Science Friday - 19th-Century Surveyor, News Roundup, Eagles' Nests. July 6, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

In the 19th century, the American West was an arid climate yet to be fully explored. But surveyors like geologist John Wesley Powell, the second director of the United States Geological Society, would chart out the natural wonders that lied beyond the Mississippi. While at the USGS, Powell would lead a project to create the first map of the country to integrate geographical features and some of the first survey expeditions along the snaking Colorado River and Grand Canyon. But he also proposed radical ideas about developing the West that took the climate and ecology into account. One of Powell’s theories stated that the U.S. was divided down the middle along the “100th Meridian”—between the dry West region and moist East. In two recent studies, climatologist Richard Seager and his team confirmed this dividing line. Seager joins Ira to explain how this ecological division has changed due to climate change. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Congress chose the bald eagle—a symbol of freedom—as the national bird. There were an estimated 100,000 eagles at that time. But the birds were nearly driven to extinction in the 1960s, with only with only 487 breeding pairs out in the wild. After the endangered species list was created and targeted conservation efforts began, eagle populations recovered. Researchers have found that one of the keys to recovery is protecting the nest of breeding pairs of eagles.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later this hour, a 19th century pioneering climate scientists who envisioned the water woes of the West. But first, this week, of course, was the 4th of July. Hope you enjoyed it. And that prompted lots of looking back on significant moments from our nation's history. How many of us have some sense of pride in the contributions of our own states to the national storyline, but is that historic pride overstated? Joining me now to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Sarah Kaplan. She's a science reporter at the Washington Post and joins me from Washington. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, John. Good to be here. Well, first of all, tell us about this study. Does this mean we've got an overstated idea of our own place in history in our states? Yeah, so a lot of Americans, it turns out, think that they're pretty important and their state is pretty important. There's this pair of studies that some psychologists conducted asking Americans how essential their state was to the history of the nation and also looking at how essentially I think the country is to the history of the world.

And they found that basically everyone thinks they're more important than maybe they actually are. The worst offenders were Virginia, Massachusetts, and Delaware. If you ask a person in Virginia, you know, how much of American history is Virginia responsible for? They will say 41%. And they actually found that even after they forced participation, to take a quiz that emphasizes like the breadth of U.S. history, the fact that there are 50 states, that had no effect on the outcome. It turns out that, you know, they still think they're really important.

And the same thing goes for the rest of the world, actually. It turns out Americans are not actually the worst about this. If you ask Russians, how important Russia is to world history, they will say they are responsible for nearly 60 percent of the history of the entire globe. So meanwhile, the U.S. is only at 29.6. So, you know, we're actually relatively modest. Well, it may be true that Russia is pretty important to current history, but that's a completely different story. What are the humble states?

What are the states that don't think that they're quite as important as, say, Virginia or Delaware? Kansas was pretty humble. And, you know, I actually don't have that one on me. But the humblest country, the humblest country is actually Switzerland, which, you know, it's home to 0.1% of the world's population. but nevertheless claims credit for 11% of world history, which actually makes it relatively good on this scale. But the thing that this shows is that most people aren't humble and that we have this sort of,

they're investigating this kind of idea of what they call collective narcissism. So people tend to think of themselves as better than average and associate themselves with successful groups. So it says it's not so much about what we know about history. it's more about how important we think ourselves are and our groups are. And does this have to do with specific events that happen in our states that we take pride in, or is it just a general impression? It's kind of just a general impression.

That's the interesting finding, you know, from having people take this quiz about American history beforehand, before they are then asked the question about how important they were, even thinking about specific events and understanding, you know, how complex and long history is and how many people took a part in it. It's not so much about the actual details. It's really just about, like, sort of the grand idea. All right. Well, there was a big, important event in Washington this week,

some policy news with the resignation of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Were you surprised at all with this news? Well, there has been a lot of controversies building up around Pruitt for a while now. He's currently, you know, he was facing, I think it's a dozen federal inquiries, You know, investigators on Capitol Hill had had EPA, current and former EPA aides coming to the Hill for questioning. But I think that people were kind of surprised because, you know, Pruitt has this reputation as a deregulator, which is a big part of the Trump administration's agenda. And he's also been an outspoken supporter of the president. And so he, you know, had been able to weather a lot of these ethics scandals that have come up.

So it was, you know, things were pretty busy on our environment team this time yesterday. So I'm sure it was. So who is taking over for Pruitt and what do we know about him? What it'll mean for the environment? So the deputy administrator of the EPA is this guy, Andrew Wheeler. He was confirmed by the Senate earlier this year by 53 to 45 vote. So, you know, most Republicans and actually a couple of Democrats supported him. And he's a lot more low profile than Pruitt, especially when it comes to all of these scandals.

You know, Pruitt had been facing questions about his taxpayer-funded first-class travel, this soundproof phone booth that he had made for his office. So Wheeler, you know, doesn't seem like he has any of those, but he's still probably going to pursue a lot of the same policies that Pruitt had. He spent a decade lobbying for the kinds of companies that the EPA regulates, like mining companies and energy companies. And he also worked for Senator James Inhoff from Oklahoma, who is, who rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. So he sort of, you know, fits in that same line with Pruitt. So let's move far, far from Washington now. Let's go further afield.

Last week came some news of some findings on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Tell us what was found. Yeah. So Saturn Enceladus is, and you're not supposed to have favorites. As a journalist, you're supposed to be objective. but Enceladus is one of my favorite moons. It's this little icy body that orbits Saturn, and it actually is spewing, it has these almost like geysers.

It spews ice and water vapor from its south pole. And so the spacecraft Cassini, which is a NASA spacecraft that orbited Saturn until last year, actually flew through one of those plumes and took a sample, and what they found are these really large, or what Cassini found is these really large complex organic molecules, bigger and more sophisticated or more complex than almost anything that we found in the solar system. And that's really exciting because organic molecules are one of the essential ingredients for life.

And that's one of the things that astrobiologists look for when they're asking this question, is there the potential of life out there in the solar system? But just because we're finding these organic compounds does not mean we're finding life, right? Yeah. So organic compounds, you know, we call them organic because they are, frequently part of organisms. They're the building box of organisms, but they are not, there are non-biological processes that could produce them. So the compounds that Cassini found are these stable ring structures called aromatics and these long chains of carbon called, that are linked

to hydrogen and oxygen and maybe nitrogen. And those are the kind of compounds that microbes, at least in earth environments, we find that microbes like to eat and there's sometimes they produce them as a byproduct of their metabolism. So it's, you know, it's another, tantalizing clue in the search for life. And it suggests that Enceladus has this saltwater ocean underneath an icy crest. And the fact that we can find these compounds coming out, and Cassini actually even sensed some compounds that were so big that it couldn't even analyze them.

They were, like, too big for the instruments. And so it suggests that there's something important out there worth going back and looking for. So if we're looking for all this stuff out in space and we're looking for new forms of life, We want to make sure that we're not taking our own life to other planets. What's the news there in terms of our space program making sure we're not taking our life elsewhere? Yeah, so, you know, it's actually the timing of the incelidist discovery, and also, you know, a couple of weeks ago there were more results reported from the Curiosity rover on Mars,

finding also very large, complex organic molecules. And it's interesting because the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine just put out a report saying that we need to be. to be better about planetary protection. And when most people hear planetary protection, they probably think of stopping a catastrophic asteroid impact or preventing an alien invasion. But what this report was really focused on

is protecting other planets, specifically Mars, but just the rest of the solar system as we explore it, making sure that we don't accidentally contaminate it with earthly microbes. And especially as private industry gets into the space exploration game, they emphasize the need for sort of stricter guidelines and clear regulations to set up for potential human exploration. Because if, you know, once humans land on, you know, if humans go to Mars, which, you know, SpaceX says it wants to do, NASA says it wants to do by the 2030s, you know, we're probably going to bring our microbes with us. And what we found from life on Earth is that Earth microbes are really good at colonizing new environments.

And so there's this worry that we might contaminate Mars with. our own life and then foul up the search for, you know, is there actual Martian life out there? Or maybe there was billions of years ago. So, yeah, so it's important to do that before all these other rockets, not state actors, get into space. I want to turn to your next story here. And this is really interesting. So a group of monkeys that seems to have entered the Stone Age?

Tell us about this. Yeah. So, you know, on this island called Hikaron off the coast of Panama. There had been kind of this rumor that there were monkeys there that used stone tools. Some scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama had heard about it. And they finally went and investigated last year. They set up some camera traps. And what they found kind of blew their minds.

These monkeys, capuchin monkeys, Sibis capucinus, their little sort of cat-sized animals with white faces and long tails. And they were actually taking large stones, stones almost half the size of their body weight, and smashing them down onto flat rocks and logs, and using that to crack open coconuts and other kinds of nuts, hermit crabs, snails, and get at the tasty morsels inside. So this is a stone tool. It's like a hammer and anvil that they're using to access food. And that's exciting because this is only the fourth non-human primate species

that's ever been observed with this kind of behavior using a stone tool. and it could help us scientists understand, you know, what causes a species to start picking up stones and using them as tools and also why our own ancestors might have entered the stone age more than 2 million years ago. But it's just these monkeys in this one place. Other monkeys aren't doing this. Yeah, that's the really weird thing, is that the, you know, so this island is pretty big, it's full of forests,

and it's inhabited with monkeys, and there are similar islands nearby that have the same species of monkey, And yet the only one group of capuchins was showing this behavior. And actually, the scientists tried leaving out some experimental rocks in other parts of the island to see if the monkeys might pick them up and start using them. And the monkeys totally ignored them. Like they were not interested unless it was this one particular group. And so that's a really strange thing because you would think that if this is an evolutionary advantageous behavior and that it helps them to sort of get at more food. get more resources than the behavior would spread, especially because these capuchins are really

fast learners. They're very smart. And so it actually sets up a really interesting scientific question allowing them to compare, you know, why does one group adopt this while another group doesn't? It's so interesting. Sarah Kaplan's a science reporter at the Washington Post who joined us from Washington today. Thank you so much, Sarah, for bringing us these stories. Yeah, thank you. After the break, we're going to talk about John Wesley Powell, who was a 19th century explorer who developed early ideas about climate science. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. In California and the western part of our country, water, or more specifically, the lack of it,

is a big issue. Supplies have been dwindling due to warming weather and expanding populations. In the late 1800s, while the country was in a rush to expand westward, there was a scientist who warned of a future water crisis in the West. John Wesley Powell was an explorer and a geologist. proposals seemed radical at the time, but his ideas about water use, climate change, and how science and government mix have lessons we can learn from today. My next guest is here to talk about that. John F. Ross is author of a new book called The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell's

perilous journey and his vision for the American West. John F. Ross, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for joining us. Well, my pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. And if you've got questions, you can give us a call. 844-724-8255. That's 844. sigh talk, if you've seen changes to water in the West. There's so much to talk about, about this fascinating explorer. He would eventually go on to become the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey. But, you know, starting off, he was studying geology in the mid-18th century. John Ross, give us a sense of what geology was like back then. Well, you know, back then, geology was the particle physics of its day.

Most people thought about Earth's history, and they were kind of stuck in a, biblical idea of it being 6,000 years old. And what geology was beginning to do was turn that on its head and suggest that maybe the Earth was millions and millions of years old. It was this Charles Lyle's grand opus, the principles of geology, that opened up the idea for Darwin to think about evolution. But it also started turning everything upside down and really moved America and the world into a new direction. And so how did Powell get into this? How did he get interested in geology? You know, he had a mentor like so many great scientists do when he was a kid in a small Ohio town.

And it was this kind of a self-taught fellow who discovered in some salt kettles. It was salt licks. He found these great Pleistocene saber-toothed tiger skulls and mastodon teeth and all like that. And so this fellow really turned John Wesley Powell. His father, of course, named him John Wesley after the great Methodist, founder of Methodism, and wanted him to be a minister like he was. And John Wesley, the young boy, said, no, I'm just really fascinated by geology and what's beginning to happen. So let's talk about this trip that made him so famous down the Grand Canyon,

this expedition into this amazing place that so few people had seen. How did he come to make that true? Well, it's a really interesting story. So he had studied some geology, didn't graduate from college. He was a principal in a Midwestern school, but with an incredible burning curiosity. And he took some of the first college field trips out west, out to Colorado, out to Middle Park and South Park to collect for institutions. And he heard about, you know, at that point, just after the Civil War, when he would

do this very famous expedition. There was only one little patch of continental America that was left unexplored, unmapped, 100 by 300-mile section of the Colorado Plateau. And, of course, it includes today's Bryce Canyon and Zion, and of course, the Grand Canyon that Powell would name, very, very inhospitable to people. But Powell saw as a geologist that there was this extraordinary

opportunity to go through the river, which hadn't, nobody knew what happened to the river, whether there were falls, whether it went underground. He'd heard reports of that, or really what it was. And he thought, wow, here's an incredible opportunity for a scientist to go into one of the greatest gashes in the world and figure it all out. Of course, there's so many stories in your book of exploration, which is what draws so many people to his story. But what were some of his scientific observations of the Grand Canyon. Yeah, so that's really interesting, John. You know, so most people know him about, it's this incredible tale.

He lost an arm at during Shiloh, so he's a one-armed guy. He takes nine guys in these puny rowboats down through these incredibly awful rapids and through unexplored. I mean, it's very dramatic. But what that is hidden over the years is the fact that, as I was saying, he's, here's this geologist. I mean, it's like one of the most incredible scientific. opportunities of the 19th century. It was, you know, like a kid in a candy store going down. So he would go

down. The other guys who were these adventurers, they looked up and they saw colorful rocks. But what the rocks were telling Powell were these incredible stories. You know, he would see, because as you start at Lee's Ferry, for instance, and you start into the Grand Canyon like I've done, you start with a Kaibab limestone. It's 250 million years old triad. classic rock, kind of creamy. And as you go down the next couple hundred miles, you go down and down and down, and you go through 19 different rock strata. And the Kaibad Blimstone eventually is 6,000 feet above your head. And you reach the Vishnu shist, this really dark, hard rock. And it's the basement rock, they call it. It's nearly two billion years old. And so he was really literally

literally going back in time into the earth. He called it like reading a book. He said, as we went, I read. So he would see these alternating layers of limestone and sandstone that kept alternating. And what he saw there was this great inland sea that was receding and coming back and receding. He saw this, but he also kind of saw these puzzles, right? He saw this mountain, split mountain. This is an incredible mountain.

And the river, Green River at that point, goes right through the middle of this, right through the middle. It's like you take a bandsaw and through 10 miles of this high mountain and cut it right in half. And the river went right through there. But instead, and Powell looked at that and said, well, why didn't the river just go around, go around? Why did it go through this mountain? So we started asking these questions. And so he started coming up with ideas about whether the river went first, whether upthrust went first. And he started basically and he vented and gave word to the science of geomorphography, which is the whole science of earth's topographic features and how they're changed through geologic processes.

So did this change the public perception of what the Grand Canyon was and how it came to be? You know, it's so interesting you asked that, John, because, you know, people had seen the Grand Canyon for a long time. The conquistadors, you know, centuries earlier, the Spanish conquistadors had come in and taken one look at it and gone, well, this is a place nobody's ever wanting to go and nobody ever should go. It scared them. And right up into Powell's time, that was pretty much what people thought. You know, this was not a place. And Powell's real genius was to start talking about the geology. to start talking about how beautiful it was and it extraordinary it was.

He brought artists out. He brought photographers on his trips. And he began to change the whole public perception of this big, huge hole in the ground until it has become today, one, as we know, one of the most iconic features, part of American exceptionalism, part of what really makes America, you know, so special. But he had very different ideas about how America was expanding and how, it should expand, then a lot of other Americans. Can you talk a bit about that, about how he felt America should be moving toward this great unknown territory?

You know, he was a man of his time, so he saw the American, you know, this was a country right after the Civil War. People had put down their arms and they were getting back to the business of building up America again. And all eyes turned to the American West. It was largely undeveloped, little known. and so what were people going to do with it? Well, for the vast majority, before the Civil War, explorers had dubbed it the Great American Desert, you know, that it was too dry out there.

Really, a lot of people thought that America kind of ended, you know, at the Rocky Mountains kind of thing. But there was a big turnaround with Manifest Destiny, railroad, boosters, all of this. Suddenly, there was talk about how the land out there was in Eden, you know, and how immigrants and people could seek their fortune. And this was America. You just have to go out there and take your plot of land and everything would be great. Powell said, who had spent so much time out of there, out there, thinking about all these things,

said, hey, hey, wait a minute. You know, I'm all for, you know, developing America to its great potential. But there's not enough water out there, among other things. He reimagined how borders of states should be drawn based on his findings, developing an idea of watershed districts, something very different than the way we actually developed. What were some specifics of his plan, if you could? Well, you know, it's interesting. So as head of the U.S. Geological Survey, which he really developed, he had his cartographers draw this map, which he presented to the Senate. And it's a really colorful thing. It looks like you take a, if you took a paintball with different colors and you hit a map of the American West, right?

And what he was indicating there were watersheds, right? And his whole idea was that water should be kept within the local, in the watersheds. And that this and that local control of water should be kept within by the small farmers, by the local people. And this was an extraordinary revolutionary idea because when you look at the map, most people thought of a map as, you know, political lines and boundaries. You know, when you look at the, it had an effect that was somewhat akin to the early pictures of the Earth, you know, in the 60s, when the astronauts brought home those pictures of the Earth as a fragile orb. It re kind of imagined what America was. about in an entirely different way, an entirely different lens. We're talking with John F. Ross. He's the author of a new book called The Promise of the Grand Canyon.

John Wesley Powell's perilous journey and his vision for the American West. If you've got questions, 844-824-8255. Another idea Powell came up with was the 100th meridian based on his observations, theorizing the country split into different regions based on climate. He drew an imaginary line right down the middle, starting on the western side of Minnesota, straight down through East Texas. A group of researchers wanted to test if Powell's boundary was real. They published the results back in March. Richard Sieger's here to tell us what they found.

He's an author on that study and a professor at the Lamont-Darty Earth Observatory of Columbia University of Palisades, New York. Richard, welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Thanks so much for joining us. So I learned about this idea, the 100th Meridian, back in school. What is the significance of it to a climatologist? Yeah, well, it was interesting.

I have been working on problems related to climate and water in the West for several years now, and of course I've read Powell's work and read about Powell and been very aware of his idea that the 100th Meridian divided America into an arid west and a humid east. And you learned that in high school, and it's very well established in the way Americans think about the country. part of their psychogeography really. And we wanted to test whether the concept was really grounded in reality, whether how it was that the climate system established such as stark boundary and whether that stark boundary can really be seen in the landscape, in soil moisture, in vegetation, and then also whether it had influenced the development of the West, whether you could find a trade

of the 100th meridian and the division in terms of how agriculture is practiced in the country and also in population density and the agricultural economy. So that's what we did in those couple of studies. And we found the power was very much correct that there is a very stark dividing line in the middle of the Great Plains. He might actually have chosen 98th Meridian is more accurate, but clearly the 100th was going to stick in the popular imagination in a way that the 98th wouldn't. I just want to say, I'm John Dankosky. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And we're talking with Richard Seeger right now. So continue your thought, Richard. And the climate system does establish this boundary, and that's like a combination of the way the

atmosphere moves moisture around. It's very well reflected in the type of vegetation that would be there naturally and then we found that the way that agriculture and settlement has developed has been very reflective of the 100th meridian so while

the previous speaker John was talking about how Powell argued for a very conscious way to develop the land he was he of course was ignored in that regard and you know the way the land was developed when

ahead without paying too much attention to the environmental constraints that existed. But what happened is that those environmental constraints made themselves known anyway. And if you look at the agricultural economy, you find that the corn that is grown is pretty much restricted outside of Nebraska to the east of the 100th meridian, whereas West is where all the wheat and rangelands are. And you also find much larger farms to the West because of the lack of the lower productivity of the land and far fewer farms as well. So you see how the aridity divide that Powell talked about did in the end, 150 years later we are now, have a very strong impact on the settlement and economy of the nation. Is this line moving further eastward all the time?

Yeah, we did look at that. The really good data on this only goes back to about the 1979s, but over the last 30-something years, it has moved eastward by sort of about 150 miles kind of thing. And we looked at model projections of the future, and we see this arid, humid divide continuing to move eastward over the current century, and that's a consequence of rising temperatures which take more moisture out of the sun. surface, increasing aridity, and in the southern plains also a decline in winter precipitation in the western plains as well. So two processes combining such that the aridity starts shifting, continues to move eastward

as the century progresses. And we would predict that that will have to have some consequences in agriculture as well, that just as agriculture has adapted to the environment over the past 150 years, it will continue to have to adapt to the change. conditions in the future. So corn would become increasingly restricted to the east. Wheaton range lands would expand eastwards as well. We're talking with Richard Seeger, Professor at the Lamont Doherty, Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York. And also with us is our guest who's written this rarely interesting new book about John Wesley Powell. It's called The Promise of

the Grand Canyon, John F. Ross. When we come back, we're going to take some of your questions at 844-724-825 That's 844 Sci Talk as we talk about the Grand Canyon and the Arid West and the dividing line between East and Western America. How we use water. That's coming up next. This is Science Friday. I'm John DeNcosky. We're talking this hour about the 19th century explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell with my guest, John F. Ross, who's the author of the new book, The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell's perilous journey and his vision for the American West.

Also joining us as Richard Seeger, professor at the Lamont Dardy Earth Observatory of the of Columbia University. Before our break, John, we were talking with Richard. He said that the ideas that he brought to the table, the Powell brought to the table, were largely ignored at the time as far as how we should organize ourselves. What did that mean for the way that America developed over time, John? Well, you know, it's kind of the peril of the visionary, and he was a very practical man, but he finally got shut down by Western senators. And of course, 30 years after his death, we have the an incredibly awful environmental tragedy of the black dusters, the dust bowl that blew away all the topsoil from over plowing. The topsoil got so, there was so much in the air that it moved as a cloud a thousand miles west and hit the East Coast in 1934 and 1935,

be grimyming windows, clouds 10,000 feet tall. And it came into the capital, most notably, where the senators were talking about what to do. And it was a very powerful ambassador, this dust cloud, because it caused them to really begin in an interesting way to listen to Powell, to talk about putting together a soil conservation service to start growing new trees and windbreaks. and really begin to talk about the thing that Powell talked about was the dynamism between Earth, human activities, and climate. Richard Seeger, do you have a sense of how you think things may have changed if Powell had been listened to to back in his day? Well, I think the powerful message that he had was that

when you're developing a harsh environment like you have everywhere west of the 100th meridian, You have to pay very careful attention to the land, the soils, the vegetation, the water, because they do represent a real limit. And you can either do that in an anticipatory way and plan for it, or you can do it as a crisis management situation. And we're still seeing in the West on a daily basis the results of not paying attention to what Powell recommended in that we deal with one crisis. after another. There are water crises all the time. The crisis that we're having every summer

now with these chronic forest fires that are, you know, endangering in inhabited areas as people expand into areas that are at high fire risk and climate change is making fire risk grows. So with the issue back in the plains and agricultural adaptation, again, we can look ahead and anticipate how climate is going to change and how that will make different parts of the planes more or less viable for different crops and plan, or we can just wait for the inevitable crises to happen and deal with it after the effect. But if we deal with it afterwards, we're going to be dealing with a lot more human suffering than we would have to deal with if we planned in advance. I want to thank Richard Seeger, a professor at the Lamont-Dority Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York. Thank you so much, Richard. I appreciate it.

Thank you. You're very welcome. I want to read, John Ross, just a brief passage from near the end of your book, where you write that Powell anticipated the tragedy of the commons. This is what we're just talking about. An economic theory coined nearly 80 years later. You write, when a group wins access to a resource held in common, pasture, for instance, fish in the sea or water and arid lands, a distinct pattern emerges. The overall effective individuals left free to act independently, leads to over-exploitation, and often the destruction of the entire resource. This seems to be something that is playing out not just in Powell's Day, but over and over again throughout American history. Absolutely. I mean, you just consider the Colorado River itself. It used to go into Mexico on its way out to the ocean, and now there's just dry land there.

Every drop of the Colorado is owned and taken by one group, one state, or another. And he just hit it right on the mark on that, and it was something that nobody wanted to listen to. But I think also, John, you know, what kind of some of the lessons here, too, are why people didn't listen to him then, or the same reasons why some people are not listening now to some of what climate change scientists are having. to say. And I think it really, at the bottom line, it has to do with people thinking that talking about these issues, talking about ecology, talking about sustainability will get in the way of American progress. It is that it's like a wall in the way. And Powell's big thing was, no,

it's not. This is actually the path toward progress. And he was not someone who wanted to stop progress, right? He wanted to build out the West. Oh, absolutely. No, he was in favor of dams and all sorts of things, and he had all kinds of ideas about, you know, changing the land and making, you know, but I think he would have been horrified by the mega dams that came, you know, after he died. We've run out of time for our segment,

but I want to thank our guest, John F. Ross. He's the author of this new book. It's called The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell's perilous journey and his vision for the American West. You can read an excerpt of that book on our website, Science Friday.com slash, Grand Canyon. John, thank you so much for the book and for joining us. I appreciate it. My pleasure, John. It was fun.

Six years after signing the Declaration of Independence, Congress chose the bald eagle as the national bird. Even though Ben Franklin was not a fan, he found the turkey to be a much more respectable bird. The rest of the delegates, however, selected the eagle because of its strength. Two centuries on, though, the symbol of American independence was nearly wiped out back in the 1960s with under 500 nesting pears out in the wild. Government agencies had to step in. eliminated DDT and passing policies like the Endangered Species Act to protect the Eagle's habitat. One key to conserving the eagle is protecting the nest. But how well does that really work?

Well, a study published this week in the Journal of Applied Ecology looked at that question. Here to talk to us about it is Benjamin Zuckerberg. He's an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. So tell us why is the nest such a critical place to focus these conservation efforts? Yeah, so as you kind of mentioned, bald eagles have really suffered pretty widespread declines in the early 1900s. And in the recent decades, they've really come roaring back, thanks a lot to protection and pesticide bans.

And one of the sort of real clear sort of management actions that a lot of agencies have taken is to try and protect a nest. This is a very long-lived bird. They can live almost 25 years in the wild. But they only produce about one or maybe too young. And so trying to protect these nests and seeing whether or not that protection can have sort of population level effects and help recovery is a major initiative for many agencies. So tell us about how national parks are protecting these individual bald eagle nests. What exactly are they doing? Yeah, so starting back in the early 1960s, wildlife biologists came up with the idea of these sort of buffer zones.

And so the idea here is actually pretty simple. You put up signs, and these signs are basically trying to tell the public to stay, away to not disturb the nest. And bald eagles and other sort of large raptors are very sensitive to human disturbance. Even sort of a camper or a hiker or certainly a motorized boat in the area will cause them to flush and in some cases abandon the nest. And so this idea here is to set up these buffer zones that restrict as sort of human disturbance and activity within the nest. And this can be anywhere from 600 feet to about a thousand feet or so that basically tells people to please stay away and give the nesting eagle some space.

And you looked at how these buffer zones work in one park, Voyager's National Park in Minnesota. Tell us what you saw there. Yeah, so Voyager's National Park is in northern Minnesota. It's a really beautiful park, almost 40% water. It's got several major lakes and sort of large sort of minor lakes as well. And what we were really interested in was to see whether or not this idea of setting up these buffer zones really helps the population. And what happened is that starting in the 1970s or so, wildlife biologists with the National Park Service started monitoring these nests.

And it turned into a really wonderful long-term monitoring data set. What they showed was a very similar story that was playing out at the national scale, that roughly in sort of the late, sort of 1970s and early 80s, that we saw the bald eagles or population in Voyager's National Park start coming back up. And so there was about 10 breeding pairs or so in those early surveys. And right around sort of the late 1980s, they started seeing an increase in a number of these breeding pairs, but they wanted to help this recovery along. So in 1991, they started setting up these buffer zones.

And what we looked at was that when they actually started setting up these buffer zones around, really just a handful of nests, so we're talking 9, 10, maybe some years 15 nests, that this had an overall sort of positive effect on nest success. So the ability for a pair of eagles to actually successfully produce, young from their nests and also had these population level effects. So what we found was that overall there was sort of an 8% increase in nexus in these sort of managed and protected nests. It was sort of a 13% increase overall and sort of the ability to produce lots of young, so more than sort of too young, two or more young in these nests. And the nice thing about this

overall is that during this time period of about 20 years of managing these nests, the breeding pairs went from about 10 or so in the mid to late 1980s to now 48 breeding pairs. And what we show is that just doing this management, which I think is a fairly sort of straightforward type of protection, generally conferred about a 38% increase in that overall sort of population rise. But it's so interesting because that sounds so simple, right? Keep people away from the nests and the eagles do better. Is it that simple?

I think in some ways it is. I think in many cases, what's interesting about it. this is that you don't have to do this for every nest, that because this is a long-lived species, that we're very good about sort of making protected areas, setting up national parks or wildlife areas and sanctuaries, but at the same time, a lot of these recovering predators need additional help. And so just even the act of going in and protecting nests or telling people to stay away from these nests can have really significant benefits over the long term. And what I think is interesting, too, is that this is a national park. We're not talking about, you know, building a parking lot or a

highway. This is really sort of low-level sort of human disturbance, I think, as many people would think about it. We're talking about camping and hiking and sort of fishing and recreational boating. But in many cases, even there's these sort of low-level disturbances can have a real population-level effect on sort of recovering predators. We're talking with Ben Zuckerberg about bald eagles. Our phone number is 844-724-8255. If you've been seeing eagles come back to your area, It's 844 Sci Talk. I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So this success isn't just happening at Voyagers, though.

This is more widespread. Oh, yeah, no. It really is one of the great conservation stories for the United States. The Bold Eagle was listed as part of the Endangered Species Act, and they were given and conferred certain protections, and over time that has really paid off. the elimination of DDT and as well as habitat protection. And these very discrete sort of management activities to try and protect nests definitely have

paid off to the point where, as you kind of mentioned, there's only 500 or so breeding pairs in the lower 48 United States. And now we have well over 10,000 pairs. And so we've seen this sort of national phenomenon of these sort of top predators, these bald eagles, being able to repatriate some of their former habitats. Are they basically back to what we would see as a normal population throughout their range, or is there still room to grow? Oh, I think there's still room to grow. In fact, the Voyagers, what I would say is that they are still coming in.

The population and the number of breeding pairs have not seemed to saturate. So there's definitely still room to grow in a lot of these areas. And we do have to keep in mind that it wasn't just DDT that back in the early 1900s, bald eagles were actively persecuted. There are actually bounties for bald eagles. And so their populations really are recovering from what has been more than 100 years of persecution and environmental pollution and habitat loss. Well, what's interesting about these buffer zones is that in national parks you can protect and you can space out maybe a thousand feet so people aren't coming near them. But I've got to say, Ben, I drive down a road almost every day of my life and bald eagles fly overhead. There are nests that I can see.

They seem to be adapting pretty well to living near humans. Yeah, and that's a really interesting question, as whether. or not they can habituate over time. What I would say is that not only if they are potentially using a nest, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are being successful in raising young in that nest. And so even though they may be setting up a nest in a certain area, whether or not that nest is ultimately successful. And certainly what we hope to have is a really highly productive nest, and meaning that

they're raising two or more young. And that's really the goal of a lot of what we think about in terms of conservation and management is to optimize that reproduction. it doesn't necessarily mean if you see a bald eagle nesting in an area, that that nest ends up being successful. But I would say you're absolutely right that a lot of species and a lot of sort of returning predators, not just bald eagles, but other species as well, are certainly beginning to adapt

to sort of what are increasingly human-modified landscapes. We're running along. Tom, I just want to ask you quickly, what does a bald eagle being back in the ecosystem mean for the ecosystem around it? That's a fantastic question. I think that's our next sort of suite of question. is that you have what was effectively a top predator that was removed from its natural system and ecosystem and is now returning to that system. And what are sort of the other consequences they might have for even recovering other recovering species as well?

And I think that question is still outstanding. But it clearly is a possibility, especially for bald eagles, they do certainly affect other birds of prey, like ospreys and even great blue herons. They'll take other birds food. they'll even predate on adults. And so we are actively thinking about sort of that next step of what are these sort of other trophic level consequences. And I'm sure you get this question all the time.

But we started off by talking about Ben Franklin. Look, if the turkey was the national bird, would people have cared enough about the bald eagle to save it in the way that they have, Ben, do you think? I think so in the sense that it is a real flagship species, meaning that it is clearly a charismatic species. It's a beautiful bird. It's got this wonderful, large wingspan and this bright white head. And so I think it always captures people's imagination.

And so when you've got a species like this that is just, you know, beautiful sort of emblem of nature, I think it's always going to engender imagination and people's interest in conservation. Benjamin Zuckerberg is an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Benjamin, thanks so much for your study and thanks for coming on Science Friday with us. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Charles Bergquist is our director on the show. our senior producer is Christopher Entaliata, and our producers are Alexa Lim,

Christy Taylor, and Katie Heiler. Our intern is Lucy Wong. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim and Sarah Fishman. We're active all week on Facebook, don't you know, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. And if you've got a smart speaker, just ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want, because now every day is Science Friday. You can email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com.

Ira is back next week. I'm John Dankowski in New York.