Episode 144: Transcript
Episode: 144: Alien Ecosystems and the Algae Menace
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, if you were going to create a hybrid life form by combining two or more living things on Earth, what would it be? And I know that you've already written extensively about bearantula, so feel free to bring that up if you need to.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] Yes! Bearantula! Oh my god, bearantula! I feel like my bearantula pitch, which was an article I wrote for io9, is probably still the greatest piece of writing I’ve ever done. I don't think I'm ever going to write anything. If you just Google, for folks at home, if you just type into Google, Gizmodo and bearantula, like bear plus antula, one word, you will find it. I was just looking at it a minute ago because you had said you wanted to talk about it. And you know, I feel like it's some darn good science fiction future casting.
[00:00:52] And it’s really about like trying to combine the majesty of a bear with the many legs and stinginess of a tarantula.
[00:00:59] How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:01:01] I mean, also the majesty of the tarantula. I just wanted to throw that in that that is also majestic. Okay, so this is probably not surprising to anyone who has listened to this podcast and knows that I love kaiju.
[00:01:15] So, I'm a huge fan of Biollante, a perhaps lesser known, adversary of Godzilla, who is a kaiju who is a spliced together rose, like the flower, with some DNA from Gojira. So it's a giant Gojira rose, which like, I love that. I love combinations of plants and animals. I love the idea of a giant angry kaiju rose.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:48] It’s a lot better than an actual rose.
Annalee: [00:01:49] That’s very true. It's kind of femme. It's like a femme giant monster. It’s also sort of bringing together all of the best of nature and fake nature. And I feel like it would fit in really well into a lot of ecosystems. So I guess in that vein like if I were to build an animal that was a hybrid, I would probably combine a plant and an animal. Like a cat and a succulent or something like that. That seems like it would make sense.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:22] Ooh, cat flower.
Annalee: [00:02:22] I don't know what that would be. A cataculant? A succulat?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:27] This is sounding very Tuca & Bertie. I feel like there was a cartoon where there's like, flowers with cat faces that are just like, “Meow. Meow.”
Annalee: [00:02:33] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:34] That might have been Adventure Time that had cat flowers. I’m not sure.
Annalee: [00:02:36] Yeah, and then Steven Universe grew cat fingers.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:40] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:02:40] That was a very dangerous experiment. So, I think these are all excellent examples of future creatures that could exist in ecosystems. And—
Charlie Jane: [00:02:52] This is what CRISPR is for.
Annalee: [00:02:54] Yes. As we learned in the documentary Rampage where CRISPR creates a giant alligator among many other important new animals that are in our ecosystems.
[00:03:08] So, today we're going to be talking about ecosystems, in fact. We're going to talk about ecosystems in fiction and in reality. And I am obsessed with ecosystems, and I think that's because they're a way of quantifying the deep interdependence between life and the geological systems on our planet.
[00:03:31] I just love anything that's about studying relationships between different forms of life and non-life, and an ecosystem, just to give you the quick definition, which I know you want, Charlie Jane.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:42] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:42] Yeah, it's a community of life forms that's adapted to a specific habitat, like say the coast in California or the Arctic in Alaska. So ecosystems include plants and animals, microbes, but they also depend on non-living things like minerals in the soil and water and climate. So, they're really a mix of like literally plants, minerals, and animals.
[00:04:07] And there's an incredible new TV series on Max called Scavenger's Reign that really got me thinking about how we represent ecosystems in science fiction.
[00:04:18] So, we're gonna talk about that and a few other examples of fictional ecosystems and then we're gonna zoom out and we're gonna talk about how scientists study ecosystems as well as how ecosystems became an important area of study right around the time when we realized that they were falling apart.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] Dang.
Annalee: [00:04:35] I know.
[00:04:36] You're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and alien parasites that take over your mind and turn you into a giant predatory plant.
[00:04:48] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. My latest book is The Terraformers. Also, I'm going to be teaching in the media studies department at University of San Francisco in the spring, so I'm technically a professor now, so you better start calling me Dr. Newitz, Charlie.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:04] Always did. Always did. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. My latest book is Promises Stronger Than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:05:15] Darkness!
Charlie Jane: [00:05:15] And I've been reviewing science fiction and fantasy books lately for The Washington Post. You can find all my review columns up there. Also, in our mini episode next week, we're going to be talking about our cats. You know? Really important topic. And how our cats form a crucial, important part of the ecosystems of our domestic spaces.
Annalee: [00:05:36] And by the way! Did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:46] Yeah!
Annalee: [00:05:46] That's right. So, if you become a patron, you're making this podcast happen. You're paying for us to have opinions. You're paying for our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti. You're paying for all of these ideas. And you get mini episodes along with every episode if you become a patron, plus you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time. So think about supporting us. It just takes maybe five bucks a month, whatever you can afford, and anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:06:21] All right. Let's start.
[00:06:24] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:06:58] Okay, so basically all of this is an excuse for me to talk about how I am obsessed with the show Scavenger's Reign.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:05] I'm excited to learn more about it. I haven't watched it yet.
Annalee: [00:07:09] Yeah, so I feel like it's kind of been a bit of a cult sensation and so I don't want to give too many spoilers. The show is has now completely aired so you can watch all of it through Max and it may be available in some other places, too. And so I want to talk about it, but I won't give too many spoilers either to you, Charlie Jane, who hasn't watched it, or to you, our listeners.
[00:07:31] So, Scavenger’s Reign is an animated series which is based on a short film from 2016 called Scavengers, which was a completely silent animated film that aired on Adult Swim that was just about some people on an alien world who were using all of the animals and plants around them to build crazy biotech machines in order to survive. And that vibe of biotechnology and weird contraptions based on a kind of a combination of machines and living organisms carries over into Scavenger's Reign, the series, but it's not a continuation of that short. The short was kind of almost like a conceptual pitch for this series. It was created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, and they brought on a team of writers and animators and first time directors to create this.
[00:08:35] And one of the things I thought was really interesting is that one of the co-directors on the original short, Joseph Bennett, said that he actually doesn't know a lot about science fiction, and that for him, the show was actually kind of a nature series. And the two of them talk a lot about how they've just watched a lot of nature documentaries, and they were really interested.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:03] That's so cool. I love that.
Annalee: [00:09:04] Yeah, and so Basically, the premise of the show is that a colony ship is heading toward a planet that they're going to go… almost everyone is in cryosleep. There's a skeleton crew and they're heading to a planet where they're going to extract resources for a company that's paying for this ship and all of the materials on it.
[00:09:26] And one of the guys in the skeleton crew is this kind of a jerk. We've all worked with a guy like this. He's a techie. He feels like nobody pays any attention to him. He really wants to make his mark and he thinks he's figured out a faster way to get to their destination. And everyone's like, dude, no, we don't want to do that. It's too dangerous. And he sneaks into the navigation area and plugs it in, plugs in this new route and surprise! They end up crash landing on an alien world that’s totally uncharted. And one more thing I'll say, that, literally the opening scene in the show is two guys working on a dock, a space dock, who work for the company that has launched this ship. And they're like, oh, did you hear about that ship? Yeah, it's missing. Nobody knows where it is. And the other guy's yeah, too bad for them because the company's never going to pay to find them. It's going to be way cheaper just to like, let them go.
[00:10:31] And so we know from the instant that the show starts, these people are totally fucked. They're like, the company doesn't care. They're just like lost equipment. So, then we cut to the survivors who are on the planet. And so, there's a couple groups of survivors and we watch them as they make their way across the planet. They're trying to get back to the ship because they've kind of launched in emergency pods and they want to get back to the ship and find the other colonists and find all their materials.
[00:10:58] And as they go through the planet, we get to know this incredibly alien ecosystem that's full of weird parasitic organisms and they start, some of the organisms start merging with members of the crew. There's a robot in the crew who starts, growing, kind of plants inside of its circuit board and becomes kind of connected to the planet. And the planet is like completely… The ecosystem is fully realized. We see plants and animals and weather and all of the different parts of the ecosystem fitting together and humans are just… they're not the kings of this ecosystem. They're basically kind of being chewed up and spit out by it in a certain way. And it's very visual. It's like the short thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:51] That sounds amazing.
Annalee: [00:11:52] Yeah. And it's like, you know, a lot of it is about, of course, survival and these characters grappling with what they've done. But also, it's just about like, well, what would it be like to be on a planet where you’re basically the equivalent vegetable and everyone wants to eat you because you look really yummy and nobody respects your Homo sapiens-ness. They're just like, okay, you're just like a tasty treat.
[00:12:21] So there's some body horror in it, but a lot of it is just really about like, how do you learn to fit into an ecosystem that isn't your own? And each of the characters has different ways of fitting in. And I was just, like a lot of people, I was fucking blown away by the originality of the representations. Like, in a way, the story itself is very generic. It's like, oh, we crash-landed on a world and we have to survive, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:49] Sure. Tried and true.
Annalee: [00:12:50] Yeah, tried and true. Right. But the, the, the representation of the world and all of the biotech stuff they come up with is amazing. So anyway, I was thinking a lot about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:01] That’s so cool. I mean, honestly, you've totally sold me on watching this show. I already was dying to watch it because you told me about it the other day, but now I'm like extra dying to watch it.
[00:13:12] And you know, I'm like, I do feel like A, this is what we need right now. We need stories that kind of have more nuanced perspectives on ecosystems and on what makes… The complexity of ecosystems, the danger of screwing around with an ecosystem we don't understand. And just learning to respect that we can't, that things are not always what they appear at first, and that we have to actually take the time to understand that ecosystems can be freaking weird and not as simplistic as what we think, like coming from a very domesticated version of nature, most of us.
[00:13:45] It actually brings to mind some other stuff that's come out recently. I made a mention, actually, while you were talking about this, I was thinking about, obviously we've talked about them before, but the Avatar movies, James Cameron's Avatar. When the first Avatar came out, I interviewed a whole bunch of people who worked on that film who were designers and experts who spent years of their lives figuring out like the different flora and fauna of this moon, Pandora. And how it all fit together and how there were all these symbiotic relationships between these different creatures and how they communicated, and they all had the weird thing where they could jack into the trees and stuff. But, you know, it was a very different ecosystem from what we're used to seeing in science fiction a lot of thought went into it, not just from James Cameron, but from a lot of other people like creature designers and people who were just trying to create a world that felt really immersive.
[00:14:44] And, you know, then there's also a novel that I read recently, which, I've been talking to you a lot about called Dry Land by Ben Pladek, which is his debut novel. And it's set during World War I. It's this guy in Wisconsin, which is where Ben is from and he has the power to kind of accelerate the growth of plants really rapidly. And so, he's shipped off to World War I to help grow timber for the army. because they need just a huge amount of wood. But a lot of the book is about him trying to go back to Wisconsin and fix these ecosystems, like these marshlands that he spent his whole life trying to protect and restore.
[00:15:21] And without getting too deep into spoiler territory, it's about the complexity of the ecosystems in Wisconsin. It's full of these fascinating little details and just the idea that could just heroically come in and fix them, even if you have magic powers, you can't really do that.
[00:15:38] Ecosystems are complicated. When they've been changed, you can't just change them back. There's just a million things that you don't see that are a key part of the ecosystem that all kind of depend on each other. It's really fascinating. And I love this kind of more complex and thoughtful kind of eco-science fiction.
Annalee: [00:15:56] Yeah. I was thinking as you were talking about Avatar, one of the things that's interesting about both Scavengers Reign and Avatar is that the thing about them that's the most game changing is really the visuals. Because both of them have pretty generic plots, you know? Not to say that the plots are bad, but it's not a kind of innovative story. It's the way that it's depicted for us visually, where we can kind of, like you said, this immersive world where we see the interconnections and the dependencies of all of these alien creatures and plants and, habitats.
[00:16:34] And then, Pladek's book, I think, is a perfect example of where a lot of science fiction about the environment is going, where it's like thinking about how humans have perturbed the environment and fantasies about how we would cope with that.
[00:16:51] I was thinking about how even The Mandalorian has this kind of subplot about environmental destruction because the planet Mandalore has been strip mined to the point where it's just like a ball of nothing. Their entire world has been destroyed by resource extraction. And that's a huge theme in a lot of these stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:16] Sure, although that's kind of the easier way to tell the story. That's like the more clear cut. It's like, oh, we wrecked it. It's wrecked. There's nothing to try to understand or protect. There's no balance because the balance has been destroyed. I feel like that's kind of in some ways the comforting fantasy that we have of like, well, it’s all just doomed or screwed. Or we've “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” like Joni Mitchell would say. And so now we're just gonna sit here and feel bad.
[00:17:44] I actually am, I mean no shade to The Mandalorian, but I actually am more into stories where it's like no, we have to do the work. We have to understand this. We were talking before the episode about like a lot of Star Trek episodes are like that. We come to a planet, we think we understand what's going on. And then it's like, oh no, this thing that we thought was like a dangerous thing is actually symbiosis. Or this thing that's actually… these creatures that we thought were dangerous are actually like part of the ecosystem. And we’re just blundering and just like… we don’t understand.
Annalee: [00:18:17] Yeah. I was also thinking about, I mean, obviously Ruthanna Emrys’ book, A Half-Built Garden, is one of the really big standouts in that area of like, yeah, we have to do the work to fix our ecosystems.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:29] Right.
Annalee: [00:18:29] That's a really interesting one. The other thing I was thinking about though, is, and we've talked about this book before, but Sylvia Moreno-Garcia's novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, is actually a very sneaky way of talking about ecosystems. And that's because it's part of this, Dr. Moreau kind of subgenre, I guess I would say, of stories about uplifted animals or hybrid human animals, and it's basically, I mean, Moreno-Garcia's novel is about colonialism, and it's about what it does to people, but it's also about what colonialism does to the environment. It's about how there's this way that colonialism mutates the environment, transforms the life there, and then, what do we do with that life? How do we form relationships with the new life that we've created or that we embody?
[00:19:20] And that's one of the things that's really exciting about her novel, whereas the, the typical Moreau story, it's kind of like, oh, we must destroy all of the uplifted animals. Whereas, she looks at it much more as like, those uplifted animals are people and they should have a community and they can be part of the revolution and the anti-colonial movement.
[00:19:42] And so, I feel like that whole genre of, like I said, of uplifted animal stories is kind of about what does the human impact on the environment mean and what do we do with that politically and scientifically? How do we handle it?
Charlie Jane: [00:20:00] Yeah. Hell yeah. I definitely think that's true.
Annalee: [00:20:03] I guess I wanted to conclude our discussion of recent, ecosystem fiction by mentioning some early examples of it that I was exposed to, in my own life. Which is, I was super heavily influenced by this Dungeons & Dragons module that came out in 1980 called Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. It was written by Gary Gygax, who created Dungeons & Dragons, and it was this really unusual module for that era in that it had full color illustrations of a lot of the locations and monsters that you run into. And, so it really sparked my imagination. And the plot of it is, spoilers for like an ancient D&D adventure, but you're going on a quest because these monsters are attacking things in this kingdom. And so you're like, where are they coming from? And you get to where the monsters are coming from, and it's actually a crashed. spaceship.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:59] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:20:59] And so you pass from the world of magic and wizards and go into this science fictional environment where you're fighting against mutants and all of this plant and animal life that is surviving in this spaceship. And you run into… My favorite one that I think everybody loves is you fight this thing called a bunnyoid. So you're like walking into this beautiful part of the spaceship where there's all these plants. It's like the garden. And there's a cute little bunny on a tree stump and you're like, Oh, cute little bunny. And then it turns out that that's actually the lure. The cute bunny is actually not a real bunny, but like on top of a giant tentacled monster's head. And as soon as you approach, like the tree stump kind of rises up and there's all these like angry tentacles that may or may not have eaten me, many times when I was, a kid playing that module.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:55] One of my favorite tropes, yeah.
Annalee: [00:21:58] Yeah, and so I mean, obviously, novel ecosystems have been part of the science fiction tradition for a really long time, but that one I think made a big impression on me, and I think a lot of people of our generation growing up and thinking about this stuff.
[00:22:11] Did you have an early encounter with this kind of environmental world building in sci fi or fantasy?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:18] You know, I'm trying to not talk about Doctor Who in every episode. But there are some…
Annalee: [00:22:24] I mean, you’ve got to do it. If it’s in you, you have to let it out, Charlie.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] There’s a Doctor Who story that like really made a huge impression on me as a kid called “Full Circle” where they travel to a planet where there's humans who are being attacked by these weird swamp creatures who look a little bit like the creature from the black lagoon. And then there's weird spiders that like they're hatch out of these fruits. They're trying to eat these fruits and then the fruits crack open and these spiders come out and bite them and kill them. And there’s all these weird life forms on this—
Annalee: [00:22:52] Whoa! Fruit spider? Spiderfruits?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:55] They just lay their eggs inside the fruits, Annalee. And if you pick the fruits too late in the season, they've got spiders hatching out of them. And that's just how it is.
Annalee: [00:23:04] No, it's scary.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:04] Yeah. And then you find out that actually the humans on the planet, it's the creature from the black lagoon guys and the spiders are all the same. Basically, they're all genetically related and they've just are three different forms of evolution of the same creature. And they actually kind of belong together. They kind of are part of like… It's very, I don't know. Actually, I haven’t—
Annalee: [00:23:28] Yeah, it is about discovering the relationships between creatures in an ecosystem or between life forms in an ecosystem. That's really cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:36] I have an interesting fact I discovered the other day that's not from my childhood, but it is from people's childhood. And it's a thing that I have consumed and enjoyed. So, I was, for my novel that I'm trying to finish revising, I did some research on Spongebob Squarepants. The cartoon that's been running since the early 2000s. It's one of the most successful cartoons of all time at this point. I did not know this until the other day, but the creator of Spongebob Squarepants was a guy named Stephen Hillenburg, who was a marine biologist. And he had worked at aquariums, he had been a professional marine biologist, and he wanted to create something to teach kids about like underwater ecosystems.
Annalee: [00:24:16] Aww.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:16] And his original design for Spongebob was like a very realistic image of a living sea sponge, and then he decided to make him a square because that was funnier. And, I mean, obviously Spongebob Squarepants has been going forever and is now just like a silly goofy cartoon, but I feel like the original idea behind it was to create something that was going to teach kids about like underwater ecosystems and how awesome they are.
Annalee: [00:24:45] No, it's funny because I've, I've talked to marine biologists who say,it's really cool because SpongeBob SquarePants has all of these creatures in it that most people have never heard of unless they've watched the show.
[00:24:57] So it is actually sticking to its original educational mandate, I think. That's awesome. I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:06] I gained a new respect for Spongebob. It's hard to say Spongebob. I don't know, respect for Spongebob. Responge for Spectbob.
Annalee: [00:25:13] That’s like my new bumper sticker. Respect the Spongebob.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:21] I mean, it's a good slogan.
Annalee: [00:25:24] Awesome. All right. So, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about how scientists create worlds when they study ecosystems.
[00:25:34] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:25:41] So I was thinking, when we were talking about fantasy ecosystems, about how one of my biggest pet peeves is the idea of a Genesis weapon that you could just invent and you could literally just create an entire ecosystem from scratch. Just like, boop! Here’s a whole ecosystem because that's not at all how ecosystems form and that's not at all scientific even though it is a very exciting idea in science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:11] I mean, Wrath of Khan is the greatest movie ever made, so I just want to point that out before we go any further. But yeah, that is very Star Trek. It's also like on Star Trek, they'll just be like we’re going to plug the DNA into the computer and see what it'll look like two million years from now. And like, they could just do that because they can see how it's going to develop and evolve in two million years because that’s how it works.
Annalee: [00:26:34] The future of science. A little bit different from actual science. But what I would like to point out is that, when actual scientists do their work of data gathering and observation in ecosystems, they aren't completely outside the realm of what fiction writers and fiction creators do when they build a fictional ecosystem.
[00:26:59] And the reason why I say, I'm not saying that, you know, environmental scientists are making things up, but they have to make a lot of decisions about what constitutes an ecosystem. You know, what are the boundaries of the ecosystem? They might be physical boundaries. They might be boundaries in terms of which life forms or which minerals they include in an ecosystem. And so there's a certain amount of picking and choosing that happens when you study an ecosystem that's kind of like world building. It's kind of like saying, all right, we're going to pretend that the Arctic is something that actually has concrete boundaries, even though, of course, the Arctic ecosystem is many, many, many things has many components.
[00:27:44] And so, when we talk about the scientific study of ecosystems, there's always a certain element of scientists saying yeah, I'm going to build this kind of abstract idea of what this particular habitat and all its life forms is. And then of course, you know, fiction writers can come along and turn that into something like Scavenger's Reign.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:07] Yeah, I love that. And I love the word ecosystem because it just sort of conveys a lot. It conveys something that's not static, that's not just linear or hierarchical. It's a system. It has moving parts. Where do we get that term from?
Annalee: [00:28:26] So there was a British scientist named Arthur George Tansley who coined the term in 1935. And it literally just means home system. Eco is from the Greek, it means home. So it's just a kind of collection of stuff in a place, right? But a lot of historians of science will say, obviously the term was coined in 1935, but people were effectively studying ecosystems long before that.
[00:28:56] And of course, Darwin's work was dependent on the idea of ecosystems because he was looking at how animals evolve within a habitat. Which is really, kind of the smallest unit of how do you look at an ecosystem? It's like, well, what is the animal's relationship to the place where it lives and to the other animals in it?
[00:29:14] And so evolutionary theory is maybe kind of a fuzzy way of thinking about the origin of ecosystems. But it obviously goes back much further than that, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:24] One of my best friends in college was doing a huge study of Erasmus Darwin, like Charles Darwin's grandfather, who wrote all of his naturalism in verse, like rhyming couplets.
Annalee: [00:29:33] Really!? Whoa.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:33] Yeah. And it’s this incredibly turgid early 19th century verse that with these very trite rhymes about all the ecosystems that Erasmus Darwin had kind of observed. And just like, it's very good. I'll find some for you. It's very kind of cute and weird and silly.
[00:29:54] And my friend just made a recording of himself reading this verse and then like played it on his headphones as he bicycled around the city and just like listened to himself reading Erasmus Darwin's poetry about—
Annalee: [00:30:08] Wow, that's taking it a little bit too far, but that’s, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:30:11] I mean, he’s an eccentric fellow, but yeah. And so, you know, people don't, Erasmus Darwin doesn't get enough credit as a poet or as a pioneer of naturalism. I'm just going to say.
Annalee: [00:30:20] Yeah, it's really true. I think that, to continue the historical look at ecosystems.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:28] Please do.
Annalee: [00:30:28] I shall, darling.
[00:30:31] So the term ecosystem really becomes popular in the 1960s, and that's because a big group of scientists in Europe and Canada and the United States created something called the International Biological Program, which was an effort to bring ecosystem studies into universities and especially to focus people on how humans were changing the environment and how humans could shepherd our ecosystems to make the world healthier for all living things, not just people.
[00:31:04] The international biological program lasted from 1964 to 1974. And by the end of that period, we were basically at the dawn of our understanding of things like climate change, understanding how pollutants in the environment were actually radically transforming ecosystems and causing extinctions.
[00:31:27] And so it's interesting to think about how the idea of ecosystem studies has always had kind of a political and a social side to it, because at least as it was conceived of by the International Biological Program, it was always a part of the project of conservation and the project of mitigating human impacts on the environment.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:48] Yeah. And you know, there's this whole moment in science fiction that really happens in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, where there's kind of this, it’s kind of the first wave of like media post apocalypses where there's like the wasteland or there's Planet of the Apes or there's, like, oh my gosh! We messed up and now like there's all these weird zombies everywhere like in I Am Legend.
Annalee: [00:32:11] Soylent Green and stuff like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:11] And yeah, Charlton Heston is just constantly grappling with our failure to understand our environment and that's all he ever does.
Annalee: [00:32:18] Yeah, and so as ecosystem studies becomes basically what we call environmental science now, it goes mainstream in the university, and we get all kinds of ways that scientists study it. And I was lucky enough to recently see a couple of ways that environmental scientists work first hand. I talked about this on one of our mini episodes, so subscribers and Patreon supporters have heard me talk about this before, but last summer I, did a fellowship at the Marine Biological Lab, which is in Cape Cod and in a little town called Woods Hole, which is basically a town that's almost exclusively scientists. There's a bunch of marine biological institutions there.
[00:33:04] The folks there were studying coastal ecosystems, and they're particularly interested in climate change and sea level rise. And so, what I got to do was basically just follow a bunch of environmental scientists around and help them out gathering samples, in a couple of different areas around, Cape Cod.
[00:33:24] And so, it was freaking amazing. And so the first story I want to tell you about that is that we went to an area called Sippewissett Marsh, which is a beautiful, region along the coast, which is a saltwater marsh, which is a very rare and vanishing ecosystem now. And it looks like a marsh. It's got beautiful grasses and flowers and you can see the ocean kind of wash in, but also freshwater is washing in from the land.
[00:33:59] And what's happening there is that because of sea level rise, certain kinds of grasses that prefer to be damp but not inundated are slowly moving inland. So, in other words, the ecosystem is migrating because the water levels are rising. And so things that like to be mostly in the water, are moving inland and things who like less water are moving further inland.
[00:34:22] I was there with Anne Giblin, who works at the Marine Biological Lab, she's an environmental scientist, and, Javier Lloret, who studies, along with her, and they are part of a 50 year program to study the Sippewissett Marsh. And so, 50 years ago, their mentor went out and designated certain regions as study areas and they've been studying how vegetation is changing in these specific spots that are literally marked out with string and little wooden stakes and that's allowing them to see how sea level rise is changing the vegetation because they've watched over 50 years as the grasses—that are changing dramatically.
[00:35:09] So, grasses that once thrived in these spots are now moving inland. Now, the thing that's really messed up about this is that a railroad track that runs along the coast through the Sippewissett Marsh, this is an old railroad track that's now a beautiful bike path, but it's built on a causeway, so it's an elevated path that creates a barrier between the marsh that's connected to the ocean and then everything inland. It turns out. grass cannot climb it.
[00:35:44] It's a road. It’s dividing up this ecosystem. It's fragmented the ecosystem.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:48] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:35:48] So as the water rises more and more, as it will, that grass that likes to be a little bit damp but not inundated has nowhere to go. It goes right up to the edge of this elevated track, this elevated bike path now, and that's it. Once the water gets up to a certain level, that grass is gonna be gone.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:12] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:36:12] And so what they've been doing over the past 50 years is just, it's just observation. they're just tracking how these micro changes in the environment are radically impacting the ecosystem because this grass, of course, is a habitat for lots of creatures and once it’s gone, it's gone. And once this saltwater marsh becomes basically coastline, the saltwater marsh is gone. So everything that lives in that kind of marshy area is just no longer going to have a habitat and so that’s the simplest way to, or well, in some ways it's the hardest way to study an ecosystem because you have to be able to consistently measure it over decades or even centuries in some cases.
[00:36:57] So that's one way that people study ecosystems is that they look at them over time and they look at how changes in the environment shift the types of life forms that are able to thrive in a particular area. And it was really great. We went out, we waded through the marsh, we saw the grass with our own eyes. And it was really kind of sad, actually, to know that it's probably not gonna last, unless they can do something really dramatic with that bike path.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:29] Man. Yeah. I mean, it’s really upsetting when you hear about, or read about, or witness something like that, where an ecosystem that's beautiful and rich and complicated is just being destroyed. And there’s never going to be the political will to do what's necessary to save it because, you know, we don't think of other creatures or other kinds of life is having the same rights as us. Or having the same right to exist that we do. And we don't understand how much we're screwing ourselves. I don't know.
[00:38:02] So, I mean, one thing that I think about, like, in terms of fictional ecosystems, like when I'm creating one, when I'm reading one and I'm just like consuming content that has an ecosystem in it, like one thing I like is similar to all kinds of world building. I feel like there's what you see right on the surface. And then there's all the stuff that goes on below the surface. And I think this is a really good thing in Ben Pladek’s book, Dry Land, is that it’s like, there's a marsh and there's these plants and oh yeah, we just have to shore up these plants and they'll be fine. But there's like all this other stuff going on. There's bacteria, there's algae, there's bugs, there's all these things that are going on beneath, literally beneath the surface of the land or of the water that we can't even see with the naked eye, that's actually really important.
[00:38:51] And the more we're learning about this sort of stuff, the more we understand that actually what we see is always just the proverbial tip of the iceberg and a lot of the important stuff is like either too small or too buried for us to be aware of what's going on. Like the fungal networks, the mycelia networks that trees use to communicate with each other and stuff like that.
Annalee: [00:39:14] Yeah, or like grasses that we don't realize are very unique to a super specific habitat.
[00:39:21] Let me tell you another quick story about Cape Cod when I was out there.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:27] Please do.
Annalee: [00:39:27] So, like I said, one way to study an ecosystem is just to observe it over time. Another really common way to characterize an ecosystem is to look at how energy moves through that ecosystem. So you quantify an ecosystem by saying, what are the energy inputs and essentially who's eating who.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:49] Like a circuit, kind of.
Annalee: [00:39:51] Kind of like the circuit. And so people will talk about it as looking at the energy in an ecosystem, or they'll say they're looking at the food web because of course energy moves through an ecosystem when somebody eats something and then somebody else eats it and calories move through.
[00:40:06] So, one of the areas we see studied was Waquoit Bay, which is another kind of nature preserve area in Cape Cod, but there's also parts of Waquoit Bay which are privately owned and there's houses there. And so, Javier Lloret, who studies food webs has been doing a study looking at how inhabited areas of Waquoit Bay have a different ecosystem than ones that are more protected and don't have a lot of human habitation.
[00:40:37] So one of the big issues in Cape Cod is that they don't have a sewer system that is very robust. So, everybody has septic tanks, and that's just how the city was built. So, the septic tanks get full of poop and they leak nitrogen into the groundwater.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:55] Right.
Annalee: [00:40:55] So nitrogen, as you may know, if you've ever studied farming or planted anything, is actually a nutrient. It's something that plants love. So, in Waquoit Bay, all these houses around the bay and in the area are basically injecting the bay with a huge amount of fertilizer. So, one of the life forms that really thrives on nitrogen is algae. Nothing wrong with algae. Love algae. It's a life form. It deserves to live, right?
[00:41:28] The problem is that algae is not really supposed to be the dominant, productive organism in Waquoit Bay. In fact, the sort of basic producer, which is kind of the lowest level of the food web, was this kind of grass that grew in the bay, and it's slowly being replaced with algae. And what, we did, as we helped out Javier Lloret, is we gathered samples from the bay. We basically scooped up some mud and we got bugs and clams and a bunch of different life forms, including plants, and we measured nitrogen levels in them.
[00:42:07] We actually, dried them and turned them into powder and put them in a mass spectrometer and measured the nitrogen. And what you can see is how in each life form, the nitrogen is passing from the algae, into bugs and into creatures that eat the bugs. And so it gives you a really good sense of how energy is moving through that food web. And what we saw is that the food web had shifted from depending on this grass that used to grow in the bay to depending on algae because they're all eating this nitrogen-rich algae and we can see it in their bodies when, when we subjected them to a laser and looked at the nitrogen signals.
[00:42:50] And so, it was a very scientific way of quantifying who's in this food web and how it's changing. Unfortunately, the more that algae enters into the bay, the more it sucks nitrogen out of the water, which can lead to these really horrific fish kills that you may have read about. It happens a lot along the coast, on the east coast especially, you get these, lakes and coastal areas that are inundated with algae, and then eventually fish are asphyxiated because there's not, you know, the algae is sucking up all the oxygen. So, it's a really dark day for these ecosystems. It's not that the ecosystem is dead. It's just that the ecosystem has radically transformed and is now hostile to many forms of life that once thrived there.
[00:43:43] So, this is, I would say, the two main ways that we study ecosystems is looking at food webs and energy relationships and through observation. And that allows scientists to say, who is part of this ecosystem and also what's happening to the ecosystem?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:59] Yeah. I mean, it's funny because like whenever people talk about the idea that we're killing our planet I always want to be like, no, we're not actually killing our planet. What we are doing is damaging our own natural habitat. Humans require very specific conditions in order to survive and in the worst-case scenario we could mess up our own natural habitat to the point where it's no longer habitable for us. And so, the planet will continue. There will still be ecosystems. There will still be life in some form on the planet, but it might not be us if we’re in the worst-case scenario with climate change.
[00:44:39] And so, I think it's just, that's the thing, is that ecosystems always change. And we're part of that. We've been part of that for a really long time. That's the thing is, it's not like humans came along a hundred years ago or 500 years ago and started messing with stuff that had previously been untouched. Humans have been messing with stuff for tens of thousands of years, but there are just ways in which we can change our ecosystem to the point where it's no longer really super comfy for us.
Annalee: [00:45:04] And it's often in these ways that are very non-obvious, like you said, like nitrogen runoff in the water or some other kind of really fundamental shift in the chemistry of a particular habitat.
[00:45:20] But I was going to say the thing I really like about ecosystems as a kind of an idea to think with or a unit of understanding our planet is that they are fundamentally about interdependencies between lifeforms and also the non-living environment, you know, the minerals, the soil, the water, the climate.
[00:45:43] And it's a reminder that life isn't ever on its own. I feel like we talked about this a bit the rugged individualism episode that here in the West, we're really obsessed with the idea of the individual and how the individual fares in a particular environment. And I think that spills over into how we study biology too.
[00:46:07] We often just learn about here's the elephant and here's the horse. And we don't learn about like, well, the elephant lives in a habitat and it's connected to all these other life forms that it eats and it's eaten by other creatures and actually you can't have an elephant in isolation. You can't have a human in isolation, either.
[00:46:30] Humans are interdependent on each other, but even more profoundly on the environment, which is what provides us with our energy and our food and all of our other awesome things that we have. And so, I think, ecosystem thinking is just so important, both scientifically and in our fiction to get us really mulling over the fact that the boundary between ourselves and the world is quite a permeable boundary.
[00:47:00] We are part of it. We are part of ecosystems. We are just a little piece of something much bigger. And to understand those bigger things will, I think, allow us to have a safer future. And ecosystems are really resilient. They do repair themselves. they are able to come back from tremendous blows and they do change all the time.
[00:47:28] And so it’s never… our goal as we try to mitigate the ways that humans are wrecking the environment. It's not, the goal is not like reset back to the Pleistocene 15,000 years ago, right? The goal is to keep changing with the ecosystem and make sure the ecosystem is healthy for all of us.
[00:47:49] So, I think if you really wanna, like, live in harmony with an ecosystem or build a realistic one in your fiction or in your scientific work, you need to remember a piece of poetic philosophy from Octavia Butler in her novel Parable of the Sower. And I wanted to finish by having us read this little piece of, philosophy.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:12] Hell yeah!
Annalee: [00:48:11] So, do you wanna, do you wanna read it with me? You start.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:15] Yeah!
[00:48:16] All that you touch, you change.
Annalee: [00:48:19] All that you change, changes you.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:22] The only lasting truth is change.
Annalee: [00:48:25] God is change.
[00:48:29] Thanks for listening.
[00:48:31] Remember, you can find us on Mastodon, Patreon, and Instagram. Thank you so much to Veronica Simonetti, our amazing producer, who is sadly leaving to go have a bigger, fancier job as an audio engineer and producer elsewhere. Veronica, can you say hello, goodbye?
Veronica: [00:48:53] Hello, goodbye, um.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:56] Oh, we're going to miss you so much!
Annalee: [00:48:57] We're going to miss you a ton.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:59] It won't be the same without you.
Annalee: [00:49:00] You've been with us for five years, yeah. Seriously.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:00] Five freaking years. We didn't drive you away. I mean, we did eventually… but not right away.
Annalee: [00:49:07] Do you want to tell everybody where you're going and how they can hear more of your work in the future, Veronica?
Veronica: [00:49:11] Yeah, I'll be working at Criminal Productions, mixing Criminal and This is Love and everything they do, so.
Annalee: [00:49:20] Criminal is such an awesome podcast. So you should be listening to it already anyway, but now, especially because Veronica's working on it. So, this is time. Time to subscribe.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:29] Hell yeah. Rock star.
Annalee: [00:49:31] Totally. You, you are seriously a rock star and just like an awesome person. So, thank you so much for being here this whole time.
Veronica: [00:49:37] It's been great working with you all and I'm definitely going to miss it.
Annalee: [00:49:42] Yeah, we'll see you. We'll see you around the inner tunes, the inner webs. Awesome. All right.
[00:49:51] Thank you also to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And we will talk to you later. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Remember, you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:04] Bye.
Annalee: [00:50:06] Bye. Bye, Veronica.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:06] Bye, Veronica.
[00:50:06] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]