Science Friday - SciFri Book Club Returns, Upcoming Winter Illnesses. Oct 28, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Don’t Trust What You See On TikTok This Election Season Midterm elections in the United States are just under two weeks away. And new research suggests a significant risk of misinformation for American social media users—particularly from the video-sharing platform TikTok. Cybersecurity researchers at NYU published their findings after submitting misleading advertisements to YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. The ads contained either the wrong dates or voter requirements for upcoming elections, or perpetuated narratives about the validity of past elections. And while TikTok prohibits all political advertising, 90% of those test ads were approved. Meanwhile, YouTube performed the best in rejecting all of the ads, and Facebook accepted about 30% of English-language ads. New Scientist’s Tim Revell joins co-host Kathleen Davis to talk about the misinformation implications of social media advertisements. Plus, the dramatic electrical charge of swarming honeybees, the good news about declining monkeypox cases, and other stories.   When Studying Ecology Means Celebrating Its Gifts Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants was first published nearly a decade ago—but in 2020, the book made the New York Times best-seller lists, propelled mainly by word of mouth. The book explores the lessons and gifts that the natural world, especially plants, have to offer to people. Kimmerer writes that improving our relationship with nature requires the acknowledgment and celebration of a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. “I think we can care better for one another, for the land, and in fact we can do better science when we consider all of these streams of evidence, and assumptions, about the living world,” says Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In this SciFri Book Club discussion, recorded before a live Zoom audience, she discusses the book, the role of ceremony in our lives, and the challenge of addressing ecological issues such as exotic species within a reciprocal framework.   Looking Ahead To Our Third Pandemic Winter As winter approaches in the northern hemisphere, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are monitoring the rise of new COVID-19 variants—all, so far, descendants of 2021’s highly transmissible Omicron variant, whose emergence kicked off a deadly winter wave. Will any new variants emerge with the same potential? Guest host Katherine Wu talks to viral evolution researcher Dr. Verity Hill about the forces that may encourage the emergence of another concerning variant, and why new variants are more likely to evade our immune system’s defenses. Meanwhile, pediatric departments around the country are seeing more children with influenza and RSV than usual, heralding an early and potentially more severe start to the winter respiratory virus season. Duke University’s Dr. Ibukun Kalu joins to share about how multiple viruses may add to the risks COVID poses, as well as the toll the pandemic has already taken on healthcare’s capacity.   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 Catherine Wu. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic, based in Connecticut. I also have a PhD in microbiology. And despite our names being very similar, we are actually two different people. Can confirm. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about SARS-CoV-2 variants and what we can expect from our third full winter with COVID-19. And we'll have a conversation with braiding sweetgrass author Robin Wall Camer. But first, midterm elections are almost here in the U.S. And with high political stakes in races all over the country, you'd hope that voters would be equipped with the best possible information at the polls. New research from a cyber security team at New York University suggests you should take social media ads with a grain of salt, though. In particular, ads found on TikTok, which they say had the worst record for catching misinformation in advertisements.

Joining me to talk about this story and more is Tim Revel, deputy U.S. editor for new scientist. He joins me from New York. Welcome back, Tim. Great to have you here. Thanks for having me. Tim, I use TikTok sometimes. It is something that I use to send silly videos to my friends. But it seems like there's a more nefarious side here, especially when it comes to the ads. Can you walk me through this story?

Yeah, so I use TikTok in it exactly the same way. And as you flick through, you'll see that occasionally ads show up in your feed as well. And so this team at New York University, they looked at how easy it is to get election-related disinformation onto the platform. They actually also looked at Facebook and YouTube so that they could do a comparison. And to do this, the team created election-related ads that all included either some sort of false election information, so something as simple as just including the wrong date for the election. or information designed to discredit the election process,

such as calling into question the validity of mail-in votes. And what they found was that all of their ads, they knew violated the policies of YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, but YouTube was the only place that managed to reject all of their ads. Facebook accepted 30% of the English ones and 20% of the Spanish ones, but then TikTok accepted a whopping 90% of them, both in English and in Spanish. and what they did was they didn't actually put any of these ads live. Instead, they just tested whether the platforms would accept them. And then they never actually got to the stage where anyone would have seen them. So just yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, which is another social media platform where disinformation has been a problem. Are there solutions to this kind of social media misinformation? And are any of them doable before, let's say, November 8? I think the chances of any big change before November 8th are very slim indeed, but the researchers

behind this work, they do mention two things that could drastically improve the situation. And the first one is that the platforms just need to better enforce the policies that already exist. But at the moment, the enforcement is not very good. There's either enough effort or the systems in place are not good enough to catch them. But the second thing is an idea that's been around for a while now. And that's universal ad-trial. transparency. At the moment, most of the platforms release some data about the political ads that appear across their websites and apps. But a lot of that data is not really good enough to get a real-time picture. For a start, it's a bit slow. And second of all, it often doesn't include

who's really being targeted, which is a really key part of this picture. So even researching what misinformation is out there, who's being targeted and what effect it has is still a really difficult task. Okay, moving on, there is some buzz about honeybees this week. And by buzz, I mean the low hum of an electric current. Tim, walk me through this story. Yeah, this is a really fun story from my colleague Corinne Wetzel at New Scientist. And it's a completely surprised discovery that honeybee swarms generate more electricity per inch than a storm cloud. Wow. And the way researchers found this was they were actually trying to track the weather at a monitoring station near their university in Bristol in England. And they suddenly saw that there was a spike in their instruments for measuring

atmospheric electric charge. And normally, especially if you're a weather monitorer, that would mean that there was some storm activity brewing. But somewhat shockingly for a day in England, it was actually clear that day. What they saw was they saw some Western honeybees nearby swarming. and this sort of tip them off that maybe they were responsible for this spike in electric activity. They managed to record three swarms of bees for around three minutes each, and they found that a bee swarm can generate an electric charge of between 100 to 1,000 volts per meter, which for that amount of density is around eight times higher charge than a thunderstorm cloud. Now, do bees at rest generate the same electricity,

or is it only when they are flying around and flapping their little wings? So bees, when they move, they do actually generate a little bit of electricity from like little hairs on their bodies that rub against other parts of their body. But most of this electricity we think probably comes from when they're flapping their wings, and that has friction with the air, and that creates a sort of static electricity, a little bit like when you're rubbing a balloon across clothing. But what we don't really know is exactly why this is useful to the bees, if there is any reason why this is useful. Bees use static electricity when they're picking up pollen. It helps pollen stick to their bodies.

But that doesn't really explain why a swarm should have such a high electric density. All right. So moving on from electric bees, let us talk about some really good news, which we don't always get to talk about here in News Roundup. So after a really alarming spring and summer, cases of monkeypox are declining all over the place. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, this is really great news. And there's a really good article in science this week by Kai Kutfer Schmidt on how all the signs for monkeypox are that the most recent outbreak in Europe and across the Americas is really on the decline. So in Europe, the World Health Organization reported about 2,000 cases a week in July.

and now that's down to just 100 cases a day. In the America's numbers have dropped by over half, and in the US in particular, it was about 400 cases a day in August, and now it's just 30 a day. Wow. Do we know why this drop is happening? Yeah, so we can't pinpoint exactly, but it's three factors that are all related to each other.

So one of them is the vaccines, and then we've also got behavior change and natural immunity. it seems that vaccines hasn't played a huge role because quite a lot of this decrease started happening before vaccines were rolled out in a major way. So the vaccines are only playing a minor role in at least the starting of the drop-off. What we think is happening is that probably this behaviour change in natural immunity are the real big ones driving it. So a survey conducted by the CDC among men who have sex with men, which is the primary group monkeypox has been spreading in, That found that around half of people in that group had reduced their number of sexual contacts,

and therefore that just reduces the amount of opportunity in monkeypox has to spread. This is a really good example of like the science working. When monkeypox was first on the rise in this most recent outbreak, there was lots of talk about how this is a controllable disease. With all these three factors of vaccines, natural immunity and behaviour change, it could be brought under control. And we've seen that that is what's happened. Meanwhile, Tim, daylight savings ends next weekend, which I am not looking forward to. But it has me thinking about clocks and something very cool is happening in the world of clocks.

It's quantum. There are lasers involved. How does this work, Tim? Yeah, so it's not every week we get a completely new way to measure time. but that is the case this week. This is a really great story from my colleague Lea Crane at New Scientist. And this Quantum Watch, it measures time using quantum interference. It's a phenomenon where probably the most famous element of it is shown in this thing called the double slit experiment, which shows that a single photon of light can pass through two slits at once. And then after going through those slits, the light sort of interacts with itself in such a way that it causes this unique

interference pattern on, say, a wall opposite. And so rather than light, the quantum watch uses a cloud of helium atoms, and these, they interact with each other in such a way as to create an interference pattern, just like in the double-slid experiment. But this changes in a very, very predictable way over time. And so by measuring this pattern, you can then work out how much time has elapsed since the interaction began, and it turns out this is an especially accurate way to measure time. Okay, so I'm getting ready to put my Christmas list together, Tim. When can I get my very own laser helium quantum stopwatch? I think the chances of this being delivered for Christmas this year, are very slim indeed, unless you work in a physics lab. Where it is useful is in this particular

type of experiment called a pump probe experiment where you sort of send a laser into a cloud of atoms. And so when you begin the experiment, the clock automatically begins to. And so that means you have just an incredibly accurate way to measure how long the experiment has been going on for. And these experiments are really useful for designing things like new materials and especially for solar panels. Oh, interesting. Okay, we have one last story before we run out of time. In case anyone is watching too many scary movies and they're getting nightmares. There's a new tool for disarming recurring nightmares. Can you walk me through how this works? Yeah. So recurring nightmares, if you experience these at the moment, one of the common ways to

try and counteract that is through a process called imagery rehearsal therapy. Essentially, that involves imagining a more positive ending to the dream and mentally rehearsing it during the day with a therapist, someone to help you through it. That doesn't always work for everyone. And so in this new study, research has found that one way to improve it is to add an associated sound to the positive experience and then play it through a wireless headband whilst people were asleep. And that actually had a big effect in improving how this therapy works. So Tim, what kind of sound are we talking about here? So it's a very simple, like, neutral piano chord. And that was just played consistently during those, uh,

positive ending imagination exercises. Then over a course of two weeks, they wore a headband during sleep, which then played the sound associated with the positive ending every 10 seconds during REM sleep, which is normally when you dream, for about two weeks. And then the group in the headband group, they had as fifth as many nightmares as the control group. But the really interesting bit is that This continued after three months. After they'd stopped wearing the headset, it seemed these effects were still in place. Tim Revel is Deputy U.S. editor for New Scientist based in New York. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. We have to take a break. And when we come back, respiratory virus season started early this year.

What happens when you add COVID and more variants to the mix? We'll be right back with that story. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Catherine Wu. Winter is approaching in the northern hemisphere. More people will be indoors, traveling to attend holiday gatherings, and generally at higher risk of cashing the coronavirus. Last year, winter also coincided with the emergence of the fast-spreading antibody-dodging Omicron variant. At its peak, more than 2,600 Americans were dying each day, more than the wave of the delta variant that preceded it. What can we expect this winter, as the virus can continues to mutate. Here with me to discuss this is first, Dr. Verity Hill, a postdoctoral researcher

studying viral evolution at Yale. Welcome, Verity. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi. Nice to talk to you again. It's great to have you here. So let's just dive right in. We've seen reports on this alphabet soup of subvariants all coming out of the Omicron lineage this year. There's BQ1, BQ1, BF7, XBB, and all of these sub-variants seem to be just in general getting better and better at dodging our immune defenses. What would you say is going on in terms of viral evolution? So at the moment, what kind of seems to be happening is we're seeing almost more of a return to what the evolutionary landscape looked like pre-variants. We've gone from having one variant that is really sweeping the world in terms of Omicron.

and to some extent, Delta. So what we're seeing now is this wide range of lineages. Like you say, in the UK at the moment, no one lineage is accounting for more than 12% of the sequenced cases. So the virus is kind of diversifying again after being locked into one variant. How do we deal with this compared to what we've dealt with before, having one Greek letter variant hitting us at a time? Does that change our strategies? Or does that tell us anything about how the virus is shifting its strategies. It's harder for us to anticipate when some of the waves might come. So if you have one variant that you see arising in another country, say when we saw Omicron really get going in South Africa and Botswana, and then other countries knew that

that was going to reach them to noir later and there would be another big wave. What we have now, because we have all of these different lineages that don't seem to have much of an advantage over each other, it makes it harder to predict which ones, if if any, are going to cause a big kind of uniform wave like that. You know, you sort of drew a comparison to earlier stages of the pandemic when there was this kind of mishmash of heterogeneity, different types of mutations cropping up all over the virus and producing different lineages.

But certainly one big difference now is there's a lot that's different about us. You know, what would you say is different from the host side, the people side? And how is that sort of pressuring the virus, to be successful in new ways? Yeah, so the biggest difference is that the level of immunity in the population is now completely different to what it was in 2020. So in 2020, we didn't have, we had more viral diversity, partly because everybody in the population was susceptible or almost everybody, you know, after that very first wave that

happened in March 2020. So there kind of wasn't a lot of selection going on. everything could just spread quite happily. There were a lot of susceptibles around to infect. And we actually saw with the first variant, alpha variant, the reason that was able to spread was actually not to do with immunity. It was because it could just get to people faster. It was more transmissible. Whereas now what we're seeing is we have this whole mosaic of immunity with people having been infected no times up to, you know, you hear about people being infected five or six times. We have different levels of vaccination status, whether people have been boosted, how long ago they've been infected or vaccinated because we know that immunity seems to wane to COVID as well.

Our population is a lot more heterogeneous than it was in terms of its immunity. Right. So it sounds like we're going to be in this kind of patchwork evolutionary race with the virus for a long time. We've seen variants gain some big advantages by transmitting better between people or just being better at dodging antibodies. Are there other viral traits that you're worried about that could make a new variant more dangerous? You know, there's been a lot of discussion about whether we're going to see more severe disease, milder disease as the virus evolves. Is there pressure on the virus to go one direction or the other? When we're looking at these traits of transmissibility and immunovation, the virulence is what we call it. it, the effect on the host, whether or not that increases or decreases is connected to whether

it allows the virus to transmit or be more immunovasive. So a virus that is extremely immunovasive might end up being more virulent and more damaging to a population because our vaccines aren't protecting us so well, for example. Or if in order to be more transmissible, it has to change how it replicates in the body, then that can also lead to more virulence. One of the interesting things that happened when Omicron evolved as compared to Delta is that it shifted the cells at targets in the human body. It became a much more upper respiratory tract infection rather than a lower respiratory tract infection. So that made it both less virulent. You know, if it's in your nose rather than deep in your lungs, that's causing less damage to your body, but also much more infectious because if it's right up in your

nose and you have a runny nose and you're sneezing, then you're spreading virus. So that's where virulence comes into that trait. So there are some things we can predict in general about upper respiratory tract infections being more transmissible but less damaging than lower ones. But it's not clear that, for example, an upper respiratory tract infection might then go and cause some secondary side effects that aren't so much to do with. the transmission of the virus but are still damaging for the host. Evolution is not by any means a perfect process. It's very, very stupid and it's very short-sighted. And the virus doesn't care

what happens to the host after it's transmitted. So it's certainly not true that it's always going to go towards lower virulence, but it's also not true that it's definitely going to go higher. It's really, there's a hundred different trade-offs happening all the time with pathogen transmission and it's very difficult to predict which way these things will go. Right. So while we're kind of on the subject of disease severity, I think it's time to expand the conversation into what's happening out in the real world. Pediatric departments all over the country are seeing an early start to the standard winter respiratory virus season and a lot of places are reporting some pretty rough symptoms in kids who are getting sickened with flu and RSV, another common virus that can be

especially dangerous for little kids. Flu and RSV have always been winter hitters in pre-pendemic years, but now they're back and we're adding COVID to the mix. So what's going to happen this winter? To help us unpack that, we have Dr. Ibu Kalu joining the conversation. She is a pediatric infectious disease expert at Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome, Ibu Koon. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right. So we've been talking a little bit about coronavirus variance and the potential for another wave, but we're already at a pretty rough place with COVID. What would you say is the situation on the ground right now with kids in COVID? Interestingly, we are seeing fewer cases as compared to what occurred in the

summer, the spring, and even last winter. And then the other point here, which I think you're alluding to, is that there are quite a few other viruses that are outpaced in COVID. I think This week is the first week we've seen RSV cases increase past the COVID case count for the week. Wow. So that's not exactly the good news I was hoping for when you started saying there's less COVID. So having this early and big rise of RSV especially and maybe to some extent flu in some parts of the country, that is pretty different from previous pandemic years. You know, we had almost no flu the first year, hardly any. the second year, why are we seeing this big surge now? And what's that going to mean for kids?

I think it has to do with the epidemiology of viral transmission. Our behaviors change significantly in 2020 and 2021. And that's not just related to what we did for SARS-Cover-2, how we traveled, how we sent kids to school, how we accessed the health care system, all changed. and that also impacted viral spread. The expectation is that similar to what occurred in the Southern Hemisphere, we will see more of routine viruses spread in 2022 because some of those behavioral changes have, we've kind of done away with them. And we're also just at a different point in the pandemic.

So we know that all of the routine viruses, are coming back. I should note that in 2020, we saw zero influenza deaths. In 2021, we started to see more influenza deaths, but they were not on track with what we saw in 2019. And this has nothing to do necessarily with the virulence of influenza. It really had to do a lot with the spread in our community. So all of that has changed, and that's where we're seeing more spread, and particularly in children who have not really seen these infections. in the last two years. To follow on from that, there was actually,

so most of the influenza cases we have globally at influenza A, there is also an influenza B, and a strain of that actually went extinct during the pandemic because it's less transmissible than influenza A. And we haven't, I don't think, seen it come back up this year. So it's possible that our non-pharmaceutical interventions, so closing schools, masking, working from home,

all of those sorts of things for COVID may have actually eradicated this particular strain of flu, which is pretty cool, I think. Yeah, I completely agree. It was so exciting to see, let me rephrase, because exciting from more of the scientific epidemiology part of things, to see that we could actually eliminate a virus from spreading our community just by taking actions that don't involve pharmaceuticals. So I thought that was pretty excited. on the depression end, unfortunately, we diagnosed the case of flu-be this week.

So he didn't really disappear. It's still there, but much lower. It's a lot lower than it was before. All right. Well, I mean, I think that shows two sides of the same coin, right? How much we can drive rates of certain pathogens down when we take these measures like distancing and masking. But as you're both pointing out, now that we've sort of let up on those behaviors,

a lot of these viruses are coming back. And this means that kids will be facing multiple different viruses at the same time this winter. What's it going to mean if kids start seeing multiple infections in a row or even co-infections getting, say, flu and COVID at the same time? So going back to a point that was raised earlier, the way in which the virus infects our bodies might impact the types of symptoms we see. So for children in particular, we worry that when a virus has a trodivus, or preference for upper airways, they can lead to a lot of inflammation along their tiny

airways, occlude their airways, and lead to them requiring more support during the acute phase of their illness. So for example, an infant that gets RSV will likely create a lot of mucus, have cough, runny nose, fevers, and be unable to eat. I say that to set the stage for thinking through an infant that gets RSV, and then two or three weeks later gets influenza, and then maybe adds COVID on the tail end. We know that kids can get back-to-back infections, and for the most part, the immune system can keep up. But when there is subsequent back-to-back injury to the tiny airway linings, and they don't

have space in between to kind of recover, or you see a co-infection that leads to more severe presentation than if they were infected with one virus as compared to the other, that's when we worry that we will see a higher burden of disease, more healthcare needs, more issues with health care access, and unfortunately more severe outcomes, which we typically look at hospitalizations and deaths. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Catherine Wu talking to viral evolution researcher Verity Hill and pediatric infectious disease specialist. Ibu Kuhlou about our next COVID winter. I mean, it sounds like we have a lot of things

working against us this winter. How are you both feeling about winters yet to come? Could we be dealing with this dangerous mix of viruses and future winters or will anything improve? I'm eternally optimistic. I think things might improve. I don't know where we're going with the variants for SARS-COVID, but some of the other viruses can change

the circulating strain each season. So I don't know how that matchup will look like in the future. But with our growing immunity in the community, with the fact that I just do restate that, so the toddlers in 2022, the infants that were born during the pandemic or are less than three years of age, have likely not seen a lot of common circulating viruses.

So that would not be the same next year. year or the year of subsequent year. It's sort of a unique situation we find ourselves in winter of 2022 that I don't think will repeat itself each year. But we'll always see viruses. They're here to stay. Verity, anything to add? It's so, it's so hard to predict what COVID's going to do because we all, everyone gets it wrong. And I mean everyone. Like, none of us were expecting the variant evolution to happen, or at least I don't know of anyone that was, you know, where we suddenly saw this huge clump of mutations come up at once. Like that doesn't really happen very often.

And like the only times we know of it happening, like in flu and antigenic shift, is by a completely different process. And it happens very rarely. So that was a shock. And then each time a new variant comes up, it's also a bit of a shock. So it's difficult to predict what's going to happen.

on the variant evolution front, my feeling is that at some point, COVID will settle into a more seasonal thing like we see blue doing. But, you know, and it's clear that when children go back to school and people are more inside, you get kind of new waves of infection regardless of variants. I mean, there's just been quite a big wave in Germany that is absolutely nothing to do with the genomics of the virus and is instead to do with human behavior and all of that sort of of things. So it's difficult to tell because it feels like it should settle down, but there may be a new variant that comes and gives us another wave in a time of the year where we wouldn't expect respiratory illness to be so much of an issue. I was going to add to that. We've, in this

conversation, we focused a lot on the virus, on the groups at risk and how we can prevent spread. If we do reach a point where we're seeing multiple viruses spread at the same time and have and impact our communities, it is important to go back to sort of that pandemic during board and ensure we have an infrastructure that can keep up with the varying spread and can be flexible enough to ensure there's access and there's equity in providing care. Dr. Verity Hill is a postdoctoral researcher studying viral evolution at Yale University School of Public Health, and Dr. Ubukun Kalu is an associate professor of pediatrics at Duke University Medical School. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

After the break, Kathleen Davis talks to braiding sweetgrass author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, about broadening our ideas about humanity's relationship with nature. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. I think about the natural world a lot, that it's full of wonder and beauty, but also that it is in crisis. And I think about this when I read the latest scientific paper about the impacts of climate change, but also when I'm on a walk and I see a weed like mugwort that's resilient against all odds. Robin Wall Kimmerer has thought deeply about the reciprocity between humans and plants by drawing on both her scientific expertise and indigenous wisdom. Dr. Kimmerer is a member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation,

and she is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and, and the teaching of plants. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, based in Syracuse, New York. And last but not least, she recently received the MacArthur Genius Award. That is quite a resume. Dr. Kimmer, welcome to Science Friday, and congratulations on such a high honor. Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you as a regular listener of Science Friday. I'm really excited. We were so excited to have you as well. And just to note, this conversation was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. For more information about future live recordings of the show, you can go to sciencefriiday.com slash live stream. So to begin, Dr. Kimmer, I want to ask a little bit about the title of your book, which is Braiding Sweetgrass. Tell me a little bit about the significance of this plant and why you decided to use it to really weave together the essays in your book. Well, sweetgrass, who is known as Wingash in our Potawatomi language, is a sacred plant for our people, and it has so much to teach us about relationship with the living world.

And, you know, I happen to have here on my guess a braid of sweet grass, and it has such a wonderful vanilla fragrance. It really does smell very sweet. And, you know, Linnaeus gave this plant the name Hyra Clovis. eauerata. And when you translate that botanical Latin, it means the sacred, fragrant, holy grass. So he got it right. And for me, it's the dominant metaphor of the book, because one of the reasons we braid sweetgrass is as a tangible sign of our care for Mother Earth, because in our creation stories, Wingosh is the hair of Mother Earth. And so when we make a sweet grass braid, we're making a statement about our caring relationship with the earth.

And the three strands that make up that braid and make up the braid of the stories that are in braiding sweetgrass are a strand of Western science. I am a trained plant ecologist in the Western tradition. But I'm also a Nishinawbekwe, Bodwewadmiqwe, an indigenous woman. And so another strand of this is traditional, ecological, or indigenous knowledge, but importantly, both of those ways of knowing are human ways of knowing. And so the third strand in that metaphorical braid is the knowledge that the plants themselves

hold. So my way of thinking is how do we best care for Mother Earth is by using all of those knowledge is not just one. So going off of that directly, a central theme in your book is reciprocity with nature. So can you explain a little bit about what? what that means and how you came to understand your relationship with nature as reciprocal. Well, if we just look at the way that ecosystems function, we know that the so-called balance of nature, the structure and function of ecosystems, is mediated by reciprocity, by give and take that we might call negative feedback loops in ecosystem sciences, right? So this idea that we cannot just take without replenishment, that everything that we do has a reciprocal consequence that we need

to consider is well established in ecological sciences. What I like to think about is extending that to our role as human people in the ecosystems. In Western science, in the Western worldview, really, we think about human people as outside of nature and that if we have a relationship, relationship with the living world, it's altogether too often characterizes nothing more than consuming and in fact is a detrimental relationship. But the kind of reciprocity that I really try to invite readers into is the remembering that human people can be good for the land, that the ways that we interact with the land can in fact be very positive so that in return for everything that we are given by the land or everything that we take, we can give back.

Scientists sometimes have a very narrow way of seeking to explain the natural world. They can use a scientific method, but there are so many ways, as you explore in your book, that we can think about nature and we can think about our relationship with nature. How do you think about the relationship between scientific inquiry and other ways of understanding plants like indigenous knowledge? Well, really for too long, I think, after what, let's be honest about, was deliberate erasure of indigenous ways of knowing by the boarding schools, by the assimilationist history, that we're now to a place where we're recognizing that Western science, incredibly powerful way of knowing, has limitations. and some of the things that we most need to consider and understand lie outside the realm of the scientific method and the ways that we generate knowledge in that pretty reductionist, materialist way. And so we are coming into a time, I think, of real intellectual pluralism.

Instead of having an intellectual monoculture dominated only by Western science and Western worldview, we're on the cusp of embracing intellectual pluralism and multiple ways of knowing. And as a result, I think we can care better for one another, for the land, and in fact, we can do better science when we consider all of these streams of evidence and assumptions about the living world. I want to talk a little bit about the language that we use to talk about nature. In the book, you write about how in English we use it pronouns to talk about plants. So I would say, oh, that pumpkin over there, it's looking extra orange. Whereas I would never say that about a person, right?

I would never use it pronouns for a person. But you argue that using it is really limiting our appreciation and understanding of plants. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah. Thank you for servicing that. because it's such an interesting pattern in the English language that forces us to speak of members of the living community as if they were objects. It is inherent in the language and is a component of much of scientific thinking as well, the objectification of the living world. And when I began studying Potawatomi language, particularly Potawatomi verbs, and realized that in my native language, it was impossible to say it.

about a bird or a butterfly or a maple tree. We use the same grammar of respect and relationship for our plant and animal relatives as we do one another, members of our own family and species. And so I think that is a powerful example of the cultural assumptions about the living world that live in these two different worldviews. And I have to think we would live in a really,

really different world. If we spoke of the beings around us as beings, as relatives, and not as natural resources, we would have a very different ethical implications of all of our actions if we thought of nature as subject and not as object. We have a really excellent question from Christine, who has a question about the role of ceremony in our lives. Hello, hi. Robin, well, Kimmer, I can't believe I'm talking to you. I live in Sofmi, also known as Northern Norway. And the question I have is, so I'm a child of immigrants from Asia, and I'm culturally hybrid like a lot of people.

And I feel the deep need for what you wrote, the elders call the invitation to remember to remember, which is ceremony. and how might ceremony be available to people like me who are culturally hybrid? I have experienced very awkward moments of things that feel more like appropriation. So I'm curious as to just some guidance on how that might be done in a more respectful way. I really appreciate this question because it speaks to the long. that we have for right relationship with land and the way that ceremony can help reinforce that

or in fact in some cases created. But I'm grateful to you for raising the question of cultural appropriation because altogether too often in the absence of, let's say, inherited heritage ceremonies, there is a tendency to want to borrow them, to take them from other cultures, i.e. engage in cultural appropriation. And this is to be avoided at all costs for so many reasons, but the one I want to focus on it in the moment is this longing to use ceremony as a way to connect with land. The way that that connection happens is through what I think of as authentic ceremony, ceremony that is true. true to the roots of what ceremony means, which is to create intentional space, to bring one's

whole being through artistic, spiritual, emotional, mental, physical relationship with the land or with whatever entities you are engaging in. So to me, the most important ceremonies are the ones that are genuine that come from your heart, from your relationship with place. Being grateful for a clean drink of water or grateful for birdsong in the morning is uniquely human. It is not culturally specific. The best way, I think, to engage in ceremonial relationship with place and not to appropriate it is to let it develop. organically out of an intimate relationship with place. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

If you're just joining us, I am speaking with Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. So your book, Braiding Sweetgrass, came out nearly a decade ago, which shocked me to be honest when I read the book because it feels very timeless, but also very urgently modern in some ways. Since it was published, it has become truly beloved by readers, and it has gained a lot of word-of-mouth popularity. In 2020, it made the New York Times bestseller list.

What is it, do you think, about this current moment that your book is resonating so much with people? It's such an interesting question, isn't it? Because by and large, we don't think about the public as either reading about plant science or reading about indigenous knowledge systems. And yet, breeding sweetgrass is really connecting with people. I think about it in a way as a reflection of what I hear from readers every single day is a kind of a longing to reconnect to the living world.

And in a time on the cusp of climate catastrophe, in the age of the sixth extinction, I think we are really reconsidering what does it mean what are our responsibilities to the land how can we make this happen why are we complicit in the destruction of this beautiful planet and braiding sweetgrass is a kind of a reminder it's it's a kind of an invitation to remember a different way of being in connection with the living world and thinking about how do each of us contribute to a restoration a right relationship to land. So my thinking about it is that it really reflects a longing from human people to support the more than human people. We have time for one more question. I want to take it to Titus, who has a question about invasive species. Go ahead, Titus, whenever you're ready.

All right, thanks. Great to talk to you, Dr. Kimmer. My question is kind of back to language again. So much of the language around invasive species control and management can be very militaristic or aggressive, I mean, even invasive species itself. But these species aren't here on their own. We brought them here. So how can Western scientists build relationships with indigenous peoples to address these hard problems like invasive species? Thanks for that question, Titus, because I think this is a really excellent example and opportunity for a symbiosis of knowledge. As a member of the plant conservation community, there's no denying the harm that can be done to native plant communities from overpopulation

by exotic species, for sure. But there's often a knee-jerk reaction in the conservation community say, well, if it's not native, if it's exotic, it's necessarily bad, as if colonizers were somehow inherently bad, which I think has very interesting political overtones and social overtones as well. What if we took seriously the idea of the intelligence of plants, of the personhood of plants, before we brand them as beings who need to be erroneous, eradicated, shouldn't we first ask the question, why are they here? What are they doing here? What are the gifts and responsibilities that those plants are bringing here? And think about the ways in which plants from other places can become integrated into or naturalized into our ecosystems. So my approach is one to respect those plants to, get to know them rather than the first response being to eradicate them. Our job as human people, I think, is to create balance. And that that's really what we would strive for with these plants

that have come to our shores is to create a balance with them so that everyone can thrive. What a wonderful way to end this conversation. That is all the time that we have. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Native People's and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, based in Syracuse, New York. Thank you so much, Dr. Kimmerer. What a wonderful conversation. We really appreciate your time. Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. If you want to see the full recording of that live Zoom conversation, you can head to our website at

Science Friday.com slash sweetgrass. Here's Jason Dinn with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. John Dancosky is our director of news and audio. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. Our community manager is Kyle Marion Viterbo. Danielle Dana is our executive director. And I'm NSF fellow Jason Jason. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Jason. B.J. Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Catherine Wu. I was back next week. Thank you for joining us.