TED Radio Hour - How deserted places find a second life

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Lots left vacant, offices full of equipment but devoid of people, entire villages literally left to the wolves--this hour, TED speakers share stories about bringing new life to abandoned places. Guests include evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, entrepreneur Garry Cooper, urban renewal expert Anika Goss, and conservationist Alysa McCall. (Original broadcast date: September 8, 2023)TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedFor handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From Ted and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. Today on the show, Abandoned Places. I remember walking through some villages where you look through the windows

and there are still shoes near the door. There's still books next to the bed. there's still a child's toy on the floor. There's so many remnants of the lives that were left on very short notice. For nearly four decades, ever since the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, the surrounding 30-kilometer radius known as the exclusion zone, has mostly been empty of human life. It's kind of this odd mixture of very surreal,

abandoned homes and abandoned lives. But there are other inhabitants. You keep going, and then in this one house that is very vivid to me, I remember a nest of a family of boar that had made residence in the front porch of one of these houses, and it was very obvious that, well, humans, at one time decades ago, lived in this place. Now the boar were living in this same structure,

creating this place for their family and to safely bed at night. This is Kara Love. She's an integrative biologist and was visiting Chernobyl regularly to study the animals that are flourishing there. So if you're walking through the zone, you'll probably see Eurasian bison, Eurasian moose, all sorts of bird life. and, you know, we got really lucky one year and actually saw two Eurasian links, just driving around to our wolf sites. Wolf sites. Kara and her colleagues are specifically researching the area's apex predator, the gray wolf.

These wolves have been thriving here, despite constant and intense exposure to radiation. Some of the wolves are exposed to upwards of three chest x-rays a day worth of radiation per individual. On the most extreme, but still pretty significant for the long-term chronic exposure over an entire lifetime. You know, I had always had questions of what impacts the radiation might have on population dynamics, and Shane was just a perfect collaborator to bring on to. add that element of evolution and natural selection and ask these questions together. And I think that has made this collaboration so incredible. Shane Campbell-Staten is an evolutionary biologist, and in 2019, Kera recruited him to help

answer a big question. How have these wolves genetically adapted to survive all this radiation? Because we know that the wolves in Chernobyl. have been there at this point for about seven or eight generations. So they've been exposed their entire lives to this novel pressure. And by understanding how natural selection has gone about molding organisms to still be able to survive and reproduce, by studying that process, it may lead us to new insights. Shane has spent his entire career studying how species evolve to adapt to human behavior, including in chernet. which is unlike anything he's ever seen before.

A pup that's born in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, from day one, it's being exposed to radiation from the environment. And that pup will live half a decade or more. And each day be continually exposed to that radiation. On top of that, these wolves, they're getting another dose of radiation from each meal that they eat in a concentrated dose because they're apex predators.

So they're eating European bison that then ate grass and other vegetation that was infused with radiation. And we know that radiation causes lots of damage to the mammalian body. Forgive me if this is a dumb question. But are some of these wolves living with cancer? So that is one thing that we're exploring right now.

What we do know is that when you look at their blood, you look at the immune profiles of their blood, they show patterns that you would expect from a person with cancer. So now all of a sudden, if you're interested in that specific question, how would a mammalian genome change in order to become more resistant or resilient to cancer? That's the kind of stage that you would want to set up in order to understand that. And as tragic, absolutely tragic as the Chernobyl incident was, we do have an opportunity to learn something of potentially incredible value from the aftermath of it. From a tragic event to a rare opportunity.

When people move on, there is loss. But there is also a chance for renewal if we make the most of what gets left behind. On this episode, stories about abandoned places and ideas for transforming them into resilient economies, cities, and even a thriving species. So back to evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten. He says the gray wolf's ability to withstand so much radiation is just one example of evolution unfolding at a breakneck pace. Here he is on the TED stage. Now, when Charles Darwin, my man Chuck D, when he first proposed this theory, when he first proposed a theory of evolution, he imagined it as this slow, gradual process

that played out over thousands or millions of years. But now, in the face of all the different changes that we are making to the planet, we're finding that evolution is rapidly altering species around our planet, in order to live alongside us. Many of these stories of rapid evolution are sad, but some also offer us hope for our own future on this planet. In nature's struggle to deal with all the nonsense that we're throwing at her in all these different ways,

some of those solutions may lead us to novel insights that may help our bodies deal with things that we currently struggle, with that will allow us to survive all the different changes that we're making on this planet. So, Shane, the novel insights you're talking about here, you are looking into what is happening to these wolves genes and if they've evolved to resist cancer. What have you found? Okay, yes. So when we sequenced the genomes of the wolves in Chernobyl, we compared them to

wolves, a wolf population right outside of the exclusion zone in Belarus, and also the wolf population in Yellowstone, which is really far away. So we have these three populations, and the question was, like, if there's something special happening in Chernobyl, then whatever genes may help some individuals better deal with cancer than others. The hypothesis is that those regions should be changing in Chernobyl and only Chernobyl at a very fast rate. And we identified those patterns and identified those genes. And then you look at the function of those genes and they're all related to some aspect

of cancer. biology. And most of those genes have some known function in immunity or in the anti-tumor immune response or in immune phenotypes. Now, we know a lot about the genes and mutations that are responsible for many cancers or make an individual more predisposed to getting cancer. We know a lot less about potential genetic mutations or variation that may make an individual more resistant or more resilient to cancer. But perhaps nature has already found this solution.

And one of the things that our data are showing us is that the fastest changing regions of the Chernobyl-Wolf genome occur in and around genes that we know are involved in cancer or in the mammalian anti-tumor immune response. We're now working with biomedical companies and cancer biologists to understand the physiological impacts of these mutations

with the hope that at least some of these changes may lead us to novel therapeutics that might result in new treatments for cancer in humans. Okay, so let me see if I understand. The wolf genome in Chernobyl is mutating like crazy. And the parts of the genome that are mutating the fastest are the ones that show some kind of immunity to cancer. So is it like whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger? So evolution and adaptation, they're not planning on anything.

It's a reactive process. So you get thrown some kind of a curveball. And whatever you have in hand is, what you have to deal with it. And if you can come up with a solution that makes you slightly better, you know, then selection will run with it. In this case, the most likely scenario is that within Chernobyl, there's some degree of standing variation in these genes that affect the way that they interact with cancer formation or cancer proliferation or metastasis. And some of those mutations, you know, are better at dealing with those things than others

in this particular environment exposed to this novel pressure and extreme pressure. Somehow, we see that the ability to deal with something biologically that maybe no other organism is able to deal with in the same way. We don't know enough yet to really understand, but it's clear that something special is happening. Shane and his colleague Kara Love are hoping to get more data from the wolves,

but the war in Ukraine has kept their teams from spending more time in the region and learning more about what the implications could be for humans. Someday, hopefully, when we're able to gain access or when my colleagues in Belarus are able to go back into the zone again, we'll be able to really fine-tune that question a bit more. but unfortunately it's still a question yet to be fully answered. When we come back from wolves to elephants, more with evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten

about how humans are speeding up evolution and how nature is responding. I'm Anush Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anousse Zamoroti, and on the show today, Abandoned Places. And we were just talking to evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten about how animals can adapt when humans radically change their natural habitat.

The one pretty much universal thing about humans is we don't know how to do anything a little bit. So whatever we do, we do to an absurd degree, which means that we're changing. environments very quickly to an absurd degree in all of these different dimensions. And that rapid environmental change, you know, if it affects the ability of the organisms that live in an environment to survive, function, and reproduce, that necessitates a pace of evolutionary change that can track the environment or, you know, you risk extinction. Shane has also been studying how some African elephants have adapted in response to poaching.

Here he is again on the TED stage. In Mozambique, there was a civil war from 1977 to 1992. During this time in Gorongosa National Park, elephants in particular were reduced by 90% because of the ivory trade being targeted for their trademark tusks. Now, under most circumstances, African elephants have tusks. But there is a small number of females

that carry a gene that prevents them from growing their tusks. But after the Mozambican Civil War, one half of the surviving females completely tusclless. Now, during a time where individuals are being hunted specifically for a trait, not having that trait puts you at a decided advantage in your ability to survive, Those surviving females then went on and passed that gene onto many of their daughters.

That turnover of genes across generations, that is rapid evolution. In our short time on this planet, we have trimmed, trained, and reshuffled the tree of life at breakneck speed. I've dedicated my life to trying to understand the lasting biological impacts of our human footprint. One of the things that I've learned along the way is that life is a paradox. It's simultaneously incredibly fragile and relentlessly resilient. One of the things you say in your talk, this line really just stuck with me, which is that life is incredibly fragile, yet also simultaneously incredibly resilient. Yeah. So, you know, we are just too much for most species to handle.

And you see that fragility in, you know, the long list of extinctions that came along with the rise of humans. You know, so in that case, it's like life is a paradox, right? It is fragile and it needs to be cared for. But at the same time, it does find all of these imaginative, innovative, completely surprising, quirky, weird ways to, to eke through, you know, when need be. I think it's easy to, you know, to see hope in these stories. And I think that's actually a good thing. But I think it is a mistake and short-sighted to then sort of shirk off responsibility.

The world is going to be from now on what we make it. The story isn't over. And right now, we are the drive. drivers of that story. That was Princeton professor and evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten. He's also the host of a PBS documentary series called Human Footprint. You can see his full talk at TED.com. Many thanks to his colleague, integrative biologist Kara Love.

On the show today, abandoned places, or in this case, abandoned stuff. So imagine a lab looking like a corridor of a hospital, so very sterile, very white. And amongst that corridor, there's going to be lots of freezer systems. This is Gary Cooper. In 2008, Gary was at Northwestern University, working in a research lab on a drug discovery program. And to do that work, Gary and his colleagues filled the banks and rows of freezers with all kinds of. supplies. We would say have antibodies, probes that attach or recognize proteins, all the way to buffer systems, thousands of those things. And because you can't just buy a single antibody or a few

enzymes, they bought them in bulk. And then you so-called aliquot that out. So you kind of make separate vials of that. And so, and then you stick those aliquots in a freezer. Aliquot is allocate in lab speak, divided up for different uses. And while some of the enzymes and proteins would get used, others would be put into storage and forgotten about. You leave the lab and no one knows that they're just these tubes. What are these tubes? They're just marked alpha. No one even knows what these tubes are.

And meanwhile, literally someone, probably in your same floor, is trying to buy that same aliquet or try to get in an aliquot or trying to get a whole bottle that. antibody or that restriction enzyme or that buffer system. And so they're buying that new when literally the refrigerator across the hallway has what they're looking for. But because they don't know it's there, you have this double waste problem. This really bothered, Gary. Not only was all this waste, well, wasteful, it was expensive. Meanwhile, I knew other students who were in labs that were smaller and less resourced and had less funding. And they were sometimes be looking for the things that we weren't even using or, in fact, that we were going to throw away. And so I thought that was absurd.

So one day... I literally just got a cart, put things that we weren't using on the cart. I would then push the cart around the floor. Not antibodies in the cart, though. Actually, they were in the cart, so I would put them in dry ice. And I would say, hey, do you need to have a quad of, you know, whatever it is? And let me tell you, people would say, oh, my gosh, yes, we were about the buck. Oh, this is so thankful.

Sometimes they would say things like, what can I give you? And when they said that, it made me think, oh, there's something more than sharing here, right? There's potentially a whole system of exchange, of sharing, of exchange of value, I'd say, that could be had if this was more than a cart. Right? We can't scale one person at a university on one floor. That's not a global scaling solution. Tell me about as you started to research on a broader scale, what the situation was in terms of wasted equipment or materials or products. Lay it out for us, big picture.

What did you find? Yeah, so something like 45% of all global greenhouse gas emissions is because of what we call a linear economy. So that's an economy where we take things out of the ground. We make something with them, and then when we're done with them, we throw them away. If we did all the things that have to do with energy and gritting and food, there's still a 45% hole in closing the gap to net zero. And the only way we can get there is by structuring this thing called a circular economy, where the item that you're using doesn't start from new products. When you make products, you design them with the end of life and reuse in mind. And so this is when you take a big leap, Gary.

You decide to leave neuroscience and start a company. That's right. I knew exactly the pain points that someone would say if you said them to reuse something. On the other hand, I knew the benefits. And so in some ways, I was our customer and user number one. I knew exactly how the system should work in the working world and for it to have global import and scale. That's kind of how we started.

Reapley, the company I founded and worked, runs helps organizations identify and catalog the things they own, reuse them internally when they can, and distribute them to other organizations when they cannot. It's like a high-tech, scaled-up version of me with the push card at Northwestern, but with hundreds of organizations from technology to manufacturing leaders and millions of items available for sell and donation, all cataloged on a digital platform stretching across partners in a local area, a city or state, creating connected networks of reuse. Reapley helps organizations reuse things like building materials and IT and industrial equipment and furniture. Gary imagined a sort of Craigslist for business that could also keep track of where all the objects are.

We didn't know where every chair is. We need to know where every desk is. We need where every door is. Because if we know where those things are before they're, quote, law, we can plan for their next life. This marketplace would show when and where a chair or desk or door is available and then get the item from A to B. Whether they be a nonprofit next to you, whether it be your colleague and then on the floor beside you, I see that door, I see that couch, I see those chairs. I want them when they're available.

Let's take a look at how it works for furniture. An investment bank in New York City had about 2,000 pre-eastern, office chairs that they no longer could use. When they hired us, we sent in a team to inventory that furniture on that floor. When it was determined that these items could no longer be useful internally, a notification was sent out through our platform to all of our partners, hundreds of them. I'm happy to report that all of these chairs found new homes in a local university, a community housing organization, and a local refurbishment company. In total, about six 68,000 pounds of potential waste was diverted from landfill, and about $100,000 of value was

recaptured and shared with these organizations. Not to mention the carbon savings. Making one of these office chairs, which weighs about 55 pounds, releases 245 pounds of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Gary, I am having a hard time envisioning 2,000 chairs. What? What? What would have happened if this company, this bank, didn't have a service like yours to find new homes for all of them? Generally speaking, what they do with the old stuff is they liquidated or they dispose of it. And the disposed word is just a.k.a. for landfill or throw it away. When they liquidated, I can tell you about 95% of the time, 5% of that stuff is resold. 95% of it is also disposed into a landfill.

So somebody comes along and buys the thousand chairs and is like, I'll take care of this for you. Exactly. Maybe they make a little bit of money. They're going to make a little bit of money. And they're not going to hold inventory that they can't sell in their warehouses. So they're going to get rid of it as soon as possible. Let me tell you a different more circular way of doing that versus the linear way we just described. We send these thousand chairs to a remanufacturer who re-apulters them, who makes them look a little bit more befitting to maybe the designer's wishes who's designing your new space.

and then they send those shares back to you. You've only paid for the updating of them, the remanufacturing of them and the reshipment. But you're not having the carbon emissions that comes from the manufacturing of those items. So the whole part of the circuit economy from a carbon emissions perspective is trying to reduce net new manufacturing.

That's where the largest share of carbon emissions happens in the world is through manufacturing. And so when you think on both the manufacturing side and on the disposition side, circularity or usage is such a better answer even at the level of chairs. So we know how to create a circular economy with a microscope on a push cart like me at Northwestern.

And we know how to do so inside and outside of a building with either its building materials or things like IT infrastructure on a digital platform like Reapley. But how do we get to the scale of a city? And why? Well, cities occupy about 3% of global landmass, but house over 50% of the global population,

which commands over 75% of all global resources. Cities are perfect, tractable fronts for us to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and create a lot of jobs by building local circular economies. Now, to transition any city's linear economy to a circular one, we're going to, at the very least, have to do three things. First, we have to build the digital infrastructure

to connect every citizen and every company to everything in their city. Next, we're going to have to build the operational infrastructure to make reuse and recycling and manufacturing easy in universal. universally acceptable. Next, we're going to have to incentivize every person in business to participate in their local circular economy. So you are actually working with the city of San Francisco right now on a pilot project. Absolutely. Absolutely. So in San Francisco, we have launched, and it's exactly all these things are operating in San Francisco. So we have the digital infrastructure. We have operational capacity and infrastructure that's provided by the city and a few

partners. We have about 200 different businesses on the platform. And San Francisco has passed a set of ordinances that either require or strongly encourage people to participate in their local reuse platform. If we can get a thousand cities to circularly, by 2040, we can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 63% and get us back on track for meeting the 1.5 target, I'm set out the Paris Accords. And if we can't do that, it's going to be maybe impossible. I'm guessing that the only person listening to this who might think that this is a bad idea is the chair manufacturer who's like, well, wait a second.

What about my business? Yeah, and I have good news for them. They should be participating too. They have all the upside. So, for instance, your iPhone, somewhere between 50 and 60% of the materials in your iPhone are re-harvested by Apple. I'm able to re-upcycle materials that were in that old phone into a new phone so that might cost for new manufacturing go way down. If you think about the re-commerce market, the re-commerce market is growing about 16 times faster in the global apparel market. If you look at companies like Patagonia and REI, comparatively to their market counterparts,

they have operationalized circularity. They've operationalized these environmental principles. And they're honestly crushing their competition in the market. It's a better system. It's a better system for a manufacturer to lease or to rent something as a service than to sell it. They make way more money. They control their reverse supply chain. I was just talking about the iPhone scenario.

And it's just more predictable business. The problem, I would say, having friends in the manufacturing world, is how do we go from where we are to there? How do we go from what we're doing today to a new system? And I think there's some good questions and good people working on those answers. Gary, this was so exciting. And it's making me, you know, I live in Brooklyn where there's like a stoop economy, but it just is one way, you know, where you clean it out, you put it out. It's disappeared by the next day. And also someone, right?

And my neighbor who is the textile recycling guy, everybody knows it's easier to take your textiles and dump it at the farmer's market on Sunday than put it in your garbage. That's right. Oh, and there's an opportunity because he has turned it into his livelihood. Like, this is what he does. Yeah, I mean, just on that front, I think compared to landfill and incineration, and one of these circular cities, it can create. millions actually are green jobs. I think 6x more recycling jobs than current and 50x more reuse jobs because of what you're just saying.

Because people will start manufacturing businesses. They will start repair businesses. They will start what I'll call reverse Uber businesses, right? I've got to take this item to you. So that's going to create these local jobs that don't need college education. In some cases, don't even need apprenticeship. They just need someone to care and someone to say, I'm going to either local remanufactured chairs or furniture or desk.

whatever it is. These assets do not belong to landfill. They don't deserve them. When we say these are assets, their value, then the question is, what do we do with them? How can we make money off of them? And the circular economy has the answer. Gary Cooper is the CEO and co-founder of Reapley. You can find his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, Abandoned Places. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. On the show today, abandoned places, stories of desertion and renewal. And a while back, I went to Ted's climate conference in Detroit. Detroit, of course, is the once wealthy Motor City, but it hit on incredibly hard times when manufacturing

and locals left in droves. One speaker, a woman named Anika Goss, is working to build a new future for Detroit, one abandoned lot at a time. Welcome to Detroit. All of you here? This is fantastic. We are so excited to see all of you here,

that Ted is here. This is amazing. I'm a third-generation Detroiter. My grandmother moved to Detroit in 1936 during the Great Migration and brought all of her southern ways with her. She owned a home on Mendoza Street and knew that home ownership would create wealth and opportunity for her growing family.

My family story is not an unusual Detroit story, and up until the late 1950s, Detroit was a haven for middle-class families living in neighborhoods where there was green space and community connectivity and opportunity. But my grandmother's Detroit is not the Detroit that I live in today. In 75 years, our city went from a peak population of 1.8 million down to a population of 620,000 in 2022. All of those sites where there was manufacturing and industrial sites that led to our economic boom, many of those industrial sites stand vacant and abandoned. We now have about 19 square miles of vacant land in Detroit.

These industrial sites have led to dangerous contamination, both to our land and our land, and our water and our air. After Anika gave her talk, she and I got together at a local coffee shop so I could learn more about her organization, Detroit Future City, and why having fewer people means rethinking Detroit's economy and landscape. I mean, it sounds like the things that made Detroit so livable then. Those have changed. Can you just sort of draw a picture of now?

Yeah. So I think what's really changed, the population loss has had a pretty dramatic effect. And in ways that I think people aren't necessarily focused on, when you think of population loss, you think of just less people. Yeah. But in fact, population loss also means fewer dollars for infrastructure. And when I say infrastructure, I mean like there's fewer dollars to fix streetlights and repair water mains and take care of parks and trees, right? The basics. The basics.

That's what that is. So all of that puts the people who are living in those communities at risk for climate impacts first. poor air quality, contaminated water, heat island, impact. And I think people are thinking that it's all equal across the board. But these people who have been living here, who live near a factory, an operating factory or a vacant factory, are definitely at the most risk for climate change impact. So here we are, a city that really thrived by being entrenched in its ways. But those ways aren't working anymore.

And that's where you come in. Tell me about what you're trying to do. Yeah, we began to see at Detroit Future City that we have to do something in those neighborhoods right away. And that's what we really call a resilient neighborhood model. this idea of planting urban tree canopy, so an urban forest, planting intentional food gardens, but also sustainable gardens. When you think of gardens, you're thinking of kale and carrots. But sustainable gardens is what brings bees back. It's what brings butterflies back. It attracts birds. It cleans the air and the soil, and which actually supports clean water. So planting sustainable

gardens alongside food gardens in neighborhoods that are also vulnerable for economic inequity is critically important. Anika took me to visit several abandoned lots that have been given round. medical makeovers. This is so beautiful. It's gorgeous. We strolled through a wooded area. What was once, six vacant lots, is now covered with trees, gardens, a fire pit, and a stage.

So we've done about 55 vacant lots in Detroit. We've spent well over a million dollars throughout the city. To help residents envision what they can do with these vacant lots, Anika and Detroit Future City have a kind of. catalog of options, like a choose-your-own adventure for landscaping. So, yeah, we provided the landscape design for them. Okay. And we worked together with the community for the design, for the kinds of trees that they wanted to see planted.

This neighborhood picked an urban forest design, another, a meditation garden. Wow. Oh, this must have been a ton of work. Unbelievable. Yeah. I was particularly partial to the friendly fence design, which helps. helps neighbors turn an empty lot between them into a rain garden that looks pretty and manages storm runoff with an optional pond. It's your fish.

Yeah, there's a lot of fish in here. It's so nice. If you come from a city that has a lot of green spaces, maybe creating community gardens doesn't seem like a big deal to you. But for these neighborhoods, it is transformative and reminiscent of better times. My relation to this neighborhood goes way back. This is Katrina Watkins. She grew up in the historically black area called Black Bottom. My family has been in this neighborhood since 1946.

I grew up hearing the stories about Black Bottom in Paradise Valley from my dad. And he was like blacks had businesses and people looked out for each other. And it was those type of stories that made me say, wow, we just really need to bring, you know, that Just a few years ago, Katrina and her dad took it upon themselves to mow all the vacant lots around them and try and spruce up the neighborhood. We just would go and start cutting down the overgrowth. But then Katrina realized that more grants were becoming available. And with help from places like Detroit Future City, she could begin to strategically revitalize the neighborhood. And it just grew from there.

Katrina founded the Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation. where she is now the CEO. The neighborhood's new centerpiece includes a playground and concert area. It's just a really green, chill environment where people feel safe to bring their children and families. We do live music events on the weekend where they can come and just enjoy it and feel the neighborhood. There are now some 250 more trees in the park and all around, native plants at the edges. When you see the park and the greenery makes such a difference in the trees. trees. And I had someone just tell me yesterday, you know, wow, that's in this neighborhood.

When people often feel that way. And it's about more than beauty. Katrina recruits her neighbors to work on these projects by explaining how tree roots anchor the soil, helping to protect their homes from climate events like the massive floods that hit a couple years ago. It's about educating residents on the importance of trees and native plants and how it You know, makes the air cleaner. It looks really good, actually. Back at the cafe, Anika explained to me that this slow but steady approach will help revitalize the city as a whole. All right, what's going to happen?

Give me your short-term vision for Detroit. My short-term vision for Detroit is that we're going to see a lot more younger, middle-class, black and brown families. that are moving into these neighborhoods. And these neighborhoods are going to have amazing green space, tree canopy, urban forests. It's going to look like a city that you just wouldn't expect and not just in the nine-mile radius around downtown. But it's 139 square miles.

This is a short term. Like, how short-term are we talking? I think you should come back. Give me five years. Okay. I think we'll have something to show you. Nika Goss is the CEO of Detroit Future City to see her full talk go to ted.com. Many thanks to Katrina Watkins, CEO of the Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation, too.

To wrap up our show, we want to talk about an animal that's being forced to abandon its home. Polar Bears. as you've likely heard, are leaving the Arctic Circle because of climate change and melting terrain. Conservationist Alyssa McCall explains that as the bears heads south, that means that people need to learn what to do if a polar bear turns up in their backyard. Here she is on the TED stage. So what happens when ice bears start losing their ice? They get stuck on land and they get hungry. polar bears use the frozen ocean for traveling, mating, and hunting their main prey, seals, specifically high-calorie seal blubber.

Polar bears can't out-swim seals, so they use the sea ice to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. Polar bears need sea ice for sustenance and survival, period. Polar bears want to need blubber, but they're still bears, so they will follow their noses to fill their tummies, whatever that takes, but it takes a lot. Just one polar bear needs a lot of seals, and just one seal is equal to about 74 snow geese or 216 snow goose eggs, it's a big omelet, or three million crowberries. This amount of food doesn't exist on the tundra in quantities great enough to sustain a population of blubber hunting ice bears. So when polar bears can't find good food to eat, just like

like people, they'll fill up on junk food. And for polar bears, junk food is human food. And for a hungry bear, the best late-night fast food takeout can be their northern neighborhoods trash. But we have a saying in conservation, a fed bear is a dead bear. And this has major implications for coexistence. This is a rising safety concern for humans who are always the number one priority. It's also a concern for the bears, because when a polar bear has a negative encounter with a human, it risks being taken out of the population in a defense kill, which is the legal killing of an animal to defend life or property. Luckily, non-lethal tools are available and more are being developed, particularly in Canada, which is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears. And one of the

best testing grounds for tools is in the self-proclaimed polar bear capital of the world, Churchill, Manitoba. Churchill is home to the Western Hudson Bay population, some of the best studied and most southern polar bears in the world. In this region, the ice-free season is lengthening, meaning these bears are on land longer and have less access to calories compared to their grandparents. This does not mean all the bears are starving to death. It means the females are having a harder time having cubs, the cubs are having a harder time becoming adults, and some bears have just moved elsewhere in search of better conditions. As a result, this population has declined from about 1,200 bears in the 1980s to just over 600 today, almost 50%. Churchill is also home to about 900 people,

but grows by thousands during tourist season. Polar bears are an economic keystone in Churchill, driving tourism and creating jobs. It's important Churchill protects them and their people, which they do through a wide variety of efforts, but one of the most interesting and effective is their waste management. Unsurprisingly, Churchill's garbage dump used to be outdoors, which was fine until it became a popular polar bear buffet. So this is a problem for the bear's health, but also because when they're on their way to the snack bar, they risk bumping into people. Polar bears are no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears, but they are more likely to attack near towns, especially when food is nearby. So Churchill did

the smart thing, and they've just moved their garbage dump indoors. Now the bears can't even get to it. They also installed residential bear resistant bins, so no polar bear with late-night munchies in this town gets any rotten food rewards. Churchill continues to evolve their waste management because it's key in coexistence, but not everywhere can do what Churchill's done, so we need more options. Just one example. GPS tracking. It can tell us where when and why polar bears move. It's critical data, but we've only successfully collared adult females. Adult males have these like pylon heads with neck thicker than their skulls, and they just, pull collars right off, and then the sub-adults are still growing. And this is really too bad

because the sub-adults or the teenagers often cause the most trouble. Big surprise. So we've started working with 3M, the Sticky Stuff Company that makes Post-it notes, and they're helping us figure out how to stick a tracker to any bear's fur. These buron fur tags could be a conservation game changer, letting us temporarily tag any bear that comes too close to a community, and upon relocation we can track that bear and intercept it before it gets too close. This could help reduce dumpster diving and reduce negative human bear encounters, keeping both species safer. So there's different coexistence tools being worked on for different needs across the North,

but we can't talk about conservation without mentioning one of the most important tools of all. Education. If you are going into bear country, polar or otherwise, please get bear aware. Stay together, secure your snacks, and carry a deterrence like flares or bangers or bear spray. Bear spray works even in the cold and the wind. But finally, the number one most important coexistence tool we have

is our willingness to cut carbon emissions and stop trapping so much heat in our atmosphere. But on that note, I have some optimism. Sea ice is very responsive to atmospheric temperatures. We can keep this habitat in the Arctic, but it will mean drastically reducing our emissions and eventually getting them to zero. Polar bears are fat, white, hairy canaries in the coal mine.

Warning us to act now, the faster we switch to clean our energy is the better we can protect future generations of polar bears and people. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried, but action is the best antidote to anxiety and I'm working to ensure climate change doesn't separate our species for good,

but until then, it's bringing us too close together. Coexistence is the only option. Let's make it safe for all. Thank you. That's Alyssa McCall. She's the director of conservation outreach at the nonprofit Polar Bears International. You can see her full talk at TED.com.

Thank you so much for listening to our episode, Abandoned Places. It was produced by Hersha Nihada, James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, and Lane Kaplan Levinson. It was edited by Sanaz Mechkampur, James Delahousie, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montilione and Fiona Gehran. Our audio engineers were Josephine, Neonai, Neil Tevalt, Josh Newell, Gilly Moon, and Ted Mebain.

Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Baleigho. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.