Science Friday - History Of Conservation, Right Whales Decline. April 16, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Conserving More Than Just the Planet’s ‘Beloved Beasts’ Historically, “conservation” simply meant not overhunting a game animal, preserving sufficient populations to continue to hunt the following year. Over time, however, conservationists have learned to broaden their focus from individual animals to entire ecosystems, protecting not just species, but the food webs and habitat they need to thrive. But the evolution of conservationist thought hasn’t been straightforward. In her new book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, science journalist Michelle Nijhuis profiles some key figures in the history of the conservation movement–from well-known names such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, to lesser known figures such as 1930s-era bird lover Rosalie Edge. Nijhuis explains how some of these conservationists did the wrong thing for the right reasons, while others managed to do the right thing despite misguided or short-sighted thinking. SciFri’s Charles Bergquist talks with Nijhuis about how conservationist thought has progressed, and her hopes for the future of the movement.     The Plight Of The North Atlantic Right Whale Every year, Earth Day is a reminder that we share this planet with many other species, large and small. And every year, humans have to reckon with the impact we have on those species—like the recent case of the disappearing North Atlantic Right Whale. Experts estimate there are fewer than 400 right whales living off the coast of the North Atlantic. Less than 90 are reproductive age females. Their declining population and poor birth rate can be largely explained by one thing: humans. Boat strikes and entanglements in lobster fishing gear accounted for nearly two thirds of right whale deaths in the last decade—and new research suggests those deaths are being undercounted. A new documentary called “Entangled,” by Boston Globe reporter and filmmaker David Abel, gives us a glimpse of what these encounters are doing to right whales, introducing a slew of researchers, conservationists, lobstermen, lawmakers and politicians who are tangled up in the effort to save the species from extinction. Charles “Stormy” Mayo, a Senior Scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies, and Melanie White, a project manager for the North Atlantic Right Whale Conservation at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute—both featured in the film—join Ira to discuss the tragic story of the right whales, and the simple, high-tech solution that is getting little attention and even less research funding. Plus, Massachusetts implemented a nearly state-wide ban on lobster fishing in all state waters from February through early May, giving right whales an opportunity to feed unencumbered in Cape Cod Bay as they migrate. The ban also gives local scientists an opportunity to monitor the pods, tracking which whales have returned, and how they’re fairing. WCAI environment reporter Eve Zuckoff shares thoughts on her recent journey out into the bay with right whale scientists.     It’s Okay To Be Confused About J&J’s Vaccine This week, the FDA and CDC both recommended a temporary pause in distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine, after the emergence of a very rare, very unusual blood clotting side effect. The clots, which block blood leaving the brain, have been found in only six of the nearly seven million people who have already received the vaccine in the U.S. One has died, and another is in critical condition. Vox staff writer Umair Irfan has been reporting on the Johnson & Johnson pause, and joins Ira to explain the challenging balance between side effect risks—the rarest of which cannot be detected in clinical trials and therefore naturally emerge when vaccination moves to the general population—and the benefits of protecting people from COVID-19. Plus, what recommendations the FDA may end up making. He also talks about why a small number of people are still getting COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, the grim outlook for wildfire in the West this summer, and more science stories from the week. 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 Ira Flato. Later in the hour, on this Earth Day edition of Science Friday, the story of the endangered ripe whale. And a new book looks at the history of the conservation movement. But first, earlier this week, the FDA and CDC both recommended a temporary halt on the use of the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. After the data showed rare instances of an unusual blood clotting condition, how rare are we? we talking? Well, six people out of seven million who have received the vaccine, all of the women, between the ages of 18 and 48. Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he expects the pause to last from days to weeks while the FDA decides on recommendations for how to move forward. For a similar clotting issue linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine, meanwhile, the UK has advised that people under 30

opt for a different vaccine. Here to help untangle the risk, and the challenges of a rare vaccine side effect, plus other important stories this week, Fox staff writer Umer Irfan. Welcome back, Umair. Thanks, Ira. Let's get right into this. You've been reporting on this J&J pause. Do we know why the vaccine might have caused these clots? Well, it's just speculation at this point, but it may be that the spike protein that is generated by these vaccines, the vaccine administers the instructions to your human body for making the protein, and then the body uses that protein as a target for its immune response. And so the idea may be that this is actually triggering an autoimmune reaction that is triggering blood clots.

But critically with this condition, it's not just that they're causing clots, but also that they're causing another related condition called thromocetopinia, which is a low level of blood platelets. And that's why regulators are really worried, because these two conditions together, mean that you can't use the same conventional treatments for blood clots. The low levels of blood platelets means you can't use blood thinners because that will lead to actual more complications. And so they really want to come up with a way to warn doctors if they see these symptoms and come up with the protocol to make sure that if they do find this in some patients,

that they are ready to treat it in a way that doesn't make the situation worse. You know, so I would imagine that people who are supposed to get vaccinated or think they're getting vaccinated with the J&J vaccine, they're probably really confused right now. Right. And I mean, this is a difficult needle for regulators to thread. I mean, right now we're talking about a complication that's extremely rare, as you noted. You know, we're talking about almost literally a one in a million type complication. And some people have criticized the regulators for overreacting to this. But because this complication occurs in very specific circumstances, they want to come up with a way to make sure that they can get these complication rates to zero.

And, you know, we saw something pretty similar with the other MRNA vaccines with the Moderna and the Pfizer-Bioentech vaccines because we saw some severe allergic reactions and people who received them. And what regulators did was they developed a screening criteria for people who were about to receive the vaccine to filter out people who have a history of severe allergic reactions and also added a waiting period post-vaccination for 15 minutes to make sure that if there was any complication that people could get treatment right away. So we could potentially see sort of a similar set of instructions.

being deployed for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, basically a way to screen out people at high risk or adding an additional precaution. Should we be surprised that a complication is coming out now that millions of people are getting vaccinated? This is actually what we expected, because when we test vaccines in clinical trials, we're only testing them in tens of thousands of people, but now we're administering them in hundreds of millions of people, and that's where the very, very rare complications start to arise. And so regulators say that they're acting out of an abundance of caution, even though these are rare complications and the benefits of these vaccines still outweigh the risk. They want to make sure that

they can get the risk to as low as possible because we want as many people as possible to get these vaccines. Another thing you've been following is this phenomenon also rare in which people who are fully vaccinated are still getting sick with COVID-19. What's going on there? Right. The CDC calls these breakthrough infections, and they reported some additional data this week. They found that out of the 75 million or so people in the U.S. that have had full vaccinations, about 5,800 of them were reported to have contracted COVID-19. And of those cases, about 396 resulted in hospitalization and 74 in death. Now, that was expected as well because we know that these vaccines, even though they're highly effective, they're not perfect. They're not airtight. And we still have a rampant

pandemic, which means that even vaccinated people are still being exposed to the virus. And if they get exposed enough, some of them may be vulnerable to an infection. Not everybody's immune system is the same and not everybody receives the same level of protections. But on balance, it shows that the rate of breakthrough is extremely low and that these vaccines work exceptionally well. Pfizer said this week that we're likely to need booster shots as soon as a year after the first vaccine. And we've been hearing that these drug companies are preparing possibly for that for later this year. Right. So some of them are investigating booster shots, basically an identical version of the shot, but one more of it, or some of them are reformulating their vaccines to target these new variants that are in circulation.

Right now, the B117 variant is very likely to become the dominant version of the virus here in the U.S. It seems to be able to slightly more effectively escape protection from the vaccine, even though the vaccines still remain highly effective against that one as well. And so the pharmaceutical companies are investigating both options, basically a booster or a reformer version of the vaccine, but it's not clear yet whether we will need them at this point. It's also a function of how much we can control the spread of the virus. Yeah, and speaking of the spreading of the virus, things are pretty bad in Michigan right now. Are they not? I mean, is it related to what we're talking about or is a whole different issue there?

Well, it's a mix of factors. Michigan is now closing in on its record of COVID-19 cases and is reaching a new peak here. And there's a number of reasons behind this. Well, one is that, of course, there is this new variant in circulation, the B117 variant, which is a little bit more transmissible and also more dangerous. But Michigan also began restricting or relaxing some of its lockdown restrictions in February. And many of these outbreaks seem to be associated with gatherings of people. And people in Michigan are also having a hard time signing up for getting vaccines. And so these factors all combine mean that, you know, there seems to be a little more transmissible strain, people having a hard time getting protection and also getting together seems to me

fueling these additional spikes. And a lot of states are opening up, totally, aren't they? Right. And so this is sort of a warning sign for states that, you know, if you relax too soon, you could potentially undo some of the fragile progress that they've made. Let's move on. Just in time for Earth Day, the state of Montana has been pushing a number of bills to allow people to hunt wolves in this state because the Trump administration took them off the endangered species list. Right. The gray wolves are, you know, the classical story of conservation. They were added to the endangered species list back in the 1970s, and since then,

because of conservation efforts and some reintroduction efforts, they've recovered in much of the Western United States in places like Montana, and the latest estimate shows that there's about 1,200 wolves in the state. But a consequence of that is that now people are getting worried about these wolves. There's a question about how many wolves are appropriate. What's the correct level to have? So there are hunting groups that are concerned about wolves attacking deer and elk populations and there are farming groups that are concerned about wolves attacking livestock. And so in Montana, they've recently started pushing these bills through the legislature. Two of them have already been signed by the governor that would extend the hunting season,

that would allow them to use more methods of killing wolves and even reimburse hunters, essentially giving them bounties for killing wolves. And this has been criticized, of course, by conservation groups saying that, you know, even though we've made progress, we're not out of the woods just yet. And, you know, it's not just Montana. Wisconsin had a wolf hunt last month. Minnesota has debated similar bills. Why are the states so keen on killing the wolves? Well, for exactly the reasons I mentioned, you know, that this is a lot of farmers and a lot of people in the region, you know, have misperceptions of how wolves fit within

the broader ecosystem and see them as a threat. In Montana in particular, conservationists point out that actually deer and elk populations are fairly stable and at some of the highest levels that they've seen and they've grown alongside the wolf populations. And so all these animal populations are relatively healthy at the moment. The wolves don't seem to be threatening them. But there's also sort of a culture war issue as well that, you know, once these gray wolves have been delisted, a lot of people are saying, why is the government still involved in regulating them? Or why is the government still protecting these animals and restricting our rights to protect our land or our desire to hunt? And so this is one of the tensions that we're seeing across many of these

habitats. So it seems to be a back and forth, back and forth. If you allow the hunters to go back, we might see the wolves endangered again. Potentially, but hunters say that, you know, they can also hunt in ways that are sustainable. And that remains to be seen if there are practices that will help maintain these populations. We know that spring is just getting started, but out west, researchers are already sizing up the wildfire risk for this summer. And it's not looking good, is it? No, it's not. This winter, the West had very little precipitation, and of that precipitation, it's been dissipating very quickly. The snowpack is actually disappearing pretty early this season and very fast. And if you look at the drought conditions, about 76% of the West, about three quarters of it, is in drought conditions right now compared to about a quarter, 27%, around the same time last year. So this combination of dry weather and then likely with summer heat is going to create much more dry vegetation. that's going to be primed to burn. And I guess there is a benefit for predicting that we're in for another bad wildfire season

because maybe people can be more careful. Right. You know, the vast majority of wildfires are ignited by humans, and that can be things like power lines, unattended fires, and things like that. So people could be taking additional precautions around these highly dry vegetation areas. But people can also be preparing for the inevitable smoke that's associated with these fires by better insulating their windows and purchasing air purifiers to help mitigate some of the health impacts that are associated with them.

And finally, before you go, a quick look ahead. NASA is getting ready to test the first ever helicopter on Mars. It's been postponed and on again, off again. Right. This is the ingenuity helicopter. It's this small box with two counter-rotating rotors. NASA ran into some hardware problems that they've managed to fix, but are now fixing some software problems and they're trying to reinstall some of the control hardware. The issue with this is that they

don't have a live control system because of the latency of communicating with Mars. So all this flighting has to be done autonomously. And of course, there's really no way to pick it up if it tips over. So NASA wants to be extra careful when they protect when they do the first flight of this aircraft. And we're talking what, just about 30 seconds at 10 foot elevation. Right. This is going to be a very brief first flight. But NASA is acknowledging that, you know, also that, you know, the Wright Brothers' first flight was only 12 seconds. And so ingenuity is actually going to be carrying a piece of the Wright Brothers' first aircraft on it as it takes its first flight on another planet. Very cool. Thank you, Amer. Thanks, Ira. Omer Irfan, staff writer for Vox based

in Washington, D.C. After the break, untangling our role in the potential demise of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, one high-tech solution, and how a springtime lobster fishing ban in Massachusetts may help. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Every year, Earth Day, is a reminder that we share this planet with so many species big and small. And perhaps nowhere is there a more classic case of us versus them than in the story of the North Atlantic right whale. Experts estimate there are less than 400 right whales living off the coast of the North Atlantic. Of those that are left, less than a quarter are able to give birth to new calves.

Their declining population, poor birth rate can be largely explained by one thing. Humans. Boat strikes and entanglement in lobster fishing gear account for nearly two-thirds of the right whale deaths in the last decade, and new research suggests those deaths are being undercounted. A new documentary entangled by Boston Globe reporter and filmmaker David Abel gives us a glimpse of what these encounters are doing to the population of Wright Whales and introduces us to the slew of researchers, conservationists, lobstermen, lawmakers, politicians tangled up in the effort to save the species from extinction. Despite all of the efforts that have gone on, entanglement has got worse. In the last 16 years, we've killed 70 right whales, and

entanglement was the primary problem. Joining me to talk more about it, are two people featured in the documentary. Dr. Charles Stormy Mayo, senior scientist and director of research at the Wright Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies. Melanie White, North Atlantic White Whale Conservation Project Manager at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you for having us. Thank you, Ira. You're welcome. Stormy, let me begin with you. In the film, you're featured as one of the people who works to disentangle whales from these lobster nets. You said you came up with the official method of doing this.

How was this done? When we started, David Matilla and I were offshore, and we ran into, not literally, but figuratively, a whale we knew well that was tangled up in nets. We were trying to figure out how to stop the whale because it was on long dives and actually cut the animal free. And on that memorable day, my father, who was aboard the boat and had hunted pilot whales, said, kegum, kegum, and nobody knew what that meant except for me, and that was use a keg at the end of a rope.

We threw a grapple into the tangling nets. We used a big fisherman's float, and it succeeded in stopping the whale, and we got it free. And that started our efforts that now are being used in lots of locations in both hemispheres. First slow the whale down and then cut the whale free. I know that you're a native of Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's at the tip of Cape Cod Bay where these whales appear every spring. Can you tell us how has the story of these whales changed over the last several decades? Well, in the beginning, when I started was back in the middle of the middle of,

80s, in that time, not much was known about them. They still are mysteries. But unfortunately, over that period of time, in the last several decades, there's been two situations that conspire to bring this animal very close to extinction. One is that the calving rate, the birth rate, is now quite low. Death rate is going up. And that usually, from what we know, is from entanglement in fishing gear and being hit struck by ships. And the combination of the two mortalities and the low birthing rate means that the population is now, over these last decades, has gone into a negative pattern with an estimated population right now of around 360 animals remaining and a declining trajectory.

So it's not looking good. Melanie, as right whales migrate down the coast to their calving grounds off of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, that's where you come in. Tell us about what you do. Yes, so I am the supervisor for three of the four aerial survey teams down on the calving grounds. So anywhere from December through mid-April, survey teams are taking to the sky off the coast of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. to try to find right whales. It is the only known calving grounds for the species, and we are hoping to see adult females come down

and give birth to their live young. The number one goal is to see who is giving birth. We can individually identify the right whales, and we will in real time in the planes that we fly, figure out who we have. So we have boat-based teams traveling along with the aircraft so that they too can do some additional work when we spot right whales on their calving grounds. So one of the issues that you are trying to understand is the birth rate,

is the birth rate high enough in order to keep up the population? Unfortunately, no. This season, it was really exciting that currently 17 mother calf pairs were cited throughout the calving season. But that's not a high enough number for these whales to secure. successfully be able to continue that population. As Stormy mentioned, the birth rate is just is too low. We need these calving numbers to be well in the 20s to have a chance of these animals being able to survive in the future. You know, 17 sounds like a great number. That's up from

10 from the 2020 season. But unfortunately, it still isn't where it needs to be. And three calves have died so far this year. Is that correct? One struck by a vessel off of the Florida coast? That's correct. Unfortunately, the major problems for these whales are human-related activities, and so not only are entanglements in fishing gear are a very big problem, but also vessel strikes. And there was a calf that washed up ashore in St. Augustine in February, and it was determined that the cause of death was consistent with a vessel strike. Yeah. Stormy, when you confront the lobster fisherman with the fact that they're their lines are entangling the whales and causing their deaths,

what do the lobster fishermen have to say about this? Well, if my family were fishermen back into the 1600s, so they and the lobstermen understandably say, please don't shut us down. On the other hand, fishermen share the ocean, so they have a sensitivity to the story of right whales, and they are, in many cases, working as well as they can with developing new methods. So they're working in that direction, but the fishermen, understandably, do not want to be told to not fish in order to protect right whales.

So it's a difficult scene and not one that has been easy to solve over the last decades. Let's talk about that solution that you mentioned, the most obvious solution to this problem to a techie person like me, would be to get rid of the fishing lines. And the film shows that people have been working on technology for ropedless fishing nets. It features a really interesting solution that is being tested. A deflated airbag is placed on the lobster trap. It's lowered into the water. And when it's time to bring it to the surface, an audio tone is sent into the water,

inflating the bag, up pops the trap to the surface. And it seems to work. What could be wrong with this to the surface? the fishermen. Why would they not be in favor of this? In the beginning, as we looked at that, that seemed like an obvious solution. And it eventually, I think, will work. Though if you listen to the fishermen who obviously spend their lives at sea and understand the problems, the buoys and rope we see that are sort of characteristic of the coastal New England waters have always been used to warn other fishermen that your gear is there,

and they should avoid that area and go to a different place. And right now, part of the issue is trying to figure out how to allow the fishing industry to know where the gear on the bottom is, where the traps that catch lobsters and crabs are to be found. You know, you have MIT around the corner with a bunch of smart folks there. You would think in the 21st century you could spend a little federal research money and find a high-tech solution that could be found for this 400-year-old technology that they're using now. Yeah, well, I will also say on behalf of my fishing family, fishermen are traditionalists,

and I think to some degree that plays into it all. But the fishermen are understanding of the plight of the right whale, and they are collaborating, and they're collaborating with groups like MIT to figure out, how to solve some of the problems. And it will happen, but we hope it happens faster than it has been. Well, they were able to adopt GPS. I'm sure they all have those on their boats and even have motors, which they didn't used to have back in the day, 100 years ago. Adopted that. Not so difficult. All right, let's move on, because I agree with you. There is a solution to this, it sounds like. In fact, this year, Massachusetts implemented a nearly statewide ban on lobster fishing in all state water.

from February through early May, giving right whales an opportunity to feed unencumbered in Cape Cod Bay as they migrate further northward. The ban also gives local scientists an opportunity to monitor the pods to track which whales have returned and how they're faring. WCAI environment reporter Eve Zucoff

traveled out into the bay with one of these research teams this past weekend, and she's here to talk more about it with us. Hi, Eve. Hi, there, Ira. So where do things stand right now in Cape Cod Bay? How are the whales doing? How many of them are there?

Give us a little thumbnail sketch, if you will. Yeah, well, there have been 180 whales seen in Cape Cod Bay this season, which is about half the population. Just last week, 67 right whales were seen south of Cape Cod Bay, and they're just kind of a mystery like that. So, you know, they matriculate out of the area end of April, following their food source, these kind of reddish-brown plankton known as copepods. And then there are teams of people taking photos of these whales on boats and from planes and drones.

And those images are compiled into this massive decades-old catalog maintained by scientists who put together profiles of the whales. So over time, they can figure out, you know, these whales are shifting their movements north. or they can figure out a female has given birth or a juvenile is faring well or poorly with its body condition. To help themselves along the way, they also give the whales little nicknames. So there's like Millipede who's named for propeller scars on her back that look like kind of little insects. There's cotton tail, boomerang, snow cone. My recent favorite is garlic. And I know these names make them sound kind of cute and fluffy, but these animals can weigh up to 70 tons.

They're pretty massive. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So we've had to these researchers collect data from a boat in the bay there. Yeah, so when I went out with right-wheel researcher, scientist named Michael Moore, just last week, he used a drone rigged up with a camera, actually. So what happens is another scientist wearing a helmet for safety precautions, stood at the bow of the boat holding a drone above her head, and then Moore launches it out of her hands 200 feet into the...

the air. And then what he does is once the drone is in the air is he handles the controls for the drone, kind of blindly moving it left and right, while this second scientist on the bow looks down at an iPad screen and directs him to get the whale in the middle of the frame. So she'd call out, left, left, left, right, forward, forward, forward, forward. Right, right, right. He's a great shot. I mean, it sounds chaotic, but they were completely in sync, and it was really actually incredible to watch. We haven't talked specifically about what these entanglements look like yet. That's right. The way they get entangled is kind of because of the way the whales feed. So they move through the water with their mouths open, sucking up their little plankton, filtering it out.

And scientists believe what happens is that a whale will come across a rope in the water that kind of gets stuck in their baleen. And it's kind of like really bothersome floss. So the whale will try to spin, to shed the rope. But what they can do is get entangled even worse. So the rope wraps around their flippers, their tails. It clamps their mouths shut so that over time they can starve or suffer infections. And I spoke to scientist Michael Moore, who described the entanglement of a whale named 2030. And this whale was found with a gill net stretching over its back and wrapped around both flippers.

By the time it had died, the net had dissected the blubber off its back. So there was this huge absence of blubber for maybe 10 feet across the midline of its back. Moore says, you know, if a dog walked into a downtown area with the disturbing, painful injuries that these whales still suffer, there would be national legislation and millions of dollars set aside to save them the very next week. So why isn't that money coming? It's hard to really nail that answer down. There is some legislation. A congressman from Massachusetts named Seth Moulton is working on the Say of the Whales Act, which is looking to get some money really dedicated to these whales. But I spoke to one right whale researcher. He basically spends nights and weekends trying to get funding for ropless fishing, which is kind of insane to think about. And right now, the money is coming from grants from SeaWorld. I mean, it's not coming in mass. in a meaningful way from the federal government. And in my reporting, honestly, I have not been able to nail down exactly why the political will isn't quite there to get that funding. But a lot of it,

you know, it has to do with the interests of fishermen who are really resistant to ropless fishing. I mean, I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had where ropedless fishing comes up unprompted as just something where fishermen say, it's not safe, I don't trust it. I don't even want to test it. I mean, there's willingness among some of them. them, but others are really opposed. They don't see it working here. So, Melanie, things don't look like they're heading in a good direction. The whale population is going down and we're going to reach a tipping point. You know, we're heading down a path that does not look good, but we're not at that crossroad yet. And we just need that calf production rate to be at a much higher number.

I'm always told I'm the eternal optimist, which you have to be. Every season, provides its own new excitement. And so, you know, already looking forward to next season as this season for the calving grounds wrap up and know that there's a lot of susceptibility that these whales are going to encounter between now and next winter. And again, researchers up and down the East Coast are working as hard as we can to keep these whales safe

so that those numbers can increase and we can help to decrease that mortality rate. I might add that looming over this entire story is the issue of climate change. Although, as you know from the climate change story, when you try to figure out what the biological reflections of it are, you don't always get good answers. But there are strong indications that the population is responding to a changed ecosystem because it's changing where the whales go and they're leaving places where there's protection for them, and they're moving into places where they are no longer protected.

Well, we'll keep watching this story. It's really an interesting and timely story and a sad story for everyone involved. I want to thank my guests, Dr. Charles Stormy Mayo, senior scientist and director of research at the Center for Coastal Studies, Melanie White, North Atlantic Wright Whale Conservation Project Manager at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute. Eve Zuccoff, environmental reporter for WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. After the break, a new book tackles the history of the conservation movement. We'll be right back. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

Continuing our lead-up to Earth Day next week, the first Earth Day 51 years ago, was all about pollution. We had rivers burning, air full of soot and smog. Well, pollution still threatens us, but our... climate crisis has changed our focus. Habitats are shrinking or shifting. Some species are still critically threatened. But in a few cases, there are victories. The conservation movement has been successful at preserving species and ecosystems. Syphrates Charles Berkwist is here. Hi, Charles. Hey, Ira. Happy almost Earth Day to you? To you too. Do you have a favorite conservation or environmental icon? You know, as a child of the 60s, I'd have to say that one of the names that most

resonates with me is Rachel Carson and her seminal book, Silent Spring, because it made me and a lot of people aware of how a chemical, a simple thing like DDT, could have such a far-reaching effect on an ecosystem and the birds that live there. Yeah, she's definitely a major figure in the lineage of conservation. But did you know that some of the of the key observations in Silent Spring, the data that based her figures on Raptor decline. They existed mainly because back in 1934, this scrappy conservationist named Rosalie Edge bought up the land around Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania in defiance of the Audubon Society. She was battling them at the time.

Really? I had no idea. Yeah. It's something I learned from a new book on the history of some of these icons from the conservation movement. It's called Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nyhouse, and I had a chance to talk to her recently. I started by asking her how she defined conservation. Conservation in the sense of preventing waste and loss has, of course, been around for as long as humans have been around. People have been restraining their own hunting activities to make sure they had enough animals for the next season for probably millennia. But the modern conservation movement started in the late

1800s when people first realized that they could drive species globally extinct. And the conservation movement has grown and developed since then into a movement to protect not only individual species, but relationships among species and relationships between species and their habitats. So it overlaps with the concerns of environmentalism quite a bit, but environmentalism as a global movement didn't really get its start until the early 1960s. You've been a science writer covering the natural world for over 20 years now. What made you write this book? Well, before I was a journalist, I made a living as a field assistant on wildlife research projects

throughout the Southwest. So I got up close with not only some fascinating creatures, but some of the very passionate and even violent debates over threatened and endangered species that were taking place at the time are still unfolding all over the world. And what struck me about those arguments was that the questions people were asking were so basic and profound, you know, instead of arguing over the details of how to save these species or how to protect these species for the long term, people were asking, you know, why is the species important?

Why should we save this particular one and not another? Whose responsibility is it? And I had a sense at the time that people in the past had asked these questions. and propose some answers. But I think like most people interested in conservation, I didn't have a very strong sense of conservation history as an intellectual movement or as a tradition that had built on itself over time. So I realized that it might be useful to try to piece together this history and look at how people had answered these profound questions over time and how those answers had changed over the years. Stories of conservation are often these tales of the charismatic

creature. And maybe one of the best examples is the story of the bison in North America, how they were almost hunted to extinction and brought back. But as you tell it, the story is much more nuanced than that. It's true that Plains bison was one of the first species that galvanized the modern conservation movement. Before the mid-1800s, people in North America and Europe didn't really have a sense that human activities could drive species extinct. They had relatively recently realized that extinction could happen at all. And then to understand that human activities could in fact make a species disappear forever was another realization entirely. But once people grasped that idea, many people then entered another stage of denial where they would say, well, this is very sad.

But maybe this is the price of national progress. And it took a few founding conservationists, most likely. wealthy hunters to stand up and say, look, this is tragic, yes, but it's not inevitable, and we have a responsibility to do something about it. So those early conservation leaders, namely a man named William Hornaday, who was a taxidermist and a trophy hunter, and eventually the director of the Bronx Zoo, took it upon himself to raise a herd of bison in the Bronx and put them on a train and send them out to Oklahoma. There are many, many ironies to William Hornaday's story, he was more concerned about protecting the ability of white, wealthy men to hunt the bison

than he was about restoring the really devastating effects of the decline of the bison on Native American communities and First Nations. But the happy irony of the bison story to me is that in the decades since Hornaday's death, Native American tribes and First Nations have begun a much more ambitious effort to restore the bison to the plains ecosystem. And there's now a really exciting tribally led continent-wide effort to bring the bison back in greater numbers and also to restore it to its place in the ecosystem in the sense of helping it recover its place as a keystone species in relationship with other prairie species. And Hornaday really didn't have a sense of that. He didn't have a sense of the bison as part of an ecosystem because the science of

ecology was so young at the time. So because of his actions, short-sighted as they were in some ways, we are now able to continue his work and facilitate a much, much richer and fuller recovery of bison on the plains and do that in parallel with a cultural recovery, which is really, I think, the direction that conservation should be going in the future and is just full of potential for both people and other species. I had always sort of mentally combined the creation of national parks with the conservation movement, but you write that conservation goals had to be almost back engineered into the park's mandate. That's true that the national parks movement operated in parallel in some ways with the early conservation movement. But the people who supported national parks were interested in protecting beautiful landscapes.

They were interested in developing tourism, in some cases. they were interested in commercial development and the places where the parks were located. Scientists and conservationists didn't see parks as potential wildlife refuges until several decades after the National Parks movement started. So they have almost retroactively become places where we conserve wildlife. So there are groups that were sort of preserving land. There were other groups that were focused on individual species or groups of species, let's block the plumage trade of feathers for fancy hats, for instance. At what point did we start thinking of ecosystems as a whole, and we need to protect this whole

ecological unit? Well, it really wasn't until the 1930s and 40s, and it's funny because I think most people who are interested in conservation and saving species today think, oh, of course, habitat is an important part of protecting species. Of course, they're part of an ecosystem. These are familiar terms to many people, even if they're not scientists. But it really wasn't until the science of ecology matured, and wildlife biologists, most prominently Aldo Leopold, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s and 40s, made the connection between protecting species and protecting the resources that they needed. Before then, wildlife conservation had mostly been about

stopping people from shooting too many animals, which was, of course, important. But Leopold and others realized that the next step was, once you stopped people from directly killing these animals, you had to make sure that you protected a place for them to live. Is there a lineage of conservationists? Do they exist as islands, or is there a connective thread from, say, Hornaday to Leopold that you can trace? Well, that was one of the most rewarding parts of this project for me. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think many conservationists or people interested in conservation have a strong sense of the movement's history.

I think we all know some famous names. Rachel Carson, maybe Aldo Leopold, maybe John Muir, but we think of these people as individual icons working more or less in isolation. And they did do great work on their own, but they also cooperated with many people famous and not so famous. And they were often in contact with one another, writing back and forth, arguing, disagreeing, building on each other's ideas. So to find correspondence between, for instance, Aldo Leopold and William Hornaday, who was a generation older than him, or between Aldo Leopold and Rosalie Edge, who was a bird conservationist in the 1930s, that was really exciting

to me just to realize that conservation is an ongoing inner-generational. project. It's an ongoing conversation, an ongoing argument, and it's a cooperative effort. It's not something that people can or do accomplish alone. You mentioned Rosalie Edge just now. There's this fascinating story about how she came to blows with the Audubon Society, but in a roundabout way, contributed to Rachel Carson's work. Yeah, Rosalie Edge is not as well known as some of the other people I profile in my book, but she was key to a very important expansion in the conservation movement. She was born into a wealthy family in Manhattan, came to conservation relatively late in life, and was horrified to find out that the Audubon Society, which whose leadership

at the time was composed more or less of the wealthy sportsmen who had founded the conservation movement, wasn't doing much to protect birds of prey, hawks and eagles, because sportsmen, at the time considered those birds pests, pests who preyed on the birds they wanted to hunt, and they just considered them kind of a lower class of a bird, a scavenger who ate leftovers, something not really worth protecting. And Rosalie Edge had a very precocious sense of ecological connections. And she said, look, conservation can't just be about protecting species you like. It has to be about protecting all species and the connections between them. She won that battle with the Audubon Society. The leadership eventually had to embrace protections for

Hawks Niles, and she also established a sanctuary for hawks that still exist today. It's called Hawk Mountain. It's in eastern Pennsylvania. I highly recommend you visit if you haven't gone. And the researchers there, beginning when the refuge was founded in the 1930s, started recording the numbers and kinds of birds that flew overhead. And that data, about 30 years later, became a key piece of evidence in Rachel Carson's case against DDT in her famous book, Silent Spring. So if Rosalie Edge had not started collecting that data, Rachel Carson might have had a much weaker case against DDT, and we might live in a very different world. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm Charles Berquist talking with science journalist Michelle Nighouse about her book, Beloved Beasts, about the history of the conservation movement. We keep using the term conservation icons, but I should make clear that this is not a book of hero worship. You give difficult stories of how some of the members of the early conservation movement had difficult views about race or the role of indigenous peoples in the landscape. As I mentioned earlier, conservationists full of people who did the right things for what we would now see as very wrong reasons. William Hornaday was one of many early conservationists who had raised. racist views, colonialist views, many views that we would now consider limited or were even considered limited at the time.

This is not, of course, to say that the practice of conservation is racist or that all conservationists are racist, nothing could be further than the truth. But my research showed that in every generation of conservationists, there are a few prominent individuals who have a very strong sense of the complexity of other species, but a much weaker sense of the complexity of our own species. In the worst cases, they see other races as less complex than their own. And then in a less pernicious but still counterproductive sense, they might see humans as not capable of individual decisions, sort of destined to cause damage to the environment. When we know from decades of social science research that humans are capable of playing a

constructive, as well as a destructive role in conservation, and that there's great opportunity for finding a constructive role for people to play in the ecosystems they live within. Are you hopeful or are you pessimistic about the future? It depends on the day. You know, one of the rewards of this project, the surprising reward really, was that the historical perspective did give me a sense of possibility and even on the best days, even optimism, because it made me see how many successes there have been in the past that we don't often appreciate as people who care about conservation because we're always focused on the next emergency.

Stepping back and seeing those successes did give me a sense of, okay, we've done it before. This can happen again. Of course, the progress of conservation has not been linear. There have been many steps backward and many failures along the way, but there has been overall, I think, a growing sophistication, a growing understanding of how complicated it is. and we know a lot and we know how to find out more, and we know in many cases what to do. It's a matter of finding the will to do it.

Michelle Nihaz is a project editor at the Atlantic. Her new book is Beloved Beasts Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, published by Norton. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. Thank you so much for having me. For Science Friday, I'm Charles Bergquist. One last thing before we go. We reached into the SciFri Archives for an interview,

back in 2000. That was the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. I talked to Dennis Hayes, one of Earth Day's original co-founders, and we reminisced on the early days of the environmental movement in the United States. You had rivers catching fire. People used to say, I want to breathe air, I can't see, right? But we don't have those visible reminders of environmental problems today. So Earth Day today is taken on a different form, the Air 3, 2000. Right. We still have in many parts of the world and in some parts of the United States these same early things that are threats to people and to their children and to their neighborhoods. But what's more profound in some ways is that over the last several decades,

our species has begun to have the ability to change for the worst the entire planet, to punch holes in the ozone layer, to trigger a global epidemic of extinction. and, of course, the one that we're choosing to focus on this year, global warming. And so what we're trying to do is to understand that with these global problems, there's no way that any one country can solve it by themselves. Wow, that does take me back. If you're like me and you like these little moments of science history captured on radio, you want to sign up for our new newsletter series.

Science Friday Rewind. We'll be dipping into our archive to look back on the history of the environmental movement. From the first rallies in the 70s that took place in the U.S. to the rise of environmental justice and equality to today's youth-led climate marches around the world. So please sign up at ScienceFriday.com slash rewind. That's ScienceFriday.com slash rewind. I know I will. Charles Berkwist is our director.

Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Senior producer is Alexa Lim. Contributing editor, John Dan Koski. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Iroflato.