E78: The Environmental Domain of Exploring

Kirtly: My father was an exploration geologist. Exploring was his job. He took us camping when we were little kids, army surplus canvas pup tents, and scratchy old wool sleeping bags. It didn't always smell great.

Anyway, whenever we left a camping site, he would make us pick up every little bit of trash, any kind of trash, anything that looked like it didn't belong there, including the last people's stuff. And we would disassemble the stone fire pit that we'd made and bury the ashes. Then he would find a pine bow and he would sweep the ground as we left. He didn't use the word restore the environment, he didn't use that phrase, but he said it should look as if we had never been there.

I'm Dr. Kirtly Jones from Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah. We are continuing our exploration of the 7 Domains of Exploring, and today is the Environmental Domain.

It's a huge topic, of course, and complicated. Is our urge to seek out new worlds good or bad for the environment? In "Star Trek," they actually had these special rules for what you could and couldn't do in a new planet. But in ours, we don't have that.

In my daddy's case, he was very careful when he took us onto public lands, that we left no mark. Well, no mark that normal people could see. But of course, as an exploration geologist, he was looking for minerals that could be mined. Not very easy on the environment. So how do we balance our desire to explore with our impact on the environment?

With me is my co-host and world explorer, Katie Ward. She has a doctorate in nursing practice and is a woman's health nurse practitioner. She's well on her way to a PhD in anthropology. And she has the exploring bug, for sure, both physical exploring and cognitive exploring.

Katie: Well, this is such an important topic, I think, to both of us in many ways. And as you said, it's complicated. But as a budding anthropologist, one of the things I read about and follow in my feeds is that we've learned that you can essentially follow human migration patterns by tracking the disappearance of large animals that used to live in that space.

So we've talked about before how as humans, as soon as we climbed out of trees and started walking, we started wandering around the globe. And one of the ways that we can tell when humans arrived in a new continent or a new space is that there were these giant animals that just disappeared.

In Australia, there was a giant kangaroo. It was actually two stories tall, had a huge long neck. It was likely one of the largest animals to live on the planet. There are still some pretty big kangaroos in Australia, and also some really tiny ones. But there were these giant ones, and they're completely gone.

We know that they disappeared about 50,000 years ago. And now we have evidence that people arrived in Australia probably 60,000, maybe a little more than 60,000 years ago. And one of the first animals to disappear were these giant kangaroos. I would've loved to have seen one, but that was a long time ago.

As humans arrived in the Americas, mammoths and giant sloths and sabretooth cats all disappeared.

And then really one of my favorite stories is in New Zealand. New Zealand is a place with no native mammals. It broke off of a main landmass before mammals even evolved. And so there are really unusual plants and animals on New Zealand, and one of them was this giant ostrich. Think four or five times bigger than ostriches, which are still really big birds.

Kirtly: Oh my god, that's so big.

Katie: They're called moas. And when people got there, which was only about 700, 800 years ago, the moas weren't afraid of humans. They hadn't ever been under predation by anything like us. There were no mammals there. And so humans, they ate these birds. There was a lot of meat on one moa. These enormous feathers were great insulation and made beautiful clothes, and the skins, you could make a whole house out of. So, of course, the adult animals were easy prey for the humans.

But the other thing that happened, and this is why I was saying it's complicated, is the people that came to New Zealand came on boats, and also on the boats were rats. And so the rats came on land and made short work of these giant moa eggs. So the rat population exploded, and that's a whole interesting cascade of things that's happened in New Zealand trying to control the rats.

But the moa disappeared. Again, this was less than a thousand years ago, and here was this amazing dinosaur that was living in New Zealand.

The humans weren't being reckless. They were just doing what humans needed to do to survive, but within a hundred years, caused the extinction of this incredible animal. That was with just a few hundred individuals and not really fancy tools.

But in spite of that, I think humans have had an outsized effect on any ecosystem that they migrate into. So as you said, this environmental impact of wandering the planet is complicated and it's not new.

Kirtly: No. The great British explorers and naturalists of the 18th and 19th century ravaged new worlds when they found them, and it was new to them, they were new worlds to them, but there were indigenous peoples living there, which is different than New Zealand. But there were people who knew what was out there, but they were new to the British explorers and they brought back thousands of specimens of animals, and especially birds and plants, thousands and thousands.

And the mountaineering explorers of the great mountains of all the continents have left tons and tons of junk behind. I guess they were too tired to carry it out. But born from their exploring is our understanding of evolution and geology.

Katie: And now we have space junk.

Kirtly: Yeah.

Katie: We've left behind trash on the moon and now on Mars, little rovers. But at the same time, that picture of the little blue dot of our earth helped launch the environmental movement.

And the satellites that I've been following recently . . . There was just a new bit of space junk that landed in Africa. But satellite technology helps us monitor the climate and track deforestation and predict the weather and prepare people for natural disasters. And it's even been really helpful in archeology and in mining. So we don't have to sort of fruitlessly dig up stuff. We can see based on LiDAR where things are lying in the ground. So again, mixed bag, right?

Kirtly: Yeah, I love those sites because I get to look at my planet. I just live in this little tiny corner of a tiny state of a tiny nation, but I get to feel like the whole planet belongs to me because of the work that got done.

Well, let's break it down a little, the good and the bad and the ugly of our interaction with the environment when we explore. Katie, you always think of the good things.

Katie: I'm a glass-half-full kind of person. And I do think that there's a lot of good in exploring. Very intentionally, it's part of my job, but also part of my being is I take students on global learning experiences and trips. And really, I do this because I believe that that interaction that my students get to have, and this is face-to-face interaction where they get to meet people, creates empathy and cross-cultural understanding. I know that that leads to environmental and political advocacy on behalf of people around the world.

There's a lot of evidence for this. There are many environmental leaders who've been inspired by their travels for to fight for conservation. Travelers become advocates for protecting the places they've visited. I think that firsthand experience with different environments is what allows us to really understand the importance of being committed to conservation. It changes our understanding of the way things are happening and the impact that that's having on real humans.

So I do think there are many good things about actually traveling and understanding places that are different than the ones you live in. Seeing firsthand the effects of climate change and changing weather patterns, that stays with you.

I like to hope that, as a teacher and as a leader, I'm dropping a pebble in the pond that has ripples that influence beyond just me traveling for the fun of me wanting to be in a new place.

Kirtly: Oh, Katie, that's lovely. I think of exploring that's good for the environment are explorations and expeditions and local adventures that restore the environment.

So we visited a nature conservancy property and I spent a day digging out invasive species. And my husband built beaver dam analogs, which are Russian pole dams that slow down a creek from eroding the sides and encourage beavers to come back.

So beavers do their good work, but they get discouraged if there's been a drought and they go away and they'll only come back when they hear water flowing. But they need it to be some still water too.

Katie: I love this. You're gentrifying the neighborhood to appeal to the beavers.

Kirtly: I want the beavers back, even though they do a lot of nasty stuff on a lakefront property in Maine that we know about.

Anyway, removing beavers from the environment all over the northern hemisphere caused a significant loss of wetlands and environmental niches for birds and other animals. Even in Britain, they're trying to bring the beaver back.

So anyway, we built beaver dam analogs and we learned a lot. And there are lots of service explorations in the national parks and wilderness areas to do trail restoration. And you get to be part of a team, learn about the area, leave it better than you found it. Oh, it's a good thing.

Katie: It really is. And I'd encourage anybody to get out and volunteer for those kinds of projects, for sure.

I want to tell you a little story about a place that I've visited, and I've mentioned it here on the podcast before. But part of my global learning work that I've mentioned is taking students to Rwanda in Eastern Africa. One of the things I've had a chance to see there, and I've been going back now for a number of years, is the impact on the mountain gorilla.

And mountain gorilla is a species of gorilla. You don't see these in zoos because they can't live in other environments. So they're unique to this one spot on the planet that is a group of extinct volcanoes that border Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo is in a bit of a mess right now, but Rwanda and Uganda in particular have really made it a priority to try and save the species through tourism. So what they do there is they allow people to visit the gorillas very thoughtfully. They have certain gorilla groups that you can visit and others that are never visited by tourists. But all of the gorilla groups are visited by humans daily.

And when you go in to visit, you can only stay for one hour. While you're there as a tourist, the employees are checking on their health and keeping them habituated to seeing humans. And they're very careful. You have to wear a mask and they give you a lot of instruction about how to interact and how close you can get and how to look at them even. You can't look them in the eyes.

Kirtly: We should do this at Yellowstone. Sorry, keep going.

Katie: No selfies with the silverback.

But they're habituated to having visitors, and people pay a lot of money for this experience.

So what it's done is it's made tourism more valuable than poaching. And in fact, the industry relies on former poachers and their skills in tracking and finding the gorillas to get the tourists into this environment. It's a dense jungle and up a very steep volcano mountainside.

But they've created this valuable tourist activity where people spend a lot of money. They travel to these countries and spend money seeing the gorillas, but also on souvenirs and hiring guides and hiring taxis and staying in hotels and buying food. And so that really is a boost to the economy in these places.

Again, that idea of being changed, that people come back and have had this interaction with this other closely related species to us.

So, having gone back for a few years, I've been able to see how this industry is growing and how it's really actually improving the lives. I see a difference from year to year in the standard of living in the villages nearby. They're able to build schools and hospitals and upgrade their houses. And so that money stays in the community.

The people who are the guides who used to make money poaching these animals now are making more money by taking tourists in. And so all of that teaches people there also about community development and the importance and the value of their ecosystem.

Even in the six years I've been traveling there, it's just been an amazing impact. And since this industry has started, at the beginning, the gorilla population of Rwanda specifically was down to 250 countable gorillas, and now it's over 1,000, which maybe doesn't sound huge. They reproduce slowly. And so this is really a big growth in that population.

Every time I've gone back, I see pregnant mamas and new babies, and it's evidence of a way that you can make tourism help the environment and save a species.

Same with whaling. Whale watching is certainly more valuable now than whaling.

Kirtly: Yeah, sort of, at least in our country. Good whaling is illegal. But I think of medical missions which can bring medicines to conflict areas or help people to fight local diseases. Katie, you've worked on that and . . .

Katie: Yeah. Well, I take nurses to teach skills to other nurses, but yeah, that's what got me into Rwanda. It has given me a chance to really take a good look at the impact that we have, and it's amazing.

Kirtly: Well, let's go to the bad, the bad part of the good, bad, and the ugly. And getting to places that are far away often requires jet fuel, which is a notorious addition to greenhouse gases. And the Swedes have a word for shaming people who fly a lot called flygskam, which is "flight shame."

I used to be a closet flight shamer, and actually, they've said, "No, we shouldn't be flight shaming because that just makes people defensive. We should be teaching flight guilt." Anyway, I didn't ever say it to people's faces, but in my heart, I quietly shamed them for using so much jet fuel. But I'm sort of over that now.

In fact, people, including me, overestimate the amount of greenhouse gases created by airplanes. It used to be more, but with the improvements in fuel economy and lighter jets, it's down to about 3% of global greenhouse gases. Although every step makes a difference, so even 3% maybe is too much.

But there's a move in the European Union, which has trains that cover most of Europe, to ban short flights in an effort to encourage people to take the much more fuel-efficient trains.

Much of the fuel emissions is in the takeoff and the landing. And so if you don't take the short hops and take the train instead . . . which you can do in Europe. It's harder here in the U.S.

And also, the majority of people on the planet don't fly around all the time. In 2018, only about 11% of humans on the planet got on a plane. That maybe it's about 1 in 10. And about 1 in 100 global humans were responsible for half the global jet emissions. So if we just talked to 1% of global humans and said, "Do you really need to take that flight?" Anyway, flygskam, I'm trying to not do that so much.

Katie: I do have guilt about it. I mean, I definitely think about it. I take probably two or three big international trips a year and I am aware that that adds to my carbon footprint, so I pay for the carbon offset. And then what I try to do is be very intentional about my small daily actions. I do wag my finger at people flying around in private jets.

Kirtly: Yes.

Katie: But I never complain about being squeezed into a very full commercial airliner because I figure at least if the plane is full, that that reduces the amount of CO2 per person on that plane. The plane is going to go, and so if it's full, I feel good about that.

Air travel gets a lot of attention, but I think our daily habits probably have the larger cumulative impact on our footprint. So I do think about all the extra trips that I might take.

In an average gasoline powered car and you're taking an extra 10-mile trip a day, I won't bore you with math, but that's probably about the same as one international flight a year. So I think it makes sense to think about all the ways that we can be sustainable.

And I really do try to balance my international travel with riding my bike to work and chaining my trips so that I'm not taking an extra trip just to go to the grocery store. I moved from one neighborhood to one where I could walk to a lot more of my shopping destinations.

And so for the 10% of us that are traveling, I think I really try to follow Jane Goodall's advice, which is if everyone does a little bit, that cumulative impact is big. So I try to do my little bit.

Kirtly: Yeah, I think so. And so, as you've already said, what you're thinking about is, "Is this trip really necessary?" The objectives of many meetings . . . and in my day, believe me, I was a road warrior, and at least once a month, I went someplace to either give a paper or give a talk or something.

I used to think, "Why? We're putting all these people, maybe 500 people, in a room from all over the country, and maybe it'd be better to use an electronic format like Zoom." Although you miss the interpersonal attachments and conversations that happen in the hall, but is there a reason to travel? Could it be met by a different format? And can you get there in a more fuel-efficient way?

Well, let me talk about the ugly because I'm really ticked about the ugly. I would say in the ugly category, it includes adventuring and exploring for purposes of big game hunting for vulnerable species. That kind of drives me a little bit crazy. Do we really need to shoot another elephant? Do you really need to have a lion's head on your wall or something?

And the other is leaving garbage all over the place or dumping your garbage overboard. It's unconscionable and it's unnecessary. You can't walk any place on any trail within 50 miles of a city and not find garbage, plastic bags, cans.

And in our part of the world, the Red Canyon deserts of Utah, people tramp all over micro-organic soils called cryptobiotic crusts. These are sand and soil that are pulled together by a number of microorganisms that hold water so other plants can grow. This microbiotic soil can take decades to grow, and it takes three people tramping on them to kill them.

Lots of people walk off the trail and they just tramp on these microbiotic soils that they don't even know exist. They may be exploring, but they haven't explored enough to know that their footprints are damaging. And once that happens, instead of leaving soil that's held together, it becomes a sandy soil that just blows away.

So what do you do about it? Do you really need that trophy in your wall? Pick up your trash, for goodness' sake, and stay on the trail if you can, and pick up other people's trash, a favorite hiking activity of my husband who never has enough room in his backpack for all the garbage that he picks up on any hike or walk. And join a cleanup crew.

Katie: And please, for the love of all that is holy, don't deface the rock art. That's my current rant. And leave the fragile sacred things on the ground. They're not for you.

I took my grandkids to Southern Utah and they both actually found pot shards. And they were pretty disappointed when I told them that they couldn't even pick them up, much less take them home.

Kirtly: Well, when you think about how far afield you need to go for your exploring, have you thought about your own backyard? Do you really know the life story of what grows there? What animals walk through? What geology lies below your feet?

Now, it may not be so compelling when you live in the middle of a big city because maybe not many animals walk through, or maybe you don't know what flies overhead, and the geology below your feet, it's below 10 feet of concrete, so you don't really see it.

But in our corner of the world, the Natural History of Museum of Utah published a book called "Wild Wasatch Front: Explore the Amazing Nature," there's the word exploring, "In and Around Salt Lake City."

So have you explored all there is close to home? Your local Audubon Society probably has local birding walks every month that are close to you. Birders are kind and they walk slowly and they share what they know.

Katie: A number of years ago, I took up beekeeping in my own backyard. I was inspired by a book called "Bee Democracy," which talked about how hives make a decision to split and where they go when they swarm. It was really fascinating. I learned a bunch of stuff about bee ecology.

And there was also a lot of news at the time that bees were in decline. We were losing honeybees. I think I was like a lot of people who kind of got into backyard beekeeping, and I thought I was going to be part of the solution.

It was a really fascinating exploration for me into something that challenged me, scared me a little bit. Bees, actually, you have an interesting fear reaction to them sometimes.

But I've since learned that backyard beekeeping might actually be causing some of the problems. So too many honeybees in one area are competing for limited nectar and pollen, and they're competing out the native bee populations and other pollinators.

And amateur beekeepers like me don't always know when to properly treat diseases or recognize them, so they're contributing to these super-spreader conditions like mites that are the reason we're having trouble with honeybees.

So I kept my colony. I mean, once you have one, it's hard to just stop it. So I kept it until they died a natural death, and then I got out of beekeeping. But I don't think I would've known all that if I hadn't explored into it.

Again, the lesson I learned was how complicated my actions are. It's never as straightforward as you think, like, "Oh, I'm going to save the bees."

Kirtly: Yeah, but you got a chance to explore this ecosystem of bees in your own backyard, in your own neighborhood.

Katie: Oh, and it was fun. It was really fun.

Kirtly: Yeah. Well, please, everybody, go exploring. Just be thoughtful about how and where you do it. I think about exploring the same way I think about saying something about other people. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Katie: Good advice.

Kirtly: Is it really exploring or just novelty-seeking? Is it kind to the environment? Is it necessary? Is there another way to do this exploring if it isn't kind to the environment?

I'm very grateful to have been given the love of exploring and to really look forward to looking at what was around and above me. And to quote the theologian Richard Rohr, "daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives, a continuous sacrament."

And that's what I think as I look around, if I notice. We'll get to more of that in the Spiritual Domain of Exploring, which is going to be coming up.

If this is the first of the 7 Domains of Exploring for you, check in with me and Katie and explore our other domains at womens7.com, or anywhere you get your podcasts of the "7 Domains of Women's Health."

Thanks for going exploring with us.