Mary Roach and Suzanne Simard: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the institute of museum and library services hi everyone i'm sarah kaplan i'm a climate reporter at the washington post and welcome to the national book festival i'm here with authors mary roach and suzanne samara to talk about their books buzz when nature breaks the law and finding the mother tree discovering the wisdom of the forest to learn more about our authors check out loc.gov bookfest before we begin i want to let you know that we'll save the last 10 minutes of this 30 minute live event to respond to audience questions you can start submitting your questions now to get started i um well welcome to our two authors and the theme of this year's book festival is open a book open the world so the first question i just wanted to ask both of you is is there a reading experience or a book that has opened a new world for you um and why don't we start with mary is there a reading experience that's opened a new for me yes yes well just about just about any book that i open um the one that jumped to mind was um a book called um the fruit hunters uh by adam lathe gallner which is a book you know it's about fruit and you would think fruit i don't know how interesting could that be but he uh was traveling just all over the world taking us into this world i mean the the fruits that we eat are a tiny percentage and just looking at you know how they've evolved and and the everything from the marketing and the it's just an amazing i mean i read it quite a while ago but it's an example of how you think you know uh about something fruit you think you're like fruit okay peaches apples but it's just this whole world literally this world uh opens up and it's just um amazing and it's not just uh non-fiction but with fiction as well um you know there's so much research that goes into fiction and you're stepping into this world every time that's why i love to read suzanne yeah i think one of my favorite books is braiding sweet grass by robin walt kimmer um robin wall kimmer is a pottawami uh woman who's also a prophet um suny university i believe um she's she teaches biology but the most important thing about her book is that i found is just her way of expressing the world view of aboriginal people and how they um are embedded in our natural world and the principles by which they live which includes respect with the environment reciprocity responsibility which is i think concepts that we think about but don't practice in the western world and we have a long ways to go to get out of our environmental crises and i think that what she writes about um is is really what we need to do to adopt this kind of philosophy about nature not just a philosophy but a way of living a way of being a way of respecting so anyway i i encourage anybody who's interested in we're going on the climate crisis for example in the biodiversity crisis read that book because i think it will um really open up a whole new way of seeing things yeah both of you um wrote books about the natural world which is both our world the one that we humans inhabit and maybe don't always pay close enough attention to or recognize our role in um and i'm wondering sort of when people read your books what are you hoping they will learn from um your examinations of the natural world mary you wrote about human and humans and wildlife and conflict and then um suzanne yours is kind of about humans learning collaboration from the natural world so um yeah i'm curious you know what what lessons from that world that is also ours are you hoping readers will take away um suzanne do you want to go first this time sure um well there's i guess there's lots of things but um yeah i mean in in agriculture forestry which has an enormous both of those things have enormous impacts on our world um in feeding our planet and housing and clothing um and you know what we're doing now isn't that sustainable if we want to think of sustainability and uh this is we see the effects of this in in you know in our in global change and uh and and i wanted to you know there are just some fundamental principles that like i was saying before that i think we can adjust and and do a much better job and one of the things in forestry uh is that we we forget about the collaborative part of nature and a lot of practices we we do like spring herbicides our genetic breeding programs um uh just you know how we plant and grow and market trees and and food plants um it's not connected to the land and and um it's connected to these ideas that are not really well investigated and i i think that what we really need and i hope that people get this from my book is that by spending time in forests and prairies and arctic tundra and seeing the small things and how they drive these big biogeochemical cycles that in understanding those is absolutely you know crucial to to how we go on and then apply practices so one of the i think the big mistakes we've made is that we haven't understood that plants actually have multiple ways that they uh interact with each other we've always sort of thought that you know like forests for example which is my area are structured by competition and yet they have these incredibly collaborative interactions as well and by ignoring that collaborative part by getting rid of the plants that we think are competitors for example we actually kind of tear apart these ecosystems and and send them on a very you know very difficult trajectory so anyway that that's i think is the main one of the main things i want people to get from my book mary did you uh is there sort of a lesson from the worlds that you examined well i think that uh you know in human wildlife conflict people tend to uh people to use the word pest or nuisance um animal nuisance animal or pest and i think that um you know it puts it puts this creature in the context of our lives and what we need and what we want and rather than looking at this creature as you know it's this independent beautiful thing and um i think also that terminology tends to give us permission to just call someone to to deal with it whether it's an exterminator or someone to trap an animal just make the problem go away and in reality i think you know almost always when you look at these conflicts um we're we are the cause of that we have you know often you know brought one animal from one continent to another to try to you know solve a problem that is often of our own making um and and i just would want people um just to stop and think uh before they call you know the pest control person or someone to trap a raccoon or whatever it is um or if they're having trouble with bears you know breaking into their homes if they live up in the mountains um there are ways to prevent these conflicts before they get rolling there's things you can do there's wonderful resources the humane society of the united states has a web page what to do about and species by species ways that we can you know if you um when you understand a little more about the animal and why what it's doing you know it's often it's a cyclical thing it's only an issue part of the year um you can make your environment uh you can seal it off better so they're not getting in you can eliminate the things that are attracting them so there's so many things that you can do to kind of co-exist so i would hope that people that that's the goal to coexist and also just you know i put a wildlife camera out in my backyard i've got squirrels and skunks and possums and roof rats and i love just you know bringing it in and seeing who what they were up to uh in the middle of the night so you know to turn it into a positive thing and not to think of um just to sort of dismiss these animals in our worlds as uh as pests yeah i think um you know one question that both of your books kind of ask is um you know what do people go to the natural systems that we're a part of and that support us and and um you know what would happen if when peop when the needs or desires of people come into conflict with the needs and desires of wild creatures or beings or trees like how do you sort of you know weigh those two things and and what happens if we put the needs of people second and i'm wondering did you in the process of of researching and writing your books did you come across any examples of that happening that felt um like it was you know it had a lesson or um you know was successful in a way that could be replicated you know by the whole world because it seems like such a difficult challenge i mean mary i'm just thinking about your book and the um stories about fair conflict and and cases where where people are you know our lives are lost to wild creatures it's very difficult to tell a person um well this is the bear's habitat so you have to live with that loss um yeah so i'm curious if you found anything that felt like it could point us in the direction of answers do you want me to can i get first you marry you can go first uh since i'm sorry yeah yeah um well i spent some time reporting in india um where there's a bit of a different philosophy for example with um with elephants uh and elephants this came as news to me because i had been brought up with you know dumbo and babar and national geographic you know the fact that uh elephants killed 500 people a year in in india came as quite a shock um but the but the approach is quite different um the in india if someone is a family member is killed um there's a government company the government compensates the family how promptly they do that i can't say but there that is the system um rather than destroying the animal um the i mean there are exceptions you know there's sort of a three strikes um with with leopards in the himalayas where they've had some issues with them killing small children um sort of preying on them in that region but the but the but the approach with the elephants is um also there's a lot of prevention that goes on i traveled with a researcher who um goes from village to village and helps people set up elephant response teams and these are people who are trained in how to you know when an elephant comes into a village uh well a group because they're social animals and they travel in big groups big animals big groups they can do a lot of damage to the to the crops in these villages um and and if and when people just run out screaming lighting firecrackers the torches and things the you know the animals get freaked out they disperse when then when they leave the group they became you know they're less stable and it's more dangerous so these these people are trained to handle the situation in a safe way kind of steer the elephants away so that nobody gets hurt um and and they're they're working on a number of different sort of early warning systems one of them is to use uh seismic uh measurements to you know seismic meters to to detect when they're you know when they're approaching it's either an earthquake or an elephant if you know if the meter goes off so there's there are ways yeah there there's different different ways to deal with it and also because uh the elephant you know ganesh is revered as an elephant god so there's a there's a kind of built-in reverence and affinity for these creatures and a desire for them not to be harmed that's true with monkeys as well there uh so that kind of informs the whole approach in a kind of lovely way so that that that trip was a little uh was kind of inspirational in that way um that's fascinating i had no idea that um that they use they are going to use seismic tools to detect elements like that that's genius that's amazing um i can talk a little bit about here on the west coast of of canada and i think it's probably true in the us as well but um you know i think everybody knows in the world that our west coast salmon populations are at incredible risk right now they've been um basically uh the populations have gone to levels that you know the we worry or you know that they're on the edge of extinction and you know this is this is a result of i guess um exploitation um since the colonization of north america and i just wanted to speak to ancient fishing practices that actually enhanced salmon populations instead of driving them to the brink of collapse and there are ways to do this and there's i think that you know we can recover these populations i believe if we practice these more holistic and careful methods that have uh respect and obligations to look after these incredible resources so here's one example um along the west coast there were many ancient fishing technologies that were considered passive technologies and um for example fishing weirs and i was just actually up in the quiquet um territory which is in the northern part of vancouver island area um where there we were looking at fish wares that are or in this area where fish wares that were over 800 years old based on carbon dating there are ancient tidal stone traps that date back thousands of years 10 000 years and i'll just speak to that for a little bit so these ancient tidal stone traps have been built along the west coast of british columbia along salmon spawning rivers and streams by the different nations the the um as well as the quakawat um the heiltsuk the the simcian the tlingit all those nations along the coast and how it worked was that they would when the tide so they built these walls basically they're walls they're walls that follow the the contour of the ocean and as the tide comes in and then the tide goes back out again on the lowest ebb tide the salmon during spawn spanish season are trapped behind these stone walls and the the nations would harvest the salmon um as they needed them and they always allowed those the big mother fish to go upstream to spawn and so they only kept the smallest fish and big mother fish have big eggs and they spawn big uh offspring and um and so this actually we think might have enhanced their populations it was kind of a way of managing the populations bears also play an incredibly important role in this in that they also fish for these salmon in spawning season and they take them up into the forest and eat them under big old mother trees um and these old mother trees actually um soak up the remains of the salmon and store that nitrogen that salmon nitrogen in the rings of these old trees the trees grow faster they shade the streams they moderate the temperatures and provide food that actually helps the the fry that that emerge in the spring and so and also the whole the the nations would of course when they fish for the salmon they would always return the bones the the basically the inevitable parts back to the rivers to enhance the nutrient status of the rivers and so as you can see like this is a cycle that is a loop a positive feedback loop that you know what the people do enhance what the salmon do which enhances the bears which enhances the forest and the circle goes around and around in a positive feedback when collins when colonization happened those ancient tidal stone traps were actually deactivated they were outlawed in many cases and um and the the fisheries was taken over by the canadian government and the consequences of this of not actually knowing what we're doing of over-harvesting especially if the larger fish is born out now in in our salmon population so there's there's so much we can learn from these old technologies that will actually help help our modern populations to recover um lost biodiversity so we're talking right now amid this huge crisis for both humanity and what we consider the natural world rate climate change humans burning fossil fuels and other activities have changed our planet faster than at any other point in its history and i i wonder you know your books come out in this moment where the effects of climate change are so obvious right we just had this summer that was disastrous on every continent with drought and fire in the west and flooding from louisiana to new york and and all around the world and i just you know i wonder if there's something from this these books that you hope people will bring to this moment um and to their understanding of climate change um what would you what would you want people to take away and say suzanne why didn't you go first since we're switching well just uh simply a couple of things we'll just you know to remember two things i think one is our old growth forests of which we're losing rapidly due to harvesting not just in north america but south america in the amazon the boreal forests of of eurasia and canada where we're clear-cutting our last few percent of the wool growth forest um that these old forests are irreplaceable especially in the context of climate change they're not ever going to be the same and yet they are biodiversity and carbon storage hot spots and we think we can replace them with plantations but they're they don't store as much carbon not even close and and the biodiversity is also hammered by this um and so number one is we need to stop doing that we're killing ourselves by by harvesting these old growth forests and then secondly from a forest perspective to restore what we have degraded you know these are two very important things that we simply have to face and do something about it um if we're going to you know bootstrap ourselves back out of global change um i there were a couple of things that i came across in my reporting i mean i wasn't setting out to write about climate change per se but it kept coming up in um when i was spending time with a bear researcher in colorado and he he talked about a study that had looked at when when temperatures rise uh hibernation periods for black bears become shorter so with every i think it was about two degrees fahrenheit increase in temperature that's a week shorter hibernation period and there was a projection to like 20 50 if you know things continue that would mean a shorter hibernation period by between 15 and 40 days and so that's 15 to 40 days more that bears will be out on the land looking for food and people complaining about bears and you know more conflicts so that was going on also i was in new zealand reporting on something entirely different but i was at this uh in the otago peninsula which is a beautiful place there's these uh yellow-eyed penguins just as a really exotic looking beautiful bird and there's only a few thousand of them left and one thing that's going on i mean i was there because the talking about the interplay between invasive species and some of the weightless birds well some other flight flighted birds as well but but what uh one of the other things that was going on with these birds was that um you know they fish they go out every day um to to fish to get food to feed their young and they um they're having to go further and further out because as the the waters have warmed if they need to the fish that they feed on have moved into deeper waters so they're having trouble they don't they can't dive that deep so they have having difficulty um getting food so just every everywhere you turn there's some effective climate change that you just it just it's it's everywhere you know i just felt like uh every time i asked about something part of the answer was climate change um i want to make sure that i make time for some questions from the folks who are watching um when robert mccoy asked a couple of questions asked actually but both are sort of on the same topic um which is that you know both of you should express so much joy in the natural world and he was wondering um do you find that it's best to be outside in it is that the best way to appreciate it and then how do you help people who maybe are not don't have easy access um or who are sort of their barriers between them and being out in nature how do you sort of help them appreciate and experience that way mary wow um i'm not sure i i mean yes the more the more you can be out in the natural world i mean just speaking personally uh it's such a bomb and a therapy b-a-l-m that is um just to to be in in nature and to explore nature and you know in different locations and different ecosystems is it's uh for me that it just there's nothing like it i i don't know you know for somebody who's uh doesn't have easy access i'm not sure uh i don't i don't have a handy answer um maybe suzanne does yeah i i think you know i i get to spend a lot of time out in forests because i'm a researcher a forest researcher and so that's where my world um it has been my whole my whole life but um i think there are many things that people can do even if you live in a big city um you know just connecting with a tree or a plant in your local park makes a difference just to go and sit with that tree and and feel its presence and honor its presence and if if you don't have access to trees any kind of plant or creature um even watching ants crawling around in the soil it connects you um and the more time you can do that the more you fall in love with it and you'll seek those experiences out so i i think probably most everybody has got access to even an ant so that's what i would say just start there and just spend the time and enjoy it another question from an audience member named janette is she asks ever since i found out the trees talked to each other i have been wondering do we have any science on communication between species within ecosystems i thought that actually even though that's sort of focused on suzanne's work mary you write a bit about the ideas of animal intelligence and and what we know about how animals think so i thought both of you might have an interesting answer um to that question i'm afraid i don't know much about animal communication so i'm to turn this one over to suzanne yeah yeah i you know i think if you walk into an ecosystem like all these creatures are you know working with each other and um it's like imagine yourself in your family and um and how you have these relationships with all these family members they're all different uh they're all nuanced and sophisticated and complex and and it's the same thing in forests or any ecosystem where you've got lots of creatures pollinators animals you know trees plants they're in a constant communication and they have to be because they're they're completely inter interdependent intertwined so in the tree world you know now we know that that they actually link below ground through fungal networks and they communicate by sharing not just water and carbon and nitrogen but information about about their species identity about how healthy they are how rich or poor they are and and they share this information to enhance the vitality of the whole community it doesn't mean they don't have other ways and you know that's collaboration they compete with each other as well in certain ways shading each other or you know or taking up resources that might exclude another species but but ultimately you know it's the ecosystem the health of the ecosystem that protects all of them and and so they do this by being in constant contact constant communication so we've only got three minutes left which is probably time for one more question um and i think this is one that both of you can answer both of your books contain some really hard stories suzanne you write about forests that have been clear-cut and doused with pesticides and mary write about um i mean there's some like heartbreaking descriptions of um eradication campaigns to deal with non-native species in various places and and you know animals on the brink of extinction how do you both avoid despair when writing about these really hard and just when experiencing and witnessing these really hard things maybe like one man at each starting with mary that's a good question um and i didn't always do it successfully um but i think i tried to i tried to focus a little bit on some of the um more positive developments there there are so there are so many people now trying to work on on coexistence and and meaning bringing together um the people who've been at loggerheads like the the farmers the ranchers and the hunters and then the environmentalists but but bringing them into a room to speak and also more than to speak to listen and to try to hear what each other are saying and understand and come up with some kind of some kind of way forward uh and to and for for for legislation to come out of these discussions rather than just some you know someone in the back room making a decision so uh the fact that this is going on uh and there's been some you know the people that run these organizations seem to be optimistic and if they can be a little optimistic then um then i try to hold on to that too yeah i completely agree with mary that um getting people in the same room to discuss even if they're at odds is the way to go um and this you know we come up with better answers and and i think what makes me hopeful is that i've been studying you know systems ecosystems for a long time and systems are resilient systems like our natural systems which means that they have the ability to heal and to recover from travesty given all the you know given these strong relationships that the very example mary is talking about not just between the ecological uh creatures in the system ecosystems but humans as ecological creatures as well that are working with these systems to help them recover um we you know we have incredible power to make positive changes and you know and we just need to get together put our minds get the right legislation get the right policies in place and you can start to see the incremental improvements i think that's probably the perfect note to end on unfortunately that's all the time we have but thank you so so much mary and suzanne for sharing your time and your insights and thanks to everyone in the audience for your questions you can keep enjoying the national book festival at loc.gov bookfest and i hope that you keep learning thanks for having me thank you sarah thank you yeah thank you guys [Music] you

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Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021