the American chestnut, which was devastated, destroyed, basically driven to the very edge of extinction by chestnut blight. Now scientists in Syracuse, New York have developed a blight-resistant chestnut that's a transgenic tree, and the choice is sort of between this tree that has one little gene, twEEK, that allows it to be resistant to chestnut blight or no chestnuts. And that's a tough choice in my view. We've been genetically modifying plants for 10,000 years. I mean, look, you've probably eaten

a transgender corn, but you've also eaten regular corn, which is the result of agriculture, which is maybe the biggest human intervention that there is. This line between what is a natural intervention versus what is an unnatural intervention is really curious to me. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. It gets very much to this point that there's a continuum, right? I don't think there are too many people around in 2021 who say, you know, plant breeding, that really shouldn't be screwing around with that. You know, that's just too, that's just, you know, bridge too far. You know, it gets to that idea that what you're used to, you're used to acres and acres and whole states worth of corn. And as you say corn itself is a product of many, many hundreds or thousands of years of very careful breeding. But well, it's there. It's always been there. Okay, I'm not appalled by that. Then some people are, you know, appalled by GMO corn, although, as I say, it's almost impossible to avoid in an American diet. My goal is not

to convince anyone not to be appalled. But my goal is to challenge, you know, why are we appalled? Is it simply what we're used to? There are big trade-offs that are being made to large extent unwittingly. And when you bring them to the level of consciousness, the questions become pretty complicated. As we go up the scale of human interventions, climate change is pretty much the biggest way people have messed with nature. And it's becoming clear that just reducing our CO2 emissions won't be enough to stop global warming, even if we get to net zero.

So scientists are talking about a series of interventions called geoengineering, and they are pretty controversial since they involve messing with the chemistry of the atmosphere. One of these technologies is called carbon capture and storage. I mean, when you hear all this talk now of going net zero in carbon emissions, what's the net? Well, the net is, you know, you're still going to have

certain amount of emissions and you're going to have to counter that, balance that with negative emissions. So negative emissions are just sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere somehow. We can talk about how, if you'd like, and storing it somehow. You actually spend a lot of money on a carbon capture system where you pay to a company to offset your emissions in Europe. What happened there? So I, yes, I still spend money. I pay a Swiss based company every month, some of money and the idea is that they,

actually, they're this machine reason Iceland, they suck some CO2 emissions out of the air, they're, you know, attributed to meme, they suck out some CO2, unfortunately it's only a small fraction of my actual emissions, and they do that in this machine that looks like kind of a giant air conditioner. like kind of a giant air conditioner, then they pipe the CO2 very deep underground in Iceland where all the rock is volcanic rock and you know under heat and pressure and with a lot of water actually there's a chemical reaction where the CO2 reacts with the rock and forms calcium carbonate. So it's locked up there underground, presumably permanently. So that is one form of carbon dioxide removal. And so what are the pros and cons of this?

I mean, it doesn't really solve the problem. What do you think of it? Well, the pros is your tang, you know, you're tangy or too out of the air and you're locking it up. So that is the obvious pro. The cons are the question of practicality at scale. How's that? I mean, the whole project that I visited in Iceland

and they're scaling it up, it's supposed to be able to deal with 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, which might sound like a lot, but is ridiculously trivial compared to the 40 billion tons of CO2 that humans pour into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels every year. So when you think about that and it takes energy to get my CO2 out of the atmosphere and Iceland, one of the reasons this project is located

in Iceland for all sorts of reasons, it's located actually at a geothermal plant, which is making producing electricity using the geothermal energy from the center of the earth. But if you imagine doing this at huge scale, how are you getting that energy? And then where are you putting this stuff? There's room in the salt of Iceland for a lot of CO2, but not for all of our CO2. So you have to locate these facilities in various places.

You'd have to potentially start piping the CO2 around. I mean, carbon dioxide removal using technology has to be when you think about it to make a difference on the scale of the energy infrastructure we have now, and that's just huge. I don't know if you want to call them downsides, but those are the obvious very evident obstacles. Another large scale intervention like this that you wrote about is solar geoengineering. And that's interventions that basically reflect the sun's rays back into space that would

in theory cool the temperature of the earth. And the idea is that we slow down global warming this way. Obviously, it's experimental, it's untested. How would it work? There are all sorts of intermediate technologies here too, so there's a technology referred to sometimes as marine cloud brightening where we would manipulate clouds to make them wider. So they'd reflect more sunlight back to space that in theory is possible and in theory could have a sort of regional cooling effect. But the biggie, the big one that the book sort of builds to is this idea that you could spray some kind of reflective substance particles into the stratosphere, these would bounce on my back to space before it hit the Earth.

So you'd really be getting less direct sunlight on planet Earth, and that would have a cooling effect. Obviously, we haven't tried this on a large scale this humans, but there is a natural analog to this with volcanoes spilling ash into the atmosphere. Yeah. Well, it's not actually the ash that has this impact. It's the sulfur dioxide from volcanoes that gets ejected up into the stratosphere, floats around, forms these tiny little, what are called aerosols, there are sensual little droplets that are highly reflective, why you get such beautiful sunsets after a big eruption. And, you know, people have measured, after Mount Pinatubu in the 90s,

climate scientists were very interested in this effect, what effect would this have? And they measured it pretty precisely, and it definitely led to a temporary drop in average global temperatures as a result of this effect. And you know, this has been understood for quite a while that volcanoes have this impact. And so the idea behind solar geoengineering is, could we mimic that? And people are also exploring different materials. People have even floated the idea of using diamond dust. You know, there are all sorts of ideas out there. For a long time, environmentalists have seen geoengineering as a total non-starter, because the argument is, it's a long shot if it would work at all, and it's a distraction from

the real work of reducing carbon emissions. What do you think of that criticism? Well, that's a big concern. This question of if you dangle in front of people some way that we might be able to counteract climate change with that actually reducing our emissions, you know, are you just going to encourage people to, you know, behave badly? And I think that's a big worry. And I think it's a legitimate worry. On the other hand, we are behaving badly. And so the counterargument is, even at the point that we do stop

emitting CO2, we haven't gotten back the climate of the past. We've simply stopped putting more heating into the system. It'll take probably a few to several decades on some level, century scale, to really reach a new equilibrium. But you're going to continue to melt the ice caps. You're going to continue to see see low rise, the oceans are going to continue to warm.

So the counter argument is, well, you may find yourself in such a terrible situation that you're going to want some way of counteracting some of that warming because the alternatives are so awful. And I think that both of those are very legitimate arguments. Yeah. The other part of this, that's interesting, is the word geo. I mean, it is a global thing. And when you're talking about cantoes in Australia, it's at least limited to Australia. Who gets to decide who pours stuff into the stratosphere? It's very difficult to think through because, you know, we're not very good at global

governments, you know, witness what's happened with climate change, and people have pointed out that a potentially frightening thing about geoengineering is it could be done in theory by one country or even once again, in theory by one very, very rich person. I don't, personally, once again, this is one woman's opinion. I don't, you know, personally, once again, this is, you know, one woman's opinion. I don't find that a very compelling argument because this is not something you do in secret. This is something that you are flying lots and lots of flights in the stratosphere. We certainly know how to shoot down planes from the stratosphere if we don't want them there.

And so, you know, I think that a bunch of very powerful nations could do it collectively, but I don't think one country is going to be able to sort of go road here. But the question of how you decide and who gets to decide, I don't have a good answer for that. I don't think anyone has a good answer for that. The obvious body, I guess would be the UN know, what have we really been able to agree on as a world since the UN was founded on some of them? The UN is only as powerful as we say it is, is the thing.

So there are a lot of risks and reasons to not do this kind of thing. But there's an argument that to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need some form of geoengineering because we've already just emitted so much carbon. Did your opinion on geoengineering change at all when you were writing this book? I certainly think that the book expresses a lot of trepidation about even, you know, that we'd even be considering this. I think I described it in one interview as a sort of respectful horror. But I did find the arguments of people working on it who

were very, very smart scientists, you know, really, really smart and a lot more immersed in the science of the atmosphere than I am certainly. The argument that there's a lot of talk now about fixing the climate or reversing climate change. That's not possible. The only possibility here is carbon dioxide removal. That's still very slow. That's not going to have an impact fast. We don't have a lot of weapons in our quiver for doing anything about climate change fast. I found that conversation to be more fraught, I suppose, than I expected going in.

That doesn't mean that I exactly change my view on it, but I have to say that some compelling arguments can be made. After the break, more with Elizabeth Colmer. When you think about our interventions and the counter interventions, it's pretty easy to consider all of those interventions as unmitigated disasters. But it's kind of a selection bias because there are lots of interventions that people like an awful lot, like dockies, for example, because dogs only exist, because humans intervened and domesticated wolves. Absolutely, and I put that exactly what you're saying to David Keith, who's really one of the chief scientists, probably spent more time thinking about geoengineering than anyone else on Earth, a professor of, I think, applied physics at Harvard.

And he said, yes, you're showing your bias is, you know, it's impossible to do that calculation of how many of these interventions, you know, we would consider good or bad, you know, starting with agriculture, as you say, you know, domesticating corn and wheat and rice was that was that a bad choice. Some people would say, yes, Jared Diamond has called agriculture, you know, the worst mistake in human history. But here we are. And there's no going back from that. We're not getting rid of agriculture. That's for damn sure. We can regret a lot of choices that have made over the last 10,000 years or longer even,

but we can't turn around now with almost 8 billion people on the planet. That's just not really an option. Something about the psychology that I found really fascinating is particularly when you're talking about New Orleans. So, New Orleans is a place, but by all accounts, at least in terms of hydrology, shouldn't exist. A struggle from the beginning remains a struggle, both to keep it dry enough to live on and surprisingly keeping it

wet enough to be a port, which was new information to me. But it's clear that we will always pile intervention upon intervention to keep New Orleans going. Is this just who we are? Well, I think that New Orleans is a great example of this phenomenon. It's at a perfect location where the Mississippi hits the Gulf, it was a swamp when the French strategically decided to settle in 1718. And, you know, prior to that, people had lived in the area. Native Americans had been living in the Mississippi Delta for thousands of years, but they didn't insist on staying in a place

that was going to get flooded during flood season. Once you start being a sedentary species that builds cities and has tremendous infrastructure, you're invested in that infrastructure. And that was happening in New Orleans right now, more and more humongous interventions. I mean, just, you know, even just what was built after Katrina, just massive, massive water works. It's a very striking example, and New Orleans situation is extremely precarious because of the nature of the delta, which is sinking, and sea level, which is rising. So relative sea level is a tremendous problem. But that being said, every major coastal city in the world is going to be playing out some version of this.

To what extent are we going to be willing to move? And to what extent are we going to try to eat out every possible decade from places that are going to be threatened, increasingly threatened by sea level rise. We have already locked in substantial sea level rise. No one can tell you exactly how much. The more, longer we continue to knit CO2, the more sea level rise we're getting. That's just a very clear relationship. That's just a very clear relationship. But, you know, just go through the list. Every coastal city is going to be grappling with this over the next, the rest of the century.

If we're locked into, like, an intervention cycle forever because of our lifestyle choices and our priorities, have we gotten more precise? Have we gotten, have we learned something? Yes, I think we've gotten a lot more knowledgeable, you know. priorities. Have we gotten more precise? Have we gotten, have we learned something? Yes, I think we've gotten a lot more knowledgeable. I do think, for example, if someone decided to build a new city on Deltaic soils, someone would raise their hand and say, wait a sec, this is a problem. But that raises a lot of new problems. right? So, you know, there are going to be all these interventions proposed for all these big cities, for example, you know, they're already looking at New York,

how are you gonna protect New York? There are lots of massive possibilities. People are going to raise a lot of objections to them as well they should about what they're going to do to, you know, the ecosystem, the New York Harbor, how they're going to just place water from one place to another, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, sea levels are rising, you know. So, I'm not saying that massive interventions are the way to go. It's quite possible that we need to take a lot of smaller steps, which are much more difficult

to coordinate than a big massive problem. But those also, even those run into resistance. So we're in a pretty complicated time and situation where a lot of our values are going to come into conflict, both in terms of watching even neighborhoods or cities or never to have a certain self-determining quality, but also not being able to agree on what intervention we need, meanwhile, the water's creeping up. So I don't know how that's gonna play out.

I think it would be fascinating if it weren't so scary. Well, thank you so much for talking with us. Oh, well, thank you so much for talking with us. Oh, well, thank you. Elizabeth Colbert's new book is Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Chris Baroube, Music and Sound Mix by our Director of Sound Sean Real. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Crueck Colesde is the digital director.

The resident includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, Heavy Madon, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K.L.W. in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the continent, but will always be in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California.

We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world to find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on, in the show at 99pi org, on Instagram and Reddit too. And you can find out all about our interventions in the world of podcasting at 99pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.