Science Friday - Accessible Birding, Human Water Consumption, Road Salt Impacts, Terraformers Book. Jan 27, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors For many blind and low vision people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging. Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate, signs don’t usually have Braille, guides generally aren’t trained to help disabled visitors, and so on. But nature recordist Juan Pablo Culasso, based in Bogata, Colombia, is changing that. He’s designed a system of fully accessible trails in the cloud forests of southwest Colombia that are specifically tailored to help visually disabled people connect with nature. The trails are the first of their kind in the Americas, and Culasso drew on his own experiences as a blind person and a professional birder to design the system. He talks with Maddie Sofia about how he designed the trail system and takes listeners on an adventure through the cloud forest he works in.   How Many Glasses Of Water A Day Do You Actually Need? If you follow health or fitness influencers, at some point you’ve probably heard something about people needing six to eight ounces glasses of water a day to be healthy. The question of the right amount of water needed for health and happiness is still an open one, and varies from person to person. But a recent study in the journal Science looked at just how much water people actually do consume each day. The study didn’t just ask people how many sips they had taken. Instead, it tracked the amount of water that flowed through the bodies of over 5,000 people around the world, using labeled isotopes to get data on “water turnover”—how much water was consumed and excreted. The researchers found a large range of water use, driven in part by differences in body size and socioeconomic status. A small, not very active woman might drink less than two liters per day, while a large, very active woman might gulp almost eight liters a day, a four-fold difference. Dr. Dale Schoeller, a professor emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the study, the importance of water consumption, and how people can do better at estimating the amount of water they need.   Road Salt Is Washing Into The Mississippi River…And It’s Not Washing Out This winter has already brought significant snowfall to much of the U.S. Historically, more snow has meant more road salt. It’s an effective way to clear roads — but also brings cascading environmental impacts as it washes into rivers and streams. But amid one powerful winter storm that walloped the Midwest in December, employees from the La Crosse County Facilities Department did something a little different. As usual, they clocked into work well before dawn to plow the county’s downtown parking lots. They were followed by facilities director Ryan Westphal, who walked each of the lots, checking for slick spots. Finding none, he didn’t lay any salt down on top. That’s a major departure from how he would have handled the situation a few years ago – before their department made the decision to dramatically cut back on salt use to prevent it from flowing into waters like the nearby Mississippi River, which new data show has been growing saltier for decades. Under the previous protocol, in Westphal’s words, his crew would have “salted the crap” out of the lots after a snowfall like this, without giving deference to whether they actually needed it. Today, there’s a careful calculation after each time it snows to ensure they’re using just the right amount of salt. To read the rest, visit www.sciencefriday.com.   In ‘The Terraformers,’ Science Fiction Reveals Real-World Challenges In her novel The Terraformers, author Annalee Newitz takes readers thousands of years into the future to a far-away planet that’s under construction. It’s in the process of being terraformed, or transformed into a more Earth-like world that can support human life. The main character Destry, a ranger for the Environmental Rescue Team, and her partner, Whistle the flying moose, are working on the corporate-owned planet when they encounter an underground society. The Terraformers explores themes of resilience, colonization, conservation, equity, and capitalism through a sci-fi lens as Newitz invites readers to reimagine a new future. Guest host Maddie Sofia talks Newitz about the inspiration behind the book and how real-world problems made their way into sci-fi.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. 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 Kathleen Davis. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Later in the hour, you've heard the line about eight, eight ounce glasses of water a day. But how much water does your body actually use? It turns out there's a lot of variation. But first, we're headed into the cloud forests of southwest Colombia, way high up in the Andes. To visit a set of trails that are the first of their kind in the Americas. They are designed specifically with flying, and low-vision visitors in mind. For many visually disabled people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging. Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate. Signs don't usually have braille.

And guides generally aren't trained to help disabled visitors. My next guest, Juan Pablo Coulaso, is working to change that. He's drawn on his own experiences as a blind person and expert birder to develop a system of accessible trails. He's also an audio nerd after our own hearts recording hours and hours of natural sound. Juan is joining us today from Bogota, Columbia. Juan Pablo, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, Madi. Juan Pablo, I've heard that you can identify more than 1,000 species of birds by sound. My first question is how, Juan? Like, how does one learn to differ at you? Okay. Well, usually blind people, we need to develop some memories techniques, right? We need to do mental maps every day to locate objects, to locate everything.

And our world is built by sounds. Everything of my images are sounds. Well, the birds, I believe, that wasn't really a coincidence, because when I was child, you know, make games to a child. Today, you put a PlayStation or whatever. but for a blind person, for a blind child is so hard. And with my father and an encyclopedia that had different birds sounds, basically Europeans and North American birds,

he began to play randomly a sound, and I need to set the answer. And then I received a cassette tape in the 90s, 1998 baby, with birds of Argentina. And my country, Uruguay and Argentina, shares 100% of the birds. So after that cassette, when we travel to the field, I began to recognize, wow, this is the bird number one in the site B. Or this is the bird, yeah, bird 25 or 26 or whatever. And then the jump to the professional path was when I was 16 years old.

I was invited to an expedition with biologist. And one of them gave me a recorder, a microphone. And when you listen the sound louder into the headphones, just hit the right button. And listening to a bird, that kingfisher really changed my mind. Well, after 20 years, I'm so grateful for the biologist that gave me the equipment, the recorder. I love that it's a kingfisher. That's my belted kingfisher. That's my favorite bird.

Oh, really? I'm so beautiful. Yeah. Wow, like a celebrity bird. Okay. So I'm wondering, you become a professional in this space. You spent your childhood falling in love and listening to these birds and making games out of it. When did you get the idea to design accessible trails?

Matt, this is a beautiful question because I did myself the same question. Juan Pablo, what can I do for the other blind people that can't go outside to nature? Because I'm a privileged person because I could travel mostly in the Americas but in other parts of the world as well. recording sounds and making workshops and making conferences to sighted people. But what can I do for the other blind people? So in the 2020, in the middle of COVID-19 pandemic situation, I moved to Bogota two weeks after the world closes with my girlfriend, appear an application of a grant to develop our grant projects

regarding reactivating tourism post-COVID-19. And we applied to that project with the first avi tourist route for blind people in South America. My idea is not make a think only for blind people or partial-sided people. Because in my opinion, this is not inclusion. It's exclusion. My idea is all people together, getting an experience in the forest. Because I know that it's possible to blind people go to nature. Wow. Okay. So walk me through some of the feature. that make it accessible.

Like, there's audio guides associated with them. Like, take me for a walk. Okay. Okay. Okay, Madi. You are in the beginning of the trail. On your right hand, there is a rope. And I invite you to close your eyes.

Okay. And walk slowly using that rope. You're going to encounter some signals in the rope, like different textures, that are advising you that a couple of steps in front of view, there is a QR code. You're going to get your phone. You're going to scan that QR code. And that QR code will have the description of the place that you are.

What trees are? What kind of birds? The description of the path, for example. Be careful. On the next steps, there are a climb down. So walk slowly, right? Right. You continue walking.

and another QR code. So, drop the rope. Extend your right hand and you are going to touch a tree. That tree is called whatever. This tree is so important to this forest regarding they get a lot of water inside. Okay, you return to the rope and continue walking. And in the end of the trail, there is a platform, fenced platform, that we are going to meet all together and share the experience.

Wow. I love this. It's so immersive. Yes, absolutely. The other thing, Juan Pablo, is there are people there to help, right? There are guides that are specially trained. Exactly. What do they do differently than, you know, conventionally trained guides?

Believe me that all the trainings that I do, 80% I need to train the people to train their common sense. Right? Yeah. Basically. When you break the eyes with a blind people, you know, so many people get scary. What going to say to them? What words can I use? Yeah.

Right? So, yeah, the guys are trained to really don't be scary about the blind person. Don't be scary to say something. The techniques, I need to train the persons to really be descriptives, but at the the same time really use the appropriate words to describe something, right? For example, the colors, the colors of the, because so many people think that blind people doesn't know nothing about colors, but it's not true. But you can use associations, for example, ah, that, I don't know, that tree is red, red,

red like the fire or whatever, blue, like the sky, right? specific techniques to really, for example, 99% of the people when tried to guide me in a place, take my hand. And this is a mistake because my hands are my eyes, you know? Sure. You need to take my arm to be my hands free to really navigate and understand. But you never take a blind person from their hands. Sorry.

So that's the idea. Well, let's do it. Let's pretend you're my guide. I have some audio that you graciously gave us. I'm going to close my eyes. You describe to me where we are, you know, what we're hearing. You know, just take me on a little tour, Juan Pablo. Okay, you, Madi, are in a forest.

It's after raining. The drops that you are listening are the water that are in the trees that are falling gently onto the floor. No rain. The rain already passes. And now you are listening a beautiful couple of meotlipis coronata. That birds are very, very small birds of the family of warblers. They are so common in the cloud forest in Colombia. Wow. Okay. I love that. Juan Pablo, how hard would this be for other parks to adopt some of these changes? because it doesn't seem tremendously difficult to me. All the people ask me, Juan Paolo, how many money I need to invest?

It's not too much. The money, in my opinion, is the easiest part. The hardest part is the change of the mental thing that most people said, no, I don't receive my people. And they said that because it's so hard to think. It's so hard to think. how can I do or how many things I need to adapt or how many people need to train. The first thing is really find people with an open mind and they need to believe the nature

is a human right. Nature is a human right. And even more for blind people, even more from blind people. We want to travel a lot. We want to enjoy different things. but it's really, really hard because the most people that is in that places, they prefer to say, no, this place is unsafe. You are going to fall.

You cannot. You can't do that. It's easy, Maddie. It's easy. So the change of the attitude of the person is the key. Yeah, that's the hard part. Yeah. I mean, what has been the reaction from,

people who visit these trails. You know, what are you hearing from people? Well, the first pilot that we did was with children with death and blind disability. And for 90% of that, even living 40 minutes away from that beautiful place, so many of they really cry a lot after the experience because no before they could do that. for me really was really emotionally was so strong so I remember that I talked to my to my guide I said for for him Luis Carlos please take me away from here to cry a little bit because it's a dream come true right so finally people with my same disability in the case of

blind are enjoying the same thing that I really enjoy for the last 20 years. Juan Pablo, that is beautiful. Thank you so much for joining me and taking me on a journey. I had so much fun. I'm so happy to be here. And if I'm allowed to,

please find me on Spotify to listen more beautiful nature songs in South America. We do have a link to your recordings on our website if the audience wants to hear more. Juan Pablo Colasso is a nature recordist and birder based in Bogota, Columbia. After the break, Kathleen Davis gets into how decades of road salt runoff is threatening ecosystems in the upper Midwest.

This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie. I'm Maddie Safaya. And I'm Kathleen Davis. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News. For W.WIS Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. In many parts of the country, we are already in peak snow season. And to combat snowy and icy roads, there's one thing that you usually works pretty well, and that's road salt.

Salt is good at preventing your car from sliding all over the road. But when too much salt runs into waterways, it can disrupt sensitive river ecosystems. It can also corrode water pipes and make drinking water too salty. Our next guest looked into this growing problem in Wisconsin and across the upper Mississippi River basin. Madelineheim is an environment reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Journalism Collaborative, the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. Madeline, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Nice to have you. So to start off, Madeline, can you explain how we got here? It's not just that we've been eagerly oversalting the roads in the past couple of years, I would imagine.

Right. So chloride, which is what we've been finding in elevated levels across the Mississippi River and frankly in lots of waterways across the Upper Midwest, it's a pollutant that doesn't dissolve or break down over time. So essentially, once you are putting in road salt, putting in chloride into a waterway, you know, if you start putting that in in 1980, that stuff is still in there today. The Mississippi River Basin, upper basin overall, has seen at least a 35% increase in chloride levels since the late 1980s. Because it never goes away, obviously, you know, it's going to be in there for life. I mean, just how. How high are these chloride levels in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and in Wisconsin? How grim is the situation?

Yeah, so it's a little bit different depending on where you look. The Upper Mississippi River and the river in general is obviously a huge body of water. So it does have a lot of capacity to flush, flush the water in and out. And so although we're seeing large percentage increases of chloride, for example, there's a spot, a monitoring station in western Wisconsin that saw like a 66% increase from the 1980s to today. But the numbers aren't as huge because, you know, the river has the capacity to flush that stuff out. The places where it's more difficult are the smaller streams and rivers and lakes. And some of those places have reached acute toxicity for chloride.

That's something that both the EPA and several individual states measure. And so we've seen places in the Twin Cities or in southeastern Wisconsin. Obviously, that's not along the river basin. But there are some places that have reached acute toxicity for chloride. So it's kind of a mixed bag. You know, there are some water bodies that have not reached that point. But I think folks who are interested in this and concerned about it are worried that they're going to eventually. So what happens when a waterway reaches that acute toxicity?

I mean, why is it so dangerous? Yeah, so essentially, if you think about the aquatic life and the fish and the plants and the birds and everything that lives in a freshwater ecosystem, they obviously live in a freshwater ecosystem for a reason. They're adapted to living in fresh water. And so when the water becomes saltier and, you know, in some of these cases, becomes excessively saltier, they just can't handle that. So those toxicity levels that I mentioned before from the EPA, if you're reaching the

acute levels, which obviously that does take a lot of chloride, but it has happened in some places. That can kill plants and animals pretty quickly. You know, it's changing their whole entire habitat, which they're used to freshwater, to something that looks more like saltwater, obviously not as salty as an ocean or anything, but, you know, it's just changing it gradually and that can have an effect there. And as far as, you know, further reaching effects, salt, when it gets into groundwater gets into pipes, it's corrosive, so it can corrode infrastructure, lead and copper pipes. And if it gets into drinking water, you know, drinking water that's too salty, we can actually start to taste that. Obviously, no one wants their drinking water to taste super salty, but for

folks who are on like low sodium diets, for example, that can start to be unhealthy. Yeah, I would imagine. So your reporting did focus on the upper Midwest, but I would imagine that this isn't just a problem there. Is that right? Yeah, this is a pretty widespread problem so much so that the EPA had released a statement, I believe, late last year, just saying that, you know, they're looking at this issue of freshwater salinization, that that's, you know, it's a big enough issue that they are that they're looking at it countrywide, that freshwater is turning into, turning into saltwater, so to speak. And I would say, you know, it's prevalent here in the upper Midwest with road salt, just because we are a colder climate and we have to use that.

But there are other reasons that chloride can get into the water through water softeners or potassium chloride fertilizer. So there's certainly this issue in other places. With colder states, it does tend to be road salt. That's a dominant factor. In your reporting, you also looked at some solutions to this problem. Can you tell me about some of those? The biggest thing that I heard from the experts that I talked to and, you know, the folks just working on the ground on this stuff is that it's really about, not about cutting salt use out entirely, because obviously some salt use is really important for keeping us safe and keeping us from slipping and falling.

And so no one's arguing like we should just completely stop using salt. It's more about using it properly and applying it properly. So, for example, salt doesn't work very effectively at temperatures below 15 degrees. So if it's zero degrees out and you've got your salt trucks out there just dumping salt pile after salt pile on the road, that's not actually really going to do anything. So a lot of the people who are working on this are interested in helping salt applicators really understand and become educated about proper salt application, how much to apply. And then we do also see solutions like brining, which is when you mix salt with water, dissolve the salt little cut down on how much salt you're using. In Wisconsin, it cut down on salt almost a quarter on average on Wisconsin highways last year.

So, you know, it works. So there's certainly like solutions to be found there. Of course, any new equipment that people are going to have to buy is expensive. So I think, you know, the facilities folks who are applying, applying salt are certainly looking to, they're going to look for needing grants and things attached to that. But there's definitely lots of possible solutions out there. And some cities are using beet juice too, right? Yeah, yeah. Beat juice is a, you can, you can use that as a brining agent to kind of help it work in lower temperatures as well. So yeah, that's certainly one of the more

creative solutions out there. Well, as long as nobody is licking the roads, hopefully that solution will be a good one. Thank you so much, Madeline for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Madelineheim, environment reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Journalism Collaborative, the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. If you follow health or fitness influencers, at some point you've probably heard the line about a person needing eight, eight ounce glasses of water a day to be healthy. The question of the right amount of water for health and happiness is still an open one, and it varies from person to person. But a recent study in the journal science looked at just how much water a human body actually uses each day. And this wasn't

just asking people how many sips they had taken, but tracking the amount of water that flowed through the bodies of over 5,000 people around the world using labeled isotopes. Joining me now to talk about the work is one of the authors of that study. Dr. Dale Schell-Hsha. Scheller is a professor emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thanks for joining me today, Dr. Scheller. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to your audience. Absolutely. So let's start kind of broad. Can you explain to me why we need water? It's probably the most important nutrient that we consume on a daily basis. If you're stranded in a

desert and cannot access any water and don't drink anything, life expectancy is about three to five days. You'll dehydrate and dry up and die. And also now the data is growing that even drinking a fair amount of water per day, but not quite enough to meet you needs, or drinking too much water and getting a little bit over hydrated, affects your chronic disease status. So it increases the risk of diabetes and other chronic diseases if you have a little bit too little. or too much. And what is the body actually doing with that water? It's the milieu in which all our chemistry, all our metabolism occurs.

The cells are about 90 to 95% water. So all the chemistry that's going on, all our metabolic processes occur in the liquid state. It's also responsible for carrying nutrients, the glucose, the other carbohydrates, fatty acids, and proteins. from where they're absorbed in the intestine to the cells, where the metabolism goes on, and then taking away the waste products from those reactions and delivering them to the kidneys to be flushed out in urine. Can you walk me through some of the factors that influence what my water needs may be versus another person? Well, the biggest influence is body size.

That old eight glasses of eight ounces is about in the middle. middle of the normal range, but it doesn't account for variability from the large to small. It's not individualized. It's not what do we call personalized nutrition. What a specific individual needs. The larger the person, the higher their metabolic rate, the higher their energy expenditure, that has the biggest influence. So it accounts for an extra two-fold variation between a small individual and a large individual. In addition, factors such as physical activity, how much you energy, expand, how much CO2 has to be excreted in breath. And that carries water out of the body as moisture.

So that affects how much you need to replace it so that you don't dehydrate over the time of the day. So I personally think a lot about water when I am sweating. And, you know, if I'm going for a jog when it's 90 degrees versus if I'm going for a jog, for a jog and it's 40 degrees. How much of this is temperature regulation? A fair amount, especially when it's warm and you are sweating. Existing in a high temperature, high humidity area where you do sweat a lot, can add about a quart to your water requirement on a daily basis.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Dale Scheller, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are talking about the amount of water that the human body actually uses every day. Let's talk about this study that you did. So you didn't just ask people how much they drink. Talk about how you actually measure output with labeled water. Okay.

The traditional methods and what was used for a long time was to ask people how much water they drink. But people underreport. court the water consumption. You just forget when you stop that water fountain to take a drink. You forget a cup of coffee. You forget a cup of tea. The water turnover that we measure with our technique is, as you're using a stable isotope tracer, a non-radiolactive stable tracer, bututerium, which is present in normal drinking water, but we give a little extra. And that mixes across the body water pool. And then every time you drink some water or eat a food containing water such as an apple, that dilutes down the deuterium and the added water then is eliminated

from the body through urine or sweat because the body works hard to keep the amount of watering it at about a constant level from day to day, hour, an hour, minute to minute. So to be clear, in this study, we're not talking here about the right amount of water for people to drink, but the amount of water that you really observed people using. Correct. What we measure with this stable isotope methodology is the behavior in terms of how much water each individual is consuming during the day. So what did you find? I mean, what was the range of the average water use? what we found was a very large range. For example, among women, the lowest water turnover was about 1.2 liters per day, well below that 64 ounces a day. But a high end was about 8 liters per day in very active large women.

So there's more than a four-fold range between the smallest and the largest individuals and those who are not physically active, and those who are physically active. Where did this mythology of eight glasses of water come from? I mean, what is the mythology there? Well, that's an interesting story, and the best we can trace it is that in 1946, the federal government here in the U.S. did a study of the requirement in which they had total control over the intake of individuals. and they came up with this figure that water turnover was about 64 ounces a day.

The media picked up on that and said, well, that must be what you have to drink. And the media missed that that total was the total water turnover from beverages plus food and moisture absorbed from the environment. So in converting that directly to water intake, actually, was overestimating the requirement for the average individual. So it was a communications error. I mean, so can we just say drink if you're thirsty? Is that enough to keep us where we need to be?

Most of us, yes. You're thirsty when you start to dehydrate, when your body water pool starts to shrink because you're losing more water than you're taking in, and you increase your urine production when you take in more water than you need to replace. both have an effect on the amount of salts that it dissolve in your body water fluid and can be measured in the blood. So the other thing you can do instead of just responding to your thirst and drinking when you are thirsty.

But to look at the urine color when you wake up, it should be a light yellow or a straw color. If it's lighter, if it's very pale, you're probably drinking more water than you need to replace. if it's a dark yellow or a little bit of the browns, you're not drinking enough fluids. It's a good biomarker of where you're standing in terms of relative hydration. In the elderly, those over 60, 65 years of age, the thirst mechanism starts to break down

so that you don't get as thirsty as you should be. And in fact, as we get heat waves when they come through, it's the elderly that suffer from dehydration. So they have to pay attention to drinking a little bit more than they feel thirsty for, especially when it's hot and humid or if they're working outside and sweating. Dale Scheller is a professor emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. When we come back, Maddie Sofaya takes us on an expedition to the world of science fiction with author Annalie Newitz's, the terraformers. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Maddie Safaya. For the rest of the hour, we're traveling deep into the future. Think thousands and thousands of years to a planet called Saski. It's being terraformed, turned into an earth-like planet for an intergalactic real estate company that has, surprise, surprise, not the purest intentions. It starts off with Destry and her. her partner, a flying moose named Whistle. Their job is to protect wildlife, help rivers flourish,

balance carbon levels, but everything changes when they find Spider's City, an ancient society secretly living inside of a volcano that changes what the terraformers think they're doing. This novel explores conservation and colonialism and how it all happens in lockstep with capitalism and corporate greed. Annalie Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist based in San Francisco and the author of the Terraformers, which comes out January 31st. Annalee, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. All right.

So what inspired you to write this book about building worlds in the first place? You know, there's a couple things. One is just like a lot of science journalists, when you're covering environmental change, you kind of wish that you could live for thousands of years just to see how everything is going to turn out. And so, of course, in fiction, I get to do that. And so I have this ability to have this multi-generational story of a planet undergoing transformation. But honestly, the other reason I wrote it was I really wanted to answer some granular questions about what it takes to build a geological formation. And what would it be like if you could build a city from scratch so that it functioned

in a bargain with the environment instead of just crushing the environment entirely. Right, right. I mean, the Terraformers is a fiction novel, but I feel like I learned a lot of just like very basic science from it. We get into plate tectonics, which I love fan favorite, conservation, urban planning. Who did you talk to about building a whole planet from scratch? I started by talking to a lot of scientists. I think because of my training as a science journalist, I can't imagine writing something without first consulting the experts. And so I talked to David Catling, who studies the development of atmospheres. I talked to Vicki Hansen, who studies the lack of plate tectonics on Venus, which is really interesting.

She's a planetary scientist. And I also talked a lot to a scientist who studies the origin of plate tectonics, a tregey gauche. And she actually helped me come up with a very very important. very ridiculous far future device that would actually affect the plate tectonics of an entire planet. I also talked to the head of the Department of Transit here in San Francisco about trains. And his name is Jeffrey Tumlin. And my main question for him, after I said, what are all the politics around setting up a train system?

How do two cities agree to let a train travel between them, which is actually quite complicated? the question I needed really answered was if you were a sentient train, what kinds of things would you do for fun? And Jeffrey was like, oh, obviously strategy gaming, 100%. Wow, didn't even second guess. They're like, oh, yeah, I mean, I've thought about being a sentient train. He had been thinking about this for a while, I believe. And so my train character, who is part of the public transit network on the planet, is in fact a huge video game nerd, as well as being a very good train, helps bring people from the northern to the southern part of the continent. Right. I learned a lot about atmospheres a lot. You referenced the person you talked about atmospheres. Like in the book,

there are generations that are, you know, seeding the planet, the first people that are there. And they're kind of designed to only be able to survive there for a short period of time, you know, before the atmosphere changed. Talk to me about that. That was really interesting. Yeah. So the planet is supposed to be an Earth-like world. And in my nerdy little brain, I came up with the whole backstory where they've come to a planet that's had its atmosphere mostly knocked off and probably had a big planetary collision. And so they're trying to recreate the process on Earth that led to our current atmosphere, which has mostly nitrogen, but 21% oxygen and some other gases in there. So the question is, how do you build oxygen into your environment? So you have to start the carbon

cycle. And while you're building up the oxygen, it's not going to be breathable for Homo sapiens. It's not going to be breathable for any of the creatures that go along with the Homo sapiens type environment. And so they designed through synthetic biology a group of basically off-brand homo sapiens called Homo Alteris who can respire in an environment that has far less oxygen and a lot more sulfur and a lot more other stuff. And that's why those people, end up being kind of programmed to die out because you've got to have, they've got to give way to the generation that can respire with the 21% oxygen. And that's where things get complicated, because when you design intelligent beings and then say, oh, by the way, you just have to die

out because the environment is changing. That creates a political problem as well as a scientific problem. But the thing that was super fun about building the atmosphere is that, of course, on Earth, this took like half a billion years. Right. And so it was kind of like getting to see it in a fast motion film. Like, what if you could really build an atmosphere in 10,000 years, which technically you could if you had some hand wavy technologies. And that was really great.

And I really hope that readers kind of come away with an understanding of how Earth's atmosphere formed, not as quickly, but like thinking about how there were generations of ecosystems that absolutely couldn't survive in our atmosphere as it is today. And, you know, and vice versa. Like, we couldn't survive very well, you know, half a billion years ago. You know, I'm reading this book and I think when people hear science fiction, they think escape or fantasy. But this book, we've got colonialism, you know, gentrification, scientific malfeasance, gender, kink. I mean, does this book actually feel like fiction to you? I mean, 100 percent, right? I mean, It's a lot of the technologies for terraforming in this book are based on what we say in the science fiction trade.

We call it hand wavium. You know, it's a special element that you just invent by randomly throwing your hands around. And so I think I want it to feel realistic. I want it to be grounded in actual science. Like you said, I want people to come away from the book being like, oh, I didn't know that was how plate tectonics worked. Or I didn't realize that moose behaved in this way. But I also do want to give people an escape because a lot of this book is dealing with extremely difficult subjects about how do politics impact the environment.

And so I threw in stuff like, oh, we have a thing called gravity mesh that allows animals to fly. Why not? You know, like, I want to fly. And there's a lot of wish fulfillment here. A lot of it is about how do we communicate with animals in a way that allows us to actually understand what they're saying and having a conversation with a moose is kind of a long-term wish that I've had. And so it's kind of a career goal for you. A career goal. Yeah, I hope one day to be able to

communicate with a moose. And so I think that the book is kind of a balance between science fantasy and science reality. And that's what makes it fun. You know, it's not going to be a fun story if it's all just, we are totally harnessed to the here and now. You know what? That actually reminds me of one of my favorite characters in the book. There's this person that builds a video game. This person's kind of like a historian and a scientist. And it felt like the most real to me because they just want to use a, quote, fun game to

teach history. And everybody gives them the feedback of like, hey, this game isn't really fun at all. And they're like, but the facts are there. But don't you love the facts? You love to learn? Yeah. There's definitely a lot of characters in this book who are based on scientists and researchers who I know. And, you know, definitely there's a whole field of educational video games where you're just, you have to ask the researcher, but why? Just make it fun. And this character is trying to recreate the history of this planet and of the kind of planetary system that they live in. And it takes a really long time to play because, environmental change takes thousands of years. And so people get into the game and they're like, but wait, I don't get to fight dragons. I just have to sit here and have conversations. Yeah, I loved it. You know, another theme that I thought was like really interesting and hit home was this idea of this like pristine or pure environment. You know, like at one point a character's

killed for hunting some small mammals because they're damaging the land. But this idea that, you know, ideal nature is untouched or untainted by humans is false. That's right. And part of the theme of the terraformers is this idea that these are people who are completely engineering an environment in order to make it look like it hasn't been engineered. And I wanted to really highlight the fact that on Earth, we have been terraforming effectively for thousands and thousands of years through agriculture, through hunting, just through land use. And there are now studies that show that humans have probably been changing the composition of forests for at least 30,000 years, kind of proto-farming by just

opportunistically throwing the seeds that they like around and trying to grow those trees. I was definitely thinking about all of those myths of the Wild West or the Virgin Land of the Americas, because indeed, as many writers and historians have told us, and as a lot of, many indigenous tribes have told us, nope, there were people in the Americas for as long as time exists basically. And they've been farming, building cities, building roads, transforming the environment completely. And so by the time Europeans kind of trekked over here, they were coming into a terraformed land. We are always in relationship with nature. We're always shaping it. It's shaping us. and this idea that there's this hard line between homo sapiens and the rest of nature.

That is a lie. And that is the lie that I hope to unmask in this book and to show that we are in an ecosystem. What humans do to the ecosystem is natural. It might not be good for the ecosystem. But we're among many life forms that have messed up the ecosystem. I mean, initially, cyanobacteria in the oceans messed up the ecosystem by adding so much oxygen to the environment. They were basically farting out oxygen. And we love it because we love their farts. But the life forms that were on the planet at the time were not exactly thrilled because

they were not oxygen breathers. If you're joining us now, I'm talking with Annalie Newitz, author of the upcoming book The Terraformers. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. There are a lot of non-human animals like my favorite character, Whistle the Flying Moose, a journalistic cat. They're as central as the humans in this book. Why did you write them like that? I really wanted people to imagine what it would be like if the environment could respond to us every time we did something to our ecosystems. And so there's a couple ways that I did that. One is that I have non-human animals who can talk. And I wanted people to really think about this myth that we have that human beings, homo sapiens are the only people.

And in fact, realized that we've already been in long-term bargains with lots of other non-human animals on our planet to help steward the environment, to help hunt. So that was part of my idea. Also part of it was just that, again, wanting to talk to moose and naked mole rats. But I also, the planet itself in this book, Saskei, the planet, is wired up with this really elaborate biodegradable sensor network. And so many of the characters are able to, for example, just touch the ground and connect to all of these billions of sensors that are part of the plants, part of the soil, connected to

animals, and they can feel, for example, if there's too much carbon loading in the atmosphere. They can feel if the nitrogen levels in the soil are off. They really can basically be in dialogue with the environment. And I think that's a great fantasy for us right now because one of our big problems with climate change is being unable to kind of feel what's happening around us unless we're being battered by a storm. We can't feel those microchanges in the environment. and say, oh, gosh, like the fact that we have water runoff from this farm is actually creating a toxic situation 30 kilometers away. But if we could feel that, if we could actually just touch the soil and the soil could say to us, dude, things are wrong. It might really change our relationship

to the environment. And so that's part of the fantasy is what would it take to have that kind of relationship with the environment and with non-human animals where we actually, they could talk back to us and kind of give us a piece of their minds. Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, the science got me in this book, right? I mean, I came for the science, but I stayed for the community building and, you know, the revolution that happens. And one of my favorite parts of the book is there are these big, you know, evil corporate companies and real estate agents and, you know, monopolies and capitalists and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, these small groups, these self-governed entities eventually work together to kind of push back against, you know, these injustices. You make a point in this book

that revolutions don't happen, you know, with one protest, one hero, one moment. Is that kind of what you want people to take away? Yeah. One of the joys of building this world scientifically was showing people this long-term environmental change, but it was also about showing long-term social change. And I've been describing this book as the story of a very slow revolution. And it's a reminder, I think, to all of us who care about the environment that these are multi-generational projects. We can't fix it alone. We can't fix it just right now. We have our future generations are going to have to pick up our trouble and carry it forward and keep making trouble. And I definitely was thinking about the fact that at some point in the future, science and politics and

culture aren't going to seem as separate as they do to us now. I think it's one of the great tragedies of our time that we try to pretend that those things don't affect each other. And that is also a fantasy in this book, is that these are not characters who see a huge distinction between doing good science and creating a good political system. They see them as all being connected in a big ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, Annalie, there is a clip from the audiobook that is a group of sentient trains singing using the sounds of every place they've ever traveled to.

I think it is only appropriate that we play you out with it. Does that sound good? Sounds lovely. Annalie Newitz is a science fiction writer and science fiction. journalist based in San Francisco. Their book, The Terraformers, comes out on January 31st. Annalie, thank you so much for joining us. And thanks for writing this book. Thank you so much for having me and thanks for reading. To read an excerpt of the Terraformers, head to our website, sciencefri-com slash terraform. That's T-E-R-R-A-Form.

Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at Science Friday.com. Send us feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover, too. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Have a great weekend. Ira's back next week.