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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Hi everyone. So here we are, it’s episode number 100 of Nature’s Archive podcast. And I have to admit number 100 kind of snuck up on me. So somewhat last minute, I thought about trying to reach out and get a big name as a guest or doing a collaboration with another podcaster. I did reach out to three different people that I highly respected, and I got one very pleasant decline and two non responders.

[00:00:23] Well, that’s okay. I should have planned ahead better. Instead, I thought it might be fun to reflect on what I’d consider to be one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned from my guests during this journey of 100 episodes, and also why it’s so important for everyone to consider.

[00:00:39] So it starts with a story, actually from just last spring, when I suddenly found myself with water up to the hood of my car while trying to take my youngest home from school. Stick with me, though, because this is a story of ecology. So where I live in California, we rarely get torrential rains. Our winter storms are usually spread out over a day or two, maybe three, if it’s a really big, prolonged storm.

[00:01:01] And I live in an area that’s what’s called rain shadowed. So we have nearby hills and mountains that force a lot of the rain out of the atmosphere before it gets to us. So, an inch of rain in 24 hours is a pretty solid storm for us, and a heavy storm might drop 2 inches of rain in a 24 hour period. But last March, we had this unique storm system come through, and it spun up a few thunderstorms, which is really a rare event here in coastal California.

[00:01:28] These thunderstorms were small, say by Midwestern comparison, say Tornado Alley or something like that. and, but they lacked any kind of steering wind. So once they developed, they just kind of stayed over one spot and meandered for a little while, before finally dissipating and one popped up right over my neighborhood.

[00:01:46] And it was a real thunderstorm, like lots of lightning and thunder and even pea sized hail and torrential rain. So much hail, in fact, that the hills turned white. It was like it snowed. So I was at home and it had been raining heavily for about 20 minutes with this hail mixed in and water was rushing down my street nearly curb to curb.

[00:02:03] But it was time for me to go pick up my youngest from school. So I went to a parking lot just a couple of blocks away. And as I was sitting in that parking lot, I was starting to worry just a little bit because the rain and the hail just kept coming. So I knew that our storm drains really weren’t adequate for this for much longer, and I didn’t know how quickly the water would start to rise.

[00:02:22] She came to my car a few minutes later and had a friend with her that needed a ride home. We left the parking lot and that was the first hint of real problems. I had to drive through about a foot of water. Now, a foot, even in my small car, is navigable if it’s not flowing. , I got to the middle of the street, the streets are sloped pretty significantly, and those center lanes really didn’t have any water in them.

[00:02:45] So, I thought we’d be fine, and I figured that was going to be the worst of it. But, a block or two down the road, we passed the crossing guard who helps kids get across the street, and she was on the corner, standing in water up to her knees. That was another indicator that, hey, okay, this is, this is turning real here.

[00:03:02] So I thought, okay, I’m going to stay on the main roads as much as I can and, get my kid’s friend home. A few blocks later though, we had to turn into the residential area where my daughter’s friend lives. I made the turn and I was surprised not to see a road at all, but it was all standing water.

[00:03:19] And at this point the rain had stopped. And I assumed the water wasn’t that deep. It was hard for me to fathom deep water in my neighborhood. I’d never seen that before. And after all, it was also a residential area. We don’t have any creeks or anything like that anywhere near us. Now the water hadn’t even really reached all the way up to the driveways of these homes.

[00:03:39] my quick assessment was, okay, this is shallow water. It’s not flowing. I should be good. But I was wrong. As I proceeded into the neighborhood, I suddenly had water splashing over the hood of my car, and I had to guess where the street was. I couldn’t see it. And I knew if I stopped that my car would stall.

[00:03:56] I didn’t want water to cover up the exhaust, so I kept moving at a slow and steady pace, kind of creating a wake so that the exhaust wouldn’t get covered, and wondering if I was going to start floating. And thankfully, as I said, the water was not flowing, otherwise this would have been extremely dangerous.

[00:04:12] And as it was, there could have been debris or other hazards beneath the water that I just couldn’t see. But it all happened so fast, and it was so unexpected, and I guess I was just lucky to have not stalled or worse. But after a couple blocks, I was able to drop off my daughter’s friend and we were, pretty much back in shallow water at that point

[00:04:32] Now the rest of the ride home was very similar. there were a few deep spots and staying towards the center of the street was safer, but, definitely white knuckle getting home. Now lots of people’s cars that were parked on the sides of the roads flooded. A few homes had water damage. And this was from a storm that lasted, according to my weather station in my backyard, only about 75 minutes.

[00:04:56] But during that 75 minute time, it dropped about an inch and a half of rain. Meanwhile the natural area just over the hill from me called Coyote Valley had no flooding on its roads at all. I knew that because my wife was traveling from that direction and I was warning her like I’ll be careful.

[00:05:12] I thought for sure that area was gonna have lots of flooding because right next to it there’s actually a wetland and that wetland fills up with a lot of water in the winter. So why was Coyote Valley okay without floods? Well, Coyote Valley actually, in a way, provides a flood mitigation service. It’s an ecosystem service.

[00:05:34] It includes, like I said, the large seasonal wetland that absorbs a lot of water. And in my neighborhood, those services were removed long ago in favor of homes, schools, buildings, streets, parking lots, and so forth. Developers, they try to build those services back through infrastructure, like storm drains, but it was obviously just inadequate.

[00:05:54] All those hard surfaces, water can’t permeate those. So the roofs and the parking lots and streets, they just channel the water. So really it’s like an anti ecosystem service, or maybe even an ecosystem disservice in a way. Of course we need houses, schools, roads, all of that. But this example just shows that we don’t always recognize the value of the services that are provided by nature.

[00:06:19] So here’s a quick definition of that term. I just used ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These benefits come in many different forms and are quite extensive. They include provisioning services like food and lumber and fertilizer, regulating services like carbon sequestration and water purification, supporting services like nutrient cycling and soil formation, and cultural services like spiritual meaning, education, and recreation.

[00:06:52] So in the last four years that I’ve been doing this podcast, I’ve learned a lot about ecosystem services from my guests and then also personal experiences and the reading that goes along with preparing for the podcast and just wanting to educate myself. So I now have what I feel to be a deeper understanding of the types of ecosystem services and their significance.

[00:07:13] To illustrate the complexities a little bit more, let’s transport ourselves to the Western United States, say pick a city, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and perhaps the year is about 1900. So approximately 125 years ago. Settlers and colonizers, they looked at the land and literally thought, what a waste they saw arid desertscapes. Some were very sparse, some were actually kind of lush, but with arid adapted plants that maybe they didn’t value. They saw grasslands, perhaps some oak savannas, but above all, they saw potential. In order to colonize this land, their first thought was to do what they did everywhere else.

[00:07:52] That’s grow crops and bring in cattle and other livestock. But to do that, they needed reliable water supplies. In that area, nearly everyone wanted to see that kind of growth. They wanted to reclaim the land. And in fact, in 1902, the United States government established the Bureau of Reclamation, which aimed to transform these vast quote unquote, unproductive arid regions into fertile agriculture areas, promoting economic growth and additional settlement in the region.

[00:08:21] Their scope was immense. It stretched from the Dakotas all the way South to Texas, and then all points westward to the Pacific coast. That’s like maybe half, a little over half of the United States. So they sought ways to create hydroelectric power by building dams and reservoirs. They built canals, they rerouted rivers, and built other infrastructure in an attempt to ensure reliable water and power to reclaim the land for growth.

[00:08:49] It didn’t take long for that incentive structure to result in wealthy developers turning into water barons of sorts. Many only looked at their work through the lens of making money. Others felt, though, a deeper meaning. Maybe they thought it was part of manifest destiny to develop these lands. And in just a few decades, hundreds of dams were built.

[00:09:08] Now, I’m not going to recount the complex history here. If you’re interested in that, I highly recommend the book Cadillac Desert to get into those intricacies. But it’s safe to say that the approach of that era was much more costly than the price tags of those initial construction projects.

[00:09:25] Even if you assume good intentions from those that were in power in that era, the progress they sought to usher in was built on optimistic assumptions that the only costs were those required to build these projects, along with maybe some token acknowledgement of operational costs and upkeep, but that was usually highly underestimated.

[00:09:44] The water was, and in a lot of cases still is today, supplied at a steep discount to its users. It’s subsidized to many.

[00:09:51] As a quick aside, most people are subject to a bias called loss aversion, and that becomes important here as we move forward in the story. What loss aversion is, is basically the simple idea that we want to avoid losing things. Even if losing things in the short term , brings greater gains in the long run.

[00:10:10] It’s one of the core reasons why losing 10 feels so much worse than winning 10.

[00:10:16] It’s one of the reasons why we hang on to old clothing and electronics. Sometimes it even contributes to why we stay in a dead end job or in a negative relationship. Yes, people are complicated and there are often other factors too, but loss aversion plays a role. Now, but you can’t feel loss aversion if you don’t realize what you have in the first place.

[00:10:35] You have to know you have it to know that you lost it. And oh, by the way, the opposite of loss aversion is literally profit maximizing.

[00:10:43] in the case of 1900s era reclamation, there was very little loss aversion because people didn’t understand or recognize or value what they were losing. They only saw the short term gains.

[00:10:55]

[00:10:55] Michael Hawk: what were people losing with the reclamation, quote unquote, and land conversion mindset? fast forward to the present day, and we understand that many fish can no longer sustain their populations because of these disrupted rivers. Natural floodplains that absorb and filter water are no longer functional.

[00:11:11] They’re built upon. we have more catastrophic flash floods, especially in urban areas, but elsewhere too. Groundwater supplies are diminishing and land is even sinking because of this. It’s called subsidence. that land sinking can be substantial, tens of feet. The unique habitats along rivers have been damaged, destroyed, and made more homogenous.

[00:11:32] It’s reducing biodiversity, and that has far reaching ripple effect on nature.

[00:11:37] And all of that developed land is now fragmented and degraded from a habitat and connectivity perspective. So back to subsidence for a moment. Not only does this damage buildings and property when your land sinks by, multiple feet, but in many cases it damages the very infrastructure that’s carrying water away.

[00:11:56] Water that used to flow downhill in a canal may now require pumps to counteract the sinking of the area, and how ironic that is.

[00:12:04] All of those effects and more seem abstract compared to seeing a reservoir full of water, lush farm fields, and bustling cities. This brings us to another bias that we’re subject to, and that’s overlooking hidden costs. This concept is crucial when we look at broader environmental issues. fact, people regularly overlook costs that are transferred to others. Some devious businesses purposely do this. Economics even has a term for this. It’s called externalities. And simply put, externalities are the costs created by producers that society as a whole end up paying for. So think of it like this.

[00:12:40] Someone might create a product that benefits many people, but in the process, that product creation pollutes the air and everyone suffers from the pollution. Other people have to pay the money to clean it up. Other people pay the money to deal with the health implications. Pollution is a straightforward example of a hidden cost, of a negative externality, and because of this, we often have laws and regulations to minimize pollution.

[00:13:04] Now, whether those laws are enough or enforced well enough, that’s another story. When we talk about complex issues like food webs and groundwater recharge or flood mitigation, these hidden costs become even harder to see.

[00:13:17] For instance, turning a floodplain into farmland or suburbs might only result in a big flood every 10 or 20 years. and it’s just rare enough that people might dismiss it as bad luck or be able to find something else to blame it on. You know, just one of those things.

[00:13:32] And this is why the concept of ecosystem services has come to be. By attaching a value to something that nature does for us, we can start to evaluate the true cost of a project.

[00:13:43] At the very least, it makes people think about the trade offs and what we’re losing, but I know some people cringe or bristle at the term ecosystem services. If this is the only argument for saving land, it reduces nature to just what benefits us and what can be priced. Why not preserve nature for its beauty and cultural importance alone?

[00:14:03] Why not save it just because it’s there? That’s true too, of course. The definition of ecosystem services that I mentioned earlier does include cultural value. And we often overlook this, perhaps because our culture is so focused on money. So I don’t see this as an either or situation. It’s not just about using ecosystem services as a model or saving nature for nature’s sake.

[00:14:26] The big lesson I’ve learned over these past four years is that ecosystem services are much more of a yes and idea. We can use this in certain situations to help influence an argument and make a point.

[00:14:38] Another lesson I’ve learned is that ecosystem services are so fundamental to every aspect of nature and our lives that we still dramatically undervalue them.

[00:14:47] So here’s an example. I know you all don’t eat fish, but a lot of people do. So people know that as a society we eat fish, but do they realize those fish are important for nutrient cycling as well? So that’s a deeper ecosystem service.

[00:15:03] decaying salmon, for instance, provide essential nutrients for coastal forests along rivers where these salmon migrate. We often overlook the role of decomposers and scavengers. This is a great one. I love to point this out because I think most of us are familiar with turkey vultures. We see them a lot in the United States.

[00:15:20] And vultures, help limit the spread of disease by eating dead animals.

[00:15:25] In fact, there’s a somewhat famous story from India where vultures dramatically declined and disappeared, and it led to increased rabies outbreaks and some other diseases as well. It’s also shown that having lots of biodiversity can help slow wildfire spread. Now, yes, wildfire is necessary too, so I’m not painting an either or perspective here.

[00:15:44] But these massive, destructive, high intensity fires we’ve been seeing in the US and Canada recently, those are not very helpful.

[00:15:52] There’s a ton of nuance in wildfire. I’m sure you’re all having thoughts right now, so I recommend that you check out the I did an interview I did on Nature’s Archive with Linnea Quinn Davidson, just a couple of months ago.

[00:16:03] and let’s not forget that nature is also therapeutic. There are many peer reviewed medical studies in medical journals showing the benefits of increased immune cells after walking in a forest. Or better regulation of hormones and sleep. There’s even a classic study showing how hospital patients with a view of a park recovered faster and had better outcomes than those who could only see a building in that same hospital on the same floor with the same treatment.

[00:16:29] Now, I admit I was pretty skeptical about the benefits of things like forest bathing when that came to light a decade or two ago. And I think it was just the term. It didn’t sound science y to me, so I was too dismissive, but as I followed the research and talked to experts, it’s clear that both hard science and personal experience support these claims.

[00:16:48] And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the services that nature provides. So the ultimate lesson that I’ve learned through these hundred episodes is that everything truly is connected. I used to hear that. I would hear quotes from people, the famous John Muir quote, and be like, yeah, that makes sense.

[00:17:05] And kind of nod along. But I think now after diving deeply into example after example, all I can say is, wow, it’s true. And what a wonderful world that we live in. Now we all have to pitch in and keep it wonderful. So yes, things are changing and it won’t look the same in the future as it does today. We’re going to have some heartbreaking losses, but there’s still so much to save.

[00:17:32] So let’s do it. So what comes next after a hundred episodes? Well, I never thought I would get here. So I find it kind of challenging to contemplate what it will look like going forward. And, you know, ideas are never really a problem for me. I’m sure as most of you can relate to, it’s actually time.

[00:17:51] Time’s the limiting factor. Now we’re about to launch our first jumpstart nature fundraiser as a nonprofit. So I’m hoping with that, maybe I can hire a media producer or editor and that would really help with the time problem

[00:18:03] but in the short term, right around the corner, two weeks from now, we have an episode coming out about how biologists are studying tree phenology to understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change. phenology is basically the timing of, in this case, trees. It could be the timing of other things in nature as well.

[00:18:21] and by timing you might consider when do they grow? How long do they hold onto their leaves? When do they leaf out? And how does climate affect that? And how maybe, can they adapt to a changing climate? So that’s going to be a really fascinating, discussion. I already have it edited. I’m just waiting to release it in two weeks.

[00:18:37] I also have an interview with a biologist who had a hands on experience reintroducing a variety of charismatic birds to their habitats. This too, I think ties in with what we were just talking about. There’s a lot of hope. There’s a lot that can be saved still, and there’s preparation we can do to prepare for what’s ahead.

[00:18:55] I’m also planning an episode about the fascinating world of wildlife forensics. That’s yet to be recorded, but I know it’s going to be great. And on the Jumpstart Nature podcast, we’ll be talking about invasive species, land preservation, and even outdoor cats. And they’re all just. So important topics. And I think that with Jumpstart Nature, we try very hard to make it very, you know, accessible and entertaining to people.

[00:19:18] So look forward to all of those. And of course I couldn’t do it without your support, without the support of the volunteers. I can’t say enough, even if you’re only donating 4 a month through my Patreon or resharing a couple of episodes once in a while with your friends or on a forum, it all helps. So We’ll be back to our normal, regular podcast episodes here going forward.

[00:19:42] I look forward to sharing what the next 100 episodes bring.