Episode 11 - Illuminators

This episode has several guests and their full names appear next to their lightening thoughts below.

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

Reid Gomez: 1:58

The priest of the sun already told us, in the beginning was the word, let's not put fat on it. This was when we could talk Indian, before the gun shattered the promises we made with the sound of death. Death from a people who were not careful in their killing. The fur trade, skins, people, bought and sold, traveling overland and overseas as parts of themselves, all of it tied to a machine that shot death. I'm sorry if you don't understand. Let it linger. I can't tell you what it means. That would be reckless and absurd. These are the things I know, but I do not completely understand. I follow the voices. I open the door. Language is often spoken without understanding. We learn how to hear a word beginning and ending. Eventually, we internalize some structures. Eventually, someone creates their own. We know it works, and that may be all we know. Not wanting the gates closed between us, listening to what is said within the silence. I can't tell you what comes next. What if we release ourselves from the desire to know what comes next? From a desire to predict and control, to cull herds, to manage lands and tell water what form to take. What if it is a great mystery forever? What if we stop sticking a claim for gold, however you define it, a standard measurement, and sit at the shoreline? That chasm between here and there is minuscule after sitting together. In the beginning was the word, and after that were all the people who helped us survive. Those with legs to walk, wings to fly, and means to float and swim. Those that got here from there without being anywhere in between. Star. We need them. We have always needed them. We are vulnerable despite our aspirations. I don't mind being vulnerable. It helps me know my place. To know one's place is not subjugation. It helps me perceive a scale and be responsible. Knowing place helps me bring my mind home. All we have are stories. Everyone must be able to tell them. God's ancestors rain clouds and rainbows, monster slayers jagged and flash lightning. We, that mighty promise, must be able to speak in divergent, riparian, rooted, windblown structures. They are structures even if you don't recognize them. The story will tell you the form it needs to be told in. Don't try to boss it, predict it, graph it, or manage it. The story process never lies. Imagine that. I'm offering you a story for that too, here and now. Go somewhere. I can't tell you where. Do something. I can't tell you what. The ancestors are falling in drops of rain. Ash from the Los Angeles fires are transforming the sea. Rivers always remember ancient paths. Attend a place near you, the one that calls you. If you cannot hear, be quiet. You are somewhere. There are voices. They are speaking. Learn how to give. Learn how to receive direction. The land will know you through the verbs you allow yourself to live by. Visit, breathe, listen, attend, wait, drift, rest, walk. These verbs become intimacies. These verbs are a mighty promise we make to each other to be careful in our killing and to care. They are a gentle kindness, not an absolute truth, and a relationship where we do not withdraw our attention. We do not leave. We do not remove ourselves. We do not sever relations. We come to the same place over and over and it comes to know us. It comes to know our devotion. The land and its people observe us. We bear the intimacy of this observation and over time, the land and its people reveal things to us because we are intimates. who have shown that we are in this love together.

MB: 6:24

That was Reed Gomez, a poet, a philosopher, and a dreamer, whose deep and thoughtful engagement with the land and all its beings has actually served as inspiration for this final episode of More Than, a podcast. We have arrived at the end of this season, which of course we have mixed emotions about. And maybe there'll be more. But for now, we want to take a bit of time to reflect on the past and the future. Since one of the outcomes we strived for in creating this project was to inspire curiosity and hope in you, our listeners, we wanted this final episode to do that very directly. In episode 10, we talked about dark skies and the importance of night and stars. But of course, we value light as well. And in many ways, humans need it. in order to see. What follows then are five short monologues, lightning talks, if you will, from people who inspire us to think about a path onward as we consider our futures with the more than. The five lightning excerpts ask all of us to look up and out and together to transcend the mundane and commonplace and dream about what could be. The past has a powerful weight on their visions, and the more than human resides in the center of what they tell us. These five, like we just did in the beginning, offer ideas and dreams for the kinds of stories we hope to write sometime in the future.

Alan Weisman: 8:02

My new book that comes out on Earth Day, which I reported in a dozen countries and is titled Hope Dies Last, portrays bold visionaries who are tackling the biggest existential questions threatening humanity. Namely, how to power civilization without broiling, how to halt the reckless massacre of other species on whose presence our own ultimately depends, and how, without sacrificing more nature, to grow as much food by 2050 as in all human history to avert even more torrents of refugees. The determined men and women I describe include climate scientists, biologists, plasma physicists, artists, engineers, architects, farmers, seafarers, indigenous elders, even the military. Although clear-eyed about the odds they face, the word impossible isn't in their vocabularies. For them, hope is an action verb. They don't wait for miracles they set out to make them. In some dark places I went for this book, they managed to shine light. In one chapter, I tell how a botanist named Ron Coleman discovered an orchid in southern Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains that spends most of its life in darkness, underground. Blooming only when conditions are perfect, it sometimes waits seven years before its pinkish stem emerges with clusters of three white petals and one lavender. but no leaves. That means it's incapable of photosynthesis, the alchemy by which plants transmute light, CO2, and water into food. Instead, this orchid survives by stealing nutrients from a single species of soil fungus found only near the roots of certain oaks. If that sounds like cheating, remember that we can't photosynthesize either, which is why we eat plants, or animals that eat plants. Coleman found just four tiny populations of this orchid, totaling no more than 200 individuals. In Earth's grand scheme, that would seem insignificant, except to the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, which repeatedly argues in U.S. federal court that no plant, animal, or fungus is inconsequential. What became known as Coleman's Coral Root along with other endemic Santa Rita plants, such as a tiny perennial aster called beardless chinchweed, are among the threatened species whose existence the center deems important enough to defend. One long, expensive lawsuit at a time. By one measure, they've been wildly successful. Of more than 900 actions they filed under one of the world's most powerful environmental laws, the U.S. Endangered Species Act, they won nearly 90%, protecting more than 700 imperiled species that range from slugs to polar bears. Since, however, they do this in the teeth of a major global extinction event, winning courtroom battles doesn't guarantee winning the war for survival. What many scientists now call the Anthropocene, when humans grew so prodigious that we've literally become a geologic force, may prove one of Earth's history's shortest epochs if we end up a victim of that war. The version of nature that survived the last major extinction, when an asteroid ended the 180 million year reign of big reptiles, included a burrowing shrew-like mammal called that over eons evolved into primates and eventually into us. That nature is still the source of everything our lives require, from food and water to oxygen. Should enough of it vanish, at one point the bottom will drop out from under us and it'll be too late to do anything. It may be the biggest question humans have ever asked. How can we stop the great extinction accelerating before our very eyes? One species at a time is a center for biological diversity strategy, or die trying, literally. I had a lot of fun writing the center's often hilarious origin story. But what I found most enlightening, while accompanying their naturalists into the field and their lawyers into court, was understanding that now on Earth, there's no such thing as more than human. All the organisms they defend themselves depend today on a modern oxymoron, wildlife management. Literally, that term makes no sense. How can you manage something that's wild? Yet if we want to pilot this Noah's Ark successfully to safe ground, we must accept that currently we're the keystone species in an ecosystem in which everything is connected. We have the power to kill everything else or to save them. What ecologists now warn us is exactly what God tells Noah in the Judeo-Christian Bible, that to save humanity, we must save the animals because we can't have a world without them. And ancient Mesopotamian ark stories that this biblical account is based on also included plants. If we don't, we'll eventually lose one species too many, a pollinator or grass that feeds critical soil microbes, or plankton that provide half our oxygen. Those losses will cascade until they include us, and all our vaunted technology will be unable to save us. Were that to happen, the light of life on Earth won't wink out with us. This planet has been through major extinctions before. Each time after tens of millions of years, life recovers more brilliantly than ever. The arc that conservation groups like the Center have managed to fill with jeopardized species like Coleman's orchid, spotted owls, jaguars, indigo snakes, and leopard frogs will become a lifeboat-bearing species to help restock the future. They will be humanity's living legacy. Don't you wish humans could stick around and be part of what comes next? Me too. That's why I wrote Hope Dies Last. This isn't over, but now we must come together and act.

EW: 14:33

We have talked about plants before and about how they inspire us, but you just heard from Alan Weisman, journalist and author of six books, including The World Without Us, which was a fascinating mind experiment about how the earth would heal if humans just disappeared tomorrow. His newest book, which is available in April of 2025, is called Hope Dies Last. Weisman was talking about a particular plant, a desert orchid, that has inspired a committed group of lawyers to use the tools of law for the more-than-humans.

MB: 15:09

Our producer for more-than, Rux Guidi, is a journalist in her own right. She devotes her life to telling stories about the more-than-human all over the world. including the Mountain West. Like Alan, Rux imagines reworking received approaches to wildland relationships. In her lightning thoughts, she asks us to consider ideas like managed retreat and rewilding in order to ensure the protection of the most vulnerable more than human beings. Here's Rux.

Ruxandra Guidi: 15:43

I'm a writer. I was trained as a journalist. And so I'm afraid a lot of My training is about looking at what isn't working, looking at history and how it shapes us. But in the last five, 10 years, I've made a conscious effort to really think towards the future and think, how do I want to remember this past, this now present? How do I want to be thinking about the past? And how can I make things better? so that in the future, that future looks like I want it to look? I hope that's making sense. How can I really shift my perspective by thinking more about the future that I want, which is what you really are focusing on in this episode? And so that's really forced me to reframe a lot of my thinking, a lot of my writing, a lot of the topics that I write about. About five or six years ago, I wanted to write about managed retreat, the idea that We should let nature take over parts of the landscape that are already really confronting climate change head on, what would it look like to rewild? What would it look like to let the sea, you know, go as far as it needs to, as opposed to building up seawalls? Now, this is something that was very interesting to me. I felt close to home. I lived in California for many years. And, you know, since I started reporting on this idea of managed retreat six years ago till today, what I've noticed is that us humans are increasingly open to the idea of retreating. I don't have the data to show for it. I can only say that the conversations I've been having with people, that what I'm seeing in a lot of communities along the coast of California, at least, is pointing to the fact that we may be realizing that the more than human, you know, these landscapes, nature, native plants are are having to take over, are having to kind of take that land back from us, from our development, from our desire to push back. That gives me hope. I feel, you know, I very much believe in this old concept of the commons, right? Of having like public lands, public areas that are for all of us to enjoy, but increasingly, you know, I think most of us are realizing that we can only push so far. We can only build in so many places. We can only kind of push nature out of our cities, you know, our peri-urban areas so much. You know, with the recent fires in Southern California, following the landslides in Southern California, I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this kind of managed retreat. It's It's not great for the folks who live there, but overall for the rest of us, I think that is a good trend. And I think most people are beginning to kind of understand this and embrace this. Rewilding, I mentioned rewilding. That's a big one, I think. And also private conservation efforts. I'm increasingly, as a writer, hearing more and more and more about people who want to buy up land, whether collectively or individually, and they want to rewild those lands. They want to really, you know, grow. allow native vegetation to come back and they wanted to be refuges for wildlife. or they really are invested in creating wildlife corridors. I'll go back to California since it's the place, even though I live in Arizona, California is still the place that I know much better because I spent the most time there. In Los Angeles, right, we had P-22, the mountain lion that ended up living in Griffith Park. The awareness that there was a mountain lion living in Los Angeles' biggest central park, so to say, really prompted a lot of those neighborhoods around it to create almost like makeshift corridors for wildlife like P-22. There is this awareness in bigger cities that we all live together. We need to coexist. And yes, I want to see the research about this stuff. I haven't seen it, but I believe that people are talking more about this. I believe that kids, especially younger generations, are more and more interested in this. And I think that will continue to grow in this awareness that we can't dominate here. We're not the bosses of these places and we need to coexist with all these other all these other species. So rewilding, managed retreat, wildlife quarters, private conservation efforts. I also think, you know, I recently wrote about this. I also think our desire to constantly be documenting things, to be taking selfies, to be, you know, getting video from wildlife cameras is teaching us more about the more than. It's inevitably so. You know, I think that's fascinating. A lot, more people are interested in documenting the wildlife that ends up in their backyards. We do get to watch you know, how a couple of like eagles may be nesting over time. I think technology in some ways is also bringing us closer to nature and to their importance in our lives. So yes, there's myriad things that do give me hope. And sometimes it's hard to see them with that perspective of time to imagine how looking back on the 2024, 2025, I may be able to see those nuggets of hope. or the beginning of some of these trends. But I think all these things I just mentioned are going to only grow. And at the end of the day, they are really feeding our consciousness about the more than, about this idea of coexisting. And so that's what brings me hope these days.

EW: 22:08

Historian Stephen Pyne has considered fire on nearly all continents and across deep time. Here, we asked him to provide some wisdom about how fire can be generative and how we might consider humans' intimate relationship with this more than human force.

Stepen Pyne: 23:01

I come to, I'm often asked if fire is alive. You know, I mean, it's born, it feeds, it breathes, it moves. makes waste, it dies. And I don't think it's alive, but I do think that, I think of it as a virus. Not itself alive, but dependent on the living world to flourish and hence takes on many of the properties of the living world. So in many ways, when I think of our relationship to fire or fire as a tool, I think of it as a biotechnology. It's more like a sheepdog than it is a hammer. It has allowed us to work with it. It gives us powers, gives us obligations. Earth is a uniquely fire planet. It's the only one that we know of that has fire. And we are the only creature that manipulates fire in this way. So we are a uniquely fire creature. And this combination is a very powerful one. And we thrived because of it. Good fire made us. A simple way to summarize it, it's even in our genome. I mean, we got big heads, small guts, because we learned to cook food. And then we went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. And now we've become a geologic force because we're cooking the planet. So in many sense, good fire made us, bad fire may break us. I mean, we have lots of myths about the world being destroyed and then renewed, in most cases, by fire. And I think that's what we're seeing now. Thanks to our combustion of fossil fuels, we've created a sort of runaway fire age. And I often hear colleagues talk about a no analog future. And really, in a sense, a broken narrative. The future is so strange, we have no way to connect it to the past. It's all ruptured. The past is meaningless now. And we have no analogs from the past to guide us. Well, I'm a fire historian, fire guy. I'm a pyromantic, not a pyromaniac. And I'll push back on that because the story of humans and fire is an unbroken saga, one of the great narratives of Earth history. And I think we have an apt analog that we are creating the fire equivalent of a nice age. So imagine the major parameters of ice ages, mass extinctions, changes in climate, sea level changes, ice-dominated landscapes. Take those and pass them through a kind of pyrrhic looking glass. And what comes out on the other side, a fire equivalent, looks pretty much like the world we're seeing around us now. And a world that will continue, I think, to intensify. So I think we're misreading the scale of what's going on. and the rapidity of it, and it's not just climate change. I think we're remaking the world in a variety of ways, primarily through our firepower, our misused, our abused firepower. So that's all bad news, isn't it? I mean, this is, you know, we can survive a fire age probably better than we can a new ice age, but a runaway fire age is not a habitable earth for us as we know it. We will really struggle. But the good news, in a sense, is that we are the fire creature. I mean, fire is what we do. Other animals knock over trees and dig holes in the ground, hunt. We do fire. So we've misused that power, but that also means we have the power to start correcting it. So I see it as part of a long fire narrative. for which we were uniquely equipped to create this problem, and I would hope are uniquely equipped to begin unraveling it and putting things back.

MB: 27:07

So Steve thinks we can work with fire because, as a species, we always have. And thus, we end with another illuminator who works daily to figure out how the future can support humans living in relationship with the more-than. Sarah King is Executive Director of the Avra [this was a mistake that didn't get caught in editing...it is the Altar Valley] Valley Conservation Alliance, and she's also a mom whose vision for tomorrow is inspired by the generations that will follow us.

Sarah King: 27:37

When I think about the future of the American West, I think about my kids and what I hope for them. My daughter's 10 and my son is 8, and I think about how they've grown up, what they notice, what they reflect on, what they see in the landscape that we live in, and what's already important to them. I hope that the undeveloped, wide open spaces of vast landscapes that make the American West so special are still around. And I hope that people see those landscapes as important, important for wildlife connectivity, important for food production, important for people in them, and important for the soul. I hope that dark skies still sprawl over those landscapes and that people can still go to those places to see the stars. I hope that we've solved the water supply question by coming together and focusing on solutions rather than politics. Mostly I hope that these landscapes aren't so few and far between that people aren't allowed to experience them, aren't allowed to experience the critters that are within them and that call them home as well. I hope that while the Western mythology of independence still inspires people to strike out with new ideas and the ability to see things through, I hope that people will remember that what has made the West special is community and a vast variety of them. That includes rural communities that are a little further spread out and perhaps each other a little less, but know the value of these folks that much more dearly. And it also includes urban communities who value the vibrance of the cities that they live in, the personalities of the cities that they live in, and the surrounding vast Western landscapes that are part of the edges of those cities. not just cookie cutter, not just sprawl. And let us not forget the soil, plant, and animal communities that we all depend on and who live in those open spaces of the American West and are part of why this area is so special. I hope that the American West of the future keeps the best of what's already unfolding out here, celebrating the special places that we call home and striving to keep those places for the next generations.

EW: 29:40

As you know, we started from a place, a region. that we both know and love. And as a perspective, we bring history into this place. And history of the more than human allows us to appreciate the ways this place has always been centered on these relationships. We've tried to articulate how all around us, we are surrounded by people, places, and things that make history.

MB: 30:12

We started... by finding the cultivators hidden in the ground we walk on.

EW: 30:19

And we considered in episode two how inanimate and lifeless compounds like water actually nourish and give all life. They're the givers of power and meaning.

MB: 30:32

And rather than thinking about insects as pests, our next episode asked us to consider the tiny animals as helpers that support all of life on Earth.

EW: 30:42

In order to understand the many meanings of place, we considered the presence of plants that have long altered the actions of humans. These supporters, aspens, ponderosas, and chollas among them, record vital information from the past and actively shape it.

MB: 31:03

We value thinkers and beings who transcend boundaries in our episode on interlopers. And in that episode, we looked at animals who do just that.

EW: 31:15

Beavers are nature's engineers, and these builders have made habitats and ecosystems healthy while humans were busy not paying attention.

MB: 31:26

Persisters... Persisters... Oh, sorry. Oh... Pick up. Pick up. (laughter) Grit and resilience are buzzwords in our dominant culture that suggest an ability to continue in spite of resistance and obstacles. And these are characteristics that fit perfectly our Persisters episode on the mighty and wily coyote.

EW: 31:51

Birds remind us of the many ways to experience the world, including from the air. Birds are also reminders of how many people, especially women, have worked to develop conservation for these more-than-humans for more than 100 years.

MB: 32:10

We also recognize... Movement has often meant freedom, except it has also resulted in enormous networks of roads. The mighty monarch butterfly is a traveler across these roads, navigating migration through generations and continents and bringing insight into travel by various means.

And here we are. in the final episode, Illuminators. We're at the end, and we're hoping that each episode gave you sheltered time and space from your busy life to learn about stories and relationships that maybe you hadn't considered before. We also spent a good deal of time learning as we wrote, produced, and recorded this season. In fact, Creating this project was so much more than we thought it would be because we learned so much in the process. And to that end, we thought it would be fun to end by sharing our top three favorite things we learned. And of course, we'd love to hear from you too. You can send comments telling us what your favorite parts of the show have been. If you just go to our website, More Than A Podcast. And as they come in, we'll add them to the show notes for this particular episode. Okay, Em. Enough of our polished musings. I want to hear the favorite things you learned over the course of this past, you know, nine or 10 months of doing this.

EW: 33:47

Well, my favorite thing was I learned that I'm a total comedian and I love telling jokes.

MB: 33:54

You do love telling jokes. I don't know about the comedian part.

EW: 34:01

No really, it's cheesy, but recording was totally my favorite. Michelle would say something and that would spark a memory or an idea or remind me of a book that I read. And then I just wanted to go on and on in conversation while we were recording. We always had a plan, but mostly we had a conversation. And I think more than anything, the world needs that right now.

MB: 34:24

Yeah. I, I love that too. And I learned, um, what an RSS feed is. It's not as hard as you might think. I, you know, I also learned, I think when we started out, um, we wondered if it would be possible to center the more than human in, in specific stories about the Mountain West. And we've learned that, uh, It's maybe not easy, but it's totally possible to do that. And of course not to get overly mushy, but I learned how steadfast our friendship is because despite the technical difficulties that we would run into or the scheduling logistics and all the work of like coordinating and having to rerecord when we messed up or whatever, we just laughed a lot. We cried only a little. Mostly me. Some of us more than others. And we ended each session, you know, not just as colleagues, but as family.

EW: 35:22

Oh, I love that. That's absolutely true. And chosen family makes the world go round, right? And I love that. It has been more than I imagined in that way,

MB: 35:33

For sure. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Okay. I swear that's our, well, maybe it's not our very last more than pun. But we really thank you listeners for joining us. We've had so honored that you've given your valuable time to think about the more than. And we'd also be so honored if you observe the more than in your daily lives and in the world around you if you would share with us those stories they could be lizards or lightning bolts whatever makes you expand what you think of when you think of history and nature tell us about it. Thanks listeners. EW thanks listeners

And that's it for this episode of More Than: A Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next season of More Than: A Podcast.