The Shape of the World

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Who Trashed My River? (Ep. 31) Oct 12, 2022

Show notes

Humans started trashing rivers 7,000 years. Since then, century after century, the water quality of many rivers deteriorated. At first, changes occurred slowly. But by the time the Industrial Revolution rolled around, humans’ harsh treatment of rivers and its nasty impacts picked up momentum and it scaled up from a few random rivers to most of Earth’s rivers being affected by pollution.
But recently, some urban rivers are undergoing transformations. Waterways that once were essentially sewers are becoming sanctuaries for wildlife and places people can access. The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It’s a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue. "There’s a million different potential outcomes for things. Being open to the many various outcomes that can happen helps people make better plans." – Nick Wesley Co-Founder of Urban Rivers How You Can Help Nick Build The Wild Mile

When completed, the Wild Mile will have floating gardens, forests, public walkways and kayak docks. The Wild Mile will function as a public park, open-air museum, botanical garden, a recreation destination, a classroom for the community, and it will provide habitat for native wildlife.

The organization Nick co-founded, Urban Rivers has a robust and active volunteer program where you can do hands-on work. (In the interview for this episode, Nick said they have about 200 volunteers.) You can also donate money—which is an awesome act to perform to support ideas you love.

Sources for the Facts & Stories in this Episode

For information on the history and origin of the group, “Friends of Trashed Rivers, here’s an article Jill Riddell wrote for the Chicago Reader. It has some lively quotes from Laurene Von Klan, an activist mentioned in the episode.

For history on rivers: Watch Wendover Productions‘ wonderful video on “Why Cities Are Where They Are.” The source for the part of this episode about how long humans have been polluting rivers was archaeologist Russell Adams at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Adams and his colleagues studied a riverbed in the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan. Adams was researching this area for more than 30 years to understand the rise of metallurgy. Seven thousand years ago is around the time when we humans started to move away from making crude tools out of stones to making more specialized and precise tools out of metal. (For more on Adams’s discoveries—including the pollution of the river—read this article.)

For information on the river in Berlin: Nick mentioned Flussbad. The Flussbad (“river pool”) is a project that is cleaning up a polluted canal along the River Spree. Located in a highly visible and much-visited part of the city, the plan will add new wetlands and provide spots where people can literally dive into the river. You can learn more about how to visit it here and read more about the concept in Archinet and the New York Times.

For information on the Shedd Aquarium’s program: Nick praised the Shedd Aquarium for its energetic efforts to conserve the Chicago River, and specifically he called out the Kayaks for Conservation program, where anyone who’s interested can go out in a kayak and learn more about the river and help clean it up.

Privilege & Inequality in Animals (Ep. 30) Aug 02, 2022

Show notes

Guest Jenn Smith says that human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality occur also in the behaviors of animals. Privilege itself isn’t new–but it’s novel and shocking to learn that humans aren’t the only species who pass along tangible assets to certain individuals in subsequent generations and consciously exclude others. Applying the term “privilege” to the animal kingdom shines a new light on animal culture–and our own. "We see privilege popping up across the tree of life, not just in humans. When there are these legacies of exclusion within human societies, there needs to be some structural change to be able to address these issues." – Dr. Jennifer Smith is a behavioral ecologist and an assistant professor of biology at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. How to Find Out More About Jenn Smith’s Work

For the original version of Jenn Smith’s scientific paper, look here in the journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. For a less scientific take, see this piece in the New York Times.

For a bigger perspective on similarities in humans and other non-human animals, read the book, “Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals.” It was written by one of Jenn’s co-authors, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, and by Kathryn Bowers. You can buy it from an independent bookstore near you or order it from The Shape of the World’s favorite one in Chicago, 57th Street Books.

In addition to privilege, Jenn studies differences in cooperation between males and females in mammals and studies leadership in social mammals. To learn more about Jenn’s full body of professional work and interests, visit her lab’s website. (If you poke around there and look at the team page, you’ll find more cool photos.) Jenn’s scientific publications can all be found on Google Scholar.

Follow Jenn on Twitter: @JennSmithSocBeh

Additional Note: The Shape of the World’s interview with Jenn Smith was conducted in spring of 2022. Although Jenn was a biology professor at Mills College in Oakland at the time of that interview, from now on, if you want to take classes with Jenn or have her be an advisor for your PhD, you’ll find her in a new position in the biology department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. (We just wanted to make that clear in case you get incredibly inspired by what you hear in the episode.)

Disruption & Resilience (Ep. 29) Jul 25, 2022

Show notes

When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious. As a marine biologist, Jane knew that hidden in the story of decimated seagrass, there had to be something in the relationship between it and its destroyer—sea otters—that wasn’t immediately obvious. Something layered and complex. In this episode, we explore how sometimes disruption can be valuable not just for the one doing the disrupting but for the organism being disrupted. "Some of the best science that’s done today comes through natural history. It comes through people having their eyes open and being wide open to new ideas." – Dr. Jane Watson is a professor emeritus of biology at Vancouver Island Institute in British Columbia. Her research focuses on marine ecology and marine mammal biology. How to Find Out More About Jane Watson’s Projects

Watch this video from the Hakai Institute. A) because it’s beautiful and you’ll feel uplifted by seeing it, and B) because in it, Jane Watson explains the relationship of sea otters and kelp. It helps fill out some details missing from the episode, gives a bigger picture of the relationship of marine plants with sea otters.

Read this article, which includes a photograph of Jane and Dr. Erin Foster, the lead author of the study. (Erin is mentioned in the episode.) Erin is a research associate at the Hakai Institute, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to coastal studies and conservation, and Erin gets mentioned in this episode. (To hear Erin tell her version of events, listen here .)

Read this article in National Geographic about Jane’s and Erin’s work, and this one, from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. The latter has gorgeous photos of otters, including one of an otter “raft,” a phenomenon that Jane describes in the episode.

Jane is an emeritus professor at Vancouver Island Institute, and you can find more about her full body of professional work here.

Season Five Coming Soon Jun 23, 2022

Show notes

Season Five Will Launch July 2022

New episodes, new guests, new insights about nature and our built environments are coming soon. And more on how we can live together–with nature, with cities and with one another. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app or check back here.

The Wild Card (Ep. 28) Jun 16, 2021

Show notes

Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an artificial remaking of what once was there? Or do we go with the plants that long to grow there now, the ones that are perfectly suited to take on land that was once paved?
Sarah named her landscape architectural studio “Ruderal,” a biological term applied to plant species willing to grow in wastelands. Several years ago, Sarah established Ruderal after leaving the United States and going to live and work in the nation of Georgia. In episode 28, she talks about how the Soviet Union was dedicated to sustaining “big health landscapes,” large outdoor spaces intended to heal and renew—and what that legacy now looks like up close and in person in Georgia. "We so finely tune infrastructures to the nth degree but what if we put a little bit extra in there as a kind of wild card? I wish more people could see the potential of setting aside a little bit of surplus." –Sarah Cowles, Director of Ruderal, a landscape architecture studio in Tbilisi, Georgia How to Find Out More About Sarah Cowles’ work

Ecologists use the term ruderal, from the Latin rudus (rubble), to describe disturbance-adapted species,” writes Sarah Cowles. “Ruderal species embody the unruly, tenacious, and opportunistic qualities of vegetation. They are metaphorically paradoxical: indexing catastrophe and abandonment, yet conversely representing resilience and renewal.” [Paper presented to and published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, available here.]

Landscape Architecture magazine publishes some wonderful pieces of Sarah’s. Here are links to some of her written work: After Extraordinary Conditions; Crisis Actors: Designers Find New Ways to Tell Communities About climate Change; and here are reviews of the books Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscape in a Digital Age and Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary. Pearly Jacobs, the audio producer who recorded Sarah’s end of the podcast interview over in Georgia, also made this cool video about Sarah’s Arsenal Oasis project. It really brings it to life.

This is the website for Ruderal; you can sign up for newsletters there. On Ruderal’s Instagram, you can see photos of Arsenal Oasis, the project Sarah describes in the episode. @_ruderal_ Facebook @ruderaltbilisi Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/ruderal

What Didn’t Make It Into the Episode But Is Important To Know About Georgia

This didn’t quite make our final cut, but it’s important not to ignore the fact that within Georgia, more than a quarter-million people have been displaced from their homes and their land during several conflicts that have flared up in the nation’s relatively brief post-Soviet history. Here’s one seven-minute audio piece on the subject that gives a taste of what’s been going on.

In the unedited interview conducted for this show, in the context of our discussion of the resorts, Sarah said, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the resorts fell into disrepair. And then others were repurposed by displaced persons from the different conflicts in the nineties and the early two thousands. So some of the ethnic Georgians who had to leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia moved into those resort buildings and hotels. And since then, some have been upgraded and their conditions have slightly improved, but displacement is an ongoing crisis.”

The World Is Not Static (Ep. 27) Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in southwestern Illinois was the site of the largest city in North America and at the pinnacle of its population in 1150, was larger than London or Paris. But over two centuries, its population waned.
Until Caitlin’s research findings found otherwise, a prevailing theory had been that residents of Cahokia caused the problem themselves; they caused the location to become uninhabitable because of poor environmental practices. But Caitlin’s examination of sediments on the site found evidence this wasn’t the case. “The people who lived in North America before the Europeans—they didn’t graze animals, and they didn’t intensively plow. We look at their agricultural system with this Western lens, when we need to consider Indigenous views and practices,” Rankin said in National Geographic magazine. (Article by Glenn Hodges, April 12, 2021). "Sometimes you need to be careful to ask the right question because you already have assumptions built in to the questions you’re considering." – Caitlin Rankin, PhD, RPA Research Geoarchaeologist Illinois State Archaeological Survey How to Find Out More About Caitlin’s work

Read her academic publication in the journal Geoarcheology. For a less-technical piece, read the article in the New York Times or this one from Washington University in St. Louis (the institution where Caitlin began this line of research when she was a graduate student.

How to Find Out More About Cahokia Mounds

Why not visit and see the site for yourself? Fly into St. Louis, which is only a half-hour from the historic site. Here’s some information. You could combine it with a longer trip to visit other ancient historic sites (including other mounds) in the Midwest; or make it part of a longer trip exploring the Mississippi River. In Illinois, Route 96 hugs the shores of this vast river valley for many miles. Hill prairies thrive on the bluffs.. (Late April and early May are a good time to visit to see spring ephemeral wildflowers, and any day in October is a good time for fall foliage.) 96 is one section of the Great River Road that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Additional Information

Note from Jill: “During the interview, when I asked Dr. Rankin about other cities and comparisons of their sizes simultaneous to the period of thriving for Cahokia, she and I spoke about London and Paris. (Two examples of cities that existed concurrently and that were much smaller than Cahokia.) What she and I didn’t cover (because I didn’t get around to asking!) was that during that same period, there were cities on Earth that surpassed Cahokia in size. These included (but weren’t limited to) Constantinople, Baghdad, and Kaifeng.”

Bees Understand the Concept of Zero (Ep. 26) May 20, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Scarlett Howard’s research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can understand the concept of zero. How Scarlett came to prove this is one of the things we discuss in this episode. The importance of zero is a topic we cover in this same episode with help from Faruck Khan, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
Scarlett is currently working on understanding the effect of urbanization on native and introduced bee species in Australia. Is the presence of people possibly beneficial to some bees? Detrimental? No one yet knows. Her research explores conceptual learning, neurobiology, and visual perception in honeybees as well as insect diversity, pollinator preferences, and plant-pollinator interactions. "There are really interesting comparisons we can make between humans and bees, especially considering that we’re separated by over 600 million years of evolution from them. And yet we’re able to do similar things, sometimes in similar ways." – Scarlett Howard, PhD, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia How to Find Out More About Bees & Zero

“It’s been said that the development of an understanding of zero by society initiated a major intellectual advance in humans, and we have been thought to be unique in this understanding. Although recent research has shown that some other vertebrates understand the concept of the ‘empty set,’ Dr. Howard’s work shows that an understanding of this concept is present in honey bees. This finding suggests that such an understanding evolved independently in distantly related species that deal with complexity in their environments, and that it may be more widespread than previously appreciated.” So says a 2018 article in Science Magazine that put Scarlett and her work on the map. It’s one of the better places to glean details about the experiments and results. For a less technical rendition, see the article from the New York Times or this one from Quanta Magazine.

In the full interview, Scarlett emphasized that she isn’t working in isolation. Other scientists are working on bee cognition; Dr. Adrian G. Dyer is one of several close collaborators, and the team also includes behavioral researchers, statisticians, color and vision scientists, photographers and theoretical physicists.

How to Find Out More About Scarlett Howard’s Work

To keep up with new information coming out of Scarlett and her colleagues’ work, follow her on Twitter. @TheBeesearcher.

How to Help Scarlett Howard in A Community Science Project

If you live in Australia, check out Bees At Home, a citizen science effort where you upload photos of bees you see out in the wild or in your backyard to Flickr using the hashtag #beesathome. In Australia there over 2,000 species of native bee species yet relatively little is known about them. Each bee photo is a data point that helps Scarlett and her colleagues uncover more information about native bee behavior and distribution. You can follow Bees at Home on Twitter @BeesAtHomeAus, and Facebook.

Think Beyond the Possible (Ep. 25) May 13, 2021

Show notes

Tony Hiss’s new book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting 50 percent of the Earth’s land by 2050. This will save millions of species and slow climate change. Tony Hiss discusses what this might look like if it were to happen and he also reflects on his own interesting life and travels.
For thirty years, Tony was a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1999, Tony wrote a memoir that reflected on what it was like to grow up as the son of Alger Hiss, a government lawyer in the State Department accused of espionage. “He actually went to jail for four years or so,” Tony says of his father. “And he would write me as a way of staying in touch. He’d say, ‘I’m not going to be able to get to Central Park this year, I wish you would go up there and be my eyes and ears.’ That tuned my senses. Writing him letters was probably the reason I became a reporter.” "Protecting biodiversity is a scramble, still a daunting task, but it looks like something that’s within our reach. I find that extraordinarily hopeful and encouraging." – Tony Hiss, Author How to Find Out More About the “Half Earth” Proposal

The wonderful writer and scientist E.O. Wilson is someone who really embodies what Tony Hiss talks about in the show: a “planetary feeling.” He’s behind the Half-Earth Project, an organization promoting this concept.

How to Find Out More About Tony Hiss

Read his books! Tony has written fifteen of them and they’re all in print from major presses and easy to find.

Also you might be interested in reading this review of Tony’s book in the Wall Street Journal.

How You Can Help Save Half the Earth

Here are five things you can do that will matter. Think about accomplishing two. One is to contribute to the organization that’s working hard on making this concept a reality, and the other is to do something directly. You know yourself, and you’ll know which of these you’re best suited for:

Contribute $ to the Half-Earth Project. Do it here.
Seek out a local effort in your community that is physically restoring a natural area. In Chicago, here’s one and here’s another one. Find a group or agency that is cutting brush or pulling weeds or planting seeds or monitoring a population of an endangered species and go out and volunteer your assistance.
Promote educational initiatives that connect students and adults with the natural world and that encourage them to take a tiny step toward becoming a conservation steward.
Advocate for conservation action and collaboration within your community—we here at The Shape of the World can’t know what that looks like for you precisely, but often it’s attending meetings related to city planning and zoning decisions and starting to understand how decisions get made. Over time, you can work your way into participating in committees and commissions that make decisions. Or if that’s not your thing, then you can be a thoughtful advocate who speaks up at meetings. You might be surprised by how easy this is—usually because only a handful of people ever take the time to do any type of citizen involvement at the municipal or county level. And that’s where the rubber really hits the road on this enterprise of protecting biodiversity. People who live near natural areas (or open spaces that potentially could become restored and protected natural areas) have to be paying attention.
Expand the Half-Earth movement culture by sharing your commitment with friends and family and encouraging them to join you in signing the Half-Earth Pledge.

Humans Need Nature (Ep. 24) Aug 14, 2020

Show notes

Architect Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earth’s atmosphere. Jeanne’s breakthrough moment was the design of Aqua, a residential tower in Chicago. Opened in 2009, Aqua was the tallest building ever designed anywhere in the world by a female architect. Jeanne conducted personal research and analysis to invent design features that would make Aqua less likely to be a building where birds strike the glass and perish.
International design awards and prestigious commissions piled up for Studio Gang after Aqua. In June of 2020, Phaidon press issued a new monograph on Studio Gang. The high profile Gilder Center, a new wing on the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is currently under construction. This fall, the first residents of Vista Tower—a new hotel and condominium building taller even than Aqua—will move into new homes in the bird-friendly building. "I’ve always thought about not only humans but also the other living things around us as part of our realm, one that we can work with and relate to… Many animals live in social societies, and I believe that we are driven by social relationships. We are animals, and we need to better understand our co-inhabitants on the planet." – Jeanne Gang is an architect and the founder of Studio Gang, an architectural design firm located in Chicago, Paris, San Francisco and New York. What Jeanne Has to Say About How Her Practice Works

“I’m an architect, but the way that I see our practice working is similar to and parallel to the way an ecologist would work. We’re studying the relationships between living things and between us and our habitat, our planet, our cities. It’s about studying relationships and not the individual elements themselves… what we try to do is to design so that we facilitate better relationships, improve our relationships, between each other and the environment.” (Excerpt from podcast)

How to Find Out More About Jeanne’s Work

Visit her buildings, either virtually or in person. For more on the principles and insights that inspire her, watch these extraordinary short videos: Toward Terrestrial, Rhythm, and Flow. And check out the work of the French philosopher Jeanne mentions in the podcast, Bruno Latour.

You can also buy and read the Phaidon book on Studio Gang’s work from Seminary Coop Books (or your own local bookstore) and watch this video about it. Or watch her Ted Talk, “Buildings That Blend Nature and City”. Jeanne and Studio Gang have authored two books you can order from your local book store: Reveal (2011) and Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways (2011), the latter of which explored the possible reversal of the flow of the Chicago River, returning it to its original path.

And if, sadly, you live oceans away from any city where Jeanne has buildings, book a ticket to fly through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago five years from now. The design team led by Studio Gang was selected to design the airport’s new international terminal.

How Can I Help Make the Built Environment Better for Nature, Too?

If you live in Chicago, ask your alderman and the Mayor to support the Chicago Bird Friendly Design Ordinance. Chicago is a major fly-through-and-rest-awhile zone for migrating birds in both spring and fall. For thousands of years, birds have taken this same journey—but now big tall buildings sticking up in the sky cause the birds to sometimes smack into them. In the past, this was no one’s fault exactly—no one intended to put something up that killed birds. As Jeanne Gang has proven, if architects avail themselves of the knowledge that is out there on why birds collide with buildings, steps can be taken in the design stage that will prevent it from happening.

This type of thing may sound small but it’s not. In the podcast, Jeanne Gang talks about why having citywide regulation is so important. Find out what’s going on in your own city—and if the answer is nothing, think about how to start something up.

Cutting Through the Noise On Climate: How to Do Something That Matters, Do It Consistently, and Then Move On with Your Life (Ep. 23) Jul 24, 2020

Show notes

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically) that government will do the work. The actions we as individuals do manage are spurred by sporadic panic: when there’s a catastrophic storm or forest fire, one jumps into doing this and that to reduce emissions. But after the adrenaline subsides, our attention is then caught by some other crisis and we neglect climate change.
This is entirely understandable and normal. But how do we counteract it? Just because something is a natural tendency doesn’t mean we should give into it. How can one replace inertia with calm, consistent, unstoppable action? This episode has a concise solution that includes the carbon offset credit, a tool that our guest, Gabe Plotkin, helps us come to grips with. "It’s impossible for everybody to have an off-the-grid, zero emission existence. We are all going to go about our lives and create emissions. What we say at Tradewater, what we encourage people to do is reduce what you can—by driving less, taking the train when you can, taking a train instead of flying—reduce where you can, and offset the rest." – Gabe Plotkin is the Chief Operating Officer of Tradewater, a company that improves the environment and creates economic opportunity through the collection, control, and destruction of potent, high impact greenhouse gases. How to Find Out More About Tradewater & Carbon Offset Credits

More about carbon offset credits and why destroying the gases in refrigerants is critical to reaching drawdown—the time when the carbon load in the atmosphere levels off and begins to decline—can be found here.

To offset your household’s or your business’s greenhouse gas emissions, go here, to the Tradewatwer website. It takes only a few minutes. If you know yourself well and are pretty experienced in knowing that you get annoyed by too many options, don’t bother with the carbon calculator on the right hand side of the screen. Instead, use the left-hand side of the screen where you enter a straightforward dollar amount. The average household in America emits 20 tons of carbon a year, just go with that and pay $300. If you want to do more and can afford to offset both your home and someone else’s, enter $600. If you live in a small apartment in a large city, don’t own a car, and suspect you emit only half the greenhouse gases of the average household, enter $150. Or if you want to cover only one ton of emissions or maybe want to give that as a gift to someone, one ton is $15.

There are many websites from other reputable businesses like Tradewater that offer carbon offsets. But the point of this episode of our podcast was to reduce the volume of choices a person faces. Having an excessive number of options stands in the way of making a decisive, ethical action to make the world a better place. That’s why we recommend one specific website rather than saying something more general, like “shop around.”

HOW TO MAKE BIG CHANGES

Underneath the “reduce your emissions” mandate lie a series of essential soft skills. Without having the underlying abilities to make a significant change in behavior, someone typically starts off with enthusiasm and then trails off over time. It leaves a good-intentioned person feeling that they failed to follow through on something they genuinely care about.

The sources we recommend here help not just with reducing greenhouse gas emissions but with making any type of behavioral change. They explain why doing something small and repeating the action consistently is the most assured path to keeping the promises we make to ourselves. These books break down the science of how to adopt a new good habit or drop a poor one: “The Slight Edge” by Jeffrey Olsen; “Atomic Habits” by James Clear; and “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. Being able to follow through on something isn’t a personality trait; it’s a skill that can be taught, practiced and learned.

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