The Shape of the World

Gabe Plotkin is the Chief Operating Officer of Tradewater, a company that improves the environment and creates economic opportunity through the collection, control, and destruction of potent, high impact greenhouse gases.

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically) that government will do the work. The actions we as individuals do manage are spurred by sporadic panic: when there’s a catastrophic storm or forest fire, one jumps into doing this and that to reduce emissions. But after the adrenaline subsides, our attention is then caught by some other crisis and we neglect climate change.

This is entirely understandable and normal. But how do we counteract it? Just because something is a natural tendency doesn’t mean we should give into it. How can one replace inertia with calm, consistent, unstoppable action? This episode has a concise solution that includes the carbon offset credit, a tool that our guest, Gabe Plotkin, helps us come to grips with.

How to Find Out More About Tradewater & Carbon Offset Credits

More about carbon offset credits and why destroying the gases in refrigerants is critical to reaching drawdown—the time when the carbon load in the atmosphere levels off and begins to decline—can be found here.

To offset your household’s or your business’s greenhouse gas emissions, go here, to the Tradewatwer website. It takes only a few minutes. If you know yourself well and are pretty experienced in knowing that you get annoyed by too many options, don’t bother with the carbon calculator on the right hand side of the screen. Instead, use the left-hand side of the screen where you enter a straightforward dollar amount. The average household in America emits 20 tons of carbon a year, just go with that and pay $300. If you want to do more and can afford to offset both your home and someone else’s, enter $600. If you live in a small apartment in a large city, don’t own a car, and suspect you emit only half the greenhouse gases of the average household, enter $150. Or if you want to cover only one ton of emissions or maybe want to give that as a gift to someone, one ton is $15.

There are many websites from other reputable businesses like Tradewater that offer carbon offsets. But the point of this episode of our podcast was to reduce the volume of choices a person faces. Having an excessive number of options stands in the way of making a decisive, ethical action to make the world a better place. That’s why we recommend one specific website rather than saying something more general, like “shop around.”

HOW TO MAKE BIG CHANGES

Underneath the “reduce your emissions” mandate lie a series of essential soft skills. Without having the underlying abilities to make a significant change in behavior, someone typically starts off with enthusiasm and then trails off over time. It leaves a good-intentioned person feeling that they failed to follow through on something they genuinely care about.

The sources we recommend here help not just with reducing greenhouse gas emissions but with making any type of behavioral change. They explain why doing something small and repeating the action consistently is the most assured path to keeping the promises we make to ourselves. These books break down the science of how to adopt a new good habit or drop a poor one: “The Slight Edge” by Jeffrey Olsen; “Atomic Habits” by James Clear; and “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. Being able to follow through on something isn’t a personality trait; it’s a skill that can be taught, practiced and learned.

Dr. Janet Voight is Associate Curator of zoology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and is a specialist in cephalopod mollusks, especially octopuses.

Janet Voight grew up in Iowa, far from the ocean. Yet as a young adult, she found her way to the study of marine organisms, especially the cephalopods: that strange and wonderful system that includes snails, clams, squids, nautilus, and octopuses. In this episode, we discuss the incredible intelligence and fascinating lives of octopus.

Janet conducts her research not just in a lab, but one–mile deep in the ocean. Sixteen times she’s journeyed down in a strange, deep-ocean vehicle that holds only three people and looks as if it would be at home in outer space. On the East Pacific Rise, she examines the creatures that live around the hypothermal vents at the bottom of the sea.

How to Find Out More

Octopus are only of the organisms Janet Voight is fascinated by. “I’ve named 20 species of wood-boring clams,” she writes in her Field Museum blog. “You wouldn’t think there’s 20 species of wood-boring clams in the world. Trees fall in the forest and some of them wash out to sea. The wood that sinks to the bottom of the ocean is colonized by clams that bore into it. They just spend their lives scraping away at wood that sunk to the bottom of the ocean. And this group of species can only survive on the sunken wood.”

Janet appears in a terrific video about the sequencing of the octopus genome, a team she was part of. Here’s another article about this breakthrough.

The video and Janet’s colleague Cliff Ragsdale’s alien metaphor was the source for that portion of the narrative in this podcast episode. The episode was also informed by this article in Scientific American by Peter Godfrey-Smith; you may also want to check out his book, “Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.”

Dr. Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. After twenty-five years studying the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, Peggy expanded her lab’s work to focus primarily on the biological basis of empathy and helping. In addition to leading the research laboratory, Peggy is a committed teacher of neurobiology, teaching both formally (at the University) and informally, through her blog and a popular free, online course.

As a child, Peggy Mason was a biology prodigy. By the age of nine she was assisting the zoologist Dr. Charles Handley in teaching taxidermy at the Smithsonian. Today, as a neurobiologist, Peggy is still working with mammals but now she’s studying whether they experience empathy and act to help one another.

Peggy was studying the subject of pain modulation until a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, asked if she’d be interested in expanding her work to collaborate on a project about empathy. “I went over to see her that same day,” says Peggy, and the upshot was the discovery that like humans, rats have an aversion to witnessing the distress of others and a strong motivation to help someone else who’s suffering.

Want to Learn More, See More, Know More?

You’ll love this video from Nova that shows one rat deliberately setting free another rat that’s trapped. Later, the rat is confronted with the question of which to do first: save some rat it had never even met before, or wolf down the chocolate Peggy offered? Also, here’s the article in Science magazine.

How can I take a class with Peggy?

On Coursera, take “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Every Day Life,” a free course taught by Peggy. Also you can gain more insights from Peggy by subscribing to her blog, which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter.

Mary Hennen directs the Chicago Peregrine Program and is Assistant Collections Manager at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Zero. When Mary Hennen was growing up, that was the total number of peregrine falcons living anywhere near her home in Chicago. Even in the wilder areas Mary would visit in summer, in Vilas County in northern Wisconsin, no peregrine falcons could be seen anywhere. In fact, in the nineteen sixties, these impressive birds had gone missing from the entire eastern half of the United States.

But Mary recalls finding other connections to nature, and those helped lay a path that eventually led her to run the program that successfully brought populations of peregrine falcons back to life. “Some of my earliest memories of being four or five, I’d be in Vilas County walking the little boat road with my grandmother, looking under the tree to see if the little fawn was sleeping there,” Mary said. That time spent outdoors led Mary to get a degree in wildlife from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. In the nineteen eighties, she returned to Chicago and wound up becoming a key player in an audacious effort to bring peregrine falcons back from the brink of extinction.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? DID MARY & THE OTHERS SUCCEED?

The conservation specialists on peregrine falcons had what sounded like a truly insane idea: reintroduce the birds not to wilderness areas but to large cities. In nature, when left to their own devices, peregrine falcons nest in canyon environments and for food, they eat other birds. The thinking was that in a city, tall skyscrapers could mimic canyon walls where the birds could nest, and a plentiful supply of pigeons could become the peregrines’ buffet.

This unpromising sounding plan totally worked. Not just slightly, but astonishingly well. Adults were fine with using ledges on buildings as places to nest, and they had no trouble finding one another, courting and mating. Their little fluffy chicks hatched out and fledged, no problem.

This year marked the 30th anniversary from when Mary spotted her first peregrine. “In 1988, I went to see that first peregrine nest site, the first one in the state of Illinois since 1951. The female was flying around the Sears Tower, going after a yellow-bellied sapsucker. My first sight of a peregrine was her in this phenomenal dive after another bird. It was just astounding.”

Today Illinois has around thirty known nesting territories for the falcons, with about twenty in or near Chicago. (Numbers and locations change slightly from year to year.) The program has been so successful that peregrine falcons have been officially removed from Illinois’ list of endangered species.

For more information about Mary and her team’s incredible work and about the birds themselves, see the Chicago Peregrine Program and its frequently asked questions page.

WHAT IF YOU LOVE FAST, HANDSOME BIRDS AND WANT TO HELP?

Mary’s ability to track how nesting sites are doing and where new nest spring up is dependent on the information she receives from people who live or work near peregrine nest sites or who happen by chance to see one when they’re out somewhere. Wildlife photographers have played a particularly key role in pointing Mary toward peregrines that nest in natural cliffs distant from Chicago.The most important thing you can do to assist the Chicago Peregrine Program is when you spot a falcon, be prepared to take down and report some information. Report the sighting to Mary, and if you can manage to take a photo that shows the band on the bird’s leg, that’s even better. Email the information to Mary at [email protected] with a subject line of “Citizen peregrine report.”

Of course, stupendously large donations are an effective way to help as well. So feel free to go that direction. Send big bucks to the Field Museum of Natural History and tell them you want the money to go to the Chicago Peregrine Program. Or call the development office at the museum at (312) 665-7777.

Peyton does a dramatic flyby. This male peregrine and his mate hatched two chicks this year on the thirty-seventh story ledge of a building in downtown Chicago. Photo by Jill Riddell.

Each peregrine chick is given a band by Mary’s team. The metal bands are carefully sized to fit, they have no sharp edges, and they ...

– A. Laurie Palmer, American artist, writer, and activist, and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Artist Laurie Palmer believes they can. In her book, The Lichen Museum, Laurie explores what we can gain from learning to see life the way a lichen does. Laurie explains how our understanding of the world is filtered constantly through our own physical selves – we have a certain height and breadth; we can see for long distances; we are transient and ephemeral beings; and our brains tend to break reality into neat, distinct pieces and then give those things names. But what if we were more like a long-lived lichen?

Laurie is fascinated by lichens, these small and mostly overlooked organisms. Individuals of some species can stay alive for literally thousands of years. Laurie discovers that lichens have a lot to teach her (and the rest of us) about resiliency, adaptability, diversity, and perhaps most importantly, about how connected we are with other beings.

HOW TO BUY & READ LAURIE’S BOOK, “THE LICHEN MUSEUM”

Easy enough to acquire: order it from your local bookstore! You can also purchase it directly from the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press.

Laurie Palmer’s earlier book was In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2015), which studies humans’ effects on nature through her decade-long exploration of mineral extraction sites in the U.S. You can read her interview with Art21 Magazine about that.

HOW TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT LAURIE’S WORK

Best place is Laurie’s own website at alauriepalmer.org. But there are also some other gems out there, like articles either written by Laurie or articles written about her. Here’s a lovely piece Laurie wrote for Orion Magazine. The article contains five tips on how to live like a lichen.

And here’s an article that provides insights into her art practice, published in SFMOMA’s Open Space series.

MORE DETAIL ON VARIOUS THINGS REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

Taking a Lichen Walk

1. Purchase and use a 10-power magnifying hand lens, like this one for only $13.75 from ASC Scientific. A “10-power lens” or as Laurie referred to it during the interview, a “10x lens” means that the lens will make an object appear ten times its actual size.

2. Keep your eyes peeled and expect to encounter lichens in unexpected places – sidewalk cracks, electrical utility boxes, car doors. And of course, don’t neglect more typical spots like on the bark of trees, the surfaces of damp stones, and the walls of neglected wooden sheds.

3. Get close to the ground. As Laurie explains, “To look at lichens, you have to bend down and kneel, and get inside their world in a way that reduces your stature and vertical human body, which is in control of the world through long distance vision. You become myopic, and they become really huge, and you enter into their tiny world, and so there’s a loss of your own sovereignty, just in the act of looking.”

ADVICE ON BINOCULARS

Another scientific tool that’s useful to have for observing nature are binoculars. In the course of the interview, Laurie asks for advice on which ones to buy. Jill suggested that for a pair that is adequate and costs less than a hundred dollars, try these fun colorful ones made by Nocs Provisions.

“BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER”

Written by Herman Melville and published in the 1850s, the short story titled “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is about a worker who, whenever his boss asks him to do something, consistently answers, “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby’s quiet refusal becomes a powerful act of passive resistance. The story is rather an odd one with elements of absurd, dark humor and ultimately, a descent into nihilism. But it’s at its best and most memorable when it’s challenging the modern world’s assumptions about obedience, productivity, and purpose.

Bartleby came up in this “Shape” interview when Laurie described lichens’ resistance to cultivation. While lichens produce unique chemical compounds th...