Today, Explained - This one's for Earth

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Cryptic treehunters. Unknown apples. Flowers fighting back. On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Vox’s Umair Irfan and Brian Resnick explain what we learned about the planet in the last year. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020, aka Earth Day 5050. I'm Sean Ramos for him, and this is your coronavirus update from Today Explained. We thought the first COVID-19 deaths in the United States occurred in Seattle in late February, but on Tuesday night, officials in Santa Clara County, California, announced that they had one in early February and another in mid-February. This new information might shift our understanding of when and how the virus spread in the United States. Apparently, neither of the people who died in California had traveled anywhere they might have been exposed to this coronavirus. President Trump appears to be backing down from the sweeping and painfully unspecific immigration ban he

announced on Twitter the other day. He's saying no more green cards, but appears to be okay with guest worker programs. The president says he'll sign the executive order today, but he's been known to make stuff up. The Department of Education has barred hundreds of thousands of DACA students from receiving emergency funds from the stimulus package passed by Congress. Over $6 billion were set aside for college students, but evidently not those who were brought to this country as children without documents. A reminder that DACA is the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program President Trump is trying to end. And the LA Times reports more than a million U.S. citizens

have been blocked from receiving stimulus checks because they are married to immigrants who don't have social security numbers. Lebanon has confirmed the first COVID-19 case in a Palestinian refugee camp. According to the United Nations, the news has amplified existing fears of how this virus could tear through camps that house hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In cancellation news, they've come for the running of the Bulls, Oktoberfest, and the National Spelling Bee here in the United States. But running with bulls can kill you too. There's beer at the store down the street, and your kids can spell from just about anywhere. Speaking of kids, we got a voicemail on our listener voicemail line from a kid named Beatrice

in South Korea. But Beatrice did not leave a callback number, and we want to get in touch. So Beatrice, if you're listening or the parents or friends of Beatrice in South Korea, but Beatrice did not leave a callback number and we want to get in touch. So Beatrice, if you're listening or the parents or friends of Beatrice hear this, we want to get in touch with her. Call us back and leave us a callback number at 202-688-5944 or email today explained at vox.com. Thank you.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. 50 years ago today, millions of Americans got together for demonstrations, celebrations, and cleanups to mark the very first Earth Day. Later that same year, President Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and we got the Clean Air Act of 1970. Since then, we haven't done the best job of protecting the planet. We have rules regulating industrial pollution, but President Trump just suspended them. We recycle, but it sort of depends on

where you live, and chances are most of our plastics are ending up in the trash, or worse, the oceans. We have more fuel-efficient vehicles, but we've pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the original Earth Day in 1970. But it's never too late to stop treating the planet like trash. And in honor of that, today we're going to mark Earth Day 50 with Umair Irfan and Brian Resnick. Both write about the planet for Vox. And every year, they get together on Earth Day to talk about what we've learned about our planet in the preceding spin around the sun. We're going to start with Umair. We learned a lot of things about the species that we've lost.

We also got some stark examples of how climate change is playing out on this planet. We're also learning a lot about how trees are fighting against climate change and protecting us. And we're learning how quickly that air pollution can be reduced. And we discovered a lot of new things about life on this planet. Well, that sounds positive. I guess let's start with the sad stuff. Which species did we lose this year? Well, in the past. I guess let's start with the sad stuff. Which species did we lose this year? Well, in the past year, we lost organisms like the Chinese paddlefish and the cryptic tree hunter bird. And other species like the Sumatran rhino were declared locally extinct,

meaning that they were no longer found in some of their ancestral habitats and are now only found in a very few scattered places around the world. Well, let's hear a bit about the Chinese paddlefish cryptic tree hunter in Sumatran Rhino. What are their greatest hits? Well, the paddlefish is native to the Yangtze River in China, and they can grow pretty big, up to 23 feet in length. Oh yeah, I just pulled up a photo. It's like, it looks like a shark almost, but with a gnarly long spear for a nose.

I think it's more of a paddle than a spear, hence the name, but I guess we can dispute that. But they've been... In my defense, it does not look like a paddle. It looks like a spear. Well, if you discover a fish, you can call it whatever you want. Okay. So, I mean, RIP Chinese paddlefish. I'm sorry.

Do we lose it to overfishing? It looks like the kind of thing that someone would want to eat. Well, that, but also like the Yangtze River has also had issues with pollution and other kinds of industrial waste seeping into the water. And so it could have had its habitat choked out by that as well, but it hasn't been spotted for a long time either. There was hope that it might have been surviving in some isolated pockets, but in the past year, they just decided at this point, call it quits and label it as an extinct organism. And how about the cryptic tree hunter?

This dude sounds hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, it's a bird that's found in Brazil, and it's found in the humid forests around there, and it's been missing for a very long time, and then scientists decided to declare it extinct because there was no evidence that it was still around. Could it be hiding somewhere? It's cute. It's like a robin with, like, not such an orange chest almost, but similar looking. Could it still be out there? Potentially, but scientists have been holding out hope for a long time, and they still have yet to find it. And I think at this point, they're calling off the search.

And is this because of us? Did we do this too? Is this deforestation? Or is this potentially, you know, natural causes? It's hard to say. I mean, you're right that there are natural extinctions that constantly happen, but the Amazon rainforest has also been experiencing a high rate of deforestation,

as well as human encroachment and settlement and things like agriculture in its vicinity. And that's causing disruption to that ecosystem, making it harder for many of the native species to survive. And this could be a casualty of that. Huh. And the Sumatran rhino, I mean, I assume it looks like a rhino still around, but on the brink? Yeah, it's a rhinoceros. You know, it's got the pointy nose, and it lives on islands in Southeast Asia and Indonesia.

But it was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia. And last year, the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia died. And right now, there's only about 80 left, but they all live in Indonesia. But over the past year, we also learned a lot more about the pace at which we're losing animals. There was a study that found that we lost more than a quarter of all North American birds since 1970. And there was another important study that looked at the kind of biodiversity we lost. This is how unique the species are that have gone extinct. And they found that if you look at all the mammal species alone that have gone extinct since humans have walked the earth about 200,000 years ago, it would take between three and seven million years worth

of evolution to restore that level of diversity. So it's a sign of just not how much we're losing, but the uniqueness of what we've lost. Okay, so from bad news to bad news, climate change is getting worse? Yes, and we got a pretty stark example of that with the fires we saw in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020. Right. They came amid Australia's hottest year on record. Now, Australia has a notoriously volatile climate.

It often goes between extremes of heat and cold and wet and dry. When you see this volatility on top of the warming that the planet has been seeing due to human activity, it makes an extreme situation even more extreme. And these fires, they went on to burn more than 27 million acres, destroy more than 3,000 homes, kill more than 29 people, and the smoke that they created went all around the world, literally circled the planet. And in Australia, it's pretty alarming because these ecosystems are some of the most fragile and unique in the world. There are animals

in Australia that you don't find anywhere else. And I think the fires in Australia are still fresh in our minds, but how is this going to replicate around the world? Well, it's true that other countries don't have the same kind of notoriously variable climate, but other countries should pay attention because as the climate changes, more extremes will start coming toward them as well. So there are other parts of the world, particularly those around the Mediterranean region, that have some overlapping climate bands similar to Australia, and they are going to eventually struggle with things like drought and more extreme heat and things like that. And that kind of volatility will start to come to them as well. So what we saw in Australia could be a sign of things to come. And a small silver lining here is that trees are getting better at dealing with

climate change. Well, I would say that we learned a lot more about how trees are helping us fight climate change in the past year. Trees help cool the air around them. They also take in carbon dioxide and store it in their biomass. And then as they die and decay, they store it in the soil. So over time, these forests take carbon dioxide out of the air and help mitigate some of the emissions that we're putting out there. And we learned last year, there was some research that came out that showed that if we were to restore forests, basically bringing them back to where they were before humans started cutting them down, we could offset a huge amount of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Now that particular study, some researchers were questioning the scope of its findings, but a lot more people do agree that trees and restoring ecosystems and forests are

an important part of fighting climate change. And there's now been a global effort to help enhance these things, like the United Nations Green Climate Fund, which is helping subsidize forest restoration projects in developing countries. Even Donald Trump, who has been hostile to acting on climate change, touted his plans to plant more trees during his State of the Union address this year. So this might be one place where the whole world can find common cause. Nice. And you said we discovered some new things about life on this planet? While we did lose a number of species, we found some more too. There are more electric eel species that were recently discovered. What? We got new species? Yeah. There was a debate about whether there was one,

and I think researchers came out and decided that there were now more than one of this one type of electric eel. And this has nothing to do with, like, CRISPR? No, they did not create this in a laboratory. This is just basically researchers looking at the distinctions between the ones that they've found so far, and they decided that they're actually different kinds of species. Well, I mean, this discovery that we have more electric eels is shocking, quite frankly.

I see what you did there, Sean. Good one. Anything else? Well, there was also a recent discovery that there are 10 apple varieties that were once thought extinct that were rediscovered in the Pacific Northwest. Wait, that's amazing. They're still discovering new apples? Yeah. I mean, like, we're not eating all the apples that are out there.

And there were some that were historically known and that are now lost. But now researchers have reported that those have actually not been lost. And potentially they could be recultivated and introduce new varieties. Cool. Well, can't wait to download some of that OS. Anything else before we go? Well, in general, we've been noticing that nature is quite resilient, and it can bounce back. One of the most stunning examples of that that we've seen recently has been in flowers.

They're much more robust and way less fragile and delicate than we once thought. I think your colleague Brian wrote about that one, huh? He did indeed. We'll talk to him after the break, Amir. All right, you do that. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions Thank you. ramp.com slash explained ramp.com slash explained r a m p.com slash explained cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC terms and conditions apply Brian Resnick, Vox, you wrote a story recently about the study that Umair Irfan Vox, our colleague, just told us about. This flower study, this study that says flowers aren't as fragile as they seem.

How so? You know, maybe it's just the lockdowns and maybe it's just like the state of the world where everything seems so fragile. And like, it's such like a panic moment that I saw this study that in normal times would be something simple. And, you know, maybe it's like a little cute study, but like this one really hit me very hard emotionally. It's a study about what happens to flowers after they have accidents. And the study references this idea that sometimes a tree branch falls on a flower, and what is the flower to do after it gets misaligned? Because there's this delicate nature of evolution where the flower needs to be oriented just perfectly so a bee can come and land on it and pollinate it

and continue the flower lines. It was really kind of like a touching story for me to hear the scientists talk about how they did this. And this has never been documented in the scientific literature before. The scientist I spoke to about this was telling me he went through all of Darwin's writings. And Darwin was a huge botanist himself. He did this huge internet search, and he couldn't find any reference to this really simple, small thing flowers do, which is when they get knocked down, they try to write themselves up.

This scientist, he told me a story about 10 years ago when he was in Australia and he came across a trigger plant. A trigger plant? Yeah, a trigger plant is kind of like a snapdragon here in the U.S. where it has a tall stalk that goes up and down vertical, and then all around the stalk, flowers are pointing outwards, like towards the horizon. It looks like this kind of jewel-encrusted stalk. He went out and he saw a trigger plant that had fallen down, like a branch had fallen on top of it, and pushed it over. And that's a problem for the trigger plant, because the flowers, they point outwards because when the flowers are oriented

like that, there is a landing pad for a bee to land on, so it can pollinate that flower. And when the plant is knocked over, the bee has nowhere to land. The bee can't go upside down. And sometimes, too, it's not just the bee giving the pollen that's messed up. It's the bee receiving the pollen that's messed up, too, when the plant has suffered an accident when it falls down. And so this scientist just observed that after this flower was knocked over, he saw the flowers on the stalk reorient themselves. They twisted into the right position.

And he just took note of that. And for the last 10 years, he and a co-author have just been, whenever they can notice a flower that has turned around after they've either tied it down or after a branch falls on it, they've made note of it. And ten years later, they have this, like, remarkably small, beautiful finding in a paper that's just flowers try to save themselves after an injury. Huh. But, you know, it just feels sort of intuitive that that would be the case. Like, if you put a houseplant in a window, it starts leaning towards the light because it's like, oh, this is what I want, you know?

What's the major revelation here? It's incredibly intuitive. It's incredibly small. The thing about plants is that they stay put in one place their whole existence. They don't move, but yet they have evolved these evolutionary mechanisms to survive. And they're just trying to deal with the worst that the world gives them with very limited tools. And so, yeah, this is a really small study. And in most times, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. But I feel like these days I've been noticing a lot of things about it's springtime and just noticing the resilience of nature and appreciating that and knowing that this is a common attribute of all life.

That when you knock a flower over, it wants more life. It's going to fight. Even a little tiny flower will try to restore itself. But then I also appreciate these scientists who just spent 10 years noticing the tiniest movements of flowers and for the first time ever documenting that in a scientific journal when even Darwin and all sorts of great botanists and evolutionary biologists never bothered to write this down. So scientists, after all this time, have just bothered to publish this study that says, when you kick a flower over, it's going to try and get back up again.

And it isn't just the trigger plant. Yeah, they looked at species in South America and Australia and North America and the UK. They would do an experiment where they would just simulate a plant being knocked over without killing it by just tying it to the ground. And they would notice that within a day or two, most flowers will reorient themselves. To make it a little bit more interesting scientifically, there's some flowers that don't do this. Certain flowers that are just open and are easily accessible even when they are knocked down, they don't reorient themselves as much. So that's a clue. This serves a real evolutionary function. I guess we can't go outside anymore to enjoy all the spring blooms, but are you looking at your houseplants differently

during this pandemic after reading this study? Yeah, like throughout this lockdown experience, I've been keeping some plants here. And like a real weird inflection point for me was I had taken this fresh basil I bought at Trader Joe's and I cut its stem and I put it in some water, hoping it would root. And then this one morning I woke up and I saw in the little glass vase there was these little two-inch roots.

And in that moment, I just got some absurd joy of watching this little plant root. It was like, this is not an ideal situation for a basil plant, but yet it started to put out new roots. Kind of just like how flowers reorient themselves after they get knocked down. And I think there's a great comfort in noticing the resilience of small things.

Brian Resnick writes about science for Vox. Umair Irfan focuses on the environment. You can find the article they wrote about all the things we've learned about Earth this year over at Vox.com. Thank you.