Piero Genovesi 02.18.18

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-piero-genovesi-021818/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z-LxNfgklP0

(Sound of shearwaters)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Piero Genovesi. Piero Genovesi gained a Masters degree in 1989 and a PhD in 1993 in Animal Ecology at the University of Rome, carrying on research on carnivore ecology. Since 1996 he has worked with the INFS (Italian Wildlife Institute – the Italian government research institute for conservation), focusing on carnivore conservation and alien species. He has coordinated several research projects (eradication and management of invasive alien species, patterns of invasions of mammals, economics of biological invasions, etc.) and worked closely with the Italian Ministry of Environment and with several international institutions (such as the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and the European Environmental Agency) to develop guidelines and policies on the management of alien species (he is a co-author of the European Strategy on Invasive Alien Species). In 2000 he was nominated Chair of the European section of IUCN SSC ISSG, and in 2005 appointed Deputy Chair of ISSG. In this capacity he has coordinated many activities on invasive species, providing technical support to States and institutions in the field of invasive alien species management and for the development of policies on the issue. At present Piero is a senior conservation officer with the ISPRA (Institute for Environmental Research and Protection, created by the Italian Government after the suppression of INFS), where he coordinates the activities on alien species management.

So first, thank you for your work, and second, thank you for being on the program.

PG: Thank you so much.

DJ: So can we start by talking about what are invasive species and how big of a problem is this? 

PG: When we talk of alien invasive species, we talk of species introduced by man. So this is something that we cause. And we talk of any kind of organism that we introduce outside their natural range. So over the history of man we have moved around the globe, and in many cases we have taken species with us, introducing them into the natural environment outside the natural range where these species have evolved. And when we talk of invasive species, we talk of these introduced species that cause harm to the environment. So we are talking of any kind of organism, from plants to animals, that are introduced artificially outside their range, and that are harmful to the environment. 

DJ: It seems to me that these invasive species are probably one of the worst problems facing wild species and wild places, maybe after direct habitat destruction. Because I think about the chestnut blight, I think about chytrid. And those have caused, and are causing, untold harm.

PG: Indeed this is a huge problem for biodiversity globally. We started to realize how severe the impact caused by invasive species is only recently, a few decades ago. In the IUCN community we work a lot with red list data, data related to species at risk of extinction. And from the information we compile from all over the world, we realize that invasive species are the first cause of extinction globally. So in terms of species that disappear, all the data that we have show in the last say 400 years, species introduced by man have caused the larger amount of known extinctions.

Just to give you an idea, about 40% of all known extinctions have been also caused by invasive alien species. And from 15 to 20% have been driven only by invasive alien species. So this is by far the first driver of species extinctions globally.

But of course biodiversity is not only about extinctions. We have many cases such as the ones you mentioned where we have a loss of environments, we have destruction at a lower scale. If we can see the general trends in biodiversity globally, we see that invasive species are probably the second most serious driver of loss of biodiversity after habitat loss and fragmentation. 

What is more alarming to us is that this is something that happens in all environments. We have many cases of invasions, as we call them, biological invasions in the sea, in fresh water, in the mainland. And also we see that the trend of invasions is growing at an alarming rate. So, in all environments, in all taxonomic groups, the data we have show that there is a steep increase in the number of new invasions. 

DJ: I’m guessing that there is also a correlation, or some sort of relationship between invasive species sort of piggybacking on other harm. Such as that if you have habitat that is fragmented  – that if you have a healthy biome it might be a bit more difficult for an invasive species to get a foothold than if the biome is healthy.

Oh, I want to mention one example of this. And I don’t know that this theory is actually shown to be true. But it’s a theory I heard several years ago that made some sense to me, which is that one of the reasons that the chestnut blight was able to successfully kill off the chestnuts was that the passenger pigeons had been eradicated, and passenger pigeons were in these immense flocks that would poop so much they would make the soil very acidic. So the less acidic soil ended up causing the chestnuts to be a bit less healthy than they would have been otherwise and less able to fight off the blight. And whether or not that’s true – the short question I should have just asked is “Is there a relationship between also these invasives and the other problems that the wildlife faces?”

PG: There is a strong correlation between invasive species and other drivers of change. For example, what we have seen is that climate change and the warming globe can facilitate invasions, especially in some areas of the world. Of course, if you think of the Arctic Sea, to give an example, where new routes of navigation have been opened. That of course poses a huge risk to that environment because many more species could arrive there and have an impact. 

And of course very often invasive species enter disturbed environments. One element that is important to stress is that the strongest correlation between the number of invasive species and the level of invasions is with the economy. This is a trait that is strongly linked with the globalization of economies. So of course for example we find more invasive species in countries that have higher levels of trade or of tourists. And we see more invasive species in urban areas compared to wild areas because urban areas, or ports, or airports can be entry points for invasive species. 

At the same time I think what you said is partly true for some environments, especially for example in forests. An untouched natural environment is less at risk of being invaded in some cases. But we also have to say that in many cases even the most undisturbed areas are vulnerable to invasions. One example is that old information we have showed that protected areas are particularly impacted by invasive species, even regions of the world like New Zealand or the Pacific where the impact by humans has been less severe than for example in Europe or North America. And if we look at some environments, like islands or fresh water, these environments are particularly vulnerable to invasive species, so even if you have a very natural fresh water spring in the mountains, but if you release some predator fish in that environment you are going to destroy it in a very short time. So I don’t think we can only rely on protecting our environment. Invasive species can be very destructive even in areas that are still only moderately impacted by humans and we need to protect these environments particularly, with a particular care of course. 

DJ: I would like to come back to the trade question in a little while, but I have a couple more questions first. One of them is: Could you give a couple-three examples of historical invasions for people who may not know? Like, I mentioned chestnut blight. Can you talk about some typically devastating, or atypical, either way; invasions that have happened prior to the present. Like 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 300 years ago. It doesn’t matter. 

PG: Yeah. I’ll try to give you a few examples that show how species can be moved sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally. If you think, for example, of the Canadian beaver, that is very familiar for many North Americans, and it’s a very important species for many environments. It’s an ecological engineer, it’s a very important component of the forest environments of the northern part of North America. The Canadian beaver has been introduced intentionally in Tierra del Fuego at the very top of Argentina, at the opposite of the continent just after the second world war, to try to start, for industry in that area. The effects have been just devastating. The beaver has been introduced in a forest that has evolved without this species, so all the trees are vulnerable to the effect of the Canadian beaver and huge areas have been totally devastated by its impact. And the soil in that region is not rich enough to allow a regeneration of the forest. So at the moment there is a very large area between Argentina and Chile that is impacted by the Canadian beaver, and there are attempts to try to preserve this region, this very important region from a biodiversity point of view, from the impact of this introduction. 

Another example is the arrival of the zebra mussel in the Great Lakes region. When it was found in the 80’s it took some time to understand how this mollusk had arrived to this area. And then we realized that probably it was moved in the ballast waters of the vessels that arrived from Europe. So probably not everybody knows that all the ships around the world have tanks filled with water that stabilizes the navigation. In that water they transport thousands of species from one region of the world to the other. So in general, when they try to keep the navigation stable, ships have to fill these tanks with huge amounts of water.

In that case, the zebra mussel arrived in the Great Lakes area and in a very short time they became very abundant, and they have this kind of characteristic of creating encrustations. For example, in the pipes that were used for industries. They blocked navigation, they blocked industry, they created a huge economic cost, and they also displaced the native mollusks in that area.

There are many examples, especially in recent times, in the last 100 years. And that is because we have realized that the trends of invasion have exploded from the beginning of the 19th century.  About 100-150 years ago due to the increase in globalization of the economies, as I said, with the increased level of trade, of transport, and of tourism.

DJ: So I have been an activist and writer for 20-25 years, and worked on environmental issues for that long. And the issue of invasives is – even with all the work I’ve done on deforestation and other issues, the issue of invasives is one of the most honestly depressing for me. Because it seems that so often – this is a lesson that we haven’t really learned. I’ll give an example. I live in California, in the United States. And the California Department of Fish and Game still intentionally stocks trout in lakes that shouldn’t have these fish in them. And then they eat the frog eggs and cause the local frogs to go extinct. And also cause the native trout, golden trout, to go extinct or to be extirpated from regions. So they’re intentionally actually harming, like you mentioned about the beavers. These are stories we’ve heard again and again. 

I don’t know what my question is. I guess I want to express admiration for you, for working on such an important and heartbreaking issue. 

PG: Thank you, Derrick. I think it’s very important that people like you stress that we need to urgently work on this issue. And of course, when I describe the patterns of invasions and the huge impacts, there is a risk of just saying there is nothing we can do. That is not true. We are winning a lot of battles and the situation can improve.

I mentioned that the data we have published on the patterns of invasions globally. We still see an increase in all taxonomic groups and in all environments. But at the same time, we start seeing some reduction in the rates of invasions, especially in groups that are moved intentionally. Increasing awareness of the people can reduce the rate of invasion. 

Another encouraging development is that many countries around the world, including the European Union, have been working with the European Parliament to develop legislation that has been adopted a couple of years ago. This now regulates the movement of the most harmful species. There are countries such as New Zealand and Australia, and more recently Norway and Iceland, that have a very stringent border system to try not to let in any invasive species in their territories. There is a higher attention also in the developing world. I often attend a political meeting to try to explain the need to work on this issue, and I see increasing attention in, for example, African countries, because they see the huge impacts of invasive species, not only on their environments but also on their livelihoods. 

So I think that we can reduce the problem. We cannot stop it. I think it’s impossible to totally stop the movement of species, but we can prevent the most harmful invasions and we can more effectively than in the past manage the current invasive species that are most harmful at present. We have become much more effective than in the past, for example, in removing invasive species from islands, and that has saved hundreds of species and threatened populations.

When we look at the data on the conservation status of threatened species a few years ago, you realize the removal of invasive species from islands has been the most effective conservation action globally. So that has been the kind of intervention that has helped the highest number of threatened species to recover. And we also see that in some cases prevention has been particularly effective. I mentioned the case of the Great Lakes region. A few months ago, the world community adopted an international convention for the treatment of ballast waters. And now all the countries in the world are working at treating these waters to reduce the risk of invasions. Just to give you an example, in the Great Lakes area ships are now required to exchange the water they use in their tanks far from the coast. And just changing the water they use has reduced the rate of invasions in the Great Lakes area 95-99%. So I think it’s possible to do much more, but the first element is that we need to raise awareness in the public. We need to explain what we are talking about and why it is important to work jointly on this issue. Because after all, as I said at the beginning, this is very much linked to our actions and behaviors. So the movement of invasive species is strongly linked to our behaviors. It is humans who release trout and beavers. It is humans who move goods around the world. And without working together and adopting more responsible behaviors, this is not a battle we can win. 

DJ: A question I should have asked you at the beginning, or near the beginning, is how is it that so often invasives, just on sort of a ecological or biological level; how is it that so often that invasives do so much harm? Why does that happen? Like the zebra mussels, how did they take over so much, as opposed to what happens in their native waters? 

PG: Okay, first of all, it’s only one fraction of all the species that are moved around the world that are harmful. And there are actually many species that are very – many exotic species are very valuable to our lives, so if you think of the food that we eat or the plants that we have in our gardens, many species that are important to our livelihoods are not of native origin, but are not causing any harm. Think of tomatoes in Europe, or potatoes, or whatever. We have brought from the Americas many species that are essential for our livelihood without creating any particular harm to the environment. So in general, what we say is that of the thousands of species that arrive, for example, via ballast water; only a few of them will establish into the natural environment and only a very few of them will create ecological damage. 

How does this happen? There are many mechanisms. I mentioned islands. The easiest way, the easiest example to make is predators. So when we introduced rats or other predators into oceanic islands where native species have evolved without predators, without evolving defensive behaviors – for example, there are many islands in the world where – think of Galapagos. Many birds have lost their ability to fly, because they didn’t have predators. So in those cases, the arrival of introduced predators can destroy one species in a few weeks or months. It’s incredibly rapid. 

In some cases, invasive species are particularly successful because in the environment where they arrive they find conditions that are suitable. They may find an environment where they don’t have limiting factors that they have in their natural range. So they may have an area without their predators or without parasites that limit their populations. So there is a combination of factors that explains the success of some invasive species. What we can say is that around the world, there is a limited number of species that are successful everywhere. I think we can identify now the species that are more at risk of becoming invasive elsewhere, and that can help us focus our prevention efforts toward those species.

DJ: Could you give a couple of examples of successful invasives eradications programs?

PG: Yes indeed. The most successful examples of eradication of invasive species are on islands. This is not something we can do everywhere for all organisms. In general eradications can be done only on vertebrates. But the removals of rats from many islands in the world have increased enormously the reproductive rate of birds that were living on those islands, for example. In general we estimate that over 300 species have benefited from the removal of rats and other predators.

In Italy, for example, we are working at the removal of the North American squirrel, that is threatening our native squirrel. We have only one species of squirrel in all Europe, the red squirrel. And the arrival of the American gray squirrel is out-competing our native species, with effects on the entire scale of our forest, because native red squirrel was very important for the regeneration of the natural environment. And wherever we manage to remove the American gray squirrel, we see a coming back of the native species or a consolidation of the native populations with wider effects in terms of environmental recovery. 

The examples are very many. Many bird species have been recovered after eradication of introduced predators on islands. And for example, in Antigua, a very rare snake, the Antiguan racer, is coming back from the brink of extinction after an eradication of rats. Or if you think of, for example, Langara Island in Canada; the population of ancient murrelets has doubled after the removal of rats from the island. Sometimes the positive effects are incredibly rapid after rat eradications. We have a very endangered species of shearwater, a marine bird in Europe, and in Italy, when we removed rats from the island of Montecristo, we saw the reproductive success of the shearwater on that island passing from zero when the rats were present, to 80%  of nests that successfully fledged new individuals in just two years. So the effects can be surprising and very rapid. 

DJ: So I want to come back to the introduced US squirrels in Italy in a moment, but before we do that, when you talk about eradication on an island, how big is one of the largest islands where they’ve been able to successfully get rid of rats? Is it like a square mile or 50 square miles? How big an island is feasible at this point? 

PG: I think it’s important to make a parallel with the sanitary efforts. We managed to remove smallpox from Earth. We can do huge eradications depending on the effort we can devote to these interventions. One of the most successful eradications has been the removal of rats from the South Georgia region in Antarctica. This has been a huge project that removed rats from over 60,000 hectares. So a huge region. Working with a team of helicopters and many tons of rat baits, rats have been completely removed from the entire region. So it is possible also to remove species from very large areas, depending on the commitment and the resources that are involved. 

Another example is the removal of the ruddy duck from Europe. The ruddy duck was introduced intentionally for ornamental reasons, in the past, and it hybridizes with the native white-headed duck, a very rare endemic European duck species. Removal of the ruddy duck has required several years of work by many countries, including Spain, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands. But now it’s more or less completed. There are only a few individuals left in the wild and once the eradication is completed this will secure the future for our endangered white-headed duck. 

DJ: What is your experience of the general political will of different countries to actually fund these efforts? Do you find that you have to fight very hard for that or do you find that a lot of countries are very eager to do this? 

PG: (laughing) No, it’s very difficult to find enough support, because initially this was considered only an environmental problem and many countries in the world don’t necessarily put environment as their top priority. So for example when I talk to the European Parliament, defending the idea of introducing legislation, I explain that this is an area where protecting environment can also help with protecting our industries and our economies, because we show with solid data that if we manage to reduce the problem, if we manage to prevent the arrival of invasive species threatening our environment, exactly the same species are also responsible for harming our economy. And that was a very effective argument for convincing decision makers to work more on this issue. But in general I think it is still an area that decision makers don’t see as a priority and donors don’t see as a priority. 

So about a year ago during the World Conservation Congress that was held in Hawaii, we launched what we call the Honolulu Challenge, a global initiative to try to raise attention and more funds to work on the problem of invasive species. But there is still a lot of work to do to convince countries, decision makers, and more generally the entire society that this is an important area of work for conservation.

DJ: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been an environmental activist for decades, and what you’re saying is reflected in my experience with a lot of activist groups. I’ve worked with a lot of groups that are working on trying to remove dams. I’ve worked with groups that are trying to stop fracking, that are trying to stop deforestation, etc. etc. But there have been fewer groups who are actively working to stop invasives or to remove local invasives.

I see it some. I see it quite a lot especially with plants. But I don’t see the emphasis – I’m merely validating what you just said. I wish there was more emphasis on it. 

PG: I agree with you, and I understand that for NGO’s that rely on their memberships and the support of the society this is an area of work that may be less rewarding. It is definitely much less easy to explain to the public than other threats to conservation including climate change or habitat loss or trafficking and so on. For example, in the work I have done in Italy with the American gray squirrel it has been very difficult to explain to some NGO’s, especially those working in animal welfare, that it was important to deal with this threat to protect our species, because after all, we were talking of removing a nice furry animal from the environment. So it’s not simple to explain it. And also in the case of the ruddy duck eradication in the U.K., the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had a very strong discussion within their membership to explain why it was important to start that project. 

So I think the level of attention in environmentalist work is also due to the fact that the actions that are required; regulating trade, regulating movement of species, in some cases removing species; are less appealing to the public and require some time to explain why this is important and why this is essential for the environment. At the same time, I think the level of awareness is increasing and it’s always important to take the time to explain things. In my work, I’ve been involved, for example, in reintroduction of wildlife. Initially, many years ago we thought that this could be a solution to the loss of biodiversity. Then we realized that reintroducing species was not solving the problems that had brought populations down to the levels where they were, was not a solution. We had to explain that it was much more important to work at the habitat scale. And I think it’s a message that has passed through the society. It took time, but it has arrived to the public. So I think we need to be brave and courageous and explain things even if they’re not very appealing, because after all this can lead to raising an understanding of the environment and the complicated relationships that are behind biodiversity and evolutionary trajectories that we want to preserve. And after all, it brings a growing environmental understanding to the public. 

DJ: So we have about seven or eight minutes left and I have a wind-down question in a minute. But before we go there, you’ve talked a bit about rat eradication or ruddy duck eradication. What can be done about some of the microorganisms like chytrid or white-nose fungus for bats? What can be done about something that is so small that you can’t put out rat bait or anything like that? What do we do about chytrid? 

PG: First of all, let’s try to think of how we’ve treated diseases that impact humans or livestock all over the world. We know that curing is important, treating the viruses or the bacteria is important, but prevention is far more important. So this is one message that is particularly important to give. With the chytrid fungus that is devastating amphibian populations all over the world, the main message is be careful. Don’t move frogs or other amphibians around the world. For example, scientists are now much more aware that they need to sterilize their equipment, they need to be very careful when they capture animals and move them around, and then the trade in amphibians should be very strictly regulated because we have evidence that the amphibians trade has been one of the causes of expansion of chytrid fungus around the world. 

So prevention is definitely the key message. The other point is that we have good examples of treatment and management options that have effectively addressed even microorganisms. If you think of the struggle against mosquitoes and the viruses or diseases that they carry, like malaria: My country, Italy, was strongly affected by malaria after the second world war. And now we have totally eradicated the disease from Italy and from many other countries. So it is possible. It requires investments and commitments but it’s doable in many cases. 

DJ: So what do you want people who hear this interview and who care about the land where they live, what do you want them to do both locally and what message do you want them to take away that will change how they perceive the world? And then also what do you want them to do globally? How can they support your work too? All three of those questions. 

PG: I think what is very important to reduce, to mitigate impacts caused by biological invasions is, on the one hand, to value your native biodiversity. So you know sometimes people perceive the term “biodiversity” as just a combination of species. So people may think that a zoo is more rich in biodiversity. And of course this is not true. So our native biodiversity, the species that live around our gardens and houses are extremely important because they have coevolved in the same area and they have adapted to the very specific local context. So for example in our gardens or for our animals we should value more the use of native species compared to sometimes more colorful exotic species. And the point is that as it has happened with climate change; where a large part of the society has realized that it is important to support political actions to try to reduce the footprint of people and to reduce the use of, for example, industry that creates carbon dioxide; the same should happen with invasive species. We need to work jointly and ask our governments to be more active on this issue, be prepared to do a little more regulating of what we can buy, in order to encourage the development of more effective policies, as in the case of the ballast water convention that I mentioned before. And that has been a great achievement globally. 

Nothing can be achieved unless there is support coming from the bottom toward decision-makers. 

DJ: So is there anything else about invasives that you’ve wanted to say that I haven’t given you the opportunity to say? 

PG: Well, I think that it is essential to remember that not all exotics are bad. Many of them are useful and nice and good to eat. So we are focusing only on a fraction of the species and I think the message is that it is a very serious threat, but in generally we only work on a tiny number of species and altogether we could identify those species and we could work also at a community level to carry on struggles focused on the priority battles to be fought.

DJ: Well thank you so much for your work and for being on the program. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Piero Genovesi. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

Katharyn Boyer 05.28.17

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-katharyn-boyer-052817/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=djP6HwzhRuU

(Sound of greater scaups)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Katharyn Boyer. Her work is focused on the ecology and restoration of coastal habitats, primarily salt marshes and seagrass beds. She is particularly interested in how species interact to structure their environments and influence fundamental ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling. Such basic ecological research has important implications for the restoration of damaged habitats. Today we talk about seagrasses.

So first, thank you for your work, and secondly, thank you for being on the program.

KB: You’re welcome.

DJ: So what/who are seagrasses?

KB: Seagrasses are a group of flowering plants that live in the oceans, as the name suggests. There are about fifty different species that grow around the world, and they’re different from each other in terms of how they look and exactly how they act, but for the most part they have long blades and they go with the flow, in the water. They’re very flexible blades that provide habitat for all different kinds of organisms that otherwise wouldn’t have a place to live in the oceans, and also provide all kinds of other services and functions that we value, such as clearing the water, taking up nutrients, sequestering carbon, all those kinds of things that we value as humans.

DJ: I’ve heard them spoken of as “underwater meadows.” Is that reasonably accurate?

KB: That is accurate. Some are more continuous beds of blades coming out of the sediment, so they look more like meadows in that way. Others are more patchy. In San Francisco Bay, for example, our beds are very patchy. The plants are quite large and they tend to not grow in really close proximity to each other. There could be a meter between each patch that might be a meter in size. So depending on where you are, it can be more like a meadow or more like a series of patches of blades.

DJ: So just to be clear, when people think of bladed beings growing in the ocean, they might think of kelp, and we are definitely not talking about beds of kelp. These are completely different species, a completely different class of creature, correct? Different class of being.

KB: That’s right. Kelp is a kind of algae, and algae don’t have roots. They have holdfasts, so they grab onto rocks. They don’t have a vascular system like you think of in humans, with veins; and plants, flowering plants have a system of veins that move materials up and down through the tissues, called the xylem and the phloem. And that’s what seagrasses have, so they are actually true flowering plants, whereas kelp is a kind of algae, it’s a whole different group of organisms.

So seagrasses all have roots, and these roots are used to take up moisture and nutrients from sediments, which is not something that kelp does.

DJ: What do we call the ocean bed where they live? If it were land it would be called “soil” so what substrate, what do they grow in, what is that called?

KB: Well, you could call it soil, but we call it sediment. So it’s soil material, it’s soil particles like clay and silt and sand that have accumulated on the bottoms of bays and estuaries. And we call those sediments, so it’s a sedimentary process, this accumulation of these soil particles at low positions on the landscape or seascape. And those build up and provide the place for the roots to grow into for the seagrasses.

DJ: And how deep in the water do most seagrasses live?

KB: That really varies. It depends on how much light there is. So if the water’s really clear, seagrasses can grow in many meters of water. They can grow ten meters down. But in places where there isn’t a lot of light that penetrates, say there are a lot of sediment particles in the water, or there is a lot of small single-celled algae we call phytoplankton, in the water; that blocks the light, and if that’s the case, these plants are rooted in the sediment, and they’re sitting there hoping for some light, to put it in very human terms. They need that light for photosynthesis, so if there’s a lot of material floating around in the water column that blocks that light, then the seagrasses can’t grow as deeply.

So, for example, in San Francisco Bay, where we have a lot of sediment, in particular, floating around in the water column, there is very poor light penetration. And that means the deepest that our seagrasses grow is a couple of meters at most.

DJ: So what was, prior to seagrass habitat being destroyed – are seagrasses all over the world – were they widespread? And are they widespread?

KB: They are widespread. They occur in temperate and tropical places. They occur in very cold places as well. So they are very widespread, pretty much any place where there is shallow water and where there is also some protection. So you tend to not find them on the open coast that’s really beaten up by waves and wind, that kind of high-energy condition that you can picture along an open coast. So think about places where there’s some protection; bays and estuaries and lagoons where there is seawater that comes in, but it’s not coming crashing in. So seagrasses need flow, they need water flow, they don’t like to be in really still conditions because they need lots of exchange of water. They need clear, fresh, not fresh as in lacking salinity, but fresh as in clean water. And that means that you find them in protected areas where there is good water exchange, but not with such high wave energy that it would rip them out of their habitat.

DJ: Because they’re in bays often, does this mean that they’re often not in the saltiest of water, but they also like brackish water, many of them?

KB: They can take some lower salinities. So if you consider seawater is about 34-35 parts per thousand salinity, many seagrasses can live in that high of a salinity, but they can also live in salinities down to, say, 15 parts per thousand. So in estuaries and bays where there’s a mixing of fresh water and salt water from the tides, they can live up into the estuary to some extent. So if you move further up the estuary, where you might find 15-20 parts per thousand salinity, you’ll start to find other submerged vegetation that we tend to not call seagrasses for obvious reasons, they’re not in seawater anymore, they’re in something much fresher. But those are the counterparts of the seagrasses that continue to march right on up through the estuaries into completely fresh water. But these are other species than what we call seagrass. We call them just submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV.

DJ: So before we get to the larger seagrass communities and also to threats to seagrasses, there are a couple more technical things I’ve been really wondering about. One of them is, how does pollination work? Because they’re pollinated plants. I understand insects, I understand wind, but I don’t understand how pollination would work underwater.

KB: Well, it is surprising to a lot of people to know that plants can pollinate underwater. Seagrasses do produce pollen and that floats in the water and that is how the pollen moves around and you actually get pollination. So it’s surprising, I think, to a lot of people, that that can happen. And it is just by water motion that that pollen gets moved around and the plants get fertilized.

But there is some evidence, some pretty cool work that’s been done on a seagrass species in Mexico, where it appears just through time lapse photography, it’s been shown that some small invertebrate species, little isopods, amphipods, those sorts of little shrimp-like animals, may be moving the pollen around, similarly to what bees would do in air, with terrestrial plants.

So we don’t know, still, what the extent is of that contribution, of animals, to the pollination of seagrasses. It might be small. But it’s not nothing, we do see evidence of it. But it is probably mostly just from movement of the pollen in the water.

DJ: So when I was doing the research for this interview, I came across something, and let me know if this is incorrect. These plants are kind of the plant equivalent of marine mammals in that they didn’t evolve in the ocean as such, but they came on land and then they went back to the ocean. Is that accurate or am I all wrong on that?

KB: No, that is correct. They did start as land plants, some probably in fresh water and some probably in saltier water, y’know you can have salty water on land, depending on what the geology of the location is. And so yes, it’s happened multiple times through evolutionary history, where these different species, they’re not even all that closely related to each other. You know I told you there are 50 species? I think there are 12 different genera, you know different genuses, of seagrasses, which means there’s a pretty diverse group that managed to perform the same act of migrating back into the ocean after being a land plant.

DJ: So seagrasses are home to other beings as well, are they not? Don’t they make larger, aren’t they parts of larger communities that include the little shrimp-like beings, fish, etc.?

KB: Yes. And that’s one of the reasons we do restoration of these seagrass habitats, one of the reasons why we’re really interested in conserving them. There are all sorts of little critters that live on the seagrasses. And those can be snails of various sorts, some with shells and some without. There can be those little shrimp-like animals like we mentioned, isopods and amphipods, just a wide variety of small critters, and then move on up from there through the food web, the things that eat those, gravitate towards the seagrass beds in order to find those sources of food, so we call those mesopredators, mesograzers. And then we get the larger predators, say larger crabs and fish that’ll come in and eat those midrange sized species that eat the small amphipods and isopods. And then, you know, keep on moving up through the larger sizes in the food web. You’ll get birds, such as herons and egrets that will eat the fish and the larger crabs. So the seagrasses really are the basis of a very complex food web that serves a whole variety of different species.

DJ: And I seem to remember, I don’t remember whether this was on your website or if I read this somewhere else, about how there is sometimes a relationship between seagrass beds and mangrove areas where the babies might grow in one and then move to another for rearing, is that accurate?

KB: That is absolutely accurate. There’s been some interesting work that’s found, particularly with coral reef fishes, large coral reef fishes, that if the coral reefs are adjacent to seagrass beds, and especially also if those seagrass beds are adjacent to mangroves, in these tropical areas, that in those places in the mangrove roots and seagrasses where the younger, the juvenile stages of the fish can live and hide, and find things to eat and grow up a little bit before they move off into the coral reef where it’s a more dangerous place; that they’re more successful by the time they grow up and move onto the coral reef. So there’s this value of having these adjacent habitats, and these complex habitats where the small versions of these animals can live and grow before they move out into more treacherous areas where they’re going to find predators.

DJ: There’s another topic I want to touch before we move to some of the threats to seagrass. I don’t remember what the figures are, but I’ve read some extraordinary figures on the capacity of seagrass beds to sequester carbon.

KB: We know some about that. There’s a lot of work going on, on that topic, right now, in seagrasses around the world. And there are some tropical seagrasses in particular, in the Mediterranean region, that have a tremendous capacity for storing carbon. They have these big, almost like peat reserves that you would find in some kinds of wetlands. But these are under the water, in the shallow waters. And those plants, those particular species have a tremendous capacity for storing carbon. There are others that we know less about, and that we suspect, because they’re a little more ephemeral in their nature, they kind of come and go, and they spread, and some of the shoots die while others are growing, and they probably don’t store as much. So it’s definitely a hot and ongoing research topic to try to understand which species and where there is that capacity for the seagrasses to really perform that function in a big way.

We know they all are sequestering carbon, because they’re photosynthesizing and they’re taking carbon out of the water, and, you know, they’re building their tissues with that carbon. And so they all are sequestering carbon, for sure, but whether or not they’re doing it in a large way compared to, say, terrestrial trees, that’s something that’s still being investigated.

DJ: You said two words that reminded me of another question. One word was “Mediterranean” and another was “ephemeral.” And I seem to recall reading, awhile ago, about a seagrass bed in the Mediterranean that some people think is one of the oldest beings on the planet, like older than bristlecone pine? Does that sound familiar?

KB: It does, yeah. There have been some genetic studies done that have shown that there are some seagrasses beds, and I don’t know whether this is the one you’re referring to or not, but that they are like a single being, they are a single clone, and they have lived for a very long time, and they have spread, but a blade or a shoot, from one end of the bed to the other, and they could be kilometers across, is identical genetically to a blade at the other end of that same bed, suggesting that these are very old and they’ve been in place for a very long time, spreading and providing that habitat.

DJ: You said that seagrass beds often are in bays and estuaries, and oftentimes bays and estuaries are where people put cities, and oftentimes cities are then associated with pollution, and disturbances to the bay itself. So if we had a time lapse map of healthy seagrass beds over the last 500 to 1000 years, would we be seeing a shrinkage and movement in the wrong direction, and if so, what are some of the primary threats?

KB: Well, you’re absolutely right that these estuaries and bays and lagoons that occur along our coasts around the world are often the places where people want to live. And there are many threats that come along with that. It’s just that human cohabitation with these same environments where the seagrasses live. In many places there has been a decline in the acreage of the seagrass, the overall health of those beds, and that can come from habitat destruction, it can be from, for example, dredging through a seagrass bed in order to provide access for boats to marinas and that sort of thing. It can be, you know, when we build bridges and tunnels, when we put structures over water that would shade the plants, things like docks and marinas. We do have those kind of direct impacts on the acreage there might be of a seagrass in a particular location. And then on top of that, we landscape, we have our agricultural use of fertilizers and those bring nutrients, particularly nitrogen, into these waters, that seagrasses didn’t evolve with, and that can often lead to algal blooms. The algae can grow on the leaves of the plants themselves. It can grow loose in the water and shade those seagrass plants. So there are many places where nutrients themselves have been a huge detriment to seagrasses and how much acreage there is and how healthy they are. So lots of different impacts, including other things like invasive species. In some of these coastal areas where we do a lot of shipping, we bring invasive species, invertebrates like I was referring to earlier, the amphipods and isopods; there is a number of examples of invasions of those from locations far from the location we’re talking about. And those come in and now don’t have predators that are used to them. Their populations can explode, and we can have damage to the seagrasses due to them.

That’s something we’ve experienced in the San Francisco Bay with a non-native, an invasive amphipod that has come in from other places. And instead of eating just the algae on the leaves, which is typical of the amphipod in its native habitat, it eats the plants themselves, and can really devastate, particularly the fruits and the seeds, remove huge amounts of those from the plants, but also eats the leaves, and so can be quite damaging. This is something that is a problem for us in the San Francisco Bay when we’re trying to do restoration, because sometimes when we go to collect those flowering shoots that we use to produce new seagrass beds using the seeds, these seeds have all been eaten. And also we’ll see these outbreaks of this amphipod in the places that we restore. We bring the plants in and we remove the amphipods as best we can before we do any of the restoration, but these amphipods still find their way to the restoration site and then eat the plants.

So those kinds of things, those movements of animals around, can be very detrimental. And there’s also examples of invasive seagrasses coming from different places, that humans have facilitated the movement of, and then those species that don’t belong there compete with the native species of seagrasses.

So that’s a variety of examples. I’m sure I could think of more if I spent long enough pondering it. But many things that humans do in these coastal areas have negative impacts.

DJ: I’m wondering too about dams. I know that dams deprive the lower rivers, and also the ocean, of a lot of sediment. And so, for example, when they took out the dam on the Elwha, on the Olympic Peninsula, there were some rocky beaches that were only rocky beaches for the last 100 years, ever since they put in the dam. As soon as the dam was taken out, it refilled with sediment and that brought back all sorts of species who were supposed to live on the sandy beach there. So I’m wondering, too, since these plants live in sediment, whether dams are also depriving them of sediment.

KB: That’s a really interesting issue now, the whole management of sediment, the availability of sediment as we think about sea level rise. Because we know the oceans are rising, and that includes in these estuaries and bays, like I’m talking about, where these seagrasses live, and as the water levels rise, these plants may or may not have the opportunity to migrate upslope where they can still get that light, depending on whether or not there is actually migration space, a gentle slope that is not developed at the top.

So we’re interested in this issue of “Is there enough sediment?” for example, to allow the plants where they currently are to rise in elevation, right where they are living, so that they can still persist after the sea level rises.

In San Francisco Bay we’ve had a huge input of sediment through the Gold Rush period, when there was the hydraulic mining of the Sierra foothills, so that’s the blasting of the hill slopes to remove gold during the Gold Rush years. So from 1850-ish to about the year 2000 we had a tremendous amount of sediment coming down through the San Francisco estuary, and allowing some of these shallow areas to build up in elevation and keep place with sea level rise. That’s already been occurring.

But now we’re seeing this clearing of the water and we’re very concerned about whether or not the seagrass beds, the wetlands that are a little higher in elevation will be able to keep up with sea level rise, because they’re not going to continue to have this influx of sediment.

So it’s an interesting thing, right? Because it was a human-caused source of sediment, and we got used to that over a 100 year period, or a 150 year period. And that became the new normal for this particular estuary. Now, when that stops, and you were talking about dams, a lot of the remaining sediment that was coming off these hill slopes is back behind dams all around the Bay area. And so that means that those sediments are not coming down and not supplying that elevational capital, if you will, to allow the seagrass beds and the wetlands to rise in elevation as the sea level rises.

And there are examples of that sort of thing, where humans have gotten involved in the management of sediment, either through damming or hydraulic mining, or other kinds of activities, and so depending on where you are, it could be a very different situation in terms of whether there will be enough sediment to keep up with sea level rise as it proceeds.

DJ: You said earlier that the seagrasses seem to have very specific requirements as to how deep they can be, based on how much light comes through the water column, and that reminds me of something. For whatever reason, I wrote maybe 100 pages on the various mass extinctions in a book five or six years ago. And until I did that research, I was just like everybody else, I pretty much thought okay, so maybe a meteorite hits or something and then it changes, it makes it get really cold and then the dinosaurs die. That’s pretty much as much as I thought of it.

But I remember reading that with every single mass extinction, a significant part of it has been with a change in sea level. And as soon as I read that, it made perfect sense, because those areas are some of the most fecund on the planet. And then when you put that together with the seagrass being able to live, let’s say one species can live between two and four meters underwater, if the sea level rises two meters, and runs into rocks and can’t have soil there, that whole community is going to die.

KB: That’s right. It means, in a lot of places where we’re thinking about what’s going to happen as the sea level continues to rise, there may be places where we don’t have any opportunity for those kinds of habitats, over time. So, say in 50 years, or 20 years, those places may run out of space.

And then there are other places where there is migration space. And so it means that managers and people who are thinking about “How do we maintain these habitats within the estuary, broadly?” Who are thinking about “Where can we focus our attention? Where can we get the most bang for our buck?” in terms of our conservation dollars, to enhance or restore or encourage these habitats to be able to do that migration. That could be buying up adjacent lands, or preventing development in certain areas, or conservation easements and that kind of thing, really focusing those efforts on places where we think there is the room for these habitats to migrate, as opposed to our shorelines where we’ve built right up to the edge and we have seawalls and riprap and we have no opportunity unless we’re willing to take out our human infrastructure to allow for those habitats to move.

DJ: So before we talk about your beautiful phrase “repair, enhance and encourage” seabeds, can you talk about your relationship to seagrass, and how did you … why seagrass, and not butterflies? What is it that draws you to seagrass?

KB: Well, I was like many kids who thought that the oceans were an amazing place when they were growing up, and thought they would be a marine biologist and study whales and dolphins, or maybe sharks. Along the way I realized that whales and dolphins and sharks and sea otters and all those things that are so appealing to humans; first of all there isn’t room for everyone to study them. There are only so many positions in which to do that. On top of that, those highly charismatic species are fed by all the little things in the ocean, and the little things in the ocean are what started to fascinate me. So the plants that harbor the amphipods that are eaten by the crabs that are then eaten by the birds, you know. As you go up through the food web, it’s those little things that run the whole system. And it became fascinating to me that this was the case. And it wasn’t obvious to me, growing up and taking my early science courses, and thinking about what it meant to be a marine biologist, that that was really a path for a marine biologist, to study the plants, for example, in the water.

So I became interested in that much more recently than when I first became interested in marine biology. It really took until I was out of my undergraduate program and into my graduate work, where I realized that I wanted my focus to be on those habitat-forming plants, including the salt marsh plants, but eventually the seagrasses that were so fascinating to me. Without them you don’t have habitat. You cannot support all of those higher organisms. So they’re just absolutely critical and that became my focus then. How can we conserve them? How can we restore them? How can we create these places where everything else can thrive? And that’s been my motivation now for my whole career since my Ph.D.

DJ: You know, when we put it as bluntly as you just did, it’s all so obvious. How can you expect other creatures to survive when they don’t have a home? It’s like how can we expect – of course on land, meadowlarks are going to start going down in population if you kill all the meadows. Or monarch butterflies are going to if you kill all their food. It’s the same with the seagrass. They’re sort of the foundation upon which everybody else rests.

KB: That’s right. We call them foundational species. I don’t know whether you knew that, but that is a term that we use for seagrasses and kelp forests and a number of different habitat-forming species. They don’t have to be plants. Corals are an example of a habitat-forming species. Or mussel beds. So those could be animals that form the habitat, but they really do, we call it a biogenic structure. Through their bodies, they provide the habitat for a whole host of other organisms.

DJ: In your bio, there’s a line about how species interact to structure their environments. And are you meaning that in the terms you’ve been talking about so far, basically just providing habitat? Or are you also meaning that in terms of – I know, for prairies, prairie grasses build tremendous amounts of soil. How are you meaning that, when you say that you’re interested in how species interact to structure their environments?

KB: I’m thinking about those biological interactions between species. It could be plant to plant or animal to plant or animal to animal. But through that biological interaction, how do they influence the physical aspects of that environment? So, like you say, how do they trap soil? How do they accomplish nutrient retention and removal from the environment? How important is it that each of those species is present in order for that physical process to actually occur?

And so I’m really interested in that aspect of the biology of these systems. Not just the biological interaction but how that interaction ends up influencing the physical aspects, what the architecture is of that habitat. So, how big are those plants and how much do they sequester carbon and how much do they trap sediment and nutrients and that sort of thing.

So it’s really that juxtaposition of that biological interaction and that physical response, that I get really fascinated by.

DJ: About ten years ago I got really obsessed with the question of who’s in charge? I mean that loosely. And thinking about how parasites affect the behavior of their hosts. Like the ones that certain snails will get, and it makes them crawl to the top of a rock and wave themselves around to attract a bird, because that’s the next one who’s going to eat the parasite. And there’s one in specific, that had to do with bays, that blew me away. It was a type of parasite who is, I believe, eaten by a snail, who is then eaten by a fish, and who causes the fish to then go up and flash its belly. And what that does is then make it easier for seabirds to eat, which is the next step. And so seabirds eat it, seabirds then poop the parasite back out, the snail eats the poop and it starts over.

And the reason I bring all this up, is the thing that blew me away is that at some point, somehow, somebody had done a study where they found that if you remove the parasite, the whole system falls apart, because without the fish swimming to the top to flash their bellies, it’s too hard for the seabirds to catch fish. So basically the parasite ends up driving everything.

Those sorts of secondary and tertiary effects that we don’t think about immediately, just blow me away. I’m thinking about this just in terms of how species interact to structure their environments. I’m just marveling at nature, that’s all.

KB: You can turn that around, too, and think it’s important that you have all those connections, all those different exchanges of the parasite through all the different levels of the food web. Something people like me do is look in a restored site, or a site that is damaged, and we look to see if you find the parasite present in all those different levels. We know that they’re important enough that if they’re lacking, that there are functions that are lacking, and that tells us that we have not successfully restored. So there’s a parasite that infects snails in salt marshes, for example, and if you don’t find that parasite throughout that food web; there are a number of different steps where that parasite normally travels in order to complete its life cycle. Then you know that you have not successfully restored that tidal marsh habitat.

DJ: Tell us a little bit about your efforts to restore, enhance, and encourage – I love that phrase – seagrass beds. What do you do, or what do other people who are working on these issues do?

KB: In San Francisco Bay, that’s where my work is focused, we are attempting to restore a particular seagrass called eelgrass, and it occurs at about 3000 acres of the bay right now, but we think there’s the potential for it to occur at about 30,000 acres. An order of magnitude more area. And that’s based on biophysical modeling that has looked at the depth available, the light penetration, the flow, a number of different conditions that we know are important for seagrass growth. And predicted where we ought to be able to have this particular species of seagrass, the eelgrass.

And we use that, then, to, as a starting point, anyway; to say “This particular location in the San Francisco Bay ought to be able to support eelgrass, and it’s not.” So we start there, and we bring in eelgrass that we’ve collected from other locations, natural eelgrass beds, and we either seed it or we transplant it, and I can tell you about the ways that we do that, if that’s of interest. We establish it in this new location in very small plots. And we watch them, and we let the seagrass tell us whether or not that’s a suitable location.

So we could measure all different aspects of the soil conditions and light, and we’ve done that very grossly through this biophysical modeling work. So we have some sense of that. But we don’t bother to do the really detailed measurements at a specific location. We plant the seagrass and we let it tell us whether it’s going to be able to grow in that location.

And if it does not, we move on. Sometimes there are places where the model suggests we can get eelgrass established, and the plants don’t grow there. And there are other places that we’ve been quite successful with.

So we plant the plants and we are working to try to expand some of these restored areas, to have eelgrass in locations in the bay that we haven’t had in the length of time we’ve known where the seagrasses are. So it’s not like we have great historical information about where eelgrass was in the San Francisco Bay. So that’s a big lack. And in fact, we’re not that interested in where it was in the past, because we know that the bay is very different than it was in the past, from sediment deposition from the hydraulic mining, like we talked about, but also because we’ve changed the whole configuration of the bay. So we’re more interested now in saying “Where can it grow today?” Not so much “Where did it grow in the past?” Where can it grow today? And we are working diligently to try to establish it in these places where we think it can grow.

DJ: Let’s say that you start a new plot tomorrow. I don’t know if that’s what you call them. You plant some seagrass tomorrow, or the right time of year, this year. And it grows, and does well. What would be a realistic best case scenario for how quickly that could grow? So, you plant something – well, first off, how much do you plant? How big an area do you cover? And second, if things went just great, how big could it be in ten years?

KB: That’s an excellent question, and we don’t know the whole answer to that yet. We’ve been working on this for a number of years now, and the largest plots that we – plot is a good word – the largest plots that we have installed, or transplanted or seeded, are about an acre in size. And when you think of that acre, don’t imagine that it’s wall-to-wall eelgrass within that space. It’s not at all. We plant it very sparsely in that space, so it can spread and fill that space. We have to collect less from natural beds that we’re trying to conserve.

So, best case scenario, that acre would fill in with the eelgrass, within a few years’ time. We have not seen that happen yet. We’ve definitely seen expansion of eelgrass in places where we’ve planted, but we haven’t been doing this long enough to see it fill in the space in the way we would hope it to over time, if we can watch these plots for longer.

DJ: And if you have it in there for five years, have you started, or however many years, and it starts to fill in, have you seen the other associated species coming into that area?

KB: Yeah, it’s interesting. Most species that we expect to see will find that new eelgrass plot within a very short period of time. And that’s not surprising for species that have, invertebrate species that have, for example, planktonic larvae. So imagine a crab, for example, that has a larval stage that floats around in the water. When its larvae are dispersing around the bay, there’s this habitat, it just sort of happens upon it, voila! It stops and decides to live there.

But there are other species that we call direct developers, and those are species that – for example, some snails that produce baby snails that look just like the adult, and those snails don’t disperse around within the water column. They have to crawl to the new location, so species like that don’t show up as fast. Some of them show up faster than we would expect. But others, after five years, aren’t there. We now have been doing this long enough that we’re figuring out which of these species, even if they don’t have planktonic larvae, are still somehow managing to arrive at these sites without our intervention, and others that are not. So we’re thinking about now; should we be bringing those species in?

There’s this really beautiful sea hare, it’s green and has stripes on it, it’s like a snail without a shell. Long, gelatinous-looking animal. It gets to maybe an inch total in length. And it lives on the seagrass blades and eats the algae off the seagrass, allowing more light to come to the seagrass. And that particular species doesn’t show up at our restoration sites on its own. So, knowing that it’s beneficial to the seagrass, we’re starting to think that maybe we should be moving it in there and allowing it to do its job. Maybe we’ll have more successful restoration at these places if we do that assisted migration.

DJ: So we have several minutes left, and I think everything you’re saying is important and really interesting. For people who recognize the importance of seagrass to the world, and to those habitats, it seems like a harder habitat to directly – like, I have friends who love buffalo, and they can work on Buffalo Field Campaign to try to protect buffalo. And I know people who love other species, and they can protect habitat. It seems one thing to file a timber sale appeal, to protect a piece of old growth forest. But if somebody listens to this interview, they think “Wow, this is really cool,” they start reading up on seagrass, they fall in love with seagrass, what can they do? How can we help seagrass? It’s obvious how you can.

KB: Well, there are a number of things that people can do. They can participate in these restoration projects as they’re going on. It’s not for everyone. These are difficult places to work. They’re windy and there are strong currents. Not like the open coast, like I was referring to, but still. Some of these places we can only access by boat, and some places we have to crawl through mud in order to get to these seagrass beds.

So, there are opportunities for people to volunteer, but usually those are for more hardy souls, except for the work when we’re actually collecting the seagrass, and we rig it up on various – we have a couple of different ways that we take seagrass that we’ve collected. We attach it to bamboo stakes or popsicle sticks. There are various ways that we then do the transplantation, and we do that on land, so people can participate in that regardless of their ability to get around through mud and in water. So we just do that on land at the Romberg Tiburon Center.

So that’s one thing that people can do. They can also support, when there are opportunities to vote for measures that promote restoration, they can vote for those and they can decide that they’re willing to tax themselves in order to provide for this kind of restoration work. A lot of the funding that goes toward doing this kind of restoration comes from bond funds, in the state of California, anyway. Or from different measures where we have property taxes that then contribute to restoration work, including of seagrasses.

There are things that people can do with their pocketbooks and their ballots, where they don’t have to get anywhere near the water, if that’s not their thing and they just appreciate these habitats.

DJ: Are there people who are doing equivalent work to yours in Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf Coast, where people could … if somebody’s living in Alabama or Nova Scotia or Louisiana, and they want to actually do some hands-on work, are there places they could find to come and volunteer, like you’re saying in the Bay area?

KB: Absolutely. So you mentioned the Chesapeake Bay. There are programs there to restore the seagrasses. The coastal bays, along Maryland and Virginia have a hugely successful seagrass restoration program going on there, that has utilized a whole lot of volunteers. Along the Gulf Coast, where there was the Deepwater Horizon event, there’s a lot of restoration going on where there are opportunities for volunteers. That’s true throughout the world, so people just need to make a little bit of effort to see what’s going on in their area, and I bet they would find opportunities.

DJ: Is there anything you wanted to say about seagrass that I haven’t given you the opportunity for?

KB: Well one thing. I think there are a lot of people who don’t even realize this is something that’s in the water, because they don’t see it. And not just seagrasses, but a number of habitats that people are just not aware of. And I encourage people to go out, on the lowest tides that they can. There are these great apps you can get on your phone, for example, that tell you when the tides will be at their lowest point during daylight hours, and you can see where that might be in your local area. And go out at those lowest tides, because that’s when you will actually be able to see these habitats.

And I think if people see them, they’ll understand so much more about what they can provide and how valuable they are. When they’re underwater at the high tides, the general public is not aware of them, and so I think it’s hard to make the case to the general public, that they should do anything about these kinds of places. So if we can get them out on those low tides, and they can see them, they can explore them, I think we’ll find more support.

DJ: Well that’s just so great. And thank you so much for your work, and thank you for being on the program. I would like to thank listeners for listening, my guest today has been Katharyn Boyer, this is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

Juliee de la Terre 11.05.17

 

Juliee de la Terre discusses Rights of Nature projects in the works for the Great Lakes, their current state of progress, and effecting cultural change.

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-juliee-de-la-terre-110517/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1zIVtTD0Ak

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen. This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Juliee de la Terre. She holds an MS from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been an activist since she was a child helping her mother care for injured wildlife.She lives on a small farm in southwest WI where she grows most of her food and teaches others the art of self-reliance. She is a member of Save Our Unique Lands, an NGO that opposes massive powerline expansion infrastructure. She owns Ethos Restoration Landscapes, a chemical free and native plant and food poly-cultural landscaping business which emphasizes removing lawns and restoring native plants (ethosrl.com), which is always a good idea.

As an environmental consultant she is engaged in a food sovereignty movement with the Ho-Chunk Nation and leads foraging walks. She hopes to launch a multi-faceted deep green immersion project with the tribe that will explore the natural world from earth to sky through various pedagogical methods and an in place poly-cultural green space. She organized and facilitated a 33 days long, trans-state walk in 2016 in Wisconsin, to unpack the dangers of the 4 pipe Enbridge pipeline corridor and oppose any expansion of same. She is recently in partnership with Earth Law Center, to initiate the Great Lakes Rights of Nature Coalition working with concerned people all around the Great Lakes ecosystem to enact legal structures that take rights away from corporations and acknowledge the rights of the lakes to exist, persist and flourish, which is what we’ll be talking about today. She travels the country giving talks on various subjects and this last weekend presented at the Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, MN about institutionalized violence, its effects on humans and the natural world and how to address it. She believes that transformation begins in hearts and minds and expands to all living systems and that we need to replace war mongering messaging, iconography, education etc with the narrative of acknowledging the intrinsic rights of all living systems. She maintains her blog called “Sacred Water Sacred Land” about the sacredness of all things.

So first off, thank you for your work, and second, thank you for being on the program.

JT: Thanks, Derrick! Great to be here.

DJ: Thanks. Today, let’s talk about this partnership with the Earth Law Center to initiate the Great Lakes Rights of Nature coalition. But before we do that, let’s talk about the Great Lakes. People may have heard of them, but I don’t know if a lot of people recognize the trouble they’re in.

Actually, can you back up? Can you talk about how amazing and wonderful the Great Lakes are and then talk about the threats to them, and then talk about how they are currently.

JT: Okay, well the first thing to realize is the Great Lakes hold over 20% of the world’s fresh water supply, which is absolutely amazing when you think about it. So they are a global issue, the health of them, the maintenance of them, making sure the water stays there, it’s really really important. There’s a huge amount of culture that surrounds the Great Lakes, 157 tribes share all the land around the Great Lakes, plus all the communities and all the people and all the stories and all the history that has to do with those lakes.

The lakes have been threatened for quite a long time, beginning with colonization of course, when they started using it for trade, and then cities started growing up along the edges and dumping their sewage in them, and then in Lake Huron there’s a nuclear power plant, so there’s heavy water in Lake Huron now. In Lake Superior there’s a whole bunch of barrels, like 200 of them, with toxic waste that the Army Corps of Engineers just threw in the middle of the lake, and the tribes have been trying to extricate them.

Of course, the lakes are also the recipients of surface water nutrient pollution coming off of agricultural areas, and now having dead zones, and having bloom. And then everybody remembers Lake Erie, and all their problems in the 70’s, before all the environmental acts which now Trump is destroying, came into being, And Lake Erie’s going back to being, well the people on Lake Erie are trying to keep it from going back the way it was before. There’s actually a group of people in Toledo, Ohio that drew up the Bill of Rights of Lake Erie, and they’re working with Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund on that. I got to peek a little bit at that, so that’s a whole group protecting one of the lakes, so that’s really cool.

What was the third thing I was supposed to comment on?

DJ: Before we get to the third thing – do we know – I know that prior to colonization here, you can read accounts of European early explorers who talked about salmon so thick on the Klamath that the entire river was black and roiling, they said. So do we know anything, do we have an account of, like, how many fish were in the Great Lakes? Was it the same sort of amazing, at this point almost unbelievable fecundity?

JT: Oh, Derrick, I’m sure that’s the way it was. I mean, lots of people made their livings just fishing the Great Lakes, and there are still countless people doing that. Fish stocks are declining just like they are everywhere else in the world. That’s really what’s happening. We’ve got shifting baselines, and what we might think is abundant now is maybe one thousandth of what it should have been. And that’s all because of global capitalism in the society that we live in. Everything is treated like a commodity. So obviously we’re not thinking about it longterm.

DJ: And also I presume that, because they’re lakes, I presume that it’s incredibly important to all sorts of waterfowl. Is that the case?

JT: The sloughs and the backwaters of these huge lakes are where you’re going to find the waterfowl, but of course it’s all connected. And as they develop the edges of these lakes and destroy those areas where the water would pool and be cleansed before it entered the lakes, of course that’s going to compromise the lake. So you would assume any kind of, they call it “development” but the kind of urban destruction along the edges is going to destroy that, and of course it’s going to destroy the habitat for the waterfowl.

DJ: So, the third part was the – the first part was “What was it like before?” The second part was “What is the current state of the Great Lakes?” And the third part was “What are some of the primary threats to the Great Lakes?”

JT: Some are saying that fresh water is going to be the new gold. Nestle’s already in the lakes. I think they’re primarily in Lake Superior with their ships, drawing out water. There’s a law that they can’t package it a certain size, so what they did is just put it in different sized containers. So Nestle’s already in there taking out the water. I can’t remember which city here in Wisconsin has gotten the go-ahead, the green light to take water directly out of Lake Michigan, and that’s never been allowed before because there was the Great Lakes Compact, which didn’t let any entity draw water out of the lakes. So maybe we’re going to end up with the Great Lakes Water Wars or something, but I guess I could speak for a lot of people who are concerned, that we don’t want it to get that bad. We don’t want it to be a big conflict, and we want to keep that water in place, because that’s all part of our regional ecosystem.

Just like anything else, when you deplete one part of it you’re going to deplete the whole thing. So there’s the taking of the water, there’s a whole bunch of invasive species that have gotten into the lakes, that’s when people come in with boats from overseas and they let the bilge water out and then pretty soon, you know, everybody’s heard about the zebra mussels clogging up all the pipes. There’s the sea lamprey, there are a couple of other fish that aren’t supposed to be in there. I can’t list off all the invasive species but it’s certainly an issue in the lakes like it is in a lot of other lakes in the midwest. And then, of course, using the water for manufacturing. A lot of companies will go on the edge of these lakes because they can just take all the water they want and they can just kind of let their poisons leak into the lake, and who’s going to know? And I know that’s happening. So there’s that. The list could go on forever, really.

DJ: So let’s move to the current campaign. You talked about Great Lakes Rights of Nature Coalition. What is the foundation for that? What does all that mean?

JT: Way back in 2005, after they passed the U.N. Declaration of Universal Human Rights, after that they passed, in 2005, the Declaration for the Universal Rights, I don’t know if I’m saying this correctly, of all living things? And out of that came the Rights of Nature movement, as I understand it. Several different organizations were formed at that point. The one that I became the most familiar with is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Their organization was the one that was involved in the Ecuadorian amendment to their constitution, the Rights of Nature amendment. And then Bolivia, and then, what’s that other country, was it New Zealand? Anyway, they’ve been all over the world,

So I went to a couple of Democracy Schools and learned about how our Supreme Court has ruled many, many times, in favor of corporations and not in favor of all living things, and once a person begins to know that, you realize we don’t really live in a democracy, and we don’t live in a system that’s actually going to preserve anything for the next seven generations, and that’s only if you’re concerned about human beings. I’m concerned about all living things, not just human beings.

So anyway, these legal structures that are written by these specialist lawyers that are schooled in this, have been enacted, ordinances have been enacted in over 150 places in the U.S. so far, and now there’s a river out in Oregon, the Siletz River is going to court on behalf of itself. This was just within the last couple of weeks, so it’s gaining momentum. Essentially it’s just legal language saying that the natural entity – I shouldn’t say “natural entity,” these nonhumans have standing in court. Of course, a human will have to speak on their behalf, but they have standing in court.

So what I did was get ahold of the Earth Law Center and asked if they would like to enter into a partnership with Sacred Water, Sacred Land to try to protect the Great Lakes. And so we’ve been at it for a couple of months now and it’s kind of slow going. Maybe 95% of the population may not realize how little constitutional protections they have and nature has under our current system. So maybe you could ask me a little bit more specific question about how it works? Or something?

DJ: Sure. Let’s back up a little bit. What do you mean by a natural right for a nonhuman being? What rights are you asserting that a lake has?

JT: A lake has the right to exist, persist and flourish, in all of its natural cycles and systems. That’s how they would say it in the language.

DJ: It seems absurd to me that we even have to make the argument that the Great Lakes have the right to exist.

JT: You’re exactly right, Derrick. We shouldn’t have to do this, but we’re in the thrall of global exploitive capitalism and patriarchy, which gives absolutely no rights to anything other than white rich men who pull the strings on everything. So, yeah; we shouldn’t have to have these laws at all. It’s insane.

DJ: It’s also insane that, you know, corporations, as you and I both know, corporations have rights. Are granted rights, I should say. So organizations of these rich men have rights, whereas the real, physical world doesn’t. That’s always been quite an extraordinary thought for me.

JT: Yeah, it’s really extraordinary, considering the fact that they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have a natural system to live in. It’s like they’re completely ignoring their origins, which is a perfect symptom of runaway patriarchy, because you’re not going to acknowledge anything other than your own narcissistic, psychopathic desires. That’s what it is.

DJ: Let’s talk about the Nature Coalition. You mentioned a group in Toledo, you mentioned CELDF. How many groups in how many states are associated with this? And first off, how many states are around the Great Lakes? I’m sorry for my ignorance, and then how many states are your people in?

JT: (laughing) Hey, you know, you’re making me bone up on it. I’m thinking it’s nine states, and I’m thinking four Canadian provinces. I might be wrong, might be more, so I guess I better sit down and look at a map so next time somebody asks me, I can really be sure of my answer. I do know it’s over 1500 communities and 157 tribes, and I don’t know how many nonprofits, or community organizations. And to answer your first question, we’re just very new, we just got the Organic Consumers Association to come on board. That’s kind of a no-brainer. And then Grant Wilson of Earth Law Center was talking to somebody today from some religious group, and he didn’t give me all the information, so like, there are different players in the coalition, he and I and other people associated with him. We’re trying to reach out to people we think might be interested in engaging, and eventually enacting these legal structures in their communities. So hopefully this interview with you will make it more visible and maybe more people will come in board.

It’s not an easy task. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of people out there ready for this information. And then trying to explain to them what it really means, and how engaging is actually going to accomplish anything, because so many people are like “Ah, that’s just another thing coming down the pike, it’s not going to accomplish anything, why waste my time?” You try to get them excited, say “Okay, this is something that actually works. A river in Ecuador, the Vilcabamba, won in court.” And you gotta tell them and get them to realize there’s a whole different way of looking at legal structures in our society. It’s almost like you have to turn their whole reality upside down, or something. So it’s not just a campaign about what law can do. It’s a campaign about what they can do. It’s a campaign about how they’re connected with nature. It’s a campaign about thinking about the next generation. It’s a campaign about interconnectivity. There are so many layers of significance that I feel like the campaign is more useful in the campaign itself than the actual legal structure at the end of it. Because you’re having all this dialog in between.

DJ: So … this might not be a fair question, but if it’s not fair, then we’ll just move on. Give me the strongest argument you can against having the Great Lakes – what is the argument that would be used by the other side to attempt to discredit you? Why should the Great Lakes not have rights?

JT: Any group that would argue it would be one that was standing to make money somehow off of the lakes not having protection. I would think it would be some sort of corporate entity and they would say “Well, it’s interfering with commerce.” The Commerce Clause is the one they always bring out to fight anything that takes away their profit. And you know as well as I do, all corporations go into court and say “Look, they took away our profit. They won’t let us do that thing and now we can’t make 18 gazillion dollars, and you gotta pay us the money we would have made if you hadn’t of stopped us.” So that would be probably the most important argument. That’s why all these other campaigns have to happen in the meantime, which is “Maybe we need to look at economic progress differently, and have a progress indicator that’s not based on the commodification of our reality, and more on ‘How well are we doing?’ and ‘How healthy is our environment?’” There’s a whole nother layer to this. And so the people that stand to gain money from exploiting the lakes are going to fight it, saying “You’re cutting into our profits.” That would probably be the most visible argument.

DJ: And they will also say “Look at all the jobs that we’re bringing in, and so basically you want all these families to starve.”

JT: Right. So being part of a corporate monetary commodification system is our first enslavement, isn’t it? So until we can walk away from that enslavement they’re always going to use that argument.

DJ: Which is one reason that you also work on food sovereignty issues, I believe.

JT: Yes, it is. I mean, taking care of yourself is your first step towards independence, if not the most important step.

DJ: So walk me through, step by step … if this campaign to gain Rights of Nature for the Great Lakes … walk me through a more or less, not ideal, but a fairly positive, realistic estimate of how you would like the campaign to go over the next year or two. What are you hoping to accomplish in the short run and what do you need to accomplish that?

JT: That’s a good question and I guess I’ll take what I learned from a new colleague of mine. His name is Henk Ovink and he’s from the Netherlands and he’s the United Nations first World Water Ambassador, and I had him on the phone last week, because I just wanted to know what works? What works in big, big projects, because he’s done some big ones. Like, he came in after Hurricane Sandy and tried to get everybody to figure out what to do about rising sea levels.

His first piece of advice to me was to make the lakes the conversation. So I would take him up on that, and I would make the lakes the conversation. And then he said the second thing is to get every school around the lakes to have a lake immersion experience, so they understand the importance of the lakes and why they need to be protected.

I shouldn’t say – sometimes I gotta pay attention to my narrative. To protect them means I’m better than them. So, like, the lakes need to be acknowledged, by humans, for the intrinsic value that they have. Because they’ve always had value. It’s not up to us to say whether something has value or not.

So, to get people to realize how they fit into the universe, that it’s not all about human beings, that our children realize the value of having clean, fresh water in order to survive in this climate chaos, that the lakes become part and parcel of people’s understanding of who they are in the space that they inhabit.

Indigenous people do that through stories. So I thought; well maybe we should come up with some lake stories or something, or ask for people to tell stories about the relationship with the lake. Because before writing and modern times, everything was by word of mouth, and it was person to person, story to story. That’s how we learned for most of human existence. So I’d like to see that come about somehow.

DJ: Let’s talk about the school thing for a minute. How would one go about – what sort of immersion would you like to see from individual schools and teachers, for their students, and what would be the steps required? I mean, say somebody is hearing this, and they live somewhere in Michigan. What would you want them to do? And what would you want the school program to look like?

JT: Wow. We’re putting a lot into 45 minutes. Okay. Earth Law Center came up with this little thing where they’d bottle an ecosystem, and the kids do this thing, and they make their own little enclosed ecosystem, and then they figure out how to protect it, as a way to think about legal structures to protect a natural system.

My idea would be to go out to some body of water, if you’re too far away from the lake, an inland lake, or some type of lake, or river even, or something, and the kids would pick out, you know, their little piece of it, and then they would be in it, and they would describe it, and observe it, and then they would talk about what its intrinsic rights were, which is really hard, because we’re talking about narratives that aren’t normalized in our culture.

So the teacher would have to spend some time adjusting their pedagogy in class from one of teaching all natural systems as objects, to one of subjects, and getting the kids to understand that they’re part of their ecosystem. And that would be maybe a whole new way of actually talking to their students. So that might have to be the first layer, getting them into that head space. And then to enter in relationship with their little ecosystem, wherever that may be. It could even just be a single plant. But teaching by example through story and narrative that we are all in relationship with the entire planet, with all ecosystems.

That’s not what we’re taught. So it would be kind of challenging for your average teacher to do this, perhaps. Especially if they have certain programs that they have to do in schools. So maybe it would have to be a program that would be extracurricular, a program put on by a nonprofit where they would invite the students to come, so the burden wouldn’t be on the teachers to actually have to develop it.

So I’m sorry I don’t have a more fleshed out answer to that. I haven’t written any curriculums yet. I’m just talking about what we would be trying to accomplish and how that might look.

DJ: I remember specifically, from fourth grade, in my elementary school, we went to a farm that was right next door to the school, and we were given a tour of their barn, so that we could see the barn owls and see all the, you know, when owls eat the mice and then they vomit up the little mouse pellet? So we were shown those, and my point is that that is one of the few days I still remember from fourth grade. So I think that these larger projects would be really great, but I think just getting children simply out of the classroom and, as you said, into some slough, or into – I remember another day, about that same time, when my friend and I went for a long long long long walk, and we came across this pond we’d never seen before, that was all full of frogs. The point is I still remember that day. I can still remember – the pond, unfortunately, was also full of – it was on a farm, and so it was all full of garbage from the farm, old tractors or whatever. But I still remember seeing the frogs just all over the pond. And I think, at the very least, it’s helpful to help children to gain those memories.

JT: I think it’s almost violent to not allow them to have them. Because look at how significant that was for you. And I’d have to say, Derrick, I share the same sort of memories, because of all the running around I did with my brothers and sister, and the deep memories were out in nature where we’re just walking down the road, or finding monarchs in a ditch, or going down to the quarry, or a pond or whatever. Those are very vivid memories for me. I remember walking down the road and there were countless, I call them monarch plants, not “milkweed,” because I don’t like the word “weed,” and there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of monarchs everywhere, so much abundance. It’s really sad that we’ve lost 50% of all our animals in my lifetime. And then I was reading the other day, 60% of the insects. This is craziness. This is nuts. This planet was so abundant and so amazing and so beautiful, and what do we do, we’re trying to McDonaldize everything? So that all we have left is an industrialized, burned out landscape with like five species of trees or something? And that’s supposed to, like, feed our soul? You know, it’s insane.

DJ: I agree with you. So, we’ve talked briefly about what schools might do. What do you want – how else are you going to build this coalition? Who else are you going to reach out to? You mentioned a religious organization. So just talk to me more about building this coalition, and what you would hope might happen.

JT: The first layer would be to reach out to everybody that says “Great Lake something-or-other,” which is what I’ve been doing. And then reaching out to the tribes, which is a whole different ballgame altogether, because I’m not native, I’m a white woman, and of course you know they have a certain understanding of what us white colonizers think and do, so I probably have to mediate my message through some native person. I think we might have a young native woman on board who might mediate that message to the native community, because they’re probably not going to give me the time of day. But that’s okay. We do it how we do it.

Then probably put on some events, and see who comes. But it’s early. We haven’t written any – there’s a possible grant, but right now I’ve put in two months of volunteer work, I’m not paid for any of this. So it would be nice to have somebody pay for my gas. I’m running around. But often that’s the case, the people that are doing the really really important work, it’s not the work of exploitation, it’s the work of all living things. There’s not a lot of monetary gain to that. There’s just the gain of knowing you’re doing something good that will hopefully live beyond yourself.

So like I said, it’s early, we’re trying to reach out, I’m trying to go – me, personally, I’m trying to go to conventions, to reach out to people and network. The two lawyers, Grant Wilson and Art Helmus are doing their own thing. They’re all the way across on the other side of the country, I’ve never met them, they’re out in California. So we speak on the phone once a week. We have an online conversation where people can check in and talk to each other via text. We put that together, and so far, nobody’s really taken off with that. Some of the difficulties with this sort of a campaign are just communication, because it’s just a huge area, it’s a huge concept. Like Einstein said; “It takes a great mind to take a complex idea and make it so anybody can understand it.” And I think right now we’re struggling with that. What does that look like?

So we’re trying to roll out a logo and a tagline, something that catches people, and I hate to say it, but I mean, we almost need to use marketing techniques. Because that’s what people are accustomed to. Saul Alinsky said “Use what the people are familiar with,” so we want to roll out some sort of campaign that way. And so I can’t really tell you. It’s early, you caught us early on. I’m hoping that things hold and build exponentially, because we really don’t have a long time to do this. The Paris climate talks last year said we had two decades to make some progress with the mess we’ve made of this planet. So every morning I wake up and I’m like, oh my god, I better keep going on this. Don’t let it go. Work on it every day. I’m one of millions of people thinking this, I’m sure.

DJ: So, something I often do with my writing is if I’m trying to figure out what to say in some paragraph or sentence even, or page, whatever, is to just stop and then say “Okay. What am I really trying to say?” And forget rhetoric. So just pretend you and I are having a private conversation, and just tell me, what’s the point? What do you really hope to accomplish? What do you want with this Great Lakes campaign? If I were to say what I want for the salmon, it’s very clear. I want there to be more wild salmon every year than the year before. So what do you want? What do you want to see? What’s the real bottom line? And don’t be rhetorical. Just say whatever comes to head.

JT: Well, that they fall in love with themselves, their community, and the planet. That’s what it is.

DJ: Okay, I love that. That’s great. And then what do you want for the Great Lakes?

JT: That they are able to exist, persist and flourish without being degraded anymore. Perhaps even made healthier.

DJ: And so what would that look like? I’m going to come back to people in a second. What would that look like for the Great Lakes to be actually recovering and healthier? I mean, I know for the Klamath River what that would look like is more water flowing through the river, fewer dams, more salmon, more lampreys, less algae, less ich, that’s a fungus. So what would it look like for the Great Lakes to be healthier?

JT: Well, okay; what you said. A greater fish abundance, less disease on the fish, less algae bloom, less persistent toxins. No more dumping of waste, no more influx of invasive species, no more messing about in the lakes like they’re some kind of test tube. You know how it is when they get an invasive species, they’re going to bring in another one, and then another one, and another one. It’s just like one big long continuous science experiment.

But I think probably the most significant part would be people having a spiritual relationship with the water, and to understand that the water in their bodies is the same as the water in that lake. So like there’s this whole understanding that that lake is as precious as anything out there. So there’s like almost this energetic relationship between the people and the water. And I’ve experienced that up on Lake Superior, on the edge of Lake Superior. I was just sitting there meditating and this piece of driftwood started talking to me. I was like, whoa, this is really amazing, this is cool. So I remember that experience. And that’s the kind of experience people should be having. That is the meaning of being a human on this planet, all these layers of understanding.

DJ: So let’s go back to people for a second. And when you raise this issue, when you start talking about the Great Lakes having rights, and talk about them flourishing, what is the response by the environmentalists you talk to, and what is the response by the sort of regular people you talk to? Are people open to this idea? And also, either before or after you do that, you said that one of the concerns that people might have is “Oh gosh, this won’t accomplish anything.” The second thing is I want you to answer that concern. So you can answer those in any order you want.

JT: So I was just at this Democracy Convention and there were a bunch of Move to Amend people there. And I tried to have a dialog with them about the Rights of Nature laws, enacting Rights of Nature laws. They’re very focused on changing the Constitution because they feel like that’s how to answer it. One way of looking at it is that people still have a lot of confidence in our existing legal structures, our Constitution, what presumably is supposed to be representing everyone, or all the humans, of course, not the nonhuman world. But there’s still a lot of faith in changing that to reflect a real society, a real egalitarian society. And I feel like, and Rights of Nature people feel too, that we can’t wait for these legal structures like the Constitution to have all the corporate rights removed from them before we move forward. We need to just assert the rights no matter what the Constitution says.

So I guess the biggest difficulty for me, talking about this, is so many people still have faith in the existing Constitution, that if we just tweak that somehow everything’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be okay, because the Constitution was written by white male property owners. It was never written for any of us or the nonhuman world. It wasn’t written for us. So it’s hard to get people past that, right? That’s the biggest difficulty. Some of the feedback I got was “Okay, so you pass it, you write the administrative rules – you can pass a law, but then you have to write administrative rules – and then how do you enforce it? What if a corporation says ‘We’re going to go ahead and dig that high capacity well whether you like it or not, and we don’t care about your rights of nature laws.’”? So their question is “Who’s going to enforce the law?”

Well, that’s another question, isn’t it? You almost have to have your local sheriff on board, on your side, standing up for the community law, the community rights law, and these battles are being fought out right now. There’s one – I can’t remember the community in Pennsylvania where the community passed a law that said it was okay for people to engage in civil disobedience on behalf of their health and the health of their ecosystem, and the corporation is challenging people’s rights to actually say anything. So the corporations are trying to destroy free speech for the community where they’re trying to dump fracking wastewater.

So essentially they’re saying all the people and all the nonhumans where they’re dumping this frack water, they’re all disposable. Henry Giroux likes to use that term, the culture of disposability. So the corporations on steroids treat all of us as disposable beings, whether we’re humans or nonhumans. We’re not part of their algorithm. So the challenge is to get people to realize current laws will not be protecting you, and trying to play the game the way that it was written is not going to get the job done either.

DJ: It seems to me – I know Thomas Linzey has said this to me many times, that one of the things he does, is doing with his work, is giving people the tools of democracy, and then if they work, that’s great, and if the corporations and the government come and stomps on them, he has made clear the contradiction, that we believe we live in a democracy when we don’t. And it seems to me that this is one of the things you’re saying, too; is that if you present this, it’s very reasonable to expect the people in the Great Lakes to want for the Great Lakes to be healthy and flourish. It seems you can’t really – you take the moral high ground there. And it’s great if you present this, and then if the corporations come and argue; “No, the Great Lakes don’t have the right,” or if the government argues “No, the Great Lakes don’t have the right to flourish,” that seems – yes, that’s an overt power play and they may win in court, but that seems it’s just a dreadful PR nightmare for them. I means it seems you – that’s a great, as you said earlier, a great way to raise awareness about the health of the Great Lakes.

JT: Right, and like you said, what Thomas Linzey says is that dichotomy in what we think we have in the way of rights, and what, when it comes right down to a lawsuit, we realize we don’t. And so it’s that dichotomy that he’s playing on.

But unfortunately, people don’t realize that until they’ve ended up in the courts, and that takes, what, three or four years? And by that time some egregious thing may have been happening in this precious space that they were very concerned about. And a lot of this damage, once it’s done, like injecting frack water into a deep well, you’ve contaminated an entire aquifer. Do we have three or four years to adjudicate? And look for damages? You can’t return that aquifer back to the way it was before, ever. And so that’s the space of opportunity, trying to get people to realize you don’t want to go there. You don’t want to let that happen. And so I live in southwestern Wisconsin on top of karst, and we have beautiful water here, and my concern is we need to have protections here so that somebody doesn’t swoop in and start taking our water just like they do other places. I don’t want to wait until they’re doing it before anybody does something about it. But unfortunately that’s the way a lot of these situations go, the damage is already done.

DJ: That’s a really good point. So when you go to something like a Democracy Convention or you go to speak to other people, how much do you run into a problem of what I call human supremacism? Where people think the entire world was created for humans and basically “Screw the Great Lakes, or screw the aquifer, screw any of that; if we can use it, it’s ridiculous that nonhumans even have the right to exist.” Do you run into that very often or is that not a problem?

JT: It’s typically not a problem in my circle, but I’m surrounded by a lot of conservative Christians where I live, and yes, you got it, that’s where they’re at, but you know, I try to use stories and metaphor to talk to them, and I would say something like “Suppose your parents gave you a beautiful house and everything you could ever want, it was just a luxury to live in, and you just took a jackhammer and a sledgehammer and you smashed it to bits and you burned it down, and then what would your parents think about that, after they gave you that beautiful space to be? Is that respectful? Is that something you would do?” And essentially that’s what we’re doing.

And on some level, they can understand that. So, I don’t run into it, like you said, because I don’t run in those circles, but when I do talk to people, I try to make it really simple to them. And I’ve actually had some pretty good conversations with the Amish around me. They don’t understand climate change because they don’t watch media and they don’t really spend a lot of time engaged in studying scientific papers or listening to climate scientists. But they see a lot of what’s going on and they’re interested in changing. Of course, they have families of 15 or 19 kids, which is like one of the major problems. I don’t think I could ever talk them out of that.

Every audience is different. I feel like, as the paradigm shifts and we start to think about how all things have intrinsic rights, and that includes women, children, elderly, LGBT, whatever, Blacks, Natives, whatever – it’s all one big picture, it’s all one thing. Because it’s whether we respect anything outside of ourselves. It’s whether we have empathy or compassion for anything outside of ourselves. It could be a human or it could be a nonhuman. So I feel like we’re trying to shift a culture of extreme narcissism to one of compassion, empathy, and relationship.

And so that’s huge, because this violent way of thinking has taught the children from a very young age, and lots of your interviews talk about such things, so you know what I’m talking about. So how do we shift that? So I feel like Rights of Nature campaigns anywhere can be part of shifting public consciousness to what I’m talking about. To one of love instead of hate.

DJ: What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. So, let’s say the coalition has been formed, and you’ve got a fairly large group of people around this question of rights for the Great Lakes. What would be the next sort of tangible steps to be taken to protect aquifers, for example, or to protect the lake itself. Would this then be moved forward in a lawsuit fashion? What would happen next, do you know?

JT: Yes. I would, or I am imagining and sharing with the group kind of a two-pronged approach, it could be more than that, but at least two. One is education and one is unrolling a legal structure. So boilerplate legal structures, examples of structures that municipalities could use, or a community could use, or a tribe could use. The language that actually ends up in court. So, first giving the community an opportunity to realize, on a really deep level, what it takes for themselves and their region to be healthy and flourishing. And the other is to what would legal protections actually look like, fitting together in a group, going through the motions of making an official action and passing the legislation, whether it be at a township level or a county level or a municipal level. It could be a state level if we had any states in the United States that were willing to take it on. Certainly not Wisconsin. And getting that language to them so they can see what it looks like. And then let them run with it, and then support them if they get sued.

So I feel like that has to be a major piece, and have a discussion about how to enforce the laws once they’re enacted. I think it kind of all rolls out in the discussion over time, and I’m kind of hoping that we get, like, nodes of activity around the lakes, where these discussions can happen. And like it’s kind of a no brainer to have Flint, Michigan; or Chicago; or Milwaukee, or any of these big cities that are on the lakes; you’d think that would be a great place to have a discussion like that and roll things out. But because the project’s so huge, we need to find people in those areas that want to take it on and run with it within their own communities, because that’s their community, they should be doing the work in their community, and we just support them while they’re doing it.

DJ: So that really leads to the last question. We have a couple of minutes left, and the last question is; so for anybody who is in the Great Lakes region especially, outside of it too, but especially inside the Great Lakes region; and they want to participate in this, or they want to find out more information about it, what should they do? If there is a person listening in Milwaukee who thinks they might want to start that process in their community, what do they do?

JT: Well, there’s a Great Lakes Rights of Nature coalition on Facebook, or there’s me or the Earth Law Center that they can contact. By email is julieedelaterre at gmail. So that’s my personal email, and I can get them into the loop. Or they can get ahold of the people at Earth Law Center ( Grant Wilson, Directing Attorney, gwilson at earthlaw dot org). Great people over there. So that would be what they can do.

DJ: Well, thank you. Is there anything else you want to say about this before we sign off?

JT: I guess what I’d say to everybody out there is love each other, take care of yourselves, your community and the planet, because we can’t afford not to.

DJ: Well, thank you so much for all that. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Juliee de la Terre. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.