Science Friday - Mapping An Insect Brain, Climate Education, Audubon Name, Wastewater Methane. March 31, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Sewage Is A Biological Necessity, And A Methane Minefield In most cities, once you flush a toilet, the water and waste flows through the sewage system to a water treatment plant. Once it’s there, it goes through a series of chemical and biological processes which clean it up and make the water safe to drink again. But a recent paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology finds that some of those sewage plants may be having a greater impact on the climate than previously thought. The anaerobic decomposition of organic material in the waste stream at sewage plants produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The researchers used an electric car fitted with a suite of atmospheric gas sensors to sniff the emissions downwind of 63 sewage treatment plants at different times and during different seasons. They found that the wastewater treatment process may release amounts of methane nearly twice that estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In a related study, other researchers analyzed data from published monitoring of wastewater treatment facilities around the globe—and arrived at a similar estimate of the methane production. Mark Zondlo, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, and one of the authors of the methane-sniffing research, talks with guest host Shahla Farzan about the studies, and about what might be done to mitigate the methane impact of treating our cities’ sewage.   Meet The Activist Reimagining Climate Education As a high school student, Sage Lenier remembers being frustrated with the way she was taught about climate change. It left her feeling helpless, contending with the gloomy predictions for a doom-filled future. Despite talking about the problems, she wasn’t learning anything about solutions. A year later at the University of California, Berkeley, Sage took it upon herself to create the course she wished she had—one focused on solutions and hope. Nearly 2,000 students have taken her course since, and she recently founded Sustainable & Just Future, a youth-led educational non-profit. Guest host Kathleen Davis talks with Sage about her experiences, why we’ve gotten climate education all wrong, and how we need to be thinking about our future.   The First Fully Mapped Animal Brain Is The Larva Of A Fruit Fly Understanding how a brain works is one of the most challenging tasks in science. One of the ultimate goals in brain research is to develop brain maps, which catalog which neurons are connected to others, and where. If researchers have a brain map, they can better understand neurological conditions like addiction, and develop more effective treatments. It may even help scientists understand more abstract concepts, like consciousness. The catch? Mapping millions, or even billions, of tiny little neurons is an extremely challenging and expensive task. But a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently completed a 12-year effort to map the entire brain of a fruit fly larva, which is the size of a grain of salt, and contains 3,000 neurons and 500,00 connections. Their results were published in the journal Science. Joining guest host Shahla Farzan is the paper’s senior author Joshua Vogelstein, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. They talk about how exactly his team completed this task, when a human brain map might be completed, and how this could be a meaningful step in understanding how enlightenment works.   National Audubon Society Sticks With Its Name, Despite Namesake’s Racism For more than a year, the National Audubon Society—one of the largest bird conservation groups—mulled over a big decision: whether or not they should rename the organization. Its namesake, John James Audubon, is known as the founding father of American birding. But Audubon and his family were anti-abolition and they enslaved nine people in their home. He also actively harmed and looted from Indigenous people. Earlier this month, the National Audubon Society announced its decision to keep “Audubon” in its name, saying that it’s important in allowing the organization to keep protecting birds. The open letter also says the organization represents “much more than the work of one person.” The decision to stick with the Audubon name has been met with intense backlash, from birders, local branches, and even its own employees. A handful of locally-run Audubon branches, from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin, plan to change their names to nix the word Audubon. Seattle’s branch is renaming itself “Birds Connect Seattle,” and Washington D.C.’s Audubon Naturalist Society is now “Nature Forward.” Guest host Kathleen Davis speaks with Stuart Wells, executive director of Portland Audubon and conservation scientist Corina Newsome about their reactions to the National Audubon Society keeping its name, and how changes are happening locally, including in places like Portland.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Shayla Farsan. We're sitting in for Ira Flato this week. Later in the hour, how an activist is challenging what climate education should look like. And the National Audubon Society announced it'll be keeping its name despite it being named after an enslaver. What that means for the burning community and what local chapters are doing about it. But first, we recently told you about researchers working to extract health data, from your toilet. Right, but now it's time to talk toilets a bit further downstream, specifically what happens after you flush the toilet. In most cities, once you flush, that water and whatever else is in it flows to a water treatment plant. Once it's there, it goes through a bunch

of different chemical and biological processes, which clean it up and make it safe to drink again. But a recent paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology finds that some of those sewage plants may be having a greater impact on the climate than we thought. Joining me to talk about that now is Mark Zondlo. He's a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, and one of the authors of that report. Welcome to the program. Thank you. All right, let's start with just some of the basics here. Why do sewage plants produce methane? So there's a lot of organic matter and waste, as one can imagine, and that gets collected by the sewage treatment plant. And the goal of the plant is to clean the water, to put it back into the waterways, to make a healthy environment.

But as part of that process, that organic material, that waste that comes into the plant, that carbon has to go somewhere and anaerobic conditions produce methane. And that's where the methane is coming from and can happen in many different sectors of plant. It can be clarifiers. It can be the sledge tanks. It can be the digesters. It can come from so many different components, any inefficiency in the plant that,

creates these anaerobic conditions, leads to methane emissions. Now, when we're talking about anaerobic digestion here, we're talking about bacteria specifically, right, munching down that organic matter, that's sewage? Correct. And then the reason why we're talking about methane here is that it's a really big contributor to climate change. Correct. The reason methane is important.

It's the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas, CO2 being the most important. But what makes methane really interesting, and from a mitigation perspective, it has a lifetime in the atmosphere of about 10 years. So if we can cut methane emissions now, we see a really big impact. And it buys us a little bit of time to the climate effects from global warming. On a 20-year horizon, methane is about 80 times more potent than a molecule of carbon dioxide. So when we're talking about kind of the methods for this particular study, your team basically sniffed the air downwind of dozens of different sewage plants. What does that look like, basically?

Like, what kinds of instruments are you using? So many times people see us on the side of the highway or driving around. They're like, oh, it's the Google car. I personally think it's much nicer and much, much more sophisticated than the Google car. But we have a bunch of laser sensors that can measure methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, ammonia and a suite of other gases, and weather conditions, winds, wind speed, wind direction. So with this suite of gases, we can fingerprint, hey, this is coming from the wastewater treatment plant or this is coming from this part even of the wastewater treatment plant and avoid, say, the car exhaust that's around us. And the advantage of our approach is we get the facility integrated emissions. So one of the problems with previous

studies of wastewater treatment plants is they look at lagoons or they look at a clarifying tank. They look at individual components of the plant. And that's great. It gives us process level understanding, but it's also a little bit biased because it assumes that everything is working perfectly and it ignores the rest of the plant. Hey, we know methane's coming from here. Let's take a couple samples. And then we can extrapolate that to the whole plant. But unfortunately, methane's generated in a lot of different parts of the plant.

And we see methane where we don't expect it to be. And that's the reason why I think we're seeing how. higher levels of methane is because we can't take individual components of plants and a very small subset of plants taken also at a very limited amount of time and extrapolate that to the entire sector. Right. So when you're talking about collecting these samples from the plumes, how close exactly do you have to get to the plant? Like, do you need to get permission from plant operators to get those samples? Well, some operators, we do go on site and we have permission to go on site. But generally speaking, we went just downwind, maybe a couple blocks away, no more than

a quarter of a mile. We go on public roads. We sample downwind of the plant. And again, we can fingerprint what other sources of methane are around. Now, the further you get away from the plant, our sensors are sensitive enough to do that, but then you get in other sources of methane that complicate the analyses. For example, if there are natural gas leaks and you're a half mile away, it becomes very difficult to say, yes, this is from the wastewater treatment plant. So typically we're on adjacent roads or within a couple blocks, and we can, by location, as well as by the fingerprint that we see of the gases, we can say this is coming from this plant. So there are satellite maps, right, of methane emissions out there from natural gas facilities

and fossil fuel production. Why can't we use the same kinds of things to look at sewage plants? So wastewater treatment plants, although they seem large at some level, they're still much smaller than the kind of resolution, the pixel size of satellite. There's some amazing satellite measurements that are both available now and our upcoming and different missions, but they're going to have trouble resolving the scale of a wastewater treatment plant. On top of that, most wastewater treatment plants are in cities. So you have this soup of other sources of methane. There could be a landfill upwind. So satellite pixels are typically on the order of a couple kilometers at the best. And that becomes really hard in a city environment to say, oh, okay, this plume is coming from the plant.

So satellite has great applications and the technologies are improving. So maybe in 10 years we can individually pick out within part of a city. These are the methane emissions from the wastewater treatment plant. But right now we just don't have that capability. Okay. So the big reveal here. you collected all this data. What did you find? We found that the methane emissions are underestimated by about a factor of two compared to the IPCC estimates, which is what the EPA uses. And the reason this is

concerning is because as we increase urbanization, we're going to have more and more centralized treatment. This is a good thing. However, we need to be very cognizant of how these plants operate, make sure they're operating really efficiently, and therefore to cut down the methammed. methane emissions. Cities are looking at net zero plans. You cannot do net zero unless you can look at wastewater treatment. So you had mentioned, you know, these results show that sewage plants are releasing about twice as much methane as we thought. So basically, the equivalent of 5.3 million metric tons of CO2, it's about the same amount as just over a million cars per year. But help us put this into context here. Like how big of a contribution to methane emissions are we

talking about overall here globally? Globally, the wastewater sector is about 6 to 9% of total methane emissions, but it's really uncertain. Why? Because we're using formulations from a limited number of plants, from a limited parts of the plant at limited times. And so it's a really uncertain number. And if we really want to understand where can we have mitigation efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, and like I said, methane's a big one because we can see immediately. impact right away. If we want to do that, we need to start understanding one of the main sectors in cities and also a non-trivial source kind of globally in the U.S. I mean, six to nine percent or even three to five percent in the U.S., it says, well, gee, that's not that much. But when you

think about it, one, it's underreported at those levels. And two, with rapid urbanization, with more centralized treatment, these are going to become a bigger problem in the future. We need to pay attention to the sector, and it really hasn't gotten that. They're public utilities. They don't get the extra scrutiny. It's not sexy. Wasteware treatment plants. Like you started out to show, toilets, right? So we need to start looking at this. They're highly engineered facilities. They're really actually quite complex and interesting to understand, but they haven't gotten the attention that, say, gas and oil wells have, even though from one very narrowly focused sector, we're talking, you know, five to 10 percent of the total global emissions roughly.

I mean, obviously there are different types of sewage treatment plants. Are there some plants that are bigger contributors to this methane problem than others? So it appears that the treatment plants with anaerobic digester, so where they put all the, after initial treatment, they put all the sludge in this container and anaerobic bacteria work on and produce methane. That's how it's designed. those seem to be leaking more than other types of plants. Now, that's a problem and an opportunity.

One, it's an opportunity because if we can capture this methane, we can use it for a circular economy. We can use it to power the plant, for example, and that methane doesn't escape to the atmosphere. So there are opportunities with this, but these digesters weak. And it's very common with the gas and oil supply chain. Anytime you have methane infrastructure, it leaks through valves,

it leaks through seals or O-rings. I mean, just it's hard to capture methane. And I think the gas and oil industry has seen that. And I think we can take advantage of some of the lessons learned there. Let's pay closer attention to these anaerobic digesters. Let's try and identify the leaks. And let's cut this out. So really, it is a win-win for the environment.

Obviously, we're not going to be, you know, stopping, flushing our toilets anytime soon and producing this waste. But it sounds like there are some things that we can do to try to prevent these leaks and try to stop them at the source then? Correct. We need a greater focus on trying to identify where the leaks are. We need greater monitoring, both on-site as well as a kind of, hey, let's look at facility level. Where is it leaking that we didn't think it was? But also, we need more information about the plants themselves. Because these are typically funded by public entities, there's surprisingly not as much information. You know, what's happening, what was built in the 1960s still may be used

today, but they're newer reactors. There are reporting requirements, but typically the reporting requirements are for water, which is a good thing. But we also need to look at the air side of things, and that has kind of been neglected in what our study shows, along with this study by my colleague Shui Hong Song and Jason Wren, they looked at the same sector that we did from looking at thousands of papers in the literature and came to the same conclusion, methane is underestimated by about a factor of two. So both studies coming from independent methods show that, you know, we need to pay attention to methane, but a lot of this is we don't know where in the plants it's leaking from. That could be parts of reactors that aren't being well aerated or parts of reactors that aren't being well

mixed. It could be leaks from the digester, anaerobic digesters. We need to look at the system with the level of scrutiny to understand and address the magnitude of the problem that we're facing. Mark Zondolo is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you, Shayla. It was a pleasure to be on. After the break, Kathleen Davis talks with a young activist who didn't like her climate education. So she built a new class. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Shayla Farsan. And I'm Kathleen Davis. Our next story takes us into the classrooms where the scientists and the science enthusiasts of tomorrow are learning. Science classes these days aren't just biology and chemistry and

physics. They're also about climate change. Right. Students these days don't really have the luxury of not talking about climate change because it's so much a part of all of our daily lives. But for me, I didn't learn about climate change in school until at least my sophomore year of college. Kathleen, did your teachers talk about it? Yeah, I do remember learning about the greenhouse effect in school. There's one thing that I do hear a lot, though, from people who are learning about climate change. It's really depressing. Constantly hearing about how things are changing and a lot of the time for the worse, it's really hard.

And that feeling of helplessness can really make people tune out of the conversation, much less feel inspired to actually do something about climate change. Our next guest was fed up with the way that climate change was taught. So she designed her own college course. And this one focused on solutions. Sage Lanier activist and founder of the nonprofit, sustainable and just future, based in California. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Kathleen. So walk me through what your climate education was like.

What was this message that you were being told in your classes? So I feel like most environmental education, and I've talked to so many people from different universities who will say the same thing. Really was one of two things, either very abstract. very distant, felt like it had no real world application, even though it obviously totally does, or super, super doomsday. Like, it's, it's, they're just trying to get you to understand how bad the problem is, but always kind of coming from an angle, whether intentional or not, of like, it's too late to do anything about it, which obviously isn't working.

So you took it upon yourself to design your own curriculum at UC Berkeley while you were a student. why did you do that? Well, because I was I was really sick of the narrative and I think I was really overwhelmed by the, all of the different types of environmental problems I was hearing about top soil degradation and climate and plastic pollution and I was like, these all seem so disconnected, but I'm sure they're connected. So I started the program and I wanted it to be super solutions focused and super action oriented. So we're constantly trying to connect students with things going on on our campus in our community and our city in the Bay Area to try to like really like get them involved. And so just to be clear, are you still talking about things like topsoil erosion, but just kind of reframing the narrative? Yeah. So instead of like car centric cities and top soil degradation, I'm doing regenerative agriculture and urban replanning. Like I think people are like, oh my gosh, no, you have to teach it from a doomsday perspective because we are in a crisis and I'm like, no, you don't. I explain the problem just enough

to establish that there is one, but then we just kind of go, okay, this is how we've been doing things. It's not working. Here's how we're going to do things going forward. You and I, now we're co-conspiratives in this. You're part of this. We're building this better future together. So you think about climate change action in this context of ecological and social justice. Can you walk me through what you mean by that? Yeah, so it's about making sure that the push for ecological wellness and for restoration and climate resilience is human-centric because we need to begin to once again see ourselves as living pieces of earth and animals along with all of our other relatives. And so, yeah, going from that lens, it's like, I'm not here to save trees, even though I am. I do believe that trees have intrinsic value, but ultimately at the end of the day, this is a human rights fight. We've been talking about the importance of solutions.

What makes for a good one, in your opinion? Great question. I love that question, actually. I really try to make the distinction between good for the planet and less bad, and so I don't consider, like, electric vehicles good for the planet. They're not. They're not. Harm reduction is not the same thing as healing. You know, we've cut down 70% of the world's forests at the same. this point. There is nothing you can do to solve that problem except for plant trees,

except for restore ecosystems, right? You know, even just like using no plastic, people will be like, oh, green. And it's like, no, no, no. All you've done is avoid harm. And I'm not saying don't do those things because harm reduction is, you know, half the pie. But what about healing? So I really try to make that distinction between less bad and good for the planet so that we can actually start to move towards healing. So in a situation where, say, electric cars are moving from a gas-guzzling vehicle to something that still does use resources, what do you propose replaces that? I mean, obviously, in public transit. Obviously, public transit. I think there's so many issues inherent with a car-centric society, and that's where we can call in the question of equality again. We can call on the

social justice side. So I grew up low income and we lived in a suburb in Southern California. And my family's only car was totaled when I was 16 years old. And that contributed to me actually having to drop out of high school because my mom could not get to work. So we lost her income. And I could have continued to walk to school, but just the bills were tight and I needed to make some money and take care of, you know, be able to take care of myself. So I was working at subway. I was not enrolled in high school for a whole semester. And that problem is not solved by electric cars, but public transit is the better environmental solution and the social justice solution because having a system of privatized transportation, poor people are inherently going to lose.

There's something that happens when we talk about small individual changes like taking public transit or eating less meat, where you always hear this argument of, yes, but big corporations are responsible for this problem that we're in to begin with. Why should I bother with small actions if these big corporations are responsible for the problem? What is your reaction to that? I think it's so funny because the realization quite isn't there that like the big corporations they're talking about are like Apple and H&M. So, like, Like what role do we play in propping them up and giving them an audience and financially incentivizing them? But the first thing we can do is that harm reduction is to no longer financially support these unsustainable institutions.

The other thing is I don't think people realize how privileged people in the West are and how much, you know, we have outsized environmental impacts. And in so many ways, and we're talking about all these big corporations or system change, whatever, the system exists to serve. the world's upper class. And I mean, there's that statistic that's always floated around 10% of the world's population is responsible for 50% of the world's emissions. Do you know what is the income threshold for being in the world's top 10%? It's got to be a whole ton. No. It's $112,000 a year. Really? Yes. So if you're a regular American doctor or a lawyer or whatever, you're in that top 10%. And so, people don't realize that yes, like the system, when we talk about system change, like very much means you. Yeah. So what do you say to other people or maybe even to yourself, people who are

feeling eco-anxiety, climate doom? I love talking about climate anxiety. What I, what I always say is like, baby, we got work to do. Come on. We cannot be sitting around. I think climate anxiety is, I mean, if you look in it, it really is the result of feeling hopeless and not feeling like there's something that you can do to create change. There's so is though. And what I'm so passionate for and been advocating for so much lately is community change. There's this idea that it's like, we need Joe Biden to pass sweeping national legislation. And I think that that is admirable. And I love, I have so much love for everybody who is out. if they're fighting for that sweeping national legislation, but I'm not counting on it. I think it's

going to be more impactful in the long run, and we're going to get it done a lot faster. If we start working on the city, county state level, if we start working on the school district level, if we start working on the neighborhood level, like that's how we patch work together, real systemic change. And I don't have climate anxiety because I've just made a point to be all about that action in my life. We're pushing solutions. We're going. We don't have the best hand of cards here, but at this point, it is a race to save all we can save. Sage Lanier activist and founder of the nonprofit Sustainable and Just Future based in California. Thank you so much for joining me, Sage. Thank you, Kathleen. One of science's greatest challenges is understanding

how exactly the brain works. Knowing how a brain is wired would not only help researchers better understand certain neurological conditions, but it could also help shed light on age-old philosophical questions about consciousness. But to get to that next level, researchers need to develop detailed brain maps for different animals, showing where each nerve cell is connected, like a wiring diagram. The catch? Even mapping teens. tiny brains, like those of insects, is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. But a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently completed a 12-year effort to map the entire brain of a fruit fly larva. Their findings were published in the journal Science.

Joining me is one of the lead authors on that paper, Dr. Joshua Vogelstein, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. So why is it so important to map the brain? Well, our brains are involved in every thought we have, every decision we make, and everything we learn. So my perspective is, if we want to truly understand who we are

and our role in the universe, we're going to have to understand how our brain works. And part of that is understanding which parts of the brain are connected to which other parts. So your main goal with this project was to map out what's known as the connectome of a fruit fly brain, which I'm guessing is a word that not many people have heard before. Can you just describe for us briefly what that is and why it's important to understand it? Yeah. So a connectome is the set of connections between every neuron in our brain.

So humans have 100 billion neurons and a thousand trillion connections. So the connectome for a human would include all of those connections. We're not able to do that yet with a human, but we have been able to do it with a little fruit fly, which has only 3,000 neurons and half a million connections. The reason it's so important is because all of the thoughts we have, all of the decisions we make, all of the feelings we feel all depend on our brain,

and all depends on information flowing across the neurons. The way they do that is through the connections. So if we understand these connections better, we'll be able to better understand ourselves and be able to help ourselves more if we have any kind of mental illness or any issues with learning or even if we just want to be able to think more clearly, learn more effectively. The connectome, we believe, can help serve all of those purposes. So think about addiction. We want to understand what changes in someone's brain when they're addicted to, say, cigarettes or opioids. And we currently believe that what's happening in human's brains is

probably very similar in certain ways so what's happening in a fly brain. So what we could do is we could cause some flies to be addicted to something. And now we could look at how their brains are different from those who are not addicted. And that will tell us the mechanism of what changes to make them addicted. From there, we can extrapolate and try to understand how that affects the humans and what we could do to help prevent that from happening or how to treat it if it has happened. Right. Okay, that makes sense. So thinking about this particular project, it took you and your colleagues about 12 years, as we mentioned, to map the brain of a fruit fly larva. How exactly did you do this? Yeah. So the first step was to slice up this little itty-bitty brain into thousands of even little or itty or bittier slices. Then we had to use a microscope to image and take thousands of megabytes of images to build this three-dimensional picture of the brain. Once we had that, then we had about 50 people all day, every day, drawing lines in this image to show which neurons were connected to other neurons. That process took a few years. Then we had to proofread and error correct all of that, which took another few years.

And finally, we got to the fun part for me, which is the part I was involved with, which is understanding what was actually going on and seeing what we can say about brains once we have this. Wow. Okay, 50 people putting in full-time work on this project. It's a huge amount of work then. Massive undertaking. It was the largest brain ever done.

This is the first brain that we've ever mapped as a species. That's incredible. And I have to ask, I mean, we're talking about a brain that's smaller than the size of a grain of salt. How did you slice it up? I'm imagining something that is like the world's tiniest meat slicer. Yeah, that's basically what it is. It's a tiny meat slicer. And it's, it is meat. It's a brain. So it's incredible. Yeah. So can you just briefly describe for us what does this brain map look like? So we wrote software that would let us navigate across brain region. just like one would do if you're driving around the city. And just like Google Maps, the first thing it had is just the fixed structure, which roads connect to which other roads. But then Google added other things. You have street view and you have traffic patterns.

And so we're now adding all of those things on top of the map that we have, but for the brain. So we're adding what the neurons are. Like, does this one have dopamine? And does this one have something else? And that helps us understand and address diseases and things like that. Right. So why fruit fly larvae?

Like, why map that particular brain out of all the brains in the world? Well, to be totally honest, it was the biggest one we could do at the time. The next biggest one that we're interested in would be an adult fruit fly that will be done soon. But that takes a whole other team of many years of many people. So you mentioned that the ultimate goal of this is to really understand the human brain. Are people trying to map the human brain right now, or is that just still too hard to do? We are involved in lots of efforts to map the human brain. We don't yet have the technology that would enable us to trace every single neuron and find every single connection. Instead,

we use technology like MRI. And it tells us basically which regions of the brain are connected to each other, but not which neurons are connected to each other. So it sounds like that that particular goal is still a ways off to try to map the human brain completely at least. Oh, yeah. So people are talking about doing a mouse next, and that project is slated to take about a decade and cost about a billion dollars. Wow. So one of your research interests is understanding enlightenment. Can you tell us how mapping the brain, especially an insect brain like this, could help us better understand that? Sure. So my perspective is that when those of us are able to achieve states of enlightenment, that corresponds to something happening in our brain, just like any other state we have, fear, anger, dreaming, or any of those things. And so what I want to understand is what it is that's happening for people when they're achieving states of enlightenment, what's happening in their brain? And more importantly, how can we develop the technology to support people? so that they can change their brains in such a ways to feel more peaceful and more serene with their life in the situation that they have. Amazing. I think that's a great note to end on. That was Joshua

Vogelstein, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for having me. And you can check out some beautiful photos of the fruitfly brain map at sciencefriety.com slash bugbrain. This is Science Friday. I'm Shayla Farsan. And I'm Kathleen Davis. For more than a year, the National Audubon Society, one of the largest bird conservation groups, mold over a big decision, whether or not they should rename the organization. Its namesake, John James Audubon, is known as the founding father of American birding.

And he was an enslaver. He and his family enslaved nine people in the 1800s. Earlier this month, the National Audubon Society announced its decision to keep Audubon in its name, saying that it's important in allowing them to keep protecting birds, and that the organization represents, quote, much more than the work of one person. This decision has been met with intense backlash, and a handful of local Audubon chapters have even changed their name, or they plan to do so, from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin, to Portland, Oregon. Here to discuss this decision and what it means for birding are my guests.

Stuart Wells, Executive Director of Portland Audubon based in Portland, Oregon, and Karina Newsom, Conservation Scientist, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome, Stewart, and welcome back, Karina. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. So happy to be back. So let's start with the basics here. Why is it so important to get rid of this Audubon name? We can start with you, Stuart. As you mentioned in your introduction, John James Audubon was a slaveholder. He desecrated Native American gravesites. But as an organization, once you recognize or understand that this man was staunchly against abolition of slaves and spoke out against it and owned and sold slaves, once you have that information, as an organization that is dedicated to inclusion

and equity, we really just can't carry that name forward. It represents a barrier. So earlier this month when the National Audubon Society decided to keep Audubon in its name, Karina, what was your reaction to that? Thanks for that question. So when they made that announcement, I actually was mentally transported back. I used to work at Georgia-O-Dobon, Atlanta, Georgia, and community engagement. So engaging diverse communities who had not typically been engaged by Audubon chapters in the region. And I remember it was days before I was supposed to start at Georgia Audubon. Prior to that, I knew that Audubon was a bird person. I knew very little about him. A few days before I started, National Audubon Society, they published information. That's when I found out that

John James Audubon was an enslaver, and I learned all that Stewart was just describing. And I remember being sick to my stomach and running out to my roommate and being like, I cannot work here. You know, it's one thing to have like a maybe a statue that is honoring a person who is violated human rights. Like that's horrible in itself or, you know, other honorific forms of naming things after people who violated human rights. But for Audubon, it's on everything. It's on my shirts. It's on my hats. It's on my gear.

It's what I'm giving out to communities. It's how I'm introducing myself is being a part of the team called Audubon. And I remember genuinely feeling like, how can I. engaged communities who have not been engaged by this organization before or this network of people before and introducing this person who I now know enslaved our ancestors, it brought me back to that moment. I no longer worked in the Audubon network, but I then thought of the people who do work for Audubon or Audubon chapters across the country. And my heart broke for them because it actually does create a weight when you know what he stood for, what he did, and how he was actively opposed

to your ancestors' freedom and violated their human rights. there is a constant struggle for me personally. And I know this is the case for others who work for Audubon to carry that name in a way that honors him. You know, and I was just transported back to that moment. And it broke my heart for the people who still have to carry this enslaver's name into black communities and indigenous communities in particular. And so that was my initial reaction. Stuart, from a branch perspective, as someone who heads up the Portland branch of the Audubon Society, what's your reaction to that? I mean, what message did it send that the national organization did not change its name?

Well, first of disappointment, National Audubon has been writing about John James Audubon for the last couple of years. And if you read some of those early articles, they were very much opposed to carrying his name forward. So it's a big shock and a disappointment that they didn't do the name change. From my point of view, as an executive director of an Audubon chapter, although we are all independent chapters, we're just part of the Audubon network, it's a challenge for me, just as Karina mentioned, you know, to wear that name and try and reach out to communities of color and talk about increasing their access to nature and learning about birds, having that knowledge, whether they know it or not. there's implicit concern for me to be able to talk to them about our mission and knowing that we're walking around with this clarion call name that represents so much of how people felt historically. But the impacts of those thoughts are still affecting people of color today. So National Audubon did release a letter and they defended why they chose to keep the name. There is a lot to unpack in that letter.

Karina, is there any part of it that really jumped out at you? Yeah, so several things jumped out. But I think the piece that comes to mind first is when they made the comment that they chose to keep the name in order to remain a nonpartisan force for conservation, for bird conservation. And I was perplexed by that comment firstly because to pretend that that is a somewhat neutral choice or helps you to remain neutral in the realm of conservation is choosing to say that. the voices of the people for whom this is a painful and hurtful decision doesn't matter because it is not a neutral decision. I wouldn't even say it's a nonpartisan choice because now you've, you know, you've made a choice. There are constituencies of yours who are harmed by carrying that name around, and there are those who want to keep it, and you made a choice between those two

camps of people. And then also as though, like, Audubon's name is doing birds of favor. And the interesting thing to me was that I would say prior to me becoming a bird biologist, I should say, I had no idea that John James Audubon, who he was or his affiliation with birds. So if someone were to come into my neighborhood and say, oh, we're from the Audubon Society. I would have no idea what that meant. That wouldn't tell me birds. That would give me no information about what they did. And so if you're actually trying to expand the reach of the organization that you are engaging, as they have professed to be a priority for many years now, why not have a name that actually describes what you do to people who do not know who that man is and who you know frankly

we don't want to keep celebrating and you know and propping up as this hero particularly when he has the history that he has and so that that comment to me was both hurtful and a little bit detached from reality in my opinion given their professed priority around expanding the people who are engaged in the work of that organization no i i agree with that completely korena and one thing about systemic racism and white supremacy. I don't know how to say this exactly, but I describe it as a constant drizzle for people of color, black people in particular. It's something that we feel, and it's always there. And carrying that Audubon name, having that knowledge is just another, an example of that. I think as an organization, we've embraced the fact that it is an impediment,

a barrier to our mission of being inclusive. Well, let's talk about that a little bit because Portland Audubon is one of these branches that has decided that it will change the name. You haven't chosen a new name yet, but it is coming at some point. Can you talk me through a little bit about this process? I mean, how long has Portland Audubon been mulling this over? I started here in this role in May of 2022, and Portland An Audubon has been discussing this since 2020 at least. So quite some time. And we did that.

We started that discussion here because we recognize as an organization and our mission is to be inclusive. We recognize that people of color historically have been sidelined from being involved in nature and wilderness. You know, I was very fortunate growing up to grow up in a rural city. and I had the nature and the river in my hometown, and I was able to kind of fall in love with, really, with nature as a child. But that's not always available for urban youth. The communities are not developed in a way that they're close access to nature. You know, trees are not something that are considered in some of these areas.

Seeing an animal, a wild animal might be a shock to somebody if they haven't really grown up with understanding that animals are all around us. So one thing that having that name Audubon did was people knew that all of these Audubon branches were connected. Seattle's Audubon branch is renaming itself. Birds Connect Seattle. Washington, D.C.'s Audubon Naturalist Society is now nature forward. I'm wondering if there could be a disconnect here if all the branches that do change their names elect for different names that are not. connected? Well, I mean, that's always a possibility. You know, the brand is a promise of what you will do and how you will carry that out. And that's also one of the more disappointing aspects of why National Audubon chose to keep the name. As an organization here in Portland, we've been here since

421 years. So you actually preceded the formation of National Audubon by a couple of years. It is unfortunate. We know that rebranding is going to be a challenge. So in that regard, we'll find a name that talks about all of the things that we've accomplished in our legacy of conservation here in Oregon. Yes, it makes it more challenging. It certainly makes it more challenging for the smaller of the 450 chapters across the country that may not have the capacity to rebrand. They're actually put in a position where they have to rely on that name in order to. continue. Karina, looking more broadly at this topic, a lot of U.S. conservation is rooted in white supremacy. It directly stems from colonization. So looking forward, how can conservation reckon with these origins? So I think a lot has to happen, but it's really rooted in power dynamics. Like who has decision-making power and who has resources.

That essentially is what has directed the priorities of conservation, since its inception on this continent in response, of course, to over-exploitation by colonizers. But I think the really central element will be, number one, Congresswoman Iona Presley made this comment that the people who are closest to the pain should be closest to the power. So the people who are those who are closest to the issues that are facing birds and people should be the ones making decisions about conservation of birds and how we engage people in that work.

I think that black communities, indigenous communities, other communities of color need to be overrepresented in positions of power. And by that, I mean, you know, a lot of organizations kind of set their diversity goals around, you know, well, what is the diversity of the people who live in the United States and we want that reflected here? I believe that black and brown communities should be overrepresented by those standards in positions of power. And I think that that will have a cascading impact. It will impact how we approach conservation to begin with, right? Ideas about one health are becoming mainstream now. But black and brown and indigenous biologists have been approaching science from a one health perspective,

meaning we're thinking about people, wildlife, and the whole of the ecosystems we share in our conservation work in the way that we invest in it, right? And so I think that kind of unrooting ourselves, unattaching ourselves from colonialism and doing conservation in a way that is reaching into other people's resources and telling them what they can and can't do with it in a way that disenfranchises certain people, we have to move away from that, that kind of fortress conservation or protectionist conservation. It needs to be a conservation that is encouraging the health of all people in connection and in health with their environment. And so to me, that's what I really want to see. And so if that means that the way we understand Berg Conservation and who are the leaders changes, I celebrate that

and I welcome that. We are starting to see those kinds of shifts happen. And I'm excited to see those shifts continue to happen in the future. And I also just kind of want to celebrate the people who are leading that change in organizations big and small, including within the National Audubon Society. There are lots of incredible employees, black and indigenous and employees of color, who are really doing this work, even from the inside. I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm speaking with Stuart Wells and Karina Newsom about the National Audubon Society deciding to not change its name, and what impact that could be. have for the inclusivity of birding. I want to end our conversation with some bird joy,

because at the end of the day, birding is just such a wonderful activity. Stuart, what does birding mean to you? Freedom. Man, I wish I could fly some days. So that's what birds bring and the fascination with them, and once you understand, you know, that the complexity of their social structures and what guides them to come back to the same place every year for hundreds, thousands of years and then go back to that other place that they hang out. It's just a fascinating ecology that those birds have. The various adaptations, you know, I used to work with ostriches and emus and incredibly large birds. I'm a fan of raptors, you know, and did a lot of work with California Condor recovery years back.

And so I'm constantly fascinated with birds, and I think because they're such an important end of creative species as to how the habitat is doing, especially in our days of understanding that we're at a precipice of climate change and how that's going to really impact how we live on this planet in years to come. Karina, what about you? What does birding mean to you? Birding to me, I think the word that sums it up is connection, similar to what Stewart it was just saying, birds connect places, right? So the same bird that I'll see stopping over in a

literal half-acre city park in the middle of Atlanta is the same bird that requires these maybe large, expansive forest habitats for breeding, right? So they need both of those spaces to survive. And, you know, just thinking about the act of migration, right, this bird just showed up in my bush outside of my window was, you know, maybe not too long ago in the Caribbean or somewhere in South America. And to look at a bird and to know that, I feel very privileged to know that about birds. It just, you see so much almost of the earth, just looking into the eyes of a bird. To me, I just, it's very, it's very miraculous. And then they connect people. Whenever I go looking at birds with people, whether they're birders, people who have gone birding, who have binoculars,

or it's like my cousins who just happened to be outside with me, you know, in the backyard and we see a bird, like the moment that we share together, both admiring that bird and, and sharing our stories about those birds, it draws us together. And so the ways that birds connect our places and our community members is just such a unique and beautiful benefit to paying attention to those little creatures outside. That's about all the time we have for now. I would like to thank my guests. Stuart Wells is the executive director of Portland Audubon based in Portland, Oregon. And Karina Newsom is a conservation scientist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you both so much for joining me.

Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you so much, Kathleen. And that's about all the time we have for today. If you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriad.com. You can send us feedback and tell us what you want us to cover. I'm Shayla Farsan.

And I'm Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend.