A Philosophy of Conservation - Dr. David O'Hara

Hosts: Travis Entenman & Lori Walsh
Guest: Dr. David O'Hara, Professor of Philosophy, Classics & Environmental Studies; Director of Environmental Studies & Sustainability at Augustana University

Episode Summary

In this episode, hosts Lori Walsh and Travis Entenman welcome Dr. David O’Hara, professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The conversation unfolds at a secluded cabin near the Big Sioux River, reflecting on the intersections of philosophy, nature, and community.

Key Themes Discussed

• Outdoor Classrooms and Environmental Spaces: David O’Hara shares how outdoor classrooms, pollinator gardens, and calming spaces on campus have transformed student engagement and environmental awareness. He connects these spaces to ancient traditions of philosophical learning, such as the Greek stoa, and discusses their importance in fostering connection to nature and community.
• Soundscapes and the Urban Experience: The hosts and David explore the impact of urban noise and light pollution, sharing personal stories about growing up in quiet rural environments and reflecting on the value of silence and natural soundscapes. David recounts the surprising quiet that followed a neighborhood power outage, highlighting how we often overlook the constant hum of urban life.
• Philosophy and Environmental Thought: David discusses the philosophical underpinnings of his environmentalism, drawing from Aristotle, Jonathan Edwards, and other thinkers. He emphasizes the role of wonder and curiosity in understanding the natural world and how philosophical inquiry can deepen our relationship with the environment.
• Teaching, Student Engagement, and Despair: The conversation turns to the challenges students face, including economic stress and anxiety about climate change. David shares his approach to meeting students where they are, nurturing their curiosity, and helping them find agency in environmental action—even amid feelings of despair.
• Faith, Values, and Moral Imagination: David reflects on the role of faith and moral values in environmental stewardship, advocating for open dialogue and mutual learning across diverse perspectives. He emphasizes the importance of curiosity, humility, and the willingness to engage with differing viewpoints.
• Mussels, Conservation, and Local Action: David shares his current work studying freshwater mussels and their decline, using this as a metaphor for broader environmental challenges. He encourages listeners to start small—by picking up trash, supporting local conservation, or simply spending time in nature—as a way to foster hope and community.
• The Power of Example: The episode closes with stories of how small actions can inspire others, from sketching in a rainforest to building outdoor classrooms. David encourages listeners to “be good ancestors” by acting in good faith and setting positive examples, even if change feels slow.

Highlights

• The value of outdoor learning spaces in fostering connection to nature and philosophy.
• Reflections on the loss of natural soundscapes and the importance of silence.
• The role of curiosity and wonder in environmental education.
• Strategies for supporting students facing climate anxiety and economic stress.
• The interconnectedness of faith, values, and environmental action.
• Inspiring stories of local conservation and the ripple effects of small actions.

About the Show

Rivers & Rangelands explores conservation, water, and community in the Northern Great Plains. Hosted by Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh, the podcast asks big questions about how we care for our land and water — today and for generations to come.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Maybe I was put here for such a time as this. Maybe this is my moment when I get to participate in making things better for people who live downstream. Welcome to rivers and range lands. I'm Lori Walsh and I am Travis Entenman. Thank you for joining us again with Dave O'Hara, and we are sitting outside a space that he and his students created at Augustana University. Yes, here in the fine, fine city of Sioux Falls. This is where I went to college. This is where my wife went to college. I'm an Augie grad, and this classroom was not here when I was here, and neither was David O'Hara so it has been a great delight for me as a journalist to come back and interview him multiple times over the years, but then also to see how he has come and made Environmental Studies part of the philosophy program in Augustana, part of a liberal arts education. Means a lot to me to me to have him here, yeah, and as a friend of his, and just seeing the impact that he has had on the campus, like physical impact having this outdoor classroom and the pollinator gardens and the greenhouse and calming spaces that have been developed on the campus. It really ties in to why we wanted to talk to him. Why are these outdoor spaces important to you know, him being a philosophy PhD, why is the environmental spaces important to these type of conversations and talks? But also, how do we increase our awareness and reasoning to want to talk about philosophy in the environmental space, using these outdoor spaces as a physical reminder, and starting off point to have those conversations so people can't see where we're seated, but we're outside on the on the lawn, on the campus, surrounded by trees and seated in this little horseshoe sort of shape, with beautiful quartzite flagstones and a little bit of lichen and moss growing between the cracks of the flagstones some small pebbles. And there's a descriptor little educational panel about everything that goes into this. But it dates back to the auditoria. Concept dates back quite a ways. Yeah, ancient Greece, the ancient stoa, where people came to learn and talk and learn from philosophers or enlightened people to talk about the issues of the day, and this is kind of a small recreation of that. It kind of helps get you rooted back into a time that wasn't as built as we have now the way we live now, and getting you outside and a little uncomfortable being cold and and in the elements, but also being in this kind of man made area, it really kind of ties everything in together that we wanted to talk with Dave about. So we talked with him a while back in the summer, we took a little walk out along the stream and through some wooded areas to a small private cabin where we set up our microphones. Why are we at this particular property in your from your perspective, why did we come to this piece of land? Why are we here? Okay, here? Well, we are on land that belongs to friends of mine, and I've told them, I won't say on a podcast, who they are or where we are. So this is going to have to remain a secret for your listeners. But this land is land where we can be far away from the sound of urban noise, and we can be kind of deep in the sound of the prairie and of the river bottom. So we're right now. We're in a little cabin that my friends built. It's kind of reminiscent of a cabin that early pioneers might have lived in. We're in a forested Valley that's heading down towards one of the tributaries of the Big Sioux River, and when we look out the windows up the hill on one side, we can see some of the prairie. Actually, we're looking at some that is, I believe, never been broken by a plow. Oh, really, just a tiny little bit up there. And if we look out down the other way, there's pretty dense forest, mostly Burr Oak, but lots of other trees as well, heading right down to the creek. So this seemed like a pretty good place to record a podcast where we were going to talk about the prairie and the water that flows through it, sure. Well, thank you for having us. Here it is. I feel like I'm in like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book right now. It's like a one room cabin with a loft, and it's lovely. It's. Wind's blowing. The trees are, yeah, the trees are moving. The birds are singing. It's really it's really nice. How rare is that to be away from any kind of traffic noise? And I mean South Dakota, in some ways, no, not that rare. You can get away from sounds, but yeah, maybe more than you would think. Is it hard to find a place, even in South Dakota, where you would have an extended period of time where you didn't have the sounds of human beings, it's quite difficult. Yeah, there, there have been maps made of both soundscapes and lightscapes to show how hard it is to get away from the sound of urban life, or to get away from the light of urban life. We rarely notice it. But one time a few years ago, I was working outside in the summertime. I was working in my garden. Wasn't mowing, so I didn't have any motors going. I think I was just weeding. And all of a sudden, something changed in my whole neighborhood. And what happened was the power went out. The power went out, and all of the air conditioners stopped running. And then I realized just how loud those air conditioners were, but it was, it was a steady hum, so you almost don't notice it. After a while, it becomes white noise. White Noise, yeah, the sound of engines, the sound of tires, even with, you know, electric vehicles, all tires are making that sound of friction on the highway. And of course, you've got people talking and lawn mowers and leaf blowers and all sorts of other things going on too. So this is pretty rare to be able to be in a place like this. A lot of what makes it quiet, of course, is the trees, because these trees here, they all have 1000s of leaves, and each leaf is a little bit of a reflective surface, so it's kind of like what you use the military uses to break up radar, right? So you get a surface that's not going to reflect back in the same direction. It reflects in many different directions. And so the trees are good noise dampener. If we went above the trees, we'd probably hear the sound of airplanes, and we'd probably hear the towns nearby too. Is this how you grew up? Travis, is this how you grew up? What were the soundscapes of your childhood? This is fairly similar to how I grew up. I was fortunate to grow up in the Catskill Park in the Catskill Mountains, just in the Hudson Valley in New York. So there's not a lot of industry there. There's, there's a town about 10 miles away where there's an IBM plant. But I was up in a, again, in the the forest, dense forest back in the sticks, way back in the sticks. Yeah, I was saying I northern Idaho is, you know, similar in that it's, you know, you're in the stick. So I grew up on 15 acres or in northern Idaho. And yeah, there's nothing around. It's you and the bears just hanging out all day. What about you in northwest Iowa, right over the border from South Dakota, and the same thing out in the middle of nothing. We did not farm. It was an acreage that we were renting. And, you know, I was born in Minneapolis, so urban childhood. But then, you know, kindergarten through sixth grade was this. Trees climb, trees read books. Yeah, they're speaking of books. There have been a couple of good books about this. There's one that's called the unwanted sound of all the things that we want. It's a good time. Yeah. There's another one written by the Norwegian explorer Erling Kaga. I don't remember the author of the first one, but Erling Kaga wrote one simply called silence. Yeah. I have that one, yeah. And you know it. It's about skiing across Antarctica and being away from all of the sound of human beings other than yourself. So you mentioned an author, and you know your philosophy professor, so you have this background, and I'm wondering what the you know, who the thinkers, philosophers, who have influenced how you think about the environment, about the prairie, about landscape today, like, is there a philosophical underpinning for your environmentalism? Yeah, there is, and it's actually coming from a bunch of different directions, but what I'll say is whether we're talking about ancient Greek philosophy or contemporary American philosophy, or the philosophies of classical China or Central America. One thing that's in common is a sense of wonder, wonder and curiosity. And so we start to wonder about things like, why is it that we surround ourselves with noise when we don't really like the noise, and what is it that we're missing? What are the things that we don't see because we move too fast, or we don't hear because we're making so much noise? If we were to go back in history, Aristotle is one of those who really influenced me. Aristotle was really curious about the entire world. Which sounds like a very big thing to be curious about, and that's part of why he stands out in history. He wanted to know, what does everything that exists have in common with everything else? And so he wrote books about weather and about the parts of animals. He's got a book called on the parts of animals he and he gave us a lot of the scientific names for species and and other kinds of taxa of animals. I'm gonna throw you on the spot. Do you know some of the species offhand of what he named? Yeah. So for instance, if you look at the way that entomologists will name insects, we have all these Greek names. So Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, that Pater is the same as the Pater and helicopter. It means wing. Helicopter has a helical wing. A Hymenoptera has a membrane wing. So that's like bees and wasps and Hornets and ants and so on. So yeah, he named he looked at all the insects around him in the Mediterranean and said, some of them are like one another. All of the Lepidoptera, the moths and butterflies, are like one another. All of the wasps and ants and bees, they're like one another. So what makes them alike and what makes them different? Really cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's also one of the things that makes people look at philosophers and say, y'all are weird. We stand on their shoulders because they mean now we can, if we look up in an app or in a field guide, yeah, we they've done a lot of work for us. Is what I'm hearing you say there, that's right, yeah. So I had an experience last summer. I was in coast. Don't have to start from scratch with our observations. Yeah, exactly. Keep going. So I was in Costa Rica, and I was staying at a biological field station. Why? Because it's cheaper than staying at the hotel. And there, it turned out to be a bunch of entomologists who were working there as well, and they were out at night. They put a light under a sheet, and it draws moths and other sorts of nighttime insects in so I stopped to talk to them. I was talking to them for about half an hour about what they were collecting, and at 1.1 of them said, Where did you do your PhD in entomology? And I said, I don't have a PhD in entomology. I'm a philosopher. And they said, We didn't know philosophers, or we don't know any philosophers who know anything about insects. And I said, Well, let me introduce you to Aristotle. So I've read Aristotle, and I know a good deal that was, he doesn't tell us all the modern scientific knowledge about insects, but he got me started, and that became a platform off which I could start studying more things that we know contemporarily about science. Say more about American early American philosophers, because my mind goes to Emerson and Thoreau. Yeah, who? Who's on your list? Well, another one who I think is kind of important, is Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards lived roughly 1700 to 1750 graduated from Yale, I think when he was 14, went on to be as one does, went on to become the president of, then the new university called Princeton, not at 14, but a little a little bit later on, he was important for a bunch of reasons. We think of him as a Puritan. That if people studied him in college, they might remember that he wrote a sermon called sinners in the hands of an angry God, and that might be the only thing people learn about Jonathan Edwards. But Edwards wrote about how rainbows occur. So in other words, he was interested in optics, the foundation of one of the branches of physics. Today, he also wrote about how spiders move from one place to another. For instance, the spiders are able to fly. And most people back then were like, spiders can't fly. I said, Well, just look, there's a bunch of them flying right now, even today, probably some of your listeners and are saying spiders can't fly. They don't have wings. Well, that's right, somehow they managed to sail on little bits of their own web that they send out from their spinnerets. And he was paying close attention to these tiny things around him, because he thought there's an order and a pattern here. He was influenced by some of the scientific philosophers who were at work in Europe at the time, and thought, if you're going to be a faithful person, you're also going to be attentive to the world. And he notices the way that when we build tools, those tools wind up changing the way that we perceive the world. One of the things he says, for instance, is if you're walking along and you have a staff in your hand, if you think about it, you'll think about the feeling of the staff in your hand. But you, if you're not thinking about it, you are aware of the ground. In other words, you feel the ground in the staff. The more you do it, the more the staff becomes a way of knowing the world. And if that sounds strange, just consider anybody who has driven a car, the same car for a long time. Most of us don't think about the fact that we're holding a steering wheel, but we do feel the road right. I mean, the instruments that the things that we hold. Hold in our hands, they wind up mediating the way that we know the world, wow. And oftentimes becomes extensions for yourself. Yeah, yeah. If you've ever swung a hammer at a nail, you know that you feel the head of the nail in some sense, when it makes contact with the head of the hammer. And the more you do it, the more that's true. It's interesting, because when I think about that, so tools or extension of yourself, but also a dilution of that experience. So because you're hitting a hammer on a nail, you don't get the full impact, so you're not feeling the full That's right, force of that experience. So they kind of dilutes that experience a bit. Same with driving is different than riding a bike. There are extensions of you, but you are experiencing those, those activities differently, or the surrounding areas different, yeah. So this cabin that you and I are sitting in right now doesn't have electricity, doesn't have air conditioning, and today's a hot day, so we opened the windows, yeah, I've been sweating for hours now, but you know, we're accustomed to being now in buildings that mediate the experience of the outdoors, so that we don't feel too hot or too cold. And this is good. It's great because we can live in air conditioning when we're vulnerable to overheating. We're going to need that even more in the future, but it does impact our experience of the world, right? I mean, Laura angles Wilder, you mentioned before she wrote the book The Long Winter 1880 1881 there's this winter that began in October, and it just it went so long that trains got frozen in their tracks, and people couldn't get food and they couldn't get heat, and a lot of people died, and we don't want to live. So being insulated from the winter is a really good thing. On the other hand, being insulated from nature. If we're too insulated from nature, we can start to lose touch with it, and we might not notice if species go extinct, we might not notice if something dramatic changes. I've noticed that my students consider the prairie to look like corn and soybean fields, because that's what they've experienced, sure, but when Laura Inga Wilder got here, it didn't look like that. So if you said draw the prairie in a classroom, some people would draw corn. They would draw straight lines, yeah, row cropping, yeah. Tell us more about your students and some of the ways they enter into this conversation right now, yeah, and how that's changed over the years, as you've seen new students come and go, Yeah, that's a that's a good question. It's, it's a big question. I have the sense that my students are, first of all, economically, feeling a good deal of distress by the time they get to college. They're aware of the fact that college is getting more and more expensive, that their prospects of getting a well paid job to pay off student loans seem to be declining. It's a pretty strong narrative about that, and there's a lot of truth to it as well. So many of them find that by the time they get to college, they they have raced to a kind of economic adulthood that doesn't leave a lot of time for curiosity and fun. They're almost on the back foot already. Yeah, yeah. So the good news is, if I offer them a little bit of fun, they're hungry for it. So if I give them the chance to go outside and have a class outdoors where we sit in the shade of a tree, they are eager for that, because they've been sitting in rows, they've been working at a lab, etc, they've they're tired. How do you as you're you know, as you've been teaching these many years, how has your students perspective you teach sustainability, environmental aspects and philosophy, have their mindset around you know, we're in climate crisis. We're losing our land use is rapidly changing. You know, we're losing songbirds, Prairie, all that fun stuff. How has their perspective changed? Along with that, coming into one of your classes, you know, even at entry level, are they seeing, has the students perspective on, like, what they can do change, or their their anxiety levels around these issues changed. How has that? Yeah, it's not uniform. Aldo Leopold once wrote that the danger of a little bit of environmental education is that you begin to feel that you are alone in a world full of wounds. And some students, when they become aware of some of the wounds, push away from it, and they choose to not pay attention to it, I think, to probably to preserve themselves. Others of them dive into it, and then they start to feel pretty alone. There's a book, well, you know the book Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. That was what. 1962 63 something like that. And she said in that book, for the first time in human history, in 1963 every human being on the face of the planet has now been directly affected by chemicals made by human beings. So that had never been the case before. And now everybody and she, of course, she's thinking about things like DDT and others, but every single one of us has had contact, physical contact, with those chemicals. Well, that was over 60 years ago, and it hasn't gotten to be the case that there's less of that, if anything, there's more than that. And the number of chemicals that we have synthesized and and made part of our environment has gone up. And I think many students are aware of that. And again, some of them, they go, I want to do something. What do we do about the PFAs? What do we do about these so called Forever chemicals that are in our water and showing up in our food. What do we do about the microplastics that are in our water, that are in our air, that are in our soil, and others of them go, well, it's just become so ubiquitous. It's everywhere. There isn't anything I can do. The prairie is corn. I mean, that's yeah, kind of mindset moving, yeah, yep, we take the status quo to be normal. Where do you reach them, where they're at and like, what's the role of a professor? To me, are you meeting them where they're at and then helping them figure out? Well, I feel like this is not something I can engage in, and therefore, you know, I'm going to help guide you to a place where you can disengage from that and engage in something else. Or are you always trying to pull your students back into you know, here are the ways that whatever you're going to go on and do after you leave this classroom, you can still be thinking about and working toward a more sustainable future, because it is essential to our survival. How do you see your role as a professor with those students, even the ones who might be in despair? Well, in addition to being a philosophy professor, I have a few other things that make me peculiar, and one of them is that my Christian faith matters to me. And a few years ago, I was driving into campus, it was All Saints Day. And I was just thinking about that. I'm not big into saints. I don't know a tremendous amount about saints, but I was thinking, what is this? All Saints Day? So we got, like, St Patrick's Day. We got, you know, St Valentine's Day. All there are certain saints that people celebrate, but this is this day for all of the other saints. And as I was driving into work, I was thinking, every one of those people that is considered a saint in any tradition, at one point was a kid. At one point there were a student. Maybe they were a teenager. And then it hit me, any one of the students that I'm going to see today, it might be that 1000 years from now, somebody will look back and remember them as a saint. And there's a there was a little bit of awe and fear, like, oh my goodness, how do I not get in the way? But also just a sense of wonder. Like, how cool is it that there might be things that are seeds that are growing in the soil of their lives, that could just flourish and become absolute wonders for other people, that their lives could be lives worthy of imitation someday. And what role do I get to play today in helping that to be the case? So if I thought about it like a gardener, like I don't make plants grow, but I can do things to help the conditions for growth be better. And knowing which plants need, which soil, which sunlight, how much water, et cetera, makes a difference. So I try to get to know my students. What do they need? What are the gifts that they've already got? What do they love? I don't expect any one of us is going to be able to see. To be able to solve all of the problems, but each one of us has got something that we can give and something that we can offer, and if I can figure out even a little bit of that and help the students along, great. That's a really wonderful approach. I mean, it actually kind of ties back to the earth, right? You're a gardener, you're you're sowing a seed, you're giving the environment to your students to be able to cultivate what they might be in the future. And so all kind of comes together. How does you know the philosophy background? Teaching philosophy, talking about philosophy, religion, any aspect of moral compass in school. How does that help? Do you often see that your students are that resonates with them? Or do they see it more as here's some old guys that wrote a book, yeah, long time ago. Mm. Um, what's that have to do with my tick tock? So how does that, how does that kind of incorporate into your teaching and your lessons, and how does that translate to your students? And what? How? How have they been able to take that kind of thought process, that more more moral, yeah, approach to their issue, you know, issues that they might face. Yeah, most of the students who come to my classes have never studied philosophy before. Even those who have a religious tradition tend not to know a lot about like, the background, the history, the details of their religious tradition. They know the holidays. They know the things that they might do regularly with family or their their faith community. So I take it to be part of my job to help them to cultivate their own curiosity. So I like to expose them to texts that lie at the background of what they do. I had a really cool experience at a conference recently. I was invited by a couple of major tech corporations to come and speak about religion and AI at a major AI conference. And as you might imagine, the people who showed up for my session were the ones who were interested in religion and in AI. And rather than just talking about Christianity, I talked about Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism and a couple of other traditions. And it was really fun afterwards to have students from each of those traditions come up to me and say, Thank you for telling me something about my own tradition that I didn't actually know related to this. So part of my job is, of course, to cultivate curiosity in the students, but to do that also by being curious myself. Sure I mentioned that I'm a person for whom my Christian faith matters. And sometimes when I say that, it might even be that some of your listeners feel that they go, Oh, I don't want everything to do with that, because many of us have had bad experiences with religion, with religious communities. And that's entirely understandable if anyone's listening to that and says, Yeah, I feel that way right now. Here are the 10 ways that religion has ruined the Earth. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna list them for you, and then you would say what I would say you're you're not alone. And if you've got objections to all of the religions or to a particular religion, that's fair game, sure, right? Any religion worth its salt can stands criticism. And at the same time, there might be treasure there, whatever that that faith tradition is. So let's kind of explore that together. Part of for me, part of my faith, is recognizing that I'm not the one with all the answers. Sure, like two things can be true at once. Yeah, yeah. There could be lessons. There could have a unique relationship with that tradition. But yeah, you can learn. I might have a student, for instance, this isn't quite religion, but I might have a student in the same class, one student who is a vegan because they have a moral sense that we shouldn't be harming animals, and another student who is a hunter because they have a moral sense that we should be in deep connection with the land and the animals that live on it, and that something is going to die for their food, that they should have a direct connection to that. My job is not to say one of them is right and one is wrong or something like that. My job is to help them to explore. Why is it that they believe what they believe, so that they can share that with others and so that they can examine it themselves? It might be that they've got a good start, but that their case could be stronger. It could be that they've got a good start, but they've also got some things that, once they examine those, they'll say that's maybe not as strong a foundation as it could be. How can I improve that for the people who didn't show up to your presentation, because it was philosophy and AI, religion and AI, I'm out. I want to go and find out how to be the, you know, the next person with the next innovation. I don't have time for that. Yeah, this is very sweet, poetic conversation. But is it relevant? And you had to go out and, you know, you got 20 seconds to get them to come in the room to talk about religion and AI, to get them into the room further. What would you what would your invitation be? What would your call to action be? Any tool that we make is going to wind up mediating our experience of the world. It's going to help us see some things better and some things worse, strong, deep values, like the ones that we've inherited from our religious traditions, can help to make sure that we don't miss some of the things that are important. How is this work showing up in your life right now, I know that you are in the middle of your Bush fellowship. Congratulations, thank you, and to you as well. Thank you. And how is it showing up now in your life? You mean the AI part or the broader of like, what are you doing with your fellowship that is going to inform your moral imagination around conservation. Yeah, one of the one of the things that I'm trying to do right now is to live in a way that's worthy of imitation. So I'm trying to be as curious as I can, and not just to be curious like stare at my navel or gaze up at the sky and. Wonder emptily, but I am curious about what is it that I have missed about the world around me. Over the last couple of years, I have learned more and more about mollusks, and so I've been studying mollusks. This year, I've spent some time studying oceanic mollusks, including the cephalopods, squid, octopus, cuttlefish, et cetera. But now I'm studying the freshwater mollusks, and in particular the native mussels to North America. And I went off to took a class at Ohio State on that I've spent a lot of time just tramping around and in the water and talking with other scientists, trying to learn what I can about what happened to them. Why is it that we find the empty shells on our river shores, and why is it that we see so few of them alive? And what? What are we missing? What have we lost? What might we do to bring them back? If it's if it's beneficial, which I think it is. Why do we see so many of them washed up when we don't see them alive? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So it's sort of always picking up going, Are you alive or someone in here? Someone, yeah, and I can't tell so I always like, try not to disturb them, because I'm not really adept at this, you know, right? But you're asking, What if I only see ones that are empty? Why am I seeing? Are we living in a world where we're only collecting empty shells? We're seeing fossils. We're seeing early stages of fossils. Now, sometimes you'll find a shell that has recently been killed. There are some species that are doing just fine, including some invasive species. So you might see something that a mink just opened up. But an awful lot of the shells that you're seeing on the shores of rivers are fossils or becoming fossils. They've been dead for a long time. So most, most mollusks and most vertebrates as well, we accumulate calcium, right? In our case, we make teeth and bones out of it. Mollusks make shells. So when we find really old fossils, what are we finding? We're finding mostly calcium deposits. When you're finding a shell on the shore, you're finding the hard part of a muscle that's left when the soft part has been digested. Yeah. So it's, in some ways, you're looking at a kind of a graveyard. You're looking at a bit of devastation that has come through. I don't want to leave anybody in absolute despair here. Some of those might again, have been recently killed, but there were over 300 species of freshwater mussels native to what we consider to be the lower 48 of the United States right now, and many of those have simply gone away. There are some that are, dozen or so that are extinct. Most of them are critically endangered or threatened, and only a handful of them are actually doing well. And here's a funny story about that. If you ever look at a man's dress shirt, if you look at the buttons on his shirt, they're probably either Brown, kind of a mottled brown, or they're pearlescent. And even though they're made of plastic, what you're looking at there is a memory of us hunting river species in order to make shirts. The mottled brown might be an imitation of turtle shells and the pearlescent ones, they were made from freshwater mussel shells, because when Europeans arrived in North America, there were hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of mussels in the major rivers of the United States, and really in every freshwater body in the United States. We thought that they were so abundant that we could harvest them without any consequence. And we didn't realize when we started harvesting them in the 1800s that some of those that we harvested and drilled into shirt buttons were 100 years old, 120 years old, we didn't realize that they have this complex life cycle where they can't reproduce unless the fish that are the host for their young are also present. And when we started letting too much run off, go into our rivers, from our fields, or from honestly, from our suburban lawns, from our sewage systems, etc, that we were killing some of those fish. So there are still rivers where you've got very old mussels, mussels that are over a century old, that are fertile, but they're unable to reproduce because the host fish that they need are gone. Some of them are species dependent. Without that fish, they'll just, they'll go into their old age and die without ever having any offspring. I mean, that is a great, I think, case study of kind of our overall interaction with the environment. Yeah, mussels are a good indicator of, you know, how we had. Used to resource thinking it was, you know, renewable beyond unlimited on our years and but now we are in an area where we desperately need them back for their economic or not economic, but environmental services, but we have done serious damage to their habitat, the other species they rely on, that kind of transcends other species and other environments as well, and it kind of shows us a the mentality we've used, at least in the past 100, 200 years, on our natural environment. How do you see us? Or how do you think we need to kind of come back to a place where we're part of the larger piece. We're one piece in a larger pond, instead of above it. Yeah. How do you how do you reckon with that? And what do you see is kind of our solution forward or not even solution, but just like a mindset forward. Well, as I said before, I don't think any one of us is going to be able to do all of the things, sure, but I do think that every one of us has something that we can do. And it might be that that something is something very small, it might be that it's something very small, that others can join in on or imitate, and it might be that there are a few people out there who can do something very big. But the thing is to start to ask, What do you care about? What do you love? And what else are you missing? It's funny. I mean, if you go into our river, the Big Sioux River, or any of its tributaries, there are still some muscles in there. They're hard to find, though, because of the way that they live. They live out of sight of humans, and out of sight, out of mind as as we came to this little cabin here in the in the woods, I saw a tiny, little blue butterfly about the size of my thumbnail. I almost wanted to stop, but I knew we had to get here. But it's called a lycaonid butterfly, and lycaonids around here have this really interesting relationship with ants. So the licanas will lay their eggs on many of them on Clover or on some other species, and then their eggs will send out a pheromone that attracts ants that the egg will then be picked up by ants, which apparently think it's a baby ant or an ant egg, and they'll bring it back underground. They're one of few butterflies that grows up underground, but they grow much bigger than the ants, and the ants just continue to feed it and feed it and feed it until it emerges from the ground as a butterfly. Now, part of what's interesting about that is just that it's strange, but also what that means is that they actually put a growth limit on the size of the ant colonies, because the ants dedicate so much of their resources to growing these tiny little butterflies. So there's a balance there. There's they bring balance to ant populations, yeah, and that's how they benefit the ant population. They actually don't really benefit the ant population, except in as much as they limit it. I guess if the ant population wasn't asking, yeah, they might get too big limitation on offering, yeah, they benefited the way that coyotes benefit deer. You know, by by keeping the deer population from getting managed too big all at once. And you know, we sometimes look at our own suburban lawns and we see a little bit of clover growing there, and we go, oh, that's a weed. Let's get rid of it. But if we let a little bit of clover grow there, well, the clover is going to be benefiting us by limiting the ant population. It's also going to be benefiting the rest of the lawn by putting nitrogen in the lawn, etc, etc. There are all these little things that are happening around us that we don't see because we move fast, we make a lot of urban noise, and we don't take the time to slow down and to learn these little things. But again, I think each one of us is going to have some kind of curiosity, some kind of gift, and I want, at least with my career, with my life, to find where are those places where people are ready to grow and to learn something new. This fall, I'm going to invite my students to wade into the Big Sioux River with me and look for muscles, just so your listeners know I have a permit to do this. From the there was a pregnant pause, disinfected out for your students. That's right, that's the first thing I thought, too. Was like, well, E coli, how are you gonna and isn't that say something that the first thing I thought when you said you were gonna bring your students in was, yeah, that will make them sick. Yeah. That's interesting. You know, I work in it. And the first thing I thought, wasn't the muscles or the education series, like, Oh, poor kids. And you work in it, and what's happening there, where, that's the impression that we have of this urban river, that is, you know, that I grew up nearby, yep, and that we all value today. Yet we kind of hold up our nose at it, because we know that it's not all right, yeah. Well, I mean, so I am an ecology professor, and I do take my students out into wild places, and we spend a lot of time talking about, what are the risks when I take students to study with me in Alaska, I do let them know there are bears. Here's how we're going to avoid the bears, and how we're going to protect one another and so on. With a bear, you can usually see it because it's big. With E coli, you can't. It's very small, so, but of course, we'll, we'll take the precautions that we can. You've got an open wound, you're not going to stick that into the river, but I want them to to know about the river. And honestly, a lot of the lesson will be in the river, but much of it will be before we go into the river. What are the risks that we have in going into the river? And then we have a good, ethical conversation and cultural conversation. If we're concerned about touching the river, who else should be concerned about touching the river? We've got plenty of neighbors here in Sioux Falls who are going into the river and fishing and taking the fish home for their food. But not only that, there are rivers all over the world that are far worse than the Big Sioux River. So what if my students were to what if just one of them were to say, Hey, this is a river worth cleaning up. And I bet I've got an idea, and we will let them to we will let them try it out and start to clean up the river. Could they come up with something that could be used to clean up other rivers as well? What a gift that would be. I think of that young Dutch man, boy on slot, who came up with this wild idea to get rid of all the plastic in the oceans. I don't know the story. So he thought if we just had a great big floating boom miles long, then all the plastic that's floating could be captured somehow by the boom. I think loads of adults would hear that from this kid who was at the time, I think 1413, or 14, and say, just graduated, Yale, right with Jonathan Edwards. And loads of us would say, That's too expensive, it'll never work. The ocean's too big, et cetera. But somebody said, let's give it a try. And so far, it's been 10 years or so. He hasn't cleaned up all the oceans, but he's been innovating, and he's been figuring out how to capture plastic at river mouths and how to make better booms. And is that going to solve the problem? No, but he continues to try, and he brings people along with them. I would love it if one of my students were to figure out, how can we make the Yamuna River in India cleaner, especially if it was one of the students from India. What if we could do this to the Ganges? What if we could do this for the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, for rivers all over the world. What a gift Sioux Falls, South Dakota and its students could be to the whole world. So if we're concerned about our river, one thing we can do is we can say, Okay, then I'm just going to shut it out from my mind and I'm never going near the river again, and then we'll just forget that some of our drinking water comes from that very same river. Or we could say maybe I was put here for such a time as this, maybe this is my moment when I get to participate in making things better for people who live downstream. That'll be pretty cool. I mean, yeah. I mean, there's a general apathy around these issues, right? So having, you know, students be able to go in the river or interact with these natural environments in a way that they might not normally do in any given day, maybe plants that seed, right? And then they start growing that and they start carrying a little bit more. They start picking maybe up garbage on their walks. And then they start thinking, how can I do this on a larger scale? So that's a really lovely approach to getting these students out, you know, in an environment that, you know, our first reaction was, please don't go in there. And doing something is a good antidote to despair, right? Exactly. I mean, it's a death by 1000 cuts, right? Yeah. So to remedy that, it's not necessary. I mean, it's gonna take a lot of band aids, and within applying those band aids, you're gonna find some cures for cancer in there, right? Or these are gonna find penicillin, and you're gonna be able to do big leaps and bounds. But you still have to put those band aids on until you get to that point, right? And if you got a lot of band aids on, don't put your hand in the river, right? And for people who say, you know, like, this has to be a system, you know, systematic solution. I mean, me, picking up a piece of garbage does not solve this problem. Me, you know, making my yard more eco friendly does not solve this problem, because the city hall or the county commission or the state government or the federal government, they're just going to undo what I do. I can't make a difference that you're back into that despair moment. What's the value in doing something that is in taking care of your own surroundings and your own actions and. Getting back to this idea of, you know, living a life worth imitating. Yeah, years ago, I was walking with my students through the rainforest in Guatemala. I sometimes take my students there. We study rainforest and reef ecology, and we do about a 40 mile walk through the forest over a couple of days, and we wind up in this in the park of Tikal, which is ancient Mayan city. We climbed up to the top of one of the temples, and we sat there looking out over the the the forest. It, by the way, this is the very spot from which the rebels launched the attack on the Death Star. It's right where George Lucas filmed that. That's what I assume. Obviously has a beautiful view from there, and one or two of us took out our sketch books. I always got a pen and paper with me, and I started sketching the forest, and my students started sketching as well. Now there were lots of tourists around us, and tourists looked over at us and started going through their purses and backpacks for pen and paper and started sketching as well. Now everybody had been taking pictures. But they saw us sketching, and they started to do it too. You just never know what sort of effect you're going to have on other people when you do start doing something that might seem useless and slow but creative, sure. I mean, why not? When I was a kid growing up in the Hudson Valley, this was back in the 1970s there was this old wooden ship, I think it was called the clear water that people were sailing up the river in order to raise awareness of the pollution in the Hudson River. Oh, really, yeah, I tell you, my memory of it is that we went there and I saw somebody make apple cider. I was young enough. I don't remember anything else about it. I know that there were musicians. I think my my dad told me later that one of them was Pete Seeger, and there were some others. But I was like, I saw them make apple cider. I saw Pete Seeger make apple cider or whatever. Good dang story, right? Is he the guy who makes cider? Not the famous musician, but years later, I remembered, oh, people were really concerned about cleaning up the Hudson River. Why is that? And little things like that wind up accumulating. You watch other people investing their time, their energy, their money, into something like that, and you say, why is it that they did that? How is this going to change my life, too? Yeah, that's interesting. And you know, it's easy to look around the world and see the famous people who get famous by being bad actors. Sure, it's frustrating, but why not try to be the people who maybe we won't get famous, but we'll set an example by being faithful actors, acting in good faith, doing the best that we can with what we have. You just never know. Maybe some child will see us and say, I want to do that, and I think I can do it better. You're being a good ancestor. That's the aim. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for all of this. Yeah. We all do the little things we can. Is there anything else either one of you wanted to cover were at about 45 minutes. But I also want to just open the door for anything else that you wanted to ask or anything else that you wanted to say. One of the things that has motivated me, especially in the last 10 years or so, I didn't train for this, but building building things, putting up signs saying that this is a native prairie restoration plot. This is an orchard on our campus. This is a vegetable garden. Building an apiary where we've been raising bees, building an outdoor classroom. The building of things has been, as I said, an excellent antidote to despair. When you start to do something in public and you get people involved in that, it works out really nicely. And in my case, other people have then come to imitate it. So we've helped five other schools build outdoor classrooms. Now, CNN wanted to talk about that, and so they interviewed me about this. IBM asked me if I would be willing to design a global competition for them to help students around the world use IBM's technology to create access to clean water. Which we did, we wound up giving away a quarter of a million dollars of IBM's money as prizes to a group of five students in India who one of whose mother had been poisoned as a child or when he was a child by not having access to clean water. There's stuff we can do, and there's creative stuff that we can do that might seem useless to other people, but that might actually wind up changing lives, developing new technology, developing new industries, doing cool things that will mediate our relationship in the with the world in a healthier way. Yeah, I love being a part of that. I think that everyone listening can be a part of that too. Yeah. I like the labeling of it. You do it, but then you tell people that you're doing it, and you tell people that you've done it, yeah? So when they. Walk by, even if they don't know what they're looking at, they can see, yeah. And if anyone tells me, you know you didn't do that very well, I say, Great. Show me how to do it better. Yeah, yeah. This was clearly a conversation of two Bush fellows and a guy that's a that was lovely. Thank you. Thank you. That's Dr David O'Hara with Augustana University, and at the end of our conversation with him, we got a few minutes to just get what's called room tone, or ambient sound, or gnat sound, or whatever. Some people call it, different things, but to sit in silence and record the sound of the room. Yeah, and just kind of a man put yourself in place. We are in this one room cabin with no electricity or anything, with the windows open and it's the three of us sitting there for five minutes not making a sound. And you wouldn't think it's a big deal or that hard, but it's, weirdly, very difficult, and but it was great. It was a, you know, a nice little meditation in the middle of the day. Yeah, it was nice to just sit there and be present with the sounds of that property, yeah. What else do you want to say about the podcast or what we're doing next? I think we should do food next. Do you want to do local foods next? Don't you think everybody's paying attention to food right now? It'll be the holiday season for a lot of people in December. Yeah, and to really be talking about food, when people are thinking about food, I think that would be, you can always pivot, you know, do something else. But our intention is, yeah, okay, once you make the promise, you got to do it. We're going on record right now, and now we're moving on to local foods. We're gonna see, speak to producers and end users and everyone in between, and talk about, where does our food come from, why we maybe want to have more localized produce and products and keeping it local, and what the hurdles are to do that. Where does our food really come from? Are we actually feeding the world? Here in South Dakota, we're kind of trying to enlighten and bring everything back, back to South Dakota and understand where our food comes from. Let's eat. Continue to follow us. Subscribe. Follow the newsletter through friends of the Big Sioux River. Feel free to reach out at any time to let us know how we're doing. Are we providing information that you find valuable? Are there topics that you want us to to look at? You know, again, we want to bring this information to you and and just help start these conversations at a larger level. So anything you guys want to hear. Let us know we are not going to leave you with Jamie Lynn today, although we started the episode with her beautiful song that she's letting us use by permission. So check her music out. We leave you with a little bit of silence from our cabin and our time with David O'Hara and just invite you To sit and listen and breathe along with us. You go down here and Two Teachers, So so you're doing three years ago? To appreciate alright. I'm.