A Very Important Popsicle

What can we learn from lakes about livable futures? How can people in the Anthropocene find optimism and be moved to climate action? Featuring Soren Brothers, the Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change at the Royal Ontario Museum.

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Transcript

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Michael Pisano 0:09

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's very special episode, we're leaving the Carnegie behind to brave the passage north. We're headed to Toronto, where we've delved deep into the Royal Ontario Museum's cabinets and cases. Well, actually, they keep today's collection item in a freezer in the basement. So bundle up and come chill with us for a chat about climate, cities, and a newly famous local lake with a global story. I'm your host, amateur appreciator of lakes, Michael Pisano. And today I'm joined by a professional professor of lakes. Please introduce yourself.

Soren Brothers 1:17

My name is Soren Brothers. I'm the Alan and Helene Schiff Curator of Climate Change at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. And I'm also an assistant professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto here. My research expertise is as a limnologist. So I study climate change and global change relationships with lakes. That's right.

Michael Pisano 1:41

And for listeners who aren't familiar, since this is the only episode this season that's not at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we've got access behind the scenes to another museum's collections. I'd love to just know a little bit about the Royal Ontario Museum and the scope of what you do there.

Soren Brothers 1:56

Yeah, it's it's uh it's an amazing museum. It's the largest museum in Canada, and it has a focus in terms of its collections on art, culture, and nature. So it has everything from a really amazing dinosaur bones and paleontological collection to modern contemporary art rotating galleries and exhibitions and installations. And so it's a fun place to be able to actually develop transdisciplinary climate change programs.

Michael Pisano 2:23

Yeah, and I think you're probably the first curator of climate change I've ever met. Um, can you kind of tell me a bit about that role and maybe the genesis of it?

Soren Brothers 2:31

Yeah, so there are there's been obviously a lot of work in museums in climate change. Um, when the ROM created this position, I'm not sure if there was any such formal title out there. So it was kind of an odd situation to be for me as a researcher. I was working in Utah at the time as an assistant professor and trying to see, you know, what the precedent was for it and really if there was a path to follow or to diverge from from other people. And there wasn't really anything. And I got the sense even from the museum when they were doing the interview, they were asking basically what would be one's vision, what what is the interviewee's vision for a curator of climate change? So it was a fun position to be able to be creative with. I think it's it's tempting to just think about what do the collections tell us, what do the exhibition possibilities, what are the exhibition possibilities, but also something like a place like the ROM, it's also a research institute. So the curators are uh tend to be professors at University of Toronto. So we're able to still generate new information. We're expected to be still publishing scientists at the same time as having this really expanded broad outreach um uh possibility. And museum professionals are apparently more trusted by the public as sources of information than either government or academic institutions. But it's funny because the ROM is kind of both. We're also associated with the province of Ontario. So it puts us in this really interesting position where we're between all of these worlds, but have a much more community-oriented role where we can talk about something like climate change from a different perspective, but from still a place of expertise, basically.

Michael Pisano 4:10

Absolutely. And I think it makes a difference also that you are rooted in a building that probably has quite a bit of history. People are very familiar with the institution from its place in Toronto. And I just think that it's really such an excellent opportunity then to be bringing in the type of traffic that a museum with the breadth of collections and activities, and I'm sure everything else that goes on at ROM has to then also engage the people coming in the door about these big questions of our age. Um you did mention also, in addition to your curatorial work, you've got a background in ongoing research in limnology. I wonder if you know you could just expand on the types of questions that you're investigating.

Soren Brothers 4:51

So I started in limnology because of it the link with climate change, actually. I was did my master's at uh in Montreal, Université de Quebec à Montréal, uh, studying the greenhouse gas emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs that they're building. So that was how I got into it. Then in Berlin, I did my PhD at the IGB Institute there, Limnology Institute, looking at regime shifts in state in lakes. So looking at how they can change suddenly from one trend, one's uh whole sort of way of organizing their ecosystem in terms of the algae that's in there, in terms of the whole food web, in terms of its functioning, its biogeochemical cycling from one state that's kind of turbid to another state that's clear, or vice versa. And I've been then applying that, and I'm not the only one. A lot of limnologists have kind of built from that work to understanding how global systems and larger systems can change really quickly between staple states, uh, is the term. So it's it's nice in limnology. Some actually consider it the first kind of holistic uh science, natural science, um, because you can't really, you know, study a fish as a zoologist or as an ichthyologist without understanding the chemistry of the water and the food web, and then you get start getting into the geology and the physics of the water and how it's mixing and then the climate and all these things influence whether that fish will be happy or not, or be able to spawn or succeed or not. And it's and so it becomes really quickly this kind of microcosm where you're looking at systems and you're thinking about systems rather than individual players. So that's it's fun for someone who's uh like me, kind of scattered a little bit in the thing and interested in a lot of stuff. Right. It's kind of funny seeing how it's now playing around. You know, people talk about critical transitions in social systems and in global systems and all of these different components that can be feedbacks, like positive feedback loops that drive a shift. But I'm still interested in kind of seeing what uh limnology, you know, now we have decades of limnologists looking at kind of these microcosm aquarium like systems and trying to understand how, again, then back to the basics of how a system shifts quickly from one state to another, and what can that teach us about global systems and social systems when it comes to tipping points and transitions?

Michael Pisano 7:08

Excellent. Wonderfully said. And I want to pause on that and come back to it as we kind of broaden out towards the end of our conversation because I want to get to the collection item that uh we are going to chat about today.

MacKenzie Kimmel 7:40

Collection item one is a contender for world's most important popsicle, but don't go running to the ice cream truck just yet. It is a cylinder measuring roughly three feet tall by six inches in diameter, tapering to a wedge-like point at the bottom. While at first glance it may appear to be an ordinary sedimentary rock, or perhaps many burned lasagnas stacked vertically, this collection item has a much deeper history. And please don't tell my Nona I said that about the lasagna. What is collection item one?

Soren Brothers 8:21

When I was first interviewed for this position, I only started this job two years ago. When they first interviewed me, the first question that I was asked was, Do you have any experience with objects? And I'd never worked in a museum, and I said, Oh, I don't really think so. The only thing I've ever worked with was, you know, sediment cores from lakes. I said it as a joke, and she took it as a joke and kind of rocked, okay, that's a no, you know, that's fine. Let's keep on talking. Right. Um, and then I love that, yeah, basically a year and a half later, the first collections object that I received is a sediment core from a lake, which is Crawford Lake. And there's different ways of coring lakes, but this one they basically put a metal tube that's hollow, they fill it with dry ice, they stick that down into the mud, and the sediments freeze to the outside of it. And actually, when you pull those sediments out to the surface, that's when you can see the most beautiful, what's called varving, that layering of the white layers and the dark layers from each winter. If you take a core or like a sediment tube, like a plug of the mud from the bottom of the lake, you can see each of those white layers as a single year. And so it's like tree rings where you can count back each year. And so it's kind of nice. It's you have this really beautiful way of looking into the history of one lake, but that lake is collecting everything around it, from the geology around it and the ecology of the landscape to the atmosphere. And so it picks up global signals, for instance, of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s, all through there, as well as the signing of the weapons test ban treaty 1963. So you can see that that stop, that ceasing of plutonium or cesium. But it also has this local Indigenous history. It has a huge shift when you have the Crawford family moving there in the late 1800s and building a sawmill around the lake and clearing the trees. So it's kind of a fun way of looking at tying together the story of how the local and global are interconnected through one timeline. And so this was this beautiful core that uh was donated to the museum by Francine McCarthy, who's the lead scientist working with Team Crawford at Brock University. And she had been, she had done her master's at the ROM with Jock McAndrews. So that was kind of her historic link with the museum and with the lake. So yeah, I was just kind of basically plupped into this interesting story just at the time that Francine was bringing this up as a contender of the global uh GSSP marker for the golden spike for the Anthropocene proposed Anthropocene epoch.

Michael Pisano 10:47

Yes, let's talk a little bit about that. So, this particular core is related to some big news coming out of the Anthropocene Working Group this past July 2023. So let's you know, spell out that collect or that connection a little bit.

Soren Brothers 10:59

So essentially, with the search for designating an official Anthropocene epoch, the first step is that we need to say, okay, if there's going to be any new epoch, and any new epoch through history has what's called a golden spike. So there's a place in on the planet where you can say, you know, this epoch most clearly jumps from you know this one to the next one at this place, whether it's a you know hillside in Italy or in China or somewhere where you can see here's where you know Paleocene becomes the Eocene. So the question is if we were to designate, if the geologists were to officially designate an Anthropocene epoch, what would be the golden spike for this one? So there had been 12 sites that were shortlisted that were that were being discussed and examined around the world. And yeah, essentially up Crawford Lake in July, this this past July, so a month or two ago, um, was announced as the candidate golden spike. But what that means already is it's interesting, Crawford Lake was uh decided by an international group as the best place on the planet to showcase the relationship basically between humans and the planet and how we've impacted the planet. And then the next step will be ideal, hopefully in the next year, to actually have this whole package of what the Anthropocene Epoch looks like, and then that will be voted on.

Michael Pisano 12:15

Just a quick note from the future. In the time since recording this conversation, the subcommission on quaternary stratigraphy, that's the people in charge of recognizing geological time units, they've voted to not formalize the Anthropocene as a new epoch. This was a contested decision. It's an ongoing conversation. You can learn more about what happened in this season's first episode from the Carnegie's curator of Anthropocene Studies, Nicole Heller. I also highly recommend Soren's article in The Conversation entitled Anthropocene or Not, it is our current epoch that we should be fighting for. Couldn't agree more. My two cents, and this is in line with what the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy had to say, regardless of whether or not a handful of geologists care to formalize the epoch in their literature, the concept of the Anthropocene is already deeply ingrained in science, culture, our world. It's still extremely useful framing for imagining and creating humankind's livable future. I was wondering if we could kind of start at the beginning and work our way through a little bit of that chronology.

Soren Brothers 13:25

For sure. Yeah, so the I mean the lake is as old as basically the last glaciation. So you can go back thousands of years. It's a lake that Rom, a Rom curator, uh Jock McAndrews, had started working on back in the 70s. Uh his student, Maria Boiko, had found corn pollen in early sediments dating as early as the 1290s. And they realized from that that there had been an agricultural settlement nearby. Uh later on, that led to some archaeological work. They reconstructed, partially reconstructed the Adawanderon or pre-bandat longhouses that were on the site that were adjacent to the lake. So there had been pre-colonial indigenous uh agricultural community right there next to this lake. They actually created through that farming, they eutrophied the systems, they added enough nutrients to Crawford Lake that it started doing this thing where every year you'd have a layer of calcium carbonate precipitating and settling on the bottom. When you really start having that consistent calcium layer, is in the late 1200s or late 13th century with indigenous. So that's where most people's story of the lake really begins because that's where we start seeing that human, that local human history. After that, so there's actually two periods where where we could see that there were villages there with a space in between them. And then you go into the little ice age where there seems to be, well, at least there's no adjacent agricultural community. It's hard to say that there's not people because there's a lack of a village, but there's definitely people around it, also could be different, different First Nations in Toronto, also or around on southern Ontario, had different different cultural practices. So, for instance, on Ashnaabe, we're not living in longhouses in the same way that everyone Autobanderon were. So you have different kinds of people that were probably there, but it's kind of a dark space on the lake in the lake sediments, and then you start seeing it's like a sudden color transition in the late 1800s with the purchase of the Crawford Lake and basically colonialism in southern Ontario and this widespread expansion of settler practices, such as um clearing forests for sawmills. And that's actually probably the largest, the most stark transition in the core. Sure. Even though, and it's kind of interesting to me, there were hundreds of peoples in these villages in the 1200s, but they didn't have as much impact on the lake as one family living next to the lake with a different lifestyle. In the 1930s, actually, the largest, thickest white line for a summer is uh in the 1930s with the the Great Dust Bowl. So you have a whole sort of continental signal there. Going up through the 50s and 60s, yeah, you see this increase of plutonium with nuclear testings, uh, nuclear weapon testings, and then you have the drop with the signing of the Test Ban Treaty. Going through the into the 90s and 2000s, you start to see the impacts of climate change through changes on the on the phytoplankton community. And we also see there's some algae blooms, like in the 70s. Actually, you can see the just the creation of the local visitor center as a kind of a blip there in that record. And it has what's called teleconnection. So you can see the impacts of El Niños and La Niña's and what's like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in terms of the size and spacing of those virus. So you have, yeah, through that, this really interesting, again, kind of local and global story that's all tied together.

Michael Pisano 16:46

You bring up a really exciting point about kind of the nuances of human impact. It's not just population numbers, it's not this linear correlation, it's cultural attitudes towards relationship to the non-human extraction from the landscape. I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit as it as it's told in this story.

Soren Brothers 17:01

I I guess in terms of the evidence of the core, I mean, I feel like that's a really interesting aspect of it. You know, I'm definitely thinking about it even in a broader sense of right now, there's a whole discussion around decolonialism and what does decolonialism mean. I think it's interesting because in the context of where we talk about the Anthropocene epoch as being this global human impact, we always, I feel pretty consistently talk about it, you know, in terms of media coverage as a negative impact. And I think it would be hard for people to say what that the impact, for instance, of indigenous farming was necessarily negative. Actually, the reason the lake was getting eutrophied was because um apparently Canada geese had changed their migration routes to nest on the lake to be closer to probably the surplus agricultural, you know, corn husks and things like that. So they were nesting on the lake, and then that was that was the nutrient extra input. And there's actual goose poop that they've done DNA analyses on in those layers of the lake. So it's this interesting kind of you know relationship that was happening. And I think that that's even just there, kind of a seed of a really important lesson that the fact that the earth is responding to us isn't necessarily negative. And then so what are the things that when we talk about impacts that we can have on the impact on the on the environment or relationships that we have with the environment, what are the positive impacts that we can have on the environment? Because I feel like right now we mostly speak in a in a spectrum of either no impact or either no impact or a negative impact. You know, leave no trace, create a national park, don't let anyone go out. Leave it alone, right? Leave it alone, or or you're gonna be, if you do something, it's gonna be bad. And I think that there's a there's a danger in that because we're at a point where we realize that there's nothing that's that we can leave alone. You know, if we don't interact with something, climate change is still impacting it, other global change, you know, there's still going to be wildfires in places that are impacted by us, whether or not we go to those places. So it's kind of, I think the illusion is that that's the end of the scope, is this no impact zone. But if we start thinking about positive management and interrelating with the environment and thinking we always have an impact, but we can choose whether it's positive or negative is what I take as the main takeaway there.

Michael Pisano 19:14

I absolutely uh agree and love that. And I, you know, I think it kind of points to this idea that the Anthropocene is um not a past epoch that we are looking back on. It is one we're inhabiting now and we're defining now with our actions. And I think you're right that, you know, the kind of the story of it thus far has been a pretty grim one, as told by media, as told even I think by Western science, um, where mostly documenting loss and documenting issues that I think in their aggregate can make us feel a little bit hopeless. Could you speak more, I guess, to your perspective on that media fear-mongering versus keeping hope, you know, and maybe even what personally keeps you hopeful for a livable future and that that work that you do.

Soren Brothers 20:00

You know, when I started this job at the museum, I already kind of knew on some level that I didn't want to be just talking about all the bad stuff that climate change does. As a climate change curator, I knew I didn't want I grew up going to this museum. I had really positive memories here. I didn't want to take away that experience from younger children or from adults who were coming here. I remember during the interview being, you know, saying that and being really excited that they didn't try and challenge me or ask me like how would my how am I going to do like happy climate change programming or what does that look like? Right. If it's now, if it's not doomy. Um and so that was kind of an interesting transition, sort of coming almost from a gut feeling first. Since I've been in this role, I think what I've come to really settle on is that there's a lot of people who are more scared of climate change solutions than there are climate change actions. Or sorry, than there are climate change consequences. So they're more worried about what a solution is going to look like in terms of, you know, the sacrifice of tightening our belts and we're going to have to spend all this money and we're going to have to stop flying and stop eating the food that we want to eat. And we're going to have to totally um, you know, upturn our whole lives to to deal with climate change. And how bad could it really be? Is it going to be that bad? And so that that's, I think, a big part of the lack of progress is this kind of fear of the solutions. And generally, I feel like the push of climate sort of communicators and activists until now has largely been trying to get them more and more scared and be like, no, no, no, it is really scary. We have to do something. And and the people who are listening to that are the people who are already usually really worried anyway and scared. And then it's just feeding into the climate anxiety as well, and this kind of doomism and the passivity. You know, people aren't adapted to respond to that, to keep that level of fear. And so we just get really good at getting jaded about climate change, I think, as a society. What I think is interesting is if you start focusing instead on this role of actually how great the climate change solutions, and I don't even know if I know some people don't like the word solutions even, but think about the climate change opportunities, the progress that we're making towards addressing the issue of climate change. These things actually make the world a better place in the here and now. And I love to say, for instance, in Ontario, uh we phased out coal from 2005 to 2014, and that remains apparently the largest climate mitigation action on the continent. And it was done basically because of the bad air quality that was resulting from coal. So not necessarily like climate change was already too politicized to get bipartisan government support for that, but air quality was not. And so it's interesting that you can think about you know public health. And I can say here for people in the public who are asking me, like, aren't you worried about reducing your carbon footprint? They can be like, we've just reduced our carbon footprint by 40% by phasing out coal. Did you notice? You know, you're still living your life. And the only thing maybe you notice is we don't have smog days anymore. We used to have 30 or 40 smog days every summer in Toronto, and that's hasn't happened really like that since 2014. So the air quality is way better. And then there's all the health benefits with that, and the less impact on the healthcare system here because of um the better air quality. So focusing on on the the here and now and the positive elements and the reasons to be excited for um climate change and thinking about like climate solutions are making our river swimmable. Um, you know, we're doing that in Toronto now, we're spending billions to clean up the Don River so that people can swim in it. And it's like you if you have heat waves in the future, you need public swimming places that are clean. But this is also a beautiful way of actually improving our city and making it a better place and not just treating our rivers as an industrial port or industrial waste site, which is again kind of goes back to Crawford Lake. That's a colonial way of looking at the landscape and a colonial way of interacting with the landscape versus one which actually loves the landscape and having a society that can go swimming in the river between beers. Mm-hmm.

Michael Pisano 24:00

Mm-hmm. Right. Yes, there's real potential for joy, for celebration. If you clean up a river, people get to connect to the river a little bit more. That connection can then perhaps lead them to the next bit of important work or important connection with the landscape outside of an extractive framework or a fearful framework of what's out there, what's in the water. You know, you you bring up a really important part of, I think, contemporary climate activism and communication, which is the intersectionality of the solutions with human rights issues. And um I think that's people in the Pittsburgh region, I think, are really that that story about coal resonate quite deeply in about smog days because we have some of the worst air quality in the country on any given day uh here because of the remaining heavy industry in this area. And I find that in Pennsylvania, and I wonder if this is similar, there is kind of a legacy of a narrative around the smog, around the pollution, as really baked into the identity of the people who live here. You know, a lot of people are generations deep in this area. They have family members who worked as a coal miner or as a steelmaker. And, you know, they I think they fear that somehow that legacy is under attack and that the city, I think, struggles to evolve when you have the kind of combined legacy of people, you know, connecting to this land in a specific way and the history of this place in a specific way. Uh, and then you also have those narratives supported by the industries themselves who are pushing very hard to say we are the economic opportunity in this area, we are the legacy and the you know identity of this area. So I wonder what that kind of was like in Toronto and what the discourse was from both sides as well as from the industry.

Soren Brothers 25:54

I mean, there's definitely you know, things get politicized here as well. You know, Southern Ontario, it's not uh it's not Pennsylvania or or West Virginia or places where that I think that, you know, coal was such a big part of the entity, but industry still is, um, or in terms of auto plants, you know, we're we're kind of just the other side of the rust belt as well, less rusty maybe. But I was kind of surprised even just recently. I'm really interested right now in urban, you know, urban renewal and urban regeneration, all these kind of things that are happening right now that I think are part of this discussion, and you know, getting better bike lanes and car free zones or cars, sort of lightening car loads in cities and traffic loads. And I saw recently there's an area downtown Toronto, Kensington Market, where there was a big local pushback against increasing its pedestrianized sort of feeling because people felt that there were some people that kind of wanted to have that grit and of having cars and having the noise. And they felt like, you know, not to totally throw it out, but they were there was this feeling that, you know, this is just another form of gentrification, and you're kind of trying to disnify this neighborhood, and suddenly all our houses are also going to be really expensive. But it was really sad to me to think that you know, this is something we should be doing to every city across every neighborhood is pedestrianizing and it's you know, you look at places like Amsterdam and it's it's it's beautiful, and it's better for the drivers, better for the bicyclists, better for everyone. It's win-win. But it's like, you know, to also imply that the only rich people should be able to have a car-free neighborhood is I feel the flip side of that, which is a it's again that that's a social justice issue. And it's like, no, people who don't have a lot of money should also be able to walk safely and not worry about um having car exhaust in their kids' faces. And 100%. You know, those conversations come in, and then quickly politicians jump on them one way or the other and say, okay, well, you're either on with us or you're against us. I I had read somewhere that at least with West Virginia, that there was, you know, the coal industry talks a lot about the the heritage of the fossil fuel industry. There talks a lot about the heritage element and like this is what people's history was, and that you know, their cart culture is all about this. But actually, the unions, like the co-workers' unions, were totally supportive of a transition to renewables. It's like the actual people doing the work don't necessarily want to have that, you know, the health impacts and that that history. They're happy to do work in solar, they just want jobs, they want to be able to have families and they can support and live in the place they love. And it didn't have to necessarily be mining. Is my understanding of how, and obviously that's different to be different from the industries that are actually making the money from the mining itself. I think, you know, as you were saying earlier, you know, there's a huge intersection with social justice and any climate scenario or solution scenario that does not take into account, you know, these kinds of transitions in people's jobs, I think is is lacking. And same with biodiversity. I mean, I feel like these are the big, the three big kind of pillars of of addressing climate change are also every good solution has to also look at biodiversity loss and and climate justice and social justice issues and really address all of them at the same time.

Michael Pisano 28:55

And I think that's absolutely possible. And that's part of what is so exciting to me, you know, getting back to this feeling of optimism and opportunity. You actually wrote a great article, and maybe we can go even further back and get Crawford Lake back in the mix. You wrote a great article for the conversation about what we might learn from Crawford Lake's history about living in cities today. And I feel like that's, you know, connecting a little bit to what you were just talking about. Could you spell out a few of those lessons and maybe, you know, I'm I'm curious about specific examples of existing good urban design and conservation practices that take into account these issues of social justice, biodiversity, you know?

Soren Brothers 29:31

It goes back to this idea of whether we have, you know, recognizing that we always have an impact and thinking about when is that impact bad and when is that impact good. And to some degree, you know, even for me, it felt sort of aspirational at first, because I think we're just trained to not think that way in terms of positive impacts, or to also feel that it's almost like Pollyannish or something to suggest that we could have a good impact on the environment, which I think is dangerous. If that's, you know, if we're scared to say that we can actually do something well or have a good impact, then that we're in a bad place. So, you know, so I started thinking, even just with writing that article of it almost as a thought exercise, like, you know, is it possible to have a city that's better than a non-urban area, a rural area in terms of biodiversity, in terms of climate, in terms of social justice, a place where there's a tree is better off if they were in a city, or an endangered plant is better off if they were in a city than if they were outside of the city, or a certain species of salamander, you know, all these kinds of things. And what would that look like? And I started thinking about, you know, there are examples, you know, it's kind of ones that seem maybe simplistic, but something like, well, say ash trees, you know, they receive treatments in the city against the emerald ash bore. Granted, this is an invasive species that we introduced that's now wiping out trees. But given where we are right now, a tree might have a better chance against the emerald ash borer in an urban area where it's being given a chemical treatment to protect it from that, versus versus a tree that's out in the forest and that's more remote. But also thinking of like wildfires and prevent and flood kind of impacts, you know, urban areas are places where species in the future might be protected from those kinds of climate impacts that are that are going to be happening everywhere. But then also just if we have a cultural shift of, you know, towards caring, towards maximizing, say, optimizing carbon drawdown in riparian zones, in wetlands, and thinking about creating those wetlands around cities, um, this is where they can become maybe climate, what we call like a climate positive or like a net sink of CO2 at the same time as getting away from burning fossil fuels and having more cleaner sources of energy and getting more efficient with the way that we use energy, getting more efficient with the way that we extract mineral or recycle minerals in what we're in how we're building it, you know, within our built environment. So thinking about all of these elements together, is it possible to make the city a better place than without having a city? And one of the reasons I was actually thinking about this too, I mean, there have been studies that have shown essentially like there's a study in Australia, and I can't remember the authors right now, but they basically looked at how many endangered plant species are already in major Australian urban areas. And people just have this kind of assumption going into urban areas that that this is a bad place for nature, there's no nature here, and if you have to leave the city to see something that's rare. And they had, I think there is one sort of anecdote in this study or in this paper that was talking about even a rare orchid that basically just lived next to a parking lot in Melbourne or Sydney. And there had been like during the study, like a few times where like a gravel truck came and just dumped all of the gravel onto the one lot, and then they had to dig it out, but they dug it out with like an excavator and like these orchids end up surviving. But people just were not treating it as a place of respect. And going back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, this idea that you can create a national, we often create national parks and have it as this thing where you can leave it and think that it's going to be fine. You know, I I think the danger with that is that we sort of treat that as a sacred space. And the idea is that everything outside of those parameters can we can do anything we want to. And it's not sacred. If it's in a city, it just should be, you know, going with whatever capital flow or the or the forces of economics determine what happened to it. And it's only if you're in that specific national park or protected area that you're protected. I think that that's a dangerous way of kind of divvying up the natural environment. And we should be thinking about everything around us, every front and back lawn as a protected area that we're working with to try and make a safer place for animals and all of the green spaces within cities trying to find ways to. I mean, we have scientists who can inform great decisions, and we have community members, we have indigenous communities as well, and non-indigenous communities that can all inform ways to to improve these places for nature. And I think that's kind of what we need right now is that different way of looking at it.

Michael Pisano 33:59

Absolutely. I think it's a shift towards uh, you know, as you said before, an active participation model of conservation, um also a regenerative model of design where we're not just thinking about maintenance or saving what we have, but rather really pushing our boundaries towards what we can actually cause to bloom, to flourish. You you mentioned a mix of kind of scales for that kind of work. And there's been a very positive, in my mind, shift away from if you use a reusable straw, if you, you know, these all these tiny things that I think that narrative is slowly getting edged out by the idea that actually, you know, community scale action is really important all the way up to kind of policy. But I do wonder where you see, you know, an individual listener or a small group of people start with this more active version of stewardship and you know, a reciprocal approach.

Soren Brothers 34:55

You know, stuff, when I started the job, I was all about moving away from the individual messaging, kind of like what you were saying. And and you know, there I felt like there was so much climate communications that just focus on like here's what you can do, and you can turn off the lights, and you can drive less, and you can stop visiting grandma. And that kind of feeds into this, like the same kind of feeling of sacrifice, and here's what you need to reduce in order for us to combat climate change. The vast majority of the issue, it has to be collectively solved. And I think that that's something that's there's a value in changing the the dialogue from what can you do to saying, what are we doing? Because a lot of people are also feeling like we're we're like stuck in this role and like there's this inertia, and we have to pierce the inertia towards climate change. And it's so much better, I think, to be able to say, look, we we phased out fuel, we're having we're doing this, we're cleaning the rivers, we're cleaning the air, we're improving bike transit and alternatives from fossil fuel burning vehicles. We're doing all these things. We're not doing them fast enough, we need to do them better. But here's, you know, the proof of the concept is in there now. We have all these examples in places around the world where this has been successful and it's saving us money, and it's improving our health, and it's making our kids' lives better. So I mean, I think that is a more powerful thing. And getting behind, you know, supporting these policies and supporting more of them and supporting, you know, the rapid expansion of really this kind of a positive transformation in society, I think is more powerful than saying, you know, like you really should have left your light off yesterday, you know, and that's why we have climate change. I'll never know in my lifetime if we've solved climate change, you know. And there's no way of measuring that. You know, getting to net zero by 2050 doesn't necessarily mean we solved it. We probably won't know within centuries, you know, the full arc of what's going to be happening, what we're putting into the system. So just even on an emotional level, I feel like I'm moving away from this idea of will we solve it or not? Will we fail? We might know if we failed miserably. But hopefully, beyond that, it's just the question of what are we doing right now to make life better and how fast can we do that? Because there is a timeline on it, and we have to do that as quickly as we can. But it is about making life better. About, you know, my daughters and growing up in Toronto will hopefully have a better, safer, less polluted time in the city than I did. And they can swim in the river and not worry about being hit by a car as much. I mean, I got hit by a car thrown 15 feet as a kid. I mean, I don't, you know, you know, these kinds of things are are part of living in a city sometimes, and they don't have to be.

Michael Pisano 37:37

They sure don't. And yeah, I hope to see those kinds of stories dissipate into you know, dad's dad's cranky again. He's telling the story when he got hit by a car, and what are cars even?

Soren Brothers 37:48

War on cars. This is nice.

Michael Pisano 37:49

Right. It's personal needs. Um I wonder, yeah. I mean, I think so in that scenario, one of the biggest things we are up against is narrative, right? Is entrenched narrative, is mainstream narrative that um I maybe it's jaded of me to say, but I think a lot of it exists in like commercial space, right? It's the idea that people are going to tune in to something sensational and most likely negative. And you know, in your conversations with people, how have you found, you know, have you found any impactful ways to kind of get them thinking along this more, I guess we'll just call it hopeful uh line of inquiry and of perception?

Soren Brothers 38:34

You know, for me, a lot of it's just about repositioning the conversation we're having. A lot of these things are win-win things that everyone can get behind. It's just that we get into this weird, we're in such a politicized state where people are trying, you know, on both ends of the spectrum to make it about politics and make it about party affiliation somehow. And just finding any way that I can sidestep that whole conversation. One of the things I like about being a limnologist is that people don't have like a political alignment with lakes and water, which is kind of nice. You know, it's yes, but it's like I can be more fluid with uh with the way I talk about things. But yeah, when I was teaching in Utah, you know, my students would often um would spend time fishing in the countryside, and they were mostly identifying strongly multiple generations as Republicans. But it was nice to be able to say, like, what's your favorite lake to go fishing at, and then sure get bring in the local monitoring person who's like another farmer who does who has decades of information on that lake, and we can look together at how it's getting warmer and the ice cover is getting lower, and this just kind of working it away and taking away that mystery, and then you're just having a fresh conversation where then you start, okay, what should we do about this? Are you worried about the fish? You know, so just any kind of way that I can sidestep these conversations with that have become entrenched and bring them into this kind of fresh air, I find is is uh is kind of where I'm coming from, at least from a communication standpoint. And that's worked so far. And I have never, yeah, I have. Had anyone saying, like, oh great, it seems like it's done then, if we've done something. Um I think if anything, it's it's more on the other side where if you say like we're not doing anything and it feels like it's all on their shoulders, then it's it it becomes that's where you just get this total paralysis. Um what's next for the folks researching Crawford Lake? I mean, there's there's been discussions about looking at microplastics analysis up core, also maybe looking at uh at calcite or um phosphorus analyses, depending on you know, basically who's doing what, and thinking about how this might tie into the whole understanding of Earth's history and relationships between humans and the and the planet. One thing that's kind of interesting actually is that any future work on the lake is strongly uh associated right now with um indigenous support for that work. We're unlikely to take any more sediment cores or retrieve any more materials from the lake because multiple local First Nation communities respect the personhood of the lake and believe that taking sediment cores from the lake is is extractive of the body of the lake itself. So we took some last sediments for the plutonium analysis in April this year, and and we had a full ceremony with local elders and um indigenous community members before doing any work on the lake. And that permission was granted to permit to proceed with that work. But going forward, we're we're not going to assume that that will be the case. And so it's kind of an interesting situation, also, again, from that human perspective, and thinking about how we're decolonizing the way we do things here.

Michael Pisano 41:41

Absolutely. Extremely exciting, and it points towards a future that is more collaborative and thoughtful in the way that we move forward, extracting in general, right? I think you know, you you use the word extraction, and normally I think of the big bads, you know, the industries with their oil derricks and their huge drills and you know, monster machines. But it really is something that we all can pay attention to in our relationship to nature, no matter who we are, and you know, what kind of scale of relationship we have that shift away from extraction towards some sort of recognition of the inherent value, not just the economic value to be extracted or the research value or whatever it is, seems like to me a beautiful signal of also moving away from just this idea of we need, and I wonder if you can speak to this as a scientist, uh, more data, more collection. Of course, those things are valuable, and there's no way to even predict how valuable they'll be to future researchers to continue having data points, but also to maybe say there's a point at which we have a decent amount of data and we know a good path forward. And the priority is perhaps to find space for active conservation efforts.

Soren Brothers 43:01

It's tricky thinking about you know this question of when you have enough data. I mean, I think in some sense climate change is a is a great example of when you you can go decades having enough data and political will pushes back against it from having forward. So, I mean, who I guess the question is who decides at what point you're going to accept that data when you have enough, and who decides when it's enough and what does enough mean? I mean, we've known since the 1950s that it's happening and that's here and now, and what we need to do to solve it has already been kind of on the world stage since the 1980s. And here we are still having discussions about, you know, let's put more research into this. And so I think that there's yeah, there's definitely kind of a a broader question there. Maybe that's just sort of a knee-jerk thing for me coming up. You know, when it comes to a specific lake like Crawford Lake, I think it is yeah, I I would definitely want to go in with a lot of thought right now in any any kind of project. And I know as an academic, you know, and I was working in a in a more straightforward, you know, research-oriented assistant professorship in Utah, there's definitely a sense of you like you want to chase the money. And if there's a grant proposal, you come up with something so that you can do that, so that you have grad students, and it's more about that than I think maybe an older way of doing things, which was just sitting back and waiting for questions that that are actually important to come to you, and then trying to find a way to do those. And there's always a bit of both. And I've always tried to do you know the latter, but I think that is hard, you know, in the current sort of academic situation where a lot of people also feel like maybe the government just releases money for a specific project that it wants done. And then you just kind of go with it, even if you feel like that's not really bringing us new knowledge that we need right now. You know, I think that it just takes creativity and again having scientists who understand enough of the system to be able to figure out what those questions are and make the connections to what's what's maybe really going to be important to know about. But you know, there's also the value of just exploration as well. And I mean, so much of science and our these important advances have come by people who are just wandering through. And uh right now, I mean, the whole thing that led to the archaeological work at Crawford Lake and the reconstruction of those Iroquois and longhouses was that uh Jock McGrangers was looking to recreate Southern Ontario's forest history through pollen analysis. And then it was just his student found this strange, really big pollen grain. It's like this isn't a tree grain, and then went through the whole like herbarium collections and then figured out it was corn. Wow. But it's you know, it was basically a research project that was, I think, pretty uh abstract for a lot of people. Like, what was the past 10,000 years of forest history in this part of Ontario? But it turned into a very, yeah, into a globally significant finding, basically, or history.

Michael Pisano 45:56

Many thanks to Soren for inviting us into the Royal Ontario Museum's basement freezer collections, and to the sediments chilling therein for inspiring local action for the global good. You can learn more about Soren's work and about Rom at rom.on.ca. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Slim McCray. It's mostly recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music, Mackenzie Kimball describes the collection items, and Garrick Schmidt and Michael Bizzano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.