Science Friday - History And Science Of Chickens, Climate Activism, Pipeline Movie. April 28, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Dirty Diapers Reveal How Germy Babies’ Microbiomes Are In a new study, researchers picked through the dirty diapers of more than 600 infants. Those stinky diapers were a gold mine of info—they contained more than 10,000 virus species. And though it may sound terrifying, those viruses play a key role in babies’ microbiomes. Guest host and SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Katherine J. Wu, staff writer at The Atlantic about this story and other science news of the week. They chat about climate change’s influence on the twilight zone, what critters can be found on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a surprising twist in the story of Mars’ moon Deimos, the impressive sleeping habits of elephant seals, and why insects seem to flock to the light when it’s dark out.   From Backyards To Barn Yards, The Surprising Science Of Chickens Raising backyard chickens continues to grow in popularity. The number of households in the United States with a backyard flock jumped from 8% in 2018 to 13% in 2020, according to a survey by the American Pet Products Association. But our fondness for chickens is hardly new. The relationship between humans and chickens goes back thousands of years, to when humans began domesticating the red junglefowl native to Southeast Asia. Guest host Sophie Bushwick has a compre(hen)sive conversation with Tove Danovich, freelance journalist and author of the new book Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them, about how she was charmed by her own backyard chickens, the history of their domestication, and the surprising science of chicken intelligence.   Why Climate Activists Are Turning To Drastic Measures For Earth Day this year, people all over the world took to the streets to demand climate action. But as large and loud as these protests can be, they are often met with inaction. So activists are ramping up their efforts. Just within the last year, we’ve seen people chain themselves to banks, throw mashed potatoes at a Monet painting, shut down highways, and even glue themselves to museum walls, all in the name of climate justice. Those actions went viral and really seemed to strike a nerve. How did we end up here? Guest host Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Dana Fisher, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland College Park, about the state of climate activism and the tactics at play.   Recasting The Climate Movement In ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’ Climate activism is getting the big screen treatment this spring, with the new film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” This action-packed heist film follows a group of young climate activists, disillusioned by the slow pace of climate action, who decide to take drastic action in the name of the climate. What follows is a tense ‘will they-won’t they’ story set in Texas oil country. The name of this movie comes from a 2021 nonfiction book by Andreas Malm. That book is a manifesto that argues that property damage and sabotage is the only way forward for climate activism. The movie features characters who struggle with this question, and whether there’s a different way to accomplish their climate goals. Guest host Kathleen Davis speaks with Ariela Barer, who co-wrote, produced, and acted in the film. They chat about bringing this complicated topic to the big screen, and creating characters reflective of the real-life climate movement.   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 Sophie Bushwick. I'm technology editor at Scientific American, and today I'm excited to bring some science to your ears. And I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. Together we're filling in for Ira Flato. Later in the hour, the science and history of our long existence with chickens and the science behind climate activism and what we can learn from studying protests. But first, baby poop. In a new study, researchers picked through the dirty diapers of more than 600 infants. And those stinky diapers were a gold mine of information. They revealed just how germy the guts of babies are, which could be key in understanding chronic diseases. Here to chat with me about this germ-laden story and other science news of the week

is Catherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic. She's joining me from Boston, Massachusetts. Katie, welcome back to Science Friday. Always good to be here. So, Katie, what exactly did this diaper study find? So as you mentioned, there is a lot of stuff in diapers, and a lot of it is stuff we cannot see or even necessarily smell. What these researchers were after was a better understanding of the different microbes that exist in baby's guts. So they looked at 10,000 new kinds of viruses, and I realize how alarming that might sound at first, but the vast majority of these viruses actually pose. no threat at all to us. They are actually incapable of infecting human cells because they are bacteria vages, which is a word that literally means bacteria eaters. They infect bacterial cells.

So really the only organisms that have to worry about them are the gut microbes that might be inherited right alongside them. So thousands of viruses and babies' guts. I mean, I think of babies as like pretty fresh and clean, I guess, microbially. I mean, how does a baby end up with all of these viruses. Right. So the big picture here is that these viruses are likely being inherited right alongside the bacteria that are colonizing these baby's guts. And a lot of it is probably coming directly from their moms. You know, when we all develop in Yidro, we are thought to be more or less completely sterile. But then as we, you know, egress out into the world, either through the vaginal tract or maybe a C-section, we start to pick up microbes from, you know, our mom's skin,

the vaginal tract, a little bit from maybe the butt area, if you happen to coming to contact with that region. And, you know, these microbes multiply. The big surprise was seeing all of these viruses because even as I mentioned earlier, the big focus up until this point in the gut microbiome has been bacteria. Okay, enough of the potty talk, Katie. Let's go to space. There is a stunning new image of Mars and its moons that was snapped by the United Arab. Emirates's orbiter named hope. Katie, what do the moons look like and, you know, what are they? Right. So Mars's two moons are Demos and Phobos. And I will mention here that if you are picturing these lovely spherical orbs just floating, you know, elegantly around Mars, that's not exactly

what we're dealing with here. These women's kind of look like really weird, lumpy potatoes, like the kind you would want to mash and not served as a baked potato because they're not quite pretty enough. Oh, okay. But these pictures were still pretty telling because they were not only just kind of, you know, taking images of the superficial surface, but they were able to shoot a bunch of different kinds of weight lengths at the moons and get a sense of their composition. You know, what is Demos in particular made of? So, Katie, how did these potato like moons even end up there? Right. So the big finding here was that Demos, the composition of it, is actually, more similar to the composition of Mars than to that of, say, an asteroid. And I'll back up here

and say, you know, the way that a planet acquires a moon, there's kind of two main ways that that can happen. Either the planet chokes a piece of itself off and it sort of gets trapped in orbit around its, I guess, parrot substance, or the planet can steal an asteroid from elsewhere in space and just lock it into permanent orbit. Seeing that Demos looks a lot more like, you know, the ingredients of Mars itself is a hint that it's probably not a captured asteroid and probably came from Mars. And that tells us a lot about, you know, the potential history here. You know, it's possible that something struck Mars and it's very dissed past and chumped a piece of it off and that became Demos, but that's just one idea. That's going to have to be a discovery for

another time. Okay, let's move on to our next story, which is going to take us to the Twilight Zone, but we're not talking about the TV show. There is actually a real Twilight. zone in the ocean and it is changing. So Katie, tell me what is this twilight zone and why is it important? Right. The twilight zone is kind of like the uncanny valley of the ocean. It is this zone that sits between about 650 and 3,000 feet below the surface, basically between the surface zone and the super deep ocean. Not a lot of light gets there, but there is still a ton of life. You know, all sorts of fish, squid, jellies, and a lot of them are bioluminescent, just very cool. types of life down there. And so how is this twilight zone changing? So researchers basically published a

study where they looked at past periods of warming in the past 66 million years. And they found that even though this twilight zone is super full right now, just absolutely teeming with diverse life, that wasn't always the case. And during periods where the globe got a lot warmer, the twilight zone got a lot emptier. And so the big concern is that as climate change continues to heat the planet, disrupt ocean ecosystems, one of the biggest, you know, losers in this game could be life in the twilight zone. What could happen climate-wise if those critters disappear? What they're sort of doing is acting as a conduit between this surface zone near the very top and the deep ocean. As you can imagine, the top of the ocean where all the light is, is also where a ton of the food is. But as that

stuff drifts down in the form of, you know, maybe dead carcasses or sort of predigested matter, stuff in the Twilight Zone can eat it and then, you know, maybe poop it back out. And then it will drift even deeper down into the deep ocean. But when temperatures get really hot, basically a lot less stuff makes it into the middle twilight zone, which can starve the deep ocean. And that actually has big implications for climate change in general. They can accelerate it because the ocean is this huge sick for carbon. If we don't grab it and pull it deeper into the ocean, it stays in the air. And that's obviously not great for the rest of us. So we're going to stick in the ocean for our next story, but we are going to come up to the surface to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is this

giant island of trash that's floating a thousand miles from land. And there's a new study that finds that this trash island is teeming with all of this life. I mean, Katie, what did they find lurking in the trash? Big surprises over the place. I mean, you picture it's just a job. I mean, giant swirl of plastic baking in the sun, super far from land. You don't expect a lot of things to be thriving there. But scientists went out there and sampled the bits of plastic floating, and they found all sorts of creatures, you know, anemones, different sorts of invertebrates, oysters, crustaceans. It's just hopping with life. Did a little critter, you know, hitch a ride on a soda bottle? You know, that is kind of the leading idea. I mean, how else would

they get out there. All the creatures that I mentioned, the anemones, the oysters, these are typically coastal creatures, which is what makes this an especially big surprise. It's not like, you know, the plastic was out there and then something from the deep ocean was like, this seems like a great place to sunbathe. It really seems like organisms from the coast were hitching right out there and managing to survive, you know, a thousand miles away from their natural habitat, which is absolutely wild. The cool thing is scientists think these creatures are so adaptable that they're able to find food and reproduce in a totally different habitat. Like they found sea anonies just gnaissance on sea snails, which to put that in context,

it's about as weird as, you know, finding a pelican, just eating desert ants, which is not its normal fodder. That is very bizarre. And thankfully, we are staying in the ocean again for our next story, which is about elephant seals. And these elephant seals have a very impressive diving routine, we can say. right? Can you tell me a little bit about this, Katie? Yeah. So really, if you look at different types of seals, nothing can dive better than the elephant seal. They can dive up to a mile below the surface of the ocean. They can hold their breath for up to two hours. I can't even manage a millionth of that. It is just really impressive stuff. And they go on annual foraging trips that last seven months. That's seven months where they never touch down on land to rest. And throughout this entire time, they are diving, deep to get squid and fish to constantly nourish themselves because this is so taxing. I mean, how do they do that and not, you know, die of exhaustion? Yeah, it's really impressive, right? That's been a question our researchers binds for a really long time. And scientists

have wondering, when do they sleep and how do they sleep? The answer is kind of wild. They actually manage just two hours of daily sleep when they're on these seven-month quarantine trains. I want to kind of get into the zone of an elephant seal. Take me on a dive, Katie. I'm an elephant seal. You know, I'm an elephant seal. You know, what am I doing? Right. So basically the way that they are managing sleep during these series of really long dives is they will actually nod off while they're diving. So I'll describe to you what sort of happens on one of these sleep dives. So the elephant seal will dive in its normal active waking state. You know, it'll be descending down, swimming, swimming, swimming, but then it'll just nod off. And keep in mind that the alipede seal is holding its breath during this entire stretch, because it's not going to inhale underwater. That would be really bad. I just nods off to sleep. Eventually, it goes into such a deep state of sleep that it loses, you know, control over its muscles. It's entering the stage of sleep called REM sleep where we have our most vivid dreams and can no longer maintain muscle tone throughout our body. It will actually flip belly up

and start to spiral downward in this corksuit pattern because the ocean currents are sort of buffeting it back and forth. Eventually, some of these elephant seals will even reach the bottom of the ocean and just kind of snooze there for a couple minutes before they wake up and are like, hey, I'm at the bottom of the ocean. I should probably swim up back to the surface and breathe. This whole cycle happens in less than 30 minutes. It's just wild. That is incredible. Obviously, the human sleep schedule is a little bit different than that. But can we learn anything about our own sleep habits from these seals? Right. So very, very, very different. But I think this is just another example in the animal world that is really showing humans that there's no single way to sleep for mammals. Elephant seals

sleep very little on average. But maybe that tells us about how to really be efficient about restoring energy and rejuvenating our brain cells and just being really efficient about sleep. That doesn't make humans lazy in the same way that koalas that sleep 20 hours on average a day are, you know, somehow really bad at sleep. It's just really different ways to tackle the same issue. We all need rest, but rest can be packaged in many different forms. Katie, it's a pleasure, as always, to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me. An absolute delight.

Thank you for ending on seals and bringing joy to my day. Anytime. Catherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic, joining me from Boston, Massachusetts. After the break, Sophie pecks apart the science and history of our long relationship with chickens. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. And I'm here with my co-host this week, Kathleen Davis, to talk about chickens.

Sophie, I am so excited to hear more about this. You know, I love eggs, an ideal day for me. I'm eating two eggs a day, fried, scrambled. It doesn't really matter how they are. Kathleen, have you ever thought about getting some backyard chickens so you could get fresh eggs every day? You know, I can't say that I've genuinely considered that in my tiny New York apartment, but you have beaked my interest, Sophie. Ah, well, I keep hearing more and more about people in the city getting a backyard flock. The other day, I was walking around in Queens, and I saw a few chickens that were just wandering around.

Then I spotted the coop in someone's yard. Look to me like a coup attempt. Oops. Sorry, I mispronounced that. I meant a coup attempt. It seems like those chickens are really living their best lives in New York City. Oh. Yeah.

Well, it's not just New York. All over the country, more people are getting interested in raising backyard chickens. But this is hardly new. The relationship between humans and chickens goes back thousands of years. Joining me now for a comprehensive conversation about the relationship between chickens and humans is my guest, Tova Danovitch, freelance journalist, and author of the new book Under the Hen Fluence, Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. She's based in Portland, Oregon. Tova, welcome to

Science Friday. Hi, Sophie. Thank you so much for having me. To start off, how did you get interested in chickens? I think my story is very similar to how a lot of people wind up becoming. interested and then later a little too interested in chickens, which is I got a small flock of three hens initially for my backyard. And the idea was that, you know, they will provide eggs and basically pay rent in exchange for all of my my care and housing of them. But then it really quickly spiraled. They just were so fascinating. They arrived as day old chicks. And of course, you're spending a lot of time with them. They're adorable baby animals, what's not to like. So as I was spending time, you know, watching them and seeing them grow and

develop, I had all these questions about chickens and why they were doing the things that they were doing, you know, how far back our history went. And I just didn't really find the answers anywhere. So I went searching. You clearly have caved to the hen fluence. So what is it about poultry that got you so hooked? I think they're really fascinating. I mean, they're so different from mammals, which I think can be hard for a lot of people. You know, our dogs have evolved this ability to raise their eyebrows, to mimic human expressions. Cows, you know, move their mouths. Goats make those funny screaming sounds. But birds don't have a lot to work with, especially not chickens who aren't as dexterous as like our parrots are. So you have to spend a little

more time getting to know them. But once you do, they are so fascinating and charmed. and personable. Each of my hens has very strong personalities. They have these wonderful little sounds that they make. Because they're flock animals, they are constantly in communication with each other. And even just going around the yard, they keep up this really delightful, relaxing burble that's just kind of them saying, like, I'm okay and checking in on each other. And they're a delight to be around. And some of that personality comes across on your Instagram. It's called The Best Little Hen House. and it has quite a following. Apparently, the breakout star is Emmylou, and she's pretty distinctive looking. So can you describe for our listeners what she looks like and some of her antics?

Emuulu is just a delight. She's a millie floor ducal bantam, which is bantoms are a small breed of chicken. If I put her in the palm of my hand, her whole body is about the size of my hand. So she's quite small. That sounds adorable. Yeah. And she has giant. foot feathers that are about three inches in diameter. I did recently measure them because I was curious. And they're so big, I have to trim them back because they're like snow shoes and she'll start tripping over them. Wow. And she has this delightful little beard on her face. But she is constantly getting into, you know, low stakes mischief. One of the things I really love about chickens

is it's like a tiny soap opera in your backyard. And I think Emmilu is a great example of that. Where She is constantly getting into fights with the other chickens. One day she's friends with someone the next day, their enemies. I don't know what has happened in between. And another funny thing that she in particular likes to do is hide her eggs throughout the yard. This is a behavior that is left over from the wild jungle fowl that chickens descended from, where when they are ready to have chicks, they go find a very secluded hidden spot and they lay a clutch of eggs until they're ready to sit on and incubate them. So my chickens, despite being domesticated,

a couple of them, and Emmylou in particular, will get this urge to go hide eggs in the yard. And I absolutely cannot find these egg clutches that they've hidden. It's like she's the best Easter egg hunt designer ever. Yeah, it's like an Easter egg hunt of my own. And because I have hens that lay eggs in different colors, I really do get like the colorful Easter eggs when I go looking. So I'll see her, you know, sneakily pop out of a bush and be like, I'm going to go look inside that bush and see what's there. And there will be like 12 eggs. It's wild. So she always keeps me on my toes. And you're not the only one to fall in love with chickens. There's been a surge in people in the U.S. getting interested in getting their own backyard chickens. What's driving this trend? It started, I think, in the early 2000s. I mean, people in rural.

areas have been continuously keeping chickens for a very long time. But I think when we started getting more interested in like the local food movement was really taking off then. We had these books like Fast Food Nation and the Obnobor's Dilemma that really put in the forefront just how bad the industrial food system is, not just for the environment and the people that work there, but for the animals themselves. And there really isn't an animal that is treated worse on our farms than the chicken. And so a lot of people realize that, you know, chickens are both fun to have pretty easy to keep and you can get eggs in the backyard from hens who you know had happy lives. And so more and more people started getting into that. And that has only grown in the,

you know, two decades since then. Every time the economy goes down, we see a little boost in chicken keeping. So of course, in recent years, you know, with the pandemic and the early days of lockdown. Toilet paper was hard to find, but so were chickens because everyone went out to start a flock of chickens. And now we have avian flu, which has led to the deaths of 58 million chickens just in the United States over the last like year or so. And that has led to an increase in the price of eggs and sometimes egg shortages. So once again, people are rushing out to get chickens. On the whole, they are just on the up and up. And let's go back in time a little. more. Why and how did humans begin domesticating chickens in the first place? So we domesticated them

about 3,500 years ago, which in the scheme of domestication is more recent by a lot compared to like horses and dogs. And what we think currently is that they were actually domesticated for entertainment, so like through cockfighting and also for their role in religious rituals. That, of course, has changed a lot today. Once we were keeping. these chickens, we realize, like, oh, these eggs are a really useful source of food that we can have very easily. And we started breeding chickens to produce more eggs. Their jungle fowl ancestor only lays 10 to 15 eggs a year. And the modern production chicken that you might have on an industrial farm lays closer to 280 to 300 eggs a year. That is a huge increase. And a lot of that

increase has only happened in the last like 60 years as we've really industrialized farming practices. Can you talk a little bit about chickens being raised for meat versus being raised to lay eggs? There is a difference. And one of the differences is just the lifespan of these birds. When you have, and I'm talking the commercial poultry operations, a laying hen, she's probably going to live about a year and a half to two years old around the time of her first mold. And at that time, they are considered spent hens and are no more. But because the poultry industry, in about 1930, diverged, we really had chickens that began to specialize. So our egg-laying chickens are only good for laying eggs. They lay these 300 eggs a year, but their bodies are so slim

that they are not actually worth the money it would take to slaughter them to go into the meat system or even pet food. So instead, we have this separate line of chickens that most people refer to as broiler breeds that have been specially designed to put on meat as fast as possible. In 1925, the average broiler went to market at about 112 days old and only weighed two and a half pounds. Today, that takes like six weeks and it's six and a half pounds. That is a big, big difference. Just genetically, the modern broiler and the modern laying hen are very, very different from these dual purpose breeds that we would have had in the past. And even though they sometimes get a bad rap as being unintelligent, chickens have these extremely sophisticated ways of

communicating with each other. One example is something called tidbiting. Can you tell me more about what that is? I love tidbidding. It's probably one of my favorite chicken behaviors. It happens. Usually roosters do it when they want to, you know, romance a hen or get on their good side. If they find an especially tasty morsel like a nice bug, you know, a really nice green of a leaf, they have a special call that they use and sometimes even a dance that goes with a little wing dip. And they call the hens over and say, look, look what I have for you. Come come and have you. Come and have you. your special treat. And the hens will come a run-in. And what's funny is that mating doesn't usually take place right after this, but the hens file this information away for later. And there have been some funny studies that people have done that show that roosters sometimes will fake tidbit, which means they go through all the motions of tidbitting, but there's not actually any food there. And the hens might fall for this once or twice, but they can tell the difference and do remember which, you know, boys are all talk and no action and which ones actually have the good treats. That's incredible.

And you visited some pretty smart and well-trained chickens for the book. Can you give me some examples of what chickens are capable of? One of my first chapters I actually got to report for the book was I went to a chicken training camp in Washington State where they, use clickers like you would use for your dogs and train chickens to do obstacle courses, which was amazing to watch. And it really teaches you so much about what a chicken is capable of. And I think more than that, working with these animals to teach them new things makes you appreciate them differently than you would have before. And it's not as though chickens just naturally love weaving through poles in and out or walking over bridges and through tunnels.

These are things that you really have to work with the chickens to get them to learn. And they are thinking about it and trying to do the right thing in order to get treats. So they are incredibly food motivated, which means they're very trainable. But they're capable of a lot more than we give them credit for. And there are some wonderful Instagram accounts and people in social media that do tricks with their chickens jumping through hoops or jumping up onto their arms or even doing little dances between their legs. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm Sophie Bushwick. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with author Tova Danovich about the history and science of domesticated chickens. And some chickens aren't just smart. They're also, well, pretty. Can you tell us a little bit about what you learned about show chickens in researching the book? When I first got into chickens, you know, I thought of chickens as like the classic farm ones where it's, you know, white, it's black and white stripes. You have the little red hen. And as I started getting into my flock, I learned that the world of chickens is so varied. And there are over 400 variations of recognized poultry breeds. This isn't even, you know, someone put two chickens together and a special mutt came out of it. But these are breeds recognized by the American poultry breeds. And Association, which is similar to our American Kennel Club or another group that looks at breeds of

animals and tracks them. So chicken shows were actually the first animal shows that we ever had anywhere. Back in the Victorian era, people started getting really into fancy poultry and wanted a way to show them and say, you know, my chicken is better than your chicken. So they developed these breeds and breed standards to go with it and developed these immensely popular poultry shows. So when you go to something like the Westminster Dog Show today, you have chicken shows to thank for that. Many people, when they start raising chickens, like you did, they originally get the hens for the eggs, but then they go on to develop a close bond with them. Do you think there's a line between a pet and a farm animal? And should there be?

That is such a good question, and it's something I think about a lot. Chickens are very interesting because they have really only recently become thought of as a pet. You know, when people started these small backyard flocks, like you name your chickens. That feels very natural. And I think just the act of naming something of having a relationship with three to six hens versus maybe a couple of hundred, which you would on a small farm, these large farms that are industrial, they have like 100,000 chickens. So you are not going to be naming them. So having a small flock in close proximity really does allow you to get to know these birds. And yet, under the law,

they are still primarily treated as livestock. There are some different rules for just, you know, how to behave in a suburban environment with your chickens, like you're expected to keep them in conditions that are much better than what you would find on an industrial farm. But by and large, there really aren't a lot of protections for chickens. And a number of people think that there should be. One interesting way we see this play out is with the response to avian flu. It's something that I'm very worried about as a backyard chicken keeper because if any of my chickens get it, the entire flock has to be euthanized. That is the way that we have dealt with the spread of avian flu in an industrial setting because it's the easiest method and you don't risk the spread of disease. And while there has

been a vaccine available, we don't want to use it because it would hinder our ability to export some of these chicken products that we would really like to sell to other countries. And so that is a really great example of how chickens being both livestock and pet can really lead to a lot of issues for people. Thank you, Tova. I have learned so clucking much about chickens. Thank you so much for an excellent talk. Tova Danovich is a freelance journalist and author of the book Under the Hent Fluence,

inside the world of backyard chickens and the people who love them. She's based in Portland, Oregon. If you want to read an excerpt of the book or see some pictures of Tova's adorable hens, go to Science Friday.com slash hens. That's sciencefriday.com slash hens. We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, what to mashed potatoes, museums, and the White House have in common? Well, they all play a part in the climate movement.

Meet the researcher analyzing these tactics right after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. And I'm Kathleen Davis. For this year's Earth Day, people all around the world took to the streets to demand climate action. like in Washington, D.C. But over the years, a lot of these protests have been met with inaction. So activists are ramping up their efforts. Just within the last year, we've seen people chain themselves to banks,

throw mashed potatoes, Adam-Oen painting, shut down highways, and even glue themselves to museum walls, all in the name of climate justice. Those actions went viral and really seemed to strike a nerve. So how did we end up here? Here to walk us through the science behind these protests is Dr. Dana Fisher, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland College Park. Dana, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me, Kathleen. So let's start with this year's Earth Day. You went out to the protests in D.C. What did you do there? Well, I was out there with a research team of graduate students and undergraduate students from the University of Maryland. And we did a couple of things. We are studying in my activism class right now.

about both institutional and non-institutional forms of activism and protest and looking at when protest gets confrontational, why and why it matters. So we were out there observing what the activists were doing. And we were also talking with the activists themselves. And we basically did a survey of the participants at the event on Saturday. And what we were trying to look for here is who was participating, what was motivating them to participate. Well, kind of of previous experiences they had doing activism and also what they were willing to do in the street. So, for example, were they willing to get arrested? Were they willing to engage in civil disobedience? But also, you know, your general demographics, et cetera. Super interesting to think

about this from a data collection lens. I mean, why is it so important to get all these little pieces of data? I am so glad you asked that question, Kathleen. So as somebody who, you know, who geeks out on data on an everyday basis and also believes that data is power. I can answer that in a couple of ways. The reason that the data are so important is that we can't really understand what activism means unless we understand who's participating in the activism. And, you know, in a different role, I actually wrote a section of the IPCC's recent report specifically around activism and civic engagement. And one of the things that I found is that research on activism and how it's related to, and this is specifically climate activism and how it's related to the outcomes in terms of

climate mitigation, climate adaptation, or even CO2 emissions or greenhouse gas emissions broadly, is woefully missing. So we have very little knowledge at this point about what it means if somebody goes out in the street and participates in a protest or glues themselves to the tarmac of an airport, how is that actually related to emissions? There are so many different types of activism out there, like racial justice or gun control. How does climate activism compare with these? One of the things that I think is unique about the climate protests that I've, you know, or climate activists whom I've studied, is that when we look at the motivations, I've been,

I've been collecting data on motivations from activists at climate related events for many years. now. And one of the things that is really interesting is the ways that we see consistent patterns of motivations for the people who are out in the streets at these climate events. And we saw it at the People's Climate March in 2017, at the youth climate strikes that took place around 2019, 2020, until, you know, the world shut down because of the pandemic. And then we see the same patterns reemerge now around Earth Day. And those patterns actually show the ways that, you know, issues having to do with equity, justice, and climate change are all combined together. And really, in a lot of ways, I think that those are the components of the ways these people are making sense of what they call climate justice, which is the big issue that is

motivating people to come out and participate in protests again and again. So, for example, this past Saturday at the Earth Day actions, what we saw was a lot of people in the streets who were motivated not just by climate change, but in addition to that, they were motivated by systemic racism. They were motivated by income inequality. Many of them also said that they were motivated to be out in the streets because of reproductive rights. So there were overlapping issues that brought them out and they say created the motivation and stimulation to get them into the streets to protest on this past Saturday. One tactic that has been making the news a lot is things like, Protesters throw soup at a super famous painting. How do these sorts of tactics come about?

I mean, what's the point there? The type of disruption that you're talking about is what I'm calling in my book, disruption for shock. And here, the activists themselves are throwing food, are spray painting, are crazy gluing themselves, et cetera, and so forth, specifically to get public attention. And the idea is to release this on social media with the hope it gets picked up and pinged all around the world. That type of disruption is specifically targeting and the goal and the way that they measure the success of the goal is how much media attention and how much conversation they make around the issue. And the hope here is that conversations about the disruption will help to get more attention for the issue and get more attention to the subject that motivated them to come out and do this disruption in the first place. place. And, you know, if we're looking at that form, there's a lot of research that suggests that

it will work when the shockers are really getting people to start talking about the issue, even though in most cases people are not particularly supportive of the action itself. There's also been this growth in civil disobedience, right? Like people chaining themselves to government buildings or shutting down highways. I mean, what message does that sort of thing send? The people who are blocking buildings, in a lot of cases, many of the people who are targeting buildings these days are using disruption in a different way. So it's the same kind of tactic, but it's a question of the way that it's embedded in a campaign or what I call it, it's a repertoire of contention. So when disruption is part of a repertoire, it's embedded in a campaign that

goes broader than just disrupting and getting public attention and hopefully media attention. It's about disruption to draw attention to a campaign. that you've been working on. Probably the best example of this is the divestment efforts on college campuses where you have college students, alumni, and faculty drawing attention to the ways that endowments are invested in and making money from fossil fuel expansion and investment and trying to pressure the universities to move their funds. And the students will draw attention to it. They'll lobby. They'll use what we call these institutional tactics they have available. all of that is part of this repertoire of contention, being, you know, engaging in civil disobedience, but it's just part of their campaign.

Is there a fear that these protests could be counterproductive? Like, could it turn people away from the climate movement to have to sit in traffic because people are blocking the road or things like that? There's absolutely legitimate fear there. At the same time, there is very little research that shows that people who have actually experienced this. type of activism are turned off to the cause. The research that actually does kind of experiments looking at people who have experienced this kind of activism that is disruptive, this type of civil disobedience. In most cases, what they find is that either people's attitudes about the issue don't change or they get stronger and they start to worry more about the climate crisis because

they're activists who are willing to, you know, block traffic. Now, it is true. that there's also a lot of research that shows that the people who are actually doing the protesting and the civil disobedience, they're not very well supported by the people who experience them. So basically, the groups that are doing the civil disobedience will have less support after doing such as, you know, such an act. But, you know, they will say, and there's lots of research that backs this up, that they're not doing it to be popular. And in fact, research shows us, If we look historically that some of the most effective tactics that have been used by movements in the United States over our history were disruptive and were extremely unpopular. Take, for example, during the civil rights period where there was a lot of disruptive activism.

But the disruptive activism and even some of the less disruptive activism was not very popular than general public. But it was very successful at getting more public attention and public attention to the way that, you know, Black Americans were being treated, which was a huge part of, you know, the movement's efforts to shine a light on the injustices. And in the end of it worked. I mean, it didn't work as well as it means to, but it certainly started a process that continues today. So, Dana, before we go, I want to ask, what might we expect from the future of climate activism? Well, Kathleen, I wish that I could tell you that this is just a wave of contention. It's, you know, it's a small period of protest. and then everybody's going to go back to their everyday lives and we don't have to think about it anymore. But unfortunately, the science is pretty clear. The world is warming.

We are approaching a number of tipping points that are going to cause climate shocks to become more frequent, more severe, and take place in more locations around the world. You know, we saw what happened in Pakistan this summer. We're going to continue to see the effects of a warming world. and that is going to mobilize more and more people to engage in activism, including civil disobedience, until we address the problem sufficiently. So, I mean, what I talk about in my book is that the only way to save ourselves is for people to pressure the power brokers for the type of systemic change

that is well documented to be what's needed. And we're nowhere near that. And until we get there, there's no reason not to expect that the people are going to rise up along with the waters. Dr. Dana Fisher is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland College Park. Dana, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Climate activism is also getting the big screen treatment this spring. And that's the subject of our next science goes to the movies. The new film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is an action-packed thriller. It follows a group of young climate activists who, disillusioned by the slow pace of climate action, decide to take drastic action in the name of the climate. The name of this movie comes from a 2021 nonfiction book by Andreas Malm. That book is a manifesto that argues that property damage and sabotage are the only way forward for climate activism. The movie features characters who struggle with this question and whether there's a different way,

to accomplish their climate goals. I spoke to Ariel LeBearer, actor, screenwriter, and producer of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. And we started by talking about the process of writing this provocative script with director Daniel Goldhaeber. I asked her how she balanced these different perspectives about climate action. Yeah, I mean, so I wrote the script with Danny and Jordan Scholl. and a lot of the conversations that these characters have, these differing point of views came from a lot of our initial conversations around what we wanted to do with this movie

and how we wanted it to be received initially when Danny approached me with the idea for this, he wanted to make a piece of outright propaganda, which was an idea that both excited and terrified me because while I had long been engaged with the ideas around property destruction in social movements, putting that out on a mass scale without these contexts of these conversations made me nervous. And so it was actually through these conversations that Danny and I had about how we would be seen, about how this movie would be received, the impact that it could have,

and our like fears around it that became a very quick narrative and character tension in the movie. And a lot of it plays out throughout the characters of Alicia and Sochi. You're doing double duty on this film. You wrote the screenplay, and you also play one of the central characters whose name is Sochi. What was that experience like? I mean, extremely cathartic. It's interesting because when we first started writing the script, I in no way was thinking about being in the movie. Sochi was one of the first characters I really thought of, because the idea at first was just,

what if it was us and our friends who did this tomorrow? and Sochi was someone that I started processing my own feelings around how I had engaged in climate movements in the past, being someone who believed in divestment and believe, and to extents I still do. I think it's an ecosystem of things that I'll have to work together to make progress. And divestment is absolutely a necessary tool. But I also, you know, wanted to engage with ideas around like a radical flank and sabotage and all. of these things. Sochi was a way of processing that kind of feeling of a lack of agency and a need to take it with force while also writing Alicia very much from the perspective of my fears around doing something like this. And that whole tension, basically their whole final conversation was

my like internal tension around writing the script at all. And then once we decided that I would play Sochi, part of Danny's pitch around that was that Sochi could also be a vehicle for us to interrogate our relationship to putting yourself at the center of a movement. Like, the type of ego that exists around that and what good and what setbacks that causes a movement that is so collective, that has to be so about community. When you were preparing for this movie, did you speak with climate activists? I know for writing it, we first contacted Andreas, just kind of pitching the idea. Andreas Mom, who wrote How to Bulp the Pipeline, and he, you know, was excited and also had no idea how we could do this,

but he immediately put us in touch with a lot of activists, and we also just started talking to our friends. And at a certain point in our conversations with Andreas, when we kind of, you know, mentioned some of our hesitations around making a movie about this, subject matter, he was extremely supportive of that and even started sending us dissenting opinions, just like reviews of his book that hated the book and was like, this makes great points to really round out the cast of characters. And we were very much advised to not make this group a monolith that all just kind of agrees on their one thing. What message do you want people to take away from this movie? I mean, they're sitting in the theater, the lights go up, people are starting to leave. I mean, how do you want people to feel?

I don't want to push one thing. I think that would be the least interesting way forward. I hope that this meets people where they're at and brings them into a conversation. I think specifically it being in theaters is important because it brings people into physical space together to discuss these ideas. And I think community and organizing is just going to be the best thing we can do moving forward. forward. Thanks to Ariel Liberer for joining me to talk about how to blow up a pipeline, the movie. The film is in theaters now. We had help from lots of people this week to make the show happen, including education program manager Sandy Roberts, executive director Daniel Johnson, controller Beth Rami, and our newest team member, stewardship manager Stanley Delva. B.J. Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover too. I'm Sophie Bushwick. And I'm Kathleen Davis. Ira's back next week.